And even though I finished my degree, I realized I could not settle into a career in law. 
(Laughter) (Applause) "" It can't be done "" was shown to be wrong. 
She asked the monk, "Why is it that her hand is so warm and the rest of her is so cold?" 
(Applause) Trevor Neilson: And also, Tan's mother is here today, in the fourth or fifth row. (Applause) 

Throughout my career, I've been fortunate enough to work with many of the great international architects, documenting their work and observing how their designs have the capacity to influence the cities in which they sit. 
I think of new cities like Dubai or ancient cities like Rome with Zaha Hadid's incredible MAXXI museum, or like right here in New York with the High Line, a city which has been so much influenced by the development of this. 
But what I find really fascinating is what happens when architects and planners leave and these places become appropriated by people, like here in Chandigarh, India, the city which has been completely designed by the architect Le Corbusier. 
Now 60 years later, the city has been taken over by people in very different ways from whatever perhaps intended for, like here, where you have the people sitting in the windows of the assembly hall. 
But over the course of several years, I've been documenting Rem Koolhaas's CCTV building in Beijing and the olympic stadium in the same city by the architects Herzog and de Meuron. 
At these large-scale construction sites in China, you see a sort of makeshift camp where workers live during the entire building process. 
As the length of the construction takes years, workers end up forming a rather rough-and-ready informal city, making for quite a juxtaposition against the sophisticated structures that they're building. 
Over the past seven years, I've been following my fascination with the built environment, and for those of you who know me, you would say that this obsession has led me to live out of a suitcase 365 days a year. 
Being constantly on the move means that sometimes I am able to catch life's most unpredictable moments, like here in New York the day after the Sandy storm hit the city. 
Just over three years ago, I was for the first time in Caracas, Venezuela, and while flying over the city, I was just amazed by the extent to which the slums reach into every corner of the city, a place where nearly 70 percent of the population lives in slums, draped literally all over the mountains. 
During a conversation with local architects Urban-Think Tank, I learned about the Torre David, a 45-story office building which sits right in the center of Caracas. 
The building was under construction until the collapse of the Venezuelan economy and the death of the developer in the early '90s. 
About eight years ago, people started moving into the abandoned tower and began to build their homes right in between every column of this unfinished tower. 
There's only one little entrance to the entire building, and the 3,000 residents come in and out through that single door. 
Together, the inhabitants created public spaces and designed them to feel more like a home and less like an unfinished tower. 
In the lobby, they painted the walls and planted trees. 
They also made a basketball court. 
But when you look up closely, you see massive holes where elevators and services would have run through. 
Within the tower, people have come up with all sorts of solutions in response to the various needs which arise from living in an unfinished tower. 
With no elevators, the tower is like a 45-story walkup. 
Designed in very specific ways by this group of people who haven't had any education in architecture or design. 
And with each inhabitant finding their own unique way of coming by, this tower becomes like a living city, a place which is alive with micro-economies and small businesses. 
The inventive inhabitants, for instance, find opportunities in the most unexpected cases, like the adjacent parking garage, which has been reclaimed as a taxi route to shuttle the inhabitants up through the ramps in order to shorten the hike up to the apartments. 
A walk through the tower reveals how residents have figured out how to create walls, how to make an air flow, how to create transparency, circulation throughout the tower, essentially creating a home that's completely adapted to the conditions of the site. 
When a new inhabitant moves into the tower, they already have a roof over their head, so they just typically mark their space with a few curtains or sheets. 
Slowly, from found materials, walls rise, and people create a space out of any found objects or materials. 
It's remarkable to see the design decisions that they're making, like when everything is made out of red bricks, some residents will cover that red brick with another layer of red brick-patterned wallpaper just to make it a kind of clean finish. 
The inhabitants literally built up these homes with their own hands, and this labor of love instills a great sense of pride in many families living in this tower. 
They typically make the best out of their conditions, and try to make their spaces look nice and homey, or at least up until as far as they can reach. 
Throughout the tower, you come across all kinds of services, like the barber, small factories, and every floor has a little grocery store or shop. 
And you even find a church. 
And on the 30th floor, there is a gym where all the weights and barbells are made out of the leftover pulleys from the elevators which were never installed. 
From the outside, behind this always-changing facade, you see how the fixed concrete beams provide a framework for the inhabitants to create their homes in an organic, intuitive way that responds directly to their needs. 
Let's go now to Africa, to Nigeria, to a community called Makoko, a slum where 150,000 people live just meters above the Lagos Lagoon. 
While it may appear to be a completely chaotic place, when you see it from above, there seems to be a whole grid of waterways and canals connecting each and every home. 
From the main dock, people board long wooden canoes which carry them out to their various homes and shops located in the expansive area. 
When out on the water, it's clear that life has been completely adapted to this very specific way of living. 
Even the canoes become variety stores where ladies paddle from house to house, selling anything from toothpaste to fresh fruits. 
Behind every window and door frame, you'll see a small child peering back at you, and while Makoko seems to be packed with people, what's more shocking is actually the amount of children pouring out of every building. 
The population growth in Nigeria, and especially in these areas like Makoko, are painful reminders of how out of control things really are. 
In Makoko, very few systems and infrastructures exist. 
Electricity is rigged and freshest water comes from self-built wells throughout the area. 
This entire economic model is designed to meet a specific way of living on the water, so fishing and boat-making are common professions. 
You'll have a set of entrepreneurs who have set up businesses throughout the area, like barbershops, CD and DVD stores, movie theaters, tailors, everything is there. 
There is even a photo studio where you see the sort of aspiration to live in a real house or to be associated with a faraway place, like that hotel in Sweden. 
On this particular evening, I came across this live band dressed to the T in their coordinating outfits. 
They were floating through the canals in a large canoe with a fitted-out generator for all of the community to enjoy. 
By nightfall, the area becomes almost pitch black, save for a small lightbulb or a fire. 
What originally brought me to Makoko was this project from a friend of mine, Kunlé Adeyemi, who recently finished building this three-story floating school for the kids in Makoko. 
With this entire village existing on the water, public space is very limited, so now that the school is finished, the ground floor is a playground for the kids, but when classes are out, the platform is just like a town square, where the fishermen mend their nets and floating shopkeepers dock their boats. 
Another place I'd like to share with you is the Zabbaleen in Cairo. 
They're descendants of farmers who began migrating from the upper Egypt in the '40s, and today they make their living by collecting and recycling waste from homes from all over Cairo. 
For years, the Zabbaleen would live in makeshift villages where they would move around trying to avoid the local authorities, but in the early 1980s, they settled on the Mokattam rocks just at the eastern edge of the city. 
Today, they live in this area, approximately 50,000 to 70,000 people, who live in this community of self-built multi-story houses where up to three generations live in one structure. 
While these apartments that they built for themselves appear to lack any planning or formal grid, each family specializing in a certain form of recycling means that the ground floor of each apartment is reserved for garbage-related activities and the upper floor is dedicated to living space. 
I find it incredible to see how these piles and piles of garbage are invisible to the people who live there, like this very distinguished man who is posing while all this garbage is sort of streaming out behind him, or like these two young men who are sitting and chatting amongst these tons of garbage. 
While to most of us, living amongst these piles and piles of garbage may seem totally uninhabitable, to those in the Zabbaleen, this is just a different type of normal. 
In all these places I've talked about today, what I do find fascinating is that there's really no such thing as normal, and it proves that people are able to adapt to any kind of situation. 
Throughout the day, it's quite common to come across a small party taking place in the streets, just like this engagement party. 
In this tradition, the bride-to-be displays all of their belongings, which they soon bring to their new husband. 
A gathering like this one offers such a juxtaposition where all the new stuff is displayed and all the garbage is used as props to display all their new home accessories. 
Like Makoko and the Torre David, throughout the Zabbaleen you'll find all the same facilities as in any typical neighborhood. 
There are the retail shops, the cafes and the restaurants, and the community is this community of Coptic Christians, so you'll also find a church, along with the scores of religious iconographies throughout the area, and also all the everyday services like the electronic repair shops, the barbers, everything. 
Visiting the homes of the Zabbaleen is also full of surprises. 
While from the outside, these homes look like any other informal structure in the city, when you step inside, you are met with all manner of design decisions and interior decoration. 
Despite having limited access to space and money, the homes in the area are designed with care and detail. 
Every apartment is unique, and this individuality tells a story about each family's circumstances and values. 
Many of these people take their homes and interior spaces very seriously, putting a lot of work and care into the details. 
The shared spaces are also treated in the same manner, where walls are decorated in faux marble patterns. 
But despite this elaborate decor, sometimes these apartments are used in very unexpected ways, like this home which caught my attention while all the mud and the grass was literally seeping out under the front door. 
When I was let in, it appeared that this fifth-floor apartment was being transformed into a complete animal farm, where six or seven cows stood grazing in what otherwise would be the living room. 
But then in the apartment across the hall from this cow shed lives a newly married couple in what locals describe as one of the nicest apartments in the area. 
The attention to this detail astonished me, and as the owner of the home so proudly led me around this apartment, from floor to ceiling, every part was decorated. 
But if it weren't for the strangely familiar stomach-churning odor that constantly passes through the apartment, it would be easy to forget that you are standing next to a cow shed and on top of a landfill. 
What moved me the most was that despite these seemingly inhospitable conditions, I was welcomed with open arms into a home that was made with love, care, and unreserved passion. 
Let's move across the map to China, to an area called Shanxi, Henan and Gansu. 
In a region famous for the soft, porous Loess Plateau soil, there lived until recently an estimated 40 million people in these houses underground. 
These dwellings are called the yaodongs. 
Through this architecture by subtraction, these yaodongs are built literally inside of the soil. 
In these villages, you see an entirely altered landscape, and hidden behind these mounds of dirt are these square, rectangular houses which sit seven meters below the ground. 
When I asked people why they were digging their houses from the ground, they simply replied that they are poor wheat and apple farmers who didn't have the money to buy materials, and this digging out was their most logical form of living. 
From Makoko to Zabbaleen, these communities have approached the tasks of planning, design and management of their communities and neighborhoods in ways that respond specifically to their environment and circumstances. 
Created by these very people who live, work and play in these particular spaces, these neighborhoods are intuitively designed to make the most of their circumstances. 
In most of these places, the government is completely absent, leaving inhabitants with no choice but to reappropriate found materials, and while these communities are highly disadvantaged, they do present examples of brilliant forms of ingenuity, and prove that indeed we have the ability to adapt to all manner of circumstances. 
What makes places like the Torre David particularly remarkable is this sort of skeleton framework where people can have a foundation where they can tap into. 
Now imagine what these already ingenious communities could create themselves, and how highly particular their solutions would be, if they were given the basic infrastructures that they could tap into. 
Today, you see these large residential development projects which offer cookie-cutter housing solutions to massive amounts of people. 
From China to Brazil, these projects attempt to provide as many houses as possible, but they're completely generic and simply do not work as an answer to the individual needs of the people. 
I would like to end with a quote from a friend of mine and a source of inspiration, Zita Cobb, the founder of the wonderful Shorefast Foundation, based out of Fogo Island, Newfoundland. 
She says that "" there's this plague of sameness which is killing the human joy, "" and I couldn't agree with her more. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Mechanical noises) (Music) (Applause) 

The work of a transportation commissioner isn't just about stop signs and traffic signals. 
It involves the design of cities and the design of city streets. 
Streets are some of the most valuable resources that a city has, and yet it's an asset that's largely hidden in plain sight. 
And the lesson from New York over the past six years is that you can update this asset. 
You can remake your streets quickly, inexpensively, it can provide immediate benefits, and it can be quite popular. 
You just need to look at them a little differently. 
This is important because we live in an urban age. 
For the first time in history, most people live in cities, and the U.N. estimates that over the next 40 years, the population is going to double on the planet. 
So the design of cities is a key issue for our future. 
Mayor Bloomberg recognized this when he launched PlaNYC in 2007. 
The plan recognized that cities are in a global marketplace, and that if we're going to continue to grow and thrive and to attract the million more people that are expected to move here, we need to focus on the quality of life and the efficiency of our infrastructure. 
For many cities, our streets have been in a kind of suspended animation for generations. 
This is a picture of Times Square in the '50s, and despite all of the technological innovation, cultural changes, political changes, this is Times Square in 2008. 
Not much has changed in those 50 years. 
So we worked hard to refocus our agenda, to maximize efficient mobility, providing more room for buses, more room for bikes, more room for people to enjoy the city, and to make our streets as safe as they can be for everybody that uses them. 
We set out a clear action plan with goals and benchmarks. 
Having goals is important, because if you want to change and steer the ship of a big city in a new direction, you need to know where you're going and why. 
The design of a street can tell you everything about what's expected on it. 
In this case, it's expected that you shelter in place. 
The design of this street is really to maximize the movement of cars moving as quickly as possible from point A to point B, and it misses all the other ways that a street is used. 
When we started out, we did some early surveys about how our streets were used, and we found that New York City was largely a city without seats. 
Pictures like this, people perched on a fire hydrant, not the mark of a world-class city. 
(Laughter) It's not great for parents with kids. 
It's not great for seniors. It's not great for retailers. 
It's probably not good for the fire hydrants. 
Certainly not good for the police department. 
So we worked hard to change that balance, and probably the best example of our new approach is in Times Square. 
Three hundred and fifty thousand people a day walk through Times Square, and people had tried for years to make changes. 
They changed signals, they changed lanes, everything they could do to make Times Square work better. 
It was dangerous, hard to cross the street. 
It was chaotic. 
And so, none of those approaches worked, so we took a different approach, a bigger approach, looked at our street differently. 
And so we did a six-month pilot. 
We closed Broadway from 42nd Street to 47th Street and created two and a half acres of new pedestrian space. 
And the temporary materials are an important part of the program, because we were able to show how it worked. 
And I work for a data-driven mayor, as you probably know. 
So it was all about the data. 
So if it worked better for traffic, if it was better for mobility, if it was safer, better for business, we would keep it, and if it didn't work, no harm, no foul, we could put it back the way that it was, because these were temporary materials. 
And that was a very big part of the buy-in, much less anxiety when you think that something can be put back. 
But the results were overwhelming. 
Traffic moved better. It was much safer. 
Five new flagship stores opened. 
It's been a total home run. 
Times Square is now one of the top 10 retail locations on the planet. 
And this is an important lesson, because it doesn't need to be a zero-sum game between moving traffic and creating public space. 
Every project has its surprises, and one of the big surprises with Times Square was how quickly people flocked to the space. 
We put out the orange barrels, and people just materialized immediately into the street. 
It was like a Star Trek episode, you know? 
They weren't there before, and then zzzzzt! 
All the people arrived. 
Where they'd been, I don't know, but they were there. 
And this actually posed an immediate challenge for us, because the street furniture had not yet arrived. 
So we went to a hardware store and bought hundreds of lawn chairs, and we put those lawn chairs out on the street. 
And the lawn chairs became the talk of the town. 
It wasn't about that we'd closed Broadway to cars. 
It was about those lawn chairs. 
"What did you think about the lawn chairs?" 
"Do you like the color of the lawn chairs?" 
So if you've got a big, controversial project, think about lawn chairs. 
(Laughter) This is the final design for Times Square, and it will create a level surface, sidewalk to sidewalk, beautiful pavers that have studs in them to reflect the light from the billboards, creating a great new energy on the street, and we think it's going to really create a great place, a new crossroads of the world that is worthy of its name. 
And we will be cutting the ribbon on this, the first phase, this December. 
With all of our projects, our public space projects, we work closely with local businesses and local merchant groups who maintain the spaces, move the furniture, take care of the plants. 
This is in front of Macy's, and they were a big supporter of this new approach, because they understood that more people on foot is better for business. 
And we've done these projects all across the city in all kinds of neighborhoods. 
This is in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and you can see the short leg that was there, used for cars, that's not really needed. 
So what we did is we painted over the street, put down epoxy gravel, and connected the triangle to the storefronts on Grand Avenue, created a great new public space, and it's been great for businesses along Grand Avenue. 
We did the same thing in DUMBO, in Brooklyn, and this is one of our first projects that we did, and we took an underutilized, pretty dingy-looking parking lot and used some paint and planters to transform it over a weekend. 
And in the three years since we've implemented the project, retail sales have increased 172 percent. 
And that's twice that of adjacent areas in the same neighborhood. 
We've moved very, very quickly with paint and temporary materials. 
Instead of waiting through years of planning studies and computer models to get something done, we've done it with paint and temporary materials. 
And the proof is not in a computer model. 
It is in the real-world performance of the street. 
You can have fun with paint. 
All told, we've created over 50 pedestrian plazas in all five boroughs across the city. 
We've repurposed 26 acres of active car lanes and turned them into new pedestrian space. 
I think one of the successes is in its emulation. 
You're seeing this kind of approach, since we've painted Times Square, you've seen this approach in Boston, in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, you name it. 
This is actually in Los Angeles, and they actually copied even the green dots that we had on the streets. 
But I can't underscore enough how much more quickly this enables you to move over traditional construction methods. 
We also brought this quick-acting approach to our cycling program, and in six years turned cycling into a real transportation option in New York. 
I think it's fair to say — (Applause) — it used to be a fairly scary place to ride a bike, and now New York has become one of the cycling capitals in the United States. 
And we moved quickly to create an interconnected network of lanes. 
You can see the map in 2007. 
This is how it looked in 2013 after we built out 350 miles of on-street bike lanes. 
I love this because it looks so easy. 
You just click it, and they're there. 
We also brought new designs to the street. 
We created the first parking-protected bike lane in the United States. 
(Applause) We protected bikers by floating parking lanes, and it's been great. 
Bike volumes have spiked. 
Injuries to all users, pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, are all down 50 percent. 
And we've built 30 miles of these protected bike lanes, and now you're seeing them pop up all over the country. 
And you can see here that this strategy has worked. 
The blue line is the number of cyclists, soaring. 
The green line is the number of bike lanes. 
And the yellow line is the number of injuries, which has remained essentially flat. 
After this big expansion, you've seen no net increase in injuries, and so there is something to that axiom that there is safety in numbers. 
Not everybody liked the new bike lanes, and there was a lawsuit and somewhat of a media frenzy a couple years ago. 
One Brooklyn paper called this bike lane that we have on Prospect Park West "" the most contested piece of land outside of the Gaza Strip. "" (Laughter) And this is what we had done. 
So if you dig below the headlines, though, you'll see that the people were far ahead of the press, far ahead of the politicians. 
In fact, I think most politicians would be happy to have those kind of poll numbers. 
Sixty-four percent of New Yorkers support these bike lanes. 
This summer, we launched Citi Bike, the largest bike share program in the United States, with 6,000 bikes and 330 stations located next to one another. 
Since we've launched the program, three million trips have been taken. 
People have ridden seven million miles. 
That's 280 times around the globe. 
And so with this little blue key, you can unlock the keys to the city and this brand new transportation option. 
And daily usage just continues to soar. 
What has happened is the average daily ridership on the streets of New York is 36,000 people. 
The high that we've had so far is 44,000 in August. 
Yesterday, 40,000 people used Citi Bike in New York City. 
The bikes are being used six times a day. 
And I think you also see it in the kinds of riders that are on the streets. 
In the past, it looked like the guy on the left, ninja-clad bike messenger. 
And today, cyclists look like New York City looks. 
It's diverse — young, old, black, white, women, kids, all getting on a bike. 
It's an affordable, safe, convenient way to get around. 
Quite radical. 
We've also brought this approach to our buses, and New York City has the largest bus fleet in North America, the slowest bus speeds. 
As everybody knows, you can walk across town faster than you can take the bus. 
And so we focused on the most congested areas of New York City, built out six bus rapid transit lines, 57 miles of new speedy bus lanes. 
You pay at a kiosk before you get on the bus. 
We've got dedicated lanes that keep cars out because they get ticketed by a camera if they use that lane, and it's been a huge success. 
I think one of my very favorite moments as transportation commissioner was the day that we launched Citi Bike, and I was riding Citi Bike up First Avenue in my protected bike lane, and I looked over and I saw pedestrians standing safely on the pedestrian islands, and the traffic was flowing, birds were singing — (Laughter) — the buses were speeding up their dedicated lanes. 
It was just fantastic. 
And this is how it looked six years ago. 
And so, I think that the lesson that we have from New York is that it's possible to change your streets quickly, it's not expensive, it can provide immediate benefits, and it can be quite popular. 
You just need to reimagine your streets. 
They're hidden in plain sight. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

We live in difficult and challenging economic times, of course. 
And one of the first victims of difficult economic times, I think, is public spending of any kind, but certainly in the firing line at the moment is public spending for science, and particularly curiosity-led science and exploration. 
So I want to try and convince you in about 15 minutes that that's a ridiculous and ludicrous thing to do. 
But I think to set the scene, I want to show — the next slide is not my attempt to show the worst TED slide in the history of TED, but it is a bit of a mess. 
(Laughter) But actually, it's not my fault; it's from the Guardian newspaper. 
And it's actually a beautiful demonstration of how much science costs. 
Because, if I'm going to make the case for continuing to spend on curiosity-driven science and exploration, I should tell you how much it costs. 
So this is a game called "" spot the science budgets. "" This is the U.K. government spend. 
You see there, it's about 620 billion a year. 
The science budget is actually — if you look to your left, there's a purple set of blobs and then yellow set of blobs. 
And it's one of the yellow set of blobs around the big yellow blob. 
It's about 3.3 billion pounds per year out of 620 billion. 
That funds everything in the U.K. 
from medical research, space exploration, where I work, at CERN in Geneva, particle physics, engineering, even arts and humanities, funded from the science budget, which is that 3.3 billion, that little, tiny yellow blob around the orange blob at the top left of the screen. 
So that's what we're arguing about. 
That percentage, by the way, is about the same in the U.S. and Germany and France. 
R & D in total in the economy, publicly funded, is about 0.6 percent of GDP. 
So that's what we're arguing about. 
The first thing I want to say, and this is straight from "" Wonders of the Solar System, "" is that our exploration of the solar system and the universe has shown us that it is indescribably beautiful. 
This is a picture that actually was sent back by the Cassini space probe around Saturn, after we'd finished filming "" Wonders of the Solar System. "" So it isn't in the series. 
It's of the moon Enceladus. 
So that big sweeping, white sphere in the corner is Saturn, which is actually in the background of the picture. 
And that crescent there is the moon Enceladus, which is about as big as the British Isles. 
It's about 500 kilometers in diameter. 
So, tiny moon. 
What's fascinating and beautiful... 
this an unprocessed picture, by the way, I should say, it's black and white, straight from Saturnian orbit. 
What's beautiful is, you can probably see on the limb there some faint, sort of, wisps of almost smoke rising up from the limb. 
This is how we visualize that in "" Wonders of the Solar System. "" It's a beautiful graphic. 
What we found out were that those faint wisps are actually fountains of ice rising up from the surface of this tiny moon. 
That's fascinating and beautiful in itself, but we think that the mechanism for powering those fountains requires there to be lakes of liquid water beneath the surface of this moon. 
And what's important about that is that, on our planet, on Earth, wherever we find liquid water, we find life. 
So, to find strong evidence of liquid, pools of liquid, beneath the surface of a moon 750 million miles away from the Earth is really quite astounding. 
So what we're saying, essentially, is maybe that's a habitat for life in the solar system. 
Well, let me just say, that was a graphic. I just want to show this picture. 
That's one more picture of Enceladus. 
This is when Cassini flew beneath Enceladus. 
So it made a very low pass, just a few hundred kilometers above the surface. 
And so this, again, a real picture of the ice fountains rising up into space, absolutely beautiful. 
But that's not the prime candidate for life in the solar system. 
That's probably this place, which is a moon of Jupiter, Europa. 
And again, we had to fly to the Jovian system to get any sense that this moon, as most moons, was anything other than a dead ball of rock. 
It's actually an ice moon. 
So what you're looking at is the surface of the moon Europa, which is a thick sheet of ice, probably a hundred kilometers thick. 
But by measuring the way that Europa interacts with the magnetic field of Jupiter, and looking at how those cracks in the ice that you can see there on that graphic move around, we've inferred very strongly that there's an ocean of liquid surrounding the entire surface of Europa. 
So below the ice, there's an ocean of liquid around the whole moon. 
It could be hundreds of kilometers deep, we think. 
We think it's saltwater, and that would mean that there's more water on that moon of Jupiter than there is in all the oceans of the Earth combined. 
So that place, a little moon around Jupiter, is probably the prime candidate for finding life on a moon or a body outside the Earth, that we know of. 
Tremendous and beautiful discovery. 
Our exploration of the solar system has taught us that the solar system is beautiful. 
It may also have pointed the way to answering one of the most profound questions that you can possibly ask, which is: "" Are we alone in the universe? "" Is there any other use to exploration and science, other than just a sense of wonder? 
Well, there is. 
This is a very famous picture taken, actually, on my first Christmas Eve, December 24th, 1968, when I was about eight months old. 
It was taken by Apollo 8 as it went around the back of the moon. 
Earthrise from Apollo 8. 
A famous picture; many people have said that it's the picture that saved 1968, which was a turbulent year — the student riots in Paris, the height of the Vietnam War. 
The reason many people think that about this picture, and Al Gore has said it many times, actually, on the stage at TED, is that this picture, arguably, was the beginning of the environmental movement. 
Because, for the first time, we saw our world, not as a solid, immovable, kind of indestructible place, but as a very small, fragile-looking world just hanging against the blackness of space. 
What's also not often said about the space exploration, about the Apollo program, is the economic contribution it made. 
I mean while you can make arguments that it was wonderful and a tremendous achievement and delivered pictures like this, it cost a lot, didn't it? 
Well, actually, many studies have been done about the economic effectiveness, the economic impact of Apollo. 
The biggest one was in 1975 by Chase Econometrics. 
And it showed that for every $1 spent on Apollo, 14 came back into the U.S. economy. 
So the Apollo program paid for itself in inspiration, in engineering, achievement and, I think, in inspiring young scientists and engineers 14 times over. 
So exploration can pay for itself. 
What about scientific discovery? 
What about driving innovation? 
Well, this looks like a picture of virtually nothing. 
What it is, is a picture of the spectrum of hydrogen. 
See, back in the 1880s, 1890s, many scientists, many observers, looked at the light given off from atoms. 
And they saw strange pictures like this. 
What you're seeing when you put it through a prism is that you heat hydrogen up and it doesn't just glow like a white light, it just emits light at particular colors, a red one, a light blue one, some dark blue ones. 
Now that led to an understanding of atomic structure because the way that's explained is atoms are a single nucleus with electrons going around them. 
And the electrons can only be in particular places. 
And when they jump up to the next place they can be, and fall back down again, they emit light at particular colors. 
And so the fact that atoms, when you heat them up, only emit light at very specific colors, was one of the key drivers that led to the development of the quantum theory, the theory of the structure of atoms. 
I just wanted to show this picture because this is remarkable. 
This is actually a picture of the spectrum of the Sun. 
And now, this is a picture of atoms in the Sun's atmosphere absorbing light. 
And again, they only absorb light at particular colors when electrons jump up and fall down, jump up and fall down. 
But look at the number of black lines in that spectrum. 
And the element helium was discovered just by staring at the light from the Sun because some of those black lines were found that corresponded to no known element. 
And that's why helium's called helium. 
It's called "" helios "" — helios from the Sun. 
Now, that sounds esoteric, and indeed it was an esoteric pursuit, but the quantum theory quickly led to an understanding of the behaviors of electrons in materials like silicon, for example. 
The way that silicon behaves, the fact that you can build transistors, is a purely quantum phenomenon. 
So without that curiosity-driven understanding of the structure of atoms, which led to this rather esoteric theory, quantum mechanics, then we wouldn't have transistors, we wouldn't have silicon chips, we wouldn't have pretty much the basis of our modern economy. 
There's one more, I think, wonderful twist to that tale. 
In "" Wonders of the Solar System, "" we kept emphasizing the laws of physics are universal. 
It's one of the most incredible things about the physics and the understanding of nature that you get on Earth, is you can transport it, not only to the planets, but to the most distant stars and galaxies. 
And one of the astonishing predictions of quantum mechanics, just by looking at the structure of atoms — the same theory that describes transistors — is that there can be no stars in the universe that have reached the end of their life that are bigger than, quite specifically, 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. 
That's a limit imposed on the mass of stars. 
You can work it out on a piece of paper in a laboratory, get a telescope, swing it to the sky, and you find that there are no dead stars bigger than 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. 
That's quite an incredible prediction. 
What happens when you have a star that's right on the edge of that mass? 
Well, this is a picture of it. 
This is the picture of a galaxy, a common "" our garden "" galaxy with, what, 100 billion stars like our Sun in it. 
It's just one of billions of galaxies in the universe. 
There are a billion stars in the galactic core, which is why it's shining out so brightly. 
This is about 50 million light years away, so one of our neighboring galaxies. 
But that bright star there is actually one of the stars in the galaxy. 
So that star is also 50 million light years away. 
It's part of that galaxy, and it's shining as brightly as the center of the galaxy with a billion suns in it. 
That's a Type Ia supernova explosion. 
Now that's an incredible phenomena, because it's a star that sits there. 
It's called a carbon-oxygen dwarf. 
It sits there about, say, 1.3 times the mass of the Sun. 
And it has a binary companion that goes around it, so a big star, a big ball of gas. 
And what it does is it sucks gas off its companion star, until it gets to this limit called the Chandrasekhar limit, and then it explodes. 
And it explodes, and it shines as brightly as a billion suns for about two weeks, and releases, not only energy, but a huge amount of chemical elements into the universe. 
In fact, that one is a carbon-oxygen dwarf. 
Now, there was no carbon and oxygen in the universe at the Big Bang. 
And there was no carbon and oxygen in the universe throughout the first generation of stars. 
It was made in stars like that, locked away and then returned to the universe in explosions like that in order to recondense into planets, stars, new solar systems and, indeed, people like us. 
I think that's a remarkable demonstration of the power and beauty and universality of the laws of physics, because we understand that process, because we understand the structure of atoms here on Earth. 
This is a beautiful quote that I found — we're talking about serendipity there — from Alexander Fleming: "" When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic. "" Now, the explorers of the world of the atom did not intend to invent the transistor. 
And they certainly didn't intend to describe the mechanics of supernova explosions, which eventually told us where the building blocks of life were synthesized in the universe. 
So, I think science can be — serendipity is important. 
It can be beautiful. It can reveal quite astonishing things. 
It can also, I think, finally reveal the most profound ideas to us about our place in the universe and really the value of our home planet. 
This is a spectacular picture of our home planet. 
Now, it doesn't look like our home planet. 
It looks like Saturn because, of course, it is. 
It was taken by the Cassini space probe. 
But it's a famous picture, not because of the beauty and majesty of Saturn's rings, but actually because of a tiny, faint blob just hanging underneath one of the rings. 
And if I blow it up there, you see it. 
It looks like a moon, but in fact, it's a picture of Earth. 
It was a picture of Earth captured in that frame of Saturn. 
That's our planet from 750 million miles away. 
I think the Earth has got a strange property that the farther away you get from it, the more beautiful it seems. 
But that is not the most distant or most famous picture of our planet. 
It was taken by this thing, which is called the Voyager spacecraft. 
And that's a picture of me in front of it for scale. 
The Voyager is a tiny machine. 
It's currently 10 billion miles away from Earth, transmitting with that dish, with the power of 20 watts, and we're still in contact with it. 
But it visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. 
And after it visited all four of those planets, Carl Sagan, who's one of my great heroes, had the wonderful idea of turning Voyager around and taking a picture of every planet it had visited. 
And it took this picture of Earth. 
Now it's very hard to see the Earth there, it's called the "" Pale Blue Dot "" picture, but Earth is suspended in that red shaft of light. 
That's Earth from four billion miles away. 
And I'd like to read you what Sagan wrote about it, just to finish, because I cannot say words as beautiful as this to describe what he saw in that picture that he had taken. 
He said, "" Consider again that dot. 
That's here. That's home. That's us. 
On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. 
The aggregates of joy and suffering thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there, on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. 
It's been said that astronomy's a humbling and character-building experience. 
There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. 
To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. "" Beautiful words about the power of science and exploration. 
The argument has always been made, and it will always be made, that we know enough about the universe. 
You could have made it in the 1920s; you wouldn't have had penicillin. 
You could have made it in the 1890s; you wouldn't have the transistor. 
And it's made today in these difficult economic times. 
Surely, we know enough. 
We don't need to discover anything else about our universe. 
Let me leave the last words to someone who's rapidly becoming a hero of mine, Humphrey Davy, who did his science at the turn of the 19th century. 
He was clearly under assault all the time. 
"" We know enough at the turn of the 19th century. 
Just exploit it; just build things. "" He said this, he said, "" Nothing is more fatal to the progress of the human mind than to presume that our views of science are ultimate, that our triumphs are complete, that there are no mysteries in nature, and that there are no new worlds to conquer. "" Thank you. 
(Applause) 

What is so special about the human brain? 
Why is it that we study other animals instead of them studying us? 
What does a human brain have or do that no other brain does? 
When I became interested in these questions about 10 years ago, scientists thought they knew what different brains were made of. 
Though it was based on very little evidence, many scientists thought that all mammalian brains, including the human brain, were made in the same way, with a number of neurons that was always proportional to the size of the brain. 
This means that two brains of the same size, like these two, with a respectable 400 grams, should have similar numbers of neurons. 
Now, if neurons are the functional information processing units of the brain, then the owners of these two brains should have similar cognitive abilities. 
And yet, one is a chimp, and the other is a cow. 
Now maybe cows have a really rich internal mental life and are so smart that they choose not to let us realize it, but we eat them. 
I think most people will agree that chimps are capable of much more complex, elaborate and flexible behaviors than cows are. 
So this is a first indication that the "" all brains are made the same way "" scenario is not quite right. 
But let's play along. 
If all brains were made the same way and you were to compare animals with brains of different sizes, larger brains should always have more neurons than smaller brains, and the larger the brain, the more cognitively able its owner should be. 
So the largest brain around should also be the most cognitively able. 
And here comes the bad news: Our brain, not the largest one around. 
It seems quite vexing. 
Our brain weighs between 1.2 and 1.5 kilos, but elephant brains weigh between four and five kilos, and whale brains can weigh up to nine kilos, which is why scientists used to resort to saying that our brain must be special to explain our cognitive abilities. 
It must be really extraordinary, an exception to the rule. 
Theirs may be bigger, but ours is better, and it could be better, for example, in that it seems larger than it should be, with a much larger cerebral cortex than we should have for the size of our bodies. 
So that would give us extra cortex to do more interesting things than just operating the body. 
That's because the size of the brain usually follows the size of the body. 
So the main reason for saying that our brain is larger than it should be actually comes from comparing ourselves to great apes. 
Gorillas can be two to three times larger than we are, so their brains should also be larger than ours, but instead it's the other way around. 
Our brain is three times larger than a gorilla brain. 
The human brain also seems special in the amount of energy that it uses. 
Although it weighs only two percent of the body, it alone uses 25 percent of all the energy that your body requires to run per day. 
That's 500 calories out of a total of 2,000 calories, just to keep your brain working. 
So the human brain is larger than it should be, it uses much more energy than it should, so it's special. 
And this is where the story started to bother me. 
In biology, we look for rules that apply to all animals and to life in general, so why should the rules of evolution apply to everybody else but not to us? 
Maybe the problem was with the basic assumption that all brains are made in the same way. 
Maybe two brains of a similar size can actually be made of very different numbers of neurons. 
Maybe a very large brain does not necessarily have more neurons than a more modest-sized brain. 
Maybe the human brain actually has the most neurons of any brain, regardless of its size, especially in the cerebral cortex. 
So this to me became the important question to answer: how many neurons does the human brain have, and how does that compare to other animals? 
Now, you may have heard or read somewhere that we have 100 billion neurons, so 10 years ago, I asked my colleagues if they knew where this number came from. 
But nobody did. 
I've been digging through the literature for the original reference for that number, and I could never find it. 
It seems that nobody had actually ever counted the number of neurons in the human brain, or in any other brain for that matter. 
So I came up with my own way to count cells in the brain, and it essentially consists of dissolving that brain into soup. 
It works like this: You take a brain, or parts of that brain, and you dissolve it in detergent, which destroys the cell membranes but keeps the cell nuclei intact, so you end up with a suspension of free nuclei that looks like this, like a clear soup. 
This soup contains all the nuclei that once were a mouse brain. 
Now, the beauty of a soup is that because it is soup, you can agitate it and make those nuclei be distributed homogeneously in the liquid, so that now by looking under the microscope at just four or five samples of this homogeneous solution, you can count nuclei, and therefore tell how many cells that brain had. 
It's simple, it's straightforward, and it's really fast. 
So we've used that method to count neurons in dozens of different species so far, and it turns out that all brains are not made the same way. 
Take rodents and primates, for instance: In larger rodent brains, the average size of the neuron increases, so the brain inflates very rapidly and gains size much faster than it gains neurons. 
But primate brains gain neurons without the average neuron becoming any larger, which is a very economical way to add neurons to your brain. 
The result is that a primate brain will always have more neurons than a rodent brain of the same size, and the larger the brain, the larger this difference will be. 
Well, what about our brain then? 
We found that we have, on average, 86 billion neurons, 16 billion of which are in the cerebral cortex, and if you consider that the cerebral cortex is the seat of functions like awareness and logical and abstract reasoning, and that 16 billion is the most neurons that any cortex has, I think this is the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities. 
But just as important is what the 86 billion neurons mean. 
Because we found that the relationship between the size of the brain and its number of neurons could be described mathematically, we could calculate what a human brain would look like if it was made like a rodent brain. 
So, a rodent brain with 86 billion neurons would weigh 36 kilos. 
That's not possible. 
A brain that huge would be crushed by its own weight, and this impossible brain would go in the body of 89 tons. 
I don't think it looks like us. 
So this brings us to a very important conclusion already, which is that we are not rodents. 
The human brain is not a large rat brain. 
Compared to a rat, we might seem special, yes, but that's not a fair comparison to make, given that we know that we are not rodents. 
We are primates, so the correct comparison is to other primates. 
And there, if you do the math, you find that a generic primate with 86 billion neurons would have a brain of about 1.2 kilos, which seems just right, in a body of some 66 kilos, which in my case is exactly right, which brings us to a very unsurprising but still incredibly important conclusion: I am a primate. 
And all of you are primates. 
And so was Darwin. 
I love to think that Darwin would have really appreciated this. 
His brain, like ours, was made in the image of other primate brains. 
So the human brain may be remarkable, yes, but it is not special in its number of neurons. 
It is just a large primate brain. 
I think that's a very humbling and sobering thought that should remind us of our place in nature. 
Why does it cost so much energy, then? 
Well, other people have figured out how much energy the human brain and that of other species costs, and now that we knew how many neurons each brain was made of, we could do the math. 
And it turns out that both human and other brains cost about the same, an average of six calories per billion neurons per day. 
So the total energetic cost of a brain is a simple, linear function of its number of neurons, and it turns out that the human brain costs just as much energy as you would expect. 
So the reason why the human brain costs so much energy is simply because it has a huge number of neurons, and because we are primates with many more neurons for a given body size than any other animal, the relative cost of our brain is large, but just because we're primates, not because we're special. 
Last question, then: how did we come by this remarkable number of neurons, and in particular, if great apes are larger than we are, why don't they have a larger brain than we do, with more neurons? 
When we realized how much expensive it is to have a lot of neurons in the brain, I figured, maybe there's a simple reason. 
They just can't afford the energy for both a large body and a large number of neurons. 
So we did the math. 
We calculated on the one hand how much energy a primate gets per day from eating raw foods, and on the other hand, how much energy a body of a certain size costs and how much energy a brain of a certain number of neurons costs, and we looked for the combinations of body size and number of brain neurons that a primate could afford if it ate a certain number of hours per day. 
And what we found is that because neurons are so expensive, there is a tradeoff between body size and number of neurons. 
So a primate that eats eight hours per day can afford at most 53 billion neurons, but then its body cannot be any bigger than 25 kilos. 
To weigh any more than that, it has to give up neurons. 
So it's either a large body or a large number of neurons. 
When you eat like a primate, you can't afford both. 
One way out of this metabolic limitation would be to spend even more hours per day eating, but that gets dangerous, and past a certain point, it's just not possible. 
Gorillas and orangutans, for instance, afford about 30 billion neurons by spending eight and a half hours per day eating, and that seems to be about as much as they can do. 
Nine hours of feeding per day seems to be the practical limit for a primate. 
What about us? 
With our 86 billion neurons and 60 to 70 kilos of body mass, we should have to spend over nine hours per day every single day feeding, which is just not feasible. 
If we ate like a primate, we should not be here. 
How did we get here, then? 
Well, if our brain costs just as much energy as it should, and if we can't spend every waking hour of the day feeding, then the only alternative, really, is to somehow get more energy out of the same foods. 
And remarkably, that matches exactly what our ancestors are believed to have invented one and a half million years ago, when they invented cooking. 
To cook is to use fire to pre-digest foods outside of your body. 
Cooked foods are softer, so they're easier to chew and to turn completely into mush in your mouth, so that allows them to be completely digested and absorbed in your gut, which makes them yield much more energy in much less time. 
So cooking frees time for us to do much more interesting things with our day and with our neurons than just thinking about food, looking for food, and gobbling down food all day long. 
So because of cooking, what once was a major liability, this large, dangerously expensive brain with a lot of neurons, could now become a major asset, now that we could both afford the energy for a lot of neurons and the time to do interesting things with them. 
So I think this explains why the human brain grew to become so large so fast in evolution, all of the while remaining just a primate brain. 
With this large brain now affordable by cooking, we went rapidly from raw foods to culture, agriculture, civilization, grocery stores, electricity, refrigerators, all of those things that nowadays allow us to get all the energy we need for the whole day in a single sitting at your favorite fast food joint. 
So what once was a solution now became the problem, and ironically, we look for the solution in raw food. 
So what is the human advantage? 
What is it that we have that no other animal has? 
My answer is that we have the largest number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, and I think that's the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities. 
And what is it that we do that no other animal does, and which I believe was fundamental to allow us to reach that large, largest number of neurons in the cortex? 
In two words, we cook. 
No other animal cooks its food. Only humans do. 
And I think that's how we got to become human. 
Studying the human brain changed the way I think about food. 
I now look at my kitchen, and I bow to it, and I thank my ancestors for coming up with the invention that probably made us humans. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Twenty-five-and-a-quarter years ago I read a newspaper article which said that one day syringes would be one of the major causes of the spread of AIDS, the transmission of AIDS. 
I thought this was unacceptable. So I decided to do something about it. 
Sadly, it's come true. Malaria, as we all know, kills approximately one million people a year. 
The reuse of syringes now exceeds that and kills 1.3 million people a year. 
This young girl and her friend that I met in an orphanage in Delhi were HIV positive from a syringe. 
And what was so sad about this particular story was that once their parents had found out — and don't forget, their parents took them to the doctor — the parents threw them out on the street. 
And hence they ended up in an orphanage. 
And it comes from situations like this where you have either skilled or unskilled practitioners, blindly giving an injection to someone. 
And the injection is so valuable, that the people basically trust the doctor, being second to God, which I've heard many times, to do the right thing. But in fact they're not. 
And you can understand, obviously, the transmission problem between people in high-virus areas. 
This video we took undercover, which shows you, over a half an hour period, a tray of medicines of 42 vials, which are being delivered with only 2 syringes in a public hospital in India. 
And over the course of half an hour, not one syringe was filmed being unwrapped. 
They started with two and they ended with two. 
And you'll see, just now, a nurse coming back to the tray, which is their sort of modular station, and dropping the syringe she's just used back in the tray for it to be picked up and used again. 
So you can imagine the scale of this problem. 
And in fact in India alone, 62 percent of all injections given are unsafe. 
These kids in Pakistan don't go to school. 
They are lucky. They already have a job. 
And that job is that they go around and pick up syringes from the back of hospitals, wash them, and in the course of this, obviously picking them up they injure themselves. 
And then they repackage them and sell them out on markets for literally more money than a sterile syringe in the first place, which is quite bizarre. 
In an interesting photo, their father, while we were talking to him, picked up a syringe and pricked his finger — I don't know whether you can see the drop of blood on the end — and immediately whipped out a box of matches, lit one, and burned the blood off the end of his finger, giving me full assurance that that was the way that you stopped the transmission of HIV. 
In China, recycling is a major issue. 
And they are collected en mass — you can see the scale of it here — and sorted out, by hand, back into the right sizes, and then put back out on the street. 
So recycling and reuse are the major issues here. 
But there was one interesting anecdote that I found in Indonesia. 
In all schools in Indonesia, there is usually a toy seller in the playground. 
The toy seller, in this case, had syringes, which they usually do, next door to the diggers, which is obviously what you would expect. 
And they use them, in the breaks, for water pistols. 
They squirt them at each other, which is lovely and innocent. 
And they are having great fun. 
But they also drink from them while they're in their breaks, because it's hot. 
And they squirt the water into their mouths. 
And these are used with traces of blood visible. 
So we need a better product. And we need better information. 
And I think, if I can just borrow this camera, I was going to show you my invention, which I came up with. 
So, it's a normal-looking syringe. 
You load it up in the normal way. This is made on existing equipment in 14 factories that we license. 
You give the injection and then put it down. 
If someone then tries to reuse it, it locks and breaks afterwards. 
It's very, very simple. Thank you. 
(Applause) And it costs the same as a normal syringe. 
And in comparison, a Coca-Cola is 10 times the price. 
And that will stop reusing a syringe 20 or 30 times. 
And I have an information charity which has done huge scale amount of work in India. 
And we're very proud of giving information to people, so that little kids like this don't do stupid things. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

When I was born, there was really only one book about how to raise your children, and it was written by Dr. Spock. 
(Laughter) Thank you for indulging me. 
I have always wanted to do that. 
No, it was Benjamin Spock, and his book was called "" The Common Sense Book of Baby And Child Care. "" It sold almost 50 million copies by the time he died. 
Today, I, as the mother of a six-year-old, walk into Barnes and Noble, and see this. 
And it is amazing the variety that one finds on those shelves. 
There are guides to raising an eco-friendly kid, a gluten-free kid, a disease-proof kid, which, if you ask me, is a little bit creepy. 
There are guides to raising a bilingual kid even if you only speak one language at home. 
There are guides to raising a financially savvy kid and a science-minded kid and a kid who is a whiz at yoga. 
Short of teaching your toddler how to defuse a nuclear bomb, there is pretty much a guide to everything. 
All of these books are well-intentioned. 
I am sure that many of them are great. 
But taken together, I am sorry, I do not see help when I look at that shelf. 
I see anxiety. 
I see a giant candy-colored monument to our collective panic, and it makes me want to know, why is it that raising our children is associated with so much anguish and so much confusion? 
Why is it that we are at sixes and sevens about the one thing human beings have been doing successfully for millennia, long before parenting message boards and peer-reviewed studies came along? 
Why is it that so many mothers and fathers experience parenthood as a kind of crisis? 
Crisis might seem like a strong word, but there is data suggesting it probably isn't. 
There was, in fact, a paper of just this very name, "" Parenthood as Crisis, "" published in 1957, and in the 50-plus years since, there has been plenty of scholarship documenting a pretty clear pattern of parental anguish. 
Parents experience more stress than non-parents. 
Their marital satisfaction is lower. 
There have been a number of studies looking at how parents feel when they are spending time with their kids, and the answer often is, not so great. 
Last year, I spoke with a researcher named Matthew Killingsworth who is doing a very, very imaginative project that tracks people's happiness, and here is what he told me he found: "" Interacting with your friends is better than interacting with your spouse, which is better than interacting with other relatives, which is better than interacting with acquaintances, which is better than interacting with parents, which is better than interacting with children. 
Who are on par with strangers. "" (Laughter) But here's the thing. 
I have been looking at what underlies these data for three years, and children are not the problem. 
Something about parenting right now at this moment is the problem. 
Specifically, I don't think we know what parenting is supposed to be. 
Parent, as a verb, only entered common usage in 1970. 
Our roles as mothers and fathers have changed. 
The roles of our children have changed. 
We are all now furiously improvising our way through a situation for which there is no script, and if you're an amazing jazz musician, then improv is great, but for the rest of us, it can kind of feel like a crisis. 
So how did we get here? 
How is it that we are all now navigating a child-rearing universe without any norms to guide us? 
Well, for starters, there has been a major historical change. 
Until fairly recently, kids worked, on our farms primarily, but also in factories, mills, mines. 
Kids were considered economic assets. 
Sometime during the Progressive Era, we put an end to this arrangement. 
We recognized kids had rights, we banned child labor, we focused on education instead, and school became a child's new work. 
And thank God it did. 
But that only made a parent's role more confusing in a way. 
The old arrangement might not have been particularly ethical, but it was reciprocal. 
We provided food, clothing, shelter, and moral instruction to our kids, and they in return provided income. 
Once kids stopped working, the economics of parenting changed. 
Kids became, in the words of one brilliant if totally ruthless sociologist, "economically worthless but emotionally priceless." 
Rather than them working for us, we began to work for them, because within only a matter of decades it became clear: if we wanted our kids to succeed, school was not enough. 
Today, extracurricular activities are a kid's new work, but that's work for us too, because we are the ones driving them to soccer practice. 
Massive piles of homework are a kid's new work, but that's also work for us, because we have to check it. 
About three years ago, a Texas woman told something to me that totally broke my heart. 
She said, almost casually, "Homework is the new dinner." 
The middle class now pours all of its time and energy and resources into its kids, even though the middle class has less and less of those things to give. 
Mothers now spend more time with their children than they did in 1965, when most women were not even in the workforce. 
It would probably be easier for parents to do their new roles if they knew what they were preparing their kids for. 
This is yet another thing that makes modern parenting so very confounding. 
We have no clue what portion our wisdom, if any, is of use to our kids. 
The world is changing so rapidly, it's impossible to say. 
This was true even when I was young. 
When I was a kid, high school specifically, I was told that I would be at sea in the new global economy if I did not know Japanese. 
And with all due respect to the Japanese, it didn't turn out that way. 
Now there is a certain kind of middle-class parent that is obsessed with teaching their kids Mandarin, and maybe they're onto something, but we cannot know for sure. 
So, absent being able to anticipate the future, what we all do, as good parents, is try and prepare our kids for every possible kind of future, hoping that just one of our efforts will pay off. 
We teach our kids chess, thinking maybe they will need analytical skills. 
We sign them up for team sports, thinking maybe they will need collaborative skills, you know, for when they go to Harvard Business School. 
We try and teach them to be financially savvy and science-minded and eco-friendly and gluten-free, though now is probably a good time to tell you that I was not eco-friendly and gluten-free as a child. 
I ate jars of pureed macaroni and beef. 
And you know what? I'm doing okay. 
I pay my taxes. 
I hold down a steady job. 
I was even invited to speak at TED. 
But the presumption now is that what was good enough for me, or for my folks for that matter, isn't good enough anymore. 
So we all make a mad dash to that bookshelf, because we feel like if we aren't trying everything, it's as if we're doing nothing and we're defaulting on our obligations to our kids. 
So it's hard enough to navigate our new roles as mothers and fathers. 
Now add to this problem something else: we are also navigating new roles as husbands and wives because most women today are in the workforce. 
This is another reason, I think, that parenthood feels like a crisis. 
We have no rules, no scripts, no norms for what to do when a child comes along now that both mom and dad are breadwinners. 
The writer Michael Lewis once put this very, very well. 
He said that the surest way for a couple to start fighting is for them to go out to dinner with another couple whose division of labor is ever so slightly different from theirs, because the conversation in the car on the way home goes something like this: "" So, did you catch that Dave is the one who walks them to school every morning? "" (Laughter) Without scripts telling us who does what in this brave new world, couples fight, and both mothers and fathers each have their legitimate gripes. 
Mothers are much more likely to be multi-tasking when they are at home, and fathers, when they are at home, are much more likely to be mono-tasking. 
Find a guy at home, and odds are he is doing just one thing at a time. 
In fact, UCLA recently did a study looking at the most common configuration of family members in middle-class homes. 
Guess what it was? 
Dad in a room by himself. 
According to the American Time Use Survey, mothers still do twice as much childcare as fathers, which is better than it was in Erma Bombeck's day, but I still think that something she wrote is highly relevant: "I have not been alone in the bathroom since October." 
(Laughter) But here is the thing: Men are doing plenty. 
They spend more time with their kids than their fathers ever spent with them. 
They work more paid hours, on average, than their wives, and they genuinely want to be good, involved dads. 
Today, it is fathers, not mothers, who report the most work-life conflict. 
Either way, by the way, if you think it's hard for traditional families to sort out these new roles, just imagine what it's like now for non-traditional families: families with two dads, families with two moms, single-parent households. 
They are truly improvising as they go. 
Now, in a more progressive country, and forgive me here for capitulating to cliché and invoking, yes, Sweden, parents could rely on the state for support. 
There are countries that acknowledge the anxieties and the changing roles of mothers and fathers. 
Unfortunately, the United States is not one of them, so in case you were wondering what the U.S. 
has in common with Papua New Guinea and Liberia, it's this: We too have no paid maternity leave policy. 
We are one of eight known countries that does not. 
In this age of intense confusion, there is just one goal upon which all parents can agree, and that is whether they are tiger moms or hippie moms, helicopters or drones, our kids' happiness is paramount. 
That is what it means to raise kids in an age when they are economically worthless but emotionally priceless. 
We are all the custodians of their self-esteem. 
The one mantra no parent ever questions is, "All I want is for my children to be happy." 
And don't get me wrong: I think happiness is a wonderful goal for a child. 
But it is a very elusive one. 
Happiness and self-confidence, teaching children that is not like teaching them how to plow a field. 
It's not like teaching them how to ride a bike. 
There's no curriculum for it. 
Happiness and self-confidence can be the byproducts of other things, but they cannot really be goals unto themselves. 
A child's happiness is a very unfair burden to place on a parent. 
And happiness is an even more unfair burden to place on a kid. 
And I have to tell you, I think it leads to some very strange excesses. 
We are now so anxious to protect our kids from the world's ugliness that we now shield them from "" Sesame Street. "" I wish I could say I was kidding about this, but if you go out and you buy the first few episodes of "" Sesame Street "" on DVD, as I did out of nostalgia, you will find a warning at the beginning saying that the content is not suitable for children. 
(Laughter) Can I just repeat that? 
The content of the original "" Sesame Street "" is not suitable for children. 
When asked about this by The New York Times, a producer for the show gave a variety of explanations. 
One was that Cookie Monster smoked a pipe in one skit and then swallowed it. 
Bad modeling. I don't know. 
But the thing that stuck with me is she said that she didn't know whether Oscar the Grouch could be invented today because he was too depressive. 
I cannot tell you how much this distresses me. 
(Laughter) You are looking at a woman who has a periodic table of the Muppets hanging from her cubicle wall. 
The offending muppet, right there. 
That's my son the day he was born. 
I was high as a kite on morphine. 
I had had an unexpected C-section. 
But even in my opiate haze, I managed to have one very clear thought the first time I held him. 
I whispered it into his ear. 
I said, "" I will try so hard not to hurt you. "" It was the Hippocratic Oath, and I didn't even know I was saying it. 
But it occurs to me now that the Hippocratic Oath is a much more realistic aim than happiness. 
In fact, as any parent will tell you, it's awfully hard. 
All of us have said or done hurtful things that we wish to God we could take back. 
I think in another era we did not expect quite so much from ourselves, and it is important that we all remember that the next time we are staring with our hearts racing at those bookshelves. 
I'm not really sure how to create new norms for this world, but I do think that in our desperate quest to create happy kids, we may be assuming the wrong moral burden. 
It strikes me as a better goal, and, dare I say, a more virtuous one, to focus on making productive kids and moral kids, and to simply hope that happiness will come to them by virtue of the good that they do and their accomplishments and the love that they feel from us. 
That, anyway, is one response to having no script. 
Absent having new scripts, we just follow the oldest ones in the book — decency, a work ethic, love — and let happiness and self-esteem take care of themselves. 
I think if we all did that, the kids would still be all right, and so would their parents, possibly in both cases even better. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Puzzles and magic. 
I work in what most people think are two distinct fields, but I believe they are the same. 
I am both a magician and a New York Times crossword puzzle constructor, which basically means I've taken the world's two nerdiest hobbies and combined them into one career. 
And I believe that magic and puzzles are the same because they both key into one of the most important human drives: the urge to solve. 
Human beings are wired to solve, to make order out of chaos. 
It's certainly true for me. 
I've been solving my whole life. 
High school consisted of epic Scrabble matches in the cafeteria and not really talking to girls, and then at about that time I started learning magic tricks and definitely not talking to girls. 
There's nothing like starting a conversation with, "" Hey, did you know that 'prestidigitation' is worth 20 points in Scrabble? "" But back then, I noticed an intersection between puzzles and illusion. 
When you do the crossword puzzle or when you watch a magic show, you become a solver, and your goal is to try to find the order in the chaos, the chaos of, say, a black-and-white puzzle grid, a mixed-up bag of Scrabble tiles, or a shuffled pack of playing cards. 
And today, as a cruciverbalist — 23 points — and an illusion designer, I create that chaos. 
I test your ability to solve. 
Now, it turns out research tells us that solving is as primal as eating and sleeping. 
From birth, we are wired to solve. 
In one UCLA study, newborns still in the hospital were shown patterns, patterns like this: circle, cross, circle, cross. 
And then the pattern was changed: triangle, square. 
And by tracking an infant's gaze, we know that newborns as young as a day old can notice and respond to disruptions in order. 
It's remarkable. 
So from infancy through old age, the urge to solve unites us all, and I even found this photo on Instagram of pop star Katy Perry solving a crossword puzzle with her morning coffee. 
Like. 
(Laughter) Now, solving exists across all cultures. 
The American invention is the crossword puzzle, and this year we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the crossword puzzle, first published in The New York World. 
But many other cultures have their signature puzzles as well. 
China gives us tangrams, which would test solvers' abilities to form shapes from the jumbled pieces. 
Chaos. Order. Order. 
And order. That one's my favorite, let's hear it again. Okay. And how about this puzzle 
invented in 18th-century England: the jigsaw puzzle. 
Is this not making order out of chaos? 
So as you can see, we are always solving. 
We are always trying to decode our world. 
It's an eternal quest. 
It's just like the one Cervantes wrote about in "" Don Quixote, "" which by the way is the root of the word "" quixotry, "" the highest-scoring Scrabble word of all time, 365 points. 
But anyway, "" Don Quixote "" is an important book. 
You guys have read "" Don Quixote, "" yes? 
I'm seeing some heads nod. 
Come on guys, really? 
Who's read "" Don Quixote? "" Let's do this. Raise your hands if you've read "" Don Quixote. "" There we go. Smart audience. 
Who's read "" Don Quixote? "" Get them up. 
Okay, good, because I need somebody smart here because now I'm going to demonstrate with the help of one of you just how deeply rooted your urge to solve is, just how wired to solve all of you really are, so I'm going to come into the audience and find somebody to help me. 
Let's see. 
Everybody's looking away all of a sudden. 
Can I? Would you? What is your name? Gwen. 
I'm not a mind reader, I can see your name tag. 
Come with me, Gwen. Everyone give her a round of applause, make her feel welcome. 
Gwen, after you. 
(Applause) Are you so excited? 
Did you know that your name is worth eight points in Scrabble? 
Okay, stand right here, Gwen, right here. 
Now, Gwen, before we begin, I'd like to point out a piece of the puzzle, which is here in this envelope, and I will not go near it. Okay? 
And over here we have a drawing of some farm animals. 
You can see we have an owl, we have a horse, a donkey, a rooster, an ox, and a sheep, and then here, Gwen, we have some fancy art store markers, colors like, can you see that word right there? 
Gwen: Cobalt. David Kwong: Cobalt, yes. Cobalt. 
But we have a silver, a red, an emerald, and an amber marker, and Gwen, you are going to color this drawing just like you were five years old, one marker at a time. 
It's going to be a lot of fun. 
But I'm going to go over here. 
I don't want to see what you're doing. 
Okay, so don't start yet. 
Wait for me to get over here and close my eyes. 
Now Gwen, are you ready? 
Pick up just one marker, pick up just one marker, and why don't you color in the horse for me? 
Color in the horse — big, big, big scribbles, broad strokes, don't worry about staying in the lines. 
All right. Great. 
And why don't you take that marker and recap it and place it on the table for me. 
Okay, and pick up another marker out of the cup and take off the cap and color in the donkey for me, color in the donkey. 
Big scribbles. 
Okay, cool, and re-cap that marker and place it on the table. 
And pick up another marker for me and take off the cap. Isn't this fun? 
And color in the owl for me. 
Color in the owl. 
Okay, and recap that marker and pick up another marker out of the cup and color in the rooster for me, color in the rooster. 
Good, good, good, good, good. 
Big, big, big strokes. Good, good. 
Pick up another marker out of the cup and color in the ox for me. Color in the ox. 
Okay, good. 
A lot of color on that, and recap, and place it on the table, and pick up another marker out of the cup. 
Oh, I'm out? Okay, I'm going to turn around. 
Did I forget? Oh, I forgot my purple marker. 
This is still going to work, though. 
I think this is still going to work, mostly. 
So Gwen, I'm going to hand you this envelope. 
Don't open it yet. Do not open it yet, but I am going to write down your choices so that everybody can see the choices that you made. 
Okay, great. So we have a cobalt horse, amber owl, a silver ox, yes, okay, a red donkey, and what was the emerald color? A rooster. 
An emerald rooster. Okay. 
Now for the moment of truth, Gwen, we're going to take a look in that envelope. 
Why don't you open it up and remove the one piece of paper from inside and hand it to me, and we will see if it matches your choices. 
Yes, I think it does. 
We have a cobalt horse, we have a red donkey, we have an amber owl, we have an emerald rooster, a silver ox, I forgot my purple marker so we have a blank sheep, but that's a pretty amazing coincidence, don't you think? 
Gwen, well done. That's beautiful. (Applause) I'll take that back from you. 
So ladies and gentlemen, how is this possible? 
How is this possible? Well, could it be that Gwen's brain is so wired to solve that she decoded hidden messages? 
Well this is the puzzle I present to you. 
Could there be order in the chaos that I created? 
Let's take a closer look. 
Do you recall when I showed you these puzzle pieces? 
What image did it ultimately become? A cobalt horse. 
The plot thickens. 
And then we played a game of tangrams with an emerald rooster. 
That one's my favorite. 
And then we had an experiment with a silver ox. 
And Katy Perry drinks her morning coffee out of an amber owl. 
Thank you, Katy, for taking that photo for me. 
Oh, and there's one more, there's one more. 
I believe you colored a red donkey, Gwen. 
Ladies and gentlemen, could you raise your hands for me if you've read "" Don Quixote? "" Who's read "" Don Quixote? "" (Laughter) But wait, but wait, wait, wait, wait, there's more. 
There's more. 
Gwen, I was so confident that you were going to make these choices that I made another prediction, and I put it in an even more indelible place, and it's right here. 
Ladies and gentlemen, we have today's New York Times. 
The date is March 18th, 2014. 
Many of you in the first couple of rows have it underneath your seats as well. 
Really dig. We hid them under there. 
See if you can fish out the newspaper and open up to the arts section and you will find the crossword puzzle, and the crossword puzzle today was written by yours truly. 
You can see my name above the grid. 
I'm going to give this to you, Gwen, to take a look. 
And I will also put it up on the screen. 
Now let's take a look at another piece of the puzzle. 
If you look at the first clue for 1-across, it starts with the letter C, for corrupt, and just below that we have an O, for outfielder, and if you keep reading the first letters of the clues down, you get cobalt horse, amber owl, silver ox, red donkey, and emerald rooster. 
(Applause) That's pretty cool, right? 
It's The New York Times. 
But wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait. 
Oh, Gwen, do you recall how I forgot my purple marker, and you were unable to color the sheep? 
Well, if you keep reading starting with 25-down, it says, "" Oh, by the way, the sheep can be left blank. "" (Laughter) (Applause) But wait, wait, wait, there's one more thing, there's one more thing, there's one final piece of the puzzle. 
Gwen, I am so grateful for your choices because if we take a look at the first letters of your combinations, we get "" C-H-A-O-S "" for chaos and "" O-R-D-E-R "" for order. 
That's chaos and order. 
We've all made order out of chaos. 
So ladies and gentlemen, the next time you find yourself with a puzzle, whether it's in your life or in your work, or maybe it's at the Sunday morning breakfast table with The New York Times, remember, you are all wired to solve. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Thank you so much. It's really scary to be here among the smartest of the smart. 
I'm here to tell you a few tales of passion. 
There's a Jewish saying that I love. 
What is truer than truth? Answer: The story. 
I'm a storyteller. I want to convey something that is truer than truth about our common humanity. 
All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. 
Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom. 
I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic. 
In the last 20 years I have published a few books, but I have lived in anonymity until February of 2006, when I carried the Olympic flag in the Winter Olympics in Italy. 
That made me a celebrity. Now people recognize me in Macy's, and my grandchildren think that I'm cool. 
(Laughter) Allow me to tell you about my four minutes of fame. 
One of the organizers of the Olympic ceremony, of the opening ceremony, called me and said that I had been selected to be one of the flag-bearers. 
I replied that surely this was a case of mistaken identity because I'm as far as you can get from being an athlete. 
Actually, I wasn't even sure that I could go around the stadium without a walker. 
(Laughter) I was told that this was no laughing matter. 
This would be the first time that only women would carry the Olympic flag. 
Five women, representing five continents, and three Olympic gold medal winners. 
My first question was, naturally, what was I going to wear? 
(Laughter) A uniform, she said, and asked for my measurements. 
My measurements. 
I had a vision of myself in a fluffy anorak, looking like the Michelin Man. 
(Laughter) By the middle of February, I found myself in Turin, where enthusiastic crowds cheered when any of the 80 Olympic teams was in the street. 
Those athletes had sacrificed everything to compete in the games. 
They all deserved to win, but there's the element of luck. 
A speck of snow, an inch of ice, the force of the wind, can determine the result of a race or a game. 
However, what matters most — more than training or luck — is the heart. 
Only a fearless and determined heart will get the gold medal. 
It is all about passion. 
The streets of Turin were covered with red posters announcing the slogan of the Olympics. 
Passion lives here. Isn't it always true? 
Heart is what drives us and determines our fate. 
That is what I need for my characters in my books: a passionate heart. 
I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks. 
People like all of you in this room. 
Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters. 
(Laughter) They only make good former spouses. (Laughter) 
(Applause) In the green room of the stadium, I met the other flag bearers: three athletes, and the actresses Susan Sarandon and Sophia Loren. 
Also, two women with passionate hearts: Wangari Maathai, the Nobel prizewinner from Kenya who has planted 30 million trees. And by doing so, she has changed the soil, the weather, in some places in Africa, and of course the economic conditions in many villages. 
And Somaly Mam, a Cambodian activist who fights passionately against child prostitution. 
When she was 14 years old, her grandfather sold her to a brothel. 
She told us of little girls raped by men who believe that having sex with a very young virgin will cure them from AIDS. 
And of brothels where children are forced to receive five, 15 clients per day, and if they rebel, they are tortured with electricity. 
In the green room I received my uniform. 
It was not the kind of outfit that I normally wear, but it was far from the Michelin Man suit that I had anticipated. Not bad, really. 
I looked like a refrigerator. 
(Laughter) But so did most of the flag-bearers, except Sophia Loren, the universal symbol of beauty and passion. 
Sophia is over 70 and she looks great. 
She's sexy, slim and tall, with a deep tan. 
Now, how can you have a deep tan and have no wrinkles? 
I don't know. 
When asked in a TV interview, "" How could she look so good? "" She replied, "" Posture. My back is always straight, and I don't make old people's noises. "" (Laughter) So, there you have some free advice from one of the most beautiful women on earth. 
No grunting, no coughing, no wheezing, no talking to yourselves, no farting. 
(Laughter) Well, she didn't say that exactly. (Laughter) 
At some point around midnight, we were summoned to the wings of the stadium, and the loudspeakers announced the Olympic flag, and the music started — by the way, the same music that starts here, the Aida March. 
Sophia Loren was right in front of me — she's a foot taller than I am, not counting the poofy hair. 
(Laughter) She walked elegantly, like a giraffe on the African savannah, holding the flag on her shoulder. I jogged behind (Laughter) — on my tiptoes — holding the flag on my extended arm, so that my head was actually under the damn flag. (Laughter) 
All the cameras were, of course, on Sophia. 
That was fortunate for me, because in most press photos I appear too, although often between Sophia's legs. 
(Laughter) A place where most men would love to be. (Laughter) 
(Applause) The best four minutes of my entire life were those in the Olympic stadium. 
My husband is offended when I say this — although I have explained to him that what we do in private usually takes less than four minutes — (Laughter) — so he shouldn't take it personally. 
I have all the press clippings of those four magnificent minutes, because I don't want to forget them when old age destroys my brain cells. 
I want to carry in my heart forever the key word of the Olympics — passion. 
So here's a tale of passion. 
The year is 1998, the place is a prison camp for Tutsi refugees in Congo. 
By the way, 80 percent of all refugees and displaced people in the world are women and girls. 
We can call this place in Congo a death camp, because those who are not killed will die of disease or starvation. 
The protagonists of this story are a young woman, Rose Mapendo, and her children. 
She's pregnant and a widow. 
Soldiers have forced her to watch as her husband was tortured and killed. 
Somehow she manages to keep her seven children alive, and a few months later, she gives birth to premature twins. 
Two tiny little boys. 
She cuts the umbilical cord with a stick, and ties it with her own hair. 
She names the twins after the camp's commanders to gain their favor, and feeds them with black tea because her milk cannot sustain them. 
When the soldiers burst in her cell to rape her oldest daughter, she grabs hold of her and refuses to let go, even when they hold a gun to her head. 
Somehow, the family survives for 16 months, and then, by extraordinary luck, and the passionate heart of a young American man, Sasha Chanoff, who manages to put her in a U.S. rescue plane, Rose Mapendo and her nine children end up in Phoenix, Arizona, where they're now living and thriving. 
Mapendo, in Swahili, means great love. 
The protagonists of my books are strong and passionate women like Rose Mapendo. 
I don't make them up. There's no need for that. 
I look around and I see them everywhere. 
I have worked with women and for women all my life. 
I know them well. 
I was born in ancient times, at the end of the world, in a patriarchal Catholic and conservative family. 
No wonder that by age five I was a raging feminist — although the term had not reached Chile yet, so nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me. 
(Laughter) I would soon find out that there was a high price to pay for my freedom, and for questioning the patriarchy. 
But I was happy to pay it, because for every blow that I received, I was able to deliver two. 
(Laughter) Once, when my daughter Paula was in her twenties, she said to me that feminism was dated, that I should move on. 
We had a memorable fight. Feminism is dated? 
Yes, for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor — they have children that they don't want or they cannot feed. 
They have no control over their bodies or their lives. 
They have no education and no freedom. 
They are raped, beaten up and sometimes killed with impunity. 
For most Western young women of today, being called a feminist is an insult. 
Feminism has never been sexy, but let me assure you that it never stopped me from flirting, and I have seldom suffered from lack of men. 
(Laughter) Feminism is not dead, by no means. 
It has evolved. If you don't like the term, change it, for Goddess' sake. 
Call it Aphrodite, or Venus, or bimbo, or whatever you want; the name doesn't matter, as long as we understand what it is about, and we support it. 
So here's another tale of passion, and this is a sad one. 
The place is a small women's clinic in a village in Bangladesh. 
The year is 2005. 
Jenny is a young American dental hygienist who has gone to the clinic as a volunteer during her three-week vacation. 
She's prepared to clean teeth, but when she gets there, she finds out that there are no doctors, no dentists, and the clinic is just a hut full of flies. 
Outside, there is a line of women who have waited several hours to be treated. 
The first patient is in excruciating pain because she has several rotten molars. 
Jenny realizes that the only solution is to pull out the bad teeth. 
She's not licensed for that; she has never done it. 
She risks a lot and she's terrified. 
She doesn't even have the proper instruments, but fortunately she has brought some Novocaine. 
Jenny has a brave and passionate heart. 
She murmurs a prayer and she goes ahead with the operation. 
At the end, the relieved patient kisses her hands. 
That day the hygienist pulls out many more teeth. 
The next morning, when she comes again to the so-called clinic, her first patient is waiting for her with her husband. 
The woman's face looks like a watermelon. 
It is so swollen that you can't even see the eyes. 
The husband, furious, threatens to kill the American. 
Jenny is horrified at what she has done, but then the translator explains that the patient's condition has nothing to do with the operation. 
The day before, her husband beat her up because she was not home in time to prepare dinner for him. 
Millions of women live like this today. 
They are the poorest of the poor. 
Although women do two-thirds of the world's labor, they own less than one percent of the world's assets. 
They are paid less than men for the same work if they're paid at all, and they remain vulnerable because they have no economic independence, and they are constantly threatened by exploitation, violence and abuse. 
It is a fact that giving women education, work, the ability to control their own income, inherit and own property, benefits the society. 
If a woman is empowered, her children and her family will be better off. 
If families prosper, the village prospers, and eventually so does the whole country. 
Wangari Maathai goes to a village in Kenya. 
She talks with the women and explains that the land is barren because they have cut and sold the trees. 
She gets the women to plant new trees and water them, drop by drop. 
In a matter of five or six years, they have a forest, the soil is enriched, and the village is saved. 
The poorest and most backward societies are always those that put women down. 
Yet this obvious truth is ignored by governments and also by philanthropy. 
For every dollar given to a women's program, 20 dollars are given to men's programs. 
Women are 51 percent of humankind. 
Empowering them will change everything — more than technology and design and entertainment. 
I can promise you that women working together — linked, informed and educated — can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet. 
In any war today, most of the casualties are civilians, mainly women and children. They are collateral damage. 
Men run the world, and look at the mess we have. 
What kind of world do we want? 
This is a fundamental question that most of us are asking. 
Does it make sense to participate in the existing world order? 
We want a world where life is preserved and the quality of life is enriched for everybody, not only for the privileged. 
In January I saw an exhibit of Fernando Botero's paintings at the UC Berkeley library. 
No museum or gallery in the United States, except for the New York gallery that carries Botero's work, has dared to show the paintings because the theme is the Abu Ghraib prison. 
They are huge paintings of torture and abuse of power, in the voluminous Botero style. 
I have not been able to get those images out of my mind or my heart. 
What I fear most is power with impunity. 
I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse. 
In our species, the alpha males define reality, and force the rest of the pack to accept that reality and follow the rules. 
The rules change all the time, but they always benefit them, and in this case, the trickle-down effect, which does not work in economics, works perfectly. 
Abuse trickles down from the top of the ladder to the bottom. 
Women and children, especially the poor, are at the bottom. 
Even the most destitute of men have someone they can abuse — a woman or a child. 
I'm fed up with the power that a few exert over the many through gender, income, race, and class. 
I think that the time is ripe to make fundamental changes in our civilization. 
But for real change, we need feminine energy in the management of the world. 
We need a critical number of women in positions of power, and we need to nurture the feminine energy in men. 
I'm talking about men with young minds, of course. 
Old guys are hopeless; we have to wait for them to die off. 
(Laughter) Yes, I would love to have Sophia Loren's long legs and legendary breasts. 
But given a choice, I would rather have the warrior hearts of Wangari Maathai, Somaly Mam, Jenny and Rose Mapendo. 
I want to make this world good. 
Not better, but to make it good. 
Why not? It is possible. Look around in this room — all this knowledge, energy, talent and technology. 
Let's get off our fannies, roll up our sleeves and get to work, passionately, in creating an almost perfect world. 
Thank you. 

What was the most difficult job you ever did? 
Was it working in the sun? 
Was it working to provide food for a family or a community? 
Was it working days and nights trying to protect lives and property? 
Was it working alone or working on a project that wasn't guaranteed to succeed, but that might improve human health or save a life? 
Was it working to build something, create something, make a work of art? 
Was it work for which you were never sure you were fully understood or appreciated? 
The people in our communities who do these jobs deserve our attention, our love and our deepest support. 
But people aren't the only ones in our communities who do these difficult jobs. 
These jobs are also done by the plants, the animals and the ecosystems on our planet, including the ecosystems I study: the tropical coral reefs. 
Coral reefs are farmers. 
They provide food, income and food security for hundreds of millions of people around the world. 
Coral reefs are security guards. 
The structures that they build protect our shorelines from storm surge and waves, and the biological systems that they house filter the water and make it safer for us to work and play. 
Coral reefs are chemists. 
The molecules that we're discovering on coral reefs are increasingly important in the search for new antibiotics and new cancer drugs. 
And coral reefs are artists. 
The structures that they build are some of the most beautiful things on planet Earth. 
And this beauty is the foundation of the tourism industry in many countries with few or little other natural resources. 
So for all of these reasons, all of these ecosystem services, economists estimate the value of the world's coral reefs in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year. 
And yet despite all that hard work being done for us and all that wealth that we gain, we have done almost everything we possibly could to destroy that. 
We have taken the fish out of the oceans and we have added in fertilizer, sewage, diseases, oil, pollution, sediments. 
We have trampled the reefs physically with our boats, our fins, our bulldozers, and we have changed the chemistry of the entire sea, warmed the waters and made storms worse. 
And these would all be bad on their own, but these threats magnify each other and compound one another and make each other worse. 
I'll give you an example. 
Where I live and work, in Curaçao, a tropical storm went by a few years ago. 
And on the eastern end of the island, where the reefs are intact and thriving, you could barely tell a tropical storm had passed. 
But in town, where corals had died from overfishing, from pollution, the tropical storm picked up the dead corals and used them as bludgeons to kill the corals that were left. 
This is a coral that I studied during my PhD — I got to know it quite well. 
And after this storm took off half of its tissue, it became infested with algae, the algae overgrew the tissue and that coral died. 
This magnification of threats, this compounding of factors is what Jeremy Jackson describes as the "" slippery slope to slime. "" It's hardly even a metaphor because many of our reefs now are literally bacteria and algae and slime. 
Now, this is the part of the talk where you may expect me to launch into my plea for us to all save the coral reefs. 
But I have a confession to make: that phrase drives me nuts. 
Whether I see it in a tweet, in a news headline or the glossy pages of a conservation brochure, that phrase bothers me, because we as conservationists have been sounding the alarms about the death of coral reefs for decades. 
And yet, almost everyone I meet, no matter how educated, is not sure what a coral is or where they come from. 
How would we get someone to care about the world's coral reefs when it's an abstract thing they can barely understand? 
If they don't understand what a coral is or where it comes from, or how funny or interesting or beautiful it is, why would we expect them to care about saving them? 
So let's change that. 
What is a coral and where does it come from? 
Corals are born in a number of different ways, but most often by mass spawning: all of the individuals of a single species on one night a year, releasing all the eggs they've made that year into the water column, packaged into bundles with sperm cells. 
And those bundles go to the surface of the ocean and break apart. 
And hopefully — hopefully — at the surface of the ocean, they meet the eggs and sperm from other corals. 
And that is why you need lots of corals on a coral reef — so that all of their eggs can meet their match at the surface. 
When they're fertilized, they do what any other animal egg does: divides in half again and again and again. 
Taking these photos under the microscope every year is one of my favorite and most magical moments of the year. 
At the end of all this cell division, they turn into a swimming larva — a little tiny blob of fat the size of a poppy seed, but with all of the sensory systems that we have. 
They can sense color and light, textures, chemicals, pH. 
They can even feel pressure waves; they can hear sound. 
And they use those talents to search the bottom of the reef for a place to attach and live the rest of their lives. 
So imagine finding a place where you would live the rest of your life when you were just two days old. 
They attach in the place they find most suitable, they build a skeleton underneath themselves, they build a mouth and tentacles, and then they begin the difficult work of building the world's coral reefs. 
One coral polyp will divide itself again and again and again, leaving a limestone skeleton underneath itself and growing up toward the sun. 
Given hundreds of years and many species, what you get is a massive limestone structure that can be seen from space in many cases, covered by a thin skin of these hardworking animals. 
Now, there are only a few hundred species of corals on the planet, maybe 1,000. 
But these systems house millions and millions of other species, and that diversity is what stabilizes the systems, and it's where we're finding our new medicines. 
It's how we find new sources of food. 
I'm lucky enough to work on the island of Curaçao, where we still have reefs that look like this. 
But, indeed, much of the Caribbean and much of our world is much more like this. 
Scientists have studied in increasing detail the loss of the world's coral reefs, and they have documented with increasing certainty the causes. 
But in my research, I'm not interested in looking backward. 
My colleagues and I in Curaçao are interested in looking forward at what might be. 
And we have the tiniest reason to be optimistic. 
Because even in some of these reefs that we probably could have written off long ago, we sometimes see baby corals arrive and survive anyway. 
And we're starting to think that baby corals may have the ability to adjust to some of the conditions that the adults couldn't. 
They may be able to adjust ever so slightly more readily to this human planet. 
So in the research I do with my colleagues in Curaçao, we try to figure out what a baby coral needs in that critical early stage, what it's looking for and how we can try to help it through that process. 
I'm going to show you three examples of the work we've done to try to answer those questions. 
A few years ago we took a 3D printer and we made coral choice surveys — different colors and different textures, and we simply asked the coral where they preferred to settle. 
And we found that corals, even without the biology involved, still prefer white and pink, the colors of a healthy reef. 
And they prefer crevices and grooves and holes, where they will be safe from being trampled or eaten by a predator. 
So we can use this knowledge, we can go back and say we need to restore those factors — that pink, that white, those crevices, those hard surfaces — in our conservation projects. 
We can also use that knowledge if we're going to put something underwater, like a sea wall or a pier. 
We can choose to use the materials and colors and textures that might bias the system back toward those corals. 
Now in addition to the surfaces, we also study the chemical and microbial signals that attract corals to reefs. 
Starting about six years ago, I began culturing bacteria from surfaces where corals had settled. 
And I tried those one by one by one, looking for the bacteria that would convince corals to settle and attach. 
And we now have many bacterial strains in our freezer that will reliably cause corals to go through that settlement and attachment process. 
So as we speak, my colleagues in Curaçao are testing those bacteria to see if they'll help us raise more coral settlers in the lab, and to see if those coral settlers will survive better when we put them back underwater. 
Now in addition to these tools, we also try to uncover the mysteries of species that are under-studied. 
This is one of my favorite corals, and always has been: dendrogyra cylindrus, the pillar coral. 
I love it because it makes this ridiculous shape, because its tentacles are fat and look fuzzy and because it's rare. 
Finding one of these on a reef is a treat. 
In fact, it's so rare, that last year it was listed as a threatened species on the endangered species list. 
And this was in part because in over 30 years of research surveys, scientists had never found a baby pillar coral. 
We weren't even sure if they could still reproduce, or if they were still reproducing. 
So four years ago, we started following these at night and watching to see if we could figure out when they spawn in Curaçao. 
We got some good tips from our colleagues in Florida, who had seen one in 2007, one in 2008, and eventually we figured out when they spawn in Curaçao and we caught it. 
Here's a female on the left with some eggs in her tissue, about to release them into the seawater. 
And here's a male on the right, releasing sperm. 
We collected this, we got it back to the lab, we got it to fertilize and we got baby pillar corals swimming in our lab. 
Thanks to the work of our scientific aunts and uncles, and thanks to the 10 years of practice we've had in Curaçao at raising other coral species, we got some of those larvae to go through the rest of the process and settle and attach, and turn into metamorphosed corals. 
So this is the first pillar coral baby that anyone ever saw. 
(Applause) And I have to say — if you think baby pandas are cute, this is cuter. 
(Laughter) So we're starting to figure out the secrets to this process, the secrets of coral reproduction and how we might help them. 
And this is true all around the world; scientists are figuring out new ways to handle their embryos, to get them to settle, maybe even figuring out the methods to preserve them at low temperatures, so that we can preserve their genetic diversity and work with them more often. 
But this is still so low-tech. 
We are limited by the space on our bench, the number of hands in the lab and the number of coffees we can drink in any given hour. 
Now, compare that to our other crises and our other areas of concern as a society. 
We have advanced medical technology, we have defense technology, we have scientific technology, we even have advanced technology for art. 
But our technology for conservation is behind. 
Think back to the most difficult job you ever did. 
Many of you would say it was being a parent. 
My mother described being a parent as something that makes your life far more amazing and far more difficult than you could've ever possibly imagined. 
I've been trying to help corals become parents for over 10 years now. 
And watching the wonder of life has certainly filled me with amazement to the core of my soul. 
But I've also seen how difficult it is for them to become parents. 
The pillar corals spawned again two weeks ago, and we collected their eggs and brought them back to the lab. 
And here you see one embryo dividing, alongside 14 eggs that didn't fertilize and will blow up. 
They'll be infected with bacteria, they will explode and those bacteria will threaten the life of this one embryo that has a chance. 
We don't know if it was our handling methods that went wrong and we don't know if it was just this coral on this reef, always suffering from low fertility. 
Whatever the cause, we have much more work to do before we can use baby corals to grow or fix or, yes, maybe save coral reefs. 
So never mind that they're worth hundreds of billions of dollars. 
Coral reefs are hardworking animals and plants and microbes and fungi. 
They're providing us with art and food and medicine. 
And we almost took out an entire generation of corals. 
But a few made it anyway, despite our best efforts, and now it's time for us to thank them for the work they did and give them every chance they have to raise the coral reefs of the future, their coral babies. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

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

Welcome to Thailand. 
Now, when I was a young man — 40 years ago, the country was very, very poor with lots and lots and lots of people living in poverty. 
We decided to do something about it, but we didn't begin with a welfare program or a poverty reduction program. 
But we began with a family-planning program, following a very successful maternal child health activity, sets of activities. 
So basically, no one would accept family planning if their children didn't survive. 
So the first step: get to the children, get to the mothers, and then follow up with family planning. 
Not just child mortality alone, you need also family planning. 
Now let me take you back as to why we needed to do it. 
In my country, that was the case in 1974. 
Seven children per family — tremendous growth at 3.3 percent. 
There was just no future. 
We needed to reduce the population growth rate. 
So we said, "" Let's do it. "" The women said, "" We agree. We'll use pills, but we need a doctor to prescribe the pills, "" and we had very, very few doctors. 
We didn't take no as an answer; we took no as a question. 
We went to the nurses and the midwives, who were also women, and did a fantastic job at explaining how to use the pill. 
That was wonderful, but it covered only 20 percent of the country. 
What do we do for the other 80 percent — leave them alone and say, "" Well, they're not medical personnel. "" No, we decided to do a bit more. 
So we went to the ordinary people that you saw. 
Actually, below that yellow sign — I wish they hadn't wiped that, because there was "" Coca-Cola "" there. 
We were so much bigger than Coca-Cola in those days. 
And no difference, the people they chose were the people we chose. 
They were well-known in the community, they knew that customers were always right, and they were terrific, and they practiced their family planning themselves. 
So they could supply pills and condoms throughout the country, in every village of the country. 
So there we are. We went to the people who were seen as the cause of the problem to be the solution. 
Wherever there were people — and you can see boats with the women, selling things — here's the floating market selling bananas and crabs and also contraceptives — wherever you find people, you'll find contraceptives in Thailand. 
And then we decided, why not get to religion because in the Philippines, the Catholic Church was pretty strong, and Thai people were Buddhist. 
We went to them and they said, "" Look, could you help us? "" I'm there — the one in blue, not the yellow — holding a bowl of holy water for the monk to sprinkle holy water on pills and condoms for the sanctity of the family. 
And this picture was sent throughout the country. 
So some of the monks in the villages were doing the same thing themselves. 
And the women were saying, "" No wonder we have no side-effects. 
It's been blessed. "" That was their perception. 
And then we went to teachers. 
You need everybody to be involved in trying to provide whatever it is that make humanity a better place. 
So we went to the teachers. 
Over a quarter of a million were taught about family planning with a new alphabet — A, B for birth, C for condom, I for IUD, V for vasectomy. 
And then we had a snakes and ladders game, where you throw dice. 
If you land on anything pro-family planning, you move ahead. 
Like, "" Mother takes the pill every night. 
Very good, mother. Move ahead. 
Uncle buys a condom. Very good, uncle. Move ahead. 
Uncle gets drunk, doesn't use condom. Come back, start again. "" (Laughter) Again, education, class entertainment. 
And the kids were doing it in school too. 
We had relay races with condoms, we had children's condom-blowing championship. 
And before long, the condom was know as the girl's best friend. 
In Thailand, for poor people, diamonds don't make it — so the condom is the girl's best friend. 
We introduced our first microcredit program in 1975, and the women who organized it said, "" We only want to lend to women who practice family planning. 
If you're pregnant, take care of your pregnancy. 
If you're not pregnant, you can take a loan out from us. "" And that was run by them. 
And after 35 / 36 years, it's still going on. 
It's a part of the Village Development Bank; it's not a real bank, but it's a fund — microcredit. 
And we didn't need a big organization to run it — it was run by the villagers themselves. 
And you probably hardly see a Thai man there, it's always women, women, women, women. 
And then we thought we'd help America, because America's been helping everyone, whether they want help or not. 
(Laughter) And this is on the Fourth of July. 
We decided to provide vasectomy to all men, but in particular, American men to the front of the queue, right up to the Ambassador's residence during his [unclear]. 
And the hotel gave us the ballroom for it — very appropriate room. 
(Laughter) And since it was near lunch time, they said, "" All right, we'll give you some lunch. 
Of course, it must be American cola. 
You get two brands, Coke and Pepsi. 
And then the food is either hamburger or hotdog. "" And I thought a hotdog will be more symbolic. 
(Laughter) And here is this, then, young man called Willy Bohm who worked for the USAID. 
Obviously, he's had his vasectomy because his hotdog is half eaten, and he was very happy. 
It made a lot of news in America, and it angered some people also. 
I said, "" Don't worry. Come over and I'll do the whole lot of you. "" (Laughter) And what happened? 
In all this thing, from seven children to 1.5 children, population growth rate of 3.3 to 0.5. 
You could call it the Coca-Cola approach if you like — it was exactly the same thing. 
I'm not sure whether Coca-Cola followed us, or we followed Coca-Cola, but we're good friends. 
And so that's the case of everyone joining in. 
We didn't have a strong government. We didn't have lots of doctors. 
But it's everybody's job who can change attitude and behavior. 
Then AIDS came along and hit Thailand, and we had to stop doing a lot of good things to fight AIDS. 
But unfortunately, the government was in denial, denial, denial. 
So our work wasn't affected. 
So I thought, "" Well, if you can't go to the government, go to the military. "" So I went to the military and asked to borrow 300 radio stations. 
They have more than the government, and they've got more guns than the government. 
So I asked them, could they help us in our fight against HIV. 
And after I gave them statistics, they said, "" Yes. Okay. You can use all the radio stations, television stations. "" And that's when we went onto the airwaves. 
And then we got a new prime minister soon after that. 
And he said, "" Mechai, could you come and join? "" He asked me in because he liked my wife a lot. 
So I said, "" Okay. "" He became the chairman of the National AIDS Committee and increased the budget fifty-fold. 
Every ministry, even judges, had to be involved in AIDS education — everyone — and we said the public, institutions, religious institutions, schools — everyone was involved. 
And here, every media person had to be trained for HIV. 
And we gave every station half a minute extra for advertising to earn more money. 
So they were happy with that. 
And then AIDS education in all schools, starting from university. 
And these are high school kids teaching high school kids. 
And the best teachers were the girls, not the boys, and they were terrific. 
And these girls who go around teaching about safe sex and HIV were known as Mother Theresa. 
And then we went down one more step. 
These are primary school kids — third, fourth grade — going to every household in the village, every household in the whole of Thailand, giving AIDS information and a condom to every household, given by these young kids. 
And no parents objected, because we were trying to save lives, and this was a lifesaver. 
And we said, "" Everyone needs to be involved. "" So you have the companies also realizing that sick staff don't work, and dead customers don't buy. 
So they all trained. 
And then we have this Captain Condom, with his Harvard MBA, going to schools and night spots. 
And they loved him. You need a symbol of something. 
In every country, every program, you need a symbol, and this is probably the best thing he's ever done with his MBA. 
(Laughter) And then we gave condoms out everywhere on the streets — everywhere, everywhere. 
In taxis, you get condoms. 
And also, in traffic, the policemen give you condoms — our "" cops and rubbers "" programs. 
(Laughter) So, can you imagine New York policemen giving out condoms? 
Of course I can. And they'd enjoy it immensely; I see them standing around right now, everywhere. 
Imagine if they had condoms, giving out to all sorts of people. 
And then, new change, we had hair bands, clothing and the condom for your mobile phone during the rainy season. 
(Laughter) And these were the condoms that we introduced. 
One says, "" Weapon of mass protection. "" We found — you know — somebody here was searching for the weapon of mass destruction, but we have found the weapon of mass protection: the condom. 
And then it says here, with the American flag, "Don't leave home without it." 
But I have some to give out afterward. 
But let me warn you, these are Thai-sized, so be very careful. 
(Laughter) And so you can see that condoms can do so many things. 
Look at this — I gave this to Al Gore and to Bill Senior also. 
Stop global warming; use condoms. 
And then this is the picture I mentioned to you — the weapon of mass protection. 
And let the next Olympics save some lives. 
Why just run around? 
(Laughter) And then finally, in Thailand we're Buddhist, we don't have a God, so instead, we say, "" In rubber we trust. "" (Laughter) So you can see that we added everything to our endeavor to make life better for the people. 
We had condoms in all the refrigerators in the hotels and the schools, because alcohol impairs judgment. 
And then what happened? 
After all this time, everybody joined in. 
According to the U.N., new cases of HIV declined by 90 percent, and according to the World Bank, 7.7 million lives were saved. 
Otherwise there wouldn't be many Thais walking around today. 
So it just showed you, you could do something about it. 
90 percent of the funding came from Thailand. 
There was political commitment, some financial commitment, and everybody joined in the fight. 
So just don't leave it to the specialists and doctors and nurses. 
We all need to help. 
And then we decided to help people out of poverty, now that we got AIDS somewhat out of the way — this time, not with government alone, but in cooperation with the business community. 
Because poor people are business people who lack business skills and access to credit. 
Those are the things to be provided by the business community. 
We're trying to turn them into barefoot entrepreneurs, little business people. 
The only way out of poverty is through business enterprise. 
So, that was done. 
The money goes from the company into the village via tree-planting. 
It's not a free gift. 
They plant the trees, and the money goes into their microcredit fund, which we call the Village Development Bank. 
Everybody joins in, and they feel they own the bank, because they have brought the money in. 
And before you can borrow the money, you need to be trained. 
And we believe if you want to help the poor, those who are living in poverty, access to credit must be a human right. 
Access to credit must be a human right. 
Otherwise they'll never get out of poverty. 
And then before getting a loan, you must be trained. 
Here's what we call a "" barefoot MBA, "" teaching people how to do business so that, when they borrow money, they'll succeed with the business. 
These are some of the businesses: mushrooms, crabs, vegetables, trees, fruits, and this is very interesting — Nike ice cream and Nike biscuits; this is a village sponsored by Nike. 
They said, "" They should stop making shoes and clothes. 
Make these better, because we can afford them. "" And then we have silk, Thai silk. 
Now we're making Scottish tartans, as you can see on the left, to sell to all people of Scottish ancestors. 
So anyone sitting in and watching TV, get in touch with me. 
And then this is our answer to Starbucks in Thailand — "Coffee and Condoms." 
See, Starbucks you awake, we keep you awake and alive. 
That's the difference. 
Can you imagine, at every Starbucks that you can also get condoms? 
You can order your condoms with your with your cappuccino. 
And then now, finally in education, we want to change the school as being underutilized into a place where it's a lifelong learning center for everyone. 
We call this our School-Based Integrated Rural Development. 
And it's a center, a focal point for economic and social development. 
Re-do the school, make it serve the community needs. 
And here is a bamboo building — all of them are bamboo. 
This is a geodesic dome made of bamboo. 
And I'm sure Buckminster Fuller would be very, very proud to see a bamboo geodesic dome. 
And we use vegetables around the school ground, so they raise their own vegetables. 
And then, finally, I firmly believe, if we want the MDGs to work — the Millennium Development Goals — we need to add family planning to it. 
Of course, child mortality first and then family planning — everyone needs family planning service — it's underutilized. 
So we have now found the weapon of mass protection. 
And we also ask the next Olympics to be involved in saving lives. 
And then, finally, that is our network. 
And these are our Thai tulips. 
(Laughter) Thank you very much indeed. 
(Applause) 

As a scientist, and also as a human being, I've been trying to make myself susceptible to wonder. 
I think Jason Webley last night called it "conspiring to be part of the magic." 
So it's fortunate that my career as a biologist lets me dive deeply into the lives of some truly wondrous creatures that share our planet: fireflies. 
Now, for many of you, I know that fireflies might conjure up some really great memories: childhood, summertime, even other TED Talks. 
Maybe something like this. 
My seduction into the world of fireflies began when I was back in graduate school. 
One evening, I was sitting out in my backyard in North Carolina, and suddenly, these silent sparks rose up all around me, and I began to wonder: How do these creatures make light, and what's with all this flashing? 
Are they talking to one another? 
And what happens after the lights go out? 
I've been lucky enough to answer some of these questions as I've explored this nocturnal world. 
Now if you've ever seen or even heard about fireflies, then you'll know how magically they can transform our everyday landscape into something ethereal and otherworldly, and this happens around the globe, like this hillside in the Smoky Mountains that I saw transformed into a living cascade of light by the eerie glows of these blue ghost fireflies, or a roadside river that I visited in Japan as it was giving birth to the slow, floating flashes of these Genji fireflies, or in Malaysia, the mangrove trees that I watched blossom nightly not with flowers but with the lights of a thousand — (Bleep! Bleep!) — fireflies, 
all blinking together in stunning synchrony. 
These luminous landscapes still fill me with wonder, and they keep me connected to the magic of the natural world. 
And I find it amazing that they're created by these tiny insects. 
In person, fireflies are charming. 
They're charismatic. 
They've been celebrated in art and in poetry for centuries. 
As I've traveled around the world, I've met many thoughtful people who have told me that God put fireflies on Earth for humans to enjoy. 
Other creatures can enjoy them too. 
I think these graceful insects are truly miraculous because they so beautifully illuminate the creative improvisation of evolution. 
They've been shaped by two powerful evolutionary forces: natural selection, the struggle for survival, and sexual selection, the struggle for reproductive opportunity. 
As a firefly junkie, the past 20 years have been quite an exciting ride. 
Together with my students at Tufts University and other colleagues, we've made lots of new discoveries about fireflies: their courtship and sex lives, their treachery and murder. 
So today I'd like to share with you just a couple of tales that we've brought back from our collective adventures into this hidden world. 
Fireflies belong to a very beautiful and diverse group of insects, the beetles. 
Worldwide, there are more than 2,000 firefly species, and these have evolved remarkably diverse courtship signals, that is, different ways to find and attract mates. 
Around 150 million years ago, the very first fireflies probably looked like this. 
They flew during the daytime and they didn't light up. 
Instead, males used their fantastic antennae to sniff out perfumes given off by their females. 
In other fireflies, it's only the females who light up. 
They are attractively plump and wingless, so every night, they climb up onto perches and they glow brightly for hours to attract their flying but unlit males. 
In still other fireflies, both sexes use quick, bright flashes to find their mates. 
Here in North America, we have more than 100 different kinds of firefly that have the remarkable ability to shine energy out from their bodies in the form of light. 
How do they do that? 
It seems totally magical, but these bioluminescent signals arise from carefully orchestrated chemical reactions that happen inside the firefly lantern. 
The main star is an enzyme called luciferase, which in the course of evolution has figured out a way to wrap its tiny arms around an even smaller molecule called luciferin, in the process getting it so excited that it actually gives off light. 
Incredible. 
But how could these bright lights have benefited some proto-firefly? 
To answer this question, we need to flip back in the family album to some baby pictures. 
Fireflies completely reinvent their bodies as they grow. 
They spend the vast majority of their lifetime, up to two years, in this larval form. 
Their main goal here, like my teenagers, is to eat and grow. 
And firefly light first originated in these juveniles. 
Every single firefly larva can light up, even when their adults can't. 
But what's the point to being so conspicuous? 
Well, we know that these juveniles make nasty-tasting chemicals that help them survive their extended childhood, so we think these lights first evolved as a warning, a neon sign that says, "" Toxic! Stay away! "" to any would-be predators. 
It took many millions of years before these bright lights evolved into a smart communication tool that could be used not just to ward off potential predators but to bring in potential mates. 
Driven now by sexual selection, some adult fireflies like this proud male evolved a shiny new glow-in-the-dark lantern that would let them take courtship to a whole new level. 
These adults only live a few weeks, and now they're single-mindedly focused on sex, that is, on propelling their genes into the next firefly generation. 
So we can follow this male out into the field as he joins hundreds of other males who are all showing off their new courtship signals. 
It's amazing to think that the luminous displays we admire here and in fact everywhere around the world are actually the silent love songs of male fireflies. 
They're flying and flashing their hearts out. 
I still find it very romantic. 
But meanwhile, where are all the females? 
Well, they're lounging down below surveying their options. 
They have plenty of males to choose from, and these females turn out to be very picky. 
When a female sees a flash from an especially attractive male, she'll aim her lantern in his direction, and give him a flash back. 
It's her "" come hither "" sign. 
So he flies closer and he flashes again. 
If she still likes him, they'll strike up a conversation. 
These creatures speak their love in the language of light. 
So what exactly do these females consider sexy? 
We decided to conduct some firefly opinion polls to find out. 
When we tested females using blinking LED lights, we discovered they prefer males who give longer-lasting flashes. 
(Laughter) (Applause) I know you're wondering, what gives these males their sex appeal? 
Now we get to see what happens when the lights go out. 
The first thing we discovered is that once a male and female hook up like this, they stay together all night long, and when we looked inside to see what might be happening, we discovered a surprising new twist to firefly sex. 
While they're mating, the male is busy giving the female not just his sperm but also a nutrient-filled package called a nuptial gift. 
We can zoom in to look more closely inside this mating pair. 
We can actually see the gift — it's shown here in red — as it's being passed from the male to the female. 
What makes this gift so valuable is that it's packed with protein that the female will use to provision her eggs. 
So females are keeping their eyes on this prize as they size up potential mates. 
We discovered that females use male flash signals to try to predict which males have the biggest gifts to offer, because this bling helps the female lay more eggs and ultimately launch more of her own offspring into the next generation. 
So it's not all sweetness and light. 
Firefly romance is risky. 
For the most part, these adult fireflies don't get eaten because like their juveniles they can manufacture toxins that are repellent to birds and other insectivores, but somewhere along the line, one particular group of fireflies somehow lost the metabolic machinery needed to make their own protective toxins. 
This evolutionary flaw, which was discovered by my colleague Tom Eisner, has driven these fireflies to take their bright lights out into the night with treacherous intent. 
Dubbed "" femme fatales "" by Jim Lloyd, another colleague, these females have figured out how to target the males of other firefly species. 
So the hunt begins with the predator — she's shown here in the lower left — where she's sitting quietly and eavesdropping on the courtship conversation of her intended prey, and here's how it might go. 
First the prey male flashes, "" Do you love me? "" His own female responds, "" Maybe. "" So then he flashes again. 
But this time, the predator sneaks in a reply that cleverly mimics exactly what the other female just said. 
She's not looking for love: she's looking for toxins. 
If she's good, she can lure this male close enough to reach out and grab him, and he's not just a light snack. 
Over the next hour, she slowly exsanguinates this male leaving behind just some gory remains. 
Unable to make their own toxins, these females resort to drinking the blood of other fireflies to get these protective chemicals. 
So a firefly vampire, brought to you by natural selection. 
We still have a lot to learn about fireflies, but it looks like many stories will remain untold, because around the world, firefly populations are blinking out. 
The main culprit: habitat loss. 
Pretty much everywhere, the fields and forests, the mangroves and meadows that fireflies need to survive, are giving way to development and to sprawl. 
Here's another problem: we've conquered darkness, but in the process, we spill so much extra light out into the night that it disrupts the lives of other creatures, and fireflies are especially sensitive to light pollution because it obscures the signals that they use to find their mates. 
Do we really need fireflies? 
After all, they're just one tiny bit of Earth's biodiversity. 
Yet every time a species is lost, it's like extinguishing a room full of candles one by one. 
You might not notice when the first few flames flicker out, but in the end, you're left sitting in darkness. 
As we work together to craft a planetary future, I hope we can find a way to keep these bright lights shining. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Brain magic. What's brain magic all about? 
Brain magic to me indicates that area of magic dealing with psychological and mind-reading effects. 
So unlike traditional magic, it uses the power of words, linguistic deception, non-verbal communication and various other techniques to create the illusion of a sixth sense. 
I'm going to show you all how easy it is to manipulate the human mind once you know how. 
I want everybody downstairs also to join in with me and everybody. 
I want everybody to put out your hands like this for me, first of all. 
OK, clap them together, once. 
OK, reverse your hands. 
Now, follow my actions exactly. 
Now about half the audience has their left hand up. Why is that? 
OK, swap them around, put your right hand up. 
Cross your hands over, so your right hand goes over, interlace your fingers like this, then make sure your right thumb is outside your left thumb — that's very important. 
Yours is the other way around, so swap it around. 
Excellent, OK. Extend your fingers like this for me. 
All right. Tap them together once. 
OK, now, if you did not allow me to deceive your minds, you would all be able to do this. 
(Laughter) (Laughter ends) Now you can see how easy it is for me to manipulate the human mind, once you know how. (Laughter) 
Now, I remember when I was about 15, (Laughter) I read a copy of Life magazine, which detailed a story about a 75-year-old blind Russian woman who could sense printed letters — there's still people trying to do it — (Laughter) — who could sense printed letters and even sense colors, just by touch. 
And she was completely blind. 
She could also read the serial numbers on bills when they were placed, face down, on a hard surface. 
Now, I was fascinated, but at the same time, skeptical. 
How could somebody read using their fingertips? 
You know, if you actually think about it, if somebody is totally blind — a guy yesterday did a demonstration in one of the rooms, where people had to close their eyes and they could just hear things. 
And it's just a really weird thing to try and figure out. 
How could somebody read using their fingertips? 
Now earlier on, as part of a TV show that I have coming up on MTV, I attempted to give a similar demonstration of what is now known as second sight. 
So, let's take a look. 
(Video) Man: There we go. 
I'm going to guide you into the car. 
Kathryn Thomas: (Laughter) Man: You're OK, keep on going. 
KT: How are you? 
Keith Barry: Kathryn, it's Keith here. 
I'm going to take you to a secret location, OK? 
Kathryn, there was no way you could see through that blindfold. 
KT: OK, but don't say my name like that. KB: But you're OK? 
KT: Yes. 
KB: No way to see through it? KT: No. 
KB: I'll take it off. 
Do you want to take the rest off? 
Take it off, you're OK. We'll stop for a second. 
KT: I'm so afraid of what I'm going to see. 
KB: You're fine, take it off. You're OK. You're safe. 
Have you ever heard of second sight? 
KT: No. 
KB: Second sight is whereby a mind-control expert can see through somebody else's eyes. 
And I'm going to try that right now. 
KT: God. 
KB: Are you ready? 
Where is it? There's no way — KT: (Beep) KT: Oh, my God! 
KB: Don't say anything, I'm trying to see through your eyes. I can't see. 
KT: There's a wall, there's a wall. 
KB: Look at the road, look at the road. 
KT: OK, OK, OK. Oh, my God! 
KB: Now, anything coming at all? KT: No. 
KB: Sure there's not? 
KT: No, no, I'm just still looking at the road. 
I'm looking at the road, all the time. 
I'm not taking my eyes off the road. 
(Beep) (Beep) (Beep) KT: Oh, my God! 
KB: Where are we? Where are we? 
We're going uphill, are we going uphill? 
KT: Look at the road — (Beep) Still got that goddamn blindfold on. 
KB: What? 
KT: How are you doing this? 
KB: Just don't break my concentration. 
We're OK, though? KT: Yes. 
That's so weird. 
We're nearly there. Oh, my God! Oh, my God! 
KB: And I've stopped. KT: That is weird. You're like a freak-ass of nature. That was the most scary thing I've ever done in my life! (Applause) 
KB: Thank you. 
By the way, two days ago, we were going to film this down there, at the race course, and we got a guy into a car, and we got a camera man in the back, but halfway through the drive, he told me he had, I think it was a nine-millimeter, stuck to his leg. 
So, I stopped pretty quick, and that was it. 
So, do you believe it's possible to see through somebody else's eyes? 
That's the question. 
Now, most people here would automatically say no. 
OK, but I want you to realize some facts. 
I couldn't see through the blindfold. 
The car was not gimmicked or tricked in any way. 
The girl, I'd never met before, all right. 
So, I want you to just think about it for a moment. 
A lot of people try to come up with a logical solution to what just happened, all right. 
But because your brains are not trained in the art of deception, the solutions you come up with will, 99 percent of the time, be way off the mark. 
This is because magic is all about directing attention. 
If, for instance, I didn't want you to look at my right hand, then I don't look at it. 
But if I wanted you to look at my right hand, then I look at it, too. 
You see, it's very simple, once you know how, but very complicated in other ways. 
I'm going to give you some demonstrations right now. 
I need two people to help me out real quick. Can you come up? 
And let's see, down at the end, here, can you also come up, real quick? 
Do you mind? Yes, at the end. 
OK, give them a round of applause as they come up. 
You might want to use the stairs, there. 
(Applause) It's very important for everybody here to realize I haven't set anything up with you. 
You don't know what will happen, right? 
Would you mind just standing over here for a moment? 
Your name is? Nicole: Nicole. 
KB: Nicole, and? 
(Telephone ringing) KB: Actually, here's the thing, answer it, answer it, answer it. 
(Laughter) Is it a girl? Man: They've already gone. 
KB: OK, swap over positions. 
Can you stand over here? This will make it easier. 
Pity, I would have told them it was the ace of spades. 
OK, a little bit closer. 
(Laughter) OK, a little bit closer, come over — they look really nervous up here. 
Do you believe in witchcraft? 
Nicole: No. 
KB: Voodoo? Nicole: No. 
KB: Things that go bump in the night? Nicole: No. 
KB: Besides, who's next, no, OK. 
I want you to just stand exactly like this for me, pull up your sleeves, if you don't mind. 
OK, now, I want you to be aware of all the different sensations around you, because we'll try a voodoo experiment. 
I want you to be aware of the sensations, but don't say anything until I ask you, and don't open your eyes until I ask you. 
From this point onwards, close your eyes, do not say anything, do not open them, be aware of the sensations. 
Yes or no, did you feel anything? 
Nicole: Yes. 
KB: You did feel that? What did you feel? 
Nicole: A touch on my back. 
KB: How many times did you feel it? 
Nicole: Twice. 
KB: Twice. OK, extend your left arm out in front of you. 
Extend your left arm, OK. 
OK, keep it there. 
Be aware of the sensations, don't say anything, don't open your eyes, OK. 
Did you feel anything, there? 
Nicole: Yes. KB: What did you feel? 
Nicole: Three — KB: Like a tickling sensation? Nicole: Yes. 
KB: Can you show us where? 
OK, excellent. Open your eyes. 
I never touched you. 
I just touched his back, and I just touched his arm. 
A voodoo experiment. 
(Laughter) Yeah, I walk around nightclubs all night like this. (Laughter) 
You just take a seat over here for a second. 
I'm going to use you again, in a moment. 
Can you take a seat right over here, if you don't mind. 
Sit right here. Man: OK. 
KB: OK, take a seat. Excellent, OK. 
Now, what I want you to do is look directly at me, OK, just take a deep breath in through your nose, letting it out through your mouth, and relax. 
Allow your eyes to close, on five, four, three, two, one. 
Close your eyes right now. 
OK, now, I'm not hypnotizing you, I'm merely placing you in a heightened state of synchronicity, so our minds are along the same lines. 
And as you sink and drift and float into this relaxed state of mind, I'm going to take your left hand, and just place it up here. 
I want you to hold it there just for a moment, and I only want you to allow your hand to sink and drift and float back to the tabletop at the same rate and speed as you drift and float into this relaxed state of awareness, and allow it to go all the way down to the tabletop. 
That's it, all the way down, all the way down. 
and further, and further. 
Excellent. 
I want you to allow your hand to stick firmly to the tabletop. 
OK, now, allow it to stay there. 
OK, now, in a moment, you'll feel a certain pressure, OK, and I want you to be aware of the pressure. 
Just be aware of the pressure. 
And I only want you to allow your hand to float slowly back up from the tabletop as you feel the pressure release, but only when you feel the pressure release. 
Do you understand? Just answer yes or no. 
Man: Yes. 
KB: Hold it right there. 
And only when you feel the pressure go back, allow your hand to drift back to the tabletop, but only when you feel the pressure. 
(Laughter) OK, that was wonderfully done. Let's try it again. 
Excellent. Now that you've got the idea, let's try something even more interesting. 
Allow it to stick firmly to the tabletop, keep your eyes closed. 
Can you stand up? Just stand, stage forward. 
I want you to point directly at his forehead. 
OK. 
Imagine a connection between you and him. 
Only when you want the pressure to be released, make an upward gesture, like this, but only when you want it to be released. 
You can wait as long as you want, but only when you want the pressure released. 
OK, let's try it again. 
OK, now, imagine the connection, OK. 
Point directly at his forehead. 
Only when you want the pressure released, we'll try it again. 
OK, it worked that time, excellent. 
And hold it there, both of you. 
Only when you want the pressure to go back, make a downward gesture. 
You can wait as long as you want. 
You did it pretty quickly, but it went down, OK. 
Now, I want you to be aware that in a moment, when I snap my fingers, your eyes will open, again. 
It's OK to remember to forget, or forget to remember what happened. 
Most people ask you, "" What the hell just happened up here? "" But it's OK that even though you're not hypnotized, you will forget everything that happened. 
On five, four, three, two, one — open your eyes, wide awake. 
Give them a round of applause, as they go back to their seats. 
(Applause) OK, you can go back. (Applause) 
I once saw a film called "" The Gods Are Crazy. "" Has anybody here seen that film? Yeah. 
Remember when they threw the Coke out of the airplane, and it landed on the ground, and it didn't break? 
Now, see, that's because Coke bottles are solid. 
It's nearly impossible to break a Coke bottle. 
Do you want to try it? 
Good job. She's not taking any chances. 
(Laughter) You see, psychokinesis is the paranormal influence of the mind on physical events and processes. 
For some magicians or mentalists, sometimes the spoon will bend or melt, sometimes it will not. 
Sometimes the object will slide across the table, sometimes it will not. 
It depends on how much energy you have that day, so on and so forth. 
We're going to try an experiment in psychokinesis, right now. 
Come right over here, next to me. Excellent. 
Now, have a look at the Coke bottle. 
Make sure it is solid, there's only one hole, and it's a normal Coke bottle. 
And you can whack it against the table, if you want; be careful. 
Even though it's solid, I'm standing away. 
I want you to pinch right here with two fingers and your thumb. 
Excellent. Now, I've got a shard of glass here, OK. 
I want you to examine the shard of glass. 
Careful, it's sharp. Just hold on to it for a moment. 
Now, hold it out here. 
I want you to imagine, right now, a broken relationship from many years ago. 
I want you to imagine all the negative energy from that broken relationship, from that guy, being imparted into the broken piece of glass, which will represent him, OK. 
But I want you to take this very seriously. 
Stare at the glass, ignore everybody right here. 
In a moment, you'll feel a certain sensation, OK, and when you feel that sensation, I want you to drop the piece of glass into the bottle. 
Think of that guy, that ba — that guy. 
(Laughter) I'm trying to be good here. 
OK, and when you feel the sensation — it might take a while — drop it into the glass. 
OK, drop it in. 
Now, imagine all that negative energy in there. 
Imagine his name and imagine him inside the glass. 
And I want you to release that negative energy by shaking it from side to side. 
(Burst) (Laughter) That was a lot of negative energy, built up in there. (Laughter) 
(Applause) I also want you to look at me and think of his name. 
OK, think of how many letters in the title of his name. 
There's five letters in the title. 
You didn't react to that, so it's four letters. 
Think of one of the letters in the title. 
There's a K in his name, there is a K. 
I knew that because my name starts with a K also, but his name doesn't start with a K, it starts with an M. 
Tell Mike I said hello, the next time you see him. 
Was that his name? Nicole: Mm-hmm. 
KB: OK, give her a round of applause. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
(Applause ends) I've got one more thing to share with you right now. 
Actually, Chris, I was going to pick you for this, but instead of picking you, can you hop up here and pick a victim for this next experiment? 
And it should be a male victim, that's the only thing. 
Chris Anderson: Oh, OK. 
KB: I was going to use you, but I decided I might want to come back another year. 
(Laughter) CA: Well, to reward him for saying "" eureka, "" and for selecting Michael Mercil to come and talk to us — Steve Jurvetson. 
KB: OK, Steve, come on up here. 
(Applause) CA: You knew! 
KB: OK, Steve, I want you to take a seat, right behind here. Excellent. 
Now, Steve — oh, you can check underneath. 
Go ahead, I've no fancy assistants underneath there. 
They insist that because I was a magician, put a nice, black tablecloth on. 
There you are, OK. 
(Laughter) I've got four wooden plinths here, Steve. 
One, two, three and four. 
Now, they're all the exact same except this one obviously has a stainless steel spike sticking out of it. 
I want you to examine it, and make sure it's solid. 
Happy? 
Steve Jurvetson: Mmm, yes. 
KB: OK. Now, Steve, I'm going to stand in front of the table, When I stand in front of the table, I want you to put the cups on the plinths, in any order you want, and then mix them all up, so nobody has any idea where the spike is, all right? 
SJ: No one in the audience? 
KB: Yes, and just to help you out, I'll block them from view, so nobody can see what you're doing. 
I'll also look away. So, go ahead and mix them up, now. 
OK, and tell me when you're done. 
(Laughter) (Laughter) KB: You done? SJ: Almost. 
KB: Almost, oh. OK, you're making sure that's well hidden. 
Oh, we've got one here, we've got one here. 
(Applause) So, all right, we'll leave them like that. 
(Laughter) I'm going to have the last laugh, though. (Laughter) 
Now, Steve, you know where the spike is, but nobody else, does? Correct? 
But I don't want you to know either, so swivel around on your chair. 
They'll keep an eye on me to make sure I don't do anything funny. 
No, stay around, OK. 
Now, Steve, look back. 
Now you don't know where the spike is, and I don't know where it is either. 
Now, is there any way to see through this blindfold? 
SJ: Put this on? 
KB: No, just, is there any way to see through it? No? 
SJ: No, I can't see through it. KB: Excellent. 
Now, I'm going to put on the blindfold. 
Don't stack them up, OK. Give them an extra mix up. 
Don't move the cups, I don't want anybody to see where the spike is, but give the plinths an extra mix up, and then line them up. 
I'll put the blindfold on. Give them an extra mix up. 
No messing around this time. OK, go ahead, mix them up. 
My hand is at risk here. 
(Laughter) Tell me when you're done. SJ: Done. 
KB: OK, where are you? Put out your hand. Your right hand. 
Tell me when I'm over a cup. 
SJ: You're over a cup. KB: I'm over a cup, right now? 
SJ: Mm-hmm. 
KB: Now, Steve, do you think it's here? Yes or no? 
SJ: Oh! 
(Laughter) KB: I told you I'd have the last laugh. (Laughter) 
SJ: I don't think it's there. KB: No? Good decision. (Laughter) 
(Applause) (Applause ends) Now, if I go this way, is there another cup over here? 
SJ: Can we do the left hand? 
KB: Oh, no, no, no. He asked me could he do the left hand. Absolutely not. 
(Laughter) KB: If I go this way, is there another cup? 
SJ: Yes. KB: Tell me when to stop. 
SJ: OK. KB: There? 
SJ: Yes, there's one. 
KB: OK. Do you think it's here, yes or no? This is your decision, not mine. 
(Laughter) SJ: I'm going to say no. KB: Good decision. (Laughter) 
OK, give me both hands. 
Now, put them on both cups. 
Do you think the spike is under your left or your right hand? 
SJ: Neither. 
KB: Neither, oh, OK. 
But if you were to guess. 
(Laughter) SJ: Under my right hand. KB: Under your right hand? 
Now, remember, you made all the decisions all along. 
Psychologists, figure this out. 
(SJ gasps) Have a look. 
SJ: Oh! 
(Applause) KB: Thank you. 
(Applause ends) If anybody wants to see some sleight of hand later on, I'll be outside. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) 

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

Every day we face issues like climate change or the safety of vaccines where we have to answer questions whose answers rely heavily on scientific information. 
Scientists tell us that the world is warming. 
Scientists tell us that vaccines are safe. 
But how do we know if they are right? 
Why should be believe the science? 
The fact is, many of us actually don't believe the science. 
Public opinion polls consistently show that significant proportions of the American people don't believe the climate is warming due to human activities, don't think that there is evolution by natural selection, and aren't persuaded by the safety of vaccines. 
So why should we believe the science? 
Well, scientists don't like talking about science as a matter of belief. 
In fact, they would contrast science with faith, and they would say belief is the domain of faith. 
And faith is a separate thing apart and distinct from science. 
Indeed they would say religion is based on faith or maybe the calculus of Pascal's wager. 
Blaise Pascal was a 17th-century mathematician who tried to bring scientific reasoning to the question of whether or not he should believe in God, and his wager went like this: Well, if God doesn't exist but I decide to believe in him nothing much is really lost. 
Maybe a few hours on Sunday. 
(Laughter) But if he does exist and I don't believe in him, then I'm in deep trouble. 
And so Pascal said, we'd better believe in God. 
Or as one of my college professors said, "He clutched for the handrail of faith." 
He made that leap of faith leaving science and rationalism behind. 
Now the fact is though, for most of us, most scientific claims are a leap of faith. 
We can't really judge scientific claims for ourselves in most cases. 
And indeed this is actually true for most scientists as well outside of their own specialties. 
So if you think about it, a geologist can't tell you whether a vaccine is safe. 
Most chemists are not experts in evolutionary theory. 
A physicist cannot tell you, despite the claims of some of them, whether or not tobacco causes cancer. 
So, if even scientists themselves have to make a leap of faith outside their own fields, then why do they accept the claims of other scientists? 
Why do they believe each other's claims? 
And should we believe those claims? 
So what I'd like to argue is yes, we should, but not for the reason that most of us think. 
Most of us were taught in school that the reason we should believe in science is because of the scientific method. 
We were taught that scientists follow a method and that this method guarantees the truth of their claims. 
The method that most of us were taught in school, we can call it the textbook method, is the hypothetical deductive method. 
According to the standard model, the textbook model, scientists develop hypotheses, they deduce the consequences of those hypotheses, and then they go out into the world and they say, "Okay, well are those consequences true?" 
Can we observe them taking place in the natural world? 
And if they are true, then the scientists say, "Great, we know the hypothesis is correct." 
So there are many famous examples in the history of science of scientists doing exactly this. 
One of the most famous examples comes from the work of Albert Einstein. 
When Einstein developed the theory of general relativity, one of the consequences of his theory was that space-time wasn't just an empty void but that it actually had a fabric. 
And that that fabric was bent in the presence of massive objects like the sun. 
So if this theory were true then it meant that light as it passed the sun should actually be bent around it. 
That was a pretty startling prediction and it took a few years before scientists were able to test it but they did test it in 1919, and lo and behold it turned out to be true. 
Starlight actually does bend as it travels around the sun. 
This was a huge confirmation of the theory. 
It was considered proof of the truth of this radical new idea, and it was written up in many newspapers around the globe. 
Now, sometimes this theory or this model is referred to as the deductive-nomological model, mainly because academics like to make things complicated. 
But also because in the ideal case, it's about laws. 
So nomological means having to do with laws. 
And in the ideal case, the hypothesis isn't just an idea: ideally, it is a law of nature. 
Why does it matter that it is a law of nature? 
Because if it is a law, it can't be broken. 
If it's a law then it will always be true in all times and all places no matter what the circumstances are. 
And all of you know of at least one example of a famous law: Einstein's famous equation, E = MC2, which tells us what the relationship is between energy and mass. 
And that relationship is true no matter what. 
Now, it turns out, though, that there are several problems with this model. 
The main problem is that it's wrong. 
It's just not true. (Laughter) And I'm going to talk about three reasons why it's wrong. 
So the first reason is a logical reason. 
It's the problem of the fallacy of affirming the consequent. 
So that's another fancy, academic way of saying that false theories can make true predictions. 
So just because the prediction comes true doesn't actually logically prove that the theory is correct. 
And I have a good example of that too, again from the history of science. 
This is a picture of the Ptolemaic universe with the Earth at the center of the universe and the sun and the planets going around it. 
The Ptolemaic model was believed by many very smart people for many centuries. 
Well, why? 
Well the answer is because it made lots of predictions that came true. 
The Ptolemaic system enabled astronomers to make accurate predictions of the motions of the planet, in fact more accurate predictions at first than the Copernican theory which we now would say is true. 
So that's one problem with the textbook model. 
A second problem is a practical problem, and it's the problem of auxiliary hypotheses. 
Auxiliary hypotheses are assumptions that scientists are making that they may or may not even be aware that they're making. 
So an important example of this comes from the Copernican model, which ultimately replaced the Ptolemaic system. 
So when Nicolaus Copernicus said, actually the Earth is not the center of the universe, the sun is the center of the solar system, the Earth moves around the sun. 
Scientists said, well okay, Nicolaus, if that's true we ought to be able to detect the motion of the Earth around the sun. 
And so this slide here illustrates a concept known as stellar parallax. 
And astronomers said, if the Earth is moving and we look at a prominent star, let's say, Sirius — well I know I'm in Manhattan so you guys can't see the stars, but imagine you're out in the country, imagine you chose that rural life — and we look at a star in December, we see that star against the backdrop of distant stars. 
If we now make the same observation six months later when the Earth has moved to this position in June, we look at that same star and we see it against a different backdrop. 
That difference, that angular difference, is the stellar parallax. 
So this is a prediction that the Copernican model makes. 
Astronomers looked for the stellar parallax and they found nothing, nothing at all. 
And many people argued that this proved that the Copernican model was false. 
So what happened? 
Well, in hindsight we can say that astronomers were making two auxiliary hypotheses, both of which we would now say were incorrect. 
The first was an assumption about the size of the Earth's orbit. 
Astronomers were assuming that the Earth's orbit was large relative to the distance to the stars. 
Today we would draw the picture more like this, this comes from NASA, and you see the Earth's orbit is actually quite small. 
In fact, it's actually much smaller even than shown here. 
The stellar parallax therefore, is very small and actually very hard to detect. 
And that leads to the second reason why the prediction didn't work, because scientists were also assuming that the telescopes they had were sensitive enough to detect the parallax. 
And that turned out not to be true. 
It wasn't until the 19th century that scientists were able to detect the stellar parallax. 
So, there's a third problem as well. 
The third problem is simply a factual problem, that a lot of science doesn't fit the textbook model. 
A lot of science isn't deductive at all, it's actually inductive. 
And by that we mean that scientists don't necessarily start with theories and hypotheses, often they just start with observations of stuff going on in the world. 
And the most famous example of that is one of the most famous scientists who ever lived, Charles Darwin. 
When Darwin went out as a young man on the voyage of the Beagle, he didn't have a hypothesis, he didn't have a theory. 
He just knew that he wanted to have a career as a scientist and he started to collect data. 
Mainly he knew that he hated medicine because the sight of blood made him sick so he had to have an alternative career path. 
So he started collecting data. 
And he collected many things, including his famous finches. 
When he collected these finches, he threw them in a bag and he had no idea what they meant. 
Many years later back in London, Darwin looked at his data again and began to develop an explanation, and that explanation was the theory of natural selection. 
Besides inductive science, scientists also often participate in modeling. 
One of the things scientists want to do in life is to explain the causes of things. 
And how do we do that? 
Well, one way you can do it is to build a model that tests an idea. 
So this is a picture of Henry Cadell, who was a Scottish geologist in the 19th century. 
You can tell he's Scottish because he's wearing a deerstalker cap and Wellington boots. 
(Laughter) And Cadell wanted to answer the question, how are mountains formed? 
And one of the things he had observed is that if you look at mountains like the Appalachians, you often find that the rocks in them are folded, and they're folded in a particular way, which suggested to him that they were actually being compressed from the side. 
And this idea would later play a major role in discussions of continental drift. 
So he built this model, this crazy contraption with levers and wood, and here's his wheelbarrow, buckets, a big sledgehammer. 
I don't know why he's got the Wellington boots. 
Maybe it's going to rain. 
And he created this physical model in order to demonstrate that you could, in fact, create patterns in rocks, or at least, in this case, in mud, that looked a lot like mountains if you compressed them from the side. 
So it was an argument about the cause of mountains. 
Nowadays, most scientists prefer to work inside, so they don't build physical models so much as to make computer simulations. 
But a computer simulation is a kind of a model. 
It's a model that's made with mathematics, and like the physical models of the 19th century, it's very important for thinking about causes. 
So one of the big questions to do with climate change, we have tremendous amounts of evidence that the Earth is warming up. 
This slide here, the black line shows the measurements that scientists have taken for the last 150 years showing that the Earth's temperature has steadily increased, and you can see in particular that in the last 50 years there's been this dramatic increase of nearly one degree centigrade, or almost two degrees Fahrenheit. 
So what, though, is driving that change? 
How can we know what's causing the observed warming? 
Well, scientists can model it using a computer simulation. 
So this diagram illustrates a computer simulation that has looked at all the different factors that we know can influence the Earth's climate, so sulfate particles from air pollution, volcanic dust from volcanic eruptions, changes in solar radiation, and, of course, greenhouse gases. 
And they asked the question, what set of variables put into a model will reproduce what we actually see in real life? 
So here is the real life in black. 
Here's the model in this light gray, and the answer is a model that includes, it's the answer E on that SAT, all of the above. 
The only way you can reproduce the observed temperature measurements is with all of these things put together, including greenhouse gases, and in particular you can see that the increase in greenhouse gases tracks this very dramatic increase in temperature over the last 50 years. 
And so this is why climate scientists say it's not just that we know that climate change is happening, we know that greenhouse gases are a major part of the reason why. 
So now because there all these different things that scientists do, the philosopher Paul Feyerabend famously said, "" The only principle in science that doesn't inhibit progress is: anything goes. "" Now this quotation has often been taken out of context, because Feyerabend was not actually saying that in science anything goes. 
What he was saying was, actually the full quotation is, "" If you press me to say what is the method of science, I would have to say: anything goes. "" What he was trying to say is that scientists do a lot of different things. 
Scientists are creative. 
But then this pushes the question back: If scientists don't use a single method, then how do they decide what's right and what's wrong? 
And who judges? 
And the answer is, scientists judge, and they judge by judging evidence. 
Scientists collect evidence in many different ways, but however they collect it, they have to subject it to scrutiny. 
And this led the sociologist Robert Merton to focus on this question of how scientists scrutinize data and evidence, and he said they do it in a way he called "organized skepticism." 
And by that he meant it's organized because they do it collectively, they do it as a group, and skepticism, because they do it from a position of distrust. 
That is to say, the burden of proof is on the person with a novel claim. 
And in this sense, science is intrinsically conservative. 
It's quite hard to persuade the scientific community to say, "" Yes, we know something, this is true. "" So despite the popularity of the concept of paradigm shifts, what we find is that actually, really major changes in scientific thinking are relatively rare in the history of science. 
So finally that brings us to one more idea: If scientists judge evidence collectively, this has led historians to focus on the question of consensus, and to say that at the end of the day, what science is, what scientific knowledge is, is the consensus of the scientific experts who through this process of organized scrutiny, collective scrutiny, have judged the evidence and come to a conclusion about it, either yea or nay. 
So we can think of scientific knowledge as a consensus of experts. 
We can also think of science as being a kind of a jury, except it's a very special kind of jury. 
It's not a jury of your peers, it's a jury of geeks. 
It's a jury of men and women with Ph.D.s, and unlike a conventional jury, which has only two choices, guilty or not guilty, the scientific jury actually has a number of choices. 
Scientists can say yes, something's true. 
Scientists can say no, it's false. 
Or, they can say, well it might be true but we need to work more and collect more evidence. 
Or, they can say it might be true, but we don't know how to answer the question and we're going to put it aside and maybe we'll come back to it later. 
That's what scientists call "" intractable. "" But this leads us to one final problem: If science is what scientists say it is, then isn't that just an appeal to authority? 
And weren't we all taught in school that the appeal to authority is a logical fallacy? 
Well, here's the paradox of modern science, the paradox of the conclusion I think historians and philosophers and sociologists have come to, that actually science is the appeal to authority, but it's not the authority of the individual, no matter how smart that individual is, like Plato or Socrates or Einstein. 
It's the authority of the collective community. 
You can think of it is a kind of wisdom of the crowd, but a very special kind of crowd. 
Science does appeal to authority, but it's not based on any individual, no matter how smart that individual may be. 
It's based on the collective wisdom, the collective knowledge, the collective work, of all of the scientists who have worked on a particular problem. 
Scientists have a kind of culture of collective distrust, this "" show me "" culture, illustrated by this nice woman here showing her colleagues her evidence. 
Of course, these people don't really look like scientists, because they're much too happy. 
(Laughter) Okay, so that brings me to my final point. 
Most of us get up in the morning. 
Most of us trust our cars. 
Well, see, now I'm thinking, I'm in Manhattan, this is a bad analogy, but most Americans who don't live in Manhattan get up in the morning and get in their cars and turn on that ignition, and their cars work, and they work incredibly well. 
The modern automobile hardly ever breaks down. 
So why is that? Why do cars work so well? 
It's not because of the genius of Henry Ford or Karl Benz or even Elon Musk. 
It's because the modern automobile is the product of more than 100 years of work by hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of people. 
The modern automobile is the product of the collected work and wisdom and experience of every man and woman who has ever worked on a car, and the reliability of the technology is the result of that accumulated effort. 
We benefit not just from the genius of Benz and Ford and Musk but from the collective intelligence and hard work of all of the people who have worked on the modern car. 
And the same is true of science, only science is even older. 
Our basis for trust in science is actually the same as our basis in trust in technology, and the same as our basis for trust in anything, namely, experience. 
But it shouldn't be blind trust any more than we would have blind trust in anything. 
Our trust in science, like science itself, should be based on evidence, and that means that scientists have to become better communicators. 
They have to explain to us not just what they know but how they know it, and it means that we have to become better listeners. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

Walk around for four months with three wishes, and all the ideas will start to percolate up. 
I think everybody should do it — think that you've got three wishes. 
And what would you do? It's actually a great exercise to really drill down to the things that you feel are important, and really reflect on the world around us. 
And thinking that, can an individual actually do something, or come up with something, that may actually get some traction out there and make a difference? 
Inspired by nature — that's the theme here. 
And I think, quite frankly, that's where I started. 
I became very interested in the landscape as a Canadian. 
We have this Great North. And there was a pretty small population, and my father was an avid outdoorsman. 
So I really had a chance to experience that. 
And I could never really understand exactly what it was, or how it was informing me. 
But what I think it was telling me is that we are this transient thing that's happening, and that the nature that you see out there — the untouched shorelines, the untouched forest that I was able to see — really bring in a sense of that geological time, that this has gone on for a long time, and we're experiencing it in a different way. 
And that, to me, was a reference point that I think I needed to have to be able to make the work that I did. 
And I did go out, and I did this picture of grasses coming through in the spring, along a roadside. 
This rebirth of grass. And then I went out for years trying to photograph the pristine landscape. 
But as a fine-art photographer I somehow felt that it wouldn't catch on out there, that there would be a problem with trying to make this as a fine-art career. 
And I kept being sucked into this genre of the calendar picture, or something of that nature, and I couldn't get away from it. 
So I started to think of, how can I rethink the landscape? 
I decided to rethink the landscape as the landscape that we've transformed. 
I had a bit of an epiphany being lost in Pennsylvania, and I took a left turn trying to get back to the highway. 
And I ended up in a town called Frackville. 
I got out of the car, and I stood up, and it was a coal-mining town. I did a 360 turnaround, and that became one of the most surreal landscapes I've ever seen. 
Totally transformed by man. 
And that got me to go out and look at mines like this, and go out and look at the largest industrial incursions in the landscape that I could find. 
And that became the baseline of what I was doing. 
And it also became the theme that I felt that I could hold onto, and not have to re-invent myself — that this theme was large enough to become a life's work, to become something that I could sink my teeth into and just research and find out where these industries are. 
And I think one of the things I also wanted to say in my thanks, which I kind of missed, was to thank all the corporations who helped me get in. 
Because it took negotiation for almost every one of these photographs — to get into that place to make those photographs, and if it wasn't for those people letting me in at the heads of those corporations, I would have never made this body of work. 
So in that respect, to me, I'm not against the corporation. 
I own a corporation. I work with them, and I feel that we all need them and they're important. 
But I am also for sustainability. 
So there's this thing that is pulling me in both directions. 
And I'm not making an indictment towards what's happening here, but it is a slow progression. 
So I started thinking, well, we live in all these ages of man: the Stone Age, and the Iron Age, and the Copper Age. 
And these ages of man are still at work today. 
But we've become totally disconnected from them. 
There's something that we're not seeing there. 
And it's a scary thing as well. Because when we start looking at the collective appetite for our lifestyles, and what we're doing to that landscape — that, to me, is something that is a very sobering moment for me to contemplate. 
And through my photographs, I'm hoping to be able to engage the audiences of my work, and to come up to it and not immediately be rejected by the image. 
Not to say, "" Oh my God, what is it? "" but to be challenged by it — to say, "" Wow, this is beautiful, "" on one level, but on the other level, "" This is scary. I shouldn't be enjoying it. "" Like a forbidden pleasure. And it's that forbidden pleasure that I think is what resonates out there, and it gets people to look at these things, and it gets people to enter it. And it also, in a way, defines kind of what I feel, too — that I'm drawn to have a good life. 
I want a house, and I want a car. 
But there's this consequence out there. 
And how do I begin to have that attraction, repulsion? 
It's even in my own conscience I'm having it, and here in my work, I'm trying to build that same toggle. 
These things that I photographed — this tire pile here had 45 million tires in it. It was the largest one. 
It was only about an hour-and-a-half away from me, and it caught fire about four years ago. It's around Westley, California, around Modesto. 
And I decided to start looking at something that, to me, had — if the earlier work of looking at the landscape had a sense of lament to what we were doing to nature, in the recycling work that you're seeing here was starting to point to a direction. To me, it was our redemption. 
That in the recycling work that I was doing, I'm looking for a practice, a human activity that is sustainable. 
That if we keep putting things, through industrial and urban existence, back into the system — if we keep doing that — we can continue on. 
Of course, listening at the conference, there's many, many things that are coming. Bio-mimicry, and there's many other things that are coming on stream — nanotechnology that may also prevent us from having to go into that landscape and tear it apart. 
And we all look forward to those things. 
But in the meantime, these things are scaling up. 
These things are continuing to happen. 
What you're looking at here — I went to Bangladesh, so I started to move away from North America; I started to look at our world globally. 
These images of Bangladesh came out of a radio program I was listening to. 
They were talking about Exxon Valdez, and that there was going to be a glut of oil tankers because of the insurance industries. 
And that those oil tankers needed to be decommissioned, and 2004 was going to be the pinnacle. 
And I thought, "" My God, wouldn't that be something? "" To see the largest vessels of man being deconstructed by hand, literally, in third-world countries. 
So originally I was going to go to India. 
And I was shut out of India because of a Greenpeace situation there, and then I was able to get into Bangladesh, and saw for the first time a third world, a view of it, that I had never actually thought was possible. 
130 million people living in an area the size of Wisconsin — people everywhere — the pollution was intense, and the working conditions were horrible. 
Here you're looking at some oil fields in California, some of the biggest oil fields. And again, I started to think that — there was another epiphany — that the whole world I was living in was a result of having plentiful oil. 
And that, to me, was again something that I started building on, and I continued to build on. 
So this is a series I'm hoping to have ready in about two or three years, under the heading of "" The Oil Party. "" Because I think everything that we're involved in — our clothing, our cars, our roads, and everything — are directly a result. 
I'm going to move to some pictures of China. 
And for me China — I started photographing it four years ago, and China truly is a question of sustainability in my mind, not to mention that China, as well, has a great effect on the industries that I grew up around. 
I came out of a blue-collar town, a GM town, and my father worked at GM, so I was very familiar with that kind of industry and that also informed my work. But you know, to see China and the scale at which it's evolving, is quite something. 
So what you see here is the Three Gorges Dam, and this is the largest dam by 50 percent ever attempted by man. 
Most of the engineers around the world left the project because they said, "" It's just too big. "" In fact, when it did actually fill with water a year and a half ago, they were able to measure a wobble within the earth as it was spinning. 
It took fifteen days to fill it. 
So this created a reservoir 600 kilometers long, one of the largest reservoirs ever created. 
And what was also one of the bigger projects around that was moving 13 full-size cities up out of the reservoir, and flattening all the buildings so they could make way for the ships. 
This is a "" before and after. "" So that was before. 
And this is like 10 weeks later, demolished by hand. 
I think 11 of the buildings they used dynamite, everything else was by hand. That was 10 weeks later. 
And this gives you an idea. 
And it was all the people who lived in those homes, were the ones that were actually taking it apart and working, and getting paid per brick to take their cities apart. 
And these are some of the images from that. 
So I spent about three trips to the Three Gorges Dam, looking at that massive transformation of a landscape. 
And it looks like a bombed-out landscape, but it isn't. 
What it is, it's a landscape that is an intentional one. 
This is a need for power, and they're willing to go through this massive transformation, on this scale, to get that power. 
And again, it's actually a relief for what's going on in China because I think on the table right now, there's 27 nuclear power stations to be built. 
There hasn't been one built in North America for 20 years because of the "" NIMBY "" problem — "" Not In My BackYard. "" But in China they're saying, "" No, we're putting in 27 in the next 10 years. "" And coal-burning furnaces are going in there for hydroelectric power literally weekly. 
So coal itself is probably one of the largest problems. 
And one of the other things that happened in the Three Gorges — a lot of the agricultural land that you see there on the left was also lost; some of the most fertile agricultural land was lost in that. 
And 1.2 to 2 million people were relocated, depending on whose statistics you're looking at. 
And this is what they were building. 
This is Wushan, one of the largest cities that was relocated. 
This is the town hall for the city. 
And again, the rebuilding of the city — to me, it was sad to see that they didn't really grab a lot of, I guess, what we know here, in terms of urban planning. 
There were no parks; there were no green spaces. 
Very high-density living on the side of a hill. 
And here they had a chance to rebuild cities from the bottom up, but somehow were not connecting with them. 
Here is a sign that, translated, says, "" Obey the birth control law. 
Build our science, civilized and advanced idea of marriage and giving birth. "" So here, if you look at this poster, it has all the trappings of Western culture. 
You're seeing the tuxedos, the bouquets. 
But what's really, to me, frightening about the picture and about this billboard is the refinery in the background. 
So it's like marrying up all the things that we have and it's an adaptation of our way of life, full stop. 
And again, when you start seeing that kind of embrace, and you start looking at them leading their rural lifestyle with a very, very small footprint and moving into an urban lifestyle with a much higher footprint, it starts to become very sobering. 
This is a shot in one of the biggest squares in Guangdong — and this is where a lot of migrant workers are coming in from the country. 
And there's about 130 million people in migration trying to get into urban centers at all times, and in the next 10 to 15 years, are expecting another 400 to 500 million people to migrate into the urban centers like Shanghai and the manufacturing centers. 
The manufacturers are — the domestics are usually — you can tell a domestic factory by the fact that they all use the same color uniforms. 
So this is a pink uniform at this factory. It's a shoe factory. 
And they have dorms for the workers. 
So they bring them in from the country and put them up in the dorms. 
This is one of the biggest shoe factories, the Yuyuan shoe factory near Shenzhen. It has 90,000 employees making shoes. 
This is a shift change, one of three. 
There's two factories of this scale in the same town. 
This is one with 45,000, so every lunch, there's about 12,000 coming through for lunch. 
They sit down; they have about 20 minutes. 
The next round comes in. It's an incredible workforce that's building there. Shanghai — I'm looking at the urban renewal in Shanghai, and this is a whole area that will be flattened and turned into skyscrapers in the next five years. 
What's also happening in Shanghai is — China is changing because this wouldn't have happened five years ago, for instance. This is a holdout. 
They're called dengzahoos — they're like pin tacks to the ground. 
They won't move. They're not negotiating. 
They're not getting enough, so they're not going to move. 
And so they're holding off until they get a deal with them. 
And they've been actually quite successful in getting better deals because most of them are getting a raw deal. 
They're being put out about two hours — the communities that have been around for literally hundreds of years, or maybe even thousands of years, are being broken up and spread across in the suburban areas outside of Shanghai. But these are a whole series of guys holding out in this reconstruction of Shanghai. 
Probably the largest urban-renewal project, I think, ever attempted on the planet. 
And then the embrace of the things that they're replacing it with — again, one of my wishes, and I never ended up going there, was to somehow tell them that there were better ways to build a house. 
The kinds of collisions of styles and things were quite something, and these are called the villas. 
And also, like right now, they're just moving. 
The scaffolding is still on, and this is an e-waste area, and if you looked in the foreground on the big print, you'd see that the industry — their industry — they're all recycling. 
So the industry's already growing around these new developments. 
This is a five-level bridge in Shanghai. 
Shanghai was a very intriguing city — it's exploding on a level that I don't think any city has experienced. 
In fact, even Shenzhen, the economic zone — one of the first ones — 15 years ago was about 100,000 people, and today it boasts about 10 to 11 million. 
So that gives you an idea of the kinds of migrations and the speed with which — this is just the taxis being built by Volkswagen. 
There's 9,000 of them here, and they're being built for most of the big cities, Beijing and Shanghai, Shenzhen. 
And this isn't even the domestic car market; this is the taxi market. 
And what we would see here as a suburban development — a similar thing, but they're all high-rises. 
So they'll put 20 or 40 up at a time, and they just go up in the same way as a single-family dwelling would go up here in an area. 
And the density is quite incredible. 
And one of the things in this picture that I wanted to point out is that when I saw these kinds of buildings, I was shocked to see that they're not using a central air-conditioning system; every window has an air conditioner in it. 
And I'm sure there are people here who probably know better than I do about efficiencies, but I can't imagine that every apartment having its own air conditioner is a very efficient way to cool a building on this scale. 
And when you start looking at that, and then you start factoring up into a city the size of Shanghai, it's literally a forest of skyscrapers. 
It's breathtaking, in terms of the speed at which this city is transforming. 
And you can see in the foreground of this picture, it's still one of the last areas that was being held up. 
Right now that's all cleared out — this was done about eight months ago — and high-rises are now going up into that central spot. 
So a skyscraper is built, literally, overnight in Shanghai. 
Most recently I went in, and I started looking at some of the biggest industries in China. 
And this is Baosteel, right outside of Shanghai. 
This is the coal supply for the steel factory — 18 square kilometers. 
It's an incredibly massive operation, I think 15,000 workers, five cupolas, and the sixth one's coming in here. 
So they're building very large blast furnaces to try to deal with the demand for steel in China. 
So this is three of the visible blast furnaces within that shot. 
And again, looking at these images, there's this constant, like, haze that you're seeing. 
This is going to show you, real time, an assembler. It's a circuit breaker. 
10 hours a day at this speed. 
I think one of the issues that we here are facing with China, is that they're using a lot of the latest production technology. 
In that one, there were 400 people that worked on the floor. 
And I asked the manager to point out five of your fastest producers, and then I went and looked at each one of them for about 15 or 20 minutes, and picked this one woman. 
And it was just lightning fast; the way she was working was almost unbelievable. 
But that is the trick that they've got right now, that they're winning with, is that they're using all the latest technologies and extrusion machines, and bringing all the components into play, but the assembly is where they're actually bringing in — the country workers are very willing to work. They want to work. 
There's a massive backlog of people wanting their jobs. 
That condition's going to be there for the next 10 to 15 years if they realize what they want, which is, you know, 400 to 500 million more people coming into the cities. 
In this particular case — this is the assembly line that you saw; this is a shot of it. 
I had to use a very small aperture to get the depth of field. 
I had to have them freeze for 10 seconds to get this shot. 
It took me five fake tries because they were just going. To slow them down was literally impossible. 
They were just wound up doing these things all day long, until the manager had to, with a stern voice, say, "Okay, everybody freeze." 
It wasn't too bad, but they're driven to produce these things at an incredible rate. 
This is a textile mill doing synthetic silk, an oil byproduct. 
And what you're seeing here is, again, one of the most state-of-the-art textile mills. 
There are 500 of these machines; they're worth about 200,000 dollars each. 
So you have about 12 people running this, and they're just inspecting it — and they're just walking the lines. 
The machines are all running, absolutely incredible to see what the scale of industries are. 
And I started getting in further and further into the factories. 
And that's a diptych. I do a lot of pairings to try and get the sense of scale in these places. 
This is a line where they get the threads and they wind the threads together, pre-going into the textile mills. 
Here's something that's far more labor-intensive, which is the making of shoes. 
This floor has about 1,500 workers on this floor. 
The company itself had about 10,000 employees, and they're doing domestic shoes. 
It was very hard to get into the international companies because I had to get permission from companies like Nike and Adidas, and that's very hard to get. 
And they don't want to let me in. 
But the domestic was much easier to do. 
It just gives you a sense of, again — and that's where, really, the whole migration of jobs started going over to China and making the shoes. Nike was one of the early ones. 
It was such a high labor component to it that it made a lot of sense to go after that labor market. 
This is a high-tech mobile phone: Bird mobile phone, one of the largest mobile makers in China. 
I think mobile phone companies are popping up, literally, on a weekly basis, and they have an explosive growth in mobile phones. 
This is a textile where they're doing shirts — Youngor, the biggest shirt factory and clothing factory in China. 
And this next shot here is one of the lunchrooms. 
Everything is very efficient. 
While setting up this shot, people on average would spend eight to 10 minutes having a lunch. 
This was one of the biggest factories I've ever seen. 
They make coffeemakers here, the biggest coffeemaker and the biggest iron makers — they make 20 million of them in the world. 
There's 21,000 employees. This one factory — and they had several of them — is half a kilometer long. 
These are just recently shot — I just came back about a month ago, so you're the first ones to be seeing these, these new factory pictures I've taken. 
So it's taken me almost a year to gain access into these places. 
The other aspect of what's happening in China is that there's a real need for materials there. 
So a lot of the recycled materials that are collected here are being recycled and taken to China by ships. 
That's cubed metal. This is armatures, electrical armatures, where they're getting the copper and the high-end steel from electrical motors out, and recycling them. 
This is certainly connected to California and Silicon Valley. 
But this is what happens to most of the computers. 
Fifty percent of the world's computers end up in China to be recycled. 
It's referred to as "" e-waste "" there. 
And it is a bit of a problem. The way they recycle the boards is that they actually use the coal briquettes, which are used all through China, but they heat up the boards, and with pairs of pliers they pull off all the components. 
They're trying to get all the valued metals out of those components. 
But the toxic smells — when you come into a town that's actually doing this kind of burning of the boards, you can smell it a good five or 10 kilometers before you get there. 
Here's another operation. It's all cottage industries, so it's not big places — it's all in people's front porches, in their backyards, even in their homes they're burning boards, if there's a concern for somebody coming by — because it is considered in China to be illegal, doing it, but they can't stop the product from coming in. 
This portrait — I'm not usually known for portraits, but I couldn't resist this one, where she's been through Mao, and she's been through the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, and now she's sitting on her porch with this e-waste beside her. It's quite something. 
This is a road where it's been shored up by computer boards in one of the biggest towns where they're recycling. 
So that's the photographs that I wanted to show you. 
(Applause) I want to dedicate my wishes to my two girls. 
They've been sitting on my shoulder the whole time while I've been thinking. 
One's Megan, the one of the right, and Katja there. 
And to me the whole notion — the things I'm photographing are out of a great concern about the scale of our progress and what we call progress. 
And as much as there are great things around the corner — and it's palpable in this room — of all of the things that are just about to break that can solve so many problems, I'm really hoping that those things will spread around the world and will start to have a positive effect. 
And it isn't something that isn't just affecting our world, but it starts to go up — because I think we can start correcting our footprint and bring it down — but there's a growing footprint that's happening in Asia, and is growing at a rapid, rapid rate, and so I don't think we can equalize it. So ultimately the strategy, I think, here is that we have to be very concerned about their evolution, because it is going to be connected to our evolution as well. 
So part of my thinking, and part of my wishes, is sitting with these thoughts in mind, and thinking about, "" How is their life going to be when they want to have children, or when they're ready to get married 20 years from now — or whatever, 15 years from now? "" And to me that has been the core behind most of my thinking — in my work, and also for this incredible chance to have some wishes. 
Wish one: world-changing. I want to use my images to persuade millions of people to join in the global conversation on sustainability. 
And it is through communications today that I believe that that is not an unreal idea. 
Oh, and I went in search — I wanted to put what I had in mind, hitch it onto something. I didn't want a wish just to start from nowhere. 
One of them I'm starting from almost nothing, but the other one, I wanted to find out what's going on that's working right now. 
And Worldchanging.com is a fantastic blog, and that blog is now being visited by close to half-a-million people a month. 
And it just started about 14 months ago. 
And the beauty of what's going on there is that the tone of the conversation is the tone that I like. 
What they're doing there is that they're not — I think the environmental movement has failed in that it's used the stick too much; it's used the apocalyptic tone too much; it hasn't sold the positive aspects of being environmentally concerned and trying to pull us out. 
Whereas this conversation that is going on in this blog is about positive movements, about how to change our world in a better way, quickly. 
And it's looking at technology, and it's looking at new energy-saving devices, and it's looking at how to rethink and how to re-strategize the movement towards sustainability. 
And so for me, one of the things that I thought would be to put some of my work in the service of promoting the Worldchanging.com website. 
Some of you might know, he's a TEDster — Stephen Sagmeister and I are working on some layouts. And this is still in preliminary stages; these aren't the finals. But these images, with Worldchanging.com, can be placed into any kind of media. 
They could be posted through the Web; they could be used as a billboard or a bus shelter, or anything of that nature. 
So we're looking at this as trying to build out. 
And what we ended up discussing was that in most media you get mostly an image with a lot of text, and the text is blasted all over. 
What was unusual, according to Stephen, is less than five percent of ads are actually leading with image. 
And so in this case, because it's about a lot of these images and what they represent, and the kinds of questions they bring up, that we thought letting the images play out and bring someone to say, "Well, what's Worldchanging.com, with these images, have to do?" 
And hopefully inspire people to go to that website. 
So Worldchanging.com, and building that blog, and it is a blog, and I'm hoping that it isn't — I don't see it as the kind of blog where we're all going to follow each other to death. 
This one is one that will spoke out, and will go out, and to start reaching. Because right now there's conversations in India, in China, in South America — there's entries coming from all around the world. 
I think there's a chance to have a dialogue, a conversation about sustainability at Worldchanging.com. 
And anything that you can do to promote that would be fantastic. 
Wish two is more of the bottom-up, ground-up one that I'm trying to work with. 
And this one is: I wish to launch a groundbreaking competition that motivates kids to invest ideas on, and invent ideas on, sustainability. 
And one of the things that came out — Allison, who actually nominated me, said something earlier on in a brainstorming. She said that recycling in Canada had a fantastic entry into our psyche through kids between grade four and six. 
And you think about it, you know, grade four — my wife and I, we say age seven is the age of reason, so they're into the age of reason. And they're pre-puberty. 
So it's this great window where they actually are — you can influence them. You know what happens at puberty? 
You know, we know that from earlier presentations. 
So my thinking here is that we try to motivate those kids to start driving home ideas. Let them understand what sustainability is, and that they have a vested interest in it to happen. 
And one of the ways I thought of doing it is to use my prize, so I would take 30,000 or 40,000 dollars of the winnings, and the rest is going to be to manage this project, but to use that as prizes for kids to get into their hands. 
But the other thing that I thought would be fantastic was to create these — call them "" prize targets. "" And so one could be for the best sustainable idea for an in-school project, the best one for a household project, or it could be the best community project for sustainability. 
And I also thought there should be a nice prize for the best artwork for "" In My World. "" And what would happen — it's a scalable thing. And if we can get people to put in things — whether it's equipment, like a media lab, or money to make the prize significant enough — and to open it up to all the schools that are public schools, or schools that are with kids that age, and make it a wide-open competition for them to go after those prizes and to submit them. 
And the prize has to be a verifiable thing, so it's not about just ideas. 
The art pieces are about the ideas and how they present them and do them, but the actual things have to be verifiable. 
In that way, what's happening is that we're motivating a certain age group to start thinking. 
And they're going to push that up, from the bottom — up into, I believe, into the households. And parents will be reacting to it, and trying to help them with the projects. 
And I think it starts to motivate the whole idea towards sustainability in a very positive way, and starts to teach them. They know about recycling now, but they don't really, I think, get sustainability in all the things, and the energy footprint, and how that matters. 
And to teach them, to me, would be a fantastic wish, and it would be something that I would certainly put my shoulder into. 
And again, in "" In My World, "" the competition — we would use the artwork that comes in from that competition to promote it. 
And I like the words, "" in my world, "" because it gives possession of the world to the person who's doing it. 
It is my world; it's not someone else's. I want to help it; I want to do something with it. So I think it has a great opportunity to engage the imaginations — and great ideas, I think, come from kids — and engage their imagination into a project, and do something for schools. 
I think all schools could use extra equipment, extra cash — it's going to be an incentive for them to do that. 
And these are some of the ideas in terms of where we could possibly put in some promotion for "" In My World. "" And wish three is: Imax film. So I was told I should do one for myself, and I've always wanted to actually get involved with doing something. 
And the scale of my work, and the kinds of ideas I'm playing with — when I first saw an Imax film, I almost immediately thought, "" There's a real resonance between what I'm trying to do and the scale of what I try to do as a photographer. "" And I think there's a real possibility to reach new audiences if I had a chance. 
So I'm looking, really, for a mentor, because I just had my birthday. 
I'm 50, and I don't have time to go back to school right now — I'm too busy. So I need somebody who can put me on a quick catch-up course on how to do something like that, and lead me through the maze of how one does something like this. 
That would be fantastic. So those are my three wishes. 
(Applause) 

Good evening. 
We are in this wonderful open-air amphitheater and we are enjoying ourselves in that mild evening temperature tonight, but when Qatar will host the football World Cup 10 years from now, 2022, we already heard it will be in the hot, very hot and sunny summer months of June and July. 
And when Qatar has been assigned to the World Cup all, many people around the world have been wondering, how would it be possible that football players show spectacular football, run around in this desert climate? How would it be possible that spectators sit, enjoy themselves in open-air stadia in this hot environment? 
Together with the architects of Albert Speer & Partner, our engineers from Transsolar have been supporting, have been developing open-air stadia based on 100 percent solar power, on 100 percent solar cooling. 
Let me tell you about that, but let me start with comfort. 
Let me start with the aspect of comfort, because many people are confusing ambient temperature with thermal comfort. 
We are used to looking at charts like that, and you see this red line showing the air temperature in June and July, and yes, that's right, it's picking up to 45 degrees C. 
It's actually very hot. 
But air temperature is not the full set of climatic parameters which define comfort. 
Let me show you analysis a colleague of mine did looking on different football, World Cups, Olympic Games around the world, looking on the comfort and analyzing the comfort people have perceived at these different sport activities, and let me start with Mexico. 
Mexico temperature has been, air temperature has been something between 15, up to 30 degrees C, and people enjoyed themselves. 
It was a very comfortable game in Mexico City. Have a look. 
Orlando, same kind of stadium, open-air stadium. People have been sitting in the strong sun, in the very high humidity in the afternoon, and they did not enjoy. It was not comfortable. 
The air temperature was not too high, but it was not comfortable during these games. 
What about Seoul? Seoul, because of broadcast rights, all the games have been in the late afternoon. Sun has already been set, so the games have been perceived as comfortable. 
What about Athens? Mediterranean climate, but in the sun it was not comfortable. They didn't perceive comfort. 
And we know that from Spain, we know that "" sol y sombra. "" If you have a ticket, and you get a ticket for the shade, you pay more, because you're in a more comfortable environment. 
What about Beijing? 
It's again, sun in the day and high humidity, and it was not comfortable. 
So if I overlay, and if you overlay all these comfort envelopes, what we see is, in all these places, air temperature has been ranging something from 25 to 35, and if you go on the line, 30, of 30 degrees C ambient temperatures. If you go along that line you see there has been all kind of comfort, all kinds of perceived outdoor comfort, ranging from very comfortable to very uncomfortable. 
So why is that? 
This is because there are more parameters influencing our thermal comfort, which is the sun, the direct sun, the diffuse sun, which is wind, strong wind, mild wind, which is air humidity, which is the radiant temperature of the surroundings where we are in. 
And this is air temperature. 
All these parameters go into the comfort feeling of our human body, and scientists have developed a parameter, which is the perceived temperature, where all these parameters go in and help designers to understand which is the driving parameter that I feel comfort or that I don't feel comfort. 
Which is the driving parameter which gives me a perceived temperature? And these parameters, these climatic parameters are related to the human metabolism. 
Because of our metabolism, we as human beings, we produce heat. 
I'm excited, I'm talking to you, I'm probably producing 150 watts at the moment. You are sitting, you are relaxed, you're looking at me. It's probably 100 watts each person is producing, and we need to get rid of that energy. I need, with my body, to get rid of the energy, and the harder it is for myself, for my body, to get rid of the energy, the less comfort I feel. 
That's it. And if I don't get rid of the energy, I will die. 
If we overlay what happens during the football World Cup, what will happen in June, July, we will see, yes, air temperature will be much higher, but because the games and the plays will be in the afternoon, it's probably the same comfort rating we've found in other places which has perceived as non-comfortable. 
So we sat together with a team which prepared the Bid Book, or goal, that we said, let's aim for perceived temperature, for outdoor comfort in this range, which is perceived with a temperature of 32 degrees Celsius perceived temperature, which is extremely comfortable. 
People would feel really fine in an open outdoor environment. 
But what does it mean? 
If we just look on what happens, we see, temperature's too high. 
If we apply the best architectural design, climate engineering design, we won't get much better. 
So we need to do something active. 
We need, for instance, to bring in radiant cooling technology, and we need to combine this with so-called soft conditioning. 
And how does it look like in a stadium? 
So the stadium has a few elements which create that outdoor comfort. First of all, it's shading. It needs to protect where the people are sitting against strong and warm wind. 
But that's not all what we need to do. We need to use active systems. 
Instead of blowing a hurricane of chilled air through the stadium, we can use radiant cooling technologies, like a floor heating system where water pipes are embedded in the floor. 
And just by using cold water going through the water pipes, you can release the heat which is absorbed during the day in the stadium, so you can create that comfort, and then by adding dry air instead of down-chilled air, the spectators and the football players can adjust to their individual comfort needs, to their individual energy balance. 
They can adjust and find their comfort they need to find. 
There are 12 stadia probably to come, but there are 32 training pitches where all the individual countries are going to train. 
We applied the same concept: shading of the training pitch, using a shelter against wind, then using the grass. 
Natural-watered lawn is a very good cooling source stabilizing temperature, and using dehumidified air to create comfort. 
But even the best passive design wouldn't help. 
We need active system. 
And how do we do that? 
Our idea for the bid was 100 percent solar cooling, based on the idea that we use the roof of the stadia, we cover the roofs of the stadia with PV systems. 
We don't borrow any energy from history. 
We are not using fossil energies. 
We are not borrowing energy from our neighbors. 
We're using energy we can harvest on our roofs, and also on the training pitches, which will be covered with large, flexible membranes, and we will see in the next years an industry coming up with flexible photovoltaics, giving the possibilities of shading against strong sun and producing electric energy in the same time. 
And this energy now is harvested throughout the year, sent into the grid, is replacing fossils in the grid, and when I need it for the cooling, I take it back from the grid and I use the solar energy which I have brought to the grid back when I need it for the solar cooling. 
And I can do that in the first year and I can balance that in the next 10, and the next 20 years, this energy, which is necessary to condition a World Cup in Qatar, the next 20 years, this energy goes into the grid of Qatar. 
So this — (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) This is not only useful for stadia. We can use that also in open-air places and streets, and we've been working on the City of the Future in Masdar, which is in the United Emirates, Abu Dhabi. 
And I had the pleasure to work on the central plaza. 
And the same idea to use there, to create outdoor conditions which are perceived as comfortable. People enjoy going there instead of going into a shopping mall, which is chilled down and which is cooled. We wanted to create an outdoor space which is so comfortable that people can go there in the early afternoon, even in these sunny and hot summer months, and they can enjoy and meet there with their families. (Applause) And the same concept: shade against the sun, shade against the wind, and use, use and take advantage of the sun you can harvest on your footprint. 
And these beautiful umbrellas. 
So I'd like to encourage you to pay attention to your thermal comfort, to your thermal environment, tonight and tomorrow, and if you'd like to learn more about that, I invite you to go to our website. 
We uploaded a very simple perceived temperature calculator where you can check out about your outdoor comfort. 
And I also hope that you share the idea that if engineers and designers can use all these different climatic parameters, it will be possible to create really good and comfortable outdoor conditions, to change our thermal perception that we feel comfortable in an outdoor environment, and we can do that with the best passive design, but also using the energy source of the site in Qatar which is the sun. 
(Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) Shukran. (Applause) 

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. 
And seeing with the brain is often called imagination. 
And we are familiar with the landscapes of our own imagination, our inscapes. We've lived with them all our lives. 
But there are also hallucinations as well, and hallucinations are completely different. 
They don't seem to be of our creation. 
They don't seem to be under our control. 
They seem to come from the outside, and to mimic perception. 
So I am going to be talking about hallucinations, and a particular sort of visual hallucination which I see among my patients. 
A few months ago, I got a phone call from a nursing home where I work. 
They told me that one of their residents, an old lady in her 90s, was seeing things, and they wondered if she'd gone bonkers or, because she was an old lady, whether she'd had a stroke, or whether she had Alzheimer's. 
And so they asked me if I would come and see Rosalie, the old lady. 
I went in to see her. 
It was evident straight away that she was perfectly sane and lucid and of good intelligence, but she'd been very startled and very bewildered, because she'd been seeing things. 
And she told me — the nurses hadn't mentioned this — that she was blind, that she had been completely blind from macular degeneration for five years. 
But now, for the last few days, she'd been seeing things. 
So I said, "" What sort of things? "" And she said, "" People in Eastern dress, in drapes, walking up and down stairs. 
A man who turns towards me and smiles. 
But he has huge teeth on one side of his mouth. 
Animals too. 
I see a white building. It's snowing, a soft snow. 
I see this horse with a harness, dragging the snow away. 
Then, one night, the scene changes. 
I see cats and dogs walking towards me. 
They come to a certain point and then stop. 
Then it changes again. 
I see a lot of children. They are walking up and down stairs. 
They wear bright colors, rose and blue, like Eastern dress. "" Sometimes, she said, before the people come on, she may hallucinate pink and blue squares on the floor, which seem to go up to the ceiling. 
I said, "" Is this like a dream? "" And she said, "" No, it's not like a dream. It's like a movie. "" She said, "" It's got color. It's got motion. 
But it's completely silent, like a silent movie. "" And she said that it's a rather boring movie. 
She said, "" All these people with Eastern dress, walking up and down, very repetitive, very limited. "" (Laughter) And she has a sense of humor. 
She knew it was a hallucination. 
But she was frightened. She'd lived 95 years and she'd never had a hallucination before. 
She said that the hallucinations were unrelated to anything she was thinking or feeling or doing, that they seemed to come on by themselves, or disappear. 
She had no control over them. 
She said she didn't recognize any of the people or places in the hallucinations. 
And none of the people or the animals, well, they all seemed oblivious of her. 
And she didn't know what was going on. 
She wondered if she was going mad or losing her mind. 
Well, I examined her carefully. 
She was a bright old lady, perfectly sane. She had no medical problems. 
She wasn't on any medications which could produce hallucinations. 
But she was blind. 
And I then said to her, "I think I know what you have." 
I said, "" There is a special form of visual hallucination which may go with deteriorating vision or blindness. 
This was originally described, "" I said, "" right back in the 18th century, by a man called Charles Bonnet. 
And you have Charles Bonnet syndrome. 
There is nothing wrong with your brain. There is nothing wrong with your mind. 
You have Charles Bonnet syndrome. "" And she was very relieved at this, that there was nothing seriously the matter, and also rather curious. 
She said, "" Who is this Charles Bonnet? "" She said, "" Did he have them himself? "" And she said, "" Tell all the nurses that I have Charles Bonnet syndrome. "" (Laughter) "I'm not crazy. I'm not demented. I have Charles Bonnet syndrome." 
Well, so I did tell the nurses. 
Now this, for me, is a common situation. 
I work in old-age homes, largely. 
I see a lot of elderly people who are hearing impaired or visually impaired. 
About 10 percent of the hearing impaired people get musical hallucinations. 
And about 10 percent of the visually impaired people get visual hallucinations. 
You don't have to be completely blind, only sufficiently impaired. 
Now with the original description in the 18th century, Charles Bonnet did not have them. 
His grandfather had these hallucinations. 
His grandfather was a magistrate, an elderly man. 
He'd had cataract surgery. 
His vision was pretty poor. 
And in 1759, he described to his grandson various things he was seeing. 
The first thing he said was he saw a handkerchief in midair. 
It was a large blue handkerchief with four orange circles. 
And he knew it was a hallucination. 
You don't have handkerchiefs in midair. 
And then he saw a big wheel in midair. 
But sometimes he wasn't sure whether he was hallucinating or not, because the hallucinations would fit in the context of the visions. 
So on one occasion, when his granddaughters were visiting them, he said, "" And who are these handsome young men with you? "" And they said, "" Alas, Grandpapa, there are no handsome young men. "" And then the handsome young men disappeared. 
It's typical of these hallucinations that they may come in a flash and disappear in a flash. 
They don't usually fade in and out. 
They are rather sudden, and they change suddenly. 
Charles Lullin, the grandfather, saw hundreds of different figures, different landscapes of all sorts. 
On one occasion, he saw a man in a bathrobe smoking a pipe, and realized it was himself. 
That was the only figure he recognized. 
On one occasion when he was walking in the streets of Paris, he saw — this was real — a scaffolding. 
But when he got back home, he saw a miniature of the scaffolding six inches high, on his study table. 
This repetition of perception is sometimes called palinopsia. 
With him and with Rosalie, what seems to be going on — and Rosalie said, "" What's going on? "" — and I said that as you lose vision, as the visual parts of the brain are no longer getting any input, they become hyperactive and excitable, and they start to fire spontaneously. 
And you start to see things. 
The things you see can be very complicated indeed. 
With another patient of mine, who, also had some vision, the vision she had could be disturbing. 
On one occasion, she said she saw a man in a striped shirt in a restaurant. 
And he turned around. And then he divided into six figures in striped shirts, who started walking towards her. 
And then the six figures came together again, like a concertina. 
Once, when she was driving, or rather, her husband was driving, the road divided into four and she felt herself going simultaneously up four roads. 
She had very mobile hallucinations as well. 
A lot of them had to do with a car. 
Sometimes she would see a teenage boy sitting on the hood of the car. 
He was very tenacious and he moved rather gracefully when the car turned. 
And then when they came to a stop, the boy would do a sudden vertical takeoff, 100 foot in the air, and then disappear. 
Another patient of mine had a different sort of hallucination. 
This was a woman who didn't have trouble with her eyes, but the visual parts of her brain, a little tumor in the occipital cortex. 
And, above all, she would see cartoons. 
These cartoons would be transparent and would cover half the visual field, like a screen. 
And especially she saw cartoons of Kermit the Frog. 
(Laughter) Now, I don't watch Sesame Street, but she made a point of saying, "" Why Kermit? "" she said, "" Kermit the Frog means nothing to me. 
You know, I was wondering about Freudian determinants. 
Why Kermit? 
Kermit the Frog means nothing to me. "" She didn't mind the cartoons too much. 
But what did disturb her was she got very persistent images or hallucinations of faces and as with Rosalie, the faces were often deformed, with very large teeth or very large eyes. 
And these frightened her. 
Well, what is going on with these people? 
As a physician, I have to try and define what's going on, and to reassure people, especially to reassure them that they're not going insane. 
Something like 10 percent, as I said, of visually impaired people get these. 
But no more than one percent of the people acknowledge them, because they are afraid they will be seen as insane or something. 
And if they do mention them to their own doctors they may be misdiagnosed. 
In particular, the notion is that if you see things or hear things, you're going mad, but the psychotic hallucinations are quite different. 
Psychotic hallucinations, whether they are visual or vocal, they address you. They accuse you. 
They seduce you. They humiliate you. 
They jeer at you. 
You interact with them. 
There is none of this quality of being addressed with these Charles Bonnet hallucinations. 
There is a film. You're seeing a film which has nothing to do with you, or that's how people think about it. 
There is also a rare thing called temporal lobe epilepsy, and sometimes, if one has this, one may feel oneself transported back to a time and place in the past. 
You're at a particular road junction. 
You smell chestnuts roasting. 
You hear the traffic. All the senses are involved. 
And you're waiting for your girl. 
And it's that Tuesday evening back in 1982. 
And the temporal lobe hallucinations are all-sense hallucinations, full of feeling, full of familiarity, located in space and time, coherent, dramatic. 
The Charles Bonnet ones are quite different. 
So in the Charles Bonnet hallucinations, you have all sorts of levels, from the geometrical hallucinations — the pink and blue squares the woman had — up to quite elaborate hallucinations with figures and especially faces. 
Faces, and sometimes deformed faces, are the single commonest thing in these hallucinations. 
And one of the second commonest is cartoons. 
So, what is going on? 
Fascinatingly, in the last few years, it's been possible to do functional brain imagery, to do fMRI on people as they are hallucinating. 
And in fact, to find that different parts of the visual brain are activated as they are hallucinating. 
When people have these simple geometrical hallucinations, the primary visual cortex is activated. 
This is the part of the brain which perceives edges and patterns. 
You don't form images with your primary visual cortex. 
When images are formed, a higher part of the visual cortex is involved in the temporal lobe. 
And in particular, one area of the temporal lobe is called the fusiform gyrus. 
And it's known that if people have damage in the fusiform gyrus, they maybe lose the ability to recognize faces. 
But if there is an abnormal activity in the fusiform gyrus, they may hallucinate faces, and this is exactly what you find in some of these people. 
There is an area in the anterior part of this gyrus where teeth and eyes are represented, and that part of the gyrus is activated when people get the deformed hallucinations. 
There is another part of the brain which is especially activated when one sees cartoons. 
It's activated when one recognizes cartoons, when one draws cartoons, and when one hallucinates them. 
It's very interesting that that should be specific. 
There are other parts of the brain which are specifically involved with the recognition and hallucination of buildings and landscapes. 
Around 1970, it was found that there were not only parts of the brain, but particular cells. 
"" Face cells "" were discovered around 1970. 
And now we know that there are hundreds of other sorts of cells, which can be very, very specific. 
So you may not only have "" car "" cells, you may have "" Aston Martin "" cells. 
(Laughter) I saw an Aston Martin this morning. 
I had to bring it in. 
And now it's in there somewhere. 
(Laughter) Now, at this level, in what's called the inferotemporal cortex, there are only visual images, or figments or fragments. 
It's only at higher levels that the other senses join in and there are connections with memory and emotion. 
And in the Charles Bonnet syndrome, you don't go to those higher levels. 
You're in these levels of inferior visual cortex where you have thousands and tens of thousands and millions of images, or figments, or fragmentary figments, all neurally encoded in particular cells or small clusters of cells. 
Normally these are all part of the integrated stream of perception, or imagination, and one is not conscious of them. 
It is only if one is visually impaired or blind that the process is interrupted. 
And instead of getting normal perception, you're getting an anarchic, convulsive stimulation, or release, of all of these visual cells in the inferotemporal cortex. 
So, suddenly you see a face. Suddenly you see a car. 
Suddenly this, and suddenly that. 
The mind does its best to organize and to give some sort of coherence to this, but not terribly successfully. 
When these were first described, it was thought that they could be interpreted like dreams. 
But in fact people say, "I don't recognize the people. I can't form any associations." 
"Kermit means nothing to me." 
You don't get anywhere thinking of them as dreams. 
Well, I've more or less said what I wanted. 
I think I just want to recapitulate and say this is common. 
Think of the number of blind people. 
There must be hundreds of thousands of blind people who have these hallucinations, but are too scared to mention them. 
So this sort of thing needs to be brought into notice, for patients, for doctors, for the public. 
Finally, I think they are infinitely interesting and valuable, for giving one some insight as to how the brain works. 
Charles Bonnet said, 250 years ago — he wondered how, thinking these hallucinations, how, as he put it, the theater of the mind could be generated by the machinery of the brain. 
Now, 250 years later, I think we're beginning to glimpse how this is done. 
Thanks very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: That was superb. Thank you so much. 
You speak about these things with so much insight and empathy for your patients. 
Have you yourself experienced any of the syndromes you write about? 
Oliver Sacks: I was afraid you'd ask that. 
(Laughter) Well, yeah, a lot of them. 
And actually I'm a little visually impaired myself. 
I'm blind in one eye, and not terribly good in the other. 
And I see the geometrical hallucinations. 
But they stop there. 
CA: And they don't disturb you? 
Because you understand what's doing it, it doesn't make you worried? 
OS: Well they don't disturb me any more than my tinnitus, which I ignore. 
They occasionally interest me, and I have many pictures of them in my notebooks. 
I've gone and had an fMRI myself, to see how my visual cortex is taking over. 
And when I see all these hexagons and complex things, which I also have, in visual migraine, I wonder whether everyone sees things like this, and whether things like cave art or ornamental art may have been derived from them a bit. 
CA: That was an utterly, utterly fascinating talk. 
Thank you so much for sharing. 
OS: Thank you. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Five hundred seventy-one million two hundred thirty thousand pounds of paper towels are used by Americans every year. 
If we could — correction, wrong figure — 13 billion used every year. 
If we could reduce the usage of paper towels, one paper towel per person per day, 571,230,000 pounds of paper not used. 
We can do that. 
Now there are all kinds of paper towel dispensers. 
There's the tri-fold. People typically take two or three. 
There's the one that cuts it, that you have to tear off. 
People go one, two, three, four, tear. 
This much, right? 
There's the one that cuts itself. 
People go, one, two, three, four. 
Or there's the same thing, but recycled paper, you have to get five of those because they're not as absorbant, of course. 
The fact is, you can do it all with one towel. 
The key, two words: This half of the room, your word is "" shake. "" Let's hear it. Shake. Louder. 
Audience: Shake. 
Joe Smith: Your word is "" fold. "" Audience: Fold. 
JS: Again. 
Audience: Fold. JS: Really loud. 
Audience: Shake. Fold. 
JS: Okay. Wet hands. 
Shake — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. 
Why 12? Twelve apostles, twelve tribes, twelve zodiac signs, twelve months. The one I like the best: It's the biggest number with one syllable. 
(Laughter) Tri-fold. Fold... 
Dry. 
(Applause) Audience: Shake. 
Fold. 
JS: Cuts itself. Fold. The fold is important because it allows interstitial suspension. 
You don't have to remember that part, but trust me. 
(Laughter) Audience: Shake. Fold. 
JS: Cuts itself. 
You know the funny thing is, I get my hands drier than people do with three or four, because they can't get in between the cracks. 
If you think this isn't as good... 
Audience: Shake. Fold. 
JS: Now, there's now a real fancy invention, it's the one where you wave your hand and it kicks it out. 
It's way too big a towel. 
Let me tell you a secret. 
If you're really quick, if you're really quick — and I can prove this — this is half a towel from the dispenser in this building. 
How? As soon as it starts, you just tear it off. 
It's smart enough to stop. 
And you get half a towel. 
Audience: Shake. Fold. 
JS: Now, let's all say it together. Shake. Fold. 
You will for the rest of your life remember those words every time you pick up a paper towel. 
And remember, one towel per person for one year — 571,230,000 pounds of paper. No small thing. 
And next year, toilet paper. 
(Laughter) 

So if I told you that this was the face of pure joy, would you call me crazy? 
I wouldn't blame you, because every time I look at this Arctic selfie, I shiver just a little bit. 
I want to tell you a little bit about this photograph. 
I was swimming around in the Lofoten Islands in Norway, just inside the Arctic Circle, and the water was hovering right at freezing. 
The air? A brisk -10 with windchill, and I could literally feel the blood trying to leave my hands, feet and face, and rush to protect my vital organs. 
It was the coldest I've ever been. 
But even with swollen lips, sunken eyes, and cheeks flushed red, I have found that this place right here is somewhere I can find great joy. 
Now, when it comes to pain, psychologist Brock Bastian probably said it best when he wrote, "" Pain is a kind of shortcut to mindfulness. 
It makes us suddenly aware of everything in the environment. 
It brutally draws us in to a virtual sensory awareness of the world much like meditation. "" If shivering is a form of meditation, then I would consider myself a monk. 
(Laughter) Now, before we get into the why would anyone ever want to surf in freezing cold water? 
I would love to give you a little perspective on what a day in my life can look like. 
(Music) (Video) Man: I mean, I know we were hoping for good waves, but I don't think anybody thought that was going to happen. 
I can't stop shaking. 
I am so cold. 
(Music) (Applause) Chris Burkard: So, surf photographer, right? 
I don't even know if it's a real job title, to be honest. 
My parents definitely didn't think so when I told them at 19 I was quitting my job to pursue this dream career: blue skies, warm tropical beaches, and a tan that lasts all year long. 
I mean, to me, this was it. Life could not get any better. 
Sweating it out, shooting surfers in these exotic tourist destinations. 
But there was just this one problem. 
You see, the more time I spent traveling to these exotic locations, the less gratifying it seemed to be. 
I set out seeking adventure, and what I was finding was only routine. 
It was things like wi-fi, TV, fine dining, and a constant cellular connection that to me were all the trappings of places heavily touristed in and out of the water, and it didn't take long for me to start feeling suffocated. 
I began craving wild, open spaces, and so I set out to find the places others had written off as too cold, too remote, and too dangerous to surf, and that challenge intrigued me. 
I began this sort of personal crusade against the mundane, because if there's one thing I've realized, it's that any career, even one as seemingly glamorous as surf photography, has the danger of becoming monotonous. 
So in my search to break up this monotony, I realized something: There's only about a third of the Earth's oceans that are warm, and it's really just that thin band around the equator. 
So if I was going to find perfect waves, it was probably going to happen somewhere cold, where the seas are notoriously rough, and that's exactly where I began to look. 
And it was my first trip to Iceland that I felt like I found exactly what I was looking for. 
I was blown away by the natural beauty of the landscape, but most importantly, I couldn't believe we were finding perfect waves in such a remote and rugged part of the world. 
At one point, we got to the beach only to find massive chunks of ice had piled on the shoreline. 
They created this barrier between us and the surf, and we had to weave through this thing like a maze just to get out into the lineup. 
and once we got there, we were pushing aside these ice chunks trying to get into waves. 
It was an incredible experience, one I'll never forget, because amidst those harsh conditions, I felt like I stumbled onto one of the last quiet places, somewhere that I found a clarity and a connection with the world I knew I would never find on a crowded beach. 
I was hooked. I was hooked. (Laughter) Cold water was constantly on my mind, and from that point on, my career focused on these types of harsh and unforgiving environments, and it took me to places like Russia, Norway, Alaska, Iceland, Chile, the Faroe Islands, and a lot of places in between. 
And one of my favorite things about these places was simply the challenge and the creativity it took just to get there: hours, days, weeks spent on Google Earth trying to pinpoint any remote stretch of beach or reef we could actually get to. 
And once we got there, the vehicles were just as creative: snowmobiles, six-wheel Soviet troop carriers, and a couple of super-sketchy helicopter flights. 
(Laughter) Helicopters really scare me, by the way. 
There was this one particularly bumpy boat ride up the coast of Vancouver Island to this kind of remote surf spot, where we ended up watching helplessly from the water as bears ravaged our camp site. 
They walked off with our food and bits of our tent, clearly letting us know that we were at the bottom of the food chain and that this was their spot, not ours. 
But to me, that trip was a testament to the wildness I traded for those touristy beaches. 
Now, it wasn't until I traveled to Norway — (Laughter) — that I really learned to appreciate the cold. 
So this is the place where some of the largest, the most violent storms in the world send huge waves smashing into the coastline. 
We were in this tiny, remote fjord, just inside the Arctic Circle. 
It had a greater population of sheep than people, so help if we needed it was nowhere to be found. 
I was in the water taking pictures of surfers, and it started to snow. 
And then the temperature began to drop. 
And I told myself, there's not a chance you're getting out of the water. 
You traveled all this way, and this is exactly what you've been waiting for: freezing cold conditions with perfect waves. 
And although I couldn't even feel my finger to push the trigger, I knew I wasn't getting out. 
So I just did whatever I could. I shook it off, whatever. 
But that was the point that I felt this wind gush through the valley and hit me, and what started as this light snowfall quickly became a full-on blizzard, and I started to lose perception of where I was. 
I didn't know if I was drifting out to sea or towards shore, and all I could really make out was the faint sound of seagulls and crashing waves. 
Now, I knew this place had a reputation for sinking ships and grounding planes, and while I was out there floating, I started to get a little bit nervous. 
Actually, I was totally freaking out — (Laughter) — and I was borderline hypothermic, and my friends eventually had to help me out of the water. 
And I don't know if it was delirium setting in or what, but they told me later I had a smile on my face the entire time. 
Now, it was this trip and probably that exact experience where I really began to feel like every photograph was precious, because all of a sudden in that moment, it was something I was forced to earn. 
And I realized, all this shivering had actually taught me something: In life, there are no shortcuts to joy. 
Anything that is worth pursuing is going to require us to suffer just a little bit, and that tiny bit of suffering that I did for my photography, it added a value to my work that was so much more meaningful to me than just trying to fill the pages of magazines. 
See, I gave a piece of myself in these places, and what I walked away with was a sense of fulfillment I had always been searching for. 
So I look back at this photograph. 
It's easy to see frozen fingers and cold wetsuits and even the struggle that it took just to get there, but most of all, what I see is just joy. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

Miranda Wang: We're here to talk about accidents. 
How do you feel about accidents? 
When we think about accidents, we usually consider them to be harmful, unfortunate or even dangerous, and they certainly can be. 
But are they always that bad? 
The discovery that had led to penicillin, for example, is one of the most fortunate accidents of all time. 
Without biologist Alexander Fleming's moldy accident, caused by a neglected workstation, we wouldn't be able to fight off so many bacterial infections. 
Jeanny Yao: Miranda and I are here today because we'd like to share how our accidents have led to discoveries. 
In 2011, we visited the Vancouver Waste Transfer Station and saw an enormous pit of plastic waste. 
We realized that when plastics get to the dump, it's difficult to sort them because they have similar densities, and when they're mixed with organic matter and construction debris, it's truly impossible to pick them out and environmentally eliminate them. 
MW: However, plastics are useful because they're durable, flexible, and can be easily molded into so many useful shapes. 
The downside of this convenience is that there's a high cost to this. 
Plastics cause serious problems, such as the destruction of ecosystems, the pollution of natural resources, and the reduction of available land space. 
This picture you see here is the Great Pacific Gyre. 
When you think about plastic pollution and the marine environment, we think about the Great Pacific Gyre, which is supposed to be a floating island of plastic waste. 
But that's no longer an accurate depiction of plastic pollution in the marine environment. 
Right now, the ocean is actually a soup of plastic debris, and there's nowhere you can go in the ocean where you wouldn't be able to find plastic particles. 
JY: In a plastic-dependent society, cutting down production is a good goal, but it's not enough. 
And what about the waste that's already been produced? 
Plastics take hundreds to thousands of years to biodegrade. 
So we thought, you know what? 
Instead of waiting for that garbage to sit there and pile up, let's find a way to break them down with bacteria. 
Sounds cool, right? 
Audience: Yeah. JY: Thank you. 
But we had a problem. 
You see, plastics have very complex structures and are difficult to biodegrade. 
Anyhow, we were curious and hopeful and still wanted to give it a go. 
MW: With this idea in mind, Jeanny and I read through some hundreds of scientific articles on the Internet, and we drafted a research proposal in the beginning of our grade 12 year. 
We aimed to find bacteria from our local Fraser River that can degrade a harmful plasticizer called phthalates. 
Phthalates are additives used in everyday plastic products to increase their flexibility, durability and transparency. 
Although they're part of the plastic, they're not covalently bonded to the plastic backbone. 
As a result, they easily escape into our environment. 
Not only do phthalates pollute our environment, but they also pollute our bodies. 
To make the matter worse, phthalates are found in products to which we have a high exposure, such as babies' toys, beverage containers, cosmetics, and even food wraps. 
Phthalates are horrible because they're so easily taken into our bodies. 
They can be absorbed by skin contact, ingested, and inhaled. 
JY: Every year, at least 470 million pounds of phthalates contaminate our air, water and soil. 
The Environmental Protection Agency even classified this group as a top-priority pollutant because it's been shown to cause cancer and birth defects by acting as a hormone disruptor. 
We read that each year, the Vancouver municipal government monitors phthalate concentration levels in rivers to assess their safety. 
So we figured, if there are places along our Fraser River that are contaminated with phthalates, and if there are bacteria that are able to live in these areas, then perhaps, perhaps these bacteria could have evolved to break down phthalates. 
MW: So we presented this good idea to Dr. Lindsay Eltis at the University of British Columbia, and surprisingly, he actually took us into his lab and asked his graduate students Adam and James to help us. 
Little did we know at that time that a trip to the dump and some research on the Internet and plucking up the courage to act upon inspiration would take us on a life-changing journey of accidents and discoveries. 
JY: The first step in our project was to collect soil samples from three different sites along the Fraser River. 
Out of thousands of bacteria, we wanted to find ones that could break down phthalates, so we enriched our cultures with phthalates as the only carbon source. 
This implied that, if anything grew in our cultures, then they must be able to live off of phthalates. 
Everything went well from there, and we became amazing scientists. (Laughter) MW: Um... uh, Jeanny. JY: I'm just joking. 
MW: Okay. Well, it was partially my fault. 
You see, I accidentally cracked the flask that had contained our third enrichment culture, and as a result, we had to wipe down the incubator room with bleach and ethanol twice. 
And this is only one of the examples of the many accidents that happened during our experimentation. 
But this mistake turned out to be rather serendipitous. 
We noticed that the unharmed cultures came from places of opposite contamination levels, so this mistake actually led us to think that perhaps we can compare the different degradative potentials of bacteria from sites of opposite contamination levels. 
JY: Now that we grew the bacteria, we wanted to isolate strains by streaking onto mediate plates, because we thought that would be less accident-prone, but we were wrong again. 
We poked holes in our agar while streaking and contaminated some samples and funghi. 
As a result, we had to streak and restreak several times. 
Then we monitored phthalate utilization and bacterial growth, and found that they shared an inverse correlation, so as bacterial populations increased, phthalate concentrations decreased. 
This means that our bacteria were actually living off of phthalates. 
MW: So now that we found bacteria that could break down phthalates, we wondered what these bacteria were. 
So Jeanny and I took three of our most efficient strains and then performed gene amplification sequencing on them and matched our data with an online comprehensive database. 
We were happy to see that, although our three strains had been previously identified bacteria, two of them were not previously associated with phthalate degradation, so this was actually a novel discovery. 
JY: To better understand how this biodegradation works, we wanted to verify the catabolic pathways of our three strains. 
To do this, we extracted enzymes from our bacteria and reacted with an intermediate of phthalic acid. 
MW: We monitored this experiment with spectrophotometry and obtained this beautiful graph. 
This graph shows that our bacteria really do have a genetic pathway to biodegrade phthalates. 
Our bacteria can transform phthalates, which is a harmful toxin, into end products such as carbon dioxide, water and alcohol. 
I know some of you in the crowd are thinking, well, carbon dioxide is horrible, it's a greenhouse gas. 
But if our bacteria did not evolve to break down phthalates, they would have used some other kind of carbon source, and aerobic respiration would have led it to have end products such as carbon dioxide anyway. 
We were also interested to see that, although we've obtained greater diversity of bacteria biodegraders from the bird habitat site, we obtained the most efficient degraders from the landfill site. 
So this fully shows that nature evolves through natural selection. 
JY: So Miranda and I shared this research at the Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge competition and were recognized with the greatest commercialization potential. 
Although we're not the first ones to find bacteria that can break down phthalates, we were the first ones to look into our local river and find a possible solution to a local problem. 
We have not only shown that bacteria can be the solution to plastic pollution, but also that being open to uncertain outcomes and taking risks create opportunities for unexpected discoveries. 
Throughout this journey, we have also discovered our passion for science, and are currently continuing research on other fossil fuel chemicals in university. 
We hope that in the near future, we'll be able to create model organisms that can break down not only phthalates but a wide variety of different contaminants. 
We can apply this to wastewater treatment plants to clean up our rivers and other natural resources. 
And perhaps one day we'll be able to tackle the problem of solid plastic waste. 
MW: I think our journey has truly transformed our view of microorganisms, and Jeanny and I have shown that even mistakes can lead to discoveries. 
Einstein once said, "" You can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking you used when you created them. "" If we're making plastic synthetically, then we think the solution would be to break them down biochemically. 
Thank you. JY: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

And you don't have sex. 

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

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

I'm a marine biologist and an explorer-photographer with National Geographic, but I want to share a secret. 
This image is totally incorrect, totally incorrect. 
I see a couple of people crying in the back that I've blown their idea of mermaids. 
All right, the mermaid is indeed real, but anyone who's gone on a dive will know that the ocean looks more like this. 
It's because the ocean is this massive filter, and as soon as you start going underwater, you're going to lose your colors, and it's going to get dark and blue very quickly. 
But we're humans — we're terrestrial mammals. 
And we've got trichromatic vision, so we see in red, green and blue, and we're just complete color addicts. 
We love eye-popping color, and we try to bring this eye-popping color underwater with us. 
So there's been a long and sordid history of bringing color underwater, and it starts 88 years ago with Bill Longley and Charles Martin, who were trying to take the first underwater color photograph. 
And they're in there with old-school scuba suits, where you're pumping air down to them, and they've got a pontoon of high-explosive magnesium powder, and the poor people at the surface are not sure when they're going to pull the string when they've got their frame in focus, and — boom! — a pound of high explosives would go off so they could put a little bit of light underwater and get an image like this beautiful hogfish. 
I mean, it's a gorgeous image, but this is not real. 
They're creating an artificial environment so we can satisfy our own addiction to color. 
And looking at it the other way, what we've been finding is that instead of bringing color underwater with us, that we've been looking at the blue ocean, and it's a crucible of blue, and these animals living there for millions of years have been evolving all sorts of ways to take in that blue light and give off other colors. 
And here's just a little sample of what this secret world looks like. 
It's like an underwater light show. 
(Music) Again, what we're seeing here is blue light hitting this image. 
These animals are absorbing the blue light and immediately transforming this light. 
So if you think about it, the ocean is 71 percent of the planet, and blue light can extend down to almost a 1,000 meters. 
As we go down underwater, after about 10 meters, all the red is gone. 
So if you see anything under 10 meters that's red, it's an animal transforming and creating its own red. 
This is the largest single monochromatic blue environment on our planet. 
And my gateway into this world of biofluorescence begins with corals. 
And I want to give a full TED Talk on corals and just how cool these things are. 
One of the things that they do, one of their miraculous feats, is they produce lots of these fluorescent proteins, fluorescent molecules. 
And in this coral, it could be making up to 14 percent of its body mass — could be this fluorescent protein. 
So you wouldn't be making, like, 14 percent muscle and not using it, so it's likely doing something that has a functional role. 
And for the last 10, 15 years, this was so special to me, because this molecule has turned out to be one of the most revolutionary tools in biomedical science, and it's allowing us to better see inside ourselves. 
So, how do I study this? 
In order to study biofluorescence, we swim at night. 
And when I started out, I was just using these blue duct-tape filters over my strobe, so I could make sure I'm actually seeing the light that's being transformed by the animals. 
We're making an exhibit for the Museum of Natural History, and we're trying to show off how great the fluorescent corals are on the reef, and something happened that just blew me away: this. 
In the middle of our corals, is this green fluorescent fish. 
It's the first time we've ever seen a green fluorescent fish or any vertebrate for that matter. 
And we're rubbing our eyes, checking the filters, thinking that somebody's maybe playing a joke on us with the camera, but the eel was real. 
It was the first green fluorescent eel that we found, and this just changed my trajectory completely. 
So I had to put down my corals and team up with a fish scientist, John Sparks, and begin a search around the world to see how prevalent this phenomenon is. 
And fish are much more interesting than corals, because they have really advanced vision, and some of the fish even have, the way that I was photographing it, they have lenses in their eyes that would magnify the fluorescence. 
So I wanted to seek this out further. 
So we designed a new set of gear and we're scouring the reefs around the world, looking for fluorescent life. 
And it's a bit like "" E.T. phone home. "" We're out there swimming with this blue light, and we're looking for a response, for animals to be absorbing the light and transferring this back to us. 
And eventually, we found our photobombing Kaupichphys eel. 
It's a really shy, reclusive eel that we know almost nothing about. 
They're only about the size of my finger, and they spend about 99.9 percent of their time hidden under a rock. 
But these eels do come out to mate under full-moon nights, and that full-moon night translates underwater to blue. 
Perhaps they're using this as a way to see each other, quickly find each other, mate, go back into their hole for the next long stint of time. 
But then we started to find other fluorescent marine life, like this green fluorescent bream, with its, like, racing stripes along its head and its nape, and it's almost camouflaged and fluorescing at the same intensity as the fluorescent coral there. 
After this fish, we were introduced to this red fluorescent scorpionfish cloaked and hidden on this rock. 
The only time we've ever seen this, it's either on red fluorescent algae or red fluorescent coral. 
Later, we found this stealthy green fluorescent lizardfish. 
These lizardfish come in many varieties, and they look almost exactly alike under white light. 
But if you look at them under fluorescent light, you see lots of patterns, you can really see the differences among them. 
And in total — we just reported this last year — we found over 200 species of biofluorescent fish. 
One of my inspirations is French artist and biologist Jean Painlevé. 
He really captures this entrepreneuring, creative spirit in biology. 
He would design his own gear, make his own cameras, and he was fascinated with the seahorse, Hippocampus erectus, and he filmed for the first time the seahorse giving birth. 
So this is the male seahorse. 
They were one of the first fish to start swimming upright with their brain above their head. 
The males give birth, just phenomenal creatures. 
So he stayed awake for days. 
He even put this electrical visor on his head that would shock him, so he could capture this moment. 
Now, I wish I could have shown Painlevé the moment where we found biofluorescent seahorses in the exact same species that he was studying. 
And here's our footage. 
(Music) They're the most cryptic fish. 
You could be swimming right on top of them and not see the seahorse. 
They would blend right into the algae, which would also fluoresce red, but they've got great vision, and they go through this long mating ritual, and perhaps they're using it in that effect. 
But things got pretty edgy when we found green fluorescence in the stingray, because stingrays are in the Elasmobranch class, which includes... 
sharks. 
So I'm, like, a coral biologist. 
Somebody's got to go down and check to see if the sharks are fluorescent. 
And there I am. 
(Laughter) And I was like, "" Maybe I should go back to corals. "" (Laughter) It turns out that these sharks are not fluorescent. 
And then we found it. 
In a deep, dark canyon off the coast of California, we found the first biofluorescent swellshark, right underneath all the surfers. 
Here it is. 
They're just about a meter long. It's called a swellshark. 
And they call them a swellshark because if they're threatened, they can gulp down water and blow up like an inner tube, about twice their size, and wedge themselves under a rock, so they don't get eaten by a predator. 
And here is our first footage of these biofluorescent swellsharks. 
Just magnificent — I mean, they're showing these distinct patterns, and there are areas that are fluorescent and areas that are not fluorescent, but they've also got these twinkling spots on them that are much brighter than other parts of the shark. 
But this is all beautiful to see. 
I was like, this is gorgeous. 
But what does it mean to the shark? 
Can they see this? 
And we looked in the literature, and nothing was known about this shark's vision. 
So I took this shark to eye specialist Ellis Loew at Cornell University, and we found out that this shark sees discretely and acutely in the blue-green interface, probably about 100 times better than we can see in the dark, but they only see blue-green. 
So what it's doing is taking this blue world and it's absorbing the blue, creating green. 
It's creating contrast that they can indeed see. 
So we have a model, showing that it creates an ability for them to see all these patterns. 
And males and females also have, we're finding, distinct patterns among them. 
But our last find came really just a few miles from where we are now, in the Solomon Islands. 
Swimming at night, I encountered the first biofluorescent sea turtle. 
So now it's going from fish and sharks into reptiles, which, again, this is only one month old, but it shows us that we know almost nothing about this hawksbill turtle's vision. 
And it makes me think about how much more there is to learn. 
And here in the Solomon Islands, there's only a few thousand breeding females of this species left, and this is one of the hotspots for them. 
So it shows us how much we need to really protect these animals while they're still here, and understand them. 
In thinking about biofluorescence, I wanted to know, how deep does it go? 
Does this go all the way to the bottom of the ocean? 
So we started using submarines, and we equipped them with special blue lights on the front here. 
And we dropped down, and we noticed one important thing — that as we get down to 1,000 meters, it drops off. 
There's no biofluorescent marine life down there, below 1,000 meters — almost nothing, it's just darkness. 
So it's mainly a shallow phenomenon. 
And below 1,000 meters, we encountered the bioluminescent zone, where nine out of 10 animals are actually making their own lights and flashing and blinking. 
As I try to get deeper, this is slapping on a one-person submarine suit — some people call this my "" Jacques Cousteau meets Woody Allen "" moment. 
(Laughter) But as we explore down here, I was thinking about: How do we interact with life delicately? 
Because we're entering a new age of exploration, where we have to take great care, and we have to set examples how we explore. 
So I've teamed up with roboticist Rob Wood at Harvard University, and we've been designing squishy underwater robot fingers, so we can delicately interact with the marine life down there. 
The idea is that most of our technologies to explore the deep ocean come from oil and gas and military, who, you know, they're not really caring to be gentle. 
Some corals could be 1,000 years old. 
You don't want to just go and crush them with a big claw. 
So my dream is something like this. 
At night, I'm in a submarine, I have force-feedback gloves, and I could delicately set up a lab in the front of my submarine, where the squishy robot fingers are delicately collecting and putting things in jars, and we can conduct our research. 
Back to the powerful applied applications. 
Here, you're looking at a living brain that's using the DNA of fluorescent marine creatures, this one from jellyfish and corals, to illuminate the living brain and see its connections. 
It's funny that we're using RGB just to kind of satisfy our own human intuition, so we can see our brains better. 
And even more mind-blowing, is my close colleague Vincent Pieribone at Yale, who has actually designed and engineered a fluorescent protein that responds to voltage. 
So he could see when a single neuron fires. 
You're essentially looking at a portal into consciousness that was designed by marine creatures. 
So this brings me all back to perspective and relationship. 
From deep space, our universe looks like a human brain cell, and then here we are in the deep ocean, and we're finding marine creatures and cells that can illuminate the human mind. 
And it's my hope that with illuminated minds, we could ponder the overarching interconnectedness of all life, and fathom how much more lies in store if we keep our oceans healthy. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Mark Twain summed up what I take to be one of the fundamental problems of cognitive science with a single witticism. 
He said, "" There's something fascinating about science. 
One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment in fact. "" (Laughter) Twain meant it as a joke, of course, but he's right: There's something fascinating about science. 
From a few bones, we infer the existence of dinosuars. 
From spectral lines, the composition of nebulae. 
From fruit flies, the mechanisms of heredity, and from reconstructed images of blood flowing through the brain, or in my case, from the behavior of very young children, we try to say something about the fundamental mechanisms of human cognition. 
In particular, in my lab in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, I have spent the past decade trying to understand the mystery of how children learn so much from so little so quickly. 
Because, it turns out that the fascinating thing about science is also a fascinating thing about children, which, to put a gentler spin on Mark Twain, is precisely their ability to draw rich, abstract inferences rapidly and accurately from sparse, noisy data. 
I'm going to give you just two examples today. 
One is about a problem of generalization, and the other is about a problem of causal reasoning. 
And although I'm going to talk about work in my lab, this work is inspired by and indebted to a field. 
I'm grateful to mentors, colleagues, and collaborators around the world. 
Let me start with the problem of generalization. 
Generalizing from small samples of data is the bread and butter of science. 
We poll a tiny fraction of the electorate and we predict the outcome of national elections. 
We see how a handful of patients responds to treatment in a clinical trial, and we bring drugs to a national market. 
But this only works if our sample is randomly drawn from the population. 
If our sample is cherry-picked in some way — say, we poll only urban voters, or say, in our clinical trials for treatments for heart disease, we include only men — the results may not generalize to the broader population. 
So scientists care whether evidence is randomly sampled or not, but what does that have to do with babies? 
Well, babies have to generalize from small samples of data all the time. 
They see a few rubber ducks and learn that they float, or a few balls and learn that they bounce. 
And they develop expectations about ducks and balls that they're going to extend to rubber ducks and balls for the rest of their lives. 
And the kinds of generalizations babies have to make about ducks and balls they have to make about almost everything: shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings. 
So do babies care whether the tiny bit of evidence they see is plausibly representative of a larger population? 
Let's find out. 
I'm going to show you two movies, one from each of two conditions of an experiment, and because you're going to see just two movies, you're going to see just two babies, and any two babies differ from each other in innumerable ways. 
But these babies, of course, here stand in for groups of babies, and the differences you're going to see represent average group differences in babies' behavior across conditions. 
In each movie, you're going to see a baby doing maybe just exactly what you might expect a baby to do, and we can hardly make babies more magical than they already are. 
But to my mind the magical thing, and what I want you to pay attention to, is the contrast between these two conditions, because the only thing that differs between these two movies is the statistical evidence the babies are going to observe. 
We're going to show babies a box of blue and yellow balls, and my then-graduate student, now colleague at Stanford, Hyowon Gweon, is going to pull three blue balls in a row out of this box, and when she pulls those balls out, she's going to squeeze them, and the balls are going to squeak. 
And if you're a baby, that's like a TED Talk. 
It doesn't get better than that. 
(Laughter) But the important point is it's really easy to pull three blue balls in a row out of a box of mostly blue balls. 
You could do that with your eyes closed. 
It's plausibly a random sample from this population. 
And if you can reach into a box at random and pull out things that squeak, then maybe everything in the box squeaks. 
So maybe babies should expect those yellow balls to squeak as well. 
Now, those yellow balls have funny sticks on the end, so babies could do other things with them if they wanted to. 
They could pound them or whack them. 
But let's see what the baby does. 
(Video) Hyowon Gweon: See this? (Ball squeaks) Did you see that? (Ball squeaks) Cool. 
See this one? 
(Ball squeaks) Wow. 
Laura Schulz: Told you. (Laughs) (Video) HG: See this one? (Ball squeaks) Hey Clara, this one's for you. You can go ahead and play. 
(Laughter) LS: I don't even have to talk, right? 
All right, it's nice that babies will generalize properties of blue balls to yellow balls, and it's impressive that babies can learn from imitating us, but we've known those things about babies for a very long time. 
The really interesting question is what happens when we show babies exactly the same thing, and we can ensure it's exactly the same because we have a secret compartment and we actually pull the balls from there, but this time, all we change is the apparent population from which that evidence was drawn. 
This time, we're going to show babies three blue balls pulled out of a box of mostly yellow balls, and guess what? 
You [probably won't] randomly draw three blue balls in a row out of a box of mostly yellow balls. 
That is not plausibly randomly sampled evidence. 
That evidence suggests that maybe Hyowon was deliberately sampling the blue balls. 
Maybe there's something special about the blue balls. 
Maybe only the blue balls squeak. 
Let's see what the baby does. 
(Video) HG: See this? (Ball squeaks) See this toy? (Ball squeaks) Oh, that was cool. See? (Ball squeaks) Now this one's for you to play. You can go ahead and play. 
(Fussing) (Laughter) LS: So you just saw two 15-month-old babies do entirely different things based only on the probability of the sample they observed. 
Let me show you the experimental results. 
On the vertical axis, you'll see the percentage of babies who squeezed the ball in each condition, and as you'll see, babies are much more likely to generalize the evidence when it's plausibly representative of the population than when the evidence is clearly cherry-picked. 
And this leads to a fun prediction: Suppose you pulled just one blue ball out of the mostly yellow box. 
You [probably won't] pull three blue balls in a row at random out of a yellow box, but you could randomly sample just one blue ball. 
That's not an improbable sample. 
And if you could reach into a box at random and pull out something that squeaks, maybe everything in the box squeaks. 
So even though babies are going to see much less evidence for squeaking, and have many fewer actions to imitate in this one ball condition than in the condition you just saw, we predicted that babies themselves would squeeze more, and that's exactly what we found. 
So 15-month-old babies, in this respect, like scientists, care whether evidence is randomly sampled or not, and they use this to develop expectations about the world: what squeaks and what doesn't, what to explore and what to ignore. 
Let me show you another example now, this time about a problem of causal reasoning. 
And it starts with a problem of confounded evidence that all of us have, which is that we are part of the world. 
And this might not seem like a problem to you, but like most problems, it's only a problem when things go wrong. 
Take this baby, for instance. 
Things are going wrong for him. 
He would like to make this toy go, and he can't. 
I'll show you a few-second clip. 
And there's two possibilities, broadly: Maybe he's doing something wrong, or maybe there's something wrong with the toy. 
So in this next experiment, we're going to give babies just a tiny bit of statistical data supporting one hypothesis over the other, and we're going to see if babies can use that to make different decisions about what to do. 
Here's the setup. 
Hyowon is going to try to make the toy go and succeed. 
I am then going to try twice and fail both times, and then Hyowon is going to try again and succeed, and this roughly sums up my relationship to my graduate students in technology across the board. 
But the important point here is it provides a little bit of evidence that the problem isn't with the toy, it's with the person. 
Some people can make this toy go, and some can't. 
Now, when the baby gets the toy, he's going to have a choice. 
His mom is right there, so he can go ahead and hand off the toy and change the person, but there's also going to be another toy at the end of that cloth, and he can pull the cloth towards him and change the toy. 
So let's see what the baby does. 
(Video) HG: Two, three. Go! (Music) LS: One, two, three, go! 
Arthur, I'm going to try again. One, two, three, go! 
YG: Arthur, let me try again, okay? 
One, two, three, go! (Music) Look at that. Remember these toys? 
See these toys? Yeah, I'm going to put this one over here, and I'm going to give this one to you. 
You can go ahead and play. 
LS: Okay, Laura, but of course, babies love their mommies. 
Of course babies give toys to their mommies when they can't make them work. 
So again, the really important question is what happens when we change the statistical data ever so slightly. 
This time, babies are going to see the toy work and fail in exactly the same order, but we're changing the distribution of evidence. 
This time, Hyowon is going to succeed once and fail once, and so am I. 
And this suggests it doesn't matter who tries this toy, the toy is broken. 
It doesn't work all the time. 
Again, the baby's going to have a choice. 
Her mom is right next to her, so she can change the person, and there's going to be another toy at the end of the cloth. 
Let's watch what she does. 
(Video) HG: Two, three, go! (Music) Let me try one more time. One, two, three, go! 
Hmm. 
LS: Let me try, Clara. 
One, two, three, go! 
Hmm, let me try again. 
One, two, three, go! (Music) HG: I'm going to put this one over here, and I'm going to give this one to you. 
You can go ahead and play. 
(Applause) LS: Let me show you the experimental results. 
On the vertical axis, you'll see the distribution of children's choices in each condition, and you'll see that the distribution of the choices children make depends on the evidence they observe. 
So in the second year of life, babies can use a tiny bit of statistical data to decide between two fundamentally different strategies for acting in the world: asking for help and exploring. 
I've just shown you two laboratory experiments out of literally hundreds in the field that make similar points, because the really critical point is that children's ability to make rich inferences from sparse data underlies all the species-specific cultural learning that we do. 
Children learn about new tools from just a few examples. 
They learn new causal relationships from just a few examples. 
They even learn new words, in this case in American Sign Language. 
I want to close with just two points. 
If you've been following my world, the field of brain and cognitive sciences, for the past few years, three big ideas will have come to your attention. 
The first is that this is the era of the brain. 
And indeed, there have been staggering discoveries in neuroscience: localizing functionally specialized regions of cortex, turning mouse brains transparent, activating neurons with light. 
A second big idea is that this is the era of big data and machine learning, and machine learning promises to revolutionize our understanding of everything from social networks to epidemiology. 
And maybe, as it tackles problems of scene understanding and natural language processing, to tell us something about human cognition. 
And the final big idea you'll have heard is that maybe it's a good idea we're going to know so much about brains and have so much access to big data, because left to our own devices, humans are fallible, we take shortcuts, we err, we make mistakes, we're biased, and in innumerable ways, we get the world wrong. 
I think these are all important stories, and they have a lot to tell us about what it means to be human, but I want you to note that today I told you a very different story. 
It's a story about minds and not brains, and in particular, it's a story about the kinds of computations that uniquely human minds can perform, which involve rich, structured knowledge and the ability to learn from small amounts of data, the evidence of just a few examples. 
And fundamentally, it's a story about how starting as very small children and continuing out all the way to the greatest accomplishments of our culture, we get the world right. 
Folks, human minds do not only learn from small amounts of data. 
Human minds think of altogether new ideas. 
Human minds generate research and discovery, and human minds generate art and literature and poetry and theater, and human minds take care of other humans: our old, our young, our sick. 
We even heal them. 
In the years to come, we're going to see technological innovations beyond anything I can even envision, but we are very unlikely to see anything even approximating the computational power of a human child in my lifetime or in yours. 
If we invest in these most powerful learners and their development, in babies and children and mothers and fathers and caregivers and teachers the ways we invest in our other most powerful and elegant forms of technology, engineering and design, we will not just be dreaming of a better future, we will be planning for one. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Laura, thank you. I do actually have a question for you. 
First of all, the research is insane. 
I mean, who would design an experiment like that? (Laughter) I've seen that a couple of times, and I still don't honestly believe that that can truly be happening, but other people have done similar experiments; it checks out. 
The babies really are that genius. 
LS: You know, they look really impressive in our experiments, but think about what they look like in real life, right? 
It starts out as a baby. 
Eighteen months later, it's talking to you, and babies' first words aren't just things like balls and ducks, they're things like "" all gone, "" which refer to disappearance, or "" uh-oh, "" which refer to unintentional actions. 
It has to be that powerful. 
It has to be much more powerful than anything I showed you. 
They're figuring out the entire world. 
A four-year-old can talk to you about almost anything. 
(Applause) CA: And if I understand you right, the other key point you're making is, we've been through these years where there's all this talk of how quirky and buggy our minds are, that behavioral economics and the whole theories behind that that we're not rational agents. 
You're really saying that the bigger story is how extraordinary, and there really is genius there that is underappreciated. 
LS: One of my favorite quotes in psychology comes from the social psychologist Solomon Asch, and he said the fundamental task of psychology is to remove the veil of self-evidence from things. 
There are orders of magnitude more decisions you make every day that get the world right. 
You know about objects and their properties. 
You know them when they're occluded. You know them in the dark. 
You can walk through rooms. 
You can figure out what other people are thinking. You can talk to them. 
You can navigate space. You know about numbers. 
You know causal relationships. You know about moral reasoning. 
You do this effortlessly, so we don't see it, but that is how we get the world right, and it's a remarkable and very difficult-to-understand accomplishment. 
CA: I suspect there are people in the audience who have this view of accelerating technological power who might dispute your statement that never in our lifetimes will a computer do what a three-year-old child can do, but what's clear is that in any scenario, our machines have so much to learn from our toddlers. 
LS: I think so. You'll have some machine learning folks up here. 
I mean, you should never bet against babies or chimpanzees or technology as a matter of practice, but it's not just a difference in quantity, it's a difference in kind. 
We have incredibly powerful computers, and they do do amazingly sophisticated things, often with very big amounts of data. 
Human minds do, I think, something quite different, and I think it's the structured, hierarchical nature of human knowledge that remains a real challenge. 
CA: Laura Schulz, wonderful food for thought. Thank you so much. 
LS: Thank you. (Applause) 

So, these are the Dark Ages. 
And the Dark Ages are the time between when you put away the Lego for the last time as a kid, and you decide as an adult that it is okay to play with a kid's toy. 
Started out with my then four-year-old: "" Oh, should buy the kid some Lego. 
That stuff's cool. "" Walked into the Lego store. 
Bought him this. 
It's totally appropriate for a four-year-old. 
(Laughter) I think the box says — let's see here — "" 8 to 12 "" on it. 
I turn to my wife and said, "" Who are we buying this for? "" She's like, "" Oh, us. "" I'm like, "" Okay. All right. That's cool. "" Pretty soon it got a little bit out of control. 
The dining room looked like this. 
You walk there, and it hurts. 
So we took a room downstairs in the basement that had been used as sort of an Abu Ghraib annex. 
(Laughter) Torture, very funny. 
Wow, you guys are great. 
And we put down those little floor tiles, and then I went onto eBay and bought 150 pounds of Lego — (Laughter) which is insane. 
My daughter — the day we got it, I was tucking her in — and I said, "Honey, you're my treasure." 
And she said, "" No, the Lego is the treasure. "" (Laughter) And then she said, "" Dad, we're Lego rich. "" I was like, "" Yeah. 
I suppose we are. "" So then once you do that you're like, "" Oh, crap. Where am I going to put all this? "" So you go to The Container Store and spend an enormous amount of money, and then you start this crazy sorting process that never — it's just nuts. 
Whatever. 
So then you realize there are these conventions. 
And you go to one of these conventions, and some dude built the Titanic. 
And you're like, "" Holy shit! 
He had to come in like a truck, a semi, with this thing. "" And then someone built this — this is the Smith Tower in Seattle. 
Just beautiful. 
And there's a dude selling these aftermarket weapons for Lego, because Lego — the Danish — no, they're not into guns. 
But the Americans? Oh, we'll make some guns for Lego, no problem. 
And at a certain point, you look around, you're like, "" Whoa, this is a really nerdy crowd. "" And I mean like this is a nerdy crowd, but that's like a couple of levels above furries. 
(Laughter) The nerds here, they get laid — except for the lady with the condoms in her pocket — and you say to yourself at some point, "Am I part of this group? Like, am I into this?" 
And I was just like, "" Yeah, I guess I am. 
I'm coming out. 
I'm kind of into this stuff, and I'm going to stop being embarrassed. "" So then you really get into it, and you're like, "" Well, the Lego people in Denmark, they've got all this software to let you build your own virtually. "" And so this is like this CAD program where you build it. 
And then whatever you design virtually, you click the button and it shows up at your doorstep a week later. 
And then some of the designs that people do they actually sell in the store. 
The Lego guys don't give you any royalties, strangely, but some user made this and then it sold. 
And it's pretty amazing actually. 
Then you notice that if that Lego-provided CAD program isn't enough, there's an entire open-source, third-party, independent Lego CAD program that lets you do 3D modeling and 3D rendering and make, in fact, movies out of Lego, 3D films of which there are thousands on YouTube, and some of them sort of mimicking famous films and some totally original content — just beautiful — and people recreating all sorts of things. 
I have to take a moment. 
I love the guy who's like running away with his clasps, his hooks. 
Okay. Anyway. 
(Laughter) There's a whole programming language and robotics tool, so if you want to teach someone how to program, kid, adult, whatever it is. 
And the guy that made this, he made a slot machine out of Lego. 
And I don't mean he made Lego that looked like a slot machine; I mean he made a slot machine out of Lego. 
The insides were Lego. 
There's people getting drunk building Lego, and you've got to finish the thing before you puke. 
There's a whole gray market for Lego, thousands of home-based businesses. 
And some people will fund their entire Lego habit by selling the little guy, but then you have no guys in your ships. 
And then, just some examples. This stuff really is sculpture. 
This is amazing what you can do. 
And don't kid yourself: some architectural details, incredible organic shapes and just, even, nature out of, again, little blocks. 
This is my house. 
And this is my house. 
I was afraid a car was going to come smash it as I was taking a picture for you guys. 
Anyway, I'm out of time. 
But just very quickly — we'll just see if I can do this quick. 
Because there aren't enough TED logos around here. 
(Laughter) Let's see here. 
Okay. 
Ta-da. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the Air Jordan 3 Black Cement. 
This might be the most important sneaker in history. 
First released in 1988, this is the shoe that started Nike marketing as we know it. 
This is the shoe that propelled the entire Air Jordan lineage, and perhaps saved Nike. 
The Air Jordan 3 Black Cement did for sneakers what the iPhone did for phones. 
It's been re-released four times. 
Every celebrity's been seen wearing it. 
There's a site about what to wear with the Black Cement. 
It's been right under your nose for decades and you never looked down. 
And right about now, most of you are probably thinking, "" Sneakers? "" (Laughter) Yes. 
Yes, sneakers. 
Some extraordinary things about sneakers and data and Nike and how they're all related, possibly, to the future of all online commerce. 
In 2011, the last time the Jordan 3 Black Cement was released, at a retail of 160 dollars, it sold out globally in minutes. 
And that's because people were camped outside of sneaker stores for days before it went on sale. 
And just minutes after that, thousands of those pairs were on eBay for two and three times retail. 
In fact, there's over 1,000 pairs on eBay right now, four years later. 
But here's the thing: this happens every single Saturday. 
Every week there's another release or two or three, and every shoe has a story as rich and compelling as the Jordan 3 Black Cement. 
This is Nike building the marketplace for sneakerheads — people who collect sneakers — and my daughter. 
(Laughter) That's an "" I love Dad "" T-shirt. 
For the brands, sneakerheads are a very important demographic. 
These are the tastemakers; these are the Apple fanboys. 
Because who else is going to buy a pair of $8,000 Back to the Future sneakers? 
(Laughter) Yeah, 8,000 dollars. 
And while that's obviously the anomaly, the resell sneaker market is definitely not. 
Thirty years in the making, what started as an underground culture of a few people who like sneakers just a bit too much — (Laughter) Now we have sneaker addictions. 
In a market where in the past 12 months, there have been over nine million pairs of shoes resold in the United States alone, at a value of 1.2 billion dollars. 
And that's a conservative estimate — I should know, I am a sneakerhead. 
This is my collection. 
In the pantheon of great collections, mine doesn't even register. 
I have about 250 pairs, but trust me, I am small-time. 
People have thousands. 
I'm a very typical 37-year-old sneakerhead. 
I grew up playing basketball when Michael Jordan played, I always wanted Air Jordans, my mother would never buy me Air Jordans, as soon as I got some money I bought Air Jordans — literally, we all have the exact same story. 
But here's where mine diverged. 
After starting three companies, I took a job as a strategy consultant, when I very quickly realized that I didn't know the first thing about data. 
But I learned, because I had to, and I liked it. 
So I thought, I wonder if I could get ahold of some sneaker data, just to play with for my own amusement. 
The goal was to develop a price guide, a real data-driven view of the market. 
And four years later, we're analyzing over 25 million transactions, providing real-time analytics on thousands of sneakers. 
Now sneakerheads check prices while camping out for releases. 
Others have used the data to validate insurance claims. 
And the top investment banks in the world now use resell data to analyze the retail footwear industry. 
And here's the best part: sneakerheads have sneaker portfolios. 
(Laughter) Sneakerheads can track the value of their collection over time, compare it to others, and have access to the same analytics you might for your online brokerage account. 
So sneakerhead Dan builds his collection and identifies which 352 are his. 
He can see it's worth 103,000 dollars — frankly, a modest collection. 
At the asset level, he can see gain-loss by shoe. 
Here he's made over 600 dollars on one pair. 
I have one of those. 
(Laughter) So an unregulated 1.2 billion dollar industry that thrives as much on the street as it does online, and has spawned fundamental financial services for sneakers? 
At some point I asked myself what's really going on in the market, and two comparisons started to emerge. 
Are sneakers more like stocks or drugs? 
(Laughter) In fact, one guy emailed to say he thought his 15-year-old son was selling drugs and later found out he was selling sneakers. (Laughter) 
And now they use the data to do it together. 
And that's because sneakers are an investment opportunity where none other exists. 
And I don't just mean the kid selling sneakers instead of drugs. 
How about all kids? 
You have to be 18 to play the stock market. 
I sold chewing gum in sixth grade, Blow Pops in ninth grade and collected baseball cards through high school. 
The cards are long dead, and the candy market's usually quite local. 
For a lot of people, sneakers are a legal and accessible investment opportunity — a democratized stock market, but also unregulated. 
Which is why the story you're probably most familiar with is people killing each other for sneakers. 
And while that definitely happens and is tragic, it's not nearly the epidemic some media would have you believe. 
In fact, it's a very small piece of a much bigger and better story. 
So sneakers have clear similarities to both the stock exchange and the illegal drug trade, but perhaps the most fundamental is the existence of a central actor. 
Someone is making the rules. 
In the case of sneakers, that someone is Nike. 
Let me walk you through some numbers. 
The resell market, we know, is $1.2 billion. 
Nike, including Jordan brand, accounts for 96 percent of all shoes sold on the secondary market. 
Just complete domination. 
Sneakerheads love Jordans. 
And profit on the secondary market is about a third. 
That means that sneakerheads made 380 million dollars selling Nikes last year. 
Let's jump to retail for a second. 
Skechers, earlier this year, became the number two footwear brand in the country, surpassing Adidas — this was a big deal. 
And in the 12 months ending in June, Skechers's net income was 209 million dollars. 
That means that Nike's customers make almost twice as much profit as their closest competitor. 
That — (Laughter) How is that even possible? 
The sneaker market is just supply and demand, but Nike's gotten very good at using supply — limited sneakers — and the distribution of those sneakers to their own benefit. 
So it's really just supply. 
Sneakerheads joke that as long as it's limited and Nike, they'll buy it. 
Shoes that sell for 8,000 dollars do so because they're very rare. 
It's no different than any other collectible market, only this isn't a market at all. 
It's a false construct created by Nike — ingeniously created by Nike, in the most positive sense — to sell more shoes. 
And in the process, it provided tens of thousands of people with life-long passions, myself included. 
If Nike wanted to kill the resell market, they could do so tomorrow, all they have to do is release more shoes. 
But we certainly don't want them to, nor is it in their best interest. 
That's because unlike Apple, who will sell an iPhone to anyone who wants one, Nike doesn't make their money by just selling $200 sneakers. 
They sell millions of shoes to millions of people for 60 dollars. 
And sneakerheads are the ones who drive the marketing and the hype and the PR and the brand cachet, and enable Nike to sell millions of $60 sneakers. 
It's marketing. 
It's marketing the likes of which has never been seen before — this isn't in any textbook. 
For 15 years Nike has propped up an artificial commodities market, with a Facebook-level hyped IPO every single weekend. 
Drive by any Footlocker at 8am on a Saturday morning, and there will be a line down the street and around the block, and sometimes those kids have been waiting there all week. 
You know those crazy iPhone lines you see on the news every other year? 
Nike lines happen 104 times more often. 
So Nike sets the rules. 
And they do so by controlling supply and distribution. 
But once a pair leaves the retail channel, it's the Wild West. 
There are very few — if any — legal, unregulated markets of this size. 
So Nike is definitely not the stock exchange. 
In fact, there is no central exchange. 
By last count, there were 48 different online markets that I know of. 
Some are eBay clones, some are mobile markets, and then you have consignment shops and brick-and-mortar stores, and sneaker conventions, and reseller sites, and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter — literally, anywhere sneakerheads come into contact with each other, shoes will be bought and sold. 
But that means no efficiencies, no transparency, sometimes not even authenticity. 
Can you imagine if that's how stocks were bought? 
What if the way to buy a share of Apple stock was to search over 100 places online and off, including every time you walk down the street just hoping to pass someone wearing some Apple stock? 
Never knowing who had the best price, or even if the stock you were looking at was real. 
That would surely make you say: [WTF?] Of course that's not how we buy stock. 
But what if that's not how we need to buy sneakers either? 
What if the inverse is true, and what if we could buy sneakers exactly the same way as we buy stock? 
And what if it wasn't just sneakers, but any similar product, like watches and handbags and women's shoes, and any collectible, any seasonal item and any markdown item? 
What if there was a stock market for commerce? 
A stock market of things. 
And not only could you buy in a much more educated and efficient manner, but you could engage in all the sophisticated financial transactions you can with the stock market. 
Shorts and options and futures and well, maybe you see where this is going. 
Maybe you want to invest in a stock market of things. 
Because if you had invested in a pair of Air Jordan 3 Black Cement in 2011, you could either be wearing them onstage, (Laughter) or have earned 162 percent on your money — double the S & P and 20 percent more than Apple. (Laughter) 
And that's why we're talking about sneakers. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Do you worry about what is going to kill you? 
Heart disease, cancer, a car accident? 
Most of us worry about things we can't control, like war, terrorism, the tragic earthquake that just occurred in Haiti. 
But what really threatens humanity? 
A few years ago, Professor Vaclav Smil tried to calculate the probability of sudden disasters large enough to change history. 
He called these, "massively fatal discontinuities," meaning that they could kill up to 100 million people in the next 50 years. 
He looked at the odds of another world war, of a massive volcanic eruption, even of an asteroid hitting the Earth. 
But he placed the likelihood of one such event above all others at close to 100 percent, and that is a severe flu pandemic. 
Now, you might think of flu as just a really bad cold, but it can be a death sentence. 
Every year, 36,000 people in the United States die of seasonal flu. 
In the developing world, the data is much sketchier but the death toll is almost certainly higher. 
You know, the problem is if this virus occasionally mutates so dramatically, it essentially is a new virus and then we get a pandemic. 
In 1918, a new virus appeared that killed some 50 to 100 million people. 
It spread like wildfire and some died within hours of developing symptoms. 
Are we safer today? 
Well, we seem to have dodged the deadly pandemic this year that most of us feared, but this threat could reappear at any time. 
The good news is that we're at a moment in time when science, technology, globalization is converging to create an unprecedented possibility: the possibility to make history by preventing infectious diseases that still account for one-fifth of all deaths and countless misery on Earth. 
We can do this. 
We're already preventing millions of deaths with existing vaccines, and if we get these to more people, we can certainly save more lives. 
But with new or better vaccines for malaria, TB, HIV, pneumonia, diarrhea, flu, we could end suffering that has been on the Earth since the beginning of time. 
So, I'm here to trumpet vaccines for you. 
But first, I have to explain why they're important because vaccines, the power of them, is really like a whisper. 
When they work, they can make history, but after a while you can barely hear them. 
Now, some of us are old enough to have a small, circular scar on our arms from an inoculation we received as children. 
But when was the last time you worried about smallpox, a disease that killed half a billion people last century and no longer is with us? 
Or polio? How many of you remember the iron lung? 
We don't see scenes like this anymore because of vaccines. 
Now, it's interesting because there are 30-odd diseases that can be treated with vaccines now, but we're still threatened by things like HIV and flu. 
Why is that? 
Well, here's the dirty little secret. 
Until recently, we haven't had to know exactly how a vaccine worked. 
We knew they worked through old-fashioned trial and error. 
You took a pathogen, you modified it, you injected it into a person or an animal and you saw what happened. 
This worked well for most pathogens, somewhat well for crafty bugs like flu, but not at all for HIV, for which humans have no natural immunity. 
So let's explore how vaccines work. 
They basically create a cache of weapons for your immune system which you can deploy when needed. 
Now, when you get a viral infection, what normally happens is it takes days or weeks for your body to fight back at full strength, and that might be too late. 
When you're pre-immunized, what happens is you have forces in your body pre-trained to recognize and defeat specific foes. 
So that's really how vaccines work. 
Now, let's take a look at a video that we're debuting at TED, for the first time, on how an effective HIV vaccine might work. 
(Music) Narrator: A vaccine trains the body in advance how to recognize and neutralize a specific invader. 
After HIV penetrates the body's mucosal barriers, it infects immune cells to replicate. 
The invader draws the attention of the immune system's front-line troops. 
Dendritic cells, or macrophages, capture the virus and display pieces of it. 
Memory cells generated by the HIV vaccine are activated when they learn HIV is present from the front-line troops. 
These memory cells immediately deploy the exact weapons needed. 
Memory B cells turn into plasma cells, which produce wave after wave of the specific antibodies that latch onto HIV to prevent it from infecting cells, while squadrons of killer T cells seek out and destroy cells that are already HIV infected. 
The virus is defeated. 
Without a vaccine, these responses would have taken more than a week. 
By that time, the battle against HIV would already have been lost. 
Seth Berkley: Really cool video, isn't it? 
The antibodies you just saw in this video, in action, are the ones that make most vaccines work. 
So the real question then is: How do we ensure that your body makes the exact ones that we need to protect against flu and HIV? 
The principal challenge for both of these viruses is that they're always changing. 
So let's take a look at the flu virus. 
In this rendering of the flu virus, these different colored spikes are what it uses to infect you. 
And also, what the antibodies use is a handle to essentially grab and neutralize the virus. 
When these mutate, they change their shape, and the antibodies don't know what they're looking at anymore. 
So that's why every year you can catch a slightly different strain of flu. 
It's also why in the spring, we have to make a best guess at which three strains are going to prevail the next year, put those into a single vaccine and rush those into production for the fall. 
Even worse, the most common influenza — influenza A — also infects animals that live in close proximity to humans, and they can recombine in those particular animals. 
In addition, wild aquatic birds carry all known strains of influenza. 
So, you've got this situation: In 2003, we had an H5N1 virus that jumped from birds into humans in a few isolated cases with an apparent mortality rate of 70 percent. 
Now luckily, that particular virus, although very scary at the time, did not transmit from person to person very easily. 
This year's H1N1 threat was actually a human, avian, swine mixture that arose in Mexico. 
It was easily transmitted, but, luckily, was pretty mild. 
And so, in a sense, our luck is holding out, but you know, another wild bird could fly over at anytime. 
Now let's take a look at HIV. 
As variable as flu is, HIV makes flu look like the Rock of Gibraltar. 
The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted. 
It mutates furiously, it has decoys to evade the immune system, it attacks the very cells that are trying to fight it and it quickly hides itself in your genome. 
Here's a slide looking at the genetic variation of flu and comparing that to HIV, a much wilder target. 
In the video a moment ago, you saw fleets of new viruses launching from infected cells. 
Now realize that in a recently infected person, there are millions of these ships; each one is just slightly different. 
Finding a weapon that recognizes and sinks all of them makes the job that much harder. 
Now, in the 27 years since HIV was identified as the cause of AIDS, we've developed more drugs to treat HIV than all other viruses put together. 
These drugs aren't cures, but they represent a huge triumph of science because they take away the automatic death sentence from a diagnosis of HIV, at least for those who can access them. 
The vaccine effort though is really quite different. 
Large companies moved away from it because they thought the science was so difficult and vaccines were seen as poor business. 
Many thought that it was just impossible to make an AIDS vaccine, but today, evidence tells us otherwise. 
In September, we had surprising but exciting findings from a clinical trial that took place in Thailand. 
For the first time, we saw an AIDS vaccine work in humans — albeit, quite modestly — and that particular vaccine was made almost a decade ago. 
Newer concepts and early testing now show even greater promise in the best of our animal models. 
But in the past few months, researchers have also isolated several new broadly neutralizing antibodies from the blood of an HIV infected individual. 
Now, what does this mean? 
We saw earlier that HIV is highly variable, that a broad neutralizing antibody latches on and disables multiple variations of the virus. 
If you take these and you put them in the best of our monkey models, they provide full protection from infection. 
In addition, these researchers found a new site on HIV where the antibodies can grab onto, and what's so special about this spot is that it changes very little as the virus mutates. 
It's like, as many times as the virus changes its clothes, it's still wearing the same socks, and now our job is to make sure we get the body to really hate those socks. 
So what we've got is a situation. 
The Thai results tell us we can make an AIDS vaccine, and the antibody findings tell us how we might do that. 
This strategy, working backwards from an antibody to create a vaccine candidate, has never been done before in vaccine research. 
It's called retro-vaccinology, and its implications extend way beyond that of just HIV. 
So think of it this way. 
We've got these new antibodies we've identified, and we know that they latch onto many, many variations of the virus. 
We know that they have to latch onto a specific part, so if we can figure out the precise structure of that part, present that through a vaccine, what we hope is we can prompt your immune system to make these matching antibodies. 
And that would create a universal HIV vaccine. 
Now, it sounds easier than it is because the structure actually looks more like this blue antibody diagram attached to its yellow binding site, and as you can imagine, these three-dimensional structures are much harder to work on. 
And if you guys have ideas to help us solve this, we'd love to hear about it. 
But, you know, the research that has occurred from HIV now has really helped with innovation with other diseases. 
So for instance, a biotechnology company has now found broadly neutralizing antibodies to influenza, as well as a new antibody target on the flu virus. 
They're currently making a cocktail — an antibody cocktail — that can be used to treat severe, overwhelming cases of flu. 
In the longer term, what they can do is use these tools of retro-vaccinology to make a preventive flu vaccine. 
Now, retro-vaccinology is just one technique within the ambit of so-called rational vaccine design. 
Let me give you another example. 
We talked about before the H and N spikes on the surface of the flu virus. 
Notice these other, smaller protuberances. 
These are largely hidden from the immune system. 
Now it turns out that these spots also don't change much when the virus mutates. 
If you can cripple these with specific antibodies, you could cripple all versions of the flu. 
So far, animal tests indicate that such a vaccine could prevent severe disease, although you might get a mild case. 
So if this works in humans, what we're talking about is a universal flu vaccine, one that doesn't need to change every year and would remove the threat of death. 
We really could think of flu, then, as just a bad cold. 
Of course, the best vaccine imaginable is only valuable to the extent we get it to everyone who needs it. 
So to do that, we have to combine smart vaccine design with smart production methods and, of course, smart delivery methods. 
So I want you to think back a few months ago. 
In June, the World Health Organization declared the first global flu pandemic in 41 years. 
The U.S. government promised 150 million doses of vaccine by October 15th for the flu peak. 
Vaccines were promised to developing countries. 
Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent and flowed to accelerating vaccine manufacturing. 
So what happened? 
Well, we first figured out how to make flu vaccines, how to produce them, in the early 1940s. 
It was a slow, cumbersome process that depended on chicken eggs, millions of living chicken eggs. 
Viruses only grow in living things, and so it turned out that, for flu, chicken eggs worked really well. 
For most strains, you could get one to two doses of vaccine per egg. 
Luckily for us, we live in an era of breathtaking biomedical advances. 
So today, we get our flu vaccines from... 
chicken eggs, (Laughter) hundreds of millions of chicken eggs. 
Almost nothing has changed. 
The system is reliable but the problem is you never know how well a strain is going to grow. 
This year's swine flu strain grew very poorly in early production: basically .6 doses per egg. 
So, here's an alarming thought. 
What if that wild bird flies by again? 
You could see an avian strain that would infect the poultry flocks, and then we would have no eggs for our vaccines. 
So, Dan [Barber], if you want billions of chicken pellets for your fish farm, I know where to get them. 
So right now, the world can produce about 350 million doses of flu vaccine for the three strains, and we can up that to about 1.2 billion doses if we want to target a single variant like swine flu. 
But this assumes that our factories are humming because, in 2004, the U.S. supply was cut in half by contamination at one single plant. 
And the process still takes more than half a year. 
So are we better prepared than we were in 1918? 
Well, with the new technologies emerging now, I hope we can say definitively, "" Yes. "" Imagine we could produce enough flu vaccine for everyone in the entire world for less than half of what we're currently spending now in the United States. 
With a range of new technologies, we could. 
Here's an example: A company I'm engaged with has found a specific piece of the H spike of flu that sparks the immune system. 
If you lop this off and attach it to the tail of a different bacterium, which creates a vigorous immune response, they've created a very powerful flu fighter. 
This vaccine is so small it can be grown in a common bacteria, E. coli. 
Now, as you know, bacteria reproduce quickly — it's like making yogurt — and so we could produce enough swine origin flu for the entire world in a few factories, in a few weeks, with no eggs, for a fraction of the cost of current methods. 
(Applause) So here's a comparison of several of these new vaccine technologies. 
And, aside from the radically increased production and huge cost savings — for example, the E. coli method I just talked about — look at the time saved: this would be lives saved. 
The developing world, mostly left out of the current response, sees the potential of these alternate technologies and they're leapfrogging the West. 
India, Mexico and others are already making experimental flu vaccines, and they may be the first place we see these vaccines in use. 
Because these technologies are so efficient and relatively cheap, billions of people can have access to lifesaving vaccines if we can figure out how to deliver them. 
Now think of where this leads us. 
New infectious diseases appear or reappear every few years. 
Some day, perhaps soon, we'll have a virus that is going to threaten all of us. 
Will we be quick enough to react before millions die? 
Luckily, this year's flu was relatively mild. 
I say, "" luckily "" in part because virtually no one in the developing world was vaccinated. 
So if we have the political and financial foresight to sustain our investments, we will master these and new tools of vaccinology, and with these tools we can produce enough vaccine for everyone at low cost and ensure healthy productive lives. 
No longer must flu have to kill half a million people a year. 
No longer does AIDS need to kill two million a year. 
No longer do the poor and vulnerable need to be threatened by infectious diseases, or indeed, anybody. 
Instead of having Vaclav Smil's "" massively fatal discontinuity "" of life, we can ensure the continuity of life. 
What the world needs now are these new vaccines, and we can make it happen. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. 
So, the science is changing. In your mind, Seth — I mean, you must dream about this — 
what is the kind of time scale on, let's start with HIV, for a game-changing vaccine that's actually out there and usable? 
SB: The game change can come at any time, because the problem we have now is we've shown we can get a vaccine to work in humans; we just need a better one. 
And with these types of antibodies, we know humans can make them. 
So, if we can figure out how to do that, then we have the vaccine, and what's interesting is there already is some evidence that we're beginning to crack that problem. 
So, the challenge is full speed ahead. 
CA: In your gut, do you think it's probably going to be at least another five years? 
SB: You know, everybody says it's 10 years, but it's been 10 years every 10 years. 
So I hate to put a timeline on scientific innovation, but the investments that have occurred are now paying dividends. 
CA: And that's the same with universal flu vaccine, the same kind of thing? 
SB: I think flu is different. I think what happened with flu is we've got a bunch — I just showed some of this — a bunch of really cool and useful technologies that are ready to go now. 
They look good. The problem has been that, what we did is we invested in traditional technologies because that's what we were comfortable with. 
You also can use adjuvants, which are chemicals you mix. 
That's what Europe is doing, so we could have diluted out our supply of flu and made more available, but, going back to what Michael Specter said, the anti-vaccine crowd didn't really want that to happen. 
CA: And malaria's even further behind? 
SB: No, malaria, there is a candidate that actually showed efficacy in an earlier trial and is currently in phase three trials now. 
It probably isn't the perfect vaccine, but it's moving along. 
CA: Seth, most of us do work where every month, we produce something; we get that kind of gratification. 
You've been slaving away at this for more than a decade, and I salute you and your colleagues for what you do. 
The world needs people like you. Thank you. 
SB: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Have you ever wondered what is inside your dental plaque? 
Probably not, but people like me do. 
I'm an archeological geneticist at the Center for Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich, and I study the origins and evolution of human health and disease by conducting genetic research on the skeletal and mummified remains of ancient humans. 
And through this work, I hope to better understand the evolutionary vulnerabilities of our bodies, so that we can improve and better manage our health in the future. 
There are different ways to approach evolutionary medicine, and one way is to extract human DNA from ancient bones. 
And from these extracts, we can reconstruct the human genome at different points in time and look for changes that might be related to adaptations, risk factors and inherited diseases. 
But this is only one half of the story. 
The most important health challenges today are not caused by simple mutations in our genome, but rather result from a complex and dynamic interplay between genetic variation, diet, microbes and parasites and our immune response. 
All of these diseases have a strong evolutionary component that directly relates to the fact that we live today in a very different environment than the ones in which our bodies evolved. 
And in order to understand these diseases, we need to move past studies of the human genome alone and towards a more holistic approach to human health in the past. 
But there are a lot of challenges for this. 
And first of all, what do we even study? 
Skeletons are ubiquitous; they're found all over the place. 
But of course, all of the soft tissue has decomposed, and the skeleton itself has limited health information. 
Mummies are a great source of information, except that they're really geographically limited and limited in time as well. 
Coprolites are fossilized human feces, and they're actually extremely interesting. 
You can learn a lot about ancient diet and intestinal disease, but they are very rare. 
(Laughter) So to address this problem, I put together a team of international researchers in Switzerland, Denmark and the U.K. 
to study a very poorly studied, little known material that's found on people everywhere. 
It's a type of fossilized dental plaque that is called officially dental calculus. 
Many of you may know it by the term tartar. 
It's what the dentist cleans off your teeth every time that you go in for a visit. 
And in a typical dentistry visit, you may have about 15 to 30 milligrams removed. 
But in ancient times before tooth brushing, up to 600 milligrams might have built up on the teeth over a lifetime. 
And what's really important about dental calculus is that it fossilizes just like the rest of the skeleton, it's abundant in quantity before the present day and it's ubiquitous worldwide. 
We find it in every population around the world at all time periods going back tens of thousands of years. 
And we even find it in neanderthals and animals. 
And so previous studies had only focused on microscopy. 
They'd looked at dental calculus under a microscope, and what they had found was things like pollen and plant starches, and they'd found muscle cells from animal meats and bacteria. 
And so what my team of researchers, what we wanted to do, is say, can we apply genetic and proteomic technology to go after DNA and proteins, and from this can we get better taxonomic resolution to really understand what's going on? 
And what we found is that we can find many commensal and pathogenic bacteria that inhabited the nasal passages and mouth. 
We also have found immune proteins related to infection and inflammation and proteins and DNA related to diet. 
But what was surprising to us, and also quite exciting, is we also found bacteria that normally inhabit upper respiratory systems. 
So it gives us virtual access to the lungs, which is where many important diseases reside. 
And we also found bacteria that normally inhabit the gut. 
And so we can also now virtually gain access to this even more distant organ system that, from the skeleton alone, has long decomposed. 
And so by applying ancient DNA sequencing and protein mass spectrometry technologies to ancient dental calculus, we can generate immense quantities of data that then we can use to begin to reconstruct a detailed picture of the dynamic interplay between diet, infection and immunity thousands of years ago. 
So what started out as an idea, is now being implemented to churn out millions of sequences that we can use to investigate the long-term evolutionary history of human health and disease, right down to the genetic code of individual pathogens. 
And from this information we can learn about how pathogens evolve and also why they continue to make us sick. 
And I hope I have convinced you of the value of dental calculus. 
And as a final parting thought, on behalf of future archeologists, I would like to ask you to please think twice before you go home and brush your teeth. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

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

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

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

I'm going to give you four specific examples, I'm going to cover at the end about how a company called Silk tripled their sales; how an artist named Jeff Koons went from being a nobody to making a whole bunch of money and having a lot of impact; to how Frank Gehry redefined what it meant to be an architect. 

I've actually been waiting by the phone for a call from TED for years. 
And in fact, in 2000, I was ready to talk about eBay, but no call. 
In 2003, I was ready to do a talk about the Skoll Foundation and social entrepreneurship. No call. 
In 2004, I started Participant Productions and we had a really good first year, and no call. 
And finally, I get a call last year, and then I have to go up after J.J. Abrams. 
(Laughter) You've got a cruel sense of humor, TED. (Laughter) 
When I first moved to Hollywood from Silicon Valley, I had some misgivings. 
But I found that there were some advantages to being in Hollywood. 
(Laughter) And, in fact, some advantages to owning your own media company. 
And I also found that Hollywood and Silicon Valley have a lot more in common than I would have dreamed. 
Hollywood has its sex symbols, and the Valley has its sex symbols. 
(Laughter) Hollywood has its rivalries, and the Valley has its rivalries. 
Hollywood gathers around power tables, and the Valley gathers around power tables. 
So it turned out there was a lot more in common than I would have dreamed. 
But I'm actually here today to tell a story. 
And part of it is a personal story. When Chris invited me to speak, he said, people think of you as a bit of an enigma, and they want to know what drives you a bit. 
And what really drives me is a vision of the future that I think we all share. 
It's a world of peace and prosperity and sustainability. 
And when we heard a lot of the presentations over the last couple of days, Ed Wilson and the pictures of James Nachtwey, I think we all realized how far we have to go to get to this new version of humanity that I like to call "" Humanity 2.0. "" And it's also something that resides in each of us, to close what I think are the two big calamities in the world today. 
One is the gap in opportunity — this gap that President Clinton last night called uneven, unfair and unsustainable — and, out of that, comes poverty and illiteracy and disease and all these evils that we see around us. 
But perhaps the other, bigger gap is what we call the hope gap. 
And someone, at some point, came up with this very bad idea that an ordinary individual couldn't make a difference in the world. 
And I think that's just a horrible thing. 
And so chapter one really begins today, with all of us, because within each of us is the power to equal those opportunity gaps and to close the hope gaps. 
And if the men and women of TED can't make a difference in the world, I don't know who can. 
And for me, a lot of this started when I was younger and my family used to go camping in upstate New York. 
And there really wasn't much to do there for the summer, except get beaten up by my sister or read books. 
And so I used to read authors like James Michener and James Clavell and Ayn Rand. 
And their stories made the world seem a very small and interconnected place. 
And it struck me that if I could write stories that were about this world as being small and interconnected, that maybe I could get people interested in the issues that affected us all, and maybe engage them to make a difference. 
I didn't think that was necessarily the best way to make a living, so I decided to go on a path to become financially independent, so I could write these stories as quickly as I could. 
I then had a bit of a wake-up call when I was 14. 
And my dad came home one day and announced that he had cancer, and it looked pretty bad. 
And what he said was, he wasn't so much afraid that he might die, but that he hadn't done the things that he wanted to with his life. 
And knock on wood, he's still alive today, many years later. 
But for a young man that made a real impression on me, that one never knows how much time one really has. 
So I set out in a hurry. I studied engineering. 
I started a couple of businesses that I thought would be the ticket to financial freedom. 
One of those businesses was a computer rental business called Micros on the Move, which is very well named, because people kept stealing the computers. 
(Laughter) So I figured I needed to learn a little bit more about business, so I went to Stanford Business School and studied there. 
And while I was there, I made friends with a fellow named Pierre Omidyar, who is here today. And Pierre, I apologize for this. This is a photo from the old days. 
And just after I'd graduated, Pierre came to me with this idea to help people buy and sell things online with each other. 
And with the wisdom of my Stanford degree, I said, "" Pierre, what a stupid idea. "" (Laughter) And needless to say, I was right. (Laughter) 
But right after that, Pierre — in '96, Pierre and I left our full-time jobs to build eBay as a company. And the rest of that story, you know. 
The company went public two years later and is today one of the best known companies in the world. 
Hundreds of millions of people use it in hundreds of countries, and so on. 
But for me, personally, it was a real change. 
I went from living in a house with five guys in Palo Alto and living off their leftovers, to all of a sudden having all kinds of resources. 
And I wanted to figure out how I could take the blessing of these resources and share it with the world. 
And around that time, I met John Gardner, who is a remarkable man. 
He was the architect of the Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. 
And I asked him what he felt was the best thing I could do, or anyone could do, to make a difference in the long-term issues facing humanity. 
And John said, "" Bet on good people doing good things. 
Bet on good people doing good things. "" And that really resonated with me. 
I started a foundation to bet on these good people doing good things. 
These leading, innovative, nonprofit folks, who are using business skills in a very leveraged way to solve social problems. 
People today we call social entrepreneurs. 
And to put a face on it, people like Muhammad Yunus, who started the Grameen Bank, has lifted 100 million people plus out of poverty around the world, won the Nobel Peace Prize. 
But there's also a lot of people that you don't know. 
Folks like Ann Cotton, who started a group called CAMFED in Africa, because she felt girls' education was lagging. 
And she started it about 10 years ago, and today, she educates over a quarter million African girls. 
And somebody like Dr. Victoria Hale, who started the world's first nonprofit pharmaceutical company, and whose first drug will be fighting visceral leishmaniasis, also known as black fever. 
And by 2010, she hopes to eliminate this disease, which is really a scourge in the developing world. 
And so this is one way to bet on good people doing good things. 
And a lot of this comes together in a philosophy of change that I find really is powerful. 
It's what we call, "" Invest, connect and celebrate. "" And invest: if you see good people doing good things, invest in them. Invest in their organizations, or in business. Invest in these folks. 
Connecting them together through conferences — like a TED — brings so many powerful connections, or through the World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship that my foundation does at Oxford every year. 
And celebrate them: tell their stories, because not only are there good people doing good work, but their stories can help close these gaps of hope. 
And it was this last part of the mission, the celebrate part, that really got me back to thinking when I was a kid and wanted to tell stories to get people involved in the issues that affect us all. 
And a light bulb went off, which was, first, that I didn't actually have to do the writing myself, I could find writers. 
And then the next light bulb was, better than just writing, what about film and TV, to get out to people in a big way? 
And I thought about the films that inspired me, films like "" Gandhi "" and "" Schindler's List. "" And I wondered who was doing these kinds of films today. 
And there really wasn't a specific company that was focused on the public interest. 
So, in 2003, I started to make my way around Los Angeles to talk about the idea of a pro-social media company and I was met with a lot of encouragement. 
One of the lines of encouragement that I heard over and over was, "" The streets of Hollywood are littered with the carcasses of people like you, who think you're going to come to this town and make movies. "" And then of course, there was the other adage. 
"" The surest way to become a millionaire is to start by being a billionaire and go into the movie business. "" (Laughter) Undeterred, in January of 2004, I started Participant Productions with the vision to be a global media company focused on the public interest. 
And our mission is to produce entertainment that creates and inspires social change. 
And we don't just want people to see our movies and say, that was fun, and forget about it. 
We want them to actually get involved in the issues. 
In 2005, we launched our first slate of films, "Murder Ball," "North Country," "Syriana" and "" Good Night and Good Luck. "" And much to my surprise, they were noticed. 
We ended up with 11 Oscar nominations for these films. 
And it turned out to be a pretty good year for this guy. 
Perhaps more importantly, tens of thousands of people joined the advocacy programs and the activism programs that we created to go around the movies. 
And we had an online component of that, our community sect called Participate.net. 
But with our social sector partners, like the ACLU and PBS and the Sierra Club and the NRDC, once people saw the film, there was actually something they could do to make a difference. 
One of these films in particular, called "" North Country, "" was actually kind of a box office disaster. 
But it was a film that starred Charlize Theron and it was about women's rights, women's empowerment, domestic violence and so on. 
And we released the film at the same time that the Congress was debating the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act. 
And with screenings on the Hill, and discussions, and with our social sector partners, like the National Organization of Women, the film was widely credited with influencing the successful renewal of the act. 
And that to me, spoke volumes, because it's — the film started about a true-life story about a woman who was harassed, sued her employer, led to a landmark case that led to the Equal Opportunity Act, and the Violence Against Women Act and others. 
And then the movie about this person doing these things, then led to this greater renewal. 
And so again, it goes back to betting on good people doing good things. 
Speaking of which, our fellow TEDster, Al — I first saw Al do his slide show presentation on global warming in May of 2005. 
At that point, I thought I knew something about global warming. 
I thought it was a 30 to 50 year problem. 
And after we saw his slide show, it became clear that it was much more urgent. 
And so right afterwards, I met backstage with Al, and with Lawrence Bender, who was there, and Laurie David, and Davis Guggenheim, who was running documentaries for Participant at the time. 
And with Al's blessing, we decided on the spot to turn it into a film, because we felt that we could get the message out there far more quickly than having Al go around the world, speaking to audiences of 100 or 200 at a time. 
And you know, there's another adage in Hollywood, that nobody knows nothing about anything. 
And I really thought this was going to be a straight-to-PBS charitable initiative. 
And so it was a great shock to all of us when the film really captured the public interest, and today is mandatory viewing in schools in England and Scotland, and most of Scandinavia. 
We've sent 50,000 DVDs to high school teachers in the U.S. 
and it's really changed the debate on global warming. 
It was also a pretty good year for this guy. 
We now call Al the George Clooney of global warming. 
(Laughter) And for Participant, this is just the start. 
Everything we do looks at the major issues in the world. 
And we have 10 films in production right now, and dozens others in development. 
I'll quickly talk about a few coming up. 
One is "" Charlie Wilson's War, "" with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. 
And it's the true story of Congressman Charlie Wilson, and how he funded the Taliban to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. 
And we're also doing a movie called "" The Kite Runner, "" based on the book "" The Kite Runner, "" also about Afghanistan. 
And we think once people see these films, they'll have a much better understanding of that part of the world and the Middle East in general. 
We premiered a film called "" The Chicago 10 "" at Sundance this year. 
It's based on the protesters at the Democratic Convention in 1968, Abby Hoffman and crew, and, again, a story about a small group of individuals who did make change in the world. 
And a documentary that we're doing on Jimmy Carter and his Mid-East peace efforts over the years. 
And in particular, we've been following him on his recent book tour, which, as many of you know, has been very non-controversial — (Laughter) — which is really bad for getting people to come see a movie. 
In closing, I'd like to say that everybody has the opportunity to make change in their own way. 
And all the people in this room have done so through their business lives, or their philanthropic work, or their other interests. 
And one thing that I've learned is that there's never one right way to make change. 
One can do it as a tech person, or as a finance person, or a nonprofit person, or as an entertainment person, but every one of us is all of those things and more. 
And I believe if we do these things, we can close the opportunity gaps, we can close the hope gaps. 
And I can imagine, if we do this, the headlines in 10 years might read something like these: "New AIDS Cases in Africa Fall to Zero," "" U.S. Imports its Last Barrel of Oil "" — (Applause) — "" Israelis and Palestinians Celebrate 10 Years of Peaceful Coexistence. "" (Applause) And I like this one, "" Snow Has Returned to Kilimanjaro. "" (Laughter) And finally, an eBay listing for one well-traveled slide show, now obsolete, museum piece. Please contact Al Gore. 
And I believe that, working together, we can make all of these things happen. 
And I want to thank you all for having me here today. 
It's been a real honor. Thank you. 
(Applause) Oh, thank you. 

I essentially drag sledges for a living, so it doesn't take an awful lot to flummox me intellectually, but I'm going to read this question from an interview earlier this year: "" Philosophically, does the constant supply of information steal our ability to imagine or replace our dreams of achieving? 
After all, if it is being done somewhere by someone, and we can participate virtually, then why bother leaving the house? "" I'm usually introduced as a polar explorer. 
I'm not sure that's the most progressive or 21st-century of job titles, but I've spent more than two percent now of my entire life living in a tent inside the Arctic Circle, so I get out of the house a fair bit. 
And in my nature, I guess, I am a doer of things more than I am a spectator or a contemplator of things, and it's that dichotomy, the gulf between ideas and action that I'm going to try and explore briefly. 
The pithiest answer to the question "" why? "" that's been dogging me for the last 12 years was credited certainly to this chap, the rakish-looking gentleman standing at the back, second from the left, George Lee Mallory. Many of you will know his name. 
In 1924 he was last seen disappearing into the clouds near the summit of Mt. Everest. 
He may or may not have been the first person to climb Everest, more than 30 years before Edmund Hillary. 
No one knows if he got to the top. It's still a mystery. 
But he was credited with coining the phrase, "" Because it's there. "" Now I'm not actually sure that he did say that. 
There's very little evidence to suggest it, but what he did say is actually far nicer, and again, I've printed this. I'm going to read it out. 
"" The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this: What is the use of climbing Mt. Everest? 
And my answer must at once be, it is no use. 
There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. 
Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation, but otherwise nothing will come of it. 
We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, and not a gem, nor any coal or iron. 
We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food. So it is no use. 
If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. 
What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy, and joy, after all, is the end of life. 
We don't live to eat and make money. 
We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. 
That is what life means, and that is what life is for. "" Mallory's argument that leaving the house, embarking on these grand adventures is joyful and fun, however, doesn't tally that neatly with my own experience. 
The furthest I've ever got away from my front door was in the spring of 2004. I still don't know exactly what came over me, but my plan was to make a solo and unsupported crossing of the Arctic Ocean. 
I planned essentially to walk from the north coast of Russia to the North Pole, and then to carry on to the north coast of Canada. 
No one had ever done this. I was 26 at the time. 
A lot of experts were saying it was impossible, and my mum certainly wasn't very keen on the idea. 
(Laughter) The journey from a small weather station on the north coast of Siberia up to my final starting point, the edge of the pack ice, the coast of the Arctic Ocean, took about five hours, and if anyone watched fearless Felix Baumgartner going up, rather than just coming down, you'll appreciate the sense of apprehension, as I sat in a helicopter thundering north, and the sense, I think if anything, of impending doom. 
I sat there wondering what on Earth I had gotten myself into. 
There was a bit of fun, a bit of joy. 
I was 26. I remember sitting there looking down at my sledge. I had my skis ready to go, I had a satellite phone, a pump-action shotgun in case I was attacked by a polar bear. 
I remember looking out of the window and seeing the second helicopter. 
We were both thundering through this incredible Siberian dawn, and part of me felt a bit like a cross between Jason Bourne and Wilfred Thesiger. Part of me felt quite proud of myself, but mostly I was just utterly terrified. 
And that journey lasted 10 weeks, 72 days. 
I didn't see anyone else. We took this photo next to the helicopter. 
Beyond that, I didn't see anyone for 10 weeks. 
The North Pole is slap bang in the middle of the sea, so I'm traveling over the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean. 
NASA described conditions that year as the worst since records began. 
I was dragging 180 kilos of food and fuel and supplies, about 400 pounds. The average temperature for the 10 weeks was minus 35. Minus 50 was the coldest. 
So again, there wasn't an awful lot of joy or fun to be had. 
One of the magical things about this journey, however, is that because I'm walking over the sea, over this floating, drifting, shifting crust of ice that's floating on top of the Arctic Ocean is it's an environment that's in a constant state of flux. 
The ice is always moving, breaking up, drifting around, refreezing, so the scenery that I saw for nearly 3 months was unique to me. No one else will ever, could ever, possibly see the views, the vistas, that I saw for 10 weeks. 
And that, I guess, is probably the finest argument for leaving the house. 
I can try to tell you what it was like, but you'll never know what it was like, and the more I try to explain that I felt lonely, I was the only human being in 5.4 million square-miles, it was cold, nearly minus 75 with windchill on a bad day, the more words fall short, and I'm unable to do it justice. 
And it seems to me, therefore, that the doing, you know, to try to experience, to engage, to endeavor, rather than to watch and to wonder, that's where the real meat of life is to be found, the juice that we can suck out of our hours and days. 
And I would add a cautionary note here, however. 
In my experience, there is something addictive about tasting life at the very edge of what's humanly possible. 
Now I don't just mean in the field of daft macho Edwardian style derring-do, but also in the fields of pancreatic cancer, there is something addictive about this, and in my case, I think polar expeditions are perhaps not that far removed from having a crack habit. 
I can't explain quite how good it is until you've tried it, but it has the capacity to burn up all the money I can get my hands on, to ruin every relationship I've ever had, so be careful what you wish for. 
Mallory postulated that there is something in man that responds to the challenge of the mountain, and I wonder if that's the case whether there's something in the challenge itself, in the endeavor, and particularly in the big, unfinished, chunky challenges that face humanity that call out to us, and in my experience that's certainly the case. 
There is one unfinished challenge that's been calling out to me for most of my adult life. 
Many of you will know the story. 
This is a photo of Captain Scott and his team. 
Scott set out just over a hundred years ago to try to become the first person to reach the South Pole. 
No one knew what was there. It was utterly unmapped at the time. We knew more about the surface of the moon than we did about the heart of Antarctica. 
Scott, as many of you will know, was beaten to it by Roald Amundsen and his Norwegian team, who used dogs and dogsleds. Scott's team were on foot, all five of them wearing harnesses and dragging around sledges, and they arrived at the pole to find the Norwegian flag already there, I'd imagine pretty bitter and demoralized. 
All five of them turned and started walking back to the coast and all five died on that return journey. 
There is a sort of misconception nowadays that it's all been done in the fields of exploration and adventure. 
When I talk about Antarctica, people often say, "" Hasn't, you know, that's interesting, hasn't that Blue Peter presenter just done it on a bike? "" Or, "" That's nice. You know, my grandmother's going on a cruise to Antarctica next year. You know. 
Is there a chance you'll see her there? "" (Laughter) But Scott's journey remains unfinished. 
No one has ever walked from the very coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and back again. 
It is, arguably, the most audacious endeavor of that Edwardian golden age of exploration, and it seemed to me high time, given everything we have figured out in the century since from scurvy to solar panels, that it was high time someone had a go at finishing the job. 
So that's precisely what I'm setting out to do. 
This time next year, in October, I'm leading a team of three. 
It will take us about four months to make this return journey. 
That's the scale. The red line is obviously halfway to the pole. 
We have to turn around and come back again. 
I'm well aware of the irony of telling you that we will be blogging and tweeting. You'll be able to live vicariously and virtually through this journey in a way that no one has ever before. 
And it'll also be a four-month chance for me to finally come up with a pithy answer to the question, "" Why? "" And our lives today are safer and more comfortable than they have ever been. There certainly isn't much call for explorers nowadays. My career advisor at school never mentioned it as an option. 
If I wanted to know, for example, how many stars were in the Milky Way, how old those giant heads on Easter Island were, most of you could find that out right now without even standing up. 
And yet, if I've learned anything in nearly 12 years now of dragging heavy things around cold places, it is that true, real inspiration and growth only comes from adversity and from challenge, from stepping away from what's comfortable and familiar and stepping out into the unknown. 
In life, we all have tempests to ride and poles to walk to, and I think metaphorically speaking, at least, we could all benefit from getting outside the house a little more often, if only we could summon up the courage. 
I certainly would implore you to open the door just a little bit and take a look at what's outside. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

The Hindus say, "" Nada brahma, "" one translation of which is, "" The world is sound. "" And in a way, that's true, because everything is vibrating. 
In fact, all of you as you sit here right now are vibrating. 
Every part of your body is vibrating at different frequencies. 
So you are, in fact, a chord — each of you an individual chord. 
One definition of health may be that that chord is in complete harmony. 
Your ears can't hear that chord; they can actually hear amazing things. Your ears can hear 10 octaves. 
Incidentally, we see just one octave. 
Your ears are always on — you have no ear lids. 
They work even when you sleep. 
The smallest sound you can perceive moves your eardrum just four atomic diameters. 
The loudest sound you can hear is a trillion times more powerful than that. 
Ears are made not for hearing, but for listening. 
Listening is an active skill, whereas hearing is passive, listening is something that we have to work at — it's a relationship with sound. 
And yet it's a skill that none of us are taught. 
For example, have you ever considered that there are listening positions, places you can listen from? 
Here are two of them. 
Reductive listening is listening "" for. "" It reduces everything down to what's relevant and it discards everything that's not relevant. 
Men typically listen reductively. 
So he's saying, "" I've got this problem. "" He's saying, "" Here's your solution. Thanks very much. Next. "" That's the way we talk, right guys? 
Expansive listening, on the other hand, is listening "" with, "" not listening "" for. "" It's got no destination in mind — it's just enjoying the journey. 
Women typically listen expansively. 
If you look at these two, eye contact, facing each other, possibly both talking at the same time. 
(Laughter) Men, if you get nothing else out of this talk, practice expansive listening, and you can transform your relationships. 
The trouble with listening is that so much of what we hear is noise, surrounding us all the time. 
Noise like this, according to the European Union, is reducing the health and the quality of life of 25 percent of the population of Europe. 
Two percent of the population of Europe — that's 16 million people — are having their sleep devastated by noise like that. 
Noise kills 200,000 people a year in Europe. 
It's a really big problem. 
Now, when you were little, if you had noise and you didn't want to hear it, you'd stick your fingers in your ears and hum. 
These days, you can do a similar thing, it just looks a bit cooler. 
It looks a bit like this. 
The trouble with widespread headphone use is it brings three really big health issues. 
The first really big health issue is a word that Murray Schafer coined: "schizophonia." 
It's a dislocation between what you see and what you hear. 
So, we're inviting into our lives the voices of people who are not present with us. 
I think there's something deeply unhealthy about living all the time in schizophonia. 
The second problem that comes with headphone abuse is compression. 
We squash music to fit it into our pocket and there is a cost attached to this. 
Listen to this — this is an uncompressed piece of music. 
(Music) And now the same piece of music with 98 percent of the data removed. (Music) 
I do hope that some of you at least can hear the difference between those two. 
There is a cost of compression. 
It makes you tired and irritable to have to make up all of that data. 
You're having to imagine it. 
It's not good for you in the long run. 
The third problem with headphones is this: deafness — noise-induced hearing disorder. 
Ten million Americans already have this for one reason or another, but really worryingly, 16 percent — roughly one in six — of American teenagers suffer from noise-induced hearing disorder as a result of headphone abuse. 
One study at an American university found that 61 percent of college freshmen had damaged hearing as a result of headphone abuse. 
We may be raising an entire generation of deaf people. 
Now that's a really serious problem. 
I'll give you three quick tips to protect your ears and pass these on to your children, please. 
Professional hearing protectors are great; I use some all the time. 
If you're going to use headphones, buy the best ones you can afford because quality means you don't have to have it so loud. 
If you can't hear somebody talking to you in a loud voice, it's too loud. 
And thirdly, if you're in bad sound, it's fine to put your fingers in your ears or just move away from it. 
Protect your ears in that way. 
Let's move away from bad sound and look at some friends that I urge you to seek out. 
WWB: Wind, water, birds — stochastic natural sounds composed of lots of individual random events, all of it very healthy, all of it sound that we evolved to over the years. 
Seek those sounds out; they're good for you and so it this. 
Silence is beautiful. 
The Elizabethans described language as decorated silence. 
I urge you to move away from silence with intention and to design soundscapes just like works of art. 
Have a foreground, a background, all in beautiful proportion. 
It's fun to get into designing with sound. 
If you can't do it yourself, get a professional to do it for you. 
Sound design is the future, and I think it's the way we're going to change the way the world sounds. 
I'm going to just run quickly through eight modalities, eight ways sound can improve health. 
First, ultrasound: we're very familiar with it from physical therapy; it's also now being used to treat cancer. 
Lithotripsy — saving thousands of people a year from the scalpel by pulverizing stones with high-intensity sound. 
Sound healing is a wonderful modality. 
It's been around for thousands of years. 
I do urge you to explore this. 
There are great things being done there, treating now autism, dementia and other conditions. 
And music, of course. Just listening to music is good for you, if it's music that's made with good intention, made with love, generally. 
Devotional music, good — Mozart, good. 
There are all sorts of types of music that are very healthy. 
And four modalities where you need to take some action and get involved. 
First of all, listen consciously. 
I hope that that after this talk you'll be doing that. 
It's a whole new dimension to your life and it's wonderful to have that dimension. 
Secondly, get in touch with making some sound — create sound. 
The voice is the instrument we all play, and yet how many of us are trained in using our voice? Get trained; learn to sing, learn to play an instrument. 
Musicians have bigger brains — it's true. 
You can do this in groups as well. 
It's a fantastic antidote to schizophonia; to make music and sound in a group of people, whichever style you enjoy particularly. 
And let's take a stewarding role for the sound around us. 
Protect your ears? Yes, absolutely. 
Design soundscapes to be beautiful around you at home and at work. 
And let's start to speak up when people are assailing us with the noise that I played you early on. 
So I'm going to leave you with seven things you can do right now to improve your health with sound. 
My vision is of a world that sounds beautiful and if we all start doing these things, we will take a very big step in that direction. 
So I urge you to take that path. 
I'm leaving you with a little more birdsong, which is very good for you. 
I wish you sound health. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Last year, three of my family members were gruesomely murdered in a hate crime. 
It goes without saying that it's really difficult for me to be here today, but my brother Deah, his wife Yusor, and her sister Razan don't give me much of a choice. 
I'm hopeful that by the end of this talk you will make a choice, and join me in standing up against hate. 
It's December 27, 2014: the morning of my brother's wedding day. 
He asks me to come over and comb his hair in preparation for his wedding photo shoot. 
A 23-year-old, six-foot-three basketball, particularly Steph Curry, fanatic — (Laughter) An American kid in dental school ready to take on the world. 
When Deah and Yusor have their first dance, I see the love in his eyes, her reciprocated joy, and my emotions begin to overwhelm me. 
I move to the back of the hall and burst into tears. 
And the second the song finishes playing, he beelines towards me, buries me into his arms and rocks me back and forth. 
Even in that moment, when everything was so distracting, he was attuned to me. 
He cups my face and says, "" Suzanne, I am who I am because of you. 
Thank you for everything. 
I love you. "" About a month later, I'm back home in North Carolina for a short visit, and on the last evening, I run upstairs to Deah's room, eager to find out how he's feeling being a newly married man. 
With a big boyish smile he says, "I'm so happy. I love her. She's an amazing girl." 
And she is. 
At just 21, she'd recently been accepted to join Deah at UNC dental school. 
She shared his love for basketball, and at her urging, they started their honeymoon off attending their favorite team of the NBA, the LA Lakers. 
I mean, check out that form. 
(Laughter) I'll never forget that moment sitting there with him — how free he was in his happiness. 
My littler brother, a basketball-obsessed kid, had become and transformed into an accomplished young man. 
He was at the top of his dental school class, and alongside Yusor and Razan, was involved in local and international community service projects dedicated to the homeless and refugees, including a dental relief trip they were planning for Syrian refugees in Turkey. 
Razan, at just 19, used her creativity as an architectural engineering student to serve those around her, making care packages for the local homeless, among other projects. 
That is who they were. 
Standing there that night, I take a deep breath and look at Deah and tell him, "I have never been more proud of you than I am in this moment." 
He pulls me into his tall frame, hugs me goodnight, and I leave the next morning without waking him to go back to San Francisco. 
That is the last time I ever hug him. 
Ten days later, I'm on call at San Francisco General Hospital when I receive a barrage of vague text messages expressing condolences. 
Confused, I call my father, who calmly intones, "" There's been a shooting in Deah's neighborhood in Chapel Hill. 
It's on lock-down. That's all we know. "" I hang up and quickly Google, "" shooting in Chapel Hill. "" One hit comes up. 
Quote: "" Three people were shot in the back of the head and confirmed dead on the scene. "" Something in me just knows. 
I fling out of my chair and faint onto the gritty hospital floor, wailing. 
I take the first red-eye out of San Francisco, numb and disoriented. 
I walk into my childhood home and faint into my parents' arms, sobbing. 
I then run up to Deah's room as I did so many times before, just looking for him, only to find a void that will never be filled. 
Investigation and autopsy reports eventually revealed the sequence of events. 
Deah had just gotten off the bus from class, Razan was visiting for dinner, already at home with Yusor. 
As they began to eat, they heard a knock on the door. 
When Deah opened it, their neighbor proceeded to fire multiple shots at him. 
According to 911 calls, the girls were heard screaming. 
The man turned towards the kitchen and fired a single shot into Yusor's hip, immobilizing her. 
He then approached her from behind, pressed the barrel of his gun against her head, and with a single bullet, lacerated her midbrain. 
He then turned towards Razan, who was screaming for her life, and, execution-style, with a single bullet to the back of the head, killed her. 
On his way out, he shot Deah one last time — a bullet in the mouth — for a total of eight bullets: two lodged in the head, two in his chest and the rest in his extremities. 
Deah, Yusor and Razan were executed in a place that was meant to be safe: their home. 
For months, this man had been harassing them: knocking on their door, brandishing his gun on a couple of occasions. 
His Facebook was cluttered with anti-religion posts. 
Yusor felt particularly threatened by him. 
As she was moving in, he told Yusor and her mom that he didn't like the way they looked. 
In response, Yusor's mom told her to be kind to her neighbor, that as he got to know them, he'd see them for who they were. 
I guess we've all become so numb to the hatred that we couldn't have ever imagined it turning into fatal violence. 
The man who murdered my brother turned himself in to the police shortly after the murders, saying he killed three kids, execution-style, over a parking dispute. 
The police issued a premature public statement that morning, echoing his claims without bothering to question it or further investigate. 
It turns out there was no parking dispute. 
There was no argument. 
No violation. 
But the damage was already done. 
In a 24-hour media cycle, the words "" parking dispute "" had already become the go-to sound bite. 
I sit on my brother's bed and remember his words, the words he gave me so freely and with so much love, "I am who I am because of you." 
That's what it takes for me to climb through my crippling grief and speak out. 
I cannot let my family's deaths be diminished to a segment that is barely discussed on local news. 
They were murdered by their neighbor because of their faith, because of a piece of cloth they chose to don on their heads, because they were visibly Muslim. 
Some of the rage I felt at the time was that if roles were reversed, and an Arab, Muslim or Muslim-appearing person had killed three white American college students execution-style, in their home, what would we have called it? 
A terrorist attack. 
When white men commit acts of violence in the US, they're lone wolves, mentally ill or driven by a parking dispute. 
I know that I have to give my family voice, and I do the only thing I know how: I send a Facebook message to everyone I know in media. 
A couple of hours later, in the midst of a chaotic house overflowing with friends and family, our neighbor Neal comes over, sits down next to my parents and asks, "" What can I do? "" Neal had over two decades of experience in journalism, but he makes it clear that he's not there in his capacity as journalist, but as a neighbor who wants to help. 
I ask him what he thinks we should do, given the bombardment of local media interview requests. 
He offers to set up a press conference at a local community center. 
Even now I don't have the words to thank him. 
"" Just tell me when, and I'll have all the news channels present, "" he said. 
He did for us what we could not do for ourselves in a moment of devastation. 
I delivered the press statement, still wearing scrubs from the previous night. 
And in under 24 hours from the murders, I'm on CNN being interviewed by Anderson Cooper. 
The following day, major newspapers — including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune — published stories about Deah, Yusor and Razan, allowing us to reclaim the narrative and call attention the mainstreaming of anti-Muslim hatred. 
These days, it feels like Islamophobia is a socially acceptable form of bigotry. 
We just have to put up with it and smile. 
The nasty stares, the palpable fear when boarding a plane, the random pat downs at airports that happen 99 percent of the time. 
It doesn't stop there. 
We have politicians reaping political and financial gains off our backs. 
Here in the US, we have presidential candidates like Donald Trump, casually calling to register American Muslims, and ban Muslim immigrants and refugees from entering this country. 
It is no coincidence that hate crimes rise in parallel with election cycles. 
Just a couple months ago, Khalid Jabara, a Lebanese-American Christian, was murdered in Oklahoma by his neighbor — a man who called him a "" filthy Arab. "" This man was previously jailed for a mere 8 months, after attempting run over Khalid's mother with his car. 
Chances are you haven't heard Khalid's story, because it didn't make it to national news. 
The least we can do is call it what it is: a hate crime. 
The least we can do is talk about it, because violence and hatred doesn't just happen in a vacuum. 
Not long after coming back to work, I'm the senior on rounds in the hospital, when one of my patients looks over at my colleague, gestures around her face and says, "" San Bernardino, "" referencing a recent terrorist attack. 
Here I am having just lost three family members to Islamophobia, having been a vocal advocate within my program on how to deal with such microaggressions, and yet — silence. 
I was disheartened. 
Humiliated. 
Days later rounding on the same patient, she looks at me and says, "Your people are killing people in Los Angeles." 
I look around expectantly. 
Again: silence. 
I realize that yet again, I have to speak up for myself. 
I sit on her bed and gently ask her, "" Have I ever done anything but treat you with respect and kindness? 
Have I done anything but give you compassionate care? "" She looks down and realizes what she said was wrong, and in front of the entire team, she apologizes and says, "" I should know better. I'm Mexican-American. 
I receive this kind of treatment all the time. "" Many of us experience microaggressions on a daily basis. 
Odds are you may have experienced it, whether for your race, gender, sexuality or religious beliefs. 
We've all been in situations where we've witnessed something wrong and didn't speak up. 
Maybe we weren't equipped with the tools to respond in the moment. 
Maybe we weren't even aware of our own implicit biases. 
We can all agree that bigotry is unacceptable, but when we see it, we're silent, because it makes us uncomfortable. 
But stepping right into that discomfort means you are also stepping into the ally zone. 
There may be over three million Muslims in America. 
That's still just one percent of the total population. 
Martin Luther King once said, "" In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. "" So what made my neighbor Neal's allyship so profound? 
A couple of things. 
He was there as a neighbor who cared, but he was also bringing in his professional expertise and resources when the moment called for it. 
Others have done the same. 
Larycia Hawkins drew on her platform as the first tenured African-American professor at Wheaton College to wear a hijab in solidarity with Muslim women who face discrimination every day. 
As a result, she lost her job. 
Within a month, she joined the faculty at the University of Virginia, where she now works on pluralism, race, faith and culture. 
Reddit cofounder, Alexis Ohanian, demonstrated that not all active allyship needs to be so serious. 
He stepped up to support a 15-year-old Muslim girl's mission to introduce a hijab emoji. 
(Laughter) It's a simple gesture, but it has a significant subconscious impact on normalizing and humanizing Muslims, including the community as a part of an "" us "" instead of an "" other. "" The editor in chief of Women's Running magazine just put the first hijabi to ever be on the cover of a US fitness magazine. 
These are all very different examples of people who drew upon their platforms and resources in academia, tech and media, to actively express their allyship. 
What resources and expertise do you bring to the table? 
Are you willing to step into your discomfort and speak up when you witness hateful bigotry? 
Will you be Neal? 
Many neighbors appeared in this story. 
And you, in your respective communities, all have a Muslim neighbor, colleague or friend your child plays with at school. 
Reach out to them. 
Let them know you stand with them in solidarity. 
It may feel really small, but I promise you it makes a difference. 
Nothing will ever bring back Deah, Yusor and Razan. 
But when we raise our collective voices, that is when we stop the hate. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I've noticed something interesting about society and culture. 
There's a certain — (Laughter) That's true in everything risky, except technology. 
For some reason, there's no standard syllabus, there's no basic course. 
The space bar scrolls down one page. 
Also on the web, when you're filling in one of these forms like your addresses, I assume you know that you can hit the Tab key to jump from box to box to box. 
Also on the web, when the text is too small, what you do is hold down the Control key and hit plus, plus, plus. 
You make the text larger with each tap. 
Go space, space. 
Also when it comes to cell phones, on all phones, if you want to redial somebody that you've dialed before, all you have to do is hit the call button, and it puts the last phone number into the box for you, and at that point you can hit call again to actually dial it. 
Something that drives me crazy: When I call you and leave a message on your voice mail, I hear you saying, "" Leave a message, "" and then I get these 15 seconds of freaking instructions, like we haven't had answering machines for 45 years! 
(Laughter) I'm not bitter. (Laughter) 
So it turns out there's a keyboard shortcut that lets you jump directly to the beep like this. 
(Beep) David Pogue: Unfortunately, the carriers didn't adopt the same keystroke, so it's different by carrier, so it devolves upon you to learn the keystroke for the person you're calling. 
While we're talking about text — When you want to highlight — this is just an example — (Laughter) When you want to highlight a word, please don't waste your life dragging across it with the mouse like a newbie. 
Double click the word. 
Also, don't delete what you've highlighted. 
You can just type over it. 
Also, you can go double-click, drag, to highlight in one-word increments as you drag. 
(Camera click) (Laughter) So, that's because the camera needs time to calculate the focus and exposure, but if you pre-focus with a half-press, leave your finger down — no shutter lag! 
And finally, it often happens that you're giving a talk, and for some reason, the audience is looking at the slide instead of at you! 
(Laughter) So when that happens — this works in Keynote, PowerPoint, it works in every program — all you do is hit the letter B key, B for blackout, to black out the slide, make everybody look at you, and then when you're ready to go on, you hit B again, and if you're really on a roll, you can hit the W key for "" whiteout, "" and you white out the slide, and then you can hit W again to un-blank it. 
So I know I went super fast. 

This is our life with bees, and this is our life without bees. 
Bees are the most important pollinators of our fruits and vegetables and flowers and crops like alfalfa hay that feed our farm animals. 
More than one third of the world's crop production is dependent on bee pollination. 
But the ironic thing is that bees are not out there pollinating our food intentionally. 
They're out there because they need to eat. 
Bees get all of the protein they need in their diet from pollen and all of the carbohydrates they need from nectar. 
They're flower-feeders, and as they move from flower to flower, basically on a shopping trip at the local floral mart, they end up providing this valuable pollination service. 
In parts of the world where there are no bees, or where they plant varieties that are not attractive to bees, people are paid to do the business of pollination by hand. 
These people are moving pollen from flower to flower with a paintbrush. 
Now this business of hand pollination is actually not that uncommon. 
Tomato growers often pollinate their tomato flowers with a hand-held vibrator. 
Now this one's the tomato tickler. (Laughter) Now this is because the pollen within a tomato flower is held very securely within the male part of the flower, the anther, and the only way to release this pollen is to vibrate it. 
So bumblebees are one of the few kinds of bees in the world that are able to hold onto the flower and vibrate it, and they do this by shaking their flight muscles at a frequency similar to the musical note C. 
So they vibrate the flower, they sonicate it, and that releases the pollen in this efficient swoosh, and the pollen gathers all over the fuzzy bee's body, and she takes it home as food. 
Tomato growers now put bumblebee colonies inside the greenhouse to pollinate the tomatoes because they get much more efficient pollination when it's done naturally and they get better quality tomatoes. 
So there's other, maybe more personal reasons, to care about bees. 
There's over 20,000 species of bees in the world, and they're absolutely gorgeous. 
These bees spend the majority of their life cycle hidden in the ground or within a hollow stem and very few of these beautiful species have evolved highly social behavior like honeybees. 
Now honeybees tend to be the charismatic representative for the other 19,900-plus species because there's something about honeybees that draws people into their world. 
Humans have been drawn to honeybees since early recorded history, mostly to harvest their honey, which is an amazing natural sweetener. 
I got drawn into the honeybee world completely by a fluke. 
I was 18 years old and bored, and I picked up a book in the library on bees and I spent the night reading it. 
I had never thought about insects living in complex societies. 
It was like the best of science fiction come true. 
And even stranger, there were these people, these beekeepers, that loved their bees like they were family, and when I put down the book, I knew I had to see this for myself. 
So I went to work for a commercial beekeeper, a family that owned 2,000 hives of bees in New Mexico. 
And I was permanently hooked. 
Honeybees can be considered a super-organism, where the colony is the organism and it's comprised of 40,000 to 50,000 individual bee organisms. 
Now this society has no central authority. 
Nobody's in charge. 
So how they come to collective decisions, and how they allocate their tasks and divide their labor, how they communicate where the flowers are, all of their collective social behaviors are mindblowing. 
My personal favorite, and one that I've studied for many years, is their system of healthcare. 
So bees have social healthcare. 
So in my lab, we study how bees keep themselves healthy. 
For example, we study hygiene, where some bees are able to locate and weed out sick individuals from the nest, from the colony, and it keeps the colony healthy. 
And more recently, we've been studying resins that bees collect from plants. 
So bees fly to some plants and they scrape these very, very sticky resins off the leaves, and they take them back to the nest where they cement them into the nest architecture where we call it propolis. 
We've found that propolis is a natural disinfectant. 
It's a natural antibiotic. 
It kills off bacteria and molds and other germs within the colony, and so it bolsters the colony health and their social immunity. 
Humans have known about the power of propolis since biblical times. 
We've been harvesting propolis out of bee colonies for human medicine, but we didn't know how good it was for the bees. 
So honeybees have these remarkable natural defenses that have kept them healthy and thriving for over 50 million years. 
So seven years ago, when honeybee colonies were reported to be dying en masse, first in the United States, it was clear that there was something really, really wrong. 
In our collective conscience, in a really primal way, we know we can't afford to lose bees. 
So what's going on? 
Bees are dying from multiple and interacting causes, and I'll go through each of these. 
The bottom line is, bees dying reflects a flowerless landscape and a dysfunctional food system. 
Now we have the best data on honeybees, so I'll use them as an example. 
In the United States, bees in fact have been in decline since World War II. 
We have half the number of managed hives in the United States now compared to 1945. 
We're down to about two million hives of bees, we think. 
And the reason is, after World War II, we changed our farming practices. 
We stopped planting cover crops. 
We stopped planting clover and alfalfa, which are natural fertilizers that fix nitrogen in the soil, and instead we started using synthetic fertilizers. 
Clover and alfalfa are highly nutritious food plants for bees. 
And after World War II, we started using herbicides to kill off the weeds in our farms. 
Many of these weeds are flowering plants that bees require for their survival. 
And we started growing larger and larger crop monocultures. 
Now we talk about food deserts, places in our cities, neighborhoods that have no grocery stores. 
The very farms that used to sustain bees are now agricultural food deserts, dominated by one or two plant species like corn and soybeans. 
Since World War II, we have been systematically eliminating many of the flowering plants that bees need for their survival. 
And these monocultures extend even to crops that are good for bees, like almonds. 
Fifty years ago, beekeepers would take a few colonies, hives of bees into the almond orchards, for pollination, and also because the pollen in an almond blossom is really high in protein. It's really good for bees. 
Now, the scale of almond monoculture demands that most of our nation's bees, over 1.5 million hives of bees, be transported across the nation to pollinate this one crop. 
And they're trucked in in semi-loads, and they must be trucked out, because after bloom, the almond orchards are a vast and flowerless landscape. 
Bees have been dying over the last 50 years, and we're planting more crops that need them. 
There has been a 300 percent increase in crop production that requires bee pollination. 
And then there's pesticides. 
After World War II, we started using pesticides on a large scale, and this became necessary because of the monocultures that put out a feast for crop pests. 
Recently, researchers from Penn State University have started looking at the pesticide residue in the loads of pollen that bees carry home as food, and they've found that every batch of pollen that a honeybee collects has at least six detectable pesticides in it, and this includes every class of insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and even inert and unlabeled ingredients that are part of the pesticide formulation that can be more toxic than the active ingredient. 
This small bee is holding up a large mirror. 
How much is it going to take to contaminate humans? 
One of these class of insecticides, the neonicontinoids, is making headlines around the world right now. 
You've probably heard about it. 
This is a new class of insecticides. 
It moves through the plant so that a crop pest, a leaf-eating insect, would take a bite of the plant and get a lethal dose and die. 
If one of these neonics, we call them, is applied in a high concentration, such as in this ground application, enough of the compound moves through the plant and gets into the pollen and the nectar, where a bee can consume, in this case, a high dose of this neurotoxin that makes the bee twitch and die. 
In most agricultural settings, on most of our farms, it's only the seed that's coated with the insecticide, and so a smaller concentration moves through the plant and gets into the pollen and nectar, and if a bee consumes this lower dose, either nothing happens or the bee becomes intoxicated and disoriented and she may not find her way home. 
And on top of everything else, bees have their own set of diseases and parasites. 
Public enemy number one for bees is this thing. 
It's called varroa destructor. 
It's aptly named. 
It's this big, blood-sucking parasite that compromises the bee's immune system and circulates viruses. 
Let me put this all together for you. 
I don't know what it feels like to a bee to have a big, bloodsucking parasite running around on it, and I don't know what it feels like to a bee to have a virus, but I do know what it feels like when I have a virus, the flu, and I know how difficult it is for me to get to the grocery store to get good nutrition. 
But what if I lived in a food desert? 
And what if I had to travel a long distance to get to the grocery store, and I finally got my weak body out there and I consumed, in my food, enough of a pesticide, a neurotoxin, that I couldn't find my way home? 
And this is what we mean by multiple and interacting causes of death. 
And it's not just our honeybees. 
All of our beautiful wild species of bees are at risk, including those tomato-pollinating bumblebees. 
These bees are providing backup for our honeybees. 
They're providing the pollination insurance alongside our honeybees. 
We need all of our bees. 
So what are we going to do? 
What are we going to do about this big bee bummer that we've created? 
It turns out, it's hopeful. It's hopeful. 
Every one of you out there can help bees in two very direct and easy ways. 
Plant bee-friendly flowers, and don't contaminate these flowers, this bee food, with pesticides. 
So go online and search for flowers that are native to your area and plant them. 
Plant them in a pot on your doorstep. 
Plant them in your front yard, in your lawns, in your boulevards. 
Campaign to have them planted in public gardens, community spaces, meadows. 
Set aside farmland. 
We need a beautiful diversity of flowers that blooms over the entire growing season, from spring to fall. 
We need roadsides seeded in flowers for our bees, but also for migrating butterflies and birds and other wildlife. 
And we need to think carefully about putting back in cover crops to nourish our soil and nourish our bees. 
And we need to diversify our farms. 
We need to plant flowering crop borders and hedge rows to disrupt the agricultural food desert and begin to correct the dysfunctional food system that we've created. 
So maybe it seems like a really small countermeasure to a big, huge problem — just go plant flowers — but when bees have access to good nutrition, we have access to good nutrition through their pollination services. 
And when bees have access to good nutrition, they're better able to engage their own natural defenses, their healthcare, that they have relied on for millions of years. 
So the beauty of helping bees this way, for me, is that every one of us needs to behave a little bit more like a bee society, an insect society, where each of our individual actions can contribute to a grand solution, an emergent property, that's much greater than the mere sum of our individual actions. 
So let the small act of planting flowers and keeping them free of pesticides be the driver of large-scale change. 
On behalf of the bees, thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. Just a quick question. 
The latest numbers on the die-off of bees, is there any sign of things bottoming out? 
What's your hope / depression level on this? 
Maria Spivak: Yeah. 
At least in the United States, an average of 30 percent of all bee hives are lost every winter. 
About 20 years ago, we were at a 15-percent loss. 
So it's getting precarious. 
CA: That's not 30 percent a year, that's — MS: Yes, thirty percent a year. 
CA: Thirty percent a year. MS: But then beekeepers are able to divide their colonies and so they can maintain the same number, they can recuperate some of their loss. 
We're kind of at a tipping point. 
We can't really afford to lose that many more. 
We need to be really appreciative of all the beekeepers out there. Plant flowers. 
CA: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I have spent the last years trying to resolve two enigmas: Why is productivity so disappointing in all the companies where I work? 
I have worked with more than 500 companies. 
Despite all the technological advances — computers, I.T., communications, telecommunications, the Internet. 
Enigma number two: Why is there so little engagement at work? 
Why do people feel so miserable, even actively disengaged? 
Disengaging their colleagues. 
Acting against the interest of their company. 
Despite all the affiliation events, the celebration, the people initiatives, the leadership development programs to train managers on how to better motivate their teams. 
At the beginning, I thought there was a chicken and egg issue: Because people are less engaged, they are less productive. 
Or vice versa, because they are less productive, we put more pressure and they are less engaged. 
But as we were doing our analysis we realized that there was a common root cause to these two issues that relates, in fact, to the basic pillars of management. 
The way we organize is based on two pillars. 
The hard — structure, processes, systems. 
The soft — feelings, sentiments, interpersonal relationships, traits, personality. 
And whenever a company reorganizes, restructures, reengineers, goes through a cultural transformation program, it chooses these two pillars. 
Now, we try to refine them, we try to combine them. 
The real issue is — and this is the answer to the two enigmas — these pillars are obsolete. 
Everything you read in business books is based either on one or the other or their combination. 
They are obsolete. 
How do they work when you try to use these approaches in front of the new complexity of business? 
The hard approach, basically is that you start from strategy, requirements, structures, processes, systems, KPIs, scorecards, committees, headquarters, hubs, clusters, you name it. 
I forgot all the metrics, incentives, committees, middle offices and interfaces. 
What happens basically on the left, you have more complexity, the new complexity of business. 
We need quality, cost, reliability, speed. 
And every time there is a new requirement, we use the same approach. 
We create dedicated structure processed systems, basically to deal with the new complexity of business. 
The hard approach creates just complicatedness in the organization. 
Let's take an example. 
An automotive company, the engineering division is a five-dimensional matrix. 
If you open any cell of the matrix, you find another 20-dimensional matrix. 
You have Mr. Noise, Mr. Petrol Consumption, Mr. Anti-Collision Properties. 
For any new requirement, you have a dedicated function in charge of aligning engineers against the new requirement. 
What happens when the new requirement emerges? 
Some years ago, a new requirement appeared on the marketplace: the length of the warranty period. 
So therefore the new requirement is repairability, making cars easy to repair. 
Otherwise when you bring the car to the garage to fix the light, if you have to remove the engine to access the lights, the car will have to stay one week in the garage instead of two hours, and the warranty budget will explode. 
So, what was the solution using the hard approach? 
If repairability is the new requirement, the solution is to create a new function, Mr. Repairability. 
And Mr. Repairability creates the repairability process. 
With a repairability scorecard, with a repairability metric and eventually repairability incentive. 
That came on top of 25 other KPIs. 
What percentage of these people is variable compensation? 
Twenty percent at most, divided by 26 KPIs, repairability makes a difference of 0.8 percent. 
What difference did it make in their actions, their choices to simplify? Zero. 
But what occurs for zero impact? Mr. Repairability, process, scorecard, evaluation, coordination with the 25 other coordinators to have zero impact. 
Now, in front of the new complexity of business, the only solution is not drawing boxes with reporting lines. 
It is basically the interplay. 
How the parts work together. 
The connections, the interactions, the synapses. 
It is not the skeleton of boxes, it is the nervous system of adaptiveness and intelligence. 
You know, you could call it cooperation, basically. 
Whenever people cooperate, they use less resources. In everything. 
You know, the repairability issue is a cooperation problem. 
When you design cars, please take into account the needs of those who will repair the cars in the after sales garages. 
When we don't cooperate we need more time, more equipment, more systems, more teams. 
We need — When procurement, supply chain, manufacturing don't cooperate we need more stock, more inventories, more working capital. 
Who will pay for that? 
Shareholders? Customers? 
No, they will refuse. 
So who is left? The employees, who have to compensate through their super individual efforts for the lack of cooperation. 
Stress, burnout, they are overwhelmed, accidents. 
No wonder they disengage. 
How do the hard and the soft try to foster cooperation? 
The hard: In banks, when there is a problem between the back office and the front office, they don't cooperate. What is the solution? 
They create a middle office. 
What happens one year later? 
Instead of one problem between the back and the front, now I have two problems. 
Between the back and the middle and between the middle and the front. 
Plus I have to pay for the middle office. 
The hard approach is unable to foster cooperation. 
It can only add new boxes, new bones in the skeleton. 
The soft approach: To make people cooperate, we need to make them like each other. 
Improve interpersonal feelings, the more people like each other, the more they will cooperate. 
It is totally wrong. 
It is even counterproductive. 
Look, at home I have two TVs. Why? 
Precisely not to have to cooperate with my wife. 
(Laughter) Not to have to impose tradeoffs to my wife. 
And why I try not to impose tradeoffs to my wife is precisely because I love my wife. 
If I didn't love my wife, one TV would be enough: You will watch my favorite football game, if you are not happy, how is the book or the door? 
(Laughter) The more we like each other, the more we avoid the real cooperation that would strain our relationships by imposing tough tradeoffs. 
And we go for a second TV or we escalate the decision above for arbitration. 
Definitely, these approaches are obsolete. 
To deal with complexity, to enhance the nervous system, we have created what we call the smart simplicity approach based on simple rules. 
Simple rule number one: Understand what others do. 
What is their real work? 
We need to go beyond the boxes, the job descriptions, beyond the surface of the container, to understand the real content. 
Me, designer, if I put a wire here, I know that it will mean that we will have to remove the engine to access the lights. 
Second, you need to reenforce integrators. 
Integrators are not middle offices, they are managers, existing managers that you reinforce so that they have power and interest to make others cooperate. 
How can you reinforce your managers as integrators? 
By removing layers. 
When there are too many layers people are too far from the action, therefore they need KPIs, metrics, they need poor proxies for reality. 
They don't understand reality and they add the complicatedness of metrics, KPIs. 
By removing rules — the bigger we are, the more we need integrators, therefore the less rules we must have, to give discretionary power to managers. 
And we do the opposite — the bigger we are, the more rules we create. 
And we end up with the Encyclopedia Britannica of rules. 
You need to increase the quanitity of power so that you can empower everybody to use their judgment, their intelligence. 
You must give more cards to people so that they have the critical mass of cards to take the risk to cooperate, to move out of insulation. 
Otherwise, they will withdraw. They will disengage. 
These rules, they come from game theory and organizational sociology. 
You can increase the shadow of the future. 
Create feedback loops that expose people to the consequences of their actions. 
This is what the automotive company did when they saw that Mr. Repairability had no impact. 
They said to the design engineers: Now, in three years, when the new car is launched on the market, you will move to the after sales network, and become in charge of the warranty budget, and if the warranty budget explodes, it will explode in your face. (Laughter) Much more powerful than 0.8 percent variable compensation. 
You need also to increase reciprocity, by removing the buffers that make us self-sufficient. 
When you remove these buffers, you hold me by the nose, I hold you by the ear. 
We will cooperate. 
Remove the second TV. 
There are many second TVs at work that don't create value, they just provide dysfunctional self-sufficiency. 
You need to reward those who cooperate and blame those who don't cooperate. 
The CEO of The Lego Group, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, has a great way to use it. 
He says, blame is not for failure, it is for failing to help or ask for help. 
It changes everything. 
Suddenly it becomes in my interest to be transparent on my real weaknesses, my real forecast, because I know I will not be blamed if I fail, but if I fail to help or ask for help. 
When you do this, it has a lot of implications on organizational design. 
You stop drawing boxes, dotted lines, full lines; you look at their interplay. 
It has a lot of implications on financial policies that we use. 
On human resource management practices. 
When you do that, you can manage complexity, the new complexity of business, without getting complicated. 
You create more value with lower cost. 
You simultaneously improve performance and satisfaction at work because you have removed the common root cause that hinders both. 
Complicatedness: This is your battle, business leaders. 
The real battle is not against competitors. 
This is rubbish, very abstract. 
When do we meet competitors to fight them? 
The real battle is against ourselves, against our bureaucracy, our complicatedness. 
Only you can fight, can do it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I am a Hazara, and the homeland of my people is Afghanistan. 
Like hundreds of thousands of other Hazara kids, I was born in exile. 
The ongoing persecution and operation against the Hazaras forced my parents to leave Afghanistan. 
This persecution has had a long history going back to the late 1800s, and the rule of King Abdur Rahman. 
He killed 63 percent of the Hazara population. 
He built minarets with their heads. 
Many Hazaras were sold into slavery, and many others fled the country for neighboring Iran and Pakistan. 
My parents also fled to Pakistan, and settled in Quetta, where I was born. 
After the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers, I got a chance to go to Afghanistan for the first time, with foreign journalists. 
I was only 18, and I got a job working as an interpreter. 
After four years, I felt it was safe enough to move to Afghanistan permanently, and I was working there as a documentary photographer, and I worked on many stories. 
One of the most important stories that I did was the dancing boys of Afghanistan. 
It is a tragic story about an appalling tradition. 
It involves young kids dancing for warlords and powerful men in the society. 
These boys are often abducted or bought from their poor parents, and they are put to work as sex slaves. 
This is Shukur. 
He was kidnapped from Kabul by a warlord. 
He was taken to another province, where he was forced to work as a sex slave for the warlord and his friends. 
When this story was published in the Washington Post, I started receiving death threats, and I was forced to leave Afghanistan, as my parents were. 
Along with my family, I returned back to Quetta. 
The situation in Quetta had changed dramatically since I left in 2005. 
Once a peaceful haven for the Hazaras, it had now turned into the most dangerous city in Pakistan. 
Hazaras are confined into two small areas, and they are marginalized socially, educationally, and financially. 
This is Nadir. 
I had known him since my childhood. 
He was injured when his van was ambushed by terrorists in Quetta. 
He later died of his injuries. 
Around 1,600 Hazara members had been killed in various attacks, and around 3,000 of them were injured, and many of them permanently disabled. 
The attacks on the Hazara community would only get worse, so it was not surprising that many wanted to flee. 
After Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Australia is home to the fourth largest population of Hazaras in the world. 
When it came time to leave Pakistan, Australia seemed the obvious choice. 
Financially, only one of us could leave, and it was decided that I would go, in the hope that if I arrived at my destination safely, I could work to get the rest of my family to join me later. 
We all knew about the risks, and how terrifying the journey is, and I met many people who lost loved ones at sea. 
It was a desperate decision to take, to leave everything behind, and no one makes this decision easily. 
If I had been able to simply fly to Australia, it would have taken me less than 24 hours. 
But getting a visa was impossible. 
My journey was much longer, much more complicated, and certainly more dangerous, traveling to Thailand by air, and then by road and boat to Malaysia and into Indonesia, paying people and smugglers all the way and spending a lot of time hiding and a lot of time in fear of being caught. 
In Indonesia, I joined a group of seven asylum seekers. 
We all shared a bedroom in a town outside of Jakarta called Bogor. 
After spending a week in Bogor, three of my roommates left for the perilous journey, and we got the news two days later that a distressed boat sank in the sea en route to Christmas Island. 
We found out that our three roommates — Nawroz, Jaffar and Shabbir — were also among those. 
Only Jaffar was rescued. 
Shabbir and Nawroz were never seen again. 
It made me think, am I doing the right thing? 
I concluded I really had no other choice but to go on. 
A few weeks later, we got the call from the people smuggler to alert us that the boat is ready for us to commence our sea journey. 
Taken in the night towards the main vessel on a motorboat, we boarded an old fishing boat that was already overloaded. 
There were 93 of us, and we were all below deck. 
No one was allowed up on the top. 
We all paid 6,000 dollars each for this part of the trip. 
The first night and day went smoothly, but by the second night, the weather turned. 
Waves tossed the boat around, and the timbers groaned. 
People below deck were crying, praying, recalling their loved ones. 
They were screaming. 
It was a terrible moment. 
It was like a scene from doomsday, or maybe like one of those scenes from those Hollywood movies that shows that everything is breaking apart and the world is just ending. 
It was happening to us for real. 
We didn't have any hope. 
Our boat was floating like a matchbox on the water without any control. 
The waves were much higher than our boat, and the water poured in faster than the motor pumps could take it out. 
We all lost hope. 
We thought, this is the end. 
We were watching our deaths, and I was documenting it. 
The captain told us that we are not going to make it, we have to turn back the boat. 
We went on the deck and turned our torches on and off to attract the attention of any passing boat. 
We kept trying to attract their attention by waving our life jackets and whistling. 
Eventually, we made it to a small island. 
Our boat crashing onto the rocks, I slipped into the water and destroyed my camera, whatever I had documented. 
But luckily, the memory card survived. 
It was a thick forest. 
We all split up into many groups as we argued over what to do next. 
We were all scared and confused. 
Then, after spending the night on the beach, we found a jetty and coconuts. 
We hailed a boat from a nearby resort, and then were quickly handed over to Indonesian water police. 
At Serang Detention Center, an immigration officer came and furtively strip-searched us. 
He took our mobile, my $300 cash, our shoes that we should not be able to escape, but we kept watching the guards, checking their movements, and around 4 a.m. when they sat around a fire, we removed two glass layers from an outside facing window and slipped through. 
We climbed a tree next to an outer wall that was topped with the shards of glass. 
We put the pillow on that and wrapped our forearms with bedsheets and climbed the wall, and we ran away with bare feet. 
I was free, with an uncertain future, no money. 
The only thing I had was the memory card with the pictures and footage. 
When my documentary was aired on SBS Dateline, many of my friends came to know about my situation, and they tried to help me. 
They did not allow me to take any other boat to risk my life. 
I also decided to stay in Indonesia and process my case through UNHCR, but I was really afraid that I would end up in Indonesia for many years doing nothing and unable to work, like every other asylum seeker. 
But it had happened to be a little bit different with me. 
My contacts worked to expedite my case through UNHCR, and I got resettled in Australia in May 2013. 
Not every asylum seeker is lucky like me. 
It is really difficult to live a life with an uncertain fate, in limbo. 
The issue of asylum seekers in Australia has been so extremely politicized that it has lost its human face. 
The asylum seekers have been demonized and then presented to the people. 
I hope my story and the story of other Hazaras could shed some light to show the people how these people are suffering in their countries of origin, and how they suffer, why they risk their lives to seek asylum. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

I'd like to talk to you today about the human brain, which is what we do research on at the University of California. 
Just think about this problem for a second. 
Here is a lump of flesh, about three pounds, which you can hold in the palm of your hand. 
But it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. 
It can contemplate the meaning of infinity, ask questions about the meaning of its own existence, about the nature of God. 
And this is truly the most amazing thing in the world. 
It's the greatest mystery confronting human beings: How does this all come about? 
Well, the brain, as you know, is made up of neurons. 
We're looking at neurons here. 
There are 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain. 
And each neuron makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons in the brain. 
And based on this, people have calculated that the number of permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe. 
So, how do you go about studying the brain? 
One approach is to look at patients who had lesions in different part of the brain, and study changes in their behavior. 
This is what I spoke about in the last TED. 
Today I'll talk about a different approach, which is to put electrodes in different parts of the brain, and actually record the activity of individual nerve cells in the brain. 
Sort of eavesdrop on the activity of nerve cells in the brain. 
Now, one recent discovery that has been made by researchers in Italy, in Parma, by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues, is a group of neurons called mirror neurons, which are on the front of the brain in the frontal lobes. 
Now, it turns out there are neurons which are called ordinary motor command neurons in the front of the brain, which have been known for over 50 years. 
These neurons will fire when a person performs a specific action. 
For example, if I do that, and reach and grab an apple, a motor command neuron in the front of my brain will fire. 
If I reach out and pull an object, another neuron will fire, commanding me to pull that object. 
These are called motor command neurons that have been known for a long time. 
But what Rizzolatti found was a subset of these neurons, maybe about 20 percent of them, will also fire when I'm looking at somebody else performing the same action. 
So, here is a neuron that fires when I reach and grab something, but it also fires when I watch Joe reaching and grabbing something. 
And this is truly astonishing. 
Because it's as though this neuron is adopting the other person's point of view. 
It's almost as though it's performing a virtual reality simulation of the other person's action. 
Now, what is the significance of these mirror neurons? 
For one thing they must be involved in things like imitation and emulation. 
Because to imitate a complex act requires my brain to adopt the other person's point of view. 
So, this is important for imitation and emulation. 
Well, why is that important? 
Well, let's take a look at the next slide. 
So, how do you do imitation? Why is imitation important? 
Mirror neurons and imitation, emulation. 
Now, let's look at culture, the phenomenon of human culture. 
If you go back in time about [75,000] to 100,000 years ago, let's look at human evolution, it turns out that something very important happened around 75,000 years ago. 
And that is, there is a sudden emergence and rapid spread of a number of skills that are unique to human beings like tool use, the use of fire, the use of shelters, and, of course, language, and the ability to read somebody else's mind and interpret that person's behavior. 
All of that happened relatively quickly. 
Even though the human brain had achieved its present size almost three or four hundred thousand years ago, 100,000 years ago all of this happened very, very quickly. 
And I claim that what happened was the sudden emergence of a sophisticated mirror neuron system, which allowed you to emulate and imitate other people's actions. 
So that when there was a sudden accidental discovery by one member of the group, say the use of fire, or a particular type of tool, instead of dying out, this spread rapidly, horizontally across the population, or was transmitted vertically, down the generations. 
So, this made evolution suddenly Lamarckian, instead of Darwinian. 
Darwinian evolution is slow; it takes hundreds of thousands of years. 
A polar bear, to evolve a coat, will take thousands of generations, maybe 100,000 years. 
A human being, a child, can just watch its parent kill another polar bear, and skin it and put the skin on its body, fur on the body, and learn it in one step. What the polar bear took 100,000 years to learn, it can learn in five minutes, maybe 10 minutes. 
And then once it's learned this it spreads in geometric proportion across a population. 
This is the basis. The imitation of complex skills is what we call culture and is the basis of civilization. 
Now there is another kind of mirror neuron, which is involved in something quite different. 
And that is, there are mirror neurons, just as there are mirror neurons for action, there are mirror neurons for touch. 
In other words, if somebody touches me, my hand, neuron in the somatosensory cortex in the sensory region of the brain fires. 
But the same neuron, in some cases, will fire when I simply watch another person being touched. 
So, it's empathizing the other person being touched. 
So, most of them will fire when I'm touched in different locations. Different neurons for different locations. 
But a subset of them will fire even when I watch somebody else being touched in the same location. 
So, here again you have neurons which are enrolled in empathy. 
Now, the question then arises: If I simply watch another person being touched, why do I not get confused and literally feel that touch sensation merely by watching somebody being touched? 
I mean, I empathize with that person but I don't literally feel the touch. 
Well, that's because you've got receptors in your skin, touch and pain receptors, going back into your brain and saying "" Don't worry, you're not being touched. 
So, empathize, by all means, with the other person, but do not actually experience the touch, otherwise you'll get confused and muddled. "" Okay, so there is a feedback signal that vetoes the signal of the mirror neuron preventing you from consciously experiencing that touch. 
But if you remove the arm, you simply anesthetize my arm, so you put an injection into my arm, anesthetize the brachial plexus, so the arm is numb, and there is no sensations coming in, if I now watch you being touched, I literally feel it in my hand. 
In other words, you have dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. 
So, I call them Gandhi neurons, or empathy neurons. 
(Laughter) And this is not in some abstract metaphorical sense. 
All that's separating you from him, from the other person, is your skin. 
Remove the skin, you experience that person's touch in your mind. 
You've dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. 
And this, of course, is the basis of much of Eastern philosophy, and that is there is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. 
You are, in fact, connected not just via Facebook and Internet, you're actually quite literally connected by your neurons. 
And there is whole chains of neurons around this room, talking to each other. 
And there is no real distinctiveness of your consciousness from somebody else's consciousness. 
And this is not mumbo-jumbo philosophy. 
It emerges from our understanding of basic neuroscience. 
So, you have a patient with a phantom limb. If the arm has been removed and you have a phantom, and you watch somebody else being touched, you feel it in your phantom. 
Now the astonishing thing is, if you have pain in your phantom limb, you squeeze the other person's hand, massage the other person's hand, that relieves the pain in your phantom hand, almost as though the neuron were obtaining relief from merely watching somebody else being massaged. 
So, here you have my last slide. 
For the longest time people have regarded science and humanities as being distinct. 
C.P. Snow spoke of the two cultures: science on the one hand, humanities on the other; never the twain shall meet. 
So, I'm saying the mirror neuron system underlies the interface allowing you to rethink about issues like consciousness, representation of self, what separates you from other human beings, what allows you to empathize with other human beings, and also even things like the emergence of culture and civilization, which is unique to human beings. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

What I'd like to start off with is an observation, which is that if I've learned anything over the last year, it's that the supreme irony of publishing a book about slowness is that you have to go around promoting it really fast. 
I seem to spend most of my time these days zipping from city to city, studio to studio, interview to interview, serving up the book in really tiny bite-size chunks. 
Because everyone these days wants to know how to slow down, but they want to know how to slow down really quickly. So... 
so I did a spot on CNN the other day where I actually spent more time in makeup than I did talking on air. 
And I think that — that's not really surprising though, is it? 
Because that's kind of the world that we live in now, a world stuck in fast-forward. 
A world obsessed with speed, with doing everything faster, with cramming more and more into less and less time. 
Every moment of the day feels like a race against the clock. 
To borrow a phrase from Carrie Fisher, which is in my bio there; I'll just toss it out again — "" These days even instant gratification takes too long. "" (Laughter) And if you think about how we to try to make things better, what do we do? 
No, we speed them up, don't we? So we used to dial; now we speed dial. 
We used to read; now we speed read. We used to walk; now we speed walk. 
And of course, we used to date and now we speed date. 
And even things that are by their very nature slow — we try and speed them up too. 
So I was in New York recently, and I walked past a gym that had an advertisement in the window for a new course, a new evening course. 
And it was for, you guessed it, speed yoga. 
So this — the perfect solution for time-starved professionals who want to, you know, salute the sun, but only want to give over about 20 minutes to it. 
I mean, these are sort of the extreme examples, and they're amusing and good to laugh at. 
But there's a very serious point, and I think that in the headlong dash of daily life, we often lose sight of the damage that this roadrunner form of living does to us. 
We're so marinated in the culture of speed that we almost fail to notice the toll it takes on every aspect of our lives — on our health, our diet, our work, our relationships, the environment and our community. 
And sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives, instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life, instead of the good life. 
And I think for many people, that wake-up call takes the form of an illness. 
You know, a burnout, or eventually the body says, "" I can't take it anymore, "" and throws in the towel. 
Or maybe a relationship goes up in smoke because we haven't had the time, or the patience, or the tranquility, to be with the other person, to listen to them. 
And my wake-up call came when I started reading bedtime stories to my son, and I found that at the end of day, I would go into his room and I just couldn't slow down — you know, I'd be speed reading "" The Cat In The Hat. "" I'd be — you know, I'd be skipping lines here, paragraphs there, sometimes a whole page, and of course, my little boy knew the book inside out, so we would quarrel. 
And what should have been the most relaxing, the most intimate, the most tender moment of the day, when a dad sits down to read to his son, became instead this kind of gladiatorial battle of wills, a clash between my speed and his slowness. 
And this went on for some time, until I caught myself scanning a newspaper article with timesaving tips for fast people. 
And one of them made reference to a series of books called "The One-Minute Bedtime Story." 
And I wince saying those words now, but my first reaction at the time was very different. 
My first reflex was to say, "" Hallelujah — what a great idea! 
This is exactly what I'm looking for to speed up bedtime even more. "" But thankfully, a light bulb went on over my head, and my next reaction was very different, and I took a step back, and I thought, "" Whoa — you know, has it really come to this? 
Am I really in such a hurry that I'm prepared to fob off my son with a sound byte at the end of the day? "" And I put away the newspaper — and I was getting on a plane — and I sat there, and I did something I hadn't done for a long time — which is I did nothing. 
I just thought, and I thought long and hard. 
And by the time I got off that plane, I'd decided I wanted to do something about it. 
I wanted to investigate this whole roadrunner culture, and what it was doing to me and to everyone else. 
And I had two questions in my head. 
The first was, how did we get so fast? 
And the second is, is it possible, or even desirable, to slow down? 
Now, if you think about how our world got so accelerated, the usual suspects rear their heads. 
You think of, you know, urbanization, consumerism, the workplace, technology. 
But I think if you cut through those forces, you get to what might be the deeper driver, the nub of the question, which is how we think about time itself. 
In other cultures, time is cyclical. 
It's seen as moving in great, unhurried circles. 
It's always renewing and refreshing itself. 
Whereas in the West, time is linear. 
It's a finite resource; it's always draining away. 
You either use it, or lose it. 
"" Time is money, "" as Benjamin Franklin said. 
And I think what that does to us psychologically is it creates an equation. 
Time is scarce, so what do we do? 
Well — well, we speed up, don't we? 
We try and do more and more with less and less time. 
We turn every moment of every day into a race to the finish line — a finish line, incidentally, that we never reach, but a finish line nonetheless. 
And I guess that the question is, is it possible to break free from that mindset? 
And thankfully, the answer is yes, because what I discovered, when I began looking around, that there is a global backlash against this culture that tells us that faster is always better, and that busier is best. 
Right across the world, people are doing the unthinkable: they're slowing down, and finding that, although conventional wisdom tells you that if you slow down, you're road kill, the opposite turns out to be true: that by slowing down at the right moments, people find that they do everything better. 
They eat better; they make love better; they exercise better; they work better; they live better. 
And, in this kind of cauldron of moments and places and acts of deceleration, lie what a lot of people now refer to as the "" International Slow Movement. "" Now if you'll permit me a small act of hypocrisy, I'll just give you a very quick overview of what's going on inside the Slow Movement. If you think of food, many of you will have heard of the Slow Food movement. 
Started in Italy, but has spread across the world, and now has 100,000 members in 50 countries. 
And it's driven by a very simple and sensible message, which is that we get more pleasure and more health from our food when we cultivate, cook and consume it at a reasonable pace. 
I think also the explosion of the organic farming movement, and the renaissance of farmers' markets, are other illustrations of the fact that people are desperate to get away from eating and cooking and cultivating their food on an industrial timetable. 
They want to get back to slower rhythms. 
And out of the Slow Food movement has grown something called the Slow Cities movement, which has started in Italy, but has spread right across Europe and beyond. 
And in this, towns begin to rethink how they organize the urban landscape, so that people are encouraged to slow down and smell the roses and connect with one another. 
So they might curb traffic, or put in a park bench, or some green space. 
And in some ways, these changes add up to more than the sum of their parts, because I think when a Slow City becomes officially a Slow City, it's kind of like a philosophical declaration. 
It's saying to the rest of world, and to the people in that town, that we believe that in the 21st century, slowness has a role to play. 
In medicine, I think a lot of people are deeply disillusioned with the kind of quick-fix mentality you find in conventional medicine. 
And millions of them around the world are turning to complementary and alternative forms of medicine, which tend to tap into sort of slower, gentler, more holistic forms of healing. 
Now, obviously the jury is out on many of these complementary therapies, and I personally doubt that the coffee enema will ever, you know, gain mainstream approval. 
But other treatments such as acupuncture and massage, and even just relaxation, clearly have some kind of benefit. 
And blue-chip medical colleges everywhere are starting to study these things to find out how they work, and what we might learn from them. 
Sex. There's an awful lot of fast sex around, isn't there? 
I was coming to — well — no pun intended there. 
I was making my way, let's say, slowly to Oxford, and I went through a news agent, and I saw a magazine, a men's magazine, and it said on the front, "How to bring your partner to orgasm in 30 seconds." 
So, you know, even sex is on a stopwatch these days. 
Now, you know, I like a quickie as much as the next person, but I think that there's an awful lot to be gained from slow sex — from slowing down in the bedroom. 
You know, you tap into that — those deeper, sort of, psychological, emotional, spiritual currents, and you get a better orgasm with the buildup. 
You can get more bang for your buck, let's say. 
I mean, the Pointer Sisters said it most eloquently, didn't they, when they sang the praises of "" a lover with a slow hand. "" Now, we all laughed at Sting a few years ago when he went Tantric, but you fast-forward a few years, and now you find couples of all ages flocking to workshops, or maybe just on their own in their own bedrooms, finding ways to put on the brakes and have better sex. 
And of course, in Italy where — I mean, Italians always seem to know where to find their pleasure — they've launched an official Slow Sex movement. 
The workplace. 
Right across much of the world — North America being a notable exception — working hours have been coming down. 
And Europe is an example of that, and people finding that their quality of life improves as they're working less, and also that their hourly productivity goes up. 
Now, clearly there are problems with the 35-hour workweek in France — too much, too soon, too rigid. 
But other countries in Europe, notably the Nordic countries, are showing that it's possible to have a kick-ass economy without being a workaholic. 
And Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland now rank among the top six most competitive nations on Earth, and they work the kind of hours that would make the average American weep with envy. 
And if you go beyond sort of the country level, down at the micro-company level, more and more companies now are realizing that they need to allow their staff either to work fewer hours or just to unplug — to take a lunch break, or to go sit in a quiet room, to switch off their Blackberrys and laptops — you at the back — mobile phones, during the work day or on the weekend, so that they have time to recharge and for the brain to slide into that kind of creative mode of thought. 
It's not just, though, these days, adults who overwork, though, is it? It's children, too. 
I'm 37, and my childhood ended in the mid- '80s, and I look at kids now, and I'm just amazed by the way they race around with more homework, more tutoring, more extracurriculars than we would ever have conceived of a generation ago. 
And some of the most heartrending emails that I get on my website are actually from adolescents hovering on the edge of burnout, pleading with me to write to their parents, to help them slow down, to help them get off this full-throttle treadmill. 
But thankfully, there is a backlash there in parenting as well, and you're finding that, you know, towns in the United States are now banding together and banning extracurriculars on a particular day of the month, so that people can, you know, decompress and have some family time, and slow down. 
Homework is another thing. There are homework bans springing up all over the developed world in schools which had been piling on the homework for years, and now they're discovering that less can be more. 
So there was a case up in Scotland recently where a fee-paying, high-achieving private school banned homework for everyone under the age of 13, and the high-achieving parents freaked out and said, "" What are you — you know, our kids will fall "" — the headmaster said, "No, no, your children need to slow down at the end of the day." 
And just this last month, the exam results came in, and in math, science, marks went up 20 percent on average last year. 
And I think what's very revealing is that the elite universities, who are often cited as the reason that people drive their kids and hothouse them so much, are starting to notice the caliber of students coming to them is falling. These kids have wonderful marks; they have CVs jammed with extracurriculars, to the point that would make your eyes water. 
But they lack spark; they lack the ability to think creatively and think outside — they don't know how to dream. And so what these Ivy League schools, and Oxford and Cambridge and so on, are starting to send a message to parents and students that they need to put on the brakes a little bit. 
And in Harvard, for instance, they send out a letter to undergraduates — freshmen — telling them that they'll get more out of life, and more out of Harvard, if they put on the brakes, if they do less, but give time to things, the time that things need, to enjoy them, to savor them. 
And even if they sometimes do nothing at all. 
And that letter is called — very revealing, I think — "" Slow Down! "" — with an exclamation mark on the end. 
So wherever you look, the message, it seems to me, is the same: that less is very often more, that slower is very often better. But that said, of course, it's not that easy to slow down, is it? 
I mean, you heard that I got a speeding ticket while I was researching my book on the benefits of slowness, and that's true, but that's not all of it. 
I was actually en route to a dinner held by Slow Food at the time. 
And if that's not shaming enough, I got that ticket in Italy. 
And if any of you have ever driven on an Italian highway, you'll have a pretty good idea of how fast I was going. 
(Laughter) But why is it so hard to slow down? 
I think there are various reasons. 
One is that speed is fun, you know, speed is sexy. 
It's all that adrenaline rush. It's hard to give it up. 
I think there's a kind of metaphysical dimension — that speed becomes a way of walling ourselves off from the bigger, deeper questions. 
We fill our head with distraction, with busyness, so that we don't have to ask, am I well? Am I happy? Are my children growing up right? 
Are politicians making good decisions on my behalf? 
Another reason — although I think, perhaps, the most powerful reason — why we find it hard to slow down is the cultural taboo that we've erected against slowing down. 
"" Slow "" is a dirty word in our culture. 
It's a byword for "" lazy, "" "" slacker, "" for being somebody who gives up. 
You know, "" he's a bit slow. "" It's actually synonymous with being stupid. 
I guess what the Slow Movement — the purpose of the Slow Movement, or its main goal, really, is to tackle that taboo, and to say that yes, sometimes slow is not the answer, that there is such a thing as "" bad slow. "" You know, I got stuck on the M25, which is a ring road around London, recently, and spent three-and-a-half hours there. And I can tell you, that's really bad slow. 
But the new idea, the sort of revolutionary idea, of the Slow Movement, is that there is such a thing as "" good slow, "" too. 
And good slow is, you know, taking the time to eat a meal with your family, with the TV switched off. 
Or taking the time to look at a problem from all angles in the office to make the best decision at work. 
Or even simply just taking the time to slow down and savor your life. 
Now, one of the things that I found most uplifting about all of this stuff that's happened around the book since it came out, is the reaction to it. 
And I knew that when my book on slowness came out, it would be welcomed by the New Age brigade, but it's also been taken up, with great gusto, by the corporate world — you know, business press, but also big companies and leadership organizations. 
Because people at the top of the chain, people like you, I think, are starting to realize that there's too much speed in the system, there's too much busyness, and it's time to find, or get back to that lost art of shifting gears. 
Another encouraging sign, I think, is that it's not just in the developed world that this idea's been taken up. In the developing world, in countries that are on the verge of making that leap into first world status — China, Brazil, Thailand, Poland, and so on — these countries have embraced the idea of the Slow Movement, many people in them, and there's a debate going on in their media, on the streets. 
Because I think they're looking at the West, and they're saying, "" Well, we like that aspect of what you've got, but we're not so sure about that. "" So all of that said, is it, I guess, is it possible? 
That's really the main question before us today. Is it possible to slow down? And I'm happy to be able to say to you that the answer is a resounding yes. 
And I present myself as Exhibit A, a kind of reformed and rehabilitated speed-aholic. 
I still love speed. You know, I live in London, and I work as a journalist, and I enjoy the buzz and the busyness, and the adrenaline rush that comes from both of those things. 
I play squash and ice hockey, two very fast sports, and I wouldn't give them up for the world. 
But I've also, over the last year or so, got in touch with my inner tortoise. 
(Laughter) And what that means is that I no longer overload myself gratuitously. 
My default mode is no longer to be a rush-aholic. 
I no longer hear time's winged chariot drawing near, or at least not as much as I did before. 
I can actually hear it now, because I see my time is ticking off. 
And the upshot of all of that is that I actually feel a lot happier, healthier, more productive than I ever have. 
I feel like I'm living my life rather than actually just racing through it. 
And perhaps, the most important measure of the success of this is that I feel that my relationships are a lot deeper, richer, stronger. 
And for me, I guess, the litmus test for whether this would work, and what it would mean, was always going to be bedtime stories, because that's sort of where the journey began. And there too the news is rosy. You know, at the end of the day, I go into my son's room. 
I don't wear a watch. I switch off my computer, so I can't hear the email pinging into the basket, and I just slow down to his pace and we read. 
And because children have their own tempo and internal clock, they don't do quality time, where you schedule 10 minutes for them to open up to you. 
They need you to move at their rhythm. 
I find that 10 minutes into a story, you know, my son will suddenly say, "" You know, something happened in the playground today that really bothered me. "" And we'll go off and have a conversation on that. 
And I now find that bedtime stories used to be a box on my to-do list, something that I dreaded, because it was so slow and I had to get through it quickly. 
It's become my reward at the end of the day, something I really cherish. 
And I have a kind of Hollywood ending to my talk this afternoon, which goes a little bit like this: a few months ago, I was getting ready to go on another book tour, and I had my bags packed. 
I was downstairs by the front door, and I was waiting for a taxi, and my son came down the stairs and he'd made a card for me. And he was carrying it. 
He'd gone and stapled two cards, very like these, together, and put a sticker of his favorite character, Tintin, on the front. 
And he said to me, or he handed this to me, and I read it, and it said, "" To Daddy, love Benjamin. "" And I thought, "" Aw, that's really sweet. 
Is that a good luck on the book tour card? "" And he said, "" No, no, no, Daddy — this is a card for being the best story reader in the world. "" And I thought, "" Yeah, you know, this slowing down thing really does work. "" Thank you very much. 

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

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

It's a great honor today to share with you The Digital Universe, which was created for humanity to really see where we are in the universe. 
And so I think we can roll the video that we have. 
[The Himalayas.] (Music) The flat horizon that we've evolved with has been a metaphor for the infinite: unbounded resources and unlimited capacity for disposal of waste. 
It wasn't until we really left Earth, got above the atmosphere and had seen the horizon bend back on itself, that we could understand our planet as a limited condition. 
The Digital Universe Atlas has been built at the American Museum of Natural History over the past 12 years. 
We maintain that, put that together as a project to really chart the universe across all scales. 
What we see here are satellites around the Earth and the Earth in proper registration against the universe, as we see. 
NASA supported this work 12 years ago as part of the rebuilding of the Hayden Planetarium so that we would share this with the world. 
The Digital Universe is the basis of our space show productions that we do — our main space shows in the dome. 
But what you see here is the result of, actually, internships that we hosted with Linkoping University in Sweden. 
I've had 12 students work on this for their graduate work, and the result has been this software called Uniview and a company called SCISS in Sweden. 
This software allows interactive use, so this actual flight path and movie that we see here was actually flown live. 
I captured this live from my laptop in a cafe called Earth Matters on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where I live, and it was done as a collaborative project with the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art for an exhibit on comparative cosmology. 
And so as we move out, we see continuously from our planet all the way out into the realm of galaxies, as we see here, light-travel time, giving you a sense of how far away we are. 
As we move out, the light from these distant galaxies have taken so long, we're essentially backing up into the past. 
We back so far up we're finally seeing a containment around us — the afterglow of the Big Bang. 
This is the WMAP microwave background that we see. 
We'll fly outside it here, just to see this sort of containment. 
If we were outside this, it would almost be meaningless, in the sense as before time. 
But this our containment of the visible universe. 
We know the universe is bigger than that which we can see. 
Coming back quickly, we see here the radio sphere that we jumped out of in the beginning, but these are positions, the latest positions of exoplanets that we've mapped, and our sun here, obviously, with our own solar system. 
What you're going to see — we're going to have to jump in here pretty quickly between several orders of magnitude to get down to where we see the solar system — these are the paths of Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 11 and Pioneer 10, the first four spacecraft to have left the solar system. 
Coming in closer, picking up Earth, orbit of the Moon, and we see the Earth. 
This map can be updated, and we can add in new data. 
I know Dr. Carolyn Porco is the camera P.I. 
for the Cassini mission. 
But here we see the complex trajectory of the Cassini mission color coded for different mission phases, ingeniously developed so that 45 encounters with the largest moon, Titan, which is larger that the planet Mercury, diverts the orbit into different parts of mission phase. 
This software allows us to come close and look at parts of this. 
This software can also be networked between domes. 
We have a growing user base of this, and we network domes. 
And we can network between domes and classrooms. 
We're actually sharing tours of the universe with the first sub-Saharan planetarium in Ghana as well as new libraries that have been built in the ghettos in Columbia and a high school in Cambodia. 
And the Cambodians have actually controlled the Hayden Planetarium from their high school. 
This is an image from Saturday, photographed by the Aqua satellite, but through the Uniview software. 
So you're seeing the edge of the Earth. 
This is Nepal. 
This is, in fact, right here is the valley of Lhasa, right here in Tibet. 
But we can see the haze from fires and so forth in the Ganges valley down below in India. 
This is Nepal and Tibet. 
And just in closing, I'd just like to say this beautiful world that we live on — here we see a bit of the snow that some of you may have had to brave in coming out — so I'd like to just say that what the world needs now is a sense of being able to look at ourselves in this much larger condition now and a much larger sense of what home is. 
Because our home is the universe, and we are the universe, essentially. 
We carry that in us. 
And to be able to see our context in this larger sense at all scales helps us all, I think, in understanding where we are and who we are in the universe. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Some of you have heard the story before, but, in fact, there's somebody in the audience who's never heard this story — in front of an audience — before, so I'm a little more nervous than I normally am telling this story. 
I used to be a photographer for many years. 
In 1978, I was working for Time magazine, and I was given a three-day assignment to photograph Amerasian children, children who had been fathered by American GIs all over Southeast Asia, and then abandoned — 40,000 children all over Asia. 
I had never heard the word Amerasian before. 
I spent a few days photographing children in different countries, and like a lot of photographers and a lot of journalists, I always hope that when my pictures were published, they might actually have an effect on a situation, instead of just documenting it. 
So, I was so disturbed by what I saw, and I was so unhappy with the article that ran afterwards, that I decided I would take six months off. 
I was 28 years old. 
I decided I would find six children in different countries, and actually go spend some time with the kids, and try to tell their story a little bit better than I thought I had done for Time magazine. 
In the course of doing the story, I was looking for children who hadn't been photographed before, and the Pearl Buck Foundation told me that they worked with a lot of Americans who were donating money to help some of these kids. 
And a man told me, who ran the Pearl Buck Foundation in Korea, that there was a young girl, who was 11 years old, being raised by her grandmother. 
And the grandmother had never let any Westerners ever see her. 
Every time any Westerners came to the village, she hid the girl. 
And of course, I was immediately intrigued. 
I saw photographs of her, and I thought I wanted to go. 
And the guy just told me, "" There's no way. This grandmother won't even — you know, there's no way she's ever going to let you meet this girl that's she's raising. "" I took a translator with me, and went to this village, found the grandmother, sat down with her. 
And to my astonishment, she agreed to let me photograph her granddaughter. 
And I was paying for this myself, so I asked the translator if it would be OK if I stayed for the week. 
I had a sleeping bag. 
The family had a small shed on the side of the house, so I said, "" Could I sleep in my sleeping bag in the evenings? "" And I just told the little girl, whose name was Hyun-Sook Lee, that if I ever did anything to embarrass her — she didn't speak a word of English, although she looked very American — she could just put up her hand and say, "" Stop, "" and I would stop taking pictures. 
And then, my translator left. 
So there I was, I couldn't speak a word of Korean, and this is the first night I met Hyun-Sook. 
Her mother was still alive. 
Her mother was not raising her, her grandmother was raising her. 
And what struck me immediately was how in love the two of these people were. 
The grandmother was incredibly fond, deeply in love with this little girl. 
They slept on the floor at night. 
The way they heat their homes in Korea is to put bricks under the floors, so the heat actually radiates from underneath the floor. 
Hyun-Sook was 11 years old. 
I had photographed, as I said, a lot of these kids. 
Hyun-Sook was in fact the fifth child that I found to photograph. 
And almost universally, amongst all the kids, they were really psychologically damaged by having been made fun of, ridiculed, picked on and been rejected. 
And he started yelling at me, and I said to the translator, "OK, tell him to calm down, what is he saying?" 
Gene and Gail know everyone in Atlanta — they're the most social couple imaginable. 

Now, extinction is a different kind of death. 
It's bigger. 
We didn't really realize that until 1914, when the last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died at the Cincinnati zoo. 
This had been the most abundant bird in the world that'd been in North America for six million years. 
Suddenly it wasn't here at all. 
Flocks that were a mile wide and 400 miles long used to darken the sun. 
Aldo Leopold said this was a biological storm, a feathered tempest. 
And indeed it was a keystone species that enriched the entire eastern deciduous forest, from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, from Canada down to the Gulf. 
But it went from five billion birds to zero in just a couple decades. 
What happened? 
Well, commercial hunting happened. 
These birds were hunted for meat that was sold by the ton, and it was easy to do because when those big flocks came down to the ground, they were so dense that hundreds of hunters and netters could show up and slaughter them by the tens of thousands. 
It was the cheapest source of protein in America. 
By the end of the century, there was nothing left but these beautiful skins in museum specimen drawers. 
There's an upside to the story. 
This made people realize that the same thing was about to happen to the American bison, and so these birds saved the buffalos. 
But a lot of other animals weren't saved. 
The Carolina parakeet was a parrot that lit up backyards everywhere. 
It was hunted to death for its feathers. 
There was a bird that people liked on the East Coast called the heath hen. 
It was loved. They tried to protect it. It died anyway. 
A local newspaper spelled out, "" There is no survivor, there is no future, there is no life to be recreated in this form ever again. "" There's a sense of deep tragedy that goes with these things, and it happened to lots of birds that people loved. 
It happened to lots of mammals. 
Another keystone species is a famous animal called the European aurochs. 
There was sort of a movie made about it recently. 
And the aurochs was like the bison. 
This was an animal that basically kept the forest mixed with grasslands across the entire Europe and Asian continent, from Spain to Korea. 
The documentation of this animal goes back to the Lascaux cave paintings. 
The extinctions still go on. 
There's an ibex in Spain called the bucardo. 
It went extinct in 2000. 
There was a marvelous animal, a marsupial wolf called the thylacine in Tasmania, south of Australia, called the Tasmanian tiger. 
It was hunted until there were just a few left to die in zoos. 
A little bit of film was shot. 
Sorrow, anger, mourning. 
Don't mourn. Organize. 
What if you could find out that, using the DNA in museum specimens, fossils maybe up to 200,000 years old could be used to bring species back, what would you do? Where would you start? 
Well, you'd start by finding out if the biotech is really there. 
I started with my wife, Ryan Phelan, who ran a biotech business called DNA Direct, and through her, one of her colleagues, George Church, one of the leading genetic engineers who turned out to be also obsessed with passenger pigeons and a lot of confidence that methodologies he was working on might actually do the deed. 
So he and Ryan organized and hosted a meeting at the Wyss Institute in Harvard bringing together specialists on passenger pigeons, conservation ornithologists, bioethicists, and fortunately passenger pigeon DNA had already been sequenced by a molecular biologist named Beth Shapiro. 
All she needed from those specimens at the Smithsonian was a little bit of toe pad tissue, because down in there is what is called ancient DNA. 
It's DNA which is pretty badly fragmented, but with good techniques now, you can basically reassemble the whole genome. 
Then the question is, can you reassemble, with that genome, the whole bird? 
George Church thinks you can. 
So in his book, "" Regenesis, "" which I recommend, he has a chapter on the science of bringing back extinct species, and he has a machine called the Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering machine. 
It's kind of like an evolution machine. 
You try combinations of genes that you write at the cell level and then in organs on a chip, and the ones that win, that you can then put into a living organism. It'll work. 
The precision of this, one of George's famous unreadable slides, nevertheless points out that there's a level of precision here right down to the individual base pair. 
The passenger pigeon has 1.3 billion base pairs in its genome. 
So what you're getting is the capability now of replacing one gene with another variation of that gene. 
It's called an allele. 
Well that's what happens in normal hybridization anyway. 
So this is a form of synthetic hybridization of the genome of an extinct species with the genome of its closest living relative. 
Now along the way, George points out that his technology, the technology of synthetic biology, is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. 
It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue. 
Okay, the closest living relative of the passenger pigeon is the band-tailed pigeon. They're abundant. There's some around here. 
Genetically, the band-tailed pigeon already is mostly living passenger pigeon. 
There's just some bits that are band-tailed pigeon. 
If you replace those bits with passenger pigeon bits, you've got the extinct bird back, cooing at you. 
Now, there's work to do. 
You have to figure out exactly what genes matter. 
So there's genes for the short tail in the band-tailed pigeon, genes for the long tail in the passenger pigeon, and so on with the red eye, peach-colored breast, flocking, and so on. 
Add them all up and the result won't be perfect. 
But it should be be perfect enough, because nature doesn't do perfect either. 
So this meeting in Boston led to three things. 
First off, Ryan and I decided to create a nonprofit called Revive and Restore that would push de-extinction generally and try to have it go in a responsible way, and we would push ahead with the passenger pigeon. 
Another direct result was a young grad student named Ben Novak, who had been obsessed with passenger pigeons since he was 14 and had also learned how to work with ancient DNA, himself sequenced the passenger pigeon, using money from his family and friends. 
We hired him full-time. 
Now, this photograph I took of him last year at the Smithsonian, he's looking down at Martha, the last passenger pigeon alive. 
So if he's successful, she won't be the last. 
The third result of the Boston meeting was the realization that there are scientists all over the world working on various forms of de-extinction, but they'd never met each other. 
And National Geographic got interested because National Geographic has the theory that the last century, discovery was basically finding things, and in this century, discovery is basically making things. 
De-extinction falls in that category. 
So they hosted and funded this meeting. And 35 scientists, they were conservation biologists and molecular biologists, basically meeting to see if they had work to do together. 
Some of these conservation biologists are pretty radical. 
There's three of them who are not just re-creating ancient species, they're recreating extinct ecosystems in northern Siberia, in the Netherlands, and in Hawaii. 
Henri, from the Netherlands, with a Dutch last name I won't try to pronounce, is working on the aurochs. 
The aurochs is the ancestor of all domestic cattle, and so basically its genome is alive, it's just unevenly distributed. 
So what they're doing is working with seven breeds of primitive, hardy-looking cattle like that Maremmana primitivo on the top there to rebuild, over time, with selective back-breeding, the aurochs. 
Now, re-wilding is moving faster in Korea than it is in America, and so the plan is, with these re-wilded areas all over Europe, they will introduce the aurochs to do its old job, its old ecological role, of clearing the somewhat barren, closed-canopy forest so that it has these biodiverse meadows in it. 
Another amazing story came from Alberto Fernández-Arias. 
Alberto worked with the bucardo in Spain. 
The last bucardo was a female named Celia who was still alive, but then they captured her, they got a little bit of tissue from her ear, they cryopreserved it in liquid nitrogen, released her back into the wild, but a few months later, she was found dead under a fallen tree. 
They took the DNA from that ear, they planted it as a cloned egg in a goat, the pregnancy came to term, and a live baby bucardo was born. 
It was the first de-extinction in history. 
(Applause) It was short-lived. 
Sometimes interspecies clones have respiration problems. 
This one had a malformed lung and died after 10 minutes, but Alberto was confident that cloning has moved along well since then, and this will move ahead, and eventually there will be a population of bucardos back in the mountains in northern Spain. 
Cryopreservation pioneer of great depth is Oliver Ryder. 
At the San Diego zoo, his frozen zoo has collected the tissues from over 1,000 species over the last 35 years. 
Now, when it's frozen that deep, minus 196 degrees Celsius, the cells are intact and the DNA is intact. 
They're basically viable cells, so someone like Bob Lanza at Advanced Cell Technology took some of that tissue from an endangered animal called the Javan banteng, put it in a cow, the cow went to term, and what was born was a live, healthy baby Javan banteng, who thrived and is still alive. 
The most exciting thing for Bob Lanza is the ability now to take any kind of cell with induced pluripotent stem cells and turn it into germ cells, like sperm and eggs. 
So now we go to Mike McGrew who is a scientist at Roslin Institute in Scotland, and Mike's doing miracles with birds. 
So he'll take, say, falcon skin cells, fibroblast, turn it into induced pluripotent stem cells. 
Since it's so pluripotent, it can become germ plasm. 
He then has a way to put the germ plasm into the embryo of a chicken egg so that that chicken will have, basically, the gonads of a falcon. 
You get a male and a female each of those, and out of them comes falcons. 
(Laughter) Real falcons out of slightly doctored chickens. 
Ben Novak was the youngest scientist at the meeting. 
He showed how all of this can be put together. 
The sequence of events: he'll put together the genomes of the band-tailed pigeon and the passenger pigeon, he'll take the techniques of George Church and get passenger pigeon DNA, the techniques of Robert Lanza and Michael McGrew, get that DNA into chicken gonads, and out of the chicken gonads get passenger pigeon eggs, squabs, and now you're getting a population of passenger pigeons. 
It does raise the question of, they're not going to have passenger pigeon parents to teach them how to be a passenger pigeon. 
So what do you do about that? 
Well birds are pretty hard-wired, as it happens, so most of that is already in their DNA, but to supplement it, part of Ben's idea is to use homing pigeons to help train the young passenger pigeons how to flock and how to find their way to their old nesting grounds and feeding grounds. 
There were some conservationists, really famous conservationists like Stanley Temple, who is one of the founders of conservation biology, and Kate Jones from the IUCN, which does the Red List. 
They're excited about all this, but they're also concerned that it might be competitive with the extremely important efforts to protect endangered species that are still alive, that haven't gone extinct yet. 
You see, you want to work on protecting the animals out there. 
You want to work on getting the market for ivory in Asia down so you're not using 25,000 elephants a year. 
But at the same time, conservation biologists are realizing that bad news bums people out. 
And so the Red List is really important, keep track of what's endangered and critically endangered, and so on. 
But they're about to create what they call a Green List, and the Green List will have species that are doing fine, thank you, species that were endangered, like the bald eagle, but they're much better off now, thanks to everybody's good work, and protected areas around the world that are very, very well managed. 
So basically, they're learning how to build on good news. 
And they see reviving extinct species as the kind of good news you might be able to build on. 
Here's a couple related examples. 
Captive breeding will be a major part of bringing back these species. 
The California condor was down to 22 birds in 1987. 
Everybody thought is was finished. 
Thanks to captive breeding at the San Diego Zoo, there's 405 of them now, 226 are out in the wild. 
That technology will be used on de-extincted animals. 
Another success story is the mountain gorilla in Central Africa. 
In 1981, Dian Fossey was sure they were going extinct. 
There were just 254 left. 
Now there are 880. They're increasing in population by three percent a year. 
The secret is, they have an eco-tourism program, which is absolutely brilliant. 
So this photograph was taken last month by Ryan with an iPhone. 
That's how comfortable these wild gorillas are with visitors. 
Another interesting project, though it's going to need some help, is the northern white rhinoceros. 
There's no breeding pairs left. 
But this is the kind of thing that a wide variety of DNA for this animal is available in the frozen zoo. 
A bit of cloning, you can get them back. 
So where do we go from here? 
These have been private meetings so far. 
I think it's time for the subject to go public. 
What do people think about it? 
You know, do you want extinct species back? 
Do you want extinct species back? 
(Applause) Tinker Bell is going to come fluttering down. 
It is a Tinker Bell moment, because what are people excited about with this? 
What are they concerned about? 
We're also going to push ahead with the passenger pigeon. 
So Ben Novak, even as we speak, is joining the group that Beth Shapiro has at UC Santa Cruz. 
They're going to work on the genomes of the passenger pigeon and the band-tailed pigeon. 
As that data matures, they'll send it to George Church, who will work his magic, get passenger pigeon DNA out of that. 
We'll get help from Bob Lanza and Mike McGrew to get that into germ plasm that can go into chickens that can produce passenger pigeon squabs that can be raised by band-tailed pigeon parents, and then from then on, it's passenger pigeons all the way, maybe for the next six million years. 
You can do the same thing, as the costs come down, for the Carolina parakeet, for the great auk, for the heath hen, for the ivory-billed woodpecker, for the Eskimo curlew, for the Caribbean monk seal, for the woolly mammoth. 
Because the fact is, humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. 
We have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage. 
Most of that we'll do by expanding and protecting wildlands, by expanding and protecting the populations of endangered species. 
But some species that we killed off totally we could consider bringing back to a world that misses them. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. 
I've got a question. 
So, this is an emotional topic. Some people stand. 
I suspect there are some people out there sitting, kind of asking tormented questions, almost, about, well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute, there's something wrong with mankind interfering in nature in this way. 
There's going to be unintended consequences. 
You're going to uncork some sort of Pandora's box of who-knows-what. Do they have a point? 
Stewart Brand: Well, the earlier point is we interfered in a big way by making these animals go extinct, and many of them were keystone species, and we changed the whole ecosystem they were in by letting them go. 
Now, there's the shifting baseline problem, which is, so when these things come back, they might replace some birds that are there that people really know and love. 
I think that's, you know, part of how it'll work. 
This is a long, slow process — One of the things I like about it, it's multi-generation. 
We will get woolly mammoths back. 
CA: Well it feels like both the conversation and the potential here are pretty thrilling. 
Thank you so much for presenting. SB: Thank you. 
CA: Thank you. (Applause) 

When we think about prejudice and bias, we tend to think about stupid and evil people doing stupid and evil things. 
And this idea is nicely summarized by the British critic William Hazlitt, who wrote, "" Prejudice is the child of ignorance. "" I want to try to convince you here that this is mistaken. I want to try to convince you 
that prejudice and bias are natural, they're often rational, and they're often even moral, and I think that once we understand this, we're in a better position to make sense of them when they go wrong, when they have horrible consequences, and we're in a better position to know what to do when this happens. 
So, start with stereotypes. You look at me, you know my name, you know certain facts about me, and you could make certain judgments. 
You could make guesses about my ethnicity, my political affiliation, my religious beliefs. 
And the thing is, these judgments tend to be accurate. 
We're very good at this sort of thing. 
And we're very good at this sort of thing because our ability to stereotype people is not some sort of arbitrary quirk of the mind, but rather it's a specific instance of a more general process, which is that we have experience with things and people in the world that fall into categories, and we can use our experience to make generalizations about novel instances of these categories. 
So everybody here has a lot of experience with chairs and apples and dogs, and based on this, you could see unfamiliar examples and you could guess, you could sit on the chair, you could eat the apple, the dog will bark. 
Now we might be wrong. 
The chair could collapse if you sit on it, the apple might be poison, the dog might not bark, and in fact, this is my dog Tessie, who doesn't bark. 
But for the most part, we're good at this. 
For the most part, we make good guesses both in the social domain and the non-social domain, and if we weren't able to do so, if we weren't able to make guesses about new instances that we encounter, we wouldn't survive. 
And in fact, Hazlitt later on in his wonderful essay concedes this. 
He writes, "" Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way my across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life. "" Or take bias. 
Now sometimes, we break the world up into us versus them, into in-group versus out-group, and sometimes when we do this, we know we're doing something wrong, and we're kind of ashamed of it. 
But other times we're proud of it. 
We openly acknowledge it. 
And my favorite example of this is a question that came from the audience in a Republican debate prior to the last election. 
(Video) Anderson Cooper: Gets to your question, the question in the hall, on foreign aid? Yes, ma'am. 
Woman: The American people are suffering in our country right now. 
Why do we continue to send foreign aid to other countries when we need all the help we can get for ourselves? 
AC: Governor Perry, what about that? 
(Applause) Rick Perry: Absolutely, I think it's — Paul Bloom: Each of the people onstage agreed with the premise of her question, which is as Americans, we should care more about Americans than about other people. 
And in fact, in general, people are often swayed by feelings of solidarity, loyalty, pride, patriotism, towards their country or towards their ethnic group. 
Regardless of your politics, many people feel proud to be American, and they favor Americans over other countries. 
Residents of other countries feel the same about their nation, and we feel the same about our ethnicities. 
Now some of you may reject this. 
Some of you may be so cosmopolitan that you think that ethnicity and nationality should hold no moral sway. 
But even you sophisticates accept that there should be some pull towards the in-group in the domain of friends and family, of people you're close to, and so even you make a distinction between us versus them. 
Now, this distinction is natural enough and often moral enough, but it can go awry, and this was part of the research of the great social psychologist Henri Tajfel. 
Tajfel was born in Poland in 1919. 
He left to go to university in France, because as a Jew, he couldn't go to university in Poland, and then he enlisted in the French military in World War II. 
He was captured and ended up in a prisoner of war camp, and it was a terrifying time for him, because if it was discovered that he was a Jew, he could have been moved to a concentration camp, where he most likely would not have survived. 
And in fact, when the war ended and he was released, most of his friends and family were dead. 
He got involved in different pursuits. 
He helped out the war orphans. 
But he had a long-lasting interest in the science of prejudice, and so when a prestigious British scholarship on stereotypes opened up, he applied for it, and he won it, and then he began this amazing career. 
And what started his career is an insight that the way most people were thinking about the Holocaust was wrong. 
Many people, most people at the time, viewed the Holocaust as sort of representing some tragic flaw on the part of the Germans, some genetic taint, some authoritarian personality. 
And Tajfel rejected this. 
Tajfel said what we see in the Holocaust is just an exaggeration of normal psychological processes that exist in every one of us. 
And to explore this, he did a series of classic studies with British adolescents. 
And in one of his studies, what he did was he asked the British adolescents all sorts of questions, and then based on their answers, he said, "" I've looked at your answers, and based on the answers, I have determined that you are either "" — he told half of them — "" a Kandinsky lover, you love the work of Kandinsky, or a Klee lover, you love the work of Klee. "" It was entirely bogus. 
Their answers had nothing to do with Kandinsky or Klee. 
They probably hadn't heard of the artists. 
He just arbitrarily divided them up. 
But what he found was, these categories mattered, so when he later gave the subjects money, they would prefer to give the money to members of their own group than members of the other group. 
Worse, they were actually most interested in establishing a difference between their group and other groups, so they would give up money for their own group if by doing so they could give the other group even less. 
This bias seems to show up very early. 
So my colleague and wife, Karen Wynn, at Yale has done a series of studies with babies where she exposes babies to puppets, and the puppets have certain food preferences. 
So one of the puppets might like green beans. 
The other puppet might like graham crackers. 
They test the babies own food preferences, and babies typically prefer the graham crackers. 
But the question is, does this matter to babies in how they treat the puppets? And it matters a lot. 
They tend to prefer the puppet who has the same food tastes that they have, and worse, they actually prefer puppets who punish the puppet with the different food taste. 
(Laughter) We see this sort of in-group, out-group psychology all the time. 
We see it in political clashes within groups with different ideologies. 
We see it in its extreme in cases of war, where the out-group isn't merely given less, but dehumanized, as in the Nazi perspective of Jews as vermin or lice, or the American perspective of Japanese as rats. 
Stereotypes can also go awry. 
So often they're rational and useful, but sometimes they're irrational, they give the wrong answers, and other times they lead to plainly immoral consequences. 
And the case that's been most studied is the case of race. 
There was a fascinating study prior to the 2008 election where social psychologists looked at the extent to which the candidates were associated with America, as in an unconscious association with the American flag. 
And in one of their studies they compared Obama and McCain, and they found McCain is thought of as more American than Obama, and to some extent, people aren't that surprised by hearing that. 
McCain is a celebrated war hero, and many people would explicitly say he has more of an American story than Obama. 
But they also compared Obama to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and they found that Blair was also thought of as more American than Obama, even though subjects explicitly understood that he's not American at all. 
But they were responding, of course, to the color of his skin. 
These stereotypes and biases have real-world consequences, both subtle and very important. 
In one recent study, researchers put ads on eBay for the sale of baseball cards. 
Some of them were held by white hands, others by black hands. 
They were the same baseball cards. 
The ones held by black hands got substantially smaller bids than the ones held by white hands. 
In research done at Stanford, psychologists explored the case of people sentenced for the murder of a white person. 
It turns out, holding everything else constant, you are considerably more likely to be executed if you look like the man on the right than the man on the left, and this is in large part because the man on the right looks more prototypically black, more prototypically African-American, and this apparently influences people's decisions over what to do about him. 
So now that we know about this, how do we combat it? 
And there are different avenues. 
One avenue is to appeal to people's emotional responses, to appeal to people's empathy, and we often do that through stories. 
So if you are a liberal parent and you want to encourage your children to believe in the merits of nontraditional families, you might give them a book like this. ["" Heather Has Two Mommies ""] If you are conservative and have a different attitude, you might give them a book like this. 
(Laughter) ["" Help! Mom! There Are Liberals under My Bed! ""] But in general, stories can turn anonymous strangers into people who matter, and the idea that we care about people when we focus on them as individuals is an idea which has shown up across history. 
So Stalin apocryphally said, "" A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic, "" and Mother Teresa said, "" If I look at the mass, I will never act. 
If I look at the one, I will. "" Psychologists have explored this. 
For instance, in one study, people were given a list of facts about a crisis, and it was seen how much they would donate to solve this crisis, and another group was given no facts at all but they were told of an individual and given a name and given a face, and it turns out that they gave far more. 
None of this I think is a secret to the people who are engaged in charity work. 
People don't tend to deluge people with facts and statistics. 
Rather, you show them faces, you show them people. 
It's possible that by extending our sympathies to an individual, they can spread to the group that the individual belongs to. 
This is Harriet Beecher Stowe. 
The story, perhaps apocryphal, is that President Lincoln invited her to the White House in the middle of the Civil War and said to her, "So you're the little lady who started this great war." 
And he was talking about "" Uncle Tom's Cabin. "" "" Uncle Tom's Cabin "" is not a great book of philosophy or of theology or perhaps not even literature, but it does a great job of getting people to put themselves in the shoes of people they wouldn't otherwise be in the shoes of, put themselves in the shoes of slaves. 
And that could well have been a catalyst for great social change. 
More recently, looking at America in the last several decades, there's some reason to believe that shows like "" The Cosby Show "" radically changed American attitudes towards African-Americans, while shows like "" Will and Grace "" and "" Modern Family "" changed American attitudes towards gay men and women. 
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the major catalyst in America for moral change has been a situation comedy. 
But it's not all emotions, and I want to end by appealing to the power of reason. 
At some point in his wonderful book "The Better Angels of Our Nature," Steven Pinker says, the Old Testament says love thy neighbor, and the New Testament says love thy enemy, but I don't love either one of them, not really, but I don't want to kill them. 
I know I have obligations to them, but my moral feelings to them, my moral beliefs about how I should behave towards them, aren't grounded in love. 
What they're grounded in is the understanding of human rights, a belief that their life is as valuable to them as my life is to me, and to support this, he tells a story by the great philosopher Adam Smith, and I want to tell this story too, though I'm going to modify it a little bit for modern times. 
So Adam Smith starts by asking you to imagine the death of thousands of people, and imagine that the thousands of people are in a country you are not familiar with. 
It could be China or India or a country in Africa. 
And Smith says, how would you respond? 
And you would say, well that's too bad, and you'd go on to the rest of your life. 
If you were to open up The New York Times online or something, and discover this, and in fact this happens to us all the time, we go about our lives. 
But imagine instead, Smith says, you were to learn that tomorrow you were to have your little finger chopped off. 
Smith says, that would matter a lot. 
You would not sleep that night wondering about that. 
So this raises the question: Would you sacrifice thousands of lives to save your little finger? 
Now answer this in the privacy of your own head, but Smith says, absolutely not, what a horrid thought. 
And so this raises the question, and so, as Smith puts it, "" When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble? "" And Smith's answer is, "" It is reason, principle, conscience. 
[This] calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it. "" And this last part is what is often described as the principle of impartiality. 
And this principle of impartiality manifests itself in all of the world's religions, in all of the different versions of the golden rule, and in all of the world's moral philosophies, which differ in many ways but share the presupposition that we should judge morality from sort of an impartial point of view. 
The best articulation of this view is actually, for me, it's not from a theologian or from a philosopher, but from Humphrey Bogart at the end of "" Casablanca. "" So, spoiler alert, he's telling his lover that they have to separate for the more general good, and he says to her, and I won't do the accent, but he says to her, "" It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. "" Our reason could cause us to override our passions. 
Our reason could motivate us to extend our empathy, could motivate us to write a book like "" Uncle Tom's Cabin, "" or read a book like "" Uncle Tom's Cabin, "" and our reason can motivate us to create customs and taboos and laws that will constrain us from acting upon our impulses when, as rational beings, we feel we should be constrained. 
This is what a constitution is. 
A constitution is something which was set up in the past that applies now in the present, and what it says is, no matter how much we might to reelect a popular president for a third term, no matter how much white Americans might choose to feel that they want to reinstate the institution of slavery, we can't. 
We have bound ourselves. 
And we bind ourselves in other ways as well. 
We know that when it comes to choosing somebody for a job, for an award, we are strongly biased by their race, we are biased by their gender, we are biased by how attractive they are, and sometimes we might say, "" Well fine, that's the way it should be. "" But other times we say, "" This is wrong. "" And so to combat this, we don't just try harder, but rather what we do is we set up situations where these other sources of information can't bias us, which is why many orchestras audition musicians behind screens, so the only information they have 
is the information they believe should matter. 
I think prejudice and bias illustrate a fundamental duality of human nature. 
We have gut feelings, instincts, emotions, and they affect our judgments and our actions for good and for evil, but we are also capable of rational deliberation and intelligent planning, and we can use these to, in some cases, accelerate and nourish our emotions, and in other cases staunch them. 
And it's in this way that reason helps us create a better world. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

In 2007, I became the attorney general of the state of New Jersey. 
Before that, I'd been a criminal prosecutor, first in the Manhattan district attorney's office, and then at the United States Department of Justice. 
But when I became the attorney general, two things happened that changed the way I see criminal justice. 
The first is that I asked what I thought were really basic questions. 
I wanted to understand who we were arresting, who we were charging, and who we were putting in our nation's jails and prisons. 
I also wanted to understand if we were making decisions in a way that made us safer. 
And I couldn't get this information out. 
It turned out that most big criminal justice agencies like my own didn't track the things that matter. 
So after about a month of being incredibly frustrated, I walked down into a conference room that was filled with detectives and stacks and stacks of case files, and the detectives were sitting there with yellow legal pads taking notes. 
They were trying to get the information I was looking for by going through case by case for the past five years. 
And as you can imagine, when we finally got the results, they weren't good. 
It turned out that we were doing a lot of low-level drug cases on the streets just around the corner from our office in Trenton. 
The second thing that happened is that I spent the day in the Camden, New Jersey police department. 
Now, at that time, Camden, New Jersey, was the most dangerous city in America. 
I ran the Camden Police Department because of that. 
I spent the day in the police department, and I was taken into a room with senior police officials, all of whom were working hard and trying very hard to reduce crime in Camden. 
And what I saw in that room, as we talked about how to reduce crime, were a series of officers with a lot of little yellow sticky notes. 
And they would take a yellow sticky and they would write something on it and they would put it up on a board. 
And one of them said, "" We had a robbery two weeks ago. 
We have no suspects. "" And another said, "" We had a shooting in this neighborhood last week. We have no suspects. "" We weren't using data-driven policing. 
We were essentially trying to fight crime with yellow Post-it notes. 
Now, both of these things made me realize fundamentally that we were failing. 
We didn't even know who was in our criminal justice system, we didn't have any data about the things that mattered, and we didn't share data or use analytics or tools to help us make better decisions and to reduce crime. 
And for the first time, I started to think about how we made decisions. 
When I was an assistant D.A., and when I was a federal prosecutor, I looked at the cases in front of me, and I generally made decisions based on my instinct and my experience. 
When I became attorney general, I could look at the system as a whole, and what surprised me is that I found that that was exactly how we were doing it across the entire system — in police departments, in prosecutors's offices, in courts and in jails. 
And what I learned very quickly is that we weren't doing a good job. 
So I wanted to do things differently. 
I wanted to introduce data and analytics and rigorous statistical analysis into our work. 
In short, I wanted to moneyball criminal justice. 
Now, moneyball, as many of you know, is what the Oakland A's did, where they used smart data and statistics to figure out how to pick players that would help them win games, and they went from a system that was based on baseball scouts who used to go out and watch players and use their instinct and experience, the scouts' instincts and experience, to pick players, from one to use smart data and rigorous statistical analysis to figure out how to pick players that would help them win games. 
It worked for the Oakland A's, and it worked in the state of New Jersey. 
We took Camden off the top of the list as the most dangerous city in America. 
We reduced murders there by 41 percent, which actually means 37 lives were saved. 
And we reduced all crime in the city by 26 percent. 
We also changed the way we did criminal prosecutions. 
So we went from doing low-level drug crimes that were outside our building to doing cases of statewide importance, on things like reducing violence with the most violent offenders, prosecuting street gangs, gun and drug trafficking, and political corruption. 
And all of this matters greatly, because public safety to me is the most important function of government. 
If we're not safe, we can't be educated, we can't be healthy, we can't do any of the other things we want to do in our lives. 
And we live in a country today where we face serious criminal justice problems. 
We have 12 million arrests every single year. 
The vast majority of those arrests are for low-level crimes, like misdemeanors, 70 to 80 percent. 
Less than five percent of all arrests are for violent crime. 
Yet we spend 75 billion, that's b for billion, dollars a year on state and local corrections costs. 
Right now, today, we have 2.3 million people in our jails and prisons. 
And we face unbelievable public safety challenges because we have a situation in which two thirds of the people in our jails are there waiting for trial. 
They haven't yet been convicted of a crime. 
They're just waiting for their day in court. 
And 67 percent of people come back. 
Our recidivism rate is amongst the highest in the world. 
Almost seven in 10 people who are released from prison will be rearrested in a constant cycle of crime and incarceration. 
So when I started my job at the Arnold Foundation, I came back to looking at a lot of these questions, and I came back to thinking about how we had used data and analytics to transform the way we did criminal justice in New Jersey. 
And when I look at the criminal justice system in the United States today, I feel the exact same way that I did about the state of New Jersey when I started there, which is that we absolutely have to do better, and I know that we can do better. 
So I decided to focus on using data and analytics to help make the most critical decision in public safety, and that decision is the determination of whether, when someone has been arrested, whether they pose a risk to public safety and should be detained, or whether they don't pose a risk to public safety and should be released. 
Everything that happens in criminal cases comes out of this one decision. 
It impacts everything. 
It impacts sentencing. 
It impacts whether someone gets drug treatment. 
It impacts crime and violence. 
And when I talk to judges around the United States, which I do all the time now, they all say the same thing, which is that we put dangerous people in jail, and we let non-dangerous, nonviolent people out. 
They mean it and they believe it. 
But when you start to look at the data, which, by the way, the judges don't have, when we start to look at the data, what we find time and time again, is that this isn't the case. 
We find low-risk offenders, which makes up 50 percent of our entire criminal justice population, we find that they're in jail. 
Take Leslie Chew, who was a Texas man who stole four blankets on a cold winter night. 
He was arrested, and he was kept in jail on 3,500 dollars bail, an amount that he could not afford to pay. 
And he stayed in jail for eight months until his case came up for trial, at a cost to taxpayers of more than 9,000 dollars. 
And at the other end of the spectrum, we're doing an equally terrible job. 
The people who we find are the highest-risk offenders, the people who we think have the highest likelihood of committing a new crime if they're released, we see nationally that 50 percent of those people are being released. 
The reason for this is the way we make decisions. 
Judges have the best intentions when they make these decisions about risk, but they're making them subjectively. 
They're like the baseball scouts 20 years ago who were using their instinct and their experience to try to decide what risk someone poses. 
They're being subjective, and we know what happens with subjective decision making, which is that we are often wrong. 
What we need in this space are strong data and analytics. 
What I decided to look for was a strong data and analytic risk assessment tool, something that would let judges actually understand with a scientific and objective way what the risk was that was posed by someone in front of them. 
I looked all over the country, and I found that between five and 10 percent of all U.S. jurisdictions actually use any type of risk assessment tool, and when I looked at these tools, I quickly realized why. 
They were unbelievably expensive to administer, they were time-consuming, they were limited to the local jurisdiction in which they'd been created. 
So basically, they couldn't be scaled or transferred to other places. 
So I went out and built a phenomenal team of data scientists and researchers and statisticians to build a universal risk assessment tool, so that every single judge in the United States of America can have an objective, scientific measure of risk. 
In the tool that we've built, what we did was we collected 1.5 million cases from all around the United States, from cities, from counties, from every single state in the country, the federal districts. 
And with those 1.5 million cases, which is the largest data set on pretrial in the United States today, we were able to basically find that there were 900-plus risk factors that we could look at to try to figure out what mattered most. 
And we found that there were nine specific things that mattered all across the country and that were the most highly predictive of risk. 
And so we built a universal risk assessment tool. 
And it looks like this. 
As you'll see, we put some information in, but most of it is incredibly simple, it's easy to use, it focuses on things like the defendant's prior convictions, whether they've been sentenced to incarceration, whether they've engaged in violence before, whether they've even failed to come back to court. 
And with this tool, we can predict three things. 
First, whether or not someone will commit a new crime if they're released. 
Second, for the first time, and I think this is incredibly important, we can predict whether someone will commit an act of violence if they're released. 
And that's the single most important thing that judges say when you talk to them. 
And third, we can predict whether someone will come back to court. 
And every single judge in the United States of America can use it, because it's been created on a universal data set. 
What judges see if they run the risk assessment tool is this — it's a dashboard. 
At the top, you see the New Criminal Activity Score, six of course being the highest, and then in the middle you see, "" Elevated risk of violence. "" What that says is that this person is someone who has an elevated risk of violence that the judge should look twice at. 
And then, towards the bottom, you see the Failure to Appear Score, which again is the likelihood that someone will come back to court. 
Now I want to say something really important. 
It's not that I think we should be eliminating the judge's instinct and experience from this process. 
I don't. 
I actually believe the problem that we see and the reason that we have these incredible system errors, where we're incarcerating low-level, nonviolent people and we're releasing high-risk, dangerous people, is that we don't have an objective measure of risk. 
But what I believe should happen is that we should take that data-driven risk assessment and combine that with the judge's instinct and experience to lead us to better decision making. 
The tool went statewide in Kentucky on July 1, and we're about to go up in a number of other U.S. jurisdictions. 
Our goal, quite simply, is that every single judge in the United States will use a data-driven risk tool within the next five years. 
We're now working on risk tools for prosecutors and for police officers as well, to try to take a system that runs today in America the same way it did 50 years ago, based on instinct and experience, and make it into one that runs on data and analytics. 
Now, the great news about all this, and we have a ton of work left to do, and we have a lot of culture to change, but the great news about all of it is that we know it works. 
It's why Google is Google, and it's why all these baseball teams use moneyball to win games. 
The great news for us as well is that it's the way that we can transform the American criminal justice system. 
It's how we can make our streets safer, we can reduce our prison costs, and we can make our system much fairer and more just. 
Some people call it data science. 
I call it moneyballing criminal justice. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Delighted to be here and to talk to you about a subject dear to my heart, which is beauty. 
I do the philosophy of art, aesthetics, actually, for a living. 
I try to figure out intellectually, philosophically, psychologically, what the experience of beauty is, what sensibly can be said about it and how people go off the rails in trying to understand it. 
Now this is an extremely complicated subject, in part because the things that we call beautiful are so different. 
I mean just think of the sheer variety — a baby's face, Berlioz's "" Harold in Italy, "" movies like "" The Wizard of Oz "" or the plays of Chekhov, a central California landscape, a Hokusai view of Mt. Fuji, "Der Rosenkavalier," a stunning match-winning goal in a World Cup soccer match, Van Gogh's "" Starry Night, "" a Jane Austen novel, Fred Astaire dancing across the screen. 
This brief list includes human beings, natural landforms, works of art and skilled human actions. 
An account that explains the presence of beauty in everything on this list is not going to be easy. 
I can, however, give you at least a taste of what I regard as the most powerful theory of beauty we yet have. 
And we get it not from a philosopher of art, not from a postmodern art theorist or a bigwig art critic. 
No, this theory comes from an expert on barnacles and worms and pigeon breeding, and you know who I mean: Charles Darwin. 
Of course, a lot of people think they already know the proper answer to the question, "What is beauty?" 
It's in the eye of the beholder. 
It's whatever moves you personally. 
Or, as some people, especially academics prefer, beauty is in the culturally conditioned eye of the beholder. 
People agree that paintings or movies or music are beautiful because their cultures determine a uniformity of aesthetic taste. 
Taste for both natural beauty and for the arts travel across cultures with great ease. 
Beethoven is adored in Japan. 
Peruvians love Japanese woodblock prints. 
Inca sculptures are regarded as treasures in British museums, while Shakespeare is translated into every major language of the Earth. 
Or just think about American jazz or American movies — they go everywhere. 
There are many differences among the arts, but there are also universal, cross-cultural aesthetic pleasures and values. 
How can we explain this universality? 
The best answer lies in trying to reconstruct a Darwinian evolutionary history of our artistic and aesthetic tastes. 
We need to reverse-engineer our present artistic tastes and preferences and explain how they came to be engraved in our minds by the actions of both our prehistoric, largely pleistocene environments, where we became fully human, but also by the social situations in which we evolved. 
This reverse engineering can also enlist help from the human record preserved in prehistory. 
I mean fossils, cave paintings and so forth. 
And it should take into account what we know of the aesthetic interests of isolated hunter-gatherer bands that survived into the 19th and the 20th centuries. 
Now, I personally have no doubt whatsoever that the experience of beauty, with its emotional intensity and pleasure, belongs to our evolved human psychology. 
The experience of beauty is one component in a whole series of Darwinian adaptations. 
Beauty is an adaptive effect, which we extend and intensify in the creation and enjoyment of works of art and entertainment. 
As many of you will know, evolution operates by two main primary mechanisms. 
The first of these is natural selection — that's random mutation and selective retention — along with our basic anatomy and physiology — the evolution of the pancreas or the eye or the fingernails. 
Natural selection also explains many basic revulsions, such as the horrid smell of rotting meat, or fears, such as the fear of snakes or standing close to the edge of a cliff. 
Natural selection also explains pleasures — sexual pleasure, our liking for sweet, fat and proteins, which in turn explains a lot of popular foods, from ripe fruits through chocolate malts and barbecued ribs. 
The other great principle of evolution is sexual selection, and it operates very differently. 
The peacock's magnificent tail is the most famous example of this. 
It did not evolve for natural survival. 
In fact, it goes against natural survival. 
No, the peacock's tail results from the mating choices made by peahens. 
It's quite a familiar story. 
It's women who actually push history forward. 
Darwin himself, by the way, had no doubts that the peacock's tail was beautiful in the eyes of the peahen. 
He actually used that word. 
Now, keeping these ideas firmly in mind, we can say that the experience of beauty is one of the ways that evolution has of arousing and sustaining interest or fascination, even obsession, in order to encourage us toward making the most adaptive decisions for survival and reproduction. 
Beauty is nature's way of acting at a distance, so to speak. 
I mean, you can't expect to eat an adaptively beneficial landscape. 
It would hardly do to eat your baby or your lover. 
So evolution's trick is to make them beautiful, to have them exert a kind of magnetism to give you the pleasure of simply looking at them. 
Consider briefly an important source of aesthetic pleasure, the magnetic pull of beautiful landscapes. 
People in very different cultures all over the world tend to like a particular kind of landscape, a landscape that just happens to be similar to the pleistocene savannas where we evolved. 
This landscape shows up today on calendars, on postcards, in the design of golf courses and public parks and in gold-framed pictures that hang in living rooms from New York to New Zealand. 
It's a kind of Hudson River school landscape featuring open spaces of low grasses interspersed with copses of trees. 
The trees, by the way, are often preferred if they fork near the ground, that is to say, if they're trees you could scramble up if you were in a tight fix. 
The landscape shows the presence of water directly in view, or evidence of water in a bluish distance, indications of animal or bird life as well as diverse greenery and finally — get this — a path or a road, perhaps a riverbank or a shoreline, that extends into the distance, almost inviting you to follow it. 
This landscape type is regarded as beautiful, even by people in countries that don't have it. 
The ideal savanna landscape is one of the clearest examples where human beings everywhere find beauty in similar visual experience. 
But, someone might argue, that's natural beauty. 
How about artistic beauty? 
Isn't that exhaustively cultural? 
No, I don't think it is. 
And once again, I'd like to look back to prehistory to say something about it. 
It is widely assumed that the earliest human artworks are the stupendously skillful cave paintings that we all know from Lascaux and Chauvet. 
Chauvet caves are about 32,000 years old, along with a few small, realistic sculptures of women and animals from the same period. 
But artistic and decorative skills are actually much older than that. 
Beautiful shell necklaces that look like something you'd see at an arts and crafts fair, as well as ochre body paint, have been found from around 100,000 years ago. 
But the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts are older even than this. 
I have in mind the so-called Acheulian hand axes. 
The oldest stone tools are choppers from the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa. 
They go back about two-and-a-half-million years. 
These crude tools were around for thousands of centuries, until around 1.4 million years ago when Homo erectus started shaping single, thin stone blades, sometimes rounded ovals, but often in what are to our eyes an arresting, symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop form. 
These Acheulian hand axes — they're named after St. Acheul in France, where finds were made in 19th century — have been unearthed in their thousands, scattered across Asia, Europe and Africa, almost everywhere Homo erectus and Homo ergaster roamed. 
Now, the sheer numbers of these hand axes shows that they can't have been made for butchering animals. 
And the plot really thickens when you realize that, unlike other pleistocene tools, the hand axes often exhibit no evidence of wear on their delicate blade edges. 
And some, in any event, are too big to use for butchery. 
Their symmetry, their attractive materials and, above all, their meticulous workmanship are simply quite beautiful to our eyes, even today. 
So what were these ancient — I mean, they're ancient, they're foreign, but they're at the same time somehow familiar. 
What were these artifacts for? 
The best available answer is that they were literally the earliest known works of art, practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects, contemplated both for their elegant shape and their virtuoso craftsmanship. 
Hand axes mark an evolutionary advance in human history — tools fashioned to function as what Darwinians call "" fitness signals "" — that is to say, displays that are performances like the peacock's tail, except that, unlike hair and feathers, the hand axes are consciously cleverly crafted. 
Competently made hand axes indicated desirable personal qualities — intelligence, fine motor control, planning ability, conscientiousness and sometimes access to rare materials. 
Over tens of thousands of generations, such skills increased the status of those who displayed them and gained a reproductive advantage over the less capable. 
You know, it's an old line, but it has been shown to work — "Why don't you come up to my cave, so I can show you my hand axes?" 
(Laughter) Except, of course, what's interesting about this is that we can't be sure how that idea was conveyed, because the Homo erectus that made these objects did not have language. 
It's hard to grasp, but it's an incredible fact. 
This object was made by a hominid ancestor, Homo erectus or Homo ergaster, between 50,000 and 100,000 years before language. 
Stretching over a million years, the hand axe tradition is the longest artistic tradition in human and proto-human history. 
By the end of the hand axe epic, Homo sapiens — as they were then called, finally — were doubtless finding new ways to amuse and amaze each other by, who knows, telling jokes, storytelling, dancing, or hairstyling. 
Yes, hairstyling — I insist on that. 
For us moderns, virtuoso technique is used to create imaginary worlds in fiction and in movies, to express intense emotions with music, painting and dance. 
But still, one fundamental trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings: the beauty we find in skilled performances. 
From Lascaux to the Louvre to Carnegie Hall, human beings have a permanent innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts. 
We find beauty in something done well. 
So the next time you pass a jewelry shop window displaying a beautifully cut teardrop-shaped stone, don't be so sure it's just your culture telling you that that sparkling jewel is beautiful. 
Your distant ancestors loved that shape and found beauty in the skill needed to make it, even before they could put their love into words. 
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? 
No, it's deep in our minds. 
It's a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors. 
Our powerful reaction to images, to the expression of emotion in art, to the beauty of music, to the night sky, will be with us and our descendants for as long as the human race exists. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Well, I was born with a rare visual condition called achromatopsia, which is total color blindness, so I've never seen color, and I don't know what color looks like, because I come from a grayscale world. 
To me, the sky is always gray, flowers are always gray, and television is still in black and white. 
But, since the age of 21, instead of seeing color, I can hear color. 
In 2003, I started a project with computer scientist Adam Montandon, and the result, with further collaborations with Peter Kese from Slovenia and Matias Lizana from Barcelona, is this electronic eye. 
It's a color sensor that detects the color frequency in front of me — (Frequency sounds) — and sends this frequency to a chip installed at the back of my head, and I hear the color in front of me through the bone, through bone conduction. 
(Frequency sounds) So, for example, if I have, like — This is the sound of purple. (Frequency sounds) For example, this is the sound of grass. (Frequency sounds) This is red, like TED. (Frequency sounds) This is the sound of a dirty sock. (Laughter) Which is like yellow, this one. 
So I've been hearing color all the time for eight years, since 2004, so I find it completely normal now to hear color all the time. 
At the start, though, I had to memorize the names you give for each color, so I had to memorize the notes, but after some time, all this information became a perception. 
I didn't have to think about the notes. 
And after some time, this perception became a feeling. 
I started to have favorite colors, and I started to dream in colors. 
So, when I started to dream in color is when I felt that the software and my brain had united, because in my dreams, it was my brain creating electronic sounds. It wasn't the software, so that's when I started to feel like a cyborg. 
It's when I started to feel that the cybernetic device was no longer a device. 
It had become a part of my body, an extension of my senses, and after some time, it even became a part of my official image. 
This is my passport from 2004. 
You're not allowed to appear on U.K. passports with electronic equipment, but I insisted to the passport office that what they were seeing was actually a new part of my body, an extension of my brain, and they finally accepted me to appear with the passport photo. 
So, life has changed dramatically since I hear color, because color is almost everywhere, so the biggest change for example is going to an art gallery, I can listen to a Picasso, for example. So it's like I'm going to a concert hall, because I can listen to the paintings. 
And supermarkets, I find this is very shocking, it's very, very attractive to walk along a supermarket. 
It's like going to a nightclub. 
It's full of different melodies. (Laughter) Yeah. 
Especially the aisle with cleaning products. 
It's just fabulous. (Laughter) Also, the way I dress has changed. 
Before, I used to dress in a way that it looked good. 
Now I dress in a way that it sounds good. (Laughter) (Applause) So today I'm dressed in C major, so it's quite a happy chord. (Laughter) If I had to go to a funeral, though, I would dress in B minor, which would be turquoise, purple and orange. (Laughter) Also, food, the way I look at food has changed, because now I can display the food on a plate, so I can eat my favorite song. (Laughter) So depending on how I display it, I can hear and I can compose music with food. 
So imagine a restaurant where we can have, like, Lady Gaga salads as starters. (Laughter) I mean, this would get teenagers to eat their vegetables, probably. 
And also, some Rachmaninov piano concertos as main dishes, and some Bjork or Madonna desserts, that would be a very exciting restaurant where you can actually eat songs. 
Also, the way I perceive beauty has changed, because when I look at someone, I hear their face, so someone might look very beautiful but sound terrible. 
(Laughter) And it might happen the opposite, the other way around. So I really enjoy creating, like, sound portraits of people. 
Instead of drawing someone's face, like drawing the shape, I point at them with the eye and I write down the different notes I hear, and then I create sound portraits. 
Here's some faces. 
(Musical chords) Yeah, Nicole Kidman sounds good. (Laughter) Some people, I would never relate, but they sound similar. 
Prince Charles has some similarities with Nicole Kidman. 
They have similar sound of eyes. 
So you relate people that you wouldn't relate, and you can actually also create concerts by looking at the audience faces. 
So I connect the eye, and then I play the audience's faces. 
The good thing about this is, if the concert doesn't sound good, it's their fault. 
It's not my fault, because — (Laughter) And so another thing that happens is that I started having this secondary effect that normal sounds started to become color. 
I heard a telephone tone, and it felt green because it sounded just like the color green. 
The BBC beeps, they sound turquoise, and listening to Mozart became a yellow experience, so I started to paint music and paint people's voices, because people's voices have frequencies that I relate to color. 
And here's some music translated into color. 
For example, Mozart, "" Queen of the Night, "" looks like this. 
(Music) Very yellow and very colorful, because there's many different frequencies. (Music) 
And this is a completely different song. 
(Music) It's Justin Bieber's "" Baby. "" (Laughter) (Music) It is very pink and very yellow. 
So, also voices, I can transform speeches into color, for example, these are two very well-known speeches. 
One of them is Martin Luther King's "" I Have A Dream, "" and the other one is Hitler. 
And I like to exhibit these paintings in the exhibition halls without labels, and then I ask people, "Which one do you prefer?" 
And most people change their preference when I tell them that the one on the left is Hitler and the one on the right is Martin Luther King. 
So I got to a point when I was able to perceive 360 colors, just like human vision. 
I was able to differentiate all the degrees of the color wheel. 
But then, I just thought that this human vision wasn't good enough. 
There's many, many more colors around us that we cannot perceive, but that electronic eyes can perceive. 
So I decided to continue extending my color senses, and I added infrared and I added ultraviolet to the color-to-sound scale, so now I can hear colors that the human eye cannot perceive. 
For example, perceiving infrared is good because you can actually detect if there's movement detectors in a room. 
I can hear if someone points at me with a remote control. 
And the good thing about perceiving ultraviolet is that you can hear if it's a good day or a bad day to sunbathe, because ultraviolet is a dangerous color, a color that can actually kill us, so I think we should all have this wish to perceive things that we cannot perceive. 
That's why, two years ago, I created the Cyborg Foundation, which is a foundation that tries to help people become a cyborg, tries to encourage people to extend their senses by using technology as part of the body. 
We should all think that knowledge comes from our senses, so if we extend our senses, we will consequently extend our knowledge. 
I think life will be much more exciting when we stop creating applications for mobile phones and we start creating applications for our own body. 
I think this will be a big, big change that we will see during this century. 
So I do encourage you all to think about which senses you'd like to extend. 
I would encourage you to become a cyborg. 
You won't be alone. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) 

Well, there's lots to talk about, but I think I'm just going to play to start off. 
(Music) ♫ When I wake up ♫ ♫ in the morning ♫ ♫ I pour the coffee ♫ ♫ I read the paper ♫ ♫ And then I slowly ♫ ♫ and so softly ♫ ♫ do the dishes ♫ ♫ So feed the fishes ♫ ♫ You sing me happy birthday ♫ ♫ Like it's gonna be ♫ ♫ your last day ♫ ♫ here on Earth ♫ (Applause) All right. 
So, I wanted to do something special today. 
I want to debut a new song that I've been working on in the last five or six months. 
And there's few things more thrilling than playing a song for the first time in front of an audience, especially when it's half-finished. 
(Laughter) I'm kind of hoping some conversations here might help me finish it. 
Because it gets into all sorts of crazy realms. 
And so this is basically a song about loops, but not the kind of loops that I make up here. 
They're feedback loops. 
And in the audio world that's when the microphone gets too close to its sound source, and then it gets in this self-destructive loop that creates a very unpleasant sound. 
And I'm going to demonstrate for you. 
(Laughter) I'm not going to hurt you. Don't worry. 
♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a — (Feedback) All right. I don't know if that was necessary to demonstrate — (Laughter) — but my point is it's the sound of self-destruction. 
And I've been thinking about how that applies across a whole spectrum of realms, from, say, the ecological, okay. 
There seems to be a rule in nature that if you get too close to where you came from, it gets ugly. 
So like, you can't feed cows their own brains or you get mad cow disease, and inbreeding and incest and, let's see, what's the other one? 
Biological — there's autoimmune diseases, where the body attacks itself a little too overzealously and destroys the host, or the person. 
And then — okay, this is where we get to the song — kind of bridges the gap to the emotional. 
Because although I've used scientific terms in songs, it's very difficult sometimes to make them lyrical. 
And there's some things you just don't need to have in songs. 
So I'm trying to bridge this gap between this idea and this melody. 
And so, I don't know if you've ever had this, but when I close my eyes sometimes and try to sleep, I can't stop thinking about my own eyes. 
And it's like your eyes start straining to see themselves. 
That's what it feels like to me. 
It's not pleasant. 
I'm sorry if I put that idea in your head. 
(Laughter) It's impossible, of course, for your eyes to see themselves, but they seem to be trying. 
So that's getting a little more closer to a personal experience. 
Or ears being able to hear themselves — it's just impossible. 
That's the thing. 
So, I've been working on this song that mentions these things and then also imagines a person who's been so successful at defending themselves from heartbreak that they're left to do the deed themselves, if that's possible. 
And that's what the song is asking. 
All right. 
It doesn't have a name yet. 
(Music) ♫ Go ahead and congratulate yourself ♫ ♫ Give yourself a hand, the hand is your hand ♫ ♫ And the eye that eyes itself is your eye ♫ ♫ And the ear that hears itself is near ♫ ♫ 'Cause it's your ear, oh oh ♫ ♫ You've done the impossible now ♫ ♫ Took yourself apart ♫ ♫ You made yourself invulnerable ♫ ♫ No one can break your heart ♫ ♫ So you wear it out ♫ ♫ And you wring it out ♫ ♫ And you wear it out ♫ ♫ And you break it yourself ♫ 
♫ Breaking your own, break it yourself ♫ ♫ Breaking your own, break it yourself ♫ ♫ Breaking your own ♫ (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) 
All right. 
It's kind of cool. Songwriters can sort of get away with murder. 
You can throw out crazy theories and not have to back it up with data or graphs or research. 
But, you know, I think reckless curiosity would be what the world needs now, just a little bit. 
(Applause) I'm going to finish up with a song of mine called "" Weather Systems. "" (Music) ♫ Quiet ♫ ♫ Quiet down, she said ♫ ♫ Speak into the back of his head ♫ ♫ On the edge of the bed, I can see your blood flow ♫ ♫ I can see your ♫ ♫ cells grow ♫ ♫ Hold still awhile ♫ ♫ Don't spill the wine ♫ ♫ I can see it all from here ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ oh, I ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ ♫ Weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ 
♫ Some things you say ♫ ♫ are not for sale ♫ ♫ I would hold it where ♫ ♫ our free agents of some substance are ♫ ♫ scared ♫ ♫ Hold still a while ♫ ♫ Don't spill the wine ♫ ♫ I can see it all from here ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ oh, I ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ weather systems of the world ♫ ♫ Weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ Thanks. 
(Applause) 

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

I want you now to imagine a wearable robot that gives you superhuman abilities, or another one that takes wheelchair users up standing and walking again. 
We at Berkeley Bionics call these robots exoskeletons. 
These are nothing else than something that you put on in the morning, and it will give you extra strength, and it will further enhance your speed, and it will help you, for instance, to manage your balance. 
It is actually the true integration of the man and the machine. 
But not only that — it will integrate and network you to the universe and other devices out there. 
This is just not some blue sky thinking. 
To show you now what we are working on by starting out talking about the American soldier, that on average does carry about 100 lbs. on their backs, and they are being asked to carry more equipment. 
Obviously, this is resulting in some major complications — back injuries, 30 percent of them — chronic back injuries. 
So we thought we would look at this challenge and create an exoskeleton that would help deal with this issue. 
So let me now introduce to you HULC — or the Human Universal Load Carrier. 
Soldier: With the HULC exoskeleton, I can carry 200 lbs. over varied terrain for many hours. 
Its flexible design allows for deep squats, crawls and high-agility movements. 
It senses what I want to do, where I want to go, and then augments my strength and endurance. 
Eythor Bender: We are ready with our industry partner to introduce this device, this new exoskeleton this year. 
So this is for real. 
Now let's turn our heads towards the wheelchair users, something that I'm particularly passionate about. 
There are 68 million people estimated to be in wheelchairs worldwide. 
This is about one percent of the total population. 
And that's actually a conservative estimate. 
We are talking here about, oftentimes, very young individuals with spinal cord injuries, that in the prime of their life — 20s, 30s, 40s — hit a wall and the wheelchair's the only option. 
But it is also the aging population that is multiplying in numbers. 
And the only option, pretty much — when it's stroke or other complications — is the wheelchair. 
And that is actually for the last 500 years, since its very successful introduction, I must say. 
So we thought we would start writing a brand new chapter of mobility. 
Let me now introduce you to eLEGS that is worn by Amanda Boxtel that 19 years ago was spinal cord injured, and as a result of that she has not been able to walk for 19 years until now. 
(Applause) Amanda Boxtel: Thank you. (Applause) 
EB: Amanda is wearing our eLEGS set. 
It has sensors. 
It's completely non-invasive, sensors in the crutches that send signals back to our onboard computer that is sitting here at her back. 
There are battery packs here as well that power motors that are sitting at her hips, as well as her knee joints, that move her forward in this kind of smooth and very natural gait. 
AB: I was 24 years old and at the top of my game when a freak summersault while downhill skiing paralyzed me. 
In a split second, I lost all sensation and movement below my pelvis. 
Not long afterwards, a doctor strode into my hospital room, and he said, "" Amanda, you'll never walk again. "" And that was 19 yeas ago. 
He robbed every ounce of hope from my being. 
Adaptive technology has since enabled me to learn how to downhill ski again, to rock climb and even handcycle. 
But nothing has been invented that enables me to walk, until now. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
EB: As you can see, we have the technology, we have the platforms to sit down and have discussions with you. 
It's in our hands, and we have all the potential here to change the lives of future generations — not only for the soldiers, or for Amanda here and all the wheelchair users, but for everyone. 
AB: Thanks. 
(Applause) 

The editor of Discover told us 10 of them; I'm going to give you the eleventh. 
Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane and I introduced myself to my seatmate, and told them what I did, they'd move away from me, because, quite rightly, they were saying psychology is about finding what's wrong with you. 
What was good about psychology — about the $30 billion investment NIMH made, about working in the disease model, about what you mean by psychology — is that, 60 years ago, none of the disorders were treatable; it was entirely smoke and mirrors. 
We could look across time at the same people — people, for example, who were genetically vulnerable to schizophrenia — and ask what the contribution of mothering, of genetics are, and we could isolate third variables by doing experiments on the mental illnesses. 
And then we were able to test them rigorously, in random-assignment, placebo-controlled designs, throw out the things that didn't work, keep the things that actively did. 
The conclusion of that is, psychology and psychiatry of the last 60 years can actually claim that we can make miserable people less miserable. 
We forgot about a mission to make relatively untroubled people happier, more fulfilled, more productive. 
And the third problem about the disease model is, in our rush to do something about people in trouble, in our rush to do something about repairing damage, it never occurred to us to develop interventions to make people happier — positive interventions. 
It should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage. 
So in the last 10 years and the hope for the future, we've seen the beginnings of a science of positive psychology, a science of what makes life worth living. 
You can ask, how do you stack up for positive emotion, for meaning, for flow, against literally tens of thousands of other people? 
We created the opposite of the diagnostic manual of the insanities: a classification of the strengths and virtues that looks at the sex ratio, how they're defined, how to diagnose them, what builds them and what gets in their way. 
We found that we could discover the causation of the positive states, the relationship between left hemispheric activity and right hemispheric activity, as a cause of happiness. 
How do they differ from the rest of us? 
But the upshot of this is that the mission I want psychology to have, in addition to its mission of curing the mentally ill, and in addition to its mission of making miserable people less miserable, is, can psychology actually make people happier? 
This is a life in which you have as much positive emotion as you possibly can, and the skills to amplify it. 
I want to say a little bit about each of those lives and what we know about them. 
But the pleasant life has three drawbacks, and it's why positive psychology is not happy-ology, and why it doesn't end here. 
The first drawback is, it turns out the pleasant life, your experience of positive emotion, is about 50 percent heritable, and, in fact, not very modifiable. 
So the different tricks that Matthieu and I and others know about increasing the amount of positive emotion in your life are 15 to 20 percent tricks, getting more of it. 
In two of the three great arenas of life, by the time Len was 30, Len was enormously successful. 
By the time he was 20, he was an options trader. 
Second, in play, he's a national champion bridge player. 
And the reason he was, was that Len is a cold fish. 
(Laughter) Len is an introvert. 
American women said to Len, when he dated them, "You're no fun. You don't have positive emotion. Get lost." 
And Len was wealthy enough to be able to afford a Park Avenue psychoanalyst, who for five years tried to find the sexual trauma that had somehow locked positive emotion inside of him. 
Re-crafting your work, your love, your play, your friendship, your parenting. 
But what she did was to take her highest strengths, and re-craft work to use them as much as possible. 
What you get out of that is not smiley-ness. 
So, that's the second path. 
This is the most venerable of the happinesses, traditionally. 
And meaning, in this view, consists of — very parallel to eudaemonia — it consists of knowing what your highest strengths are, and using them to belong to and in the service of something larger than you are. 
Just to sample the kind of interventions that we find have an effect: when we teach people about the pleasant life, how to have more pleasure in your life, one of your assignments is to take the mindfulness skills, the savoring skills, and you're assigned to design a beautiful day. 
I'd like you to remember someone who did something enormously important that changed your life in a good direction, and who you never properly thanked. 
Now, OK, you can open your eyes. 
And what you find is when you do something fun, it has a square wave walk set. 
So the next to last thing I want to say is: we're interested in how much life satisfaction people have. 
And we ask the question as a function of the three different lives, how much life satisfaction do you get? 
The pursuit of meaning is the strongest. 
Where pleasure matters is if you have both engagement and you have meaning, then pleasure's the whipped cream and the cherry. 
But I found that the problems of psychology seemed to be parallel to the problems of technology, entertainment and design in the following way: we all know that technology, entertainment and design have been and can be used for destructive purposes. 
And by the way, the distinction between relieving misery and building happiness is extremely important. 
I thought, when I first became a therapist 30 years ago, that if I was good enough to make someone not depressed, not anxious, not angry, that I'd make them happy. 
But once you fractionate happiness the way I do — not just positive emotion, that's not nearly enough — there's flow in life, and there's meaning in life. 
As Laura Lee told us, design and, I believe, entertainment and technology, can be used to increase meaning engagement in life as well. 

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

So, when I was in art school, I developed a shake in my hand, and this was the straightest line I could draw. 
Now in hindsight, it was actually good for some things, like mixing a can of paint or shaking a Polaroid, but at the time this was really doomsday. 
This was the destruction of my dream of becoming an artist. 
The shake developed out of, really, a single-minded pursuit of pointillism, just years of making tiny, tiny dots. 
And eventually these dots went from being perfectly round to looking more like tadpoles, because of the shake. 
So to compensate, I'd hold the pen tighter, and this progressively made the shake worse, so I'd hold the pen tighter still. 
And this became a vicious cycle that ended up causing so much pain and joint issues, I had trouble holding anything. 
And after spending all my life wanting to do art, I left art school, and then I left art completely. 
But after a few years, I just couldn't stay away from art, and I decided to go to a neurologist about the shake and discovered I had permanent nerve damage. 
And he actually took one look at my squiggly line, and said, "" Well, why don't you just embrace the shake? "" So I did. I went home, I grabbed a pencil, and I just started letting my hand shake and shake. 
I was making all these scribble pictures. 
And even though it wasn't the kind of art that I was ultimately passionate about, it felt great. 
And more importantly, once I embraced the shake, I realized I could still make art. 
I just had to find a different approach to making the art that I wanted. 
Now, I still enjoyed the fragmentation of pointillism, seeing these little tiny dots come together to make this unified whole. 
So I began experimenting with other ways to fragment images where the shake wouldn't affect the work, like dipping my feet in paint and walking on a canvas, or, in a 3D structure consisting of two-by-fours, creating a 2D image by burning it with a blowtorch. 
I discovered that, if I worked on a larger scale and with bigger materials, my hand really wouldn't hurt, and after having gone from a single approach to art, I ended up having an approach to creativity that completely changed my artistic horizons. 
This was the first time I'd encountered this idea that embracing a limitation could actually drive creativity. 
At the time, I was finishing up school, and I was so excited to get a real job and finally afford new art supplies. 
I had this horrible little set of tools, and I felt like I could do so much more with the supplies I thought an artist was supposed to have. 
I actually didn't even have a regular pair of scissors. 
I was using these metal shears until I stole a pair from the office that I worked at. 
So I got out of school, I got a job, I got a paycheck, I got myself to the art store, and I just went nuts buying supplies. 
And then when I got home, I sat down and I set myself to task to really try to create something just completely outside of the box. 
But I sat there for hours, and nothing came to mind. 
The same thing the next day, and then the next, quickly slipping into a creative slump. 
And I was in a dark place for a long time, unable to create. 
And it didn't make any sense, because I was finally able to support my art, and yet I was creatively blank. 
But as I searched around in the darkness, I realized I was actually paralyzed by all of the choices that I never had before. 
And it was then that I thought back to my jittery hands. 
Embrace the shake. 
And I realized, if I ever wanted my creativity back, I had to quit trying so hard to think outside of the box and get back into it. 
I wondered, could you become more creative, then, by looking for limitations? 
What if I could only create with a dollar's worth of supplies? 
At this point, I was spending a lot of my evenings in — well, I guess I still spend a lot of my evenings in Starbucks — but I know you can ask for an extra cup if you want one, so I decided to ask for 50. 
Surprisingly, they just handed them right over, and then with some pencils I already had, I made this project for only 80 cents. 
It really became a moment of clarification for me that we need to first be limited in order to become limitless. 
I took this approach of thinking inside the box to my canvas, and wondered what if, instead of painting on a canvas, I could only paint on my chest? 
So I painted 30 images, one layer at a time, one on top of another, with each picture representing an influence in my life. 
Or what if, instead of painting with a brush, I could only paint with karate chops? (Laughter) So I'd dip my hands in paint, and I just attacked the canvas, and I actually hit so hard that I bruised a joint in my pinkie and it was stuck straight for a couple of weeks. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Or, what if instead of relying on myself, I had to rely on other people to create the content for the art? 
So for six days, I lived in front of a webcam. 
I slept on the floor and I ate takeout, and I asked people to call me and share a story with me about a life-changing moment. 
Their stories became the art as I wrote them onto the revolving canvas. 
(Applause) Or what if instead of making art to display, I had to destroy it? 
This seemed like the ultimate limitation, being an artist without art. 
This destruction idea turned into a yearlong project that I called Goodbye Art, where each and every piece of art had to be destroyed after its creation. 
In the beginning of Goodbye Art, I focused on forced destruction, like this image of Jimi Hendrix, made with over 7,000 matches. 
(Laughter) Then I opened it up to creating art that was destroyed naturally. 
I looked for temporary materials, like spitting out food — (Laughter) — sidewalk chalk and even frozen wine. 
The last iteration of destruction was to try to produce something that didn't actually exist in the first place. 
So I organized candles on a table, I lit them, and then blew them out, then repeated this process over and over with the same set of candles, then assembled the videos into the larger image. 
So the end image was never visible as a physical whole. 
It was destroyed before it ever existed. 
In the course of this Goodbye Art series, I created 23 different pieces with nothing left to physically display. 
What I thought would be the ultimate limitation actually turned out to be the ultimate liberation, as each time I created, the destruction brought me back to a neutral place where I felt refreshed and ready to start the next project. 
It did not happen overnight. 
There were times when my projects failed to get off the ground, or, even worse, after spending tons of time on them the end image was kind of embarrassing. 
But having committed to the process, I continued on, and something really surprising came out of this. 
As I destroyed each project, I was learning to let go, let go of outcomes, let go of failures, and let go of imperfections. 
And in return, I found a process of creating art that's perpetual and unencumbered by results. 
I found myself in a state of constant creation, thinking only of what's next and coming up with more ideas than ever. 
When I think back to my three years away from art, away from my dream, just going through the motions, instead of trying to find a different way to continue that dream, I just quit, I gave up. 
And what if I didn't embrace the shake? 
Because embracing the shake for me wasn't just about art and having art skills. 
It turned out to be about life, and having life skills. 
Because ultimately, most of what we do takes place here, inside the box, with limited resources. 
Learning to be creative within the confines of our limitations is the best hope we have to transform ourselves and, collectively, transform our world. 
Looking at limitations as a source of creativity changed the course of my life. 
Now, when I run into a barrier or I find myself creatively stumped, I sometimes still struggle, but I continue to show up for the process and try to remind myself of the possibilities, like using hundreds of real, live worms to make an image, using a pushpin to tattoo a banana, or painting a picture with hamburger grease. 
(Laughter) One of my most recent endeavors is to try to translate the habits of creativity that I've learned into something others can replicate. 
Limitations may be the most unlikely of places to harness creativity, but perhaps one of the best ways to get ourselves out of ruts, rethink categories and challenge accepted norms. 
And instead of telling each other to seize the day, maybe we can remind ourselves every day to seize the limitation. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So today's top chef class is in how to rob a bank, and it's clear that the general public needs guidance, because the average bank robbery nets only 7,500 dollars. 
Rank amateurs who know nothing about how to cook the books. 
The folks who know, of course, run our largest banks, and in the last go-around, they cost us over 11 trillion dollars. 
That's what 11 trillion looks like. 
That's how many zeros? 
And cost us over 10 million jobs as well. 
So our task is to educate ourselves so that we can understand why we have these recurrent, intensifying financial crises, and how we can prevent them in the future. 
And the answer to that is that we have to stop epidemics of control fraud. 
Control fraud is what happens when the people who control, typically a CEO, a seemingly legitimate entity, use it as a weapon to defraud. 
And these are the weapons of mass destruction in the financial world. 
They also follow in finance a particular strategy, because the weapon of choice in finance is accounting, and there is a recipe for accounting control fraud, and how it occurs. 
And we discovered this recipe in quite an odd way that I'll come back to in a moment. 
First ingredient in the recipe: grow like crazy; second, by making or buying really crappy loans, but loans that are made at a very high interest rate or yield; three, while employing extreme leverage — that just means a lot of debt — compared to your equity; and four, while providing only trivial loss reserves against the inevitable losses. 
If you follow those four simple steps, and any bank can follow them, then you are mathematically guaranteed to have three things occur. 
The first thing is you will report record bank profits — not just high, record. 
Two, the CEO will immediately be made incredibly wealthy by modern executive compensation. 
And three, farther down the road, the bank will suffer catastrophic losses and will fail unless it is bailed out. 
And that's a hint as to how we discovered this recipe, because we discovered it through an autopsy process. 
During the savings and loan debacle in 1984, we looked at every single failure, and we looked for common characteristics, and we discovered this recipe was common to each of these frauds. 
In other words, a coroner could find these things because this is a fatal recipe that will destroy the banks as well as the economy. 
And it also turns out to be precisely what could have stopped this crisis, the one that cost us 11 trillion dollars just in the household sector, that cost us 10 million jobs, was the easiest financial crisis by far to have avoided completely if we had simply learned the lessons of epidemics of control fraud, particularly using this recipe. 
So let's go to this crisis, and the two huge epidemics of loan origination fraud that drove the crisis — appraisal fraud and liar's loans — and what we're going to see in looking at both of these is we got warnings that were incredibly early about these frauds. 
We got warnings that we could have taken advantage of easily, because back in the savings and loan debacle, we had figured out how to respond and prevent these crises. 
And three, the warnings were unambiguous. 
They were obvious that what was going on was an epidemic of accounting control fraud building up. 
Let's take appraisal fraud first. 
This is simply where you inflate the value of the home that is being pledged as security for the loan. 
In 2000, the year 2000, that is over a year before Enron fails, by the way, the honest appraisers got together a formal petition begging the federal government to act, and the industry to act, to stop this epidemic of appraisal fraud. 
And the appraisers explained how it was occurring, that banks were demanding that appraisers inflate the appraisal, and that if the appraisers refused to do so, they, the banks, would blacklist honest appraisers and refuse to use them. 
Now, we've seen this before in the savings and loan debacle, and we know that this kind of fraud can only originate from the lenders, and that no honest lender would ever inflate the appraisal, because it's the great protection against loss. 
So this was an incredibly early warning, 2000. 
It was something we'd seen before, and it was completely unambiguous. 
This was an epidemic of accounting control fraud led by the banks. 
What about liar's loans? 
Well, that warning actually comes earlier. 
The savings and loan debacle is basically the early 1980s through 1993, and in the midst of fighting that wave of accounting control fraud, in 1990, we found that a second front of fraud was being started. 
And like all good financial frauds in America, it began in Orange County, California. 
And we happened to be the regional regulators for it. 
And our examiners said, they are making loans without even checking what the borrower's income is. 
This is insane, it has to lead to massive losses, and it only makes sense for entities engaged in these accounting control frauds. 
And we said, yeah, you're absolutely right, and we drove those liar's loans out of the industry in 1990 and 1991, but we could only deal with the industry we had jurisdiction over, which was savings and loans, and so the biggest and the baddest of the frauds, Long Beach Savings, voluntarily gave up its federal savings and loan charter, gave up federal deposit insurance, converted to become a mortgage bank for the sole purpose of escaping our jurisdiction, and changed its name to Ameriquest, and became the most notorious of the liar's loans frauds early on, and to add to that, 
they deliberately predated upon minorities. 
So we knew again about this crisis. 
We'd seen it before. We'd stopped it before. 
We had incredibly early warnings of it, and it was absolutely unambiguous that no honest lender would make loans in this fashion. 
So let's take a look at the reaction of the industry and the regulators and the prosecutors to these clear early warnings that could have prevented the crisis. 
Start with the industry. 
The industry responded between 2003 and 2006 by increasing liar's loans by over 500 percent. 
These were the loans that hyperinflated the bubble and produced the economic crisis. 
By 2006, half of all the loans called subprime were also liar's loans. 
They're not mutually exclusive, it's just that together, they're the most toxic combination you can possibly imagine. 
By 2006, 40 percent of all the loans made that year, all the home loans made that year, were liar's loans, 40 percent. 
And this is despite a warning from the industry's own antifraud experts that said that these loans were an open invitation to fraudsters, and that they had a fraud incidence of 90 percent, nine zero. 
In response to that, the industry first started calling these loans liar's loans, which lacks a certain subtlety, and second, massively increased them, and no government regulator ever required or encouraged any lender to make a liar's loan or anyone to purchase a liar's loan, and that explicitly includes Fannie and Freddie. 
This came from the lenders because of the fraud recipe. 
What happened to appraisal fraud? 
It expanded remarkably as well. 
By 2007, when a survey of appraisers was done, 90 percent of appraisers reported that they had been subject to coercion from the lenders trying to get them to inflate an appraisal. 
In other words, both forms of fraud became absolutely endemic and normal, and this is what drove the bubble. 
What happened in the governmental sector? 
Well, the government, as I told you, when we were the savings and loan regulators, we could only deal with our industry, and if people gave up their federal deposit insurance, we couldn't do anything to them. 
Congress, it may strike you as impossible, but actually did something intelligent in 1994, and passed the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act that gave the Fed, and only the Federal Reserve, the explicit, statutory authority to ban liar's loans by every lender, whether or not they had federal deposit insurance. 
So what did Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan, as chairs of the Fed, do when they got these warnings that these were massively fraudulent loans and that they were being sold to the secondary market? 
Remember, there's no fraud exorcist. 
Once it starts out a fraudulent loan, it can only be sold to the secondary market through more frauds, lying about the reps and warrantees, and then those people are going to produce mortgage-backed securities and exotic derivatives which are also going to be supposedly backed by those fraudulent loans. 
So the fraud is going to progress through the entire system, hyperinflate the bubble, produce a disaster. 
And remember, we had experience with this. 
We had seen significant losses, and we had experience of competent regulators in stopping it. 
Greenspan and Bernanke refused to use the authority under the statute to stop liar's loans. 
And this was a matter first of dogma. 
They're just horrifically opposed to anything regulatory. 
But it is also the international competition in laxity, the race to the bottom between the United States and the United Kingdom, the city of London, in particular, and the city of London won that race to the bottom, but it meant that all regulation in the West was completely degraded in this stupid competition to be who could have the weakest regulation. 
So that was the regulatory response. 
What about the response of the prosecutors after the crisis, after 11 trillion dollars in losses, after 10 million jobs lost, a crisis in which the losses and the frauds were more than 70 times larger than the savings and loan debacle? 
Well, in the savings and loan debacle, our agency that regulated savings and loans, OTS, made over 30,000 criminal referrals, produced over 1,000 felony convictions just in cases designated as major, and that understates the degree of prioritization, because we worked with the FBI to create the list of the top 100 fraud schemes, the absolute worst of the worst, nationwide. 
Roughly 300 savings and loans involved, roughly 600 senior officials. 
Virtually all of them were prosecuted. 
We had a 90 percent conviction rate. 
It's the greatest success against elite white collar criminals ever, and it was because of this understanding of control fraud and the accounting control fraud mechanism. 
Flash forward to the current crisis. 
The same agency, Office of Thrift Supervision, which was supposed to regulate many of the largest makers of liar's loans in the country, has made, even today — it no longer exists, but as of a year ago, it had made zero criminal referrals. 
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is supposed to regulate the largest national banks, has made zero criminal referrals. 
The Fed appears to have made zero criminal referrals. 
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is smart enough to refuse to answer the question. 
Without any guidance from the regulators, there's no expertise in the FBI to investigate complex frauds. 
It isn't simply that they've had to reinvent the wheel of how to do these prosecutions; they've forgotten that the wheel exists, and therefore, we have zero prosecutions, and of course, zero convictions, of any of the elite bank frauds, the Wall Street types, that drove this crisis. 
With no expertise coming from the regulators, the FBI formed what it calls a partnership with the Mortgage Bankers Association in 2007. 
The Mortgage Bankers Association is the trade association of the perps. 
And the Mortgage Bankers Association set out, it had the audacity and the success to con the FBI. 
It had created a supposed definition of mortgage fraud, in which, guess what, its members are always the victim and never the perpetrators. 
And the FBI has bought this hook, line, sinker, rod, reel and the boat they rode out in. 
And so the FBI, under the leadership of an attorney general who is African-American and a president of the United States who is African-American, have adopted the Tea Party definition of the crisis, in which it is the first virgin crisis in history, conceived without sin in the executive ranks. 
And it's those oh-so-clever hairdressers who were able to defraud the poor, pitiful banks, who lack any financial sophistication. 
It is the silliest story you can conceive of, and so they go and they prosecute the hairdressers, and they leave the banksters alone entirely. 
And so, while lions are roaming the campsite, the FBI is chasing mice. 
What do we need to do? 
What can we do in all of this? 
We need to change the perverse incentive structures that produce these recurrent epidemics of accounting control fraud that are driving our crises. 
So we have to first get rid of the systemically dangerous institutions. 
These are the so-called too-big-to-fail institutions. 
We need to shrink them to the point, within the next five years, that they no longer pose a systemic risk. 
Right now, they are ticking time bombs that will cause a global crisis as soon as the next one fails — not if, when. 
Second thing we need to do is completely reform modern executive and professional compensation, which is what they use to suborn the appraisers. 
Remember, they were pressuring the appraisers through the compensation system, trying to produce what we call a Gresham's dynamic, in which bad ethics drives good ethics out of the marketplace. 
And they largely succeeded, which is how the fraud became endemic. 
And the third thing that we need to do is deal with what we call the three D's: deregulation, desupervision, and the de facto decriminalization. 
Because we can make all three of these changes, and if we do so, we can dramatically reduce how often we have a crisis and how severe those crises are. 
That is not simply critical to our economy. 
You can see what these crises do to inequality and what they do to our democracy. 
They have produced crony capitalism, American-style, in which the largest financial institutions are the leading financial donors of both parties, and that's the reason why even after this crisis, 70 times larger than the savings and loan crisis, we have no meaningful reforms in any of the three areas that I've talked about, other than banning liar's loans, which is good, but that's just one form of ammunition for this fraud weapon. 
There are many forms of ammunition they can use. 
That's why we need to learn what the bankers have learned: the recipe for the best way to rob a bank, so that we can stop that recipe, because our legislators, who are dependent on political contributions, will not do it on their own. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

Some years ago, I stumbled across a simple design exercise that helps people understand and solve complex problems, and like many of these design exercises, it kind of seems trivial at first, but under deep inspection, it turns out that it reveals unexpected truths about the way that we collaborate and make sense of things. 
The exercise has three parts and begins with something that we all know how to do, which is how to make toast. 
It begins with a clean sheet of paper, a felt marker, and without using any words, you begin to draw how to make toast. 
And most people draw something like this. 
They draw a loaf of bread, which is sliced, then put into a toaster. 
The toast is then deposited for some time. 
It pops up, and then voila! After two minutes, toast and happiness. 
Now, over the years, I've collected many hundreds of drawings of these toasts, and some of them are very good, because they really illustrate the toast-making process quite clearly. 
And then there are some that are, well, not so good. 
They really suck, actually, because you don't know what they're trying to say. 
Under close inspection, some reveal some aspects of toast-making while hiding others. 
So there's some that are all about the toast, and all about the transformation of toast. 
And there's others that are all about the toaster, and the engineers love to draw the mechanics of this. 
(Laughter) And then there are others that are about people. 
It's about visualizing the experience that people have. 
And then there are others that are about the supply chain of making toast that goes all the way back to the store. 
It goes through the supply chain networks of teleportation and all the way back to the field and wheat, and one all actually goes all the way back to the Big Bang. 
So it's crazy stuff. 
But I think it's obvious that even though these drawings are really wildly different, they share a common quality, and I'm wondering if you can see it. 
Do you see it? What's common about these? 
Most drawings have nodes and links. 
So nodes represent the tangible objects like the toaster and people, and links represent the connections between the nodes. 
And it's the combination of links and nodes that produces a full systems model, and it makes our private mental models visible about how we think something works. 
So that's the value of these things. 
What's interesting about these systems models is how they reveal our various points of view. 
So for example, Americans make toast with a toaster. 
That seems obvious. 
Whereas many Europeans make toast with a frying pan, of course, and many students make toast with a fire. 
I don't really understand this. A lot of MBA students do this. 
So you can measure the complexity by counting the number of nodes, and the average illustration has between four and eight nodes. 
Less than that, the drawing seems trivial, but it's quick to understand, and more than 13, the drawing produces a feeling of map shock. 
It's too complex. 
So the sweet spot is between 5 and 13. 
So if you want to communicate something visually, have between five and 13 nodes in your diagram. 
So though we may not be skilled at drawing, the point is that we intuitively know how to break down complex things into simple things and then bring them back together again. 
So this brings us to our second part of the exercise, which is how to make toast, but now with sticky notes or with cards. 
So what happens then? 
Well, with cards, most people tend to draw clear, more detailed, and more logical nodes. 
You can see the step by step analysis that takes place, and as they build up their model, they move their nodes around, rearranging them like Lego blocks. 
Now, though this might seem trivial, it's actually really important. 
This rapid iteration of expressing and then reflecting and analyzing is really the only way in which we get clarity. 
It's the essence of the design process. 
And systems theorists do tell us that the ease with which we can change a representation correlates to our willingness to improve the model. 
So sticky note systems are not only more fluid, they generally produce way more nodes than static drawings. 
The drawings are much richer. 
And this brings us to our third part of the exercise, which is to draw how to make toast, but this time in a group. 
So what happens then? 
Well, here's what happens. 
It starts out messy, and then it gets really messy, and then it gets messier, but as people refine the models, the best nodes become more prominent, and with each iteration, the model becomes clearer because people build on top of each other's ideas. 
What emerges is a unified systems model that integrates the diversity of everyone's individual points of view, so that's a really different outcome from what usually happens in meetings, isn't it? 
So these drawings can contain 20 or more nodes, but participants don't feel map shock because they participate in the building of their models themselves. 
Now, what's also really interesting, that the groups spontaneously mix and add additional layers of organization to it. 
To deal with contradictions, for example, they add branching patterns and parallel patterns. 
Oh, and by the way, if they do it in complete silence, they do it much better and much more quickly. 
Really interesting — talking gets in the way. 
So here's some key lessons that can emerge from this. 
First, drawing helps us understand the situations as systems with nodes and their relationships. 
Movable cards produce better systems models, because we iterate much more fluidly. 
And then the group notes produce the most comprehensive models because we synthesize several points of view. 
So that's interesting. 
When people work together under the right circumstances, group models are much better than individual models. 
So this approach works really great for drawing how to make toast, but what if you wanted to draw something more relevant or pressing, like your organizational vision, or customer experience, or long-term sustainability? 
There's a visual revolution that's taking place as more organizations are addressing their wicked problems by collaboratively drawing them out. 
And I'm convinced that those who see their world as movable nodes and links really have an edge. 
And the practice is really pretty simple. 
You start with a question, you collect the nodes, you refine the nodes, you do it over again, you refine and refine and refine, and the patterns emerge, and the group gets clarity and you answer the question. 
So this simple act of visualizing and doing over and over again produces some really remarkable outcomes. 
What's really important to know is that it's the conversations that are the important aspects, not just the models themselves. 
And these visual frames of reference can grow to several hundreds or even thousands of nodes. 
So, one example is from an organization called Rodale. 
Big publishing company. 
They lost a bunch of money one year, and their executive team for three days visualized their entire practice. 
And what's interesting is that after visualizing the entire business, systems upon systems, they reclaimed 50 million dollars of revenue, and they also moved from a D rating to an A rating from their customers. 
Why? Because there's alignment from the executive team. 
So I'm now on a mission to help organizations solve their wicked problems by using collaborative visualization, and on a site that I've produced called drawtoast.com, I've collected a bunch of best practices. 
and so you can learn how to run a workshop here, you can learn more about the visual language and the structure of links and nodes that you can apply to general problem-solving, and download examples of various templates for unpacking the thorny problems that we all face in our organizations. 
So the seemingly trivial design exercise of drawing toast helps us get clear, engaged and aligned. 
So next time you're confronted with an interesting challenge, remember what design has to teach us. 
Make your ideas visible, tangible, and consequential. 
It's simple, it's fun, it's powerful, and I believe it's an idea worth celebrating. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Thank you. 
I'm thrilled to be here. 
I'm going to talk about a new, old material that still continues to amaze us, and that might impact the way we think about material science, high technology — and maybe, along the way, also do some stuff for medicine and for global health and help reforestation. 
So that's kind of a bold statement. 
I'll tell you a little bit more. 
This material actually has some traits that make it seem almost too good to be true. 
It's sustainable; it's a sustainable material that is processed all in water and at room temperature — and is biodegradable with a clock, so you can watch it dissolve instantaneously in a glass of water or have it stable for years. 
It's edible; it's implantable in the human body without causing any immune response. 
It actually gets reintegrated in the body. 
And it's technological, so it can do things like microelectronics, and maybe photonics do. 
And the material looks something like this. 
In fact, this material you see is clear and transparent. 
The components of this material are just water and protein. 
So this material is silk. 
So it's kind of different from what we're used to thinking about silk. 
So the question is, how do you reinvent something that has been around for five millennia? 
The process of discovery, generally, is inspired by nature. 
And so we marvel at silk worms — the silk worm you see here spinning its fiber. 
The silk worm does a remarkable thing: it uses these two ingredients, protein and water, that are in its gland, to make a material that is exceptionally tough for protection — so comparable to technical fibers like Kevlar. 
And so in the reverse engineering process that we know about, and that we're familiar with, for the textile industry, the textile industry goes and unwinds the cocoon and then weaves glamorous things. 
We want to know how you go from water and protein to this liquid Kevlar, to this natural Kevlar. 
So the insight is how do you actually reverse engineer this and go from cocoon to gland and get water and protein that is your starting material. 
And this is an insight that came, about two decades ago, from a person that I'm very fortunate to work with, David Kaplan. 
And so we get this starting material. 
And so this starting material is back to the basic building block. 
And then we use this to do a variety of things — like, for example, this film. 
And we take advantage of something that is very simple. 
The recipe to make those films is to take advantage of the fact that proteins are extremely smart at what they do. 
They find their way to self-assemble. 
So the recipe is simple: you take the silk solution, you pour it, and you wait for the protein to self-assemble. 
And then you detach the protein and you get this film, as the proteins find each other as the water evaporates. 
But I mentioned that the film is also technological. 
And so what does that mean? 
It means that you can interface it with some of the things that are typical of technology, like microelectronics and nanoscale technology. 
And the image of the DVD here is just to illustrate a point that silk follows very subtle topographies of the surface, which means that it can replicate features on the nanoscale. 
So it would be able to replicate the information that is on the DVD. 
And we can store information that's film with water and protein. 
So we tried something out, and we wrote a message in a piece of silk, which is right here, and the message is over there. 
And much like in the DVD, you can read it out optically. 
And this requires a stable hand, so this is why I decided to do it onstage in front of a thousand people. 
So let me see. 
So as you see the film go in transparently through there, and then... 
(Applause) And the most remarkable feat is that my hand actually stayed still long enough to do that. 
So once you have these attributes of this material, then you can do a lot of things. 
It's actually not limited to films. 
And so the material can assume a lot of formats. 
And then you go a little crazy, and so you do various optical components or you do microprism arrays, like the reflective tape that you have on your running shoes. 
Or you can do beautiful things that, if the camera can capture, you can make. 
You can add a third dimensionality to the film. 
And if the angle is right, you can actually see a hologram appear in this film of silk. 
But you can do other things. 
You can imagine that then maybe you can use a pure protein to guide light, and so we've made optical fibers. 
But silk is versatile and it goes beyond optics. 
And you can think of different formats. 
So for instance, if you're afraid of going to the doctor and getting stuck with a needle, we do microneedle arrays. 
What you see there on the screen is a human hair superimposed on the needle that's made of silk — just to give you a sense of size. 
You can do bigger things. 
You can do gears and nuts and bolts — that you can buy at Whole Foods. 
And the gears work in water as well. 
So you think of alternative mechanical parts. 
And maybe you can use that liquid Kevlar if you need something strong to replace peripheral veins, for example, or maybe an entire bone. 
And so you have here a little example of a small skull — what we call mini Yorick. 
(Laughter) But you can do things like cups, for example, and so, if you add a little bit of gold, if you add a little bit of semiconductors you could do sensors that stick on the surfaces of foods. 
You can do electronic pieces that fold and wrap. 
Or if you're fashion forward, some silk LED tattoos. 
So there's versatility, as you see, in the material formats, that you can do with silk. 
But there are still some unique traits. 
I mean, why would you want to do all these things for real? 
I mentioned it briefly at the beginning; the protein is biodegradable and biocompatible. 
And you see here a picture of a tissue section. 
And so what does that mean, that it's biodegradable and biocompatible? 
You can implant it in the body without needing to retrieve what is implanted. 
Which means that all the devices that you've seen before and all the formats, in principle, can be implanted and disappear. 
And what you see there in that tissue section, in fact, is you see that reflector tape. 
So, much like you're seen at night by a car, then the idea is that you can see, if you illuminate tissue, you can see deeper parts of tissue because there is that reflective tape there that is made out of silk. 
And you see there, it gets reintegrated in tissue. 
And reintegration in the human body is not the only thing, but reintegration in the environment is important. 
So you have a clock, you have protein, and now a silk cup like this can be thrown away without guilt — (Applause) unlike the polystyrene cups that unfortunately fill our landfills everyday. 
It's edible, so you can do smart packaging around food that you can cook with the food. 
It doesn't taste good, so I'm going to need some help with that. 
But probably the most remarkable thing is that it comes full circle. 
Silk, during its self-assembly process, acts like a cocoon for biological matter. 
And so if you change the recipe, and you add things when you pour — so you add things to your liquid silk solution — where these things are enzymes or antibodies or vaccines, the self-assembly process preserves the biological function of these dopants. 
So it makes the materials environmentally active and interactive. 
So that screw that you thought about beforehand can actually be used to screw a bone together — a fractured bone together — and deliver drugs at the same, while your bone is healing, for example. 
Or you could put drugs in your wallet and not in your fridge. 
So we've made a silk card with penicillin in it. 
And we stored penicillin at 60 degrees C, so 140 degrees Fahrenheit, for two months without loss of efficacy of the penicillin. 
And so that could be — - (Applause) that could be potentially a good alternative to solar powered refrigerated camels. (Laughter) And of course, there's no use in storage if you can't use [it]. 
And so there is this other unique material trait that these materials have, that they're programmably degradable. 
And so what you see there is the difference. 
In the top, you have a film that has been programmed not to degrade, and in the bottom, a film that has been programmed to degrade in water. 
And what you see is that the film on the bottom releases what is inside it. 
So it allows for the recovery of what we've stored before. 
And so this allows for a controlled delivery of drugs and for reintegration in the environment in all of these formats that you've seen. 
So the thread of discovery that we have really is a thread. 
We're impassioned with this idea that whatever you want to do, whether you want to replace a vein or a bone, or maybe be more sustainable in microelectronics, perhaps drink a coffee in a cup and throw it away without guilt, maybe carry your drugs in your pocket, deliver them inside your body or deliver them across the desert, the answer may be in a thread of silk. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

So I'm going to tell you a little bit about reimagining food. 
I've been interested in food for a long time. 
I taught myself to cook with a bunch of big books like this. 
I went to chef school in France. 
And there is a way the world both envisions food, the way the world writes about food and learns about food. 
And it's largely what you would find in these books. 
And it's a wonderful thing. 
But there's some things that have been going on since this idea of food was established. 
In the last 20 years, people have realized that science has a tremendous amount to do with food. 
In fact, understanding why cooking works requires knowing the science of cooking — some of the chemistry, some of the physics and so forth. 
But that's not in any of those books. 
There's also a tremendous number of techniques that chefs have developed, some about new aesthetics, new approaches to food. 
There's a chef in Spain named Ferran Adria. 
He's developed a very avant-garde cuisine. 
A guy in England called Heston Blumenthal, he's developed his avant-garde cuisine. 
None of the techniques that these people have developed over the course of the last 20 years is in any of those books. 
None of them are taught in cooking schools. 
In order to learn them, you have to go work in those restaurants. 
And finally, there's the old way of viewing food is the old way. 
And so a few years ago — fours years ago, actually — I set out to say, is there a way we can communicate science and technique and wonder? 
Is there a way we can show people food in a way they have not seen it before? 
So we tried, and I'll show you what we came up with. 
This is a picture called a cutaway. 
This is actually the first picture I took in the book. 
The idea here is to explain what happens when you steam broccoli. 
And this magic view allows you to see all of what's happening while the broccoli steams. 
Then each of the different little pieces around it explain some fact. 
And the hope was two-fold. 
One is you can actually explain what happens when you steam broccoli. 
But the other thing is that maybe we could seduce people into stuff that was a little more technical, maybe a little bit more scientific, maybe a little bit more chef-y than they otherwise would have. 
Because with that beautiful photo, maybe I can also package this little box here that talks about how steaming and boiling actually take different amounts of time. 
Steaming ought to be faster. 
It turns out it isn't because of something called film condensation, and this explains that. 
Well, that first cutaway picture worked, so we said, "" Okay, let's do some more. "" So here's another one. 
We discovered why woks are the shape they are. 
This shaped wok doesn't work very well; this caught fire three times. 
But we had a philosophy, which is it only has to look good for a thousandth of a second. 
(Laughter) And one of our canning cutaways. 
Once you start cutting things in half, you kind of get carried away, so you see we cut the jars in half as well as the pan. 
And each of these text blocks explains a key thing that's going on. 
In this case, boiling water canning is for canning things that are already pretty acidic. 
You don't have to heat them up as hot as you would something you do pressure canning because bacterial spores can't grow in the acid. 
So this is great for pickled vegetables, which is what we're canning here. 
Here's our hamburger cutaway. 
One of our philosophies in the book is that no dish is really intrinsically any better than any other dish. 
So you can lavish all the same care, all the same technique, on a hamburger as you would on some much more fancy dish. 
And if you do lavish as much technique as possible, and you try to make the highest quality hamburger, it gets to be a little bit involved. 
The New York Times ran a piece after my book was delayed and it was called "" The Wait for the 30-Hour Hamburger Just Got Longer. "" Because our hamburger recipe, our ultimate hamburger recipe, if you make the buns and you marinate the meat and you do all this stuff, it does take about 30 hours. 
Of course, you're not actually working the whole time. 
Most of the time is kind of sitting there. 
The point of this cutaway is to show people a view of hamburgers they haven't seen before and to explain the physics of hamburgers and the chemistry of hamburgers, because, believe it or not, there is something to the physics and chemistry — in particular, those flames underneath the burger. 
Most of the characteristic char-grilled taste doesn't come from the wood or the charcoal. 
Buying mesquite charcoal will not actually make that much difference. 
Mostly it comes from fat pyrolyzing, or burning. 
So it's the fat that drips down and flares up that causes the characteristic taste. 
Now you might wonder, how do we make these cutaways? 
Most people assume we use Photoshop. 
And the answer is: no, not really; we use a machine shop. 
And it turns out, the best way to cut things in half is to actually cut them in half. 
So we have two halves of one of the best kitchens in the world. 
(Laughter) We cut a $5,000 restaurant oven in half. 
The manufacturer said, "What would it take for you to cut one in half?" 
I said, "" It would have to show up free. "" And so it showed up, we used it a little while, we cut it in half. 
Now you can also see a little bit how we did some of these shots. 
We would glue a piece of Pyrex or heat-resistant glass in front. 
We used a red, very high-temperature silicon to do that. 
The great thing is, when you cut something in half, you have another half. 
So you photograph that in exactly the same position, and then you can substitute in — and that part does use Photoshop — just the edges. 
So it's very much like in a Hollywood movie where a guy flies through the air, supported by wires, and then they take the wires away digitally so you're flying through the air. 
In most cases, though, there was no glass. 
Like for the hamburger, we just cut the damn barbecue. 
And so those coals that kept falling off the edge, we kept having to put them back up. 
But again, it only has to work for a thousandth of a second. 
The wok shot caught fire three times. 
What happens when you have your wok cut in half is the oil goes down into the fire and whoosh! 
One of our cooks lost his eyebrows that way. 
But hey, they grow back. 
In addition to cutaways, we also explain physics. 
This is Fourier's law of heat conduction. 
It's a partial differential equation. 
We have the only cookbook in the world that has partial differential equations in it. 
But to make them palatable, we cut it out of a steel plate and put it in front of a fire and photographed it like this. 
We've got lots of little tidbits in the book. 
Everybody knows that your various appliances have wattage, right? 
But you probably don't know that much about James Watt. 
But now you will; we put a biography of James Watt in. 
It's a little couple paragraphs to explain why we call that unit of heat the watt, and where he got his inspiration. 
It turned out he was hired by a Scottish distillery to understand why they were burning so damn much peat to distill the whiskey. 
We also did a lot of calculation. 
I personally wrote thousands of lines of code to write this cookbook. 
Here's a calculation that shows how the intensity of a barbecue, or other radiant heat source, goes as you move away from it. 
So as you move vertically away from this surface, the heat falls off. 
As you move side to side, it moves off. 
That horn-shaped region is what we call the sweet spot. 
That's the place where the heat is even to within 10 percent. 
So that's the place where you really want to cook. 
And it's got this funny horn-shaped thing, which as far as I know, again, the first cookbook to ever do this. 
Now it may also be the last cookbook that ever does it. 
You know, there's two ways you can make a product. 
You can do lots of market research and do focus groups and figure out what people really want, or you can just kind of go for it and make the book you want and hope other people like it. 
Here's a step-by-step that shows grinding hamburger. 
If you really want great hamburger, it turns out it makes a difference if you align the grain. 
And it's really simple, as you can see here. 
As it comes out of the grinder, you just have a little tray, and you just take it off in little passes, build it up, slice it vertically. 
Here's the final hamburger. 
This is the 30-hour hamburger. 
We make every aspect of this burger. 
The lettuce has got liquid smoke infused into it. 
We also have things about how to make the bun. 
There's a mushroom, ketchup — it goes on and on. 
Now watch closely. This is popcorn. I'll explain it here. 
The popcorn is illustrating a key thing in physics. 
Isn't that beautiful? 
We have a very high-speed camera, which we had lots of fun with on the book. 
The key physics principle here is when water boils to steam it expands by a factor of 1,600. 
That's what's happening to the water inside that popcorn. 
So it's a great illustration of that. 
Now I'm going to close with a video that is kind of unusual. 
We have a chapter on gels. 
And because people watch Mythbusters and CSI, I thought, well, let's put in a recipe for a ballistics gelatin. 
Well, if you have a high-speed camera, and you have a block of ballistics gelatin lying around, pretty soon somebody does this. 
(Gasps) Now the amazing thing here is that a ballistics gelatin is supposed to mimic what happens to human flesh when you get shot — that's why you shouldn't get shot. 
The other amazing thing is, when this ballistics gelatin comes down, it falls back down as a nice block. 
Anyway, here's the book. 
Here it is. 
2,438 pages. 
And they're nice big pages too. 
(Applause) A friend of mine complained that this was too big and too pretty to go in the kitchen, so there's a sixth volume that has washable, waterproof paper. (Applause) 

There's a group of people in Kenya. 
People cross oceans to go see them. 
These people are tall. 
They jump high. They wear red. 
And they kill lions. 
You might be wondering, who are these people? 
These are the Maasais. 
And you know what's cool? I'm actually one of them. 
The Maasais, the boys are brought up to be warriors. 
The girls are brought up to be mothers. 
When I was five years old, I found out that I was engaged to be married as soon as I reached puberty. 
My mother, my grandmother, my aunties, they constantly reminded me that your husband just passed by. 
(Laughter) Cool, yeah? 
And everything I had to do from that moment was to prepare me to be a perfect woman at age 12. 
My day started at 5 in the morning, milking the cows, sweeping the house, cooking for my siblings, collecting water, firewood. 
I did everything that I needed to do to become a perfect wife. 
I went to school not because the Maasais' women or girls were going to school. 
It's because my mother was denied an education, and she constantly reminded me and my siblings that she never wanted us to live the life she was living. 
Why did she say that? 
My father worked as a policeman in the city. 
He came home once a year. 
We didn't see him for sometimes even two years. 
And whenever he came home, it was a different case. 
My mother worked hard in the farm to grow crops so that we can eat. 
She reared the cows and the goats so that she can care for us. 
But when my father came, he would sell the cows, he would sell the products we had, and he went and drank with his friends in the bars. 
Because my mother was a woman, she was not allowed to own any property, and by default, everything in my family anyway belongs to my father, so he had the right. 
And if my mother ever questioned him, he beat her, abused her, and really it was difficult. 
When I went to school, I had a dream. 
I wanted to become a teacher. 
Teachers looked nice. 
They wear nice dresses, high-heeled shoes. 
I found out later that they are uncomfortable, but I admired it. 
(Laughter) But most of all, the teacher was just writing on the board — not hard work, that's what I thought, compared to what I was doing in the farm. 
So I wanted to become a teacher. 
I worked hard in school, but when I was in eighth grade, it was a determining factor. 
In our tradition, there is a ceremony that girls have to undergo to become women, and it's a rite of passage to womanhood. 
And then I was just finishing my eighth grade, and that was a transition for me to go to high school. 
This was the crossroad. 
Once I go through this tradition, I was going to become a wife. 
Well, my dream of becoming a teacher will not come to pass. 
So I talked — I had to come up with a plan to figure these things out. 
I talked to my father. I did something that most girls have never done. 
I told my father, "" I will only go through this ceremony if you let me go back to school. "" The reason why, if I ran away, my father will have a stigma, people will be calling him the father of that girl who didn't go through the ceremony. 
It was a shameful thing for him to carry the rest of his life. 
So he figured out. "" Well, "" he said, "" okay, you'll go to school after the ceremony. "" I did. The ceremony happened. 
It's a whole week long of excitement. 
It's a ceremony. People are enjoying it. 
And the day before the actual ceremony happens, we were dancing, having excitement, and through all the night we did not sleep. 
The actual day came, and we walked out of the house that we were dancing in. Yes, we danced and danced. 
We walked out to the courtyard, and there were a bunch of people waiting. 
They were all in a circle. 
And as we danced and danced, and we approached this circle of women, men, women, children, everybody was there. 
There was a woman sitting in the middle of it, and this woman was waiting to hold us. 
I was the first. There were my sisters and a couple of other girls, and as I approached her, she looked at me, and I sat down. 
And I sat down, and I opened my legs. 
As I opened my leg, another woman came, and this woman was carrying a knife. 
And as she carried the knife, she walked toward me and she held the clitoris, and she cut it off. 
As you can imagine, I bled. I bled. 
After bleeding for a while, I fainted thereafter. 
It's something that so many girls — I'm lucky, I never died — but many die. 
It's practiced, it's no anesthesia, it's a rusty old knife, and it was difficult. 
I was lucky because one, also, my mom did something that most women don't do. 
Three days later, after everybody has left the home, my mom went and brought a nurse. 
We were taken care of. 
Three weeks later, I was healed, and I was back in high school. 
I was so determined to be a teacher now so that I could make a difference in my family. 
Well, while I was in high school, something happened. 
I met a young gentleman from our village who had been to the University of Oregon. 
This man was wearing a white t-shirt, jeans, camera, white sneakers — and I'm talking about white sneakers. 
There is something about clothes, I think, and shoes. 
They were sneakers, and this is in a village that doesn't even have paved roads. It was quite attractive. 
I told him, "" Well, I want to go to where you are, "" because this man looked very happy, and I admired that. 
And he told me, "" Well, what do you mean, you want to go? 
Don't you have a husband waiting for you? "" And I told him, "" Don't worry about that part. 
Just tell me how to get there. "" This gentleman, he helped me. 
While I was in high school also, my dad was sick. 
He got a stroke, and he was really, really sick, so he really couldn't tell me what to do next. 
But the problem is, my father is not the only father I have. 
Everybody who is my dad's age, male in the community, is my father by default — my uncles, all of them — and they dictate what my future is. 
So the news came, I applied to school and I was accepted to Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and I couldn't come without the support of the village, because I needed to raise money to buy the air ticket. 
I got a scholarship but I needed to get myself here. 
But I needed the support of the village, and here again, when the men heard, and the people heard that a woman had gotten an opportunity to go to school, they said, "" What a lost opportunity. 
This should have been given to a boy. We can't do this. "" So I went back and I had to go back to the tradition. 
There's a belief among our people that morning brings good news. 
So I had to come up with something to do with the morning, because there's good news in the morning. 
And in the village also, there is one chief, an elder, who if he says yes, everybody will follow him. 
So I went to him very early in the morning, as the sun rose. 
The first thing he sees when he opens his door is, it's me. 
"My child, what are you doing here?" 
"Well, Dad, I need help. Can you support me to go to America?" 
I promised him that I would be the best girl, I will come back, anything they wanted after that, I will do it for them. 
He said, "" Well, but I can't do it alone. "" He gave me a list of another 15 men that I went — 16 more men — every single morning I went and visited them. 
They all came together. 
The village, the women, the men, everybody came together to support me to come to get an education. 
I arrived in America. As you can imagine, what did I find? 
I found snow! 
I found Wal-Marts, vacuum cleaners, and lots of food in the cafeteria. 
I was in a land of plenty. 
I enjoyed myself, but during that moment while I was here, I discovered a lot of things. 
I learned that that ceremony that I went through when I was 13 years old, it was called female genital mutilation. 
I learned that it was against the law in Kenya. 
I learned that I did not have to trade part of my body to get an education. I had a right. 
And as we speak right now, three million girls in Africa are at risk of going through this mutilation. 
I learned that my mom had a right to own property. 
I learned that she did not have to be abused because she is a woman. 
Those things made me angry. 
I wanted to do something. 
As I went back, every time I went, I found that my neighbors' girls were getting married. 
They were getting mutilated, and here, after I graduated from here, I worked at the U.N., I went back to school to get my graduate work, the constant cry of these girls was in my face. 
I had to do something. 
As I went back, I started talking to the men, to the village, and mothers, and I said, "" I want to give back the way I had promised you that I would come back and help you. What do you need? "" As I spoke to the women, they told me, "You know what we need? We really need a school for girls." 
Because there had not been any school for girls. 
And the reason they wanted the school for girls is because when a girl is raped when she's walking to school, the mother is blamed for that. 
If she got pregnant before she got married, the mother is blamed for that, and she's punished. 
She's beaten. 
They said, "" We wanted to put our girls in a safe place. "" As we moved, and I went to talk to the fathers, the fathers, of course, you can imagine what they said: "We want a school for boys." 
And I said, "" Well, there are a couple of men from my village who have been out and they have gotten an education. 
Why can't they build a school for boys, and I'll build a school for girls? "" That made sense. And they agreed. 
And I told them, I wanted them to show me a sign of commitment. 
And they did. They donated land where we built the girls' school. 
We have. 
I want you to meet one of the girls in that school. 
Angeline came to apply for the school, and she did not meet any criteria that we had. 
She's an orphan. Yes, we could have taken her for that. 
But she was older. She was 12 years old, and we were taking girls who were in fourth grade. 
Angeline had been moving from one place — because she's an orphan, she has no mother, she has no father — moving from one grandmother's house to another one, from aunties to aunties. She had no stability in her life. 
And I looked at her, I remember that day, and I saw something beyond what I was seeing in Angeline. 
And yes, she was older to be in fourth grade. 
We gave her the opportunity to come to the class. 
Five months later, that is Angeline. 
A transformation had begun in her life. 
Angeline wants to be a pilot so she can fly around the world and make a difference. 
She was not the top student when we took her. 
Now she's the best student, not just in our school, but in the entire division that we are in. 
That's Sharon. That's five years later. 
That's Evelyn. Five months later, that is the difference that we are making. 
As a new dawn is happening in my school, a new beginning is happening. 
As we speak right now, 125 girls will never be mutilated. 
One hundred twenty-five girls will not be married when they're 12 years old. 
One hundred twenty-five girls are creating and achieving their dreams. 
This is the thing that we are doing, giving them opportunities where they can rise. 
As we speak right now, women are not being beaten because of the revolutions we've started in our community. 
(Applause) I want to challenge you today. 
You are listening to me because you are here, very optimistic. 
You are somebody who is so passionate. 
You are somebody who wants to see a better world. 
You are somebody who wants to see that war ends, no poverty. 
You are somebody who wants to make a difference. 
You are somebody who wants to make our tomorrow better. 
I want to challenge you today that to be the first, because people will follow you. 
Be the first. People will follow you. 
Be bold. Stand up. Be fearless. Be confident. 
Move out, because as you change your world, as you change your community, as we believe that we are impacting one girl, one family, one village, one country at a time. 
We are making a difference, so if you change your world, you are going to change your community, you are going to change your country, and think about that. If you do that, and I do that, aren't we going to create a better future for our children, for your children, for our grandchildren? 
And we will live in a very peaceful world. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

Tonight, I want to have a conversation about this incredible global issue that's at the intersection of land use, food and environment, something we can all relate to, and what I've been calling the other inconvenient truth. 
But first, I want to take you on a little journey. 
Let's first visit our planet, but at night, and from space. 
This is what our planet looks like from outer space at nighttime, if you were to take a satellite and travel around the planet. And the thing you would notice first, of course, is how dominant the human presence on our planet is. 
We see cities, we see oil fields, you can even make out fishing fleets in the sea, that we are dominating much of our planet, and mostly through the use of energy that we see here at night. 
But let's go back and drop it a little deeper and look during the daytime. 
What we see during the day is our landscapes. 
This is part of the Amazon Basin, a place called Rondônia in the south-center part of the Brazilian Amazon. 
If you look really carefully in the upper right-hand corner, you're going to see a thin white line, which is a road that was built in the 1970s. 
If we come back to the same place in 2001, what we're going to find is that these roads spurt off more roads, and more roads after that, at the end of which is a small clearing in the rainforest where there are going to be a few cows. 
These cows are used for beef. We're going to eat these cows. 
And these cows are eaten basically in South America, in Brazil and Argentina. They're not being shipped up here. 
But this kind of fishbone pattern of deforestation is something we notice a lot of around the tropics, especially in this part of the world. 
If we go a little bit further south in our little tour of the world, we can go to the Bolivian edge of the Amazon, here also in 1975, and if you look really carefully, there's a thin white line through that kind of seam, and there's a lone farmer out there in the middle of the primeval jungle. 
Let's come back again a few years later, here in 2003, and we'll see that that landscape actually looks a lot more like Iowa than it does like a rainforest. 
In fact, what you're seeing here are soybean fields. 
These soybeans are being shipped to Europe and to China as animal feed, especially after the mad cow disease scare about a decade ago, where we don't want to feed animals animal protein anymore, because that can transmit disease. 
Instead, we want to feed them more vegetable proteins. 
So soybeans have really exploded, showing how trade and globalization are really responsible for the connections to rainforests and the Amazon — an incredibly strange and interconnected world that we have today. 
Well, again and again, what we find as we look around the world in our little tour of the world is that landscape after landscape after landscape have been cleared and altered for growing food and other crops. 
So one of the questions we've been asking is, how much of the world is used to grow food, and where is it exactly, and how can we change that into the future, and what does it mean? 
Well, our team has been looking at this on a global scale, using satellite data and ground-based data kind of to track farming on a global scale. 
And this is what we found, and it's startling. 
This map shows the presence of agriculture on planet Earth. 
The green areas are the areas we use to grow crops, like wheat or soybeans or corn or rice or whatever. 
That's 16 million square kilometers' worth of land. 
If you put it all together in one place, it'd be the size of South America. 
The second area, in brown, is the world's pastures and rangelands, where our animals live. 
That area's about 30 million square kilometers, or about an Africa's worth of land, a huge amount of land, and it's the best land, of course, is what you see. And what's left is, like, the middle of the Sahara Desert, or Siberia, or the middle of a rain forest. 
We're using a planet's worth of land already. 
If we look at this carefully, we find it's about 40 percent of the Earth's land surface is devoted to agriculture, and it's 60 times larger than all the areas we complain about, our suburban sprawl and our cities where we mostly live. 
Half of humanity lives in cities today, but a 60-times-larger area is used to grow food. 
So this is an amazing kind of result, and it really shocked us when we looked at that. 
So we're using an enormous amount of land for agriculture, but also we're using a lot of water. 
This is a photograph flying into Arizona, and when you look at it, you're like, "" What are they growing here? "" It turns out they're growing lettuce in the middle of the desert using water sprayed on top. 
Now, the irony is, it's probably sold in our supermarket shelves in the Twin Cities. 
But what's really interesting is, this water's got to come from some place, and it comes from here, the Colorado River in North America. 
Well, the Colorado on a typical day in the 1950s, this is just, you know, not a flood, not a drought, kind of an average day, it looks something like this. 
But if we come back today, during a normal condition to the exact same location, this is what's left. 
The difference is mainly irrigating the desert for food, or maybe golf courses in Scottsdale, you take your pick. 
Well, this is a lot of water, and again, we're mining water and using it to grow food, and today, if you travel down further down the Colorado, it dries up completely and no longer flows into the ocean. 
We've literally consumed an entire river in North America for irrigation. 
Well, that's not even the worst example in the world. 
This probably is: the Aral Sea. 
Now, a lot you will remember this from your geography classes. 
This is in the former Soviet Union in between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, one of the great inland seas of the world. 
But there's kind of a paradox here, because it looks like it's surrounded by desert. Why is this sea here? 
The reason it's here is because, on the right-hand side, you see two little rivers kind of coming down through the sand, feeding this basin with water. 
Those rivers are draining snowmelt from mountains far to the east, where snow melts, it travels down the river through the desert, and forms the great Aral Sea. 
Well, in the 1950s, the Soviets decided to divert that water to irrigate the desert to grow cotton, believe it or not, in Kazakhstan, to sell cotton to the international markets to bring foreign currency into the Soviet Union. 
They really needed the money. 
Well, you can imagine what happens. You turn off the water supply to the Aral Sea, what's going to happen? 
Here it is in 1973, 1986, 1999, 2004, and about 11 months ago. 
It's pretty extraordinary. 
Now a lot of us in the audience here live in the Midwest. 
Imagine that was Lake Superior. 
Imagine that was Lake Huron. 
It's an extraordinary change. 
This is not only a change in water and where the shoreline is, this is a change in the fundamentals of the environment of this region. 
Let's start with this. 
The Soviet Union didn't really have a Sierra Club. 
Let's put it that way. 
So what you find in the bottom of the Aral Sea ain't pretty. 
There's a lot of toxic waste, a lot of things that were dumped there that are now becoming airborne. 
One of those small islands that was remote and impossible to get to was a site of Soviet biological weapons testing. 
You can walk there today. 
Weather patterns have changed. 
Nineteen of the unique 20 fish species found only in the Aral Sea are now wiped off the face of the Earth. 
This is an environmental disaster writ large. 
But let's bring it home. 
This is a picture that Al Gore gave me a few years ago that he took when he was in the Soviet Union a long, long time ago, showing the fishing fleets of the Aral Sea. 
You see the canal they dug? 
They were so desperate to try to, kind of, float the boats into the remaining pools of water, but they finally had to give up because the piers and the moorings simply couldn't keep up with the retreating shoreline. 
I don't know about you, but I'm terrified that future archaeologists will dig this up and write stories about our time in history, and wonder, "" What were you thinking? "" Well, that's the future we have to look forward to. 
We already use about 50 percent of the Earth's fresh water that's sustainable, and agriculture alone is 70 percent of that. 
So we use a lot of water, a lot of land for agriculture. 
We also use a lot of the atmosphere for agriculture. 
Usually when we think about the atmosphere, we think about climate change and greenhouse gases, and mostly around energy, but it turns out agriculture is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases too. 
If you look at carbon dioxide from burning tropical rainforest, or methane coming from cows and rice, or nitrous oxide from too many fertilizers, it turns out agriculture is 30 percent of the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere from human activity. 
That's more than all our transportation. 
It's more than all our electricity. 
It's more than all other manufacturing, in fact. 
It's the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases of any human activity in the world. 
And yet, we don't talk about it very much. 
So we have this incredible presence today of agriculture dominating our planet, whether it's 40 percent of our land surface, 70 percent of the water we use, 30 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions. 
We've doubled the flows of nitrogen and phosphorus around the world simply by using fertilizers, causing huge problems of water quality from rivers, lakes, and even oceans, and it's also the single biggest driver of biodiversity loss. 
So without a doubt, agriculture is the single most powerful force unleashed on this planet since the end of the ice age. No question. 
And it rivals climate change in importance. 
And they're both happening at the same time. 
But what's really important here to remember is that it's not all bad. It's not that agriculture's a bad thing. 
In fact, we completely depend on it. 
It's not optional. It's not a luxury. It's an absolute necessity. 
We have to provide food and feed and, yeah, fiber and even biofuels to something like seven billion people in the world today, and if anything, we're going to have the demands on agriculture increase into the future. It's not going to go away. 
It's going to get a lot bigger, mainly because of growing population. We're seven billion people today heading towards at least nine, probably nine and a half before we're done. 
More importantly, changing diets. 
As the world becomes wealthier as well as more populous, we're seeing increases in dietary consumption of meat, which take a lot more resources than a vegetarian diet does. 
So more people, eating more stuff, and richer stuff, and of course having an energy crisis at the same time, where we have to replace oil with other energy sources that will ultimately have to include some kinds of biofuels and bio-energy sources. 
So you put these together. It's really hard to see how we're going to get to the rest of the century without at least doubling global agricultural production. 
Well, how are we going to do this? How are going to double global ag production around the world? 
Well, we could try to farm more land. 
This is an analysis we've done, where on the left is where the crops are today, on the right is where they could be based on soils and climate, assuming climate change doesn't disrupt too much of this, which is not a good assumption. 
We could farm more land, but the problem is the remaining lands are in sensitive areas. 
They have a lot of biodiversity, a lot of carbon, things we want to protect. 
So we could grow more food by expanding farmland, but we'd better not, because it's ecologically a very, very dangerous thing to do. 
Instead, we maybe want to freeze the footprint of agriculture and farm the lands we have better. 
This is work that we're doing to try to highlight places in the world where we could improve yields without harming the environment. 
The green areas here show where corn yields, just showing corn as an example, are already really high, probably the maximum you could find on Earth today for that climate and soil, but the brown areas and yellow areas are places where we're only getting maybe 20 or 30 percent of the yield you should be able to get. 
You see a lot of this in Africa, even Latin America, but interestingly, Eastern Europe, where Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries used to be, is still a mess agriculturally. 
Now, this would require nutrients and water. 
It's going to either be organic or conventional or some mix of the two to deliver that. 
Plants need water and nutrients. 
But we can do this, and there are opportunities to make this work. 
But we have to do it in a way that is sensitive to meeting the food security needs of the future and the environmental security needs of the future. 
We have to figure out how to make this tradeoff between growing food and having a healthy environment work better. 
Right now, it's kind of an all-or-nothing proposition. 
We can grow food in the background — that's a soybean field — and in this flower diagram, it shows we grow a lot of food, but we don't have a lot clean water, we're not storing a lot of carbon, we don't have a lot of biodiversity. 
In the foreground, we have this prairie that's wonderful from the environmental side, but you can't eat anything. What's there to eat? 
We need to figure out how to bring both of those together into a new kind of agriculture that brings them all together. 
Now, when I talk about this, people often tell me, "" Well, isn't blank the answer? "" — organic food, local food, GMOs, new trade subsidies, new farm bills — and yeah, we have a lot of good ideas here, but not any one of these is a silver bullet. 
In fact, what I think they are is more like silver buckshot. 
And I love silver buckshot. You put it together and you've got something really powerful, but we need to put them together. 
So what we have to do, I think, is invent a new kind of agriculture that blends the best ideas of commercial agriculture and the green revolution with the best ideas of organic farming and local food and the best ideas of environmental conservation, not to have them fighting each other but to have them collaborating together to form a new kind of agriculture, something I call "" terraculture, "" or farming for a whole planet. 
Now, having this conversation has been really hard, and we've been trying very hard to bring these key points to people to reduce the controversy, to increase the collaboration. 
I want to show you a short video that does kind of show our efforts right now to bring these sides together into a single conversation. So let me show you that. 
(Music) ("" Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota: Driven to Discover "") (Music) ("" The world population is growing by 75 million people each year. 
That's almost the size of Germany. 
Today, we're nearing 7 billion people. 
At this rate, we'll reach 9 billion people by 2040. 
And we all need food. 
But how? 
How do we feed a growing world without destroying the planet? 
We already know climate change is a big problem. 
But it's not the only problem. 
We need to face 'the other inconvenient truth.' A global crisis in agriculture. 
Population growth + meat consumption + dairy consumption + energy costs + bioenergy production = stress on natural resources. 
More than 40% of Earth's land has been cleared for agriculture. 
Global croplands cover 16 million km ². 
That's almost the size of South America. 
Global pastures cover 30 million km ². 
That's the size of Africa. 
Agriculture uses 60 times more land than urban and suburban areas combined. 
Irrigation is the biggest use of water on the planet. 
We use 2,800 cubic kilometers of water on crops every year. 
That's enough to fill 7,305 Empire State Buildings every day. 
Today, many large rivers have reduced flows. 
Some dry up altogether. 
Look at the Aral Sea, now turned to desert. 
Or the Colorado River, which no longer flows to the ocean. 
Fertilizers have more than doubled the phosphorus and nitrogen in the environment. 
The consequence? 
Widespread water pollution and massive degradation of lakes and rivers. 
Surprisingly, agriculture is the biggest contributor to climate change. 
It generates 30% of greenhouse gas emissions. 
That's more than the emissions from all electricity and industry, or from all the world's planes, trains and automobiles. 
Most agricultural emissions come from tropical deforestation, methane from animals and rice fields, and nitrous oxide from over-fertilizing. 
There is nothing we do that transforms the world more than agriculture. 
And there's nothing we do that is more crucial to our survival. 
Here's the dilemma... 
As the world grows by several billion more people, We'll need to double, maybe even triple, global food production. 
So where do we go from here? 
We need a bigger conversation, an international dialogue. 
We need to invest in real solutions: incentives for farmers, precision agriculture, new crop varieties, drip irrigation, gray water recycling, better tillage practices, smarter diets. 
We need everyone at the table. 
Advocates of commercial agriculture, environmental conservation, and organic farming... 
must work together. 
There is no single solution. 
We need collaboration, imagination, determination, because failure is not an option. 
How do we feed the world without destroying it? 
Yeah, so we face one of the greatest grand challenges in all of human history today: the need to feed nine billion people and do so sustainably and equitably and justly, at the same time protecting our planet for this and future generations. 
This is going to be one of the hardest things we ever have done in human history, and we absolutely have to get it right, and we have to get it right on our first and only try. 
So thanks very much. (Applause) 

I have a question for you: Are you religious? 
Please raise your hand right now if you think of yourself as a religious person. 
Let's see, I'd say about three or four percent. 
I had no idea there were so many believers at a TED Conference. 
(Laughter) Okay, here's another question: Do you think of yourself as spiritual in any way, shape or form? Raise your hand. 
Okay, that's the majority. 
My Talk today is about the main reason, or one of the main reasons, why most people consider themselves to be spiritual in some way, shape or form. 
My Talk today is about self-transcendence. 
It's just a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away. 
And when that happens, the feeling is ecstatic and we reach for metaphors of up and down to explain these feelings. 
We talk about being uplifted or elevated. 
Now it's really hard to think about anything abstract like this without a good concrete metaphor. 
So here's the metaphor I'm offering today. 
Think about the mind as being like a house with many rooms, most of which we're very familiar with. 
But sometimes it's as though a doorway appears from out of nowhere and it opens onto a staircase. 
We climb the staircase and experience a state of altered consciousness. 
In 1902, the great American psychologist William James wrote about the many varieties of religious experience. 
He collected all kinds of case studies. 
He quoted the words of all kinds of people who'd had a variety of these experiences. 
One of the most exciting to me is this young man, Stephen Bradley, had an encounter, he thought, with Jesus in 1820. 
And here's what Bradley said about it. 
(Music) (Video) Stephen Bradley: I thought I saw the savior in human shape for about one second in the room, with arms extended, appearing to say to me, "" Come. "" The next day I rejoiced with trembling. 
My happiness was so great that I said I wanted to die. 
This world had no place in my affections. 
Previous to this time, I was very selfish and self-righteous. 
But now I desired the welfare of all mankind and could, with a feeling heart, forgive my worst enemies. 
JH: So note how Bradley's petty, moralistic self just dies on the way up the staircase. 
And on this higher level he becomes loving and forgiving. 
The world's many religions have found so many ways to help people climb the staircase. 
Some shut down the self using meditation. 
Others use psychedelic drugs. 
This is from a 16th century Aztec scroll showing a man about to eat a psilocybin mushroom and at the same moment get yanked up the staircase by a god. 
Others use dancing, spinning and circling to promote self-transcendence. 
But you don't need a religion to get you through the staircase. 
Lots of people find self-transcendence in nature. 
Others overcome their self at raves. 
But here's the weirdest place of all: war. 
So many books about war say the same thing, that nothing brings people together like war. 
And that bringing them together opens up the possibility of extraordinary self-transcendent experiences. 
I'm going to play for you an excerpt from this book by Glenn Gray. 
Gray was a soldier in the American army in World War II. 
And after the war he interviewed a lot of other soldiers and wrote about the experience of men in battle. 
Here's a key passage where he basically describes the staircase. 
(Video) Glenn Gray: Many veterans will admit that the experience of communal effort in battle has been the high point of their lives. 
"I" passes insensibly into a "we," "my" becomes "our" and individual faith loses its central importance. 
I believe that it is nothing less than the assurance of immortality that makes self-sacrifice at these moments so relatively easy. 
I may fall, but I do not die, for that which is real in me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for whom I gave up my life. 
JH: So what all of these cases have in common is that the self seems to thin out, or melt away, and it feels good, it feels really good, in a way totally unlike anything we feel in our normal lives. 
It feels somehow uplifting. 
This idea that we move up was central in the writing of the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim. 
Durkheim even called us Homo duplex, or two-level man. 
The lower level he called the level of the profane. 
Now profane is the opposite of sacred. 
It just means ordinary or common. 
And in our ordinary lives we exist as individuals. 
We want to satisfy our individual desires. 
We pursue our individual goals. 
But sometimes something happens that triggers a phase change. 
Individuals unite into a team, a movement or a nation, which is far more than the sum of its parts. 
Durkheim called this level the level of the sacred because he believed that the function of religion was to unite people into a group, into a moral community. 
Durkheim believed that anything that unites us takes on an air of sacredness. 
And once people circle around some sacred object or value, they'll then work as a team and fight to defend it. 
Durkheim wrote about a set of intense collective emotions that accomplish this miracle of E pluribus unum, of making a group out of individuals. 
Think of the collective joy in Britain on the day World War II ended. 
Think of the collective anger in Tahrir Square, which brought down a dictator. 
And think of the collective grief in the United States that we all felt, that brought us all together, after 9 / 11. 
So let me summarize where we are. 
I'm saying that the capacity for self-transcendence is just a basic part of being human. 
I'm offering the metaphor of a staircase in the mind. 
I'm saying we are Homo duplex and this staircase takes us up from the profane level to the level of the sacred. 
When we climb that staircase, self-interest fades away, we become just much less self-interested, and we feel as though we are better, nobler and somehow uplifted. 
So here's the million-dollar question for social scientists like me: Is the staircase a feature of our evolutionary design? 
Is it a product of natural selection, like our hands? 
Or is it a bug, a mistake in the system — this religious stuff is just something that happens when the wires cross in the brain — Jill has a stroke and she has this religious experience, it's just a mistake? 
Well many scientists who study religion take this view. 
The New Atheists, for example, argue that religion is a set of memes, sort of parasitic memes, that get inside our minds and make us do all kinds of crazy religious stuff, self-destructive stuff, like suicide bombing. 
And after all, how could it ever be good for us to lose ourselves? 
How could it ever be adaptive for any organism to overcome self-interest? 
Well let me show you. 
In "" The Descent of Man, "" Charles Darwin wrote a great deal about the evolution of morality — where did it come from, why do we have it. 
Darwin noted that many of our virtues are of very little use to ourselves, but they're of great use to our groups. 
He wrote about the scenario in which two tribes of early humans would have come in contact and competition. 
He said, "" If the one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members who are always ready to aid and defend each other, this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other. "" He went on to say that "" Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected. "" In other words, Charles Darwin believed in group selection. 
Now this idea has been very controversial for the last 40 years, but it's about to make a major comeback this year, especially after E.O. Wilson's book comes out in April, making a very strong case that we, and several other species, are products of group selection. 
But really the way to think about this is as multilevel selection. 
So look at it this way: You've got competition going on within groups and across groups. 
So here's a group of guys on a college crew team. 
Within this team there's competition. 
There are guys competing with each other. 
The slowest rowers, the weakest rowers, are going to get cut from the team. 
And only a few of these guys are going to go on in the sport. 
Maybe one of them will make it to the Olympics. 
So within the team, their interests are actually pitted against each other. 
And sometimes it would be advantageous for one of these guys to try to sabotage the other guys. 
Maybe he'll badmouth his chief rival to the coach. 
But while that competition is going on within the boat, this competition is going on across boats. 
And once you put these guys in a boat competing with another boat, now they've got no choice but to cooperate because they're all in the same boat. 
They can only win if they all pull together as a team. 
I mean, these things sound trite, but they are deep evolutionary truths. 
The main argument against group selection has always been that, well sure, it would be nice to have a group of cooperators, but as soon as you have a group of cooperators, they're just going to get taken over by free-riders, individuals that are going to exploit the hard work of the others. 
Let me illustrate this for you. 
Suppose we've got a group of little organisms — they can be bacteria, they can be hamsters; it doesn't matter what — and let's suppose that this little group here, they evolved to be cooperative. 
Well that's great. They graze, they defend each other, they work together, they generate wealth. 
And as you'll see in this simulation, as they interact they gain points, as it were, they grow, and when they've doubled in size, you'll see them split, and that's how they reproduce and the population grows. 
But suppose then that one of them mutates. 
There's a mutation in the gene and one of them mutates to follow a selfish strategy. 
It takes advantage of the others. 
And so when a green interacts with a blue, you'll see the green gets larger and the blue gets smaller. 
So here's how things play out. 
We start with just one green, and as it interacts it gains wealth or points or food. 
And in short order, the cooperators are done for. 
The free-riders have taken over. 
If a group cannot solve the free-rider problem then it cannot reap the benefits of cooperation and group selection cannot get started. 
But there are solutions to the free-rider problem. 
It's not that hard a problem. 
In fact, nature has solved it many, many times. 
And nature's favorite solution is to put everyone in the same boat. 
For example, why is it that the mitochondria in every cell has its own DNA, totally separate from the DNA in the nucleus? 
It's because they used to be separate free-living bacteria and they came together and became a superorganism. 
Somehow or other — maybe one swallowed another; we'll never know exactly why — but once they got a membrane around them, they were all in the same membrane, now all the wealth-created division of labor, all the greatness created by cooperation, stays locked inside the membrane and we've got a superorganism. 
And now let's rerun the simulation putting one of these superorganisms into a population of free-riders, of defectors, of cheaters and look what happens. 
A superorganism can basically take what it wants. 
It's so big and powerful and efficient that it can take resources from the greens, from the defectors, the cheaters. 
And pretty soon the whole population is actually composed of these new superorganisms. 
What I've shown you here is sometimes called a major transition in evolutionary history. 
Darwin's laws don't change, but now there's a new kind of player on the field and things begin to look very different. 
Now this transition was not a one-time freak of nature that just happened with some bacteria. 
It happened again about 120 or a 140 million years ago when some solitary wasps began creating little simple, primitive nests, or hives. 
Once several wasps were all together in the same hive, they had no choice but to cooperate, because pretty soon they were locked into competition with other hives. 
And the most cohesive hives won, just as Darwin said. 
These early wasps gave rise to the bees and the ants that have covered the world and changed the biosphere. 
And it happened again, even more spectacularly, in the last half-million years when our own ancestors became cultural creatures, they came together around a hearth or a campfire, they divided labor, they began painting their bodies, they spoke their own dialects, and eventually they worshiped their own gods. 
Once they were all in the same tribe, they could keep the benefits of cooperation locked inside. 
And they unlocked the most powerful force ever known on this planet, which is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction. 
Of course, human groups are nowhere near as cohesive as beehives. 
Human groups may look like hives for brief moments, but they tend to then break apart. 
We're not locked into cooperation the way bees and ants are. 
In fact, often, as we've seen happen in a lot of the Arab Spring revolts, often those divisions are along religious lines. 
Nonetheless, when people do come together and put themselves all into the same movement, they can move mountains. 
Look at the people in these photos I've been showing you. 
Do you think they're there pursuing their self-interest? 
Or are they pursuing communal interest, which requires them to lose themselves and become simply a part of a whole? 
Okay, so that was my Talk delivered in the standard TED way. 
And now I'm going to give the whole Talk over again in three minutes in a more full-spectrum sort of way. 
(Music) (Video) Jonathan Haidt: We humans have many varieties of religious experience, as William James explained. 
One of the most common is climbing the secret staircase and losing ourselves. 
The staircase takes us from the experience of life as profane or ordinary upwards to the experience of life as sacred, or deeply interconnected. 
We are Homo duplex, as Durkheim explained. 
And we are Homo duplex because we evolved by multilevel selection, as Darwin explained. 
I can't be certain if the staircase is an adaptation rather than a bug, but if it is an adaptation, then the implications are profound. 
If it is an adaptation, then we evolved to be religious. 
I don't mean that we evolved to join gigantic organized religions. 
Those things came along too recently. 
I mean that we evolved to see sacredness all around us and to join with others into teams and circle around sacred objects, people and ideas. 
This is why politics is so tribal. 
Politics is partly profane, it's partly about self-interest, but politics is also about sacredness. 
It's about joining with others to pursue moral ideas. 
It's about the eternal struggle between good and evil, and we all believe we're on the good team. 
And most importantly, if the staircase is real, it explains the persistent undercurrent of dissatisfaction in modern life. 
Because human beings are, to some extent, hivish creatures like bees. 
We're bees. We busted out of the hive during the Enlightenment. 
We broke down the old institutions and brought liberty to the oppressed. 
We unleashed Earth-changing creativity and generated vast wealth and comfort. 
Nowadays we fly around like individual bees exulting in our freedom. 
But sometimes we wonder: Is this all there is? 
What should I do with my life? 
What's missing? 
What's missing is that we are Homo duplex, but modern, secular society was built to satisfy our lower, profane selves. 
It's really comfortable down here on the lower level. 
Come, have a seat in my home entertainment center. 
One great challenge of modern life is to find the staircase amid all the clutter and then to do something good and noble once you climb to the top. 
I see this desire in my students at the University of Virginia. 
They all want to find a cause or calling that they can throw themselves into. 
They're all searching for their staircase. 
And that gives me hope because people are not purely selfish. 
Most people long to overcome pettiness and become part of something larger. 
And this explains the extraordinary resonance of this simple metaphor conjured up nearly 400 years ago. 
"" No man is an island entire of itself. 
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. "" JH: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm going to talk today about the pleasures of everyday life. 
But I want to begin with a story of an unusual and terrible man. 
This is Hermann Goering. 
Goering was Hitler's second in command in World War II, his designated successor. 
And like Hitler, Goering fancied himself a collector of art. 
He went through Europe, through World War II, stealing, extorting and occasionally buying various paintings for his collection. 
And what he really wanted was something by Vermeer. 
Hitler had two of them, and he didn't have any. 
So he finally found an art dealer, a Dutch art dealer named Han van Meegeren, who sold him a wonderful Vermeer for the cost of what would now be 10 million dollars. 
And it was his favorite artwork ever. 
World War II came to an end, and Goering was captured, tried at Nuremberg and ultimately sentenced to death. 
Then the Allied forces went through his collections and found the paintings and went after the people who sold it to him. 
And at some point the Dutch police came into Amsterdam and arrested Van Meegeren. 
Van Meegeren was charged with the crime of treason, which is itself punishable by death. 
Six weeks into his prison sentence, van Meegeren confessed. 
But he didn't confess to treason. 
He said, "" I did not sell a great masterpiece to that Nazi. 
I painted it myself; I'm a forger. "" Now nobody believed him. 
And he said, "" I'll prove it. 
Bring me a canvas and some paint, and I will paint a Vermeer much better than I sold that disgusting Nazi. 
I also need alcohol and morphine, because it's the only way I can work. "" (Laughter) So they brought him in. 
He painted a beautiful Vermeer. 
And then the charges of treason were dropped. 
He had a lesser charge of forgery, got a year sentence and died a hero to the Dutch people. 
There's a lot more to be said about van Meegeren, but I want to turn now to Goering, who's pictured here being interrogated at Nuremberg. 
Now Goering was, by all accounts, a terrible man. 
Even for a Nazi, he was a terrible man. 
His American interrogators described him as an amicable psychopath. 
But you could feel sympathy for the reaction he had when he was told that his favorite painting was actually a forgery. 
According to his biographer, "" He looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world. "" (Laughter) And he killed himself soon afterwards. 
He had discovered after all that the painting he thought was this was actually that. 
It looked the same, but it had a different origin, it was a different artwork. 
It wasn't just him who was in for a shock. 
Once van Meegeren was on trial, he couldn't stop talking. 
And he boasted about all the great masterpieces that he himself had painted that were attributed to other artists. 
In particular, "" The Supper at Emmaus "" which was viewed as Vermeer's finest masterpiece, his best work — people would come [from] all over the world to see it — was actually a forgery. 
It was not that painting, but that painting. 
And when that was discovered, it lost all its value and was taken away from the museum. 
Why does this matter? 
I'm a psychologists — why do origins matter so much? 
Why do we respond so much to our knowledge of where something comes from? 
Well there's an answer that many people would give. 
Many sociologists like Veblen and Wolfe would argue that the reason why we take origins so seriously is because we're snobs, because we're focused on status. 
Among other things, if you want to show off how rich you are, how powerful you are, it's always better to own an original than a forgery because there's always going to be fewer originals than forgeries. 
I don't doubt that that plays some role, but what I want to convince you of today is that there's something else going on. I want to convince you 
that humans are, to some extent, natural born essentialists. 
What I mean by this is we don't just respond to things as we see them, or feel them, or hear them. 
Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is. 
I want to suggest that this is true, not just for how we think about things, but how we react to things. 
So I want to suggest that pleasure is deep — and that this isn't true just for higher level pleasures like art, but even the most seemingly simple pleasures are affected by our beliefs about hidden essences. 
So take food. 
Would you eat this? 
Well, a good answer is, "" It depends. What is it? "" Some of you would eat it if it's pork, but not beef. 
Some of you would eat it if it's beef, but not pork. 
Few of you would eat it if it's a rat or a human. 
Some of you would eat it only if it's a strangely colored piece of tofu. 
That's not so surprising. 
But what's more interesting is how it tastes to you will depend critically on what you think you're eating. 
So one demonstration of this was done with young children. 
How do you make children not just be more likely to eat carrots and drink milk, but to get more pleasure from eating carrots and drinking milk — to think they taste better? 
It's simple, you tell them they're from McDonald's. 
They believe McDonald's food is tastier, and it leads them to experience it as tastier. 
How do you get adults to really enjoy wine? 
It's very simple: pour it from an expensive bottle. 
There are now dozens, perhaps hundreds of studies showing that if you believe you're drinking the expensive stuff, it tastes better to you. 
This was recently done with a neuroscientific twist. 
They get people into a fMRI scanner, and while they're lying there, through a tube, they get to sip wine. 
In front of them on a screen is information about the wine. 
Everybody, of course, drinks exactly the same wine. 
But if you believe you're drinking expensive stuff, parts of the brain associated with pleasure and reward light up like a Christmas tree. 
It's not just that you say it's more pleasurable, you say you like it more, you really experience it in a different way. 
Or take sex. 
These are stimuli I've used in some of my studies. 
And if you simply show people these pictures, they'll say these are fairly attractive people. 
But how attractive you find them, how sexually or romantically moved you are by them, rests critically on who you think you're looking at. 
You probably think the picture on the left is male, the one on the right is female. 
If that belief turns out to be mistaken, it will make a difference. 
(Laughter) It will make a difference if they turn out to be much younger or much older than you think they are. 
It will make a difference if you were to discover that the person you're looking at with lust is actually a disguised version of your son or daughter, your mother or father. 
Knowing somebody's your kin typically kills the libido. 
Maybe one of the most heartening findings from the psychology of pleasure is there's more to looking good than your physical appearance. 
If you like somebody, they look better to you. 
This is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than anyone else thinks that they do. 
(Laughter) A particularly dramatic example of this comes from a neurological disorder known as Capgras syndrome. 
So Capgras syndrome is a disorder where you get a specific delusion. 
Sufferers of Capgras syndrome believe that the people they love most in the world have been replaced by perfect duplicates. 
Now often, a result of Capgras syndrome is tragic. 
People have murdered those that they loved, believing that they were murdering an imposter. 
But there's at least one case where Capgras syndrome had a happy ending. 
This was recorded in 1931. 
"" Research described a woman with Capgras syndrome who complained about her poorly endowed and sexually inadequate lover. "" But that was before she got Capgras syndrome. 
After she got it, "" She was happy to report that she has discovered that he possessed a double who was rich, virile, handsome and aristocratic. "" Of course, it was the same man, but she was seeing him in different ways. 
As a third example, consider consumer products. 
So one reason why you might like something is its utility. 
You can put shoes on your feet; you can play golf with golf clubs; and chewed up bubble gum doesn't do anything at all for you. 
But each of these three objects has value above and beyond what it can do for you based on its history. 
The golf clubs were owned by John F. Kennedy and sold for three-quarters of a million dollars at auction. 
The bubble gum was chewed up by pop star Britney Spears and sold for several hundreds of dollars. 
And in fact, there's a thriving market in the partially eaten food of beloved people. 
(Laughter) The shoes are perhaps the most valuable of all. 
According to an unconfirmed report, a Saudi millionaire offered 10 million dollars for this pair of shoes. 
They were the ones thrown at George Bush at an Iraqi press conference several years ago. 
(Applause) Now this attraction to objects doesn't just work for celebrity objects. 
Each one of us, most people, have something in our life that's literally irreplaceable, in that it has value because of its history — maybe your wedding ring, maybe your child's baby shoes — so that if it was lost, you couldn't get it back. 
You could get something that looked like it or felt like it, but you couldn't get the same object back. 
With my colleagues George Newman and Gil Diesendruck, we've looked to see what sort of factors, what sort of history, matters for the objects that people like. 
So in one of our experiments, we asked people to name a famous person who they adored, a living person they adored. 
So one answer was George Clooney. 
Then we asked them, "How much would you pay for George Clooney's sweater?" 
And the answer is a fair amount — more than you would pay for a brand new sweater or a sweater owned by somebody who you didn't adore. 
Then we asked other groups of subjects — we gave them different restrictions and different conditions. 
So for instance, we told some people, "" Look, you can buy the sweater, but you can't tell anybody you own it, and you can't resell it. "" That drops the value of it, suggesting that that's one reason why we like it. 
But what really causes an effect is you tell people, "" Look, you could resell it, you could boast about it, but before it gets to you, it's thoroughly washed. "" That causes a huge drop in the value. 
As my wife put it, "" You've washed away the Clooney cooties. "" (Laughter) So let's go back to art. 
I would love a Chagall. I love the work of Chagall. 
If people want to get me something at the end of the conference, you could buy me a Chagall. 
But I don't want a duplicate, even if I can't tell the difference. 
That's not because, or it's not simply because, I'm a snob and want to boast about having an original. 
Rather, it's because I want something that has a specific history. 
In the case of artwork, the history is special indeed. 
The philosopher Denis Dutton in his wonderful book "" The Art Instinct "" makes the case that, "" The value of an artwork is rooted in assumptions about the human performance underlying its creation. "" And that could explain the difference between an original and a forgery. 
They may look alike, but they have a different history. 
The original is typically the product of a creative act, the forgery isn't. 
I think this approach can explain differences in people's taste in art. 
This is a work by Jackson Pollock. 
Who here likes the work of Jackson Pollock? 
Okay. Who here, it does nothing for them? 
They just don't like it. 
I'm not going to make a claim about who's right, but I will make an empirical claim about people's intuitions, which is that, if you like the work of Jackson Pollock, you'll tend more so than the people who don't like it to believe that these works are difficult to create, that they require a lot of time and energy and creative energy. 
I use Jackson Pollock on purpose as an example because there's a young American artist who paints very much in the style of Jackson Pollock, and her work was worth many tens of thousands of dollars — in large part because she's a very young artist. 
This is Marla Olmstead who did most of her work when she was three years old. 
The interesting thing about Marla Olmstead is her family made the mistake of inviting the television program 60 Minutes II into their house to film her painting. 
And they then reported that her father was coaching her. 
When this came out on television, the value of her art dropped to nothing. 
It was the same art, physically, but the history had changed. 
I've been focusing now on the visual arts, but I want to give two examples from music. 
This is Joshua Bell, a very famous violinist. 
And the Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten decided to enlist him for an audacious experiment. 
The question is: How much would people like Joshua Bell, the music of Joshua Bell, if they didn't know they were listening to Joshua Bell? 
So he got Joshua Bell to take his million dollar violin down to a Washington D.C. subway station and stand in the corner and see how much money he would make. 
And here's a brief clip of this. 
(Violin music) After being there for three-quarters of an hour, he made 32 dollars. 
Not bad. It's also not good. 
Apparently to really enjoy the music of Joshua Bell, you have to know you're listening to Joshua Bell. 
He actually made 20 dollars more than that, but he didn't count it. 
Because this woman comes up — you see at the end of the video — she comes up. 
She had heard him at the Library of Congress a few weeks before at this extravagant black-tie affair. 
So she's stunned that he's standing in a subway station. 
So she's struck with pity. 
She reaches into her purse and hands him a 20. 
(Laughter) (Applause) The second example from music is from John Cage's modernist composition, "4 '33". " 
As many of you know, this is the composition where the pianist sits at a bench, opens up the piano and sits and does nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds — that period of silence. 
And people have different views on this. 
But what I want to point out is you can buy this from iTunes. 
(Laughter) For a dollar 99, you can listen to that silence, which is different than other forms of silence. (Laughter) 
Now I've been talking so far about pleasure, but what I want to suggest is that everything I've said applies as well to pain. 
And how you think about what you're experiencing, your beliefs about the essence of it, affect how it hurts. 
One lovely experiment was done by Kurt Gray and Dan Wegner. 
What they did was they hooked up Harvard undergraduates to an electric shock machine. 
And they gave them a series of painful electric shocks. 
So it was a series of five painful shocks. 
Half of them are told that they're being given the shocks by somebody in another room, but the person in the other room doesn't know they're giving them shocks. 
There's no malevolence, they're just pressing a button. 
The first shock is recorded as very painful. 
The second shock feels less painful, because you get a bit used to it. 
The third drops, the fourth, the fifth. 
The pain gets less. 
In the other condition, they're told that the person in the next room is shocking them on purpose — knows they're shocking them. 
The first shock hurts like hell. 
The second shock hurts just as much, and the third and the fourth and the fifth. 
It hurts more if you believe somebody is doing it to you on purpose. 
The most extreme example of this is that in some cases, pain under the right circumstances can transform into pleasure. 
Humans have this extraordinarily interesting property that will often seek out low-level doses of pain in controlled circumstances and take pleasure from it — as in the eating of hot chili peppers and roller coaster rides. 
The point was nicely summarized by the poet John Milton who wrote, "" The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. "" And I'll end with that. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Tonight, I'm going to try to make the case that inviting a loved one, a friend or even a stranger to record a meaningful interview with you just might turn out to be one of the most important moments in that person's life, and in yours. 
When I was 22 years old, I was lucky enough to find my calling when I fell into making radio stories. 
At almost the exact same time, I found out that my dad, who I was very, very close to, was gay. 
We were a very tight-knit family, and I was crushed. 
At some point, in one of our strained conversations, my dad mentioned the Stonewall riots. 
He told me that one night in 1969, a group of young black and Latino drag queens fought back against the police at a gay bar in Manhattan called the Stonewall Inn, and how this sparked the modern gay rights movement. 
It was an amazing story, and it piqued my interest. 
So I decided to pick up my tape recorder and find out more. 
With the help of a young archivist named Michael Shirker, we tracked down all of the people we could find who had been at the Stonewall Inn that night. 
Recording these interviews, I saw how the microphone gave me the license to go places I otherwise never would have gone and talk to people I might not otherwise ever have spoken to. 
I had the privilege of getting to know some of the most amazing, fierce and courageous human beings I had ever met. 
I dedicated the program to my dad, it changed my relationship with him, and it changed my life. 
Over the next 15 years, I made many more radio documentaries, working to shine a light on people who are rarely heard from in the media. 
Over and over again, I'd see how this simple act of being interviewed could mean so much to people, particularly those who had been told that their stories didn't matter. 
I could literally see people's back straighten as they started to speak into the microphone. 
In 1998, I made a documentary about the last flophouse hotels on the Bowery in Manhattan. 
They lived in cubicles the size of prison cells covered with chicken wire so you couldn't jump from one room into the next. 
Later, I wrote a book on the men with the photographer Harvey Wang. 
I remember walking into a flophouse with an early version of the book and showing one of the guys his page. 
He stood there staring at it in silence, then he grabbed the book out of my hand and started running down the long, narrow hallway holding it over his head shouting, "" I exist! I exist. "" (Applause) In many ways, "" I exist "" became the clarion call for StoryCorps, this crazy idea that I had a dozen years ago. 
The thought was to take documentary work and turn it on its head. 
Traditionally, broadcast documentary has been about recording interviews to create a work of art or entertainment or education that is seen or heard by a whole lot of people, but I wanted to try something where the interview itself was the purpose of this work, and see if we could give many, many, many people the chance to be listened to in this way. 
So in Grand Central Terminal 11 years ago, we built a booth where anyone can come to honor someone else by interviewing them about their life. 
You come to this booth and you're met by a facilitator who brings you inside. 
You sit across from, say, your grandfather for close to an hour and you listen and you talk. 
Many people think of it as, if this was to be our last conversation, what would I want to ask of and say to this person who means so much to me? 
At the end of the session, you walk away with a copy of the interview and another copy goes to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress so that your great-great-great-grandkids can someday get to know your grandfather through his voice and story. 
So we open this booth in one of the busiest places in the world and invite people to have this incredibly intimate conversation with another human being. 
I had no idea if it would work, but from the very beginning, it did. 
People treated the experience with incredible respect, and amazing conversations happened inside. 
I want to play just one animated excerpt from an interview recorded at that original Grand Central Booth. 
This is 12-year-old Joshua Littman interviewing his mother, Sarah. 
Josh has Asperger's syndrome. 
As you may know, kids with Asperger's are incredibly smart but have a tough time socially. 
They usually have obsessions. 
In Josh's case, it's with animals, so this is Josh talking with his mom Sarah at Grand Central nine years ago. 
(Video) Josh Littman: From a scale of one to 10, do you think your life would be different without animals? 
Sarah Littman: I think it would be an eight without animals, because they add so much pleasure to life. 
JL: How else do you think your life would be different without them? 
SL: I could do without things like cockroaches and snakes. 
JL: Well, I'm okay with snakes as long as they're not venomous or constrict you or anything. 
SL: Yeah, I'm not a big snake person — JL: But cockroach is just the insect we love to hate. 
SL: Yeah, it really is. 
JL: Have you ever thought you couldn't cope with having a child? 
SL: I remember when you were a baby, you had really bad colic, so you would just cry and cry. 
JL: What's colic? SL: It's when you get this stomach ache and all you do is scream for, like, four hours. 
JL: Even louder than Amy does? 
SL: You were pretty loud, but Amy's was more high-pitched. 
JL: I think it feels like everyone seems to like Amy more, like she's the perfect little angel. 
SL: Well, I can understand why you think that people like Amy more, and I'm not saying it's because of your Asperger's syndrome, but being friendly comes easily to Amy, whereas I think for you it's more difficult, but the people who take the time to get to know you love you so much. 
JL: Like Ben or Eric or Carlos? SL: Yeah — JL: Like I have better quality friends but less quantity? (Laughter) SL: I wouldn't judge the quality, but I think — JL: I mean, first it was like, Amy loved Claudia, then she hated Claudia, she loved Claudia, then she hated Claudia. 
SL: Part of that's a girl thing, honey. 
The important thing for you is that you have a few very good friends, and really that's what you need in life. 
JL: Did I turn out to be the son you wanted when I was born? 
Did I meet your expectations? 
SL: You've exceeded my expectations, sweetie, because, sure, you have these fantasies of what your child's going to be like, but you have made me grow so much as a parent, because you think — JL: Well, I was the one who made you a parent. 
SL: You were the one who made me a parent. That's a good point. (Laughter) But also because you think differently from what they tell you in the parenting books, I really had to learn to think outside of the box with you, and it's made me much more creative as a parent and as a person, and I'll always thank you for that. 
SL: And that helped when Amy was born, but you are so incredibly special to me and I'm so lucky to have you as my son. 
(Applause) David Isay: After this story ran on public radio, Josh received hundreds of letters telling him what an amazing kid he was. 
His mom, Sarah, bound them together in a book, and when Josh got picked on at school, they would read the letters together. 
I just want to acknowledge that two of my heroes are here with us tonight. 
Sarah Littman and her son Josh, who is now an honors student in college. 
(Applause) You know, a lot of people talk about crying when they hear StoryCorps stories, and it's not because they're sad. 
Most of them aren't. 
I think it's because you're hearing something authentic and pure at this moment, when sometimes it's hard to tell what's real and what's an advertisement. 
It's kind of the anti-reality TV. 
Nobody comes to StoryCorps to get rich. 
Nobody comes to get famous. 
It's simply an act of generosity and love. 
So many of these are just everyday people talking about lives lived with kindness, courage, decency and dignity, and when you hear that kind of story, it can sometimes feel like you're walking on holy ground. 
So this experiment in Grand Central worked, and we expanded across the country. 
Today, more than 100,000 people in all 50 states in thousands of cities and towns across America have recorded StoryCorps interviews. 
It's now the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered. 
(Applause) We've hired and trained hundreds of facilitators to help guide people through the experience. 
Most serve a year or two with StoryCorps traveling the country, gathering the wisdom of humanity. 
They call it bearing witness, and if you ask them, all of the facilitators will tell you that the most important thing they've learned from being present during these interviews is that people are basically good. 
And I think for the first years of StoryCorps, you could argue that there was some kind of a selection bias happening, but after tens of thousands of interviews with every kind of person in every part of the country — rich, poor, five years old to 105, 80 different languages, across the political spectrum — you have to think that maybe these guys are actually onto something. 
I've also learned so much from these interviews. 
I've learned about the poetry and the wisdom and the grace that can be found in the words of people all around us when we simply take the time to listen, like this interview between a betting clerk in Brooklyn named Danny Perasa who brought his wife Annie to StoryCorps to talk about his love for her. 
(Audio) Danny Perasa: You see, the thing of it is, I always feel guilty when I say "" I love you "" to you. 
And I say it so often. I say it to remind you that as dumpy as I am, it's coming from me. 
It's like hearing a beautiful song from a busted old radio, and it's nice of you to keep the radio around the house. 
You never want to go back to black and white. 
(Laughter) DI: Danny was about five feet tall with crossed eyes and one single snaggletooth, but Danny Perasa had more romance in his little pinky than all of Hollywood's leading men put together. 
What else have I learned? 
I've learned about the almost unimaginable capacity for the human spirit to forgive. 
I've learned about resilience and I've learned about strength. 
Like an interview with Oshea Israel and Mary Johnson. 
When Oshea was a teenager, he murdered Mary's only son, Laramiun Byrd, in a gang fight. 
A dozen years later, Mary went to prison to meet Oshea and find out who this person was who had taken her son's life. 
Slowly and remarkably, they became friends, and when he was finally released from the penitentiary, Oshea actually moved in next door to Mary. 
This is just a short excerpt of a conversation they had soon after Oshea was freed. 
(Video) Mary Johnson: My natural son is no longer here. 
I didn't see him graduate, and now you're going to college. 
I'll have the opportunity to see you graduate. 
I didn't see him get married. 
Hopefully one day, I'll be able to experience that with you. 
Oshea Israel: Just to hear you say those things and to be in my life in the manner in which you are is my motivation. 
It motivates me to make sure that I stay on the right path. 
You still believe in me, and the fact that you can do it despite how much pain I caused you, it's amazing. 
MJ: I know it's not an easy thing to be able to share our story together, even with us sitting here looking at each other right now. 
I know it's not an easy thing, so I admire that you can do this. 
OI: I love you, lady. MJ: I love you too, son. 
(Applause) DI: And I've been reminded countless times of the courage and goodness of people, and how the arc of history truly does bend towards justice. 
Like the story of Alexis Martinez, who was born Arthur Martinez in the Harold Ickes projects in Chicago. 
In the interview, she talks with her daughter Lesley about joining a gang as a young man, and later in life transitioning into the woman she was always meant to be. 
This is Alexis and her daughter Lesley. 
(Audio) Alexis Martinez: One of the most difficult things for me was I was always afraid that I wouldn't be allowed to be in my granddaughters' lives, and you blew that completely out of the water, you and your husband. 
One of the fruits of that is, in my relationship with my granddaughters, they fight with each other sometimes over whether I'm he or she. 
Lesley Martinez: But they're free to talk about it. 
AM: They're free to talk about it, but that, to me, is a miracle. 
LM: You don't have to apologize. You don't have to tiptoe. 
We're not going to cut you off, and that's something I've always wanted you to just know, that you're loved. 
AM: You know, I live this every day now. 
I walk down the streets as a woman, and I really am at peace with who I am. 
I mean, I wish I had a softer voice maybe, but now I walk in love and I try to live that way every day. 
DI: Now I walk in love. 
I'm going to tell you a secret about StoryCorps. 
It takes some courage to have these conversations. 
StoryCorps speaks to our mortality. 
Participants know this recording will be heard long after they're gone. 
There's a hospice doctor named Ira Byock who has worked closely with us on recording interviews with people who are dying. 
He wrote a book called "" The Four Things That Matter Most "" about the four things you want to say to the most important people in your life before they or you die: thank you, I love you, forgive me, I forgive you. 
They're just about the most powerful words we can say to one another, and often that's what happens in a StoryCorps booth. 
It's a chance to have a sense of closure with someone you care about — no regrets, nothing left unsaid. 
And it's hard and it takes courage, but that's why we're alive, right? 
So, the TED Prize. 
When I first heard from TED and Chris a few months ago about the possibility of the Prize, I was completely floored. 
They asked me to come up with a very brief wish for humanity, no more than 50 words. 
So I thought about it, I wrote my 50 words, and a few weeks later, Chris called and said, "" Go for it. "" So here is my wish: that you will help us take everything we've learned through StoryCorps and bring it to the world so that anyone anywhere can easily record a meaningful interview with another human being which will then be archived for history. 
How are we going to do that? With this. 
We're fast moving into a future where everyone in the world will have access to one of these, and it has powers I never could have imagined 11 years ago when I started StoryCorps. 
It has a microphone, it can tell you how to do things, and it can send audio files. 
Those are the key ingredients. 
So the first part of the wish is already underway. 
Over the past couple of months, the team at StoryCorps has been working furiously to create an app that will bring StoryCorps out of our booths so that it can be experienced by anyone, anywhere, anytime. 
Remember, StoryCorps has always been two people and a facilitator helping them record their conversation, which is preserved forever, but at this very moment, we're releasing a public beta version of the StoryCorps app. 
The app is a digital facilitator that walks you through the StoryCorps interview process, helps you pick questions, and gives you all the tips you need to record a meaningful StoryCorps interview, and then with one tap upload it to our archive at the Library of Congress. 
That's the easy part, the technology. 
The real challenge is up to you: to take this tool and figure out how we can use it all across America and around the world, so that instead of recording thousands of StoryCorps interviews a year, we could potentially record tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or maybe even more. 
Imagine, for example, a national homework assignment where every high school student studying U.S. history across the country records an interview with an elder over Thanksgiving, so that in one single weekend an entire generation of American lives and experiences are captured. 
(Applause) Or imagine mothers on opposite sides of a conflict somewhere in the world sitting down not to talk about that conflict but to find out who they are as people, and in doing so, begin to build bonds of trust; or that someday it becomes a tradition all over the world that people are honored with a StoryCorps interview on their 75th birthday; or that people in your community go into retirement homes or hospitals or homeless shelters or even prisons armed with this app to honor the people least heard in our society and ask them who they are, what they've learned in life, 
and how they want to be remembered. 
(Applause) Ten years ago, I recorded a StoryCorps interview with my dad who was a psychiatrist, and became a well-known gay activist. 
This is the picture of us at that interview. 
I never thought about that recording until a couple of years ago, when my dad, who seemed to be in perfect health and was still seeing patients 40 hours a week, was diagnosed with cancer. 
He passed away very suddenly a few days later. 
It was June 28, 2012, the anniversary of the Stonewall riots. 
I listened to that interview for the first time at three in the morning on the day that he died. 
I have a couple of young kids at home, and I knew that the only way they were going to get to know this person who was such a towering figure in my life would be through that session. 
I thought I couldn't believe in StoryCorps any more deeply than I did, but it was at that moment that I fully and viscerally grasped the importance of making these recordings. 
Every day, people come up to me and say, "" I wish I had interviewed my father or my grandmother or my brother, but I waited too long. "" Now, no one has to wait anymore. 
At this moment, when so much of how we communicate is fleeting and inconsequential, join us in creating this digital archive of conversations that are enduring and important. 
Help us create this gift to our children, this testament to who we are as human beings. 
I hope you'll help us make this wish come true. 
Interview a family member, a friend or even a stranger. 
Together, we can create an archive of the wisdom of humanity, and maybe in doing so, we'll learn to listen a little more and shout a little less. 
Maybe these conversations will remind us what's really important. 
And maybe, just maybe, it will help us recognize that simple truth that every life, every single life, matters equally and infinitely. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

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

When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. 
I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools. 
I gave out homework assignments. 
What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. 
After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective. 
But what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily? 
I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my question was, who is successful here and why? 
We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students? 
Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. 
I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate. 
Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure, things like family income, standardized achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school. 
It's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out. 
To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. 
Every day, parents and teachers ask me, "" How do I build grit in kids? 
How do I keep them motivated for the long run? "" The honest answer is, I don't know. 
So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called "" growth mindset. "" This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. 
Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition. 
But we need more. 
We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them. 

The Kraken, a beast so terrifying it was said to devour men and ships and whales, and so enormous it could be mistaken for an island. 
In assessing the merits of such tales, it's probably wise to keep in mind that old sailor's saw that the only difference between a fairytale and a sea story is a fairytale begins, "" Once upon a time, "" and a sea story begins, "" This ain't no shit. "" (Laughter) Every fish that gets away grows with every telling of the tale. 
Nevertheless, there are giants in the ocean, and we now have video proof, as those of you that saw the Discovery Channel documentary are no doubt aware. 
I was one of the three scientists on this expedition that took place last summer off Japan. 
I'm the short one. 
The other two are Dr. Tsunemi Kubodera and Dr. Steve O'Shea. 
I owe my participation in this now-historic event to TED. 
In 2010, there was a TED event called Mission Blue held aboard the Lindblad Explorer in the Galapagos as part of the fulfillment of Sylvia Earle's TED wish. 
I spoke about a new way of exploring the ocean, one that focuses on attracting animals instead of scaring them away. 
Mike deGruy was also invited, and he spoke with great passion about his love of the ocean, and he also talked to me about applying my approach to something he's been involved with for a very long time, which is the hunt for the giant squid. 
It was Mike that got me invited to the squid summit, a gathering of squid experts at the Discovery Channel that summer during Shark Week. (Laughter) I gave a talk on unobtrusive viewing and optical luring of deep sea squid in which I emphasized the importance of using quiet, unobtrusive platforms for exploration. 
This came out of hundreds of dives I have made, farting around in the dark using these platforms, and my impression that I saw more animals working from the submersible than I did with either of the remote-operated vehicles. 
But that could just be because the submersible has a wider field of view. 
But I also felt like I saw more animals working with the Tiburon than the Ventana, two vehicles with the same field of view but different propulsion systems. 
So my suspicion was that it might have something to do with the amount of noise they make. 
So I set up a hydrophone on the bottom of the ocean, and I had each of these fly by at the same speed and distance and recorded the sound they made. 
The Johnson Sea-Link — (whirring noise) — which you can probably just barely hear here, uses electric thrusters — very, very quiet. 
The Tiburon also uses electric powered thrusters. 
It's also pretty quiet, but a bit noisier. (Louder whirring noise) But most deep-diving ROVs these days use hydraulics and they sound like the Ventana. (Loud beeping noise) I think that's got to be scaring a lot of animals away. 
So for the deep sea squid hunt, I proposed using an optical lure attached to a camera platform with no thrusters, no motors, just a battery-powered camera, and the only illumination coming from red light that's invisible to most deep-sea animals that are adapted to see primarily blue. 
That's visible to our eye, but it's the equivalent of infrared in the deep sea. 
So this camera platform, which we called the Medusa, could just be thrown off the back of the ship, attached to a float at the surface with over 2,000 feet of line, it would just float around passively carried by the currents, and the only light visible to the animals in the deep would be the blue light of the optical lure, which we called the electronic jellyfish, or e-jelly, because it was designed to imitate the bioluminescent display of the common deep sea jellyfish Atolla. 
Now, this pinwheel of light that the Atolla produces is known as a bioluminescent burglar alarm and is a form of defense. 
The reason that the electronic jellyfish worked as a lure is not because giant squid eat jellyfish, but it's because this jellyfish only resorts to producing this light when it's being chewed on by a predator and its only hope for escape may be to attract the attention of a larger predator that will attack its attacker and thereby afford it an opportunity for escape. 
It's a scream for help, a last-ditch attempt for escape, and a common form of defense in the deep sea. 
The approach worked. 
Whereas all previous expeditions had failed to garner a single video glimpse of the giant, we managed six, and the first triggered wild excitement. 
Edith Widder (on video): Oh my God. Oh my God! Are you kidding me? Other scientists: Oh ho ho! That's just hanging there. 
EW: It was like it was teasing us, doing a kind of fan dance — now you see me, now you don't — and we had four such teasing appearances, and then on the fifth, it came in and totally wowed us. 
(Music) Narrator: (Speaking in Japanese) Scientists: Ooh. Bang! Oh my God! Whoa! 
(Applause) EW: The full monty. 
What really wowed me about that was the way it came in up over the e-jelly and then attacked the enormous thing next to it, which I think it mistook for the predator on the e-jelly. 
But even more incredible was the footage shot from the Triton submersible. 
What was not mentioned in the Discovery documentary was that the bait squid that Dr. Kubodera used, a one-meter long diamondback squid had a light attached to it, a squid jig of the type that longline fishermen use, and I think it was this light that brought the giant in. 
Now, what you're seeing is the intensified camera's view under red light, and that's all Dr. Kubodera could see when the giant comes in here. 
And then he got so excited, he turned on his flashlight because he wanted to see better, and the giant didn't run away, so he risked turning on the white lights on the submersible, bringing a creature of legend from the misty history into high-resolution video. 
It was absolutely breathtaking, and had this animal had its feeding tentacles intact and fully extended, it would have been as tall as a two-story house. 
How could something that big live in our ocean and yet remain unfilmed until now? 
We've only explored about five percent of our ocean. 
There are great discoveries yet to be made down there, fantastic creatures representing millions of years of evolution and possibly bioactive compounds that could benefit us in ways that we can't even yet imagine. 
Yet we have spent only a tiny fraction of the money on ocean exploration that we've spent on space exploration. 
We need a NASA-like organization for ocean exploration, because we need to be exploring and protecting our life support systems here on Earth. 
We need — thank you. (Applause) Exploration is the engine that drives innovation. 
Innovation drives economic growth. 
So let's all go exploring, but let's do it in a way that doesn't scare the animals away, or, as Mike deGruy once said, "" If you want to get away from it all and see something you've never seen, or have an excellent chance of seeing something that no one's ever seen, get in a sub. "" He should have been with us for this adventure. 
We miss him. 
(Applause) 

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

Late in January 1975, a 17-year-old German girl called Vera Brandes walked out onto the stage of the Cologne Opera House. 
The auditorium was empty. 
It was lit only by the dim, green glow of the emergency exit sign. 
This was the most exciting day of Vera's life. 
She was the youngest concert promoter in Germany, and she had persuaded the Cologne Opera House to host a late-night concert of jazz from the American musician, Keith Jarrett. 
1,400 people were coming. 
And in just a few hours, Jarrett would walk out on the same stage, he'd sit down at the piano and without rehearsal or sheet music, he would begin to play. 
But right now, Vera was introducing Keith to the piano in question, and it wasn't going well. 
Jarrett looked to the instrument a little warily, played a few notes, walked around it, played a few more notes, muttered something to his producer. 
Then the producer came over to Vera and said... 
"If you don't get a new piano, Keith can't play." 
There'd been a mistake. 
The opera house had provided the wrong instrument. 
This one had this harsh, tinny upper register, because all the felt had worn away. 
The black notes were sticking, the white notes were out of tune, the pedals didn't work and the piano itself was just too small. 
It wouldn't create the volume that would fill a large space such as the Cologne Opera House. 
So Keith Jarrett left. 
He went and sat outside in his car, leaving Vera Brandes to get on the phone to try to find a replacement piano. 
Now she got a piano tuner, but she couldn't get a new piano. 
And so she went outside and she stood there in the rain, talking to Keith Jarrett, begging him not to cancel the concert. 
And he looked out of his car at this bedraggled, rain-drenched German teenager, took pity on her, and said, "Never forget... only for you." 
And so a few hours later, Jarrett did indeed step out onto the stage of the opera house, he sat down at the unplayable piano and began. 
(Music) Within moments it became clear that something magical was happening. 
Jarrett was avoiding those upper registers, he was sticking to the middle tones of the keyboard, which gave the piece a soothing, ambient quality. 
But also, because the piano was so quiet, he had to set up these rumbling, repetitive riffs in the bass. 
And he stood up twisting, pounding down on the keys, desperately trying to create enough volume to reach the people in the back row. 
It's an electrifying performance. 
It somehow has this peaceful quality, and at the same time it's full of energy, it's dynamic. 
Keith Jarrett had been handed a mess. 
But Jarrett's instinct was wrong, and thank goodness he changed his mind. 
We've actually known for a while that certain kinds of difficulty, certain kinds of obstacle, can actually improve our performance. 
Now, they've proved their worth in album after album. 
The musicians hate them. 
(Laughter) So Phil Collins was playing drums on an early Brian Eno album. 
He got so frustrated he started throwing beer cans across the studio. 
Carlos Alomar, great rock guitarist, working with Eno on David Bowie's "" Lodger "" album, and at one point he turns to Brian and says, "Brian, this experiment is stupid." 
But the thing is it was a pretty good album, but also, Carlos Alomar, 35 years later, now uses The Oblique Strategies. 
And he tells his students to use The Oblique Strategies because he's realized something. 
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't helping you. 
The strategies actually weren't a deck of cards originally, they were just a list — list on the recording studio wall. 
A checklist of things you might try if you got stuck. 
The list didn't work. 
Know why? 
Not messy enough. 
Your eye would go down the list and it would settle on whatever was the least disruptive, the least troublesome, which of course misses the point entirely. 
And what Brian Eno came to realize was, yes, we need to run the stupid experiments, we need to deal with the awkward strangers, we need to try to read the ugly fonts. 
These things help us. 
They help us solve problems, they help us be more creative. 
But also... 
we really need some persuasion if we're going to accept this. 
So however we do it... 
whether it's sheer willpower, whether it's the flip of a card or whether it's a guilt trip from a German teenager, all of us, from time to time, need to sit down and try and play the unplayable piano. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm going to talk about the simple truth in leadership in the 21st century. 
In the 21st century, we need to actually look at — and what I'm actually going to encourage you to consider today — is to go back to our school days when we learned how to count. 
But I think it's time for us to think about what we count. 
Because what we actually count truly counts. 
Let me start by telling you a little story. 
This is Van Quach. 
She came to this country in 1986 from Vietnam. 
She changed her name to Vivian because she wanted to fit in here in America. 
Her first job was at an inner-city motel in San Francisco as a maid. 
I happened to buy that motel about three months after Vivian started working there. 
So Vivian and I have been working together for 23 years. 
With the youthful idealism of a 26-year-old, in 1987, I started my company and I called it Joie de Vivre, a very impractical name, because I actually was looking to create joy of life. 
And this first hotel that I bought, motel, was a pay-by-the-hour, no-tell motel in the inner-city of San Francisco. 
As I spent time with Vivian, I saw that she had sort of a joie de vivre in how she did her work. 
It made me question and curious: How could someone actually find joy in cleaning toilets for a living? 
So I spent time with Vivian, and I saw that she didn't find joy in cleaning toilets. 
Her job, her goal and her calling was not to become the world's greatest toilet scrubber. 
What counts for Vivian was the emotional connection she created with her fellow employees and our guests. 
And what gave her inspiration and meaning was the fact that she was taking care of people who were far away from home. 
Because Vivian knew what it was like to be far away from home. 
That very human lesson, more than 20 years ago, served me well during the last economic downturn we had. 
In the wake of the dotcom crash and 9 / 11, San Francisco Bay Area hotels went through the largest percentage revenue drop in the history of American hotels. 
We were the largest operator of hotels in the Bay Area, so we were particularly vulnerable. 
But also back then, remember we stopped eating French fries in this country. 
Well, not exactly, of course not. 
We started eating "" freedom fries, "" and we started boycotting anything that was French. 
Well, my name of my company, Joie de Vivre — so I started getting these letters from places like Alabama and Orange County saying to me that they were going to boycott my company because they thought we were a French company. 
And I'd write them back, and I'd say, "" What a minute. We're not French. 
We're an American company. We're based in San Francisco. "" And I'd get a terse response: "" Oh, that's worse. "" (Laughter) So one particular day when I was feeling a little depressed and not a lot of joie de vivre, I ended up in the local bookstore around the corner from our offices. 
And I initially ended up in the business section of the bookstore looking for a business solution. 
But given my befuddled state of mind, I ended up in the self-help section very quickly. 
That's where I got reacquainted with Abraham Maslow's "" hierarchy of needs. "" I took one psychology class in college, and I learned about this guy, Abraham Maslow, as many of us are familiar with his hierarchy of needs. 
But as I sat there for four hours, the full afternoon, reading Maslow, I recognized something that is true of most leaders. 
One of the simplest facts in business is something that we often neglect, and that is that we're all human. 
Each of us, no matter what our role is in business, has some hierarchy of needs in the workplace. 
So as I started reading more Maslow, what I started to realize is that Maslow, later in his life, wanted to take this hierarchy for the individual and apply it to the collective, to organizations and specifically to business. 
But unfortunately, he died prematurely in 1970, and so he wasn't really able to live that dream completely. 
So I realized in that dotcom crash that my role in life was to channel Abe Maslow. 
And that's what I did a few years ago when I took that five-level hierarchy of needs pyramid and turned it into what I call the transformation pyramid, which is survival, success and transformation. 
It's not just fundamental in business, it's fundamental in life. 
And we started asking ourselves the questions about how we were actually addressing the higher needs, these transformational needs for our key employees in the company. 
These three levels of the hierarchy needs relate to the five levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. 
But as we started asking ourselves about how we were addressing the higher needs of our employees and our customers, I realized we had no metrics. 
We had nothing that actually could tell us whether we were actually getting it right. 
So we started asking ourselves: What kind of less obvious metrics could we use to actually evaluate our employees' sense of meaning, or our customers' sense of emotional connection with us? 
For example, we actually started asking our employees, do they understand the mission of our company, and do they feel like they believe in it, can they actually influence it, and do they feel that their work actually has an impact on it? 
We started asking our customers, did they feel an emotional connection with us, in one of seven different kinds of ways. 
Miraculously, as we asked these questions and started giving attention higher up the pyramid, what we found is we created more loyalty. 
Our customer loyalty skyrocketed. 
Our employee turnover dropped to one-third of the industry average, and during that five year dotcom bust, we tripled in size. 
As I went out and started spending time with other leaders out there and asking them how they were getting through that time, what they told me over and over again was that they just manage what they can measure. 
What we can measure is that tangible stuff at the bottom of the pyramid. 
They didn't even see the intangible stuff higher up the pyramid. 
So I started asking myself the question: How can we get leaders to start valuing the intangible? 
If we're taught as leaders to just manage what we can measure, and all we can measure is the tangible in life, we're missing a whole lot of things at the top of the pyramid. 
So I went out and studied a bunch of things, and I found a survey that showed that 94 percent of business leaders worldwide believe that the intangibles are important in their business, things like intellectual property, their corporate culture, their brand loyalty, and yet, only five percent of those same leaders actually had a means of measuring the intangibles in their business. 
So as leaders, we understand that intangibles are important, but we don't have a clue how to measure them. 
So here's another Einstein quote: "" Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. "" I hate to argue with Einstein, but if that which is most valuable in our life and our business actually can't be counted or valued, aren't we going to spend our lives just mired in measuring the mundane? 
It was that sort of heady question about what counts that led me to take my CEO hat off for a week and fly off to the Himalayan peaks. 
I flew off to a place that's been shrouded in mystery for centuries, a place some folks call Shangri-La. 
It's actually moved from the survival base of the pyramid to becoming a transformational role model for the world. 
I went to Bhutan. 
The teenage king of Bhutan was also a curious man, but this was back in 1972, when he ascended to the throne two days after his father passed away. 
At age 17, he started asking the kinds of questions that you'd expect of someone with a beginner's mind. 
On a trip through India, early in his reign as king, he was asked by an Indian journalist about the Bhutanese GDP, the size of the Bhutanese GDP. 
The king responded in a fashion that actually has transformed us four decades later. 
He said the following, he said: "" Why are we so obsessed and focused with gross domestic product? 
Why don't we care more about gross national happiness? "" Now, in essence, the king was asking us to consider an alternative definition of success, what has come to be known as GNH, or gross national happiness. 
Most world leaders didn't take notice, and those that did thought this was just "" Buddhist economics. "" But the king was serious. 
This was a notable moment, because this was the first time a world leader in almost 200 years had suggested that intangible of happiness — that leader 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson with the Declaration of Independence — 200 years later, this king was suggesting that intangible of happiness is something that we should measure, and it's something we should actually value as government officials. 
For the next three dozen years as king, this king actually started measuring and managing around happiness in Bhutan — including, just recently, taking his country from being an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy with no bloodshed, no coup. 
Bhutan, for those of you who don't know it, is the newest democracy in the world, just two years ago. 
So as I spent time with leaders in the GNH movement, I got to really understand what they're doing. 
And I got to spend some time with the prime minister. 
Over dinner, I asked him an impertinent question. 
I asked him, "" How can you create and measure something which evaporates — in other words, happiness? "" And he's a very wise man, and he said, "" Listen, Bhutan's goal is not to create happiness. 
We create the conditions for happiness to occur. 
In other words, we create a habitat of happiness. "" Wow, that's interesting. 
He said that they have a science behind that art, and they've actually created four essential pillars, nine key indicators and 72 different metrics that help them to measure their GNH. 
One of those key indicators is: How do the Bhutanese feel about how they spend their time each day? 
It's a good question. How do you feel about how you spend your time each day? 
Time is one of the scarcest resources in the modern world. 
And yet, of course, that little intangible piece of data doesn't factor into our GDP calculations. 
As I spent my week up in the Himalayas, I started to imagine what I call an emotional equation. 
And it focuses on something I read long ago from a guy named Rabbi Hyman Schachtel. 
How many know him? Anybody? 
1954, he wrote a book called "" The Real Enjoyment of Living, "" and he suggested that happiness is not about having what you want; instead, it's about wanting what you have. 
Or in other words, I think the Bhutanese believe happiness equals wanting what you have — imagine gratitude — divided by having what you want — gratification. 
The Bhutanese aren't on some aspirational treadmill, constantly focused on what they don't have. 
Their religion, their isolation, their deep respect for their culture and now the principles of their GNH movement all have fostered a sense of gratitude about what they do have. 
How many of us here, as TEDsters in the audience, spend more of our time in the bottom half of this equation, in the denominator? 
We are a bottom-heavy culture in more ways than one. 
(Laughter) The reality is, in Western countries, quite often we do focus on the pursuit of happiness as if happiness is something that we have to go out — an object that we're supposed to get, or maybe many objects. 
Actually, in fact, if you look in the dictionary, many dictionaries define pursuit as to "" chase with hostility. "" Do we pursue happiness with hostility? 
Good question. But back to Bhutan. 
Bhutan's bordered on its north and south by 38 percent of the world's population. 
Could this little country, like a startup in a mature industry, be the spark plug that influences a 21st century of middle-class in China and India? 
Bhutan's created the ultimate export, a new global currency of well-being, and there are 40 countries around the world today that are studying their own GNH. 
You may have heard, this last fall Nicolas Sarkozy in France announcing the results of an 18-month study by two Nobel economists, focusing on happiness and wellness in France. 
Sarkozy suggested that world leaders should stop myopically focusing on GDP and consider a new index, what some French are calling a "" joie de vivre index. "" I like it. 
Co-branding opportunities. 
Just three days ago, three days ago here at TED, we had a simulcast of David Cameron, potentially the next prime minister of the UK, quoting one of my favorite speeches of all-time, Robert Kennedy's poetic speech from 1968 when he suggested that we're myopically focused on the wrong thing and that GDP is a misplaced metric. 
So it suggests that the momentum is shifting. 
I've taken that Robert Kennedy quote, and I've turned it into a new balance sheet for just a moment here. 
This is a collection of things that Robert Kennedy said in that quote. 
GDP counts everything from air pollution to the destruction of our redwoods. 
But it doesn't count the health of our children or the integrity of our public officials. 
As you look at these two columns here, doesn't it make you feel like it's time for us to start figuring out a new way to count, a new way to imagine what's important to us in life? 
(Applause) Certainly Robert Kennedy suggested at the end of the speech exactly that. 
He said GDP "" measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. "" Wow. 
So how do we do that? 
Let me say one thing we can just start doing ten years from now, at least in this country. 
Why in the heck in America are we doing a census in 2010? 
We're spending 10 billion dollars on the census. 
We're asking 10 simple questions — it is simplicity. 
But all of those questions are tangible. 
They're about demographics. 
They're about where you live, how many people you live with, and whether you own your home or not. 
That's about it. 
We're not asking meaningful metrics. 
We're not asking important questions. 
We're not asking anything that's intangible. 
Abe Maslow said long ago something you've heard before, but you didn't realize it was him. 
He said, "" If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. "" We've been fooled by our tool. 
Excuse that expression. 
(Laughter) We've been fooled by our tool. 
GDP has been our hammer. 
And our nail has been a 19th- and 20th-century industrial-era model of success. 
And yet, 64 percent of the world's GDP today is in that intangible industry we call service, the service industry, the industry I'm in. 
And only 36 percent is in the tangible industries of manufacturing and agriculture. 
So maybe it's time that we get a bigger toolbox, right? 
Maybe it's time we get a toolbox that doesn't just count what's easily counted, the tangible in life, but actually counts what we most value, the things that are intangible. 
I guess I'm sort of a curious CEO. 
I was also a curious economics major as an undergrad. 
I learned that economists measure everything in tangible units of production and consumption as if each of those tangible units is exactly the same. 
They aren't the same. 
In fact, as leaders, what we need to learn is that we can influence the quality of that unit of production by creating the conditions for our employees to live their calling. 
In Vivian's case, her unit of production isn't the tangible hours she works, it's the intangible difference she makes during that one hour of work. 
This is Dave Arringdale who's actually been a longtime guest at Vivian's motel. 
He stayed there a hundred times in the last 20 years, and he's loyal to the property because of the relationship that Vivian and her fellow employees have created with him. 
They've created a habitat of happiness for Dave. 
He tells me that he can always count on Vivian and the staff there to make him feel at home. 
Why is it that business leaders and investors quite often don't see the connection between creating the intangible of employee happiness with creating the tangible of financial profits in their business? 
We don't have to choose between inspired employees and sizable profits, we can have both. 
In fact, inspired employees quite often help make sizable profits, right? 
So what the world needs now, in my opinion, is business leaders and political leaders who know what to count. 
We count numbers. 
We count on people. 
What really counts is when we actually use our numbers to truly take into account our people. 
I learned that from a maid in a motel and a king of a country. 
What can you start counting today? 
What one thing can you start counting today that actually would be meaningful in your life, whether it's your work life or your business life? 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

"" I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, and Mourners to and fro kept treading — treading — till [it seemed] that Sense was breaking through — And when they all were seated, a Service, like a Drum — kept beating — beating — till I [thought] my Mind was going numb — And then I heard them lift a Box and creak across my Soul with those same Boots of Lead, again, then Space — began to toll, As [all] the Heavens were a Bell, and Being, [but] an Ear, and I, and Silence, some strange Race, wrecked, solitary, here — 
[And] then a Plank in Reason, broke, and I fell down and down — and hit a World, at every plunge, and Finished knowing — then — "" We know depression through metaphors. 
Emily Dickinson was able to convey it in language, Goya in an image. 
As for me, I had always thought myself tough, one of the people who could survive if I'd been sent to a concentration camp. 
In 1991, I had a series of losses. 
My mother died, a relationship I'd been in ended, I moved back to the United States from some years abroad, and I got through all of those experiences intact. 
I didn't want to do any of the things I had previously wanted to do, and I didn't know why. 
I would come home and I would see the red light flashing on my answering machine, and instead of being thrilled to hear from my friends, I would think, "What a lot of people that is to have to call back." 
Or I would decide I should have lunch, and then I would think, but I'd have to get the food out and put it on a plate and cut it up and chew it and swallow it, and it felt to me like the Stations of the Cross. 
And one of the things that often gets lost in discussions of depression is that you know it's ridiculous. 
You know it's ridiculous while you're experiencing it. 
You know that most people manage to listen to their messages and eat lunch and organize themselves to take a shower and go out the front door and that it's not a big deal, and yet you are nonetheless in its grip and you are unable to figure out any way around it. 
And so I began to feel myself doing less and thinking less and feeling less. 
And then the anxiety set in. 
If you told me that I'd have to be depressed for the next month, I would say, "" As long I know it'll be over in November, I can do it. "" But if you said to me, "You have to have acute anxiety for the next month," I would rather slit my wrist than go through it. 
It was the feeling all the time like that feeling you have if you're walking and you slip or trip and the ground is rushing up at you, but instead of lasting half a second, the way that does, it lasted for six months. 
And it was at that point that I began to think that it was just too painful to be alive, and that the only reason not to kill oneself was so as not to hurt other people. 
And finally one day, I woke up and I thought perhaps I'd had a stroke, because I lay in bed completely frozen, looking at the telephone, thinking, "Something is wrong and I should call for help," and I couldn't reach out my arm and pick up the phone and dial. 
And finally, after four full hours of my lying and staring at it, the phone rang, and somehow I managed to pick it up, and it was my father, and I said, "I'm in serious trouble. We need to do something." 
The next day I started with the medications and the therapy. 
And if I have to take medication, is that medication making me more fully myself, or is it making me someone else? 
The first is that I knew that, objectively speaking, I had a nice life, and that if I could only get well, there was something at the other end that was worth living for. 
And the other was that I had access to good treatment. 
But I nonetheless emerged and relapsed, and emerged and relapsed, and emerged and relapsed, and finally understood I would have to be on medication and in therapy forever. 
And does it need a chemical cure or a philosophical cure? "" And I couldn't figure out which it was. 
And then I understood that actually, we aren't advanced enough in either area for it to explain things fully. 
The chemical cure and the psychological cure both have a role to play, and I also figured out that depression was something that was braided so deep into us that there was no separating it from our character and personality. 
I hope that 50 years hence, people will hear about my treatments and be appalled that anyone endured such primitive science. 
Depression is the flaw in love. 
If you were married to someone and thought, "Well, if my wife dies, I'll find another one," it wouldn't be love as we know it. 
There are three things people tend to confuse: depression, grief and sadness. 
It's much, much too much sadness, much too much grief at far too slight a cause. 
As I set out to understand depression, and to interview people who had experienced it, I found that there were people who seemed, on the surface, to have what sounded like relatively mild depression who were nonetheless utterly disabled by it. 
And I set out to find out what it is that causes some people to be more resilient than other people. 
What are the mechanisms that allow people to survive? 
One of the first people I interviewed described depression as a slower way of being dead, and that was a good thing for me to hear early on because it reminded me that that slow way of being dead can lead to actual deadness, that this is a serious business. 
It's the leading disability worldwide, and people die of it every day. 
One of the people I talked to when I was trying to understand this was a beloved friend who I had known for many years, and who had had a psychotic episode in her freshman year of college, and then plummeted into a horrific depression. 
She had bipolar illness, or manic depression, as it was then known. 
And then she did very well for many years on lithium, and then eventually, she was taken off her lithium to see how she would do without it, and she had another psychosis, and then plunged into the worst depression that I had ever seen in which she sat in her parents' apartment, more or less catatonic, essentially without moving, day after day after day. 
And when I interviewed her about that experience some years later — she's a poet and psychotherapist named Maggie Robbins — when I interviewed her, she said, "" I was singing 'Where Have All The Flowers Gone,' over and over, to occupy my mind. 
I was singing to blot out the things my mind was saying, which were, 'You are nothing. You are nobody. 
You don't even deserve to live. 'And that was when I really started thinking about killing myself. "" You don't think in depression that you've put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. 
You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you're seeing truly. 
It's easier to help schizophrenics who perceive that there's something foreign inside of them that needs to be exorcised, but it's difficult with depressives, because we believe we are seeing the truth. 
But the truth lies. 
I became obsessed with that sentence: "But the truth lies." 
People will say, "" No one loves me. "" And you say, "" I love you, your wife loves you, your mother loves you. "" You can answer that one pretty readily, at least for most people. 
Each of us is trapped in his own body. "" To which you have to say, "" That's true, but I think we should focus right now on what to have for breakfast. "" (Laughter) A lot of the time, what they are expressing is not illness, but insight, and one comes to think what's really extraordinary is that most of us know about those existential questions and they don't distract us very much. 
There was a study I particularly liked in which a group of depressed and a group of non-depressed people were asked to play a video game for an hour, and at the end of the hour, they were asked how many little monsters they thought they had killed. 
The depressive group was usually accurate to within about 10 percent, and the non-depressed people guessed between 15 and 20 times as many little monsters — (Laughter) as they had actually killed. 
A lot of people said, when I chose to write about my depression, that it must be very difficult to be out of that closet, to have people know. 
They talk to me differently insofar as they start telling me about their experience, or their sister's experience, or their friend's experience. 
I went a few years ago to a conference, and on Friday of the three-day conference, one of the participants took me aside, and she said, "" I suffer from depression and I'm a little embarrassed about it, but I've been taking this medication, and I just wanted to ask you what you think? "" And so I did my best to give her such advice as I could. 
And then she said, "" You know, my husband would never understand this. 
He's really the kind of guy to whom this wouldn't make any sense, so, you know, it's just between us. "" And I said, "" Yes, that's fine. "" On Sunday of the same conference, her husband took me aside, (Laughter) and he said, "" My wife wouldn't think that I was really much of a guy if she knew this, but I've been dealing with this depression and I'm taking some medication, and I wondered what you think? "" They were hiding the same medication in two different places in the same bedroom. (Laughter) 
And I said that I thought communication within the marriage might be triggering some of their problems. (Laughter) 
Depression is so exhausting. 
It takes up so much of your time and energy, and silence about it, it really does make the depression worse. 
I thought there were a few kinds of therapy that worked, it was clear what they were — there was medication, there were certain psychotherapies, there was possibly electroconvulsive treatment, and that everything else was nonsense. 
If you have brain cancer, and you say that standing on your head for 20 minutes every morning makes you feel better, it may make you feel better, but you still have brain cancer, and you'll still probably die from it. 
But if you say that you have depression, and standing on your head for 20 minutes every day makes you feel better, then it's worked, because depression is an illness of how you feel, and if you feel better, then you are effectively not depressed anymore. 
And I get letters, I get hundreds of letters from people writing to tell me about what's worked for them. 
My favorite of the letters that I got was the one that came from a woman who wrote and said that she had tried therapy, medication, she had tried pretty much everything, and she had found a solution and hoped I would tell the world, and that was making little things from yarn. 
(Laughter) She sent me some of them. (Laughter) 
I suggested to her that she also should look up obsessive compulsive disorder in the DSM. 
I went through a tribal exorcism in Senegal that involved a great deal of ram's blood and that I'm not going to detail right now, but a few years afterwards I was in Rwanda, working on a different project, and I happened to describe my experience to someone, and he said, "" Well, that's West Africa, and we're in East Africa, and our rituals are in some ways very different, but we do have some rituals that have something in common with what you're describing. "" And he said, "" But we've had a lot of trouble with Western mental health workers, especially the ones who came right after the genocide. "" 
They didn't take people out in the sunshine where you begin to feel better. 
They didn't include drumming or music to get people's blood going. 
Instead what they did was they took people one at a time into dingy little rooms and had them talk for an hour about bad things that had happened to them. "" (Laughter) (Applause) He said, "" We had to ask them to leave the country. "" (Laughter) Now at the other end of alternative treatments, let me tell you about Frank Russakoff. 
He was constantly depressed. 
He was, when I met him, at a point at which every month, he would have electroshock treatment. 
Then he would feel sort of disoriented for a week. 
Then he would feel okay for a week. 
Then he would have a week of going downhill. 
I can't go on this way, and I've figured out how I'm going to end it if I don't get better. "" "" But, "" he said to me, "" I heard about a protocol at Mass General for a procedure called a cingulotomy, which is a brain surgery, and I think I'm going to give that a try. "" And I remember being amazed at that point to think that someone who clearly had so many bad experiences with so many different treatments still had buried in him, somewhere, enough optimism to reach out for one more. 
And he had the cingulotomy, and it was incredibly successful. 
He's now a friend of mine. 
He wrote me a letter the Christmas after the surgery, and he said, "" My father sent me two presents this year, First, a motorized CD rack from The Sharper Image that I didn't really need, but I knew he was giving it to me to celebrate the fact that I'm living on my own and have a job I seem to love. 
It's not that I'm so sad, but I get overwhelmed, I think, because I could have killed myself, but my parents kept me going, and so did the doctors, and I had the surgery. 
I'm alive and grateful. 
We live in the right time, even if it doesn't always feel like it. "" I was struck by the fact that depression is broadly perceived to be a modern, Western, middle-class thing, and I went to look at how it operated in a variety of other contexts, and one of the things I was most interested in was depression among the indigent. 
Depression is the result of a genetic vulnerability, which is presumably evenly distributed in the population, and triggering circumstances, which are likely to be more severe for people who are impoverished. 
And yet it turns out that if you have a really lovely life but feel miserable all the time, you think, "" Why do I feel like this? 
I must have depression. "" And you set out to find treatment for it. 
But if you have a perfectly awful life, and you feel miserable all the time, the way you feel is commensurate with your life, and it doesn't occur to you to think, "Maybe this is treatable." 
And so we have an epidemic in this country of depression among impoverished people that's not being picked up and that's not being treated and that's not being addressed, and it's a tragedy of a grand order. 
And so I found an academic who was doing a research project in slums outside of D.C., where she picked up women who had come in for other health problems and diagnosed them with depression, and then provided six months of the experimental protocol. 
One of them, Lolly, came in, and this is what she said the day she came in. 
In the morning, I can't wait for them to leave, and then I climb in bed and pull the covers over my head, and three o'clock when they come home, it just comes so fast. "" She said, "" I've been taking a lot of Tylenol, anything I can take so that I can sleep more. 
My husband has been telling me I'm stupid, I'm ugly. 
I wish I could stop the pain. "" Well, she was brought into this experimental protocol, and when I interviewed her six months later, she had taken a job working in childcare for the U.S. Navy, she had left the abusive husband, and she said to me, "My kids are so much happier now." 
She said, "" There's one room in my new place for the boys and one room for the girls, but at night, they're just all up on my bed, and we're doing homework all together and everything. 
One of them wants to be a preacher, one of them wants to be a firefighter, and one of the girls says she's going to be a lawyer. 
They don't cry like they used to, and they don't fight like they did. 
I asked the Lord to send me an angel, and He heard my prayers. "" I was really moved by these experiences, and I decided that I wanted to write about them not only in a book I was working on, but also in an article, and I got a commission from The New York Times Magazine to write about depression among the indigent. 
These people who are sort of at the very bottom rung of society and then they get a few months of treatment and they're virtually ready to run Morgan Stanley? 
It's just too implausible. "" She said, "" I've never even heard of anything like it. "" And I said, "" The fact that you've never heard of it is an indication that it is news. "" (Laughter) (Applause) "And you are a news magazine." 
But I think a lot of what they said was connected in some strange way to this distaste that people still have for the idea of treatment, the notion that somehow if we went out and treated a lot of people in indigent communities, that would be exploitative, because we would be changing them. 
There is this false moral imperative that seems to be all around us, that treatment of depression, the medications and so on, are an artifice, and that it's not natural. 
It would be natural for people's teeth to fall out, but there is nobody militating against toothpaste, at least not in my circles. 
Being able to have sadness and fear and joy and pleasure and all of the other moods that we have, that's incredibly valuable. 
And major depression is something that happens when that system gets broken. 
Think it through. "" It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed of many other languages, that we use this same word, depression, to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide. 
And it's that orange dust spot, that orange dust problem, that's the one we're setting out to address. 
But I don't feel sad about having to eat lunch, and I don't feel sad about my answering machine, and I don't feel sad about taking a shower. 
I feel more, in fact, I think, because I can feel sadness without nullity. 
Those are the things that I feel sad about now. 
And I said to myself, well, what is the conclusion? 
How did those people who have better lives even with bigger depression manage to get through? 
And what I came up with over time was that the people who deny their experience, and say, "" I was depressed a long time ago, I never want to think about it again, I'm not going to look at it and I'm just going to get on with my life, "" ironically, those are the people who are most enslaved by what they have. 
And the people who do better are the ones who are able to tolerate the fact that they have this condition. 
It taught me so much about love, and my relationship with my parents and my doctors has been so precious to me, and will be always. "" And Maggie Robbins said, "" I used to volunteer in an AIDS clinic, and I would just talk and talk and talk, and the people I was dealing with weren't very responsive, and I thought, 'That's not very friendly or helpful of them.' "" (Laughter) "" And then I realized, I realized that they weren't going to do more than make those first few minutes of small talk. 
It turns out I've learned to give all the things I need. "" Valuing one's depression does not prevent a relapse, but it may make the prospect of relapse and even relapse itself easier to tolerate. 
I have learned in my own depression how big an emotion can be, how it can be more real than facts, and I have found that that experience has allowed me to experience positive emotion in a more intense and more focused way. 
The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and these days, my life is vital, even on the days when I'm sad. 
I felt that funeral in my brain, and I sat next to the colossus at the edge of the world, and I have discovered something inside of myself that I would have to call a soul that I had never formulated until that day 20 years ago when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. 
I think that while I hated being depressed and would hate to be depressed again, I've found a way to love my depression. 
I love it because each day I decide, sometimes gamely, and sometimes against the moment's reason, to cleave to the reasons for living. 

So, stepping down out of the bus, I headed back to the corner to head west en route to a braille training session. 
It was the winter of 2009, and I had been blind for about a year. 
Things were going pretty well. 
Safely reaching the other side, I turned to the left, pushed the auto-button for the audible pedestrian signal, and waited my turn. 
As it went off, I took off and safely got to the other side. 
Stepping onto the sidewalk, I then heard the sound of a steel chair slide across the concrete sidewalk in front of me. 
I know there's a cafe on the corner, and they have chairs out in front, so I just adjusted to the left to get closer to the street. 
As I did, so slid the chair. 
I just figured I'd made a mistake, and went back to the right, and so slid the chair in perfect synchronicity. 
Now I was getting a little anxious. 
I went back to the left, and so slid the chair, blocking my path of travel. 
Now, I was officially freaking out. 
So I yelled, "Who the hell's out there? What's going on?" 
Just then, over my shout, I heard something else, a familiar rattle. 
It sounded familiar, and I quickly considered another possibility, and I reached out with my left hand, as my fingers brushed against something fuzzy, and I came across an ear, the ear of a dog, perhaps a golden retriever. 
Its leash had been tied to the chair as her master went in for coffee, and she was just persistent in her efforts to greet me, perhaps get a scratch behind the ear. 
Who knows, maybe she was volunteering for service. 
(Laughter) But that little story is really about the fears and misconceptions that come along with the idea of moving through the city without sight, seemingly oblivious to the environment and the people around you. 
So let me step back and set the stage a little bit. 
On St. Patrick's Day of 2008, I reported to the hospital for surgery to remove a brain tumor. 
The surgery was successful. 
Two days later, my sight started to fail. 
On the third day, it was gone. 
Immediately, I was struck by an incredible sense of fear, of confusion, of vulnerability, like anybody would. 
But as I had time to stop and think, I actually started to realize I had a lot to be grateful for. 
In particular, I thought about my dad, who had passed away from complications from brain surgery. 
He was 36. I was seven at the time. 
So although I had every reason to be fearful of what was ahead, and had no clue quite what was going to happen, I was alive. 
My son still had his dad. 
And besides, it's not like I was the first person ever to lose their sight. 
I knew there had to be all sorts of systems and techniques and training to have to live a full and meaningful, active life without sight. 
So by the time I was discharged from the hospital a few days later, I left with a mission, a mission to get out and get the best training as quickly as I could and get on to rebuilding my life. 
Within six months, I had returned to work. 
My training had started. 
I even started riding a tandem bike with my old cycling buddies, and was commuting to work on my own, walking through town and taking the bus. 
It was a lot of hard work. 
But what I didn't anticipate through that rapid transition was the incredible experience of the juxtaposition of my sighted experience up against my unsighted experience of the same places and the same people within such a short period of time. 
From that came a lot of insights, or outsights, as I called them, things that I learned since losing my sight. 
These outsights ranged from the trival to the profound, from the mundane to the humorous. 
As an architect, that stark juxtaposition of my sighted and unsighted experience of the same places and the same cities within such a short period of time has given me all sorts of wonderful outsights of the city itself. 
Paramount amongst those was the realization that, actually, cities are fantastic places for the blind. 
And then I was also surprised by the city's propensity for kindness and care as opposed to indifference or worse. 
And then I started to realize that it seemed like the blind seemed to have a positive influence on the city itself. 
That was a little curious to me. 
Let me step back and take a look at why the city is so good for the blind. 
Inherent with the training for recovery from sight loss is learning to rely on all your non-visual senses, things that you would otherwise maybe ignore. 
It's like a whole new world of sensory information opens up to you. 
I was really struck by the symphony of subtle sounds all around me in the city that you can hear and work with to understand where you are, how you need to move, and where you need to go. 
Similarly, just through the grip of the cane, you can feel contrasting textures in the floor below, and over time you build a pattern of where you are and where you're headed. 
Similarly, just the sun warming one side of your face or the wind at your neck gives you clues about your alignment and your progression through a block and your movement through time and space. 
But also, the sense of smell. 
Some districts and cities have their own smell, as do places and things around you, and if you're lucky, you can even follow your nose to that new bakery that you've been looking for. 
All this really surprised me, because I started to realize that my unsighted experienced was so far more multi-sensory than my sighted experience ever was. 
What struck me also was how much the city was changing around me. 
When you're sighted, everybody kind of sticks to themselves, you mind your own business. 
Lose your sight, though, and it's a whole other story. 
And I don't know who's watching who, but I have a suspicion that a lot of people are watching me. 
And I'm not paranoid, but everywhere I go, I'm getting all sorts of advice: Go here, move there, watch out for this. 
A lot of the information is good. 
Some of it's helpful. A lot of it's kind of reversed. 
You've got to figure out what they actually meant. 
Some of it's kind of wrong and not helpful. 
But it's all good in the grand scheme of things. 
But one time I was in Oakland walking along Broadway, and came to a corner. 
I was waiting for an audible pedestrian signal, and as it went off, I was just about to step out into the street, when all of a sudden, my right hand was just gripped by this guy, and he yanked my arm and pulled me out into the crosswalk and was dragging me out across the street, speaking to me in Mandarin. 
(Laughter) It's like, there was no escape from this man's death grip, but he got me safely there. 
What could I do? 
But believe me, there are more polite ways to offer assistance. 
We don't know you're there, so it's kind of nice to say "" Hello "" first. 
"Would you like some help?" 
But while in Oakland, I've really been struck by how much the city of Oakland changed as I lost my sight. 
I liked it sighted. It was fine. 
It's a perfectly great city. 
But once I lost my sight and was walking along Broadway, I was blessed every block of the way. 
"Bless you, man." 
"Go for it, brother." 
"God bless you." 
I didn't get that sighted. 
(Laughter) And even without sight, I don't get that in San Francisco. 
And I know it bothers some of my blind friends, it's not just me. 
Often it's thought that that's an emotion that comes up out of pity. 
I tend to think that it comes out of our shared humanity, out of our togetherness, and I think it's pretty cool. 
In fact, if I'm feeling down, I just go to Broadway in downtown Oakland, I go for a walk, and I feel better like that, in no time at all. 
But also that it illustrates how disability and blindness sort of cuts across ethnic, social, racial, economic lines. 
Disability is an equal-opportunity provider. 
Everybody's welcome. 
In fact, I've heard it said in the disability community that there are really only two types of people: There are those with disabilities, and there are those that haven't quite found theirs yet. 
It's a different way of thinking about it, but I think it's kind of beautiful, because it is certainly far more inclusive than the us-versus-them or the abled-versus-the-disabled, and it's a lot more honest and respectful of the fragility of life. 
So my final takeaway for you is that not only is the city good for the blind, but the city needs us. 
And I'm so sure of that that I want to propose to you today that the blind be taken as the prototypical city dwellers when imagining new and wonderful cities, and not the people that are thought about after the mold has already been cast. 
It's too late then. 
So if you design a city with the blind in mind, you'll have a rich, walkable network of sidewalks with a dense array of options and choices all available at the street level. 
If you design a city with the blind in mind, sidewalks will be predictable and will be generous. 
The space between buildings will be well-balanced between people and cars. 
In fact, cars, who needs them? 
If you're blind, you don't drive. (Laughter) They don't like it when you drive. (Laughter) If you design a city with the blind in mind, you design a city with a robust, accessible, well-connected mass transit system that connects all parts of the city and the region all around. If you design a city with the blind in mind, 
there'll be jobs, lots of jobs. 
Blind people want to work too. 
They want to earn a living. 
So, in designing a city for the blind, I hope you start to realize that it actually would be a more inclusive, a more equitable, a more just city for all. 
And based on my prior sighted experience, it sounds like a pretty cool city, whether you're blind, whether you have a disability, or you haven't quite found yours yet. 
So thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I'd like to start with a short story. 
It's about a little boy whose father was a history buff and who used to take him by the hand to visit the ruins of an ancient metropolis on the outskirts of their camp. 
They would always stop by to visit these huge winged bulls that used to guard the gates of that ancient metropolis, and the boy used to be scared of these winged bulls, but at the same time they excited him. 
And the dad used to use those bulls to tell the boy stories about that civilization and their work. 
Let's fast-forward to the San Francisco Bay Area many decades later, where I started a technology company that brought the world its first 3D laser scanning system. 
Let me show you how it works. 
Female Voice: Long range laser scanning by sending out a pulse that's a laser beam of light. 
The system measures the beam's time of flight, recording the time it takes for the light to hit a surface and make its return. 
With two mirrors, the scanner calculates the beam's horizontal and vertical angles, giving accurate x, y, and z coordinates. 
The point is then recorded into a 3D visualization program. 
All of this happens in seconds. 
Ben Kacyra: You can see here, these systems are extremely fast. 
They collect millions of points at a time with very high accuracy and very high resolution. 
A surveyor with traditional survey tools would be hard-pressed to produce maybe 500 points in a whole day. 
These babies would be producing something like ten thousand points a second. 
So, as you can imagine, this was a paradigm shift in the survey and construction as well as in reality capture industry. 
Approximately ten years ago, my wife and I started a foundation to do good, and right about that time, the magnificent Bamiyan Buddhas, hundred and eighty foot tall in Afghanistan, were blown up by the Taliban. 
They were gone in an instant. 
And unfortunately, there was no detailed documentation of these Buddhas. 
This clearly devastated me, and I couldn't help but wonder about the fate of my old friends, the winged bulls, and the fate of the many, many heritage sites all over the world. 
Both my wife and I were so touched by this that we decided to expand the mission of our foundation to include digital heritage preservation of world sites. 
We called the project CyArk, which stands for Cyber Archive. 
To date, with the help of a global network of partners, we've completed close to fifty projects. 
Let me show you some of them: Chichen Itza, Rapa Nui — and what you're seeing here are the cloud of points — Babylon, Rosslyn Chapel, Pompeii, and our latest project, Mt. Rushmore, which happened to be one of our most challenging projects. 
As you see here, we had to develop a special rig to bring the scanner up close and personal. 
The results of our work in the field are used to produce media and deliverables to be used by conservators and researchers. 
We also produce media for dissemination to the public — free through the CyArk website. 
These would be used for education, cultural tourism, etc. 
What you're looking at in here is a 3D viewer that we developed that would allow the display and manipulation of [the] cloud of points in real time, cutting sections through them and extracting dimensions. 
This happens to be the cloud of points for Tikal. 
In here you see a traditional 2D architectural engineering drawing that's used for preservation, and of course we tell the stories through fly-throughs. 
And here, this is a fly-through the cloud of points of Tikal, and here you see it rendered and photo-textured with the photography that we take of the site. 
And so this is not a video. 
This is actual 3D points with two to three millimeter accuracy. 
And of course the data can be used to develop 3D models that are very accurate and very detailed. 
And here you're looking at a model that's extracted from the cloud of points for Stirling Castle. 
It's used for studies, for visualization, as well as for education. 
And finally, we produce mobile apps that include narrated virtual tools. 
The more I got involved in the heritage field, the more it became clear to me that we are losing the sites and the stories faster than we can physically preserve them. 
Of course, earthquakes and all the natural phenomena — floods, tornadoes, etc. — take their toll. 
However, what occurred to me was human-caused destruction, which was not only causing a significant portion of the destruction, but actually it was accelerating. 
This includes arson, urban sprawl, acid rain, not to mention terrorism and wars. 
It was getting more and more apparent that we're fighting a losing battle. 
We're losing our sites and the stories, and basically we're losing a piece — and a significant piece — of our collective memory. 
Imagine us as a human race not knowing where we came from. 
Luckily, in the last two or three decades, digital technologies have been developing that have helped us to develop tools that we've brought to bear in the digital preservation, in our digital preservation war. 
This includes, for example, the 3D laser scanning systems, ever more powerful personal computers, 3D graphics, high-definition digital photography, not to mention the Internet. 
Because of this accelerated pace of destruction, it became clear to us that we needed to challenge ourselves and our partners to accelerate our work. 
And we created a project we call the CyArk 500 Challenge — and that is to digitally preserve 500 World Heritage Sites in five years. 
We do have the technology that's scaleable, and our network of global partners has been expanding and can be expanded at a rapid rate, so we're comfortable that this task can be accomplished. 
However, to me, the 500 is really just the first 500. 
In order to sustain our work into the future, we use technology centers where we partner with local universities and colleges to take the technology to them, whereby they then can help us with digital preservation of their heritage sites, and at the same time, it gives them the technology to benefit from in the future. 
Let me close with another short story. 
Two years ago, we were approached by a partner of ours to digitally preserve an important heritage site, a UNESCO heritage site in Uganda, the Royal Kasubi Tombs. 
The work was done successfully in the field, and the data was archived and publicly disseminated through the CyArk website. 
Last March, we received very sad news. 
The Royal Tombs had been destroyed by suspected arson. 
A few days later, we received a call: "" Is the data available and can it be used for reconstruction? "" Our answer, of course, was yes. 
Let me leave you with a final thought. 
Our heritage is much more than our collective memory — it's our collective treasure. 
We owe it to our children, our grandchildren and the generations we will never meet to keep it safe and to pass it along. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 
Well, I'm staying here because we wanted to demonstrate to you 
the power of this technology and so, while I've been speaking, you have been scanned. 
(Laughter) The two wizards that I have that are behind the curtain will help me bring the results on the screen. 
(Applause) This is all in 3D and of course you can fly through the cloud of points. 
You can look at it from on top, from the ceiling. 
You can look from different vantage points, but I'm going to ask Doug to zoom in on an individual in the crowd, just to show the amount of detail that we can create. 
So you have been digitally preserved in about four minutes. 
(Laughter) I'd like to thank the wizards here. 
We were very lucky to have two of our partners participate in this: the Historic Scotland, and the Glasgow School of Art. 
I'd like to also thank personally the efforts of David Mitchell, who is the Director of Conservation at Historic Scotland. 
David. 
(Applause) And Doug Pritchard, who's the Head of Visualization at the Glasgow School of Art. 
Let's give them a hand. 
(Applause) Thank you. 

Once upon a time, there was a place called Lesterland. 
Now Lesterland looks a lot like the United States. 
Like the United States, it has about 311 million people, and of that 311 million people, it turns out 144,000 are called Lester. 
If Matt's in the audience, I just borrowed that, I'll return it in a second, this character from your series. 
So 144,000 are called Lester, which means about .05 percent is named Lester. 
Now, Lesters in Lesterland have this extraordinary power. 
There are two elections every election cycle in Lesterland. 
One is called the general election. 
The other is called the Lester election. 
And in the general election, it's the citizens who get to vote, but in the Lester election, it's the Lesters who get to vote. 
And here's the trick. 
In order to run in the general election, you must do extremely well in the Lester election. 
You don't necessarily have to win, but you must do extremely well. 
Now, what can we say about democracy in Lesterland? 
What we can say, number one, as the Supreme Court said in Citizens United, that people have the ultimate influence over elected officials, because, after all, there is a general election, but only after the Lesters have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in the general election. 
And number two, obviously, this dependence upon the Lesters is going to produce a subtle, understated, we could say camouflaged, bending to keep the Lesters happy. 
Okay, so we have a democracy, no doubt, but it's dependent upon the Lesters and dependent upon the people. 
It has competing dependencies, we could say conflicting dependencies, depending upon who the Lesters are. 
Okay. That's Lesterland. 
Now there are three things I want you to see now that I've described Lesterland. 
Number one, the United States is Lesterland. 
The United States is Lesterland. 
The United States also looks like this, also has two elections, one we called the general election, the second we should call the money election. 
In the general election, it's the citizens who get to vote, if you're over 18, in some states if you have an ID. 
In the money election, it's the funders who get to vote, the funders who get to vote, and just like in Lesterland, the trick is, to run in the general election, you must do extremely well in the money election. 
You don't necessarily have to win. There is Jerry Brown. 
But you must do extremely well. 
And here's the key: There are just as few relevant funders in USA-land as there are Lesters in Lesterland. 
Now you say, really? 
Really .05 percent? 
Well, here are the numbers from 2010: .26 percent of America gave 200 dollars or more to any federal candidate, .05 percent gave the maximum amount to any federal candidate, .01 percent — the one percent of the one percent — gave 10,000 dollars or more to federal candidates, and in this election cycle, my favorite statistic is .000042 percent — for those of you doing the numbers, you know that's 132 Americans — gave 60 percent of the Super PAC money spent in the cycle we have just seen ending. 
So I'm just a lawyer, I look at this range of numbers, and I say it's fair for me to say it's .05 percent who are our relevant funders in America. 
In this sense, the funders are our Lesters. 
Now, what can we say about this democracy in USA-land? 
Well, as the Supreme Court said in Citizens United, we could say, of course the people have the ultimate influence over the elected officials. We have a general election, but only after the funders have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in that general election. 
And number two, obviously, this dependence upon the funders produces a subtle, understated, camouflaged bending to keep the funders happy. 
Candidates for Congress and members of Congress spend between 30 and 70 percent of their time raising money to get back to Congress or to get their party back into power, and the question we need to ask is, what does it do to them, these humans, as they spend their time behind the telephone, calling people they've never met, but calling the tiniest slice of the one percent? 
As anyone would, as they do this, they develop a sixth sense, a constant awareness about how what they do might affect their ability to raise money. 
They become, in the words of "" The X-Files, "" shape-shifters, as they constantly adjust their views in light of what they know will help them to raise money, not on issues one to 10, but on issues 11 to 1,000. 
Leslie Byrne, a Democrat from Virginia, describes that when she went to Congress, she was told by a colleague, "" Always lean to the green. "" Then to clarify, she went on, "" He was not an environmentalist. "" (Laughter) So here too we have a democracy, a democracy dependent upon the funders and dependent upon the people, competing dependencies, possibly conflicting dependencies depending upon who the funders are. 
Okay, the United States is Lesterland, point number one. 
Here's point number two. 
The United States is worse than Lesterland, worse than Lesterland because you can imagine in Lesterland if we Lesters got a letter from the government that said, "Hey, you get to pick who gets to run in the general election," we would think maybe of a kind of aristocracy of Lesters. 
You know, there are Lesters from every part of social society. 
There are rich Lesters, poor Lesters, black Lesters, white Lesters, not many women Lesters, but put that to the side for one second. 
We have Lesters from everywhere. We could think, "What could we do to make Lesterland better?" 
It's at least possible the Lesters would act for the good of Lesterland. 
But in our land, in this land, in USA-land, there are certainly some sweet Lesters out there, many of them in this room here today, but the vast majority of Lesters act for the Lesters, because the shifting coalitions that are comprising the .05 percent are not comprising it for the public interest. 
It's for their private interest. In this sense, the USA is worse than Lesterland. 
And finally, point number three: Whatever one wants to say about Lesterland, against the background of its history, its traditions, in our land, in USA-land, Lesterland is a corruption, a corruption. 
Now, by corruption I don't mean brown paper bag cash secreted among members of Congress. 
I don't mean Rod Blagojevich sense of corruption. 
I don't mean any criminal act. 
The corruption I'm talking about is perfectly legal. 
It's a corruption relative to the framers' baseline for this republic. 
The framers gave us what they called a republic, but by a republic they meant a representative democracy, and by a representative democracy, they meant a government, as Madison put it in Federalist 52, that would have a branch that would be dependent upon the people alone. 
So here's the model of government. 
They have the people and the government with this exclusive dependency, but the problem here is that Congress has evolved a different dependence, no longer a dependence upon the people alone, increasingly a dependence upon the funders. 
Now this is a dependence too, but it's different and conflicting from a dependence upon the people alone so long as the funders are not the people. 
This is a corruption. 
Now, there's good news and bad news about this corruption. 
One bit of good news is that it's bipartisan, equal-opportunity corruption. 
It blocks the left on a whole range of issues that we on the left really care about. 
It blocks the right too, as it makes principled arguments of the right increasingly impossible. 
So the right wants smaller government. 
When Al Gore was Vice President, his team had an idea for deregulating a significant portion of the telecommunications industry. 
The chief policy man took this idea to Capitol Hill, and as he reported back to me, the response was, "" Hell no! 
If we deregulate these guys, how are we going to raise money from them? "" This is a system that's designed to save the status quo, including the status quo of big and invasive government. 
It works against the left and the right, and that, you might say, is good news. 
But here's the bad news. 
It's a pathological, democracy-destroying corruption, because in any system where the members are dependent upon the tiniest fraction of us for their election, that means the tiniest number of us, the tiniest, tiniest number of us, can block reform. 
I know that should have been, like, a rock or something. 
I can only find cheese. I'm sorry. So there it is. 
Block reform. 
Because there is an economy here, an economy of influence, an economy with lobbyists at the center which feeds on polarization. 
It feeds on dysfunction. 
The worse that it is for us, the better that it is for this fundraising. 
Henry David Thoreau: "" There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root. "" This is the root. 
Okay, now, every single one of you knows this. 
You couldn't be here if you didn't know this, yet you ignore it. 
You ignore it. This is an impossible problem. 
You focus on the possible problems, like eradicating polio from the world, or taking an image of every single street across the globe, or building the first real universal translator, or building a fusion factory in your garage. 
These are the manageable problems, so you ignore — (Laughter) (Applause) — so you ignore this corruption. 
But we cannot ignore this corruption anymore. 
(Applause) We need a government that works. 
And not works for the left or the right, but works for the left and the right, the citizens of the left and right, because there is no sensible reform possible until we end this corruption. 
So I want you to take hold, to grab the issue you care the most about. 
Climate change is mine, but it might be financial reform or a simpler tax system or inequality. 
Grab that issue, sit it down in front of you, look straight in its eyes, and tell it there is no Christmas this year. 
There will never be a Christmas. 
We will never get your issue solved until we fix this issue first. 
So it's not that mine is the most important issue. It's not. 
Yours is the most important issue, but mine is the first issue, the issue we have to solve before we get to fix the issues you care about. 
No sensible reform, and we cannot afford a world, a future, with no sensible reform. 
Okay. So how do we do it? 
Turns out, the analytics here are easy, simple. 
If the problem is members spending an extraordinary amount of time fundraising from the tiniest slice of America, the solution is to have them spend less time fundraising but fundraise from a wider slice of Americans, to spread it out, to spread the funder influence so that we restore the idea of dependence upon the people alone. 
And to do this does not require a constitutional amendment, changing the First Amendment. 
To do this would require a single statute, a statute establishing what we think of as small dollar funded elections, a statute of citizen-funded campaigns, and there's any number of these proposals out there: Fair Elections Now Act, the American Anti-Corruption Act, an idea in my book that I call the Grant and Franklin Project to give vouchers to people to fund elections, an idea of John Sarbanes called the Grassroots Democracy Act. 
Each of these would fix this corruption by spreading out the influence of funders to all of us. 
The analytics are easy here. 
It's the politics that's hard, indeed impossibly hard, because this reform would shrink K Street, and Capitol Hill, as Congressman Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee, put it, has become a farm league for K Street, a farm league for K Street. 
Members and staffers and bureaucrats have an increasingly common business model in their head, a business model focused on their life after government, their life as lobbyists. 
Fifty percent of the Senate between 1998 and 2004 left to become lobbyists, 42 percent of the House. 
Those numbers have only gone up, and as United Republic calculated last April, the average increase in salary for those who they tracked was 1,452 percent. 
So it's fair to ask, how is it possible for them to change this? 
Now I get this skepticism. 
I get this cynicism. I get this sense of impossibility. 
But I don't buy it. 
This is a solvable issue. 
If you think about the issues our parents tried to solve in the 20th century, issues like racism, or sexism, or the issue that we've been fighting in this century, homophobia, those are hard issues. 
You don't wake up one day no longer a racist. 
It takes generations to tear that intuition, that DNA, out of the soul of a people. 
But this is a problem of just incentives, just incentives. 
Change the incentives, and the behavior changes, and the states that have adopted small dollar funded systems have seen overnight a change in the practice. 
When Connecticut adopted this system, in the very first year, 78 percent of elected representatives gave up large contributions and took small contributions only. 
It's solvable, not by being a Democrat, not by being a Republican. 
It's solvable by being citizens, by being citizens, by being TEDizens. 
Because if you want to kickstart reform, look, I could kickstart reform at half the price of fixing energy policy, I could give you back a republic. 
Okay. But even if you're not yet with me, even if you believe this is impossible, what the five years since I spoke at TED has taught me as I've spoken about this issue again and again is, even if you think it's impossible, that is irrelevant. 
Irrelevant. 
I spoke at Dartmouth once, and a woman stood up after I spoke, I write in my book, and she said to me, "" Professor, you've convinced me this is hopeless. Hopeless. 
There's nothing we can do. "" When she said that, I scrambled. 
I tried to think, "" How do I respond to that hopelessness? 
What is that sense of hopelessness? "" And what hit me was an image of my six-year-old son. 
And I imagined a doctor coming to me and saying, "" Your son has terminal brain cancer, and there's nothing you can do. 
Nothing you can do. "" So would I do nothing? 
Would I just sit there? Accept it? Okay, nothing I can do? 
I'm going off to build Google Glass. 
Of course not. I would do everything I could, and I would do everything I could because this is what love means, that the odds are irrelevant and that you do whatever the hell you can, the odds be damned. 
And then I saw the obvious link, because even we liberals love this country. 
(Laughter) And so when the pundits and the politicians say that change is impossible, what this love of country says back is, "That's just irrelevant." 
We lose something dear, something everyone in this room loves and cherishes, if we lose this republic, and so we act with everything we can to prove these pundits wrong. 
So here's my question: Do you have that love? Do you have that love? 
Because if you do, 
then what the hell are you, what are the hell are we doing? 
When Ben Franklin was carried from the constitutional convention in September of 1787, he was stopped in the street by a woman who said, "Mr. Franklin, what have you wrought?" 
Franklin said, "" A republic, madam, if you can keep it. "" A republic. A representative democracy. 
A government dependent upon the people alone. 
We have lost that republic. 
All of us have to act to get it back. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) 

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

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

I'm here to show you how something you can't see can be so much fun to look at. 
You're about to experience a new, available and exciting technology that's going to make us rethink how we waterproof our lives. 
What I have here is a cinder block that we've coated half with a nanotechnology spray that can be applied to almost any material. 
It's called Ultra-Ever Dry, and when you apply it to any material, it turns into a superhydrophobic shield. 
So this is a cinder block, uncoated, and you can see that it's porous, it absorbs water. 
Not anymore. 
Porous, nonporous. 
So what's superhydrophobic? 
Superhydrophobic is how we measure a drop of water on a surface. 
The rounder it is, the more hydrophobic it is, and if it's really round, it's superhydrophobic. 
A freshly waxed car, the water molecules slump to about 90 degrees. 
A windshield coating is going to give you about 110 degrees. 
But what you're seeing here is 160 to 175 degrees, and anything over 150 is superhydrophobic. 
So as part of the demonstration, what I have is a pair of gloves, and we've coated one of the gloves with the nanotechnology coating, and let's see if you can tell which one, and I'll give you a hint. 
Did you guess the one that was dry? 
When you have nanotechnology and nanoscience, what's occurred is that we're able to now look at atoms and molecules and actually control them for great benefits. 
And we're talking really small here. 
The way you measure nanotechnology is in nanometers, and one nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and to put some scale to that, if you had a nanoparticle that was one nanometer thick, and you put it side by side, and you had 50,000 of them, you'd be the width of a human hair. 
So very small, but very useful. 
And it's not just water that this works with. 
It's a lot of water-based materials like concrete, water-based paint, mud, and also some refined oils as well. 
You can see the difference. 
Moving onto the next demonstration, we've taken a pane of glass and we've coated the outside of it, we've framed it with the nanotechnology coating, and we're going to pour this green-tinted water inside the middle, and you're going to see, it's going to spread out on glass like you'd normally think it would, except when it hits the coating, it stops, and I can't even coax it to leave. 
It's that afraid of the water. 
(Applause) So what's going on here? What's happening? 
Well, the surface of the spray coating is actually filled with nanoparticles that form a very rough and craggly surface. 
You'd think it'd be smooth, but it's actually not. 
And it has billions of interstitial spaces, and those spaces, along with the nanoparticles, reach up and grab the air molecules, and cover the surface with air. 
It's an umbrella of air all across it, and that layer of air is what the water hits, the mud hits, the concrete hits, and it glides right off. 
So if I put this inside this water here, you can see a silver reflective coating around it, and that silver reflective coating is the layer of air that's protecting the water from touching the paddle, and it's dry. 
So what are the applications? 
I mean, many of you right now are probably going through your head. 
Everyone that sees this gets excited, and says, "Oh, I could use it for this and this and this." 
The applications in a general sense could be anything that's anti-wetting. 
We've certainly seen that today. 
It could be anything that's anti-icing, because if you don't have water, you don't have ice. 
It could be anti-corrosion. 
No water, no corrosion. 
It could be anti-bacterial. 
Without water, the bacteria won't survive. 
And it could be things that need to be self-cleaning as well. 
So imagine how something like this could help revolutionize your field of work. 
And I'm going to leave you with one last demonstration, but before I do that, I would like to say thank you, and think small. 
(Applause) It's going to happen. Wait for it. Wait for it. 
Chris Anderson: You guys didn't hear about us cutting out the Design from TED? (Laughter) [Two minutes later...] He ran into all sorts of problems in terms of managing the medical research part. 
It's happening! 
(Applause) 

You are a high-ranking military service member deployed to Afghanistan. 
You are responsible for the lives of hundreds of men and women, and your base is under attack. 
Incoming mortar rounds are exploding all around you. 
Struggling to see through the dust and the smoke, you do your best to assist the wounded and then crawl to a nearby bunker. 
Conscious but dazed by the blasts, you lay on your side and attempt to process what has just happened. 
As you regain your vision, you see a bloody face staring back at you. 
The image is terrifying, but you quickly come to understand it's not real. 
This vision continues to visit you multiple times a day and in your sleep. 
You choose not to tell anyone for fear of losing your job or being seen as weak. 
You give the vision a name, Bloody Face in Bunker, and call it BFIB for short. 
You keep BFIB locked away in your mind, secretly haunting you, for the next seven years. 
Now close your eyes. 
Can you see BFIB? 
If you can, you're beginning to see the face of the invisible wounds of war, commonly known as post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. 
While I can't say I have post-traumatic stress disorder, I've never been a stranger to it. 
When I was a little girl, I would visit my grandparents every summer. 
It was my grandfather who introduced me to the effects of combat on the psyche. 
While my grandfather was serving as a Marine in the Korean War, a bullet pierced his neck and rendered him unable to cry out. 
He watched as a corpsman passed him over, declaring him a goner, and then leaving him to die. 
Years later, after his physical wounds had healed and he'd returned home, he rarely spoke of his experiences in waking life. 
But at night I would hear him shouting obscenities from his room down the hall. 
And during the day I would announce myself as I entered the room, careful not to startle or agitate him. 
He lived out the remainder of his days isolated and tight-lipped, never finding a way to express himself, and I didn't yet have the tools to guide him. 
I wouldn't have a name for my grandfather's condition until I was in my 20s. 
Seeking a graduate degree in art therapy, I naturally gravitated towards the study of trauma. 
And while sitting in class learning about post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD for short, my mission to help service members who suffered like my grandfather began to take form. 
We've had various names for post-traumatic stress throughout the history of war: homesickness, soldier's heart, shell shock, thousand-yard stare, for instance. 
And while I was pursuing my degree, a new war was raging, and thanks to modern body armor and military vehicles, service members were surviving blast injuries they wouldn't have before. 
But the invisible wounds were reaching new levels, and this pushed military doctors and researchers to try and truly understand the effects that traumatic brain injury, or TBI, and PTSD have on the brain. 
Due to advances in technology and neuroimaging, we now know there's an actual shutdown in the Broca's, or the speech-language area of the brain, after an individual experiences trauma. 
This physiological change, or speechless terror as it's often called, coupled with mental health stigma, the fear of being judged or misunderstood, possibly even removed from their current duties, has led to the invisible struggles of our servicemen and women. 
Generation after generation of veterans have chosen not to talk about their experiences, and suffer in solitude. 
I had my work cut out for me when I got my first job as an art therapist at the nation's largest military medical center, Walter Reed. 
After working for a few years on a locked-in patient psychiatric unit, I eventually transferred to the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, NICoE, which leads TBI care for active duty service members. 
Now, I believed in art therapy, but I was going to have to convince service members, big, tough, strong, manly military men, and some women too, to give art-making as a psychotherapeutic intervention a try. 
The results have been nothing short of spectacular. 
Vivid, symbolic artwork is being created by our servicemen and women, and every work of art tells a story. 
We've observed that the process of art therapy bypasses the speech-language issue with the brain. 
Art-making accesses the same sensory areas of the brain that encode trauma. 
Service members can use the art-making to work through their experiences in a nonthreatening way. 
They can then apply words to their physical creations, reintegrating the left and the right hemispheres of the brain. 
Now, we've seen this can work with all forms of art — drawing, painting, collage — but what seems to have the most impact is mask-making. 
Finally, these invisible wounds don't just have a name, they have a face. 
And when service members create these masks, it allows them to come to grips, literally, with their trauma. 
And it's amazing how often that enables them to break through the trauma and start to heal. 
Remember BFIB? 
That was a real experience for one of my patients, and when he created his mask, he was able to let go of that haunting image. 
Initially, it was a daunting process for the service member, but eventually he began to think of BFIB as the mask, not his internal wound, and he would go to leave each session, he would hand me the mask, and say, "" Melissa, take care of him. "" Eventually, we placed BFIB in a box to further contain him, and when the service member went to leave the NICoE, he chose to leave BFIB behind. 
A year later, he had only seen BFIB twice, and both times BFIB was smiling and the service member didn't feel anxious. 
Now, whenever that service member is haunted by some traumatic memory, he continues to paint. 
Every time he paints these disturbing images, he sees them less or not at all. 
Philosophers have told us for thousands of years that the power to create is very closely linked to the power to destroy. 
Now science is showing us that the part of the brain that registers a traumatic wound can be the part of the brain where healing happens too. 
And art therapy is showing us how to make that connection. 
We asked one of our service members to describe how mask-making impacted his treatment, and this is what he had to say. 
(Video) Service Member: You sort of just zone out into the mask. 
You zone out into the drawing, and for me, it just released the block, so I was able to do it. 
And then when I looked at it after two days, I was like, "Holy crap, here's the picture, here's the key, here's the puzzle," and then from there it just soared. 
I mean, from there my treatment just when out of sight, because they were like, Kurt, explain this, explain this. 
And for the first time in 23 years, I could actually talk about stuff openly to, like, anybody. 
I could talk to you about it right now if I wanted to, because it unlocked it. 
It's just amazing. 
And it allowed me to put 23 years of PTSD and TBI stuff together in one place that has never happened before. 
Sorry. 
Melissa Walker: Over the past five years, we've had over 1,000 masks made. 
It's pretty amazing, isn't it? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) I wish I could have shared this process with my grandfather, but I know that he would be thrilled that we are finding ways to help today's and tomorrow's service members heal, and finding the resources within them that they can call upon to heal themselves. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

"Don't talk to strangers." 
You have heard that phrase uttered by your friends, family, schools and the media for decades. 
It's a norm. It's a social norm. 
But it's a special kind of social norm, because it's a social norm that wants to tell us who we can relate to and who we shouldn't relate to. 
"" Don't talk to strangers "" says, "" Stay from anyone who's not familiar to you. 
Stick with the people you know. 
Stick with people like you. "" How appealing is that? 
It's not really what we do, is it, when we're at our best? 
When we're at our best, we reach out to people who are not like us, because when we do that, we learn from people who are not like us. 
My phrase for this value of being with "" not like us "" is "" strangeness, "" and my point is that in today's digitally intensive world, strangers are quite frankly not the point. 
The point that we should be worried about is, how much strangeness are we getting? 
Why strangeness? Because our social relations are increasingly mediated by data, and data turns our social relations into digital relations, and that means that our digital relations now depend extraordinarily on technology to bring to them a sense of robustness, a sense of discovery, a sense of surprise and unpredictability. 
Why not strangers? 
Because strangers are part of a world of really rigid boundaries. 
They belong to a world of people I know versus people I don't know, and in the context of my digital relations, I'm already doing things with people I don't know. 
The question isn't whether or not I know you. 
The question is, what can I do with you? 
What can I learn with you? 
What can we do together that benefits us both? 
I spend a lot of time thinking about how the social landscape is changing, how new technologies create new constraints and new opportunities for people. 
The most important changes facing us today have to do with data and what data is doing to shape the kinds of digital relations that will be possible for us in the future. 
The economies of the future depend on that. 
Our social lives in the future depend on that. 
The threat to worry about isn't strangers. 
The threat to worry about is whether or not we're getting our fair share of strangeness. 
Now, 20th-century psychologists and sociologists were thinking about strangers, but they weren't thinking so dynamically about human relations, and they were thinking about strangers in the context of influencing practices. 
Stanley Milgram from the '60s and' 70s, the creator of the small-world experiments, which became later popularized as six degrees of separation, made the point that any two arbitrarily selected people were likely connected from between five to seven intermediary steps. 
His point was that strangers are out there. 
We can reach them. There are paths that enable us to reach them. 
Mark Granovetter, Stanford sociologist, in 1973 in his seminal essay "" The Strength of Weak Ties, "" made the point that these weak ties that are a part of our networks, these strangers, are actually more effective at diffusing information to us than are our strong ties, the people closest to us. 
He makes an additional indictment of our strong ties when he says that these people who are so close to us, these strong ties in our lives, actually have a homogenizing effect on us. 
They produce sameness. 
My colleagues and I at Intel have spent the last few years looking at the ways in which digital platforms are reshaping our everyday lives, what kinds of new routines are possible. 
We've been looking specifically at the kinds of digital platforms that have enabled us to take our possessions, those things that used to be very restricted to us and to our friends in our houses, and to make them available to people we don't know. 
Whether it's our clothes, whether it's our cars, whether it's our bikes, whether it's our books or music, we are able to take our possessions now and make them available to people we've never met. 
And we concluded a very important insight, which was that as people's relationships to the things in their lives change, so do their relations with other people. 
And yet recommendation system after recommendation system continues to miss the boat. 
It continues to try to predict what I need based on some past characterization of who I am, of what I've already done. 
Security technology after security technology continues to design data protection in terms of threats and attacks, keeping me locked into really rigid kinds of relations. 
Categories like "" friends "" and "" family "" and "" contacts "" and "" colleagues "" don't tell me anything about my actual relations. 
A more effective way to think about my relations might be in terms of closeness and distance, where at any given point in time, with any single person, I am both close and distant from that individual, all as a function of what I need to do right now. 
People aren't close or distant. 
People are always a combination of the two, and that combination is constantly changing. 
What if technologies could intervene to disrupt the balance of certain kinds of relationships? What if technologies could intervene 
to help me find the person that I need right now? 
Strangeness is that calibration of closeness and distance that enables me to find the people that I need right now, that enables me to find the sources of intimacy, of discovery, and of inspiration that I need right now. 
Strangeness is not about meeting strangers. 
It simply makes the point that we need to disrupt our zones of familiarity. 
So jogging those zones of familiarity is one way to think about strangeness, and it's a problem faced not just by individuals today, but also by organizations, organizations that are trying to embrace massively new opportunities. 
Whether you're a political party insisting to your detriment on a very rigid notion of who belongs and who does not, whether you're the government protecting social institutions like marriage and restricting access of those institutions to the few, whether you're a teenager in her bedroom who's trying to jostle her relations with her parents, strangeness is a way to think about how we pave the way to new kinds of relations. 
We have to change the norms. 
We have to change the norms in order to enable new kinds of technologies as a basis for new kinds of businesses. 
What interesting questions lie ahead for us in this world of no strangers? 
How might we think differently about our relations with people? How might we think differently about our relations 
with distributed groups of people? 
How might we think differently about our relations with technologies, things that effectively become social participants in their own right? 
The range of digital relations is extraordinary. 
In the context of this broad range of digital relations, safely seeking strangeness might very well be a new basis for that innovation. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I want to talk about 4.6 billion years of history in 18 minutes. 
That's 300 million years per minute. 
Let's start with the first photograph NASA obtained of planet Mars. 
This is fly-by, Mariner IV. 
It was taken in 1965. 
When this picture appeared, that well-known scientific journal, The New York Times, wrote in its editorial, "" Mars is uninteresting. 
It's a dead world. NASA should not spend any time or effort studying Mars anymore. "" Fortunately, our leaders in Washington at NASA headquarters knew better and we began a very extensive study of the red planet. 
One of the key questions in all of science, "Is there life outside of Earth?" 
I believe that Mars is the most likely target for life outside the Earth. 
I'm going to show you in a few minutes some amazing measurements that suggest there may be life on Mars. 
But let me start with a Viking photograph. 
This is a composite taken by Viking in 1976. 
Viking was developed and managed at the NASA Langley Research Center. 
We sent two orbiters and two landers in the summer of 1976. 
We had four spacecraft, two around Mars, two on the surface — an amazing accomplishment. 
This is the first photograph taken from the surface of any planet. 
This is a Viking Lander photograph of the surface of Mars. 
And yes, the red planet is red. 
Mars is half the size of the Earth, but because two-thirds of the Earth is covered by water, the land area on Mars is comparable to the land area on Earth. 
So, Mars is a pretty big place even though it's half the size. 
We have obtained topographic measurements of the surface of Mars. We understand the elevation differences. 
We know a lot about Mars. 
Mars has the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons. 
Mars has the Grand Canyon of the solar system, Valles Marineris. 
Very, very interesting planet. 
Mars has the largest impact crater in the solar system, Hellas Basin. 
This is 2,000 miles across. 
If you happened to be on Mars when this impactor hit, it was a really bad day on Mars. 
(Laughter) This is Olympus Mons. 
This is bigger than the state of Arizona. 
Volcanoes are important, because volcanoes produce atmospheres and they produce oceans. 
We're looking at Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system, superimposed on a map of the United States, 3,000 miles across. 
One of the most intriguing features about Mars, the National Academy of Science says one of the 10 major mysteries of the space age, is why certain areas of Mars are so highly magnetized. 
We call this crustal magnetism. 
There are regions on Mars, where, for some reason — we don't understand why at this point — the surface is very, very highly magnetized. 
Is there water on Mars? 
The answer is no, there is no liquid water on the surface of Mars today. 
But there is intriguing evidence that suggests that the early history of Mars there may have been rivers and fast flowing water. 
Today Mars is very very dry. 
We believe there's some water in the polar caps, there are polar caps of North Pole and South Pole. 
Here are some recent images. 
This is from Spirit and Opportunity. 
These images that show at one time, there was very fast flowing water on the surface of Mars. 
Why is water important? Water is important because if you want life you have to have water. 
Water is the key ingredient in the evolution, the origin of life on a planet. 
Here is some picture of Antarctica and a picture of Olympus Mons, very similar features, glaciers. 
So, this is frozen water. 
This is ice water on Mars. 
This is my favorite picture. This was just taken a few weeks ago. 
It has not been seen publicly. 
This is European space agency Mars Express, image of a crater on Mars and in the middle of the crater we have liquid water, we have ice. 
Very intriguing photograph. 
We now believe that in the early history of Mars, which is 4.6 billion years ago, 4.6 billion years ago, Mars was very Earth-like. 
Mars had rivers, Mars had lakes, but more important Mars had planetary-scale oceans. 
We believe that the oceans were in the northern hemisphere, and this area in blue, which shows a depression of about four miles, was the ancient ocean area on the surface of Mars. 
Where did the ocean's worth of water on Mars go? 
Well, we have an idea. 
This is a measurement we obtained a few years ago from a Mars-orbiting satellite called Odyssey. 
Sub-surface water on Mars, frozen in the form of ice. 
And this shows the percent. If it's a blueish color, it means 16 percent by weight. 
Sixteen percent, by weight, of the interior contains frozen water, or ice. 
So, there is a lot of water below the surface. 
The most intriguing and puzzling measurement, in my opinion, we've obtained of Mars, was released earlier this year in the magazine Science. 
And what we're looking at is the presence of the gas methane, CH4, in the atmosphere of Mars. 
And you can see there are three distinct regions of methane. 
Why is methane important? 
Because on Earth, almost all — 99.9 percent — of the methane is produced by living systems, not little green men, but microscopic life below the surface or at the surface. 
We now have evidence that methane is in the atmosphere of Mars, a gas that, on Earth, is biogenic in origin, produced by living systems. 
These are the three plumes: A, B1, B2. 
And this is the terrain it appears over, and we know from geological studies that these regions are the oldest regions on Mars. 
In fact, the Earth and Mars are both 4.6 billion years old. 
The oldest rock on Earth is only 3.6 billion. 
The reason there is a billion-year gap in our geological understanding is because of plate tectonics, The crust of the Earth has been recycled. 
We have no geological record prior for the first billion years. 
That record exists on Mars. 
And this terrain that we're looking at dates back to 4.6 billion years when Earth and Mars were formed. 
It was a Tuesday. 
(Laughter) This is a map that shows where we've put our spacecraft on the surface of Mars. 
Here is Viking I, Viking II. 
This is Opportunity. This is Spirit. 
This is Mars Pathfinder. This is Phoenix, we just put two years ago. 
Notice all of our rovers and all of our landers have gone to the northern hemisphere. 
That's because the northern hemisphere is the region of the ancient ocean basin. 
There aren't many craters. 
And that's because the water protected the basin from being impacted by asteroids and meteorites. 
But look in the southern hemisphere. 
In the southern hemisphere there are impact craters, there are volcanic craters. 
Here's Hellas Basin, a very very different place, geologically. 
Look where the methane is, the methane is in a very rough terrain area. 
What is the best way to unravel the mysteries on Mars that exist? 
We asked this question 10 years ago. 
We invited 10 of the top Mars scientists to the Langley Research Center for two days. 
We addressed on the board the major questions that have not been answered. 
And we spent two days deciding how to best answer this question. 
And the result of our meeting was a robotic rocket-powered airplane we call ARES. 
It's an Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Surveyor. 
There's a model of ARES here. 
This is a 20-percent scale model. 
This airplane was designed at the Langley Research Center. 
If any place in the world can build an airplane to fly on Mars, it's the Langley Research Center, for almost 100 years a leading center of aeronautics in the world. 
We fly about a mile above the surface. 
We cover hundreds of miles, and we fly about 450 miles an hour. 
We can do things that rovers can't do and landers can't do: We can fly above mountains, volcanoes, impact craters; we fly over valleys; we can fly over surface magnetism, the polar caps, subsurface water; and we can search for life on Mars. 
But, of equal importance, as we fly through the atmosphere of Mars, we transmit that journey, the first flight of an airplane outside of the Earth, we transmit those images back to Earth. 
And our goal is to inspire the American public who is paying for this mission through tax dollars. 
But more important we will inspire the next generation of scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians. 
And that's a critical area of national security and economic vitality, to make sure we produce the next generation of scientists, engineers, mathematicians and technologists. 
This is what ARES looks like as it flies over Mars. 
We preprogram it. 
We will fly where the methane is. 
We will have instruments aboard the plane that will sample, every three minutes, the atmosphere of Mars. 
We will look for methane as well as other gasses produced by living systems. 
We will pinpoint where these gases emanate from, because we can measure the gradient where it comes from, and there, we can direct the next mission to land right in that area. 
How do we transport an airplane to Mars? 
In two words, very carefully. 
The problem is we don't fly it to Mars, we put it in a spacecraft and we send it to Mars. 
The problem is the spacecraft's largest diameter is nine feet; ARES is 21-foot wingspan, 17 feet long. 
How do we get it to Mars? 
We fold it, and we transport it in a spacecraft. 
And we have it in something called an aeroshell. 
This is how we do it. 
And we have a little video that describes the sequence. 
Video: Seven, six. Green board. Five, four, three, two, one. 
Main engine start, and liftoff. 
Joel Levine: This is a launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 
This is the spacecraft taking nine months to get to Mars. 
It enters the atmosphere of Mars. 
A lot of heating, frictional heating. It's going 18 thousand miles an hour. 
A parachute opens up to slow it down. 
The thermal tiles fall off. 
The airplane is exposed to the atmosphere for the first time. 
It unfolds. 
The rocket engine begins. 
We believe that in a one-hour flight we can rewrite the textbook on Mars by making high-resolution measurements of the atmosphere, looking for gases of biogenic origin, looking for gases of volcanic origin, studying the surface, studying the magnetism on the surface, which we don't understand, as well as about a dozen other areas. 
Practice makes perfect. 
How do we know we can do it? 
Because we have tested ARES model, several models in a half a dozen wind tunnels at the NASA Langley Research Center for eight years, under Mars conditions. 
And, of equal importance is, we test ARES in the Earth's atmosphere, at 100,000 feet, which is comparable to the density and pressure of the atmosphere on Mars where we'll fly. 
Now, 100,000 feet, if you fly cross-country to Los Angeles, you fly 37,000 feet. 
We do our tests at 100,000 feet. 
And I want to show you one of our tests. 
This is a half-scale model. 
This is a high-altitude helium balloon. 
This is over Tilamook, Oregon. 
We put the folded airplane on the balloon — it took about three hours to get up there — and then we released it on command at 103,000 feet, and we deploy the airplane and everything works perfectly. 
And we've done high-altitude and low-altitude tests, just to perfect this technique. 
We're ready to go. 
I have a scale model here. 
But we have a full-scale model in storage at the NASA Langley Research Center. 
We're ready to go. All we need is a check from NASA headquarters (Laughter) to cover the costs. 
I'm prepared to donate my honorarium for today's talk for this mission. 
There's actually no honorarium for anyone for this thing. 
This is the ARES team; we have about 150 scientists, engineers; where we're working with Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center, Ames Research Center and half a dozen major universities and corporations in developing this. 
It's a large effort. It's all at NASA Langley Research Center. 
And let me conclude by saying not too far from here, right down the road in Kittyhawk, North Carolina, a little more than 100 years ago history was made when we had the first powered flight of an airplane on Earth. 
We are on the verge right now to make the first flight of an airplane outside the Earth's atmosphere. 
We are prepared to fly this on Mars, rewrite the textbook about Mars. 
If you're interested in more information, we have a website that describes this exciting and intriguing mission, and why we want to do it. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

A couple of years ago, Harvard Business School chose the best business model of that year. 
It chose Somali piracy. 
Pretty much around the same time, I discovered that there were 544 seafarers being held hostage on ships, often anchored just off the Somali coast in plain sight. 
And I learned these two facts, and I thought, what's going on in shipping? 
And I thought, would that happen in any other industry? 
Would we see 544 airline pilots held captive in their jumbo jets on a runway for months, or a year? 
Would we see 544 Greyhound bus drivers? 
It wouldn't happen. 
So I started to get intrigued. 
And I discovered another fact, which to me was more astonishing almost for the fact that I hadn't known it before at the age of 42, 43. 
That is how fundamentally we still depend on shipping. 
Because perhaps the general public thinks of shipping as an old-fashioned industry, something brought by sailboat with Moby Dicks and Jack Sparrows. 
But shipping isn't that. 
Shipping is as crucial to us as it has ever been. 
Shipping brings us 90 percent of world trade. 
Shipping has quadrupled in size since 1970. 
We are more dependent on it now than ever. 
And yet, for such an enormous industry — there are a 100,000 working vessels on the sea — it's become pretty much invisible. 
Now that sounds absurd in Singapore to say that, because here shipping is so present that you stuck a ship on top of a hotel. 
(Laughter) But elsewhere in the world, if you ask the general public what they know about shipping and how much trade is carried by sea, you will get essentially a blank face. 
You will ask someone on the street if they've heard of Microsoft. 
I should think they'll say yes, because they'll know that they make software that goes on computers, and occasionally works. 
But if you ask them if they've heard of Maersk, I doubt you'd get the same response, even though Maersk, which is just one shipping company amongst many, has revenues pretty much on a par with Microsoft. 
[$60.2 billion] Now why is this? 
A few years ago, the first sea lord of the British admiralty — he is called the first sea lord, although the chief of the army is not called a land lord — he said that we, and he meant in the industrialized nations in the West, that we suffer from sea blindness. 
We are blind to the sea as a place of industry or of work. 
It's just something we fly over, a patch of blue on an airline map. 
Nothing to see, move along. 
So I wanted to open my own eyes to my own sea blindness, so I ran away to sea. 
A couple of years ago, I took a passage on the Maersk Kendal, a mid-sized container ship carrying nearly 7,000 boxes, and I departed from Felixstowe, on the south coast of England, and I ended up right here in Singapore five weeks later, considerably less jet-lagged than I am right now. 
And it was a revelation. 
We traveled through five seas, two oceans, nine ports, and I learned a lot about shipping. 
And one of the first things that surprised me when I got on board Kendal was, where are all the people? 
I have friends in the Navy who tell me they sail with 1,000 sailors at a time, but on Kendal there were only 21 crew. 
Now that's because shipping is very efficient. 
Containerization has made it very efficient. 
Ships have automation now. 
They can operate with small crews. 
But it also means that, in the words of a port chaplain I once met, the average seafarer you're going to find on a container ship is either tired or exhausted, because the pace of modern shipping is quite punishing for what the shipping calls its human element, a strange phrase which they don't seem to realize sounds a little bit inhuman. 
So most seafarers now working on container ships often have less than two hours in port at a time. 
They don't have time to relax. 
They're at sea for months at a time, and even when they're on board, they don't have access to what a five-year-old would take for granted, the Internet. 
And another thing that surprised me when I got on board Kendal was who I was sitting next to — Not the queen; I can't imagine why they put me underneath her portrait — But around that dining table in the officer's saloon, I was sitting next to a Burmese guy, I was opposite a Romanian, a Moldavian, an Indian. 
On the next table was a Chinese guy, and in the crew room, it was entirely Filipinos. 
So that was a normal working ship. 
Now how is that possible? 
Because the biggest dramatic change in shipping over the last 60 years, when most of the general public stopped noticing it, was something called an open registry, or a flag of convenience. 
Ships can now fly the flag of any nation that provides a flag registry. 
You can get a flag from the landlocked nation of Bolivia, or Mongolia, or North Korea, though that's not very popular. 
(Laughter) So we have these very multinational, global, mobile crews on ships. 
And that was a surprise to me. 
And when we got to pirate waters, down the Bab-el-Mandeb strait and into the Indian Ocean, the ship changed. 
And that was also shocking, because suddenly, I realized, as the captain said to me, that I had been crazy to choose to go through pirate waters on a container ship. 
We were no longer allowed on deck. 
There were double pirate watches. 
And at that time, there were those 544 seafarers being held hostage, and some of them were held hostage for years because of the nature of shipping and the flag of convenience. 
Not all of them, but some of them were, because for the minority of unscrupulous ship owners, it can be easy to hide behind the anonymity offered by some flags of convenience. 
What else does our sea blindness mask? 
Well, if you go out to sea on a ship or on a cruise ship, and look up to the funnel, you'll see very black smoke. 
And that's because shipping has very tight margins, and they want cheap fuel, so they use something called bunker fuel, which was described to me by someone in the tanker industry as the dregs of the refinery, or just one step up from asphalt. 
And shipping is the greenest method of transport. 
In terms of carbon emissions per ton per mile, it emits about a thousandth of aviation and about a tenth of trucking. 
But it's not benign, because there's so much of it. 
So shipping emissions are about three to four percent, almost the same as aviation's. 
And if you put shipping emissions on a list of the countries' carbon emissions, it would come in about sixth, somewhere near Germany. 
It was calculated in 2009 that the 15 largest ships pollute in terms of particles and soot and noxious gases as much as all the cars in the world. 
And the good news is that people are now talking about sustainable shipping. 
There are interesting initiatives going on. 
But why has it taken so long? 
When are we going to start talking and thinking about shipping miles as well as air miles? 
I also traveled to Cape Cod to look at the plight of the North Atlantic right whale, because this to me was one of the most surprising things about my time at sea, and what it made me think about. 
We know about man's impact on the ocean in terms of fishing and overfishing, but we don't really know much about what's happening underneath the water. 
And in fact, shipping has a role to play here, because shipping noise has contributed to damaging the acoustic habitats of ocean creatures. 
Light doesn't penetrate beneath the surface of the water, so ocean creatures like whales and dolphins and even 800 species of fish communicate by sound. 
And a North Atlantic right whale can transmit across hundreds of miles. 
A humpback can transmit a sound across a whole ocean. 
But a supertanker can also be heard coming across a whole ocean, and because the noise that propellers make underwater is sometimes at the same frequency that whales use, then it can damage their acoustic habitat, and they need this for breeding, for finding feeding grounds, for finding mates. 
And the acoustic habitat of the North Atlantic right whale has been reduced by up to 90 percent. 
But there are no laws governing acoustic pollution yet. 
And when I arrived in Singapore, and I apologize for this, but I didn't want to get off my ship. 
I'd really loved being on board Kendal. 
I'd been well treated by the crew, I'd had a garrulous and entertaining captain, and I would happily have signed up for another five weeks, something that the captain also said I was crazy to think about. 
But I wasn't there for nine months at a time like the Filipino seafarers, who, when I asked them to describe their job to me, called it "" dollar for homesickness. "" They had good salaries, but theirs is still an isolating and difficult life in a dangerous and often difficult element. 
But when I get to this part, I'm in two minds, because I want to salute those seafarers who bring us 90 percent of everything and get very little thanks or recognition for it. 
I want to salute the 100,000 ships that are at sea that are doing that work, coming in and out every day, bringing us what we need. 
But I also want to see shipping, and us, the general public, who know so little about it, to have a bit more scrutiny, to be a bit more transparent, to have 90 percent transparency. 
Because I think we could all benefit from doing something very simple, which is learning to see the sea. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'd like to apologize, first of all, to all of you because I have no form of PowerPoint presentation. 
So what I'm going to do is, every now and again, I will make this gesture, and in a moment of PowerPoint democracy, you can imagine what you'd like to see. 
I do a radio show. 
The radio show is called "" The Infinite Monkey Cage. "" It's about science, it's about rationalism. 
So therefore, we get a lot of complaints every single week — complaints including one we get very often, which is to say the very title, "" Infinite Monkey Cage, "" celebrates the idea of vivisection. 
We have made it quite clear to these people that an infinite monkey cage is roomy. 
(Laughter) We also had someone else who said, "" 'The Infinite Monkey Cage' idea is ridiculous. 
An infinite number of monkeys could never write the works of Shakespeare. 
We know this because they did an experiment. "" Yes, they gave 12 monkeys a typewriter for a week, and after a week, they only used it as a bathroom. 
(Laughter) So the main element though, the main complaint we get — and one that I find most worrying — is that people say, "" Oh, why do you insist on ruining the magic? 
You bring in science, and it ruins the magic. "" Now I'm an arts graduate; I love myth and magic and existentialism and self-loathing. 
That's what I do. 
But I also don't understand how it does ruin the magic. 
All of the magic, I think, that may well be taken away by science is then replaced by something as wonderful. 
Astrology, for instance: like many rationalists, I'm a Pisces. 
(Laughter) Now astrology — we remove the banal idea that your life could be predicted; that you'll, perhaps today, meet a lucky man who's wearing a hat. 
That is gone. 
But if we want to look at the sky and see predictions, we still can. 
We can see predictions of galaxies forming, of galaxies colliding into each other, of new solar systems. 
This is a wonderful thing. 
If the Sun could one day — and indeed the Earth, in fact — if the Earth could read its own astrological, astronomical chart, one day it would say, "" Not a good day for making plans. 
You'll been engulfed by a red giant. "" And that to me as well, that if you think I'm worried about losing worlds, well Many Worlds theory — one of the most beautiful, fascinating, sometimes terrifying ideas from the quantum interpretation — is a wonderful thing. 
That every person here, every decision that you've made today, every decision you've made in your life, you've not really made that decision, but in fact, every single permutation of those decisions is made, each one going off into a new universe. 
That is a wonderful idea. 
If you ever think that your life is rubbish, always remember there's another you that's made much worse decisions than that. 
(Laughter) If you ever think, "" Ah, I want to end it all, "" don't end it all. 
Remember that in the majority of universes, you don't even exist in the first place. 
This to me, in its own strange way, is very, very comforting. 
Now reincarnation, that's another thing gone — the afterlife. 
But it's not gone. 
Science actually says we will live forever. 
Well, there is one proviso. 
We won't actually live forever. You won't live forever. 
Your consciousness, the you-ness of you, the me-ness of me — that gets this one go. 
But every single thing that makes us, every atom in us, has already created a myriad of different things and will go on to create a myriad of new things. 
We have been mountains and apples and pulsars and other people's knees. 
Who knows, maybe one of your atoms was once Napoleon's knee. 
That is a good thing. 
Unlike the occupants of the universe, the universe itself is not wasteful. 
We are all totally recyclable. 
And when we die, we don't even have to be placed in different refuse sacs. 
This is a wonderful thing. 
Understanding, to me, does not remove the wonder and the joy. 
For instance, my wife could turn to me and she may say, "Why do you love me?" 
And I can with all honesty look her in the eye and say, "" Because our pheromones matched our olfactory receptors. "" (Laughter) Though I'll probably also say something about her hair and personality as well. 
And that is a wonderful thing there. 
Love does not die because of that thing. 
Pain doesn't go away either. 
This is a terrible thing, even though I understand pain. 
If someone punches me — and because of my personality, this is recently a regular occurrence — I understand where the pain comes from. 
It is basically momentum to energy where the four-vector is constant — that's what it is. 
But at no point can I react and go, "Ha! Is that the best momentum-to-energy fourth vector constant you've got?" 
No, I just spit out a tooth. 
(Laughter) And that is all of these different things — the love for my child. 
I have a son. His name is Archie. 
I'm very lucky, because he's better than all the other children. 
Now I know you don't think that. 
You may well have your own children and think, "" Oh no, my child's best. "" That's the wonderful thing about evolution — the predilection to believe that our child is best. 
Now in many ways, that's just a survival thing. 
The fact we see here is the vehicle for our genes, and therefore we love it. 
But we don't notice that bit; we just unconditionally love. 
That is a wonderful thing. 
Though I should say that my son is best and is better than your children. 
I've done some tests. 
And all of these things to me give such joy and excitement and wonder. 
Even quantum mechanics can give you an excuse for bad housework, for instance. 
Perhaps you've been at home for a week on your own. 
You house is in a terrible state. 
Your partner is about to return. 
You think, what should I do? 
Do nothing. 
All you have to do is, when she walks in, using a quantum interpretation, say, "" I'm so sorry. 
I stopped observing the house for a moment, and when I started observing again, everything had happened. "" (Laughter) That's the strong anthropic principle of vacuuming. 
For me, it's a very, very important thing. 
Even on my journey up here — the joy that I have on my journey up here every single time. 
If you actually think, you remove the myth and there is still something wonderful. 
I'm sitting on a train. 
Every time I breathe in, I'm breathing in a million-billion-billion atoms of oxygen. 
I'm sitting on a chair. 
Even though I know the chair is made of atoms and therefore actually in many ways empty space, I find it comfortable. 
I look out the window, and I realize that every single time we stop and I look out that window, framed in that window, wherever we are, I am observing more life than there is in the rest of the known universe beyond the planet Earth. 
If you go to the safari parks on Saturn or Jupiter, you will be disappointed. 
And I realize I'm observing this with the brain, the human brain, the most complex thing in the known universe. 
That, to me, is an incredible thing. 
And do you know what, that might be enough. 
Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate, once said, "" The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless. "" Now for some people, that seems to lead to an idea of nihilism. 
But for me, it doesn't. That is a wonderful thing. 
I'm glad the universe is pointless. 
It means if I get to the end of my life, the universe can't turn to me and go, "" What have you been doing, you idiot? 
That's not the point. "" I can make my own purpose. 
You can make your own purpose. 
We have the individual power to go, "" This is what I want to do. "" And in a pointless universe, that, to me, is a wonderful thing. 
I have chosen to make silly jokes about quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen interpretation. 
You, I imagine, can do much better things with your time. 
Thank you very much. Goodbye. 
(Applause) 

Wow, what an honor. I always wondered what this would feel like. 
So eight years ago, I got the worst career advice of my life. 
I had a friend tell me, "" Don't worry about how much you like the work you're doing now. 
It's all about just building your resume. "" And I'd just come back from living in Spain for a while, and I'd joined this Fortune 500 company. I thought, "" This is fantastic. 
I'm going to have big impact on the world. "" I had all these ideas. And within about two months, I noticed at about 10am every morning I had this strange urge to want to slam my head through the monitor of my computer. 
I don't know if anyone's ever felt that. 
And I noticed pretty soon after that that all the competitors in our space had already automated my job role. 
And this is right about when I got this sage advice to build up my resume. 
Well, as I'm trying to figure out what two-story window I'm going to jump out of and change things up, I read some altogether different advice from Warren Buffett, and he said, "Taking jobs to build up your resume is the same as saving up sex for old age." 
(Laughter) And I heard that, and that was all I needed. 
Within two weeks, I was out of there, and I left with one intention: to find something that I could screw up. That's how tough it was. 
I wanted to have some type of impact. It didn't matter what it was. 
And I found pretty quickly that I wasn't alone: it turns out that over 80 percent of the people around don't enjoy their work. 
I'm guessing this room is different, but that's the average that Deloitte has done with their studies. 
So I wanted to find out, what is it that sets these people apart, the people who do the passionate, world-changing work, that wake up inspired every day, and then these people, the other 80 percent who lead these lives of quiet desperation. 
So I started to interview all these people doing this inspiring work, and I read books and did case studies, 300 books altogether on purpose and career and all this, totally just self-immersion, really for the selfish reason of — I wanted to find the work that I couldn't not do, what that was for me. 
But as I was doing this, more and more people started to ask me, "" You're into this career thing. 
I don't like my job. Can we sit down for lunch? "" I'd say, "" Sure. "" But I would have to warn them, because at this point, my quit rate was also 80 percent. 
Of the people I'd sit down with for lunch, 80 percent would quit their job within two months. 
I was proud of this, and it wasn't that I had any special magic. 
It was that I would ask one simple question. 
It was, "" Why are you doing the work that you're doing? "" And so often their answer would be, "Well, because somebody told me I'm supposed to." 
And I realized that so many people around us are climbing their way up this ladder that someone tells them to climb, and it ends up being leaned up against the wrong wall, or no wall at all. 
The more time I spent around these people and saw this problem, I thought, what if we could create a community, a place where people could feel like they belonged and that it was OK to do things differently, to take the road less traveled, where that was encouraged, and inspire people to change? 
And that later became what I now call Live Your Legend, which I'll explain in a little bit. 
But as I've made these discoveries, I noticed a framework of really three simple things that all these different passionate world-changers have in common, whether you're a Steve Jobs or if you're just, you know, the person that has the bakery down the street. 
But you're doing work that embodies who you are. 
I want to share those three with you, so we can use them as a lens for the rest of today and hopefully the rest of our life. 
The first part of this three-step passionate work framework is becoming a self-expert and understanding yourself, because if you don't know what you're looking for, you're never going to find it. 
And the thing is that no one is going to do this for us. 
There's no major in university on passion and purpose and career. 
I don't know how that's not a required double major, but don't even get me started on that. 
I mean, you spend more time picking out a dorm room TV set than you do you picking your major and your area of study. 
But the point is, it's on us to figure that out, and we need a framework, we need a way to navigate through this. 
And so the first step of our compass is finding out what our unique strengths are. 
What are the things that we wake up loving to do no matter what, whether we're paid or we're not paid, the things that people thank us for? 
And the Strengths Finder 2.0 is a book and also an online tool. 
I highly recommend it for sorting out what it is that you're naturally good at. 
And next, what's our framework or our hierarchy for making decisions? 
Do we care about the people, our family, health, or is it achievement, success, all this stuff? 
We have to figure out what it is to make these decisions, so we know what our soul is made of, so that we don't go selling it to some cause we don't give a shit about. 
And then the next step is our experiences. 
All of us have these experiences. We learn things every day, every minute about what we love, what we hate, what we're good at, what we're terrible at. 
And if we don't spend time paying attention to that and assimilating that learning and applying it to the rest of our lives, it's all for nothing. 
Every day, every week, every month of every year I spend some time just reflecting on what went right, what went wrong, and what do I want to repeat, what can I apply more to my life. 
And even more so than that, as you see people, especially today, who inspire you, who are doing things where you say "Oh God, what Jeff is doing, I want to be like him." 
Why are you saying that? Open up a journal. 
Write down what it is about them that inspires you. 
It's not going to be everything about their life, but whatever it is, take note on that, so over time we'll have this repository of things that we can use to apply to our life and have a more passionate existence and make a better impact. 
Because when we start to put these things together, we can then define what success actually means to us, and without these different parts of the compass, it's impossible. 
We end up in the situation — we have that scripted life that everybody seems to be living going up this ladder to nowhere. 
It's kind of like in Wall Street 2, if anybody saw that, the peon employee asks the big Wall Street banker CEO, "" What's your number? Everyone's got a number, where if they make this money, they'll leave it all. "" He says, "" Oh, it's simple. More. "" And he just smiles. 
And it's the sad state of most of the people that haven't spent time understanding what matters for them, who keep reaching for something that doesn't mean anything to us, but we're doing it because everyone said we're supposed to. 
But once we have this framework together, we can start to identify the things that make us come alive. 
You know, before this, a passion could come and hit you in the face, or maybe in your possible line of work, you might throw it away because you don't have a way of identifying it. 
But once you do, you can see something that's congruent with my strengths, my values, who I am as a person, so I'm going to grab ahold of this, I'm going to do something with it, and I'm going to pursue it and try to make an impact with it. 
And Live Your Legend and the movement we've built wouldn't exist if I didn't have this compass to identify, "Wow, this is something I want to pursue and make a difference with." 
If we don't know what we're looking for, we're never going to find it, but once we have this framework, this compass, then we can move on to what's next — and that's not me up there — doing the impossible and pushing our limits. 
There's two reasons why people don't do things. 
One is they tell themselves they can't do them, or people around them tell them they can't do them. 
Either way, we start to believe it. 
Either we give up, or we never start in the first place. 
The things is, everyone was impossible until somebody did it. 
Every invention, every new thing in the world, people thought were crazy at first. 
Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile, it was a physical impossibility to break the four-minute mile in a foot race until Roger Bannister stood up and did it. 
And then what happened? 
Two months later, 16 people broke the four-minute mile. 
The things that we have in our head that we think are impossible are often just milestones waiting to be accomplished if we can push those limits a bit. 
And I think this starts with probably your physical body and fitness more than anything, because we can control that. 
If you don't think you can run a mile, you show yourself you can run a mile or two, or a marathon, or lose five pounds, or whatever it is, you realize that confidence compounds and can be transferred into the rest of your world. 
And I've actually gotten into the habit of this a little bit with my friends. 
We have this little group. We go on physical adventures, and recently, I found myself in a kind of precarious spot. 
I'm terrified of deep, dark, blue water. 
I don't know if anyone's ever had that same fear ever since they watched Jaws 1, 2, 3 and 4 like six times when I was a kid. 
But anything above here, if it's murky, I can already feel it right now. 
I swear there's something in there. 
Even if it's Lake Tahoe, it's fresh water, totally unfounded fear, ridiculous, but it's there. 
Anyway, three years ago I find myself on this tugboat right down here in the San Francisco Bay. 
It's a rainy, stormy, windy day, and people are getting sick on the boat, and I'm sitting there wearing a wetsuit, and I'm looking out the window in pure terror thinking I'm about to swim to my death. 
I'm going to try to swim across the Golden Gate. 
And my guess is some people in this room might have done that before. 
I'm sitting there, and my buddy Jonathan, who had talked me into it, he comes up to me and he could see the state I was in. 
And he says, "" Scott, hey man, what's the worst that could happen? 
You're wearing a wetsuit. You're not going to sink. 
And If you can't make it, just hop on one of the 20 kayaks. 
Plus, if there's a shark attack, why are they going to pick you over the 80 people in the water? "" So thanks, that helps. 
He's like, "" But really, just have fun with this. Good luck. "" And he dives in, swims off. OK. 
Turns out, the pep talk totally worked, and I felt this total feeling of calm, and I think it was because Jonathan was 13 years old. 
(Laughter) And of the 80 people swimming that day, 65 of them were between the ages of nine and 13. 
Think how you would have approached your world differently if at nine years old you found out you could swim a mile and a half in 56-degree water from Alcatraz to San Francisco. 
What would you have said yes to? 
What would you have not given up on? What would you have tried? 
As I'm finishing this swim, I get to Aquatic Park, and I'm getting out of the water and of course half the kids are already finished, so they're cheering me on and they're all excited. 
And I got total popsicle head, if anyone's ever swam in the Bay, and I'm trying to just thaw my face out, and I'm watching people finish. 
And I see this one kid, something didn't look right. 
And he's just flailing like this. 
And he's barely able to sip some air before he slams his head back down. 
And I notice other parents were watching too, and I swear they were thinking the same thing I was: this is why you don't let nine-year-olds swim from Alcatraz. 
This was not fatigue. 
All of a sudden, two parents run up and grab him, and they put him on their shoulders, and they're dragging him like this, totally limp. 
And then all of a sudden they walk a few more feet and they plop him down in his wheelchair. 
And he puts his fists up in the most insane show of victory I've ever seen. 
I can still feel the warmth and the energy on this guy when he made this accomplishment. 
I had seen him earlier that day in his wheelchair. 
I just had no idea he was going to swim. 
I mean, where is he going to be in 20 years? 
How many people told him he couldn't do that, that he would die if tried that? 
You prove people wrong, you prove yourself wrong, that you can make little incremental pushes of what you believe is possible. 
You don't have to be the fastest marathoner in the world, just your own impossibilities, to accomplish those, and it starts with little bitty steps. 
And the best way to do this is to surround yourself with passionate people. 
The fastest things to do things you don't think can be done is to surround yourself with people already doing them. 
There's this quote by Jim Rohn and it says. 
"You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with." 
And there is no bigger lifehack in the history of the world from getting where you are today to where you want to be than the people you choose to put in your corner. 
They change everything, and it's a proven fact. 
In 1898, Norman Triplett did this study with a bunch of cyclists, and he would measure their times around the track in a group, and also individually. 
And he found that every time the cyclists in the group would cycle faster. 
And it's been repeated in all kinds of walks of life since then, and it proves the same thing over again, that the people around you matter, and environment is everything. 
But it's on you to control it, because it can go both ways. 
With 80 percent of people who don't like the work they do, that means most people around us, not in this room, but everywhere else, are encouraging complacency and keeping us from pursuing the things that matter to us so we have to manage those surroundings. 
I found myself in this situation — personal example, a couple years ago. 
Has anyone ever had a hobby or a passion they poured their heart and soul into, unbelievable amount of time, and they so badly want to call it a business, but no one's paying attention and it doesn't make a dime? 
OK, I was there for four years trying to build this Live Your Legend movement to help people do work that they genuinely cared about and that inspired them, and I was doing all I could, and there were only three people paying attention, and they're all right there: my mother, father and my wife, Chelsea. 
Thank you guys for the support. 
(Applause) And this is how badly I wanted it, it grew at zero percent for four years, and I was about to shut it down, and right about then, I moved to San Francisco and started to meet some pretty interesting people who had these crazy lifestyles of adventure, of businesses and websites and blogs that surrounded their passions and helped people in a meaningful way. 
And one of my friends, now, he has a family of eight, and he supports his whole family with a blog that he writes for twice a week. 
They just came back from a month in Europe, all of them together. 
This blew my mind. How does this even exist? 
And I got unbelievably inspired by seeing this, and instead of shutting it down, I decided, let's take it seriously. 
And I did everything I could to spend my time, every waking hour possible trying to hound these guys, hanging out and having beers and workouts, whatever it was. 
And after four years of zero growth, within six months of hanging around these people, the community at Live Your Legend grew by 10 times. 
In another 12 months, it grew by 160 times. 
And today over 30,000 people from 158 countries use our career and connection tools on a monthly basis. 
And those people have made up that community of passionate folks who inspired that possibility that I dreamed of for Live Your Legend so many years back. 
The people change everything, and this is why — you know, you ask what was going on. 
Well, for four years, I knew nobody in this space, and I didn't even know it existed, that people could do this stuff, that you could have movements like this. 
And then I'm over here in San Francisco, and everyone around me was doing it. 
It became normal, so my thinking went from how could I possibly do this to how could I possibly not. 
And right then, when that happens, that switch goes on in your head, it ripples across your whole world. 
And without even trying, your standards go from here to here. 
You don't need to change your goals. You just need to change your surroundings. 
That's it, and that's why I love being around this whole group of people, why I go to every TED event I can, and watch them on my iPad on the way to work, whatever it is. 
Because this is the group of people that inspires possibility. 
We have a whole day to spend together and plenty more. 
To sum things up, in terms of these three pillars, they all have one thing in common more than anything else. 
They are 100 percent in our control. 
No one can tell you you can't learn about yourself. 
No one can tell you you can't push your limits and learn your own impossible and push that. 
No one can tell you you can't surround yourself with inspiring people or get away from the people who bring you down. 
You can't control a recession. 
You can't control getting fired or getting in a car accident. 
Most things are totally out of our hands. 
These three things are totally on us, and they can change our whole world if we decide to do something about it. 
And the thing is, it's starting to happen on a widespread level. 
I just read in Forbes, the US Government reported for the first time in a month where more people had quit their jobs than had been laid off. 
They thought this was an anomaly, but it's happened three months straight. 
In a time where people claim it's kind of a tough environment, people are giving a middle finger to this scripted life, the things that people say you're supposed to do, in exchange for things that matter to them and do the things that inspire them. 
And the thing is, people are waking up to this possibility, that really the only thing that limits possibility now is imagination. 
That's not a cliché anymore. 
I don't care what it is that you're into, what passion, what hobby. 
If you're into knitting, you can find someone who is killing it knitting, and you can learn from them. It's wild. 
And that's what this whole day is about, to learn from the folks speaking, and we profile these people on Live Your Legend every day, because when ordinary people are doing the extraordinary, and we can be around that, it becomes normal. 
And this isn't about being Gandhi or Steve Jobs, doing something crazy. 
It's just about doing something that matters to you, and makes an impact that only you can make. 
Speaking of Gandhi, he was a recovering lawyer, as I've heard the term, and he was called to a greater cause, something that mattered to him, he couldn't not do. 
And he has this quote that I absolutely live by. 
"" First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. "" Everything was impossible until somebody did it. 
You can either hang around the people who tell you it can't be done and tell you you're stupid for trying, or surround yourself with the people who inspire possibility, the people who are in this room. 
Because I see it as our responsibility to show the world that what's seen as impossible can become that new normal. 
And that's already starting to happen. 
First, do the things that inspire us, so we can inspire other people to do the things that inspire them. 
But we can't find that unless we know what we're looking for. 
We have to do our work on ourself, be intentional about that, and make those discoveries. 
Because I imagine a world where 80 percent of people love the work they do. 
What would that look like? 
What would the innovation be like? How would you treat the people around you? 
Things would start to change. 
And as we finish up, I have just one question to ask you guys, and I think it's the only question that matters. 
And it's what is the work you can't not do? 
Discover that, live it, not just for you, but for everybody around you, because that is what starts to change the world. 
What is the work you can't not do? 
Thank you guys. 
(Applause) 

Okay, now I don't want to alarm anybody in this room, but it's just come to my attention that the person to your right is a liar. 
(Laughter) Also, the person to your left is a liar. 
Also the person sitting in your very seats is a liar. 
We're all liars. 
What I'm going to do today is I'm going to show you what the research says about why we're all liars, how you can become a liespotter and why you might want to go the extra mile and go from liespotting to truth seeking, and ultimately to trust building. 
Now, speaking of trust, ever since I wrote this book, "" Liespotting, "" no one wants to meet me in person anymore, no, no, no, no, no. 
They say, "" It's okay, we'll email you. "" (Laughter) I can't even get a coffee date at Starbucks. 
My husband's like, "" Honey, deception? 
Maybe you could have focused on cooking. How about French cooking? "" So before I get started, what I'm going to do is I'm going to clarify my goal for you, which is not to teach a game of Gotcha. 
Liespotters aren't those nitpicky kids, those kids in the back of the room that are shouting, "" Gotcha! Gotcha! 
I watch that TV show 'Lie To Me.' I know you're lying. "" No, liespotters are armed with scientific knowledge of how to spot deception. 
They use it to get to the truth, and they do what mature leaders do everyday; they have difficult conversations with difficult people, sometimes during very difficult times. 
And they start up that path by accepting a core proposition, and that proposition is the following: Lying is a cooperative act. 
Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie. 
So I know it may sound like tough love, but look, if at some point you got lied to, it's because you agreed to get lied to. 
Truth number one about lying: Lying's a cooperative act. 
Now not all lies are harmful. 
Sometimes we're willing participants in deception for the sake of social dignity, maybe to keep a secret that should be kept secret, secret. 
We say, "" Nice song. "" "Honey, you don't look fat in that, no." 
Or we say, favorite of the digiratti, "" You know, I just fished that email out of my Spam folder. 
So sorry. "" But there are times when we are unwilling participants in deception. 
Last year saw 997 billion dollars in corporate fraud alone in the United States. 
Deception can cost billions. 
Think Enron, Madoff, the mortgage crisis. 
Or in the case of double agents and traitors, like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, lies can betray our country, they can compromise our security, they can undermine democracy, they can cause the deaths of those that defend us. 
Deception is actually serious business. 
This con man, Henry Oberlander, he was such an effective con man, British authorities say he could have undermined the entire banking system of the Western world. 
He said, "" Look, I've got one rule. "" And this was Henry's rule, he said, "" Look, everyone is willing to give you something. 
We wish we were better husbands, better wives, smarter, more powerful, taller, richer — the list goes on. 
Lying is an attempt to bridge that gap, to connect our wishes and our fantasies about who we wish we were, how we wish we could be, with what we're really like. 
And boy are we willing to fill in those gaps in our lives with lies. 
On a given day, studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times. 
Now granted, many of those are white lies. 
But in another study, it showed that strangers lied three times within the first 10 minutes of meeting each other. 
(Laughter) Now when we first hear this data, we recoil. 
We can't believe how prevalent lying is. 
We're essentially against lying. 
But if you look more closely, the plot actually thickens. 
We lie more to strangers than we lie to coworkers. 
Extroverts lie more than introverts. 
Men lie eight times more about themselves than they do other people. 
Women lie more to protect other people. 
If you're an average married couple, you're going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions. 
Now, you may think that's bad. 
If you're unmarried, that number drops to three. 
It's woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives. 
We parse it out on an as-needed basis, sometimes for very good reasons, other times just because we don't understand the gaps in our lives. 
We're against lying, but we're covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries and centuries. 
It's part of our culture, it's part of our history. 
(Laughter) Lying has evolutionary value to us as a species. 
Researchers have long known that the more intelligent the species, the larger the neocortex, the more likely it is to be deceptive. 
Now you might remember Koko. 
Does anybody remember Koko the gorilla who was taught sign language? 
Here's Koko with her kitten. 
It's her cute little, fluffy pet kitten. 
Koko once blamed her pet kitten for ripping a sink out of the wall. 
(Laughter) We're hardwired to become leaders of the pack. 
How early? 
Well babies will fake a cry, pause, wait to see who's coming and then go right back to crying. 
One-year-olds learn concealment. 
(Laughter) Two-year-olds bluff. 
Five-year-olds lie outright. 
They manipulate via flattery. 
Nine-year-olds, masters of the cover-up. 
By the time you enter college, you're going to lie to your mom in one out of every five interactions. 
By the time we enter this work world and we're breadwinners, we enter a world that is just cluttered with Spam, fake digital friends, partisan media, ingenious identity thieves, world-class Ponzi schemers, a deception epidemic — in short, what one author calls a post-truth society. 
Well, there are steps we can take to navigate our way through the morass. 
Trained liespotters get to the truth 90 percent of the time. 
The rest of us, we're only 54 percent accurate. 
Why is it so easy to learn? 
There are good liars and bad liars. 
I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. 
And these allegations are false. 
And I need to go back to work for the American people. 
(Applause) Pamela Meyer: Okay, what were the telltale signs? 
Well first we heard what's known as a non-contracted denial. 
Studies show that people who are overdetermined in their denial will resort to formal rather than informal language. 
We also heard distancing language: "" that woman. "" We know that liars will unconsciously distance themselves from their subject, using language as their tool. 
Now if Bill Clinton had said, "" Well, to tell you the truth... "" or Richard Nixon's favorite, "" In all candor... "" he would have been a dead giveaway for any liespotter that knows that qualifying language, as it's called, qualifying language like that, further discredits the subject. 
Now if he had repeated the question in its entirety, or if he had peppered his account with a little too much detail — and we're all really glad he didn't do that — he would have further discredited himself. 
Freud said, look, there's much more to it than speech: "" No mortal can keep a secret. 
If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips. "" And we all do it no matter how powerful you are. 
We all chatter with our fingertips. 
I'm going to show you Dominique Strauss-Kahn with Obama who's chattering with his fingertips. 
(Laughter) Now this brings us to our next pattern, which is body language. 
With body language, here's what you've got to do. 
You've really got to just throw your assumptions out the door. 
Let the science temper your knowledge a little bit. 
Well guess what, they're known to freeze their upper bodies when they're lying. 
Well guess what, they look you in the eyes a little too much just to compensate for that myth. 
But a trained liespotter can spot a fake smile a mile away. 
Can you all spot the fake smile here? 
You can consciously contract the muscles in your cheeks. 
But the real smile's in the eyes, the crow's feet of the eyes. 
They cannot be consciously contracted, especially if you overdid the Botox. 
Don't overdo the Botox; nobody will think you're honest. 
Now we're going to look at the hot spots. 
Can you tell what's happening in a conversation? 
Can you start to find the hot spots to see the discrepancies between someone's words and someone's actions? 
Now, I know it seems really obvious, but when you're having a conversation with someone you suspect of deception, attitude is by far the most overlooked but telling of indicators. 
They're going to be willing and helpful to getting you to the truth. 
They're going to say, "Hey, maybe it was those guys in payroll that forged those checks." 
Now let's say you're having that exact same conversation with someone deceptive. 
That person may be withdrawn, look down, lower their voice, pause, be kind of herky-jerky. 
Ask a deceptive person to tell their story, they're going to pepper it with way too much detail in all kinds of irrelevant places. 
And then they're going to tell their story in strict chronological order. 
And what a trained interrogator does is they come in and in very subtle ways over the course of several hours, they will ask that person to tell that story backwards, and then they'll watch them squirm, and track which questions produce the highest volume of deceptive tells. 
We rehearse our words, but we rarely rehearse our gestures. 
We say "" yes, "" we shake our heads "" no. "" We tell very convincing stories, we slightly shrug our shoulders. 
We commit terrible crimes, and we smile at the delight in getting away with it. 
Now, that smile is known in the trade as "" duping delight. "" And we're going to see that in several videos moving forward, but we're going to start — for those of you who don't know him, this is presidential candidate John Edwards who shocked America by fathering a child out of wedlock. 
We're going to see him talk about getting a paternity test. 
See now if you can spot him saying, "" yes "" while shaking his head "" no, "" slightly shrugging his shoulders. 
(Video) John Edwards: I'd be happy to participate in one. 
Happy to take a paternity test, and would love to see it happen. 
Interviewer: Are you going to do that soon? Is there somebody — JE: Well, I'm only one side. I'm only one side of the test. 
But I'm happy to participate in one. 
Murderers are known to leak sadness. 
Your new joint venture partner might shake your hand, celebrate, go out to dinner with you and then leak an expression of anger. 
And we're not all going to become facial expression experts overnight here, but there's one I can teach you that's very dangerous and it's easy to learn, and that's the expression of contempt. 
It's associated with moral superiority. 
And for that reason, it's very, very hard to recover from. 
Here's what it looks like. 
It's marked by one lip corner pulled up and in. 
It's the only asymmetrical expression. 
And in the presence of contempt, whether or not deception follows — and it doesn't always follow — look the other way, go the other direction, reconsider the deal, say, "" No thank you. I'm not coming up for just one more nightcap. Thank you. "" Science has surfaced many, many more indicators. 
We know, for example, we know liars will shift their blink rate, point their feet towards an exit. 
They will take barrier objects and put them between themselves and the person that is interviewing them. 
They'll alter their vocal tone, often making their vocal tone much lower. 
Now here's the deal. 
These behaviors are just behaviors. 
They're not proof of deception. 
They're red flags. 
We're human beings. 
We make deceptive flailing gestures all over the place all day long. 
Look, listen, probe, ask some hard questions, get out of that very comfortable mode of knowing, walk into curiosity mode, ask more questions, have a little dignity, treat the person you're talking to with rapport. 
And as I promised, we're now going to look at what the truth looks like. 
And these were surfaced by researcher David Matsumoto in California. 
This mother, Diane Downs, shot her kids at close range, drove them to the hospital while they bled all over the car, claimed a scraggy-haired stranger did it. 
And you'll see when you see the video, she can't even pretend to be an agonizing mother. 
What you want to look for here is an incredible discrepancy between horrific events that she describes and her very, very cool demeanor. 
And if you look closely, you'll see duping delight throughout this video. 
That bothers me the most. 
PM: Now I'm going to show you a video of an actual grieving mother, Erin Runnion, confronting her daughter's murderer and torturer in court. 
Here you're going to see no false emotion, just the authentic expression of a mother's agony. 
(Video) Erin Runnion: I wrote this statement on the third anniversary of the night you took my baby, and you hurt her, and you crushed her, you terrified her until her heart stopped. 
And she fought, and I know she fought you. 
But I know she looked at you with those amazing brown eyes, and you still wanted to kill her. 
And I don't understand it, and I never will. 
Now the technology around what the truth looks like is progressing on, the science of it. 
We know, for example, that we now have specialized eye trackers and infrared brain scans, MRI's that can decode the signals that our bodies send out when we're trying to be deceptive. 
And these technologies are going to be marketed to all of us as panaceas for deceit, and they will prove incredibly useful some day. 
But you've got to ask yourself in the meantime: Who do you want on your side of the meeting, someone who's trained in getting to the truth or some guy who's going to drag a 400-pound electroencephalogram through the door? 
They know, as someone once said, "Character's who you are in the dark." 
And what's kind of interesting is that today, we have so little darkness. 
Our world is lit up 24 hours a day. 
It's transparent with blogs and social networks broadcasting the buzz of a whole new generation of people that have made a choice to live their lives in public. 
So one challenge we have is to remember, oversharing, that's not honesty. 
Our manic tweeting and texting can blind us to the fact that the subtleties of human decency — character integrity — that's still what matters, that's always what's going to matter. 
So in this much noisier world, it might make sense for us to be just a little bit more explicit about our moral code. 
When you combine the science of recognizing deception with the art of looking, listening, you exempt yourself from collaborating in a lie. 
You start up that path of being just a little bit more explicit, because you signal to everyone around you, you say, "" Hey, my world, our world, it's going to be an honest one. 
My world is going to be one where truth is strengthened and falsehood is recognized and marginalized. "" And when you do that, the ground around you starts to shift just a little bit. 
And that's the truth. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I wanna start today — here's my thing. Hold on. There I go. 
Hey. I wanna start today — talk about the structure of a polypeptide. (Laughter) I get a lot of people asking me, in terms of "" Lost, "" you know, "" What the hell's that island? "" You know, it's usually followed by, "No, seriously, what the hell is that island?" (Laughter) 
Why so many mysteries? What is it about mystery that I seem to be drawn to? 
And I was thinking about this, what to talk about at TED. 
When I talked to the kind rep from TED, and I said, "Listen, you know, what should I talk about?" 
He said, "" Don't worry about it. Just be profound. "" (Laughter) And I took enormous comfort in that. 
So thank you, if you're here. 
I was trying to think, what do I talk about? It's a good question. 
Why do I do so much stuff that involves mystery? And I started trying to figure it out. 
And I started thinking about why do I do any of what I do, and I started thinking about my grandfather. 
I loved my grandfather. Harry Kelvin was his name, my mother's father. He died in 1986. He was an amazing guy. 
And one of the reasons he was amazing: After World War II he began an electronics company. 
He started selling surplus parts, kits, to schools and stuff. 
So he had this incredible curiosity. As a kid I saw him come over to me with radios and telephones and all sorts of things. 
And he'd open them up, he'd unscrew them, and reveal the inner workings — which many of us, I'm sure, take for granted. 
But it's an amazing gift to give a kid. 
To open up this thing and show how it works and why it works and what it is. 
He was the ultimate deconstructer, in many ways. 
And my grandfather was a kind of guy who would not only take things apart, but he got me interested in all sorts of different odd crafts, like, you know, printing, like the letter press. I'm obsessed with printing. 
I'm obsessed with silk screening and bookbinding and box making. 
When I was a kid, I was always, like, taking apart boxes and stuff. 
And last night in the hotel, I took apart the Kleenex box. 
I was just looking at it. And I'm telling you... (Laughter) It's a beautiful thing. 
I swear to God. I mean, when you look at the box, and you sort of see how it works. 
Rives is here, and I met him years ago at a book fair; he does pop-up books. 
And I'm obsessed with, like, engineering of paper. 
But like, the scoring of it, the printing of it, where the thing gets glued, you know, the registration marks for the ink. I just love boxes. 
My grandfather was sort of the guy who, you know, kind of got me into all sorts of these things. 
He would also supply me with tools. 
He was this amazing encourager — this patron, sort of, to make stuff. 
And he got me a Super 8 camera when I was 10 years old. 
And in 1976, that was sort of an anomaly, to be a 10-year-old kid that had access to a camera. 
And you know, he was so generous; I couldn't believe it. 
He wasn't doing it entirely without some manipulation. 
I mean, I would call him, and I'd be like, "" Listen, Grandpa, I really need this camera. 
You don't understand. This is, like, you know, I want to make movies. 
I'll get invited to TED one day. This is like — "" (Laughter) And you know, and my grandmother was the greatest. 
Because she'd be like, you know — she'd get on the phone. 
She'd be like, "" Harry, it's better than the drugs. He should be doing — "" She was fantastic. (Laughter) So I found myself getting this stuff, thanks to her assist, and suddenly, you know, I had a synthesizer when I was 14 years old — this kind of stuff. 
And it let me make things, which, to me, was sort of the dream. 
He sort of humored my obsession to other things too, like magic. 
The thing is, we'd go to this magic store in New York City called Lou Tannen's Magic. 
It was this great magic store. It was a crappy little building in Midtown, but you'd be in the elevator, the elevator would open — there'd be this little, small magic store. You'd be in the magic store. 
And it was just, it was a magical place. 
So I got all these sort of magic tricks. Oh, here. I'll show you. 
This is the kind of thing. So it would be like, you know. Right? 
Which is good, but now I can't move. 
Now, I have to do this, the rest of the thing, like this. 
I'm like, "" Oh, wow. Look at my computer over there! "" (Laughter) Anyway, so one of the things that I bought at the magic store was this: Tannen's Mystery Magic Box. 
The premise behind the mystery magic box was the following: 15 dollars buys you 50 dollars worth of magic. 
Which is a savings. (Laughter) Now, I bought this decades ago and I'm not kidding. 
If you look at this, you'll see it's never been opened. 
But I've had this forever. 
Now, I was looking at this, it was in my office, as it always is, on the shelf, and I was thinking, why have I not opened this? 
And why have I kept it? Because I'm not a pack rat. I don't keep everything but for some reason I haven't opened this box. 
And I felt like there was a key to this, somehow, in talking about something at TED that I haven't discussed before, and bored people elsewhere. 
So I thought, maybe there's something with this. I started thinking about it. 
And there was this giant question mark. I love the design, for what it's worth, of this thing. And I started thinking, why haven't I opened it? 
And I realized that I haven't opened it because it represents something important — to me. It represents my grandfather. 
Am I allowed to cry at TED? Because — no, I'm not going to cry. But — (Laughter) — the thing is, that it represents infinite possibility. 
It represents hope. It represents potential. 
And what I love about this box, and what I realize I sort of do in whatever it is that I do, is I find myself drawn to infinite possibility, that sense of potential. 
And I realize that mystery is the catalyst for imagination. 
Now, it's not the most ground-breaking idea, but when I started to think that maybe there are times when mystery is more important than knowledge, I started getting interested in this. 
And so I started thinking about "" Lost, "" and the stuff that we do, and I realized, oh my God, mystery boxes are everywhere in what I do! 
In how — in the creation of "" Lost, "" Damon Lindelof and I, who created the show with me, we were basically tasked with creating this series that we had very little time to do. We had 11 and a half weeks to write it, cast it, crew it, shoot it, cut it, post it, turn in a two-hour pilot. 
So it was not a lot of time. And that sense of possibility — what could this thing be? 
There was no time to develop it. 
I'm sure you're all familiar with those people who tell you what you can't do and what you should change. 
And there was no time for that, which is kind of amazing. 
And so we did this show, and for those of you who, you know, who haven't seen it, or don't know it, I can show you this one little clip from the pilot, just to show you some stuff that we did. 
Claire: Help! Please help me! Help me! Help me! 
Jack: Get him out of here! Get him away from the engine! Get him out of here! 
C: I'm having contractions! 
J: How many months pregnant are you? 
C: I'm only eight months. 
J: And how far apart are they coming? 
C: I don't know. I think it just happened. 
Man: Hey! Hey! Hey, get away from — JJA: Now, 10 years ago, if we wanted to do that, we'd have to kill a stuntman. 
We'd actually — (Laughter) it would be harder. It would take — Take 2 would be a bitch. 
So the amazing thing was, we were able to do this thing. 
And part of that was the amazing availability of technology, knowing we could do anything. I mean, we could never have done that. 
We might have been able to write it; we wouldn't have been able to depict it like we did. And so part of the amazing thing for me is in the creative process, technology is, like, mind-blowingly inspiring to me. 
I realize that that blank page is a magic box, you know? 
It needs to be filled with something fantastic. 
I used to have the "" Ordinary People "" script that I'd flip through. 
The romance of the script was amazing to me; it would inspire me. 
I wanted to try and fill pages with the same kind of spirit and thought and emotion that that script did. 
You know, I love Apple computers. I'm obsessed. 
So the Apple computer — like those — the PowerBook — this computer, right, it challenges me. It basically says, what are you going to write worthy of me? (Laughter) I guess I feel this — I'm compelled. 
And I often am like, you know, dude, today I'm out. I got nothing. You know? (Laughter) So there's that. In terms of the content of it, you look at stories, you think, well, what are stories but mystery boxes? 
There's a fundamental question — in TV, the first act is called the teaser. 
It's literally the teaser. It's the big question. 
So you're drawn into it. Then of course, there's another question. And it goes on and on. 
Look at "" Star Wars. "" You got the droids; they meet the mysterious woman. 
Who's that? We don't know. Mystery box! You know? 
Then you meet Luke Skywalker. He gets the Droid, you see the holographic image. 
You learn, oh, it's a message, you know. 
She wants to, you know, find Obi Wan Kenobi. He's her only hope. 
But who the hell's Obi Wan Kenobi? Mystery box! 
So then you go and he meets Ben Kenobi. Ben Kenobi is Obi Wan Kenobi. 
Holy shit! You know — so it keeps us — (Laughter) — have you guys not seen that? 
(Laughter) It's huge! Anyway — So there's this thing with mystery boxes that I started feeling compelled. 
Then there's the thing of mystery in terms of imagination — the withholding of information. You know, doing that intentionally is much more engaging. 
Whether it's like the shark in "" Jaws "" — if Spielberg's mechanical shark, Bruce, had worked, it would not be remotely as scary; you would have seen it too much. 
In "" Alien "", they never really showed the alien: terrifying! 
Even in a movie, like a romantic comedy, "" The Graduate, "" they're having that date, remember? 
And they're in the car, and it's loud, and so they put the top up. 
They're in there — you don't hear anything they're saying! You can't hear a word! 
But it's the most romantic date ever. And you love it because you don't hear it. 
So to me, there's that. 
And then, finally, there's this idea — stretching the sort of paradigm a little bit — but the idea of the mystery box. 
Meaning, what you think you're getting, then what you're really getting. 
And it's true in so many movies and stories. 
And when you look at "" E.T., "" for example — "" E.T. "" is this, you know, unbelievable movie about what? It's about an alien who meets a kid, right? 
Well, it's not. "" E.T. "" is about divorce. "" E.T. "" is about a heartbroken, divorce-crippled family, and ultimately, this kid who can't find his way. 
"" Die Hard, "" right? Crazy, great, fun, action-adventure movie in a building. 
It's about a guy who's on the verge of divorce. 
He's showing up to L.A., tail between his legs. 
There are great scenes — maybe not the most amazing dramatic scenes in the history of time, but pretty great scenes. 
There's a half an hour of investment in character before you get to the stuff that you're, you know, expecting. 
When you look at a movie like "" Jaws, "" the scene that you expect — we have the screen? 
These are the kind of, you know, scenes that you remember and expect from "" Jaws. "" And she's being eaten; there's a shark. 
The thing about "" Jaws "" is, it's really about a guy who is sort of dealing with his place in the world — with his masculinity, with his family, how he's going to, you know, make it work in this new town. 
This is one of my favorite scenes ever, and this is a scene that you wouldn't necessarily think of when you think of "" Jaws. "" But it's an amazing scene. 
Father: C'mere. Give us a kiss. 
Son: Why? 
Father: 'Cause I need it. 
JJA: C'mon. "" Why? 'Cause I need it? "" Best scene ever, right? 
Come on! So you think of "" Jaws "" — so that's the kind of stuff that, like, you know, the investment of character, which is the stuff that really is inside the box, you know? 
It's why when people do sequels, or rip off movies, you know, of a genre, they're ripping off the wrong thing. 
You're not supposed to rip off the shark or the monster. 
You gotta rip off — you know, if you rip something off — rip off the character. 
Rip off the stuff that matters. I mean, look inside yourself and figure out what is inside you. 
Because ultimately, you know, the mystery box is all of us. So there's that. 
Then the distribution. What's a bigger mystery box than a movie theater? 
You know? You go to the theater, you're just so excited to see anything. 
The moment the lights go down is often the best part, you know? 
And you're full of that amazing — that feeling of excited anticipation. 
And often, the movie's, like, there and it's going, and then something happens and you go, "" Oh — "" and then something else, and you're, "" Mmm... "" Now, when it's a great movie, you're along for the ride 'cause you're willing to give yourself to it. 
So to me, whether it's that, whether it's a TV, an iPod, computer, cell phone — it's funny, I'm an — as I said, Apple fanatic — and one day, about a year or so ago, I was signing on online in the morning to watch Steve Jobs' keynote, 'cause I always do. And he came on, he was presenting the video iPod, and what was on the enormous iPod behind him? 
"" Lost ""! I had no idea! And I realized, holy shit, it'd come full circle. 
Like, the inspiration I get from the technology is now using the stuff that I do, inspired by it, to sell technology. I mean, it's nuts! (Laughter) I was gonna show you a couple of other things I'm gonna skip through. 
I just want to show you one other thing that has nothing to do with anything. 
This is something online; I don't know if you've seen it before. 
Six years ago they did this. This is an online thing done by guys who had some visual effects experience. But the point was, that they were doing things that were using these mystery boxes that they had — everyone has now. 
What I've realized is what my grandfather did for me when I was a kid, everyone has access to now. 
You don't need to have my grandfather, though you wished you had. 
But I have to tell you — this is a guy doing stuff on a Quadra 950 computer — the resolution's a little bit low — using Infinity software they stopped making 15 years ago. 
He's doing stuff that looks as amazing as stuff I've seen released from Hollywood. 
The most incredible sort of mystery, I think, is now the question of what comes next. 
Because it is now democratized. So now, the creation of media is — it's everywhere. 
The stuff that I was lucky and begging for to get when I was a kid is now ubiquitous. 
And so, there's an amazing sense of opportunity out there. 
And when I think of the filmmakers who exist out there now who would have been silenced, you know — who have been silenced in the past — it's a very exciting thing. 
I used to say in classes and lectures and stuff, to someone who wants to write, "" Go! Write! Do your thing. "" It's free, you know, you don't need permission to go write. But now I can say, "" Go make your movie! "" There's nothing stopping you from going out there and getting the technology. 
You can lease, rent, buy stuff off the shelf that is either as good, or just as good, as the stuff that's being used by the, you know, quote unquote "" legit people. "" No community is best served when only the elite have control. 
And I feel like this is an amazing opportunity to see what else is out there. 
When I did "" Mission: Impossible III, "" we had amazing visual effects stuff. 
ILM did the effects; it was incredible. 
And sort of like my dream to be involved. 
And there are a couple of sequences in the movie, like these couple of moments I'll show you. 
There's that. 
Okay, obviously I have an obsession with big crazy explosions. 
So my favorite visual effect in the movie is the one I'm about to show you. 
And it's a scene in which Tom's character wakes up. He's drowsy. He's crazy — out of it. And the guy wakes up, and he shoves this gun in his nose and shoots this little capsule into his brain that he's going to use later to kill him, as bad guys do. 
Bad Guy: Good morning. 
JJA: OK, now. When we shot that scene, we were there doing it, the actor who had the gun, an English actor, Eddie Marsan — sweetheart, great guy — he kept taking the gun and putting it into Tom's nose, and it was hurting Tom's nose. 
And I learned this very early on in my career: Don't hurt Tom's nose. (Laughter) There are three things you don't want to do. Number two is: Don't hurt Tom's nose. 
So Eddie has this gun — and he's the greatest guy — he's this really sweet English guy. He's like, "" Sorry, I don't want to hurt you. "" I'm like — you gotta — we have to make this look good. 
And I realized that we had to do something 'cause it wasn't working just as it was. 
And I literally, like, thought back to what I would have done using the Super 8 camera that my grandfather got me sitting in that room, and I realized that hand didn't have to be Eddie Marsan's. It could be Tom's. 
And Tom would know just how hard to push the gun. He wouldn't hurt himself. 
So we took his hand and we painted it to look a little bit more like Eddie's. 
We put it in Eddie's sleeve, and so the hand that you see — I'll show you again, that's not Eddie's hand, that's Tom's. 
So Tom is playing two roles. (Laughter) And he didn't ask for any more money. 
So here, here. Watch it again. 
There he is. He's waking up. He's drowsy, been through a lot. 
Tom's hand. Tom's hand. Tom's hand. (Laughter) Anyway. 
So. 
(Applause) Thanks. 
So you don't need the greatest technology to do things that can work in movies. 
And the mystery box, in honor of my grandfather, stays closed. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

There's a medical revolution happening all around us, and it's one that's going to help us conquer some of society's most dreaded conditions, including cancer. 
And what that means is that as adults, blood vessels don't normally grow. 
In women, blood vessels grow every month, to build the lining of the uterus. 
And this is actually what it looks like, hundreds of blood vessels, all growing toward the center of the wound. 
It does this through an elaborate and elegant system of checks and balances, stimulators and inhibitors of angiogenesis, such that, when we need a brief burst of blood vessels, the body can do this by releasing stimulators, proteins called angiogenic factors, that act as natural fertilizer, and stimulate new blood vessels to sprout. 
There are other situations where we start beneath the baseline, and we need to grow more blood vessels, just to get back to normal levels — for example, after an injury — and the body can do that too, but only to that normal level, that set point. 
But what we now know, is that for a number of diseases, there are defects in the system, where the body can't prune back extra blood vessels, or can't grow enough new ones in the right place at the right time. 
For example, insufficient angiogenesis — not enough blood vessels — leads to wounds that don't heal, heart attacks, legs without circulation, death from stroke, nerve damage. 
Yet, without a blood supply, most of these cancers will never become dangerous. 
Dr. Judah Folkman, who was my mentor and who was the pioneer of the angiogenesis field, once called this "" cancer without disease. "" So the body's ability to balance angiogenesis, when it's working properly, prevents blood vessels from feeding cancers. 
And this turns out to be one of our most important defense mechanisms against cancer. 
Cancer cells mutate, and they gain the ability to release lots of those angiogenic factors, natural fertilizer, that tip the balance in favor of blood vessels invading the cancer. 
And once those vessels invade the cancer, it can expand, it can invade local tissues, and the same vessels that are feeding tumors allow cancer cells to exit into the circulation as metastases. 
So, if angiogenesis is a tipping point between a harmless cancer and a harmful one, then one major part of the angiogenesis revolution is a new approach to treating cancer by cutting off the blood supply. 
In effect, when we give cancer patients antiangiogenic therapy — here, an experimental drug for a glioma, which is a type of brain tumor — you can see that there are dramatic changes that occur when the tumor is being starved. 
Well, I've just shown you two very different types of cancer that both responded to antiangiogenic therapy. 
So a few years ago, I asked myself, "" Can we take this one step further and treat other cancers, even in other species? "" So here is a nine year-old boxer named Milo, who had a very aggressive tumor called a malignant neurofibroma growing on his shoulder. 
So we created a cocktail of antiangiogenic drugs that could be mixed into his dog food, as well as an antiangiogenic cream, that could be applied on the surface of the tumor. 
We have about a 60 percent response rate, and improved survival for these pets that were about to be euthanized. 
(Applause) Now obviously, antiangiogenic therapy could be used for a wide range of cancers. 
But the real question is: How well do these work in practice? 
So I started asking myself, "Why haven't we been able to do better?" 
So to look for a way to prevent angiogenesis in cancer, I went back to look at cancer's causes. 
And what really intrigued me, was when I saw that diet accounts for 30 to 35 percent of environmentally-caused cancers. 
And our search for this has taken us to the market, the farm and to the spice cabinet, because what we've discovered is that Mother Nature has laced a large number of foods and beverages and herbs with naturally-occurring inhibitors of angiogenesis. 
The active ingredient is resveratrol, it's also found in red wine. 
This inhibits abnormal angiogenesis, by 60 percent. 
And we want to measure this because, well, while you're eating a strawberry or drinking tea, why not select the one that's most potent for preventing cancer? 
So here are four different teas that we've tested. 
They're all common ones: Chinese jasmine, Japanese sencha, Earl Grey and a special blend that we prepared, and you can see clearly that the teas vary in their potency, from less potent to more potent. 
And here are some common drugs that have been associated with reducing the risk of cancer in people. 
Statins, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and a few others — they inhibit angiogenesis, too. 
And here are the dietary factors going head-to-head against these drugs. 
You can see they clearly hold their own, and in some cases, they're more potent than the actual drugs. 
Well, the best example I know is a study of 79,000 men followed over 20 years, in which it was found that men who consumed cooked tomatoes two to three times a week, had up to a 50 percent reduction in their risk of developing prostate cancer. 
So this human study is a prime example of how antiangiogenic substances present in food and consumed at practical levels, can have an impact on cancer. 
And we're now studying the role of a healthy diet — with Dean Ornish at UCSF and Tufts University — the role of this healthy diet on markers of angiogenesis that we can find in the bloodstream. 
Because if we're right, it could impact consumer education, food services, public health and even the insurance industry. 
Now, finally, I've talked to you about food, and I've talked to you about cancer, so there's just one more disease that I have to tell you about, and that's obesity. 
Because it turns out that adipose tissue — fat — is highly angiogenesis-dependent. 
The truly interesting thing about this is that we can't take these obese mice and make them lose more weight than what the normal mouse's weight is supposed to be. 
Albert Szent-Györgi once said, "" Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen, and thinking what no one has thought. "" I hope I've convinced you that for diseases like cancer, obesity and other conditions, there may be a great power in attacking their common denominator: angiogenesis. 
Do you recommend pursuing these treatments now, for most cancer patients? 
The Angiogenesis Foundation is following almost 300 companies, and there are about 100 more drugs in that pipeline. 
So, consider the approved ones, look for clinical trials, but then between what the doctor can do for you, we need to start asking what can we do for ourselves. 
And if Mother Nature has given us some clues, we think there might be a new future in the value of how we eat, and what we eat is really our chemotherapy three times a day. 
JC: Right. And along those lines, for people who might have risk factors for cancer, would you recommend pursuing any treatments prophylactically, or simply pursuing the right diet, with lots of tomato sauce? 

So if you've been following the news, you've heard that there's a pack of giant asteroids headed for the United States, all scheduled to strike within the next 50 years. 
Now I don't mean actual asteroids made of rock and metal. 
That actually wouldn't be such a problem, because if we were really all going to die, we would put aside our differences, we'd spend whatever it took, and we'd find a way to deflect them. 
I'm talking instead about threats that are headed our way, but they're wrapped in a special energy field that polarizes us, and therefore paralyzes us. 
Last March, I went to the TED conference, and I saw Jim Hansen speak, the NASA scientist who first raised the alarm about global warming in the 1980s, and it seems that the predictions he made back then are coming true. 
This is where we're headed in terms of global temperature rises, and if we keep on going the way we're going, we get a four- or five-degree-Centigrade temperature rise by the end of this century. 
Hansen says we can expect about a five-meter rise in sea levels. 
This is what a five-meter rise in sea levels would look like. 
Low-lying cities all around the world will disappear within the lifetime of children born today. 
Hansen closed his talk by saying, "" Imagine a giant asteroid on a collision course with Earth. 
That is the equivalent of what we face now. 
Yet we dither, taking no action to deflect the asteroid, even though the longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive it becomes. "" Of course, the left wants to take action, but the right denies that there's any problem. 
All right, so I go back from TED, and then the following week, I'm invited to a dinner party in Washington, D.C., where I know that I'll be meeting a number of conservative intellectuals, including Yuval Levin, and to prepare for the meeting, I read this article by Levin in National Affairs called "" Beyond the Welfare State. "" Levin writes that all over the world, nations are coming to terms with the fact that the social democratic welfare state is turning out to be untenable and unaffordable, dependent upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era. 
All right, now this might not sound as scary as an asteroid, but look at these graphs that Levin showed. 
This graph shows the national debt as a percentage of America's GDP, and as you see, if you go all the way back to the founding, we borrowed a lot of money to fight the Revolutionary War. 
Wars are expensive. But then we'd pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, and then, oh, what's this? The Civil War. Even more expensive. 
Borrow a lot of money, pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, get down to near zero, and bang! — World War I. 
Once again, the same process repeats. 
Now then we get the Great Depression and World War II. 
We rise to an astronomical level, around 118 percent of GDP, really unsustainable, really dangerous. 
But we pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, and then, what's this? 
Why has it been rising since the '70s? 
It's partly due to tax cuts that were unfunded, but it's due primarily to the rise of entitlement spending, especially Medicare. 
We're approaching the levels of indebtedness we had at World War II, and the baby boomers haven't even retired yet, and when they do, this is what will happen. 
This is data from the Congressional Budget Office showing its most realistic forecast of what would happen if current situations and expectations and trends are extended. 
All right, now what you might notice is that these two graphs are actually identical, not in terms of the x- and y-axes, or in terms of the data they present, but in terms of their moral and political implications, they say the same thing. 
Let me translate for you. 
"" We are doomed unless we start acting now. 
What's wrong with you people on the other side in the other party? 
Can't you see reality? If you won't help, then get the hell out of the way. "" We can deflect both of these asteroids. 
These problems are both technically solvable. 
Our problem and our tragedy is that in these hyper-partisan times, the mere fact that one side says, "" Look, there's an asteroid, "" means that the other side's going to say, "" Huh? What? 
No, I'm not even going to look up. No. "" To understand why this is happening to us, and what we can do about it, we need to learn more about moral psychology. 
So I'm a social psychologist, and I study morality, and one of the most important principles of morality is that morality binds and blinds. 
It binds us into teams that circle around sacred values but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality. 
Think of it like this. 
Large-scale cooperation is extremely rare on this planet. 
There are only a few species that can do it. 
That's a beehive. That's a termite mound, a giant termite mound. 
And when you find this in other animals, it's always the same story. 
They're always all siblings who are children of a single queen, so they're all in the same boat. 
They rise or fall, they live or die, as one. 
There's only one species on the planet that can do this without kinship, and that, of course, is us. 
This is a reconstruction of ancient Babylon, and this is Tenochtitlan. 
Now how did we do this? How did we go from being hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago to building these gigantic cities in just a few thousand years? 
It's miraculous, and part of the explanation is this ability to circle around sacred values. 
As you see, temples and gods play a big role in all ancient civilizations. 
This is an image of Muslims circling the Kaaba in Mecca. 
It's a sacred rock, and when people circle something together, they unite, they can trust each other, they become one. 
It's as though you're moving an electrical wire through a magnetic field that generates current. 
When people circle together, they generate a current. 
We love to circle around things. 
We circle around flags, and then we can trust each other. 
We can fight as a team, as a unit. 
But even as morality binds people together into a unit, into a team, the circling blinds them. 
It causes them to distort reality. 
We begin separating everything into good versus evil. 
Now that process feels great. It feels really satisfying. 
But it is a gross distortion of reality. 
You can see the moral electromagnet operating in the U.S. Congress. 
This is a graph that shows the degree to which voting in Congress falls strictly along the left-right axis, so that if you know how liberal or conservative someone is, you know exactly how they voted on all the major issues. 
And what you can see is that, in the decades after the Civil War, Congress was extraordinarily polarized, as you would expect, about as high as can be. 
But then, after World War I, things dropped, and we get this historically low level of polarization. 
This was a golden age of bipartisanship, at least in terms of the parties' ability to work together and solve grand national problems. 
But in the 1980s and '90s, the electromagnet turns back on. 
Polarization rises. 
It used to be that conservatives and moderates and liberals could all work together in Congress. 
They could rearrange themselves, form bipartisan committees, but as the moral electromagnet got cranked up, the force field increased, Democrats and Republicans were pulled apart. 
It became much harder for them to socialize, much harder for them to cooperate. 
Retiring members nowadays say that it's become like gang warfare. 
Did anybody notice that in two of the three debates, Obama wore a blue tie and Romney wore a red tie? 
Do you know why they do this? 
It's so that the Bloods and the Crips will know which side to vote for. (Laughter) The polarization is strongest among our political elites. 
Nobody doubts that this is happening in Washington. 
But for a while, there was some doubt as to whether it was happening among the people. 
Well, in the last 12 years it's become much more apparent that it is. 
So look at this data. This is from the American National Elections Survey. 
And what they do on that survey is they ask what's called a feeling thermometer rating. 
So, how warm or cold do you feel about, you know, Native Americans, or the military, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, all sorts of groups in American life. 
The blue line shows how warmly Democrats feel about Democrats, and they like them. 
You know, ratings in the 70s on a 100-point scale. 
Republicans like Republicans. That's not a surprise. 
But when you look at cross-party ratings, you find, well, that it's lower, but actually, when I first saw this data, I was surprised. 
That's actually not so bad. If you go back to the Carter and even Reagan administrations, they were rating the other party 43, 45. It's not terrible. 
It drifts downwards very slightly, but now look what happens under George W. Bush and Obama. 
It plummets. Something is going on here. 
The moral electromagnet is turning back on, and nowadays, just very recently, Democrats really dislike Republicans. 
Republicans really dislike the Democrats. We're changing. 
It's as though the moral electromagnet is affecting us too. 
It's like put out in the two oceans and it's pulling the whole country apart, pulling left and right into their own territories like the Bloods and the Crips. 
Now, there are many reasons why this is happening to us, and many of them we cannot reverse. 
We will never again have a political class that was forged by the experience of fighting together in World War II against a common enemy. 
We will never again have just three television networks, all of which are relatively centrist. 
And we will never again have a large group of conservative southern Democrats and liberal northern Republicans making it easy, making there be a lot of overlap for bipartisan cooperation. 
So for a lot of reasons, those decades after the Second World War were an historically anomalous time. 
We will never get back to those low levels of polarization, I believe. 
But there's a lot that we can do. There are dozens and dozens of reforms we can do that will make things better, because a lot of our dysfunction can be traced directly to things that Congress did to itself in the 1990s that created a much more polarized and dysfunctional institution. 
These changes are detailed in many books. 
These are two that I strongly recommend, and they list a whole bunch of reforms. 
I'm just going to group them into three broad classes here. 
So if you think about this as the problem of a dysfunctional, hyper-polarized institution, well, the first step is, do what you can so that fewer hyper-partisans get elected in the first place, and when you have closed party primaries, and only the most committed Republicans and Democrats are voting, you're nominating and selecting the most extreme hyper-partisans. 
So open primaries would make that problem much, much less severe. 
But the problem isn't primarily that we're electing bad people to Congress. 
From my experience, and from what I've heard from Congressional insiders, most of the people going to Congress are good, hard-working, intelligent people who really want to solve problems, but once they get there, they find that they are forced to play a game that rewards hyper-partisanship and that punishes independent thinking. 
You step out of line, you get punished. 
So there are a lot of reforms we could do that will counteract this. 
For example, this "" Citizens United "" ruling is a disaster, because it means there's like a money gun aimed at your head, and if you step out of line, if you try to reach across the aisle, there's a ton of money waiting to be given to your opponent to make everybody think that you are a terrible person through negative advertising. 
But the third class of reforms is that we've got to change the nature of social relationships in Congress. 
The politicians I've met are generally very extroverted, friendly, very socially skillful people, and that's the nature of politics. You've got to make relationships, make deals, you've got to cajole, please, flatter, you've got to use your personal skills, and that's the way politics has always worked. 
But beginning in the 1990s, first the House of Representatives changed its legislative calendar so that all business is basically done in the middle of the week. 
Nowadays, Congressmen fly in on Tuesday morning, they do battle for two days, then they fly home Thursday afternoon. 
They don't move their families to the District. 
They don't meet each other's spouses or children. 
There's no more relationship there. 
And trying to run Congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil. 
Should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up and descends into paralysis and polarization? 
A simple change to the legislative calendar, such as having business stretch out for three weeks and then they get a week off to go home, that would change the fundamental relationships in Congress. 
So there's a lot we can do, but who's going to push them to do it? 
There are a number of groups that are working on this. 
No Labels and Common Cause, I think, have very good ideas for changes we need to do to make our democracy more responsive and our Congress more effective. 
But I'd like to supplement their work with a little psychological trick, and the trick is this. 
Nothing pulls people together like a common threat or a common attack, especially an attack from a foreign enemy, unless of course that threat hits on our polarized psychology, in which case, as I said before, it can actually pull us apart. 
Sometimes a single threat can polarize us, as we saw. 
But what if the situation we face is not a single threat but is actually more like this, where there's just so much stuff coming in, it's just, "" Start shooting, come on, everybody, we've got to just work together, just start shooting. "" Because actually, we do face this situation. 
This is where we are as a country. 
So here's another asteroid. 
We've all seen versions of this graph, right, which shows the changes in wealth since 1979, and as you can see, almost all the gains in wealth have gone to the top 20 percent, and especially the top one percent. 
Rising inequality like this is associated with so many problems for a democracy. 
Especially, it destroys our ability to trust each other, to feel that we're all in the same boat, because it's obvious we're not. 
Some of us are sitting there safe and sound in gigantic private yachts. 
Other people are clinging to a piece of driftwood. 
We're not all in the same boat, and that means nobody's willing to sacrifice for the common good. 
The left has been screaming about this asteroid for 30 years now, and the right says, "" Huh, what? Hmm? No problem. No problem. "" Now, why is that happening to us? Why is the inequality rising? 
Well, one of the largest causes, after globalization, is actually this fourth asteroid, rising non-marital births. 
This graph shows the steady rise of out-of-wedlock births since the 1960s. 
Most Hispanic and black children are now born to unmarried mothers. 
Whites are headed that way too. 
Within a decade or two, most American children will be born into homes with no father. 
This means that there's much less money coming into the house. 
But it's not just money. It's also stability versus chaos. 
As I know from working with street children in Brazil, Mom's boyfriend is often a really, really dangerous person for kids. 
Now the right has been screaming about this asteroid since the 1960s, and the left has been saying, "" It's not a problem. It's not a problem. "" The left has been very reluctant to say that marriage is actually good for women and for children. 
Now let me be clear. I'm not blaming the women here. 
I'm actually more critical of the men who won't take responsibility for their own children and of an economic system that makes it difficult for many men to earn enough money to support those children. 
But even if you blame nobody, it still is a national problem, and one side has been more concerned about it than the other. 
The New York Times finally noticed this asteroid with a front-page story last July showing how the decline of marriage contributes to inequality. 
We are becoming a nation of just two classes. 
When Americans go to college and marry each other, they have very low divorce rates. 
They earn a lot of money, they invest that money in their kids, some of them become tiger mothers, the kids rise to their full potential, and the kids go on to become the top two lines in this graph. 
And then there's everybody else: the children who don't benefit from a stable marriage, who don't have as much invested in them, who don't grow up in a stable environment, and who go on to become the bottom three lines in that graph. 
So once again, we see that these two graphs are actually saying the same thing. 
As before, we've got a problem, we've got to start working on this, we've got to do something, and what's wrong with you people that you don't see my threat? 
But if everybody could just take off their partisan blinders, we'd see that these two problems actually are best addressed together. 
Because if you really care about income inequality, you might want to talk to some evangelical Christian groups that are working on ways to promote marriage. 
But then you're going to run smack into the problem that women don't generally want to marry someone who doesn't have a job. 
So if you really care about strengthening families, you might want to talk to some liberal groups who are working on promoting educational equality, who are working on raising the minimum wage, who are working on finding ways to stop so many men from being sucked into the criminal justice system and taken out of the marriage market for their whole lives. 
So to conclude, there are at least four asteroids headed our way. 
How many of you can see all four? 
Please raise your hand right now if you're willing to admit that all four of these are national problems. 
Please raise your hands. 
Okay, almost all of you. 
Well, congratulations, you guys are the inaugural members of the Asteroids Club, which is a club for all Americans who are willing to admit that the other side actually might have a point. 
In the Asteroids Club, we don't start by looking for common ground. 
Common ground is often very hard to find. 
No, we start by looking for common threats because common threats make common ground. 
Now, am I being naive? Is it naive to think that people could ever lay down their swords, and left and right could actually work together? 
I don't think so, because it happens, not all that often, but there are a variety of examples that point the way. 
This is something we can do. 
Because Americans on both sides care about the decline in civility, and they've formed dozens of organizations, at the national level, such as this one, down to many local organizations, such as To The Village Square in Tallahassee, Florida, which tries to bring state leaders together to help facilitate that sort of working together human relationship that's necessary to solve Florida's problems. 
Americans on both sides care about global poverty and AIDS, and on so many humanitarian issues, liberals and evangelicals are actually natural allies, and at times they really have worked together to solve these problems. 
And most surprisingly to me, they sometimes can even see eye to eye on criminal justice. 
For example, the incarceration rate, the prison population in this country has quadrupled since 1980. 
Now this is a social disaster, and liberals are very concerned about this. 
The Southern Poverty Law Center is often fighting the prison-industrial complex, fighting to prevent a system that's just sucking in more and more poor young men. 
But are conservatives happy about this? 
Well, Grover Norquist isn't, because this system costs an unbelievable amount of money. 
And so, because the prison-industrial complex is bankrupting our states and corroding our souls, groups of fiscal conservatives and Christian conservatives have come together to form a group called Right on Crime. 
And at times they have worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center to oppose the building of new prisons and to work for reforms that will make the justice system more efficient and more humane. 
So this is possible. We can do it. 
Let us therefore go to battle stations, not to fight each other, but to begin deflecting these incoming asteroids. 
And let our first mission be to press Congress to reform itself, before it's too late for our nation. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

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

Mobility in developing world cities is a very peculiar challenge, because different from health or education or housing, it tends to get worse as societies become richer. 
Clearly, a unsustainable model. 
Mobility, as most other developing country problems, more than a matter of money or technology, is a matter of equality, equity. 
The great inequality in developing countries makes it difficult to see, for example, that in terms of transport, an advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport. 
Or bicycles: For example, in Amsterdam, more than 30 percent of the population uses bicycles, despite the fact that the Netherlands has a higher income per capita than the United States. 
There is a conflict in developing world cities for money, for government investment. 
If more money is invested in highways, of course there is less money for housing, for schools, for hospitals, and also there is a conflict for space. 
There is a conflict for space between those with cars and those without them. 
Most of us accept today that private property and a market economy is the best way to manage most of society's resources. 
However, there is a problem with that, that market economy needs inequality of income in order to work. 
Some people must make more money, some others less. 
Some companies succeed. Others fail. 
Then what kind of equality can we hope for today with a market economy? 
I would propose two kinds which both have much to do with cities. 
The first one is equality of quality of life, especially for children, that all children should have, beyond the obvious health and education, access to green spaces, to sports facilities, to swimming pools, to music lessons. 
And the second kind of equality is one which we could call "" democratic equality. "" The first article in every constitution states that all citizens are equal before the law. 
That is not just poetry. 
It's a very powerful principle. 
For example, if that is true, a bus with 80 passengers has a right to 80 times more road space than a car with one. 
We have been so used to inequality, sometimes, that it's before our noses and we do not see it. 
Less than 100 years ago, women could not vote, and it seemed normal, in the same way that it seems normal today to see a bus in traffic. 
In fact, when I became mayor, applying that democratic principle that public good prevails over private interest, that a bus with 100 people has a right to 100 times more road space than a car, we implemented a mass transit system based on buses in exclusive lanes. 
We called it TransMilenio, in order to make buses sexier. 
And one thing is that it is also a very beautiful democratic symbol, because as buses zoom by, expensive cars stuck in traffic, it clearly is almost a picture of democracy at work. 
In fact, it's not just a matter of equity. 
It doesn't take Ph.D. 's. 
A committee of 12-year-old children would find out in 20 minutes that the most efficient way to use scarce road space is with exclusive lanes for buses. 
In fact, buses are not sexy, but they are the only possible means to bring mass transit to all areas of fast growing developing cities. 
They also have great capacity. 
For example, this system in Guangzhou is moving more passengers our direction than all subway lines in China, except for one line in Beijing, at a fraction of the cost. 
We fought not just for space for buses, but we fought for space for people, and that was even more difficult. 
Cities are human habitats, and we humans are pedestrians. 
Just as fish need to swim or birds need to fly or deer need to run, we need to walk. 
There is a really enormous conflict, when we are talking about developing country cities, between pedestrians and cars. 
Here, what you see is a picture that shows insufficient democracy. 
What this shows is that people who walk are third-class citizens while those who go in cars are first-class citizens. 
In terms of transport infrastructure, what really makes a difference between advanced and backward cities is not highways or subways but quality sidewalks. 
Here they made a flyover, probably very useless, and they forgot to make a sidewalk. 
This is prevailing all over the world. 
Not even schoolchildren are more important than cars. 
In my city of Bogotá, we fought a very difficult battle in order to take space from cars, which had been parking on sidewalks for decades, in order to make space for people that should reflect dignity of human beings, and to make space for protected bikeways. 
First of all, I had black hair before that. 
(Laughter) And I was almost impeached in the process. 
It is a very difficult battle. 
However, it was possible, finally, after very difficult battles, to make a city that would reflect some respect for human dignity, that would show that those who walk are equally important to those who have cars. 
Indeed, a very important ideological and political issue anywhere is how to distribute that most valuable resource of a city, which is road space. 
A city could find oil or diamonds underground and it would not be so valuable as road space. 
How to distribute it between pedestrians, bicycles, public transport and cars? 
This is not a technological issue, and we should remember that in no constitution parking is a constitutional right when we make that distribution. 
We also built, and this was 15 years ago, before there were bikeways in New York or in Paris or in London, it was a very difficult battle as well, more than 350 kilometers of protected bicycle ways. 
I don't think protected bicycle ways are a cute architectural feature. 
They are a right, just as sidewalks are, unless we believe that only those with access to a motor vehicle have a right to safe mobility, without the risk of getting killed. 
And just as busways are, protected bikeways also are a powerful symbol of democracy, because they show that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally important to one in a $30,000 car. 
And we are living in a unique moment in history. 
In the next 50 years, more than half of those cities which will exist in the year 2060 will be built. 
In many developing country cities, more than 80 and 90 percent of the city which will exist in 2060 will be built over the next four or five decades. 
But this is not just a matter for developing country cities. 
In the United States, for example, more than 70 million new homes must be built over the next 40 or 50 years. 
That's more than all the homes that today exist in Britain, France and Canada put together. 
And I believe that our cities today have severe flaws, and that different, better ones could be built. 
What is wrong with our cities today? 
Well, for example, if we tell any three-year-old child who is barely learning to speak in any city in the world today, "Watch out, a car," the child will jump in fright, and with a very good reason, because there are more than 10,000 children who are killed by cars every year in the world. 
We have had cities for 8,000 years, and children could walk out of home and play. 
In fact, only very recently, towards 1900, there were no cars. 
Cars have been here for really less than 100 years. 
They completely changed cities. 
In 1900, for example, nobody was killed by cars in the United States. 
Only 20 years later, between 1920 and 1930, almost 200,000 people were killed by cars in the United States. 
Only in 1925, almost 7,000 children were killed by cars in the United States. 
So we could make different cities, cities that will give more priority to human beings than to cars, that will give more public space to human beings than to cars, cities which show great respect for those most vulnerable citizens, such as children or the elderly. 
I will propose to you a couple of ingredients which I think would make cities much better, and it would be very simple to implement them in the new cities which are only being created. 
Hundreds of kilometers of greenways criss-crossing cities in all directions. 
Children will walk out of homes into safe spaces. 
They could go for dozens of kilometers safely without any risk in wonderful greenways, sort of bicycle highways, and I would invite you to imagine the following: a city in which every other street would be a street only for pedestrians and bicycles. 
In new cities which are going to be built, this would not be particularly difficult. 
When I was mayor of Bogotá, in only three years, we were able to create 70 kilometers, in one of the most dense cities in the world, of these bicycle highways. 
And this changes the way people live, move, enjoy the city. 
In this picture, you see in one of the very poor neighborhoods, we have a luxury pedestrian bicycle street, and the cars still in the mud. 
Of course, I would love to pave this street for cars. 
But what do we do first? 
Ninety-nine percent of the people in those neighborhoods don't have cars. 
But you see, when a city is only being created, it's very easy to incorporate this kind of infrastructure. 
Then the city grows around it. 
And of course this is just a glimpse of something which could be much better if we just create it, and it changes the way of life. 
And the second ingredient, which would solve mobility, that very difficult challenge in developing countries, in a very low-cost and simple way, would be to have hundreds of kilometers of streets only for buses, buses and bicycles and pedestrians. 
This would be, again, a very low-cost solution if implemented from the start, low cost, pleasant transit with natural sunlight. 
But unfortunately, reality is not as good as my dreams. 
Because of private property of land and high land prices, all developing country cities have a large problem of slums. 
In my country of Colombia, almost half the homes in cities initially were illegal developments. 
And of course it's very difficult to have mass transit or to use bicycles in such environments. 
But even legal developments have also been located in the wrong places, very far from the city centers where it's impossible to provide low-cost, high-frequency public transport. 
As a Latin American, and Latin America was the most recently organized region in the world, I would recommend, respectfully, passionately, to those countries which are yet to urbanize — Latin America went from 40 percent urban in 1950 to 80 percent urban in 2010 — I would recommend Asian and African countries which are yet to urbanize, such as India which is only 33 percent urban now, that governments should acquire all land around cities. 
In this way, their cities could grow in the right places with the right spaces, with the parks, with the greenways, with the busways. 
The cities we are going to build over the next 50 years will determine quality of life and even happiness for billions of people towards the future. 
What a fantastic opportunity for leaders and many young leaders to come, especially in the developing countries. 
They can create a much happier life for billions towards the future. 
I am sure, I am optimistic, that they will make cities better than our most ambitious dreams. 
(Applause) 

So, well, I do applied math, and this is a peculiar problem for anyone who does applied math, is that we are like management consultants. 
No one knows what the hell we do. 
So I am going to give you some — attempt today to try and explain to you what I do. 
So, dancing is one of the most human of activities. 
We delight at ballet virtuosos and tap dancers you will see later on. 
Now, ballet requires an extraordinary level of expertise and a high level of skill, and probably a level of initial suitability that may well have a genetic component to it. 
Now, sadly, neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease gradually destroy this extraordinary ability, as it is doing to my friend Jan Stripling, who was a virtuoso ballet dancer in his time. 
So great progress and treatment has been made over the years. 
However, there are 6.3 million people worldwide who have the disease, and they have to live with incurable weakness, tremor, rigidity and the other symptoms that go along with the disease, so what we need are objective tools to detect the disease before it's too late. 
We need to be able to measure progression objectively, and ultimately, the only way we're going to know when we actually have a cure is when we have an objective measure that can answer that for sure. 
But frustratingly, with Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders, there are no biomarkers, so there's no simple blood test that you can do, and the best that we have is like this 20-minute neurologist test. 
You have to go to the clinic to do it. It's very, very costly, and that means that, outside the clinical trials, it's just never done. It's never done. 
But what if patients could do this test at home? 
Now, that would actually save on a difficult trip to the clinic, and what if patients could do that test themselves, right? 
No expensive staff time required. 
Takes about $300, by the way, in the neurologist's clinic to do it. 
So what I want to propose to you as an unconventional way in which we can try to achieve this, because, you see, in one sense, at least, we are all virtuosos like my friend Jan Stripling. 
So here we have a video of the vibrating vocal folds. 
Now, this is healthy and this is somebody making speech sounds, and we can think of ourselves as vocal ballet dancers, because we have to coordinate all of these vocal organs when we make sounds, and we all actually have the genes for it. FoxP2, for example. 
And like ballet, it takes an extraordinary level of training. 
I mean, just think how long it takes a child to learn to speak. 
From the sound, we can actually track the vocal fold position as it vibrates, and just as the limbs are affected in Parkinson's, so too are the vocal organs. 
So on the bottom trace, you can see an example of irregular vocal fold tremor. 
We see all the same symptoms. 
We see vocal tremor, weakness and rigidity. 
The speech actually becomes quieter and more breathy after a while, and that's one of the example symptoms of it. 
So these vocal effects can actually be quite subtle, in some cases, but with any digital microphone, and using precision voice analysis software in combination with the latest in machine learning, which is very advanced by now, we can now quantify exactly where somebody lies on a continuum between health and disease using voice signals alone. 
So these voice-based tests, how do they stack up against expert clinical tests? We'll, they're both non-invasive. 
The neurologist's test is non-invasive. They both use existing infrastructure. 
You don't have to design a whole new set of hospitals to do it. 
And they're both accurate. Okay, but in addition, voice-based tests are non-expert. 
That means they can be self-administered. 
They're high-speed, take about 30 seconds at most. 
They're ultra-low cost, and we all know what happens. 
When something becomes ultra-low cost, it becomes massively scalable. 
So here are some amazing goals that I think we can deal with now. 
We can reduce logistical difficulties with patients. 
No need to go to the clinic for a routine checkup. 
We can do high-frequency monitoring to get objective data. 
We can perform low-cost mass recruitment for clinical trials, and we can make population-scale screening feasible for the first time. 
We have the opportunity to start to search for the early biomarkers of the disease before it's too late. 
So, taking the first steps towards this today, we're launching the Parkinson's Voice Initiative. 
With Aculab and PatientsLikeMe, we're aiming to record a very large number of voices worldwide to collect enough data to start to tackle these four goals. 
We have local numbers accessible to three quarters of a billion people on the planet. 
Anyone healthy or with Parkinson's can call in, cheaply, and leave recordings, a few cents each, and I'm really happy to announce that we've already hit six percent of our target just in eight hours. 
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Tom Rielly: So Max, by taking all these samples of, let's say, 10,000 people, you'll be able to tell who's healthy and who's not? 
What are you going to get out of those samples? 
Max Little: Yeah. Yeah. So what will happen is that, during the call you have to indicate whether or not you have the disease or not, you see. TR: Right. 
ML: You see, some people may not do it. They may not get through it. 
But we'll get a very large sample of data that is collected from all different circumstances, and it's getting it in different circumstances that matter because then we are looking at ironing out the confounding factors, and looking for the actual markers of the disease. 
TR: So you're 86 percent accurate right now? 
ML: It's much better than that. 
Actually, my student Thanasis, I have to plug him, because he's done some fantastic work, and now he has proved that it works over the mobile telephone network as well, which enables this project, and we're getting 99 percent accuracy. 
TR: Ninety-nine. Well, that's an improvement. 
So what that means is that people will be able to — ML: (Laughs) TR: People will be able to call in from their mobile phones and do this test, and people with Parkinson's could call in, record their voice, and then their doctor can check up on their progress, see where they're doing in this course of the disease. 
ML: Absolutely. 
TR: Thanks so much. Max Little, everybody. 
ML: Thanks, Tom. (Applause) 

The public debate about architecture quite often just stays on contemplating the final result, the architectural object. 
Is the latest tower in London a gherkin or a sausage or a sex tool? 
So recently, we asked ourselves if we could invent a format that could actually tell the stories behind the projects, maybe combining images and drawings and words to actually sort of tell stories about architecture. 
And we discovered that we didn't have to invent it, it already existed in the form of a comic book. 
So we basically copied the format of the comic book to actually tell the stories of behind the scenes, how our projects actually evolve through adaptation and improvisation. 
Sort of through the turmoil and the opportunities and the incidents of the real world. 
We call this comic book "" Yes is More, "" which is obviously a sort of evolution of the ideas of some of our heroes. 
In this case it's Mies van der Rohe's Less is More. 
He triggered the modernist revolution. 
After him followed the post-modern counter-revolution, Robert Venturi saying, "" Less is a bore. "" After him, Philip Johnson sort of introduced (Laughter) you could say promiscuity, or at least openness to new ideas with, "" I am a whore. "" Recently, Obama has introduced optimism at a sort of time of global financial crisis. 
And what we'd like to say with "" Yes is More "" is basically trying to question this idea that the architectural avant-garde is almost always negatively defined, as who or what we are against. 
The cliche of the radical architect is the sort of angry young man rebelling against the establishment. 
Or this idea of the misunderstood genius, frustrated that the world doesn't fit in with his or her ideas. 
Rather than revolution, we're much more interested in evolution, this idea that things gradually evolve by adapting and improvising to the changes of the world. 
In fact, I actually think that Darwin is one of the people who best explains our design process. 
His famous evolutionary tree could almost be a diagram of the way we work. 
As you can see, a project evolves through a series of generations of design meetings. 
At each meeting, there's way too many ideas. 
Only the best ones can survive. 
And through a process of architectural selection, we might choose a really beautiful model or we might have a very functional model. 
We mate them. They have sort of mutant offspring. 
And through these sort of generations of design meetings we arrive at a design. 
A very literal way of showing it is a project we did for a library and a hotel in Copenhagen. 
The design process was really tough, almost like a struggle for survival, but gradually an idea evolved: this sort of idea of a rational tower that melts together with the surrounding city, sort of expanding the public space onto what we refer to as a Scandinavian version of the Spanish Steps in Rome, but sort of public on the outside, as well as on the inside, with the library. 
But Darwin doesn't only explain the evolution of a single idea. 
As you can see, sometimes a subspecies branches off. 
And quite often we sit in a design meeting and we discover that there is this great idea. 
It doesn't really work in this context. 
But for another client in another culture, it could really be the right answer to a different question. 
So as a result, we never throw anything out. 
We keep our office almost like an archive of architectural biodiversity. 
You never know when you might need it. 
And what I'd like to do now, in an act of warp-speed storytelling, is tell the story of how two projects evolved by adapting and improvising to the happenstance of the world. 
The first story starts last year when we went to Shanghai to do the competition for the Danish National Pavilion for the World Expo in 2010. 
And we saw this guy, Haibao. 
He's the mascot of the expo, and he looks strangely familiar. 
In fact he looked like a building we had designed for a hotel in the north of Sweden. 
When we submitted it for the Swedish competition we thought it was a really cool scheme, but it didn't exactly look like something from the north of Sweden. 
The Swedish jury didn't think so either. So we lost. 
But then we had a meeting with a Chinese businessman who saw our design and said, "Wow, that's the Chinese character for the word 'people.'" (Laughter) So, apparently this is how you write "" people, "" as in the People's Republic of China. 
We even double checked. 
And at the same time, we got invited to exhibit at the Shanghai Creative Industry Week. 
So we thought like, this is too much of an opportunity, so we hired a feng shui master. 
We scaled the building up three times to Chinese proportions, and went to China. 
(Laughter) So the People's Building, as we called it. 
This is our two interpreters, sort of reading the architecture. 
It went on the cover of the Wen Wei Po newspaper, which got Mr. Liangyu Chen, the mayor of Shanghai, to visit the exhibition. 
And we had the chance to explain the project. 
And he said, "" Shanghai is the city in the world with most skyscrapers, "" but to him it was as if the connection to the roots had been cut over. 
And with the People's Building, he saw an architecture that could bridge the gap between the ancient wisdom of China and the progressive future of China. 
So we obviously profoundly agreed with him. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Unfortunately, Mr. Chen is now in prison for corruption. (Laughter) 
But like I said, Haibao looked very familiar, because he is actually the Chinese character for "" people. "" And they chose this mascot because the theme of the expo is "" Better City, Better Life. "" Sustainability. 
And we thought, sustainability has grown into being this sort of neo-Protestant idea that it has to hurt in order to do good. 
You know, you're not supposed to take long, warm showers. 
You're not supposed to fly on holidays because it's bad for the environment. 
Gradually, you get this idea that sustainable life is less fun than normal life. 
So we thought that maybe it could be interesting to focus on examples where a sustainable city actually increases the quality of life. 
We also asked ourselves, what could Denmark possibly show China that would be relevant? 
You know, it's one of the biggest countries in the world, one of the smallest. 
China symbolized by the dragon. 
Denmark, we have a national bird, the swan. 
(Laughter) China has many great poets, but we discovered that in the People's Republic public school curriculum, they have three fairy tales by An Tu Sheng, or Hans Christian Anderson, as we call him. 
So that means that all 1.3 billion Chinese have grown up with "" The Emperor's New Clothes, "" "The Matchstick Girl" and "The Little Mermaid." 
It's almost like a fragment of Danish culture integrated into Chinese culture. 
The biggest tourist attraction in China is the Great Wall. 
The Great Wall is the only thing that can be seen from the moon. 
The big tourist attraction in Denmark is The Little Mermaid. 
That can actually hardly be seen from the canal tours. 
(Laughter) And it sort of shows the difference between these two cities. 
Copenhagen, Shanghai, modern, European. 
But then we looked at recent urban development, and we noticed that this is like a Shanghai street, 30 years ago. All bikes, no cars. 
This is how it looks today; all traffic jam. 
Bicycles have become forbidden many places. 
Meanwhile, in Copenhagen we're actually expanding the bicycle lanes. 
A third of all the people commute by bike. 
We have a free system of bicycles called the City Bike that you can borrow if you visit the city. 
So we thought, why don't we reintroduce the bicycle in China? 
We donate 1,000 bikes to Shanghai. 
So if you come to the expo, go straight to the Danish pavilion, get a Danish bike, and then continue on that to visit the other pavilions. 
Like I said, Shanghai and Copenhagen are both port cities, but in Copenhagen the water has gotten so clean that you can actually swim in it. 
One of the first projects we ever did was the harbor bath in Copenhagen, sort of continuing the public realm into the water. 
So we thought that these expos quite often have a lot of state financed propaganda, images, statements, but no real experience. 
So just like with a bike, we don't talk about it. 
You can try it. 
Like with the water, instead of talking about it, we're going to sail a million liters of harbor water from Copenhagen to Shanghai, so the Chinese who have the courage can actually dive in and feel how clean it is. 
This is where people normally object that it doesn't sound very sustainable to sail water from Copenhagen to China. 
But in fact, the container ships go full of goods from China to Denmark, and then they sail empty back. 
So quite often you load water for ballast. 
So we can actually hitch a ride for free. 
And in the middle of this sort of harbor bath, we're actually going to put the actual Little Mermaid. 
So the real Mermaid, the real water, and the real bikes. 
And when she's gone, we're going to invite a Chinese artist to reinterpret her. 
The architecture of the pavilion is this sort of loop of exhibition and bikes. 
When you go to the exhibition, you'll see the Mermaid and the pool. 
You'll walk around, start looking for a bicycle on the roof, jump on your ride and then continue out into the rest of the expo. 
So when we actually won the competition we had to do an exhibition in China explaining the project. 
And to our surprise we got one of our boards back with corrections from the Chinese state censorship. 
The first thing, the China map missed Taiwan. 
It's a very serious political issue in China. We will add on. 
The second thing, we had compared the swan to the dragon, and then the Chinese state said, "Suggest change to panda." 
(Laughter) (Applause) So, when it came out in Denmark that we were actually going to move our national monument, the National People's Party sort of rebelled against it. 
They tried to pass a law against moving the Mermaid. 
So for the first time, I got invited to speak at the National Parliament. 
It was kind of interesting because in the morning, from 9 to 11, they were discussing the bailout package — how many billions to invest in saving the Danish economy. 
And then at 11 o'clock they stopped talking about these little issues. 
And then from 11 to 1, they were debating whether or not to send the Mermaid to China. 
(Laughter) (Applause) But to conclude, if you want to see the Mermaid from May to December next year, don't come to Copenhagen, because she's going to be in Shanghai. 
If you do come to Copenhagen, you will probably see an installation by Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist. 
But if the Chinese government intervenes, it might even be a panda. 
(Laughter) So the second story that I'd like to tell is, actually starts in my own house. 
This is my apartment. 
This is the view from my apartment, over the sort of landscape of triangular balconies that our client called the Leonardo DiCaprio balcony. 
And they form this sort of vertical backyard where, on a nice summer day, you'll actually get introduced to all your neighbors in a vertical radius of 10 meters. 
The house is sort of a distortion of a square block. 
Trying to zigzag it to make sure that all of the apartments look at the straight views, instead of into each other. 
Until recently, this was the view from my apartment, onto this place where our client actually bought the neighbor site. 
And he said that he was going to do an apartment block next to a parking structure. 
And we thought, rather than doing a traditional stack of apartments looking straight into a big boring block of cars, why don't we turn all the apartments into penthouses, put them on a podium of cars. 
And because Copenhagen is completely flat, if you want to have a nice south-facing slope with a view, you basically have to do it yourself. 
Then we sort of cut up the volume, so we wouldn't block the view from my apartment. 
(Laughter) And essentially the parking is sort of occupying the deep space underneath the apartments. 
And up in the sun, you have a single layer of apartments that combine all the splendors of a suburban lifestyle, like a house with a garden with a sort of metropolitan view, and a sort of dense urban location. 
This is our first architectural model. 
This is an aerial photo taken last summer. 
And essentially, the apartments cover the parking. 
They are accessed through this diagonal elevator. 
It's actually a stand-up product from Switzerland, because in Switzerland they have a natural need for diagonal elevators. 
(Laughter) And the facade of the parking, we wanted to make the parking naturally ventilated, so we needed to perforate it. 
And we discovered that by controlling the size of the holes, we could actually turn the entire facade into a gigantic, naturally ventilated, rasterized image. 
And since we always refer to the project as The Mountain, we commissioned this Japanese Himalaya photographer to give us this beautiful photo of Mount Everest, making the entire building a 3,000 square meter artwork. 
(Applause) So if you go back into the parking, into the corridors, it's almost like traveling into a parallel universe from cars and colors, into this sort of south-facing urban oasis. 
The wood of your apartment continues outside becoming the facades. 
If you go even further, it turns into this green garden. 
And all the rainwater that drops on the Mountain is actually accumulated. 
And there is an automatic irrigation system that makes sure that this sort of landscape of gardens, in one or two years it will sort of transform into a Cambodian temple ruin, completely covered in green. 
So, the Mountain is like our first built example of what we like to refer to as architectural alchemy. 
This idea that you can actually create, if not gold, then at least added value by mixing traditional ingredients, like normal apartments and normal parking, and in this case actually offer people the chance that they don't have to choose between a life with a garden or a life in the city. 
They can actually have both. 
As an architect, it's really hard to set the agenda. 
You can't just say that now I'd like to do a sustainable city in central Asia, because that's not really how you get commissions. 
You always have to sort of adapt and improvise to the opportunities and accidents that happen, and the sort of turmoil of the world. 
One last example is that recently we, like last summer, we won the competition to design a Nordic national bank. 
This was the director of the bank when he was still smiling. 
(Laughter) It was in the middle of the capital so we were really excited by this opportunity. 
Unfortunately, it was the national bank of Iceland. 
At the same time, we actually had a visitor — a minister from Azerbaijan came to our office. 
We took him to see the Mountain. And he got very excited by this idea that you could actually make mountains out of architecture, because Azerbaijan is known as the Alps of Central Asia. 
So he asked us if we could actually imagine an urban master plan on an island outside the capital that would recreate the silhouette of the seven most significant mountains of Azerbaijan. 
So we took the commission. 
And we made this small movie that I'd like to show. 
We quite often make little movies. 
We always argue a lot about the soundtrack, but in this case it was really easy to choose the song. 
So basically, Baku is this sort of crescent bay overlooking the island of Zira, the island that we are planning — almost like the diagram of their flag. 
And our main idea was to sort of sample the seven most significant mountains of the topography of Azerbaijan and reinterpret them into urban and architectural structures, inhabitable of human life. 
Then we place these mountains on the island, surrounding this sort of central green valley, almost like a central park. 
And what makes it interesting is that the island right now is just a piece of desert. It has no vegetation. 
It has no water. It has no energy, no resources. 
So we actually sort of designed the entire island as a single ecosystem, exploiting wind energy to drive the desalination plants, and to use the thermal properties of water to heat and cool the buildings. 
And all the sort of excess freshwater wastewater is filtered organically into the landscape, gradually transforming the desert island into sort of a green, lush landscape. 
So, you can say where an urban development normally happens at the expense of nature, in this case it's actually creating nature. 
And the buildings, they don't only sort of invoke the imagery of the mountains, they also operate like mountains. 
They create shelter from the wind. 
They accumulate the solar energy. 
They accumulate the water. 
So they actually transform the entire island into a single ecosystem. 
So we recently presented the master plan, and it has gotten approved. 
And this summer we are starting the construction documents of the two first mountains, in what's going to be the first carbon-neutral island in Central Asia. 
(Applause) Yes, maybe just to round off. 
So in a way you can see how the Mountain in Copenhagen sort of evolved into the Seven Peaks of Azerbaijan. 
With a little luck and some more evolution, maybe in 10 years it could be the Five Mountains on Mars. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

On my desk in my office, I keep a small clay pot that I made in college. It's raku, which is a kind of pottery that began in Japan centuries ago as a way of making bowls for the Japanese tea ceremony. 
This one is more than 400 years old. 
Each one was pinched or carved out of a ball of clay, and it was the imperfections that people cherished. 
Everyday pots like this cup take eight to 10 hours to fire. 
I just took this out of the kiln last week, and the kiln itself takes another day or two to cool down, but raku is really fast. You do it outside, and you take the kiln up to temperature. In 15 minutes, it goes to 1,500 degrees, and as soon as you see that the glaze has melted inside, you can see that faint sheen, you turn the kiln off, and you reach in with these long metal tongs, you grab the pot, and in Japan, this red-hot pot would be immediately immersed in a solution of green tea, and you can imagine what that steam would smell like. 
But here in the United States, we ramp up the drama a little bit, and we drop our pots into sawdust, which catches on fire, and you take a garbage pail, and you put it on top, and smoke starts pouring out. 
I would come home with my clothes reeking of woodsmoke. 
I love raku because it allows me to play with the elements. 
I can shape a pot out of clay and choose a glaze, but then I have to let it go to the fire and the smoke, and what's wonderful is the surprises that happen, like this crackle pattern, because it's really stressful on these pots. They go from 1,500 degrees to room temperature in the space of just a minute. 
Raku is a wonderful metaphor for the process of creativity. 
I find in so many things that tension between what I can control and what I have to let go happens all the time, whether I'm creating a new radio show or just at home negotiating with my teenage sons. 
When I sat down to write a book about creativity, I realized that the steps were reversed. 
I had to let go at the very beginning, and I had to immerse myself in the stories of hundreds of artists and writers and musicians and filmmakers, and as I listened to these stories, I realized that creativity grows out of everyday experiences more often than you might think, including letting go. 
It was supposed to break, but that's okay. (Laughter) (Laughs) That's part of the letting go, is sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't, because creativity also grows from the broken places. 
The best way to learn about anything is through stories, and so I want to tell you a story about work and play and about four aspects of life that we need to embrace in order for our own creativity to flourish. 
The first embrace is something that we think, "" Oh, this is very easy, "" but it's actually getting harder, and that's paying attention to the world around us. 
So many artists speak about needing to be open, to embrace experience, and that's hard to do when you have a lighted rectangle in your pocket that takes all of your focus. 
The filmmaker Mira Nair speaks about growing up in a small town in India. Its name is Bhubaneswar, and here's a picture of one of the temples in her town. 
Mira Nair: In this little town, there were like 2,000 temples. 
We played cricket all the time. We kind of grew up in the rubble. The major thing that inspired me, that led me on this path, that made me a filmmaker eventually, was traveling folk theater that would come through the town and I would go off and see these great battles of good and evil by two people in a school field with no props but with a lot of, you know, passion, and hashish as well, and it was amazing. 
You know, the folk tales of Mahabharata and Ramayana, the two holy books, the epics that everything comes out of in India, they say. After seeing that Jatra, the folk theater, I knew I wanted to get on, you know, and perform. 
Julie Burstein: Isn't that a wonderful story? 
You can see the sort of break in the everyday. 
There they are in the school fields, but it's good and evil, and passion and hashish. And Mira Nair was a young girl with thousands of other people watching this performance, but she was ready. She was ready to open up to what it sparked in her, and it led her, as she said, down this path to become an award-winning filmmaker. 
So being open for that experience that might change you is the first thing we need to embrace. 
Artists also speak about how some of their most powerful work comes out of the parts of life that are most difficult. 
The novelist Richard Ford speaks about a childhood challenge that continues to be something he wrestles with today. He's severely dyslexic. 
Richard Ford: I was slow to learn to read, went all the way through school not really reading more than the minimum, and still to this day can't read silently much faster than I can read aloud, but there were a lot of benefits to being dyslexic for me because when I finally did reconcile myself to how slow I was going to have to do it, then I think I came very slowly into an appreciation of all of those qualities of language and of sentences that are not just the cognitive aspects of language: the syncopations, the sounds of words, 
what words look like, where paragraphs break, where lines break. I mean, I wasn't so badly dyslexic that I was disabled from reading. I just had to do it really slowly, and as I did, lingering on those sentences as I had to linger, I fell heir to language's other qualities, which I think has helped me write sentences. 
JB: It's so powerful. Richard Ford, who's won the Pulitzer Prize, says that dyslexia helped him write sentences. 
He had to embrace this challenge, and I use that word intentionally. He didn't have to overcome dyslexia. 
He had to learn from it. He had to learn to hear the music in language. 
Artists also speak about how pushing up against the limits of what they can do, sometimes pushing into what they can't do, helps them focus on finding their own voice. 
The sculptor Richard Serra talks about how, as a young artist, he thought he was a painter, and he lived in Florence after graduate school. 
While he was there, he traveled to Madrid, where he went to the Prado to see this picture by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. 
It's from 1656, and it's called "" Las Meninas, "" and it's the picture of a little princess and her ladies-in-waiting, and if you look over that little blonde princess's shoulder, you'll see a mirror, and reflected in it are her parents, the King and Queen of Spain, who would be standing where you might stand to look at the picture. 
As he often did, Velázquez put himself in this painting too. 
He's standing on the left with his paintbrush in one hand and his palette in the other. 
Richard Serra: I was standing there looking at it, and I realized that Velázquez was looking at me, and I thought, "" Oh. I'm the subject of the painting. "" And I thought, "" I'm not going to be able to do that painting. "" I was to the point where I was using a stopwatch and painting squares out of randomness, and I wasn't getting anywhere. So I went back and dumped all my paintings in the Arno, and I thought, I'm going to just start playing around. 
JB: Richard Serra says that so nonchalantly, you might have missed it. He went and saw this painting by a guy who'd been dead for 300 years, and realized, "" I can't do that, "" and so Richard Serra went back to his studio in Florence, picked up all of his work up to that point, and threw it in a river. 
Richard Serra let go of painting at that moment, but he didn't let go of art. He moved to New York City, and he put together a list of verbs — to roll, to crease, to fold — more than a hundred of them, and as he said, he just started playing around. He did these things to all kinds of material. He would take a huge sheet of lead and roll it up and unroll it. He would do the same thing to rubber, and when he got to the direction "" to lift, "" he created this, which is in the Museum of Modern Art. 
Richard Serra had to let go of painting in order to embark on this playful exploration that led him to the work that he's known for today: huge curves of steel that require our time and motion to experience. In sculpture, Richard Serra is able to do what he couldn't do in painting. 
He makes us the subject of his art. 
So experience and challenge and limitations are all things we need to embrace for creativity to flourish. 
There's a fourth embrace, and it's the hardest. 
It's the embrace of loss, the oldest and most constant of human experiences. 
In order to create, we have to stand in that space between what we see in the world and what we hope for, looking squarely at rejection, at heartbreak, at war, at death. 
That's a tough space to stand in. 
The educator Parker Palmer calls it "" the tragic gap, "" tragic not because it's sad but because it's inevitable, and my friend Dick Nodel likes to say, "" You can hold that tension like a violin string and make something beautiful. "" That tension resonates in the work of the photographer Joel Meyerowitz, who at the beginning of his career was known for his street photography, for capturing a moment on the street, and also for his beautiful photographs of landscapes — of Tuscany, of Cape Cod, of light. 
Joel is a New Yorker, and his studio for many years was in Chelsea, with a straight view downtown to the World Trade Center, and he photographed those buildings in every sort of light. 
You know where this story goes. 
On 9 / 11, Joel wasn't in New York. He was out of town, but he raced back to the city, and raced down to the site of the destruction. 
Joel Meyerowitz: And like all the other passersby, I stood outside the chain link fence on Chambers and Greenwich, and all I could see was the smoke and a little bit of rubble, and I raised my camera to take a peek, just to see if there was something to see, and some cop, a lady cop, hit me on my shoulder, and said, "" Hey, no pictures! "" And it was such a blow that it woke me up, in the way that it was meant to be, I guess. 
And when I asked her why no pictures, she said, "It's a crime scene. No photographs allowed." 
And I asked her, "" What would happen if I was a member of the press? "" And she told me, "" Oh, look back there, "" and back a block was the press corps tied up in a little penned-in area, and I said, "" Well, when do they go in? "" and she said, "" Probably never. "" And as I walked away from that, I had this crystallization, probably from the blow, because it was an insult in a way. 
I thought, "" Oh, if there's no pictures, then there'll be no record. We need a record. "" And I thought, "" I'm gonna make that record. 
I'll find a way to get in, because I don't want to see this history disappear. "" JB: He did. He pulled in every favor he could, and got a pass into the World Trade Center site, where he photographed for nine months almost every day. 
Looking at these photographs today brings back the smell of smoke that lingered on my clothes when I went home to my family at night. 
My office was just a few blocks away. 
But some of these photographs are beautiful, and we wondered, was it difficult for Joel Meyerowitz to make such beauty out of such devastation? 
JM: Well, you know, ugly, I mean, powerful and tragic and horrific and everything, but it was also as, in nature, an enormous event that was transformed after the fact into this residue, and like many other ruins — you go to the ruins of the Colosseum or the ruins of a cathedral someplace — and they take on a new meaning when you watch the weather. 
I mean, there were afternoons I was down there, and the light goes pink and there's a mist in the air and you're standing in the rubble, and I found myself recognizing both the inherent beauty of nature and the fact that nature, as time, is erasing this wound. 
Time is unstoppable, and it transforms the event. 
It gets further and further away from the day, and light and seasons temper it in some way, and it's not that I'm a romantic. I'm really a realist. 
The reality is, there's the Woolworth Building in a veil of smoke from the site, but it's now like a scrim across a theater, and it's turning pink, you know, and down below there are hoses spraying, and the lights have come on for the evening, and the water is turning acid green because the sodium lamps are on, and I'm thinking, "" My God, who could dream this up? "" But the fact is, I'm there, it looks like that, you have to take a picture. 
JB: You have to take a picture. That sense of urgency, of the need to get to work, is so powerful in Joel's story. 
When I saw Joel Meyerowitz recently, I told him how much I admired his passionate obstinacy, his determination to push through all the bureaucratic red tape to get to work, and he laughed, and he said, "" I'm stubborn, but I think what's more important is my passionate optimism. "" The first time I told these stories, a man in the audience raised his hand and said, "" All these artists talk about their work, not their art, which has got me thinking about my work and where the creativity is there, and I'm not an artist. "" He's right. We all wrestle with experience and challenge, limits and loss. 
Creativity is essential to all of us, whether we're scientists or teachers, parents or entrepreneurs. 
I want to leave you with another image of a Japanese tea bowl. This one is at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C. 
It's more than a hundred years old and you can still see the fingermarks where the potter pinched it. 
But as you can also see, this one did break at some point in its hundred years. 
But the person who put it back together, instead of hiding the cracks, decided to emphasize them, using gold lacquer to repair it. 
This bowl is more beautiful now, having been broken, than it was when it was first made, and we can look at those cracks, because they tell the story that we all live, of the cycle of creation and destruction, of control and letting go, of picking up the pieces and making something new. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

I'm an ecologist, mostly a coral reef ecologist. 
I started out in Chesapeake Bay and went diving in the winter and became a tropical ecologist overnight. 
And it was really a lot of fun for about 10 years. 
I mean, somebody pays you to go around and travel and look at some of the most beautiful places on the planet. 
And that was what I did. 
And I ended up in Jamaica, in the West Indies, where the coral reefs were really among the most extraordinary, structurally, that I ever saw in my life. 
And this picture here, it's really interesting, it shows two things: First of all, it's in black and white because the water was so clear and you could see so far, and film was so slow in the 1960s and early 70s, you took pictures in black and white. 
The other thing it shows you is that, although there's this beautiful forest of coral, there are no fish in that picture. 
Those reefs at Discovery Bay, Jamaica were the most studied coral reefs in the world for 20 years. 
We were the best and the brightest. 
People came to study our reefs from Australia, which is sort of funny because now we go to theirs. 
And the view of scientists about how coral reefs work, how they ought to be, was based on these reefs without any fish. 
Then, in 1980, there was a hurricane, Hurricane Allen. 
I put half the lab up in my house. 
The wind blew very strong. 
The waves were 25 to 50 feet high. 
And the reefs disappeared, and new islands formed, and we thought, "" Well, we're real smart. 
We know that hurricanes have always happened in the past. "" And we published a paper in Science, the first time that anybody ever described the destruction on a coral reef by a major hurricane. 
And we predicted what would happen, and we got it all wrong. 
And the reason was because of overfishing, and the fact that a last common grazer, a sea urchin, died. 
And within a few months after that sea urchin dying, the seaweed started to grow. 
And that is the same reef; that's the same reef 15 years ago; that's the same reef today. 
The coral reefs of the north coast of Jamaica have a few percent live coral cover and a lot of seaweed and slime. 
And that's more or less the story of the coral reefs of the Caribbean, and increasingly, tragically, the coral reefs worldwide. 
Now, that's my little, depressing story. 
All of us in our 60s and 70s have comparable depressing stories. 
There are tens of thousands of those stories out there, and it's really hard to conjure up much of a sense of well-being, because it just keeps getting worse. 
And the reason it keeps getting worse is that after a natural catastrophe, like a hurricane, it used to be that there was some kind of successional sequence of recovery, but what's going on now is that overfishing and pollution and climate change are all interacting in a way that prevents that. 
And so I'm going to sort of go through and talk about those three kinds of things. 
We hear a lot about the collapse of cod. 
It's difficult to imagine that two, or some historians would say three world wars were fought during the colonial era for the control of cod. 
Cod fed most of the people of Western Europe. 
It fed the slaves brought to the Antilles, the song "" Jamaica Farewell "" — "" Ackee rice salt fish are nice "" — is an emblem of the importance of salt cod from northeastern Canada. 
It all collapsed in the 80s and the 90s: 35,000 people lost their jobs. 
And that was the beginning of a kind of serial depletion from bigger and tastier species to smaller and not-so-tasty species, from species that were near to home to species that were all around the world, and what have you. 
It's a little hard to understand that, because you can go to a Costco in the United States and buy cheap fish. 
You ought to read the label to find out where it came from, but it's still cheap, and everybody thinks it's okay. 
It's hard to communicate this, and one way that I think is really interesting is to talk about sport fish, because people like to go out and catch fish. 
It's one of those things. 
This picture here shows the trophy fish, the biggest fish caught by people who pay a lot of money to get on a boat, go to a place off of Key West in Florida, drink a lot of beer, throw a lot of hooks and lines into the water, come back with the biggest and the best fish, and the champion trophy fish are put on this board, where people take a picture, and this guy is obviously really excited about that fish. 
Well, that's what it's like now, but this is what it was like in the 1950s from the same boat in the same place on the same board on the same dock. 
The trophy fish were so big that you couldn't put any of those small fish up on it. 
And the average size trophy fish weighed 250 to 300 pounds, goliath grouper, and if you wanted to go out and kill something, you could pretty much count on being able to catch one of those fish. 
And they tasted really good. 
And people paid less in 1950 dollars to catch that than what people pay now to catch those little, tiny fish. 
And that's everywhere. 
It's not just the fish, though, that are disappearing. 
Industrial fishing uses big stuff, big machinery. 
We use nets that are 20 miles long. 
We use longlines that have one million or two million hooks. 
And we trawl, which means to take something the size of a tractor trailer truck that weighs thousands and thousands of pounds, put it on a big chain, and drag it across the sea floor to stir up the bottom and catch the fish. 
Think of it as being kind of the bulldozing of a city or of a forest, because it clears it away. 
And the habitat destruction is unbelievable. 
This is a photograph, a typical photograph, of what the continental shelves of the world look like. 
You can see the rows in the bottom, the way you can see the rows in a field that has just been plowed to plant corn. 
What that was, was a forest of sponges and coral, which is a critical habitat for the development of fish. 
What it is now is mud, and the area of the ocean floor that has been transformed from forest to level mud, to parking lot, is equivalent to the entire area of all the forests that have ever been cut down on all of the earth in the history of humanity. 
We've managed to do that in the last 100 to 150 years. 
We tend to think of oil spills and mercury and we hear a lot about plastic these days. 
And all of that stuff is really disgusting, but what's really insidious is the biological pollution that happens because of the magnitude of the shifts that it causes to entire ecosystems. 
And I'm going to just talk very briefly about two kinds of biological pollution: one is introduced species and the other is what comes from nutrients. 
So this is the infamous Caulerpa taxifolia, the so-called killer algae. 
A book was written about it. 
It's a bit of an embarrassment. 
It was accidentally released from the aquarium in Monaco, it was bred to be cold tolerant to have in peoples aquaria. 
It's very pretty, and it has rapidly started to overgrow the once very rich biodiversity of the northwestern Mediterranean. 
I don't know how many of you remember the movie "The Little Shop of Horrors," but this is the plant of "" The Little Shop of Horrors. "" But, instead of devouring the people in the shop, what it's doing is overgrowing and smothering virtually all of the bottom-dwelling life of the entire northwestern Mediterranean Sea. 
We don't know anything that eats it, we're trying to do all sorts of genetics and figure out something that could be done, but, as it stands, it's the monster from hell, about which nobody knows what to do. 
Now another form of pollution that's biological pollution is what happens from excess nutrients. 
The green revolution, all of this artificial nitrogen fertilizer, we use too much of it. 
It's subsidized, which is one of the reasons we used too much of it. 
It runs down the rivers, and it feeds the plankton, the little microscopic plant cells in the coastal water. 
But since we ate all the oysters and we ate all the fish that would eat the plankton, there's nothing to eat the plankton and there's more and more of it, so it dies of old age, which is unheard of for plankton. 
And when it dies, it falls to the bottom and then it rots, which means that bacteria break it down. 
And in the process they use up all the oxygen, and in using up all the oxygen they make the environment utterly lethal for anything that can't swim away. 
So, what we end up with is a microbial zoo dominated by bacteria and jellyfish, as you see on the left in front of you. 
And the only fishery left — and it is a commercial fishery — is the jellyfish fishery you see on the right, where there used to be prawns. 
Even in Newfoundland where we used to catch cod, we now have a jellyfish fishery. 
And another version of this sort of thing is what is often called red tides or toxic blooms. 
That picture on the left is just staggering to me. 
I have talked about it a million times, but it's unbelievable. 
In the upper right of that picture on the left is almost the Mississippi Delta, and the lower left of that picture is the Texas-Mexico border. 
You're looking at the entire northwestern Gulf of Mexico; you're looking at one toxic dinoflagellate bloom that can kill fish, made by that beautiful little creature on the lower right. 
And in the upper right you see this black sort of cloud moving ashore. 
That's the same species. 
And as it comes to shore and the wind blows, and little droplets of the water get into the air, the emergency rooms of all the hospitals fill up with people with acute respiratory distress. 
And that's retirement homes on the west coast of Florida. 
A friend and I did this thing in Hollywood we called Hollywood ocean night, and I was trying to figure out how to explain to actors what's going on. 
And I said, "" So, imagine you're in a movie called 'Escape from Malibu' because all the beautiful people have moved to North Dakota, where it's clean and safe. 
And the only people who are left there are the people who can't afford to move away from the coast, because the coast, instead of being paradise, is harmful to your health. "" And then this is amazing. 
It was when I was on holiday last early autumn in France. 
This is from the coast of Brittany, which is being enveloped in this green, algal slime. 
The reason that it attracted so much attention, besides the fact that it's disgusting, is that sea birds flying over it are asphyxiated by the smell and die, and a farmer died of it, and you can imagine the scandal that happened. 
And so there's this war between the farmers and the fishermen about it all, and the net result is that the beaches of Brittany have to be bulldozed of this stuff on a regular basis. 
And then, of course, there's climate change, and we all know about climate change. 
I guess the iconic figure of it is the melting of the ice in the Arctic Sea. 
Think about the thousands and thousands of people who died trying to find the Northwest Passage. 
Well, the Northwest Passage is already there. 
I think it's sort of funny; it's on the Siberian coast, maybe the Russians will charge tolls. 
The governments of the world are taking this really seriously. 
The military of the Arctic nations is taking it really seriously. 
For all the denial of climate change by government leaders, the CIA and the navies of Norway and the U.S. and Canada, whatever are busily thinking about how they will secure their territory in this inevitability from their point of view. 
And, of course, Arctic communities are toast. 
The other kinds of effects of climate change — this is coral bleaching. It's a beautiful picture, right? 
All that white coral. 
Except it's supposed to be brown. 
What happens is that the corals are a symbiosis, and they have these little algal cells that live inside them. 
And the algae give the corals sugar, and the corals give the algae nutrients and protection. 
But when it gets too hot, the algae can't make the sugar. 
The corals say, "" You cheated. You didn't pay your rent. "" They kick them out, and then they die. 
Not all of them die; some of them survive, some more are surviving, but it's really bad news. 
To try and give you a sense of this, imagine you go camping in July somewhere in Europe or in North America, and you wake up the next morning, and you look around you, and you see that 80 percent of the trees, as far as you can see, have dropped their leaves and are standing there naked. 
And you come home, and you discover that 80 percent of all the trees in North America and in Europe have dropped their leaves. 
And then you read in the paper a few weeks later, "Oh, by the way, a quarter of those died." 
Well, that's what happened in the Indian Ocean during the 1998 El Nino, an area vastly greater than the size of North America and Europe, when 80 percent of all the corals bleached and a quarter of them died. 
And then the really scary thing about all of this — the overfishing, the pollution and the climate change — is that each thing doesn't happen in a vacuum. 
But there are these, what we call, positive feedbacks, the synergies among them that make the whole vastly greater than the sum of the parts. 
And the great scientific challenge for people like me in thinking about all this, is do we know how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again? 
I mean, because we, at this point, we can protect it. 
But what does that mean? 
We really don't know. 
So what are the oceans going to be like in 20 or 50 years? 
Well, there won't be any fish except for minnows, and the water will be pretty dirty, and all those kinds of things and full of mercury, etc., etc. 
And dead zones will get bigger and bigger and they'll start to merge, and we can imagine something like the dead-zonification of the global, coastal ocean. 
Then you sure won't want to eat fish that were raised in it, because it would be a kind of gastronomic Russian roulette. 
Sometimes you have a toxic bloom; sometimes you don't. 
That doesn't sell. 
The really scary things though are the physical, chemical, oceanographic things that are happening. 
As the surface of the ocean gets warmer, the water is lighter when it's warmer, it becomes harder and harder to turn the ocean over. 
We say it becomes more strongly stratified. 
The consequence of that is that all those nutrients that fuel the great anchoveta fisheries, of the sardines of California or in Peru or whatever, those slow down and those fisheries collapse. 
And, at the same time, water from the surface, which is rich in oxygen, doesn't make it down and the ocean turns into a desert. 
So the question is: How are we all going to respond to this? 
And we can do all sorts of things to fix it, but in the final analysis, the thing we really need to fix is ourselves. 
It's not about the fish; it's not about the pollution; it's not about the climate change. 
It's about us and our greed and our need for growth and our inability to imagine a world that is different from the selfish world we live in today. 
So the question is: Will we respond to this or not? 
I would say that the future of life and the dignity of human beings depends on our doing that. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

Chris Anderson: Elon, what kind of crazy dream would persuade you to think of trying to take on the auto industry and build an all-electric car? 
Elon Musk: Well, it goes back to when I was in university. 
I thought about, what are the problems that are most likely to affect the future of the world or the future of humanity? 
I think it's extremely important that we have sustainable transport and sustainable energy production. 
That sort of overall sustainable energy problem is the biggest problem that we have to solve this century, independent of environmental concerns. 
In fact, even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we're going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating. 
CA: Most of American electricity comes from burning fossil fuels. 
How can an electric car that plugs into that electricity help? 
EM: Right. There's two elements to that answer. 
One is that, even if you take the same source fuel and produce power at the power plant and use it to charge electric cars, you're still better off. 
So if you take, say, natural gas, which is the most prevalent hydrocarbon source fuel, if you burn that in a modern General Electric natural gas turbine, you'll get about 60 percent efficiency. 
If you put that same fuel in an internal combustion engine car, you get about 20 percent efficiency. 
And the reason is, in the stationary power plant, you can afford to have something that weighs a lot more, is voluminous, and you can take the waste heat and run a steam turbine and generate a secondary power source. 
So in effect, even after you've taken transmission loss into account and everything, even using the same source fuel, you're at least twice as better off charging an electric car, then burning it at the power plant. 
CA: That scale delivers efficiency. 
EM: Yes, it does. 
And then the other point is, we have to have sustainable means of power generation anyway, electricity generation. 
So given that we have to solve sustainable electricity generation, then it makes sense for us to have electric cars as the mode of transport. 
CA: So we've got some video here of the Tesla being assembled, which, if we could play that first video — So what is innovative about this process in this vehicle? 
EM: Sure. So, in order to accelerate the advent of electric transport, and I should say that I think, actually, all modes of transport will become fully electric with the ironic exception of rockets. 
There's just no way around Newton's third law. 
The question is how do you accelerate the advent of electric transport? 
And in order to do that for cars, you have to come up with a really energy efficient car, so that means making it incredibly light, and so what you're seeing here is the only all-aluminum body and chassis car made in North America. 
In fact, we applied a lot of rocket design techniques to make the car light despite having a very large battery pack. 
And then it also has the lowest drag coefficient of any car of its size. 
So as a result, the energy usage is very low, and it has the most advanced battery pack, and that's what gives it the range that's competitive, so you can actually have on the order of a 250-mile range. 
CA: I mean, those battery packs are incredibly heavy, but you think the math can still work out intelligently — by combining light body, heavy battery, you can still gain spectacular efficiency. 
EM: Exactly. The rest of the car has to be very light to offset the mass of the pack, and then you have to have a low drag coefficient so that you have good highway range. 
And in fact, customers of the Model S are sort of competing with each other to try to get the highest possible range. 
I think somebody recently got 420 miles out of a single charge. 
CA: Bruno Bowden, who's here, did that, broke the world record.EM: Congratulations. 
CA: That was the good news. The bad news was that to do it, he had to drive at 18 miles an hour constant speed and got pulled over by the cops. (Laughter) EM: I mean, you can certainly drive — if you drive it 65 miles an hour, under normal conditions, 250 miles is a reasonable number. 
CA: Let's show that second video showing the Tesla in action on ice. 
Not at all a dig at The New York Times, this, by the way. 
What is the most surprising thing about the experience of driving the car? 
EM: In creating an electric car, the responsiveness of the car is really incredible. 
So we wanted really to have people feel as though they've almost got to mind meld with the car, so you just feel like you and the car are kind of one, and as you corner and accelerate, it just happens, like the car has ESP. 
You can do that with an electric car because of its responsiveness. 
You can't do that with a gasoline car. 
I think that's really a profound difference, and people only experience that when they have a test drive. 
CA: I mean, this is a beautiful but expensive car. 
Is there a road map where this becomes a mass-market vehicle? 
EM: Yeah. The goal of Tesla has always been to have a sort of three-step process, where version one was an expensive car at low volume, version two is medium priced and medium volume, and then version three would be low price, high volume. 
So we're at step two at this point. 
So we had a $100,000 sports car, which was the Roadster. 
Then we've got the Model S, which starts at around 50,000 dollars. 
And our third generation car, which should hopefully be out in about three or four years will be a $30,000 car. 
But whenever you've got really new technology, it generally takes about three major versions in order to make it a compelling mass-market product. 
And so I think we're making progress in that direction, and I feel confident that we'll get there. 
CA: I mean, right now, if you've got a short commute, you can drive, you can get back, you can charge it at home. 
There isn't a huge nationwide network of charging stations now that are fast. 
Do you see that coming, really, truly, or just on a few key routes? 
EM: There actually are far more charging stations than people realize, and at Tesla we developed something called a Supercharging technology, and we're offering that if you buy a Model S for free, forever. 
And so this is something that maybe a lot of people don't realize. 
We actually have California and Nevada covered, and we've got the Eastern seaboard from Boston to D.C. covered. 
By the end of this year, you'll be able to drive from L.A. to New York just using the Supercharger network, which charges at five times the rate of anything else. 
And the key thing is to have a ratio of drive to stop, to stop time, of about six or seven. 
So if you drive for three hours, you want to stop for 20 or 30 minutes, because that's normally what people will stop for. 
So if you start a trip at 9 a.m., by noon you want to stop to have a bite to eat, hit the restroom, coffee, and keep going. 
CA: So your proposition to consumers is, for the full charge, it could take an hour. 
So it's common — don't expect to be out of here in 10 minutes. 
Wait for an hour, but the good news is, you're helping save the planet, and by the way, the electricity is free. You don't pay anything. 
EM: Actually, what we're expecting is for people to stop for about 20 to 30 minutes, not for an hour. 
It's actually better to drive for about maybe 160, 170 miles and then stop for half an hour and then keep going. 
That's the natural cadence of a trip. 
CA: All right. So this is only one string to your energy bow. 
You've been working on this solar company SolarCity. 
What's unusual about that? 
EM: Well, as I mentioned earlier, we have to have sustainable electricity production as well as consumption, so I'm quite confident that the primary means of power generation will be solar. 
I mean, it's really indirect fusion, is what it is. 
We've got this giant fusion generator in the sky called the sun, and we just need to tap a little bit of that energy for purposes of human civilization. 
What most people know but don't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. 
If the sun wasn't there, we'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. 
The whole ecosystem is solar-powered. 
CA: But in a gallon of gasoline, you have, effectively, thousands of years of sun power compressed into a small space, so it's hard to make the numbers work right now on solar, and to remotely compete with, for example, natural gas, fracked natural gas. How are you going to build a business here? 
EM: Well actually, I'm confident that solar will beat everything, hands down, including natural gas. 
(Applause) CA: How? 
EM: It must, actually. If it doesn't, we're in deep trouble. 
CA: But you're not selling solar panels to consumers. 
What are you doing? 
EM: No, we actually are. You can buy a solar system or you can lease a solar system. 
Most people choose to lease. 
And the thing about solar power is that it doesn't have any feed stock or operational costs, so once it's installed, it's just there. 
It works for decades. It'll work for probably a century. 
So therefore, the key thing to do is to get the cost of that initial installation low, and then get the cost of the financing low, because that interest — those are the two factors that drive the cost of solar. 
And we've made huge progress in that direction, and that's why I'm confident we'll actually beat natural gas. 
CA: So your current proposition to consumers is, don't pay so much up front. 
EM: Zero.CA: Pay zero up front. 
We will install panels on your roof. 
You will then pay, how long is a typical lease? 
EM: Typical leases are 20 years, but the value proposition is, as you're sort of alluding to, quite straightforward. 
It's no money down, and your utility bill decreases. 
Pretty good deal. 
CA: So that seems like a win for the consumer. 
No risk, you'll pay less than you're paying now. 
For you, the dream here then is that — I mean, who owns the electricity from those panels for the longer term? 
I mean, how do you, the company, benefit? 
EM: Well, essentially, SolarCity raises a chunk of capital from say, a company or a bank. 
Google is one of our big partners here. 
And they have an expected return on that capital. 
With that capital, SolarCity purchases and installs the panel on the roof and then charges the homeowner or business owner a monthly lease payment, which is less than the utility bill. 
CA: But you yourself get a long-term commercial benefit from that power. 
You're kind of building a new type of distributed utility. 
EM: Exactly. What it amounts to is a giant distributed utility. 
I think it's a good thing, because utilities have been this monopoly, and people haven't had any choice. 
So effectively it's the first time there's been competition for this monopoly, because the utilities have been the only ones that owned those power distribution lines, but now it's on your roof. 
So I think it's actually very empowering for homeowners and businesses. 
CA: And you really picture a future where a majority of power in America, within a decade or two, or within your lifetime, it goes solar? 
EM: I'm extremely confident that solar will be at least a plurality of power, and most likely a majority, and I predict it will be a plurality in less than 20 years. 
I made that bet with someone — CA: Definition of plurality is? 
EM: More from solar than any other source. 
CA: Ah. Who did you make the bet with? 
EM: With a friend who will remain nameless. 
CA: Just between us. (Laughter) EM: I made that bet, I think, two or three years ago, so in roughly 18 years, I think we'll see more power from solar than any other source. 
CA: All right, so let's go back to another bet that you made with yourself, I guess, a kind of crazy bet. 
You'd made some money from the sale of PayPal. 
You decided to build a space company. 
Why on Earth would someone do that? 
(Laughter) EM: I got that question a lot, that's true. 
People would say, "" Did you hear the joke about the guy who made a small fortune in the space industry? "" Obviously, "" He started with a large one, "" is the punchline. 
And so I tell people, well, I was trying to figure out the fastest way to turn a large fortune into a small one. 
And they'd look at me, like, "" Is he serious? "" CA: And strangely, you were. So what happened? 
EM: It was a close call. Things almost didn't work out. 
We came very close to failure, but we managed to get through that point in 2008. 
The goal of SpaceX is to try to advance rocket technology, and in particular to try to crack a problem that I think is vital for humanity to become a space-faring civilization, which is to have a rapidly and fully reusable rocket. 
CA: Would humanity become a space-faring civilization? 
So that was a dream of yours, in a way, from a young age? 
You've dreamed of Mars and beyond? 
EM: I did build rockets when I was a kid, but I didn't think I'd be involved in this. 
It was really more from the standpoint of what are the things that need to happen in order for the future to be an exciting and inspiring one? 
And I really think there's a fundamental difference, if you sort of look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that's out there exploring the stars, on multiple planets, and I think that's really exciting, compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event. 
CA: So you've somehow slashed the cost of building a rocket by 75 percent, depending on how you calculate it. 
How on Earth have you done that? 
NASA has been doing this for years. How have you done this? 
EM: Well, we've made significant advances in the technology of the airframe, the engines, the electronics and the launch operation. 
There's a long list of innovations that we've come up with there that are a little difficult to communicate in this talk, but — CA: Not least because you could still get copied, right? 
You haven't patented this stuff. It's really interesting to me. 
EM: No, we don't patent.CA: You didn't patent because you think it's more dangerous to patent than not to patent. 
EM: Since our primary competitors are national governments, the enforceability of patents is questionable. (Laughter) (Applause) CA: That's really, really interesting. 
But the big innovation is still ahead, and you're working on it now. Tell us about this. 
EM: Right, so the big innovation — CA: In fact, let's roll that video and you can talk us through it, what's happening here. 
EM: Absolutely. So the thing about rockets is that they're all expendable. 
All rockets that fly today are fully expendable. 
The space shuttle was an attempt at a reusable rocket, but even the main tank of the space shuttle was thrown away every time, and the parts that were reusable took a 10,000-person group nine months to refurbish for flight. 
So the space shuttle ended up costing a billion dollars per flight. 
Obviously that doesn't work very well for — CA: What just happened there? We just saw something land? 
EM: That's right. So it's important that the rocket stages be able to come back, to be able to return to the launch site and be ready to launch again within a matter of hours. 
CA: Wow. Reusable rockets.EM: Yes. (Applause) And so what a lot of people don't realize is, the cost of the fuel, of the propellant, is very small. 
It's much like on a jet. 
So the cost of the propellant is about .3 percent of the cost of the rocket. 
So it's possible to achieve, let's say, roughly 100-fold improvement in the cost of spaceflight if you can effectively reuse the rocket. 
That's why it's so important. 
Every mode of transport that we use, whether it's planes, trains, automobiles, bikes, horses, is reusable, but not rockets. 
So we must solve this problem in order to become a space-faring civilization. 
CA: You asked me the question earlier of how popular traveling on cruises would be if you had to burn your ships afterward.EM: Certain cruises are apparently highly problematic. 
CA: Definitely more expensive. 
So that's potentially absolutely disruptive technology, and, I guess, paves the way for your dream to actually take, at some point, to take humanity to Mars at scale. 
You'd like to see a colony on Mars. 
EM: Yeah, exactly. SpaceX, or some combination of companies and governments, needs to make progress in the direction of making life multi-planetary, of establishing a base on another planet, on Mars — being the only realistic option — and then building that base up until we're a true multi-planet species. 
CA: So progress on this "" let's make it reusable, "" how is that going? That was just a simulation video we saw. 
How's it going? 
EM: We're actually, we've been making some good progress recently with something we call the Grasshopper Test Project, where we're testing the vertical landing portion of the flight, the sort of terminal portion which is quite tricky. 
And we've had some good tests. 
CA: Can we see that? EM: Yeah. 
So that's just to give a sense of scale. 
We dressed a cowboy as Johnny Cash and bolted the mannequin to the rocket. (Laughter) CA: All right, let's see that video then, because this is actually amazing when you think about it. 
You've never seen this before. A rocket blasting off and then — EM: Yeah, so that rocket is about the size of a 12-story building. 
(Rocket launch) So now it's hovering at about 40 meters, and it's constantly adjusting the angle, the pitch and yaw of the main engine, and maintaining roll with cold gas thrusters. 
CA: How cool is that? (Applause) Elon, how have you done this? 
These projects are so — Paypal, SolarCity, Tesla, SpaceX, they're so spectacularly different, they're such ambitious projects at scale. 
How on Earth has one person been able to innovate in this way? 
What is it about you? 
EM: I don't know, actually. 
I don't have a good answer for you. 
I work a lot. I mean, a lot. 
CA: Well, I have a theory.EM: Okay. All right. 
CA: My theory is that you have an ability to think at a system level of design that pulls together design, technology and business, so if TED was TBD, design, technology and business, into one package, synthesize it in a way that very few people can and — and this is the critical thing — feel so damn confident in that clicked-together package that you take crazy risks. 
You bet your fortune on it, and you seem to have done that multiple times. 
I mean, almost no one can do that. 
Is that — could we have some of that secret sauce? 
Can we put it into our education system? Can someone learn from you? 
It is truly amazing what you've done. 
EM: Well, thanks. Thank you. 
Well, I do think there's a good framework for thinking. 
It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning. 
Generally I think there are — what I mean by that is, boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. 
Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations. 
And you have to do that. 
Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn't be able to get through the day. 
But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. 
Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. 
It's really counterintuitive. 
So I think that's an important thing to do, and then also to really pay attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends. 
This may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that, and it's incredibly helpful. 
CA: Boys and girls watching, study physics. 
Learn from this man. 
Elon Musk, I wish we had all day, but thank you so much for coming to TED. 
EM: Thank you. CA: That was awesome. That was really, really cool. 
Look at that. (Applause) Just take a bow. That was fantastic. 
Thank you so much. 

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

Intelligence — what is it? 
If we take a look back at the history of how intelligence has been viewed, one seminal example has been Edsger Dijkstra's famous quote that "" the question of whether a machine can think is about as interesting as the question of whether a submarine can swim. "" Now, Edsger Dijkstra, when he wrote this, intended it as a criticism of the early pioneers of computer science, like Alan Turing. 
However, if you take a look back and think about what have been the most empowering innovations that enabled us to build artificial machines that swim and artificial machines that [fly], you find that it was only through understanding the underlying physical mechanisms of swimming and flight that we were able to build these machines. 
And so, several years ago, I undertook a program to try to understand the fundamental physical mechanisms underlying intelligence. 
Let's take a step back. 
Let's first begin with a thought experiment. 
Pretend that you're an alien race that doesn't know anything about Earth biology or Earth neuroscience or Earth intelligence, but you have amazing telescopes and you're able to watch the Earth, and you have amazingly long lives, so you're able to watch the Earth over millions, even billions of years. 
And you observe a really strange effect. 
You observe that, over the course of the millennia, Earth is continually bombarded with asteroids up until a point, and that at some point, corresponding roughly to our year, 2000 AD, asteroids that are on a collision course with the Earth that otherwise would have collided mysteriously get deflected or they detonate before they can hit the Earth. 
Now of course, as earthlings, we know the reason would be that we're trying to save ourselves. 
We're trying to prevent an impact. 
But if you're an alien race who doesn't know any of this, doesn't have any concept of Earth intelligence, you'd be forced to put together a physical theory that explains how, up until a certain point in time, asteroids that would demolish the surface of a planet mysteriously stop doing that. 
And so I claim that this is the same question as understanding the physical nature of intelligence. 
So in this program that I undertook several years ago, I looked at a variety of different threads across science, across a variety of disciplines, that were pointing, I think, towards a single, underlying mechanism for intelligence. 
In cosmology, for example, there have been a variety of different threads of evidence that our universe appears to be finely tuned for the development of intelligence, and, in particular, for the development of universal states that maximize the diversity of possible futures. 
In game play, for example, in Go — everyone remembers in 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess — fewer people are aware that in the past 10 years or so, the game of Go, arguably a much more challenging game because it has a much higher branching factor, has also started to succumb to computer game players for the same reason: the best techniques right now for computers playing Go are techniques that try to maximize future options during game play. 
Finally, in robotic motion planning, there have been a variety of recent techniques that have tried to take advantage of abilities of robots to maximize future freedom of action in order to accomplish complex tasks. 
And so, taking all of these different threads and putting them together, I asked, starting several years ago, is there an underlying mechanism for intelligence that we can factor out of all of these different threads? 
Is there a single equation for intelligence? 
And the answer, I believe, is yes. ["" F = T ∇ Sτ ""] What you're seeing is probably the closest equivalent to an E = mc ² for intelligence that I've seen. 
So what you're seeing here is a statement of correspondence that intelligence is a force, F, that acts so as to maximize future freedom of action. 
It acts to maximize future freedom of action, or keep options open, with some strength T, with the diversity of possible accessible futures, S, up to some future time horizon, tau. 
In short, intelligence doesn't like to get trapped. 
Intelligence tries to maximize future freedom of action and keep options open. 
And so, given this one equation, it's natural to ask, so what can you do with this? 
How predictive is it? 
Does it predict human-level intelligence? 
Does it predict artificial intelligence? 
So I'm going to show you now a video that will, I think, demonstrate some of the amazing applications of just this single equation. 
(Video) Narrator: Recent research in cosmology has suggested that universes that produce more disorder, or "" entropy, "" over their lifetimes should tend to have more favorable conditions for the existence of intelligent beings such as ourselves. 
But what if that tentative cosmological connection between entropy and intelligence hints at a deeper relationship? 
What if intelligent behavior doesn't just correlate with the production of long-term entropy, but actually emerges directly from it? 
To find out, we developed a software engine called Entropica, designed to maximize the production of long-term entropy of any system that it finds itself in. 
Amazingly, Entropica was able to pass multiple animal intelligence tests, play human games, and even earn money trading stocks, all without being instructed to do so. 
Here are some examples of Entropica in action. 
Just like a human standing upright without falling over, here we see Entropica automatically balancing a pole using a cart. 
This behavior is remarkable in part because we never gave Entropica a goal. 
It simply decided on its own to balance the pole. 
This balancing ability will have appliactions for humanoid robotics and human assistive technologies. 
Just as some animals can use objects in their environments as tools to reach into narrow spaces, here we see that Entropica, again on its own initiative, was able to move a large disk representing an animal around so as to cause a small disk, representing a tool, to reach into a confined space holding a third disk and release the third disk from its initially fixed position. 
This tool use ability will have applications for smart manufacturing and agriculture. 
In addition, just as some other animals are able to cooperate by pulling opposite ends of a rope at the same time to release food, here we see that Entropica is able to accomplish a model version of that task. 
This cooperative ability has interesting implications for economic planning and a variety of other fields. 
Entropica is broadly applicable to a variety of domains. 
For example, here we see it successfully playing a game of pong against itself, illustrating its potential for gaming. 
Here we see Entropica orchestrating new connections on a social network where friends are constantly falling out of touch and successfully keeping the network well connected. 
This same network orchestration ability also has applications in health care, energy, and intelligence. 
Here we see Entropica directing the paths of a fleet of ships, successfully discovering and utilizing the Panama Canal to globally extend its reach from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 
By the same token, Entropica is broadly applicable to problems in autonomous defense, logistics and transportation. 
Finally, here we see Entropica spontaneously discovering and executing a buy-low, sell-high strategy on a simulated range traded stock, successfully growing assets under management exponentially. 
This risk management ability will have broad applications in finance and insurance. 
Alex Wissner-Gross: So what you've just seen is that a variety of signature human intelligent cognitive behaviors such as tool use and walking upright and social cooperation all follow from a single equation, which drives a system to maximize its future freedom of action. 
Now, there's a profound irony here. 
Going back to the beginning of the usage of the term robot, the play "" RUR, "" there was always a concept that if we developed machine intelligence, there would be a cybernetic revolt. 
The machines would rise up against us. 
One major consequence of this work is that maybe all of these decades, we've had the whole concept of cybernetic revolt in reverse. 
It's not that machines first become intelligent and then megalomaniacal and try to take over the world. 
It's quite the opposite, that the urge to take control of all possible futures is a more fundamental principle than that of intelligence, that general intelligence may in fact emerge directly from this sort of control-grabbing, rather than vice versa. 
Another important consequence is goal seeking. 
I'm often asked, how does the ability to seek goals follow from this sort of framework? 
And the answer is, the ability to seek goals will follow directly from this in the following sense: just like you would travel through a tunnel, a bottleneck in your future path space, in order to achieve many other diverse objectives later on, or just like you would invest in a financial security, reducing your short-term liquidity in order to increase your wealth over the long term, goal seeking emerges directly from a long-term drive to increase future freedom of action. 
Finally, Richard Feynman, famous physicist, once wrote that if human civilization were destroyed and you could pass only a single concept on to our descendants to help them rebuild civilization, that concept should be that all matter around us is made out of tiny elements that attract each other when they're far apart but repel each other when they're close together. 
My equivalent of that statement to pass on to descendants to help them build artificial intelligences or to help them understand human intelligence, is the following: Intelligence should be viewed as a physical process that tries to maximize future freedom of action and avoid constraints in its own future. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

When I was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were playing on top of a bunk bed. 
I was two years older than my sister at the time — I mean, I'm two years older than her now — but at the time it meant she had to do everything that I wanted to do, and I wanted to play war. 
So we were up on top of our bunk beds. 
There are differing accounts of what actually happened that afternoon, but since my sister is not here with us today, let me tell you the true story — (Laughter) which is my sister's a little on the clumsy side. 
I nervously peered over the side of the bed to see what had befallen my fallen sister and saw that she had landed painfully on her hands and knees on all fours on the ground. 
And seeing as how I had accidentally broken Amy's arm just one week before — (Laughter) (Laughter ends) heroically pushing her out of the way of an oncoming imaginary sniper bullet, (Laughter) for which I have yet to be thanked, I was trying as hard as I could — she didn't even see it coming — I was trying hard to be on my best behavior. 
Amy, I think this means you're a unicorn. "" (Laughter) Now, that was cheating, because there was nothing she would want more than not to be Amy the hurt five year-old little sister, but Amy the special unicorn. 
Instead of crying or ceasing our play, instead of waking my parents, with all the negative consequences for me, a smile spread across her face and she scrambled back up onto the bunk bed with all the grace of a baby unicorn — (Laughter) with one broken leg. 
This graph looks boring, but it is the reason I get excited and wake up every morning. 
What we found is — (Laughter) If I got this data studying you, I would be thrilled, because there's a trend there, and that means that I can get published, which is all that really matters. 
There is one weird red dot above the curve, there's one weirdo in the room — I know who you are, I saw you earlier — that's no problem. 
That's no problem, as most of you know, because I can just delete that dot. 
I can delete that dot because that's clearly a measurement error. 
But if I'm interested in your potential, or for happiness or productivity or energy or creativity, we're creating the cult of the average with science. 
If I asked a question like, "How fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom?" 
We're hoping for both because our business model is, if you come into a therapy session with one problem, we want to make sure you leave knowing you have ten, so you keep coming back. 
Bobo called me on the phone — (Laughter) from Yale Medical School, and Bobo said, "" Shawn, I have leprosy. "" (Laughter) Which, even at Yale, is extraordinarily rare. 
But I had no idea how to console poor Bobo because he had just gotten over an entire week of menopause. 
(Laughter) We're finding it's not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. 
(Laughter) I was an officer to counsel students through the difficult four years. 
What does a Harvard student possibly have to be unhappy about? "" Embedded within that question is the key to understanding the science of happiness. 
What we found is that only 25% of job successes are predicted by IQ, 75 percent of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat. 
And Friday night we're trying to decide between risky sex or happiness. "" (Laughter) I said, "" That's most people's Friday nights. "" (Laughter) (Applause) Which I'm glad you liked, but they did not like that at all. 
And into the silence, I said, "" I'd be happy to speak at your school, but that's not a wellness week, that's a sickness week. 
We need to be able to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of. 

My job at Twitter is to ensure user trust, protect user rights and keep users safe, both from each other and, at times, from themselves. 
Let's talk about what scale looks like at Twitter. 
Back in January 2009, we saw more than two million new tweets each day on the platform. 
January 2014, more than 500 million. 
We were seeing two million tweets in less than six minutes. 
That's a 24,900-percent increase. 
Now, the vast majority of activity on Twitter puts no one in harm's way. 
There's no risk involved. 
My job is to root out and prevent activity that might. 
Sounds straightforward, right? 
You might even think it'd be easy, given that I just said the vast majority of activity on Twitter puts no one in harm's way. 
Why spend so much time searching for potential calamities in innocuous activities? 
Given the scale that Twitter is at, a one-in-a-million chance happens 500 times a day. 
It's the same for other companies dealing at this sort of scale. 
For us, edge cases, those rare situations that are unlikely to occur, are more like norms. 
Say 99.999 percent of tweets pose no risk to anyone. 
There's no threat involved. 
Maybe people are documenting travel landmarks like Australia's Heart Reef, or tweeting about a concert they're attending, or sharing pictures of cute baby animals. 
After you take out that 99.999 percent, that tiny percentage of tweets remaining works out to roughly 150,000 per month. 
The sheer scale of what we're dealing with makes for a challenge. 
You know what else makes my role particularly challenging? 
People do weird things. 
(Laughter) And I have to figure out what they're doing, why, and whether or not there's risk involved, often without much in terms of context or background. 
I'm going to show you some examples that I've run into during my time at Twitter — these are all real examples — of situations that at first seemed cut and dried, but the truth of the matter was something altogether different. 
The details have been changed to protect the innocent and sometimes the guilty. 
We'll start off easy. 
["" Yo bitch ""] If you saw a Tweet that only said this, you might think to yourself, "That looks like abuse." 
After all, why would you want to receive the message, "Yo, bitch." 
Now, I try to stay relatively hip to the latest trends and memes, so I knew that "" yo, bitch "" was also often a common greeting between friends, as well as being a popular "" Breaking Bad "" reference. 
I will admit that I did not expect to encounter a fourth use case. 
It turns out it is also used on Twitter when people are role-playing as dogs. 
(Laughter) And in fact, in that case, it's not only not abusive, it's technically just an accurate greeting. (Laughter) 
So okay, determining whether or not something is abusive without context, definitely hard. 
Let's look at spam. 
Here's an example of an account engaged in classic spammer behavior, sending the exact same message to thousands of people. 
While this is a mockup I put together using my account, we see accounts doing this all the time. 
Seems pretty straightforward. 
We should just automatically suspend accounts engaging in this kind of behavior. 
Turns out there's some exceptions to that rule. 
Turns out that that message could also be a notification you signed up for that the International Space Station is passing overhead because you wanted to go outside and see if you could see it. 
You're not going to get that chance if we mistakenly suspend the account thinking it's spam. 
Okay. Let's make the stakes higher. 
Back to my account, again exhibiting classic behavior. 
This time it's sending the same message and link. 
This is often indicative of something called phishing, somebody trying to steal another person's account information by directing them to another website. 
That's pretty clearly not a good thing. 
We want to, and do, suspend accounts engaging in that kind of behavior. 
So why are the stakes higher for this? 
Well, this could also be a bystander at a rally who managed to record a video of a police officer beating a non-violent protester who's trying to let the world know what's happening. 
We don't want to gamble on potentially silencing that crucial speech by classifying it as spam and suspending it. 
That means we evaluate hundreds of parameters when looking at account behaviors, and even then, we can still get it wrong and have to reevaluate. 
Now, given the sorts of challenges I'm up against, it's crucial that I not only predict but also design protections for the unexpected. 
And that's not just an issue for me, or for Twitter, it's an issue for you. 
It's an issue for anybody who's building or creating something that you think is going to be amazing and will let people do awesome things. 
So what do I do? 
I pause and I think, how could all of this go horribly wrong? 
I visualize catastrophe. 
And that's hard. There's a sort of inherent cognitive dissonance in doing that, like when you're writing your wedding vows at the same time as your prenuptial agreement. 
(Laughter) But you still have to do it, particularly if you're marrying 500 million tweets per day. 
What do I mean by "" visualize catastrophe? "" I try to think of how something as benign and innocuous as a picture of a cat could lead to death, and what to do to prevent that. 
Which happens to be my next example. 
This is my cat, Eli. 
We wanted to give users the ability to add photos to their tweets. 
A picture is worth a thousand words. 
You only get 140 characters. 
You add a photo to your tweet, look at how much more content you've got now. 
There's all sorts of great things you can do by adding a photo to a tweet. 
My job isn't to think of those. 
It's to think of what could go wrong. 
How could this picture lead to my death? 
Well, here's one possibility. 
There's more in that picture than just a cat. 
There's geodata. 
When you take a picture with your smartphone or digital camera, there's a lot of additional information saved along in that image. 
In fact, this image also contains the equivalent of this, more specifically, this. 
Sure, it's not likely that someone's going to try to track me down and do me harm based upon image data associated with a picture I took of my cat, but I start by assuming the worst will happen. 
That's why, when we launched photos on Twitter, we made the decision to strip that geodata out. 
(Applause) If I start by assuming the worst and work backwards, I can make sure that the protections we build work for both expected and unexpected use cases. 
Given that I spend my days and nights imagining the worst that could happen, it wouldn't be surprising if my worldview was gloomy. 
(Laughter) It's not. 
The vast majority of interactions I see — and I see a lot, believe me — are positive, people reaching out to help or to connect or share information with each other. 
It's just that for those of us dealing with scale, for those of us tasked with keeping people safe, we have to assume the worst will happen, because for us, a one-in-a-million chance is pretty good odds. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

For me, this story begins about 15 years ago, when I was a hospice doctor at the University of Chicago. 
And I was taking care of people who were dying and their families in the South Side of Chicago. 
And I was observing what happened to people and their families over the course of their terminal illness. 
And in my lab, I was studying the widower effect, which is a very old idea in the social sciences, going back 150 years, known as "" dying of a broken heart. "" So, when I die, my wife's risk of death can double, for instance, in the first year. 
And I had gone to take care of one particular patient, a woman who was dying of dementia. 
And in this case, unlike this couple, she was being cared for by her daughter. 
And the daughter was exhausted from caring for her mother. 
And the daughter's husband, he also was sick from his wife's exhaustion. 
And I was driving home one day, and I get a phone call from the husband's friend, calling me because he was depressed about what was happening to his friend. 
So here I get this call from this random guy that's having an experience that's being influenced by people at some social distance. 
And so I suddenly realized two very simple things: First, the widowhood effect was not restricted to husbands and wives. 
And second, it was not restricted to pairs of people. 
And I started to see the world in a whole new way, like pairs of people connected to each other. 
And then I realized that these individuals would be connected into foursomes with other pairs of people nearby. 
And then, in fact, these people were embedded in other sorts of relationships: marriage and spousal and friendship and other sorts of ties. 
And that, in fact, these connections were vast and that we were all embedded in this broad set of connections with each other. 
So I started to see the world in a completely new way and I became obsessed with this. 
I became obsessed with how it might be that we're embedded in these social networks, and how they affect our lives. 
So, social networks are these intricate things of beauty, and they're so elaborate and so complex and so ubiquitous, in fact, that one has to ask what purpose they serve. 
Why are we embedded in social networks? 
I mean, how do they form? How do they operate? 
And how do they effect us? 
So my first topic with respect to this, was not death, but obesity. 
It had become trendy to speak about the "" obesity epidemic. "" And, along with my collaborator, James Fowler, we began to wonder whether obesity really was epidemic and could it spread from person to person like the four people I discussed earlier. 
So this is a slide of some of our initial results. 
It's 2,200 people in the year 2000. 
Every dot is a person. We make the dot size proportional to people's body size; so bigger dots are bigger people. 
In addition, if your body size, if your BMI, your body mass index, is above 30 — if you're clinically obese — we also colored the dots yellow. 
So, if you look at this image, right away you might be able to see that there are clusters of obese and non-obese people in the image. 
But the visual complexity is still very high. 
It's not obvious exactly what's going on. 
In addition, some questions are immediately raised: How much clustering is there? 
Is there more clustering than would be due to chance alone? 
How big are the clusters? How far do they reach? 
And, most importantly, what causes the clusters? 
So we did some mathematics to study the size of these clusters. 
This here shows, on the Y-axis, the increase in the probability that a person is obese given that a social contact of theirs is obese and, on the X-axis, the degrees of separation between the two people. 
On the far left, you see the purple line. 
It says that, if your friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 45 percent higher. 
And the next bar over, the [red] line, says if your friend's friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 25 percent higher. 
And then the next line over says if your friend's friend's friend, someone you probably don't even know, is obese, your risk of obesity is 10 percent higher. 
And it's only when you get to your friend's friend's friend's friends that there's no longer a relationship between that person's body size and your own body size. 
Well, what might be causing this clustering? 
There are at least three possibilities: One possibility is that, as I gain weight, it causes you to gain weight. 
A kind of induction, a kind of spread from person to person. 
Another possibility, very obvious, is homophily, or, birds of a feather flock together; here, I form my tie to you because you and I share a similar body size. 
And the last possibility is what is known as confounding, because it confounds our ability to figure out what's going on. 
And here, the idea is not that my weight gain is causing your weight gain, nor that I preferentially form a tie with you because you and I share the same body size, but rather that we share a common exposure to something, like a health club that makes us both lose weight at the same time. 
When we studied these data, we found evidence for all of these things, including for induction. 
And we found that if your friend becomes obese, it increases your risk of obesity by about 57 percent in the same given time period. 
There can be many mechanisms for this effect: One possibility is that your friends say to you something like — you know, they adopt a behavior that spreads to you — like, they say, "" Let's go have muffins and beer, "" which is a terrible combination. (Laughter) But you adopt that combination, and then you start gaining weight like them. 
Another more subtle possibility is that they start gaining weight, and it changes your ideas of what an acceptable body size is. 
Here, what's spreading from person to person is not a behavior, but rather a norm: An idea is spreading. 
Now, headline writers had a field day with our studies. 
I think the headline in The New York Times was, "" Are you packing it on? 
Blame your fat friends. "" (Laughter) What was interesting to us is that the European headline writers had a different take: They said, "Are your friends gaining weight? Perhaps you are to blame." (Laughter) 
And we thought this was a very interesting comment on America, and a kind of self-serving, "" not my responsibility "" kind of phenomenon. 
Now, I want to be very clear: We do not think our work should or could justify prejudice against people of one or another body size at all. 
Our next questions was: Could we actually visualize this spread? 
Was weight gain in one person actually spreading to weight gain in another person? 
And this was complicated because we needed to take into account the fact that the network structure, the architecture of the ties, was changing across time. 
In addition, because obesity is not a unicentric epidemic, there's not a Patient Zero of the obesity epidemic — if we find that guy, there was a spread of obesity out from him — it's a multicentric epidemic. 
Lots of people are doing things at the same time. 
And I'm about to show you a 30 second video animation that took me and James five years of our lives to do. 
So, again, every dot is a person. 
Every tie between them is a relationship. 
We're going to put this into motion now, taking daily cuts through the network for about 30 years. 
The dot sizes are going to grow, you're going to see a sea of yellow take over. 
You're going to see people be born and die — dots will appear and disappear — ties will form and break, marriages and divorces, friendings and defriendings. 
A lot of complexity, a lot is happening just in this 30-year period that includes the obesity epidemic. 
And, by the end, you're going to see clusters of obese and non-obese individuals within the network. 
Now, when looked at this, it changed the way I see things, because this thing, this network that's changing across time, it has a memory, it moves, things flow within it, it has a kind of consistency — people can die, but it doesn't die; it still persists — and it has a kind of resilience that allows it to persist across time. 
And so, I came to see these kinds of social networks as living things, as living things that we could put under a kind of microscope to study and analyze and understand. 
And we used a variety of techniques to do this. 
And we started exploring all kinds of other phenomena. 
We looked at smoking and drinking behavior, and voting behavior, and divorce — which can spread — and altruism. 
And, eventually, we became interested in emotions. 
Now, when we have emotions, we show them. 
Why do we show our emotions? 
I mean, there would be an advantage to experiencing our emotions inside, you know, anger or happiness. 
But we don't just experience them, we show them. 
And not only do we show them, but others can read them. 
And, not only can they read them, but they copy them. 
There's emotional contagion that takes place in human populations. 
And so this function of emotions suggests that, in addition to any other purpose they serve, they're a kind of primitive form of communication. 
And that, in fact, if we really want to understand human emotions, we need to think about them in this way. 
Now, we're accustomed to thinking about emotions in this way, in simple, sort of, brief periods of time. 
So, for example, I was giving this talk recently in New York City, and I said, "" You know when you're on the subway and the other person across the subway car smiles at you, and you just instinctively smile back? "" And they looked at me and said, "" We don't do that in New York City. "" (Laughter) And I said, "" Everywhere else in the world, that's normal human behavior. "" And so there's a very instinctive way in which we briefly transmit emotions to each other. 
And, in fact, emotional contagion can be broader still. 
Like we could have punctuated expressions of anger, as in riots. 
The question that we wanted to ask was: Could emotion spread, in a more sustained way than riots, across time and involve large numbers of people, not just this pair of individuals smiling at each other in the subway car? 
Maybe there's a kind of below the surface, quiet riot that animates us all the time. 
Maybe there are emotional stampedes that ripple through social networks. 
Maybe, in fact, emotions have a collective existence, not just an individual existence. 
And this is one of the first images we made to study this phenomenon. 
Again, a social network, but now we color the people yellow if they're happy and blue if they're sad and green in between. 
And if you look at this image, you can right away see clusters of happy and unhappy people, again, spreading to three degrees of separation. 
And you might form the intuition that the unhappy people occupy a different structural location within the network. 
There's a middle and an edge to this network, and the unhappy people seem to be located at the edges. 
So to invoke another metaphor, if you imagine social networks as a kind of vast fabric of humanity — I'm connected to you and you to her, on out endlessly into the distance — this fabric is actually like an old-fashioned American quilt, and it has patches on it: happy and unhappy patches. 
And whether you become happy or not depends in part on whether you occupy a happy patch. 
(Laughter) So, this work with emotions, which are so fundamental, then got us to thinking about: Maybe the fundamental causes of human social networks are somehow encoded in our genes. 
Because human social networks, whenever they are mapped, always kind of look like this: the picture of the network. 
But they never look like this. 
Why do they not look like this? 
Why don't we form human social networks that look like a regular lattice? 
Well, the striking patterns of human social networks, their ubiquity and their apparent purpose beg questions about whether we evolved to have human social networks in the first place, and whether we evolved to form networks with a particular structure. 
And notice first of all — so, to understand this, though, we need to dissect network structure a little bit first — and notice that every person in this network has exactly the same structural location as every other person. 
But that's not the case with real networks. 
So, for example, here is a real network of college students at an elite northeastern university. 
And now I'm highlighting a few dots. 
If you look here at the dots, compare node B in the upper left to node D in the far right; B has four friends coming out from him and D has six friends coming out from him. 
And so, those two individuals have different numbers of friends. 
That's very obvious, we all know that. 
But certain other aspects of social network structure are not so obvious. 
Compare node B in the upper left to node A in the lower left. 
Now, those people both have four friends, but A's friends all know each other, and B's friends do not. 
So the friend of a friend of A's is, back again, a friend of A's, whereas the friend of a friend of B's is not a friend of B's, but is farther away in the network. 
This is known as transitivity in networks. 
And, finally, compare nodes C and D: C and D both have six friends. 
If you talk to them, and you said, "" What is your social life like? "" they would say, "" I've got six friends. 
That's my social experience. "" But now we, with a bird's eye view looking at this network, can see that they occupy very different social worlds. 
And I can cultivate that intuition in you by just asking you: Who would you rather be if a deadly germ was spreading through the network? 
Would you rather be C or D? 
You'd rather be D, on the edge of the network. 
And now who would you rather be if a juicy piece of gossip — not about you — was spreading through the network? (Laughter) Now, you would rather be C. 
So different structural locations have different implications for your life. 
And, in fact, when we did some experiments looking at this, what we found is that 46 percent of the variation in how many friends you have is explained by your genes. 
And this is not surprising. We know that some people are born shy and some are born gregarious. That's obvious. 
But we also found some non-obvious things. 
For instance, 47 percent in the variation in whether your friends know each other is attributable to your genes. 
Whether your friends know each other has not just to do with their genes, but with yours. 
And we think the reason for this is that some people like to introduce their friends to each other — you know who you are — and others of you keep them apart and don't introduce your friends to each other. 
And so some people knit together the networks around them, creating a kind of dense web of ties in which they're comfortably embedded. 
And finally, we even found that 30 percent of the variation in whether or not people are in the middle or on the edge of the network can also be attributed to their genes. 
So whether you find yourself in the middle or on the edge is also partially heritable. 
Now, what is the point of this? 
How does this help us understand? How does this help us 
figure out some of the problems that are affecting us these days? 
Well, the argument I'd like to make is that networks have value. 
They are a kind of social capital. 
New properties emerge because of our embeddedness in social networks, and these properties inhere in the structure of the networks, not just in the individuals within them. 
So think about these two common objects. 
They're both made of carbon, and yet one of them has carbon atoms in it that are arranged in one particular way — on the left — and you get graphite, which is soft and dark. 
But if you take the same carbon atoms and interconnect them a different way, you get diamond, which is clear and hard. 
And those properties of softness and hardness and darkness and clearness do not reside in the carbon atoms; they reside in the interconnections between the carbon atoms, or at least arise because of the interconnections between the carbon atoms. 
So, similarly, the pattern of connections among people confers upon the groups of people different properties. 
It is the ties between people that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. 
And so it is not just what's happening to these people — whether they're losing weight or gaining weight, or becoming rich or becoming poor, or becoming happy or not becoming happy — that affects us; it's also the actual architecture of the ties around us. 
Our experience of the world depends on the actual structure of the networks in which we're residing and on all the kinds of things that ripple and flow through the network. 
Now, the reason, I think, that this is the case is that human beings assemble themselves and form a kind of superorganism. 
Now, a superorganism is a collection of individuals which show or evince behaviors or phenomena that are not reducible to the study of individuals and that must be understood by reference to, and by studying, the collective. 
Like, for example, a hive of bees that's finding a new nesting site, or a flock of birds that's evading a predator, or a flock of birds that's able to pool its wisdom and navigate and find a tiny speck of an island in the middle of the Pacific, or a pack of wolves that's able to bring down larger prey. 
Superorganisms have properties that cannot be understood just by studying the individuals. 
I think understanding social networks and how they form and operate can help us understand not just health and emotions but all kinds of other phenomena — like crime, and warfare, and economic phenomena like bank runs and market crashes and the adoption of innovation and the spread of product adoption. 
Now, look at this. 
I think we form social networks because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. 
If I was always violent towards you or gave you misinformation or made you sad or infected you with deadly germs, you would cut the ties to me, and the network would disintegrate. 
So the spread of good and valuable things is required to sustain and nourish social networks. 
Similarly, social networks are required for the spread of good and valuable things, like love and kindness and happiness and altruism and ideas. 
I think, in fact, that if we realized how valuable social networks are, we'd spend a lot more time nourishing them and sustaining them, because I think social networks are fundamentally related to goodness. 
And what I think the world needs now is more connections. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

As humans, it's in our nature to want to improve our health and minimize our suffering. 
Whatever life throws at us, whether it's cancer, diabetes, heart disease, or even broken bones, we want to try and get better. 
Now I'm head of a biomaterials lab, and I'm really fascinated by the way that humans have used materials in really creative ways in the body over time. 
Take, for example, this beautiful blue nacre shell. 
This was actually used by the Mayans as an artificial tooth replacement. 
We're not quite sure why they did it. 
It's hard. It's durable. 
But it also had other very nice properties. 
In fact, when they put it into the jawbone, it could integrate into the jaw, and we know now with very sophisticated imaging technologies that part of that integration comes from the fact that this material is designed in a very specific way, has a beautiful chemistry, has a beautiful architecture. 
And I think in many ways we can sort of think of the use of the blue nacre shell and the Mayans as the first real application of the bluetooth technology. 
(Laughter) But if we move on and think throughout history how people have used different materials in the body, very often it's been physicians that have been quite creative. 
They've taken things off the shelf. 
One of my favorite examples is that of Sir Harold Ridley, who was a famous ophthalmologist, or at least became a famous ophthalmologist. 
And during World War II, what he would see would be pilots coming back from their missions, and he noticed that within their eyes they had shards of small bits of material lodged within the eye, but the very interesting thing about it was that material, actually, wasn't causing any inflammatory response. 
So he looked into this, and he figured out that actually that material was little shards of plastic that were coming from the canopy of the Spitfires. 
And this led him to propose that material as a new material for intraocular lenses. 
It's called PMMA, and it's now used in millions of people every year and helps in preventing cataracts. 
And that example, I think, is a really nice one, because it helps remind us that in the early days, people often chose materials because they were bioinert. 
Their very purpose was to perform a mechanical function. 
You'd put them in the body and you wouldn't get an adverse response. 
And what I want to show you is that in regenerative medicine, we've really shifted away from that idea of taking a bioinert material. 
We're actually actively looking for materials that will be bioactive, that will interact with the body, and that furthermore we can put in the body, they'll have their function, and then they'll dissolve away over time. 
If we look at this schematic, this is showing you what we think of as the typical tissue-engineering approach. 
We have cells there, typically from the patient. 
We can put those onto a material, and we can make that material very complex if we want to, and we can then grow that up in the lab or we can put it straight back into the patient. 
And this is an approach that's used all over the world, including in our lab. 
But one of the things that's really important when we're thinking about stem cells is that obviously stem cells can be many different things, and they want to be many different things, and so we want to make sure that the environment we put them into has enough information so that they can become the right sort of specialist tissue. 
And if we think about the different types of tissues that people are looking at regenerating all over the world, in all the different labs in the world, there's pretty much every tissue you can think of. 
And actually, the structure of those tissues is quite different, and it's going to really depend on whether your patient has any underlying disease, other conditions, in terms of how you're going to regenerate your tissue, and you're going to need to think about the materials you're going to use really carefully, their biochemistry, their mechanics, and many other properties as well. 
Our tissues all have very different abilities to regenerate, and here we see poor Prometheus, who made a rather tricky career choice and was punished by the Greek gods. 
He was tied to a rock, and an eagle would come every day to eat his liver. 
But of course his liver would regenerate every day, and so day after day he was punished for eternity by the gods. 
And liver will regenerate in this very nice way, but actually if we think of other tissues, like cartilage, for example, even the simplest nick and you're going to find it really difficult to regenerate your cartilage. 
So it's going to be very different from tissue to tissue. 
Now, bone is somewhere in between, and this is one of the tissues that we work on a lot in our lab. 
And bone is actually quite good at repairing. 
It has to be. We've probably all had fractures at some point or other. 
And one of the ways that you can think about repairing your fracture is this procedure here, called an iliac crest harvest. 
And what the surgeon might do is take some bone from your iliac crest, which is just here, and then transplant that somewhere else in the body. 
And it actually works really well, because it's your own bone, and it's well vascularized, which means it's got a really good blood supply. 
But the problem is, there's only so much you can take, and also when you do that operation, your patients might actually have significant pain in that defect site even two years after the operation. 
So what we were thinking is, there's a tremendous need for bone repair, of course, but this iliac crest-type approach really has a lot of limitations to it, and could we perhaps recreate the generation of bone within the body on demand and then be able to transplant it without these very, very painful aftereffects that you would have with the iliac crest harvest? 
And so this is what we did, and the way we did it was by coming back to this typical tissue-engineering approach but actually thinking about it rather differently. 
And we simplified it a lot, so we got rid of a lot of these steps. 
We got rid of the need to harvest cells from the patient, we got rid of the need to put in really fancy chemistries, and we got rid of the need to culture these scaffolds in the lab. 
And what we really focused on was our material system and making it quite simple, but because we used it in a really clever way, we were able to generate enormous amounts of bone using this approach. 
So we were using the body as really the catalyst to help us to make lots of new bone. 
And it's an approach that we call the in vivo bioreactor, and we were able to make enormous amounts of bone using this approach. 
And I'll talk you through this. 
So what we do is, in humans, we all have a layer of stem cells on the outside of our long bones. 
That layer is called the periosteum. 
And that layer is actually normally very, very tightly bound to the underlying bone, and it's got stem cells in it. 
Those stem cells are really important in the embryo when it develops, and they also sort of wake up if you have a fracture to help you with repairing the bone. 
So we take that periosteum layer and we developed a way to inject underneath it a liquid that then, within 30 seconds, would turn into quite a rigid gel and can actually lift the periosteum away from the bone. 
So it creates, in essence, an artificial cavity that is right next to both the bone but also this really rich layer of stem cells. 
And we go in through a pinhole incision so that no other cells from the body can get in, and what happens is that that artificial in vivo bioreactor cavity can then lead to the proliferation of these stem cells, and they can form lots of new tissue, and then over time, you can harvest that tissue and use it elsewhere in the body. 
This is a histology slide of what we see when we do that, and essentially what we see is very large amounts of bone. 
So in this picture, you can see the middle of the leg, so the bone marrow, then you can see the original bone, and you can see where that original bone finishes, and just to the left of that is the new bone that's grown within that bioreactor cavity, and you can actually make it even larger. 
And that demarcation that you can see between the original bone and the new bone acts as a very slight point of weakness, so actually now the surgeon can come along, can harvest away that new bone, and the periosteum can grow back, so you're left with the leg in the same sort of state as if you hadn't operated on it in the first place. 
So it's very, very low in terms of after-pain compared to an iliac crest harvest. 
And you can grow different amounts of bone depending on how much gel you put in there, so it really is an on demand sort of procedure. 
Now, at the time that we did this, this received a lot of attention in the press, because it was a really nice way of generating new bone, and we got many, many contacts from different people that were interested in using this. 
And I'm just going to tell you, sometimes those contacts are very strange, slightly unexpected, and the very most interesting, let me put it that way, contact that I had, was actually from a team of American footballers that all wanted to have double-thickness skulls made on their head. 
And so you do get these kinds of contacts, and of course, being British and also growing up in France, I tend to be very blunt, and so I had to explain to them very nicely that in their particular case, there probably wasn't that much in there to protect in the first place. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So this was our approach, and it was simple materials, but we thought about it carefully. 
And actually we know that those cells in the body, in the embryo, as they develop can form a different kind of tissue, cartilage, and so we developed a gel that was slightly different in nature and slightly different chemistry, put it in there, and we were able to get 100 percent cartilage instead. 
And this approach works really well, I think, for pre-planned procedures, but it's something you do have to pre-plan. 
So for other kinds of operations, there's definitely a need for other scaffold-based approaches. 
And when you think about designing those other scaffolds, actually, you need a really multi-disciplinary team. 
And so our team has chemists, it has cell biologists, surgeons, physicists even, and those people all come together and we think really hard about designing the materials. 
But we want to make them have enough information that we can get the cells to do what we want, but not be so complex as to make it difficult to get to clinic. 
And so one of the things we think about a lot is really trying to understand the structure of the tissues in the body. 
And so if we think of bone, obviously my own favorite tissue, we zoom in, we can see, even if you don't know anything about bone structure, it's beautifully organized, really beautifully organized. 
We've lots of blood vessels in there. 
And if we zoom in again, we see that the cells are actually surrounded by a 3D matrix of nano-scale fibers, and they give a lot of information to the cells. And if we zoom in again, 
actually in the case of bone, the matrix around the cells is beautifully organized at the nano scale, and it's a hybrid material that's part organic, part inorganic. 
And that's led to a whole field, really, that has looked at developing materials that have this hybrid kind of structure. 
And so I'm showing here just two examples where we've made some materials that have that sort of structure, and you can really tailor it. 
You can see here a very squishy one and now a material that's also this hybrid sort of material but actually has remarkable toughness, and it's no longer brittle. 
And an inorganic material would normally be really brittle, and you wouldn't be able to have that sort of strength and toughness in it. 
One other thing I want to quickly mention is that many of the scaffolds we make are porous, and they have to be, because you want blood vessels to grow in there. 
But the pores are actually oftentimes much bigger than the cells, and so even though it's 3D, the cell might see it more as a slightly curved surface, and that's a little bit unnatural. 
And so one of the things you can think about doing is actually making scaffolds with slightly different dimensions that might be able to surround your cells in 3D and give them a little bit more information. 
And there's a lot of work going on in both of these areas. 
Now finally, I just want to talk a little bit about applying this sort of thing to cardiovascular disease, because this is a really big clinical problem. 
And one of the things that we know is that, unfortunately, if you have a heart attack, then that tissue can start to die, and your outcome may not be very good over time. 
And it would be really great, actually, if we could stop that dead tissue either from dying or help it to regenerate. 
And there's lots and lots of stem cell trials going on worldwide, and they use many different types of cells, but one common theme that seems to be coming out is that actually, very often, those cells will die once you've implanted them. 
And you can either put them into the heart or into the blood system, but either way, we don't seem to be able to get quite the right number of cells getting to the location we want them to and being able to deliver the sort of beautiful cell regeneration that we would like to have to get good clinical outcomes. 
And so some of the things that we're thinking of, and many other people in the field are thinking of, are actually developing materials for that. 
But there's a difference here. 
We still need chemistry, we still need mechanics, we still need really interesting topography, and we still need really interesting ways to surround the cells. 
But now, the cells also would probably quite like a material that's going to be able to be conductive, because the cells themselves will respond very well and will actually conduct signals between themselves. 
You can see them now beating synchronously on these materials, and that's a very, very exciting development that's going on. 
So just to wrap up, I'd like to actually say that being able to work in this sort of field, all of us that work in this field that's not only super-exciting science, but also has the potential to impact on patients, however big or small they are, is really a great privilege. 
And so for that, I'd like to thank all of you as well. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

We are stealing nature from our children. 
Now, when I say this, I don't mean that we are destroying nature that they will have wanted us to preserve, although that is unfortunately also the case. 
What I mean here is that we've started to define nature in a way that's so purist and so strict that under the definition we're creating for ourselves, there won't be any nature left for our children when they're adults. 
But there's a fix for this. 
So let me explain. 
Right now, humans use half of the world to live, to grow their crops and their timber, to pasture their animals. 
If you added up all the human beings, we would weigh 10 times as much as all the wild mammals put together. 
We cut roads through the forest. 
We have added little plastic particles to the sand on ocean beaches. 
We've changed the chemistry of the soil with our artificial fertilizers. 
And of course, we've changed the chemistry of the air. 
So when you take your next breath, you'll be breathing in 42 percent more carbon dioxide than if you were breathing in 1750. 
So all of these changes, and many others, have come to be kind of lumped together under this rubric of the "" Anthropocene. "" And this is a term that some geologists are suggesting we should give to our current epoch, given how pervasive human influence has been over it. 
Now, it's still just a proposed epoch, but I think it's a helpful way to think about the magnitude of human influence on the planet. 
So where does this put nature? 
What counts as nature in a world where everything is influenced by humans? 
So 25 years ago, environmental writer Bill McKibben said that because nature was a thing apart from man and because climate change meant that every centimeter of the Earth was altered by man, then nature was over. 
In fact, he called his book "" The End of Nature. "" I disagree with this. I just disagree with this. 
I disagree with this definition of nature, because, fundamentally, we are animals. 
Right? Like, we evolved on this planet in the context of all the other animals with which we share a planet, and all the other plants, and all the other microbes. 
And so I think that nature is not that which is untouched by humanity, man or woman. 
I think that nature is anywhere where life thrives, anywhere where there are multiple species together, anywhere that's green and blue and thriving and filled with life and growing. 
And under that definition, things look a little bit different. 
Now, I understand that there are certain parts of this nature that speak to us in a special way. 
Places like Yellowstone, or the Mongolian steppe, or the Great Barrier Reef or the Serengeti. 
Places that we think of as kind of Edenic representations of a nature before we screwed everything up. 
And in a way, they are less impacted by our day to day activities. 
Many of these places have no roads or few roads, so on, like such. 
But ultimately, even these Edens are deeply influenced by humans. 
Now, let's just take North America, for example, since that's where we're meeting. 
So between about 15,000 years ago when people first came here, they started a process of interacting with the nature that led to the extinction of a big slew of large-bodied animals, from the mastodon to the giant ground sloth, saber-toothed cats, all of these cool animals that unfortunately are no longer with us. 
And when those animals went extinct, you know, the ecosystems didn't stand still. 
Massive ripple effects changed grasslands into forests, changed the composition of forest from one tree to another. 
So even in these Edens, even in these perfect-looking places that seem to remind us of a past before humans, we're essentially looking at a humanized landscape. 
Not just these prehistoric humans, but historical humans, indigenous people all the way up until the moment when the first colonizers showed up. 
And the case is the same for the other continents as well. 
Humans have just been involved in nature in a very influential way for a very long time. 
Now, just recently, someone told me, "Oh, but there are still wild places." 
And I said, "" Where? Where? I want to go. "" And he said, "" The Amazon. "" And I was like, "" Oh, the Amazon. I was just there. 
It's awesome. National Geographic sent me to Manú National Park, which is in the Peruvian Amazon, but it's a big chunk of rainforest, uncleared, no roads, protected as a national park, one of the most, in fact, biodiverse parks in the world. 
And when I got in there with my canoe, what did I find, but people. 
People have been living there for hundreds and thousands of years. 
People live there, and they don't just float over the jungle. 
They have a meaningful relationship with the landscape. 
They hunt. They grow crops. 
They domesticate crops. 
They use the natural resources to build their houses, to thatch their houses. 
They even make pets out of animals that we consider to be wild animals. 
These people are there and they're interacting with the environment in a way that's really meaningful and that you can see in the environment. 
Now, I was with an anthropologist on this trip, and he told me, as we were floating down the river, he said, "" There are no demographic voids in the Amazon. "" This statement has really stuck with me, because what it means is that the whole Amazon is like this. 
There's people everywhere. 
And many other tropical forests are the same, and not just tropical forests. 
People have influenced ecosystems in the past, and they continue to influence them in the present, even in places where they're harder to notice. 
So, if all of the definitions of nature that we might want to use that involve it being untouched by humanity or not having people in it, if all of those actually give us a result where we don't have any nature, then maybe they're the wrong definitions. 
Maybe we should define it by the presence of multiple species, by the presence of a thriving life. 
Now, if we do it that way, what do we get? 
Well, it's this kind of miracle. 
All of a sudden, there's nature all around us. 
All of a sudden, we see this Monarch caterpillar munching on this plant, and we realize that there it is, and it's in this empty lot in Chattanooga. 
And look at this empty lot. 
I mean, there's, like, probably, a dozen, minimum, plant species growing there, supporting all kinds of insect life, and this is a completely unmanaged space, a completely wild space. 
This is a kind of wild nature right under our nose, that we don't even notice. 
And there's an interesting little paradox, too. 
So this nature, this kind of wild, untended part of our urban, peri-urban, suburban agricultural existence that flies under the radar, it's arguably more wild than a national park, because national parks are very carefully managed in the 21st century. 
Crater Lake in southern Oregon, which is my closest national park, is a beautiful example of a landscape that seems to be coming out of the past. 
But they're managing it carefully. 
One of the issues they have now is white bark pine die-off. 
White bark pine is a beautiful, charismatic — I'll say it's a charismatic megaflora that grows up at high altitude — and it's got all these problems right now with disease. 
There's a blister rust that was introduced, bark beetle. 
So to deal with this, the park service has been planting rust-resistant white bark pine seedlings in the park, even in areas that they are otherwise managing as wilderness. 
And they're also putting out beetle repellent in key areas as I saw last time I went hiking there. 
And this kind of thing is really much more common than you would think. 
National parks are heavily managed. 
The wildlife is kept to a certain population size and structure. 
Fires are suppressed. 
Fires are started. 
Non-native species are removed. 
Native species are reintroduced. 
And in fact, I took a look, and Banff National Park is doing all of the things I just listed: suppressing fire, having fire, radio-collaring wolves, reintroducing bison. 
It takes a lot of work to make these places look untouched. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And in a further irony, these places that we love the most are the places that we love a little too hard, sometimes. 
A lot of us like to go there, and because we're managing them to be stable in the face of a changing planet, they often are becoming more fragile over time. 
Which means that they're the absolute worst places to take your children on vacation, because you can't do anything there. 
You can't climb the trees. 
You can't fish the fish. 
You can't make a campfire out in the middle of nowhere. 
You can't take home the pinecones. 
There are so many rules and restrictions that from a child's point of view, this is, like, the worst nature ever. 
Because children don't want to hike through a beautiful landscape for five hours and then look at a beautiful view. 
That's maybe what we want to do as adults, but what kids want to do is hunker down in one spot and just tinker with it, just work with it, just pick it up, build a house, build a fort, do something like that. 
Additionally, these sort of Edenic places are often distant from where people live. 
And they're expensive to get to. They're hard to visit. 
So this means that they're only available to the elites, and that's a real problem. 
The Nature Conservancy did a survey of young people, and they asked them, how often do you spend time outdoors? 
And only two out of five spent time outdoors at least once a week. 
The other three out of five were just staying inside. 
And when they asked them why, what are the barriers to going outside, the response of 61 percent was, "There are no natural areas near my home." 
And this is crazy. This is just patently false. 
I mean, 71 percent of people in the US live within a 10-minute walk of a city park. 
And I'm sure the figures are similar in other countries. 
And that doesn't even count your back garden, the urban creek, the empty lot. 
Everybody lives near nature. 
Every kid lives near nature. 
We've just somehow forgotten how to see it. 
We've spent too much time watching David Attenborough documentaries where the nature is really sexy — (Laughter) and we've forgotten how to see the nature that is literally right outside our door, the nature of the street tree. 
So here's an example: Philadelphia. 
There's this cool elevated railway that you can see from the ground, that's been abandoned. 
Now, this may sound like the beginning of the High Line story in Manhattan, and it's very similar, except they haven't developed this into a park yet, although they're working on it. 
So for now, it's still this little sort of secret wilderness in the heart of Philadelphia, and if you know where the hole is in the chain-link fence, you can scramble up to the top and you can find this completely wild meadow just floating above the city of Philadelphia. 
Every single one of these plants grew from a seed that planted itself there. 
This is completely autonomous, self-willed nature. 
And it's right in the middle of the city. 
And they've sent people up there to do sort of biosurveys, and there are over 50 plant species up there. 
And it's not just plants. 
This is an ecosystem, a functioning ecosystem. 
It's creating soil. It's sequestering carbon. 
There's pollination going on. 
I mean, this is really an ecosystem. 
So scientists have started calling ecosystems like these "" novel ecosystems, "" because they're often dominated by non-native species, and because they're just super weird. 
They're just unlike anything we've ever seen before. 
For so long, we dismissed all these novel ecosystems as trash. 
We're talking about regrown agricultural fields, timber plantations that are not being managed on a day-to-day basis, second-growth forests generally, the entire East Coast, where after agriculture moved west, the forest sprung up. 
And of course, pretty much all of Hawaii, where novel ecosystems are the norm, where exotic species totally dominate. 
This forest here has Queensland maple, it has sword ferns from Southeast Asia. 
You can make your own novel ecosystem, too. 
It's really simple. 
You just stop mowing your lawn. 
(Laughter) Ilkka Hanski was an ecologist in Finland, and he did this experiment himself. 
He just stopped mowing his lawn, and after a few years, he had some grad students come, and they did sort of a bio-blitz of his backyard, and they found 375 plant species, including two endangered species. 
So when you're up there on that future High Line of Philadelphia, surrounded by this wildness, surrounded by this diversity, this abundance, this vibrance, you can look over the side and you can see a local playground for a local school, and that's what it looks like. 
These children have, that — You know, under my definition, there's a lot of the planet that counts as nature, but this would be one of the few places that wouldn't count as nature. 
There's nothing there except humans, no other plants, no other animals. 
And what I really wanted to do was just, like, throw a ladder over the side and get all these kids to come up with me into this cool meadow. 
In a way, I feel like this is the choice that faces us. 
If we dismiss these new natures as not acceptable or trashy or no good, we might as well just pave them over. 
And in a world where everything is changing, we need to be very careful about how we define nature. 
In order not to steal it from our children, we have to do two things. 
First, we cannot define nature as that which is untouched. 
This never made any sense anyway. 
Nature has not been untouched for thousands of years. 
And it excludes most of the nature that most people can visit and have a relationship with, including only nature that children cannot touch. 
Which brings me to the second thing that we have to do, which is that we have to let children touch nature, because that which is untouched is unloved. 
(Applause) We face some pretty grim environmental challenges on this planet. 
Climate change is among them. 
There's others too: habitat loss is my favorite thing to freak out about in the middle of the night. 
But in order to solve them, we need people — smart, dedicated people — who care about nature. 
And the only way we're going to raise up a generation of people who care about nature is by letting them touch nature. 
I have a Fort Theory of Ecology, Fort Theory of Conservation. 
Every ecologist I know, every conservation biologist I know, every conservation professional I know, built forts when they were kids. 
If we have a generation that doesn't know how to build a fort, we'll have a generation that doesn't know how to care about nature. 
And I don't want to be the one to tell this kid, who is on a special program that takes Philadelphia kids from poor neighborhoods and takes them to city parks, I don't want to be the one to tell him that the flower he's holding is a non-native invasive weed that he should throw away as trash. 
I think I would much rather learn from this boy that no matter where this plant comes from, it is beautiful, and it deserves to be touched and appreciated. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I'm excited to be here to speak about vets, because I didn't join the Army because I wanted to go to war. 
I didn't join the Army because I had a lust or a need to go overseas and fight. 
Frankly, I joined the Army because college is really damn expensive, and they were going to help with that, and I joined the Army because it was what I knew, and it was what I knew that I thought I could do well. 
I didn't come from a military family. 
I'm not a military brat. 
No one in my family ever had joined the military at all, and how I first got introduced to the military was when I was 13 years old and I got sent away to military school, because my mother had been threatening me with this idea of military school ever since I was eight years old. 
I had some issues when I was coming up, and my mother would always tell me, she's like, "" You know, if you don't get this together, I'm going to send you to military school. "" And I'd look at her, and I'd say, "" Mommy, I'll work harder. "" And then when I was nine years old, she started giving me brochures to show me she wasn't playing around, so I'd look at the brochures, and I'm like, "Okay, Mommy, I can see you're serious, and I'll work harder." 
And then when I was 10 and 11, my behavior just kept on getting worse. 
I was on academic and disciplinary probation before I hit double digits, and I first felt handcuffs on my wrists when I was 11 years old. 
And so when I was 13 years old, my mother came up to me, and she was like, "" I'm not going to do this anymore. 
I'm going to send you to military school. "" And I looked at her, and I said, "" Mommy, I can see you're upset, and I'm going to work harder. "" And she was like, "" No, you're going next week. "" And that was how I first got introduced to this whole idea of the military, because she thought this was a good idea. 
I had to disagree with her wholeheartedly when I first showed up there, because literally in the first four days, I had already run away five times from this school. 
They had these big black gates that surrounded the school, and every time they would turn their backs, I would just simply run out of the black gates and take them up on their offer that if we don't want to be there, we can leave at any time. 
So I just said, "" Well, if that's the case, then I'd like to leave. "" (Laughter) And it never worked. 
And I kept on getting lost. 
But then eventually, after staying there for a little while, and after the end of that first year at this military school, I realized that I actually was growing up. 
I realized the things that I enjoyed about this school and the thing that I enjoyed about the structure was something that I'd never found before: the fact that I finally felt like I was part of something bigger, part of a team, and it actually mattered to people that I was there, the fact that leadership wasn't just a punchline there, but that it was a real, actually core part of the entire experience. 
And so when it was time for me to actually finish up high school, I started thinking about what I wanted to do, and just like probably most students, had no idea what that meant or what I wanted to do. 
And I thought about the people who I respected and admired. 
I thought about a lot of the people, in particular a lot of the men, in my life who I looked up to. 
They all happened to wear the uniform of the United States of America, so for me, the question and the answer really became pretty easy. 
The question of what I wanted to do was filled in very quickly with saying, I guess I'll be an Army officer. 
So the Army then went through this process and they trained me up, and when I say I didn't join the Army because I wanted to go to war, the truth is, I joined in 1996. 
There really wasn't a whole lot going on. 
I didn't ever feel like I was in danger. 
When I went to my mom, I first joined the Army when I was 17 years old, so I literally needed parental permission to join the Army, so I kind of gave the paperwork to my mom, and she just assumed it was kind of like military school. 
She was like, "" Well, it was good for him before, so I guess I'll just let him keep doing it, "" having no idea that the paperwork that she was signing was actually signing her son up to become an Army officer. 
And I went through the process, and again the whole time still just thinking, this is great, maybe I'll serve on a weekend, or two weeks during the year, do drill, and then a couple years after I signed up, a couple years after my mother signed those papers, the whole world changed. 
And after 9 / 11, there was an entirely new context about the occupation that I chose. 
When I first joined, I never joined to fight, but now that I was in, this is exactly what was now going to happen. 
And I thought about so much about the soldiers who I eventually had to end up leading. 
I remember when we first, right after 9 / 11, three weeks after 9 / 11, I was on a plane heading overseas, but I wasn't heading overseas with the military, I was heading overseas because I got a scholarship to go overseas. 
I received the scholarship to go overseas and to go study and live overseas, and I was living in England and that was interesting, but at the same time, the same people who I was training with, the same soldiers that I went through all my training with, and we prepared for war, they were now actually heading over to it. 
They were now about to find themselves in the middle of places the fact is the vast majority of people, the vast majority of us as we were training, couldn't even point out on a map. 
I spent a couple years finishing graduate school, and the whole entire time while I'm sitting there in buildings at Oxford that were literally built hundreds of years before the United States was even founded, and I'm sitting there talking to dons about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and how that influenced the start of World War I, where the entire time my heart and my head were on my soldiers who were now throwing on Kevlars and grabbing their flak vests and figuring out how exactly do I change around or how exactly do I clean a machine gun in the darkness. 
That was the new reality. 
By the time I finished that up and I rejoined my military unit and we were getting ready to deploy to Afghanistan, there were soldiers in my unit who were now on their second and third deployments before I even had my first. 
I remember walking out with my unit for the first time, and when you join the Army and you go through a combat tour, everyone looks at your shoulder, because on your shoulder is your combat patch. 
And so immediately as you meet people, you shake their hand, and then your eyes go to their shoulder, because you want to see where did they serve, or what unit did they serve with? 
And I was the only person walking around with a bare shoulder, and it burned every time someone stared at it. 
But you get a chance to talk to your soldiers, and you ask them why did they sign up. 
I signed up because college was expensive. 
A lot of my soldiers signed up for completely different reasons. 
They signed up because of a sense of obligation. 
They signed up because they were angry and they wanted to do something about it. They signed up because 
their family said this was important. 
They signed up because they wanted some form of revenge. 
They signed for a whole collection of different reasons. 
And now we all found ourselves overseas fighting in these conflicts. 
And what was amazing to me was that I very naively started hearing this statement that I never fully understood, because right after 9 / 11, you start hearing this idea where people come up to you and they say, "Well, thank you for your service." 
And I just kind of followed in and started saying the same things to all my soldiers. 
This is even before I deployed. 
But I really had no idea what that even meant. 
I just said it because it sounded right. 
I said it because it sounded like the right thing to say to people who had served overseas. 
"Thank you for your service." 
But I had no idea what the context was or what that even, what it even meant to the people who heard it. 
When I first came back from Afghanistan, I thought that if you make it back from conflict, then the dangers were all over. 
I thought that if you made it back from a conflict zone that somehow you could kind of wipe the sweat off your brow and say, "Whew, I'm glad I dodged that one," without understanding that for so many people, as they come back home, the war keeps going. 
It keeps playing out in all of our minds. 
It plays out in all of our memories. 
It plays out in all of our emotions. 
Please forgive us if we don't like being in big crowds. Please forgive us 
when we spend one week in a place that has 100 percent light discipline, because you're not allowed to walk around with white lights, because if anything has a white light, it can be seen from miles away, versus if you use little green or little blue lights, they cannot be seen from far away. 
So please forgive us if out of nowhere, we go from having 100 percent light discipline to then a week later being back in the middle of Times Square, and we have a difficult time adjusting to that. 
Please forgive us when you transition back to a family who has completely been maneuvering without you, and now when you come back, it's not that easy to fall back into a sense of normality, because the whole normal has changed. 
I remember when I came back, I wanted to talk to people. 
I wanted people to ask me about my experiences. 
I wanted people to come up to me and tell me, "What did you do?" I wanted people to come up to me and tell me, 
"" What was it like? What was the food like? 
What was the experience like? How are you doing? "" And the only questions I got from people was, "Did you shoot anybody?" 
And those were the ones who were even curious enough to say anything. 
Because sometimes there's this fear and there's this apprehension that if I say anything, I'm afraid I'll offend, or I'm afraid I'll trigger something, so the common default is just saying nothing. 
The problem with that is then it feels like your service was not even acknowledged, like no one even cared. 
"Thank you for your service," and we move on. 
What I wanted to better understand was what's behind that, and why "" thank you for your service "" isn't enough. 
The fact is, we have literally 2.6 million men and women who are veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan who are all amongst us. 
Sometimes we know who they are, sometimes we don't, but there is that feeling, the shared experience, the shared bond where we know that that experience and that chapter of our life, while it might be closed, it's still not over. 
We think about "" thank you for your service, "" and people say, "" So what does' thank you for your service 'mean to you? "" Well, "" Thank you for your service "" means to me, it means acknowledging our stories, asking us who we are, understanding the strength that so many people, so many people who we serve with, have, and why that service means so much. 
"" Thank you for your service "" means acknowledging the fact that just because we've now come home and we've taken off the uniform does not mean our larger service to this country is somehow over. 
The fact is, there's still a tremendous amount that can be offered and can be given. 
When I look at people like our friend Taylor Urruela, who in Iraq loses his leg, had two big dreams in his life. 
One was to be a soldier. The other was to be a baseball player. 
He loses his leg in Iraq. 
He comes back and instead of deciding that, well, now since I've lost my leg, that second dream is over, he decides that he still has that dream of playing baseball, and he starts this group called VETSports, which now works with veterans all over the country and uses sports as a way of healing. 
People like Tammy Duckworth, who was a helicopter pilot and with the helicopter that she was flying, you need to use both your hands and also your legs to steer, and her helicopter gets hit, and she's trying to steer the chopper, but the chopper's not reacting to her instructions and to her commands. 
She's trying to land the chopper safely, but the chopper doesn't land safely, and the reason it's not landing safely is because it's not responding to the commands that her legs are giving because her legs were blown off. 
She barely survives. 
Medics come and they save her life, but then as she's doing her recuperation back at home, she realizes that, "" My job's still not done. "" And now she uses her voice as a Congresswoman from Illinois to fight and advocate for a collection of issues to include veterans issues. 
We signed up because we love this country we represent. We signed up because 
we believe in the idea and we believe in the people to our left and to our right. 
And the only thing we then ask is that "thank you for your service" needs to be more than just a quote break, that "" thank you for your service "" means honestly digging in to the people who have stepped up simply because they were asked to, and what that means for us not just now, not just during combat operations, but long after the last vehicle has left and after the last shot has been taken. 
These are the people who I served with, and these are the people who I honor. 
So thank you for your service. 
(Applause) 

We are at a remarkable moment in time. 
We face over the next two decades two fundamental transformations that will determine whether the next 100 years is the best of centuries or the worst of centuries. 
Let me illustrate with an example. 
I first visited Beijing 25 years ago to teach at the People's University of China. 
China was getting serious about market economics and about university education, so they decided to call in the foreign experts. 
Like most other people, I moved around Beijing by bicycle. 
Apart from dodging the occasional vehicle, it was a safe and easy way to get around. 
Cycling in Beijing now is a completely different prospect. 
The roads are jammed by cars and trucks. 
The air is dangerously polluted from the burning of coal and diesel. 
When I was there last in the spring, there was an advisory for people of my age — over 65 — to stay indoors and not move much. 
How did this come about? 
It came from the way in which Beijing has grown as a city. 
It's doubled over those 25 years, more than doubled, from 10 million to 20 million. 
It's become a sprawling urban area dependent on dirty fuel, dirty energy, particularly coal. 
China burns half the world's coal each year, and that's why, it is a key reason why, it is the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases. 
At the same time, we have to recognize that in that period China has grown remarkably. 
It has become the world's second largest economy. 
Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. 
That's really important. 
But at the same time, the people of China are asking the question: What's the value of this growth if our cities are unlivable? 
They've analyzed, diagnosed that this is an unsustainable path of growth and development. 
China's planning to scale back coal. 
It's looking to build its cities in different ways. 
Now, the growth of China is part of a dramatic change, fundamental change, in the structure of the world economy. 
Just 25 years ago, the developing countries, the poorer countries of the world, were, notwithstanding being the vast majority of the people, they accounted for only about a third of the world's output. 
Now it's more than half; 25 years from now, it will probably be two thirds from the countries that we saw 25 years ago as developing. 
That's a remarkable change. 
It means that most countries around the world, rich or poor, are going to be facing the two fundamental transformations that I want to talk about and highlight. 
Now, the first of these transformations is the basic structural change of the economies and societies that I've already begun to illustrate through the description of Beijing. 
Fifty percent now in urban areas. 
That's going to go to 70 percent in 2050. 
Over the next two decades, we'll see the demand for energy rise by 40 percent, and the growth in the economy and in the population is putting increasing pressure on our land, on our water and on our forests. 
This is profound structural change. 
If we manage it in a negligent or a shortsighted way, we will create waste, pollution, congestion, destruction of land and forests. 
If we think of those three areas that I have illustrated with my numbers — cities, energy, land — if we manage all that badly, then the outlook for the lives and livelihoods of the people around the world would be poor and damaged. 
And more than that, the emissions of greenhouse gases would rise, with immense risks to our climate. 
Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are already higher than they've been for millions of years. 
If we go on increasing those concentrations, we risk temperatures over the next century or so that we have not seen on this planet for tens of millions of years. 
We've been around as Homo sapiens — that's a rather generous definition, sapiens — for perhaps a quarter of a million years, a quarter of a million. 
We risk temperatures we haven't seen for tens of millions of years over a century. 
That would transform the relationship between human beings and the planet. 
It would lead to changing deserts, changing rivers, changing patterns of hurricanes, changing sea levels, hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions of people who would have to move, and if we've learned anything from history, that means severe and extended conflict. 
And we couldn't just turn it off. 
You can't make a peace treaty with the planet. 
You can't negotiate with the laws of physics. 
You're in there. You're stuck. 
Those are the stakes we're playing for, and that's why we have to make this second transformation, the climate transformation, and move to a low-carbon economy. 
Now, the first of these transformations is going to happen anyway. 
We have to decide whether to do it well or badly, the economic, or structural, transformation. 
But the second of the transformations, the climate transformations, we have to decide to do. 
Those two transformations face us in the next two decades. 
The next two decades are decisive for what we have to do. 
Now, the more I've thought about this, the two transformations coming together, the more I've come to realize that this is an enormous opportunity. 
It's an opportunity which we can use or it's an opportunity which we can lose. 
And let me explain through those three key areas that I've identified: cities, energy and land. 
And let me start with cities. 
I've already described the problems of Beijing: pollution, congestion, waste and so on. 
Surely we recognize that in many of our cities around the world. 
Now, with cities, like life but particularly cities, you have to think ahead. 
The cities that are going to be built — and there are many, and many big ones — we have to think of how to design them in a compact way so we can save travel time and we can save energy. 
The cities that already are there, well established, we have to think about renewal and investment in them so that we can connect ourselves much better within those cities, and make it easier, encourage more people, to live closer to the center. 
We've got examples building around the world of the kinds of ways in which we can do that. 
The bus rapid transport system in Bogotá in Colombia is a very important case of how to move around safely and quickly in a non-polluting way in a city: very frequent buses, strongly protected routes, the same service, really, as an underground railway system, but much, much cheaper and can be done much more quickly, a brilliant idea in many more cities around the world that's developing. 
Now, some things in cities do take time. 
Some things in cities can happen much more quickly. 
Take my hometown, London. 
In 1952, smog in London killed 4,000 people and badly damaged the lives of many, many more. 
And it happened all the time. 
For those of you live outside London in the U.K. 
will remember it used to be called The Smoke. 
That's the way London was. 
By regulating coal, within a few years the problems of smog were rapidly reduced. 
I remember the smogs well. 
When the visibility dropped to [less] than a few meters, they stopped the buses and I had to walk. 
This was the 1950s. 
I had to walk home three miles from school. 
Again, breathing was a hazardous activity. 
But it was changed. It was changed by a decision. 
Good decisions can bring good results, striking results, quickly. 
We've seen more: In London, we've introduced the congestion charge, actually quite quickly and effectively, and we've seen great improvements in the bus system, and cleaned up the bus system. 
You can see that the two transformations I've described, the structural and the climate, come very much together. 
But we have to invest. We have to invest in our cities, and we have to invest wisely, and if we do, we'll see cleaner cities, quieter cities, safer cities, more attractive cities, more productive cities, and stronger community in those cities — public transport, recycling, reusing, all sorts of things that bring communities together. 
We can do that, but we have to think, we have to invest, we have to plan. 
Let me turn to energy. 
Now, energy over the last 25 years has increased by about 50 percent. 
Eighty percent of that comes from fossil fuels. 
Over the next 20 years, perhaps it will increase by another 40 percent or so. 
We have to invest strongly in energy, we have to use it much more efficiently, and we have to make it clean. 
We can see how to do that. 
Take the example of California. 
It would be in the top 10 countries in the world if it was independent. 
I don't want to start any — (Laughter) California's a big place. (Laughter) 
In the next five or six years, they will likely move from around 20 percent in renewables — wind, solar and so on — to over 33 percent, and that would bring California back to greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 to where they were in 1990, a period when the economy in California would more or less have doubled. 
That's a striking achievement. 
It shows what can be done. 
Not just California — the incoming government of India is planning to get solar technology to light up the homes of 400 million people who don't have electricity in India. 
They've set themselves a target of five years. 
I think they've got a good chance of doing that. 
We'll see, but what you're seeing now is people moving much more quickly. 
Four hundred million, more than the population of the United States. 
Those are the kinds of ambitions now people are setting themselves in terms of rapidity of change. 
Again, you can see good decisions can bring quick results, and those two transformations, the economy and the structure and the climate and the low carbon, are intimately intertwined. 
Do the first one well, the structural, the second one on the climate becomes much easier. 
Look at land, land and particularly forests. 
Forests are the hosts to valuable plant and animal species. 
They hold water in the soil and they take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, fundamental to the tackling of climate change. 
But we're losing our forests. 
In the last decade, we've lost a forest area the size of Portugal, and much more has been degraded. 
But we're already seeing that we can do so much about that. 
We can recognize the problem, but we can also understand how to tackle it. 
In Brazil, the rate of deforestation has been reduced by 70 percent over the last 10 years. 
How? By involving local communities, investing in their agriculture and their economies, by monitoring more carefully, by enforcing the law more strictly. 
And it's not just stopping deforestation. 
That's of course of first and fundamental importance, but it's also regrading degraded land, regenerating, rehabilitating degraded land. 
I first went to Ethiopia in 1967. 
It was desperately poor. In the following years, it suffered devastating famines and profoundly destructive social conflict. 
Over the last few years, actually more than a few, Ethiopia has been growing much more rapidly. 
It has ambitions to be a middle-income country 15 years from now and to be carbon neutral. 
Again, I think it's a strong ambition but it is a plausible one. 
You're seeing that commitment there. 
You're seeing what can be done. 
Ethiopia is investing in clean energy. 
It's working in the rehabilitation of land. 
In Humbo, in southwest Ethiopia, a wonderful project to plant trees on degraded land and work with local communities on sustainable forest management has led to big increases in living standards. 
So we can see, from Beijing to London, from California to India, from Brazil to Ethiopia, we do understand how to manage those two transformations, the structural and the climate. 
We do understand how to manage those well. 
And technology is changing very rapidly. 
I don't have to list all those things to an audience like this, but you can see the electric cars, you can see the batteries using new materials. 
You can see that we can manage remotely now our household appliances on our mobile phones when we're away. 
You can see better insulation. 
And there's much more coming. 
But, and it's a big but, the world as a whole is moving far too slowly. 
We're not cutting emissions in the way we should. 
We're not managing those structural transformations as we can. 
The depth of understanding of the immense risks of climate change are not there yet. The depth of understanding 
of the attractiveness of what we can do is not there yet. 
We need political pressure to build. 
We need leaders to step up. 
We can have better growth, better climate, a better world. 
We can make, by managing those two transformations well, the next 100 years the best of centuries. 
If we make a mess of it, we, you and me, if we make a mess of it, if we don't manage those transformations properly, it will be, the next 100 years will be the worst of centuries. 
That's the major conclusion of the report on the economy and climate chaired by ex-President Felipe Calderón of Mexico, and I co-chaired that with him, and we handed that report yesterday here in New York, in the United Nations Building to the Secretary-General of the U.N., Ban Ki-moon. 
We know that we can do this. 
Now, two weeks ago, I became a grandfather for the fourth time. 
Our daughter — (Baby cries) (Laughter) (Applause) — Our daughter gave birth to Rosa here in New York two weeks ago. Here are Helen and Rosa. (Applause) 
Two weeks old. 
Are we going to look our grandchildren in the eye and tell them that we understood the issues, that we recognized the dangers and the opportunities, and still we failed to act? 
Surely not. Let's make the next 100 years the best of centuries. 
(Applause) 

If your life were a book and you were the author, how would you want your story to go? 
That's the question that changed my life forever. 
Growing up in the hot Last Vegas desert, all I wanted was to be free. 
I would daydream about traveling the world, living in a place where it snowed, and I would picture all of the stories that I would go on to tell. 
At the age of 19, the day after I graduated high school, I moved to a place where it snowed and I became a massage therapist. 
With this job all I needed were my hands and my massage table by my side and I could go anywhere. 
For the first time in my life, I felt free, independent and completely in control of my life. 
That is, until my life took a detour. 
I went home from work early one day with what I thought was the flu, and less than 24 hours later I was in the hospital on life support with less than a two percent chance of living. 
It wasn't until days later as I lay in a coma that the doctors diagnosed me with bacterial meningitis, a vaccine-preventable blood infection. 
Over the course of two and a half months I lost my spleen, my kidneys, the hearing in my left ear and both of my legs below the knee. 
When my parents wheeled me out of the hospital I felt like I had been pieced back together like a patchwork doll. 
I thought the worst was over until weeks later when I saw my new legs for the first time. 
The calves were bulky blocks of metal with pipes bolted together for the ankles and a yellow rubber foot with a raised rubber line from the toe to the ankle to look like a vein. 
I didn't know what to expect, but I wasn't expecting that. 
With my mom by my side and tears streaming down our faces, I strapped on these chunky legs and I stood up. 
They were so painful and so confining that all I could think was, how am I ever going to travel the world in these things? 
How was I ever going to live the life full of adventure and stories, as I always wanted? 
And how was I going to snowboard again? 
That day, I went home, I crawled into bed and this is what my life looked like for the next few months: me passed out, escaping from reality, with my legs resting by my side. 
I was absolutely physically and emotionally broken. 
But I knew that in order to move forward, I had to let go of the old Amy and learn to embrace the new Amy. 
And that is when it dawned on me that I didn't have to be five-foot-five anymore. 
I could be as tall as I wanted! 
(Laughter) (Applause) Or as short as I wanted, depending on who I was dating. (Laughter) 
And if I snowboarded again, my feet aren't going to get cold. (Laughter) 

I'm here today to talk about social change, not a new therapy or a new intervention or a new way of working with kids or something like that, but a new business model for social change, a new way of tackling the problem. 
In Britain, 63 percent of all men who come out of short sentences from prison re-offend again within a year. 
Now how many previous offenses do you think they have on average managed to commit? 
Forty-three. 
And how many previous times do you think they've been in prison? 
Seven. 
So we went to talk to the Ministry of Justice, and we said to the Ministry of Justice, what's it worth to you if fewer of these guys re-offend? 
It's got to be worth something, right? 
I mean, there's prison costs, there's police costs, there's court costs, all these things that you're spending money on to deal with these guys. What's it worth? 
Now, of course, we care about the social value. 
Social Finance, the organization I helped set up, cares about social stuff. 
But we wanted to make the economic case, because if we could make the economic case, then the value of doing this would be completely compelling. 
And if we can agree on both a value and a way of measuring whether we've been successful at reducing that re-offending, then we can do something we think rather interesting. 
The idea is called the social impact bond. 
Now, the social impact bond is simply saying, if we can get the government to agree, that we can create a contract where they only pay if it worked. 
So that means that they can try out new stuff without the embarrassment of having to pay if it didn't work, which for still quite a lot of bits of government, that's a serious issue. 
Now, many of you may have noticed there's a problem at this point, and that is that it takes a long time to measure whether those outcomes have happened. 
So we have to raise some money. 
We use the contract to raise money from socially motivated investors. 
Socially motivated investors: there's an interesting idea, right? 
But actually, there's a lot of people who, if they're given the chance, would love to invest in something that does social good. 
And here's the opportunity. 
Do you want to also help government find whether there's a better economic model, not just leaving these guys to come out of prison and waiting till they re-offend and putting them back in again, but actually working with them to move to a different path to end up with fewer crimes and fewer victims? 
So we find some investors, and they pay for a set of services, and if those services are successful, then they improve outcomes, and with those measured reductions in re-offending, government saves money, and with those savings, they can pay outcomes. 
And the investors do not just get their money back, but they make a return. 
So in March 2010, we signed the first social impact bond with the Ministry of Justice around Peterborough Prison. 
It was to work with 3,000 offenders split into three cohorts of 1,000 each. 
Now, each of those cohorts would get measured over the two years that they were coming out of prison. 
They've got to have a year to commit their crimes, six months to get through the court system, and then they would be compared to a group taken from the police national computer, as similar as possible, and we would get paid providing we achieved a hurdle rate of 10-percent reduction, for every conviction event that didn't happen. 
So we get paid for crimes saved. 
Now if we achieved that 10-percent reduction across all three cohorts, then the investors get a seven and a half percent annualized return on their investment, and if we do better than that, they can get up to 13 percent annualized return on their investment, which is okay. 
So everyone wins here, right? 
The Ministry of Justice can try out a new program and they only pay if it works. 
Investors get two opportunities: for the first time, they can invest in social change. 
Also, they make a reasonable return, and they also know that first investors in these kinds of things, they're going to have to believers. 
They're going to have to care in the social program, but if this builds a track record over five or 10 years, then you can widen that investor community as more people have confidence in the product. 
The service providers, well, for the first time, they've got an opportunity to provide services and grow the evidence for what they're doing in a really constructive way and learn and demonstrate the value of what they're doing over five or six years, not just one or two as often happens at the moment. 
Society wins: fewer crimes, fewer victims. 
Now, the offenders, they also benefit. 
Instead of just coming out of the prison with 46 pounds in their pocket, half of them not knowing where they're spending their first night out of jail, actually, someone meets them in prison, learns about their issues, meets them at the gate, takes them through to somewhere to stay, connects them to benefits, connects them to employment, drug rehabilitation, mental health, whatever's needed. 
So let's think of another example: working with children in care. 
Social impact bonds work great for any area where there is at the moment very expensive provision that produces poor outcomes for people. 
So children in the state care tend to do very badly. 
Only 13 percent achieve a reasonable level of five GCSEs at 16, against 58 percent of the wider population. 
More troublingly, 27 percent of offenders in prison have spent some time in care. 
And even more worryingly, and this is a Home Office statistic, 70 percent of prostitutes have spent some time in care. 
The state is not a great parent. 
But there are great programs for adolescents who are on the edge of care, and 30 percent of kids going into care are adolescents. 
So we set up a program with Essex County Council to test out intensive family therapeutic support for those families with adolescents on the edge of the care system. 
Essex only pays in the event that it's saving them care costs. 
Investors have put in 3.1 million pounds. 
That program started last month. 
Others, around homelessness in London, around youth and employment and education elsewhere in the country. 
There are now 13 social impact bonds in Britain, and amazing levels of interest in this idea all over the world. 
So David Cameron's put 20 million pounds into a social outcomes fund to support this idea. 
Obama has suggested 300 million dollars in the U.S. budget for these kinds of ideas and structures to move it forward, and a lot of other countries are demonstrating considerable interest. 
So what's caused this excitement? 
Why is this so different for people? 
Well, the first piece, which we've talked about, is innovation. 
It enables testing of new ideas in a way that's less difficult for everybody. 
The second piece it brings is rigor. 
By working to outcomes, people really have to test and bring data into the situation that one's dealing with. 
So taking Peterborough as an example, we add case management across all of the different organizations that we're working with so they know what actually has been done with different prisoners, and at the same time they learn from the Ministry of Justice, and we learn, because we pushed for the data, what actually happens, whether they get re-arrested or not. 
And we learn and adapt the program accordingly. 
And this leads to the third element, which is new, and that's flexibility. 
Because normal contracting for things, when you're spending government money, you're spending our money, tax money, and the people who are in charge of that are very aware of it so the temptation is to control exactly how you spend it. 
Now any entrepreneur in the room knows that version 1.0, the business plan, is not the one that generally works. 
So when you're trying to do something like this, you need the flexibility to adapt the program. 
And again, in Peterborough, we started off with a program, but we also collected data, and over the period of time, we nuanced and changed that program to add a range of other elements, so that the service adapts and we meet the needs of the long term as well as the short term: greater engagement from the prisoners, longer-term engagement as well. 
The last element is partnership. 
There is, at the moment, a stale debate going on very often: state's better, public sector's better, private sector's better, social sector's better, for a lot of these programs. 
Actually, for creating social change, we need to bring in the expertise from all of those parties in order to make this work. 
And this creates a structure through which they can combine. 
So where does this leave us? 
This leaves us with a way that people can invest in social change. 
We've met thousands, possibly millions of people, who want the opportunity to invest in social change. 
We've met champions all over the public sector keen to make these kinds of differences. 
With this kind of model, we can help bring them together. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'd like to talk today about how we can change our brains and our society. 
Meet Joe. 
Joe's 32 years old and a murderer. 
I met Joe 13 years ago on the lifer wing at Wormwood Scrubs high-security prison in London. 
I'd like you to imagine this place. 
It looks and feels like it sounds: Wormwood Scrubs. 
Built at the end of the Victorian Era by the inmates themselves, it is where England's most dangerous prisoners are kept. 
These individuals have committed acts of unspeakable evil. 
And I was there to study their brains. 
I was part of a team of researchers from University College London, on a grant from the U.K. department of health. 
My task was to study a group of inmates who had been clinically diagnosed as psychopaths. 
That meant they were the most callous and the most aggressive of the entire prison population. 
What lay at the root of their behavior? 
Was there a neurological cause for their condition? 
And if there was a neurological cause, could we find a cure? 
So I'd like to speak about change, and especially about emotional change. 
Growing up, I was always intrigued by how people change. 
My mother, a clinical psychotherapist, would occasionally see patients at home in the evening. 
She would shut the door to the living room, and I imagined magical things happened in that room. 
At the age of five or six I would creep up in my pajamas and sit outside with my ear glued to the door. 
On more than one occasion, I fell asleep and they had to push me out of the way at the end of the session. 
And I suppose that's how I found myself walking into the secure interview room on my first day at Wormwood Scrubs. 
Joe sat across a steel table and greeted me with this blank expression. 
The prison warden, looking equally indifferent, said, "" Any trouble, just press the red buzzer, and we'll be around as soon as we can. "" (Laughter) I sat down. 
The heavy metal door slammed shut behind me. 
I looked up at the red buzzer far behind Joe on the opposite wall. 
(Laughter) I looked at Joe. 
Perhaps detecting my concern, he leaned forward, and said, as reassuringly as he could, "" Ah, don't worry about the buzzer, it doesn't work anyway. "" (Laughter) Over the subsequent months, we tested Joe and his fellow inmates, looking specifically at their ability to categorize different images of emotion. 
And we looked at their physical response to those emotions. 
So, for example, when most of us look at a picture like this of somebody looking sad, we instantly have a slight, measurable physical response: increased heart rate, sweating of the skin. 
Whilst the psychopaths in our study were able to describe the pictures accurately, they failed to show the emotions required. 
They failed to show a physical response. 
It was as though they knew the words but not the music of empathy. 
So we wanted to look closer at this to use MRI to image their brains. 
That turned out to be not such an easy task. 
Imagine transporting a collection of clinical psychopaths across central London in shackles and handcuffs in rush hour, and in order to place each of them in an MRI scanner, you have to remove all metal objects, including shackles and handcuffs, and, as I learned, all body piercings. 
After some time, however, we had a tentative answer. 
These individuals were not just the victims of a troubled childhood. 
There was something else. 
People like Joe have a deficit in a brain area called the amygdala. 
The amygdala is an almond-shaped organ deep within each of the hemispheres of the brain. 
It is thought to be key to the experience of empathy. 
Normally, the more empathic a person is, the larger and more active their amygdala is. 
Our population of inmates had a deficient amygdala, which likely led to their lack of empathy and to their immoral behavior. 
So let's take a step back. 
Normally, acquiring moral behavior is simply part of growing up, like learning to speak. 
At the age of six months, virtually every one of us is able to differentiate between animate and inanimate objects. 
At the age of 12 months, most children are able to imitate the purposeful actions of others. 
So for example, your mother raises her hands to stretch, and you imitate her behavior. 
At first, this isn't perfect. 
I remember my cousin Sasha, two years old at the time, looking through a picture book and licking one finger and flicking the page with the other hand, licking one finger and flicking the page with the other hand. 
(Laughter) Bit by bit, we build the foundations of the social brain so that by the time we're three, four years old, most children, not all, have acquired the ability to understand the intentions of others, another prerequisite for empathy. 
The fact that this developmental progression is universal, irrespective of where you live in the world or which culture you inhabit, strongly suggests that the foundations of moral behavior are inborn. 
If you doubt this, try, as I've done, to renege on a promise you've made to a four-year-old. 
You will find that the mind of a four-year old is not naïve in the slightest. 
It is more akin to a Swiss army knife with fixed mental modules finely honed during development and a sharp sense of fairness. 
The early years are crucial. 
There seems to be a window of opportunity, after which mastering moral questions becomes more difficult, like adults learning a foreign language. 
That's not to say it's impossible. 
A recent, wonderful study from Stanford University showed that people who have played a virtual reality game in which they took on the role of a good and helpful superhero actually became more caring and helpful towards others afterwards. 
Now I'm not suggesting we endow criminals with superpowers, but I am suggesting that we need to find ways to get Joe and people like him to change their brains and their behavior, for their benefit and for the benefit of the rest of us. 
So can brains change? 
For over 100 years, neuroanatomists and later neuroscientists held the view that after initial development in childhood, no new brain cells could grow in the adult human brain. 
The brain could only change within certain set limits. 
That was the dogma. 
But then, in the 1990s, studies starting showing, following the lead of Elizabeth Gould at Princeton and others, studies started showing the evidence of neurogenesis, the birth of new brain cells in the adult mammalian brain, first in the olfactory bulb, which is responsible for our sense of smell, then in the hippocampus involving short-term memory, and finally in the amygdala itself. 
In order to understand how this process works, I left the psychopaths and joined a lab in Oxford specializing in learning and development. 
Instead of psychopaths, I studied mice, because the same pattern of brain responses appears across many different species of social animals. 
So if you rear a mouse in a standard cage, a shoebox, essentially, with cotton wool, alone and without much stimulation, not only does it not thrive, but it will often develop strange, repetitive behaviors. 
This naturally sociable animal will lose its ability to bond with other mice, even becoming aggressive when introduced to them. 
However, mice reared in what we called an enriched environment, a large habitation with other mice with wheels and ladders and areas to explore, demonstrate neurogenesis, the birth of new brain cells, and as we showed, they also perform better on a range of learning and memory tasks. 
Now, they don't develop morality to the point of carrying the shopping bags of little old mice across the street, but their improved environment results in healthy, sociable behavior. 
Mice reared in a standard cage, by contrast, not dissimilar, you might say, from a prison cell, have dramatically lower levels of new neurons in the brain. 
It is now clear that the amygdala of mammals, including primates like us, can show neurogenesis. 
In some areas of the brain, more than 20 percent of cells are newly formed. 
We're just beginning to understand what exact function these cells have, but what it implies is that the brain is capable of extraordinary change way into adulthood. 
However, our brains are also exquisitely sensitive to stress in our environment. 
Stress hormones, glucocorticoids, released by the brain, suppress the growth of these new cells. 
The more stress, the less brain development, which in turn causes less adaptability and causes higher stress levels. 
This is the interplay between nature and nurture in real time in front of our eyes. 
When you think about it, it is ironic that our current solution for people with stressed amygdalae is to place them in an environment that actually inhibits any chance of further growth. 
Of course, imprisonment is a necessary part of the criminal justice system and of protecting society. 
Our research does not suggest that criminals should submit their MRI scans as evidence in court and get off the hook because they've got a faulty amygdala. 
The evidence is actually the other way. 
Because our brains are capable of change, we need to take responsibility for our actions, and they need to take responsibility for their rehabilitation. 
One way such rehabilitation might work is through restorative justice programs. 
Here victims, if they choose to participate, and perpetrators meet face to face in safe, structured encounters, and the perpetrator is encouraged to take responsibility for their actions, and the victim plays an active role in the process. 
In such a setting, the perpetrator can see, perhaps for the first time, the victim as a real person with thoughts and feelings and a genuine emotional response. 
This stimulates the amygdala and may be a more effective rehabilitative practice than simple incarceration. 
Such programs won't work for everyone, but for many, it could be a way to break the frozen sea within. 
So what can we do now? 
How can we apply this knowledge? 
I'd like to leave you with three lessons that I learned. 
The first thing that I learned was that we need to change our mindset. 
Since Wormwood Scrubs was built 130 years ago, society has advanced in virtually every aspect, in the way we run our schools, our hospitals. 
Yet the moment we speak about prisons, it's as though we're back in Dickensian times, if not medieval times. 
For too long, I believe, we've allowed ourselves to be persuaded of the false notion that human nature cannot change, and as a society, it's costing us dearly. 
We know that the brain is capable of extraordinary change, and the best way to achieve that, even in adults, is to change and modulate our environment. 
The second thing I have learned is that we need to create an alliance of people who believe that science is integral to bringing about social change. 
It's easy enough for a neuroscientist to place a high-security inmate in an MRI scanner. 
Well actually, that turns out not to be so easy, but ultimately what we want to show is whether we're able to reduce the reoffending rates. 
In order to answer complex questions like that, we need people of different backgrounds — lab-based scientists and clinicians, social workers and policy makers, philanthropists and human rights activists — to work together. 
Finally, I believe we need to change our own amygdalae, because this issue goes to the heart not just of who Joe is, but who we are. 
We need to change our view of Joe as someone wholly irredeemable, because if we see Joe as wholly irredeemable, how is he going to see himself as any different? 
In another decade, Joe will be released from Wormwood Scrubs. 
Will he be among the 70 percent of inmates who end up reoffending and returning to the prison system? 
Wouldn't it be better if, while serving his sentence, Joe was able to train his amygdala, which would stimulate the growth of new brain cells and connections, so that he will be able to face the world once he gets released? 
Surely, that would be in the interest of all of us. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

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

In December of 2010, the city of Apatzingán in the coastal state of Michoacán, in Mexico, awoke to gunfire. 
For two straight days, the city became an open battlefield between the federal forces and a well-organized group, presumably from the local criminal organization, La Familia Michoacana, or the Michoacán family. 
The citizens didn't only experience incessant gunfire but also explosions and burning trucks used as barricades across the city, so truly like a battlefield. 
After these two days, and during a particularly intense encounter, it was presumed that the leader of La Familia Michoacana, Nazario Moreno, was killed. 
In response to this terrifying violence, the mayor of Apatzingán decided to call the citizens to a march for peace. 
The idea was to ask for a softer approach to criminal activity in the state. 
And so, the day of the scheduled procession, thousands of people showed up. 
As the mayor was preparing to deliver the speech starting the march, his team noticed that, while half of the participants were appropriately dressed in white, and bearing banners asking for peace, the other half was actually marching in support of the criminal organization and its now-presumed-defunct leader. 
Shocked, the mayor decided to step aside rather than participate or lead a procession that was ostensibly in support of organized crime. 
And so his team stepped aside. 
The two marches joined together, and they continued their path towards the state capital. 
This story of horrific violence followed by a fumbled approach by federal and local authorities as they tried to engage civil society, who has been very well engaged by a criminal organization, is a perfect metaphor for what's happening in Mexico today, where we see that our current understanding of drug violence and what leads to it is probably at the very least incomplete. 
If you decided to spend 30 minutes trying to figure out what's going on with drug violence in Mexico by, say, just researching online, the first thing you would find out is that while the laws state that all Mexican citizens are equal, there are some that are more and there are some that are much less equal than others, because you will quickly find out that in the past six years anywhere between 60 and 100,000 people have lost their lives in drug-related violence. 
To put these numbers in perspective, this is eight times larger than the number of casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. 
It's also shockingly close to the number of people who have died in the Syrian civil war, which is an active civil war. 
This is happening just south of the border. 
Now as you're reading, however, you will be maybe surprised that you will quickly become numb to the numbers of deaths, because you will see that these are sort of abstract numbers of faceless, nameless dead people. 
Implicitly or explicitly, there is a narrative that all the people who are dying were somehow involved in the drug trade, and we infer this because they were either tortured or executed in a professional manner, or, most likely, both. 
And so clearly they were criminals because of the way they died. 
And so the narrative is that somehow these people got what they were deserved. 
They were part of the bad guys. 
And that creates some form of comfort for a lot of people. 
However, while it's easier to think of us, the citizens, the police, the army, as the good guys, and them, the narcos, the carteles, as the bad guys, if you think about it, the latter are only providing a service to the former. 
Whether we like it or not, the U.S. is the largest market for illegal substances in the world, accounting for more than half of global demand. 
It shares thousands of miles of border with Mexico that is its only route of access from the South, and so, as the former dictator of Mexico, Porfirio Diaz, used to say, "" Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States. "" The U.N. estimates that there are 55 million users of illegal drugs in the United States. 
Using very, very conservative assumptions, this yields a yearly drug market on the retail side of anywhere between 30 and 150 billion dollars. 
If we assume that the narcos only have access to the wholesale part, which we know is false, that still leaves you with yearly revenues of anywhere between 15 billion and 60 billion dollars. 
To put these numbers in perspective, Microsoft has yearly revenues of 60 billion dollars. 
And it so happens that this is a product that, because of its nature, a business model to address this market requires you to guarantee to your producers that their product will be reliably placed in the markets where it is consumed. 
And the only way to do this, because it's illegal, is to have absolute control of the geographic corridors that are used to transport drugs. 
Hence the violence. 
If you look at a map of cartel influence and violence, you will see that it almost perfectly aligns with the most efficient routes of transportation from the south to the north. 
The only thing that the cartels are doing is that they're trying to protect their business. 
It's not only a multi-billion dollar market, but it's also a complex one. 
For example, the coca plant is a fragile plant that can only grow in certain latitudes, and so it means that a business model to address this market requires you to have decentralized, international production, that by the way needs to have good quality control, because people need a good high that is not going to kill them and that is going to be delivered to them when they need it. 
And so that means they need to secure production and quality control in the south, and you need to ensure that you have efficient and effective distribution channels in the markets where these drugs are consumed. 
I urge you, but only a little bit, because I don't want to get you in trouble, to just ask around and see how difficult it would be to get whatever drug you want, wherever you want it, whenever you want it, anywhere in the U.S., and some of you may be surprised to know that there are many dealers that offer a service where if you send them a text message, they guarantee delivery of the drug in 30 minutes or less. 
Think about this for a second. 
Think about the complexity of the distribution network that I just described. 
It's very difficult to reconcile this with the image of faceless, ignorant goons that are just shooting each other, very difficult to reconcile. 
Now, as a business professor, and as any business professor would tell you, an effective organization requires an integrated strategy that includes a good organizational structure, good incentives, a solid identity and good brand management. 
This leads me to the second thing that you would learn in your 30-minute exploration of drug violence in Mexico. 
Because you would quickly realize, and maybe be confused by the fact, that there are three organizations that are constantly named in the articles. 
You will hear about Los Zetas, the Knights Templar, which is the new brand for the Familia Michoacana that I spoke about at the beginning, and the Sinaloa Federation. 
You will read that Los Zetas is this assortment of sociopaths that terrify the cities that they enter and they silence the press, and this is somewhat true, or mostly true. 
But this is the result of a very careful branding and business strategy. 
You see, Los Zetas is not just this random assortment of individuals, but was actually created by another criminal organization, the Gulf Cartel, that used to control the eastern corridor of Mexico. 
When that corridor became contested, they decided that they wanted to recruit a professional enforcement arm. 
So they recruited Los Zetas: an entire unit of elite paratroopers from the Mexican Army. 
They were incredibly effective as enforcers for the Gulf Cartel, so much so that at some point, they decided to just take over the operations, which is why I ask you to never keep tigers as pets, because they grow up. 
Because the Zetas organization was founded in treason, they lost some of the linkages to the production and distribution in the most profitable markets like cocaine, but what they did have, and this is again based on their military origin, was a perfectly structured chain of command with a very clear hierarchy and a very clear promotion path that allowed them to supervise and operate across many, many markets very effectively, which is the essence of what a chain of command seeks to do. 
And so because they didn't have access to the more profitable drug markets, this pushed them and gave them the opportunity to diversify into other forms of crime. 
That includes kidnapping, prostitution, local drug dealing and human trafficking, including of migrants that go from the south to the U.S. 
So what they currently run is truly and quite literally a franchise business. 
They focus most of their recruiting on the army, and they very openly advertise for better salaries, better benefits, better promotion paths, not to mention much better food, than what the army can deliver. 
The way they operate is that when they arrive in a locality, they let people know that they are there, and they go to the most powerful local gang and they say, "" I offer you to be the local representative of the Zeta brand. "" If they agree — and you don't want to know what happens if they don't — they train them and they supervise them on how to run the most efficient criminal operation for that town, in exchange for royalties. 
This kind of business model obviously depends entirely on having a very effective brand of fear, and so Los Zetas carefully stage acts of violence that are spectacular in nature, especially when they arrive first in a city, but again, that's just a brand strategy. 
I'm not saying they're not violent, but what I am saying is that even though you will read that they are the most violent of all, when you count, when you do the body count, they're actually all the same. 
In contrast to them, the Knights Templar that arose in Michoacán emerged in reaction to the incursion of the Zetas into the state of Michoacán. 
Michoacán is a geographically strategic state because it has one of the largest ports in Mexico, and it has very direct routes to the center of Mexico, which then gives you direct access to the U.S. 
The Knights Templar realized very quickly that they couldn't face the Zetas on violence alone, and so they developed a strategy as a social enterprise. 
They brand themselves as representative of and protecting of the citizens of Michoacán against organized crime. 
Their brand of social enterprise means that they require a lot of civic engagement, so they invest heavily in providing local services, like dealing with home violence, going after petty criminals, treating addicts, and keeping drugs out of the local markets where they are, and, of course, protecting people from other criminal organizations. 
Now, they kill a lot of people too, but when they kill them, they provide very careful narratives and descriptions for why they did them, through newspaper insertions, YouTube videos, and billboards that explain that the people who were killed were killed because they represented a threat not to us, as an organization, of course, but to you, as citizens. 
And so we're actually here to protect you. 
They, as social enterprises do, have created a moral and ethical code that they advertise around, and they have very strict recruiting practices. 
And here you have the types of explanations that they provide for some of their actions. 
They have actually retained access to the profitable drug trade, but the way they do it is, because they control all of Michoacán, and they control the Port of Lázaro Cárdenas, they leverage that to, for example, trade copper from Michoacán that is legally created and legally extracted with illegal ephedrine from China which is a critical precursor for methamphetamines that they produce, and then they have partnerships with larger organizations like the Sinaloa Federation that place their products in the U.S. 
Finally, the Sinaloa Federation. 
When you read about them, you will often read about them with an undertone of reverence and admiration, because they are the most integrated and the largest of all the Mexican organizations, and, many people argue, the world. 
They started as just sort of a transport organization that specialized in smuggling between the U.S. 
and the Mexican borders, but now they have grown into a truly integrated multinational that has partnerships in production in the south and partnerships in global distribution across the planet. 
They have cultivated a brand of professionalism, business acumen and innovation. 
They have designed new drug products and new drug processes. 
They have designed narco-tunnels that go across the border, and you can see that these are not "" The Shawshank Redemption "" types. 
They have invented narco-submarines and boats that are not detected by radar. 
They have invented drones to transport drugs, catapults, you name it. 
One of the leaders of the Sinaloa Federation actually made it to the Forbes list. 
[# 701 Joaquin Guzman Loera] Like any multinational would, they have specialized and focused only in the most profitable part of the business, which is high-margin drugs like cocaine, heroine, methamphetamines. 
Like any traditional Latin American multinational would, the way they control their operations is through family ties. 
When they're entering a new market, they send a family member to supervise it, or, if they're partnering with a new organization, they create a family tie, either through marriages or other types of ties. 
Like any other multinational would, they protect their brand by outsourcing the more questionable parts of the business model, like for example, when they have to engage in violence against other criminal organizations, they recruit gangs and other smaller players to do the dirty work for them, and they try to separate their operations and their violence and be very discrete about this. 
To further strengthen their brand, they actually have professional P.R. firms that shape how the press talks about them. 
They have professional videographers on staff. 
They have incredibly productive ties with the security organizations on both sides of the border. 
And so, differences aside, what these three organizations share is on the one hand, a very clear understanding that institutions cannot be imposed from the top, but rather they are built from the bottom up one interaction at a time. 
They have created extremely coherent structures that they use to show the inconsistencies in government policies. 
And so what I want you to remember from this talk are three things. 
The first one is that drug violence is actually the result of a huge market demand and an institutional setup that forces the servicing of this market to necessitate violence to guarantee delivery routes. 
The second thing I want you to remember is that these are sophisticated, coherent organizations that are business organizations, and analyzing them and treating them as such is probably a much more useful approach. 
The third thing I want you to remember is that even though we're more comfortable with this idea of "" them, "" a set of bad guys separated from us, we are actually accomplices to them, either through our direct consumption or through our acceptance of the inconsistency between our policies of prohibition and our actual behavior of tolerance or even encouragement of consumption. 
These organizations service, recruit from, and operate within our communities, so necessarily, they are much more integrated within them than we are comfortable acknowledging. 
And so to me the question is not whether these dynamics will continue the way they have. 
We see that the nature of this phenomenon guarantees that they will. 
The question is whether we are willing to continue our support of a failed strategy based on our stubborn, blissful, voluntary ignorance at the cost of the deaths of thousands of our young. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

On March 14, this year, I posted this poster on Facebook. 
This is an image of me and my daughter holding the Israeli flag. 
I will try to explain to you about the context of why and when I posted. 
A few days ago, I was sitting waiting on the line at the grocery store, and the owner and one of the clients were talking to each other, and the owner was explaining to the client that we're going to get 10,000 missiles on Israel. 
And the client was saying, no, it's 10,000 a day. 
(Laughter) ("" 10,000 missiles "") This is the context. This is where we are now in Israel. 
We have this war with Iran coming for 10 years now, and we have people, you know, afraid. 
It's like every year it's the last minute that we can do something about the war with Iran. 
It's like, if we don't act now, it's too late forever, for 10 years now. 
So at some point it became, you know, to me, I'm a graphic designer, so I made posters about it and I posted the one I just showed you before. 
Most of the time, I make posters, I post them on Facebook, my friends like it, don't like it, most of the time don't like it, don't share it, don't nothing, and it's another day. 
So I went to sleep, and that was it for me. 
And later on in the night, I woke up because I'm always waking up in the night, and I went by the computer and I see all these red dots, you know, on Facebook, which I've never seen before. 
(Laughter) And I was like, "" What's going on? "" So I come to the computer and I start looking on, and suddenly I see many people talking to me, most of them I don't know, and a few of them from Iran, which is — What? 
Because you have to understand, in Israel we don't talk with people from Iran. 
We don't know people from Iran. 
It's like, on Facebook, you have friends only from — it's like your neighbors are your friends on Facebook. 
And now people from Iran are talking to me. 
So I start answering this girl, and she's telling me she saw the poster and she asked her family to come, because they don't have a computer, she asked her family to come to see the poster, and they're all sitting in the living room crying. 
So I'm like, whoa. 
I ask my wife to come, and I tell her, you have to see that. 
People are crying, and she came, she read the text, and she started to cry. 
And everybody's crying now. (Laughter) So I don't know what to do, so my first reflex, as a graphic designer, is, you know, to show everybody what I'd just seen, and people started to see them and to share them, and that's how it started. 
The day after, when really it became a lot of talking, I said to myself, and my wife said to me, I also want a poster, so this is her. (Laughter) Because it's working, put me in a poster now. 
But more seriously, I was like, okay, these ones work, but it's not just about me, it's about people from Israel who want to say something. 
So I'm going to shoot all the people I know, if they want, and I'm going to put them in a poster and I'm going to share them. 
So I went to my neighbors and friends and students and I just asked them, give me a picture, I will make you a poster. 
And that's how it started. And that's how, really, it's unleashed, because suddenly people from Facebook, friends and others, just understand that they can be part of it. 
It's not just one dude making one poster, it's — we can be part of it, so they start sending me pictures and ask me, "" Make me a poster. Post it. 
Tell the Iranians we from Israel love you too. "" It became, you know, at some point it was really, really intense. 
I mean, so many pictures, so I asked friends to come, graphic designers most of them, to make posters with me, because I didn't have the time. 
It was a huge amount of pictures. 
So for a few days, that's how my living room was. 
And we received Israeli posters, Israeli images, but also lots of comments, lots of messages from Iran. 
And we took these messages and we made posters out of it, because I know people: They don't read, they see images. 
If it's an image, they may read it. 
So here are a few of them. 
("" You are my first Israelian friend. I wish we both get rid of our idiot politicians, anyway nice to see you! "") ("" I love that blue. I love that star. I love that flag. "") This one is really moving for me because it's the story of a girl who has been raised in Iran to walk on an Israeli flag to enter her school every morning, and now that she sees the posters that we're sending, she starts — she said that she changed her mind, and now she loves that blue, she loves that star, and she loves that flag, talking about the Israeli flag, 
and she wished that we'd meet and come to visit one another, and just a few days after I posted the first poster. 
The day after, Iranians started to respond with their own posters. 
They have graphic designers. What? (Laughter) Crazy, crazy. 
So you can see they are still shy, they don't want to show their faces, but they want to spread the message. 
They want to respond. They want to say the same thing. 
So. And now it's communication. 
It's a two-way story. It's Israelis and Iranians sending the same message, one to each other. 
("" My Israeli Friends. I don't hate you. I don't want War. "") This never happened before, and this is two people supposed to be enemies, we're on the verge of a war, and suddenly people on Facebook are starting to say, "I like this guy. I love those guys." 
And it became really big at some point. 
And then it became news. 
Because when you're seeing the Middle East, you see only the bad news. 
And suddenly, there is something that was happening that was good news. So the guys on the news, they say, "" Okay, let's talk about this. "" And they just came, and it was so much, I remember one day, Michal, she was talking with the journalist, and she was asking him, "Who's gonna see the show?" And he said, "Everybody." 
So she said, "" Everybody in Palestine, in where? Israel? 
Who is everybody? "" "" Everybody. "" They said, "" Syria? "" "" Syria. "" "Lebanon?" "Lebanon." 
At some point, he just said, "" 40 million people are going to see you today. 
It's everybody. "" The Chinese. 
And we were just at the beginning of the story. 
Something crazy also happened. 
Every time a country started talking about it, like Germany, America, wherever, a page on Facebook popped up with the same logo with the same stories, so at the beginning we had "" Iran-Loves-Israel, "" which is an Iranian sitting in Tehran, saying, "" Okay, Israel loves Iran? 
I give you Iran-Loves-Israel. "" You have Palestine-Loves-Israel. 
You have Lebanon that just — a few days ago. 
And this whole list of pages on Facebook dedicated to the same message, to people sending their love, one to each other. 
The moment I really understood that something was happening, a friend of mine told me, "Google the word 'Israel.'" And those were the first images on those days that popped up from Google when you were typing, "" Israel "" or "" Iran. "" We really changed how people see the Middle East. 
Because you're not in the Middle East. 
You're somewhere over there, and then you want to see the Middle East, so you go on Google and you say, "" Israel, "" and they give you the bad stuff. 
And for a few days you got those images. 
Today the Israel-Loves-Iran page is this number, 80,831, and two million people last week went on the page and shared, liked, I don't know, commented on one of the photos. 
So for five months now, that's what we are doing, me, Michal, a few of my friends, are just making images. 
We're showing a new reality by just making images because that's how the world perceives us. 
They see images of us, and they see bad images. 
So we're working on making good images. End of story. 
Look at this one. This is the Iran-Loves-Israel page. 
This is not the Israel-Loves-Iran. This is not my page. 
This is a guy in Tehran on the day of remembrance of the Israeli fallen soldier putting an image of an Israeli soldier on his page. 
This is the enemy. 
What? 
("" Our heartfelt condolences to the families who lost their dearests in terror attack in Bulgaria "") And it's going both ways. 
It's like, we are showing respect, one to each other. 
And we're understanding. And you show compassion. 
And you become friends. 
And at some point, you become friends on Facebook, and you become friends in life. 
You can go and travel and meet people. 
And I was in Munich a few weeks ago. 
I went there to open an exposition about Iran and I met there with people from the page that told me, "" Okay, you're going to be in Europe, I'm coming. I'm coming from France, from Holland, from Germany, "" of course, and from Israel people came, and we just met there for the first time in real life. 
I met with people that are supposed to be my enemies for the first time. And we just shake hands, and have a coffee and a nice discussion, and we talk about food and basketball. 
And that was the end of it. 
Remember that image from the beginning? 
At some point we met in real life, and we became friends. 
And it goes the other way around. 
Some girl that we met on Facebook never been in Israel, born and raised in Iran, lives in Germany, afraid of Israelis because of what she knows about us, decides after a few months of talking on the Internet with some Israelis to come to Israel, and she gets on the plane and arrives at Ben Gurion and says, "" Okay, not that big a deal. "" So a few weeks ago, the stress is getting higher, so we start this new campaign called "" Not ready to die in your war. "" I mean, it's plus / minus the same message, but we wanted really to add some aggressivity to it. 
And again, something amazing happened, something that we didn't have on the first wave of the campaign. 
Now people from Iran, the same ones who were shy at the first campaign and just sent, you know, their foot and half their faces, now they're sending their faces, and they're saying, "Okay, no problem, we're into it. We are with you." 
Just read where those guys are from. 
And for every guy from Israel, you've got someone from Iran. 
Just people sending their pictures. 
Crazy, yes? 
So — (Applause) So you may ask yourself, who is this dude? 
My name is Ronny Edry, and I'm 41, I'm an Israeli, I'm a father of two, I'm a husband, and I'm a graphic designer. I'm teaching graphic design. 
And I'm not that naive, because a lot of the time I've been asked, many times I've been asked, "" Yeah, but, this is really naive, sending flowers over, I mean — "" I was in the army. I was in the paratroopers for three years, and I know how it looks from the ground. 
I know how it can look really bad. 
So to me, this is the courageous thing to do, to try to reach the other side before it's too late, because when it's going to be too late, it's going to be too late. 
And sometimes war is inevitable, sometimes, but maybe [with] effort, we can avoid it. 
Maybe as people, because especially in Israel, we're in a democracy. We have the freedom of speech, and maybe that little thing can change something. 
And really, we can be our own ambassadors. 
We can just send a message and hope for the best. 
So I want to ask Michal, my wife, to come with me on the stage just to make with you one image, because it's all about images. 
And maybe that image will help us change something. 
Just raise that. Exactly. 
And I'm just going to take a picture of it, and I'm just going to post it on Facebook with kind of "" Israelis for peace "" or something. 
Oh my God. 
Don't cry. 
Thank you guys. 
(Applause) 

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

Dre Urhahn: This theater is built on Copacabana, which is the most famous beach in the world, but 25 kilometers away from here in the North Zone of Rio lies a community called Vila Cruzeiro, and roughly 60,000 people live there. 
Now, the people here in Rio mostly know Vila Cruzeiro from the news, and unfortunately, news from Vila Cruzeiro often is not good news. 
But Vila Cruzeiro is also the place where our story begins. 
Jeroen Koolhaas: Ten years ago, we first came to Rio to shoot a documentary about life in the favelas. 
Now, we learned that favelas are informal communities. 
They emerged over the years when immigrants from the countryside came to the cities looking for work, like cities within the cities, known for problems like crime, poverty, and the violent drug war between police and the drug gangs. 
So what struck us was that these were communities that the people who lived there had built with their own hands, without a master plan and like a giant work in progress. 
Where we're from, in Holland, everything is planned. 
We even have rules for how to follow the rules. 
(Laughter) DU: So the last day of filming, we ended up in Vila Cruzeiro, and we were sitting down and we had a drink, and we were overlooking this hill with all these houses, and most of these houses looked unfinished, and they had walls of bare brick, but we saw some of these houses which were plastered and painted, and suddenly we had this idea: what would it look like if all these houses would be plastered and painted? 
And then we imagined one big design, one big work of art. 
Who would expect something like that in a place like this? 
So we thought, would that even be possible? 
So first we started to count the houses, but we soon lost count. 
But somehow the idea stuck. 
JK: We had a friend. 
He ran an NGO in Vila Cruzeiro. 
His name was Nanko, and he also liked the idea. 
He said, "" You know, everybody here would pretty much love to have their houses plastered and painted. 
It's when a house is finished. "" So he introduced us to the right people, and Vitor and Maurinho became our crew. 
We picked three houses in the center of the community and we start here. We made a few designs, and everybody liked this design of a boy flying a kite the best. 
So we started painting, and the first thing we did was to paint everything blue, and we thought that looked already pretty good. 
But they hated it. The people who lived there really hated it. 
They said, "" What did you do? 
You painted our house in exactly the same color as the police station. "" (Laughter) In a favela, that is not a good thing. 
Also the same color as the prison cell. 
So we quickly went ahead and we painted the boy, and then we thought we were finished, we were really happy, but still, it wasn't good because the little kids started coming up to us, and they said, "" You know, there's a boy flying the kite, but where is his kite? "" We said, "" Uh, it's art. 
You know, you have to imagine the kite. "" (Laughter) And they said, "" No, no, no, we want to see the kite. "" So we quickly installed a kite way up high on the hill, so that you could see the boy flying the kite and you could actually see a kite. 
So the local news started writing about it, which was great, and then even The Guardian wrote about it: "Notorious slum becomes open-air gallery." 
JK: So, encouraged by this success, we went back to Rio for a second project, and we stumbled upon this street. 
It was covered in concrete to prevent mudslides, and somehow we saw a sort of river in it, and we imagined this river to be a river in Japanese style with koi carp swimming upstream. 
So we decided to paint that river, and we invited Rob Admiraal, who is a tattoo artist, and he specialized in the Japanese style. 
So little did we know that we would spend almost an entire year painting that river, together with Geovani and Robinho and Vitor, who lived nearby. 
And we even moved into the neighborhood when one of the guys that lived on the street, Elias, told us that we could come and live in his house, together with his family, which was fantastic. 
Unfortunately, during that time, another war broke out between the police and the drug gangs. 
(Video) (Gunfire) We learned that during those times, people in communities really stick together during these times of hardship, but we also learned a very important element, the importance of barbecues. (Laughter) Because, when you throw a barbecue, it turns you from a guest into a host, so we decided to throw one almost every other week, and we got to know everybody in the neighborhood. 
JK: We still had this idea of the hill, though. 
DU: Yeah, yeah, we were talking about the scale of this, because this painting was incredibly big, and it was insanely detailed, and this process almost drove us completely insane ourselves. 
But we figured that maybe, during this process, all the time that we had spent in the neighborhood was maybe actually even more important than the painting itself. 
JK: So after all that time, this hill, this idea was still there, and we started to make sketches, models, and we figured something out. 
We figured that our ideas, our designs had to be a little bit more simple than that last project so that we could paint with more people and cover more houses at the same time. 
And we had an opportunity to try that out in a community in the central part of Rio, which is called Santa Marta, and we made a design for this place which looked like this, and then we got people to go along with it because turns out that if your idea is ridiculously big, it's easier to get people to go along with this. (Laughter) And the people of Santa Marta got together and in a little over a month they turned that square into this. 
(Applause) And this image somehow went all over the world. 
DU: So then we received an unexpected phone call from the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, and they had this question if this idea, our approach, if this would actually work in North Philly, which is one of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States. 
So we immediately said yes. 
We had no idea how, but it seemed like a very interesting challenge, so we did exactly the same as we did in Rio, and we moved into the neighborhood and started barbecuing. 
(Laughter) So the project took almost two years to complete, and we made individual designs for every single house on the avenue that we painted, and we made these designs together with the local store owners, the building owners, and a team of about a dozen young men and women. 
They were hired, and then they were trained as painters, and together they transformed their own neighborhood, the whole street, into a giant patchwork of color. 
(Applause) And at the end, the city of Philadelphia thanked every single one of them and gave them a merit for their accomplishment. 
JK: So now we had painted a whole street. 
How about we do this whole hill now? 
We started looking for funding, but instead, we just ran into questions, like, how many houses are you going to paint? 
How many square meters is that? 
How much paint are you going to use, and how many people are you going to employ? 
And we did try for years to write plans for the funding and answer all those questions, but then we thought, in order to answer all those questions, you have to know exactly what you're going to do before you actually get there and start. 
And maybe it's a mistake to think like that. 
It would lose some of the magic that we had learned about that if you go somewhere and you spend time there, you can let the project grow organically and have a life of its own. 
DU: So what we did is we decided to take this plan and strip it away from all the numbers and all the ideas and presumptions and just go back to the base idea, which was to transform this hill into a giant work of art. 
And instead of looking for funding, we started a crowdfunding campaign, and in a little over a month, more than 1,500 people put together and donated over 100,000 dollars. 
So for us, this was an amazing moment, because now — (Applause) — because now we finally had the freedom to use all the lessons that we had learned and create a project that was built the same way that the favela was built, from the ground on up, bottom up, with no master plan. 
JK: So we went back, and we employed Angelo, and he's a local artist from Vila Cruzeiro, very talented guy, and he knows almost everybody there, and then we employed Elias, our former landlord who invited us into his house, and he's a master of construction. 
Together with them, we decided where to start. 
We picked this spot in Vila Cruzeiro, and houses are being plastered as we speak. 
And the good thing about them is that they are deciding which houses go next. 
They're even printing t-shirts, they're putting up banners explaining everything to everybody, and talking to the press. 
This article about Angelo appeared. 
DU: So while this is happening, we are bringing this idea all over the world. 
So, like the project we did in Philadelphia, we are also invited to do workshops, for instance in Curaçao, and right now we're planning a huge project in Haiti. 
JK: So the favela was not only the place where this idea started: it was also the place that made it possible to work without a master plan, because these communities are informal — this was the inspiration — and in a communal effort, together with the people, you can almost work like in an orchestra, where you can have a hundred instruments playing together to create a symphony. 
DU: So we want to thank everybody who wanted to become part of this dream and supported us along the way, and we are looking at continuing. 
JK: Yeah. And so one day pretty soon, when the colors start going up on these walls, we hope more people will join us, and join this big dream, and maybe one day, the whole of Vila Cruzeiro will be painted. 
DU: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

In 2002, a group of treatment activists met to discuss the early development of the airplane. 
The Wright Brothers, in the beginning of the last century, had for the first time managed to make one of those devices fly. 
They also had taken out numerous patents on essential parts of the airplane. 
They were not the only ones. 
That was common practice in the industry, and those who held patents on airplanes were defending them fiercely and suing competitors left and right. 
This actually wasn't so great for the development of the aviation industry, and this was at a time that in particular the U.S. government was interested in ramping up the production of military airplanes. 
So there was a bit of a conflict there. 
The U.S. government decided to take action, and forced those patent holders to make their patents available to share with others to enable the production of airplanes. 
So what has this got to do with this? 
In 2002, Nelson Otwoma, a Kenyan social scientist, discovered he had HIV and needed access to treatment. 
He was told that a cure did not exist. 
AIDS, he heard, was lethal, and treatment was not offered. This was at a time that treatment actually existed in rich countries. 
AIDS had become a chronic disease. 
People in our countries here in Europe, in North America, were living with HIV, healthy lives. 
Not so for Nelson. He wasn't rich enough, and not so for his three-year-old son, who he discovered a year later also had HIV. 
Nelson decided to become a treatment activist and join up with other groups. 
In 2002, they were facing a different battle. 
Prices for ARVs, the drugs needed to treat HIV, cost about 12,000 [dollars] per patient per year. 
The patents on those drugs were held by a number of Western pharmaceutical companies that were not necessarily willing to make those patents available. 
When you have a patent, you can exclude anyone else from making, from producing or making low-cost versions, for example, available of those medications. 
Clearly this led to patent wars breaking out all over the globe. 
Luckily, those patents did not exist everywhere. 
There were countries that did not recognize pharmaceutical product patents, such as India, and Indian pharmaceutical companies started to produce so-called generic versions, low-cost copies of antiretroviral medicines, and make them available in the developing world, and within a year the price had come down from 10,000 dollars per patient per year to 350 dollars per patient per year, and today that same triple pill cocktail is available for 60 dollars per patient per year, and of course that started to have an enormous effect on the number of people who could afford access to those medicines. 
Treatment programs became possible, funding became available, and the number of people on antiretroviral drugs started to increase very rapidly. 
Today, eight million people have access to antiretroviral drugs. 
Thirty-four million are infected with HIV. 
Never has this number been so high, but actually this is good news, because what it means is people stop dying. 
People who have access to these drugs stop dying. 
And there's something else. 
They also stop passing on the virus. 
This is fairly recent science that has shown that. 
What that means is we have the tools to break the back of this epidemic. 
So what's the problem? 
Well, things have changed. 
First of all, the rules have changed. 
Today, all countries are obliged to provide patents for pharmaceuticals that last at least 20 years. 
This is as a result of the intellectual property rules of the World Trade Organization. 
So what India did is no longer possible. 
Second, the practice of patent-holding companies have changed. 
Here you see the patent practices before the World Trade Organization's rules, before '95, before antiretroviral drugs. 
This is what you see today, and this is in developing countries, so what that means is, unless we do something deliberate and unless we do something now, we will very soon be faced with another drug price crisis, because new drugs are developed, new drugs go to market, but these medicines are patented in a much wider range of countries. 
So unless we act, unless we do something today, we will soon be faced [with] what some have termed the treatment time bomb. 
It isn't only the number of drugs that are patented. 
There's something else that can really scare generic manufacturers away. 
This shows you a patent landscape. 
This is the landscape of one medicine. 
So you can imagine that if you are a generic company about to decide whether to invest in the development of this product, unless you know that the licenses to these patents are actually going to be available, you will probably choose to do something else. 
Again, deliberate action is needed. 
So surely if a patent pool could be established to ramp up the production of military airplanes, we should be able to do something similar to tackle the HIV / AIDS epidemic. 
And we did. 
In 2010, UNITAID established the Medicines Patent Pool for HIV. 
And this is how it works: Patent holders, inventors that develop new medicines patent those inventions, but make those patents available to the Medicines Patent Pool. The Medicines Patent Pool then license those out to whoever needs access to those patents. 
That can be generic manufacturers. 
It can also be not-for-profit drug development agencies, for example. 
Those manufacturers can then sell those medicines at much lower cost to people who need access to them, to treatment programs that need access to them. 
They pay royalties over the sales to the patent holders, so they are remunerated for sharing their intellectual property. 
There is one key difference with the airplane patent pool. 
The Medicines Patent Pool is a voluntary mechanism. 
The airplane patent holders were not left a choice whether they'd license their patents or not. 
They were forced to do so. 
That is something that the Medicines Patent Pool cannot do. 
It relies on the willingness of pharmaceutical companies to license their patents and make them available for others to use. 
Today, Nelson Otwoma is healthy. 
He has access to antiretroviral drugs. 
His son will soon be 14 years old. 
Nelson is a member of the expert advisory group of the Medicines Patent Pool, and he told me not so long ago, "" Ellen, we rely in Kenya and in many other countries on the Medicines Patent Pool to make sure that new medicines also become available to us, that new medicines, without delay, become available to us. "" And this is no longer fantasy. 
Already, I'll give you an example. 
In August of this year, the United States drug agency approved a new four-in-one AIDS medication. 
The company, Gilead, that holds the patents, has licensed the intellectual property to the Medicines Patent Pool. 
The pool is already working today, two months later, with generic manufacturers to make sure that this product can go to market at low cost where and when it is needed. This is unprecedented. 
This has never been done before. 
The rule is about a 10-year delay for a new product to go to market in developing countries, if at all. 
This has never been seen before. 
Nelson's expectations are very high, and quite rightly so. He and his son will need access to the next generation of antiretrovirals and the next, throughout their lifetime, so that he and many others in Kenya and other countries can continue to live healthy, active lives. 
Now we count on the willingness of drug companies to make that happen. We count on those companies that understand that it is in the interest, not only in the interest of the global good, but also in their own interest, to move from conflict to collaboration, and through the Medicines Patent Pool they can make that happen. 
They can also choose not to do that, but those that go down that road may end up in a similar situation the Wright brothers ended up with early last century, facing forcible measures by government. So they'd better jump now. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

Chris Anderson: Welcome to TED. 
Richard Branson: Thank you very much. The first TED has been great. 
CA: Have you met anyone interesting? 
RB: Well, the nice thing about TED is everybody's interesting. 
I was very glad to see Goldie Hawn, because I had an apology to make to her. 
I'd had dinner with her about two years ago and I'd — she had this big wedding ring and I put it on my finger and I couldn't get it off. 
And I went home to my wife that night and she wanted to know why I had another woman's big, massive, big wedding ring on my finger. 
And, anyway, the next morning we had to go along to the jeweler and get it cut off. 
So — (Laughter) — so apologies to Goldie. 
CA: That's pretty good. 
So, we're going to put up some slides of some of your companies here. 
You've started one or two in your time. 
So, you know, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Records — I guess it all started with a magazine called Student. 
And then, yes, all these other ones as well. I mean, how do you do this? 
RB: I read all these sort of TED instructions: you must not talk about your own business, and this, and now you ask me. 
So I suppose you're not going to be able to kick me off the stage, since you asked the question. 
(Laughter) CA: It depends what the answer is though. 
RB: No, I mean, I think I learned early on that if you can run one company, you can really run any companies. 
I mean, companies are all about finding the right people, inspiring those people, you know, drawing out the best in people. 
And I just love learning and I'm incredibly inquisitive and I love taking on, you know, the status quo and trying to turn it upside down. 
So I've seen life as one long learning process. 
And if I see — you know, if I fly on somebody else's airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one, which it wasn't, 21 years ago, then I'd think, well, you know, maybe I can create the kind of airline that I'd like to fly on. 
And so, you know, so got one secondhand 747 from Boeing and gave it a go. 
CA: Well, that was a bizarre thing, because you made this move that a lot of people advised you was crazy. 
And in fact, in a way, it almost took down your empire at one point. 
I had a conversation with one of the investment bankers who, at the time when you basically sold Virgin Records and invested heavily in Virgin Atlantic, and his view was that you were trading, you know, the world's fourth biggest record company for the twenty-fifth biggest airline and that you were out of your mind. 
Why did you do that? 
RB: Well, I think that there's a very thin dividing line between success and failure. 
And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you're likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line. 
We had — we were being attacked by British Airways. 
They were trying to put our airline out of business, and they launched what's become known as the dirty tricks campaign. 
And I realized that the whole empire was likely to come crashing down unless I chipped in a chip. 
And in order to protect the jobs of the people who worked for the airline, and protect the jobs of the people who worked for the record company, I had to sell the family jewelry to protect the airline. 
CA: Post-Napster, you're looking like a bit of a genius, actually, for that as well. 
RB: Yeah, as it turned out, it proved to be the right move. 
But, yeah, it was sad at the time, but we moved on. 
CA: Now, you use the Virgin brand a lot and it seems like you're getting synergy from one thing to the other. 
What does the brand stand for in your head? 
RB: Well, I like to think it stands for quality, that you know, if somebody comes across a Virgin company, they — CA: They are quality, Richard. Come on now, everyone says quality. Spirit? 
RB: No, but I was going to move on this. 
We have a lot of fun and I think the people who work for it enjoy it. 
As I say, we go in and shake up other industries, and I think, you know, we do it differently and I think that industries are not quite the same as a result of Virgin attacking the market. 
CA: I mean, there are a few launches you've done where the brand maybe hasn't worked quite as well. 
I mean, Virgin Brides — what happened there? 
(Laughter) RB: We couldn't find any customers. (Laughter) 
(Applause) CA: I was actually also curious why — I think you missed an opportunity with your condoms launch. You called it Mates. 
I mean, couldn't you have used the Virgin brand for that as well? 
Ain't virgin no longer, or something. 
RB: Again, we may have had problems finding customers. 
I mean, we had — often, when you launch a company and you get customer complaints, you know, you can deal with them. 
But about three months after the launch of the condom company, I had a letter, a complaint, and I sat down and wrote a long letter back to this lady apologizing profusely. 
But obviously, there wasn't a lot I could do about it. 
And then six months later, or nine months after the problem had taken, I got this delightful letter with a picture of the baby asking if I'd be godfather, which I became. 
So, it all worked out well. 
CA: Really? You should have brought a picture. That's wonderful. 
RB: I should have. 
CA: So, just help us with some of the numbers. 
I mean, what are the numbers on this? 
I mean, how big is the group overall? 
How much — what's the total revenue? 
RB: It's about 25 billion dollars now, in total. 
CA: And how many employees? 
RB: About 55,000. 
CA: So, you've been photographed in various ways at various times and never worrying about putting your dignity on the line or anything like that. 
What was that? Was that real? 
RB: Yeah. We were launching a megastore in Los Angeles, I think. 
No, I mean, I think — CA: But is that your hair? 
RB: No. 
CA: What was that one? 
RB: Dropping in for tea. 
CA: OK. 
(Laughter) RB: Ah, that was quite fun. That was a wonderful car-boat in which — CA: Oh, that car that we — actually we — it was a TEDster event there, I think. 
Is that — could you still pause on that one actually, for a minute? 
(Laughter) RB: It's a tough job, isn't it? 
CA: I mean, it is a tough job. 
(Laughter) When I first came to America, I used to try this with employees as well and they kind of — they have these different rules over here, it's very strange. 
RB: I know, I have — the lawyers say you mustn't do things like that, but — CA: I mean, speaking of which, tell us about — RB: "" Pammy "" we launched, you know — mistakenly thought we could take on Coca-Cola, and we launched a cola bottle called "" The Pammy "" and it was shaped a bit like Pamela Anderson. 
But the trouble is, it kept on tipping over, but — (Laughter) CA: Designed by Philippe Starck perhaps? 
RB: Of course. 
CA: So, we'll just run a couple more pictures here. Virgin Brides. Very nice. 
And, OK, so stop there. This was — you had some award I think? 
RB: Yeah, well, 25 years earlier, we'd launched the Sex Pistols' "" God Save The Queen, "" and I'd certainly never expected that 25 years later — that she'd actually knight us. 
But somehow, she must have had a forgetful memory, I think. 
CA: Well, God saved her and you got your just reward. 
Do you like to be called Sir Richard, or how? 
RB: Nobody's ever called me Sir Richard. 
Occasionally in America, I hear people saying Sir Richard and think there's some Shakespearean play taking place. 
But nowhere else anyway. 
CA: OK. So can you use your knighthood for anything or is it just... 
RB: No. I suppose if you're having problems getting a booking in a restaurant or something, that might be worth using it. 
CA: You know, it's not Richard Branson. It's Sir Richard Branson. 
RB: I'll go get the secretary to use it. 
CA: OK. So let's look at the space thing. 
I think, with us, we've got a video that shows what you're up to, and Virgin Galactic up in the air. (Video) So that's the Bert Rutan designed spaceship? 
RB: Yeah, it'll be ready in — well, ready in 12 months and then we do 12 months extensive testing. 
And then 24 months from now, people will be able to take a ride into space. 
CA: So this interior is Philippe Starcke designed? 
RB: Philippe has done the — yeah, quite a bit of it: the logos and he's building the space station in New Mexico. 
And basically, he's just taken an eye and the space station will be one giant eye, so when you're in space, you ought to be able to see this massive eye looking up at you. 
And when you land, you'll be able to go back into this giant eye. 
But he's an absolute genius when it comes to design. 
CA: But you didn't have him design the engine? 
RB: Philippe is quite erratic, so I think that he wouldn't be the best person to design the engine, no. 
RB: Yeah? No, he is a — CA: Well, some people found it wonderful, some people found it completely bizarre. 
But, I personally found it wonderful. 
RB: He's a wonderful enthusiast, which is why I love him. But... 
CA: So, now, you've always had this exploration bug in you. 
Have you ever regretted that? 
RB: Many times. 
I mean, I think with the ballooning and boating expeditions we've done in the past. 
Well, I got pulled out of the sea I think six times by helicopters, so — and each time, I didn't expect to come home to tell the tale. 
So in those moments, you certainly wonder what you're doing up there or — CA: What was the closest you got to — when did you think, this is it, I might be on my way out? 
RB: Well, I think the balloon adventures were — each one was, each one, actually, I think we came close. 
And, I mean, first of all we — nobody had actually crossed the Atlantic in a hot air balloon before, so we had to build a hot air balloon that was capable of flying in the jet stream, and we weren't quite sure, when a balloon actually got into the jet stream, whether it would actually survive the 200, 220 miles an hour winds that you can find up there. 
And so, just the initial lift off from Sugarloaf to cross the Atlantic, as we were pushing into the jet stream, this enormous balloon — the top of the balloon ended up going at a couple of hundred miles an hour, the capsule that we were in at the bottom was going at maybe two miles an hour, and it just took off. 
And it was like holding onto a thousand horses. 
And we were just crossing every finger, praying that the balloon would hold together, which, fortunately, it did. 
But the ends of all those balloon trips were, you know — something seemed to go wrong every time, and on that particular occasion, the more experienced balloonist who was with me jumped, and left me holding on for dear life. 
(Laughter) CA: Did he tell you to jump, or he just said, "" I'm out of here! "" and... 
RB: No, he told me jump, but once his weight had gone, the balloon just shot up to 12,000 feet and I... 
CA: And you inspired an Ian McEwan novel I think with that. 
RB: Yeah. No, I put on my oxygen mask and stood on top of the balloon, with my parachute, looking at the swirling clouds below, trying to pluck up my courage to jump into the North Sea, which — and it was a very, very, very lonely few moments. 
RB: Well, I knew I had about half an hour's fuel left, and I also knew that the chances were that if I jumped, I would only have a couple of minutes of life left. 
So I climbed back into the capsule and just desperately tried to make sure that I was making the right decision. 
And wrote some notes to my family. And then climbed back up again, looked down at those clouds again, climbed back into the capsule again. 
And then finally, just thought, there's a better way. 
I've got, you know, this enormous balloon above me, it's the biggest parachute ever, why not use it? 
And so I managed to fly the balloon down through the clouds, and about 50 feet, before I hit the sea, threw myself over. 
And the balloon hit the sea and went shooting back up to 10,000 feet without me. 
But it was a wonderful feeling being in that water and — CA: What did you write to your family? 
RB: Just what you would do in a situation like that: just I love you very much. And I'd already written them a letter before going on this trip, which — just in case anything had happened. 
But fortunately, they never had to use it. 
CA: Your companies have had incredible PR value out of these heroics. 
The years — and until I stopped looking at the polls, you were sort of regarded as this great hero in the U.K. and elsewhere. 
And cynics might say, you know, this is just a smart business guy doing what it takes to execute his particular style of marketing. 
How much was the PR value part of this? 
RB: Well, of course, the PR experts said that as an airline owner, the last thing you should be doing is heading off in balloons and boats, and crashing into the seas. 
(Laughter) CA: They have a point, Richard. 
RB: In fact, I think our airline took a full page ad at the time saying, you know, come on, Richard, there are better ways of crossing the Atlantic. 
(Laughter) CA: To do all this, you must have been a genius from the get-go, right? 
RB: Well, I won't contradict that. 
(Laughter) CA: OK, this isn't exactly hardball. OK. 
Didn't — weren't you just terrible at school? 
RB: I was dyslexic. I had no understanding of schoolwork whatsoever. 
I certainly would have failed IQ tests. 
And it was one of the reasons I left school when I was 15 years old. 
And if I — if I'm not interested in something, I don't grasp it. 
As somebody who's dyslexic, you also have some quite bizarre situations. 
I mean, for instance, I've had to — you know, I've been running the largest group of private companies in Europe, but haven't been able to know the difference between net and gross. 
And so the board meetings have been fascinating. 
(Laughter) And so, it's like, good news or bad news? 
And generally, the people would say, oh, well that's bad news. 
CA: But just to clarify, the 25 billion dollars is gross, right? That's gross? 
(Laughter) RB: Well, I hope it's net actually, having — (Laughter) — I've got it right. 
CA: No, trust me, it's gross. 
(Laughter) RB: So, when I turned 50, somebody took me outside the boardroom and said, "" Look Richard, here's a — let me draw on a diagram. 
Here's a net in the sea, and the fish have been pulled from the sea into this net. 
And that's the profits you've got left over in this little net, everything else is eaten. "" And I finally worked it all out. 
(Laughter) (Applause) CA: But, I mean, at school — so as well as being, you know, doing pretty miserably academically, but you were also the captain of the cricket and football teams. 
So you were kind of a — you were a natural leader, but just a bit of a... Were you a rebel then, or how would you... 
RB: Yeah, I think I was a bit of a maverick and — but I... And I was, yeah, I was fortunately good at sport, and so at least I had something to excel at, at school. 
CA: And some bizarre things happened just earlier in your life. 
I mean, there's the story about your mother allegedly dumping you in a field, aged four, and saying "" OK, walk home. "" Did this really happen? 
RB: She was, you know, she felt that we needed to stand on our own two feet from an early age. 
So she did things to us, which now she'd be arrested for, such as pushing us out of the car, and telling us to find our own way to Granny's, about five miles before we actually got there. 
And making us go on wonderful, long bike rides. 
And we were never allowed to watch television and the like. 
CA: But is there a risk here? 
I mean, there's a lot of people in the room who are wealthy, and they've got kids, and we've got this dilemma about how you bring them up. 
Do you look at the current generation of kids coming up and think they're too coddled, they don't know what they've got, we're going to raise a generation of privileged... 
So I don't think you can mollycoddle your kids too much really. 
CA: You didn't turn out too bad, I have to say, I'm... 
Your headmaster said to you — I mean he found you kind of an enigma at your school — he said, you're either going to be a millionaire or go to prison, and I'm not sure which. 
Which of those happened first? 
(Laughter) RB: Well, I've done both. I think I went to prison first. 
I was actually prosecuted under two quite ancient acts in the U.K. 
I was prosecuted under the 1889 Venereal Diseases Act and the 1916 Indecent Advertisements Act. 
On the first occasion, for mentioning the word venereal disease in public, which — we had a center where we would help young people who had problems. 
And one of the problems young people have is venereal disease. 
And there's an ancient law that says you can't actually mention the word venereal disease or print it in public. 
So the police knocked on the door, and told us they were going to arrest us if we carried on mentioning the word venereal disease. 
We changed it to social diseases and people came along with acne and spots, but nobody came with VD any more. 
And then subsequently, "" Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, "" the word bollocks, the police decided was a rude word and so we were arrested for using the word bollocks on the Sex Pistols' album. 
And John Mortimer, the playwright, defended us. 
And he asked if I could find a linguistics expert to come up with a different definition of the word bollocks. 
And so I rang up Nottingham University, and I asked to talk to the professor of linguistics. 
And he said, "" Look, bollocks is not a — has nothing to do with balls whatsoever. 
It's actually a nickname given to priests in the eighteenth century. "" (Laughter) And he went, "" Furthermore, I'm a priest myself. "" And so I said, "" Would you mind coming to the court? "" And he said he'd be delighted. And I said — and he said, "" Would you like me to wear my dog collar? "" And I said, "" Yes, definitely. Please. "" (Laughter) CA: That's great. 
RB: So our key witness argued that it was actually "Never Mind the Priest, Here's the Sex Pistols." 
(Laughter) And the judge found us — reluctantly found us not guilty, so... (Laughter) 
CA: That is outrageous. 
(Applause) So seriously, is there a dark side? 
A lot of people would say there's no way that someone could put together this incredible collection of businesses without knifing a few people in the back, you know, doing some ugly things. 
You've been accused of being ruthless. 
There was a nasty biography written about you by someone. 
RB: I don't actually think that the stereotype of a businessperson treading all over people to get to the top, generally speaking, works. 
I think if you treat people well, people will come back and come back for more. 
And I think all you have in life is your reputation and it's a very small world. 
And I actually think that the best way of becoming a successful business leader is dealing with people fairly and well, and I like to think that's how we run Virgin. 
CA: And what about the people who love you and who see you spending — you keep getting caught up in these new projects, but it almost feels like you're addicted to launching new stuff. 
You get excited by an idea and, kapow! 
I mean, do you think about life balance? 
How do your family feel about each time you step into something big and new? 
RB: I also believe that being a father's incredibly important, so from the time the kids were very young, you know, when they go on holiday, I go on holiday with them. 
And so we spend a very good sort of three months away together. 
Yes, I'll, you know, be in touch. We're very lucky, we have this tiny little island in the Caribbean and we can — so I can take them there and we can bring friends, and we can play together, but I can also keep in touch with what's going on. 
CA: You started talking in recent years about this term capitalist philanthropy. 
What is that? 
RB: Capitalism has been proven to be a system that works. 
You know, the alternative, communism, has not worked. 
But the problem with capitalism is extreme wealth ends up in the hands of a few people, and therefore extreme responsibility, I think, goes with that wealth. 
And I think it's important that the individuals, who are in that fortunate position, do not end up competing for bigger and bigger boats, and bigger and bigger cars, but, you know, use that money to either create new jobs or to tackle issues around the world. 
CA: And what are the issues that you worry about most, care most about, want to turn your resources toward? 
RB: Well, there's — I mean there's a lot of issues. 
I mean global warming certainly is a massive threat to mankind and we are putting a lot of time and energy into, A, trying to come up with alternative fuels and, B, you know, we just launched this prize, which is really a prize in case we don't get an answer on alternative fuels, in case we don't actually manage to get the carbon emissions cut down quickly, and in case we go through the tipping point. 
We need to try to encourage people to come up with a way of extracting carbon out of the Earth's atmosphere. 
And we just — you know, there weren't really people working on that before, so we wanted people to try to — all the best brains in the world to start thinking about that, and also to try to extract the methane out of the Earth's atmosphere as well. 
And actually, we've had about 15,000 people fill in the forms saying they want to give it a go. 
And so we only need one, so we're hopeful. 
CA: And you're also working in Africa on a couple of projects? 
RB: Yes, I mean, we've got — we're setting up something called the war room, which is maybe the wrong word. 
We're trying to — maybe we'll change it — but anyway, it's a war room to try to coordinate all the attack that's going on in Africa, all the different social problems in Africa, and try to look at best practices. 
So, for instance, there's a doctor in Africa that's found that if you give a mother antiretroviral drugs at 24 weeks, when she's pregnant, that the baby will not have HIV when it's born. 
And so disseminating that information to around the rest of Africa is important. 
CA: The war room sounds, it sounds powerful and dramatic. 
And is there a risk that the kind of the business heroes of the West get so excited about — I mean, they're used to having an idea, getting stuff done, and they believe profoundly in their ability to make a difference in the world. 
Is there a risk that we go to places like Africa and say, we've got to fix this problem and we can do it, I've got all these billions of dollars, you know, da, da, da — here's the big idea. And kind of take a much more complex situation and actually end up making a mess of it. Do you worry about that? 
RB: Well, first of all, on this particular situation, we're actually — we're working with the government on it. 
I mean, Thabo Mbeki's had his problems with accepting HIV and AIDS are related, but this is a way, I think, of him tackling this problem and instead of the world criticizing him, it's a way of working with him, with his government. 
It's important that if people do go to Africa and do try to help, they don't just go in there and then leave after a few years. 
It's got to be consistent. 
But I think business leaders can bring their entrepreneurial know-how and help governments approach things slightly differently. 
For instance, we're setting up clinics in Africa where we're going to be giving free antiretroviral drugs, free TB treatment and free malaria treatment. 
But we're also trying to make them self-sustaining clinics, so that people pay for some other aspects. 
CA: I mean a lot of cynics say about someone like yourself, or Bill Gates, or whatever, that this is really being — it's almost driven by some sort of desire again, you know, for the right image, for guilt avoidance and not like a real philanthropic instinct. 
What would you say to them? 
RB: Well, I think that everybody — people do things for a whole variety of different reasons and I think that, you know, when I'm on me deathbed, I will want to feel that I've made a difference to other people's lives. 
And that may be a selfish thing to think, but it's the way I've been brought up. 
I think if I'm in a position to radically change other people's lives for the better, I should do so. 
CA: How old are you? 
RB: I'm 56. 
CA: I mean, the psychologist Erik Erikson says that — as I understand him and I'm a total amateur — but that during 30s, 40s people are driven by this desire to grow and that's where they get their fulfillment. 
50s, 60s, the mode of operation shifts more to the quest for wisdom and a search for legacy. 
I mean, it seems like you're still a little bit in the growth phases, you're still doing these incredible new plans. 
How much do you think about legacy, and what would you like your legacy to be? 
RB: I don't think I think too much about legacy. 
I mean, I like to — you know, my grandmother lived to 101, so hopefully I've got another 30 or 40 years to go. 
No, I just want to live life to its full. 
You know, if I can make a difference, I hope to be able to make a difference. 
And I think one of the positive things at the moment is you've got Sergey and Larry from Google, for instance, who are good friends. 
And, thank God, you've got two people who genuinely care about the world and with that kind of wealth. 
If they had that kind of wealth and they didn't care about the world, it would be very worrying. 
And you know they're going to make a hell of a difference to the world. 
And I think it's important that people in that kind of position do make a difference. 
CA: Well, Richard, when I was starting off in business, I knew nothing about it and I also was sort of — I thought that business people were supposed to just be ruthless and that that was the only way you could have a chance of succeeding. 
And you actually did inspire me. I looked at you, I thought, well, he's made it. Maybe there is a different way. 
So I would like to thank you for that inspiration, and for coming to TED today. Thank you. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

So it was about four years ago, five years ago, I was sitting on a stage in Philadelphia, I think it was, with a bag similar to this. 
And I was pulling a molecule out of this bag. 
And I was saying, you don't know this molecule really well, but your body knows it extremely well. 
And I was thinking that your body hated it, at the time, because we are very immune to this. This is called alpha-gal epitope. 
And the fact that pig heart valves have lots of these on them is the reason that you can't transplant a pig heart valve into a person easily. 
Actually our body doesn't hate these. 
Our body loves these. It eats them. 
I mean, the cells in our immune system are always hungry. 
And if an antibody is stuck to one of these things on the cell, it means "" that's food. "" Now, I was thinking about that and I said, you know, we've got this immune response to this ridiculous molecule that we don't make, and we see it a lot in other animals and stuff. 
But I said we can't get rid of it, because all the people who tried to transplant heart valves found out you can't get rid of that immunity. 
And I said, why don't you use that? 
What if I could stick this molecule, slap it onto a bacteria that was pathogenic to me, that had just invaded my lungs? 
I mean I could immediately tap into an immune response that was already there, where it was not going to take five or six days to develop it — it was going to immediately attack whatever this thing was on. 
It was kind of like the same thing that happens when you, like when you're getting stopped for a traffic ticket in L.A., and the cop drops a bag of marijuana in the back of your car, and then charges you for possession of marijuana. 
It's like this very fast, very efficient way to get people off the street. 
(Laughter) So you can take a bacteria that really doesn't make these things at all, and if you could clamp these on it really well you have it taken off the street. 
And for certain bacteria we don't have really efficient ways to do that anymore. 
Our antibiotics are running out. 
And, I mean, the world apparently is running out too. 
So probably it doesn't matter 50 years from now — streptococcus and stuff like that will be rampant — because we won't be here. But if we are — (Laughter) we're going to need something to do with the bacteria. 
So I started working with this thing, with a bunch of collaborators. 
And trying to attach this to things that were themselves attached to certain specific target zones, bacteria that we don't like. 
And I feel now like George Bush. 
It's like "" mission accomplished. "" So I might be doing something dumb, just like he was doing at the time. 
But basically what I was talking about there we've now gotten to work. 
And it's killing bacteria. It's eating them. 
This thing can be stuck, like that little green triangle up there, sort of symbolizing this right now. 
You can stick this to something called a DNA aptamer. 
And that DNA aptamer will attach specifically to a target that you have selected for it. 
So you can find a little feature on a bacterium that you don't like, like Staphylococcus — I don't like it in particular, because it killed a professor friend of mine last year. 
It doesn't respond to antibiotics. So I don't like it. 
And I'm making an aptamer that will have this attached to it. 
That will know how to find Staph when it's in your body, and will alert your immune system to go after it. 
Here's what happened. See that line on the very top with the little dots? 
That's a bunch of mice that had been poisoned by our scientist friends down in Texas, at Brooks Air Base, with anthrax. 
And they had also been treated with a drug that we made that would attack anthrax in particular, and direct your immune system to it. 
You'll notice they all lived, the ones on the top line — that's a 100 percent survival rate. 
And they actually lived another 14 days, or 28 when we finally killed them, and took them apart and figured out what went wrong. 
Why did they not die? 
And they didn't die because they didn't have anthrax anymore. 
So we did it. Okay? 
(Applause) Mission accomplished! (Applause) 

(Music) ["" Oedipus Rex ""] ["" The Lion King ""] ["" Titus ""] ["" Frida ""] ["" The Magic Flute ""] ["" Across The Universe ""] (Applause) Julie Taymor: Thank you. Thank you very much. 
That's a few samples of the theater, opera and films that I have done over the last 20 years. 
But what I'd like to begin with right now is to take you back to a moment that I went through in Indonesia, which is a seminal moment in my life and, like all myths, these stories need to be retold and told, lest we forget them. 
And when I'm in the turbulent times, as we know, that I am right now, through the crucible and the fire of transformation, which is what all of you do, actually. 
Anybody who creates knows there's that point where it hasn't quite become the phoenix or the burnt char. 
(Laughter) And I am right there on the edge, which I'll tell you about, another story. 
I want to go back to Indonesia where I was about 21, 22 years, a long time ago, on a fellowship. 
And I found myself, after two years there and performing and learning, on the island of Bali, on the edge of a crater, Gunung Batur. 
And I was in a village where there was an initiation ceremony for the young men, a rite of passage. 
Little did I know that it was mine as well. 
And as I sat in this temple square under this gigantic beringin banyan tree, in the dark, there was no electricity, just the full moon, down in this empty square, and I heard the most beautiful sounds, like a Charles Ives concert as I listened to the gamelan music from all the different villagers that came for this once-every-five-years ceremony. 
And I thought I was alone in the dark under this tree. 
And all of a sudden, out of the dark, from the other end of the square, I saw the glint of mirrors lit by the moon. 
And these 20 old men who I'd seen before all of a sudden stood up in these full warrior costumes with the headdress and the spears, and no one was in the square, and I was hidden in the shadows. 
No one was there, and they came out, and they did this incredible dance. 
"Huhuhuhuhuhuhuhahahahaha." 
And they moved their bodies and they came forward, and the lights bounced off these costumes. 
And I've been in theater since I was 11 years old, and performing, creating, and I went, "" Who are they performing for with these elaborate costumes, these extraordinary headdresses? "" And I realized that they were performing for God, whatever that means. 
But somehow, it didn't matter about the publicity. 
There was no money involved. 
It wasn't going to be written down. It was no news. 
And there were these incredible artists that felt for me like an eternity as they performed. 
The next moment, as soon as they finished and disappeared into the shadows, a young man with a propane lantern came on, hung it up on a tree, set up a curtain. 
The village square was filled with hundreds of people. 
And they put on an opera all night long. 
Human beings needed the light. 
They needed the light to see. 
So what I gained and gathered from this incredible, seminal moment in my life as a young artist was that you must be true to what you believe as an artist all the way through, but you also have to be aware that the audience is out there in our lives at this time, and they also need the light. 
And it's this incredible balance that I think that we walk when we are creating something that is breaking ground, that's trying to do something you've never seen before, that imaginary world where you actually don't know where you're going to end up, that's the fine line on the edge of a crater that I have walked my whole life. 
What I would like to do now is to tell you a little bit about how I work. Let's take "" The Lion King. "" You saw many examples of my work up there, but it's one that people know. 
I start with the notion of the ideograph. 
An ideograph is like a brush painting, a Japanese brush painting. 
Three strokes, you get the whole bamboo forest. 
I go to the concept of "" The Lion King "" and I say, "" What is the essence of it? 
What is the abstraction? 
If I were to reduce this entire story into one image, what would it be? "" The circle. The circle. It's so obvious. 
The circle of life. The circle of Mufasa's mask. 
The circle that, when we come to Act II and there's a drought, how do you express drought? 
It's a circle of silk on the floor that disappears into the hole in the stage floor. 
The circle of life comes in the wheels of the gazelles that leap. 
And you see the mechanics. 
And being a theater person, what I know and love about the theater is that when the audience comes in and they suspend their disbelief, when you see men walking or women walking with a platter of grass on their heads, you know it's the savanna. 
You don't question that. 
I love the apparent truth of theater. 
I love that people are willing to fill in the blanks. 
The audience is willing to say, "" Oh, I know that's not a real sun. 
You took pieces of sticks. 
You added silk to the bottom. 
You suspended these pieces. You let it fall flat on the floor. 
And as it rises with the strings, I see that it's a sun. 
But the beauty of it is that it's just silk and sticks. 
And in a way, that is what makes it spiritual. 
That's what moves you. 
It's not the actual literal sunrise that's coming. 
It's the art of it. 
So in the theater, as much as the story is critical and the book and the language, the telling of the story, how it's told, the mechanics, the methods that you use, is equal to the story itself. 
And I'm one who loves high tech and low tech. 
So I could go from — For instance, I'll show you some "" Spider-Man "" later, these incredible machines that move people along. 
But the fact is, without the dancer who knows how to use his body and swing on those wires, it's nothing. 
So now I'm going to show you some clips from the other big project of my life this year, "The Tempest." 
It's a movie. I did "" The Tempest "" on a stage three times in the theater since 1984, '86, and I love the play. 
I did it always with a male Prospero. 
And all of a sudden, I thought, "" Well, who am I gonna get to play Prospero? 
Why not Helen Mirren? She's a great actor. Why not? "" And this material really did work for a woman equally as well. 
So now, let's take a look at some of the images from "" The Tempest. "" (Music) (Video) Prospera: Hast thou, spirit, performed to the point the tempest that I bade thee? 
Prospera: At first sight, they have changed eyes. 
Miranda: Do you love me? 
Ferdinand: Beyond all limit. 
HM: They are both in either's powers. 
Trinculo: Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. 
(Music) Looking for business, governor? 
Caliban: Hast thou not dropped from heaven? 
Prospera: Caliban! 
Caliban: This island is mine. 
Prospera: For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps. 
Antonio: Here lies your brother no better than the earth he lies upon. 
Sebastian: Draw thy sword. 
And I, the king, shall love thee. 
Prospera: I will plague them all, even to roaring. 
Ariel: I have made you mad. 
Prospera: We are such stuff as dreams are made on. 
and our little life is rounded with a sleep. 
(Music) JT: Okay. 
(Applause) So I went from theater, doing "" The Tempest "" on the stage in a very low-budget production many years ago, and I love the play, and I also think it's Shakespeare's last play, and it really lends itself, as you can see, to cinema. 
But I'm just going to give you a little example about how one stages it in theater and then how one takes that same idea or story and moves it into cinema. 
The ideograph that I talked to you about before, what is it for "" The Tempest ""? 
What, if I were to boil it down, would be the one image that I could hang my hat on for this? 
And it was the sand castle, the idea of nurture versus nature, that we build these civilizations — she speaks about it at the end, Helen Mirren's Prospera — we build them, but under nature, under the grand tempest, these cloud-capped towers, these gorgeous palaces will fade and there will — leave not a rack behind. 
So in the theater, I started the play, it was a black sand rake, white cyc, and there was a little girl, Miranda, on the horizon, building a drip castle, a sand castle. 
And as she was there on the edge of that stage, two stagehands all in black with watering cans ran along the top and started to pour water on the sand castle, and the sand castle started to drip and sink, but before it did, the audience saw the black-clad stagehands. 
The medium was apparent. It was banal. We saw it. 
But as they started to pour the water, the light changed from showing you the black-clad stagehands to focusing, this rough magic that we do in theater, it focused right on the water itself. 
And all of a sudden, the audience's perspective changes. 
It becomes something magically large. 
It becomes the rainstorm. 
The masked actors, the puppeteers, they disappear, and the audience makes that leap into this world, into this imaginary world of "" The Tempest "" actually happening. 
Now the difference when I went and did it in the cinema, I started the actual movie with a close-up of a sand castle, a black sand castle, and what cinema can do is, by using camera, perspective, and also long shots and close-ups, it started on a close-up of the sand castle, and as it pulled away, you saw that it was a miniature sitting in the palm of the girl's hands. 
And so I could play with the medium, and why I move from one medium to another is to be able to do this. 
Now I'm going to take you to "" Spider-Man. "" (Music) (Video) Peter Parker: ♪ Standing on the precipice, I can soar away from this. ♪ JT: We're trying to do everything in live theater that you can't do in two dimensions in film and television. 
PP: ♪ Rise above yourself and take control. ♪ George Tsypin: We're looking at New York from a Spider-Man point of view. 
Manhattan in the show is not bound by gravity either. 
PP: ♪ Be yourself and rise above it all. ♪ Ensemble: ♪ Sock! Pow! ♪ ♪ Slam! Scratch! ♪ Danny Ezralow: I don't want you to even think there's a choreographer. 
It's real, what's happening. 
I prefer you to see people moving, and you're going, "" Whoa, what was that? "" (Music) JT: If I give enough movement in the sculpture, and the actor moves their head, you feel like it's alive. 
It's really comic book live. It's a comic book coming alive. 
(Music) Bono: They're mythologies. 
They're modern myths, these comic book heroes. 
PP: ♪ They believe. ♪ (Screams) (Music) (Applause) JT: Ohhhh. What was that? 
Circus, rock 'n' roll, drama. 
What the hell are we doing up there on that stage? 
Well, one last story, very quickly. 
After I was in that village, I crossed the lake, and I saw that the volcano was erupting on the other side, Gunung Batur, and there was a dead volcano next to the live volcano. 
I didn't think I'd be swallowed by the volcano, and I am here. 
But it's very easy to climb up, is it not? 
You hold on to the roots, you put your foot in the little rocks and climb up there, and you get to the top, and I was with a good friend who was an actor, and we said, "" Let's go up there. 
Let's see if we can come close to the edge of that live volcano. "" And we climbed up and we got to the very top, and we're on the edge, on this precipice, Roland disappears into the sulfur smoke at the volcano at the other end, and I'm up there alone on this incredible precipice. 
Did you hear the lyrics? 
I'm on the precipice looking down into a dead volcano to my left. 
To my right is sheer shale. It's coming off. 
I'm in thongs and sarongs. It was many years ago. 
And no hiking boots. 
And he's disappeared, this mad French gypsy actor, off in the smoke, and I realize, I can't go back the way that I've come. I can't. 
So I throw away my camera. I throw away my thongs, and I looked at the line straight in front of me, and I got down on all fours like a cat, and I held with my knees to either side of this line in front of me, for 30 yards or 30 feet, I don't know. 
The wind was massively blowing, and the only way I could get to the other side was to look at the line straight in front of me. 
I know you've all been there. 
I'm in the crucible right now. 
It's my trial by fire. 
It's my company's trials by fire. 
We survive because our theme song is "" Rise Above. "" Boy falls from the sky, rise above. 
It's right there in the palm of both of our hands, of all of my company's hands. 
I have beautiful collaborators, and we as creators only get there all together. 
I know you understand that. 
And you just stay going forward, and then you see this extraordinary thing in front of your eyes. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm a neuroscientist. 
And in neuroscience, we have to deal with many difficult questions about the brain. 
But I want to start with the easiest question and the question you really should have all asked yourselves at some point in your life, because it's a fundamental question if we want to understand brain function. 
And that is, why do we and other animals have brains? 
Not all species on our planet have brains, so if we want to know what the brain is for, let's think about why we evolved one. 
Now you may reason that we have one to perceive the world or to think, and that's completely wrong. 
If you think about this question for any length of time, it's blindingly obvious why we have a brain. 
We have a brain for one reason and one reason only, and that's to produce adaptable and complex movements. 
There is no other reason to have a brain. 
Think about it. 
Movement is the only way you have of affecting the world around you. 
Now that's not quite true. There's one other way, and that's through sweating. 
But apart from that, everything else goes through contractions of muscles. 
So think about communication — speech, gestures, writing, sign language — they're all mediated through contractions of your muscles. 
So it's really important to remember that sensory, memory and cognitive processes are all important, but they're only important to either drive or suppress future movements. 
There can be no evolutionary advantage to laying down memories of childhood or perceiving the color of a rose if it doesn't affect the way you're going to move later in life. 
Now for those who don't believe this argument, we have trees and grass on our planet without the brain, but the clinching evidence is this animal here — the humble sea squirt. 
Rudimentary animal, has a nervous system, swims around in the ocean in its juvenile life. 
And at some point of its life, it implants on a rock. 
And the first thing it does in implanting on that rock, which it never leaves, is to digest its own brain and nervous system for food. 
So once you don't need to move, you don't need the luxury of that brain. 
And this animal is often taken as an analogy to what happens at universities when professors get tenure, but that's a different subject. 
(Applause) So I am a movement chauvinist. 
I believe movement is the most important function of the brain — don't let anyone tell you that it's not true. 
Now if movement is so important, how well are we doing understanding how the brain controls movement? 
And the answer is we're doing extremely poorly; it's a very hard problem. 
But we can look at how well we're doing by thinking about how well we're doing building machines which can do what humans can do. 
Think about the game of chess. 
How well are we doing determining what piece to move where? 
If you pit Garry Kasparov here, when he's not in jail, against IBM's Deep Blue, well the answer is IBM's Deep Blue will occasionally win. 
And I think if IBM's Deep Blue played anyone in this room, it would win every time. 
That problem is solved. 
What about the problem of picking up a chess piece, dexterously manipulating it and putting it back down on the board? 
If you put a five year-old child's dexterity against the best robots of today, the answer is simple: the child wins easily. 
There's no competition at all. 
Now why is that top problem so easy and the bottom problem so hard? 
One reason is a very smart five year-old could tell you the algorithm for that top problem — look at all possible moves to the end of the game and choose the one that makes you win. 
So it's a very simple algorithm. 
Now of course there are other moves, but with vast computers we approximate and come close to the optimal solution. 
When it comes to being dexterous, it's not even clear what the algorithm is you have to solve to be dexterous. 
And we'll see you have to both perceive and act on the world, which has a lot of problems. 
But let me show you cutting-edge robotics. 
Now a lot of robotics is very impressive, but manipulation robotics is really just in the dark ages. 
So this is the end of a Ph.D. project from one of the best robotics institutes. 
And the student has trained this robot to pour this water into a glass. 
It's a hard problem because the water sloshes about, but it can do it. 
But it doesn't do it with anything like the agility of a human. 
Now if you want this robot to do a different task, that's another three-year Ph.D. program. 
There is no generalization at all from one task to another in robotics. 
Now we can compare this to cutting-edge human performance. 
So what I'm going to show you is Emily Fox winning the world record for cup stacking. 
Now the Americans in the audience will know all about cup stacking. 
It's a high school sport where you have 12 cups you have to stack and unstack against the clock in a prescribed order. 
And this is her getting the world record in real time. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And she's pretty happy. 
We have no idea what is going on inside her brain when she does that, and that's what we'd like to know. 
So in my group, what we try to do is reverse engineer how humans control movement. 
And it sounds like an easy problem. 
You send a command down, it causes muscles to contract. 
Your arm or body moves, and you get sensory feedback from vision, from skin, from muscles and so on. 
The trouble is these signals are not the beautiful signals you want them to be. 
So one thing that makes controlling movement difficult is, for example, sensory feedback is extremely noisy. 
Now by noise, I do not mean sound. 
We use it in the engineering and neuroscience sense meaning a random noise corrupting a signal. 
So the old days before digital radio when you were tuning in your radio and you heard "" crrcckkk "" on the station you wanted to hear, that was the noise. 
But more generally, this noise is something that corrupts the signal. 
So for example, if you put your hand under a table and try to localize it with your other hand, you can be off by several centimeters due to the noise in sensory feedback. 
Similarly, when you put motor output on movement output, it's extremely noisy. 
Forget about trying to hit the bull's eye in darts, just aim for the same spot over and over again. 
You have a huge spread due to movement variability. 
And more than that, the outside world, or task, is both ambiguous and variable. 
The teapot could be full, it could be empty. 
It changes over time. 
So we work in a whole sensory movement task soup of noise. 
Now this noise is so great that society places a huge premium on those of us who can reduce the consequences of noise. 
So if you're lucky enough to be able to knock a small white ball into a hole several hundred yards away using a long metal stick, our society will be willing to reward you with hundreds of millions of dollars. 
Now what I want to convince you of is the brain also goes through a lot of effort to reduce the negative consequences of this sort of noise and variability. 
And to do that, I'm going to tell you about a framework which is very popular in statistics and machine learning of the last 50 years called Bayesian decision theory. 
And it's more recently a unifying way to think about how the brain deals with uncertainty. 
And the fundamental idea is you want to make inferences and then take actions. 
So let's think about the inference. 
You want to generate beliefs about the world. 
So what are beliefs? 
Beliefs could be: where are my arms in space? 
Am I looking at a cat or a fox? 
But we're going to represent beliefs with probabilities. 
So we're going to represent a belief with a number between zero and one — zero meaning I don't believe it at all, one means I'm absolutely certain. 
And numbers in between give you the gray levels of uncertainty. 
And the key idea to Bayesian inference is you have two sources of information from which to make your inference. 
You have data, and data in neuroscience is sensory input. 
So I have sensory input, which I can take in to make beliefs. 
But there's another source of information, and that's effectively prior knowledge. 
You accumulate knowledge throughout your life in memories. 
And the point about Bayesian decision theory is it gives you the mathematics of the optimal way to combine your prior knowledge with your sensory evidence to generate new beliefs. 
And I've put the formula up there. 
I'm not going to explain what that formula is, but it's very beautiful. 
And it has real beauty and real explanatory power. 
And what it really says, and what you want to estimate, is the probability of different beliefs given your sensory input. 
So let me give you an intuitive example. 
Imagine you're learning to play tennis and you want to decide where the ball is going to bounce as it comes over the net towards you. 
There are two sources of information Bayes' rule tells you. 
There's sensory evidence — you can use visual information auditory information, and that might tell you it's going to land in that red spot. 
But you know that your senses are not perfect, and therefore there's some variability of where it's going to land shown by that cloud of red, representing numbers between 0.5 and maybe 0.1. 
That information is available in the current shot, but there's another source of information not available on the current shot, but only available by repeated experience in the game of tennis, and that's that the ball doesn't bounce with equal probability over the court during the match. 
If you're playing against a very good opponent, they may distribute it in that green area, which is the prior distribution, making it hard for you to return. 
Now both these sources of information carry important information. 
And what Bayes' rule says is that I should multiply the numbers on the red by the numbers on the green to get the numbers of the yellow, which have the ellipses, and that's my belief. 
So it's the optimal way of combining information. 
Now I wouldn't tell you all this if it wasn't that a few years ago, we showed this is exactly what people do when they learn new movement skills. 
And what it means is we really are Bayesian inference machines. 
As we go around, we learn about statistics of the world and lay that down, but we also learn about how noisy our own sensory apparatus is, and then combine those in a real Bayesian way. 
Now a key part to the Bayesian is this part of the formula. 
And what this part really says is I have to predict the probability of different sensory feedbacks given my beliefs. 
So that really means I have to make predictions of the future. 
And I want to convince you the brain does make predictions of the sensory feedback it's going to get. 
And moreover, it profoundly changes your perceptions by what you do. 
And to do that, I'll tell you about how the brain deals with sensory input. 
So you send a command out, you get sensory feedback back, and that transformation is governed by the physics of your body and your sensory apparatus. 
But you can imagine looking inside the brain. 
And here's inside the brain. 
You might have a little predictor, a neural simulator, of the physics of your body and your senses. 
So as you send a movement command down, you tap a copy of that off and run it into your neural simulator to anticipate the sensory consequences of your actions. 
So as I shake this ketchup bottle, I get some true sensory feedback as the function of time in the bottom row. 
And if I've got a good predictor, it predicts the same thing. 
Well why would I bother doing that? 
I'm going to get the same feedback anyway. 
Well there's good reasons. 
Imagine, as I shake the ketchup bottle, someone very kindly comes up to me and taps it on the back for me. 
Now I get an extra source of sensory information due to that external act. 
So I get two sources. 
I get you tapping on it, and I get me shaking it, but from my senses' point of view, that is combined together into one source of information. 
Now there's good reason to believe that you would want to be able to distinguish external events from internal events. 
Because external events are actually much more behaviorally relevant than feeling everything that's going on inside my body. 
So one way to reconstruct that is to compare the prediction — which is only based on your movement commands — with the reality. 
Any discrepancy should hopefully be external. 
So as I go around the world, I'm making predictions of what I should get, subtracting them off. 
Everything left over is external to me. 
What evidence is there for this? 
Well there's one very clear example where a sensation generated by myself feels very different then if generated by another person. 
And so we decided the most obvious place to start was with tickling. 
It's been known for a long time, you can't tickle yourself as well as other people can. 
But it hasn't really been shown, it's because you have a neural simulator, simulating your own body and subtracting off that sense. 
So we can bring the experiments of the 21st century by applying robotic technologies to this problem. 
And in effect, what we have is some sort of stick in one hand attached to a robot, and they're going to move that back and forward. 
And then we're going to track that with a computer and use it to control another robot, which is going to tickle their palm with another stick. 
And then we're going to ask them to rate a bunch of things including ticklishness. 
I'll show you just one part of our study. 
And here I've taken away the robots, but basically people move with their right arm sinusoidally back and forward. 
And we replay that to the other hand with a time delay. 
Either no time delay, in which case light would just tickle your palm, or with a time delay of two-tenths of three-tenths of a second. 
So the important point here is the right hand always does the same things — sinusoidal movement. 
The left hand always is the same and puts sinusoidal tickle. 
All we're playing with is a tempo causality. 
And as we go from naught to 0.1 second, it becomes more ticklish. 
As you go from 0.1 to 0.2, it becomes more ticklish at the end. 
And by 0.2 of a second, it's equivalently ticklish to the robot that just tickled you without you doing anything. 
So whatever is responsible for this cancellation is extremely tightly coupled with tempo causality. 
And based on this illustration, we really convinced ourselves in the field that the brain's making precise predictions and subtracting them off from the sensations. 
Now I have to admit, these are the worst studies my lab has ever run. 
Because the tickle sensation on the palm comes and goes, you need large numbers of subjects with these stars making them significant. 
So we were looking for a much more objective way to assess this phenomena. 
And in the intervening years I had two daughters. 
And one thing you notice about children in backseats of cars on long journeys, they get into fights — which started with one of them doing something to the other, the other retaliating. 
It quickly escalates. 
And children tend to get into fights which escalate in terms of force. 
Now when I screamed at my children to stop, sometimes they would both say to me the other person hit them harder. 
Now I happen to know my children don't lie, so I thought, as a neuroscientist, it was important how I could explain how they were telling inconsistent truths. 
And we hypothesize based on the tickling study that when one child hits another, they generate the movement command. 
They predict the sensory consequences and subtract it off. 
So they actually think they've hit the person less hard than they have — rather like the tickling. 
Whereas the passive recipient doesn't make the prediction, feels the full blow. 
So if they retaliate with the same force, the first person will think it's been escalated. 
So we decided to test this in the lab. 
(Laughter) Now we don't work with children, we don't work with hitting, but the concept is identical. 
We bring in two adults. We tell them they're going to play a game. 
And so here's player one and player two sitting opposite to each other. 
And the game is very simple. 
We started with a motor with a little lever, a little force transfuser. 
And we use this motor to apply force down to player one's fingers for three seconds and then it stops. 
And that player's been told, remember the experience of that force and use your other finger to apply the same force down to the other subject's finger through a force transfuser — and they do that. 
And player two's been told, remember the experience of that force. 
Use your other hand to apply the force back down. 
And so they take it in turns to apply the force they've just experienced back and forward. 
But critically, they're briefed about the rules of the game in separate rooms. 
So they don't know the rules the other person's playing by. 
And what we've measured is the force as a function of terms. 
And if we look at what we start with, a quarter of a Newton there, a number of turns, perfect would be that red line. 
And what we see in all pairs of subjects is this — a 70 percent escalation in force on each go. 
So it really suggests, when you're doing this — based on this study and others we've done — that the brain is canceling the sensory consequences and underestimating the force it's producing. 
So it re-shows the brain makes predictions and fundamentally changes the precepts. 
So we've made inferences, we've done predictions, now we have to generate actions. 
And what Bayes' rule says is, given my beliefs, the action should in some sense be optimal. 
But we've got a problem. 
Tasks are symbolic — I want to drink, I want to dance — but the movement system has to contract 600 muscles in a particular sequence. 
And there's a big gap between the task and the movement system. 
So it could be bridged in infinitely many different ways. 
So think about just a point to point movement. 
I could choose these two paths out of an infinite number of paths. 
Having chosen a particular path, I can hold my hand on that path as infinitely many different joint configurations. 
And I can hold my arm in a particular joint configuration either very stiff or very relaxed. 
So I have a huge amount of choice to make. 
Now it turns out, we are extremely stereotypical. 
We all move the same way pretty much. 
And so it turns out we're so stereotypical, our brains have got dedicated neural circuitry to decode this stereotyping. 
So if I take some dots and set them in motion with biological motion, your brain's circuitry would understand instantly what's going on. 
Now this is a bunch of dots moving. 
You will know what this person is doing, whether happy, sad, old, young — a huge amount of information. 
If these dots were cars going on a racing circuit, you would have absolutely no idea what's going on. 
So why is it that we move the particular ways we do? 
Well let's think about what really happens. 
Maybe we don't all quite move the same way. 
Maybe there's variation in the population. 
And maybe those who move better than others have got more chance of getting their children into the next generation. 
So in evolutionary scales, movements get better. 
And perhaps in life, movements get better through learning. 
So what is it about a movement which is good or bad? 
Imagine I want to intercept this ball. 
Here are two possible paths to that ball. 
Well if I choose the left-hand path, I can work out the forces required in one of my muscles as a function of time. 
But there's noise added to this. 
So what I actually get, based on this lovely, smooth, desired force, is a very noisy version. 
So if I pick the same command through many times, I will get a different noisy version each time, because noise changes each time. 
So what I can show you here is how the variability of the movement will evolve if I choose that way. 
If I choose a different way of moving — on the right for example — then I'll have a different command, different noise, playing through a noisy system, very complicated. 
All we can be sure of is the variability will be different. 
If I move in this particular way, I end up with a smaller variability across many movements. 
So if I have to choose between those two, I would choose the right one because it's less variable. 
And the fundamental idea is you want to plan your movements so as to minimize the negative consequence of the noise. 
And one intuition to get is actually the amount of noise or variability I show here gets bigger as the force gets bigger. 
So you want to avoid big forces as one principle. 
So we've shown that using this, we can explain a huge amount of data — that exactly people are going about their lives planning movements so as to minimize negative consequences of noise. 
So I hope I've convinced you the brain is there and evolved to control movement. 
And it's an intellectual challenge to understand how we do that. 
But it's also relevant for disease and rehabilitation. 
There are many diseases which effect movement. 
And hopefully if we understand how we control movement, we can apply that to robotic technology. 
And finally, I want to remind you, when you see animals do what look like very simple tasks, the actual complexity of what is going on inside their brain is really quite dramatic. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Quick question for you, Dan. 
So you're a movement — (DW: Chauvinist.) — chauvinist. 
Does that mean that you think that the other things we think our brains are about — the dreaming, the yearning, the falling in love and all these things — are a kind of side show, an accident? 
DW: No, no, actually I think they're all important to drive the right movement behavior to get reproduction in the end. 
So I think people who study sensation or memory without realizing why you're laying down memories of childhood. 
The fact that we forget most of our childhood, for example, is probably fine, because it doesn't effect our movements later in life. 
You only need to store things which are really going to effect movement. 
CA: So you think that people thinking about the brain, and consciousness generally, could get real insight by saying, where does movement play in this game? 
DW: So people have found out for example that studying vision in the absence of realizing why you have vision is a mistake. 
You have to study vision with the realization of how the movement system is going to use vision. 
And it uses it very differently once you think about it that way. 
CA: Well that was quite fascinating. Thank you very much indeed. 
(Applause) 

So I'm a city planner, an urban designer, former arts advocate, trained in architecture and art history, and I want to talk to you today not about design but about America and how America can be more economically resilient, how America can be healthier, and how America can be more environmentally sustainable. 
And I realize this is a global forum, but I think I need to talk about America because there is a history, in some places, not all, of American ideas being appropriated, being emulated, for better or for worse, around the world. 
And the worst idea we've ever had is suburban sprawl. 
It's being emulated in many places as we speak. 
By suburban sprawl, I refer to the reorganization of the landscape and the creation of the landscape around the requirement of automobile use, and that the automobile that was once an instrument of freedom has become a gas-belching, time-wasting and life-threatening prosthetic device that many of us need just to, most Americans, in fact, need, just to live their daily lives. 
And there's an alternative. 
You know, we say, half the world is living in cities. 
Well, in America, that living in cities, for many of them, they're living in cities still where they're dependent on that automobile. 
And what I work for, and to do, is to make our cities more walkable. 
But I can't give design arguments for that that will have as much impact as the arguments that I've learned from the economists, the epidemiologists and the environmentalists. 
So these are the three arguments that I'm going to give you quickly today. 
When I was growing up in the '70s, the typical American spent one tenth of their income, American family, on transportation. 
Since then, we've doubled the number of roads in America, and we now spend one fifth of our income on transportation. 
Working families, which are defined as earning between 20,000 and 50,000 dollars a year in America are spending more now on transportation than on housing, slightly more, because of this phenomenon called "" drive till you qualify, "" finding homes further and further and further from the city centers and from their jobs, so that they're locked in this, two, three hours, four hours a day of commuting. 
And these are the neighborhoods, for example, in the Central Valley of California that weren't hurt when the housing bubble burst and when the price of gas went up; they were decimated. 
And in fact, these are many of the half-vacant communities that you see today. 
Imagine putting everything you have into your mortgage, it goes underwater, and you have to pay twice as much for all the driving that you're doing. 
So we know what it's done to our society and all the extra work we have to do to support our cars. 
What happens when a city decides it's going to set other priorities? 
And probably the best example we have here in America is Portland, Oregon. 
Portland made a bunch of decisions in the 1970s that began to distinguish it from almost every other American city. 
While most other cities were growing an undifferentiated spare tire of sprawl, they instituted an urban growth boundary. 
While most cities were reaming out their roads, removing parallel parking and trees in order to flow more traffic, they instituted a skinny streets program. 
And while most cities were investing in more roads and more highways, they actually invested in bicycling and in walking. 
And they spent 60 million dollars on bike facilities, which seems like a lot of money, but it was spent over about 30 years, so two million dollars a year — not that much — and half the price of the one cloverleaf that they decided to rebuild in that city. 
These changes and others like them changed the way that Portlanders live, and their vehicle-miles traveled per day, the amount that each person drives, actually peaked in 1996, has been dropping ever since, and they now drive 20 percent less than the rest of the country. 
The typical Portland citizen drives four miles less, and 11 minutes less per day than they did before. 
The economist Joe Cortright did the math and he found out that those four miles plus those 11 minutes adds up to fully three and a half percent of all income earned in the region. 
So if they're not spending that money on driving — and by the way, 85 percent of the money we spend on driving leaves the local economy — if they're not spending that money on driving, what are they spending it on? 
Well, Portland is reputed to have the most roof racks per capita, the most independent bookstores per capita, the most strip clubs per capita. 
These are all exaggerations, slight exaggerations of a fundamental truth, which is Portlanders spend a lot more on recreation of all kinds than the rest of America. 
Actually, Oregonians spend more on alcohol than most other states, which may be a good thing or a bad thing, but it makes you glad they're driving less. 
(Laughter) But actually, they're spending most of it in their homes, and home investment is about as local an investment as you can get. 
But there's a whole other Portland story, which isn't part of this calculus, which is that young, educated people have been moving to Portland in droves, so that between the last two censuses, they had a 50-percent increase in college-educated millennials, which is five times what you saw anywhere else in the country, or, I should say, of the national average. 
So on the one hand, a city saves money for its residents by being more walkable and more bikeable, but on the other hand, it also is the cool kind of city that people want to be in these days. 
So the best economic strategy you can have as a city is not the old way of trying to attract corporations and trying to have a biotech cluster or a medical cluster, or an aerospace cluster, but to become a place where people want to be. 
And millennials, certainly, these engines of entrepreneurship, 64 percent of whom decide first where they want to live, then they move there, then they look for a job, they will come to your city. 
The health argument is a scary one, and you've probably heard part of this argument before. 
Again, back in the '70s, a lot's changed since then, back in the' 70s, one in 10 Americans was obese. 
Now one out of three Americans is obese, and a second third of the population is overweight. 
Twenty-five percent of young men and 40 percent of young women are too heavy to enlist in our own military forces. 
According to the Center for Disease Control, fully one third of all children born after 2000 will get diabetes. 
We have the first generation of children in America who are predicted to live shorter lives than their parents. 
I believe that this American healthcare crisis that we've all heard about is an urban design crisis, and that the design of our cities lies at the cure. 
Because we've talked a long time about diet, and we know that diet impacts weight, and weight of course impacts health. 
But we've only started talking about inactivity, and how inactivity born of our landscape, inactivity that comes from the fact that we live in a place where there is no longer any such thing as a useful walk, is driving our weight up. 
And we finally have the studies, one in Britain called "" Gluttony versus sloth "" that tracked weight against diet and tracked weight against inactivity, and found a much higher, stronger correlation between the latter two. 
Dr. James Levine at, in this case, the aptly-named Mayo Clinic put his test subjects in electronic underwear, held their diet steady, and then started pumping the calories in. 
Some people gained weight, some people didn't gain weight. 
Expecting some metabolic or DNA factor at work, they were shocked to learn that the only difference between the subjects that they could figure out was the amount they were moving, and that in fact those who gained weight were sitting, on average, two hours more per day than those who didn't. 
So we have these studies that tie weight to inactivity, but even more, we now have studies that tie weight to where you live. 
Do you live in a more walkable city or do you live in a less walkable city, or where in your city do you live? 
In San Diego, they used Walk Score — Walk Score rates every address in America and soon the world in terms of how walkable it is — they used Walk Score to designate more walkable neighborhoods and less walkable neighborhoods. 
Well guess what? If you lived in a more walkable neighborhood, you were 35 percent likely to be overweight. 
If you lived in a less walkable neighborhood, you were 60 percent likely to be overweight. 
So we have study after study now that's tying where you live to your health, particularly as in America, the biggest health crisis we have is this one that's stemming from environmental-induced inactivity. 
And I learned a new word last week. 
They call these neighborhoods "" obesageneric. "" I may have that wrong, but you get the idea. 
Now that's one thing, of course. 
Briefly mentioning, we have an asthma epidemic in this country. 
You probably haven't thought that much about it. 
Fourteen Americans die each day from asthma, three times what it was in the '90s, and it's almost all coming from car exhaust. 
American pollution does not come from factories anymore, it comes from tailpipes, and the amount that people are driving in your city, your urban VMT, is a good prediction of the asthma problems in your city. 
And then finally, in terms of driving, there's the issue of the single-largest killer of healthy adults, and one of the largest killers of all people, is car crashes. 
And we take car crashes for granted. 
We figure it's a natural risk of being on the road. 
But in fact, here in America, 12 people out of every 100,000 die every year from car crashes. 
We're pretty safe here. 
Well, guess what? In England, it's seven per 100,000. 
It's Japan, it's four per 100,000. 
Do you know where it's three per 100,000? 
New York City. 
San Francisco, the same thing. Portland, the same thing. 
Oh, so cities make us safer because we're driving less? 
Tulsa: 14 per 100,000. 
Orlando: 20 per 100,000. 
It's not whether you're in the city or not, it's how is your city designed? 
Was it designed around cars or around people? 
Because if your city is designed around cars, it's really good at smashing them into each other. 
That's part of a much larger health argument. 
Finally, the environmental argument is fascinating, because the environmentalists turned on a dime about 10 years ago. 
The environmental movement in America has historically been an anti-city movement from Jefferson on. 
"" Cities are pestilential to the health, to the liberties, to the morals of man. 
If we continue to pile upon ourselves in cities, as they do in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as they are in Europe and take to eating one another as they do there. "" He apparently had a sense of humor. 
And then the American environmental movement has been a classically Arcadian movement. 
To become more environmental, we move into the country, we commune with nature, we build suburbs. 
But, of course, we've seen what that does. 
The carbon mapping of America, where is the CO2 being emitted, for many years only hammered this argument in more strongly. 
If you look at any carbon map, because we map it per square mile, any carbon map of the U.S., it looks like a night sky satellite photo of the U.S., hottest in the cities, cooler in the suburbs, dark, peaceful in the countryside. 
Until some economists said, you know, is that the right way to measure CO2? 
There are only so many people in this country at any given time, and we can choose to live where perhaps we would have a lighter impact. 
And they said, let's measure CO2 per household, and when they did that, the maps just flipped, coolest in the center city, warmer in the suburbs, and red hot in these exurban "" drive till you qualify "" neighborhoods. 
So a fundamental shift, and now you have environmentalists and economists like Ed Glaeser saying we are a destructive species. 
If you love nature, the best thing you can do is stay the heck away from it, move to a city, and the denser the better, and the denser cities like Manhattan are the cities that perform the best. 
So the average Manhattanite is consuming gasoline at the rate the rest of the nation hasn't seen since the '20s, consuming half of the electricity of Dallas. 
Canadian cities, they consume half the gasoline of American cities. 
European cities consume half as much again. 
So obviously, we can do better, and we want to do better, and we're all trying to be green. 
My final argument in this topic is that I think we're trying to be green the wrong way, and I'm one of many people who believes that this focus on gadgets, on accessorizing — What can I add to my house, what can I add to what I've already got to make my lifestyle more sustainable? — has kind of dominated the discussion. 
So I'm not immune to this. 
My wife and I built a new house on an abandoned lot in Washington, D.C., and we did our best to clear the shelves of the sustainability store. 
We've got the solar photovoltaic system, solar hot water heater, dual-flush toilets, bamboo floors. 
A log burning in my German high-tech stove apparently, supposedly, contributes less carbon to the atmosphere than were it left alone to decompose in the forest. 
Yet all of these innovations — That's what they said in the brochure. 
(Laughter) All of these innovations together contribute a fraction of what we contribute by living in a walkable neighborhood three blocks from a metro in the heart of a city. 
We've changed all our light bulbs to energy-savers, and you should do the same thing, but changing all your light bulbs to energy-savers saves as much energy in a year as moving to a walkable city does in a week. 
And we don't want to have this argument. 
Politicians and marketers are afraid of marketing green as a "" lifestyle choice. "" You don't want to tell Americans, God forbid, that they have to change their lifestyle. 
But what if lifestyle was really about quality of life and about perhaps something that we would all enjoy more, something that would be better than what we have right now? 
Well, the gold standard of quality of life rankings, it's called the Mercer Survey. 
You may have heard of it. 
They rank hundreds of nations worldwide according to 10 criteria that they believe add up to quality of life: health, economics, education, housing, you name it. 
There's six more. Short talk. 
(Laughter) And it's very interesting to see that the highest-ranking American city, Honolulu, number 28, is followed by kind of the usual suspects of Seattle and Boston and all walkable cities. 
The driving cities in the Sun Belt, the Dallases and the Phoenixes and, sorry, Atlanta, these cities are not appearing on the list. 
But who's doing even better? 
The Canadian cities like Vancouver, where again, they're burning half the fuel. 
And then it's usually won by cities where they speak German, like Dusseldorf or Vienna, where they're burning, again, half as much fuel. 
And you see this alignment, this strange alignment. 
Is being more sustainble what gives you a higher quality of life? 
I would argue the same thing that makes you more sustainble is what gives you a higher quality of life, and that's living in a walkable neighborhood. 
So sustainability, which includes our wealth and our health may not be a direct function of our sustainability. 
But particularly here in America, we are polluting so much because we're throwing away our time and our money and our lives on the highway, then these two problems would seem to share the same solution, which is to make our cities more walkable. 
Doing so isn't easy, but it can be done, it has been done, and it's being done now in more than a few cities, around the globe and in our country. 
I take some solace from Winston Churchill, who put it this way: "" The Americans can be counted on to do the right thing once they have exhausted the alternatives. "" (Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So that's Johnny Depp, of course. 
And that's Johnny Depp's shoulder. 
And that's Johnny Depp's famous shoulder tattoo. 
Some of you might know that, in 1990, Depp got engaged to Winona Ryder, and he had tattooed on his right shoulder "Winona forever." 
And then three years later — which in fairness, kind of is forever by Hollywood standards — they broke up, and Johnny went and got a little bit of repair work done. 
And now his shoulder says, "" Wino forever. "" (Laughter) So like Johnny Depp, and like 25 percent of Americans between the ages of 16 and 50, I have a tattoo. 
I first started thinking about getting it in my mid-20s, but I deliberately waited a really long time. 
Because we all know people who have gotten tattoos when they were 17 or 19 or 23 and regretted it by the time they were 30. 
That didn't happen to me. 
I got my tattoo when I was 29, and I regretted it instantly. 
And by "" regretted it, "" I mean that I stepped outside of the tattoo place — this is just a couple miles from here down on the Lower East Side — and I had a massive emotional meltdown in broad daylight on the corner of East Broadway and Canal Street. 
(Laughter) Which is a great place to do it because nobody cares. (Laughter) 
And then I went home that night, and I had an even larger emotional meltdown, which I'll say more about in a minute. 
And this was all actually quite shocking to me, because prior to this moment, I had prided myself on having absolutely no regrets. 
I made a lot of mistakes and dumb decisions, of course. 
I do that hourly. 
But I had always felt like, look, you know, I made the best choice I could make given who I was then, given the information I had on hand. 
I learned a lesson from it. 
It somehow got me to where I am in life right now. 
And okay, I wouldn't change it. 
In other words, I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets. 
This idea is nicely captured by this quote: "" Things without all remedy should be without regard; what's done is done. "" And it seems like kind of an admirable philosophy at first — something we might all agree to sign onto... 
until I tell you who said it. 
Right, so this is Lady MacBeth basically telling her husband to stop being such a wuss for feeling bad about murdering people. 
And as it happens, Shakespeare was onto something here, as he generally was. 
Because the inability to experience regret is actually one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths. 
It's also, by the way, a characteristic of certain kinds of brain damage. 
So people who have damage to their orbital frontal cortex seem to be unable to feel regret in the face of even obviously very poor decisions. 
So if, in fact, you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you. 
It's called a lobotomy. 
But if you want to be fully functional and fully human and fully humane, I think you need to learn to live, not without regret, but with it. 
So let's start off by defining some terms. 
What is regret? 
Regret is the emotion we experience when we think that our present situation could be better or happier if we had done something different in the past. 
So in other words, regret requires two things. 
It requires, first of all, agency — we had to make a decision in the first place. 
And second of all, it requires imagination. 
We need to be able to imagine going back and making a different choice, and then we need to be able to kind of spool this imaginary record forward and imagine how things would be playing out in our present. 
And in fact, the more we have of either of these things — the more agency and the more imagination with respect to a given regret, the more acute that regret will be. 
So let's say for instance that you're on your way to your best friend's wedding and you're trying to get to the airport and you're stuck in terrible traffic, and you finally arrive at your gate and you've missed your flight. 
You're going to experience more regret in that situation if you missed your flight by three minutes than if you missed it by 20. 
Why? 
Well because, if you miss your flight by three minutes, it is painfully easy to imagine that you could have made different decisions that would have led to a better outcome. 
"" I should have taken the bridge and not the tunnel. 
I should have gone through that yellow light. "" These are the classic conditions that create regret. 
We feel regret when we think we are responsible for a decision that came out badly, but almost came out well. 
Now within that framework, we can obviously experience regret about a lot of different things. 
This session today is about behavioral economics. 
And most of what we know about regret comes to us out of that domain. 
We have a vast body of literature on consumer and financial decisions and the regrets associated with them — buyer's remorse, basically. 
But then finally, it occurred to some researchers to step back and say, well okay, but overall, what do we regret most in life? 
Here's what the answers turn out to look like. 
So top six regrets — the things we regret most in life: Number one by far, education. 
33 percent of all of our regrets pertain to decisions we made about education. 
We wish we'd gotten more of it. 
We wish we'd taken better advantage of the education that we did have. 
We wish we'd chosen to study a different topic. 
Others very high on our list of regrets include career, romance, parenting, various decisions and choices about our sense of self and how we spend our leisure time — or actually more specifically, how we fail to spend our leisure time. 
The remaining regrets pertain to these things: finance, family issues unrelated to romance or parenting, health, friends, spirituality and community. 
So in other words, we know most of what we know about regret by the study of finance. 
But it turns out, when you look overall at what people regret in life, you know what, our financial decisions don't even rank. 
They account for less than three percent of our total regrets. 
So if you're sitting there stressing about large cap versus small cap, or company A versus company B, or should you buy the Subaru or the Prius, you know what, let it go. 
Odds are, you're not going to care in five years. 
But for these things that we actually do really care about and do experience profound regret around, what does that experience feel like? 
We all know the short answer. 
It feels terrible. Regret feels awful. 
But it turns out that regret feels awful in four very specific and consistent ways. 
So the first consistent component of regret is basically denial. 
When I went home that night after getting my tattoo, I basically stayed up all night. 
And for the first several hours, there was exactly one thought in my head. 
And the thought was, "Make it go away!" 
This is an unbelievably primitive emotional response. 
I mean, it's right up there with, "" I want my mommy! "" We're not trying to solve the problem. 
We're not trying to understand how the problem came about. 
We just want it to vanish. 
The second characteristic component of regret is a sense of bewilderment. 
So the other thing I thought about there in my bedroom that night was, "" How could I have done that? 
What was I thinking? "" This real sense of alienation from the part of us that made a decision we regret. 
We can't identify with that part. 
We don't understand that part. 
And we certainly don't have any empathy for that part — which explains the third consistent component of regret, which is an intense desire to punish ourselves. 
That's why, in the face of our regret, the thing we consistently say is, "" I could have kicked myself. "" The fourth component here is that regret is what psychologists call perseverative. 
To perseverate means to focus obsessively and repeatedly on the exact same thing. 
Now the effect of perseveration is to basically take these first three components of regret and put them on an infinite loop. 
So it's not that I sat there in my bedroom that night, thinking, "" Make it go away. "" It's that I sat there and I thought, "" Make it go away. Make it go away. 
Make it go away. Make it go away. "" So if you look at the psychological literature, these are the four consistent defining components of regret. 
But I want to suggest that there's also a fifth one. 
And I think of this as a kind of existential wake-up call. 
That night in my apartment, after I got done kicking myself and so forth, I lay in bed for a long time, and I thought about skin grafts. 
And then I thought about how, much as travel insurance doesn't cover acts of God, probably my health insurance did not cover acts of idiocy. 
In point of fact, no insurance covers acts of idiocy. 
The whole point of acts of idiocy is that they leave you totally uninsured; they leave you exposed to the world and exposed to your own vulnerability and fallibility in face of, frankly, a fairly indifferent universe. 
This is obviously an incredibly painful experience. 
And I think it's particularly painful for us now in the West in the grips of what I sometimes think of as a Control-Z culture — Control-Z like the computer command, undo. 
We're incredibly used to not having to face life's hard realities, in a certain sense. 
We think we can throw money at the problem or throw technology at the problem — we can undo and unfriend and unfollow. 
And the problem is that there are certain things that happen in life that we desperately want to change and we cannot. 
Sometimes instead of Control-Z, we actually have zero control. 
And for those of us who are control freaks and perfectionists — and I know where of I speak — this is really hard, because we want to do everything ourselves and we want to do it right. 
Now there is a case to be made that control freaks and perfectionists should not get tattoos, and I'm going to return to that point in a few minutes. 
But first I want to say that the intensity and persistence with which we experience these emotional components of regret is obviously going to vary depending on the specific thing that we're feeling regretful about. 
So for instance, here's one of my favorite automatic generators of regret in modern life. 
(Laughter) Text: Relpy to all. 
And the amazing thing about this really insidious technological innovation is that even just with this one thing, we can experience a huge range of regret. 
You can accidentally hit "" reply all "" to an email and torpedo a relationship. 
Or you can just have an incredibly embarrassing day at work. 
Or you can have your last day at work. 
And this doesn't even touch on the really profound regrets of a life. 
Because of course, sometimes we do make decisions that have irrevocable and terrible consequences, either for our own or for other people's health and happiness and livelihoods, and in the very worst case scenario, even their lives. 
Now obviously, those kinds of regrets are incredibly piercing and enduring. 
I mean, even the stupid "" reply all "" regrets can leave us in a fit of excruciating agony for days. 
So how are we supposed to live with this? 
I want to suggest that there's three things that help us to make our peace with regret. 
And the first of these is to take some comfort in its universality. 
If you Google regret and tattoo, you will get 11.5 million hits. 
(Laughter) The FDA estimates that of all the Americans who have tattoos, 17 percent of us regret getting them. 
That is Johnny Depp and me and our seven million friends. 
And that's just regret about tattoos. 
We are all in this together. 
The second way that we can help make our peace with regret is to laugh at ourselves. 
Now in my case, this really wasn't a problem, because it's actually very easy to laugh at yourself when you're 29 years old and you want your mommy because you don't like your new tattoo. 
But it might seem like a kind of cruel or glib suggestion when it comes to these more profound regrets. 
I don't think that's the case though. 
All of us who've experienced regret that contains real pain and real grief understand that humor and even black humor plays a crucial role in helping us survive. 
It connects the poles of our lives back together, the positive and the negative, and it sends a little current of life back into us. 
The third way that I think we can help make our peace with regret is through the passage of time, which, as we know, heals all wounds — except for tattoos, which are permanent. 
So it's been several years since I got my own tattoo. 
And do you guys just want to see it? 
All right. 
Actually, you know what, I should warn you, you're going to be disappointed. 
Because it's actually not that hideous. 
I didn't tattoo Marilyn Manson's face on some indiscreet part of myself or something. 
When other people see my tattoo, for the most part they like how it looks. 
It's just that I don't like how it looks. 
And as I said earlier, I'm a perfectionist. 
But I'll let you see it anyway. 
This is my tattoo. 
I can guess what some of you are thinking. 
So let me reassure you about something. 
Some of your own regrets are also not as ugly as you think they are. 
I got this tattoo because I spent most of my 20s living outside the country and traveling. 
And when I came and settled in New York afterward, I was worried that I would forget some of the most important lessons that I learned during that time. 
Specifically the two things I learned about myself that I most didn't want to forget was how important it felt to keep exploring and, simultaneously, how important it is to somehow keep an eye on your own true north. 
And what I loved about this image of the compass was that I felt like it encapsulated both of these ideas in one simple image. 
And I thought it might serve as a kind of permanent mnemonic device. 
Well it did. 
But it turns out, it doesn't remind me of the thing I thought it would; it reminds me constantly of something else instead. 
It actually reminds me of the most important lesson regret can teach us, which is also one of the most important lessons life teaches us. 
And ironically, I think it's probably the single most important thing I possibly could have tattooed onto my body — partly as a writer, but also just as a human being. 
Here's the thing, if we have goals and dreams, and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don't want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong. 
The point isn't to live without any regrets. 
The point is to not hate ourselves for having them. 
The lesson that I ultimately learned from my tattoo and that I want to leave you with today is this: We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them. 
Regret doesn't remind us that we did badly. 
It reminds us that we know we can do better. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm a writer and a journalist, and I'm also an insanely curious person, so in 22 years as a journalist, I've learned how to do a lot of new things. 
And three years ago, one of the things I learned how to do was to become invisible. 
I became one of the working homeless. 
I quit my job as a newspaper editor after my father died in February of that same year, and decided to travel. 
His death hit me pretty hard. 
And there were a lot of things that I wanted to feel and deal with while I was doing that. 
I've camped my whole life. And I decided that living in a van for a year to do this would be like one long camping trip. 
So I packed my cat, my Rottweiler and my camping gear into a 1975 Chevy van, and drove off into the sunset, having fully failed to realize three critical things. 
One: that society equates living in a permanent structure, even a shack, with having value as a person. 
Two: I failed to realize how quickly the negative perceptions of other people can impact our reality, if we let it. 
Three: I failed to realize that homelessness is an attitude, not a lifestyle. 
At first, living in the van was great. 
I showered in campgrounds. I ate out regularly. 
And I had time to relax and to grieve. 
But then the anger and the depression about my father's death set in. 
My freelance job ended. And I had to get a full-time job to pay the bills. 
What had been a really mild spring turned into a miserably hot summer. 
And it became impossible to park anywhere — (Laughs) — without being very obvious that I had a cat and a dog with me, and it was really hot. 
The cat came and went through an open window in the van. 
The doggy went into doggy day care. 
And I sweated. 
Whenever I could, I used employee showers in office buildings and truck stops. 
Or I washed up in public rest rooms. 
Nighttime temperatures in the van rarely dropped below 80 degrees Fahrenheit, making it difficult or impossible to sleep. 
Food rotted in the heat. 
Ice in my ice chest melted within hours, and it was pretty miserable. 
I couldn't afford to find an apartment, or couldn't afford an apartment that would allow me to have the Rottweiler and the cat. 
And I refused to give them up, so I stayed in the van. 
And when the heat made me too sick to walk the 50 feet to the public restroom outside my van at night, I used a bucket and a trash bag as a toilet. 
When winter weather set in, the temperatures dropped below freezing. And they stayed there. 
And I faced a whole new set of challenges. 
I parked a different place every night so I would avoid being noticed and hassled by the police. 
I didn't always succeed. 
But I felt out of control of my life. 
And I don't know when or how it happened, but the speed at which I went from being a talented writer and journalist to being a homeless woman, living in a van, took my breath away. 
I hadn't changed. My I.Q. hadn't dropped. 
My talent, my integrity, my values, everything about me remained the same. 
But I had changed somehow. 
I spiraled deeper and deeper into a depression. 
And eventually someone referred me to a homeless health clinic. 
And I went. I hadn't bathed in three days. 
I was as smelly and as depressed as anyone in line. 
I just wasn't drunk or high. 
And when several of the homeless men realized that, including a former university professor, they said, "" You aren't homeless. Why are you really here? "" Other homeless people didn't see me as homeless, but I did. 
Then the professor listened to my story and he said, "" You have a job. You have hope. 
The real homeless don't have hope. "" A reaction to the medication the clinic gave me for my depression left me suicidal. And I remember thinking, "If I killed myself, no one would notice." 
A friend told me, shortly after that, that she had heard that Tim Russert, a nationally renowned journalist, had been talking about me on national T.V. 
An essay I'd written about my father, the year before he died, was in Tim's new book. 
And he was doing the talk show circuit. And he was talking about my writing. 
And when I realized that Tim Russert, former moderator of "" Meet the Press, "" was talking about my writing, while I was living in a van in a Wal-Mart parking lot, I started laughing. 
You should too. 
(Laughter) I started laughing because it got to the point where, was I a writer, or was I a homeless woman? 
So I went in the bookstore. And I found Tim's book. 
And I stood there. And I reread my essay. 
And I cried. 
Because I was a writer. I was a writer. 
Shortly after that I moved back to Tennessee. I alternated between living in a van and couch surfing with friends. And I started writing again. By the summer of the following year I was a working journalist. I was winning awards. I was living in my own apartment. I was no longer homeless. And I was no longer invisible. Thousands of people work full and part-time jobs, 
and live in their cars. 
But society continues to stigmatize and criminalize living in your vehicle or on the streets. 
So the homeless, the working homeless, primarily remain invisible. 
But if you ever meet one, engage them, encourage them, and offer them hope. 
The human spirit can overcome anything if it has hope. 
And I'm not here to be the poster girl for the homeless. 
I'm not here to encourage you to give money to the next panhandler you meet. 
But I am here to tell you that, based on my experience, people are not where they live, where they sleep, or what their life situation is at any given time. 
Three years ago I was living in a van in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and today I'm speaking at TED. 
Hope always, always finds a way. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I worked as a war reporter for 15 years before I realized that I really had a problem. 
There was something really wrong with me. 
This was about a year before 9 / 11, and America wasn't at war yet. 
We weren't talking about PTSD. 
We were not yet talking about the effect of trauma and war on the human psyche. 
I'd been in Afghanistan for a couple of months with the Northern Alliance as they were fighting the Taliban. 
And at that point the Taliban had an air force, they had fighter planes, they had tanks, they had artillery, and we really got hammered pretty badly a couple of times. 
We saw some very ugly things. 
But I didn't really think it affected me. 
I didn't think much about it. 
I came home to New York, where I live. 
Then one day I went down into the subway, and for the first time in my life, I knew real fear. 
I had a massive panic attack. 
I was way more scared than I had ever been in Afghanistan. 
Everything I was looking at seemed like it was going to kill me, but I couldn't explain why. 
The trains were going too fast. 
There were too many people. 
The lights were too bright. 
Everything was too loud, everything was moving too quickly. 
I backed up against a support column and just waited for it. 
When I couldn't take it any longer, I ran out of the subway station and walked wherever I was going. 
Later, I found out that what I had was short-term PTSD: post-traumatic stress disorder. 
We evolved as animals, as primates, to survive periods of danger, and if your life has been in danger, you want to react to unfamiliar noises. 
You want to sleep lightly, wake up easily. 
You want to have nightmares and flashbacks of the thing that could kill you. 
You want to be angry because it makes you predisposed to fight, or depressed, because it keeps you out of circulation a little bit. 
Keeps you safe. 
It's not very pleasant, but it's better than getting eaten. 
Most people recover from that pretty quickly. 
It takes a few weeks, a few months. 
I kept having panic attacks, but they eventually went away. 
I had no idea it was connected to the war that I'd seen. 
I just thought I was going crazy, and then I thought, well, now I'm not going crazy anymore. 
About 20 percent of people, however, wind up with chronic, long-term PTSD. 
They are not adapted to temporary danger. 
They are maladapted for everyday life, unless they get help. 
We know that the people who are vulnerable to long-term PTSD are people who were abused as children, who suffered trauma as children, people who have low education levels, people who have psychiatric disorders in their family. 
If you served in Vietnam and your brother is schizophrenic, you're way more likely to get long-term PTSD from Vietnam. 
So I started to study this as a journalist, and I realized that there was something really strange going on. 
The numbers seemed to be going in the wrong direction. 
Every war that we have fought as a country, starting with the Civil War, the intensity of the combat has gone down. 
As a result, the casualty rates have gone down. 
But disability rates have gone up. 
They should be going in the same direction, but they're going in different directions. 
The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced, thank God, a casualty rate about one third of what it was in Vietnam. 
But they've also created — they've also produced three times the disability rates. 
Around 10 percent of the US military is actively engaged in combat, 10 percent or under. 
They're shooting at people, killing people, getting shot at, seeing their friends get killed. 
It's incredibly traumatic. 
But it's only about 10 percent of our military. 
But about half of our military has filed for some kind of PTSD compensation from the government. 
And suicide doesn't even fit into this in a very logical way. 
We've all heard the tragic statistic of 22 vets a day, on average, in this country, killing themselves. 
Most people don't realize that the majority of those suicides are veterans of the Vietnam War, that generation, and their decision to take their own lives actually might not be related to the war they fought 50 years earlier. 
In fact, there's no statistical connection between combat and suicide. 
If you're in the military and you're in a lot of combat, you're no more likely to kill yourself than if you weren't. 
In fact, one study found that if you deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan, you're actually slightly less likely to commit suicide later. 
I studied anthropology in college. 
I did my fieldwork on the Navajo reservation. 
I wrote a thesis on Navajo long-distance runners. 
And recently, while I was researching PTSD, I had this thought. 
I thought back to the work I did when I was young, and I thought, I bet the Navajo, the Apache, the Comanche — I mean, these are very warlike nations — I bet they weren't getting PTSD like we do. 
When their warriors came back from fighting the US military or fighting each other, I bet they pretty much just slipped right back into tribal life. 
And maybe what determines the rate of long-term PTSD isn't what happened out there, but the kind of society you come back to. 
And maybe if you come back to a close, cohesive, tribal society, you can get over trauma pretty quickly. 
And if you come back to an alienating, modern society, you might remain traumatized your entire life. 
In other words, maybe the problem isn't them, the vets; maybe the problem is us. 
Certainly, modern society is hard on the human psyche by every metric that we have. 
As wealth goes up in a society, the suicide rate goes up instead of down. 
If you live in modern society, you're up to eight times more likely to suffer from depression in your lifetime than if you live in a poor, agrarian society. 
Modern society has probably produced the highest rates of suicide and depression and anxiety and loneliness and child abuse ever in human history. 
I saw one study that compared women in Nigeria, one of the most chaotic and violent and corrupt and poorest countries in Africa, to women in North America. 
And the highest rates of depression were urban women in North America. 
That was also the wealthiest group. 
So let's go back to the US military. 
Ten percent are in combat. 
Around 50 percent have filed for PTSD compensation. 
So about 40 percent of veterans really were not traumatized overseas but have come home to discover they are dangerously alienated and depressed. 
So what is happening with them? 
What's going on with those people, the phantom 40 percent that are troubled but don't understand why? 
Maybe it's this: maybe they had an experience of sort of tribal closeness in their unit when they were overseas. 
They were eating together, sleeping together, doing tasks and missions together. 
They were trusting each other with their lives. 
And then they come home and they have to give all that up and they're coming back to a society, a modern society, which is hard on people who weren't even in the military. 
It's just hard on everybody. 
And we keep focusing on trauma, PTSD. 
But for a lot of these people, maybe it's not trauma. 
I mean, certainly, soldiers are traumatized and the ones who are have to be treated for that. 
But a lot of them — maybe what's bothering them is actually a kind of alienation. 
I mean, maybe we just have the wrong word for some of it, and just changing our language, our understanding, would help a little bit. 
"Post-deployment alienation disorder." 
Maybe even just calling it that for some of these people would allow them to stop imagining trying to imagine a trauma that didn't really happen in order to explain a feeling that really is happening. 
And in fact, it's an extremely dangerous feeling. 
That alienation and depression can lead to suicide. 
These people are in danger. 
It's very important to understand why. 
The Israeli military has a PTSD rate of around one percent. 
The theory is that everyone in Israel is supposed to serve in the military. 
When soldiers come back from the front line, they're not going from a military environment to a civilian environment. 
They're coming back to a community where everyone understands about the military. 
Everyone's been in it or is going to be in it. 
Everyone understands the situation they're all in. 
It's as if they're all in one big tribe. 
We know that if you take a lab rat and traumatize it and put it in a cage by itself, you can maintain its trauma symptoms almost indefinitely. 
And if you take that same lab rat and put it in a cage with other rats, after a couple of weeks, it's pretty much OK. 
After 9 / 11, the murder rate in New York City went down by 40 percent. 
The suicide rate went down. 
The violent crime rate in New York went down after 9 / 11. 
Even combat veterans of previous wars who suffered from PTSD said that their symptoms went down after 9 / 11 happened. 
The reason is that if you traumatize an entire society, we don't fall apart and turn on one another. 
We come together. We unify. 
Basically, we tribalize, and that process of unifying feels so good and is so good for us, that it even helps people who are struggling with mental health issues. 
During the blitz in London, admissions to psychiatric wards went down during the bombings. 
For a while, that was the kind of country that American soldiers came back to — a unified country. 
We were sticking together. 
We were trying to understand the threat against us. 
We were trying to help ourselves and the world. 
But that's changed. 
Now, American soldiers, American veterans are coming back to a country that is so bitterly divided that the two political parties are literally accusing each other of treason, of being an enemy of the state, of trying to undermine the security and the welfare of their own country. 
The gap between rich and poor is the biggest it's ever been. 
It's just getting worse. 
Race relations are terrible. 
There are demonstrations and even riots in the streets because of racial injustice. 
And veterans know that any tribe that treated itself that way — in fact, any platoon that treated itself that way — would never survive. 
We've gotten used to it. 
Veterans have gone away and are coming back and seeing their own country with fresh eyes. 
And they see what's going on. 
This is the country they fought for. 
No wonder they're depressed. 
No wonder they're scared. 
Sometimes, we ask ourselves if we can save the vets. 
I think the real question is if we can save ourselves. 
If we can, I think the vets are going to be fine. 
It's time for this country to unite, if only to help the men and women who fought to protect us. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

It's a simple idea about nature. 
I want to say a word for nature because we haven't talked that much about it the last couple days. 
I want to say a word for the soil and the bees and the plants and the animals, and tell you about a tool, a very simple tool that I have found. 
Although it's really nothing more than a literary conceit; it's not a technology. 
It's very powerful for, I think, changing our relationship to the natural world and to the other species on whom we depend. 
And that tool is very simply, as Chris suggested, looking at us and the world from the plants' or the animals' point of view. 
It's not my idea, other people have hit on it, but I've tried to take it to some new places. 
Let me tell you where I got it. 
Like a lot of my ideas, like a lot of the tools I use, I found it in the garden; I'm a very devoted gardener. 
And there was a day about seven years ago: I was planting potatoes, it was the first week of May — this is New England, when the apple trees are just vibrating with bloom; they're just white clouds above. 
I was here, planting my chunks, cutting up potatoes and planting it, and the bees were working on this tree; bumblebees, just making this thing vibrate. 
And one of the things I really like about gardening is that it doesn't take all your concentration, you really can't get hurt — it's not like woodworking — and you have plenty of kind of mental space for speculation. 
And the question I asked myself that afternoon in the garden, working alongside that bumblebee, was: what did I and that bumblebee have in common? 
How was our role in this garden similar and different? 
And I realized we actually had quite a bit in common: both of us were disseminating the genes of one species and not another, and both of us — probably, if I can imagine the bee's point of view — thought we were calling the shots. 
I had decided what kind of potato I wanted to plant — I had picked my Yukon Gold or Yellow Finn, or whatever it was — and I had summoned those genes from a seed catalog across the country, brought it, and I was planting it. 
And that bee, no doubt, assumed that it had decided, "" I'm going for that apple tree, I'm going for that blossom, I'm going to get the nectar and I'm going to leave. "" We have a grammar that suggests that's who we are; that we are sovereign subjects in nature, the bee as well as me. 
I plant the potatoes, I weed the garden, I domesticate the species. 
But that day, it occurred to me: what if that grammar is nothing more than a self-serving conceit? 
Because, of course, the bee thinks he's in charge or she's in charge, but we know better. 
We know that what's going on between the bee and that flower is that bee has been cleverly manipulated by that flower. 
And when I say manipulated, I'm talking about in a Darwinian sense, right? 
I mean it has evolved a very specific set of traits — color, scent, flavor, pattern — that has lured that bee in. 
And the bee has been cleverly fooled into taking the nectar, and also picking up some powder on its leg, and going off to the next blossom. 
The bee is not calling the shots. 
And I realized then, I wasn't either. 
I had been seduced by that potato and not another into planting its — into spreading its genes, giving it a little bit more habitat. 
And that's when I got the idea, which was, "" Well, what would happen if we kind of looked at us from this point of view of these other species who are working on us? "" And agriculture suddenly appeared to me not as an invention, not as a human technology, but as a co-evolutionary development in which a group of very clever species, mostly edible grasses, had exploited us, figured out how to get us to basically deforest the world. 
The competition of grasses, right? 
And suddenly everything looked different. 
And suddenly mowing the lawn that day was a completely different experience. 
I had thought always — and in fact, had written this in my first book; this was a book about gardening — that lawns were nature under culture's boot, that they were totalitarian landscapes, and that when we mowed them we were cruelly suppressing the species and never letting it set seed or die or have sex. 
And that's what the lawn was. 
But then I realized, "" No, this is exactly what the grasses want us to do. 
I'm a dupe. I'm a dupe of the lawns, whose goal in life is to outcompete the trees, who they compete with for sunlight. "" And so by getting us to mow the lawn, we keep the trees from coming back, which in New England happens very, very quickly. 
So I started looking at things this way and wrote a whole book about it called "" The Botany of Desire. "" And I realized that in the same way you can look at a flower and deduce all sorts of interesting things about the taste and the desires of bees — that they like sweetness, that they like this color and not that color, that they like symmetry — what could we find out about ourselves by doing the same thing? 
That a certain kind of potato, a certain kind of drug, a sativa-indica Cannabis cross has something to say about us. 
And that, wouldn't this be kind of an interesting way to look at the world? 
Now, the test of any idea — I said it was a literary conceit — is what does it get us? 
And when you're talking about nature, which is really my subject as a writer, how does it meet the Aldo Leopold test? 
Which is, does it make us better citizens of the biotic community? 
Get us to do things that leads to the support and perpetuation of the biota, rather than its destruction? 
And I would submit that this idea does this. 
So, let me go through what you gain when you look at the world this way, besides some entertaining insights about human desire. 
As an intellectual matter, looking at the world from other species' points of view helps us deal with this weird anomaly, which is — and this is in the realm of intellectual history — which is that we have this Darwinian revolution 150 years ago... 
Ugh. Mini-Me. (Laughter) We have this intellectual, this Darwinian revolution in which, thanks to Darwin, we figured out we are just one species among many; evolution is working on us the same way it's working on all the others; we are acted upon as well as acting; we are really in the fiber, the fabric of life. 
But the weird thing is, we have not absorbed this lesson 150 years later; none of us really believes this. 
We are still Cartesians — the children of Descartes — who believe that subjectivity, consciousness, sets us apart; that the world is divided into subjects and objects; that there is nature on one side, culture on another. 
As soon as you start seeing things from the plant's point of view or the animal's point of view, you realize that the real literary conceit is that — is the idea that nature is opposed to culture, the idea that consciousness is everything — and that's another very important thing it does. 
Looking at the world from other species' points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance. 
You suddenly realize that consciousness — which we value and we consider the crowning achievement of nature, human consciousness — is really just another set of tools for getting along in the world. 
And it's kind of natural that we would think it was the best tool. 
But, you know, there's a comedian who said, "" Well, who's telling me that consciousness is so good and so important? 
Well, consciousness. "" So when you look at the plants, you realize that there are other tools and they're just as interesting. 
I'll give you two examples, also from the garden: lima beans. You know what a lima bean does when it's attacked by spider mites? 
It releases this volatile chemical that goes out into the world and summons another species of mite that comes in and attacks the spider mite, defending the lima bean. 
So what plants have — while we have consciousness, tool making, language, they have biochemistry. 
And they have perfected that to a degree far beyond what we can imagine. 
Their complexity, their sophistication, is something to really marvel at, and I think it's really the scandal of the Human Genome Project. 
You know, we went into it thinking, 40,000 or 50,000 human genes and we came out with only 23,000. 
Just to give you grounds for comparison, rice: 35,000 genes. 
So who's the more sophisticated species? 
Well, we're all equally sophisticated. 
We've been evolving just as long, just along different paths. 
So, cure for self-importance, way to sort of make us feel the Darwinian idea. 
And that's really what I do as a writer, as a storyteller, is try to make people feel what we know and tell stories that actually help us think ecologically. 
Now, the other use of this is practical. 
And I'm going to take you to a farm right now, because I used this idea to develop my understanding of the food system and what I learned, in fact, is that we are all, now, being manipulated by corn. 
And the talk you heard about ethanol earlier today, to me, is the final triumph of corn over good sense. (Laughter) (Applause) It is part of corn's scheme for world domination. (Laughter) 
And you will see, the amount of corn planted this year will be up dramatically from last year and there will be that much more habitat because we've decided ethanol is going to help us. 
So it helped me understand industrial agriculture, which of course is a Cartesian system. 
It's based on this idea that we bend other species to our will and that we are in charge, and that we create these factories and we have these technological inputs and we get the food out of it or the fuel or whatever we want. 
Let me take you to a very different kind of farm. 
This is a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. 
I went looking for a farm where these ideas about looking at things from the species' point of view are actually implemented, and I found it in a man. The farmer's name is Joel Salatin. 
And I spent a week as an apprentice on his farm, and I took away from this some of the most hopeful news about our relationship to nature that I've ever come across in 25 years of writing about nature. 
And that is this: the farm is called Polyface, which means... 
the idea is he's got six different species of animals, as well as some plants, growing in this very elaborate symbiotic arrangement. 
It's permaculture, those of you who know a little bit about this, such that the cows and the pigs and the sheep and the turkeys and the... 
what else does he have? 
All the six different species — rabbits, actually — are all performing ecological services for one another, such that the manure of one is the lunch for the other and they take care of pests for one another. 
It's a very elaborate and beautiful dance, but I'm going to just give you a close-up on one piece of it, and that is the relationship between his cattle and his chickens, his laying hens. 
And I'll show you, if you take this approach, what you get, OK? 
And this is a lot more than growing food, as you'll see; this is a different way to think about nature and a way to get away from the zero-sum notion, the Cartesian idea that either nature's winning or we're winning, and that for us to get what we want, nature is diminished. 
So, one day, cattle in a pen. 
The only technology involved here is this cheap electric fencing: relatively new, hooked to a car battery; even I could carry a quarter-acre paddock, set it up in 15 minutes. 
Cows graze one day. They move, OK? 
They graze everything down, intensive grazing. 
He waits three days, and then we towed in something called the Eggmobile. 
The Eggmobile is a very rickety contraption — it looks like a prairie schooner made out of boards — but it houses 350 chickens. 
He tows this into the paddock three days later and opens the gangplank, turns them down, and 350 hens come streaming down the gangplank — clucking, gossiping as chickens will — and they make a beeline for the cow patties. 
And what they're doing is very interesting: they're digging through the cow patties for the maggots, the grubs, the larvae of flies. 
And the reason he's waited three days is because he knows that on the fourth day or the fifth day, those larvae will hatch and he'll have a huge fly problem. 
But he waits that long to grow them as big and juicy and tasty as he can because they are the chickens' favorite form of protein. 
So the chickens do their kind of little breakdance and they're pushing around the manure to get at the grubs, and in the process they're spreading the manure out. 
Very useful second ecosystem service. 
And third, while they're in this paddock they are, of course, defecating madly and their very nitrogenous manure is fertilizing this field. 
They then move out to the next one, and in the course of just a few weeks, the grass just enters this blaze of growth. 
And within four or five weeks, he can do it again. 
He can graze again, he can cut, he can bring in another species, like the lambs, or he can make hay for the winter. 
Now, I want you to just look really close up onto what's happened there. 
So, it's a very productive system. 
And what I need to tell you is that on 100 acres he gets 40,000 pounds of beef; 30,000 pounds of pork; 25,000 dozen eggs; 20,000 broilers; 1,000 turkeys; 1,000 rabbits — an immense amount of food. 
You know, you hear, "" Can organic feed the world? "" Well, look how much food you can produce on 100 acres if you do this kind of... 
again, give each species what it wants, let it realize its desires, its physiological distinctiveness. 
Put that in play. 
But look at it from the point of view of the grass, now. 
What happens to the grass when you do this? 
When a ruminant grazes grass, the grass is cut from this height to this height, and it immediately does something very interesting. 
Any one of you who gardens knows that there is something called the root-shoot ratio, and plants need to keep the root mass in some rough balance with the leaf mass to be happy. 
So when they lose a lot of leaf mass, they shed roots; they kind of cauterize them and the roots die. 
And the species in the soil go to work basically chewing through those roots, decomposing them — the earthworms, the fungi, the bacteria — and the result is new soil. 
This is how soil is created. 
It's created from the bottom up. 
This is how the prairies were built, the relationship between bison and grasses. 
And what I realized when I understood this — and if you ask Joel Salatin what he is, he'll tell you he's not a chicken farmer, he's not a sheep farmer, he's not a cattle rancher; he's a grass farmer, because grass is really the keystone species of such a system — is that, if you think about it, this completely contradicts the tragic idea of nature we hold in our heads, which is that for us to get what we want, nature is diminished. 
More for us, less for nature. 
Here, all this food comes off this farm, and at the end of the season there is actually more soil, more fertility and more biodiversity. 
It's a remarkably hopeful thing to do. 
There are a lot of farmers doing this today. 
This is well beyond organic agriculture, which is still a Cartesian system, more or less. 
And what it tells you is that if you begin to take account of other species, take account of the soil, that even with nothing more than this perspectival idea — because there is no technology involved here except for those fences, which are so cheap they could be all over Africa in no time — that we can take the food we need from the Earth and actually heal the Earth in the process. 
This is a way to reanimate the world, and that's what's so exciting about this perspective. 
When we really begin to feel Darwin's insights in our bones, the things we can do with nothing more than these ideas are something to be very hopeful about. 
Thank you very much. 

So I want to take you on a trip to an alien world. 
And it's not a trip that requires light-years of travel, but it's to a place where it's defined by light. 
So it's a little-appreciated fact that most of the animals in our ocean make light. 
I've spent most of my career studying this phenomenon called bioluminescence. 
I study it because I think understanding it is critical to understanding life in the ocean where most bioluminescence occurs. 
I also use it as a tool for visualizing and tracking pollution. 
But mostly I'm entranced by it. 
Since my my first dive in a deep-diving submersible, when I went down and turned out the lights and saw the fireworks displays, I've been a bioluminescence junky. 
But I would come back from those dives and try to share the experience with words, and they were totally inadequate to the task. 
I needed some way to share the experience directly. 
And the first time I figured out that way was in this little single-person submersible called Deep Rover. 
This next video clip, you're going to see how we stimulated the bioluminescence. 
And the first thing you're going to see is a transect screen that is about a meter across. 
(Video) Narrator: In front of the sub, a mess screen will come into contact with the soft-bodied creatures of the deep sea. 
With the sub's lights switched off, it is possible to see their bioluminescence — the light produced when they collide with the mesh. 
This is the first time it has ever been recorded. 
Edith Widder: So I recorded that with an intensified video camera that has about the sensitivity of the fully dark-adapted human eye. 
Which means that really is what you would see if you took a dive in a submersible. 
But just to try to prove that fact to you, I've brought along some bioluminescent plankton in what is undoubtedly a foolhardy attempt at a live demonstration. 
(Laughter) So, if we could have the lights down and have it as dark in here as possible, I have a flask that has bioluminescent plankton in it. 
And you'll note there's no light coming from them right now, either because they're dead — (Laughter) or because I need to stir them up in some way for you to see what bioluminescence really looks like. 
(Gasps) Oops. Sorry. 
(Laughter) I spend most of my time working in the dark; I'm used to that. 
Okay. 
So that light was made by a bioluminescent dinoflagellate, a single-celled alga. 
So why would a single-celled alga need to be able to produce light? 
Well, it uses it to defend itself from its predators. 
The flash is like a scream for help. 
It's what's known as a bioluminescent burglar alarm, and just like the alarm on your car or your house, it's meant to cast unwanted attention onto the intruder, thereby either leading to his capture or scaring him away. 
There's a lot of animals that use this trick, for example this black dragonfish. 
It's got a light organ under its eye. 
It's got a chin barbel. 
It's got a lot of other light organs you can't see, but you'll see in here in a minute. 
So we had to chase this in the submersible for quite sometime, because the top speed of this fish is one knot, which was the top speed of the submersible. 
But it was worth it, because we caught it in a special capture device, brought it up into the lab on the ship, and then everything on this fish lights up. 
It's unbelievable. 
The light organs under the eyes are flashing. 
That chin barbel is flashing. 
It's got light organs on its belly that are flashing, fin lights. 
It's a scream for help; it's meant to attract attention. 
It's phenomenal. 
And you normally don't get to see this because we've exhausted the luminescence when we bring them up in nets. 
There's other ways you can defend yourself with light. 
For example, this shrimp releases its bioluminescent chemicals into the water just the way a squid or an octopus would release an ink cloud. 
This blinds or distracts the predator. 
This little squid is called the fire shooter because of its ability to do this. 
Now it may look like a tasty morsel, or a pig's head with wings — (Laughter) but if it's attacked, it puts out a barrage of light — in fact, a barrage of photon torpedoes. 
I just barely got the lights out in time for you to be able to see those gobs of light hitting the transect screen and then just glowing. 
It's phenomenal. 
So there's a lot of animals in the open ocean — most of them that make light. 
And we have a pretty good idea, for most of them, why. 
They use it for finding food, for attracting mates, for defending against predators. 
But when you get down to the bottom of the ocean, that's where things get really strange. 
And some of these animals are probably inspiration for the things you saw in "" Avatar, "" but you don't have to travel to Pandora to see them. 
They're things like this. 
This is a golden coral, a bush. 
It grows very slowly. 
In fact, it's thought that some of these are as much as 3,000 years old, which is one reason that bottom trawling should not be allowed. 
The other reason is this amazing bush glows. 
So if you brush up against it, any place you brushed against it, you get this twinkling blue-green light that's just breathtaking. 
And you see things like this. 
This looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book — just all manner of creatures all over this thing. 
And these are flytrap anemones. 
Now if you poke it, it pulls in its tentacles. 
But if you keep poking it, it starts to produce light. 
And it actually ends up looking like a galaxy. 
It produces these strings of light, presumably as some form of defense. 
There are starfish that can make light. 
And there are brittle stars that produce bands of light that dance along their arms. 
This looks like a plant, but it's actually an animal. 
And it anchors itself in the sand by blowing up a balloon on the end of its stock. 
So it can actually hold itself in very strong currents, as you see here. 
But if we collect it very gently, and we bring it up into the lab and just squeeze it at the base of the stock, it produces this light that propagates from stem to the plume, changing color as it goes, from green to blue. 
Colorization and sound effects added for you viewing pleasure. 
(Laughter) But we have no idea why it does that. 
Here's another one. This is also a sea pen. 
It's got a brittle star hitching a ride. 
It's a green saber of light. 
And like the one you just saw, it can produce these as bands of light. 
So if I squeeze the base, the bands go from base to tip. 
If I squeeze the tip, they go from tip to base. 
So what do you think happens if you squeeze it in the middle? 
(Gasps) I'd be very interested in your theories about what that's about. 
(Laughter) So there's a language of light in the deep ocean, and we're just beginning to understand it, and one way we're going about that is we're imitating a lot of these displays. 
This is an optical lure that I've used. 
We call it the electronic jellyfish. 
It's just 16 blue LEDs that we can program to do different types of displays. 
And we view it with a camera system I developed called Eye-in-the-Sea that uses far red light that's invisible to most animals, so it's unobtrusive. 
So I just want to show you some of the responses we've elicited from animals in the deep sea. 
So the camera's black and white. 
It's not high-resolution. 
And what you're seeing here is a bait box with a bunch of — like the cockroaches of the ocean — there are isopods all over it. 
And right in the front is the electronic jellyfish. 
And when it starts flashing, it's just going to be one of the LEDs that's flashing very fast. 
But as soon as it starts to flash — and it's going to look big, because it blooms on the camera — I want you to look right here. 
There's something small there that responds. 
We're talking to something. 
It looks like a little of string pearls basically — in fact, three strings of pearls. 
And this was very consistent. 
This was in the Bahamas at about 2,000 feet. 
We basically have a chat room going on here, because once it gets started, everybody's talking. 
And I think this is actually a shrimp that's releasing its bioluminescent chemicals into the water. 
But the cool thing is, we're talking to it. 
We don't know what we're saying. 
Personally, I think it's something sexy. 
(Laughter) And then finally, I want to show you some responses that we recorded with the world's first deep-sea webcam, which we had installed in Monterey Canyon last year. 
We've only just begun to analyze all of this data. 
This is going to be a glowing source first, which is like bioluminescent bacteria. 
And it is an optical cue that there's carrion on the bottom of the ocean. 
So this scavenger comes in, which is a giant sixgill shark. 
And I can't claim for sure that the optical source brought it in, because there's bait right there. 
But if it had been following the odor plume, it would have come in from the other direction. 
And it does actually seem to be trying to eat the electronic jellyfish. 
That's a 12-foot-long giant sixgill shark. 
Okay, so this next one is from the webcam, and it's going to be this pinwheel display. 
And this is a burglar alarm. 
And that was a Humboldt squid, a juvenile Humboldt squid, about three feet long. 
This is at 3,000 feet in Monterey Canyon. 
But if it's a burglar alarm, you wouldn't expect it to attack the jellyfish directly. 
It's supposed to be attacking what's attacking the jellyfish. 
But we did see a bunch of responses like this. 
This guy is a little more contemplative. 
"" Hey, wait a minute. 
There's supposed to be something else there. "" He's thinking about it. 
But he's persistent. 
He keeps coming back. 
And then he goes away for a few seconds to think about it some more, and thinks, "Maybe if I come in from a different angle." 
(Laughter) Nope. 
So we are starting to get a handle on this, but only just the beginnings. 
We need more eyes on the process. 
So if any of you ever get a chance to take a dive in a submersible, by all means, climb in and take the plunge. 
This is something that should be on everybody's bucket list, because we live on an ocean planet. 
More than 90 percent, 99 percent, of the living space on our planet is ocean. 
It's a magical place filled with breathtaking light shows and bizarre and wondrous creatures, alien life forms that you don't have to travel to another planet to see. 
But if you do take the plunge, please remember to turn out the lights. 
But I warn you, it's addictive. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Bruno Giussani: Commissioner, thank you for coming to TED. 
António Guterres: Pleasure. 
BG: Let's start with a figure. 
During 2015, almost one million refugees and migrants arrived in Europe from many different countries, of course, from Syria and Iraq, but also from Afghanistan and Bangladesh and Eritrea and elsewhere. 
And there have been reactions of two different kinds: welcoming parties and border fences. 
But I want to look at it a little bit from the short-term and the long-term perspective. 
And the first question is very simple: Why has the movement of refugees spiked so fast in the last six months? 
AG: Well, I think, basically, what triggered this huge increase was the Syrian refugee group. 
There has been an increased movement into Europe from Africa, from Asia, but slowly growing, and all of a sudden we had this massive increase in the first months of this year. 
Why? I think there are three reasons, two long-term ones and the trigger. 
The long-term ones, in relation to Syrians, is that hope is less and less clear for people. 
I mean, they look at their own country and they don't see much hope to go back home, because there is no political solution, so there is no light at the end of the tunnel. 
Second, the living conditions of the Syrians in the neighboring countries have been deteriorating. 
We just had research with the World Bank, and 87 percent of the Syrians in Jordan and 93 percent of the Syrians in Lebanon live below the national poverty lines. 
Only half of the children go to school, which means that people are living very badly. 
Not only are they refugees, out of home, not only have they suffered what they have suffered, but they are living in very, very dramatic conditions. 
And then the trigger was when all of a sudden, international aid decreased. 
The World Food Programme was forced, for lack of resources, to cut by 30 percent food support to the Syrian refugees. 
They're not allowed to work, so they are totally dependent on international support, and they felt, "" The world is abandoning us. "" And that, in my opinion, was the trigger. 
All of a sudden, there was a rush, and people started to move in large numbers and, to be absolutely honest, if I had been in the same situation and I would have been brave enough to do it, I think I would have done the same. 
BG: But I think what surprised many people is it's not only sudden, but it wasn't supposed to be sudden. 
The war in Syria has been happening for five years. 
Millions of refugees are in camps and villages and towns around Syria. 
You have yourself warned about the situation and about the consequences of a breakdown of Libya, for example, and yet Europe looked totally unprepared. 
AG: Well, unprepared because divided, and when you are divided, you don't want to recognize the reality. 
You prefer to postpone decisions, because you do not have the capacity to make them. 
And the proof is that even when the spike occurred, Europe remained divided and was unable to put in place a mechanism to manage the situation. 
You talk about one million people. 
It looks enormous, but the population of the European Union is 550 million people, which means we are talking about one per every [550] Europeans. 
Now, in Lebanon, we have one refugee per three Lebanese. 
And Lebanon? Struggling, of course, but it's managing. 
So, the question is: is this something that could have been managed if — not mentioning the most important thing, which would have been addressing the root causes, but forgetting about root causes for now, looking at the phenomenon as it is — if Europe were able to come together in solidarity to create an adequate reception capacity of entry points? 
But for that, the countries at entry points need to be massively supported, and then screening the people with security checks and all the other mechanisms, distributing those that are coming into all European countries, according to the possibilities of each country. 
I mean, if you look at the relocation program that was approved by the Commission, always too little too late, or by the Council, too little too late — BG: It's already breaking down. 
AG: My country is supposed to receive four thousand. 
Four thousand in Portugal means nothing. 
So this is perfectly manageable if it is managed, but in the present circumstances, the pressure is at the point of entry, and then, as people move in this chaotic way through the Balkans, then they come to Germany, Sweden, basically, and Austria. 
They are the three countries that are, in the end, receiving the refugees. 
The rest of Europe is looking without doing much. 
BG: Let me try to bring up three questions, playing a bit devil's advocate. 
I'll try to ask them, make them blunt. 
But I think the questions are very present in the minds of many people in Europe right now, The first, of course, is about numbers. 
You say 550 million versus one million is not much, but realistically, how many people can Europe take? 
AG: Well, that is a question that has no answer, because refugees have the right to be protected. 
And there is such a thing as international law, so there is no way you can say, "" I take 10,000 and that's finished. "" I remind you of one thing: in Turkey, at the beginning of the crisis, I remember one minister saying, "Turkey will be able to receive up to 100,000 people." 
Turkey has now two million three-hundred thousand or something of the sort, if you count all refugees. 
So I don't think it's fair to say how many we can take. 
What it is fair to say is: how we can we organize ourselves to assume our international responsibilities? 
And Europe has not been able to do so, because basically, Europe is divided because there is no solidarity in the European project. 
And it's not only about refugees; there are many other areas. 
And let's be honest, this is the moment in which we need more Europe instead of less Europe. 
But as the public less and less believes in European institutions, it is also each time more difficult to convince the public that we need more Europe to solve these problems. 
BG: We seem to be at the point where the numbers turn into political shifts, particularly domestically. 
We saw it again this weekend in France, but we have seen it over and over in many countries: in Poland and in Denmark and in Switzerland and elsewhere, where the mood changes radically because of the numbers, although they are not very significant in absolute numbers. 
The Prime Minister of — AG: But, if I may, on these: I mean, what does a European see at home in a village where there are no migrants? 
What a European sees is, on television, every single day, a few months ago, opening the news every single day, a crowd coming, uncontrolled, moving from border to border, and the images on television were of hundreds or thousands of people moving. 
And the idea is that nobody is taking care of it — this is happening without any kind of management. 
And so their idea was, "" They are coming to my village. "" So there was this completely false idea that Europe was being invaded and our way of life is going to change, and everything will — And the problem is that if this had been properly managed, if people had been properly received, welcomed, sheltered at point of entry, screened at point of entry, and the moved by plane to different European countries, this would not have scared people. 
But, unfortunately, we have a lot of people scared, just because Europe was not able to do the job properly. 
BG: But there are villages in Germany with 300 inhabitants and 1,000 refugees. 
So, what's your position? 
How do you imagine these people reacting? 
AG: If there would be a proper management of the situation and the proper distribution of people all over Europe, you would always have the percentage that I mentioned: one per each 2,000. 
It is because things are not properly managed that in the end we have situations that are totally impossible to live with, and of course if you have a village — in Lebanon, there are many villages that have more Syrians than Lebanese; Lebanon has been living with that. 
I'm not asking for the same to happen in Europe, for all European villages to have more refugees than inhabitants. 
What I am asking is for Europe to do the job properly, and to be able to organize itself to receive people as other countries in the world were forced to do in the past. 
BG: So, if you look at the global situation not only at Europe — (Applause) BG: Yes! (Applause) 
BG: If you look at the global situation, so, not only at Europe, I know you can make a long list of countries that are not really stepping up, but I'm more interested in the other part — is there somebody who's doing the right thing? 
AG: Well, 86 percent of the refugees in the world are in the developing world. 
And if you look at countries like Ethiopia — Ethiopia has received more than 600,000 refugees. 
All the borders in Ethiopia are open. 
And they have, as a policy, they call the "" people to people "" policy that every refugee should be received. 
And they have South Sudanese, they have Sudanese, they have Somalis. 
They have all the neighbors. 
They have Eritreans. 
And, in general, African countries are extremely welcoming of refugees coming, and I would say that in the Middle East and in Asia, we have seen a tendency for borders to be open. 
Now we see some problems with the Syrian situation, as the Syrian situation evolved into also a major security crisis, but the truth is that for a large period, all borders in the Middle East were open. 
The truth is that for Afghans, the borders of Pakistan and Iran were open for, at the time, six million Afghans that came. 
So I would say that even today, the trend in the developing world has been for borders to be open. 
The trend in the developed world is for these questions to become more and more complex, especially when there is, in the public opinion, a mixture of discussions between refugee protections on one side and security questions — in my opinion, misinterpreted — on the other side. 
BG: We'll come back to that too, but you mentioned the cutting of funding and the vouchers from the World Food Programme. 
That reflects the general underfunding of the organizations working on these issues. 
Now that the world seems to have woken up, are you getting more funding and more support, or it's still the same? 
AG: We are getting more support. 
I would say that we are coming close to the levels of last year. 
We were much worse during the summer. 
But that is clearly insufficient to address the needs of the people and address the needs of the countries that are supporting the people. 
And here we have a basic review of the criteria, the objectives, the priorities of development cooperation that is required. 
For instance, Lebanon and Jordan are middle-income countries. 
Because they are middle-income countries, they cannot receive soft loans or grants from the World Bank. 
Now, today this doesn't make any sense, because they are providing a global public good. 
They have millions of refugees there, and to be honest, they are pillars of stability in the region, with all the difficulties they face, and the first line of defense of our collective security. 
So it doesn't make sense that these countries are not a first priority in development cooperation policies. 
And they are not. 
And not only do the refugees live in very dramatic circumstances inside those countries, but the local communities themselves are suffering, because salaries went down, because there are more unemployed, because prices and rents went up. 
And, of course, if you look at today's situation of the indicators in these countries, it is clear that, especially their poor groups of the population, are living worse and worse because of the crisis they are facing. 
BG: Who should be providing this support? 
Country by country, international organizations, the European Union? 
Who should be coming up with this support? 
AG: We need to join all efforts. 
It's clear that bilateral cooperation is essential. 
It's clear that multilateral cooperation is essential. 
It's clear that international financial institutions should have flexibility in order to be able to invest more massively in support to these countries. 
We need to combine all the instruments and to understand that today, in protracted situations, at a certain moment, that it doesn't make sense anymore to make a distinction between humanitarian aid and development aid or development processes. 
Because you are talking about children in school, you are talking about health, you are talking about infrastructure that is overcrowded. 
You are talking about things that require a long-term perspective, a development perspective and not only an emergency humanitarian aid perspective. 
BG: I would like your comment on something that was in newspapers this morning. 
It is a statement made by the current front-runner for the Republican nomination for US President, Donald Trump. 
Yesterday, he said this. 
(Laughter) No, listen to this. It's interesting. 
I quote: "" I am calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the US, until our country's representatives can figure out what's going on. "" How do you react to that? 
AG: Well, it's not only Donald Trump. 
We have seen several people around the world with political responsibility saying, for instance, that Muslims refugees should not be received. 
And the reason why they say this is because they think that by doing or saying this, they are protecting the security of their countries. 
Now, I've been in government. 
I am very keen on the need for governments to protect the security of their countries and their people. 
But if you say, like that, in the US or in any European country, "We are going to close our doors to Muslim refugees," what you are saying is the best possible help for the propaganda of terrorist organizations. 
Because what you are saying — (Applause) What you are saying will be heard by all the Muslims in your own country, and it will pave the way for the recruitment and the mechanisms that, through technology, Daesh and al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, and all those other groups are today penetrating in our societies. 
And it's just telling them, "" You are right, we are against you. "" So obviously, this is creating in societies that are all multiethnic, multi-religious, multicultural, this is creating a situation in which, really, it is much easier for the propaganda of these terrorist organizations to be effective in recruiting people for terror acts within the countries where these kinds of sentences are expressed. 
BG: Have the recent attacks in Paris and the reactions to them made your job more difficult? 
AG: Undoubtedly. 
BG: In what sense? 
AG: In the sense that, I mean, for many people the first reaction in relation to these kinds of terrorist attacks is: close all borders — not understanding that the terrorist problem in Europe is largely homegrown. 
We have thousands and thousands of European fighters in Syria and in Iraq, so this is not something that you solve by just not allowing Syrians to come in. 
And I must say, I am convinced that the passport that appeared, I believe, was put by the person who has blown — BG: — himself up, yeah. 
AG: [I believe] it was on purpose, because part of the strategies of Daesh is against refugees, because they see refugees as people that should be with the caliphate and are fleeing to the crusaders. 
And I think that is part of Daesh's strategy to make Europe react, closing its doors to Muslim refugees and having an hostility towards Muslims inside Europe, exactly to facilitate Daesh's work. 
And my deep belief is that it was not the refugee movement that triggered terrorism. 
I think, as I said, essentially terrorism in Europe is today a homegrown movement in relation to the global situation that we are facing, and what we need is exactly to prove these groups wrong, by welcoming and integrating effectively those that are coming from that part of the world. 
And another thing that I believe is that to a large extent, what we are today paying for in Europe is the failures of integration models that didn't work in the '60s, in the' 70s, in the '80s, in relation to big migration flows that took place at that time and generated what is today in many of the people, for instance, of the second generation of communities, a situation of feeling marginalized, having no jobs, having improper education, living in some of the neighborhoods that are not adequately provided by public infrastructure. 
And this kind of uneasiness, sometimes even anger, that exists in this second generation is largely due to the failure of integration policies, to the failure of what should have been a much stronger investment in creating the conditions for people to live together and respect each other. 
For me it is clear. 
(Applause) For me it is clear that all societies will be multiethnic, multicultural, multi-religious in the future. 
To try to avoid it is, in my opinion, impossible. 
And for me it's a good thing that they will be like that, but I also recognize that, for that to work properly, you need a huge investment in the social cohesion of your own societies. 
And Europe, to a large extent, failed in that investment in the past few decades. 
BG: Question: You are stepping down from your job at the end of the year, after 10 years. 
If you look back at 2005, when you entered that office for the first time, what do you see? 
AG: Well, look: In 2005, we were helping one million people go back home in safety and dignity, because conflicts had ended. 
Last year, we helped 124,000. 
In 2005, we had about 38 million people displaced by conflict in the world. 
Today, we have more than 60 million. 
At that time, we had had, recently, some conflicts that were solved. 
Now, we see a multiplication of new conflicts and the old conflicts never died: Afghanistan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo. 
It is clear that the world today is much more dangerous than it was. 
It is clear that the capacity of the international community to prevent conflicts and to timely solve them, is, unfortunately, much worse than what it was 10 years ago. 
There are no clear power relations in the world, no global governance mechanisms that work, which means that we live in a situation where impunity and unpredictability tend to prevail, and that means that more and more people suffer, namely those that are displaced by conflicts. 
BG: It's a tradition in American politics that when a President leaves the Oval Office for the last time, he leaves a handwritten note on the desk for his successor that walks in a couple of hours later. 
If you had to write such a note to your successor, Filippo Grandi, what would you write? 
AG: Well, I don't think I would write any message. 
You know, one of the terrible things when one leaves an office is to try to become the backseat driver, always telling the new one what to do. 
So that, I will not do. 
If I had to say something to him, it would be, "" Be yourself, and do your best. "" BG: Commissioner, thank you for the job you do. 
Thank you for coming to TED. 
(Applause) 

You know, my favorite part of being a dad is the movies I get to watch. 
I love sharing my favorite movies with my kids, and when my daughter was four, we got to watch "" The Wizard of Oz "" together. 
It totally dominated her imagination for months. 
Her favorite character was Glinda, of course. 
It gave her a great excuse to wear a sparkly dress and carry a wand. 
But you watch that movie enough times, and you start to realize how unusual it is. 
Now we live today, and are raising our children, in a kind of children's-fantasy-spectacular-industrial complex. 
But "" The Wizard of Oz "" stood alone. 
It did not start that trend. 
Forty years later was when the trend really caught on, with, interestingly, another movie that featured a metal guy and a furry guy rescuing a girl by dressing up as the enemy's guards. 
Do you know what I'm talking about? (Laughter) Yeah. 
Now, there's a big difference between these two movies, a couple of really big differences between "" The Wizard of Oz "" and all the movies we watch today. 
One is there's very little violence in "" The Wizard of Oz. "" The monkeys are rather aggressive, as are the apple trees. 
But I think if "" The Wizard of Oz "" were made today, the wizard would say, "" Dorothy, you are the savior of Oz that the prophecy foretold. 
Use your magic slippers to defeat the computer-generated armies of the Wicked Witch. "" But that's not how it happens. 
Another thing that's really unique about "" The Wizard of Oz "" to me is that all of the most heroic and wise and even villainous characters are female. 
Now I started to notice this when I actually showed "" Star Wars "" to my daughter, which was years later, and the situation was different. 
At that point I also had a son. 
He was only three at the time. 
He was not invited to the screening. He was too young for that. 
But he was the second child, and the level of supervision had plummeted. (Laughter) So he wandered in, and it imprinted on him like a mommy duck does to its duckling, and I don't think he understands what's going on, but he is sure soaking in it. 
And I wonder what he's soaking in. 
Is he picking up on the themes of courage and perseverance and loyalty? 
Is he picking up on the fact that Luke joins an army to overthrow the government? Is he picking up on the fact that 
there are only boys in the universe except for Aunt Beru, and of course this princess, who's really cool, but who kind of waits around through most of the movie so that she can award the hero with a medal and a wink to thank him for saving the universe, which he does by the magic that he was born with? 
Compare this to 1939 with "" The Wizard of Oz. "" How does Dorothy win her movie? 
By making friends with everybody and being a leader. 
That's kind of the world I'd rather raise my kids in — Oz, right? — and not the world of dudes fighting, which is where we kind of have to be. 
Why is there so much Force — capital F, Force — in the movies we have for our kids, and so little yellow brick road? 
There is a lot of great writing about the impact that the boy-violent movie has on girls, and you should do that reading. It's very good. 
I haven't read as much on how boys are picking up on this vibe. 
I know from my own experience that Princess Leia did not provide the adequate context that I could have used in navigating the adult world that is co-ed. (Laughter) I think there was a first-kiss moment when I really expected the credits to start rolling because that's the end of the movie, right? 
I finished my quest, I got the girl. 
Why are you still standing there? 
I don't know what I'm supposed to do. 
The movies are very, very focused on defeating the villain and getting your reward, and there's not a lot of room for other relationships and other journeys. 
It's almost as though if you're a boy, you are a dopey animal, and if you are a girl, you should bring your warrior costume. 
There are plenty of exceptions, and I will defend the Disney princesses in front of any you. 
But they do send a message to boys, that they are not, the boys are not really the target audience. 
They are doing a phenomenal job of teaching girls how to defend against the patriarchy, but they are not necessarily showing boys how they're supposed to defend against the patriarchy. 
There's no models for them. 
And we also have some terrific women who are writing new stories for our kids, and as three-dimensional and delightful as Hermione and Katniss are, these are still war movies. 
And, of course, the most successful studio of all time continues to crank out classic after classic, every single one of them about the journey of a boy, or a man, or two men who are friends, or a man and his son, or two men who are raising a little girl. 
Until, as many of you are thinking, this year, when they finally came out with "" Brave. "" I recommend it to all of you. It's on demand now. 
Do you remember what the critics said when "" Brave "" came out? 
"Aw, I can't believe Pixar made a princess movie." 
It's very good. Don't let that stop you. 
Now, almost none of these movies pass the Bechdel Test. 
I don't know if you've heard of this. 
It has not yet caught on and caught fire, but maybe today we will start a movement. 
Alison Bechdel is a comic book artist, and back in the mid- '80s, she recorded this conversation she'd had with a friend about assessing the movies that they saw. 
And it's very simple. There's just three questions you should ask: Is there more than one character in the movie that is female who has lines? 
So try to meet that bar. 
And do these women talk to each other at any point in the movie? 
And is their conversation about something other than the guy that they both like? (Laughter) Right? Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. 
Two women who exist and talk to each other about stuff. 
It does happen. I've seen it, and yet I very rarely see it in the movies that we know and love. 
In fact, this week I went to see a very high-quality movie, "" Argo. "" Right? Oscar buzz, doing great at the box office, a consensus idea of what a quality Hollywood film is. 
It pretty much flunks the Bechdel test. 
And I don't think it should, because a lot of the movie, I don't know if you've seen it, but a lot of the movie takes place in this embassy where men and women are hiding out during the hostage crisis. 
We've got quite a few scenes of the men having deep, angst-ridden conversations in this hideout, and the great moment for one of the actresses is to peek through the door and say, "" Are you coming to bed, honey? "" That's Hollywood for you. 
So let's look at the numbers. 
2011, of the 100 most popular movies, how many of them do you think actually have female protagonists? 
Eleven. It's not bad. 
It's not as many percent as the number of women we've just elected to Congress, so that's good. 
But there is a number that is greater than this that's going to bring this room down. 
Last year, The New York Times published a study that the government had done. 
Here's what it said. 
One out of five women in America say that they have been sexually assaulted some time in their life. 
Now, I don't think that's the fault of popular entertainment. 
I don't think kids' movies have anything to do with that. 
I don't even think that music videos or pornography are really directly related to that, but something is going wrong, and when I hear that statistic, one of the things I think of is that's a lot of sexual assailants. 
Who are these guys? What are they learning? 
What are they failing to learn? 
Are they absorbing the story that a male hero's job is to defeat the villain with violence and then collect the reward, which is a woman who has no friends and doesn't speak? 
Are we soaking up that story? 
You know, as a parent with the privilege of raising a daughter like all of you who are doing the same thing, we find this world and this statistic very alarming and we want to prepare them. 
We have tools at our disposal like "" girl power, "" and we hope that that will help, but I gotta wonder, is girl power going to protect them if, at the same time, actively or passively, we are training our sons to maintain their boy power? 
I mean, I think the Netflix queue is one way that we can do something very important, and I'm talking mainly to the dads here. 
I think we have got to show our sons a new definition of manhood. 
The definition of manhood is already turning upside down. 
You've read about how the new economy is changing the roles of caregiver and wage earner. 
They're throwing it up in the air. 
So our sons are going to have to find some way of adapting to this, some new relationship with each other, and I think we really have to show them, and model for them, how a real man is someone who trusts his sisters and respects them, and wants to be on their team, and stands up against the real bad guys, who are the men who want to abuse the women. 
And I think our job in the Netflix queue is to look out for those movies that pass the Bechdel Test, if we can find them, and to seek out the heroines who are there, who show real courage, who bring people together, and to nudge our sons to identify with those heroines and to say, "" I want to be on their team, "" because they're going to be on their team. 
When I asked my daughter who her favorite character was in "" Star Wars, "" do you know what she said? 
Obi-Wan. 
Obi-Wan Kenobi and Glinda. 
What do these two have in common? 
Maybe it's not just the sparkly dress. 
I think these people are experts. 
I think these are the two people in the movie who know more than anybody else, and they love sharing their knowledge with other people to help them reach their potential. 
Now, they are leaders. 
I like that kind of quest for my daughter, and I like that kind of quest for my son. 
I want more quests like that. 
I want fewer quests where my son is told, "Go out and fight it alone," and more quests where he sees that it's his job to join a team, maybe a team led by women, to help other people become better and be better people, like the Wizard of Oz. 
Thank you. 

I'd like to tell you about a legal case that I worked on involving a man named Steve Titus. 
Titus was a restaurant manager. 
He was 31 years old, he lived in Seattle, Washington, he was engaged to Gretchen, about to be married, she was the love of his life. 
And one night, the couple went out for a romantic restaurant meal. 
They were on their way home, and they were pulled over by a police officer. 
You see, Titus' car sort of resembled a car that was driven earlier in the evening by a man who raped a female hitchhiker, and Titus kind of resembled that rapist. 
So the police took a picture of Titus, they put it in a photo lineup, they later showed it to the victim, and she pointed to Titus' photo. 
She said, "" That one's the closest. "" The police and the prosecution proceeded with a trial, and when Steve Titus was put on trial for rape, the rape victim got on the stand and said, "" I'm absolutely positive that's the man. "" And Titus was convicted. 
He proclaimed his innocence, his family screamed at the jury, his fiancée collapsed on the floor sobbing, and Titus is taken away to jail. 
So what would you do at this point? 
What would you do? 
Well, Titus lost complete faith in the legal system, and yet he got an idea. 
He called up the local newspaper, he got the interest of an investigative journalist, and that journalist actually found the real rapist, a man who ultimately confessed to this rape, a man who was thought to have committed 50 rapes in that area, and when this information was given to the judge, the judge set Titus free. 
And really, that's where this case should have ended. 
It should have been over. 
Titus should have thought of this as a horrible year, a year of accusation and trial, but over. 
It didn't end that way. 
Titus was so bitter. 
He'd lost his job. He couldn't get it back. 
He lost his fiancée. 
She couldn't put up with his persistent anger. 
He lost his entire savings, and so he decided to file a lawsuit against the police and others whom he felt were responsible for his suffering. 
And that's when I really started working on this case, trying to figure out how did that victim go from "That one's the closest" to "" I'm absolutely positive that's the guy. "" Well, Titus was consumed with his civil case. 
He spent every waking moment thinking about it, and just days before he was to have his day in court, he woke up in the morning, doubled over in pain, and died of a stress-related heart attack. 
He was 35 years old. 
So I was asked to work on Titus' case because I'm a psychological scientist. 
I study memory. I've studied memory for decades. 
And if I meet somebody on an airplane — this happened on the way over to Scotland — if I meet somebody on an airplane, and we ask each other, "" What do you do? What do you do? "" and I say "" I study memory, "" they usually want to tell me how they have trouble remembering names, or they've got a relative who's got Alzheimer's or some kind of memory problem, but I have to tell them I don't study when people forget. 
I study the opposite: when they remember, when they remember things that didn't happen or remember things that were different from the way they really were. 
I study false memories. 
Unhappily, Steve Titus is not the only person to be convicted based on somebody's false memory. 
In one project in the United States, information has been gathered on 300 innocent people, 300 defendants who were convicted of crimes they didn't do. 
They spent 10, 20, 30 years in prison for these crimes, and now DNA testing has proven that they are actually innocent. 
And when those cases have been analyzed, three quarters of them are due to faulty memory, faulty eyewitness memory. 
Well, why? 
Like the jurors who convicted those innocent people and the jurors who convicted Titus, many people believe that memory works like a recording device. 
You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. 
But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn't true. 
Our memories are constructive. 
They're reconstructive. 
Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people. 
I first started studying this constructive memory process in the 1970s. 
I did my experiments that involved showing people simulated crimes and accidents and asking them questions about what they remember. 
In one study, we showed people a simulated accident and we asked people, how fast were the cars going when they hit each other? 
And we asked other people, how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other? 
And if we asked the leading "" smashed "" question, the witnesses told us the cars were going faster, and moreover, that leading "" smashed "" question caused people to be more likely to tell us that they saw broken glass in the accident scene when there wasn't any broken glass at all. 
In another study, we showed a simulated accident where a car went through an intersection with a stop sign, and if we asked a question that insinuated it was a yield sign, many witnesses told us they remember seeing a yield sign at the intersection, not a stop sign. 
And you might be thinking, well, you know, these are filmed events, they are not particularly stressful. 
Would the same kind of mistakes be made with a really stressful event? 
In a study we published just a few months ago, we have an answer to this question, because what was unusual about this study is we arranged for people to have a very stressful experience. 
The subjects in this study were members of the U.S. military who were undergoing a harrowing training exercise to teach them what it's going to be like for them if they are ever captured as prisoners of war. 
And as part of this training exercise, these soldiers are interrogated in an aggressive, hostile, physically abusive fashion for 30 minutes and later on they have to try to identify the person who conducted that interrogation. 
And when we feed them suggestive information that insinuates it's a different person, many of them misidentify their interrogator, often identifying someone who doesn't even remotely resemble the real interrogator. 
And so what these studies are showing is that when you feed people misinformation about some experience that they may have had, you can distort or contaminate or change their memory. 
Well out there in the real world, misinformation is everywhere. 
We get misinformation not only if we're questioned in a leading way, but if we talk to other witnesses who might consciously or inadvertently feed us some erroneous information, or if we see media coverage about some event we might have experienced, all of these provide the opportunity for this kind of contamination of our memory. 
In the 1990s, we began to see an even more extreme kind of memory problem. 
Some patients were going into therapy with one problem — maybe they had depression, an eating disorder — and they were coming out of therapy with a different problem. 
Extreme memories for horrific brutalizations, sometimes in satanic rituals, sometimes involving really bizarre and unusual elements. 
One woman came out of psychotherapy believing that she'd endured years of ritualistic abuse, where she was forced into a pregnancy and that the baby was cut from her belly. 
But there were no physical scars or any kind of physical evidence that could have supported her story. 
And when I began looking into these cases, I was wondering, where do these bizarre memories come from? 
And what I found is that most of these situations involved some particular form of psychotherapy. 
And so I asked, were some of the things going on in this psychotherapy — like the imagination exercises or dream interpretation, or in some cases hypnosis, or in some cases exposure to false information — were these leading these patients to develop these very bizarre, unlikely memories? 
And I designed some experiments to try to study the processes that were being used in this psychotherapy so I could study the development of these very rich false memories. 
In one of the first studies we did, we used suggestion, a method inspired by the psychotherapy we saw in these cases, we used this kind of suggestion and planted a false memory that when you were a kid, five or six years old, you were lost in a shopping mall. 
You were frightened. You were crying. 
You were ultimately rescued by an elderly person and reunited with the family. 
And we succeeded in planting this memory in the minds of about a quarter of our subjects. 
And you might be thinking, well, that's not particularly stressful. 
But we and other investigators have planted rich false memories of things that were much more unusual and much more stressful. 
So in a study done in Tennessee, researchers planted the false memory that when you were a kid, you nearly drowned and had to be rescued by a life guard. 
And in a study done in Canada, researchers planted the false memory that when you were a kid, something as awful as being attacked by a vicious animal happened to you, succeeding with about half of their subjects. 
And in a study done in Italy, researchers planted the false memory, when you were a kid, you witnessed demonic possession. 
I do want to add that it might seem like we are traumatizing these experimental subjects in the name of science, but our studies have gone through thorough evaluation by research ethics boards that have made the decision that the temporary discomfort that some of these subjects might experience in these studies is outweighed by the importance of this problem for understanding memory processes and the abuse of memory that is going on in some places in the world. 
Well, to my surprise, when I published this work and began to speak out against this particular brand of psychotherapy, it created some pretty bad problems for me: hostilities, primarily from the repressed memory therapists, who felt under attack, and by the patients whom they had influenced. 
I had sometimes armed guards at speeches that I was invited to give, people trying to drum up letter-writing campaigns to get me fired. 
But probably the worst was I suspected that a woman was innocent of abuse that was being claimed by her grown daughter. 
She accused her mother of sexual abuse based on a repressed memory. 
And this accusing daughter had actually allowed her story to be filmed and presented in public places. 
I was suspicious of this story, and so I started to investigate, and eventually found information that convinced me that this mother was innocent. 
I published an exposé on the case, and a little while later, the accusing daughter filed a lawsuit. 
Even though I'd never mentioned her name, she sued me for defamation and invasion of privacy. 
And I went through nearly five years of dealing with this messy, unpleasant litigation, but finally, finally, it was over and I could really get back to my work. 
In the process, however, I became part of a disturbing trend in America where scientists are being sued for simply speaking out on matters of great public controversy. 
When I got back to my work, I asked this question: if I plant a false memory in your mind, does it have repercussions? 
Does it affect your later thoughts, your later behaviors? 
Our first study planted a false memory that you got sick as a child eating certain foods: hard-boiled eggs, dill pickles, strawberry ice cream. 
And we found that once we planted this false memory, people didn't want to eat the foods as much at an outdoor picnic. 
The false memories aren't necessarily bad or unpleasant. 
If we planted a warm, fuzzy memory involving a healthy food like asparagus, we could get people to want to eat asparagus more. 
And so what these studies are showing is that you can plant false memories and they have repercussions that affect behavior long after the memories take hold. 
Well, along with this ability to plant memories and control behavior obviously come some important ethical issues, like, when should we use this mind technology? 
And should we ever ban its use? 
Therapists can't ethically plant false memories in the mind of their patients even if it would help the patient, but there's nothing to stop a parent from trying this out on their overweight or obese teenager. 
And when I suggested this publicly, it created an outcry again. 
"There she goes. She's advocating that parents lie to their children." 
Hello, Santa Claus. (Laughter) I mean, another way to think about this is, which would you rather have, a kid with obesity, diabetes, shortened lifespan, all the things that go with it, or a kid with one little extra bit of false memory? 
I know what I would choose for a kid of mine. 
But maybe my work has made me different from most people. 
Most people cherish their memories, know that they represent their identity, who they are, where they came from. 
And I appreciate that. I feel that way too. 
But I know from my work how much fiction is already in there. 
If I've learned anything from these decades of working on these problems, it's this: just because somebody tells you something and they say it with confidence, just because they say it with lots of detail, just because they express emotion when they say it, it doesn't mean that it really happened. 
We can't reliably distinguish true memories from false memories. 
We need independent corroboration. 
Such a discovery has made me more tolerant of the everyday memory mistakes that my friends and family members make. 
Such a discovery might have saved Steve Titus, the man whose whole future was snatched away by a false memory. 
But meanwhile, we should all keep in mind, we'd do well to, that memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing. 
Thank you. Thank you. 
Thank you. (Applause) Thanks very much. (Applause) 

I have a big impact on the planet to travel here by plane. 
I emitted, in the atmosphere, nine tons of CO2; that is the weight of two elephants. 
I came here to speak about ecology, and I emitted as much CO2 as a Frenchman in one year. 
So what do I have to do? 
I have to kill a Frenchman when I come back at home? 
(Laughter) I have to do my carbon offset in another way, like I do every time. (Laughter) 
In fact my work is to show our impact on our planet. 
I'm going to show you some examples of the last pictures I've done in the last year. 
Alberta sand oil, a lot of pollution. 
You know the problem; we don't want to believe what we know. 
In Alberta people work nonstop, 24 hours by seven to extract as much oil as they can. 
We know about the end of oil. 
Oil sand is not a long-term solution. 
But we use three times more oil than we find every year. 
We don't want to believe what we know. 
Deny. 
Coral reef in New Caledonia. 
100 percent of the coral may be wiped out before 2050 because of global warming. 
And you know how coral are very sensitive to temperature, and are very important for the biodiversity of the sea. 
North Pole. I've done this picture last summer. 
It was impossible to do this picture 15 years ago. 
Now there is a new way open between Atlantic and Pacific. 
The thickness of the Arctic decreased more than 40 percent since 1960. 
There is a new face of Kilimanjaro without ice. 
Sad picture. 
It lost 80 percent of its ice. 
According to scientists, in 100 years all the mountain glacier will be gone. 
Glaciers are very important for the life on earth. 
Like Al Gore told you, two billion people live on the water from the glacier of Himalaya. 
Return of fish men. 
One fifth of human kind depend on fish to live. 
Today now 70 percent of the fish stock are over-exploited. 
According to FAO, if we don't change our system of fishing the main sea resources will be gone in 2050. 
We don't want to believe what we know. 
The beautiful picture, by [unclear] in Africa. 
One human of six have not enough to eat in the world. 
One billion people have not enough to eat. 
In Africa, corn is one of the main foods in many places. 
Here in America, 90 percent of the corn cultivated is used to feed animals or to do oil. 
Palm tree plantation in Borneo. 
Every year we lose 50 thousand square miles in deforestation. 
Refugee camp in Darfur. 
Today we have 20 million refugees in the world. 
According to the U.N., we speak about 250 million refugees in 2050. 
I always show my pictures in the street. 
We have done already 100 exhibitions in the cities. 
But how to understand the world without the voice of people? 
Landscape was not enough. 
It was obvious to me to do another work. 
I launched a project named Six Billion Others. 
I sent around the world six cameramen asking the same question, the same crucial question, about life. 
We have done five thousand interviews. 
I'm going to show you this. 
Man: The most beautiful thing that has happened to me in life? 
It's when my dad told me, "" Here, I give you this girl as your fiance. "" Woman: Love? Love is nice if you can have it. 
Second Man: Romeo and Juliet, Sassi and Panno, Dodi and Diana, Heer and Ranjha, this is love! Third Man: My greatest fear is... 
Woman: You're asking me a hard question. 
Fourth Man: I live happily because what else should I do? 
Fifth Man: The first thing I remember... (Sixth Man: That's how I learned, by my mother,) Fifth Man:... from my childhood, (Sixth Man: that you should respect humans.) Fifth Man: we were having fun, biking. (Sixth Man: I will never forget those words.) Seventh Man: We invented stories, we flew around the world, while remaining in our attic. 
Eighth Man: I had a big laugh today. 
Ninth Man: You see, family is... it's awful. 
10th Man: In the word life, you have the life. 
11th Man: Who am I? Isn't that the biggest question? 
12th Man: If I was to go back to Iraq and speak to the people, I'd have to bow down and kiss their feet. 
Just as that woman tried to kiss my feet when we were taking her sons. 
I feel ashamed. 
And I feel humbled by their strength. 
And I will forever feel a need to make reparations to Iraq. 
Second Woman: Dad, Mom, I grew up. 
You shouldn't worry about me. Dad doesn't need to go to work. 
My family... What can I say? 
At the moment, my family is very poor, my life here in Shenzhen is just about showing myself that I can earn more and to let my parents stay and have something to live on. 
I don't want them to spend their whole lives in poverty. 
If someday I can achieve something, I would like to say thank you daddy and mommy. 
Thank you. 
Thank you for having fed me and raised me, and for making my life of today. Thank you. 
13th Man: After seven years now of being in a wheelchair, I've done more in life being in a chair than out of a chair. 
I still surf. I sail the world. I freedive. 
After many people said I couldn't do that. 
And I think that comes from connecting with nature, connecting with the energy of life, because we're all disabled in some way on the planet — spiritually, mentally or physically. 
I got the easy part. 
14th Man: Let's say that you and me like each other. 
You come from elsewhere. 
You don't know me. I don't know you. 
We talk without lying. 
If I do like you, I give you one cow and many other things and we become friends. 
How can we make it all by ourselves? 
(Applause) YAB: You can also go to the website, answer — respond to the questions also. 
Forty crucial questions. 
Now I am going to speak to you about my movie. 
For the last three years, I was shooting the earth for the movie. 
The name of the movie is "" Home "" — "Maison." 
It is about the state of the planet. 
It's a fantastic story of life on the earth. 
I'm very proud to show you the teaser. 
Video: This Earth is four and a half billion years old. 
These plants, several hundred million years old. 
And we humans have been walking upright for only 200 thousand years. 
We've managed to adapt, and have conquered the whole planet. 
For generations, we've been raising our children, not unlike millions of other species living beside us. 
For the past 30 years I've been closely watching the earth and its dwellers from high up in the sky. 
Our life is tied to the well-being of our planet. 
We depend on water, forests, deserts, oceans. 
Fishing, breeding, farming are still the world's foremost human occupations. 
And what binds us together is far greater than what divides us. 
We all share the same need for the earth's gifts — the same wish to rise above ourselves, and become better. 
And yet we carry on raising walls to keep us apart. 
Today our greatest battle is to protect the natural offerings of our planet. 
In less than 50 years we've altered it more thoroughly than in the entire history of mankind. 
Half of the world's forests have vanished. 
Water resources are running low. 
Intensive farming is depleting soils. 
Our energy sources are not sustainable. 
The climate is changing. 
We are endangering ourselves. 
We're only trying to improve our lives. 
But the wealth gaps are growing wider. 
We haven't yet understood that we're going at a much faster pace than the planet can sustain. 
We know that solutions are available today. 
We all have the power to change this trend for the better. 
So what are we waiting for? 
(Applause) YAB: Luc Besson is the producer of the movie. 
But it is not a normal movie. 
The film is going to be distributed free. 
This film has no copyright. 
On the five of June, the environment day, everybody can download the movie on Internet. 
The film is given for free to the distributor for TV and theater to show it the fifth of June. 
There is no business on this movie. 
It is also available for school, cities, NGOs and you. 
We have to believe what we know. 
Let me tell you something. 
It's too late to be pessimistic — really too late. 
We have all a part of the solutions. 
To finish, I would like to welcome the 4,700th baby born since the beginning of this talk. 
Merci beaucoup. I love you. 
(Applause) 

I've spent the last decade subjecting myself to pain and humiliation, hopefully for a good cause, which is self-improvement. 
And I've done this in three parts. 
So first I started with the mind. 
And I decided to try to get smarter by reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z — or, more precisely, from "" a-ak "" to "" Zywiec. "" And here's a little image of that. 
And this was an amazing year. 
It was really a fascinating journey. 
It was painful at times, especially for those around me. 
My wife started to fine me one dollar for every irrelevant fact I inserted into conversation. 
So it had its downsides. 
But after that, I decided to work on the spirit. 
As I mentioned last year, I grew up with no religion at all. 
I'm Jewish, but I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. 
(Laughter) Not really. 
But I decided to learn about the Bible and my heritage by actually diving in and trying to live it and immerse myself in it. 
So I decided to follow all the rules of the Bible. 
And from the Ten Commandments to growing my beard — because Leviticus says you cannot shave. 
So this is what I looked like by the end. 
Thank you for that reaction. 
(Laughter) I look a little like Moses, or Ted Kaczynski. 
I got both of them. 
So there was the topiary there. 
And there's the sheep. 
Now the final part of the trilogy was I wanted to focus on the body and try to be the healthiest person I could be, the healthiest person alive. 
So that's what I've been doing the last couple of years. 
And I just finished a couple of months ago. 
And I have to say, thank God. 
Because living so healthily was killing me. 
(Laughter) It was so overwhelming, because the amount of things you have to do, it's just mind-boggling. 
I was listening to all the experts and talking to sort of a board of medical advisers. 
And they were telling me all the things I had to do. 
I had to eat right, exercise, meditate, pet dogs, because that lowers the blood pressure. 
I wrote the book on a treadmill, and it took me about a thousand miles to write the book. 
I had to put on sunscreen. 
This was no small feat, because if you listen to dermatologists, they say that you should have a shot glass full of sunscreen. 
And you have to reapply it every two to four hours. 
So I think half of my book advance went into sunscreen. 
I was like a glazed doughnut for most of the year. 
There was the washing of hands. 
I had to do that properly. 
And my immunologist told me that I should also wipe down all of the remote controls and iPhones in my house, because those are just orgies of germs. 
So that took a lot of time. 
I also tried to be the safest person I could be, because that's a part of health. 
I was inspired by the Danish Safety Council. 
They started a public campaign that says, "" A walking helmet is a good helmet. "" So they believe you should not just wear helmets for biking, but also for walking around. 
And you can see there they're shopping with their helmets. 
(Laughter) Well yeah, I tried that. 
Now it's a little extreme, I admit. 
But if you think about this, this is actually — the "" Freakonomics "" authors wrote about this — that more people die on a per mile basis from drunk walking than from drunk driving. 
So something to think about tonight if you've had a couple. 
So I finished, and it was a success in a sense. 
All of the markers went in the right direction. 
My cholesterol went down, I lost weight, my wife stopped telling me that I looked pregnant. 
So that was nice. 
And it was successful overall. 
But I also learned that I was too healthy, and that was unhealthy. 
I was so focused on doing all these things that I was neglecting my friends and family. 
And as Dan Buettner can tell you, having a strong social network is so crucial to our health. 
So I finished. 
And I kind of went overboard on the week after the project was over. 
I went to the dark side, and I just indulged myself. 
It was like something out of Caligula. 
(Laughter) Without the sex part. 
Because I have three young kids, so that wasn't happening. 
But the over-eating and over-drinking, definitely. 
And I finally have stabilized. 
So now I'm back to adopting many — not all; I don't wear a helmet anymore — but dozens of healthy behaviors that I adopted during my year. 
It was really a life-changing project. 
And I, of course, don't have time to go into all of them. 
Let me just tell you two really quickly. 
The first is — and this was surprising to me; I didn't expect this to come out — but I live a much quieter life now. 
Because we live in such a noisy world. 
There's trains and planes and cars and Bill O'Reilly, he's very noisy. 
(Laughter) And this is a real underestimated, under-appreciated health hazard — not just because it harms our hearing, which it obviously does, but it actually initiates the fight-or-flight response. 
A loud noise will get your fight-or-flight response going. 
And this, over the years, can cause real damage, cardiovascular damage. 
The World Health Organization just did a big study that they published this year. 
And it was done in Europe. 
And they estimated that 1.6 million years of healthy living are lost every year in Europe because of noise pollution. 
So they think it's actually very deadly. 
And by the way, it's also terrible for your brain. 
It really impairs cognition. 
And our Founding Fathers knew about this. 
When they wrote the Constitution, they put dirt all over the cobblestones outside the hall so that they could concentrate. 
So without noise reduction technology, our country would not exist. 
So as a patriot, I felt it was important to — I wear all the earplugs and the earphones, and it's really improved my life in a surprising and unexpected way. 
And the second point I want to make, the final point, is that — and it's actually been a theme of TEDMED — that joy is so important to your health, that very few of these behaviors will stick with me unless there's some sense of pleasure and joy in them. 
And just to give you one instance of this: food. 
The junk food industry is really great at pressing our pleasure buttons and figuring out what's the most pleasurable. 
But I think we can use their techniques and apply them to healthy food. 
To give just one example, we love crunchiness, mouthfeel. 
So I basically have tried to incorporate crunchiness into a lot of my recipes — throw in some sunflower seeds. 
And you can almost trick yourself into thinking you're eating Doritos. 
(Laughter) And it has made me a healthier person. 
So that is it. 
The book about it comes out in April. 
It's called "" Drop Dead Healthy. "" And I hope that I don't get sick during the book tour. 
That's my greatest hope. 
So thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Well, now we're going to the Bahamas to meet a remarkable group of dolphins that I've been working with in the wild for the last 28 years. 
Now I'm interested in dolphins because of their large brains and what they might be doing with all that brainpower in the wild. 
And we know they use some of that brainpower for just living complicated lives, but what do we really know about dolphin intelligence? 
Well, we know a few things. 
We know that their brain-to-body ratio, which is a physical measure of intelligence, is second only to humans. 
Cognitively, they can understand artificially-created languages. 
And they pass self-awareness tests in mirrors. 
And in some parts of the world, they use tools, like sponges to hunt fish. 
But there's one big question left: do they have a language, and if so, what are they talking about? 
So decades ago, not years ago, I set out to find a place in the world where I could observe dolphins underwater to try to crack the code of their communication system. 
Now in most parts of the world, the water's pretty murky, so it's very hard to observe animals underwater, but I found a community of dolphins that live in these beautiful, clear, shallow sandbanks of the Bahamas which are just east of Florida. 
And they spend their daytime resting and socializing in the safety of the shallows, but at night, they go off the edge and hunt in deep water. 
Now, it's not a bad place to be a researcher, either. 
So we go out for about five months every summer in a 20-meter catamaran, and we live, sleep and work at sea for weeks at a time. 
My main tool is an underwater video with a hydrophone, which is an underwater microphone, and this is so I can correlate sound and behavior. 
And most of our work's pretty non-invasive. 
We try to follow dolphin etiquette while we're in the water, since we're actually observing them physically in the water. 
Now, Atlantic spotted dolphins are a really nice species to work with for a couple of reasons. 
They're born without spots, and they get spots with age, and they go through pretty distinct developmental phases, so that's fun to track their behavior. 
And by about the age of 15, they're fully spotted black and white. 
Now the mother you see here is Mugsy. 
She's 35 years old in this shot, but dolphins can actually live into their early 50s. 
And like all the dolphins in our community, we photographed Mugsy and tracked her little spots and nicks in her dorsal fin, and also the unique spot patterns as she matured over time. 
Now, young dolphins learn a lot as they're growing up, and they use their teenage years to practice social skills, and at about the age of nine, the females become sexually mature, so they can get pregnant, and the males mature quite a bit later, at around 15 years of age. 
And dolphins are very promiscuous, and so we have to determine who the fathers are, so we do paternity tests by collecting fecal material out of the water and extracting DNA. 
So what that means is, after 28 years, we are tracking three generations, including grandmothers and grandfathers. 
Now, dolphins are natural acousticians. 
They make sounds 10 times as high and hear sounds 10 times as high as we do. 
But they have other communication signals they use. 
They have good vision, so they use body postures to communicate. 
They have taste, not smell. 
And they have touch. 
And sound can actually be felt in the water, because the acoustic impedance of tissue and water's about the same. 
So dolphins can buzz and tickle each other at a distance. 
Now, we do know some things about how sounds are used with certain behaviors. 
Now, the signature whistle is a whistle that's specific to an individual dolphin, and it's like a name. (Dolphin whistling noises) And this is the best-studied sound, because it's easy to measure, really, and you'd find this whistle when mothers and calves are reuniting, for example. 
Another well studied sound are echolocation clicks. 
This is the dolphin's sonar. (Dolphin echolocation noises) And they use these clicks to hunt and feed. 
But they can also tightly pack these clicks together into buzzes and use them socially. 
For example, males will stimulate a female during a courtship chase. 
You know, I've been buzzed in the water. 
(Laughter) Don't tell anyone. It's a secret. 
And you can really feel the sound. That was my point with that. 
(Laughter) So dolphins are also political animals, so they have to resolve conflicts. 
(Dolphin noises) And they use these burst-pulsed sounds as well as their head-to-head behaviors when they're fighting. 
And these are very unstudied sounds because they're hard to measure. 
Now this is some video of a typical dolphin fight. 
(Dolphin noises) So you're going to see two groups, and you're going to see the head-to-head posturing, some open mouths, lots of squawking. 
There's a bubble. 
And basically, one of these groups will kind of back off and everything will resolve fine, and it doesn't really escalate into violence too much. 
Now, in the Bahamas, we also have resident bottlenose that interact socially with the spotted dolphins. 
For example, they babysit each other's calves. 
The males have dominance displays that they use when they're chasing each other's females. 
And the two species actually form temporary alliances when they're chasing sharks away. 
And one of the mechanisms they use to communicate their coordination is synchrony. 
They synchronize their sounds and their body postures to look bigger and sound stronger. 
(Dolphins noises) Now, these are bottlenose dolphins, and you'll see them starting to synchronize their behavior and their sounds. 
(Dolphin noises) You see, they're synchronizing with their partner as well as the other dyad. 
I wish I was that coordinated. 
Now, it's important to remember that you're only hearing the human-audible parts of dolphin sounds, and dolphins make ultrasonic sounds, and we use special equipment in the water to collect these sounds. 
Now, researchers have actually measured whistle complexity using information theory, and whistles rate very high relative to even human languages. 
But burst-pulsed sounds is a bit of a mystery. 
Now, these are three spectragrams. 
Two are human words, and one is a dolphin vocalizing. 
So just take a guess in your mind which one is the dolphin. 
Now, it turns out burst-pulsed sounds actually look a bit like human phonemes. 
Now, one way to crack the code is to interpret these signals and figure out what they mean, but it's a difficult job, and we actually don't have a Rosetta Stone yet. 
But a second way to crack the code is to develop some technology, an interface to do two-way communication, and that's what we've been trying to do in the Bahamas and in real time. 
Now, scientists have used keyboard interfaces to try to bridge the gap with species including chimpanzees and dolphins. 
This underwater keyboard in Orlando, Florida, at the Epcot Center, was actually the most sophisticated ever two-way interface designed for humans and dolphins to work together under the water and exchange information. 
So we wanted to develop an interface like this in the Bahamas, but in a more natural setting. 
And one of the reasons we thought we could do this is because the dolphins were starting to show us a lot of mutual curiosity. 
They were spontaneously mimicking our vocalizations and our postures, and they were also inviting us into dolphin games. 
Now, dolphins are social mammals, so they love to play, and one of their favorite games is to drag seaweed, or sargassum in this case, around. 
And they're very adept. They like to drag it and drop it from appendage to appendage. 
Now in this footage, the adult is Caroh. 
She's 25 years old here, and this is her newborn, Cobalt, and he's just learning how to play this game. 
(Dolphin noises) She's kind of teasing him and taunting him. 
He really wants that sargassum. 
Now, when dolphins solicit humans for this game, they'll often sink vertically in the water, and they'll have a little sargassum on their flipper, and they'll sort of nudge it and drop it sometimes on the bottom and let us go get it, and then we'll have a little seaweed keep away game. 
But when we don't dive down and get it, they'll bring it to the surface and they'll sort of wave it in front of us on their tail and drop it for us like they do their calves, and then we'll pick it up and have a game. 
And so we started thinking, well, wouldn't it be neat to build some technology that would allow the dolphins to request these things in real time, their favorite toys? 
So the original vision was to have a keyboard hanging from the boat attached to a computer, and the divers and dolphins would activate the keys on the keypad and happily exchange information and request toys from each other. 
But we quickly found out that dolphins simply were not going to hang around the boat using a keyboard. 
They've got better things to do in the wild. 
They might do it in captivity, but in the wild — So we built a portable keyboard that we could push through the water, and we labeled four objects they like to play with, the scarf, rope, sargassum, and also had a bow ride, which is a fun activity for a dolphin. (Whistle) And that's the scarf whistle, which is also associated with a visual symbol. 
And these are artificially created whistles. 
They're outside the dolphin's normal repertoire, but they're easily mimicked by the dolphins. 
And I spent four years with my colleagues Adam Pack and Fabienne Delfour, working out in the field with this keyboard using it with each other to do requests for toys while the dolphins were watching. 
And the dolphins could get in on the game. 
They could point at the visual object, or they could mimic the whistle. 
Now this is video of a session. 
The diver here has a rope toy, and I'm on the keyboard on the left, and I've just played the rope key, and that's the request for the toy from the human. 
So I've got the rope, I'm diving down, and I'm basically trying to get the dolphin's attention, because they're kind of like little kids. 
You have to keep their attention. 
I'm going to drop the rope, see if they come over. 
Here they come, and then they're going to pick up the rope and drag it around as a toy. 
Now, I'm at the keyboard on the left, and this is actually the first time that we tried this. 
I'm going to try to request this toy, the rope toy, from the dolphins using the rope sound. 
Let's see if they might actually understand what that means. 
(Whistle) That's the rope whistle. 
Up come the dolphins, and drop off the rope, yay. Wow. 
(Applause) So this is only once. 
We don't know for sure if they really understand the function of the whistles. 
Okay, so here's a second toy in the water. 
This is a scarf toy, and I'm trying to lead the dolphin over to the keyboard to show her the visual and the acoustic signal. 
Now this dolphin, we call her "" the scarf thief, "" because over the years she's absconded with about 12 scarves. 
In fact, we think she has a boutique somewhere in the Bahamas. 
So I'm reaching over. She's got the scarf on her right side. 
And we try to not touch the animals too much, we really don't want to over-habituate them. 
And I'm trying to lead her back to the keyboard. 
And the diver there is going to activate the scarf sound to request the scarf. 
So I try to give her the scarf. 
Whoop. Almost lost it. 
But this is the moment where everything becomes possible. 
The dolphin's at the keyboard. 
You've got full attention. 
And this sometimes went on for hours. 
And I wanted to share this video with you not to show you any big breakthroughs, because they haven't happened yet, but to show you the level of intention and focus that these dolphins have, and interest in the system. 
And because of this, we really decided we needed some more sophisticated technology. 
So we joined forces with Georgia Tech, with Thad Starner's wearable computing group, to build us an underwater wearable computer that we're calling CHAT. [CHAT: Cetacean Hearing And Telemetry] Now, instead of pushing a keyboard through the water, the diver's wearing the complete system, and it's acoustic only, so basically the diver activates the sounds on a keypad on the forearm, the sounds go out through an underwater speaker, if a dolphin mimics the whistle or a human plays the whistle, the sounds come in and are localized by two hydrophones. 
The computer can localize who requested the toy if there's a word match. 
And the real power of the system is in the real-time sound recognition, so we can respond to the dolphins quickly and accurately. 
And we're at prototype stage, but this is how we hope it will play out. 
So Diver A and Diver B both have a wearable computer and the dolphin hears the whistle as a whistle, the diver hears the whistle as a whistle in the water, but also as a word through bone conduction. 
So Diver A plays the scarf whistle or Diver B plays the sargassum whistle to request a toy from whoever has it. 
What we hope will happen is that the dolphin mimics the whistle, and if Diver A has the sargassum, if that's the sound that was played and requested, then the diver will give the sargassum to the requesting dolphin and they'll swim away happily into the sunset playing sargassum for forever. 
Now, how far can this kind of communication go? 
Well, CHAT is designed specifically to empower the dolphins to request things from us. 
It's designed to really be two-way. 
Now, will they learn to mimic the whistles functionally? 
We hope so and we think so. 
But as we decode their natural sounds, we're also planning to put those back into the computerized system. 
For example, right now we can put their own signature whistles in the computer and request to interact with a specific dolphin. 
Likewise, we can create our own whistles, our own whistle names, and let the dolphins request specific divers to interact with. 
Now it may be that all our mobile technology will actually be the same technology that helps us communicate with another species down the road. 
In the case of a dolphin, you know, it's a species that, well, they're probably close to our intelligence in many ways and we might not be able to admit that right now, but they live in quite a different environment, and you still have to bridge the gap with the sensory systems. 
I mean, imagine what it would be like to really understand the mind of another intelligent species on the planet. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I once had this nightmare: I'm standing in the middle of a deserted field full of land mines. 
In real life, I love to hike, but every time I want to go on a hike, it makes me nervous. 
I have this thought in the back of my mind that I might lose a limb. 
This underlying fear started 10 years ago, after I met Mohammed, a cluster bomb survivor of the summer 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War in Lebanon. 
Mohammed, like so many other survivors all around the world, had to live through the horrifying repercussions of cluster munitions on a daily basis. 
When the one-month conflict started in Lebanon, I was still working at Agence France-Presse in Paris. 
I remember how I was glued to the screens, anxiously following the news. 
I wanted to reassure myself that the falling bombs missed my parents' home. 
When I arrived in Beirut on assignment to cover that war, I was relieved to be united with my family, after they had finally managed to escape southern Lebanon. 
The day the war was over, I remember seeing this image — one of blocked roads, of displaced people eagerly rushing south, back to their homes, regardless of what they would find. 
An estimated four million cluster submunitions were spread in Lebanon during the 34-day conflict. 
Mohammed lost both legs during the last week of the conflict. 
The fact that he lives a five-minute drive from my parents' home made it easier to follow him through the years. 
It was now almost 10 years since we first met. 
I saw the young boy who had to endure physical and emotional trauma. 
I saw the teenager who tried to offer his friends tattoos, in return for a set fee of five dollars. 
And I know the young, jobless man who spends hours surfing the Internet trying to meet a girl who might become his girlfriend. 
His fate and the effects of losing his legs are now his daily reality. 
Survivors of bomb trauma like Mohammed have to deal with so many details that never occur to us. 
Who would have imagined that so many daily tasks we do or take for granted, such as going to the beach or even picking up something from the floor, would become sources of stress and anxiety? 
Well, that's what eventually became of Mohammed, due to his inflexible prosthetic legs. 
Ten years ago, I had no clue what a cluster bomb was, nor its horrifying implications. 
I learned that this indiscriminate weapon was used in so many parts of the world and continues to kill on a regular basis, without distinguishing between a military target or a child. 
I naively asked myself, "" But seriously, who made those weapons? 
And what for? "" Let me explain to you what a cluster bomb is. 
It's a large canister filled with bomblets. 
When it's dropped from the air, it opens up in midair to release hundreds of bomblets. 
They scatter around wide areas and on impact, many fail to explode. 
Those unexploded ones end up just like landmines — sitting on the ground, waiting for their next target. 
If someone steps on them by accident or picks them up, they can explode. 
These weapons are extremely unpredictable, which makes the threat even bigger. 
One day, a farmer can work his land without a problem. 
The next day, he can make fire and burn some branches, and the submunitions close by could be set off because of the heat. 
The problem is children mistake those bomblets for toys, because they can look like bouncy balls or soda cans. 
Being a documentary photographer, I decided to go back to Lebanon a few months after the conflict ended to meet cluster bomb survivors. 
And I met a few — Hussein and Rasha, who both lost a leg to submunitions. 
Their stories are similar to so many other kids' stories across the world and are a testimony to the horrifying implications of the continuous use of such weapons. 
That's when I met Mohammed, in January 2007. 
He was 11 years old, and I met him exactly four months after his accident. 
When I first saw him, he was going through painful physiotherapy to recover from his fresh wounds. 
Still in shock at such a young age, Mohammed was struggling to get used to his new body. 
He would even wake up sometimes at night wanting to scratch his lost feet. 
What drew me closer to his story was my instant realization of the difficulties Mohammed was likely to face in the future — that what he has been suffering while adjusting to his injury at the age of 11, would increase manyfold. 
Even before his disability, Mohammed's life wasn't easy. 
He was born in the Rashidieh Camp for Palestinian refugees, and this is where he still lives. 
Lebanon holds some 400,000 Palestinian refugees, and they suffer from discriminatory laws. 
They're not allowed to work in the public sector or practice certain professions and are denied the right to own property. 
This is one of the reasons why Mohammed doesn't really regret dropping out of school right after his injury. 
He said, "" What's the point of a university degree when I can't find a job to start with? "" Cluster bomb use creates a vicious circle of impact on communities, and not only the lives of their victims. 
Many who get injured by this weapon drop out of school, can't find jobs or even lose their jobs, therefore losing the ability to provide for their families. 
This is not to mention the continuous physical pain and the experience of feeling isolated. 
These weapons affect the poorest of the poor. 
The high medical cost is a burden to the families. 
They end up relying on humanitarian agencies, which is insufficient and unsustainable, especially when injuries require lifelong support to the injured. 
Ten years after Mohammed's injury, he is still unable to afford proper prosthetic legs. 
He's very cautious with his steps, as a couple of falls over the years brought him embarrassment among his friends. 
He joked that since he doesn't have legs, some days he tries to walk on his hands. 
One of the worst yet invisible impacts of the weapon is the psychological scars it leaves. 
In one of Mohammed's early medical reports, he was diagnosed with signs of PTSD. 
He suffered from anxiety, poor appetite, sleep disturbance and showed signs of anger. 
The reality is Mohammed never received proper help to fully recover. 
His current obsession is to leave Lebanon at any cost — even if it meant embarking on a hazardous journey along with refugees drifting towards Europe today through the Mediterranean. 
Knowing how risky such a journey would be, he said, "" If I were to die on the way, it doesn't matter. "" To Mohammed, he is dead here, anyway. 
Cluster bombs are a world problem, as this munition keeps destroying and hurting whole communities for generations to come. 
In an online interview with the director of the Mines Advisory Group, Jamie Franklin, he said, "" The US forces dropped over two million tons of munitions over Laos. 
If they couldn't find their targets in Vietnam, there were free-drop areas in Laos where planes would drop their loads before going back to base, because it's dangerous to land with loaded planes. "" According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, in Laos alone — one of the poorest countries in the world — nine to 27 million unexploded submunitions remain. 
Some 11,000 people have been killed or injured since 1973. 
This lethal weapon has been used by over 20 states during armed conflicts in over 35 countries, such as Ukraine, Iraq and Sudan. 
So far, 119 states have joined an international treaty banning cluster bombs, which is officially called the Convention on Cluster Munitions. 
But some of the biggest producers of cluster munitions — namely, the United States, Russia and China — remain outside of this lifesaving treaty and continue to produce them, reserve the right to produce them in the future, keep those harmful weapons in their stockpiles and even possibly use them in the future. 
Cluster bombs have reportedly been used most recently in the ongoing conflicts in Yemen and Syria. 
According to research on the worldwide investments in cluster munitions producers by Pax, a Dutch-based NGO, financial institutions invested billions of US dollars into companies that make cluster munitions. 
The majority of these institutions are based in countries that have not yet signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions. 
Getting back to Mohammed, one of the few jobs he was able to find was picking lemons. 
When I ask him if it's safe to work in the field he said, "I'm not sure." 
Research shows that cluster munitions often contaminate areas where agriculture is the main source of income. 
According to Handicap International's research, 98 percent of those killed or injured by cluster munitions are civilians. 
Eighty-four percent of casualties are males. 
In countries where these people have no choice but to work in those fields, they simply do it and risk it. 
Mohammed is the only male to three sisters. 
Culturally, he's expected to provide for his family, but he simply can't. 
He tried to have so many different jobs, but he couldn't keep any due to his physical disability and the less-than-friendly environment to people with disabilities, to say the least. 
It hurts him a lot when he goes out looking for a job, and he's turned away with a small amount of money paid to him out of pity. 
He said, "" I'm not here to beg for money, I just want to earn it. "" Mohammed today is 21 years old. 
He's illiterate, and he communicates with voice messages. 
Here is one of his messages. 
(Audio) Mohammed: (Speaking in Arabic) Laura Boushnak: He said, "" My dream is to run, and I'm pretty sure once I start running, I would never stop. "" Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Good morning. How are you? 
I have an interest in education. 
But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, "" What do you do? "" and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. 
And yet we're meant to be educating them for it. 
And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. 
So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. 
We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: "" James Robinson IS Joseph! "" (Laughter) He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in? 
What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original — if you're not prepared to be wrong. 
(Laughter) Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born. 
Shakespeare being seven? 
I've got two kids; he's 21 now, my daughter's 16. 
He didn't want to come to Los Angeles. 
(Laughter) Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. 
If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say "" What's it for, public education? "" I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. 
They're just a form of life, another form of life. 
(Laughter) Waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it. (Laughter) 
And I didn't want one, frankly. (Laughter) But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. 
And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. 
If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. 
The brain isn't divided into compartments. 
In fact, creativity — which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value — more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. 
By the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus callosum. 
Because you are, aren't you? 
(Laughter) No, she's good at some things, but if she's cooking, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling, she's doing open-heart surgery over here. 
If I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed. 
I say, "" Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here. "" (Laughter) "Give me a break." (Laughter) 
I saw a great t-shirt recently, which said, "" If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong? "" (Laughter) And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. 
And the school, in the '30s, wrote to her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." 
(Laughter) People weren't aware they could have that. (Laughter) 
And when they got out, he said to her mother, "" Just stand and watch her. "" And the minute they left the room, she was on her feet, moving to the music. 
And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, "" Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick; she's a dancer. 
Take her to a dance school. "" I said, "" What happened? "" She said, "" She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. 
We walked in this room and it was full of people like me. 
People who had to move to think. "" Who had to move to think. 
(Applause) What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. 
I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. 
Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. 
We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. 
And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. 
By the way — we may not see this future, but they will. 

There are a few things that all of us need. 
We all need air to breathe. 
We need clean water to drink. 
We need food to eat. We need shelter and love. 
You know. Love is great, too. 
And we all need a safe place to pee. 
(Laughter) Yeah? 
As a trans person who doesn't fit neatly into the gender binary, if I could change the world tomorrow to make it easier for me to navigate, the very first thing I would do is blink and create single stall, gender-neutral bathrooms in all public places. 
(Applause) Trans people and trans issues, they've been getting a lot of mainstream media attention lately. 
And this is a great and necessary thing, but most of that attention has been focused on a very few individuals, most of whom are kinda rich and pretty famous, and probably don't have to worry that much anymore about where they're going to pee in between classes at their community college, or where they're going to get changed into their gym strip at their public high school. 
Fame and money insulates these television star trans people from most of the everyday challenges that the rest of us have to tackle on a daily basis. 
Public bathrooms. 
They've been a problem for me since as far back as I can remember, first when I was just a little baby tomboy and then later as a masculine-appearing, predominantly estrogen-based organism. 
(Laughter) Now, today as a trans person, public bathrooms and change rooms are where I am most likely to be questioned or harassed. 
I've often been verbally attacked behind their doors. 
I've been hauled out by security guards with my pants still halfway pulled up. 
I've been stared at, screamed at, whispered about, and one time I got smacked in the face by a little old lady's purse that from the looks of the shiner I took home that day I am pretty certain contained at least 70 dollars of rolled up small change and a large hard candy collection. 
(Laughter) And I know what some of you are thinking, and you're mostly right. 
I can and do just use the men's room most of the time these days. 
But that doesn't solve my change room dilemmas, does it? 
And I shouldn't have to use the men's room because I'm not a man. 
I'm a trans person. 
And now we've got these fearmongering politicians that keep trying to pass these bathroom bills. 
Have you heard about these? 
They try to legislate to try and force people like myself to use the bathroom that they deem most appropriate according to the gender I was assigned at birth. 
And if these politicians ever get their way, in Arizona or California or Florida or just last week in Houston, Texas, or Ottawa, well then, using the men's room will not be a legal option for me either. 
And every time one of these politicians brings one of these bills to the table, I can't help but wonder, you know, just who will and exactly how would we go about enforcing laws like these. Right? 
Panty checks? 
Really. 
Genital inspections outside of bath change rooms at public pools? 
There's no legal or ethical or plausible way to enforce laws like these anyway. 
They exist only to foster fear and promote transphobia. 
They don't make anyone safer. 
But they do for sure make the world more dangerous for some of us. 
And meanwhile, our trans children suffer. 
They drop out of school, or they opt out of life altogether. 
Trans people, especially trans and gender-nonconforming youth face additional challenges when accessing pools and gyms, but also universities, hospitals, libraries. 
Don't even get me started on how they treat us in airports. 
If we don't move now to make sure that these places are truly open and accessible to everyone, then we just need to get honest and quit calling them public places. 
We need to just admit that they are really only open for people who fit neatly into one of two gender boxes, which I do not. 
I never have. 
And this starts very early. 
I know a little girl. She's the daughter of a friend of mine. 
She's a self-identified tomboy. 
I'm talking about cowboy boots and Caterpillar yellow toy trucks and bug jars, the whole nine yards. 
One time I asked her what her favorite color was. 
She told me, "" Camouflage. "" (Laughter) So that awesome little kid, she came home from school last October from her half day of preschool with soggy pants on because the other kids at school were harassing her when she tried to use the girls' bathroom. 
And the teacher had already instructed her to stay out of the boys' bathroom. 
And she had drank two glasses of that red juice at the Halloween party, and I mean, who can resist that red juice, right? It's so good. 
And she couldn't hold her pee any longer. 
Her and her classmates were four years old. 
They already felt empowered enough to police her use of the so-called public bathrooms. 
She was four years old. 
She had already been taught the brutal lesson that there was no bathroom door at preschool with a sign on it that welcomed people like her. 
She'd already learned that bathrooms were going to be a problem, and that problem started with her and was hers alone. 
So my friend asked me to talk to her little daughter, and I did. 
I wanted to tell her that me and her mom were going to march on down and talk to that school, and the problem was going to go away, but I knew that wasn't true. 
I wanted to tell her that it was all going to get better when she got older, but I couldn't. 
So I asked her to tell me the story of what had happened, asked her to tell me how it made her feel. 
"Mad and sad," she told me. 
So I told her that she wasn't alone and that it wasn't right what had happened to her, and then she asked me if I had ever peed in my pants before. 
I said yes, I had, but not for a really long time. 
(Laughter) Which of course was a lie, because you know how you hit, like, 42 or 43, and sometimes you just, I don't know, you pee a little bit when you cough or sneeze, when you're running upstairs, or you're stretching. 
Don't lie. 
It happens. Right? 
She doesn't need to know that, I figure. 
(Laughter) I told her, when you get older, your bladder is going to grow bigger, too. 
When you get old like me, you're going to be able to hold your pee for way longer, I promised her. 
"Until you can get home?" 
she asked me. 
I said, "" Yes, until you can get home. "" She seemed to take some comfort in that. 
So let's just build some single stall, gender-neutral bathrooms with a little bench for getting changed into your gym clothes. 
We can't change the world overnight for our children, but we can give them a safe and private place to escape that world, if only for just a minute. 
This we can do. 
So let's just do it. 
And if you are one of those people who is sitting out there right now already coming up with a list of reasons in your head why this is not a priority, or it's too expensive, or telling yourself that giving a trans person a safe place to pee or get changed in supports a lifestyle choice that you feel offends your morality, or your masculinity, or your religious beliefs, then let me just appeal to the part of your heart that probably, hopefully, does care about the rest of the population. 
If you can't bring yourself to care enough about people like me, then what about women and girls with body image issues? 
What about anyone with body image stuff going on? 
What about that boy at school who is a foot shorter than his classmates, whose voice still hasn't dropped yet? Hey? 
Oh, grade eight, what a cruel master you can be. 
Right? 
What about people with anxiety issues? 
What about people with disabilities or who need assistance in there? 
What about folks with bodies who, for whatever reason, don't fit into the mainstream idea of what a body should look like? 
How many of us still feel shy or afraid to disrobe in front of our peers, and how many of us allow that fear to keep us from something as important as physical exercise? 
Would all those people not benefit from these single stall facilities? 
We can't change transphobic minds overnight, but we can give everybody a place to get changed in so that we can all get to work making the world safer for all of us. 
Thank you for listening. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

So there are a few things that bring us humans together in the way that an election does. 
We stand in elections; we vote in elections; we observe elections. 
Our democracies rely on elections. 
We all understand why we have elections, and we all leave the house on the same day to go and vote. 
We cherish the opportunity to have our say, to help decide the future of the country. 
The fundamental idea is that politicians are given mandate to speak for us, to make decisions on our behalf that affect us all. 
Without that mandate, they would be corrupt. 
Well unfortunately, power corrupts, and so people will do lots of things to get power and to stay in power, including doing bad things to elections. 
You see, even if the idea of the election is perfect, running a countrywide election is a big project, and big projects are messy. 
Whenever there is an election, it seems like something always goes wrong, someone tries to cheat, or something goes accidentally awry — a ballot box goes missing here, chads are left hanging over here. 
To make sure as few things as possible go wrong, we have all these procedures around the election. 
So for example, you come to the polling station, and a poll station worker asks for your ID before giving you a ballot form and asking you to go into a voting booth to fill out your vote. 
When you come back out, you get to drop your vote into the ballot box where it mixes with all the other votes, so that no one knows how you voted. 
Well, what I want us to think about for a moment is what happens after that, after you drop your vote into the ballot box. 
And most people would go home and feel sure that their vote has been counted, because they trust that the election system works. 
They trust that election workers and election observers do their jobs and do their jobs correctly. 
The ballot boxes go to counting places. 
They're unsealed and the votes are poured out and laboriously counted. 
Most of us have to trust that that happens correctly for our own vote, and we all have to trust that that happens correctly for all the votes in the election. 
So we have to trust a lot of people. 
We have to trust a lot of procedures. 
And sometimes we even have to trust computers. 
So imagine hundreds of millions of voters casting hundreds of millions of votes, all to be counted correctly and all the things that can possibly go wrong causing all these bad headlines, and you cannot help but feel exhausted at the idea of trying to make elections better. 
Well in the face of all these bad headlines, researchers have taken a step back and thought about how we can do elections differently. 
They've zoomed out and looked at the big picture. 
And the big picture is this: elections should be verifiable. 
Voters should be able to check that their votes are counted correctly, without breaking election secrecy, which is so very important. 
And that's the tough part. 
How do we make an election system completely verifiable while keeping the votes absolutely secret? 
Well, the way we've come up with uses computers but doesn't depend on them. 
And the secret is the ballot form. 
And if you look closely at these ballot forms, you'll notice that the candidate list is in a different order on each one. 
And that means, if you mark your choices on one of them and then remove the candidate list, I won't be able to tell from the bit remaining what your vote is for. 
And on each ballot form there is this encrypted value in the form of this 2D barcode on the right. 
And there's some complicated cryptography going on in there, but what's not complicated is voting with one of these forms. 
So we can let computers do all the complicated cryptography for us, and then we'll use the paper for verification. 
So this is how you vote. 
You get one of these ballot forms at random, and then you go into the voting booth, and you mark your choices, and you tear along a perforation. 
And you shred the candidate list. 
And the bit that remains, the one with your marks — this is your encrypted vote. 
So you let a poll station worker scan your encrypted vote. 
And because it's encrypted, it can be submitted, stored and counted centrally and displayed on a website for anyone to see, including you. 
So you take this encrypted vote home as your receipt. 
And after the close of the election, you can check that your vote was counted by comparing your receipt to the vote on the website. 
And remember, the vote is encrypted from the moment you leave the voting booth, so if an election official wants to find out how you voted, they will not be able to. 
If the government wants to find out how you voted, they won't be able to. 
No hacker can break in and find out how you voted. 
No hacker can break in and change your vote, because then it won't match your receipt. 
Votes can't go missing because then you won't find yours when you look for it. 
But the election magic doesn't stop there. 
Instead, we want to make the whole process so transparent that news media and international observers and anyone who wants to can download all the election data and do the count themselves. 
They can check that all the votes were counted correctly. They can check 
that the announced result of the election is the correct one. 
And these are elections by the people, for the people. 
So the next step for our democracies are transparent and verifiable elections. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

We are built out of very small stuff, and we are embedded in a very large cosmos, and the fact is that we are not very good at understanding reality at either of those scales, and that's because our brains haven't evolved to understand the world at that scale. 
Instead, we're trapped on this very thin slice of perception right in the middle. 
But it gets strange, because even at that slice of reality that we call home, we're not seeing most of the action that's going on. 
So take the colors of our world. 
This is light waves, electromagnetic radiation that bounces off objects and it hits specialized receptors in the back of our eyes. 
But we're not seeing all the waves out there. 
In fact, what we see is less than a 10 trillionth of what's out there. 
So you have radio waves and microwaves and X-rays and gamma rays passing through your body right now and you're completely unaware of it, because you don't come with the proper biological receptors for picking it up. 
There are thousands of cell phone conversations passing through you right now, and you're utterly blind to it. 
Now, it's not that these things are inherently unseeable. 
Snakes include some infrared in their reality, and honeybees include ultraviolet in their view of the world, and of course we build machines in the dashboards of our cars to pick up on signals in the radio frequency range, and we built machines in hospitals to pick up on the X-ray range. 
But you can't sense any of those by yourself, at least not yet, because you don't come equipped with the proper sensors. 
Now, what this means is that our experience of reality is constrained by our biology, and that goes against the common sense notion that our eyes and our ears and our fingertips are just picking up the objective reality that's out there. 
Instead, our brains are sampling just a little bit of the world. 
Now, across the animal kingdom, different animals pick up on different parts of reality. 
So in the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and butyric acid; in the world of the black ghost knifefish, its sensory world is lavishly colored by electrical fields; and for the echolocating bat, its reality is constructed out of air compression waves. 
That's the slice of their ecosystem that they can pick up on, and we have a word for this in science. 
It's called the umwelt, which is the German word for the surrounding world. 
Now, presumably, every animal assumes that its umwelt is the entire objective reality out there, because why would you ever stop to imagine that there's something beyond what we can sense. 
Instead, what we all do is we accept reality as it's presented to us. 
Let's do a consciousness-raiser on this. 
Imagine that you are a bloodhound dog. 
Your whole world is about smelling. 
You've got a long snout that has 200 million scent receptors in it, and you have wet nostrils that attract and trap scent molecules, and your nostrils even have slits so you can take big nosefuls of air. 
Everything is about smell for you. 
So one day, you stop in your tracks with a revelation. 
You look at your human owner and you think, "" What is it like to have the pitiful, impoverished nose of a human? 
(Laughter) What is it like when you take a feeble little noseful of air? 
How can you not know that there's a cat 100 yards away, or that your neighbor was on this very spot six hours ago? "" (Laughter) So because we're humans, we've never experienced that world of smell, so we don't miss it, because we are firmly settled into our umwelt. 
But the question is, do we have to be stuck there? 
So as a neuroscientist, I'm interested in the way that technology might expand our umwelt, and how that's going to change the experience of being human. 
So we already know that we can marry our technology to our biology, because there are hundreds of thousands of people walking around with artificial hearing and artificial vision. 
So the way this works is, you take a microphone and you digitize the signal, and you put an electrode strip directly into the inner ear. 
Or, with the retinal implant, you take a camera and you digitize the signal, and then you plug an electrode grid directly into the optic nerve. 
And as recently as 15 years ago, there were a lot of scientists who thought these technologies wouldn't work. 
Why? It's because these technologies speak the language of Silicon Valley, and it's not exactly the same dialect as our natural biological sense organs. 
But the fact is that it works; the brain figures out how to use the signals just fine. 
Now, how do we understand that? 
Well, here's the big secret: Your brain is not hearing or seeing any of this. 
Your brain is locked in a vault of silence and darkness inside your skull. 
All it ever sees are electrochemical signals that come in along different data cables, and this is all it has to work with, and nothing more. 
Now, amazingly, the brain is really good at taking in these signals and extracting patterns and assigning meaning, so that it takes this inner cosmos and puts together a story of this, your subjective world. 
But here's the key point: Your brain doesn't know, and it doesn't care, where it gets the data from. 
Whatever information comes in, it just figures out what to do with it. 
And this is a very efficient kind of machine. 
It's essentially a general purpose computing device, and it just takes in everything and figures out what it's going to do with it, and that, I think, frees up Mother Nature to tinker around with different sorts of input channels. 
So I call this the P.H. model of evolution, and I don't want to get too technical here, but P.H. stands for Potato Head, and I use this name to emphasize that all these sensors that we know and love, like our eyes and our ears and our fingertips, these are merely peripheral plug-and-play devices: You stick them in, and you're good to go. 
The brain figures out what to do with the data that comes in. 
And when you look across the animal kingdom, you find lots of peripheral devices. 
So snakes have heat pits with which to detect infrared, and the ghost knifefish has electroreceptors, and the star-nosed mole has this appendage with 22 fingers on it with which it feels around and constructs a 3D model of the world, and many birds have magnetite so they can orient to the magnetic field of the planet. 
So what this means is that nature doesn't have to continually redesign the brain. 
Instead, with the principles of brain operation established, all nature has to worry about is designing new peripherals. 
Okay. So what this means is this: The lesson that surfaces is that there's nothing really special or fundamental about the biology that we come to the table with. 
It's just what we have inherited from a complex road of evolution. 
But it's not what we have to stick with, and our best proof of principle of this comes from what's called sensory substitution. 
And that refers to feeding information into the brain via unusual sensory channels, and the brain just figures out what to do with it. 
Now, that might sound speculative, but the first paper demonstrating this was published in the journal Nature in 1969. 
So a scientist named Paul Bach-y-Rita put blind people in a modified dental chair, and he set up a video feed, and he put something in front of the camera, and then you would feel that poked into your back with a grid of solenoids. 
So if you wiggle a coffee cup in front of the camera, you're feeling that in your back, and amazingly, blind people got pretty good at being able to determine what was in front of the camera just by feeling it in the small of their back. 
Now, there have been many modern incarnations of this. 
The sonic glasses take a video feed right in front of you and turn that into a sonic landscape, so as things move around, and get closer and farther, it sounds like "" Bzz, bzz, bzz. "" It sounds like a cacophony, but after several weeks, blind people start getting pretty good at understanding what's in front of them just based on what they're hearing. 
And it doesn't have to be through the ears: this system uses an electrotactile grid on the forehead, so whatever's in front of the video feed, you're feeling it on your forehead. 
Why the forehead? Because you're not using it for much else. 
The most modern incarnation is called the brainport, and this is a little electrogrid that sits on your tongue, and the video feed gets turned into these little electrotactile signals, and blind people get so good at using this that they can throw a ball into a basket, or they can navigate complex obstacle courses. 
They can come to see through their tongue. 
Now, that sounds completely insane, right? 
But remember, all vision ever is is electrochemical signals coursing around in your brain. 
Your brain doesn't know where the signals come from. 
It just figures out what to do with them. 
So my interest in my lab is sensory substitution for the deaf, and this is a project I've undertaken with a graduate student in my lab, Scott Novich, who is spearheading this for his thesis. 
And here is what we wanted to do: we wanted to make it so that sound from the world gets converted in some way so that a deaf person can understand what is being said. 
And we wanted to do this, given the power and ubiquity of portable computing, we wanted to make sure that this would run on cell phones and tablets, and also we wanted to make this a wearable, something that you could wear under your clothing. 
So here's the concept. 
So as I'm speaking, my sound is getting captured by the tablet, and then it's getting mapped onto a vest that's covered in vibratory motors, just like the motors in your cell phone. So as I'm speaking, 
the sound is getting translated to a pattern of vibration on the vest. 
Now, this is not just conceptual: this tablet is transmitting Bluetooth, and I'm wearing the vest right now. 
So as I'm speaking — (Applause) — the sound is getting translated into dynamic patterns of vibration. 
I'm feeling the sonic world around me. 
So, we've been testing this with deaf people now, and it turns out that after just a little bit of time, people can start feeling, they can start understanding the language of the vest. 
So this is Jonathan. He's 37 years old. He has a master's degree. 
He was born profoundly deaf, which means that there's a part of his umwelt that's unavailable to him. 
So we had Jonathan train with the vest for four days, two hours a day, and here he is on the fifth day. 
Scott Novich: You. 
David Eagleman: So Scott says a word, Jonathan feels it on the vest, and he writes it on the board. 
SN: Where. Where. 
DE: Jonathan is able to translate this complicated pattern of vibrations into an understanding of what's being said. 
SN: Touch. Touch. 
DE: Now, he's not doing this — (Applause) — Jonathan is not doing this consciously, because the patterns are too complicated, but his brain is starting to unlock the pattern that allows it to figure out what the data mean, and our expectation is that, after wearing this for about three months, he will have a direct perceptual experience of hearing in the same way that when a blind person passes a finger over braille, the meaning comes directly off the page without any conscious intervention at all. 
Now, this technology has the potential to be a game-changer, because the only other solution for deafness is a cochlear implant, and that requires an invasive surgery. 
And this can be built for 40 times cheaper than a cochlear implant, which opens up this technology globally, even for the poorest countries. 
Now, we've been very encouraged by our results with sensory substitution, but what we've been thinking a lot about is sensory addition. 
How could we use a technology like this to add a completely new kind of sense, to expand the human umvelt? 
For example, could we feed real-time data from the Internet directly into somebody's brain, and can they develop a direct perceptual experience? 
So here's an experiment we're doing in the lab. 
A subject is feeling a real-time streaming feed from the Net of data for five seconds. 
Then, two buttons appear, and he has to make a choice. 
He doesn't know what's going on. 
He makes a choice, and he gets feedback after one second. 
Now, here's the thing: The subject has no idea what all the patterns mean, but we're seeing if he gets better at figuring out which button to press. 
He doesn't know that what we're feeding is real-time data from the stock market, and he's making buy and sell decisions. 
(Laughter) And the feedback is telling him whether he did the right thing or not. 
And what we're seeing is, can we expand the human umvelt so that he comes to have, after several weeks, a direct perceptual experience of the economic movements of the planet. 
So we'll report on that later to see how well this goes. 
(Laughter) Here's another thing we're doing: During the talks this morning, we've been automatically scraping Twitter for the TED2015 hashtag, and we've been doing an automated sentiment analysis, which means, are people using positive words or negative words or neutral? 
And while this has been going on, I have been feeling this, and so I am plugged in to the aggregate emotion of thousands of people in real time, and that's a new kind of human experience, because now I can know how everyone's doing and how much you're loving this. 
(Laughter) (Applause) It's a bigger experience than a human can normally have. 
We're also expanding the umvelt of pilots. 
So in this case, the vest is streaming nine different measures from this quadcopter, so pitch and yaw and roll and orientation and heading, and that improves this pilot's ability to fly it. 
It's essentially like he's extending his skin up there, far away. 
And that's just the beginning. 
What we're envisioning is taking a modern cockpit full of gauges and instead of trying to read the whole thing, you feel it. 
We live in a world of information now, and there is a difference between accessing big data and experiencing it. 
So I think there's really no end to the possibilities on the horizon for human expansion. 
Just imagine an astronaut being able to feel the overall health of the International Space Station, or, for that matter, having you feel the invisible states of your own health, like your blood sugar and the state of your microbiome, or having 360-degree vision or seeing in infrared or ultraviolet. 
So the key is this: As we move into the future, we're going to increasingly be able to choose our own peripheral devices. 
We no longer have to wait for Mother Nature's sensory gifts on her timescales, but instead, like any good parent, she's given us the tools that we need to go out and define our own trajectory. 
So the question now is, how do you want to go out and experience your universe? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Can you feel it? DE: Yeah. 
Actually, this was the first time I felt applause on the vest. 
It's nice. It's like a massage. (Laughter) CA: Twitter's going crazy. Twitter's going mad. 
So that stock market experiment. 
This could be the first experiment that secures its funding forevermore, right, if successful? 
DE: Well, that's right, I wouldn't have to write to NIH anymore. 
CA: Well look, just to be skeptical for a minute, I mean, this is amazing, but isn't most of the evidence so far that sensory substitution works, not necessarily that sensory addition works? 
I mean, isn't it possible that the blind person can see through their tongue because the visual cortex is still there, ready to process, and that that is needed as part of it? 
DE: That's a great question. We actually have no idea what the theoretical limits are of what kind of data the brain can take in. 
So when a person goes blind, what we used to call their visual cortex gets taken over by other things, by touch, by hearing, by vocabulary. 
So what that tells us is that the cortex is kind of a one-trick pony. 
It just runs certain kinds of computations on things. 
And when we look around at things like braille, for example, people are getting information through bumps on their fingers. 
So I don't think we have any reason to think there's a theoretical limit that we know the edge of. 
CA: If this checks out, you're going to be deluged. 
There are so many possible applications for this. 
Are you ready for this? What are you most excited about, the direction it might go? 
DE: I mean, I think there's a lot of applications here. 
In terms of beyond sensory substitution, the things I started mentioning about astronauts on the space station, they spend a lot of their time monitoring things, and they could instead just get what's going on, because what this is really good for is multidimensional data. 
The key is this: Our visual systems are good at detecting blobs and edges, but they're really bad at what our world has become, which is screens with lots and lots of data. 
We have to crawl that with our attentional systems. 
So this is a way of just feeling the state of something, just like the way you know the state of your body as you're standing around. 
So I think heavy machinery, safety, feeling the state of a factory, of your equipment, that's one place it'll go right away. 
CA: David Eagleman, that was one mind-blowing talk. Thank you very much. 
DE: Thank you, Chris. (Applause) 

I'm going to talk about a failure of intuition that many of us suffer from. 
It's really a failure to detect a certain kind of danger. 
I'm going to describe a scenario that I think is both terrifying and likely to occur, and that's not a good combination, as it turns out. 
And yet rather than be scared, most of you will feel that what I'm talking about is kind of cool. 
I'm going to describe how the gains we make in artificial intelligence could ultimately destroy us. 
And in fact, I think it's very difficult to see how they won't destroy us or inspire us to destroy ourselves. 
And yet if you're anything like me, you'll find that it's fun to think about these things. 
And that response is part of the problem. 
OK? That response should worry you. 
And if I were to convince you in this talk that we were likely to suffer a global famine, either because of climate change or some other catastrophe, and that your grandchildren, or their grandchildren, are very likely to live like this, you wouldn't think, "" Interesting. 
I like this TED Talk. "" Famine isn't fun. 
Death by science fiction, on the other hand, is fun, and one of the things that worries me most about the development of AI at this point is that we seem unable to marshal an appropriate emotional response to the dangers that lie ahead. 
I am unable to marshal this response, and I'm giving this talk. 
It's as though we stand before two doors. 
Behind door number one, we stop making progress in building intelligent machines. 
Our computer hardware and software just stops getting better for some reason. 
Now take a moment to consider why this might happen. 
I mean, given how valuable intelligence and automation are, we will continue to improve our technology if we are at all able to. 
What could stop us from doing this? 
A full-scale nuclear war? 
A global pandemic? 
An asteroid impact? 
Justin Bieber becoming president of the United States? 
(Laughter) The point is, something would have to destroy civilization as we know it. 
You have to imagine how bad it would have to be to prevent us from making improvements in our technology permanently, generation after generation. 
Almost by definition, this is the worst thing that's ever happened in human history. 
So the only alternative, and this is what lies behind door number two, is that we continue to improve our intelligent machines year after year after year. 
At a certain point, we will build machines that are smarter than we are, and once we have machines that are smarter than we are, they will begin to improve themselves. 
And then we risk what the mathematician IJ Good called an "" intelligence explosion, "" that the process could get away from us. 
Now, this is often caricatured, as I have here, as a fear that armies of malicious robots will attack us. 
But that isn't the most likely scenario. 
It's not that our machines will become spontaneously malevolent. 
The concern is really that we will build machines that are so much more competent than we are that the slightest divergence between their goals and our own could destroy us. 
Just think about how we relate to ants. 
We don't hate them. 
We don't go out of our way to harm them. 
In fact, sometimes we take pains not to harm them. 
We step over them on the sidewalk. 
But whenever their presence seriously conflicts with one of our goals, let's say when constructing a building like this one, we annihilate them without a qualm. 
The concern is that we will one day build machines that, whether they're conscious or not, could treat us with similar disregard. 
Now, I suspect this seems far-fetched to many of you. 
I bet there are those of you who doubt that superintelligent AI is possible, much less inevitable. 
And there are only three of them. 
Intelligence is a matter of information processing in physical systems. 
We have already built narrow intelligence into our machines, and many of these machines perform at a level of superhuman intelligence already. 
And we know that mere matter can give rise to what is called "" general intelligence, "" an ability to think flexibly across multiple domains, because our brains have managed it. Right? 
I mean, there's just atoms in here, and as long as we continue to build systems of atoms that display more and more intelligent behavior, we will eventually, unless we are interrupted, we will eventually build general intelligence into our machines. 
It's crucial to realize that the rate of progress doesn't matter, because any progress is enough to get us into the end zone. 
We don't need Moore's law to continue. We don't need exponential progress. 
We just need to keep going. 
The second assumption is that we will keep going. 
We will continue to improve our intelligent machines. 
And given the value of intelligence — I mean, intelligence is either the source of everything we value or we need it to safeguard everything we value. 
So we want to do this. 
We have problems that we desperately need to solve. 
We want to cure diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer. 
We want to understand economic systems. We want to improve our climate science. 
So we will do this, if we can. 
The train is already out of the station, and there's no brake to pull. 
Finally, we don't stand on a peak of intelligence, or anywhere near it, likely. 
This is what makes our situation so precarious, and this is what makes our intuitions about risk so unreliable. 
Now, just consider the smartest person who has ever lived. 
On almost everyone's shortlist here is John von Neumann. 
I mean, the impression that von Neumann made on the people around him, and this included the greatest mathematicians and physicists of his time, is fairly well-documented. 
If only half the stories about him are half true, there's no question he's one of the smartest people who has ever lived. 
So consider the spectrum of intelligence. 
Here we have John von Neumann. 
And then we have you and me. 
And then we have a chicken. 
(Laughter) Sorry, a chicken. (Laughter) 
There's no reason for me to make this talk more depressing than it needs to be. (Laughter) 
It seems overwhelmingly likely, however, that the spectrum of intelligence extends much further than we currently conceive, and if we build machines that are more intelligent than we are, they will very likely explore this spectrum in ways that we can't imagine, and exceed us in ways that we can't imagine. 
And it's important to recognize that this is true by virtue of speed alone. 
Right? So imagine if we just built a superintelligent AI that was no smarter than your average team of researchers at Stanford or MIT. 
Well, electronic circuits function about a million times faster than biochemical ones, so this machine should think about a million times faster than the minds that built it. 
So you set it running for a week, and it will perform 20,000 years of human-level intellectual work, week after week after week. 
How could we even understand, much less constrain, a mind making this sort of progress? 
The other thing that's worrying, frankly, is that, imagine the best case scenario. 
So imagine we hit upon a design of superintelligent AI that has no safety concerns. 
It's as though we've been handed an oracle that behaves exactly as intended. 
Well, this machine would be the perfect labor-saving device. 
It can design the machine that can build the machine that can do any physical work, powered by sunlight, more or less for the cost of raw materials. 
So we're talking about the end of human drudgery. 
We're also talking about the end of most intellectual work. 
So what would apes like ourselves do in this circumstance? 
Well, we'd be free to play Frisbee and give each other massages. 
Add some LSD and some questionable wardrobe choices, and the whole world could be like Burning Man. 
(Laughter) Now, that might sound pretty good, but ask yourself what would happen under our current economic and political order? 
It seems likely that we would witness a level of wealth inequality and unemployment that we have never seen before. 
Absent a willingness to immediately put this new wealth to the service of all humanity, a few trillionaires could grace the covers of our business magazines while the rest of the world would be free to starve. 
And what would the Russians or the Chinese do if they heard that some company in Silicon Valley was about to deploy a superintelligent AI? 
This machine would be capable of waging war, whether terrestrial or cyber, with unprecedented power. 
This is a winner-take-all scenario. 
To be six months ahead of the competition here is to be 500,000 years ahead, at a minimum. 
So it seems that even mere rumors of this kind of breakthrough could cause our species to go berserk. 
Now, one of the most frightening things, in my view, at this moment, are the kinds of things that AI researchers say when they want to be reassuring. 
And the most common reason we're told not to worry is time. 
This is all a long way off, don't you know. 
This is probably 50 or 100 years away. 
One researcher has said, "" Worrying about AI safety is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars. "" This is the Silicon Valley version of "" don't worry your pretty little head about it. "" (Laughter) No one seems to notice that referencing the time horizon is a total non sequitur. 
If intelligence is just a matter of information processing, and we continue to improve our machines, we will produce some form of superintelligence. 
And we have no idea how long it will take us to create the conditions to do that safely. 
Let me say that again. 
We have no idea how long it will take us to create the conditions to do that safely. 
And if you haven't noticed, 50 years is not what it used to be. 
This is 50 years in months. 
This is how long we've had the iPhone. 
This is how long "" The Simpsons "" has been on television. 
Fifty years is not that much time to meet one of the greatest challenges our species will ever face. 
Once again, we seem to be failing to have an appropriate emotional response to what we have every reason to believe is coming. 
He said, imagine that we received a message from an alien civilization, which read: "" People of Earth, we will arrive on your planet in 50 years. 
Get ready. "" And now we're just counting down the months until the mothership lands? 
We would feel a little more urgency than we do. 
Another reason we're told not to worry is that these machines can't help but share our values because they will be literally extensions of ourselves. 
They'll be grafted onto our brains, and we'll essentially become their limbic systems. 
Now take a moment to consider that the safest and only prudent path forward, recommended, is to implant this technology directly into our brains. 
Now, this may in fact be the safest and only prudent path forward, but usually one's safety concerns about a technology have to be pretty much worked out before you stick it inside your head. 
(Laughter) The deeper problem is that building superintelligent AI on its own seems likely to be easier than building superintelligent AI and having the completed neuroscience that allows us to seamlessly integrate our minds with it. 
And given that the companies and governments doing this work are likely to perceive themselves as being in a race against all others, given that to win this race is to win the world, provided you don't destroy it in the next moment, then it seems likely that whatever is easier to do will get done first. 
Now, unfortunately, I don't have a solution to this problem, apart from recommending that more of us think about it. 
I think we need something like a Manhattan Project on the topic of artificial intelligence. 
Not to build it, because I think we'll inevitably do that, but to understand how to avoid an arms race and to build it in a way that is aligned with our interests. 
When you're talking about superintelligent AI that can make changes to itself, it seems that we only have one chance to get the initial conditions right, and even then we will need to absorb the economic and political consequences of getting them right. 
But the moment we admit that information processing is the source of intelligence, that some appropriate computational system is what the basis of intelligence is, and we admit that we will improve these systems continuously, and we admit that the horizon of cognition very likely far exceeds what we currently know, then we have to admit that we are in the process of building some sort of god. 
Now would be a good time to make sure it's a god we can live with. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

It's a pleasure to be here in Edinburgh, Scotland, the birthplace of the needle and syringe. 
Less than a mile from here in this direction, in 1853 a Scotsman filed his very first patent on the needle and syringe. 
His name was Alexander Wood, and it was at the Royal College of Physicians. 
This is the patent. 
What blows my mind when I look at it even today is that it looks almost identical to the needle in use today. 
Yet, it's 160 years old. 
So we turn to the field of vaccines. 
Most vaccines are delivered with the needle and syringe, this 160-year-old technology. 
And credit where it's due — on many levels, vaccines are a successful technology. 
After clean water and sanitation, vaccines are the one technology that has increased our life span the most. 
That's a pretty hard act to beat. 
But just like any other technology, vaccines have their shortcomings, and the needle and syringe is a key part within that narrative — this old technology. 
So let's start with the obvious: Many of us don't like the needle and syringe. 
I share that view. 
However, 20 percent of the population have a thing called needle phobia. 
That's more than disliking the needle; that is actively avoiding being vaccinated because of needle phobia. 
And that's problematic in terms of the rollout of vaccines. 
Now, related to this is another key issue, which is needlestick injuries. 
And the WHO has figures that suggest about 1.3 million deaths per year take place due to cross-contamination with needlestick injuries. 
These are early deaths that take place. 
Now, these are two things that you probably may have heard of, but there are two other shortcomings of the needle and syringe you may not have heard about. 
One is it could be holding back the next generation of vaccines in terms of their immune responses. 
And the second is that it could be responsible for the problem of the cold chain that I'll tell you about as well. 
I'm going to tell you about some work that my team and I are doing in Australia at the University of Queensland on a technology designed to tackle those four problems. 
And that technology is called the Nanopatch. 
Now, this is a specimen of the Nanopatch. 
To the naked eye it just looks like a square smaller than a postage stamp, but under a microscope what you see are thousands of tiny projections that are invisible to the human eye. 
And there's about 4,000 projections on this particular square compared to the needle. 
And I've designed those projections to serve a key role, which is to work with the skin's immune system. 
So that's a very important function tied in with the Nanopatch. 
Now we make the Nanopatch with a technique called deep reactive ion etching. 
And this particular technique is one that's been borrowed from the semiconductor industry, and therefore is low cost and can be rolled out in large numbers. 
Now we dry-coat vaccines to the projections of the Nanopatch and apply it to the skin. 
Now, the simplest form of application is using our finger, but our finger has some limitations, so we've devised an applicator. 
And it's a very simple device — you could call it a sophisticated finger. 
It's a spring-operated device. 
What we do is when we apply the Nanopatch to the skin as so — (Click) — immediately a few things happen. 
So firstly, the projections on the Nanopatch breach through the tough outer layer and the vaccine is very quickly released — within less than a minute, in fact. 
Then we can take the Nanopatch off and discard it. 
And indeed we can make a reuse of the applicator itself. 
So that gives you an idea of the Nanopatch, and immediately you can see some key advantages. 
We've talked about it being needle-free — these are projections that you can't even see — and, of course, we get around the needle phobia issue as well. 
Now, if we take a step back and think about these other two really important advantages: One is improved immune responses through delivery, and the second is getting rid of the cold chain. 
So let's start with the first one, this immunogenicity idea. 
It takes a little while to get our heads around, but I'll try to explain it in simple terms. 
So I'll take a step back and explain to you how vaccines work in a simple way. 
So vaccines work by introducing into our body a thing called an antigen which is a safe form of a germ. 
Now that safe germ, that antigen, tricks our body into mounting an immune response, learning and remembering how to deal with intruders. 
When the real intruder comes along the body quickly mounts an immune response to deal with that vaccine and neutralizes the infection. 
So it does that well. 
Now, the way it's done today with the needle and syringe, most vaccines are delivered that way — with this old technology and the needle. 
But it could be argued that the needle is holding back our immune responses; it's missing our immune sweet spot in the skin. 
To describe this idea, we need to take a journey through the skin, starting with one of those projections and applying the Nanopatch to the skin. 
And we see this kind of data. 
Now, this is real data — that thing that we can see there is one projection from the Nanopatch that's been applied to the skin and those colors are different layers. 
Now, to give you an idea of scale, if the needle was shown here, it would be too big. 
It would be 10 times bigger than the size of that screen, going 10 times deeper as well. 
It's off the grid entirely. 
You can see immediately that we have those projections in the skin. 
That red layer is a tough outer layer of dead skin, but the brown layer and the magenta layer are jammed full of immune cells. 
As one example, in the brown layer there's a certain type of cell called a Langerhans cell — every square millimeter of our body is jammed full of those Langerhans cells, those immune cells, and there's others shown as well that we haven't stained in this image. 
But you can immediately see that the Nanopatch achieves that penetration indeed. 
We target thousands upon thousands of these particular cells just residing within a hair's width of the surface of the skin. 
Now, as the guy that's invented this thing and designed it to do that, I found that exciting. But so what? 
So what if you've targeted cells? 
In the world of vaccines, what does that mean? 
The world of vaccines is getting better. 
It's getting more systematic. 
However, you still don't really know if a vaccine is going to work until you roll your sleeves up and vaccinate and wait. 
It's a gambler's game even today. 
So, we had to do that gamble. 
We obtained an influenza vaccine, we applied it to our Nanopatches and we applied the Nanopatches to the skin, and we waited — and this is in the live animal. 
We waited a month, and this is what we found out. 
This is a data slide showing the immune responses that we've generated with a Nanopatch compared to the needle and syringe into muscle. 
So on the horizontal axis we have the dose shown in nanograms. 
On the vertical axis we have the immune response generated, and that dashed line indicates the protection threshold. 
If we're above that line it's considered protective; if we're below that line it's not. 
So the red line is mostly below that curve and indeed there's only one point that is achieved with the needle that's protective, and that's with a high dose of 6,000 nanograms. 
But notice immediately the distinctly different curve that we achieve with the blue line. 
That's what's achieved with the Nanopatch; the delivered dose of the Nanopatch is a completely different immunogenicity curve. 
That's a real fresh opportunity. 
Suddenly we have a brand new lever in the world of vaccines. 
We can push it one way, where we can take a vaccine that works but is too expensive and can get protection with a hundredth of the dose compared to the needle. 
That can take a vaccine that's suddenly 10 dollars down to 10 cents, and that's particularly important within the developing world. 
But there's another angle to this as well — you can take vaccines that currently don't work and get them over that line and get them protective. 
And certainly in the world of vaccines that can be important. 
Let's consider the big three: HIV, malaria, tuberculosis. 
They're responsible for about 7 million deaths per year, and there is no adequate vaccination method for any of those. 
So potentially, with this new lever that we have with the Nanopatch, we can help make that happen. 
We can push that lever to help get those candidate vaccines over the line. 
Now, of course, we've worked within my lab with many other vaccines that have attained similar responses and similar curves to this, what we've achieved with influenza. 
I'd like to now switch to talk about another key shortcoming of today's vaccines, and that is the need to maintain the cold chain. 
As the name suggests — the cold chain — it's the requirements of keeping a vaccine right from production all the way through to when the vaccine is applied, to keep it refrigerated. 
Now, that presents some logistical challenges but we have ways to do it. 
This is a slightly extreme case in point but it helps illustrate the logistical challenges, in particular in resource-poor settings, of what's required to get vaccines refrigerated and maintain the cold chain. 
If the vaccine is too warm the vaccine breaks down, but interestingly it can be too cold and the vaccine can break down as well. 
Now, the stakes are very high. 
The WHO estimates that within Africa, up to half the vaccines used there are considered to not be working properly because at some point the cold chain has fallen over. 
So it's a big problem, and it's tied in with the needle and syringe because it's a liquid form vaccine, and when it's liquid it needs the refrigeration. 
A key attribute of our Nanopatch is that the vaccine is dry, and when it's dry it doesn't need refrigeration. 
Within my lab we've shown that we can keep the vaccine stored at 23 degrees Celsius for more than a year without any loss in activity at all. 
That's an important improvement. 
(Applause) We're delighted about it as well. 
And the thing about it is that we have well and truly proven the Nanopatch within the laboratory setting. 
And as a scientist, I love that and I love science. 
However, as an engineer, as a biomedical engineer and also as a human being, I'm not going to be satisfied until we've rolled this thing out, taken it out of the lab and got it to people in large numbers and particularly the people that need it the most. 
So we've commenced this particular journey, and we've commenced this journey in an unusual way. 
We've started with Papua New Guinea. 
Now, Papua New Guinea is an example of a developing world country. 
It's about the same size as France, but it suffers from many of the key barriers existing within the world of today's vaccines. 
There's the logistics: Within this country there are only 800 refrigerators to keep vaccines chilled. 
Many of them are old, like this one in Port Moresby, many of them are breaking down and many are not in the Highlands where they are required. 
That's a challenge. 
But also, Papua New Guinea has the world's highest incidence of HPV, human papillomavirus, the cervical cancer [risk factor]. 
Yet, that vaccine is not available in large numbers because it's too expensive. 
So for those two reasons, with the attributes of the Nanopatch, we've got into the field and worked with the Nanopatch, and taken it to Papua New Guinea and we'll be following that up shortly. 
Now, doing this kind of work is not easy. 
It's challenging, but there's nothing else in the world I'd rather be doing. 
And as we look ahead I'd like to share with you a thought: It's the thought of a future where the 17 million deaths per year that we currently have due to infectious disease is a historical footnote. 
And it's a historical footnote that has been achieved by improved, radically improved vaccines. 
Now standing here today in front of you at the birthplace of the needle and syringe, a device that's 160 years old, I'm presenting to you an alternative approach that could really help make that happen — and it's the Nanopatch with its attributes of being needle-free, pain-free, the ability for removing the cold chain and improving the immunogenicity. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When I was invited to give this talk a couple of months ago, we discussed a number of titles with the organizers, and a lot of different items were kicked around and were discussed. 
But nobody suggested this one, and the reason for that was two months ago, Ebola was escalating exponentially and spreading over wider geographic areas than we had ever seen, and the world was terrified, concerned and alarmed by this disease, in a way we've not seen in recent history. 
But today, I can stand here and I can talk to you about beating Ebola because of people whom you've never heard of, people like Peter Clement, a Liberian doctor who's working in Lofa County, a place that many of you have never heard of, probably, in Liberia. 
The reason that Lofa County is so important is because about five months ago, when the epidemic was just starting to escalate, Lofa County was right at the center, the epicenter of this epidemic. 
At that time, MSF and the treatment center there, they were seeing dozens of patients every single day, and these patients, these communities were becoming more and more terrified as time went by, with this disease and what it was doing to their families, to their communities, to their children, to their relatives. 
And so Peter Clement was charged with driving that 12-hour-long rough road from Monrovia, the capital, up to Lofa County, to try and help bring control to the escalating epidemic there. 
And what Peter found when he arrived was the terror that I just mentioned to you. 
So he sat down with the local chiefs, and he listened. 
And what he heard was heartbreaking. 
He heard about the devastation and the desperation of people affected by this disease. 
He heard the heartbreaking stories about not just the damage that Ebola did to people, but what it did to families and what it did to communities. 
And he listened to the local chiefs there and what they told him — They said, "" When our children are sick, when our children are dying, we can't hold them at a time when we want to be closest to them. 
When our relatives die, we can't take care of them as our tradition demands. 
We are not allowed to wash the bodies to bury them the way our communities and our rituals demand. 
And for this reason, they were deeply disturbed, deeply alarmed and the entire epidemic was unraveling in front of them. 
People were turning on the healthcare workers who had come, the heroes who had come to try and help save the community, to help work with the community, and they were unable to access them. 
And what happened then was Peter explained to the leaders. 
The leaders listened. They turned the tables. 
And Peter explained what Ebola was. He explained what the disease was. 
He explained what it did to their communities. 
And he explained that Ebola threatened everything that made us human. 
Ebola means you can't hold your children the way you would in this situation. 
You can't bury your dead the way that you would. 
You have to trust these people in these space suits to do that for you. 
And ladies and gentlemen, what happened then was rather extraordinary: The community and the health workers, Peter, they sat down together and they put together a new plan for controlling Ebola in Lofa County. 
And the reason that this is such an important story, ladies and gentlemen, is because today, this county, which is right at the center of this epidemic you've been watching, you've been seeing in the newspapers, you've been seeing on the television screens, today Lofa County is nearly eight weeks without seeing a single case of Ebola. 
(Applause) Now, this doesn't mean that the job is done, obviously. 
There's still a huge risk that there will be additional cases there. 
But what it does teach us is that Ebola can be beaten. 
That's the key thing. 
Even on this scale, even with the rapid kind of growth that we saw in this environment here, we now know Ebola can be beaten. 
When communities come together with health care workers, work together, that's when this disease can be stopped. 
But how did Ebola end up in Lofa County in the first place? 
Well, for that, we have to go back 12 months, to the start of this epidemic. 
And as many of you know, this virus went undetected, it evaded detection for three or four months when it began. 
That's because this is not a disease of West Africa, it's a disease of Central Africa, half a continent away. 
People hadn't seen the disease before; health workers hadn't seen the disease before. 
They didn't know what they were dealing with, and to make it even more complicated, the virus itself was causing a symptom, a type of a presentation that wasn't classical of the disease. 
So people didn't even recognize the disease, people who knew Ebola. 
For that reason it evaded detection for some time, But contrary to public belief sometimes these days, once the virus was detected, there was a rapid surge in of support. 
MSF rapidly set up an Ebola treatment center, as many of you know, in the area. 
The World Health Organization and the partners that it works with deployed eventually hundreds of people over the next two months to be able to help track the virus. 
The problem, ladies and gentlemen, is by then, this virus, well known now as Ebola, had spread too far. 
It had already outstripped what was one of the largest responses that had been mounted so far to an Ebola outbreak. 
By the middle of the year, not just Guinea but now Sierra Leone and Liberia were also infected. 
As the virus was spreading geographically, the numbers were increasing and at this time, not only were hundreds of people infected and dying of the disease, but as importantly, the front line responders, the people who had gone to try and help, the health care workers, the other responders were also sick and dying by the dozens. 
The presidents of these countries recognized the emergencies. 
They met right around that time, they agreed on common action and they put together an emergency joint operation center in Conakry to try and work together to finish this disease and get it stopped, to implement the strategies we talked about. 
But what happened then was something we had never seen before with Ebola. 
What happened then was the virus, or someone sick with the virus, boarded an airplane, flew to another country, and for the first time, we saw in another distant country the virus pop up again. 
This time it was in Nigeria, in the teeming metropolis of Lagos, 21 million people. 
Now the virus was in that environment. 
And as you can anticipate, there was international alarm, international concern on a scale that we hadn't seen in recent years caused by a disease like this. 
The World Health Organization immediately called together an expert panel, looked at the situation, declared an international emergency. 
And in doing so, the expectation would be that there would be a huge outpouring of international assistance to help these countries which were in so much trouble and concern at that time. 
But what we saw was something very different. 
There was some great response. 
A number of countries came to assist — many, many NGOs and others, as you know, but at the same time, the opposite happened in many places. 
Alarm escalated, and very soon these countries found themselves not receiving the support they needed, but increasingly isolated. 
What we saw was commercial airlines [stopped] flying into these countries and people who hadn't even been exposed to the virus were no longer allowed to travel. 
This caused not only problems, obviously, for the countries themselves, but also for the response. 
Those organizations that were trying to bring people in, to try and help them respond to the outbreak, they could not get people on airplanes, they could not get them into the countries to be able to respond. 
In that situation, ladies and gentleman, a virus like Ebola takes advantage. 
And what we saw then was something also we hadn't seen before. 
Not only did this virus continue in the places where they'd already become infected, but then it started to escalate and we saw the case numbers that you see here, something we'd never seen before on such a scale, an exponential increase of Ebola cases not just in these countries or the areas already infected in these countries but also spreading further and deeper into these countries. 
Ladies and gentleman, this was one of the most concerning international emergencies in public health we've ever seen. 
And what happened in these countries then, many of you saw, again, on the television, read about in the newspapers, we saw the health system start to collapse under the weight of this epidemic. 
We saw the schools begin to close, markets no longer started, no longer functioned the way that they should in these countries. 
We saw that misinformation and misperceptions started to spread even faster through the communities, which became even more alarmed about the situation. 
They started to recoil from those people that you saw in those space suits, as they call them, who had come to help them. 
And then the situation deteriorated even further. 
The countries had to declare a state of emergency. 
Large populations needed to be quarantined in some areas, and then riots broke out. 
It was a very, very terrifying situation. 
Around the world, many people began to ask, can we ever stop Ebola when it starts to spread like this? 
And they started to ask, how well do we really know this virus? 
The reality is we don't know Ebola extremely well. 
It's a relatively modern disease in terms of what we know about it. 
We've known the disease only for 40 years, since it first popped up in Central Africa in 1976. 
But despite that, we do know many things: We know that this virus probably survives in a type of a bat. 
We know that it probably enters a human population when we come in contact with a wild animal that has been infected with the virus and probably sickened by it. 
Then we know that the virus spreads from person to person through contaminated body fluids. 
And as you've all seen, we know the horrific disease that it then causes in humans, where we see this disease cause severe fevers, diarrhea, vomiting, and then unfortunately, in 70 percent of the cases or often more, death. 
This is a very dangerous, debilitating, and deadly disease. 
But despite the fact that we've not known this disease for a particularly long time, and we don't know everything about it, we do know how to stop this disease. 
There are four things that are critical to stopping Ebola. 
First and foremost, the communities have got to understand this disease, they've got to understand how it spreads and how to stop it. 
And then we've got to be able to have systems that can find every single case, every contact of those cases, and begin to track the transmission chains so that you can stop transmission. 
We have to have treatment centers, specialized Ebola treatment centers, where the workers can be protected as they try to provide support to the people who are infected, so that they might survive the disease. 
And then for those who do die, we have to ensure there is a safe, but at the same time dignified, burial process, so that there is no spread at that time as well. 
So we do know how to stop Ebola, and these strategies work, ladies and gentlemen. 
The virus was stopped in Nigeria by these four strategies and the people implementing them, obviously. 
It was stopped in Senegal, where it had spread, and also in the other countries that were affected by this virus, in this outbreak. 
So there's no question that these strategies actually work. 
The big question, ladies and gentlemen, was whether these strategies could work on this scale, in this situation, with so many countries affected with the kind of exponential growth that you saw. 
That was the big question that we were facing just two or three months ago. 
Today we know the answer to that question. 
And we know that answer because of the extraordinary work of an incredible group of NGOs, of governments, of local leaders, of U.N. agencies and many humanitarian and other organizations that came and joined the fight to try and stop Ebola in West Africa. 
But what had to be done there was slightly different. 
These countries took those strategies I just showed you; the community engagement, the case finding, contact tracing, etc., and they turned them on their head. 
There was so much disease, they approached it differently. 
What they decided to do was they would first try and slow down this epidemic by rapidly building as many beds as possible in specialized treatment centers so that they could prevent the disease from spreading from those were infected. 
They would rapidly build out many, many burial teams so that they could safely deal with the dead, and with that, they would try and slow this outbreak to see if it could actually then be controlled using the classic approach of case finding and contact tracing. 
And when I went to West Africa about three months ago, when I was there what I saw was extraordinary. 
I saw presidents opening emergency operation centers themselves against Ebola so that they could personally coordinate and oversee and champion this surge of international support to try and stop this disease. 
We saw militaries from within those countries and from far beyond coming in to help build Ebola treatment centers that could be used to isolate those who were sick. 
We saw the Red Cross movement working with its partner agencies on the ground there to help train the communities so that they could actually safely bury their dead in a dignified manner themselves. 
And we saw the U.N. agencies, the World Food Program, build a tremendous air bridge that could get responders to every single corner of these countries rapidly to be able to implement the strategies that we just talked about. 
What we saw, ladies and gentlemen, which was probably most impressive, was this incredible work by the governments, by the leaders in these countries, with the communities, to try to ensure people understood this disease, understood the extraordinary things they would have to do to try and stop Ebola. 
And as a result, ladies and gentlemen, we saw something that we did not know only two or three months earlier, whether or not it would be possible. 
What we saw was what you see now in this graph, when we took stock on December 1. 
What we saw was we could bend that curve, so to speak, change this exponential growth, and bring some hope back to the ability to control this outbreak. 
And for this reason, ladies and gentlemen, there's absolutely no question now that we can catch up with this outbreak in West Africa and we can beat Ebola. 
The big question, though, that many people are asking, even when they saw this curve, they said, "" Well, hang on a minute — that's great you can slow it down, but can you actually drive it down to zero? "" We already answered that question back at the beginning of this talk, when I spoke about Lofa County in Liberia. 
We told you the story how Lofa County got to a situation where they have not seen Ebola for eight weeks. 
But there are similar stories from the other countries as well. 
From Gueckedou in Guinea, the first area where the first case was actually diagnosed. 
We've seen very, very few cases in the last couple of months, and here in Kenema, in Sierra Leone, another area in the epicenter, we have not seen the virus for more than a couple of weeks — way too early to declare victory, obviously, but evidence, ladies and gentlemen, not only can the response catch up to the disease, but this disease can be driven to zero. 
The challenge now, of course, is doing this on the scale needed right across these three countries, and that is a huge challenge. 
Because when you've been at something for this long, on this scale, two other big threats come in to join the virus. 
The first of those is complacency, the risk that as this disease curve starts to bend, the media look elsewhere, the world looks elsewhere. 
Complacency always a risk. 
And the other risk, of course, is when you've been working so hard for so long, and slept so few hours over the past months, people are tired, people become fatigued, and these new risks start to creep into the response. 
Ladies and gentlemen, I can tell you today I've just come back from West Africa. 
The people of these countries, the leaders of these countries, they are not complacent. 
They want to drive Ebola to zero in their countries. 
And these people, yes, they're tired, but they are not fatigued. 
They have an energy, they have a courage, they have the strength to get this finished. 
What they need, ladies and gentlemen, at this point, is the unwavering support of the international community, to stand with them, to bolster and bring even more support at this time, to get the job finished. 
Because finishing Ebola right now means turning the tables on this virus, and beginning to hunt it. 
Remember, this virus, this whole crisis, rather, started with one case, and is going to finish with one case. 
But it will only finish if those countries have got enough epidemiologists, enough health workers, enough logisticians and enough other people working with them to be able to find every one of those cases, track their contacts and make sure that this disease stops once and for all. 
Ladies and gentleman, Ebola can be beaten. 
Now we need you to take this story out to tell it to the people who will listen and educate them on what it means to beat Ebola, and more importantly, we need you to advocate with the people who can help us bring the resources we need to these countries, to beat this disease. 
There are a lot of people out there who will survive and will thrive, in part because of what you do to help us beat Ebola. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Alec Soth: So about 10 years ago, I got a call from a woman in Texas, Stacey Baker, and she'd seen some of my photographs in an art exhibition and was wondering if she could commission me to take a portrait of her parents. 
Now, at the time I hadn't met Stacey, and I thought this was some sort of wealthy oil tycoon and I'd struck it rich, but it was only later that I found out she'd actually taken out a loan to make this happen. 
I took the picture of her parents, but I was actually more excited about photographing Stacey. 
The picture I made that day ended up becoming one of my best-known portraits. 
At the time I made this picture, Stacey was working as an attorney for the State of Texas. 
Not long after, she left her job to study photography in Maine, and while she was there, she ended up meeting the director of photography at the New York Times Magazine and was actually offered a job. 
Stacey Baker: In the years since, Alec and I have done a number of magazine projects together, and we've become friends. 
A few months ago, I started talking to Alec about a fascination of mine. 
I've always been obsessed with how couples meet. 
I asked Alec how he and his wife Rachel met, and he told me the story of a high school football game where she was 16 and he was 15, and he asked her out. 
He liked her purple hair. 
She said yes, and that was it. 
I then asked Alec if he'd be interested in doing a photography project exploring this question. 
AS: And I was interested in the question, but I was actually much more interested in Stacey's motivation for asking it, particularly since I'd never known Stacey to have a boyfriend. 
So as part of this project, I thought it'd be interesting if she tried to meet someone. 
So my idea was to have Stacey here go speed dating in Las Vegas on Valentine's Day. 
(Laughter) (Applause) (Music) SB: We ended up at what was advertised as the world's largest speed dating event. 
I had 19 dates and each date lasted three minutes. 
Participants were given a list of ice- breaker questions to get the ball rolling, things like, "" If you could be any kind of animal, what would you be? "" That sort of thing. 
My first date was Colin. 
He's from England, and he once married a woman he met after placing an ad for a Capricorn. 
Alec and I saw him at the end of the evening, and he said he'd kissed a woman in line at one of the concession stands. 
Zack and Chris came to the date-a-thon together. 
This is Carl. 
I asked Carl, "" What's the first thing you notice about a woman? "" He said, "" Tits. "" (Laughter) Matthew is attracted to women with muscular calves. 
We talked about running. He does triathlons, I run half-marathons. 
Alec actually liked his eyes and asked if I was attracted to him, but I wasn't, and I don't think he was attracted to me either. 
Austin and Mike came together. 
Mike asked me a hypothetical question. 
He said, "" You're in an elevator running late for a meeting. 
Someone makes a dash for the elevator. 
Do you hold it open for them? "" And I said I would not. 
(Laughter) Cliff said the first thing he notices about a woman is her teeth, and we complimented each other's teeth. 
Because he's an open mouth sleeper, he says he has to floss more to help prevent gum disease, and so I asked him how often he flosses, and he said, "" Every other day. "" (Laughter) Now, as someone who flosses twice a day, I wasn't really sure that that was flossing more but I don't think I said that out loud. 
Bill is an auditor, and we talked the entire three minutes about auditing. (Laughter) The first thing Spencer notices about a woman is her complexion. 
He feels a lot of women wear too much makeup, and that they should only wear enough to accentuate the features that they have. 
I told him I didn't wear any makeup at all and he seemed to think that that was a good thing. 
Craig told me he didn't think I was willing to be vulnerable. 
He was also frustrated when I couldn't remember my most embarrassing moment. 
He thought I was lying, but I wasn't. 
I didn't think he liked me at all, but at the end of the night, he came back to me and he gave me a box of chocolates. 
William was really difficult to talk to. 
I think he was drunk. 
(Laughter) Actor Chris McKenna was the MC of the event. 
He used to be on "" The Young and the Restless. "" I didn't actually go on a date with him. 
Alec said he saw several women give their phone numbers to him. 
Needless to say, I didn't fall in love. 
I didn't feel a particular connection with any of the men that I went on dates with, and I didn't feel like they felt a particular connection with me either. 
AS: Now, the most beautiful thing to me — (Laughter) — as a photographer is the quality of vulnerability. 
The physical exterior reveals a crack in which you can get a glimpse at a more fragile interior. 
At this date-a-thon event, I saw so many examples of that, but as I watched Stacey's dates and talked to her about them, I realized how different photographic love is from real love. 
What is real love? How does it work? 
In order to work on this question and to figure out how someone goes from meeting on a date to having a life together, Stacey and I went to Sun City Summerlin, which is the largest retirement community in Las Vegas. 
Our contact there was George, who runs the community's photography club. 
He arranged for us to meet other couples in their makeshift photo studio. 
SB: After 45 years of marriage, Anastasia's husband died two years ago, so we asked if she had an old wedding picture. 
She met her husband when she was a 15-year-old waitress at a small barbecue place in Michigan. 
He was 30. 
She'd lied about her age. 
He was the first person she'd dated. 
Dean had been named photographer of the year in Las Vegas two years in a row, and this caught Alec's attention, as did the fact that he met his wife, Judy, at the same age when Alec met Rachel. 
Dean admitted that he likes to look at beautiful women, but he's never questioned his decision to marry Judy. 
AS: George met Josephine at a parish dance. 
He was 18, she was 15. 
Like a lot of the couples we met, they weren't especially philosophical about their early choices. 
George said something that really stuck with me. 
He said, "" When you get that feeling, you just go with it. "" Bob and Trudy met on a blind date when she was still in high school. 
They said they weren't particularly attracted to each other when the first met. 
Nevertheless, they were married soon after. 
SB: The story that stayed with me the most was that of George, the photography club president, and his wife, Mary. 
This was George and Mary's second marriage. 
They met at a country-western club in Louisville, Kentucky called the Sahara. 
He was there alone drinking and she was with friends. 
When they started dating, he owed the IRS 9,000 dollars in taxes, and she offered to help him get out of debt, so for the next year, he turned his paychecks over to Mary, and she got him out of debt. 
George was actually an alcoholic when they married, and Mary knew it. 
At some point in their marriage, he says he consumed 54 beers in one day. 
Another time, when he was drunk, he threatened to kill Mary and her two kids, but they escaped and a SWAT team was called to the house. 
Amazingly, Mary took him back, and eventually things got better. 
George has been involved in Alcoholics Anonymous and hasn't had a drink in 36 years. 
(Music) At the end of the day, after we left Sun City, I told Alec that I didn't actually think that the stories of how these couples met were all that interesting. 
What was more interesting was how they managed to stay together. 
AS: They all had this beautiful quality of endurance, but that was true of the singles, too. 
The world is hard, and the singles were out there trying to connect with other people, and the couples were holding onto each other after all these decades. 
My favorite pictures on this trip were of Joe and Roseanne. 
Now, by the time we met Joe and Roseanne, we'd gotten in the habit of asking couples if they had an old wedding photograph. 
In their case, they simultaneously pulled out of their wallets the exact same photograph. 
What's more beautiful, I thought to myself, this image of a young couple who has just fallen in love or the idea of these two people holding onto this image for decades? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I have a friend in Portugal whose grandfather built a vehicle out of a bicycle and a washing machine so he could transport his family. 
He did it because he couldn't afford a car, but also because he knew how to build one. 
There was a time when we understood how things worked and how they were made, so we could build and repair them, or at the very least make informed decisions about what to buy. 
Many of these do-it-yourself practices were lost in the second half of the 20th century. 
But now, the maker community and the open-source model are bringing this kind of knowledge about how things work and what they're made of back into our lives, and I believe we need to take them to the next level, to the components things are made of. 
For the most part, we still know what traditional materials like paper and textiles are made of and how they are produced. 
But now we have these amazing, futuristic composites — plastics that change shape, paints that conduct electricity, pigments that change color, fabrics that light up. 
Let me show you some examples. 
So conductive ink allows us to paint circuits instead of using the traditional printed circuit boards or wires. 
In the case of this little example I'm holding, we used it to create a touch sensor that reacts to my skin by turning on this little light. 
Conductive ink has been used by artists, but recent developments indicate that we will soon be able to use it in laser printers and pens. 
And this is a sheet of acrylic infused with colorless light-diffusing particles. 
What this means is that, while regular acrylic only diffuses light around the edges, this one illuminates across the entire surface when I turn on the lights around it. 
Two of the known applications for this material include interior design and multi-touch systems. 
And thermochromic pigments change color at a given temperature. 
So I'm going to place this on a hot plate that is set to a temperature only slightly higher than ambient and you can see what happens. 
So one of the principle applications for this material is, amongst other things, in baby bottles, so it indicates when the contents are cool enough to drink. 
So these are just a few of what are commonly known as smart materials. 
In a few years, they will be in many of the objects and technologies we use on a daily basis. 
We may not yet have the flying cars science fiction promised us, but we can have walls that change color depending on temperature, keyboards that roll up, and windows that become opaque at the flick of a switch. 
So I'm a social scientist by training, so why am I here today talking about smart materials? 
Well first of all, because I am a maker. 
I'm curious about how things work and how they are made, but also because I believe we should have a deeper understanding of the components that make up our world, and right now, we don't know enough about these high-tech composites our future will be made of. 
Smart materials are hard to obtain in small quantities. 
There's barely any information available on how to use them, and very little is said about how they are produced. 
So for now, they exist mostly in this realm of trade secrets and patents only universities and corporations have access to. 
So a little over three years ago, Kirsty Boyle and I started a project we called Open Materials. 
It's a website where we, and anyone else who wants to join us, share experiments, publish information, encourage others to contribute whenever they can, and aggregate resources such as research papers and tutorials by other makers like ourselves. 
We would like it to become a large, collectively generated database of do-it-yourself information on smart materials. 
But why should we care how smart materials work and what they are made of? 
First of all, because we can't shape what we don't understand, and what we don't understand and use ends up shaping us. 
The objects we use, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in, all have a profound impact on our behavior, health and quality of life. 
So if we are to live in a world made of smart materials, we should know and understand them. 
Secondly, and just as important, innovation has always been fueled by tinkerers. 
So many times, amateurs, not experts, have been the inventors and improvers of things ranging from mountain bikes to semiconductors, personal computers, airplanes. 
The biggest challenge is that material science is complex and requires expensive equipment. 
But that's not always the case. 
Two scientists at University of Illinois understood this when they published a paper on a simpler method for making conductive ink. 
Jordan Bunker, who had had no experience with chemistry until then, read this paper and reproduced the experiment at his maker space using only off-the-shelf substances and tools. 
He used a toaster oven, and he even made his own vortex mixer, based on a tutorial by another scientist / maker. 
Jordan then published his results online, including all the things he had tried and didn't work, so others could study and reproduce it. 
So Jordan's main form of innovation was to take an experiment created in a well-equipped lab at the university and recreate it in a garage in Chicago using only cheap materials and tools he made himself. 
And now that he published this work, others can pick up where he left and devise even simpler processes and improvements. 
Another example I'd like to mention is Hannah Perner-Wilson's Kit-of-No-Parts. 
Her project's goal is to highlight the expressive qualities of materials while focusing on the creativity and skills of the builder. 
Electronics kits are very powerful in that they teach us how things work, but the constraints inherent in their design influence the way we learn. 
So Hannah's approach, on the other hand, is to formulate a series of techniques for creating unusual objects that free us from pre-designed constraints by teaching us about the materials themselves. 
So amongst Hannah's many impressive experiments, this is one of my favorites. 
["" Paper speakers ""] What we're seeing here is just a piece of paper with some copper tape on it connected to an mp3 player and a magnet. 
(Music: "" Happy Together "") So based on the research by Marcelo Coelho from MIT, Hannah created a series of paper speakers out of a wide range of materials from simple copper tape to conductive fabric and ink. 
Just like Jordan and so many other makers, Hannah published her recipes and allows anyone to copy and reproduce them. 
But paper electronics is one of the most promising branches of material science in that it allows us to create cheaper and flexible electronics. 
So Hannah's artisanal work, and the fact that she shared her findings, opens the doors to a series of new possibilities that are both aesthetically appealing and innovative. 
So the interesting thing about makers is that we create out of passion and curiosity, and we are not afraid to fail. 
We often tackle problems from unconventional angles, and, in the process, end up discovering alternatives or even better ways to do things. 
So the more people experiment with materials, the more researchers are willing to share their research, and manufacturers their knowledge, the better chances we have to create technologies that truly serve us all. 
So I feel a bit as Ted Nelson must have when, in the early 1970s, he wrote, "You must understand computers now." 
Back then, computers were these large mainframes only scientists cared about, and no one dreamed of even having one at home. 
So it's a little strange that I'm standing here and saying, "You must understand smart materials now." 
Just keep in mind that acquiring preemptive knowledge about emerging technologies is the best way to ensure that we have a say in the making of our future. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I recently was at a friend's house, and their five-year-old was getting ready for bed. 
We all know how to maintain our physical health and how to practice dental hygiene, right? 
We've known it since we were five years old. 
What do we teach our children about emotional hygiene? 
How is it that we spend more time taking care of our teeth than we do our minds? 
We sustain psychological injuries even more often than we do physical ones, injuries like failure or rejection or loneliness. 
And yet, even though there are scientifically proven techniques we could use to treat these kinds of psychological injuries, we don't. 
"Oh, you're feeling depressed? Just shake it off; it's all in your head." 
In fact, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life is move across the Atlantic to New York City to get my doctorate in psychology. 
But while he remained among family and friends, I was alone in a new country. 
Given the time difference, I assumed, "OK, he's out with friends, he'll call later." 
I glanced down at the phone, and I realized I had kicked it off the hook when pacing the day before. 
It make us really afraid to reach out, because why set yourself up for rejection and heartache when your heart is already aching more than you can stand? 
It even suppress the functioning of your immune system, making you vulnerable to all kinds of illnesses and diseases. 
Now, cigarette packs come with warnings saying, "" This could kill you. "" But loneliness doesn't. 
And that's why it's so important that we prioritize our psychological health, that we practice emotional hygiene. 
Loneliness isn't the only psychological wound that distorts our perceptions and misleads us. 
I once visited a day care center, where I saw three toddlers play with identical plastic toys. 
The little boy next to her watched this happen, then turned to his box and burst into tears without even touching it. 
Meanwhile, another little girl tried everything she could think of until she slid the red button, the cute doggie popped out, and she squealed with delight. 
The only thing that prevented them from succeeding was that their mind tricked them into believing they could not. 
Now, adults get tricked this way as well, all the time. 
Because if your mind tries to convince you you're incapable of something, and you believe it, then like those two toddlers, you'll begin to feel helpless and you'll stop trying too soon, or you won't even try at all. 
And then you'll be even more convinced you can't succeed. 
You see, that's why so many people function below their actual potential. 
Because somewhere along the way, sometimes a single failure convinced them that they couldn't succeed, and they believed it. 
We were driving with friends down a dark road at night, when a police car stopped us. 
So it might be very natural to feel demoralized and defeated after you fail. 
You have to fight feelings of helplessness. 
And you have to break this kind of negative cycle before it begins. 
[Stop Emotional Bleeding] Our minds and our feelings — they're not the trustworthy friends we thought they were. 
Ten minutes into the date, the man stands up and says, "" I'm not interested, "" and walks out. 
Why? Because of poor emotional hygiene. 
When you're in emotional pain, treat yourself with the same compassion you would expect from a truly good friend. 
To ruminate means to chew over. 
It's when your boss yells at you or your professor makes you feel stupid in class, or you have big fight with a friend and you just can't stop replaying the scene in your head for days, sometimes for weeks on end. 
He had visible tumors all over his body. 
And he had to start a harsh course of chemotherapy. 
By taking action when you're lonely, by changing your responses to failure, by protecting your self-esteem, by battling negative thinking, you won't just heal your psychological wounds, you will build emotional resilience, you will thrive. 
If they felt better about themselves and more empowered? 

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

(Laughter) Thank you. 
(Laughter) But today, against my better judgment, against the advice of my own wife, I want to try to dust off some of those legal skills — what's left of those legal skills. 
I want to make a case. 
I want to make a hard-headed, evidence-based, dare I say lawyerly case, for rethinking how we run our businesses. 
It's created in 1945 by a psychologist named Karl Duncker. 
He created this experiment that is used in many other experiments in behavioral science. 
I bring you into a room. 
And I say to you, "" Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table. "" Now what would you do? 
And eventually, after five or ten minutes, most people figure out the solution, which you can see here. 
I want to tell you about an experiment using the candle problem, done by a scientist named Sam Glucksberg, who is now at Princeton University, US, This shows the power of incentives. 
He gathered his participants and said: "I'm going to time you, how quickly you can solve this problem." 
To one group he said, "" I'm going to time you to establish norms, averages for how long it typically takes someone to solve this sort of problem. "" To the second group he offered rewards. 
He said, "" If you're in the top 25% of the fastest times, you get five dollars. 
If you're the fastest of everyone we're testing here today, you get 20 dollars. "" Now this is several years ago, adjusted for inflation, it's a decent sum of money for a few minutes of work. 
Question: How much faster did this group solve the problem? 
(Laughter) If you want people to perform better, you reward them. Right? 
Incentivize them. 
You've got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, and it does just the opposite. 
It dulls thinking and blocks creativity. 
What's interesting about this experiment is that it's not an aberration. 
These contingent motivators — if you do this, then you get that — work in some circumstances. 
But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don't work or, often, they do harm. 
And I'm telling you, it's not even close. 
Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind; that's why they work in so many cases. 
Let me tell you why this is so important. 
or even the problems we've been talking about here, do they have a clear set of rules, and a single solution? 
The solution, if it exists at all, is surprising and not obvious. 
Everybody in this room is dealing with their own version of the candle problem. 
And for candle problems of any kind, in any field, those if-then rewards, the things around which we've built so many of our businesses, don't work! 
I'm not telling a story, I'm making a case. 
They gave these MIT students a bunch of games, games that involved creativity, and motor skills, and concentration. 
As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. 
But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance. 
In Madurai, a reward that is modest in North American standards, is more meaningful there. 
Do you know who sponsored this research? 
Let's go across the pond to the London School of Economics, LSE, London School of Economics, alma mater of eleven Nobel Laureates in economics. 
Training ground for great economic thinkers like George Soros, and Friedrich Hayek, and Mick Jagger. 
(Laughter) Last month, just last month, economists at LSE looked at 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans, inside of companies. 
Here's what they said: "" We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance. "" There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. 
And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. 
And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things, to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. 
The good news is that the scientists who've been studying motivation have given us this new approach. 
And to my mind, that new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. 
Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. 
Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. 
Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. 
I want to talk today only about autonomy. 
In the 20th century, we came up with this idea of management. 
Management did not emanate from nature. 
Somebody invented it. 
But if you want engagement, self-direction works better. 
How many of you have heard of the company Atlassian? 
(Laughter) Atlassian is an Australian software company. 
And they do something incredibly cool. 
It's worked so well that Atlassian has taken it to the next level with 20% time — done, famously, at Google — where engineers can spend 20% of their time working on anything they want. 
Let me give you an even more radical example of it: something called the Results Only Work Environment (the ROWE), created by two American consultants, in place at a dozen companies around North America. 
Autonomy, mastery and purpose, the building blocks of a new way of doing things. 
Some of you might look at this and say, "Hmm, that sounds nice, but it's Utopian." 
They had deployed all the right incentives, They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. 
A few years later, another encyclopedia got started. 
Just 10 years ago, if you had gone to an economist, anywhere, "" Hey, I've got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia. 
Autonomy, mastery and purpose, versus carrot and sticks, and who wins? 
The drive to do things cause they matter. 
And here's the best part. 
We already know this. 
So, if we repair this mismatch between science and business, if we bring our motivation, notions of motivation into the 21st century, if we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks, we can strengthen our businesses, we can solve a lot of those candle problems, and maybe, maybe — we can change the world. 

I worked on a film called "" Apollo 13, "" and when I worked on this film, I discovered something about how our brains work, and how our brains work is that, when we're sort of infused with either enthusiasm or awe or fondness or whatever, it changes and alters our perception of things. 
It changes what we see. It changes what we remember. 
And as an experiment, because I dauntingly create a task for myself of recreating a Saturn V launch for this particular movie, because I put it out there, I felt a little nervous about it, so I need to do an experiment and bring a group of people like this in a projection room and play this stock footage, and when I played this stock footage, I simply wanted to find out what people remembered, what was memorable about it? 
What should I actually try to replicate? 
What should I try to emulate to some degree? 
So this is the footage that I was showing everybody. 
And what I discovered is, because of the nature of the footage and the fact that we're doing this film, there was an emotion that was built into it and our collective memories of what this launch meant to us and all these various things. 
When I showed it, and I asked, immediately after the screening was over, what they thought of it, what was your memorable shots, they changed them. 
They were — had camera moves on them. 
They had all kinds of things. Shots were combined, and I was just really curious, I mean, what the hell were you looking at just a few minutes ago and how come, how'd you come up with this sort of description? 
And what I discovered is, what I should do is not actually replicate what they saw, is replicate what they remembered. 
So this is our footage of the launch, based on, basically, taking notes, asking people what they thought, and then the combination of all the different shots and all the different things put together created their sort of collective consciousness of what they remembered it looked like, but not what it really looked like. 
So this is what we created for "" Apollo 13. "" (Launch noises) So literally what you're seeing now is the confluence of a bunch of different people, a bunch of different memories, including my own, of taking a little bit of liberty with the subject matter. 
I basically shot everything with short lenses, which means that you're very close to the action, but framed it very similarly to the long lens shots which gives you a sense of distance, so I was basically was setting up something that would remind you of something you haven't really quite seen before. (Music) And then I'm going to show you exactly what it is that you were reacting to when you were reacting to it. (Music) 
Tom Hanks: Hello, Houston, this is Odyssey. 
It's good to see you again. (Cheers) (Music) Rob Legato: I pretend they're clapping for me. 
(Laughter) So now I'm in a parking lot. Basically it's a tin can, and I'm basically recreating the launch with fire extinguishers, fire, I have wax that I threw in front of the lens to look like ice, and so basically if you believed any of the stuff that I just showed you, what you were reacting to, what you're emoting to, is something that's a total falsehood, and I found that really kind of fascinating. 
And in this particular case, this is the climax of the movie, and, you know, the weight of achieving it was simply take a model, throw it out of a helicopter, and shoot it. 
And that's simply what I did. 
That's me shooting, and I'm a fairly mediocre operator, so I got that nice sense of verisimilitude, of a kind of, you know, following the rocket all the way down, and giving that little sort of edge, I was desperately trying to keep it in frame. So then I come up to the next thing. 
We had a NASA consultant who was actually an astronaut, who was actually on some of the missions, of Apollo 15, and he was there to basically double check my science. 
And, I guess somebody thought they needed to do that. 
(Laughter) I don't know why, but they thought they did. 
So we were, he's a hero, he's an astronaut, and we're all sort of excited, and, you know, I gave myself the liberty of saying, you know, some of the shots I did didn't really suck that bad. 
And so maybe, you know, we were feeling kind of a little good about it, so I brought him in here, and he needed to really check and see what we were doing, and basically give us our A plus report card, and so I showed him some shots we were working on, and waiting for the reaction that you hope for, which is what I got. (Music) (Launch noises) So I showed him these two shots, and then he basically told me what he thought. 
("" That's wrong "") (Laughter) Okay. (Laughter) It's what you dream about. (Laughter) 
So what I got from him is, he turned to me and said, "" You would never, ever design a rocket like that. 
You would never have a rocket go up while the gantry arms are going out. Can you imagine the tragedy that could possibly happen with that? 
You would never, ever design a rocket like that. "" And he was looking at me. It's like, Yeah, I don't know if you noticed, but I'm the guy out in the parking lot recreating one of America's finest moments with fire extinguishers. 
(Laughter) And I'm not going to argue with you. You're an astronaut, a hero, and I'm from New Jersey, so — (Laughter) I'm just going to show you some footage. 
I'm just going to show you some footage, and tell me what you think. 
And then I did kind of get the reaction I was hoping for. 
So I showed him this, and this is actual footage that he was on. This is Apollo 15. This was his mission. 
So I showed him this, and the reaction I got was interesting. 
("" That's wrong too. "") (Laughter) So, and what happened was, I mean, what I sort of intuned in that is that he remembered it differently. 
He remembered that was a perfectly safe sort of gantry system, perfectly safe rocket launch, because he's sitting in a rocket that has, like, a hundred thousand pounds of thrust, built by the lowest bidder. 
He was hoping it was going to work out okay. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So he twisted his memory around. 
Now, Ron Howard ran into Buzz Aldrin, who was not on the movie, so he had no idea that we were faking any of this footage, and he just responded as he would respond, and I'll run this. 
Ron Howard: Buzz Aldrin came up to me and said, "" Hey, that launch footage, I saw some shots I'd never seen before. Did you guys, what vault did you find that stuff in? "" And I said, "" Well, no vault, Buzz, we generated all that from scratch. "" And he said, "" Huh, that's pretty good. Can we use it? "" (Explosion) ("" Sure "") (Laughter) RL: I think he's a great American. (Laughter) 
So, "" Titanic "" was, if you don't know the story, doesn't end well. (Laughter) 
Jim Cameron actually photographed the real Titanic. 
So he basically set up, or basically shattered the suspension of disbelief, because what he photographed was the real thing, a Mir sub going down, or actually two Mir subs going down to the real wreck, and he created this very haunting footage. 
It's really beautiful, and it conjures up all these various different emotions, but he couldn't photograph everything, and to tell the story, I had to fill in the gaps, which is now rather daunting, because now I have to recreate back to back what really happened and I had, I'm the only one who could really blow it at that point. 
So this is the footage he photographed, and it was pretty moving and pretty awe-inspiring. 
So I'm going to just let it run, so you kind of absorb this sort of thing, and I'll describe my sort of reactions when I was looking at it for the very first time. 
I got the feeling that my brain wanted to basically see it come back to life. 
I automatically wanted to see this ship, this magnificent ship, basically in all its glory, and conversely, I wanted to see it not in all its glory, basically go back to what it looks like. 
So I conjured up an effect that I'm later going to show you what I tried to do, which is kind of the heart of the movie, for me, and so that's why I wanted to do the movie, that's why I wanted to create the sort of things I created. 
And I'll show you, you know, another thing that I found interesting is what we really were emoting to when you take a look at it. 
So here's the behind the scenes, a couple of little shots here. 
So, when you saw my footage, you were seeing this: basically, a bunch of guys flipping a ship upside down, and the little Mir subs are actually about the size of small footballs, and shot in smoke. 
Jim went three miles went down, and I went about three miles away from the studio and photographed this in a garage. 
And so, but what you're emoting to, or what you're looking at, had the same feeling, the same haunting quality, that Jim's footage had, so I found it so fascinating that our brains sort of, once you believe something's real, you transfer everything that you feel about it, this quality you have, and it's totally artificial. 
It's totally make-believe, yet it's not to you, and I found that that was a very interesting thing to explore and use, and it caused me to create the next effect that I'll show you, which is this sort of magic transition, and all I was really attempting to do is basically have the audience cue the effect, so it became a seamless experience for them, that I wasn't showing you my sort of interpretation, I was showing you what you wanted to see. 
And the very next shot, right after this — So you can see what I was doing. 
So basically, if there's two subs in the same shot, I shot it, because where's the camera coming from? 
And when Jim shot it, it was only one sub, because he was photographing from the other, and I don't remember if I did this or Jim did this. 
I'll give it to Jim, because he could use the pat on the back. 
(Laughter) Okay. So now the Titanic transition. 
So this is what I was referring to where I wanted to basically magically transplant from one state of the Titanic to the other. So I'll just play the shot once. (Music) (Music) And what I was hoping for is that it just melts in front of you. 
Gloria Stuart: That was the last time Titanic ever saw daylight. 
RL: So, what I did is basically I had another screening room experience where I was basically tracking where I was looking, or where we were looking, and of course you're looking at the two people on the bow of the ship, and then at some point, I'm changing the periphery of the shot, I'm changing, it's becoming the rusted wreck, and then I would run it every day, and then I would find exactly the moment that I stopped looking at them and start noticing the rest of it, and the moment my eye shifted, we just marked it to the frame. 
The moment my eye shifted, I immediately started to change them, so now somehow you missed where it started and where it stopped. 
And so I'll just show it one more time. 
(Music) And it's literally done by using what our brains naturally do for us, which is, as soon as you shift your attention, something changes, and then I left the little scarf going, because it really wanted to be a ghostly shot, really wanted to feel like they were still on the wreck, essentially. That's where they were buried forever. 
Or something like that. I just made that up. 
(Laughter) It was, incidentally, the last time I ever saw daylight. 
It was a long film to work on. (Laughter) Now, "" Hugo "" was another interesting movie, because the movie itself is about film illusions. 
It's about how our brain is tricked into seeing a persistence of vision that creates a motion picture, and one of the things I had to do is, we — Sasha Baron Cohen is a very clever, very smart guy, comedian, wanted to basically do an homage to the kind of the Buster Keaton sort of slapstick things, and he wanted his leg brace to get caught on a moving train. 
Very dangerous, very impossible to do, and particularly on our stage, because there literally is no way to actually move this train, because it fits so snugly into our set. 
So let me show you the scene, and then I basically used the trick that was identified by Sergei Eisenstein, which is, if you have a camera that's moving with a moving object, what is not moving appears to be moving, and what is moving appears to be stopped, so what you're actually seeing now is the train is not moving at all, and what is actually moving is the floor. 
So this is the shot. That's a little video of what you're looking at there, which is our little test, so that's actually what you're seeing, and I thought it was sort of an interesting thing, because it was, part of the homage of the movie itself is coming up with this sort of genius trick which I can't take credit for. 
I'd love to but I can't, because it was invented like in 1910 or something like that, is I told Marty, and it's kind of one of those mind things that it's really hard to really get until you actually see it work, and I said, you know, what I was going to do, and he said, "" So, let me see if I can get this straight. The thing with the wheels? 
That doesn't move. "" (Laughter) (Applause) "And the thing without the wheels, that moves." 
Precisely. (Laughter) Brings me to the next, and final — Marty's not going to see this, is he? (Laughter) This isn't viewed outside of — (Laughter) The next illustration is something that, there's like all one shot theory. It's a very elegant way of telling a story, especially if you're following somebody on a journey, and that journey basically tells something about their personality in a very concise way, and what we wanted to do based on the shot in "" Goodfellas, "" which is one of the great shots ever, a Martin Scorsese film, of basically following Henry Hill through what it feels like to be a gangster walk 
going through the Copacabana and being treated in a special way. 
He was the master of his universe, and we wanted Hugo to feel the same way, so we created this shot. 
(Music) That's Hugo. (Music) And we felt that if we could basically move the camera with him, we would feel what it feels like to be this boy who is basically the master of his universe, and his universe is, you know, behind the scenes in the bowels of this particular train station that only he can actually navigate through and do it this way, and we had to make it feel that this is his normal, everyday sort of life, so the idea of doing it as one shot was very important, and of course, in shooting in 3D, which is basically 
it's a huge camera that's hanging off of a giant stick, so to recreate a steadycam shot was the task, and make it feel kind of like what the reaction you got when you saw the "" Goodfellas "" shot. 
So what you're now going to see is how we actually did it. 
It's actually five separate sets shot at five different times with two different boys. 
The one on the left is where the shot ends, and the shot on the right is where it takes over, and now we switch boys, so it went from Asa Butterfield, who's the star of the show, to his stand-in. (Music) I wouldn't say his stunt double. There's a crazy rig that we built for this. (Music) And so this is, and now this is set number three we're into, and then we're going to go into, basically the very last moment of the shot is actually the steadycam shot. Everything else was shot on cranes and various things like that, and it literally was done 
over five different sets, two different boys, different times, and it all had to feel like it was all one shot, and what was sort of great for me was it was probably the best-reviewed shot I've ever worked on, and, you know, I was kind of proud of it when I was done, which is, you should never really be proud of stuff, I guess. 
So I was kind of proud of it, and I went to a friend of mine, and said, "" You know, this is, you know, kind of the best-reviewed shot I've ever worked on. 
What do you think was the reason? "" And he said, "" Because no one knows you had anything to do with it. "" (Laughter) So, all I can say is, thank you, and that's my presentation for you. (Applause) (Applause) 

The child's symptoms begin with mild fever, headache, muscle pains, followed by vomiting and diarrhea, then bleeding from the mouth, nose and gums. 
Death follows in the form of organ failure from low blood pressure. 
Sounds familiar? 
If you're thinking this is Ebola, actually, in this case, it's not. 
It's an extreme form of dengue fever, a mosquito-born disease which also does not have an effective therapy or a vaccine, and kills 22,000 people each year. 
That is actually twice the number of people that have been killed by Ebola in the nearly four decades that we've known about it. 
As for measles, so much in the news recently, the death toll is actually tenfold higher. 
Yet for the last year, it has been Ebola that has stolen all of the headlines and the fear. 
Clearly, there is something deeply rooted about it, something which scares us and fascinates us more than other diseases. 
But what is it, exactly? 
Well, it's hard to acquire Ebola, but if you do, the risk of a horrible death is high. 
Why? 
Because right now, we don't have any effective therapy or vaccine available. 
And so, that's the clue. 
We may have it someday. 
So we rightfully fear Ebola, because it doesn't kill as many people as other diseases. 
In fact, it's much less transmissible than viruses such as flu or measles. 
We fear Ebola because of the fact that it kills us and we can't treat it. 
We fear the certain inevitability that comes with Ebola. 
Ebola has this inevitability that seems to defy modern medical science. 
But wait a second, why is that? 
We've known about Ebola since 1976. 
We've known what it's capable of. 
We've had ample opportunity to study it in the 24 outbreaks that have occurred. 
And in fact, we've actually had vaccine candidates available now for more than a decade. 
Why is that those vaccines are just going into clinical trials now? 
This goes to the fundamental problem we have with vaccine development for infectious diseases. 
It goes something like this: The people most at risk for these diseases are also the ones least able to pay for vaccines. 
This leaves little in the way of market incentives for manufacturers to develop vaccines, unless there are large numbers of people who are at risk in wealthy countries. 
It's simply too commercially risky. 
As for Ebola, there is absolutely no market at all, so the only reason we have two vaccines in late-stage clinical trials now, is actually because of a somewhat misguided fear. 
Ebola was relatively ignored until September 11 and the anthrax attacks, when all of a sudden, people perceived Ebola as, potentially, a bioterrorism weapon. 
Why is it that the Ebola vaccine wasn't fully developed at this point? 
Well, partially, because it was really difficult — or thought to be difficult — to weaponize the virus, but mainly because of the financial risk in developing it. 
And this is really the point. 
The sad reality is, we develop vaccines not based upon the risk the pathogen poses to people, but on how economically risky it is to develop these vaccines. 
Vaccine development is expensive and complicated. 
It can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to take even a well-known antigen and turn it into a viable vaccine. 
Fortunately for diseases like Ebola, there are things we can do to remove some of these barriers. 
The first is to recognize when there's a complete market failure. 
In that case, if we want vaccines, we have to provide incentives or some type of subsidy. 
We also need to do a better job at being able to figure out which are the diseases that most threaten us. 
By creating capabilities within countries, we then create the ability for those countries to create epidemiological and laboratory networks which are capable of collecting and categorizing these pathogens. 
The data from that then can be used to understand the geographic and genetic diversity, which then can be used to help us understand how these are being changed immunologically, and what type of reactions they promote. 
So these are the things that can be done, but to do this, if we want to deal with a complete market failure, we have to change the way we view and prevent infectious diseases. 
We have to stop waiting until we see evidence of a disease becoming a global threat before we consider it as one. 
So, for Ebola, the paranoid fear of an infectious disease, followed by a few cases transported to wealthy countries, led the global community to come together, and with the work of dedicated vaccine companies, we now have these: Two Ebola vaccines in efficacy trials in the Ebola countries — (Applause) and a pipeline of vaccines that are following behind. 
Every year, we spend billions of dollars, keeping a fleet of nuclear submarines permanently patrolling the oceans to protect us from a threat that almost certainly will never happen. 
And yet, we spend virtually nothing to prevent something as tangible and evolutionarily certain as epidemic infectious diseases. 
And make no mistake about it — it's not a question of "" if, "" but "" when. "" These bugs are going to continue to evolve and they're going to threaten the world. 
And vaccines are our best defense. 
So if we want to be able to prevent epidemics like Ebola, we need to take on the risk of investing in vaccine development and in stockpile creation. 
And we need to view this, then, as the ultimate deterrent — something we make sure is available, but at the same time, praying we never have to use it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

On March 10, 2011, I was in Cambridge at the MIT Media Lab meeting with faculty, students and staff, and we were trying to figure out whether I should be the next director. 
That night, at midnight, a magnitude 9 earthquake hit off of the Pacific coast of Japan. 
My wife and family were in Japan, and as the news started to come in, I was panicking. 
I was looking at the news streams and listening to the press conferences of the government officials and the Tokyo Power Company, and hearing about this explosion at the nuclear reactors and this cloud of fallout that was headed towards our house which was only about 200 kilometers away. 
And the people on TV weren't telling us anything that we wanted to hear. 
I wanted to know what was going on with the reactor, what was going on with the radiation, whether my family was in danger. 
So I did what instinctively felt like the right thing, which was to go onto the Internet and try to figure out if I could take matters into my own hands. 
On the Net, I found there were a lot of other people like me trying to figure out what was going on, and together we sort of loosely formed a group and we called it Safecast, and we decided we were going to try to measure the radiation and get the data out to everybody else, because it was clear that the government wasn't going to be doing this for us. 
Three years later, we have 16 million data points, we have designed our own Geiger counters that you can download the designs and plug it into the network. 
We have an app that shows you most of the radiation in Japan and other parts of the world. 
We are arguably one of the most successful citizen science projects in the world, and we have created the largest open dataset of radiation measurements. 
And the interesting thing here is how did — (Applause) — Thank you. 
How did a bunch of amateurs who really didn't know what we were doing somehow come together and do what NGOs and the government were completely incapable of doing? 
And I would suggest that this has something to do with the Internet. It's not a fluke. 
It wasn't luck, and it wasn't because it was us. 
It helped that it was an event that pulled everybody together, but it was a new way of doing things that was enabled by the Internet and a lot of the other things that were going on, and I want to talk a little bit about what those new principles are. 
So remember before the Internet? (Laughter) I call this B.I. Okay? 
So, in B.I., life was simple. 
Things were Euclidian, Newtonian, somewhat predictable. 
People actually tried to predict the future, even the economists. 
And then the Internet happened, and the world became extremely complex, extremely low-cost, extremely fast, and those Newtonian laws that we so dearly cherished turned out to be just local ordinances, and what we found was that in this completely unpredictable world that most of the people who were surviving were working with sort of a different set of principles, and I want to talk a little bit about that. 
Before the Internet, if you remember, when we tried to create services, what you would do is you'd create the hardware layer and the network layer and the software and it would cost millions of dollars to do anything that was substantial. 
So when it costs millions of dollars to do something substantial, what you would do is you'd get an MBA who would write a plan and get the money from V.C.s or big companies, and then you'd hire the designers and the engineers, and they'd build the thing. 
This is the Before Internet, B.I., innovation model. 
What happened after the Internet was the cost of innovation went down so much because the cost of collaboration, the cost of distribution, the cost of communication, and Moore's Law made it so that the cost of trying a new thing became nearly zero, and so you would have Google, Facebook, Yahoo, students that didn't have permission — permissionless innovation — didn't have permission, didn't have PowerPoints, they just built the thing, then they raised the money, and then they sort of figured out a business plan and maybe later on they hired some MBAs. 
So the Internet caused innovation, at least in software and services, to go from an MBA-driven innovation model to a designer-engineer-driven innovation model, and it pushed innovation to the edges, to the dorm rooms, to the startups, away from the large institutions, the stodgy old institutions that had the power and the money and the authority. 
And we all know this. We all know this happened on the Internet. 
It turns out it's happening in other things, too. 
Let me give you some examples. 
So at the Media Lab, we don't just do hardware. 
We do all kinds of things. 
We do biology, we do hardware, and Nicholas Negroponte famously said, "" Demo or die, "" as opposed to "" Publish or perish, "" which was the traditional academic way of thinking. 
And he often said, the demo only has to work once, because the primary mode of us impacting the world was through large companies being inspired by us and creating products like the Kindle or Lego Mindstorms. 
But today, with the ability to deploy things into the real world at such low cost, I'm changing the motto now, and this is the official public statement. 
I'm officially saying, "" Deploy or die. "" You have to get the stuff into the real world for it to really count, and sometimes it will be large companies, and Nicholas can talk about satellites. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
But we should be getting out there ourselves and not depending on large institutions to do it for us. 
So last year, we sent a bunch of students to Shenzhen, and they sat on the factory floors with the innovators in Shenzhen, and it was amazing. 
What was happening there was you would have these manufacturing devices, and they weren't making prototypes or PowerPoints. 
They were fiddling with the manufacturing equipment and innovating right on the manufacturing equipment. 
The factory was in the designer, and the designer was literally in the factory. 
And so what you would do is, you'd go down to the stalls and you would see these cell phones. 
So instead of starting little websites like the kids in Palo Alto do, the kids in Shenzhen make new cell phones. 
They make new cell phones like kids in Palo Alto make websites, and so there's a rainforest of innovation going on in the cell phone. 
What they do is, they make a cell phone, go down to the stall, they sell some, they look at the other kids' stuff, go up, make a couple thousand more, go down. 
Doesn't this sound like a software thing? 
It sounds like agile software development, A / B testing and iteration, and what we thought you could only do with software kids in Shenzhen are doing this in hardware. 
My next fellow, I hope, is going to be one of these innovators from Shenzhen. 
And so what you see is that is pushing innovation to the edges. 
We talk about 3D printers and stuff like that, and that's great, but this is Limor. 
She is one of our favorite graduates, and she is standing in front of a Samsung Techwin Pick and Place Machine. 
This thing can put 23,000 components per hour onto an electronics board. 
This is a factory in a box. 
So what used to take a factory full of workers working by hand in this little box in New York, she's able to have effectively — She doesn't actually have to go to Shenzhen to do this manufacturing. 
She can buy this box and she can manufacture it. 
So manufacturing, the cost of innovation, the cost of prototyping, distribution, manufacturing, hardware, is getting so low that innovation is being pushed to the edges and students and startups are being able to build it. 
This is a recent thing, but this will happen and this will change just like it did with software. 
Sorona is a DuPont process that uses a genetically engineered microbe to turn corn sugar into polyester. 
It's 30 percent more efficient than the fossil fuel method, and it's much better for the environment. 
Genetic engineering and bioengineering are creating a whole bunch of great new opportunities for chemistry, for computation, for memory. 
We will probably be doing a lot, obviously doing health things, but we will probably be growing chairs and buildings soon. 
The problem is, Sorona costs about 400 million dollars and took seven years to build. 
It kind of reminds you of the old mainframe days. 
The thing is, the cost of innovation in bioengineering is also going down. 
This is desktop gene sequencer. 
It used to cost millions and millions of dollars to sequence genes. 
Now you can do it on a desktop like this, and kids can do this in dorm rooms. 
This is Gen9 gene assembler, and so right now when you try to print a gene, what you do is somebody in a factory with pipettes puts the thing together by hand, you have one error per 100 base pairs, and it takes a long time and costs a lot of money. 
This new device assembles genes on a chip, and instead of one error per 100 base pairs, it's one error per 10,000 base pairs. 
In this lab, we will have the world's capacity of gene printing within a year, 200 million base pairs a year. 
This is kind of like when we went from transistor radios wrapped by hand to the Pentium. 
This is going to become the Pentium of bioengineering, pushing bioengineering into the hands of dorm rooms and startup companies. 
So it's happening in software and in hardware and bioengineering, and so this is a fundamental new way of thinking about innovation. 
It's a bottom-up innovation, it's democratic, it's chaotic, it's hard to control. 
It's not bad, but it's very different, and I think that the traditional rules that we have for institutions don't work anymore, and most of us here operate with a different set of principles. 
One of my favorite principles is the power of pull, which is the idea of pulling resources from the network as you need them rather than stocking them in the center and controlling everything. 
So in the case of the Safecast story, I didn't know anything when the earthquake happened, but I was able to find Sean who was the hackerspace community organizer, and Peter, the analog hardware hacker who made our first Geiger counter, and Dan, who built the Three Mile Island monitoring system after the Three Mile Island meltdown. 
And these people I wouldn't have been able to find beforehand and probably were better that I found them just in time from the network. 
I'm a three-time college dropout, so learning over education is very near and dear to my heart, but to me, education is what people do to you and learning is what you do to yourself. 
(Applause) And it feels like, and I'm biased, it feels like they're trying to make you memorize the whole encyclopedia before they let you go out and play, and to me, I've got Wikipedia on my cell phone, and it feels like they assume you're going to be on top of some mountain all by yourself with a number 2 pencil trying to figure out what to do when in fact you're always going to be connected, you're always going to have friends, and you can pull Wikipedia up whenever you need it, and what you need to learn is how to learn. 
In the case of Safecast, a bunch of amateurs when we started three years ago, I would argue that we probably as a group know more than any other organization about how to collect data and publish data and do citizen science. 
Compass over maps. 
So this one, the idea is that the cost of writing a plan or mapping something is getting so expensive and it's not very accurate or useful. 
So in the Safecast story, we knew we needed to collect data, we knew we wanted to publish the data, and instead of trying to come up with the exact plan, we first said, oh, let's get Geiger counters. 
Oh, they've run out. 
Let's build them. There aren't enough sensors. 
Okay, then we can make a mobile Geiger counter. 
We can drive around. We can get volunteers. 
We don't have enough money. Let's Kickstarter it. 
We could not have planned this whole thing, but by having a very strong compass, we eventually got to where we were going, and to me it's very similar to agile software development, but this idea of compasses is very important. 
So I think the good news is that even though the world is extremely complex, what you need to do is very simple. 
I think it's about stopping this notion that you need to plan everything, you need to stock everything, and you need to be so prepared, and focus on being connected, always learning, fully aware, and super present. 
So I don't like the word "" futurist. "" I think we should be now-ists, like we are right now. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So I begin with an advertisement inspired by George Orwell that Apple ran in 1984. 
(Video) Big Brother: We are one people with one will, one resolve, one cause. 
Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will fight them with their own confusion. 
We shall prevail. 
Narrator: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. 
And you'll see why 1984 won't be like "" 1984. "" Rebecca MacKinnon: So the underlying message of this video remains very powerful even today. 
Technology created by innovative companies will set us all free. 
Fast-forward more than two decades: Apple launches the iPhone in China and censors the Dalai Lama out along with several other politically sensitive applications at the request of the Chinese government for its Chinese app store. 
The American political cartoonist Mark Fiore also had his satire application censored in the United States because some of Apple's staff were concerned it would be offensive to some groups. 
His app wasn't reinstated until he won the Pulitzer Prize. 
The German magazine Stern, a news magazine, had its app censored because the Apple nannies deemed it to be a little bit too racy for their users, and despite the fact that this magazine is perfectly legal for sale on newsstands throughout Germany. 
And more controversially, recently, Apple censored a Palestinian protest app after the Israeli government voiced concerns that it might be used to organize violent attacks. 
So here's the thing. 
We have a situation where private companies are applying censorship standards that are often quite arbitrary and generally more narrow than the free speech constitutional standards that we have in democracies. 
Or they're responding to censorship requests by authoritarian regimes that do not reflect consent of the governed. 
Or they're responding to requests and concerns by governments that have no jurisdiction over many, or most, of the users and viewers who are interacting with the content in question. 
So here's the situation. 
In a pre-Internet world, sovereignty over our physical freedoms, or lack thereof, was controlled almost entirely by nation-states. 
But now we have this new layer of private sovereignty in cyberspace. 
And their decisions about software coding, engineering, design, terms of service all act as a kind of law that shapes what we can and cannot do with our digital lives. 
And their sovereignties, cross-cutting, globally interlinked, can in some ways challenge the sovereignties of nation-states in very exciting ways, but sometimes also act to project and extend it at a time when control over what people can and cannot do with information has more effect than ever on the exercise of power in our physical world. 
After all, even the leader of the free world needs a little help from the sultan of Facebookistan if he wants to get reelected next year. 
And these platforms were certainly very helpful to activists in Tunisia and Egypt this past spring and beyond. 
As Wael Ghonim, the Google-Egyptian-executive by day, secret-Facebook-activist by night, famously said to CNN after Mubarak stepped down, "" If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet. "" But overthrowing a government is one thing and building a stable democracy is a bit more complicated. 
On the left there's a photo taken by an Egyptian activist who was part of the storming of the Egyptian state security offices in March. 
And many of the agents shredded as many of the documents as they could and left them behind in piles. 
But some of the files were left behind intact, and activists, some of them, found their own surveillance dossiers full of transcripts of their email exchanges, their cellphone text message exchanges, even Skype conversations. 
And one activist actually found a contract from a Western company for the sale of surveillance technology to the Egyptian security forces. 
And Egyptian activists are assuming that these technologies for surveillance are still being used by the transitional authorities running the networks there. 
And in Tunisia, censorship actually began to return in May — not nearly as extensively as under President Ben Ali. 
But you'll see here a blocked page of what happens when you try to reach certain Facebook pages and some other websites that the transitional authorities have determined might incite violence. 
In protest over this, blogger Slim Amamou, who had been jailed under Ben Ali and then became part of the transitional government after the revolution, he resigned in protest from the cabinet. 
But there's been a lot of debate in Tunisia about how to handle this kind of problem. 
In fact, on Twitter, there were a number of people who were supportive of the revolution who said, "" Well actually, we do want democracy and free expression, but there is some kinds of speech that need to be off-bounds because it's too violent and it might be destabilizing for our democracy. 
But the problem is, how do you decide who is in power to make these decisions and how do you make sure that they do not abuse their power? 
As Riadh Guerfali, the veteran digital activist from Tunisia, remarked over this incident, "" Before, things were simple: you had the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other. 
Today, things are a lot more subtle. "" Welcome to democracy, our Tunisian and Egyptian friends. 
The reality is that even in democratic societies today, we do not have good answers for how you balance the need for security and law enforcement on one hand and protection of civil liberties and free speech on the other in our digital networks. 
In fact, in the United States, whatever you may think of Julian Assange, even people who are not necessarily big fans of his are very concerned about the way in which the United States government and some companies have handled Wikileaks. 
Amazon webhosting dropped Wikileaks as a customer after receiving a complaint from U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, despite the fact that Wikileaks had not been charged, let alone convicted, of any crime. 
So we assume that the Internet is a border-busting technology. 
This is a map of social networks worldwide, and certainly Facebook has conquered much of the world — which is either a good or a bad thing, depending on how you like the way Facebook manages its service. 
But borders do persist in some parts of cyberspace. 
In Brazil and Japan, it's for unique cultural and linguistic reasons. 
But if you look at China, Vietnam and a number of the former Soviet states, what's happening there is more troubling. 
You have a situation where the relationship between government and local social networking companies is creating a situation where, effectively, the empowering potential of these platforms is being constrained because of these relationships between companies and government. 
Now in China, you have the "" great firewall, "" as it's well-known, that blocks Facebook and Twitter and now Google + and many of the other overseas websites. 
And that's done in part with the help from Western technology. 
But that's only half of the story. 
The other part of the story are requirements that the Chinese government places on all companies operating on the Chinese Internet, known as a system of self-discipline. 
In plain English, that means censorship and surveillance of their users. 
And this is a ceremony I actually attended in 2009 where the Internet Society of China presented awards to the top 20 Chinese companies that are best at exercising self-discipline — i.e. policing their content. 
And Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, China's dominant search engine, was one of the recipients. 
In Russia, they do not generally block the Internet and directly censor websites. 
But this is a website called Rospil that's an anti-corruption site. 
And earlier this year, there was a troubling incident where people who had made donations to Rospil through a payments processing system called Yandex Money suddenly received threatening phone calls from members of a nationalist party who had obtained details about donors to Rospil through members of the security services who had somehow obtained this information from people at Yandex Money. 
This has a chilling effect on people's ability to use the Internet to hold government accountable. 
So we have a situation in the world today where in more and more countries the relationship between citizens and governments is mediated through the Internet, which is comprised primarily of privately owned and operated services. 
So the important question, I think, is not this debate over whether the Internet is going to help the good guys more than the bad guys. 
Of course, it's going to empower whoever is most skilled at using the technology and best understands the Internet in comparison with whoever their adversary is. 
The most urgent question we need to be asking today is how do we make sure that the Internet evolves in a citizen-centric manner. 
Because I think all of you will agree that the only legitimate purpose of government is to serve citizens, and I would argue that the only legitimate purpose of technology is to improve our lives, not to manipulate or enslave us. 
So the question is, we know how to hold government accountable. 
We don't necessarily always do it very well, but we have a sense of what the models are, politically and institutionally, to do that. 
How do you hold the sovereigns of cyberspace accountable to the public interest when most CEO's argue that their main obligation is to maximize shareholder profit? 
And government regulation often isn't helping all that much. 
You have situations, for instance, in France where president Sarkozy tells the CEO's of Internet companies, "" We're the only legitimate representatives of the public interest. "" But then he goes and champions laws like the infamous "" three-strikes "" law that would disconnect citizens from the Internet for file sharing, which has been condemned by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression as being a disproportionate violation of citizens' right to communications, and has raised questions amongst civil society groups about whether some political representatives are more interested in preserving the interests of the entertainment industry than they are in defending the rights of their citizens. 
And here in the United Kingdom there's also concern over a law called the Digital Economy Act that's placing more onus on private intermediaries to police citizen behavior. 
So what we need to recognize is that if we want to have a citizen-centric Internet in the future, we need a broader and more sustained Internet freedom movement. 
After all, companies didn't stop polluting groundwater as a matter of course, or employing 10-year-olds as a matter of course, just because executives woke up one day and decided it was the right thing to do. 
It was the result of decades of sustained activism, shareholder advocacy and consumer advocacy. 
Similarly, governments don't enact intelligent environmental and labor laws just because politicians wake up one day. 
It's the result of very sustained and prolonged political activism that you get the right regulations, and that you get the right corporate behavior. 
We need to make the same approach with the Internet. 
We also are going to need political innovation. 
Eight hundred years ago, approximately, the barons of England decided that the Divine Right of Kings was no longer working for them so well, and they forced King John to sign the Magna Carta, which recognized that even the king who claimed to have divine rule still had to abide by a basic set of rules. 
This set off a cycle of what we can call political innovation, which led eventually to the idea of consent of the governed — which was implemented for the first time by that radical revolutionary government in America across the pond. 
So now we need to figure out how to build consent of the networked. 
And what does that look like? 
At the moment, we still don't know. 
But it's going to require innovation that's not only going to need to focus on politics, on geopolitics, but it's also going to need to deal with questions of business management, investor behavior, consumer choice and even software design and engineering. 
Each and every one of us has a vital part to play in building the kind of world in which government and technology serve the world's people and not the other way around. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

Today I want to talk to you about swimming across the North Pole, across the most northern place in the whole world. 
And perhaps the best place to start is with my late father. 
He was a great storyteller. 
He could tell a story about an event, and so you felt you were absolutely there at the moment. 
And one of the stories he told me so often when I was a young boy was of the first British atomic bomb test. 
He had been there and watched it go off. 
And he said that the explosion was so loud and the light was so intense, that he actually had to put his hands in front of his face to protect his eyes. 
And he said that he could actually see an x-ray of his fingers, because the light was so bright. 
And I know that watching that atomic bomb going off had a very, very big impact on my late father. 
Every holiday I had as a young boy was in a national park. 
What he was trying to do with me was to inspire me to protect the world, and show me just how fragile the world is. 
He also told me about the great explorers. 
He loved history. He would tell me about Captain Scott walking all the way to the South Pole and Sir Edmund Hillary climbing up Mount Everest. 
And so ever since I think I was just six years old, I dreamed of going to the polar regions. 
I really, really wanted to go to the Arctic. 
There was something about that place which drew me to it. 
And, well, sometimes it takes a long time for a dream to come true. 
But seven years ago, I went to the Arctic for the first time. 
And it was so beautiful that I've been back there ever since, for the last seven years. 
I love the place. 
But I have seen that place change beyond all description, just in that short period of time. 
I have seen polar bears walking across very, very thin ice in search of food. 
I have swum in front of glaciers which have retreated so much. 
And I have also, every year, seen less and less sea ice. 
And I wanted the world to know what was happening up there. 
In the two years before my swim, 23 percent of the arctic sea ice cover just melted away. 
And I wanted to really shake the lapels of world leaders to get them to understand what is happening. 
So I decided to do this symbolic swim at the top of the world, in a place which should be frozen over, but which now is rapidly unfreezing. 
And the message was very clear: Climate change is for real, and we need to do something about it. 
And we need to do something about it right now. 
Well, swimming across the North Pole, it's not an ordinary thing to do. 
I mean, just to put it in perspective, 27 degrees is the temperature of a normal indoor swimming pool. 
This morning, the temperature of the English Channel was 18 degrees. 
The passengers who fell off the Titanic fell into water of just five degrees centigrade. 
Fresh water freezes at zero. 
And the water at the North Pole is minus 1.7. 
It's fucking freezing. 
(Laughter) (Applause) I'm sorry, but there is no other way to describe it. (Laughter) 
And so I had to assemble an incredible team around me to help me with this task. 
I assembled this team of 29 people from 10 nations. 
Some people think that swimming is a very solo sport, you just dive into the sea and off you go. 
It couldn't be further from the truth for me. 
And I then went and did a huge amount of training, swimming in icy water, backwards and forwards. 
But the most important thing was to train my mind to prepare myself for what was going to happen. 
And I had to visualize the swim. 
I had to see it from the beginning all the way to the end. 
I had to taste the salt water in my mouth. 
I had to see my coach screaming for me, "Come on Lewis! Come on! Go! Go! Go! Don't slow down!" 
And so I literally swam across the North Pole hundreds and hundreds of times in my mind. 
And then, after a year of training, I felt ready. 
I felt confident that I could actually do this swim. 
So myself and the five members of the team, we hitched a ride on an icebreaker which was going to the North Pole. 
And on day four, we decided to just do a quick five minute test swim. 
I had never swum in water of minus 1.7 degrees before, because it's just impossible to train in those types of conditions. 
So we stopped the ship, as you do. 
We all got down onto the ice, and I then got into my swimming costume and I dived into the sea. 
I have never in my life felt anything like that moment. 
I could barely breathe. I was gasping for air. 
I was hyperventilating so much, and within seconds my hands were numb. 
And it was — the paradox is that you're in freezing cold water, but actually you're on fire. 
I swam as hard as I could for five minutes. 
I remember just trying to get out of the water. 
I climbed out of the ice. 
And I remember taking the goggles off my face and looking down at my hands in sheer shock, because my fingers had swollen so much that they were like sausages. 
And they were swollen so much, I couldn't even close them. 
What had happened is that we are made partially of water, and when water freezes it expands. 
And so what had actually happened is that the cells in my fingers had frozen and expanded. 
And they had burst. And I was in so much agony. 
I immediately got rushed onto the ship and into a hot shower. 
And I remember standing underneath the hot shower and trying to defrost my fingers. 
And I thought, in two days' time, I was going to do this swim across the North Pole. 
I was going to try and do a 20-minute swim, for one kilometer across the North Pole. 
And this dream which I had had ever since I was a young boy with my father, was just going out the window. 
There is no possibility that this was going to happen. 
And I remember then getting out of the shower and realizing I couldn't even feel my hands. 
And for a swimmer, you need to feel your hands because you need to be able to grab the water and pull it through with you. 
The next morning, I woke up and I was in such a state of depression, and all I could think about was Sir Ranulph Fiennes. 
For those of you who don't know him, he's the great British explorer. 
A number of years ago, he tried to ski all the way to the North Pole. 
He accidentally fell through the ice into the sea. 
And after just three minutes in that water, he was able to get himself out. 
And his hands were so badly frostbitten that he had to return to England. 
He went to a local hospital and there they said, "" Ran, there is no possibility of us being able to save these fingers. 
We are going to actually have to take them off. "" And Ran decided to go into his tool shed and take out a saw and do it himself. 
And all I could think of was, if that happened to Ran after three minutes, and I can't feel my hands after five minutes, what on earth is going to happen if I try 20 minutes? 
At the very best, I'm going to end up losing some fingers. 
And at worst, I didn't even want to think about it. 
We carried on sailing through the ice packs towards the North Pole. 
And my close friend David, he saw the way I was thinking, and he came up to me and he said, "" Lewis, I've known you since you were 18 years old. 
I've known you, and I know, Lewis, deep down, right deep down here, that you are going to make this swim. 
I so believe in you Lewis. I've seen the way you've been training. 
And I realize the reason why you're going to do this. 
This is such an important swim. 
We stand at a very, very important moment in this history, and you're going to make a symbolic swim here to try to shake the lapels of world leaders. 
Lewis, have the courage to go in there, because we are going to look after you every moment of it. "" And I just, I got so much confidence from him saying that, because he knew me so well. 
So we carried on sailing and we arrived at the North Pole. 
And we stopped the ship, and it was just as the scientists had predicted. 
There were open patches of sea everywhere. 
And I went down into my cabin and I put on my swimming costume. 
And then the doctor strapped on a chest monitor, which measures my core body temperature and my heart rate. 
And then we walked out onto the ice. 
And I remember looking into the ice, and there were big chunks of white ice in there, and the water was completely black. 
I had never seen black water before. 
And it is 4,200 meters deep. 
And I said to myself, "" Lewis, don't look left, don't look right. 
Just scuttle forward and go for it. "" And so I now want to show you a short video of what happened there on the ice. 
Narrator (Video): We're just sailing out of harbor now, and it's at this stage when one can have a bit of a wobble mentally. 
Everything just looks so gray around here, and looks so cold. 
We've just seen our first polar bears. 
It was absolutely magical. 
A mother and a cub, such a beautiful sight. 
And to think that in 30, 40 years they could become extinct. 
It's a very frightening, very, very frightening thought. 
We're finally at the North Pole. This is months and months and months of dreaming to get here, years of training and planning and preparation. 
Ooh. In a couple of hours' time I'm going to get in here and do my swim. 
It's all a little bit frightening, and emotional. 
Amundson, you ready? Amudson: Ready. 
Lewis Pugh: Ten seconds to swim. Ten seconds to swim. 
Take the goggles off. Take the goggles off! 
Man: Take the shoes. Take the shoes. 
Well done lad! You did it! You did it Lewis! 
You did it! You did it man! 
LP: How on earth did we do that? 
Man: Against the current! You did it against the current! 
(Applause) LP: Thank you very much. Thank you very much. (Applause) 
Thank you so much. 
Audience: Encore! 
(Laughter) LP: I'd just like to end off by just saying this: It took me four months again to feel my hands. 
But was it worth it? Yes, absolutely it was. 
There are very, very few people who don't know now about what is happening in the Arctic. 
And people ask me, "" Lewis, what can we do about climate change? "" And I say to them, I think we need to do three things. 
The first thing we need to do is we need to break this problem down into manageable chunks. 
You saw during that video all those flags. 
Those flags represented the countries from which my team came from. 
And equally, when it comes to climate change, every single country is going to have to make cuts. 
Britain, America, Japan, South Africa, the Congo. 
All of us together, we're all on the same ship together. 
The second thing we need to do is we need to just look back at how far we have come in such a short period of time. 
I remember, just a few years ago, speaking about climate change, and people heckling me in the back and saying it doesn't even exist. 
I've just come back from giving a series of speeches in some of the poorest townships in South Africa to young children as young as 10 years old. 
Four or five children sitting behind a desk, and even in those poorest conditions, they all have a very, very good grasp of climate change. 
We need to believe in ourselves. 
Now is the time to believe. 
We've come a long way. We're doing good. 
But the most important thing we must do is, I think, we must all walk to the end of our lives and turn around, and ask ourselves a most fundamental question. 
And that is, "" What type of world do we want to live in, and what decision are we going to make today to ensure that we all live in a sustainable world? "" Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very, very much. 
(Applause) 

Sergey Brin: I want to discuss a question I know that's been pressing on many of your minds. 
We spoke to you last several years ago. 
And before I get started today, since many of you are wondering, I just wanted to get it out of the way. 
The answer is boxers. 
Now I hope all of you feel better. 
Do you know what this might be? Does anyone know what that is? 
Audience: Yes. 
SB: What is it? 
Audience: It's people logging on to Google around the world. 
SB: Wow, OK. I didn't really realize what it was when I first saw it. 
But this is what helped me see it. 
This is what we run at the office, that actually runs real time. 
Here it's slightly logged. 
But here you can see around the world how people are using Google. 
And every one of those rising dots represents probably about 20, 30 searches, or something like that. 
And they're labeled by color right now, by language. 
So you can see: here we are in the U.S., and they're all coming up red. 
There we are in Monterey — hopefully I can get it right. 
You can see that Japan is busy at night, right there. 
We have Tokyo coming in in Japanese. 
There's a lot of activity in China. 
There's a lot of activity in India. 
There's some in the Middle East, the little pockets. 
And Europe, which is right now in the middle of the day, is going really strong with a whole wide variety of languages. 
Now you can also see, if I turn this around here — hopefully I won't shake the world too much. 
But you can also see, there are places where there's not so much. 
Australia, because there just aren't very many people there. 
And this is something that we should really work on, which is Africa, which is just a few trickles, basically in South Africa and a few other urban cities. 
But basically, what we've noticed is these queries, which come in at thousands per second, are available everywhere there is power. 
And pretty much everywhere there is power, there is the Internet. 
And even in Antarctica — well, at least this time of year — we from time to time will see a query rising up. 
And if we had it plotted correctly, I think the International Space Station would have it, too. 
So this is some of the challenge that we have here, is you can see that it's actually kind of hard to get the — there we go. 
This is how we have to move the bits around to actually get the people the answers to their questions. 
You can see that there's a lot of data running around. 
It has to go all over the world: through fibers, through satellites, through all kinds of connections. 
And it's pretty tricky for us to maintain the latencies as low as we try to. Hopefully your experience is good. 
But you can see also, once again — so some places are much more wired than others, and you can see all the bandwidth across the U.S., going up over to Asia, Europe in the other direction, and so forth. 
Now what I would like to do is just to show you what one second of this activity would look like. 
And if we can switch to slides — all right, here we go. 
So this is slowed down. 
This is what one second looks like. 
And this is what we spend a lot of our time doing, is just making sure that we can keep up with this kind of traffic load. 
Now, each one of those queries has an interesting life and tale of its own. 
I mean, it could be somebody's health, it could be somebody's career, something important to them. 
And it could potentially be something as important as tomato sauce, or in this case, ketchup. 
So this is a query that we had — I guess it's a popular band that was more popular in some parts of the world than others. 
You can see that it got started right here. 
In the U.S. and Spain, it was popular at the same time. 
But it didn't have quite the same pickup in the U.S. 
as it did in Spain. 
And then from Spain, it went to Italy, and then Germany got excited, and maybe right now the U.K. is enjoying it. 
And so I guess the U.S. finally, finally started to like it, too. 
Anyway, you can all enjoy it for yourselves — hopefully that search will work. 
As a part of — you know, part of what we want to do to grow our company is to have more searches. 
And what that means is we want to have more people who are healthy and educated. 
More animals, if they start doing searches as well. 
But partly, we want to make the world a better place, and so one thing that we're embarking upon is the Google Foundation, and we're in the process of setting that up. 
We also have a program already called Google Grants that now serves over 150 different charities around the world, and these are some of the charities that are on there. 
And it's something I'm very excited to be a part of. 
In fact, many of the organizations that are here — the Acumen Fund, I think ApproTEC we have running, I'm not sure if that one's up yet — and many of the people who have presented here are running through Google Grants. 
They run Google ads, and we just give them the ad credit so they can let organizations know. 
One of the earlier results that we got — we have a Singaporean businessman who is now sponsoring a village of 25 Vietnamese girls for their education, and that was one of the earliest results. And as I said, now there have been many, many stories that have come in, because we do have hundreds of charities in there, and the Google Foundation will be an even broader endeavor. 
Now does anybody know who this is? 
A-ha! 
Audience: Orkut. 
SB: Yes! Somebody got it. 
This is Orkut. Is anybody here on Orkut? 
Do we have any? 
Okay, not very many people know about it. 
I'll explain it in a second. 
This is one of our engineers. 
We find that they work better when they're submerged and covered with leaves. 
That's how we churn those products out. 
Orkut had a vision to create a social network. 
I know all of you are thinking, "" Yet another social network. "" But it was a dream of his, and we, basically, when people really want to do something, well, we generally let them. 
So this is what he built. 
We just released it in a test phase last month, and it's been taking off. 
This is our VP of Engineering. 
You can see the red hair, and I don't know if you can see the nose ring there. 
And these are all of his friends. 
So this is how — we just deployed it — we just decided that people would send each other invitations to get into the service, and so we just had the people in our company initially send them out. 
And now we've grown to over 100,000 members. 
And they spread, actually, very quickly, even outside the U.S. 
You can see, even though the U.S. is still the majority here — though, by the way, search-wise, it's only about 30 percent of our traffic — but it's already going to Japan, and the U.K., and Europe, and all the rest of the countries. 
So it's a fun little project. 
There are a variety of demographics. I won't bore you with these. 
But it's just the kind of thing that we just try out for fun and see where it goes. 
And — well, I'll leave you in suspense. 
Larry, you can explain this one. 
Larry Page: Thank you, Sergey. 
So one of the things — both Sergey and I went to a Montessori school, and I think, for some reason, this has been incorporated in Google. 
And Sergey mentioned Orkut, which is something that, you know, Orkut wanted to do in his time, and we call this — at Google, we've embodied this as "" the 20 percent time, "" and the idea is, for 20 percent of your time, if you're working at Google, you can do what you think is the best thing to do. 
And many, many things at Google have come out of that, such as Orkut and also Google News. 
And I think many other things in the world also have come out of this. 
Mendel, who was supposed to be teaching high-school students, actually, you know, discovered the laws of genetics — as a hobby, basically. 
So many, many useful things come out of this. 
And News, which I just mentioned, was started by a researcher. 
And he just — he — after 9 / 11, he got really interested in the news. 
And he said, "" Why don't I look at the news better? "" And so he started clustering it by category, and then he started using it, and then his friends started using it. 
And then, besides just looking cute on a baby's bottom, we made it a Googlette, which is basically a small project at Google. 
So it'd be like three people, or something like that, and they would try to make a product. 
And we wouldn't really be sure if it's going to work or not. 
And in News' case, you know, they had a couple of people working on it for a while, and then more and more people started using it, and then we put it out on the Internet, and more and more people started using it. 
And now it's a real, full-blown project with more people on it. 
And this is how we keep our innovation running. 
I think usually, as companies get bigger, they find it really hard to have small, innovative projects. 
And we had this problem, too, for a while, and we said, "Oh, we really need a new concept." 
You know, the Googlettes — that's a small project that we're not quite sure if it's going to work or not, but we hope it will, and if we do enough of them, some of them will really work and turn out, such as News. 
But then we had a problem because then we had over 100 projects. 
And I don't know about all of you, but I have trouble keeping 100 things in my head at once. 
And we found that if we just wrote all of them down and ordered them — and these are kind of made up. 
Don't really pay attention to them. 
For example, the "" Buy Iceland "" was from a media article. 
We would never do such a crazy thing, but — in any case, we found if we just basically wrote them all down and ordered them, that most people would actually agree what the ordering should be. 
And this was kind of a surprise to me, but we found that as long as you keep the 100 things in your head, which you did by writing them down, that you could do a pretty good job deciding what to do and where to put your resources. 
And so that's basically what we've done since we instituted that a few years ago, and I think it has really allowed us to be innovative and still stay reasonably well-organized. 
The other thing we discovered is that people like to work on things that are important, and so naturally, people sort of migrate to the things that are high priorities. 
I just wanted to highlight a couple of things that are new, or you might not know about. 
And the top thing, actually, is the Deskbar. 
So this is a new — how many of you use the Google Toolbar? 
Raise your hands. 
How many of you use the Deskbar? 
All right, see? You guys should try it out. 
But if you go to our site and search for "" Deskbar, "" you'll get this. 
And the idea is, instead of a toolbar, it's just present all the time on your screen on the bottom, and you can do searches really easily. 
And it's sort of like a better version of the toolbar. 
Thank you, Sergey. 
This is another example of a project that somebody at Google was really passionate about, and they just, they got going, and it's really, really a great product, and really taking off. 
Google Answers is something we started, which is really cool, which lets you — for five to 100 dollars, you can type a question in, and then there's a pool of researchers that go out and research it for you, and it's guaranteed and all that, and you can get actually very good answers to things without spending all that time yourself. 
Froogle lets you search shopping information, and Blogger lets you publish things. 
But all of these — well, these were all sort of innovative things that we did that — you know, we try many, many different things in our company. 
We also like to innovate in our physical space, and we noticed in meetings, you know, you have to wait a long time for projectors to turn on and off, and they're noisy, so people shut them off. 
And we didn't like that, so we actually, in maybe a couple of weeks, we built these little enclosures that enclosed the projectors, and so we can leave them on all the time and they're completely silent. 
And as a result, we were able to build some software that also lets us manage a meeting, so when you walk into a meeting room now, it lists all the meetings that are happening, you can very easily take notes, and they just get emailed automatically to all the people that were present in the meeting. 
And as we become more of a global company, we find these things really affect us — you know, can we work effectively with people who aren't in the room? 
And things like that. And simple things like this can really make a big difference. 
We also have a lot of engineers in those meetings, and they don't always do their laundry as much as they should. 
And so we found it was pretty helpful to have laundry machines, for our younger employees especially, and... 
we also allow dogs and things like that, and we've had, I think, a really fun culture at our company, which helps people work and enjoy what they're doing. 
This is actually our "" cult picture. "" I just wanted to show quickly. 
We had this on our website for a while, but we found that after we put it on our website, we didn't get any job applications anymore. 
But anyway, every year we've taken the whole company on a ski trip. 
A lot of work happens in companies from people knowing each other, and informally. 
And I think we've done a good job encouraging that. 
It makes it a really fun place to work. 
Along with our logos, too, which I think really embody our culture when we change things. 
In the early days, we were actually advised we should never change our logo because we should establish our brand, you know, because, you know, you'd never want to change your logo. 
You want it to be consistent. 
And we said, "" Well, that doesn't sound so much fun. 
Why don't we try changing it every day? "" One of the things that really excites me about what we're doing now is we have this thing called AdSense, and this is a little bit foreshadowing — this is from before Dean dropped out. 
But the idea is, like, on a newspaper, for example, we show you relevant ads. 
And this is hard to read, but this says "" Battle for New Hampshire: Howard Dean for President "" — articles on Howard Dean. 
And these ads are generated automatically — like in this case, on the Washington Post — from the content on the site. 
And so we use our over 150,000 advertisers and millions of advertisements, so we pick the one that's most relevant to what you're actually looking at, much as we do on search. 
So the idea is we can make advertising useful, not just annoying, right? 
And the nice thing about this, we have a self-serve program, and many thousands of websites have signed up, and this let's them really make money. And I — you know, there's a number of people I met — I met this guy who runs a conservation site at a party, and he said, "" You know, I wasn't making any money. 
I just put this thing on my site and I'm making 10,000 dollars a month. 
And, you know, thank you. 
I don't have to do my other job now. "" And I think this is really important for us, because it makes the Internet work better. 
It makes content get better, it makes searching work better, when people can really make their livelihood from producing great content. 
So this session is supposed to be about the future, so I'd thought I'd talk at least briefly about it. 
And the idea behind this is to do the perfect job doing search, you really have to be smart. 
Because you can type, you know, any kind of thing into Google, and you expect an answer back, right? 
But finding things is tricky, and so you really want intelligence. 
And in fact, the ultimate search engine would be smart. 
It would be artificial intelligence. 
And so that's something we work on, and we even have some people who are excited enough and crazy enough to work on it now, and that's really their goal. 
So we always hope that Google will be smart, but we're always surprised when other people think that it is. 
And so I just wanted to give a funny example of this. 
This is a blog from Iraq, and it's not really what I'm going to talk about, but I just wanted to show you an example. 
Maybe, Sergey, you can highlight this. 
So we decided — actually, the highlight's right there. Oh, thank you. 
So, "" related searches, "" right there. You can't see it that well, but we decided we should put in this feature into our AdSense ads, called "" related searches. "" And so we'd say, you know, "" Did you mean 'search for' "" — what is this, in this case, "" Saddam Hussein, "" because this blog is about Iraq — and you know, in addition to the ads, and we thought this would be a great idea. 
And so there is this blog of a young person who was kind of depressed, and he said, "You know, I'm sleeping a lot." 
He was just kind of writing about his life. 
And our algorithms — not a person, of course, but our algorithms, our computers — read his blog and decided that the related search was, "" I am bored. "" And he read this, and he thought a person had decided that he was boring, and it was very unfortunate, and he said, "" You know, what are these, you know, bastards at Google doing? 
Why don't they like my blog? "" And so then we read his blog, which was getting — you know, sort of going from bad to worse, and we said the related search was, "" Retards. "" And then, you know, he got even more mad, and he wrote — like, started swearing and so on. 
And then we produced "" You suck. "" And finally, it ended with "" Kiss my ass. "" And so basically, he thought he was dealing with something smart, and of course, you know, we just sort of wrote this program and we tried it out, and it didn't quite work, and we don't have this feature anymore. 
So with that, maybe I can switch back to the world. 
I wanted to end just by saying that there's a couple things that really make me excited to be involved with Google, and one of those is that we're able to make money largely through advertising, and one of the benefits that I didn't expect from that was that we're able to serve everyone in the world without worrying about, you know, places that don't have as much money. 
So we don't have to worry about our products being sold, for example, for less money in places that are poor, and then they get re-imported into the U.S. — for example, with the drug industry. 
And I think we're really lucky to have that kind of business model because everyone in the world has access to our search, and I think that's a tremendous, tremendous benefit. 
The other thing I wanted to mention just briefly is that we have a tremendous ability and responsibility to provide people the right information, and we view ourselves like a newspaper or a magazine — that we should provide very objective information. 
And so in our search results, we never accept payment for our search results. 
We accept payment for advertising, and we mark it as such. 
And that's unlike many of our competitors. 
And I think decisions we're able to make like that have a tremendous impact on the world, and it makes me really proud to be involved with Google. 
So thank you. 

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

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

Have you ever wanted to stay young a little longer and put off aging? 
This is a dream of the ages. 
But scientists have for a long time thought this just was never going to be possible. 
They thought you just wear out, there's nothing you can do about it — kind of like an old shoe. 
But if you look in nature, you see that different kinds of animals can have really different lifespans. 
Now these animals are different from one another, because they have different genes. 
So that suggests that somewhere in these genes, somewhere in the DNA, are genes for aging, genes that allow them to have different lifespans. 
So if there are genes like that, then you can imagine that, if you could change one of the genes in an experiment, an aging gene, maybe you could slow down aging and extend lifespan. 
And if you could do that, then you could find the genes for aging. 
And if they exist and you can find them, then maybe one could eventually do something about it. 
So we've set out to look for genes that control aging. 
And we didn't study any of these animals. 
Instead, we studied a little, tiny, round worm called C. elegans, which is just about the size of a comma in a sentence. 
And we were really optimistic that we could find something because there had been a report of a long-lived mutant. 
So we started to change genes at random, looking for long-lived animals. 
And we were very lucky to find that mutations that damage one single gene called daf-2 doubled the lifespan of the little worm. 
So you can see in black, after a month — they're very short-lived; that's why we like to study them for studies of aging — in black, after a month, the normal worms are all dead. 
But at that time, most of the mutant worms are still alive. 
And it isn't until twice as long that they're all dead. 
And now I want to show what they actually look like in this movie here. 
So the first thing you're going to see is the normal worm when it's about college student age — a young adult. 
It's quite a cute little fellow. 
And next you're going to see the long-lived mutant when it's young. 
So this animal is going to live twice as long. 
Is it miserable? It doesn't seem to be. 
It's active. You can't tell the difference really. 
And they can be completely fertile — have the same number of progeny as the normal worms do. 
Now get out your handkerchiefs here. 
You're going to see, in just two weeks, the normal worms are old. 
You can see the little head moving down at the bottom there. 
But everything else is just lying there. 
The animal's clearly in the nursing home. 
And if you look at the tissues of the animal, they're starting to deteriorate. 
You know, even if you've never seen one of these little C. elegans — which probably most of you haven't seen one — you can tell they're old — isn't that interesting? 
So there's something about aging that's kind of universal. 
And now here is the daf-2 mutant. 
One gene is changed out of 20,000, and look at it. 
It's the same age, but it's not in the nursing home; it's going skiing. 
This is what's really cool: it's aging more slowly. 
It takes this worm two days to age as much as the normal worm ages in one day. 
And when I tell people about this, they tend to think of maybe an 80 or 90 year-old person who looks really good for being 90 or 80. 
But it's really more like this: let's say you're a 30 year-old guy — or in your 30s — and you're a bachelor and you're dating people. 
And you meet someone you really like, you get to know her. 
And you're in a restaurant, and you say, "" Well how old are you? "" She says, "" I'm 60. "" That's what it's like. And you would never know. 
You would never know, until she told you. 
(Laughter) Okay. 
So what is the daf-2 gene? 
Well as you know, genes, which are part of the DNA, they're instructions to make a protein that does something. 
And the daf-2 gene encodes a hormone receptor. 
So what you see in the picture there is a cell with a hormone receptor in red punching through the edge of the cell. 
So part of it is like a baseball glove. 
Part of it's on the outside, and it's catching the hormone as it comes by in green. 
And the other part is on the inside where it sends signals into the cell. 
Okay, so what is the daf-2 receptor telling the inside of the cell? 
I just told you that, if you make a mutation in the daf-2 gene cell, that you get a receptor that doesn't work as well; the animal lives longer. 
So that means that the normal function of this hormone receptor is to speed up aging. 
That's what that arrow means. 
It speeds up aging. It makes it go faster. 
So it's like the animal has the grim reaper inside of itself, speeding up aging. 
So this is altogether really, really interesting. 
It says that aging is subject to control by the genes, and specifically by hormones. 
So what kind of hormones are these? 
There's lots of hormones. There's testosterone, adrenalin. 
You know about a lot of them. 
These hormones are similar to hormones that we have in our bodies. 
The daf-2 hormone receptor is very similar to the receptor for the hormone insulin and IGF-1. 
Now you've all heard of at least insulin. 
Insulin is a hormone that promotes the uptake of nutrients into your tissues after you eat a meal. 
And the hormone IGF-1 promotes growth. 
So these functions were known for these hormones for a long time, but our studies suggested that maybe they had a third function that nobody knew about — maybe they also affect aging. 
And it's looking like that's the case. 
So after we made our discoveries with little C. elegans, people who worked on other kinds of animals started asking, if we made the same daf-2 mutation, the hormone receptor mutation, in other animals, will they live longer? 
And that is the case in flies. 
If you change this hormone pathway in flies, they live longer. 
And also in mice — and mice are mammals like us. 
So it's an ancient pathway, because it must have arisen a long time ago in evolution such that it still works in all these animals. 
And also, the common precursor also gave rise to people. 
So maybe it's working in people the same way. 
And there are hints of this. 
So for example, there was one study that was done in a population of Ashkenazi Jews in New York City. 
And just like any population, most of the people live to be about 70 or 80, but some live to be 90 or 100. 
And what they found was that people who lived to 90 or 100 were more likely to have daf-2 mutations — that is, changes in the gene that encodes the receptor for IGF-1. 
And these changes made the gene not act as well as the normal gene would have acted. 
It damaged the gene. 
So those are hints suggesting that humans are susceptible to the effects of the hormones for aging. 
So the next question, of course, is: Is there any effect on age-related disease? 
As you age, you're much more likely to get cancer, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, all sorts of diseases. 
It turns out that these long-lived mutants are more resistant to all these diseases. 
They hardly get cancer, and when they do it's not as severe. 
So it's really interesting, and it makes sense in a way, that they're still young, so why would they be getting diseases of aging until their old? 
So it suggests that, if we could have a therapeutic or a pill to take to replicate some of these effects in humans, maybe we would have a way of combating lots of different age-related diseases all at once. 
So how can a hormone ultimately affect the rate of aging? 
How could that work? 
Well it turns out that in the daf-2 mutants, a whole lot of genes are switched on in the DNA that encode proteins that protect the cells and the tissues, and repair damage. 
And the way that they're switched on is by a gene regulator protein called FOXO. 
So in a daf-2 mutant — you see that I have the X drawn here through the receptor. 
The receptor isn't working as well. 
Under those conditions, the FOXO protein in blue has gone into the nucleus — that little compartment there in the middle of the cell — and it's sitting down on a gene binding to it. 
You see one gene. There are lots of genes actually that bind on FOXO. 
And it's just sitting on one of them. 
So FOXO turns on a lot of genes. 
And the genes it turns on includes antioxidant genes, genes I call carrot-giver genes, whose protein products actually help other proteins to function well — to fold correctly and function correctly. 
And it can also escort them to the garbage cans of the cell and recycle them if they're damaged. 
DNA repair genes are more active in these animals. 
And the immune system is more active. 
And many of these different genes, we've shown, actually contribute to the long lifespan of the daf-2 mutant. 
So it's really interesting. 
These animals have within them the latent capacity to live much longer than they normally do. 
They have the ability to protect themselves from many kinds of damage, which we think makes them live longer. 
So what about the normal worm? 
Well when the daf-2 receptor is active, then it triggers a series of events that prevent FOXO from getting into the nucleus where the DNA is. 
So it can't turn the genes on. 
That's how it works. That's why we don't see the long lifespan, until we have the daf-2 mutant. 
But what good is this for the worm? 
Well we think that insulin and IGF-1 hormones are hormones that are particularly active under favorable conditions — in the good times — when food is plentiful and there's not a lot of stress in the environment. 
Then they promote the uptake of nutrients. 
You can store the food, use it for energy, grow, etc. 
But what we think is that, under conditions of stress, the levels of these hormones drop — for example, having limited food supply. 
And that, we think, is registered by the animal as a danger signal, a signal that things are not okay and that it should roll out its protective capacity. 
So it activates FOXO, FOXO goes to the DNA, and that triggers the expression of these genes that improves the ability of the cell to protect itself and repair itself. 
And that's why we think the animals live longer. 
So you can think of FOXO as being like a building superintendent. 
So maybe he's a little bit lazy, but he's there, he's taking care of the building. 
But it's deteriorating. 
And then suddenly, he learns that there's going to be a hurricane. 
So he doesn't actually do anything himself. 
He gets on the telephone — just like FOXO gets on the DNA — and he calls up the roofer, the window person, the painter, the floor person. 
And they all come and they fortify the house. 
And then the hurricane comes through, and the house is in much better condition than it would normally have been in. 
And not only that, it can also just last longer, even if there isn't a hurricane. 
So that's the concept here for how we think this life extension ability exists. 
Now the really cool thing about FOXO is that there are different forms of it. 
We all have FOXO genes, but we don't all have exactly the same form of the FOXO gene. 
Just like we all have eyes, but some of us have blue eyes and some of us have brown eyes. 
And there are certain forms of the FOXO gene that have found to be more frequently present in people who live to be 90 or 100. 
And that's the case all over the world, as you can see from these stars. 
And each one of these stars represents a population where scientists have asked, "" Okay, are there differences in the type of FOXO genes among people who live a really long time? "" and there are. 
We don't know the details of how this works, but we do know then that FOXO genes can impact the lifespan of people. 
And that means that, maybe if we tweak it a little bit, we can increase the health and longevity of people. 
So this is really exciting to me. 
A FOXO is a protein that we found in these little, round worms to affect lifespan, and here it affects lifespan in people. 
So we've been trying in our lab now to develop drugs that will activate this FOXO cell using human cells now in order to try and come up with drugs that will delay aging and age-related diseases. 
And I'm really optimistic that this is going to work. 
There are lots of different proteins that are known to affect aging. 
And for at least one of them, there is a drug. 
There's one called TOR, which is another nutrient sensor, like the insulin pathway. 
And mutations that damage the TOR gene — just like the daf-2 mutations — extend lifespan in worms and flies and mice. 
But in this case, there's already a drug called rapamycin that binds to the TOR protein and inhibits its activity. 
And you can take rapamycin and give it to a mouse — even when it's pretty old, like age 60 for a human, that old for a mouse — if you give the mouse rapamycin, it will live longer. 
Now I don't want you all to go out taking rapamycin. 
It is a drug for people, but the reason is it suppresses the immune system. 
So people take it to prevent organ transplants from being rejected. 
So this may not be the perfect drug for staying young longer. 
But still, here in the year 2011, there's a drug that you can give to mice at a pretty old age that will extend their lifespan, which comes out of this science that's been done in all these different animals. 
So I'm really optimistic, and I think it won't be too long, I hope, before this age-old dream begins to come true. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Matt Ridley: Thank you, Cynthia. 
Let me get this straight. 
Although you're looking for a drug that can solve aging in old men like me, what you could do now pretty well in the lab, if you were allowed ethically, is start a human life from scratch with altered genes that would make it live for a lot longer? 
CK: Ah, so the kinds of drugs I was talking about would not change the genes, they would just bind to the protein itself and change its activity. 
So if you stop taking the drug, the protein would go back to normal. 
You could change the genes in principle. 
There isn't the technology to do that. 
But I don't think that's a good idea. 
And the reason is that these hormones, like the insulin and the IGF hormones and the TOR pathway, they're essential. 
If you knock them out completely, then you're very sick. 
So it might be that you would just have to fine tune it very carefully to get the benefits without getting any problems. 
And I think that's much better, that kind of control would be much better as a drug. 
And also, there are other ways of activating FOXO that don't even involve insulin or IGF-1 that might even be safer. 
MR: I wasn't suggesting that I was going to go and do it, but... 
(Laughter) There's a phenomenon which you have written about and spoken about, which is a negligible senescence. 
There are some creatures on this planet already that don't really do aging. 
Just move to one side for us, if you would. 
CK: There are. There are some animals that don't seem to age. 
For example, there are some tortoises called Blanding's turtles. 
And they grow to be about this size. 
And they've been tagged, and they've been found to be 70 years old. 
And when you look at these 70 year-old turtles, you can't tell the difference, just by looking, between those turtles and 20 year-old turtles. 
And the 70 year-old ones, actually they're better at scouting out the good nesting places, and they also have more progeny every year. 
And there are other examples of these kinds of animals, like turns, certain kinds of birds are like this. 
And nobody knows if they really can live forever, or what keeps them from aging. 
It's not clear. 
If you look at birds, which live a long time, cells from the birds tend to be more resistant to a lot of different environmental stresses like high temperature or hydrogen peroxide, things like that. 
And our long-lived mutants are too. 
They're more resistant to these kinds of stresses. 
So it could be that the pathways that I've been talking about, which are set to run really quickly in the worm, have a different normal set point in something like a bird, so that a bird can live a lot longer. 
And maybe they're even set really differently in animals with no senescence at all — but we don't know. 
MR: But what you're talking about here is not extending human lifespan by preventing death, so much as extending human youthspan. 
CK: Yes, that's right. 
It's more like, say, if you were a dog. 
You notice that you're getting old, and you look at your human and you think, "" Why isn't this human getting old? "" They're not getting old in the dog's lifespan. 
It's more like that. 
But now we're the human looking out and imagining a different human. 
MR: Thank you very much indeed, Cynthia Kenyon. 
(Applause) 

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

How many of you have checked your email today? 
Come on, raise your hands. 
How many of you are checking it right now? 
(Laughter) And how about finances? Anybody check that today? 
Credit card, investment account? 
How about this week? 
Now, how about your household energy use? 
Anybody check that today? 
This week? Last week? 
A few energy geeks spread out across the room. 
It's good to see you guys. 
But the rest of us — this is a room filled with people who are passionate about the future of this planet, and even we aren't paying attention to the energy use that's driving climate change. 
The woman in the photo with me is Harriet. 
We met her on our first family vacation. 
Harriet's paying attention to her energy use, and she is decidedly not an energy geek. 
This is the story of how Harriet came to pay attention. 
This is coal, the most common source of electricity on the planet, and there's enough energy in this coal to light this bulb for more than a year. 
But unfortunately, between here and here, most of that energy is lost to things like transmission leakage and heat. 
In fact, only 10 percent ends up as light. 
So this coal will last a little bit more than a month. 
If you wanted to light this bulb for a year, you'd need this much coal. 
The bad news here is that, for every unit of energy we use, we waste nine. 
That means there's good news, because for every unit of energy we save, we save the other nine. 
So the question is, how can we get the people in this room and across the globe to start paying attention to the energy we're using, and start wasting less of it? 
The answer comes from a behavioral science experiment that was run one hot summer, 10 years ago, and only 90 miles from here, in San Marcos, California. 
Graduate students put signs on every door in a neighborhood, asking people to turn off their air conditioning and turn on their fans. 
One quarter of the homes received a message that said, did you know you could save 54 dollars a month this summer? 
Turn off your air conditioning, turn on your fans. 
Another group got an environmental message. 
And still a third group got a message about being good citizens, preventing blackouts. 
Most people guessed that money-saving message would work best of all. 
In fact, none of these messages worked. 
They had zero impact on energy consumption. 
It was as if the grad students hadn't shown up at all. 
But there was a fourth message, and this message simply said, "" When surveyed, 77 percent of your neighbors said that they turned off their air conditioning and turned on their fans. 
Please join them. Turn off your air conditioning and turn on your fans. "" And wouldn't you know it, they did. 
The people who received this message showed a marked decrease in energy consumption simply by being told what their neighbors were doing. 
So what does this tell us? 
Well, if something is inconvenient, even if we believe in it, moral suasion, financial incentives, don't do much to move us — but social pressure, that's powerful stuff. 
And harnessed correctly, it can be a powerful force for good. 
In fact, it already is. 
Inspired by this insight, my friend Dan Yates and I started a company called Opower. 
We built software and partnered with utility companies who wanted to help their customers save energy. 
We deliver personalized home energy reports that show people how their consumption compares to their neighbors in similar-sized homes. 
Just like those effective door hangers, we have people comparing themselves to their neighbors, and then we give everyone targeted recommendations to help them save. 
We started with paper, we moved to a mobile application, web, and now even a controllable thermostat, and for the last five years we've been running the largest behavioral science experiment in the world. 
And it's working. 
Ordinary homeowners and renters have saved more than 250 million dollars on their energy bills, and we're just getting started. 
This year alone, in partnership with more than 80 utilities in six countries, we're going to generate another two terawatt hours of electricity savings. 
Now, the energy geeks in the room know two terawatt hours, but for the rest of us, two terawatt hours is more than enough energy to power every home in St. Louis and Salt Lake City combined for more than a year. 
Two terawatt hours, it's roughly half what the U.S. solar industry produced last year. 
And two terawatt hours? In terms of coal, we'd need to burn 34 of these wheelbarrows every minute around the clock every day for an entire year to get two terawatt hours of electricity. 
And we're not burning anything. 
We're just motivating people to pay attention and change their behavior. 
But we're just one company, and this is just scratching the surface. 
Twenty percent of the electricity in homes is wasted, and when I say wasted, I don't mean that people have inefficient lightbulbs. They may. 
I mean we leave the lights on in empty rooms, and we leave the air conditioning on when nobody's home. 
That's 40 billion dollars a year wasted on electricity that does not contribute to our well-being but does contribute to climate change. 
That's 40 billion — with a B — every year in the U.S. alone. 
That's half our coal usage right there. 
Now thankfully, some of the world's best material scientists are looking to replace coal with sustainable resources like these, and this is both fantastic and essential. 
But the most overlooked resource to get us to a sustainable energy future, it isn't on this slide. 
It's in this room. It's you, and it's me. 
And we can harness this resource with no new material science simply by applying behavioral science. 
We can do it today, we know it works, and it will save us money right away. 
So what are we waiting for? 
Well, in most places, utility regulation hasn't changed much since Thomas Edison. 
Utilities are still rewarded when their customers waste energy. 
They ought to be rewarded for helping their customers save it. 
But this story is much more than about household energy use. 
Take a look at the Prius. 
It's efficient not only because Toyota invested in material science but because they invested in behavioral science. 
The dashboard that shows drivers how much energy they're saving in real time makes former speed demons drive more like cautious grandmothers. 
Which brings us back to Harriet. 
We met her on our first family vacation. 
She came over to meet my young daughter, and she was tickled to learn that my daughter's name is also Harriet. 
She asked me what I did for a living, and I told her, I work with utilities to help people save energy. 
It was then that her eyes lit up. 
She looked at me, and she said, "" You're exactly the person I need to talk to. 
You see, two weeks ago, my husband and I got a letter in the mail from our utility. 
It told us we were using twice as much energy as our neighbors. "" (Laughter) "" And for the last two weeks, all we can think about, talk about, and even argue about, is what we should be doing to save energy. 
We did everything that letter told us to do, and still I know there must be more. 
Now I'm here with a genuine expert. 
Tell me. What should I do to save energy? "" There are many experts who can help answer Harriet's question. 
My goal is to make sure we are all asking it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I've been a journalist now since I was about 17, and it's an interesting industry to be in at the moment, because as you all know, there's a huge amount of upheaval going on in media, and most of you probably know this from the business angle, which is that the business model is pretty screwed, and as my grandfather would say, the profits have all been gobbled up by Google. 
So it's a really interesting time to be a journalist, but the upheaval that I'm interested in is not on the output side. 
It's on the input side. It's concern with how we get information and how we gather the news. 
And that's changed, because we've had a huge shift in the balance of power from the news organizations to the audience. 
And the audience for such a long time was in a position where they didn't have any way of affecting news or making any change. They couldn't really connect. 
And that's changed irrevocably. 
My first connection with the news media was in 1984, the BBC had a one-day strike. 
I wasn't happy. I was angry. I couldn't see my cartoons. 
So I wrote a letter. 
And it's a very effective way of ending your hate mail: "" Love Markham, Aged 4. "" Still works. 
I'm not sure if I had any impact on the one-day strike, but what I do know is that it took them three weeks to get back to me. 
And that was the round journey. It took that long for anyone to have any impact and get some feedback. 
And that's changed now because, as journalists, we interact in real time. We're not in a position where the audience is reacting to news. 
We're reacting to the audience, and we're actually relying on them. 
They're helping us find the news. They're helping us figure out what is the best angle to take and what is the stuff that they want to hear. 
So it's a real-time thing. It's much quicker. It's happening on a constant basis, and the journalist is always playing catch up. 
To give an example of how we rely on the audience, on the 5th of September in Costa Rica, an earthquake hit. 
It was a 7.6 magnitude. It was fairly big. 
And 60 seconds is the amount of time it took for it to travel 250 kilometers to Managua. 
So the ground shook in Managua 60 seconds after it hit the epicenter. 
Thirty seconds later, the first message went onto Twitter, and this was someone saying "" temblor, "" which means earthquake. 
So 60 seconds was how long it took for the physical earthquake to travel. 
Thirty seconds later news of that earthquake had traveled all around the world, instantly. Everyone in the world, hypothetically, had the potential to know that an earthquake was happening in Managua. 
And that happened because this one person had a documentary instinct, which was to post a status update, which is what we all do now, so if something happens, we put our status update, or we post a photo, we post a video, and it all goes up into the cloud in a constant stream. 
And what that means is just constant, huge volumes of data going up. 
It's actually staggering. When you look at the numbers, every minute there are 72 more hours of video on YouTube. 
So that's, every second, more than an hour of video gets uploaded. 
And in photos, Instagram, 58 photos are uploaded to Instagram a second. 
More than three and a half thousand photos go up onto Facebook. 
So by the time I'm finished talking here, there'll be 864 more hours of video on Youtube than there were when I started, and two and a half million more photos on Facebook and Instagram than when I started. 
So it's an interesting position to be in as a journalist, because we should have access to everything. 
Any event that happens anywhere in the world, I should be able to know about it pretty much instantaneously, as it happens, for free. 
And that goes for every single person in this room. 
The only problem is, when you have that much information, you have to find the good stuff, and that can be incredibly difficult when you're dealing with those volumes. 
And nowhere was this brought home more than during Hurricane Sandy. So what you had in Hurricane Sandy was a superstorm, the likes of which we hadn't seen for a long time, hitting the iPhone capital of the universe — (Laughter) — and you got volumes of media like we'd never seen before. 
And that meant that journalists had to deal with fakes, so we had to deal with old photos that were being reposted. 
We had to deal with composite images that were merging photos from previous storms. 
We had to deal with images from films like "" The Day After Tomorrow. "" (Laughter) And we had to deal with images that were so realistic it was nearly difficult to tell if they were real at all. (Laughter) 
But joking aside, there were images like this one from Instagram which was subjected to a grilling by journalists. 
They weren't really sure. It was filtered in Instagram. 
The lighting was questioned. Everything was questioned about it. 
And it turned out to be true. It was from Avenue C in downtown Manhattan, which was flooded. 
And the reason that they could tell that it was real was because they could get to the source, and in this case, these guys were New York food bloggers. 
They were well respected. They were known. 
So this one wasn't a debunk, it was actually something that they could prove. 
And that was the job of the journalist. It was filtering all this stuff. 
And you were, instead of going and finding the information and bringing it back to the reader, you were holding back the stuff that was potentially damaging. 
And finding the source becomes more and more important — finding the good source — and Twitter is where most journalists now go. 
It's like the de facto real-time newswire, if you know how to use it, because there is so much on Twitter. 
And a good example of how useful it can be but also how difficult was the Egyptian revolution in 2011. 
As a non-Arabic speaker, as someone who was looking from the outside, from Dublin, Twitter lists, and lists of good sources, people we could establish were credible, were really important. 
And how do you build a list like that from scratch? 
Well, it can be quite difficult, but you have to know what to look for. 
This visualization was done by an Italian academic. 
He's called André Pannison, and he basically took the Twitter conversation in Tahrir Square on the day that Hosni Mubarak would eventually resign, and the dots you can see are retweets, so when someone retweets a message, a connection is made between two dots, and the more times that message is retweeted by other people, the more you get to see these nodes, these connections being made. 
And it's an amazing way of visualizing the conversation, but what you get is hints at who is more interesting and who is worth investigating. 
And as the conversation grew and grew, it became more and more lively, and eventually you were left with this huge, big, rhythmic pointer of this conversation. 
You could find the nodes, though, and then you went, and you go, "" Right, I've got to investigate these people. 
These are the ones that are obviously making sense. 
Let's see who they are. "" Now in the deluge of information, this is where the real-time web gets really interesting for a journalist like myself, because we have more tools than ever to do that kind of investigation. 
And when you start digging into the sources, you can go further and further than you ever could before. 
Sometimes you come across a piece of content that is so compelling, you want to use it, you're dying to use it, but you're not 100 percent sure if you can because you don't know if the source is credible. 
You don't know if it's a scrape. You don't know if it's a re-upload. 
And you have to do that investigative work. 
And this video, which I'm going to let run through, was one we discovered a couple of weeks ago. 
Video: Getting real windy in just a second. 
(Rain and wind sounds) (Explosion) Oh, shit! 
Markham Nolan: Okay, so now if you're a news producer, this is something you'd love to run with, because obviously, this is gold. 
You know? This is a fantastic reaction from someone, very genuine video that they've shot in their back garden. 
But how do you find if this person, if it's true, if it's faked, or if it's something that's old and that's been reposted? 
So we set about going to work on this video, and the only thing that we had to go on was the username on the YouTube account. 
There was only one video posted to that account, and the username was Rita Krill. 
And we didn't know if Rita existed or if it was a fake name. 
But we started looking, and we used free Internet tools to do so. 
The first one was called Spokeo, which allowed us to look for Rita Krills. 
So we looked all over the U.S. We found them in New York, we found them in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Florida. 
So we went and we looked for a second free Internet tool called Wolfram Alpha, and we checked the weather reports for the day in which this video had been uploaded, and when we went through all those various cities, we found that in Florida, there were thunderstorms and rain on the day. 
So we went to the white pages, and we found, we looked through the Rita Krills in the phonebook, and we looked through a couple of different addresses, and that took us to Google Maps, where we found a house. 
And we found a house with a swimming pool that looked remarkably like Rita's. So we went back to the video, and we had to look for clues that we could cross-reference. 
So if you look in the video, there's the big umbrella, there's a white lilo in the pool, there are some unusually rounded edges in the swimming pool, and there's two trees in the background. 
And we went back to Google Maps, and we looked a little bit closer, and sure enough, there's the white lilo, there are the two trees, there's the umbrella. It's actually folded in this photo. 
Little bit of trickery. And there are the rounded edges on the swimming pool. 
So we were able to call Rita, clear the video, make sure that it had been shot, and then our clients were delighted because they were able to run it without being worried. 
Sometimes the search for truth, though, is a little bit less flippant, and it has much greater consequences. 
Syria has been really interesting for us, because obviously a lot of the time you're trying to debunk stuff that can be potentially war crime evidence, so this is where YouTube actually becomes the most important repository of information about what's going on in the world. 
So this video, I'm not going to show you the whole thing, because it's quite gruesome, but you'll hear some of the sounds. 
This is from Hama. 
Video: (Shouting) And what this video shows, when you watch the whole thing through, is bloody bodies being taken out of a pickup truck and thrown off a bridge. 
The allegations were that these guys were Muslim Brotherhood and they were throwing Syrian Army officers' bodies off the bridge, and they were cursing and using blasphemous language, and there were lots of counterclaims about who they were, and whether or not they were what the video said it was. 
So we talked to some sources in Hama who we had been back and forth with on Twitter, and we asked them about this, and the bridge was interesting to us because it was something we could identify. 
Three different sources said three different things about the bridge. 
They said, one, the bridge doesn't exist. 
Another one said the bridge does exist, but it's not in Hama. It's somewhere else. 
And the third one said, "" I think the bridge does exist, but the dam upstream of the bridge was closed, so the river should actually have been dry, so this doesn't make sense. "" So that was the only one that gave us a clue. 
We looked through the video for other clues. 
We saw the distinctive railings, which we could use. 
We looked at the curbs. The curbs were throwing shadows south, so we could tell the bridge was running east-west across the river. 
It had black-and-white curbs. 
As we looked at the river itself, you could see there's a concrete stone on the west side. There's a cloud of blood. 
That's blood in the river. So the river is flowing south to north. That's what that tells me. 
And also, as you look away from the bridge, there's a divot on the left-hand side of the bank, and the river narrows. 
So onto Google Maps we go, and we start looking through literally every single bridge. 
We go to the dam that we talked about, we start just literally going through every time that road crosses the river, crossing off the bridges that don't match. 
We're looking for one that crosses east-west. 
And we get to Hama. We get all the way from the dam to Hama and there's no bridge. 
So we go a bit further. We switch to the satellite view, and we find another bridge, and everything starts to line up. 
The bridge looks like it's crossing the river east to west. 
So this could be our bridge. And we zoom right in. 
We start to see that it's got a median, so it's a two-lane bridge. 
And it's got the black-and-white curbs that we saw in the video, and as we click through it, you can see someone's uploaded photos to go with the map, which is very handy, so we click into the photos. And the photos start showing us more detail that we can cross-reference with the video. 
The first thing that we see is we see black-and-white curbing, which is handy because we've seen that before. 
We see the distinctive railing that we saw the guys throwing the bodies over. 
And we keep going through it until we're certain that this is our bridge. 
So what does that tell me? I've got to go back now to my three sources and look at what they told me: the one who said the bridge didn't exist, the one who said the bridge wasn't in Hama, and the one guy who said, "" Yes, the bridge does exist, but I'm not sure about the water levels. "" Number three is looking like the most truthful all of a sudden, and we've been able to find that out using some free Internet tools sitting in a cubicle in an office in Dublin in the space of 20 minutes. 
And that's part of the joy of this. Although the web is running like a torrent, there's so much information there that it's incredibly hard to sift and getting harder every day, if you use them intelligently, you can find out incredible information. 
Given a couple of clues, I could probably find out a lot of things about most of you in the audience that you might not like me finding out. 
But what it tells me is that, at a time when there's more — there's a greater abundance of information than there ever has been, it's harder to filter, we have greater tools. 
We have free Internet tools that allow us, help us do this kind of investigation. 
We have algorithms that are smarter than ever before, and computers that are quicker than ever before. 
But here's the thing. Algorithms are rules. They're binary. 
They're yes or no, they're black or white. 
Truth is never binary. Truth is a value. 
Truth is emotional, it's fluid, and above all, it's human. 
No matter how quick we get with computers, no matter how much information we have, you'll never be able to remove the human from the truth-seeking exercise, because in the end, it is a uniquely human trait. 
Thanks very much. (Applause) 

Those of you who have seen the film "" Moneyball, "" or have read the book by Michael Lewis, will be familiar with the story of Billy Beane. 
Billy was supposed to be a tremendous ballplayer; all the scouts told him so. 
They told his parents that they predicted that he was going to be a star. 
But what actually happened when he signed the contract — and by the way, he didn't want to sign that contract, he wanted to go to college — which is what my mother, who actually does love me, said that I should do too, and I did — well, he didn't do very well. He struggled mightily. 
He got traded a couple of times, he ended up in the Minors for most of his career, and he actually ended up in management. He ended up as a General Manager of the Oakland A's. 
Now for many of you in this room, ending up in management, which is also what I've done, is seen as a success. 
I can assure you that for a kid trying to make it in the Bigs, going into management ain't no success story. It's a failure. 
And what I want to talk to you about today, and share with you, is that our healthcare system, our medical system, is just as bad at predicting what happens to people in it — patients, others — as those scouts were at predicting what would happen to Billy Beane. 
And yet, every day thousands of people in this country are diagnosed with preconditions. 
We hear about pre-hypertension, we hear about pre-dementia, we hear about pre-anxiety, and I'm pretty sure that I diagnosed myself with that in the green room. 
We also refer to subclinical conditions. 
There's subclinical atherosclerosis, subclinical hardening of the arteries, obviously linked to heart attacks, potentially. 
One of my favorites is called subclinical acne. 
If you look up subclinical acne, you may find a website, which I did, which says that this is the easiest type of acne to treat. 
You don't have the pustules or the redness and inflammation. 
Maybe that's because you don't actually have acne. 
I have a name for all of these conditions, it's another precondition: I call them preposterous. 
In baseball, the game follows the pre-game. 
Season follows the pre-season. 
But with a lot of these conditions, that actually isn't the case, or at least it isn't the case all the time. It's as if there's a rain delay, every single time in many cases. 
We have pre-cancerous lesions, which often don't turn into cancer. 
And yet, if you take, for example, subclinical osteoporosis, a bone thinning disease, the precondition, otherwise known as osteopenia, you would have to treat 270 women for three years in order to prevent one broken bone. 
That's an awful lot of women when you multiply by the number of women who were diagnosed with this osteopenia. 
And so is it any wonder, given all of the costs and the side effects of the drugs that we're using to treat these preconditions, that every year we're spending more than two trillion dollars on healthcare and yet 100,000 people a year — and that's a conservative estimate — are dying not because of the conditions they have, but because of the treatments that we're giving them and the complications of those treatments? 
We've medicalized everything in this country. 
Women in the audience, I have some pretty bad news that you already know, and that's that every aspect of your life has been medicalized. 
Strike one is when you hit puberty. 
You now have something that happens to you once a month that has been medicalized. 
It's a condition; it has to be treated. Strike two is if you get pregnant. 
That's been medicalized as well. 
You have to have a high-tech experience of pregnancy, otherwise something might go wrong. 
Strike three is menopause. 
We all know what happened when millions of women were given hormone replacement therapy for menopausal symptoms for decades until all of a sudden we realized, because a study came out, a big one, NIH-funded. 
It said, actually, a lot of that hormone replacement therapy may be doing more harm than good for many of those women. 
Just in case, I don't want to leave the men out — I am one, after all — I have really bad news for all of you in this room, and for everyone listening and watching elsewhere: You all have a universally fatal condition. 
So, just take a moment. 
It's called pre-death. 
Every single one of you has it, because you have the risk factor for it, which is being alive. 
But I have some good news for you, because I'm a journalist, I like to end things in a happy way or a forward-thinking way. 
And that good news is that if you can survive to the end of my talk, which we'll see if that happens for everyone, you will be a pre-vivor. 
I made up pre-death. 
If I used someone else's pre-death, I apologize, I think I made it up. 
I didn't make up pre-vivor. 
Pre-vivor is what a particular cancer advocacy group would like everyone who just has a risk factor, but hasn't actually had that cancer, to call themselves. 
You are a pre-vivor. 
We've had HBO here this morning. I'm wondering if Mark Burnett is anywhere in the audience, I'd like to suggest a reality TV show called "" Pre-vivor. "" If you develop a disease, you're off the island. 
But the problem is, we have a system that is completely — basically promoted this. 
We've selected, at every point in this system, to do what we do, and to give everyone a precondition and then eventually a condition, in some cases. 
Start with the doctor-patient relationship. Doctors, most of them, are in a fee-for-service system. They are basically incentivized to do more — procedures, tests, prescribe medications. 
Patients come to them, they want to do something. We're Americans, we can't just stand there, we have to do something. And so they want a drug. 
They want a treatment. They want to be told, this is what you have and this is how you treat it. If the doctor doesn't give you that, you go somewhere else. 
That's not very good for doctors' business. 
Or even worse, if you are diagnosed with something eventually, and the doctor didn't order that test, you get sued. 
We have pharmaceutical companies that are constantly trying to expand the indications, expand the number of people who are eligible for a given treatment, because that obviously helps their bottom line. We have advocacy groups, like the one that's come up with pre-vivor, who want to make more and more people feel they are at risk, or might have a condition, so that they can raise more funds and raise visibility, et cetera. 
But this isn't actually, despite what journalists typically do, this isn't actually about blaming particular players. 
We are all responsible. 
I'm responsible. 
I actually root for the Yankees, I mean talk about rooting for the worst possible offender when it comes to doing everything you can do. 
Thank you. 
But everyone is responsible. 
I went to medical school, and I didn't have a course called How to Think Skeptically, or How Not to Order Tests. 
We have this system where that's what you do. 
And it actually took being a journalist to understand all these incentives. You know, economists like to say, there are no bad people, there are just bad incentives. 
And that's actually true. 
Because what we've created is a sort of Field of Dreams, when it comes to medical technology. 
So when you put another MRI in every corner, you put a robot in every hospital saying that everyone has to have robotic surgery. 
Well, we've created a system where if you build it, they will come. 
But you can actually perversely tell people to come, convince them that they have to come. 
It was when I became a journalist that I really realized how I was part of this problem, and how we all are part of this problem. 
I was medicalizing every risk factor, I was writing stories, commissioning stories, every day, that were trying to, not necessarily make people worried, although that was what often happened. 
But, you know, there are ways out. 
I saw my own internist last week, and he said to me, "" You know, "" and he told me something that everyone in this audience could have told me for free, but I paid him for the privilege, which is that I need to lose some weight. 
Well, he's right. I've had honest-to-goodness high blood pressure for a dozen years now, same age my father got it, and it's a real disease. It's not pre-hypertension, it's actual hypertension, high blood pressure. 
Well, he's right, but he didn't say to me, well, you have pre-obesity or you have pre-diabetes, or anything like that. He didn't say, better start taking this Statin, you need to lower your cholesterol. 
No, he said, "" Go out and lose some weight. Come back and see me in a bit, or just give me a call and let me know how you're doing. "" So that's, to me, a way forward. 
Billy Beane, by the way, learned the same thing. 
He learned, from watching this kid who he eventually hired, who was really successful for him, that it wasn't swinging for the fences, it wasn't swinging at every pitch like the sluggers do, which is what all the expensive teams like the Yankees like to — they like to pick up those guys. 
This kid told him, you know, you gotta watch the guys, and you gotta go out and find the guys who like to walk, because getting on base by a walk is just as good, and in our healthcare system we need to figure out, is that really a good pitch or should we let it go by and not swing at everything? 
Thanks. 

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

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

So, last month, the Encyclopaedia Britannica announced that it is going out of print after 244 years, which made me nostalgic, because I remember playing a game with the colossal encyclopedia set in my hometown library back when I was a kid, maybe 12 years old. 
And I wondered if I could update that game, not just for modern methods, but for the modern me. 
So I tried. 
I went to an online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and I entered the term "" Earth. "" You can start anywhere, this time I chose Earth. 
And the first rule of the game is pretty simple. 
You just have to read the article until you find something you don't know, and preferably something your dad doesn't even know. 
And in this case, I quickly found this: The furthest point from the center of the Earth is not the tip of Mount Everest, like I might have thought, it's the tip of this mountain: Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador. 
The Earth spins, of course, as it travels around the sun, so the Earth bulges a little bit around the middle, like some Earthlings. 
And even though Mount Chimborazo isn't the tallest mountain in the Andes, it's one degree away from the equator, it's riding that bulge, and so the summit of Chimborazo is the farthest point on Earth from the center of the Earth. 
And it is really fun to say. 
So I immediately decided, this is going to be the name of the game, or my new exclamation. 
You can use it at TED. 
Chimborazo, right? 
It's like "" eureka "" and "" bingo "" had a baby. 
I didn't know that; that's pretty cool. 
Chimborazo! 
So the next rule of the game is also pretty simple. 
You just have to find another term and look that up. 
Now in the old days, that meant getting out a volume and browsing through it alphabetically, maybe getting sidetracked, that was fun. 
Nowadays there are hundreds of links to choose from. 
I can go literally anywhere in the world, I think since I was already in Ecuador, I just decided to click on the word "" tropical. "" That took me to this wet and warm band of the tropics that encircles the Earth. 
Now that's the Tropic of Cancer in the north and the Tropic of Capricorn in the south, that much I knew, but I was surprised to learn this little fact: Those are not cartographers' lines, like latitude or the borders between nations, they are astronomical phenomena caused by the Earth's tilt, and they change. 
They move; they go up, they go down. 
In fact, for years, the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn have been steadily drifting towards the equator at the rate of about 15 meters per year, and nobody told me that. 
I didn't know it. 
Chimborazo! 
So to keep the game going, I just have to find another term and look that one up. 
Since I'm already in the tropics, I chose "" Tropical rainforest. "" Famous for its diversity, human diversity. 
There are still dozens and dozens of uncontacted tribes living on this planet. 
They're all over the globe, but virtually all of them live in tropical rainforests. 
This is the only place you can go nowadays and not get "" friended. "" The link that I clicked on here was exotic in the beginning and then absolutely mysterious at the very end. 
It mentioned leopards and ring-tailed coatis and poison dart frogs and boa constrictors and then coleoptera, which turn out to be beetles. 
Now I clicked on this on purpose, but if I'd somehow gotten here by mistake, it does remind me, for the band, see "" The Beatles, "" for the car see "" Volkswagon Beetle, "" but I am here for beetle beetles. 
This is the most successful order on the planet by far. 
Something between 20 and 25 percent of all life forms on the planet, including plants, are beetles. 
That means the next time you are in the grocery store, take a look at the four people ahead of you in line. 
Statistically, one of you is a beetle. 
And if it is you, you are astonishingly well adapted. 
There are scavenger beetles that pick the skin and flesh off of bones in museums. 
There are predator beetles, that attack other insects and still look pretty cute to us. 
There are beetles that roll little balls of dung great distances across the desert floor to feed to their hatchlings. 
This reminded the ancient Egyptians of their god Khepri, who renews the ball of the sun every morning, which is how that dung-rolling scarab became that sacred scarab on the breastplate of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun. 
Beetles, I was reminded, have the most romantic flirtation in the animal kingdom. 
Fireflies are not flies, fireflies are beetles. 
Fireflies are coleoptera, and coleoptera communicate in other ways as well. 
Like my next link: The chemical language of pheromones. 
Now the pheromone page took me to a video of a sea urchin having sex. 
Yeah. 
(Laughter) And the link to aphrodisiac. 
Now that's something that increases sexual desire, possibly chocolate. 
There is a compound in chocolate called phenethylamine that might be an aphrodisiac. 
But as the article mentions, because of enzyme breakdown, it's unlikely that phenethylamine will reach your brain if taken orally. 
So those of you who only eat your chocolate, you might have to experiment. 
The link I clicked on here, "" sympathetic magic, "" mostly because I understand what both of those words mean. 
But not when they're together like that. 
I do like sympathy. I do like magic. 
So when I click on "" sympathetic magic, "" I get sympathetic magic and voodoo dolls. 
This is the boy in me getting lucky again. 
Sympathetic magic is imitation. 
If you imitate something, maybe you can have an effect on it. 
That's the idea behind voodoo dolls, and possibly also cave paintings. 
The link to cave paintings takes me to some of the oldest art known to humankind. 
I would love to see Google maps inside some of these caves. 
We've got tens-of-thousands-years-old artwork. 
Common themes around the globe include large wild animals and tracings of human hands, usually the left hand. 
We have been a dominantly right-handed tribe for millenia, so even though I don't know why a paleolithic person would trace his hand or blow pigment on it from a tube, I can easily picture how he did it. 
And I really don't think it's that different form our own little dominant hand avatar right there that I'm going to use now to click on the term for "" hand, "" go to the page for "" hand, "" where I found the most fun and possibly embarrassing bit of trivia I've found in a long time. It's simply this: The back of the hand is formally called the opisthenar. 
Now that's embarrassing, because up until now, every time I've said, "" I know it like the back of my hand, "" I've really been saying, "" I'm totally familiar with that, I just don't know it's freaking name, right? "" And the link I clicked on here, well, lemurs, monkeys and chimpanzees have the little opisthenar. 
I click on chimpanzee, and I get our closest genetic relative. 
Pan troglodytes, the name we give him, means "" cave dweller. "" He doesn't. 
He lives in rainforests and savannas. 
It's just that we're always thinking of this guy as lagging behind us, evolutionarily or somehow uncannily creeping up on us, and in some cases, he gets places before us. 
Like my next link, the almost irresistible link, Ham the Astrochimp. 
I click on him, and I really thought he was going to bring me full circle twice, in fact. 
He's born in Cameroon, which is smack in the middle of my tropics map, and more specifically his skeleton wound up in the Smithsonian museum getting picked clean by beetles. 
In between those two landmarks in Ham's life, he flew into space. 
He experienced weightlessness and re-entry months before the first human being to do it, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. 
When I click on Yuri Gagarin's page, I get this guy who was surprisingly short in stature, huge in heroism. 
Top estimates, Soviet estimates, put this guy at 1.65 meters, that is less than five and a half feet tall max, possibly because he was malnourished as a child. 
Germans occupied Russia. 
A Nazi officer took over the Gagarin household, and he and his family built and lived in a mud hut. 
Years later, the boy from that cramped mud hut would grow up to be the man in that cramped capsule on the tip of a rocket who volunteered to be launched into outer space, the first one of any of us to really physically leave this planet. 
And he didn't just leave it, he circled it once. 
Fifty years later, as a tribute, the International Space Station, which is still up there tonight, synced its orbit with Gagarin's orbit, at the exact same time of day, and filmed it, so you can go online and you can watch over 100 minutes of what must have been an absolutely mesmerizing ride, possibly a lonely one, the first person to ever see such a thing. 
And then when you've had your fill of that, you can click on one more link. 
You can come back to Earth. 
You return to where you started. 
You can finish your game. 
You just need to find one more fact that you didn't know. 
And for me, I quickly landed on this one: The Earth has a tolerance of about .17 percent from the reference spheroid, which is less than the .22 percent allowed in billiard balls. 
This is the kind of fact I would have loved as a boy. 
I found it myself. 
It's got some math that I can do. 
I'm pretty sure my dad doesn't know it. 
What this means is that if you could shrink the Earth to the size of a billiard ball, if you could take planet Earth, with all its mountain tops and caves and rainforests, astronauts and uncontacted tribes and chimpanzees, voodoo dolls, fireflies, chocolate, sea creatures making love in the deep blue sea, you just shrink that to the size of a billiard ball, it would be as smooth as a billiard ball, presumably a billiard ball with a slight bulge around the middle. 
That's pretty cool. 
I didn't know that. 
Chimborazo! 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

And you might also know that, for science and medicine, Boston is a bit of a candy store. 

What I want to talk about today is one idea. 
It's an idea for a new kind of school, which turns on its head much of our conventional thinking about what schools are for and how they work. 
And it might just be coming to a neighborhood near you soon. 
Where it comes from is an organization called the Young Foundation, which, over many decades, has come up with many innovations in education, like the Open University and things like Extended Schools, Schools for Social Entrepreneurs, Summer Universities and the School of Everything. 
And about five years ago, we asked what was the most important need for innovation in schooling here in the U.K. 
And we felt the most important priority was to bring together two sets of problems. 
One was large numbers of bored teenagers who just didn't like school, couldn't see any relationship between what they learned in school and future jobs. 
And employers who kept complaining that the kids coming out of school weren't actually ready for real work, didn't have the right attitudes and experience. 
And so we try to ask: What kind of school would have the teenagers fighting to get in, not fighting to stay out? 
And after hundreds of conversations with teenagers and teachers and parents and employers and schools from Paraguay to Australia, and looking at some of the academic research, which showed the importance of what's now called non-cognitive skills — the skills of motivation, resilience — and that these are as important as the cognitive skills — formal academic skills — we came up with an answer, a very simple answer in a way, which we called the Studio School. 
And we called it a studio school to go back to the original idea of a studio in the Renaissance where work and learning are integrated. 
You work by learning, and you learn by working. 
And the design we came up with had the following characteristics. 
First of all, we wanted small schools — about 300, 400 pupils — 14 to 19 year-olds, and critically, about 80 percent of the curriculum done not through sitting in classrooms, but through real-life, practical projects, working on commission to businesses, NGO's and others. 
That every pupil would have a coach, as well as teachers, who would have timetables much more like a work environment in a business. 
And all of this will be done within the public system, funded by public money, but independently run. 
And all at no extra cost, no selection, and allowing the pupils the route into university, even if many of them would want to become entrepreneurs and have manual jobs as well. 
Underlying it was some very simple ideas that large numbers of teenagers learn best by doing things, they learn best in teams and they learn best by doing things for real — all the opposite of what mainstream schooling actually does. 
Now that was a nice idea, so we moved into the rapid prototyping phase. 
We tried it out, first in Luton — famous for its airport and not much else, I fear — and in Blackpool — famous for its beaches and leisure. 
And what we found — and we got quite a lot of things wrong and then improved them — but we found that the young people loved it. 
They found it much more motivational, much more exciting than traditional education. 
And perhaps most important of all, two years later when the exam results came through, the pupils who had been put on these field trials who were in the lowest performing groups had jumped right to the top — in fact, pretty much at the top decile of performance in terms of GCSE's, which is the British marking system. 
Now not surprisingly, that influenced some people to think we were onto something. 
The minister of education down south in London described himself as a "" big fan. "" And the business organizations thought we were onto something in terms of a way of preparing children much better for real-life work today. 
And indeed, the head of the Chambers of Commerce is now the chairman of the Studio Schools Trust and helping it, not just with big businesses, but small businesses all over the country. 
We started with two schools. 
That's grown this year to about 10. 
And next year, we're expecting about 35 schools open across England, and another 40 areas want to have their own schools opening — a pretty rapid spread of this idea. 
Interestingly, it's happened almost entirely without media coverage. 
It's happened almost entirely without big money behind it. 
It spread almost entirely through word of mouth, virally, across teachers, parents, people involved in education. 
And it spread because of the power of an idea — so the very, very simple idea about turning education on its head and putting the things which were marginal, things like working in teams, doing practical projects, and putting them right at the heart of learning, rather than on the edges. 
Now there's a whole set of new schools opening up this autumn. 
This is one from Yorkshire where, in fact, my nephew, I hope, will be able to attend it. 
And this one is focused on creative and media industries. 
Other ones have a focus on health care, tourism, engineering and other fields. 
We think we're onto something. 
It's not perfect yet, but we think this is one idea which can transform the lives of thousands, possibly millions, of teenagers who are really bored by schooling. 
It doesn't animate them. 
They're not like all of you who can sit in rows and hear things said to you for hour after hour. 
They want to do things, they want to get their hands dirty, they want education to be for real. 
And my hope is that some of you out there may be able to help us. 
We feel we're on the beginning of a journey of experiment and improvement to turn the Studio School idea into something which is present, not as a universal answer for every child, but at least as an answer for some children in every part of the world. 
And I hope that a few of you at least can help us make that happen. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

I'm going to talk a little bit about strategy and its relationship with technology. 
We tend to think of business strategy as being a rather abstract body of essentially economic thought, perhaps rather timeless. 
I'm going to argue that, in fact, business strategy has always been premised on assumptions about technology, that those assumptions are changing, and, in fact, changing quite dramatically, and that therefore what that will drive us to is a different concept of what we mean by business strategy. 
Let me start, if I may, with a little bit of history. 
The idea of strategy in business owes its origins to two intellectual giants: Bruce Henderson, the founder of BCG, and Michael Porter, professor at the Harvard Business School. 
Henderson's central idea was what you might call the Napoleonic idea of concentrating mass against weakness, of overwhelming the enemy. 
What Henderson recognized was that, in the business world, there are many phenomena which are characterized by what economists would call increasing returns — scale, experience. 
The more you do of something, disproportionately the better you get. 
And therefore he found a logic for investing in such kinds of overwhelming mass in order to achieve competitive advantage. 
And that was the first introduction of essentially a military concept of strategy into the business world. 
Porter agreed with that premise, but he qualified it. 
He pointed out, correctly, that that's all very well, but businesses actually have multiple steps to them. 
They have different components, and each of those components might be driven by a different kind of strategy. 
A company or a business might actually be advantaged in some activities but disadvantaged in others. 
He formed the concept of the value chain, essentially the sequence of steps with which a, shall we say, raw material, becomes a component, becomes assembled into a finished product, and then is distributed, for example, and he argued that advantage accrued to each of those components, and that the advantage of the whole was in some sense the sum or the average of that of its parts. 
And this idea of the value chain was predicated on the recognition that what holds a business together is transaction costs, that in essence you need to coordinate, organizations are more efficient at coordination than markets, very often, and therefore the nature and role and boundaries of the cooperation are defined by transaction costs. 
It was on those two ideas, Henderson's idea of increasing returns to scale and experience, and Porter's idea of the value chain, encompassing heterogenous elements, that the whole edifice of business strategy was subsequently erected. 
Now what I'm going to argue is that those premises are, in fact, being invalidated. 
First of all, let's think about transaction costs. 
There are really two components to transaction costs. 
One is about processing information, and the other is about communication. 
These are the economics of processing and communicating as they have evolved over a long period of time. 
As we all know from so many contexts, they have been radically transformed since the days when Porter and Henderson first formulated their theories. 
In particular, since the mid- '90s, communications costs have actually been falling even faster than transaction costs, which is why communication, the Internet, has exploded in such a dramatic fashion. 
Now, those falling transaction costs have profound consequences, because if transaction costs are the glue that hold value chains together, and they are falling, there is less to economize on. 
There is less need for vertically integrated organization, and value chains at least can break up. 
They needn't necessarily, but they can. 
In particular, it then becomes possible for a competitor in one business to use their position in one step of the value chain in order to penetrate or attack or disintermediate the competitor in another. 
That is not just an abstract proposition. 
There are many very specific stories of how that actually happened. 
A poster child example was the encyclopedia business. 
The encyclopedia business in the days of leatherbound books was basically a distribution business. 
Most of the cost was the commission to the salesmen. 
The CD-ROM and then the Internet came along, new technologies made the distribution of knowledge many orders of magnitude cheaper, and the encyclopedia industry collapsed. 
It's now, of course, a very familiar story. 
This, in fact, more generally was the story of the first generation of the Internet economy. 
It was about falling transaction costs breaking up value chains and therefore allowing disintermediation, or what we call deconstruction. 
One of the questions I was occasionally asked was, well, what's going to replace the encyclopedia when Britannica no longer has a business model? 
And it was a while before the answer became manifest. 
Now, of course, we know what it is: it's the Wikipedia. 
Now what's special about the Wikipedia is not its distribution. 
What's special about the Wikipedia is the way it's produced. 
The Wikipedia, of course, is an encyclopedia created by its users. 
And this, in fact, defines what you might call the second decade of the Internet economy, the decade in which the Internet as a noun became the Internet as a verb. 
It became a set of conversations, the era in which user-generated content and social networks became the dominant phenomenon. 
Now what that really meant in terms of the Porter-Henderson framework was the collapse of certain kinds of economies of scale. 
It turned out that tens of thousands of autonomous individuals writing an encyclopedia could do just as good a job, and certainly a much cheaper job, than professionals in a hierarchical organization. 
So basically what was happening was that one layer of this value chain was becoming fragmented, as individuals could take over where organizations were no longer needed. 
But there's another question that obviously this graph poses, which is, okay, we've gone through two decades — does anything distinguish the third? 
And what I'm going to argue is that indeed something does distinguish the third, and it maps exactly on to the kind of Porter-Henderson logic that we've been talking about. 
And that is, about data. 
If we go back to around 2000, a lot of people were talking about the information revolution, and it was indeed true that the world's stock of data was growing, indeed growing quite fast. 
but it was still at that point overwhelmingly analog. 
We go forward to 2007, not only had the world's stock of data exploded, but there'd been this massive substitution of digital for analog. 
And more important even than that, if you look more carefully at this graph, what you will observe is that about a half of that digital data is information that has an I.P. address. 
It's on a server or it's on a P.C. 
But having an I.P. address means that it can be connected to any other data that has an I.P. address. 
It means it becomes possible to put together half of the world's knowledge in order to see patterns, an entirely new thing. 
If we run the numbers forward to today, it probably looks something like this. 
We're not really sure. 
If we run the numbers forward to 2020, we of course have an exact number, courtesy of IDC. 
It's curious that the future is so much more predictable than the present. 
And what it implies is a hundredfold multiplication in the stock of information that is connected via an I.P. address. 
Now, if the number of connections that we can make is proportional to the number of pairs of data points, a hundredfold multiplication in the quantity of data is a ten-thousandfold multiplication in the number of patterns that we can see in that data, this just in the last 10 or 11 years. 
This, I would submit, is a sea change, a profound change in the economics of the world that we live in. 
The first human genome, that of James Watson, was mapped as the culmination of the Human Genome Project in the year 2000, and it took about 200 million dollars and about 10 years of work to map just one person's genomic makeup. 
Since then, the costs of mapping the genome have come down. 
In fact, they've come down in recent years very dramatically indeed, to the point where the cost is now below 1,000 dollars, and it's confidently predicted that by the year 2015 it will be below 100 dollars — a five or six order of magnitude drop in the cost of genomic mapping in just a 15-year period, an extraordinary phenomenon. 
Now, in the days when mapping a genome cost millions, or even tens of thousands, it was basically a research enterprise. 
Scientists would gather some representative people, and they would see patterns, and they would try and make generalizations about human nature and disease from the abstract patterns they find from these particular selected individuals. 
But when the genome can be mapped for 100 bucks, 99 dollars while you wait, then what happens is, it becomes retail. 
It becomes above all clinical. 
You go the doctor with a cold, and if he or she hasn't done it already, the first thing they do is map your genome, at which point what they're now doing is not starting from some abstract knowledge of genomic medicine and trying to work out how it applies to you, but they're starting from your particular genome. 
Now think of the power of that. 
Think of where that takes us when we can combine genomic data with clinical data with data about drug interactions with the kind of ambient data that devices like our phone and medical sensors will increasingly be collecting. 
Think what happens when we collect all of that data and we can put it together in order to find patterns we wouldn't see before. 
This, I would suggest, perhaps it will take a while, but this will drive a revolution in medicine. 
Fabulous, lots of people talk about this. 
But there's one thing that doesn't get much attention. 
How is that model of colossal sharing across all of those kinds of databases compatible with the business models of institutions and organizations and corporations that are involved in this business today? 
If your business is based on proprietary data, if your competitive advantage is defined by your data, how on Earth is that company or is that society in fact going to achieve the value that's implicit in the technology? They can't. 
So essentially what's happening here, and genomics is merely one example of this, is that technology is driving the natural scaling of the activity beyond the institutional boundaries within which we have been used to thinking about it, and in particular beyond the institutional boundaries in terms of which business strategy as a discipline is formulated. 
The basic story here is that what used to be vertically integrated, oligopolistic competition among essentially similar kinds of competitors is evolving, by one means or another, from a vertical structure to a horizontal one. 
Why is that happening? 
It's happening because transaction costs are plummeting and because scale is polarizing. 
The plummeting of transaction costs weakens the glue that holds value chains together, and allows them to separate. 
The polarization of scale economies towards the very small — small is beautiful — allows for scalable communities to substitute for conventional corporate production. 
The scaling in the opposite direction, towards things like big data, drive the structure of business towards the creation of new kinds of institutions that can achieve that scale. 
But either way, the typically vertical structure gets driven to becoming more horizontal. 
The logic isn't just about big data. 
If we were to look, for example, at the telecommunications industry, you can tell the same story about fiber optics. 
If we look at the pharmaceutical industry, or, for that matter, university research, you can say exactly the same story about so-called "" big science. "" And in the opposite direction, if we look, say, at the energy sector, where all the talk is about how households will be efficient producers of green energy and efficient conservers of energy, that is, in fact, the reverse phenomenon. 
That is the fragmentation of scale because the very small can substitute for the traditional corporate scale. 
Either way, what we are driven to is this horizontalization of the structure of industries, and that implies fundamental changes in how we think about strategy. 
It means, for example, that we need to think about strategy as the curation of these kinds of horizontal structure, where things like business definition and even industry definition are actually the outcomes of strategy, not something that the strategy presupposes. 
It means, for example, we need to work out how to accommodate collaboration and competition simultaneously. 
Think about the genome. 
We need to accommodate the very large and the very small simultaneously. 
And we need industry structures that will accommodate very, very different motivations, from the amateur motivations of people in communities to maybe the social motivations of infrastructure built by governments, or, for that matter, cooperative institutions built by companies that are otherwise competing, because that is the only way that they can get to scale. 
These kinds of transformations render the traditional premises of business strategy obsolete. 
They drive us into a completely new world. 
They require us, whether we are in the public sector or the private sector, to think very fundamentally differently about the structure of business, and, at last, it makes strategy interesting again. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I was basically concerned about what was going on in the world. 
I couldn't understand the starvation, the destruction, the killing of innocent people. 
Making sense of those things is a very difficult thing to do. 
And when I was 12, I became an actor. 
I was bottom of the class. I haven't got any qualifications. 
I was told I was dyslexic. 
In fact, I have got qualifications. 
I got a D in pottery, which was the one thing that I did get — which was useful, obviously. 
And so concern is where all of this comes from. 
And then, being an actor, I was doing these different kinds of things, and I felt the content of the work that I was involved in really wasn't cutting it, that there surely had to be more. 
And at that point, I read a book by Frank Barnaby, this wonderful nuclear physicist, and he said that media had a responsibility, that all sectors of society had a responsibility to try and progress things and move things forward. 
And that fascinated me, because I'd been messing around with a camera most of my life. 
And then I thought, well maybe I could do something. 
Maybe I could become a filmmaker. 
Maybe I can use the form of film constructively to in some way make a difference. 
Maybe there's a little change I can get involved in. 
So I started thinking about peace, and I was obviously, as I said to you, very much moved by these images, trying to make sense of that. 
Could I go and speak to older and wiser people who would tell me how they made sense of the things that are going on? 
Because it's obviously incredibly frightening. 
But I realized that, having been messing around with structure as an actor, that a series of sound bites in itself wasn't enough, that there needed to be a mountain to climb, there needed to be a journey that I had to take. 
And if I took that journey, no matter whether it failed or succeeded, it would be completely irrelevant. 
The point was that I would have something to hook the questions of — is humankind fundamentally evil? 
Is the destruction of the world inevitable? Should I have children? 
Is that a responsible thing to do? Etc., etc. 
So I was thinking about peace, and then I was thinking, well where's the starting point for peace? 
And that was when I had the idea. 
There was no starting point for peace. 
There was no day of global unity. 
There was no day of intercultural cooperation. 
There was no day when humanity came together, separate in all of those things and just shared it together — that we're in this together, and that if we united and we interculturally cooperated, then that might be the key to humanity's survival. 
That might shift the level of consciousness around the fundamental issues that humanity faces — if we did it just for a day. 
So obviously we didn't have any money. 
I was living at my mom's place. 
And we started writing letters to everybody. 
You very quickly work out what is it that you've got to do to fathom that out. 
How do you create a day voted by every single head of state in the world to create the first ever Ceasefire Nonviolence Day, the 21st of September? 
And I wanted it to be the 21st of September because it was my granddad's favorite number. 
He was a prisoner of war. 
He saw the bomb go off at Nagasaki. 
It poisoned his blood. He died when I was 11. 
So he was like my hero. 
And the reason why 21 was the number is 700 men left, 23 came back, two died on the boat and 21 hit the ground. 
And that's why we wanted it to be the 21st of September as the date of peace. 
So we began this journey, and we launched it in 1999. 
And we wrote to heads of state, their ambassadors, Nobel Peace laureates, NGOs, faiths, various organizations — literally wrote to everybody. 
And very quickly, some letters started coming back. 
And we started to build this case. 
And I remember the first letter. 
One of the first letters was from the Dalai Lama. 
And of course we didn't have the money; we were playing guitars and getting the money for the stamps that we were sending out all of [this mail]. 
A letter came through from the Dalai Lama saying, "" This is an amazing thing. Come and see me. 
I'd love to talk to you about the first ever day of peace. "" And we didn't have money for the flight. 
And I rang Sir Bob Ayling, who was CEO of BA at the time, and said, "" Mate, we've got this invitation. 
Could you give me a flight? Because we're going to go see him. "" And of course, we went and saw him and it was amazing. 
And then Dr. Oscar Arias came forward. 
And actually, let me go back to that slide, because when we launched it in 1999 — this idea to create the first ever day of ceasefire and non-violence — we invited thousands of people. 
Well not thousands — hundreds of people, lots of people — all the press, because we were going to try and create the first ever World Peace Day, a peace day. 
And we invited everybody, and no press showed up. 
There were 114 people there — they were mostly my friends and family. 
And that was kind of like the launch of this thing. 
But it didn't matter because we were documenting, and that was the thing. 
For me, it was really about the process. 
It wasn't about the end result. 
And that's the beautiful thing about the camera. 
They used to say the pen is mightier than the sword. I think the camera is. 
And just staying in the moment with it was a beautiful thing and really empowering actually. 
So anyway, we began the journey. 
And here you see people like Mary Robinson, I went to see in Geneva. 
I'm cutting my hair, it's getting short and long, because every time I saw Kofi Annan, I was so worried that he thought I was a hippie that I cut it, and that was kind of what was going on. 
(Laughter) Yeah, I'm not worried about it now. 
So Mary Robinson, she said to me, "" Listen, this is an idea whose time has come. This must be created. "" Kofi Annan said, "" This will be beneficial to my troops on the ground. "" The OAU at the time, led by Salim Ahmed Salim, said, "" I must get the African countries involved. "" Dr. Oscar Arias, Nobel Peace laureate, president now of Costa Rica, said, "" I'll do everything that I can. "" So I went and saw Amr Moussa at the League of Arab States. 
I met Mandela at the Arusha peace talks, and so on and so on and so on — while I was building the case to prove whether this idea would make sense. 
And then we were listening to the people. We were documenting everywhere. 
76 countries in the last 12 years, I've visited. 
And I've always spoken to women and children wherever I've gone. 
I've recorded 44,000 young people. 
I've recorded about 900 hours of their thoughts. 
I'm really clear about how young people feel when you talk to them about this idea of having a starting point for their actions for a more peaceful world through their poetry, their art, their literature, their music, their sport, whatever it might be. 
And we were listening to everybody. 
And it was an incredibly thing, working with the U.N. 
and working with NGOs and building this case. 
I felt that I was presenting a case on behalf of the global community to try and create this day. 
And the stronger the case and the more detailed it was, the better chance we had of creating this day. 
And it was this stuff, this, where I actually was in the beginning kind of thinking no matter what happened, it didn't actually matter. 
It didn't matter if it didn't create a day of peace. 
The fact is that, if I tried and it didn't work, then I could make a statement about how unwilling the global community is to unite — until, it was in Somalia, picking up that young girl. 
And this young child who'd taken about an inch and a half out of her leg with no antiseptic, and that young boy who was a child soldier, who told me he'd killed people — he was about 12 — these things made me realize that this was not a film that I could just stop. 
And that actually, at that moment something happened to me, which obviously made me go, "" I'm going to document. 
If this is the only film that I ever make, I'm going to document until this becomes a reality. "" Because we've got to stop, we've got to do something where we unite — separate from all the politics and religion that, as a young person, is confusing me. 
I don't know how to get involved in that process. 
And then on the seventh of September, I was invited to New York. 
The Costa Rican government and the British government had put forward to the United Nations General Assembly, with 54 co-sponsors, the idea of the first ever Ceasefire Nonviolence Day, the 21st of September, as a fixed calendar date, and it was unanimously adopted by every head of state in the world. 
(Applause) Yeah, but there were hundreds of individuals, obviously, who made that a reality. 
And thank you to all of them. 
That was an incredible moment. 
I was at the top of the General Assembly just looking down into it and seeing it happen. 
And as I mentioned, when it started, we were at the Globe, and there was no press. 
And now I was thinking, "" Well, the press it really going to hear this story. "" And suddenly, we started to institutionalize this day. 
Kofi Annan invited me on the morning of September the 11th to do a press conference. 
And it was 8: 00 AM when I stood there. 
And I was waiting for him to come down, and I knew that he was on his way. 
And obviously he never came down. The statement was never made. 
The world was never told there was a day of global ceasefire and nonviolence. 
And it was obviously a tragic moment for the thousands of people who lost their lives, there and then subsequently all over the world. 
It never happened. 
And I remember thinking, "" This is exactly why, actually, we have to work even harder. 
And we have to make this day work. 
It's been created; nobody knows. 
But we have to continue this journey, and we have to tell people, and we have to prove it can work. "" And I left New York freaked, but actually empowered. 
And I felt inspired by the possibilities that if it did, then maybe we wouldn't see things like that. 
I remember putting that film out and going to cynics. 
I was showing the film, and I remember being in Israel and getting it absolutely slaughtered by some guys having watched the film — that it's just a day of peace, it doesn't mean anything. 
It's not going to work; you're not going to stop the fighting in Afghanistan; the Taliban won't listen, etc., etc. 
It's just symbolism. 
And that was even worse than actually what had just happened in many ways, because it couldn't not work. 
I'd spoken in Somalia, Burundi, Gaza, the West Bank, India, Sri Lanka, Congo, wherever it was, and they'd all tell me, "" If you can create a window of opportunity, we can move aid, we can vaccinate children. 
Children can lead their projects. 
They can unite. They can come together. If people would stop, lives will be saved. "" That's what I'd heard. 
And I'd heard that from the people who really understood what conflict was about. 
And so I went back to the United Nations. 
I decided that I'd continue filming and make another movie. 
And I went back to the U.N. for another couple of years. 
We started moving around the corridors of the U.N. system, governments and NGOs, trying desperately to find somebody to come forward and have a go at it, see if we could make it possible. 
And after lots and lots of meetings obviously, I'm delighted that this man, Ahmad Fawzi, one of my heroes and mentors really, he managed to get UNICEF involved. 
And UNICEF, God bless them, they said, "" Okay, we'll have a go. "" And then UNAMA became involved in Afghanistan. 
It was historical. Could it work in Afghanistan with UNAMA and WHO and civil society, etc., etc., etc.? 
And I was getting it all on film and I was recording it, and I was thinking, "" This is it. This is the possibility of it maybe working. 
But even if it doesn't, at least the door is open and there's a chance. "" And so I went back to London, and I went and saw this chap, Jude Law. 
And I saw him because he was an actor, I was an actor, I had a connection to him, because we needed to get to the press, we needed this attraction, we needed the media to be involved. 
Because if we start pumping it up a bit maybe more people would listen and there'd be more — when we got into certain areas, maybe there would be more people interested. 
And maybe we'd be helped financially a little bit more, which had been desperately difficult. 
I won't go into that. 
So Jude said, "" Okay, I'll do some statements for you. "" While I was filming these statements, he said to me, "" Where are you going next? "" I said, "" I'm going to go to Afghanistan. "" He said, "" Really? "" And I could sort of see a little look in his eye of interest. 
So I said to him, "" Do you want to come with me? 
It'd be really interesting if you came. 
It would help and bring attention. 
And that attention would help leverage the situation, as well as all of the other sides of it. "" I think there's a number of pillars to success. 
One is you've got to have a great idea. 
The other is you've got to have a constituency, you've got to have finance, and you've got to be able to raise awareness. 
And actually I could never raise awareness by myself, no matter what I'd achieved. 
So these guys were absolutely crucial. 
So he said yes, and we found ourselves in Afghanistan. 
It was a really incredible thing that when we landed there, I was talking to various people, and they were saying to me, "" You've got to get everybody involved here. 
You can't just expect it to work. You have to get out and work. "" And we did, and we traveled around, and we spoke to elders, we spoke to doctors, we spoke to nurses, we held press conferences, we went out with soldiers, we sat down with ISAF, we sat down with NATO, we sat down with the U.K. government. 
I mean, we basically sat down with everybody — in and out of schools with ministers of education, holding these press conferences, which of course, now were loaded with press, everybody was there. 
There was an interest in what was going on. 
This amazing woman, Fatima Gailani, was absolutely instrumental in what went on as she was the spokesperson for the resistance against the Russians. 
And her Afghan network was just absolutely everywhere. 
And she was really crucial in getting the message in. 
And then we went home. We'd sort of done it. 
We had to wait now and see what happened. 
And I got home, and I remember one of the team bringing in a letter to me from the Taliban. 
And that letter basically said, "" We'll observe this day. 
We will observe this day. 
We see it as a window of opportunity. 
And we will not engage. We're not going to engage. "" And that meant that humanitarian workers wouldn't be kidnapped or killed. 
And then suddenly, I obviously knew at this point, there was a chance. 
And days later, 1.6 million children were vaccinated against polio as a consequence of everybody stopping. 
(Applause) And like the General Assembly, obviously the most wonderful, wonderful moment. 
And so then we wrapped the film up and we put it together because we had to go back. 
We put it into Dari and Pashto. We put it in the local dialects. 
We went back to Afghanistan, because the next year was coming, and we wanted to support. 
But more importantly, we wanted to go back, because these people in Afghanistan were the heroes. 
They were the people who believed in peace and the possibilities of it, etc., etc. — and they made it real. 
And we wanted to go back and show them the film and say, "" Look, you guys made this possible. And thank you very much. "" And we gave the film over. 
Obviously it was shown, and it was amazing. 
And then that year, that year, 2008, this ISAF statement from Kabul, Afghanistan, September 17th: "" General Stanley McChrystal, commander of international security assistance forces in Afghanistan, announced today ISAF will not conduct offensive military operations on the 21st of September. "" They were saying they would stop. 
And then there was this other statement that came out from the U.N. Department of Security and Safety saying that, in Afghanistan, because of this work, the violence was down by 70 percent. 
70 percent reduction in violence on this day at least. 
And that completely blew my mind almost more than anything. 
And I remember being stuck in New York, this time because of the volcano, which was obviously much less harmful. 
And I was there thinking about what was going on. 
And I kept thinking about this 70 percent. 
70 percent reduction in violence — in what everyone said was completely impossible and you couldn't do. 
And that made me think that, if we can get 70 percent in Afghanistan, then surely we can get 70 percent reduction everywhere. 
We have to go for a global truce. 
We have to utilize this day of ceasefire and nonviolence and go for a global truce, go for the largest recorded cessation of hostilities, both domestically and internationally, ever recorded. 
That's exactly what we must do. 
And on the 21st of September this year, we're going to launch that campaign at the O2 Arena to go for that process, to try and create the largest recorded cessation of hostilities. 
And we will utilize all kinds of things — have a dance and social media and visiting on Facebook and visit the website, sign the petition. 
And it's in the six official languages of the United Nations. 
And we'll globally link with government, inter-government, non-government, education, unions, sports. 
And you can see the education box there. 
We've got resources at the moment in 174 countries trying to get young people to be the driving force behind the vision of that global truce. 
And obviously the life-saving is increased, the concepts help. 
Linking up with the Olympics — I went and saw Seb Coe. I said, "" London 2012 is about truce. 
Ultimately, that's what it's about. "" Why don't we all team up? Why don't we bring truce to life? 
Why don't you support the process of the largest ever global truce? 
We'll make a new film about this process. 
We'll utilize sport and football. 
On the Day of Peace, there's thousands of football matches all played, from the favelas of Brazil to wherever it might be. 
So, utilizing all of these ways to inspire individual action. 
And ultimately, we have to try that. 
We have to work together. 
And when I stand here in front of all of you, and the people who will watch these things, I'm excited, on behalf of everybody I've met, that there is a possibility that our world could unite, that we could come together as one, that we could lift the level of consciousness around the fundamental issues, brought about by individuals. 
I was with Brahimi, Ambassador Brahimi. 
I think he's one of the most incredible men in relation to international politics — in Afghanistan, in Iraq. 
He's an amazing man. 
And I sat with him a few weeks ago. 
And I said to him, "" Mr. Brahimi, is this nuts, going for a global truce? 
Is this possible? Is it really possible that we could do this? "" He said, "" It's absolutely possible. "" I said, "" What would you do? 
Would you go to governments and lobby and use the system? "" He said, "" No, I'd talk to the individuals. "" It's all about the individuals. 
It's all about you and me. 
It's all about partnerships. 
It's about your constituencies; it's about your businesses. 
Because together, by working together, I seriously think we can start to change things. 
And there's a wonderful man sitting in this audience, and I don't know where he is, who said to me a few days ago — because I did a little rehearsal — and he said, "" I've been thinking about this day and imagining it as a square with 365 squares, and one of them is white. "" And it then made me think about a glass of water, which is clear. 
If you put one drop, one drop of something, in that water, it'll change it forever. 
By working together, we can create peace one day. 
Thank you TED. Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
Thanks a lot. (Applause) 
Thank you very much. Thank you. 

This cell phone started its trajectory in an artisanal mine in the Eastern Congo. 
It's mined by armed gangs using slaves, child slaves, what the U.N. Security Council calls "" blood minerals, "" then traveled into some components and ended up in a factory in Shinjin in China. 
That factory — over a dozen people have committed suicide already this year. 
One man died after working a 36-hour shift. 
We all love chocolate. 
We buy it for our kids. 
Eighty percent of the cocoa comes from Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana and it's harvested by children. 
Cote d'Ivoire, we have a huge problem of child slaves. 
Children have been trafficked from other conflict zones to come and work on the coffee plantations. 
Heparin — a blood thinner, a pharmaceutical product — starts out in artisanal workshops like this in China, because the active ingredient comes from pigs' intestines. 
Your diamond — you've all heard, probably seen the movie "" Blood Diamond. "" This is a mine in Zimbabwe right now. 
Cotton: Uzbekistan is the second biggest exporter of cotton on Earth. 
Every year when it comes to the cotton harvest, the government shuts down the schools, puts the kids in buses, buses them to the cotton fields to spend three weeks harvesting the cotton. 
It's forced child labor on an institutional scale. 
And all of those products probably end their lives in a dump like this one in Manila. 
These places, these origins, represent governance gaps. 
That's the politest description I have for them. 
These are the dark pools where global supply chains begin — the global supply chains, which bring us our favorite brand name products. 
Some of these governance gaps are run by rogue states. 
Some of them are not states anymore at all. 
They're failed states. 
Some of them are just countries who believe that deregulation or no regulation is the best way to attract investment, promote trade. 
Either way, they present us with a huge moral and ethical dilemma. 
I know that none of us want to be accessories after the fact of a human rights abuse in a global supply chain. 
But right now, most of the companies involved in these supply chains don't have any way of assuring us that nobody had to mortgage their future, nobody had to sacrifice their rights to bring us our favorite brand name product. 
Now, I didn't come here to depress you about the state of the global supply chain. 
We need a reality check. 
We need to recognize just how serious a deficit of rights we have. 
This is an independent republic, probably a failed state. 
It's definitely not a democratic state. 
And right now, that independent republic of the supply chain is not being governed in a way that would satisfy us, that we can engage in ethical trade or ethical consumption. 
Now, that's not a new story. 
You've seen the documentaries of sweatshops making garments all over the world, even in developed countries. 
You want to see the classic sweatshop, meet me at Madison Square Garden, I'll take you down the street, and I'll show you a Chinese sweatshop. 
But take the example of heparin. 
It's a pharmaceutical product. 
You expect that the supply chain that gets it to the hospital, probably squeaky clean. 
The problem is that the active ingredient in there — as I mentioned earlier — comes from pigs. 
The main American manufacturer of that active ingredient decided a few years ago to relocate to China because it's the world's biggest supplier of pigs. 
And their factory in China — which probably is pretty clean — is getting all of the ingredients from backyard abattoirs, where families slaughter pigs and extract the ingredient. 
So a couple of years ago, we had a scandal which killed about 80 people around the world, because of contaminants that crept into the heparin supply chain. 
Worse, some of the suppliers realized that they could substitute a product which mimicked heparin in tests. 
This substitute cost nine dollars a pound, whereas real heparin, the real ingredient, cost 900 dollars a pound. 
A no-brainer. 
The problem was that it killed more people. 
And so you're asking yourself, "" How come the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allowed this to happen? 
How did the Chinese State Agency for Food and Drugs allow this to happen? "" And the answer is quite simple: the Chinese define these facilities as chemical facilities, not pharmaceutical facilities, so they don't audit them. 
And the USFDA has a jurisdictional problem. 
This is offshore. 
They actually do conduct a few investigations overseas — about a dozen a year — maybe 20 in a good year. 
There are 500 of these facilities producing active ingredients in China alone. 
In fact, about 80 percent of the active ingredients in medicines now come from offshore, particularly China and India, and we don't have a governance system. 
We don't have a regulatory system able to ensure that that production is safe. 
We don't have a system to ensure that human rights, basic dignity, are ensured. 
So at a national level — and we work in about 60 different countries — at a national level we've got a serious breakdown in the ability of governments to regulate production on their own soil. 
And the real problem with the global supply chain is that it's supranational. 
So governments who are failing, who are dropping the ball at a national level, have even less ability to get their arms around the problem at an international level. 
And you can just look at the headlines. 
Take Copenhagen last year — complete failure of governments to do the right thing in the face of an international challenge. 
Take the G20 meeting a couple of weeks ago — stepped back from its commitments of just a few months ago. 
You can take any one of the major global challenges we've discussed this week and ask yourself, where is the leadership from governments to step up and come up with solutions, responses, to those international problems? 
And the simple answer is they can't. They're national. 
Their voters are local. 
They have parochial interests. 
They can't subordinate those interests to the greater global public good. 
So, if we're going to ensure the delivery of the key public goods at an international level — in this case, in the global supply chain — we have to come up with a different mechanism. 
We need a different machine. 
Fortunately, we have some examples. 
In the 1990s, there were a whole series of scandals concerning the production of brand name goods in the U.S. — child labor, forced labor, serious health and safety abuses. 
And eventually President Clinton, in 1996, convened a meeting at the White House, invited industry, human rights NGOs, trade unions, the Department of Labor, got them all in a room and said, "" Look, I don't want globalization to be a race to the bottom. 
I don't know how to prevent that, but I'm at least going to use my good offices to get you folks together to come up with a response. "" So they formed a White House task force, and they spent about three years arguing about who takes how much responsibility in the global supply chain. 
Companies didn't feel it was their responsibility. 
They don't own those facilities. 
They don't employ those workers. 
They're not legally liable. 
Everybody else at the table said, "" Folks, that doesn't cut it. 
You have a custodial duty, a duty of care, to make sure that that product gets from wherever to the store in a way that allows us to consume it, without fear of our safety, or without having to sacrifice our conscience to consume that product. "" So they agreed, "" Okay, what we'll do is we agree on a common set of standards, code of conduct. 
We'll apply that throughout our global supply chain regardless of ownership or control. 
We'll make it part of the contract. "" And that was a stroke of absolute genius, because what they did was they harnessed the power of the contract, private power, to deliver public goods. 
And let's face it, the contract from a major multinational brand to a supplier in India or China has much more persuasive value than the local labor law, the local environmental regulations, the local human rights standards. 
Those factories will probably never see an inspector. 
If the inspector did come along, it would be amazing if they were able to resist the bribe. 
Even if they did their jobs, and they cited those facilities for their violations, the fine would be derisory. 
But you lose that contract for a major brand name, that's the difference between staying in business or going bankrupt. 
That makes a difference. 
So what we've been able to do is we've been able to harness the power and the influence of the only truly transnational institution in the global supply chain, that of the multinational company, and get them to do the right thing, get them to use that power for good, to deliver the key public goods. 
Now of course, this doesn't come naturally to multinational companies. 
They weren't set up to do this. They're set up to make money. 
But they are extremely efficient organizations. 
They have resources, and if we can add the will, the commitment, they know how to deliver that product. 
Now, getting there is not easy. 
Those supply chains I put up on the screen earlier, they're not there. 
You need a safe space. 
You need a place where people can come together, sit down without fear of judgment, without recrimination, to actually face the problem, agree on the problem and come up with solutions. 
We can do it. The technical solutions are there. 
The problem is the lack of trust, the lack of confidence, the lack of partnership between NGOs, campaign groups, civil society organizations and multinational companies. 
If we can put those two together in a safe space, get them to work together, we can deliver public goods right now, or in extremely short supply. 
This is a radical proposition, and it's crazy to think that if you're a 15-year-old Bangladeshi girl leaving your rural village to go and work in a factory in Dhaka — 22, 23, 24 dollars a month — your best chance of enjoying rights at work is if that factory is producing for a brand name company which has got a code of conduct and made that code of conduct part of the contract. 
It's crazy. 
Multinationals are protecting human rights. 
I know there's going to be disbelief. 
You'll say, "" How can we trust them? "" Well, we don't. 
It's the old arms control phrase: "Trust, but verify." 
So we audit. 
We take their supply chain, we take all the factory names, we do a random sample, we send inspectors on an unannounced basis to inspect those facilities, and then we publish the results. 
Transparency is absolutely critical to this. 
You can call yourself responsible, but responsibility without accountability often doesn't work. 
So what we're doing is, we're not only enlisting the multinationals, we're giving them the tools to deliver this public good — respect for human rights — and we're checking. 
You don't need to believe me. You shouldn't believe me. 
Go to the website. Look at the audit results. 
Ask yourself, is this company behaving in a socially responsible way? 
Can I buy that product without compromising my ethics? 
That's the way the system works. 
I hate the idea that governments are not protecting human rights around the world. I hate the idea 
that governments have dropped this ball and I can't get used to the idea that somehow we can't get them to do their jobs. 
I've been at this for 30 years, and in that time I've seen the ability, the commitment, the will of government to do this decline, and I don't see them making a comeback right now. 
So we started out thinking this was a stopgap measure. 
We're now thinking that, in fact, this is probably the start of a new way of regulating and addressing international challenges. 
Call it network governance. Call it what you will. 
The private actors, companies and NGOs, are going to have to get together to face the major challenges we are going to face. 
Just look at pandemics — swine flu, bird flu, H1N1. 
Look at the health systems in so many countries. 
Do they have the resources to face up to a serious pandemic? 
No. 
Could the private sector and NGOs get together and marshal a response? 
Absolutely. 
What they lack is that safe space to come together, agree and move to action. 
That's what we're trying to provide. 
I know as well that this often seems like an overwhelming level of responsibility for people to assume. 
"" You want me to deliver human rights throughout my global supply chain. 
There are thousands of suppliers in there. "" It seems too daunting, too dangerous, for any company to take on. 
But there are companies. 
We have 4,000 companies who are members. 
Some of them are very, very large companies. 
The sporting goods industry, in particular, stepped up to the plate and have done it. 
The example, the role model, is there. 
And whenever we discuss one of these problems that we have to address — child labor in cottonseed farms in India — this year we will monitor 50,000 cottonseed farms in India. 
It seems overwhelming. 
The numbers just make you want to zone out. 
But we break it down to some basic realities. 
And human rights comes down to a very simple proposition: can I give this person their dignity back? 
Poor people, people whose human rights have been violated — the crux of that is the loss of dignity, the lack of dignity. 
It starts with just giving people back their dignity. 
I was sitting in a slum outside Gurgaon just next to Delhi, one of the flashiest, brightest new cities popping up in India right now, and I was talking to workers who worked in garment sweatshops down the road, and I asked them what message they would like me to take to the brands. 
They didn't say money. 
They said, "" The people who employ us treat us like we are less than human, like we don't exist. 
Please ask them to treat us like human beings. "" That's my simple understanding of human rights. 
That's my simple proposition to you, my simple plea to every decision-maker in this room, everybody out there. 
We can all make a decision to come together and pick up the balls and run with the balls that governments have dropped. 
If we don't do it, we're abandoning hope, we're abandoning our essential humanity, and I know that's not a place we want to be, and we don't have to be there. 
So I appeal to you. 
Join us, come into that safe space, and let's start to make this happen. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

Scientific breakthrough, the kind that can potentially save lives, can sometimes be lying right out in the open for us to discover, in the evolved, accumulated body of human anecdote, for example, or in the time-tested adaptations that we observe in the natural world around us. 
Science starts with observation, but the trick is to identify the patterns and signatures that we might otherwise dismiss as myth or coincidence, isolate them, and test them with scientific rigor. 
And when we do, the results will often surprise. 
Western Australia has had a particular problem with shark attacks over the last three years, unfortunately and tragically culminating in five fatal shark attacks in a 10-month period during that time. 
But Western Australia is not alone in this. 
The incident of shark engagements on humans is escalating worldwide. 
And so it's not surprising, perhaps, that in July of this year, Shark Attack Mitigation Systems in collaboration with the University of Western Australia Oceans Institute made an announcement which captured the attention of the worldwide media and of ocean users worldwide, and that was around the development of technology to mitigate or reduce the risk of shark attack based on the science of what sharks can see. 
And I have for you today the story of that journey, but also the notion that science can be as powerful as a translator as it can be for invention. 
When we began this process, we were looking, it was about three years ago, and we'd just had the first two fatal shark attacks in Western Australia, and by chance, in a previous role, I happened to be having dinner with Harry Butler. 
Now Harry Butler, who most Australians would know is a famous naturalist, had spent a lot of time in the marine environment. 
Harry Butler is a precursor, if you like, to the late Steve Irwin. 
When I asked him about what the solution to the problem might be, the answer was quite surprising. 
He said, "" Take a black wetsuit, band it in yellow stripes like a bumblebee, and you'll be mimicking the warning systems of most marine species. "" I didn't think about that much at the time, and it wasn't until the next three fatal shark attacks happened, and it caused me to think, maybe there's some merit to this idea. 
And I turned to the web to see if there might be some clues. 
And it turns out the web is awash with this sort of evidence that supports this sort of thinking. 
So biologically, there are plenty of species that display banding or patterns, warning patterns, to either be cryptical in the water or warn against being attacked, not the least of which is the pilot fish which spends a big slab of its life around the business end of a shark. 
On the human side, Walter Starck, an oceanographer, has been painting his wetsuit since the 1970s, and anthropologically, Pacific island tribes painted themselves in bands in a sea snake ceremony to ward off the shark god. 
So what's going on here? 
Is this an idea lying wide out in the open for us to consider and define? 
We know that sharks use a range of sensors when they engage, particularly for attack, but the sight sensor is the one that they use to identify the target, and particularly in the last number of meters before the attack. 
It makes sense to pay attention to the biological anecdote because that's time-tested evolution over many millennia. 
But isn't human anecdote also an evolution of sorts, the idea that there's a kernel of truth thought to be important, passed down from generation to generation, so that it actually ends up shaping human behavior? 
I wanted to test this idea. 
I wanted to put some science to this anecdotal evidence, because if science could support this concept, then we might have at least part of the solution to shark attack right under our very nose. 
To do that, I needed some experts in shark vision and shark neurology, and a worldwide search, again, led to the University of W.A. 
on the doorstep here, with the Oceans Institute. 
And professor Nathan Hart and his team had just written a paper which tells us, confirms that predatory sharks see in black and white, or grayscale. 
So I called up Nathan, a little bit sheepishly, actually, about this idea that maybe we could use these patterns and shapes to produce a wetsuit to try and mitigate the risk of shark attack, and fortunately, he thought that was a good idea. 
So what ensued is a collaborative bit of research supported by the West Australian State Government. 
And we did three key things. 
The first is that we mapped the characteristics, the physical characteristics of the eyes of the three main predatory sharks, so the great white, tiger and bull shark. 
We did that genetically and we did that anatomically. 
The next thing we did was to understand, using complex computer modeling, what that eye can see at different depths, distances, light conditions, and water clarity in the ocean. 
And from there, we were able to pinpoint two key characteristics: what patterns and shapes would present the wearer as hidden or hard to make out in the water, cryptic, and what patterns and shapes might provide the greatest contrast but provide the greatest breakup of profile so that that person wasn't confused for shark prey or shark food. 
The next thing we needed to do was to convert this into wetsuits that people might actually wear, and to that end, I invited Ray Smith, a surfer, industrial designer, wetsuit designer, and in fact the guy that designed the original Quiksilver logo, to come over and sit with the science team and interpret that science into aesthetic wetsuits that people might actually wear. 
And here's an example of one of the first drawings. 
So this is what I call a "" don't eat me "" wetsuit. 
So this takes that banding idea, takes that banding idea, it's highly visible, provides a highly disruptive profile, and is intended to prevent the shark from considering that you would be ordinary food, and potentially even create confusion for the shark. 
And this one's configured to go with a surfboard. 
You can see that dark, opaque panel on the front, and it's particularly better for the surface, where being backlit and providing a silhouette is problematic. 
Second iteration is the cryptic wetsuit, or the one which attempts to hide the wearer in the water column. 
There are three panels on this suit, and in any given conditions, one or more of those panels will match the reflective spectra of the water so as to disappear fully or partially, leaving the last panel or panels to create a disruptive profile in the water column. 
And this one's particularly well-suited to the dive configuration, so when you're deeper under the water. 
So we knew that we had some really solid science here. 
We knew, if you wanted to stand out, you needed to look stripy, and we knew if you wanted to be cryptic, you needed to look like this. 
But the acid test is always going to be, how would sharks really behave in the context of these patterns and shapes. 
And testing to simulate a person in a wetsuit in the water with a predatory shark in a natural environment is actually a lot harder than you might think. 
(Laughter) So we have to bait the rig, because we need to get the statistical number of samples through to get the scientific evidence, and by baiting the rig, we're obviously changing shark behavior. 
We can't put humans in the water. 
We're ethically precluded from even using humanoid shapes and baiting them up in the water. 
But nevertheless, we started the testing process in January of this year, initially with tiger sharks and subsequently with great white sharks. 
The way we did that was to get a perforated drum which is full of bait, wrap it in a neoprene skin, and then run two stereo underwater cameras to watch how the shark actually engages with that rig. 
And because we use stereo, we can capture all the statistics on how big the shark is, what angle it comes in at, how quickly it leaves, and what its behavior is in an empirical rather than a subjective way. 
Because we needed to preserve the scientific method, we ran a control rig which was a black neoprene rig just like a normal black wetsuit against the, what we call, SAMS technology rig. 
And the results were not just exciting, but very encouraging, and today I would like to just give you a snapshot of two of those engagements. 
So here we've got a four-meter tiger shark engaging the black control rig, which it had encountered about a minute and a half before. 
Now that exact same shark had engaged, or encountered this SAMS rig, which is the Elude SAMS rig, about eight minutes before, and spent six minutes circling it, hunting for it, looking for what it could smell and sense but not see, and this was the final engagement. 
Great white sharks are more confident than the tigers, and here you see great white shark engaging a control rig, so a black neoprene wetsuit, and going straight to the bottom, coming up and engaging. 
In contrast to the SAMS technology rig, this is the banded one, where it's more tactile, it's more investigative, it's more apprehensive, and shows a reluctance to come straight in and go. 
(Applause) So, it's important for us that all the testing is done independently, and the University of W.A. is doing the testing. 
It'll be an ongoing process. 
It's subject to peer review and subject to publication. 
It's so important that this concept is led with the science. 
From the perspective of Shark Attack Mitigation Systems, we're a biotechnology licensing company, so we don't make wetsuits ourselves. 
We'll license others to do that. 
But I thought you might be interested in seeing what SAMS technology looks like embedded in a wetsuit, and to that end, for the first time, live, worldwide — (Laughter) — I can show you what biological adaptation, science and design looks like in real life. 
So I can welcome Sam, the surfer, from this side. Where are you, Sam? 
(Applause) And Eduardo. (Applause) 
Cheers, mate. 
Cheers. 
Thanks, gentlemen. (Applause) So what have we done here? 
Well, to my mind, rather than take a blank sheet and use science as a tool for invention, we've paid attention to the biological evidence, we've put importance to the human anecdotal evidence, and we've used science as a tool for translation, translation of something that was already there into something that we can use for the benefit of mankind. 
And it strikes me that this idea of science as a tool for translation rather than invention is one that we can apply much more widely than this in the pursuit of innovation. 
After all, did the Wright brothers discover manned flight, or did they observe the biological fact of flight and translate that mechanically, replicate it in a way that humans could use? 
As for the humble wetsuit, who knows what oceanwear will look like in two years' time, in five years' time or in 50 years' time, but with this new thinking, I'm guessing there's a fair chance it won't be pure black. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

(Laughter) (Applause) So this has actually been a little bit startling to the game-development community. (Laughter) 

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

You will understand nothing with my type of English. 
It's good for you because you can have a break after all these fantastic people. 
I must tell you I am like that, not very comfortable, because usually, in life, I think my job is absolutely useless. 
I mean, I feel useless. 
Now after Carolyn, and all the other guys, I feel like shit. 
And definitively, I don't know why I am here, but — you know the nightmare you can have, like you are an impostor, you arrive at the opera, and they push you, "" You must sing! "" I don't know. (Laughter) So, so, because I have nothing to show, nothing to say, we shall try to speak about something else. 
We can start, if you want, by understanding — it's just to start, it's not interesting, but — how I work. 
When somebody comes to me and ask for what I am known, I mean, yes, lemon squeezer, toilet brush, toothpick, beautiful toilet seats, and why not — a toothbrush? 
I don't try to design the toothbrush. 
I don't try to say, "" Oh, that will be a beautiful object, "" or something like that. 
That doesn't interest me. 
Because there is different types of design. 
The one, we can call it the cynical design, that means the design invented by Raymond Loewy in the '50s, who said, what is ugly is a bad sale, la laideur se vend mal, which is terrible. 
It means the design must be just the weapon for marketing, for producer to make product more sexy, like that, they sell more: it's shit, it's obsolete, it's ridiculous. 
I call that the cynical design. 
After, there is the narcissistic design: it's a fantastic designer who designs only for other fantastic designers. (Laughter) After, there is people like me, who try to deserve to exist, and who are so ashamed to make this useless job, who try to do it in another way, and they try, I try, to not make the object for the object but for the result, for the profit for the human being, the person who will use it. 
If we take the toothbrush — I don't think about the toothbrush. 
I think, "" What will be the effect of the brush in the mouth? "" And to understand what will be the effect of the toothbrush in the mouth, I must imagine: Who owns this mouth? 
What is the life of the owner of this mouth? In what society [does] this guy live? 
What civilization creates this society? 
What animal species creates this civilization? 
When I arrive — and I take one minute, I am not so intelligent — when I arrive at the level of animal species, that becomes real interesting. 
Me, I have strictly no power to change anything. 
But when I come back, I can understand why I shall not do it, because today to not do it, it's more positive than do it, or how I shall do it. 
But to come back, where I am at the animal species, there is things to see. 
There is things to see, there is the big challenge. 
The big challenge in front of us. 
Because there is not a human production which exists outside of what I call "" the big image. "" The big image is our story, our poetry, our romanticism. 
Our poetry is our mutation, our life. 
We must remember, and we can see that in any book of my son of 10 years old, that life appears four billion years ago, around — four billion point two? 
Voice offstage: Four point five. 
Yes, point five, OK, OK, OK! (Laughter) I'm a designer, that's all, of Christmas gifts. 
And before, there was this soup, called "" soupe primordiale, "" this first soup — bloop bloop bloop — sort of dirty mud, no life, nothing. 
So then — pshoo-shoo — lightning — pshoo — arrive — pshoo-shoo — makes life — bloop bloop — and that dies. 
Some million years after — pshoo-shoo, bloop-bloop — ah, wake up! 
At the end, finally, that succeeds, and life appears. 
We was so, so stupid. The most stupid bacteria. 
Even, I think, we copy our way to reproduce, you know what I mean, and something of — oh no, forget it. 
After, we become a fish; after, we become a frog; after, we become a monkey; after, we become what we are today: a super-monkey, and the fun is, the super-monkey we are today, is at half of the story. 
Can you imagine? From that stupid bacteria to us, with a microphone, with a computer, with an iPod: four billion years. 
And we know, and especially Carolyn knows, that when the sun will implode, the earth will burn, explode, I don't know what, and this is scheduled for four, four billion years? 
Yes, she said, something like that. OK, that means we are at half of the story. 
Fantastic! It's a beauty! 
Can you imagine? It's very symbolic. 
Because the bacteria we was had no idea of what we are today. 
And today, we have no idea of what we shall be in four billion years. 
And this territory is fantastic. 
That is our poetry. That is our beautiful story. 
It's our romanticism. Mu-ta-tion. We are mutants. 
And if we don't deeply understand, if we don't integrate that we are mutants, we completely miss the story. 
Because every generation thinks we are the final one. 
We have a way to look at Earth like that, you know, "" I am the man. The final man. 
You know, we mutate during four billion years before, but now, because it's me, we stop. Fin. (Laughter) For the end, for the eternity, it is one with a red jacket. "" Something like that. I am not sure of that. (Laughter) Because that is our intelligence of mutation and things like that. 
There is so many things to do; it's so fresh. 
And here is something: nobody is obliged to be a genius, but everybody is obliged to participate. 
And to participate, for a mutant, there is a minimum of exercise, a minimum of sport. 
We can say that. 
The first, if you want — there is so many — but one which is very easy to do, is the duty of vision. 
I can explain you. I shall try. 
If you walk like that, it's OK, it's OK, you can walk, but perhaps, because you walk with the eyes like that, you will not see, oh, there is a hole. 
And you will fall, and you will die. Dangerous. 
That's why, perhaps, you will try to have this angle of vision. 
OK, I can see, if I found something, up, up, and they continue, up up up. 
I raise the angle of vision, but it's still very — selfish, selfish, egoiste — yes, selfish. 
You, you survive. It's OK. 
If you raise the level of your eyes a little more you go, "" I see you, oh my God you are here, how are you, I can help you, I can design for you a new toothbrush, new toilet brush, "" something like that. 
I live in society; I live in community. 
It's OK. You start to be in the territory of intelligence, we can say. 
From this level, the more you can raise this angle of view, the more you will be important for the society. 
The more you will rise, the more you will be important for the civilization. 
The more you will rise, to see far and high, like that, the more you will be important for the story of our mutation. 
That means intelligent people are in this angle. That is intelligence. 
From this to here, that, it's genius. 
Ptolemy, Eratosthenes, Einstein, things like that. 
Nobody's obliged to be a genius. 
It's better, but nobody. 
Take care, in this training, to be a good mutant. 
There is some danger, there is some trap. One trap: the vertical. 
Because at the vertical of us, if you look like that, "Ah! my God, there is God. Ah! God!" 
God is a trap. God is the answer when we don't know the answer. 
That means, when your brain is not enough big, when you don't understand, you go, "" Ah, it's God, it's God. "" That's ridiculous. 
That's why — jump, like that? No, don't jump. 
Come back. Because, after, there is another trap. 
If you look like that, you look to the past, or you look inside if you are very flexible, inside yourself. 
It's called schizophrenia, and you are dead also. 
That's why every morning, now, because you are a good mutant, you will raise your angle of view. 
Out, more of the horizontal. You are an intelligence. 
Never forget — like that, like that. 
It's very, very, very important. 
What, what else we can say about that? Why do that? 
It's because we — if we look from far, we see our line of evolution. 
This line of evolution is clearly positive. 
From far, this line looks very smooth, like that. 
But if you take a lens, like that, this line is ack, ack, ack, ack, ack. Like that. 
It's made of light and shadow. 
We can say light is civilization, shadow is barbaria. 
And it's very important to know where we are. 
Because some cycle, there is a spot in the cycle, and you have not the same duty in the different parts of the cycle. 
That means, we can imagine — I don't say it was fantastic, but in the '80s, there was not too much war, like that, it was — we can imagine that the civilization can become civilized. 
In this case, people like me are acceptable. 
We can say, "" It's luxurious time. "" We have time to think, we have time to I don't know what, speak about art and things like that. 
It's OK. We are in the light. 
But sometimes, like today, we fall, we fall so fast, so fast to shadow, we fall so fast to barbaria. 
With many, many, many, many face of barbaria. 
Because it's not, the barbaria we have today, it's perhaps not the barbaria we think. 
There is different type of barbaria. 
That's why we must adapt. 
That means, when barbaria is back, forget the beautiful chairs, forget the beautiful hotel, forget design, even — I'm sorry to say — forget art. 
Forget all that. There is priority; there is urgency. 
You must go back to politics, you must go back to radicalization, I'm sorry if that's not very English. 
You must go back to fight, to battle. 
That's why today I'm so ashamed to make this job. 
That's why I am here, to try to do it the best possible. 
But I know that even I do it the best possible — that's why I'm the best — it's nothing. 
Because it's not the right time. 
That's why I say that. I say that, because, I repeat, nothing exist if it's not in the good reason, the reason of our beautiful dream, of this civilization. 
And because we must all work to finish this story. 
Because the scenario of this civilization — about love, progress, and things like that — it's OK, but there is so many different, other scenarios of other civilizations. 
This scenario, of this civilization, was about becoming powerful, intelligent, like this idea we have invented, this concept of God. 
We are God now. We are. It's almost done. 
We have just to finish the story. 
That is very, very important. 
And when you don't understand really what's happened, you cannot go and fight and work and build and things like that. 
You go to the future back, back, back, back, like that. 
And you can fall, and it's very dangerous. 
No, you must really understand that. 
Because we have almost finished, I'll repeat this story. 
And the beauty of this, in perhaps 50 years, 60 years, we can finish completely this civilization, and offer to our children the possibility to invent a new story, a new poetry, a new romanticism. 
With billions of people who have been born, worked, lived and died before us, these people who have worked so much, we have now bring beautiful things, beautiful gifts, we know so many things. 
We can say to our children, OK, done, that was our story. That passed. 
Now you have a duty: invent a new story. Invent a new poetry. 
The only rule is, we have not to have any idea about the next story. 
We give you white pages. Invent. 
We give you the best tools, the best tools, and now, do it. 
That's why I continue to work, even if it's for toilet brush. 

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

Guatemala is recovering from a 36-year armed conflict. 
A conflict that was fought during the Cold War. 
It was really just a small leftist insurgency and a devastating response by the state. 
What we have as a result is 200,000 civilian victims, 160,000 of those killed in the communities: small children, men, women, the elderly even. 
And then we have about 40,000 others, the missing, the ones we're still looking for today. 
We call them the Desaparecidos. 
Now, 83 percent of the victims are Mayan victims, victims that are the descendants of the original inhabitants of Central America. 
And only about 17 percent are of European descent. 
But the most important thing here is that the very people who are supposed to defend us, the police, the military, are the ones that committed most of the crimes. 
Now the families, they want information. 
They want to know what happened. 
They want the bodies of their loved ones. 
But most of all, what they want is they want you, they want everyone to know that their loved ones did nothing wrong. 
Now, my case was that my father received death threats in 1980. 
And we left. 
We left Guatemala and we came here. 
So I grew up in New York, I grew up in Brooklyn as a matter of fact, and I went to New Utrecht High School and I graduated from Brooklyn College. 
The only thing was that I really didn't know what was happening in Guatemala. 
I didn't care for it; it was too painful. 
But it wasn't till 1995 that I decided to do something about it. 
So I went back. 
I went back to Guatemala, to look for the bodies, to understand what happened and to look for part of myself as well. 
The way we work is that we give people information. 
We talk to the family members and we let them choose. 
We let them decide to tell us the stories, to tell us what they saw, to tell us about their loved ones. 
And even more important, we let them choose to give us a piece of themselves. 
A piece, an essence, of who they are. 
And that DNA is what we're going to compare to the DNA that comes from the skeletons. 
While we're doing that, though, we're looking for the bodies. 
And these are skeletons by now, most of these crimes happened 32 years ago. 
When we find the grave, we take out the dirt and eventually clean the body, document it, and exhume it. 
We literally bring the skeleton out of the ground. 
Once we have those bodies, though, we take them back to the city, to our lab, and we begin a process of trying to understand mainly two things: One is how people died. 
So here you see a gunshot wound to the back of the head or a machete wound, for example. 
The other thing we want to understand is who they are. 
Whether it's a baby, or an adult. 
Whether it's a woman or a man. 
But when we're done with that analysis what we'll do is we'll take a small fragment of the bone and we'll extract DNA from it. 
We'll take that DNA and then we'll compare it with the DNA of the families, of course. 
The best way to explain this to you is by showing you two cases. 
The first is the case of the military diary. 
Now this is a document that was smuggled out of somewhere in 1999. 
And what you see there is the state following individuals, people that, like you, wanted to change their country, and they jotted everything down. 
And one of the things that they wrote down is when they executed them. 
Inside that yellow rectangle, you see a code, it's a secret code: 300. 
And then you see a date. 
The 300 means "" executed "" and the date means when they were executed. 
Now that's going to come into play in a second. 
What we did is we conducted an exhumation in 2003, where we exhumed 220 bodies from 53 graves in a military base. 
Grave 9, though, matched the family of Sergio Saul Linares. 
Now Sergio was a professor at the university. 
He graduted from Iowa State University and went back to Guatemala to change his country. 
And he was captured on February 23, 1984. 
And if you can see there, he was executed on March 29, 1984, which was incredible. 
We had the body, we had the family's information and their DNA, and now we have documents that told us exactly what happened. 
But most important is about two weeks later, we go another hit, another match from the same grave to Amancio Villatoro. 
The DNA of that body also matched the DNA of that family. 
And then we noticed that he was also in the diary. 
But it was amazing to see that he was also executed on March 29, 1984. 
So that led us to think, hmm, how many bodies were in the grave? 
Six. 
So then we said, how many people were executed on March 29, 1984? 
That's right, six as well. 
So we have Juan de Dios, Hugo, Moises and Zoilo. 
All of them executed on the same date, all captured at different locations and at different moments. 
All put in that grave. 
The only thing we needed now was the DNA of those four families So we went and we looked for them and we found them. 
And we identified those six bodies and gave them back to the families. 
The other case I want to tell you about is that of a military base called CREOMPAZ. 
It actually means, "" to believe in peace, "" but the acronym really means Regional Command Center for Peacekeeping Operations. 
And this is where the Guatemalan military trains peacekeepers from other countries, the ones that serve with the U.N. 
and go to countries like Haiti and the Congo. 
Well, we have testimony that said that within this military base, there were bodies, there were graves. 
So we went in there with a search warrant and about two hours after we went in, we found the first of 84 graves, a total of 533 bodies. 
Now, if you think about that, peacekeepers being trained on top of bodies. 
It's very ironic. 
But the bodies — face down, most of them, hands tied behind their backs, blindfolded, all types of trauma — these were people who were defenseless who were being executed. 
People that 533 families are looking for. 
So we're going to focus on Grave 15. 
Grave 15, what we noticed, was a grave full of women and children, 63 of them. 
And that immediately made us think, my goodness, where is there a case like this? 
When I got to Guatemala in 1995, I heard of a case of a massacre that happened on May 14, 1982, where the army came in, killed the men, and took the women and children in helicopters to an unknown location. 
Well, guess what? 
The clothing from this grave matched the clothing from the region where these people were taken from, where these women and children were taken from. 
So we conducted some DNA analysis, and guess what? 
We identified Martina Rojas and Manuel Chen. 
Both of them disappeared in that case, and now we could prove it. 
We have physical evidence that proves that this happened and that those people were taken to this base. 
Now, Manuel Chen was three years old. 
His mother went to the river to wash clothes, and she left him with a neighbor. 
That's when the army came and that's when he was taken away in a helicopter and never seen again until we found him in Grave 15. 
So now with science, with archaeology, with anthropology, with genetics, what we're doing is, we're giving a voice to the voiceless. 
But we're doing more than that. 
We're actually providing evidence for trials, like the genocide trial that happened last year in Guatemala where General Ríos Montt was found guilty of genocide and sentenced to 80 years. 
So I came here to tell you today that this is happening everywhere — it's happening in Mexico right in front of us today — and we can't let it go on anymore. 
We have to now come together and decide that we're not going to have any more missing. 
So no more missing, guys. 
Okay? No more missing. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I just met you on a bus, and we would really like to get to know each other, but I've got to get off at the next stop, so you're going to tell me three things about yourself that just define you as a person, three things about yourself that will help me understand who you are, three things that just get to your very essence. 
And what I'm wondering is, of those three things, is any one of them surviving some kind of trauma? 
Cancer survivor, rape survivor, Holocaust survivor, incest survivor. 
Ever notice how we tend to identify ourselves by our wounds? 
And where I have seen this survivor identity have the most consequences is in the cancer community. 
And I've been around this community for a long time, because I've been a hospice and a hospital chaplain for almost 30 years. 
And in 2005, I was working at a big cancer center when I received the news that my mother had breast cancer. 
And then five days later, I received the news that I had breast cancer. 
My mother and I can be competitive — (Laughter) — but I was really not trying to compete with her on this one. 
And in fact, I thought, well, if you have to have cancer, it's pretty convenient to be working at a place that treats it. 
You should be immune. 
Like, maybe I should have just gotten off with a warning instead of an actual ticket, because I'm on the force. 
So I did get my treatment at the cancer center where I worked, which was amazingly convenient, and I had chemotherapy and a mastectomy, and a saline implant put in, and so before I say another word, let me just say right now, this is the fake one. (Laughter) I have found that I need to get that out of the way, because I'll see somebody go "Oh, I know it's this one." 
And then I'll move or I'll gesture and they'll go, "No, it's that one." 
So now you know. 
I learned a lot being a patient, and one of the surprising things was that only a small part of the cancer experience is about medicine. 
Most of it is about feelings and faith and losing and finding your identity and discovering strength and flexibility you never even knew you had. 
It's about realizing that the most important things in life are not things at all, but relationships, and it's about laughing in the face of uncertainty and learning that the way to get out of almost anything is to say, "" I have cancer. "" So the other thing I learned was that I don't have to take on "" cancer survivor "" as my identity, but, boy, are there powerful forces pushing me to do just that. 
Now, don't, please, misunderstand me. 
Cancer organizations and the drive for early screening and cancer awareness and cancer research have normalized cancer, and this is a wonderful thing. 
We can now talk about cancer without whispering. 
We can talk about cancer and we can support one another. 
But sometimes, it feels like people go a little overboard and they start telling us how we're going to feel. 
So about a week after my surgery, we had a houseguest. 
That was probably our first mistake. 
And keep in mind that at this point in my life I had been a chaplain for over 20 years, and issues like dying and death and the meaning of life, these are all things I'd been yakking about forever. 
So at dinner that night, our houseguest proceeds to stretch his arms up over his head, and say, "" You know, Deb, now you're really going to learn what's important. 
Yes, you are going to make some big changes in your life, and now you're going to start thinking about your death. 
Yep, this cancer is your wakeup call. "" Now, these are golden words coming from someone who is speaking about their own experience, but when someone is telling you how you are going to feel, it's instant crap. 
The only reason I did not kill him with my bare hands was because I could not lift my right arm. 
But I did say a really bad word to him, followed by a regular word, that — (Laughter) — made my husband say, "" She's on narcotics. "" (Laughter) And then after my treatment, it just felt like everyone was telling me what my experience was going to mean. 
"Oh, this means you're going to be doing the walk." 
"Oh, this means you're coming to the luncheon." 
"" This means you're going to be wearing the pink ribbon and the pink t-shirt and the headband and the earrings and the bracelet and the panties. "" Panties. No, seriously, google it. 
(Laughter) How is that raising awareness? 
Only my husband should be seeing my panties. 
(Laughter) He's pretty aware of cancer already. 
It was at that point where I felt like, oh my God, this is just taking over my life. 
And that's when I told myself, claim your experience. 
Don't let it claim you. 
We all know that the way to cope with trauma, with loss, with any life-changing experience, is to find meaning. 
But here's the thing: No one can tell us what our experience means. 
We have to decide what it means. 
And it doesn't have to be some gigantic, extroverted meaning. 
We don't all have to start a foundation or an organization or write a book or make a documentary. 
Meaning can be quiet and introverted. 
Maybe we make one small decision about our lives that can bring about big change. 
Many years ago, I had a patient, just a wonderful young man who was loved by the staff, and so it was something of a shock to us to realize that he had no friends. 
He lived by himself, he would come in for chemotherapy by himself, he would receive his treatment, and then he'd walk home alone. 
And I even asked him. I said, "" Hey, how come you never bring a friend with you? "" And he said, "" I don't really have any friends. "" But he had tons of friends on the infusion floor. 
We all loved him, and people were going in and out of his room all the time. 
So at his last chemo, we sang him the song and we put the crown on his head and we blew the bubbles, and then I asked him, I said, "So what are you going to do now?" 
And he answered, "Make friends." 
And he did. 
He started volunteering and he made friends there, and he began going to a church and he made friends there, and at Christmas he invited my husband and me to a party in his apartment, and the place was filled with his friends. 
Claim your experience. 
Don't let it claim you. 
He decided that the meaning of his experience was to know the joy of friendship, and then learn to make friends. 
So what about you? 
How are you going to find meaning in your crappy experience? 
It could be a recent one, or it could be one that you've been carrying around for a really long time. 
It's never too late to change what it means, because meaning is dynamic. 
What it means today may not be what it means a year from now, or 10 years from now. 
It's never too late to become someone other than simply a survivor. 
Hear how static that word sounds? 
Survivor. 
No movement, no growth. 
Claim your experience. 
Don't let it claim you, because if you do, I believe you will become trapped, you will not grow, you will not evolve. 
But of course, sometimes it's not outside pressures that cause us to take on that identity of survivor. 
Sometimes we just like the perks. 
Sometimes there's a payoff. 
But then we get stuck. 
Now, one of the first things I learned as a chaplain intern was the three C's of the chaplain's job: Comfort, clarify and, when necessary, confront or challenge. 
Now, we all pretty much love the comforting and the clarifying. 
The confronting, not so much. 
One of the other things that I loved about being a chaplain was seeing patients a year, or even several years after their treatment, because it was just really cool to see how they had changed and how their lives had evolved and what had happened to them. 
So I was thrilled one day to get a page down into the lobby of the clinic from a patient who I had seen the year before, and she was there with her two adult daughters, who I also knew, for her one year follow-up exam. 
So I got down to the lobby, and they were ecstatic because she had just gotten all of her test results back and she was NED: No Evidence of Disease. 
Which I used to think meant Not Entirely Dead. 
So they were ecstatic, we sat down to visit, and it was so weird, because within two minutes, she started retelling me the story of her diagnosis and her surgery and her chemo, even though, as her chaplain, I saw her every week, and so I knew this story. 
And she was using words like suffering, agony, struggle. 
And she ended her story with, "I felt crucified." 
And at that point, her two daughters got up and said, "We're going to go get coffee." 
And they left. 
Tell me three things about yourself before the next stop. 
People were leaving the bus before she even got to number two or number three. 
So I handed her a tissue, and I gave her a hug, and then, because I really cared for this woman, I said, "Get down off your cross." 
And she said, "" What? "" And I repeated, "" Get down off your cross. "" And to her credit, she could talk about her reasons for embracing and then clinging to this identity. 
It got her a lot of attention. 
People were taking care of her for a change. 
But now, it was having the opposite effect. 
It was pushing people away. 
People kept leaving to get coffee. 
She felt crucified by her experience, but she didn't want to let that crucified self die. 
Now, perhaps you are thinking I was a little harsh with her, so I must tell you that I was speaking out of my own experience. 
Many, many years before, I had been fired from a job that I loved, and I would not stop talking about my innocence and the injustice and the betrayal and the deceipt, until finally, just like this woman, people were walking away from me, until I finally realized I wasn't just processing my feelings, I was feeding them. 
I didn't want to let that crucified self die. 
But we all know that with any resurrection story, you have to die first. 
The Christian story, Jesus was dead a whole day in the tomb before he was resurrected. 
And I believe that for us, being in the tomb means doing our own deep inner work around our wounds and allowing ourselves to be healed. 
We have to let that crucified self die so that a new self, a truer self, is born. 
(Applause) 

I had a slide that said 'Breakdown.' At what point did I think that was a good idea? "" (Laughter) And she said, "" I saw your talk live-streamed. 
YouTube, they're putting this thing on YouTube. 
Why did you bring this up? 
And maybe the hardest part about my life ending is that I learned something hard about myself, and that was that, as much as I would be frustrated about not being able to get my work out to the world, there was a part of me that was working very hard to engineer staying small, staying right under the radar. 
Let me ask you honestly — and I'll give you this warning, I'm trained as a therapist, so I can out-wait you uncomfortably — so if you could just raise your hand that would be awesome — how many of you honestly, when you're thinking about doing or saying something vulnerable think, "" God, vulnerability is weakness. "" How many of you think of vulnerability and weakness synonymously? 
Now let me ask you this question: This past week at TED, how many of you, when you saw vulnerability up here, thought it was pure courage? 
And so many of the calls went like this, "" Dr. Brown, we loved your TED talk. 
We'd appreciate it if you wouldn't mention vulnerability or shame. "" (Laughter) What would you like for me to talk about? 
So I'm like, just keep walking, she's on my six. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And she looks back and does this, "I know." (Laughter) 
Then we read your book and we renamed ourselves' The Breakdown Babes. '"" (Laughter) And she said, "" Our tagline is:' We're falling apart and it feels fantastic. '"" (Laughter) You can only imagine what it's like for me in a faculty meeting. 
(Laughter) And I see you. (Laughter) 
But in surviving this last year, I was reminded of a cardinal rule — not a research rule, but a moral imperative from my upbringing — "" you've got to dance with the one who brung ya "". 
And the purpose is not to walk in and construct a home and live there. 
You can't fix that problem without addressing shame, because when they teach those folks how to suture, they also teach them how to stitch their self-worth to being all-powerful. 
And it goes like this: "" It is not the critic who counts. 
And if we can quiet it down and walk in and say, "" I'm going to do this, "" we look up and the critic that we see pointing and laughing, 99 percent of the time is who? 
Shame drives two big tapes — "" never good enough "" — and, if you can talk it out of that one, "who do you think you are?" 
Shame is "" I am bad. "" Guilt is "" I did something bad. "" How many of you, if you did something that was hurtful to me, would be willing to say, "" I'm sorry. I made a mistake? "" How many of you would be willing to say that? 
I don't know how much perfume that commercial sold, but I guarantee you, it moved a lot of antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds. 
For men, shame is not a bunch of competing, conflicting expectations. 
When we reach out and be vulnerable, we get the shit beat out of us. 
(Laughter) But he really listens — because that's all we need — I'll show you a guy who's done a lot of work. 
The top answers in this country: nice, thin, modest and use all available resources for appearance. 
If we're going to find our way back to each other, we have to understand and know empathy, because empathy's the antidote to shame. 

Why does the universe exist? 
Why is there — Okay. Okay. (Laughter) This is a cosmic mystery. Be solemn. 
Why is there a world, why are we in it, and why is there something rather than nothing at all? 
I mean, this is the super ultimate "" why "" question? 
So I'm going to talk about the mystery of existence, the puzzle of existence, where we are now in addressing it, and why you should care, and I hope you do care. 
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that those who don't wonder about the contingency of their existence, of the contingency of the world's existence, are mentally deficient. 
That's a little harsh, but still. (Laughter) So this has been called the most sublime and awesome mystery, the deepest and most far-reaching question man can pose. 
It's obsessed great thinkers. 
Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, was astonished that there should be a world at all. 
He wrote in his "" Tractatus, "" Proposition 4.66, "" It is not how things are in the world that is the mystical, it's that the world exists. "" And if you don't like taking your epigrams from a philosopher, try a scientist. 
John Archibald Wheeler, one of the great physicists of the 20th century, the teacher of Richard Feynman, the coiner of the term "" black hole, "" he said, "" I want to know how come the quantum, how come the universe, how come existence? "" And my friend Martin Amis — sorry that I'll be doing a lot of name-dropping in this talk, so get used to it — my dear friend Martin Amis once said that we're about five Einsteins away from answering the mystery of where the universe came from. 
And I've no doubt there are five Einsteins in the audience tonight. 
Any Einsteins? Show of hands? No? No? No? 
No Einsteins? Okay. 
So this question, why is there something rather than nothing, this sublime question, was posed rather late in intellectual history. 
It was towards the end of the 17th century, the philosopher Leibniz who asked it, a very smart guy, Leibniz, who invented the calculus independently of Isaac Newton, at about the same time, but for Leibniz, who asked why is there something rather than nothing, this was not a great mystery. 
He either was or pretended to be an Orthodox Christian in his metaphysical outlook, and he said it's obvious why the world exists: because God created it. 
And God created, indeed, out of nothing at all. 
That's how powerful God is. 
He doesn't need any preexisting materials to fashion a world out of. 
He can make it out of sheer nothingness, creation ex nihilo. 
And by the way, this is what most Americans today believe. 
There is no mystery of existence for them. 
God made it. 
So let's put this in an equation. 
I don't have any slides so I'm going to mime my visuals, so use your imaginations. 
So it's God + nothing = the world. 
Okay? Now that's the equation. 
And so maybe you don't believe in God. 
Maybe you're a scientific atheist or an unscientific atheist, and you don't believe in God, and you're not happy with it. 
By the way, even if we have this equation, God + nothing = the world, there's already a problem: Why does God exist? 
God doesn't exist by logic alone unless you believe the ontological argument, and I hope you don't, because it's not a good argument. 
So it's conceivable, if God were to exist, he might wonder, I'm eternal, I'm all-powerful, but where did I come from? 
(Laughter) Whence then am I? 
God speaks in a more formal English. 
(Laughter) And so one theory is that God was so bored with pondering the puzzle of His own existence that He created the world just to distract himself. 
But anyway, let's forget about God. 
Take God out of the equation: We have _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ + nothing = the world. 
Now, if you're a Buddhist, you might want to stop right there, because essentially what you've got is nothing = the world, and by symmetry of identity, that means the world = nothing. Okay? 
And to a Buddhist, the world is just a whole lot of nothing. 
It's just a big cosmic vacuity. 
And we think there's a lot of something out there but that's because we're enslaved by our desires. 
If we let our desires melt away, we'll see the world for what it truly is, a vacuity, nothingness, and we'll slip into this happy state of nirvana which has been defined as having just enough life to enjoy being dead. (Laughter) So that's the Buddhist thinking. 
But I'm a Westerner, and I'm still concerned with the puzzle of existence, so I've got _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ + — this is going to get serious in a minute, so — _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ + nothing = the world. 
What are we going to put in that blank? 
Well, how about science? 
Science is our best guide to the nature of reality, and the most fundamental science is physics. 
That tells us what naked reality really is, that reveals what I call TAUFOTU, the True And Ultimate Furniture Of The Universe. 
So maybe physics can fill this blank, and indeed, since about the late 1960s or around 1970, physicists have purported to give a purely scientific explanation of how a universe like ours could have popped into existence out of sheer nothingness, a quantum fluctuation out of the void. 
Stephen Hawking is one of these physicists, more recently Alex Vilenkin, and the whole thing has been popularized by another very fine physicist and friend of mine, Lawrence Krauss, who wrote a book called "A Universe from Nothing," and Lawrence thinks that he's given — he's a militant atheist, by the way, so he's gotten God out of the picture. 
The laws of quantum field theory, the state-of-the-art physics, can show how out of sheer nothingness, no space, no time, no matter, nothing, a little nugget of false vacuum can fluctuate into existence, and then, by the miracle of inflation, blow up into this huge and variegated cosmos we see around us. 
Okay, this is a really ingenious scenario. 
It's very speculative. It's fascinating. 
But I've got a big problem with it, and the problem is this: It's a pseudo-religious point of view. 
Now, Lawrence thinks he's an atheist, but he's still in thrall to a religious worldview. 
He sees physical laws as being like divine commands. 
The laws of quantum field theory for him are like fiat lux, "" Let there be light. "" The laws have some sort of ontological power or clout that they can form the abyss, that it's pregnant with being. 
They can call a world into existence out of nothing. 
But that's a very primitive view of what a physical law is, right? 
We know that physical laws are actually generalized descriptions of patterns and regularities in the world. 
They don't exist outside the world. 
They don't have any ontic cloud of their own. 
They can't call a world into existence out of nothingness. 
That's a very primitive view of what a scientific law is. 
And if you don't believe me on this, listen to Stephen Hawking, who himself put forward a model of the cosmos that was self-contained, didn't require any outside cause, any creator, and after proposing this, Hawking admitted that he was still puzzled. 
He said, this model is just equations. 
What breathes fire into the equations and creates a world for them to describe? 
He was puzzled by this, so equations themselves can't do the magic, can't resolve the puzzle of existence. 
And besides, even if the laws could do that, why this set of laws? 
Why quantum field theory that describes a universe with a certain number of forces and particles and so forth? 
Why not a completely different set of laws? 
There are many, many mathematically consistent sets of laws. 
Why not no laws at all? Why not sheer nothingness? 
So this is a problem, believe it or not, that reflective physicists really think a lot about, and at this point they tend to go metaphysical, say, well, maybe the set of laws that describes our universe, it's just one set of laws and it describes one part of reality, but maybe every consistent set of laws describes another part of reality, and in fact all possible physical worlds really exist, they're all out there. 
We just see a little tiny part of reality that's described by the laws of quantum field theory, but there are many, many other worlds, parts of reality that are described by vastly different theories that are different from ours in ways we can't imagine, that are inconceivably exotic. 
Steven Weinberg, the father of the standard model of particle physics, has actually flirted with this idea himself, that all possible realities actually exist. 
Also, a younger physicist, Max Tegmark, who believes that all mathematical structures exist, and mathematical existence is the same thing as physical existence, so we have this vastly rich multiverse that encompasses every logical possibility. 
Now, in taking this metaphysical way out, these physicists and also philosophers are actually reaching back to a very old idea that goes back to Plato. 
It's the principle of plenitude or fecundity, or the great chain of being, that reality is actually as full as possible. 
It's as far removed from nothingness as it could possibly be. 
So we have these two extremes now. 
We have sheer nothingness on one side, and we have this vision of a reality that encompasses every conceivable world at the other extreme: the fullest possible reality, nothingness, the simplest possible reality. 
Now what's in between these two extremes? 
There are all kinds of intermediate realities that include some things and leave out others. 
So one of these intermediate realities is, say, the most mathematically elegant reality, that leaves out the inelegant bits, the ugly asymmetries and so forth. 
Now, there are some physicists who will tell you that we're actually living in the most elegant reality. 
I think that Brian Greene is in the audience, and he has written a book called "" The Elegant Universe. "" He claims that the universe we live in mathematically is very elegant. 
Don't believe him. (Laughter) It's a pious hope, I wish it were true, but I think the other day he admitted to me it's really an ugly universe. 
It's stupidly constructed, it's got way too many arbitrary coupling constants and mass ratios and superfluous families of elementary particles, and what the hell is dark energy? 
It's a stick and bubble gum contraption. 
It's not an elegant universe. (Laughter) And then there's the best of all possible worlds in an ethical sense. 
You should get solemn now, because a world in which sentient beings don't suffer needlessly, in which there aren't things like childhood cancer or the Holocaust. 
This is an ethical conception. 
Anyway, so between nothingness and the fullest possible reality, various special realities. 
Nothingness is special. It's the simplest. 
Then there's the most elegant possible reality. 
That's special. 
The fullest possible reality, that's special. 
But what are we leaving out here? 
There's also just the crummy, generic realities that aren't special in any way, that are sort of random. 
They're infinitely removed from nothingness, but they fall infinitely short of complete fullness. 
They're a mixture of chaos and order, of mathematical elegance and ugliness. 
So I would describe these realities as an infinite, mediocre, incomplete mess, a generic reality, a kind of cosmic junk shot. 
And these realities, is there a deity in any of these realities? 
Maybe, but the deity isn't perfect like the Judeo-Christian deity. 
The deity isn't all-good and all-powerful. 
It might be instead 100 percent malevolent but only 80 percent effective, which pretty much describes the world we see around us, I think. (Laughter) So I would like to propose that the resolution to the mystery of existence is that the reality we exist in is one of these generic realities. 
Reality has to turn out some way. 
It can either turn out to be nothing or everything or something in between. 
So if it has some special feature, like being really elegant or really full or really simple, like nothingness, that would require an explanation. 
But if it's just one of these random, generic realities, there's no further explanation for it. 
And indeed, I would say that's the reality we live in. 
That's what science is telling us. 
At the beginning of the week, we got the exciting information that the theory of inflation, which predicts a big, infinite, messy, arbitrary, pointless reality, it's like a big frothing champagne coming out of a bottle endlessly, a vast universe, mostly a wasteland with little pockets of charm and order and peace, this has been confirmed, this inflationary scenario, by the observations made by radio telescopes in Antarctica that looked at the signature of the gravitational waves from just before the Big Bang. 
I'm sure you all know about this. 
So anyway, I think there's some evidence that this really is the reality that we're stuck with. 
Now, why should you care? 
Well — (Laughter) — the question, "" Why does the world exist? "" that's the cosmic question, it sort of rhymes with a more intimate question: Why do I exist? Why do you exist? 
you know, our existence would seem to be amazingly improbable, because there's an enormous number of genetically possible humans, if you can compute it by looking at the number of the genes and the number of alleles and so forth, and a back-of-the-envelope calculation will tell you there are about 10 to the 10,000th possible humans, genetically. 
That's between a googol and a googolplex. 
And the number of the actual humans that have existed is 100 billion, maybe 50 billion, an infinitesimal fraction, so all of us, we've won this amazing cosmic lottery. 
We're here. Okay. 
So what kind of reality do we want to live in? 
Do we want to live in a special reality? 
What if we were living in the most elegant possible reality? 
Imagine the existential pressure on us to live up to that, to be elegant, not to pull down the tone of it. 
Or, what if we were living in the fullest possible reality? 
Well then our existence would be guaranteed, because every possible thing exists in that reality, but our choices would be meaningless. 
If I really struggle morally and agonize and I decide to do the right thing, what difference does it make, because there are an infinite number of versions of me also doing the right thing and an infinite number doing the wrong thing. 
So my choices are meaningless. 
So we don't want to live in that special reality. 
And as for the special reality of nothingness, we wouldn't be having this conversation. 
So I think living in a generic reality that's mediocre, there are nasty bits and nice bits and we could make the nice bits bigger and the nasty bits smaller and that gives us a kind of purpose in life. 
The universe is absurd, but we can still construct a purpose, and that's a pretty good one, and the overall mediocrity of reality kind of resonates nicely with the mediocrity we all feel in the core of our being. 
And I know you feel it. 
I know you're all special, but you're still kind of secretly mediocre, don't you think? 
(Laughter) (Applause) So anyway, you may say, this puzzle, the mystery of existence, it's just silly mystery-mongering. 
You're not astonished at the existence of the universe and you're in good company. 
Bertrand Russell said, "I should say the universe is just there, and that's all." 
Just a brute fact. 
And my professor at Columbia, Sidney Morgenbesser, a great philosophical wag, when I said to him, "" Professor Morgenbesser, why is there something rather than nothing? "" And he said, "" Oh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldn't be satisfied. "" So — (Laughter) — okay. 
So you're not astonished. I don't care. 
But I will tell you something to conclude that I guarantee you will astonish you, because it's astonished all of the brilliant, wonderful people I've met at this TED conference, when I've told them, and it's this: Never in my life have I had a cell phone. 
Thank you. 
(Laughter) (Applause) 

(Applause) (Music) (Applause) 

Okay, so 90 percent of my photographic process is, in fact, not photographic. 
It involves a campaign of letter writing, research and phone calls to access my subjects, which can range from Hamas leaders in Gaza to a hibernating black bear in its cave in West Virginia. 
And oddly, the most notable letter of rejection I ever received came from Walt Disney World, a seemingly innocuous site. 
And it read — I'm just going to read a key sentence: "" Especially during these violent times, I personally believe that the magical spell cast upon guests who visit our theme parks is particularly important to protect and helps to provide them with an important fantasy they can escape to. "" Photography threatens fantasy. 
They didn't want to let my camera in because it confronts constructed realities, myths and beliefs, and provides what appears to be evidence of a truth. 
But there are multiple truths attached to every image, depending on the creator's intention, the viewer and the context in which it is presented. 
Over a five year period following September 11th, when the American media and government were seeking hidden and unknown sites beyond its borders, most notably weapons of mass destruction, I chose to look inward at that which was integral to America's foundation, mythology and daily functioning. 
I wanted to confront the boundaries of the citizen, self-imposed and real, and confront the divide between privileged and public access to knowledge. 
It was a critical moment in American history and global history where one felt they didn't have access to accurate information. 
And I wanted to see the center with my own eyes, but what I came away with is a photograph. 
And it's just another place from which to observe, and the understanding that there are no absolute, all-knowing insiders. 
And the outsider can never really reach the core. 
I'm going to run through some of the photographs in this series. 
It's titled, "" An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, "" and it's comprised of nearly 70 images. 
In this context I'll just show you a few. 
This is a nuclear waste storage and encapsulation facility at Hanford site in Washington State, where there are over 1,900 stainless steel capsules containing nuclear waste submerged in water. 
A human standing in front of an unprotected capsule would die instantly. 
And I found one section amongst all of these that actually resembled the outline of the United States of America, which you can see here. 
And a big part of the work that is sort of absent in this context is text. 
So I create these two poles. 
Every image is accompanied with a very detailed factual text. 
And what I'm most interested in is the invisible space between a text and its accompanying image, and how the image is transformed by the text and the text by the image. 
So, at best, the image is meant to float away into abstraction and multiple truths and fantasy. 
And then the text functions as this cruel anchor that kind of nails it to the ground. 
But in this context I'm just going to read an abridged version of those texts. 
This is a cryopreservation unit, and it holds the bodies of the wife and mother of cryonics pioneer Robert Ettinger, who hoped to be awoken one day to extended life in good health, with advancements in science and technology, all for the cost of 35 thousand dollars, for forever. 
This is a 21-year-old Palestinian woman undergoing hymenoplasty. 
Hymenoplasty is a surgical procedure which restores the virginal state, allowing her to adhere to certain cultural expectations regarding virginity and marriage. 
So it essentially reconstructs a ruptured hymen, allowing her to bleed upon having sexual intercourse, to simulate the loss of virginity. 
This is a jury simulation deliberation room, and you can see beyond that two-way mirror jury advisers standing in a room behind the mirror. 
And they observe deliberations after mock trial proceedings so that they can better advise their clients how to adjust their trial strategy to have the outcome that they're hoping for. 
This process costs 60,000 dollars. 
This is a U.S. Customs and Border Protection room, a contraband room, at John F. Kennedy International Airport. 
On that table you can see 48 hours' worth of seized goods from passengers entering in to the United States. 
There is a pig's head and African cane rats. 
And part of my photographic work is I'm not just documenting what's there. 
I do take certain liberties and intervene. 
And in this I really wanted it to resemble an early still-life painting, so I spent some time with the smells and items. 
This is the exhibited art on the walls of the CIA in Langley, Virginia, their original headquarters building. 
And the CIA has had a long history with both covert and public cultural diplomacy efforts. 
And it's speculated that some of their interest in the arts was designed to counter Soviet communism and promote what it considered to be pro-American thoughts and aesthetics. 
And one of the art forms that elicited the interest of the agency, and had thus come under question, is abstract expressionism. 
This is the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, and on a six acre plot there are approximately 75 cadavers at any given time that are being studied by forensic anthropologists and researchers who are interested in monitoring a rate of corpse decomposition. 
And in this particular photograph the body of a young boy has been used to reenact a crime scene. 
This is the only federally funded site where it is legal to cultivate cannabis for scientific research in the United States. 
It's a research crop marijuana grow room. 
And part of the work that I hope for is that there is a sort of disorienting entropy where you can't find any discernible formula in how these things — they sort of awkwardly jump from government to science to religion to security — and you can't completely understand how information is being distributed. 
These are transatlantic submarine communication cables that travel across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, connecting North America to Europe. 
They carry over 60 million simultaneous voice conversations, and in a lot of the government and technology sites there was just this very apparent vulnerability. 
This one is almost humorous because it feels like I could just snip all of that conversation in one easy cut. 
But stuff did feel like it could have been taken 30 or 40 years ago, like it was locked in the Cold War era and hadn't necessarily progressed. 
This is a Braille edition of Playboy magazine. 
(Laughter) And this is... a division of the Library of Congress produces a free national library service for the blind and visually impaired, and the publications they choose to publish are based on reader popularity. 
And Playboy is always in the top few. 
(Laughter) But you'd be surprised, they don't do the photographs. It's just the text. (Laughter) 
This is an avian quarantine facility where all imported birds coming into America are required to undergo a 30-day quarantine, where they are tested for diseases including Exotic Newcastle Disease and Avian Influenza. 
This film shows the testing of a new explosive fill on a warhead. 
And the Air Armament Center at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida is responsible for the deployment and testing of all air-delivered weaponry coming from the United States. 
And the film was shot on 72 millimeter, government-issue film. 
And that red dot is a marking on the government-issue film. 
All living white tigers in North America are the result of selective inbreeding — that would be mother to son, father to daughter, sister to brother — to allow for the genetic conditions that create a salable white tiger. 
Meaning white fur, ice blue eyes, a pink nose. 
And the majority of these white tigers are not born in a salable state and are killed at birth. 
It's a very violent process that is little known. 
And the white tiger is obviously celebrated in several forms of entertainment. 
Kenny was born. He actually made it to adulthood. 
He has since passed away, but was mentally retarded and suffers from severe bone abnormalities. 
This, on a lighter note, is at George Lucas' personal archive. 
This is the Death Star. 
And it's shown here in its true orientation. 
In the context of "" Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, "" its mirror image is presented. 
They flip the negative. 
And you can see the photoetched brass detailing, and the painted acrylic facade. 
In the context of the film, this is a deep-space battle station of the Galactic Empire, capable of annihilating planets and civilizations, and in reality it measures about four feet by two feet. 
(Laughter) This is at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. 
It's a Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain site. 
Essentially they've simulated a city for urban combat, and this is one of the structures that exists in that city. 
It's called the World Church of God. 
It's supposed to be a generic site of worship. 
And after I took this photograph, they constructed a wall around the World Church of God to mimic the set-up of mosques in Afghanistan or Iraq. 
And I worked with Mehta Vihar who creates virtual simulations for the army for tactical practice. 
And we put that wall around the World Church of God, and also used the characters and vehicles and explosions that are offered in the video games for the army. 
And I put them into my photograph. 
This is live HIV virus at Harvard Medical School, who is working with the U.S. Government to develop sterilizing immunity. 
And Alhurra is a U.S. Government- sponsored Arabic language television network that distributes news and information to over 22 countries in the Arab world. 
It runs 24 hours a day, commercial free. 
However, it's illegal to broadcast Alhurra within the United States. 
And in 2004, they developed a channel called Alhurra Iraq, which specifically deals with events occurring in Iraq and is broadcast to Iraq. 
Now I'm going to move on to another project I did. 
It's titled "" The Innocents. "" And for the men in these photographs, photography had been used to create a fantasy. 
Contradicting its function as evidence of a truth, in these instances it furthered the fabrication of a lie. 
I traveled across the United States photographing men and women who had been wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit, violent crimes. 
I investigate photography's ability to blur truth and fiction, and its influence on memory, which can lead to severe, even lethal consequences. 
For the men in these photographs, the primary cause of their wrongful conviction was mistaken identification. 
A victim or eyewitness identifies a suspected perpetrator through law enforcement's use of images. 
But through exposure to composite sketches, Polaroids, mug shots and line-ups, eyewitness testimony can change. 
I'll give you an example from a case. 
A woman was raped and presented with a series of photographs from which to identify her attacker. 
She saw some similarities in one of the photographs, but couldn't quite make a positive identification. 
Days later, she is presented with another photo array of all new photographs, except that one photograph that she had some draw to from the earlier array is repeated in the second array. 
And a positive identification is made because the photograph replaced the memory, if there ever was an actual memory. 
Photography offered the criminal justice system a tool that transformed innocent citizens into criminals, and the criminal justice system failed to recognize the limitations of relying on photographic identifications. 
Frederick Daye, who is photographed at his alibi location, where 13 witnesses placed him at the time of the crime. 
He was convicted by an all-white jury of rape, kidnapping and vehicle theft. 
And he served 10 years of a life sentence. 
Now DNA exonerated Frederick and it also implicated another man who was serving time in prison. 
But the victim refused to press charges because she claimed that law enforcement had permanently altered her memory through the use of Frederick's photograph. 
Charles Fain was convicted of kidnapping, rape and murder of a young girl walking to school. 
He served 18 years of a death sentence. 
I photographed him at the scene of the crime at the Snake River in Idaho. 
And I photographed all of the wrongfully convicted at sites that came to particular significance in the history of their wrongful conviction. 
The scene of arrest, the scene of misidentification, the alibi location. 
And here, the scene of the crime, it's this place to which he's never been, but changed his life forever. 
So photographing there, I was hoping to highlight the tenuous relationship between truth and fiction, in both his life and in photography. 
Calvin Washington was convicted of capital murder. 
He served 13 years of a life sentence in Waco, Texas. 
Larry Mayes, I photographed at the scene of arrest, where he hid between two mattresses in Gary, Indiana, in this very room to hide from the police. 
He ended up serving 18 and a half years of an 80 year sentence for rape and robbery. 
The victim failed to identify Larry in two live lineups and then made a positive identification, days later, from a photo array. 
Larry Youngblood served eight years of a 10 and half year sentence in Arizona for the abduction and repeated sodomizing of a 10 year old boy at a carnival. 
He is photographed at his alibi location. 
Ron Williamson. Ron was convicted of the rape and murder of a barmaid at a club, and served 11 years of a death sentence. 
I photographed Ron at a baseball field because he had been drafted to the Oakland A's to play professional baseball just before his conviction. 
And the state's key witness in Ron's case was, in the end, the actual perpetrator. 
Ronald Jones served eight years of a death sentence for rape and murder of a 28-year-old woman. 
I photographed him at the scene of arrest in Chicago. 
William Gregory was convicted of rape and burglary. 
He served seven years of a 70 year sentence in Kentucky. 
Timothy Durham, who I photographed at his alibi location where 11 witnesses placed him at the time of the crime, was convicted of 3.5 years of a 3220 year sentence, for several charges of rape and robbery. 
He had been misidentified by an 11-year-old victim. 
Troy Webb is photographed here at the scene of the crime in Virginia. 
He was convicted of rape, kidnapping and robbery, and served seven years of a 47 year sentence. 
Troy's picture was in a photo array that the victim tentatively had some draw toward, but said he looked too old. 
The police went and found a photograph of Troy Webb from four years earlier, which they entered into a photo array days later, and he was positively identified. 
Now I'm going to leave you with a self portrait. 
And it reiterates that distortion is a constant, and our eyes are easily deceived. 
That's it. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

One year ago, I rented a car in Jerusalem to go find a man I'd never met but who had changed my life. 
I didn't have a phone number to call to say I was coming. 
I didn't have an exact address, but I knew his name, Abed, I knew that he lived in a town of 15,000, Kfar Kara, and I knew that, 21 years before, just outside this holy city, he broke my neck. 
And so, on an overcast morning in January, I headed north off in a silver Chevy to find a man and some peace. 
The road dropped and I exited Jerusalem. 
I then rounded the very bend where his blue truck, heavy with four tons of floor tiles, had borne down with great speed onto the back left corner of the minibus where I sat. 
I was then 19 years old. 
I'd grown five inches and done some 20,000 pushups in eight months, and the night before the crash, I delighted in my new body, playing basketball with friends into the wee hours of a May morning. 
I palmed the ball in my large right hand, and when that hand reached the rim, I felt invincible. 
I was off in the bus to get the pizza I'd won on the court. 
I didn't see Abed coming. 
From my seat, I was looking up at a stone town on a hilltop, bright in the noontime sun, when from behind there was a great bang, as loud and violent as a bomb. 
My head snapped back over my red seat. 
My eardrum blew. My shoes flew off. 
I flew too, my head bobbing on broken bones, and when I landed, I was a quadriplegic. 
Over the coming months, I learned to breathe on my own, then to sit and to stand and to walk, but my body was now divided vertically. 
I was a hemiplegic, and back home in New York, I used a wheelchair for four years, all through college. 
College ended and I returned to Jerusalem for a year. 
There I rose from my chair for good, I leaned on my cane, and I looked back, finding all from my fellow passengers in the bus to photographs of the crash, and when I saw this photograph, I didn't see a bloody and unmoving body. 
I saw the healthy bulk of a left deltoid, and I mourned that it was lost, mourned all I had not yet done, but was now impossible. 
It was then I read the testimony that Abed gave the morning after the crash, of driving down the right lane of a highway toward Jerusalem. 
Reading his words, I welled with anger. 
It was the first time I'd felt anger toward this man, and it came from magical thinking. 
On this xeroxed piece of paper, the crash had not yet happened. 
Abed could still turn his wheel left so that I would see him whoosh by out my window and I would remain whole. 
"Be careful, Abed, look out. Slow down." 
But Abed did not slow, and on that xeroxed piece of paper, my neck again broke, and again, I was left without anger. 
I decided to find Abed, and when I finally did, he responded to my Hebrew hello which such nonchalance, it seemed he'd been awaiting my phone call. 
And maybe he had. 
I didn't mention to Abed his prior driving record — 27 violations by the age of 25, the last, his not shifting his truck into a low gear on that May day — and I didn't mention my prior record — the quadriplegia and the catheters, the insecurity and the loss — and when Abed went on about how hurt he was in the crash, I didn't say that I knew from the police report that he'd escaped serious injury. 
I said I wanted to meet. 
Abed said that I should call back in a few weeks, and when I did, and a recording told me that his number was disconnected, I let Abed and the crash go. 
Many years passed. 
I walked with my cane and my ankle brace and a backpack on trips in six continents. 
I pitched overhand in a weekly softball game that I started in Central Park, and home in New York, I became a journalist and an author, typing hundreds of thousands of words with one finger. 
A friend pointed out to me that all of my big stories mirrored my own, each centering on a life that had changed in an instant, owing, if not to a crash, then to an inheritance, a swing of the bat, a click of the shutter, an arrest. 
Each of us had a before and an after. 
I'd been working through my lot after all. 
Still, Abed was far from my mind, when last year, I returned to Israel to write of the crash, and the book I then wrote, "" Half-Life, "" was nearly complete when I recognized that I still wanted to meet Abed, and finally I understood why: to hear this man say two words: "" I'm sorry. "" People apologize for less. 
And so I got a cop to confirm that Abed still lived somewhere in his same town, and I was now driving to it with a potted yellow rose in the back seat, when suddenly flowers seemed a ridiculous offering. 
But what to get the man who broke your fucking neck? 
(Laughter) I pulled into the town of Abu Ghosh, and bought a brick of Turkish delight: pistachios glued in rosewater. Better. 
Back on Highway 1, I envisioned what awaited. 
Abed would hug me. Abed would spit at me. 
Abed would say, "" I'm sorry. "" I then began to wonder, as I had many times before, how my life would have been different had this man not injured me, had my genes been fed a different helping of experience. 
Who was I? 
Was I who I had been before the crash, before this road divided my life like the spine of an open book? 
Was I what had been done to me? 
Were all of us the results of things done to us, done for us, the infidelity of a parent or spouse, money inherited? 
Were we instead our bodies, their inborn endowments and deficits? 
It seemed that we could be nothing more than genes and experience, but how to tease out the one from the other? 
As Yeats put that same universal question, "" O body swayed to music, o brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance? "" I'd been driving for an hour when I looked in my rearview mirror and saw my own brightening glance. 
The light my eyes had carried for as long as they had been blue. 
The predispositions and impulses that had propelled me as a toddler to try and slip over a boat into a Chicago lake, that had propelled me as a teen to jump into wild Cape Cod Bay after a hurricane. 
But I also saw in my reflection that, had Abed not injured me, I would now, in all likelihood, be a doctor and a husband and a father. 
I would be less mindful of time and of death, and, oh, I would not be disabled, would not suffer the thousand slings and arrows of my fortune. 
The frequent furl of five fingers, the chips in my teeth come from biting at all the many things a solitary hand cannot open. 
The dancer and the dance were hopelessly entwined. 
It was approaching 11 when I exited right toward Afula, and passed a large quarry and was soon in Kfar Kara. 
I felt a pang of nerves. 
But Chopin was on the radio, seven beautiful mazurkas, and I pulled into a lot by a gas station to listen and to calm. 
I'd been told that in an Arab town, one need only mention the name of a local and it will be recognized. 
And I was mentioning Abed and myself, noting deliberately that I was here in peace, to the people in this town, when I met Mohamed outside a post office at noon. 
He listened to me. 
You know, it was most often when speaking to people that I wondered where I ended and my disability began, for many people told me what they told no one else. 
Many cried. 
And one day, after a woman I met on the street did the same and I later asked her why, she told me that, best she could tell, her tears had had something to do with my being happy and strong, but vulnerable too. 
I listened to her words. I suppose they were true. 
I was me, but I was now me despite a limp, and that, I suppose, was what now made me, me. 
Anyway, Mohamed told me what perhaps he would not have told another stranger. 
He led me to a house of cream stucco, then drove off. 
And as I sat contemplating what to say, a woman approached in a black shawl and black robe. 
I stepped from my car and said "" Shalom, "" and identified myself, and she told me that her husband Abed would be home from work in four hours. 
Her Hebrew was not good, and she later confessed that she thought that I had come to install the Internet. 
(Laughter) I drove off and returned at 4: 30, thankful to the minaret up the road that helped me find my way back. 
And as I approached the front door, Abed saw me, my jeans and flannel and cane, and I saw Abed, an average-looking man of average size. 
He wore black and white: slippers over socks, pilling sweatpants, a piebald sweater, a striped ski cap pulled down to his forehead. 
He'd been expecting me. Mohamed had phoned. 
And so at once, we shook hands, and smiled, and I gave him my gift, and he told me I was a guest in his home, and we sat beside one another on a fabric couch. 
It was then that Abed resumed at once the tale of woe he had begun over the phone 16 years before. 
He'd just had surgery on his eyes, he said. 
He had problems with his side and his legs too, and, oh, he'd lost his teeth in the crash. 
Did I wish to see him remove them? 
Abed then rose and turned on the TV so that I wouldn't be alone when he left the room, and returned with polaroids of the crash and his old driver's license. 
"" I was handsome, "" he said. 
We looked down at his laminated mug. 
Abed had been less handsome than substantial, with thick black hair and a full face and a wide neck. 
It was this youth who on May 16, 1990, had broken two necks including mine, and bruised one brain and taken one life. 
Twenty-one years later, he was now thinner than his wife, his skin slack on his face, and looking at Abed looking at his young self, I remembered looking at that photograph of my young self after the crash, and recognized his longing. 
"" The crash changed both of our lives, "" I said. 
Abed then showed me a picture of his mashed truck, and said that the crash was the fault of a bus driver in the left lane who did not let him pass. 
I did not want to recap the crash with Abed. 
I'd hoped for something simpler: to exchange a Turkish dessert for two words and be on my way. 
And so I didn't point out that in his own testimony the morning after the crash, Abed did not even mention the bus driver. 
No, I was quiet. I was quiet because I had not come for truth. 
I had come for remorse. 
And so I now went looking for remorse and threw truth under the bus. 
"" I understand, "" I said, "" that the crash was not your fault, but does it make you sad that others suffered? "" Abed spoke three quick words. 
"Yes, I suffered." 
Abed then told me why he'd suffered. 
He'd lived an unholy life before the crash, and so God had ordained the crash, but now, he said, he was religious, and God was pleased. 
It was then that God intervened: news on the TV of a car wreck that hours before had killed three people up north. 
We looked up at the wreckage. 
"" Strange, "" I said. 
"" Strange, "" he agreed. 
I had the thought that there, on Route 804, there were perpetrators and victims, dyads bound by a crash. 
Some, as had Abed, would forget the date. 
Some, as had I, would remember. 
The report finished and Abed spoke. 
"" It is a pity, "" he said, "" that the police in this country are not tough enough on bad drivers. "" I was baffled. 
Abed had said something remarkable. 
Did it point up the degree to which he'd absolved himself of the crash? 
Was it evidence of guilt, an assertion that he should have been put away longer? 
He'd served six months in prison, lost his truck license for a decade. 
I forgot my discretion. 
"" Um, Abed, "" I said, "I thought you had a few driving issues before the crash." 
"Well," he said, "I once went 60 in a 40." 
And so 27 violations — driving through a red light, driving at excessive speed, driving on the wrong side of a barrier, and finally, riding his brakes down that hill — reduced to one. 
And it was then I understood that no matter how stark the reality, the human being fits it into a narrative that is palatable. 
The goat becomes the hero. The perpetrator becomes the victim. 
It was then I understood that Abed would never apologize. 
Abed and I sat with our coffee. 
We'd spent 90 minutes together, and he was now known to me. 
He was not a particularly bad man or a particularly good man. 
He was a limited man who'd found it within himself to be kind to me. 
With a nod to Jewish custom, he told me that I should live to be 120 years old. 
But it was hard for me to relate to one who had so completely washed his hands of his own calamitous doing, to one whose life was so unexamined that he said he thought two people had died in the crash. 
There was much I wished to say to Abed. 
I wished to tell him that, were he to acknowledge my disability, it would be okay, for people are wrong to marvel at those like me who smile as we limp. 
People don't know that they have lived through worse, that problems of the heart hit with a force greater than a runaway truck, that problems of the mind are greater still, more injurious, than a hundred broken necks. 
I wished to tell him that what makes most of us who we are most of all is not our minds and not our bodies and not what happens to us, but how we respond to what happens to us. 
"" This, "" wrote the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, "" is the last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. "" I wished to tell him that not only paralyzers and paralyzees must evolve, reconcile to reality, but we all must — the aging and the anxious and the divorced and the balding and the bankrupt and everyone. 
I wished to tell him that one does not have to say that a bad thing is good, that a crash is from God and so a crash is good, a broken neck is good. 
One can say that a bad thing sucks, but that this natural world still has many glories. 
I wished to tell him that, in the end, our mandate is clear: We have to rise above bad fortune. 
We have to be in the good and enjoy the good, study and work and adventure and friendship — oh, friendship — and community and love. 
But most of all, I wished to tell him what Herman Melville wrote, that "" truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. "" Yes, contrast. 
If you are mindful of what you do not have, you may be truly mindful of what you do have, and if the gods are kind, you may truly enjoy what you have. 
That is the one singular gift you may receive if you suffer in any existential way. 
You know death, and so may wake each morning pulsing with ready life. 
Some part of you is cold, and so another part may truly enjoy what it is to be warm, or even to be cold. 
When one morning, years after the crash, I stepped onto stone and the underside of my left foot felt the flash of cold, nerves at last awake, it was exhilarating, a gust of snow. 
But I didn't say these things to Abed. 
I told him only that he had killed one man, not two. 
I told him the name of that man. 
And then I said, "" Goodbye. "" Thank you. 
(Applause) Thanks a lot. (Applause) 

We have historical records that allow us to know how the ancient Greeks dressed, how they lived, how they fought... 
but how did they think? 
One natural idea is that the deepest aspects of human thought — our ability to imagine, to be conscious, to dream — have always been the same. 
Another possibility is that the social transformations that have shaped our culture may have also changed the structural columns of human thought. 
We may all have different opinions about this. 
Actually, it's a long-standing philosophical debate. 
But is this question even amenable to science? 
Here I'd like to propose that in the same way we can reconstruct how the ancient Greek cities looked just based on a few bricks, that the writings of a culture are the archaeological records, the fossils, of human thought. 
And in fact, doing some form of psychological analysis of some of the most ancient books of human culture, Julian Jaynes came up in the '70s with a very wild and radical hypothesis: that only 3,000 years ago, humans were what today we would call schizophrenics. 
And he made this claim based on the fact that the first humans described in these books behaved consistently, in different traditions and in different places of the world, as if they were hearing and obeying voices that they perceived as coming from the Gods, or from the muses... 
what today we would call hallucinations. 
And only then, as time went on, they began to recognize that they were the creators, the owners of these inner voices. 
And with this, they gained introspection: the ability to think about their own thoughts. 
So Jaynes's theory is that consciousness, at least in the way we perceive it today, where we feel that we are the pilots of our own existence — is a quite recent cultural development. 
And this theory is quite spectacular, but it has an obvious problem which is that it's built on just a few and very specific examples. 
So the question is whether the theory that introspection built up in human history only about 3,000 years ago can be examined in a quantitative and objective manner. 
And the problem of how to go about this is quite obvious. 
It's not like Plato woke up one day and then he wrote, "" Hello, I'm Plato, and as of today, I have a fully introspective consciousness. "" (Laughter) And this tells us actually what is the essence of the problem. 
We need to find the emergence of a concept that's never said. 
The word introspection does not appear a single time in the books we want to analyze. 
So our way to solve this is to build the space of words. 
This is a huge space that contains all words in such a way that the distance between any two of them is indicative of how closely related they are. 
So for instance, you want the words "" dog "" and "" cat "" to be very close together, but the words "" grapefruit "" and "" logarithm "" to be very far away. 
And this has to be true for any two words within the space. 
And there are different ways that we can construct the space of words. 
One is just asking the experts, a bit like we do with dictionaries. 
Another possibility is following the simple assumption that when two words are related, they tend to appear in the same sentences, in the same paragraphs, in the same documents, more often than would be expected just by pure chance. 
And this simple hypothesis, this simple method, with some computational tricks that have to do with the fact that this is a very complex and high-dimensional space, turns out to be quite effective. 
And just to give you a flavor of how well this works, this is the result we get when we analyze this for some familiar words. 
And you can see first that words automatically organize into semantic neighborhoods. 
So you get the fruits, the body parts, the computer parts, the scientific terms and so on. 
The algorithm also identifies that we organize concepts in a hierarchy. 
So for instance, you can see that the scientific terms break down into two subcategories of the astronomic and the physics terms. 
And then there are very fine things. 
For instance, the word astronomy, which seems a bit bizarre where it is, is actually exactly where it should be, between what it is, an actual science, and between what it describes, the astronomical terms. 
And we could go on and on with this. 
Actually, if you stare at this for a while, and you just build random trajectories, you will see that it actually feels a bit like doing poetry. 
And this is because, in a way, walking in this space is like walking in the mind. 
And the last thing is that this algorithm also identifies what are our intuitions, of which words should lead in the neighborhood of introspection. 
So for instance, words such as "" self, "" "" guilt, "" "" reason, "" "" emotion, "" are very close to "" introspection, "" but other words, such as "" red, "" "" football, "" "" candle, "" "" banana, "" are just very far away. 
And so once we've built the space, the question of the history of introspection, or of the history of any concept which before could seem abstract and somehow vague, becomes concrete — becomes amenable to quantitative science. 
All that we have to do is take the books, we digitize them, and we take this stream of words as a trajectory and project them into the space, and then we ask whether this trajectory spends significant time circling closely to the concept of introspection. 
And with this, we could analyze the history of introspection in the ancient Greek tradition, for which we have the best available written record. 
So what we did is we took all the books — we just ordered them by time — for each book we take the words and we project them to the space, and then we ask for each word how close it is to introspection, and we just average that. 
And then we ask whether, as time goes on and on, these books get closer, and closer and closer to the concept of introspection. 
And this is exactly what happens in the ancient Greek tradition. 
So you can see that for the oldest books in the Homeric tradition, there is a small increase with books getting closer to introspection. 
But about four centuries before Christ, this starts ramping up very rapidly to an almost five-fold increase of books getting closer, and closer and closer to the concept of introspection. 
And one of the nice things about this is that now we can ask whether this is also true in a different, independent tradition. 
So we just ran this same analysis on the Judeo-Christian tradition, and we got virtually the same pattern. 
Again, you see a small increase for the oldest books in the Old Testament, and then it increases much more rapidly in the new books of the New Testament. 
And then we get the peak of introspection in "" The Confessions of Saint Augustine, "" about four centuries after Christ. 
And this was very important, because Saint Augustine had been recognized by scholars, philologists, historians, as one of the founders of introspection. 
Actually, some believe him to be the father of modern psychology. 
So our algorithm, which has the virtue of being quantitative, of being objective, and of course of being extremely fast — it just runs in a fraction of a second — can capture some of the most important conclusions of this long tradition of investigation. 
And this is in a way one of the beauties of science, which is that now this idea can be translated and generalized to a whole lot of different domains. 
So in the same way that we asked about the past of human consciousness, maybe the most challenging question we can pose to ourselves is whether this can tell us something about the future of our own consciousness. 
To put it more precisely, whether the words we say today can tell us something of where our minds will be in a few days, in a few months or a few years from now. 
And in the same way many of us are now wearing sensors that detect our heart rate, our respiration, our genes, on the hopes that this may help us prevent diseases, we can ask whether monitoring and analyzing the words we speak, we tweet, we email, we write, can tell us ahead of time whether something may go wrong with our minds. 
And with Guillermo Cecchi, who has been my brother in this adventure, we took on this task. 
And we did so by analyzing the recorded speech of 34 young people who were at a high risk of developing schizophrenia. 
And so what we did is, we measured speech at day one, and then we asked whether the properties of the speech could predict, within a window of almost three years, the future development of psychosis. 
But despite our hopes, we got failure after failure. 
There was just not enough information in semantics to predict the future organization of the mind. 
It was good enough to distinguish between a group of schizophrenics and a control group, a bit like we had done for the ancient texts, but not to predict the future onset of psychosis. 
But then we realized that maybe the most important thing was not so much what they were saying, but how they were saying it. 
More specifically, it was not in which semantic neighborhoods the words were, but how far and fast they jumped from one semantic neighborhood to the other one. 
And so we came up with this measure, which we termed semantic coherence, which essentially measures the persistence of speech within one semantic topic, within one semantic category. 
And it turned out to be that for this group of 34 people, the algorithm based on semantic coherence could predict, with 100 percent accuracy, who developed psychosis and who will not. 
And this was something that could not be achieved — not even close — with all the other existing clinical measures. 
And I remember vividly, while I was working on this, I was sitting at my computer and I saw a bunch of tweets by Polo — Polo had been my first student back in Buenos Aires, and at the time he was living in New York. 
And there was something in this tweets — I could not tell exactly what because nothing was said explicitly — but I got this strong hunch, this strong intuition, that something was going wrong. 
So I picked up the phone, and I called Polo, and in fact he was not feeling well. 
And this simple fact, that reading in between the lines, I could sense, through words, his feelings, was a simple, but very effective way to help. 
What I tell you today is that we're getting close to understanding how we can convert this intuition that we all have, that we all share, into an algorithm. 
And in doing so, we may be seeing in the future a very different form of mental health, based on objective, quantitative and automated analysis of the words we write, of the words we say. 
Gracias. 

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

Khan Academy is most known for its collection of videos, so before I go any further, let me show you a little bit of a montage. 
And for dollars, is their 30 million, plus the 20 million dollars from the American manufacturer. 
(Laughter) (Applause) (Live) SK: We now have on the order of 2,200 videos, covering everything from basic arithmetic, all the way to vector calculus, and some of the stuff that you saw up there. 
We have a million students a month using the site, watching on the order of 100 to 200,000 videos a day. 
But what we're going to talk about in this is how we're going to the next level. 
But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about really just how I got started. 
Probably the least-appreciated aspect of this is the notion that the very first time that you're trying to get your brain around a new concept, the very last thing you need is another human being saying, "" Do you understand this? "" And that's what was happening with the interaction with my cousins before, and now they can just do it in the intimacy of their own room. 
The other thing that happened is — I put them on YouTube just — I saw no reason to make it private, so I let other people watch it, and then people started stumbling on it, and I started getting some comments and some letters and all sorts of feedback from random people around the world. 
(Laughter) Let's pause here. 
I actually got a natural high and a good mood for the entire day, since I remember seeing all of this matrix text in class, and here I'm all like, 'I know kung fu.' "" (Laughter) We get a lot of feedback along those lines. 
This is just an excerpt from one of those letters: "" My 12 year-old son has autism, and has had a terrible time with math. 
We have tried everything, viewed everything, bought everything. 
We stumbled on your video on decimals, and it got through. 
(Laughter) (Applause) But I was excited, so I kept going. 
And then a few other things started to dawn on me; that not only would it help my cousins right now, or these people who were sending letters, but that this content will never grow old, that it could help their kids or their grandkids. 
(Laughter) Assuming he was good. We don't know. (Laughter) 
One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit — the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did, they can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time. 
And so, what I'm showing over here, these are actual exercises that I started writing for my cousins. 
The ones I started were much more primitive. 
And the Khan Academy videos are there. 
You get hints, the actual steps for that problem, if you don't know how to do it. 
In a traditional classroom, you have homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. 
And the idea is you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of the sudden, and start failing calculus all of the sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers, and it's usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation. 
The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. 
Green means the student's already proficient. 
Or even better, "" Let me get one of the green kids, who are already proficient in that concept, to be the first line of attack, and actually tutor their peer. "" (Applause) Now, I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "" What don't you understand? What do you understand? "" and all the rest. 
Now as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos, our goal is to use technology to humanize, not just in Los Altos, but on a global scale, what's happening in education. 
Imagine what happens if that student in Calcutta all of the sudden can tutor your son, or your son can tutor that kid in Calcutta. 
And I think what you'll see emerging is this notion of a global one-world classroom. 
Tell me what you're thinking there. 
(Laughter) BG: And the collaboration you're doing with Los Altos, how did that come about? 
Someone from their board came and said, "What would you do if you had carte Blanche in a classroom?" 
Through the summers, as they go from one teacher to the next, you have this continuity of data that even at the district level, they can see. 
BG: So some of those views we saw were for the teacher to go in and track actually what's going on with those kids. 
(Laughter) No, no reason why it really can't happen in every classroom in America tomorrow. 
The idea there is, if I'm confused about a topic, somehow right in the user interface, I'd find people who are volunteering, maybe see their reputation, and I could schedule and connect up with those people? 
Those dashboards the teachers have, you can go log in right now and you can essentially become a coach for your kids, your nephews, your cousins, or maybe some kids at the Boys and Girls Club. 
(Applause) 

How could we help you? "" And we think, we like to think, that this is one of the major problems why all — maybe not all — but most of the ehealth projects fail, since we stopped listening. 
And it's collected by my general practitioner as well, so he can see what's my problem in weight, not on the very moment that I need cardiologic support or something like it, but also looking backward. 
As of next week, it will soon be available, there will be this little blood-pressure meter connected to an iPhone or something or other. 
We set up a website, and asked the crowd, "" If you see an AED, please submit it, tell us where it is, tell us when it's open, "" since sometimes in office hours it's closed, of course. 
And we would like to start this on a worldwide level. 
So please help us on this one and try to make not only health a little bit better, but take control of it. 

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

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

Take a look at this drawing. 
Can you tell what it is? 
I'm a molecular biologist by training, and I've seen a lot of these kinds of drawings. 
They're usually referred to as a model figure, a drawing that shows how we think a cellular or molecular process occurs. 
This particular drawing is of a process called clathrin-mediated endocytosis. 
It's a process by which a molecule can get from the outside of the cell to the inside by getting captured in a bubble or a vesicle that then gets internalized by the cell. 
There's a problem with this drawing, though, and it's mainly in what it doesn't show. 
From lots of experiments, from lots of different scientists, we know a lot about what these molecules look like, how they move around in the cell, and that this is all taking place in an incredibly dynamic environment. 
So in collaboration with a clathrin expert Tomas Kirchhausen, we decided to create a new kind of model figure that showed all of that. 
So we start outside of the cell. 
Now we're looking inside. 
Clathrin are these three-legged molecules that can self-assemble into soccer-ball-like shapes. 
Through connections with a membrane, clathrin is able to deform the membrane and form this sort of a cup that forms this sort of a bubble, or a vesicle, that's now capturing some of the proteins that were outside of the cell. 
Proteins are coming in now that basically pinch off this vesicle, making it separate from the rest of the membrane, and now clathrin is basically done with its job, and so proteins are coming in now — we've covered them yellow and orange — that are responsible for taking apart this clathrin cage. 
And so all of these proteins can get basically recycled and used all over again. 
These processes are too small to be seen directly, even with the best microscopes, so animations like this provide a really powerful way of visualizing a hypothesis. 
Here's another illustration, and this is a drawing of how a researcher might think that the HIV virus gets into and out of cells. 
And again, this is a vast oversimplification and doesn't begin to show what we actually know about these processes. 
You might be surprised to know that these simple drawings are the only way that most biologists visualize their molecular hypotheses. 
Why? 
Because creating movies of processes as we think they actually occur is really hard. 
I spent months in Hollywood learning 3D animation software, and I spend months on each animation, and that's just time that most researchers can't afford. 
The payoffs can be huge, though. 
Molecular animations are unparalleled in their ability to convey a great deal of information to broad audiences with extreme accuracy. 
And I'm working on a new project now called "" The Science of HIV "" where I'll be animating the entire life cycle of the HIV virus as accurately as possible and all in molecular detail. 
The animation will feature data from thousands of researchers collected over decades, data on what this virus looks like, how it's able to infect cells in our body, and how therapeutics are helping to combat infection. 
Over the years, I found that animations aren't just useful for communicating an idea, but they're also really useful for exploring a hypothesis. 
Biologists for the most part are still using a paper and pencil to visualize the processes they study, and with the data we have now, that's just not good enough anymore. 
The process of creating an animation can act as a catalyst that allows researchers to crystalize and refine their own ideas. 
One researcher I worked with who works on the molecular mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases came up with experiments that were related directly to the animation that she and I worked on together, and in this way, animation can feed back into the research process. 
I believe that animation can change biology. 
It can change the way that we communicate with one another, how we explore our data and how we teach our students. 
But for that change to happen, we need more researchers creating animations, and toward that end, I brought together a team of biologists, animators and programmers to create a new, free, open-source software — we call it Molecular Flipbook — that's created just for biologists just to create molecular animations. 
From our testing, we've found that it only takes 15 minutes for a biologist who has never touched animation software before to create her first molecular animation of her own hypothesis. 
We're also building an online database where anyone can view, download and contribute their own animations. 
We're really excited to announce that the beta version of the molecular animation software toolkit will be available for download today. 
We are really excited to see what biologists will create with it and what new insights they're able to gain from finally being able to animate their own model figures. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

In his inaugural address, Barack Obama appealed to each of us to give our best as we try to extricate ourselves from this current financial crisis. 
But what did he appeal to? 
He did not, happily, follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, and tell us to just go shopping. 
Let me begin with an example. 
This is the job description of a hospital janitor that is scrolling up on the screen. 
They're the things you would expect: mop the floors, sweep them, empty the trash, restock the cabinets. 
It may be a little surprising how many things there are, but it's not surprising what they are. 
And yet, when some psychologists interviewed hospital janitors to get a sense of what they thought their jobs were like, they encountered Mike, who told them about how he stopped mopping the floor because Mr. Jones was out of his bed getting a little exercise, trying to build up his strength, walking slowly up and down the hall. 
And Charlene told them about how she ignored her supervisor's admonition and didn't vacuum the visitor's lounge because there were some family members who were there all day, every day who, at this moment, happened to be taking a nap. 
And then there was Luke, who washed the floor in a comatose young man's room twice because the man's father, who had been keeping a vigil for six months, didn't see Luke do it the first time, and his father was angry. 
But the ones who are think that these sorts of human interactions involving kindness, care and empathy are an essential part of the job. 
Real-world problems are often ambiguous and ill-defined and the context is always changing. 
When you ask the janitors who behaved like the ones I described how hard it is to learn to do their job, they tell you that it takes lots of experience. 
All they had was Mike's Hard Lemonade, which was five percent alcohol. 
Dad, being an academic, had no idea that Mike's Hard Lemonade contained alcohol. 
So he brought it back. 
And they were ready to let the kid go. 
But not so fast. 
After two weeks, I'm happy to report, the family was reunited. 
But the welfare workers and the ambulance people and the judge all said the same thing: "We hate to do it but we have to follow procedure." 
Scott Simon, who told this story on NPR, said, "" Rules and procedures may be dumb, but they spare you from thinking. "" And, to be fair, rules are often imposed because previous officials have been lax and they let a child go back to an abusive household. 
When things go wrong, as of course they do, we reach for two tools to try to fix them. 
We can certainly see this in response to the current financial crisis. 
Regulate, regulate, regulate. 
The truth is that neither rules nor incentives are enough to do the job. 
How could you even write a rule that got the janitors to do what they did? 
And what happens is that as we turn increasingly to rules, rules and incentives may make things better in the short run, but they create a downward spiral that makes them worse in the long run. 
And moral will is undermined by an incessant appeal to incentives that destroy our desire to do the right thing. 
And without intending it, by appealing to rules and incentives, we are engaging in a war on wisdom. 
Let me just give you a few examples, first of rules and the war on moral skill. 
Second, no doubt more familiar to you, is the nature of modern American education: scripted, lock-step curricula. 
Here's an example from Chicago kindergarten. 
Reading and enjoying literature and words that begin with 'B.' "" The Bath: "" Assemble students on a rug and give students a warning about the dangers of hot water. 
We don't trust the judgment of teachers enough to let them loose on their own. 
(Applause) Don't get me wrong. We need rules! 
Jazz musicians need some notes — most of them need some notes on the page. 
We need more rules for the bankers, God knows. 
But too many rules prevent accomplished jazz musicians from improvising. 
Right? 
In Switzerland, back about 15 years ago, they were trying to decide where to site nuclear waste dumps. 
And they said, "" Would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your community? "" Astonishingly, 50 percent of the citizens said yes. 
They knew it was dangerous. 
They thought it would reduce their property values. 
But it had to go somewhere and they had responsibilities as citizens. 
The psychologists asked other people a slightly different question. 
They said, "" If we paid you six weeks' salary every year would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your community? "" Two reasons. It's my responsibility and I'm getting paid. 
What happens is that the second this introduction of incentive gets us so that instead of asking, "" What is my responsibility? "" all we ask is, "" What serves my interests? "" When incentives don't work, when CEOs ignore the long-term health of their companies in pursuit of short-term gains that will lead to massive bonuses, the response is always the same. 
Get smarter incentives. 
The truth is that there are no incentives that you can devise that are ever going to be smart enough. 
("" In order to remain competitive in today's marketplace, I'm afraid we're going to have to replace you with a sleezeball. "") ("" I sold my soul for about a tenth of what the damn things are going for now. "") It is obvious that this is not the way people want to do their work. 
(Applause) There is no better way to show people that you're not serious than to tie up everything you have to say about ethics into a little package with a bow and consign it to the margins as an ethics course. 
Acknowledge, when you go to law school, that a little voice is whispering in your ear about Atticus Finch. 
People are inspired by moral heroes. 
But we learn that with sophistication comes the understanding that you can't acknowledge that you have moral heroes. 
"" Maybe on paper our company is worth less to Wall Street, but I can tell you it's worth more. We're doing fine. "" Just at this TED we heard talks from several moral heroes. 
One was Ray Anderson, who turned — (Applause) — turned, you know, a part of the evil empire into a zero-footprint, or almost zero-footprint business. 
And a bonus he's discovering is he's actually going to make even more money. 
His employees are inspired by the effort. 
Yesterday we heard Willie Smits talk about re-foresting in Indonesia. 
(Applause) In many ways this is the perfect example. 
Ordinary heroes like the janitors who are worth celebrating too. 
As practitioners each and every one of us should strive to be ordinary, if not extraordinary heroes. 
As heads of organizations, we should strive to create environments that encourage and nurture both moral skill and moral will. 
Even the wisest and most well-meaning people will give up if they have to swim against the current in the organizations in which they work. 
If you run an organization, you should be sure that none of the jobs — none of the jobs — have job descriptions like the job descriptions of the janitors. 
Because the truth is that any work that you do that involves interaction with other people is moral work. 
And any moral work depends upon practical wisdom. 
And, perhaps most important, as teachers, we should strive to be the ordinary heroes, the moral exemplars, to the people we mentor. 
Someone is always watching. 
The camera is always on. 
Bill Gates talked about the importance of education and, in particular, the model that KIPP was providing: "Knowledge is power." 
And he talked about a lot of the wonderful things that KIPP is doing to take inner-city kids and turn them in the direction of college. 
They need to learn to respect themselves. 
They need to learn to respect their schoolmates. 
They need to learn to respect their teachers. 
That's the principle objective. 
If you do that, the rest is just pretty much a coast downhill. 
And the teachers: the way you teach these things to the kids is by having the teachers and all the other staff embody it every minute of every day. 
And the virtue I think we need above all others is practical wisdom, because it's what allows other virtues — honesty, kindness, courage and so on — to be displayed at the right time and in the right way. 
Right again. 
I think there is reason for hope. 
I think people want to be allowed to be virtuous. 
In many ways, it's what TED is all about. 
Wanting to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. 
Paying attention to what we do, to how we do it, and, perhaps most importantly, to the structure of the organizations within which we work, so as to make sure that it enables us and other people to develop wisdom rather than having it suppressed. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: You have to go and stand out here a sec. 
Barry Schwartz: Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

When you grow up in a developing country like India, as I did, you instantly learn to get more value from limited resources and find creative ways to reuse what you already have. 
Take Mansukh Prajapati, a potter in India. 
He has created a fridge made entirely of clay that consumes no electricity. 
He can keep fruits and vegetables fresh for many days. 
That's a cool invention, literally. 
In Africa, if you run out of your cell phone battery, don't panic. 
You will find some resourceful entrepreneurs who can recharge your cell phone using bicycles. 
And since we are in South America, let's go to Lima in Peru, a region with high humidity that receives only one inch of rainfall each year. 
An engineering college in Lima designed a giant advertising billboard that absorbs air humidity and converts it into purified water, generating over 90 liters of water every day. 
Now, I talked about frugal innovation, initially pioneered in the South, now being adopted in the North. 
Ultimately, we would like to see developed countries and developing countries come together and co-create frugal solutions that benefit the entire humanity. 
Let's go to Nairobi to find that out. 
The North is now learning to do more and better with less as it faces resource constraints. 

"" It's funny, "" I said to myself, "" You can mingle with the opposite sex at the holy Kaaba, but not at the Burger King? "" (Laughter) Quite, quite ironic. 
On the other hand, the Westerners who look at Islamic culture and see some troubling aspects should not readily conclude that this is what Islam ordains. 
And Westerners — Europeans or Americans — who didn't know about this before, [saw] this practice within some of the Muslim communities who migrated from North Africa. 
And we see, truly, in some Muslim communities, that tradition. 
And the religious police imposes the supposed Islamic way of life on every citizen, by force — like, women are forced to cover their heads — wear the hijab, the Islamic head cover. 
But when I saw that, I said, "" Maybe the problem is just an authoritarian culture in the region, and some Muslims have been influenced by that. 
I said, "" Well, I will do research about how Islam actually came to be what it is today, and what roads were taken and what roads could have been taken. "" The name of the book is "" Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty. "" And as the subtitle suggests, I looked at Islamic tradition and the history of Islamic thought from the perspective of individual liberty, and I tried to find what are the strengths with regard to individual liberty. 

The stories we tell about each other matter very much. 
The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives matter. 
And most of all, I think the way that we participate in each other's stories is of deep importance. 
I was six years old when I first heard stories about the poor. 
Now I didn't hear those stories from the poor themselves, I heard them from my Sunday school teacher and Jesus, kind of via my Sunday school teacher. 
I remember learning that people who were poor needed something material — food, clothing, shelter — that they didn't have. 
And I also was taught, coupled with that, that it was my job — this classroom full of five and six year-old children — it was our job, apparently, to help. 
This is what Jesus asked of us. 
And then he said, "" What you do for the least of these, you do for me. "" Now I was pretty psyched. 
I was very eager to be useful in the world — I think we all have that feeling. 
And also, it was kind of interesting that God needed help. 
That was news to me, and it felt like it was a very important thing to get to participate in. 
But I also learned very soon thereafter that Jesus also said, and I'm paraphrasing, the poor would always be with us. 
This frustrated and confused me; I felt like I had been just given a homework assignment that I had to do, and I was excited to do, but no matter what I would do, I would fail. 
So I felt confused, a little bit frustrated and angry, like maybe I'd misunderstood something here. 
And I felt overwhelmed. 
And for the first time, I began to fear this group of people and to feel negative emotion towards a whole group of people. 
I imagined in my head, a kind of long line of individuals that were never going away, that would always be with us. 
They were always going to ask me to help them and give them things, which I was excited to do, but I didn't know how it was going to work. 
And I didn't know what would happen when I ran out of things to give, especially if the problem was never going away. 
In the years following, the other stories I heard about the poor growing up were no more positive. 
For example, I saw pictures and images frequently of sadness and suffering. 
I heard about things that were going wrong in the lives of the poor. 
I heard about disease, I heard about war — they always seemed to be kind of related. 
And in general, I got this sort of idea that the poor in the world lived lives that were wrought with suffering and sadness, devastation, hopelessness. 
And after a while, I developed what I think many of us do, is this predictable response, where I started to feel bad every time I heard about them. 
I started to feel guilty for my own relative wealth, because I wasn't doing more, apparently, to make things better. 
And I even felt a sense of shame because of that. 
And so naturally, I started to distance myself. 
I stopped listening to their stories quite as closely as I had before. 
And I stopped expecting things to really change. 
Now I still gave — on the outside it looked like I was still quite involved. 
I gave of my time and my money, I gave when solutions were on sale. 
The cost of a cup of coffee can save a child's life, right. 
I mean who can argue with that? 
I gave when I was cornered, when it was difficult to avoid and I gave, in general, when the negative emotions built up enough that I gave to relieve my own suffering, not someone else's. 
The truth be told, I was giving out of that place, not out of a genuine place of hope and excitement to help and of generosity. 
It became a transaction for me, became sort of a trade. 
I was purchasing something — I was buying my right to go on with my day and not necessarily be bothered by this bad news. 
And I think the way that we go through that sometimes can, first of all, disembody a group of people, individuals out there in the world. 
And it can also turn into a commodity, which is a very scary thing. 
So as I did this, and as I think many of us do this, we kind of buy our distance, we kind of buy our right to go on with our day. 
I think that exchange can actually get in the way of the very thing that we want most. 
It can get in the way of our desire to really be meaningful and useful in another person's life and, in short to love. 
Thankfully, a few years ago, things shifted for me because I heard this gentleman speak, Dr. Muhammad Yunus. 
I know many in the room probably know exactly who he is, but to give the shorthand version for any who have not heard him speak, Dr. Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize a few years ago for his work pioneering modern microfinance. 
When I heard him speak, it was three years before that. 
But basically, microfinance — if this is new to you as well — think of that as financial services for the poor. 
Think of all the things you get at your bank and imagine those products and services tailored to the needs of someone living on a few dollars a day. 
Dr. Yunus shared his story, explaining what that was, and what he had done with his Grameen Bank. 
He also talked about, in particular, microlending, which is a tiny loan that could help someone start or grow a business. 
Now, when I heard him speak, it was exciting for a number of reasons. 
First and foremost, I learned about this new method of change in the world that, for once, showed me, maybe, a way to interact with someone and to give, to share of a resource in a way that wasn't weird and didn't make me feel bad — that was exciting. 
But more importantly, he told stories about the poor that were different than any stories I had heard before. 
In fact, those individuals he talked about who were poor was sort of a side note. 
He was talking about strong, smart, hardworking entrepreneurs who woke up every day and were doing things to make their lives and their family's lives better. 
All they needed to do that more quickly and to do it better was a little bit of capital. 
It was an amazing sort of insight for me. 
And I, in fact, was so deeply moved by this — it's hard to express now how much that affected me — but I was so moved that I actually quit my job a few weeks later, and I moved to East Africa to try to see for myself what this was about. 
For the first time, actually, in a long time I wanted to meet those individuals, I wanted to meet these entrepreneurs, and see for myself what their lives were actually about. 
So I spent three months in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania interviewing entrepreneurs that had received 100 dollars to start or grow a business. 
And in fact, through those interactions, for the first time, I was starting to get to be friends with some of those people in that big amorphous group out there that was supposed to be far away. 
I was starting to be friends and get to know their personal stories. 
And over and over again, as I interviewed them and spent my days with them, I did hear stories of life change and amazing little details of change. 
So I would hear from goat herders who had used that money that they had received to buy a few more goats. 
Their business trajectory would change. 
They would make a little bit more money; their standard of living would shift and would get better. 
And they would make really interesting little adjustments in their lives, like they would start to send their children to school. 
They might be able to buy mosquito nets. 
Maybe they could afford a lock for the door and feel secure. 
Maybe it was just that they could put sugar in their tea and offer that to me when I came as their guest and that made them feel proud. 
But there were these beautiful details, even if I talked to 20 goat herders in a row, and some days that's what happened — these beautiful details of life change that were meaningful to them. 
That was another thing that really touched me. 
It was really humbling to see for the first time, to really understand that even if I could have taken a magic wand and fixed everything, I probably would have gotten a lot wrong. 
Because the best way for people to change their lives is for them to have control and to do that in a way that they believe is best for them. 
So I saw that and it was very humbling. 
Anyway, another interesting thing happened while I was there. 
I never once was asked for a donation, which had kind of been my mode, right. 
There's poverty, you give money to help — no one asked me for a donation. 
In fact, no one wanted me to feel bad for them at all. 
If anything, they just wanted to be able to do more of what they were doing already and to build on their own capabilities. 
So what I did hear, once in a while, was that people wanted a loan — I thought that sounded very reasonable and really exciting. 
And by the way, I was a philosophy and poetry major in school, so I didn't know the difference between profit and revenue when I went to East Africa. 
I just got this impression that the money would work. 
And my introduction to business was in these $100 little infuses of capital. 
And I learned about profit and revenue, about leverage, all sorts of things, from farmers, from seamstresses, from goat herders. 
So this idea that these new stories of business and hope might be shared with my friends and family, and through that, maybe we could get some of the money that they needed to be able to continue their businesses as loans, that's this little idea that turned into Kiva. 
A few months later, I went back to Uganda with a digital camera and a basic website that my partner, Matthew, and I had kind of built, and took pictures of seven of my new friends, posted their stories, these stories of entrepreneurship, up on the website, spammed friends and family and said, "" We think this is legal. 
Haven't heard back yet from SEC on all the details, but do you say, do you want to help participate in this, provide the money that they need? "" The money came in basically overnight. 
We sent it over to Uganda. 
And over the next six months, a beautiful thing happened; the entrepreneurs received the money, they were paid, and their businesses, in fact, grew, and they were able to support themselves and change the trajectory of their lives. 
In October of '05, after those first seven loans were paid, Matt and I took the word beta off of the site. 
We said, "" Our little experiment has been a success. 
Let's start for real. "" That was our official launch. 
And then that first year, October '05 through' 06, Kiva facilitated $500,000 in loans. 
The second year, it was a total of 15 million. 
The third year, the total was up to around 40. 
The fourth year, we were just short of 100. 
And today, less than five years in, Kiva's facilitated more than 150 million dollars, in little 25-dollar bits, from lenders and entrepreneurs — more than a million of those, collectively in 200 countries. 
So that's where Kiva is today, just to bring you right up to the present. 
And while those numbers and those statistics are really fun to talk about and they're interesting, to me, Kiva's really about stories. 
It's about retelling the story of the poor, and it's about giving ourselves an opportunity to engage that validates their dignity, validates a partnership relationship, not a relationship that's based on the traditional sort of donor beneficiary weirdness that can happen. 
But instead a relationship that can promote respect and hope and this optimism that together we can move forward. 
So what I hope is that, not only can the money keep flowing forth through Kiva — that's a very positive and meaningful thing — but I hope Kiva can blur those lines, like I said, between the traditional rich and poor categories that we're taught to see in the world, this false dichotomy of us and them, have and have not. 
I hope that Kiva can blur those lines. 
Because as that happens, I think we can feel free to interact in a way that's more open, more just and more creative, to engage with each other and to help each other. 
Imagine how you feel when you see somebody on street who is begging and you're about to approach them. 
Imagine how you feel; and then imagine the difference when you might see somebody who has a story of entrepreneurship and hard work who wants to tell you about their business. 
Maybe they're smiling, and they want to talk to you about what they've done. 
Imagine if you're speaking with somebody who's growing things and making them flourish, somebody who's using their talents to do something productive, somebody who's built their own business from scratch, someone who is surrounded by abundance, not scarcity, who's in fact creating abundance, somebody with full hands with something to offer, not empty hands asking for you to give them something. 
Imagine if you could hear a story you didn't expect of somebody who wakes up every day and works very, very hard to make their life better. 
These stories can really change the way that we think about each other. 
And if we can catalyze a supportive community to come around these individuals and to participate in their story by lending a little bit of money, I think that can change the way we believe in each other and each other's potential. 
Now for me, Kiva is just the beginning. 
And as I look forward to what is next, it's been helpful to reflect on the things I've learned so far. 
The first one is, as I mentioned, entrepreneurship was a new idea to me. 
Kiva borrowers, as I interviewed them and got to know them over the last few years, have taught me what entrepreneurship is. 
And I think, at its core, it's deciding that you want your life to be better. 
You see an opportunity and you decide what you're going to do to try to seize that. 
In short, it's deciding that tomorrow can better than today and going after that. 
Second thing that I've learned is that loans are a very interesting tool for connectivity. 
So they're not a donation. 
Yeah, maybe it doesn't sound that much different. 
But in fact, when you give something to someone and they say, "" Thanks, "" and let you know how things go, that's one thing. 
When you lend them money, and they slowly pay you back over time, you have this excuse to have an ongoing dialogue. 
This continued attention — this ongoing attention — is a really big deal to build different kinds of relationships among us. 
And then third, from what I've heard from the entrepreneurs I've gotten to know, when all else is equal, given the option to have just money to do what you need to do, or money plus the support and encouragement of a global community, people choose the community plus the money. 
That's a much more meaningful combination, a more powerful combination. 
So with that in mind, this particular incident has led to the things that I'm working on now. 
I see entrepreneurs everywhere now, now that I'm tuned into this. 
And one thing that I've seen is there are a lot of supportive communities that already exist in the world. 
With social networks, it's an amazing way, growing the number of people that we all have around us in our own supportive communities, rapidly. 
And so, as I have been thinking about this, I've been wondering: how can we engage these supportive communities to catalyze even more entrepreneurial ideas and to catalyze all of us to make tomorrow better than today? 
As I've researched what's going on in the United States, a few interesting little insights have come up. 
So one is that, of course, as we all might expect, many small businesses in the U.S. and all over the world still need money to grow and to do more of what they want to do or they might need money during a hard month. 
But there's always a need for resources close by. 
Another thing is, it turns out, those resources don't usually come from the places you might expect — banks, venture capitalists, other organizations and support structures — they come from friends and family. 
Some statistics say 85 percent or more of funding for small businesses comes from friends and family. 
That's around 130 billion dollars a year — it's a lot. 
And third, so as people are doing this friends and family fundraising process, it's very awkward, people don't know exactly what to ask for, how to ask, what to promise in return, even though they have the best of intentions and want to thank those people that are supporting them. 
So to harness the power of these supportive communities in a new way and to allow entrepreneurs to decide for themselves exactly what that financial exchange should look like, exactly what fits them and the people around them, this week actually, we're quietly doing a launch of Profounder, which is a crowd funding platform for small businesses to raise what they need through investments from their friends and family. 
And it's investments, not donations, not loans, but investments that have a dynamic return. 
So the mapping of participating in the story, it actually flows with the up and down. 
So in short, it's a do-it-yourself tool for small businesses to raise these funds. 
And what you can do is go onto the site, create a profile, create investment terms in a really easy way. 
We make it really, really simple for me as well as anyone else who wants to use the site. 
And we allow entrepreneurs to share a percentage of their revenues. 
They can raise up to a million dollars from an unlimited number of unaccredited, unsophisticated investors — everyday people, heaven forbid — and they can share those returns over time — again, whatever terms they set. 
As investors choose to become involved based on those terms, they can either take their rewards back as cash, or they can decide in advance to give those returns away to a non-profit. 
So they can be a cash, or a cause, investor. 
It's my hope that this kind of tool can show anybody who has an idea a path to go do what they want to do in the world and to gather the people around them that they already have, the people that know them best and that love them and want to support them, to gather them to make this happen. 
So that's what I'm working on now. 
And to close, I just want to say, look these are tools. 
Right now, Profounder's right at the very beginning, and it's very palpable; it's very clear to me, that it's just a vessel, it's just a tool. 
What we need are for people to care, to actually go use it, just like they've cared enough to use Kiva to make those connections. 
But the good news is I don't think I need to stand here and convince you to care — I'm not even going to try. 
I don't think, even though we often hear, you know, hear the ethical and moral reasons, the religious reasons, "Here's why caring and giving will make you happier." 
I don't think we need to be convinced of that. I think we know; in fact, I think we know so much, and it's such a reality that we care so deeply, that in fact, what usually stops us is that we're afraid to try and to mess up, because we care so very much about helping each other and being meaningful in each other's lives. 
So what I think I can do today, that best thing I can give you — I've given you my story, which is the best I can do. 
And I think I can remind us that we do care. 
I think we all already know that. 
And I think we know that love is resilient enough for us to get out there and try. 
Just a sec. 
(Applause) Thanks. (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) 
For me, the best way to be inspired to try 
is to stop and to listen to someone else's story. 
And I'm grateful that I've gotten to do that here at TED. 
And I'm grateful that whenever I do that, guaranteed, I am inspired — I am inspired by the person I am listening to. 
And I believe more and more every time I listen in that that person's potential to do great things in the world and in my own potential to maybe help. 
And that — forget the tools, forget the moving around of resources — that stuff's easy. 
Believing in each other, really being sure when push comes to shove that each one of us can do amazing things in the world, that is what can make our stories into love stories and our collective story into one that continually perpetuates hope and good things for all of us. 
So that, this belief in each other, knowing that without a doubt and practicing that every day in whatever you do, that's what I believe will change the world and make tomorrow better than today. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

What is it about flying cars? 
We've wanted to do this for about a hundred years. 
And there are historic attempts that have had some level of technical success. 
But we haven't yet gotten to the point where on your way here this morning you see something that really, truly seamlessly integrates the two-dimensional world that we're comfortable in with the three-dimensional sky above us — that, I don't know about you, but I really enjoy spending time in. 
We looked at the historical attempts that had been out there and realized that, despite the fact that we have a lot of modern innovations to draw on today that weren't available previously — we have modern composite materials, we have aircraft engines that get good fuel economy and have better power-to-rate ratios than have ever been available, we have glass cockpit avionics that bring the information you need to fly directly to you in the cockpit — but without fundamentally addressing the problem from a different perspective, we realized that we were going to be getting the same result that people had been getting 
for the last hundred years, which isn't where we want to be right now. 
So instead of trying to make a car that can fly, we decided to try to make a plane that could drive. 
And the result is the Terrafugia Transition. 
It's a two-seat, single-engine airplane that works just like any other small airplane. 
You take off and land at a local airport. 
Then once you're on the ground, you fold up the wings, drive it home, park it in your garage. 
And it works. 
After two years of an innovative design and construction process, the proof of concept made its public debut in 2008. 
Now like with anything that's really different from the status quo, it didn't always go so well testing that aircraft. 
And we discovered that it's a very good thing that, when you go home with something that's been broken, you've actually learned a lot more than when you managed to tick off all of your test objectives the first time through. 
Still, we very much wanted to see the aircraft that we'd all helped build in the air, off the ground, like it was supposed to be. 
And on our third high-speed testing deployment on a bitter cold morning in upstate New York, we got to do that for the first time. 
The picture behind me was snapped by the copilot in our chase aircraft just moments after the wheels got off the ground for the first time. 
And we were all very flattered to see that image become a symbol of accomplishing something that people had thought was impossible really the world over. 
The flight testing that followed that was as basic and low-risk as we could make it, but it still accomplished what we needed to to take the program to the next step and to gain the credibility that we needed within our eventual market, the general aviation community, and with the regulators that govern the use of design of aircraft, particularly in the States. 
The FAA, about a year ago, gave us an exemption for the Transition to allow us to have an additional 110 lbs. 
within the light sport aircraft category. 
Now that doesn't sound like a lot, but it's very important, because being able to deliver the Transition as a light sport aircraft makes it simpler for us to certify it, but it also makes it much easier for you to learn how to fly it. 
A sport pilot can be certificated in as little as 20 hours of flight time. 
And at 110 lbs., that's very important for solving the other side of the equation — driving. 
It turns out that driving, with its associated design implementation and regulatory hurdles, is actually a harder problem to solve than flying. 
For those of us that spend most of our lives on the ground, this may be counter-intuitive, but driving has potholes, cobblestones, pedestrians, other drivers and a rather long and detailed list of federal motor vehicle safety standards to contend with. 
Fortunately, necessity remains the mother of invention, and a lot of the design work that we're the most proud of with the aircraft came out of solving the unique problems of operating it on the ground — everything from a continuously-variable transmission and liquid-based cooling system that allows us to use an aircraft engine in stop-and-go traffic, to a custom-designed gearbox that powers either the propeller when you're flying or the wheels on the ground, to the automated wing-folding mechanism that we'll see in a moment, to crash safety features. 
We have a carbon fiber safety cage that protects the occupants for less than 10 percent of the weight of a traditional steel chassis in a car. 
Now this also, as good as it is, wasn't quite enough. 
The regulations for vehicles on the road weren't written with an airplane in mind. 
So we did need a little bit of support from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. 
Now you may have seen in the news recently, they came through with us at the end of last month with a few special exemptions that will allow the Transition to be sold in the same category as SUVs and light trucks. 
As a multi-purpose passenger vehicle, it is now officially "" designed for occasional off-road use. "" (Laughter) Now let's see it in action. 
You can see there the wings folded up just along the side of the plane. 
You're not powering the propeller, you're powering the wheels. 
And it is under seven feet tall, so it will fit in a standard construction garage. 
And that's the automated wing-folding mechanism. 
That's real time. 
You just push a few buttons in the cockpit, and the wings come out. 
Once they're fully deployed, there's a mechanical lock that goes into place, again, from inside the cockpit. 
And they're now fully capable of handling any of the loads you would see in flight — just like putting down your convertible top. 
And you're all thinking what your neighbors would think of seeing that. 
(Video) Test Pilot: Until the vehicle flies, 75 percent of your risk is that first flight. 
Radio: It actually flew. Yes. 
Radio 2: That was gorgeous. 
Radio: What did you think of that? 
That was beautiful from up here, I tell you. 
AMD: See, we're all exceedingly excited about that little bunny hop. 
And our test pilot gave us the best feedback you can get from a test pilot after a first flight, which was that it was "" remarkably unremarkable. "" He would go onto tell us that the Transition had been the easiest airplane to land that he'd flown in his entire 30-year career as a test pilot. 
So despite making something that is seemingly revolutionary, we really focused on doing as little new as possible. 
We leverage a lot of technology from the state-of-the-art in general aviation and from automotive racing. 
When we do have to do something truly out-of-the-box, we use an incremental design, build, test, redesign cycle that lets us reduce risk in baby steps. 
Now since we started Terrafugia about 6 years ago, we've had a lot of those baby steps. 
We've gone from being three of us working in the basement at MIT while we were still in graduate school to about two-dozen of us working in an initial production facility outside of Boston. 
We've had to overcome challenges like keeping the weight below the light sport limit that I talked about, figuring out how to politely respond when a regulator tells you, "" But that won't fit through a toll booth with the wings extended — (Laughter) to all of the other associated durability and engineering issues that we talked about on the ground. 
Still, if everything goes to our satisfaction with the testing and construction of the two production prototypes that we're working on right now, those first deliveries to the, about a hundred, people who have reserved an airplane at this point should begin at the end of next year. 
The Transition will cost in line with other small airplanes. 
And I'm certainly not out to replace your Chevy, but I do think that the Transition should be your next airplane. 
Here's why. 
While nearly all of the commercial air travel in the world goes through a relatively small number of large hub airports, there is a huge underutilized resource out there. 
There are thousands of local airstrips that don't see nearly as many aircraft operations a day as they could. 
On average, there's one within 20 to 30 miles of wherever you are in the United States. 
The Transition gives you a safer, more convenient and more fun way of using this resource. 
For those of you who aren't yet pilots, there's four main reasons why those of us who are don't fly as much as we'd like to: the weather, primarily, cost, long door-to-door travel time and mobility at your destination. 
Now, bad weather comes in, just land, fold up the wings, drive home. 
Doesn't matter if it rains a little, you have a windshield wiper. 
Instead of paying to keep your airplane in a hanger, park it in your garage. 
And the unleaded automotive fuel that we use is both cheaper and better for the environment than traditional avgas. 
Door-to-door travel time is reduced, because now, instead of lugging bags, finding a parking space, taking off your shoes or pulling your airplane out of the hanger, you're now just spending that time getting to where you want to go. 
And mobility to your destination is clearly solved. 
Just fold up the wings and keep going. 
The Transition simultaneously expands our horizons while making the world a smaller, more accessible place. 
It also continues to be a fabulous adventure. 
I hope you'll each take a moment to think about how you could use something like this to give yourself more access to your own world, and to make your own travel more convenient and more fun. 
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share it with you. 
(Applause) 

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

Over the past 10 years, I've been researching the way people organize and visualize information. 
And I've noticed an interesting shift. 
For a long period of time, we believed in a natural ranking order in the world around us, also known as the great chain of being, or "" Scala naturae "" in Latin, a top-down structure that normally starts with God at the very top, followed by angels, noblemen, common people, animals, and so on. 
This idea was actually based on Aristotle's ontology, which classified all things known to man in a set of opposing categories, like the ones you see behind me. 
But over time, interestingly enough, this concept adopted the branching schema of a tree in what became known as the Porphyrian tree, also considered to be the oldest tree of knowledge. 
The branching scheme of the tree was, in fact, such a powerful metaphor for conveying information that it became, over time, an important communication tool to map a variety of systems of knowledge. 
We can see trees being used to map morality, with the popular tree of virtues and tree of vices, as you can see here, with these beautiful illustrations from medieval Europe. 
We can see trees being used to map consanguinity, the various blood ties between people. 
We can also see trees being used to map genealogy, perhaps the most famous archetype of the tree diagram. 
I think many of you in the audience have probably seen family trees. 
Many of you probably even have your own family trees drawn in such a way. 
We can see trees even mapping systems of law, the various decrees and rulings of kings and rulers. 
And finally, of course, also a very popular scientific metaphor, we can see trees being used to map all species known to man. 
And trees ultimately became such a powerful visual metaphor because in many ways, they really embody this human desire for order, for balance, for unity, for symmetry. 
However, nowadays we are really facing new complex, intricate challenges that cannot be understood by simply employing a simple tree diagram. 
And a new metaphor is currently emerging, and it's currently replacing the tree in visualizing various systems of knowledge. 
It's really providing us with a new lens to understand the world around us. 
And this new metaphor is the metaphor of the network. 
And we can see this shift from trees into networks in many domains of knowledge. 
We can see this shift in the way we try to understand the brain. 
While before, we used to think of the brain as a modular, centralized organ, where a given area was responsible for a set of actions and behaviors, the more we know about the brain, the more we think of it as a large music symphony, played by hundreds and thousands of instruments. 
This is a beautiful snapshot created by the Blue Brain Project, where you can see 10,000 neurons and 30 million connections. 
And this is only mapping 10 percent of a mammalian neocortex. 
We can also see this shift in the way we try to conceive of human knowledge. 
These are some remarkable trees of knowledge, or trees of science, by Spanish scholar Ramon Llull. 
And Llull was actually the precursor, the very first one who created the metaphor of science as a tree, a metaphor we use every single day, when we say, "Biology is a branch of science," when we say, "Genetics is a branch of science." 
But perhaps the most beautiful of all trees of knowledge, at least for me, was created for the French encyclopedia by Diderot and d'Alembert in 1751. 
This was really the bastion of the French Enlightenment, and this gorgeous illustration was featured as a table of contents for the encyclopedia. 
And it actually maps out all domains of knowledge as separate branches of a tree. 
But knowledge is much more intricate than this. 
These are two maps of Wikipedia showing the inter-linkage of articles — related to history on the left, and mathematics on the right. 
And I think by looking at these maps and other ones that have been created of Wikipedia — arguably one of the largest rhizomatic structures ever created by man — we can really understand how human knowledge is much more intricate and interdependent, just like a network. 
We can also see this interesting shift in the way we map social ties between people. 
This is the typical organization chart. 
I'm assuming many of you have seen a similar chart as well, in your own corporations, or others. 
It's a top-down structure that normally starts with the CEO at the very top, and where you can drill down all the way to the individual workmen on the bottom. 
But humans sometimes are, well, actually, all humans are unique in their own way, and sometimes you really don't play well under this really rigid structure. 
I think the Internet is really changing this paradigm quite a lot. 
This is a fantastic map of online social collaboration between Perl developers. 
Perl is a famous programming language, and here, you can see how different programmers are actually exchanging files, and working together on a given project. 
And here, you can notice that this is a completely decentralized process — there's no leader in this organization, it's a network. 
We can also see this interesting shift when we look at terrorism. 
One of the main challenges of understanding terrorism nowadays is that we are dealing with decentralized, independent cells, where there's no leader leading the whole process. 
And here, you can actually see how visualization is being used. 
The diagram that you see behind me shows all the terrorists involved in the Madrid attack in 2004. 
And what they did here is, they actually segmented the network into three different years, represented by the vertical layers that you see behind me. 
And the blue lines tie together the people that were present in that network year after year. 
So even though there's no leader per se, these people are probably the most influential ones in that organization, the ones that know more about the past, and the future plans and goals of this particular cell. 
We can also see this shift from trees into networks in the way we classify and organize species. 
The image on the right is the only illustration that Darwin included in "" The Origin of Species, "" which Darwin called the "" Tree of Life. "" There's actually a letter from Darwin to the publisher, expanding on the importance of this particular diagram. 
It was critical for Darwin's theory of evolution. 
But recently, scientists discovered that overlaying this tree of life is a dense network of bacteria, and these bacteria are actually tying together species that were completely separated before, to what scientists are now calling not the tree of life, but the web of life, the network of life. 
And finally, we can really see this shift, again, when we look at ecosystems around our planet. 
No more do we have these simplified predator-versus-prey diagrams we have all learned at school. 
This is a much more accurate depiction of an ecosystem. 
This is a diagram created by Professor David Lavigne, mapping close to 100 species that interact with the codfish off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada. 
And I think here, we can really understand the intricate and interdependent nature of most ecosystems that abound on our planet. 
But even though recent, this metaphor of the network, is really already adopting various shapes and forms, and it's almost becoming a growing visual taxonomy. 
It's almost becoming the syntax of a new language. 
And this is one aspect that truly fascinates me. 
And these are actually 15 different typologies I've been collecting over time, and it really shows the immense visual diversity of this new metaphor. 
And here is an example. 
On the very top band, you have radial convergence, a visualization model that has become really popular over the last five years. 
At the top left, the very first project is a gene network, followed by a network of IP addresses — machines, servers — followed by a network of Facebook friends. 
You probably couldn't find more disparate topics, yet they are using the same metaphor, the same visual model, to map the never-ending complexities of its own subject. 
And here are a few more examples of the many I've been collecting, of this growing visual taxonomy of networks. 
But networks are not just a scientific metaphor. 
As designers, researchers, and scientists try to map a variety of complex systems, they are in many ways influencing traditional art fields, like painting and sculpture, and influencing many different artists. 
And perhaps because networks have this huge aesthetical force to them — they're immensely gorgeous — they are really becoming a cultural meme, and driving a new art movement, which I've called "" networkism. "" And we can see this influence in this movement in a variety of ways. 
This is just one of many examples, where you can see this influence from science into art. 
The example on your left side is IP-mapping, a computer-generated map of IP addresses; again — servers, machines. 
And on your right side, you have "" Transient Structures and Unstable Networks "" by Sharon Molloy, using oil and enamel on canvas. 
And here are a few more paintings by Sharon Molloy, some gorgeous, intricate paintings. 
And here's another example of that interesting cross-pollination between science and art. 
On your left side, you have "" Operation Smile. "" It is a computer-generated map of a social network. 
And on your right side, you have "" Field 4, "" by Emma McNally, using only graphite on paper. 
Emma McNally is one of the main leaders of this movement, and she creates these striking, imaginary landscapes, where you can really notice the influence from traditional network visualization. 
But networkism doesn't happen only in two dimensions. 
This is perhaps one of my favorite projects of this new movement. 
And I think the title really says it all — it's called: "" Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider's Web. "" And I just find this particular project to be immensely powerful. 
It was created by Tomás Saraceno, and he occupies these large spaces, creates these massive installations using only elastic ropes. 
As you actually navigate that space and bounce along those elastic ropes, the entire network kind of shifts, almost like a real organic network would. 
And here's yet another example of networkism taken to a whole different level. 
This was created by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota in a piece called "" In Silence. "" And Chiharu, like Tomás Saraceno, fills these rooms with this dense network, this dense web of elastic ropes and black wool and thread, sometimes including objects, as you can see here, sometimes even including people, in many of her installations. 
But networks are also not just a new trend, and it's too easy for us to dismiss it as such. 
Networks really embody notions of decentralization, of interconnectedness, of interdependence. 
And this new way of thinking is critical for us to solve many of the complex problems we are facing nowadays, from decoding the human brain, to understanding the vast universe out there. 
On your left side, you have a snapshot of a neural network of a mouse — very similar to our own at this particular scale. 
And on your right side, you have the Millennium Simulation. 
It was the largest and most realistic simulation of the growth of cosmic structure. 
It was able to recreate the history of 20 million galaxies in approximately 25 terabytes of output. 
And coincidentally or not, I just find this particular comparison between the smallest scale of knowledge — the brain — and the largest scale of knowledge — the universe itself — to be really quite striking and fascinating. 
Because as Bruce Mau once said, "" When everything is connected to everything else, for better or for worse, everything matters. "" Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

I'm thrilled to be here tonight to share with you something we've been working on for over two years, and it's in the area of additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing. 
Now, I'm a chemist, a material scientist too, and my co-inventors are also material scientists, one a chemist, one a physicist, and we began to be interested in 3D printing. 
And very often, as you know, new ideas are often simple connections between people with different experiences in different communities, and that's our story. 
Now, we were inspired by the "" Terminator 2 "" scene for T-1000, and we thought, why couldn't a 3D printer operate in this fashion, where you have an object arise out of a puddle in essentially real time with essentially no waste to make a great object? 
Okay, just like the movies. 
There are mushrooms that grow faster than 3D printed parts. (Laughter) The layer by layer process leads to defects in mechanical properties, and if we could grow continuously, we could eliminate those defects. 
So if we could pull this off, imitate Hollywood, we could in fact address 3D manufacturing. 
Light can take a resin and convert it to a solid, can convert a liquid to a solid. 
At the bottom of the reservoir is a special window. 
The third component is a digital light projection system underneath the reservoir, illuminating with light in the ultraviolet region. 
In addition, because we're growing things, we eliminate the layers, and the parts are monolithic. 
And the mechanical properties of most parts made in a 3D printer are notorious for having properties that depend on the orientation with which how you printed it, because of the layer-like structure. 
You always take the risk that something like this won't work onstage, right? 
Often, the digital thread is broken right at prototype, because you can't go all the way to manufacturing because most parts don't have the properties to be a final part. 
We're really good at that, but it's actually very hard to make things from 10 microns to 1,000 microns, the mesoscale. 
And subtractive techniques from the silicon industry can't do that very well. 
They can't etch wafers that well. 

So historically there has been a huge divide between what people consider to be non-living systems on one side, and living systems on the other side. 
So we go from, say, this beautiful and complex crystal as non-life, and this rather beautiful and complex cat on the other side. 
Over the last hundred and fifty years or so, science has kind of blurred this distinction between non-living and living systems, and now we consider that there may be a kind of continuum that exists between the two. 
We'll just take one example here: a virus is a natural system, right? 
But it's very simple. It's very simplistic. 
It doesn't really satisfy all the requirements, it doesn't have all the characteristics of living systems and is in fact a parasite on other living systems in order to, say, reproduce and evolve. 
But what we're going to be talking about here tonight are experiments done on this sort of non-living end of this spectrum — so actually doing chemical experiments in the laboratory, mixing together nonliving ingredients to make new structures, and that these new structures might have some of the characteristics of living systems. 
Really what I'm talking about here is trying to create a kind of artificial life. 
So what are these characteristics that I'm talking about? These are them. 
We consider first that life has a body. 
Now this is necessary to distinguish the self from the environment. 
Life also has a metabolism. Now this is a process by which life can convert resources from the environment into building blocks so it can maintain and build itself. 
Life also has a kind of inheritable information. 
Now we, as humans, we store our information as DNA in our genomes and we pass this information on to our offspring. 
If we couple the first two — the body and the metabolism — we can come up with a system that could perhaps move and replicate, and if we coupled these now to inheritable information, we can come up with a system that would be more lifelike, and would perhaps evolve. 
And so these are the things we will try to do in the lab, make some experiments that have one or more of these characteristics of life. 
So how do we do this? Well, we use a model system that we term a protocell. 
You might think of this as kind of like a primitive cell. It is a simple chemical model of a living cell, and if you consider for example a cell in your body may have on the order of millions of different types of molecules that need to come together, play together in a complex network to produce something that we call alive. 
In the laboratory what we want to do is much the same, but with on the order of tens of different types of molecules — so a drastic reduction in complexity, but still trying to produce something that looks lifelike. 
And so what we do is, we start simple and we work our way up to living systems. 
Consider for a moment this quote by Leduc, a hundred years ago, considering a kind of synthetic biology: "" The synthesis of life, should it ever occur, will not be the sensational discovery which we usually associate with the idea. "" That's his first statement. So if we actually create life in the laboratories, it's probably not going to impact our lives at all. 
"" If we accept the theory of evolution, then the first dawn of synthesis of life must consist in the production of forms intermediate between the inorganic and the organic world, or between the non-living and living world, forms which possess only some of the rudimentary attributes of life "" — so, the ones I just discussed — "" to which other attributes will be slowly added in the course of development by the evolutionary actions of the environment. "" So we start simple, we make some structures that may have some of these characteristics of life, and then we try to develop that to become more lifelike. 
This is how we can start to make a protocell. 
We use this idea called self-assembly. 
What that means is, I can mix some chemicals together in a test tube in my lab, and these chemicals will start to self-associate to form larger and larger structures. 
So say on the order of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of molecules will come together to form a large structure that didn't exist before. 
And in this particular example, what I took is some membrane molecules, mixed those together in the right environment, and within seconds it forms these rather complex and beautiful structures here. 
These membranes are also quite similar, morphologically and functionally, to the membranes in your body, and we can use these, as they say, to form the body of our protocell. 
Likewise, we can work with oil and water systems. 
As you know, when you put oil and water together, they don't mix, but through self-assembly we can get a nice oil droplet to form, and we can actually use this as a body for our artificial organism or for our protocell, as you will see later. 
So that's just forming some body stuff, right? 
Some architectures. 
What about the other aspects of living systems? 
So we came up with this protocell model here that I'm showing. 
We started with a natural occurring clay called montmorillonite. 
This is natural from the environment, this clay. 
It forms a surface that is, say, chemically active. 
It could run a metabolism on it. 
Certain kind of molecules like to associate with the clay. For example, in this case, RNA, shown in red — this is a relative of DNA, it's an informational molecule — it can come along and it starts to associate with the surface of this clay. 
This structure, then, can organize the formation of a membrane boundary around itself, so it can make a body of liquid molecules around itself, and that's shown in green here on this micrograph. 
So just through self-assembly, mixing things together in the lab, we can come up with, say, a metabolic surface with some informational molecules attached inside of this membrane body, right? 
So we're on a road towards living systems. 
But if you saw this protocell, you would not confuse this with something that was actually alive. 
It's actually quite lifeless. Once it forms, it doesn't really do anything. 
So, something is missing. 
Some things are missing. 
So some things that are missing is, for example, if you had a flow of energy through a system, what we'd want is a protocell that can harvest some of that energy in order to maintain itself, much like living systems do. 
So we came up with a different protocell model, and this is actually simpler than the previous one. 
In this protocell model, it's just an oil droplet, but a chemical metabolism inside that allows this protocell to use energy to do something, to actually become dynamic, as we'll see here. 
You add the droplet to the system. 
It's a pool of water, and the protocell starts moving itself around in the system. 
Okay? Oil droplet forms through self-assembly, has a chemical metabolism inside so it can use energy, and it uses that energy to move itself around in its environment. 
As we heard earlier, movement is very important in these kinds of living systems. 
It is moving around, exploring its environment, and remodeling its environment, as you see, by these chemical waves that are forming by the protocell. 
So it's acting, in a sense, like a living system trying to preserve itself. 
We take this same moving protocell here, and we put it in another experiment, get it moving. Then I'm going to add some food to the system, and you'll see that in blue here, right? 
So I add some food source to the system. 
The protocell moves. It encounters the food. 
It reconfigures itself and actually then is able to climb to the highest concentration of food in that system and stop there. 
Alright? So not only do we have this system that has a body, it has a metabolism, it can use energy, it moves around. 
It can sense its local environment and actually find resources in the environment to sustain itself. 
Now, this doesn't have a brain, it doesn't have a neural system. This is just a sack of chemicals that is able to have this interesting and complex lifelike behavior. 
If we count the number of chemicals in that system, actually, including the water that's in the dish, we have five chemicals that can do this. 
So then we put these protocells together in a single experiment to see what they would do, and depending on the conditions, we have some protocells on the left that are moving around and it likes to touch the other structures in its environment. 
On the other hand we have two moving protocells that like to circle each other, and they form a kind of a dance, a complex dance with each other. 
Right? So not only do individual protocells have behavior, what we've interpreted as behavior in this system, but we also have basically population-level behavior similar to what organisms have. 
So now that you're all experts on protocells, we're going to play a game with these protocells. 
We're going to make two different kinds. 
Protocell A has a certain kind of chemistry inside that, when activated, the protocell starts to vibrate around, just dancing. 
So remember, these are primitive things, so dancing protocells, that's very interesting to us. (Laughter) The second protocell has a different chemistry inside, and when activated, the protocells all come together and they fuse into one big one. Right? 
And we just put these two together in the same system. 
So there's population A, there's population B, and then we activate the system, and protocell Bs, they're the blue ones, they all come together. They fuse together to form one big blob, and the other protocell just dances around. And this just happens until all of the energy in the system is basically used up, and then, game over. 
So then I repeated this experiment a bunch of times, and one time something very interesting happened. 
So, I added these protocells together to the system, and protocell A and protocell B fused together to form a hybrid protocell AB. 
That didn't happen before. There it goes. 
There's a protocell AB now in this system. 
Protocell AB likes to dance around for a bit, while protocell B does the fusing, okay? 
But then something even more interesting happens. 
Watch when these two large protocells, the hybrid ones, fuse together. 
Now we have a dancing protocell and a self-replication event. Right. (Laughter) Just with blobs of chemicals, again. 
So the way this works is, you have a simple system of five chemicals here, a simple system here. When they hybridize, you then form something that's different than before, it's more complex than before, and you get the emergence of another kind of lifelike behavior which in this case is replication. 
So since we can make some interesting protocells that we like, interesting colors and interesting behaviors, and they're very easy to make, and they have interesting lifelike properties, perhaps these protocells have something to tell us about the origin of life on the Earth. Perhaps these represent an easily accessible step, one of the first steps by which life got started on the early Earth. 
Certainly, there were molecules present on the early Earth, but they wouldn't have been these pure compounds that we worked with in the lab and I showed in these experiments. 
Rather, they'd be a real complex mixture of all kinds of stuff, because uncontrolled chemical reactions produce a diverse mixture of organic compounds. 
Think of it like a primordial ooze, okay? 
And it's a pool that's too difficult to fully characterize, even by modern methods, and the product looks brown, like this tar here on the left. A pure compound is shown on the right, for contrast. 
So this is similar to what happens when you take pure sugar crystals in your kitchen, you put them in a pan, and you apply energy. 
You turn up the heat, you start making or breaking chemical bonds in the sugar, forming a brownish caramel, right? 
If you let that go unregulated, you'll continue to make and break chemical bonds, forming an even more diverse mixture of molecules that then forms this kind of black tarry stuff in your pan, right, that's difficult to wash out. So that's what the origin of life would have looked like. 
You needed to get life out of this junk that is present on the early Earth, four, 4.5 billion years ago. 
So the challenge then is, throw away all your pure chemicals in the lab, and try to make some protocells with lifelike properties from this kind of primordial ooze. 
So we're able to then see the self-assembly of these oil droplet bodies again that we've seen previously, and the black spots inside of there represent this kind of black tar — this diverse, very complex, organic black tar. 
And we put them into one of these experiments, as you've seen earlier, and then we watch lively movement that comes out. 
They look really good, very nice movement, and also they appear to have some kind of behavior where they kind of circle around each other and follow each other, similar to what we've seen before — but again, working with just primordial conditions, no pure chemicals. 
These are also, these tar-fueled protocells, are also able to locate resources in their environment. 
I'm going to add some resource from the left, here, that defuses into the system, and you can see, they really like that. 
They become very energetic, and able to find the resource in the environment, similar to what we saw before. 
But again, these are done in these primordial conditions, really messy conditions, not sort of sterile laboratory conditions. 
These are very dirty little protocells, as a matter of fact. (Laughter) But they have lifelike properties, is the point. 
So, doing these artificial life experiments helps us define a potential path between non-living and living systems. 
And not only that, but it helps us broaden our view of what life is and what possible life there could be out there — life that could be very different from life that we find here on Earth. 
And that leads me to the next term, which is "" weird life. "" This is a term by Steve Benner. 
This is used in reference to a report in 2007 by the National Research Council in the United States, wherein they tried to understand how we can look for life elsewhere in the universe, okay, especially if that life is very different from life on Earth. If we went to another planet and we thought there might be life there, how could we even recognize it as life? 
Well, they came up with three very general criteria. First is — and they're listed here. 
The first is, the system has to be in non-equilibrium. That means the system cannot be dead, in a matter of fact. 
Basically what that means is, you have an input of energy into the system that life can use and exploit to maintain itself. 
This is similar to having the Sun shining on the Earth, driving photosynthesis, driving the ecosystem. 
Without the Sun, there's likely to be no life on this planet. 
Secondly, life needs to be in liquid form, so that means even if we had some interesting structures, interesting molecules together but they were frozen solid, then this is not a good place for life. 
And thirdly, we need to be able to make and break chemical bonds. And again this is important because life transforms resources from the environment into building blocks so it can maintain itself. 
Now today, I told you about very strange and weird protocells — some that contain clay, some that have primordial ooze in them, some that have basically oil instead of water inside of them. 
Most of these don't contain DNA, but yet they have lifelike properties. 
But these protocells satisfy these general requirements of living systems. 
So by making these chemical, artificial life experiments, we hope not only to understand something fundamental about the origin of life and the existence of life on this planet, but also what possible life there could be out there in the universe. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Well, good afternoon. 
How many of you took the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge? 
(Applause) Woo hoo! 
Well, I have to tell you, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you so very, very much. 
Do you know to date the ALS Association has raised 125 million dollars? 
Woo hoo! (Applause) It takes me back to the summer of 2011. 
My family, my kids had all grown up. 
We were officially empty nesters, and we decided, let's go on a family vacation. 
Jenn, my daughter, and my son-in-law came down from New York. 
My youngest, Andrew, he came down from his home in Charlestown where he was working in Boston, and my son Pete, who had played at Boston College, baseball, had played baseball professionally in Europe, and had now come home and was selling group insurance, he also joined us. 
And one night, I found myself having a beer with Pete, and Pete was looking at me and he just said, "" You know, Mom, I don't know, selling group insurance is just not my passion. "" He said, "" I just don't feel I'm living up to my potential. 
I don't feel this is my mission in life. "" And he said, "" You know, oh by the way, Mom, I have to leave early from vacation because my inter-city league team that I play for made the playoffs, and I have to get back to Boston because I can't let my team down. 
I'm just not as passionate about my job as I am about baseball. "" So off Pete went, and left the family vacation — break a mother's heart — and he went, and we followed four days later to see the next playoff game. 
We're at the playoff game, Pete's at the plate, and a fastball's coming in, and it hits him on the wrist. 
Oh, Pete. 
His wrist went completely limp, like this. 
So for the next six months, Pete went back to his home in Southie, kept working that unpassionate job, and was going to doctors to see what was wrong with this wrist that never came back. 
Six months later, in March, he called my husband and me, and he said, "" Oh, Mom and Dad, we have a doctor that found a diagnosis for that wrist. 
Do you want to come with the doctor's appointment with me? "" I said, "" Sure, we'll come in. "" That morning, Pete, John and I all got up, got dressed, got in our cars — three separate cars because we were going to go to work after the doctor's appointment to find out what happened to the wrist. 
We walked into the neurologist's office, sat down, four doctors walk in, and the head neurologist sits down. 
And he says, "" Well, Pete, we've been looking at all the tests, and I have to tell you, it's not a sprained wrist, it's not a broken wrist, it's not nerve damage in the wrist, it's not an infection, it's not Lyme disease. "" And there was this deliberate elimination going up, and I was thinking to myself, where is he going with this? 
Then he put his hands on his knees, he looked right at my 27-year-old kid, and said, "" I don't know how to tell a 27-year-old this: Pete, you have ALS. "" ALS? 
I had had a friend whose 80-year-old father had ALS. 
I looked at my husband, he looked at me, and then we looked at the doctor, and we said, "" ALS? 
Okay, what treatment? Let's go. 
What do we do? Let's go. "" And he looked at us, and he said, "" Mr. and Mrs. Frates, I'm sorry to tell you this, but there's no treatment and there's no cure. "" We were the worst culprits. 
We didn't even understand that it had been 75 years since Lou Gehrig and nothing had been done in the progress against ALS. 
So we all went home, and Jenn and Dan flew home from Wall Street, Andrew came home from Charlestown, and Pete went to B.C. to pick up his then-girlfriend Julie and brought her home, and six hours later after diagnosis, we're sitting around having a family dinner, and we're having small chat. 
I don't even remember cooking dinner that night. 
But then our leader, Pete, set the vision, and talked to us just like we were his new team. 
He said, "" There will be no wallowing, people. "" He goes, "" We're not looking back, we're looking forward. 
What an amazing opportunity we have to change the world. 
I'm going to change the face of this unacceptable situation of ALS. 
We're going to move the needle, and I'm going to get it in front of philanthropists like Bill Gates. "" And that was it. We were given our directive. 
So in the days and months that followed, within a week, we had our brothers and sisters and our family come to us, that they were already creating Team Frate Train. 
Uncle Dave, he was the webmaster; Uncle Artie, he was the accountant; Auntie Dana, she was the graphic artist; and my youngest son, Andrew, quit his job, left his apartment in Charlestown and says, "" I'm going to take care of Pete and be his caregiver. "" Then all those people, classmates, teammates, coworkers that Pete had inspired throughout his whole life, the circles of Pete all started intersecting with one another, and made Team Frate Train. 
Six months after diagnosis, Pete was given an award at a research summit for advocacy. 
He got up and gave a very eloquent speech, and at the end of the speech, there was a panel, and on the panel were these pharmaceutical executives and biochemists and clinicians and I'm sitting there and I'm listening to them and most of the content went straight over my head. 
I avoided every science class I ever could. 
But I was watching these people, and I was listening to them, and they were saying, "" I, I do this, I do that, "" and there was a real unfamiliarity between them. 
So at the end of their talk, the panel, they had questions and answers, and boom, my hand went right up, and I get the microphone, and I look at them and I say, "" Thank you. 
Thank you so much for working in ALS. 
It means so very much to us. "" I said, "" But I do have to tell you that I'm watching your body language and I'm listening to what you're saying. 
It just doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of collaboration going on here. 
And not only that, where's the flip chart with the action items and the follow-up and the accountability? 
What are you going to do after you leave this room? "" And then I turned around and there was about 200 pairs of eyes just staring at me. 
And it was that point that I realized that I had talked about the elephant in the room. 
Thus my mission had begun. 
So over the next couple of years, Pete — we've had our highs and our lows. 
Pete was put on a compassionate use drug. 
It was hope in a bottle for the whole ALS community. 
It was in a phase III trial. 
Then six months later, the data comes back: no efficacy. 
We were supposed to have therapies overseas, and the rug was pulled out from under us. 
So for the next two years, we just watched my son be taken away from me, little by little every day. 
Two and a half years ago, Pete was hitting home runs at baseball fields. 
Today, Pete's completely paralyzed. 
He can't hold his head up any longer. 
He's confined to a motorized wheelchair. 
He can no longer swallow or eat. 
He has a feeding tube. 
He can't speak. 
He talks with eye gaze technology and a speech generating device, and we're watching his lungs, because his diaphragm eventually is going to give out and then the decision will be made to put him on a ventilator or not. 
ALS robs the human of all their physical parts, but the brain stays intact. 
So July 4th, 2014, 75th year of Lou Gehrig's inspirational speech comes, and Pete is asked by MLB.com to write an article in the Bleacher Report. 
And it was very significant, because he wrote it using his eye gaze technology. 
Twenty days later, the ice started to fall. 
On July 27th, Pete's roommate in New York City, wearing a Quinn For The Win shirt, signifying Pat Quinn, another ALS patient known in New York, and B.C. shorts said, "" I'm taking the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, "" picked up the ice, put it over his head. 
"" And I'm nominating... "" And he sent it up to Boston. 
And that was on July 27th. 
Over the next couple of days, our news feed was full of family and friends. 
If you haven't gone back, the nice thing about Facebook is that you have the dates, you can go back. 
You've got to see Uncle Artie's human Bloody Mary. 
I'm telling you, it's one of the best ones, and that was probably in day two. 
By about day four, Uncle Dave, the webmaster, he isn't on Facebook, and I get a text from him, and it says, "" Nancy, what the hell is going on? "" Uncle Dave gets a hit every time Pete's website is gone onto, and his phone was blowing up. 
So we all sat down and we realized, money is coming in — how amazing. 
So we knew awareness would lead to funding, we just didn't know it would only take a couple of days. 
So we got together, put our best 501 (c) (3) s on Pete's website, and off we went. 
So week one, Boston media. 
Week two, national media. 
It was during week two that our neighbor next door opened up our door and threw a pizza across the kitchen floor, saying, "I think you people might need food in there." 
(Laughter) Week three, celebrities — Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood. 
Week four, global — BBC, Irish Radio. 
Did anyone see "" Lost In Translation ""? 
My husband did Japanese television. 
It was interesting. 
(Laughter) And those videos, the popular ones. 
Paul Bissonnette's glacier video, incredible. 
How about the redemption nuns of Dublin? 
Who's seen that one? 
It's absolutely fantastic. 
J.T., Justin Timberlake. 
That's when we knew, that was a real A-list celebrity. 
I go back on my texts, and I can see "" JT! JT! "" My sister texting me. 
Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany. 
Incredible. 
And the ALS patients, you know what their favorite ones are, and their families'? 
All of them. 
Because this misunderstood and underfunded "" rare "" disease, they just sat and watched people saying it over and over: "" ALS, ALS. "" It was unbelievable. 
And those naysayers, let's just talk a couple of stats, shall we? 
Okay, so the ALS Association, they think by year end, it'll be 160 million dollars. 
ALS TDI in Cambridge, they raised three million dollars. 
Well, guess what? 
They had a clinical trial for a drug that they've been developing. 
It was on a three-year track for funding. 
Two months. 
It's coming out starting in two months. 
(Applause) And YouTube has reported that over 150 countries have posted Ice Bucket Challenges for ALS. 
And Facebook, 2.5 million videos, and I had the awesome adventure visiting the Facebook campus last week, and I said to them, "" I know what it was like in my house. 
I can't imagine what it was like around here. "" All she said was, "" Jaw-dropping. "" And my family's favorite video? 
Bill Gates. 
Because the night Pete was diagnosed, he told us that he was going to get ALS in front of philanthropists like Bill Gates, and he did it. 
Goal number one, check. 
Now on to the treatment and cure. 
(Applause) So okay, after all of this ice, we know that it was much more than just pouring buckets of ice water over your head, and I really would like to leave you with a couple of things that I'd like you to remember. 
The first thing is, every morning when you wake up, you can choose to live your day in positivity. 
Would any of you blame me if I just was in the fetal position and pulled the covers over my head every day? 
No, I don't think anybody would blame me, but Pete has inspired us to wake up every morning and be positive and proactive. 
I actually had to ditch support groups because everybody was in there saying that spraying their lawns with chemicals, that's why they got ALS, and I was like, "" I don't think so, "" but I had to get away from the negativity. 
The second thing I want to leave you with is the person at the middle of the challenge has to be willing to have the mental toughness to put themselves out there. 
Pete still goes to baseball games and he still sits with his teammates in the dugout, and he hangs his gravity feed bag right on the cages. 
You'll see the kids, they're up there hanging it up. 
"Pete, is that okay?" "Yup." 
And then they put it right into his stomach. 
Because he wants them to see what the reality of this is, and how he's never, ever going to give up. 
And the third thing I want to leave you with: If you ever come across a situation that you see as so unacceptable, I want you to dig down as deep as you can and find your best mother bear and go after it. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
I know that I'm running over, but I've got to leave you with this: the gifts that my son has given me. 
I have had 29 years of having the honor of being the mother of Pete Frates. 
Pete Frates has been inspiring and leading his whole life. 
He's thrown out kindness, and all that kindness has come back to him. 
He walks the face of the Earth right now and knows why he's here. 
What a gift. 
The second thing that my son has given me is he's given me my mission in life. 
Now I know why I'm here. 
I'm going to save my son, and if it doesn't happen in time for him, I'm going to work so that no other mother has to go through what I'm going through. 
And the third thing, and last but not least gift that my son has given me, as an exclamation point to the miraculous month of August 2014: That girlfriend that he went to get on the night of diagnosis is now his wife, and Pete and Julie have given me my granddaughter, Lucy Fitzgerald Frates. 
Lucy Fitzgerald Frates came two weeks early as the exclamation point on August 31st, 2014. 
And so — (Applause) — And so let me leave you with Pete's words of inspiration that he would use to classmates, coworkers and teammates. 
Be passionate. 
Be genuine. 
Be hardworking. 
And don't forget to be great. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

The new me is beauty. 
(Laughter) Yeah, people used to say, "" Norman's OK, but if you followed what he said, everything would be usable but it would be ugly. "" Well, I didn't have that in mind, so... 
This is neat. 
Thank you for setting up my display. 
I mean, it's just wonderful. 
And I haven't the slightest idea of what it does or what it's good for, but I want it. 
And that's my new life. 
My new life is trying to understand what beauty is about, and "" pretty, "" and "" emotions. "" The new me is all about making things kind of neat and fun. 
And so this is a Philippe Starck juicer, produced by Alessi. 
It's just neat; it's fun. It's so much fun I have it in my house — but I have it in the entryway, I don't use it to make juice. 
(Laughter) In fact, I bought the gold-plated special edition and it comes with a little slip of paper that says, "" Don't use this juicer to make juice. "" The acid will ruin the gold plating. (Laughter) 
So actually, I took a carton of orange juice and I poured it in the glass to take this picture. (Laughter) 
Beneath it is a wonderful knife. 
It's a Global cutting knife made in Japan. 
First of all, look at the shape — it's just wonderful to look at. 
Second of all, it's really beautifully balanced: it holds well, it feels well. 
And third of all, it's so sharp, it just cuts. 
It's a delight to use. 
And so it's got everything, right? 
It's beautiful and it's functional. 
And I can tell you stories about it, which makes it reflective, and so you'll see I have a theory of emotion. 
And those are the three components. 
Hiroshi Ishii and his group at the MIT Media Lab took a ping-pong table and placed a projector above it, and on the ping-pong table they projected an image of water with fish swimming in it. 
And as you play ping-pong, whenever the ball hits part of the table, the ripples spread out and the fish run away. 
But of course, then the ball hits the other side, the ripples hit the — poor fish, they can't find any peace and quiet. 
(Laughter) Is that a good way to play ping-pong? 
No. But is it fun? 
Yeah! Yeah. 
Or look at Google. 
If you type in, oh say, "" emotion and design, "" you get 10 pages of results. 
So Google just took their logo and they spread it out. 
Instead of saying, "" You got 73,000 results. 
This is one through 20. Next, "" they just give you as many o's as there are pages. 
It's really simple and subtle. 
I bet a lot of you have seen it and never noticed it. 
That's the subconscious mind that sort of notices it — it probably is kind of pleasant and you didn't know why. 
And it's just clever. 
And of course, what's especially good is, if you type "" design and emotion, "" the first response out of those 10 pages is my website. 
(Laughter) Now, the weird thing is Google lies, because if I type "" design and emotion, "" it says, "" You don't need the 'and.' We do it anyway. "" So, OK. 
So I type "" design emotion "" and my website wasn't first again. 
It was third. 
Oh well, different story. 
There was this wonderful review in The New York Times about the MINI Cooper automobile. 
It said, "" You know, this is a car that has lots of faults. 
Buy it anyway. 
It's so much fun to drive. "" And if you look at the inside of the car — I mean, I loved it, I wanted to see it, I rented it, this is me taking a picture while my son is driving — and the inside of the car, the whole design is fun. 
It's round, it's neat. 
The controls work wonderfully. 
So that's my new life; it's all about fun. 
I really have the feeling that pleasant things work better, and that never made any sense to me until I finally figured out — look... 
I'm going to put a plank on the ground. 
So, imagine I have a plank about two feet wide and 30 feet long and I'm going to walk on it, and you see I can walk on it without looking, I can go back and forth and I can jump up and down. 
No problem. 
Now I'm going to put the plank 300 feet in the air — and I'm not going to go near it, thank you. 
Intense fear paralyzes you. 
It actually affects the way the brain works. 
So, Paul Saffo, before his talk said that he didn't really have it down until just a few days or hours before the talk, and that anxiety was really helpful in causing him to focus. 
That's what fear and anxiety does; it causes you to be — what's called depth-first processing — to focus, not be distracted. 
And I couldn't force myself across that. 
Now some people can — circus workers, steel workers. 
But it really changes the way you think. 
And then, a psychologist, Alice Isen, did this wonderful experiment. 
She brought students in to solve problems. 
So, she'd bring people into the room, and there'd be a string hanging down here and a string hanging down here. 
It was an empty room, except for a table with a bunch of crap on it — some papers and scissors and stuff. 
And she'd bring them in, and she'd say, "" This is an IQ test and it determines how well you do in life. 
Would you tie those two strings together? "" So they'd take one string and they'd pull it over here and they couldn't reach the other string. 
Still can't reach it. 
And, basically, none of them could solve it. 
You bring in a second group of people, and you say, "" Oh, before we start, I got this box of candy, and I don't eat candy. 
Would you like the box of candy? "" And turns out they liked it, and it made them happy — not very happy, but a little bit of happy. 
And guess what — they solved the problem. 
And it turns out that when you're anxious you squirt neural transmitters in the brain, which focuses you makes you depth-first. 
And when you're happy — what we call positive valence — you squirt dopamine into the prefrontal lobes, which makes you a breadth-first problem solver: you're more susceptible to interruption; you do out-of-the-box thinking. 
That's what brainstorming is about, right? 
With brainstorming we make you happy, we play games, and we say, "" No criticism, "" and you get all these weird, neat ideas. 
But in fact, if that's how you always were you'd never get any work done because you'd be working along and say, "" Oh, I got a new way of doing it. "" So to get work done, you've got to set a deadline, right? 
You've got be anxious. 
The brain works differently if you're happy. Things work better because you're more creative. 
You get a little problem, you say, "" Ah, I'll figure it out. "" No big deal. 
There's something I call the visceral level of processing, and there will be visceral-level design. 
Biology — we have co-adapted through biology to like bright colors. 
That's especially good that mammals and primates like fruits and bright plants, because you eat the fruit and you thereby spread the seed. 
There's an amazing amount of stuff that's built into the brain. 
We dislike bitter tastes, we dislike loud sounds, we dislike hot temperatures, cold temperatures. 
We dislike scolding voices. We dislike frowning faces; we like symmetrical faces, etc., etc. 
So that's the visceral level. 
In design, you can express visceral in lots of ways, like the choice of type fonts and the red for hot, exciting. 
Or the 1963 Jaguar: It's actually a crummy car, falls apart all the time, but the owners love it. 
And it's beautiful — it's in the Museum of Modern Art. 
A water bottle: You buy it because of the bottle, not because of the water. 
And when people are finished, they don't throw it away. 
They keep it for — you know, it's like the old wine bottles, you keep it for decoration or maybe fill it with water again, which proves it's not the water. 
It's all about the visceral experience. 
The middle level of processing is the behavioral level and that's actually where most of our stuff gets done. 
Visceral is subconscious, you're unaware of it. 
Behavioral is subconscious, you're unaware of it. 
Almost everything we do is subconscious. 
I'm walking around the stage — I'm not attending to the control of my legs. 
I'm doing a lot; most of my talk is subconscious; it has been rehearsed and thought about a lot. 
Most of what we do is subconscious. 
Automatic behavior — skilled behavior — is subconscious, controlled by the behavioral side. 
And behavioral design is all about feeling in control, which includes usability, understanding — but also the feel and heft. 
That's why the Global knives are so neat. 
They're so nicely balanced, so sharp, that you really feel you're in control of the cutting. 
Or, just driving a high-performance sports car over a demanding curb — again, feeling that you are in complete control of the environment. 
Or the sensual feeling. 
This is a Kohler shower, a waterfall shower, and actually, all those knobs beneath are also showerheads. 
It will squirt you all around and you can stay in that shower for hours — and not waste water, by the way, because it recirculates the same dirty water. 
(Laughter) Or this — this is a really neat teapot I found at high tea at The Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago. 
It's a Ronnefeldt tilting teapot. 
That's kind of what the teapot looks like but the way you use it is you lay it on its back, and you put tea in, and then you fill it with water. 
The water then seeps over the tea. 
And the tea is sitting in this stuff to the right — the tea is to the right of this line. 
There's a little ledge inside, so the tea is sitting there and the water is filling it up like that. 
And when the tea is ready, or almost ready, you tilt it. 
And that means the tea is partially covered while it completes the brewing. 
And when it's finished, you put it vertically, and now the tea is — you remember — above this line and the water only comes to here — and so it keeps the tea out. 
On top of that, it communicates, which is what emotion does. 
Emotion is all about acting; emotion is really about acting. 
It's being safe in the world. 
Cognition is about understanding the world, emotion is about interpreting it — saying good, bad, safe, dangerous, and getting us ready to act, which is why the muscles tense or relax. 
And that's why we can tell the emotion of somebody else — because their muscles are acting, subconsciously, except that we've evolved to make the facial muscles really rich with emotion. 
Well, this has emotions if you like, because it signals the waiter that, "" Hey, I'm finished. See — upright. "" And the waiter can come by and say, "" Would you like more water? "" It's kind of neat. What a wonderful design. 
And the third level is reflective, which is, if you like the superego, it's a little part of the brain that has no control over what you do, no control over the — doesn't see the senses, doesn't control the muscles. 
It looks over what's going on. 
It's that little voice in your head that's watching and saying, "" That's good. That's bad. "" Or, "" Why are you doing that? I don't understand. "" It's that little voice in your head that's the seat of consciousness. 
Here's a great reflective product. 
Owners of the Hummer have said, "" You know I've owned many cars in my life — all sorts of exotic cars, but never have I had a car that attracted so much attention. "" It's about attention. It's about their image, not about the car. 
If you want a more positive model — this is the GM car. 
And the reason you might buy it now is because you care about the environment. 
And you'll buy it to protect the environment, even though the first few cars are going to be really expensive and not perfected. 
But that's reflective design as well. 
Or an expensive watch, so you can impress people — "Oh gee, I didn't know you had that watch." 
As opposed to this one, which is a pure behavioral watch, which probably keeps better time than the $13,000 watch I just showed you. 
But it's ugly. 
This is a clear Don Norman watch. 
And what's neat is sometimes you pit one emotion against the other, the visceral fear of falling against the reflective state saying, "" It's OK. It's OK. It's safe. It's safe. "" If that amusement park were rusty and falling apart, you'd never go on the ride. 
So, it's pitting one against the other. 
The other neat thing... 
(Laughter) So Jake Cress is this furniture maker, and he makes this unbelievable set of furniture. 
And this is his chair with claw, and the poor little chair has lost its ball and it's trying to get it back before anybody notices. 
And what's so neat about it is how you accept that story. 
And that's what's nice about emotion. 
So that's the new me. 
I'm only saying positive things from now on. 
(Laughter) (Applause) 

Everyone's familiar with cancer, but we don't normally think of cancer as being a contagious disease. 
The Tasmanian devil has shown us that, not only can cancer be a contagious disease, but it can also threaten an entire species with extinction. 
So first of all, what is a Tasmanian devil? 
Many of you might be familiar with Taz, the cartoon character, the one that spins around and around and around. 
But not many people know that there actually is a real animal called the Tasmanian devil, and it's the world's largest carnivorous marsupial. 
A marsupial is a mammal with a pouch like a kangaroo. 
The Tasmanian devil got its name from the terrifying nocturnal scream that it makes. 
(Screaming) (Laughter) The Tasmanian devil is predominantly a scavenger, and it uses its powerful jaws and its sharp teeth to chomp on the bones of rotting dead animals. 
[The] Tasmanian devil is found only on the island of Tasmania, which is that small island just to the south of the mainland of Australia. 
And despite their ferocious appearance, Tasmanian devils are actually quite adorable little animals. 
In fact, growing up in Tasmania, it always was incredibly exciting when we got a chance to see a Tasmanian devil in the wild. 
But the Tasmanian devil population has been undergoing a really extremely fast decline. 
And in fact, there's concern that the species could go extinct in the wild within 20 to 30 years. 
And the reason for that is the emergence of a new disease, a contagious cancer. 
The story begins in 1996 when a wildlife photographer took this photograph here of a Tasmanian devil with a large tumor on its face. 
At the time, this was thought to be a one-off. 
Animals, just like humans, sometimes get strange tumors. 
However, we now believe that this is the first sighting of a new disease, which is now an epidemic spreading through Tasmania. 
The disease was first sighted in the northeast of Tasmania in 1996 and has spread across Tasmania like a huge wave. 
Now there's only a small part of the population, which remains unaffected. 
This disease appears first as tumors, usually on the face or inside the mouth of affected Tasmanian devils. 
These tumors inevitably grow into larger tumors, such as these ones here. 
And the next image I'm going to show is quite gruesome. 
But inevitably, these tumors progress towards being enormous, ulcerating tumors like this one here. 
This one in particular sticks in my mind, because this is the first case of this disease that I saw myself. 
And I remember the horror of seeing this little female devil with this huge ulcerating, foul-smelling tumor inside her mouth that had actually cracked off her entire lower jaw. 
She hadn't eaten for days. 
Her guts were swimming with parasitic worms. 
Her body was riddled with secondary tumors. 
And yet, she was feeding three little baby Tasmanian devils in her pouch. 
Of course, they died along with the mother. 
They were too young to survive without their mother. 
In fact, in the area where she comes from, more than 90 percent of the Tasmanian devil population has already died of this disease. 
Scientists around the world were intrigued by this cancer, this infectious cancer, that was spreading through the Tasmanian devil population. 
And our minds immediately turned to cervical cancer in women, which is spread by a virus, and to the AIDS epidemic, which is associated with a number of different types of cancer. 
All the evidence suggested that this devil cancer was spread by a virus. 
However, we now know — and I'll tell you right now — that we know that this cancer is not spread by a virus. 
In fact, the infectious agent of disease in this cancer is something altogether more sinister, and something that we hadn't really thought of before. 
But in order for me to explain what that is, I need to spend just a couple of minutes talking more about cancer itself. 
Cancer is a disease that affects millions of people around the world every year. 
One in three people in this room will develop cancer at some stage in their lives. 
I myself had a tumor removed from my large intestine when I was only 14. 
Cancer occurs when a single cell in your body acquires a set of random mutations in important genes that cause that cell to start to produce more and more and more copies of itself. 
Paradoxically, once established, natural selection actually favors the continued growth of cancer. 
Natural selection is survival of the fittest. 
And when you have a population of fast-dividing cancer cells, if one of them acquires new mutations, which allow them to grow more quickly, acquire nutrients more successfully, invade the body, they'll be selected for by evolution. 
That's why cancer is such a difficult disease to treat. 
It evolves. 
Throw a drug at it, and resistant cells will grow back. 
An amazing fact is that, given the right environment and the right nutrients, a cancer cell has the potential to go on growing forever. 
However cancer is constrained by living inside our bodies, and its continued growth, its spreading through our bodies and eating away at our tissues, leads to the death of the cancer patient and also to the death of the cancer itself. 
So cancer could be thought of as a strange, short-lived, self-destructive life form — an evolutionary dead end. 
But that is where the Tasmanian devil cancer has acquired an absolutely amazing evolutionary adaptation. 
And the answer came from studying the Tasmanian devil cancer's DNA. 
This was work from many people, but I'm going to explain it through a confirmatory experiment that I did a few years ago. 
The next slide is going to be gruesome. 
This is Jonas. 
He's a Tasmanian devil that we found with a large tumor on his face. 
And being a geneticist, I'm always interested to look at DNA and mutations. 
So I took this opportunity to collect some samples from Jonas' tumor and also some samples from other parts of his body. 
I took these back to the lab. 
I extracted DNA from them. 
And when I looked at the sequence of the DNA, and compared the sequence of Jonas' tumor to that of the rest of his body, I discovered that they had a completely different genetic profile. 
In fact, Jonas and his tumor were as different from each other as you and the person sitting next to you. 
What this told us was that Jonas' tumor did not arise from cells of his own body. 
In fact, more genetic profiling told us that this tumor in Jonas actually probably first arose from the cells of a female Tasmanian devil — and Jonas was clearly a male. 
So how come a tumor that arose from the cells of another individual is growing on Jonas' face? 
Well the next breakthrough came from studying hundreds of Tasmanian devil cancers from all around Tasmania. 
We found that all of these cancers shared the same DNA. 
Think about that for a minute. 
That means that all of these cancers actually are the same cancer that arose once from one individual devil, that have broken free of that first devil's body and spread through the entire Tasmanian devil population. 
But how can a cancer spread in a population? 
Well the final piece of the puzzle came when we remember how devils behave when they meet each other in the wild. 
They tend to bite each other, often quite ferociously and usually on the face. 
We think that cancer cells actually come off the tumor, get into the saliva. 
When the devil bites another devil, it actually physically implants living cancer cells into the next devil, so the tumor continues to grow. 
So this Tasmanian devil cancer is perhaps the ultimate cancer. 
It's not constrained by living within the body that gave rise to it. 
It spreads through the population, has mutations that allow it to evade the immune system, and it's the only cancer that we know of that's threatening an entire species with extinction. 
But if this can happen in Tasmanian devils, why hasn't it happened in other animals or even humans? 
Well the answer is, it has. 
This is Kimbo. 
He's a dog that belongs to a family in Mombasa in Kenya. 
Last year, his owner noticed some blood trickling from his genital region. 
She took him to the vet and the vet discovered something quite disgusting. 
And if you're squeamish, please look away now. 
He discovered this, a huge bleeding tumor at the base of Kimbo's penis. 
The vet diagnosed this as transmissible venereal tumor, a sexually transmitted cancer that affects dogs. 
And just as the Tasmanian devil cancer is contagious through the spread of living cancer cells, so is this dog cancer. 
But this dog cancer is quite remarkable, because it spread all around the world. 
And in fact, these same cells that are affecting Kimbo here are also found affecting dogs in New York City, in mountain villages in the Himalayas and in Outback Australia. 
We also believe this cancer might be very old. 
In fact, genetic profiling tells that it may be tens of thousands of years old, which means that this cancer may have first arisen from the cells of a wolf that lived alongside the Neanderthals. 
This cancer is remarkable. 
It's the oldest mammalian-derived life form that we know of. 
It's a living relic of the distant past. 
So we've seen that this can happen in animals. 
Could cancers be contagious between people? 
Well this is a question which fascinated Chester Southam, a cancer doctor in the 1950s. 
Ad he decided to put this to the test by actually deliberately inoculating people with cancer from somebody else. 
And this is a photograph of Dr. Southam in 1957 injecting cancer into a volunteer, who in this case was an inmate in Ohio State Penitentiary. 
Most of the people that Dr. Southam injected did not go on to develop cancer from the injected cells. 
But a small number of them did, and they were mostly people who were otherwise ill — whose immune systems were probably compromised. 
What this tells us, ethical issues aside, is that... 
(Laughter) it's probably extremely rare for cancers to be transferred between people. 
However, under some circumstances, it can happen. 
And I think that this is something that oncologists and epidemiologists should be aware of in the future. 
So just finally, cancer is an inevitable outcome of the ability of our cells to divide and to adapt to their environments. 
But that does not mean that we should give up hope in the fight against cancer. 
In fact, I believe, given more knowledge of the complex evolutionary processes that drive cancer's growth, we can defeat cancer. 
My personal aim is to defeat the Tasmanian devil cancer. 
Let's prevent the Tasmanian devil from being the first animal to go extinct from cancer. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When I was a young boy, I used to gaze through the microscope of my father at the insects in amber that he kept in the house. 
And they were remarkably well preserved, morphologically just phenomenal. 
And we used to imagine that someday, they would actually come to life and they would crawl out of the resin, and, if they could, they would fly away. 
If you had asked me 10 years ago whether or not we would ever be able to sequence the genome of extinct animals, I would have told you, it's unlikely. 
If you had asked whether or not we would actually be able to revive an extinct species, I would have said, pipe dream. 
But I'm actually standing here today, amazingly, to tell you that not only is the sequencing of extinct genomes a possibility, actually a modern-day reality, but the revival of an extinct species is actually within reach, maybe not from the insects in amber — in fact, this mosquito was actually used for the inspiration for "" Jurassic Park "" — but from woolly mammoths, the well preserved remains of woolly mammoths in the permafrost. 
Woollies are a particularly interesting, quintessential image of the Ice Age. 
They had large tusks, and we seem to have a very deep connection with them, like we do with elephants. 
Maybe it's because elephants share many things in common with us. 
They bury their dead. They educate the next of kin. 
They have social knits that are very close. 
Or maybe it's actually because we're bound by deep time, because elephants, like us, share their origins in Africa some seven million years ago, and as habitats changed and environments changed, we actually, like the elephants, migrated out into Europe and Asia. 
So the first large mammoth that appears on the scene is meridionalis, which was standing four meters tall weighing about 10 tons, and was a woodland-adapted species and spread from Western Europe clear across Central Asia, across the Bering land bridge and into parts of North America. 
And then, again, as climate changed as it always does, and new habitats opened up, we had the arrival of a steppe-adapted species called trogontherii in Central Asia pushing meridionalis out into Western Europe. 
And the open grassland savannas of North America opened up, leading to the Columbian mammoth, a large, hairless species in North America. 
And it was really only about 500,000 years later that we had the arrival of the woolly, the one that we all know and love so much, spreading from an East Beringian point of origin across Central Asia, again pushing the trogontherii out through Central Europe, and over hundreds of thousands of years migrating back and forth across the Bering land bridge during times of glacial peaks and coming into direct contact with the Columbian relatives living in the south, and there they survive over hundreds of thousands of years during traumatic climatic shifts. 
So there's a highly plastic animal dealing with great transitions in temperature and environment, and doing very, very well. 
And there they survive on the mainland until about 10,000 years ago, and actually, surprisingly, on the small islands off of Siberia and Alaska until about 3,000 years ago. 
So Egyptians are building pyramids and woollies are still living on islands. 
And then they disappear. 
Like 99 percent of all the animals that have once lived, they go extinct, likely due to a warming climate and fast-encroaching dense forests that are migrating north, and also, as the late, great Paul Martin once put it, probably Pleistocene overkill, so the large game hunters that took them down. 
Fortunately, we find millions of their remains strewn across the permafrost buried deep in Siberia and Alaska, and we can actually go up there and actually take them out. 
And the preservation is, again, like those insects in [amber], phenomenal. 
So you have teeth, bones with blood which look like blood, you have hair, and you have intact carcasses or heads which still have brains in them. 
So the preservation and the survival of DNA depends on many factors, and I have to admit, most of which we still don't quite understand, but depending upon when an organism dies and how quickly he's buried, the depth of that burial, the constancy of the temperature of that burial environment, will ultimately dictate how long DNA will survive over geologically meaningful time frames. 
And it's probably surprising to many of you sitting in this room that it's not the time that matters, it's not the length of preservation, it's the consistency of the temperature of that preservation that matters most. 
So if we were to go deep now within the bones and the teeth that actually survived the fossilization process, the DNA which was once intact, tightly wrapped around histone proteins, is now under attack by the bacteria that lived symbiotically with the mammoth for years during its lifetime. 
So those bacteria, along with the environmental bacteria, free water and oxygen, actually break apart the DNA into smaller and smaller and smaller DNA fragments, until all you have are fragments that range from 10 base pairs to, in the best case scenarios, a few hundred base pairs in length. 
So most fossils out there in the fossil record are actually completely devoid of all organic signatures. 
But a few of them actually have DNA fragments that survive for thousands, even a few millions of years in time. 
And using state-of-the-art clean room technology, we've devised ways that we can actually pull these DNAs away from all the rest of the gunk in there, and it's not surprising to any of you sitting in the room that if I take a mammoth bone or a tooth and I extract its DNA that I'll get mammoth DNA, but I'll also get all the bacteria that once lived with the mammoth, and, more complicated, I'll get all the DNA that survived in that environment with it, so the bacteria, the fungi, and so on and so forth. 
Not surprising then again that a mammoth preserved in the permafrost will have something on the order of 50 percent of its DNA being mammoth, whereas something like the Columbian mammoth, living in a temperature and buried in a temperate environment over its laying-in will only have 3 to 10 percent endogenous. 
But we've come up with very clever ways that we can actually discriminate, capture and discriminate, the mammoth from the non-mammoth DNA, and with the advances in high-throughput sequencing, we can actually pull out and bioinformatically re-jig all these small mammoth fragments and place them onto a backbone of an Asian or African elephant chromosome. 
And so by doing that, we can actually get all the little points that discriminate between a mammoth and an Asian elephant, and what do we know, then, about a mammoth? 
Well, the mammoth genome is almost at full completion, and we know that it's actually really big. It's mammoth. 
So a hominid genome is about three billion base pairs, but an elephant and mammoth genome is about two billion base pairs larger, and most of that is composed of small, repetitive DNAs that make it very difficult to actually re-jig the entire structure of the genome. 
So having this information allows us to answer one of the interesting relationship questions between mammoths and their living relatives, the African and the Asian elephant, all of which shared an ancestor seven million years ago, but the genome of the mammoth shows it to share a most recent common ancestor with Asian elephants about six million years ago, so slightly closer to the Asian elephant. 
With advances in ancient DNA technology, we can actually now start to begin to sequence the genomes of those other extinct mammoth forms that I mentioned, and I just wanted to talk about two of them, the woolly and the Columbian mammoth, both of which were living very close to each other during glacial peaks, so when the glaciers were massive in North America, the woollies were pushed into these subglacial ecotones, and came into contact with the relatives living to the south, and there they shared refugia, and a little bit more than the refugia, it turns out. 
It looks like they were interbreeding. 
And that this is not an uncommon feature in Proboscideans, because it turns out that large savanna male elephants will outcompete the smaller forest elephants for their females. 
So large, hairless Columbians outcompeting the smaller male woollies. 
It reminds me a bit of high school, unfortunately. 
(Laughter) So this is not trivial, given the idea that we want to revive extinct species, because it turns out that an African and an Asian elephant can actually interbreed and have live young, and this has actually occurred by accident in a zoo in Chester, U.K., in 1978. 
So that means that we can actually take Asian elephant chromosomes, modify them into all those positions we've actually now been able to discriminate with the mammoth genome, we can put that into an enucleated cell, differentiate that into a stem cell, subsequently differentiate that maybe into a sperm, artificially inseminate an Asian elephant egg, and over a long and arduous procedure, actually bring back something that looks like this. 
Now, this wouldn't be an exact replica, because the short DNA fragments that I told you about will prevent us from building the exact structure, but it would make something that looked and felt very much like a woolly mammoth did. 
Now, when I bring up this with my friends, we often talk about, well, where would you put it? 
Where are you going to house a mammoth? 
There's no climates or habitats suitable. 
Well, that's not actually the case. 
It turns out that there are swaths of habitat in the north of Siberia and Yukon that actually could house a mammoth. 
Remember, this was a highly plastic animal that lived over tremendous climate variation. 
So this landscape would be easily able to house it, and I have to admit that there [is] a part of the child in me, the boy in me, that would love to see these majestic creatures walk across the permafrost of the north once again, but I do have to admit that part of the adult in me sometimes wonders whether or not we should. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Ryan Phelan: Don't go away. 
You've left us with a question. 
I'm sure everyone is asking this. When you say, "" Should we? "" it feels like you're reticent there, and yet you've given us a vision of it being so possible. 
I think it's just that we have to think very deeply about the implications, ramifications of our actions, and so as long as we have good, deep discussion like we're having now, I think we can come to a very good solution as to why to do it. 
But I just want to make sure that we spend time thinking about why we're doing it first. 
RP: Perfect. Perfect answer. Thank you very much, Hendrik. 
HP: Thank you. (Applause) 

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

The technology likely to have the greatest impact on the next few decades has arrived. 
And it's not social media. 
You'll be surprised to learn that it's the underlying technology of digital currencies like Bitcoin. 
It's called the blockchain. Blockchain. 
Now, it's not the most sonorous word in the world, but I believe that this is now the next generation of the internet, and that it holds vast promise for every business, every society and for all of you, individually. 
You know, for the past few decades, we've had the internet of information. 
And when I send you an email or a PowerPoint file or something, I'm actually not sending you the original, I'm sending you a copy. 
And that's great. 
This is democratized information. 
But when it comes to assets — things like money, financial assets like stocks and bonds, loyalty points, intellectual property, music, art, a vote, carbon credit and other assets — sending you a copy is a really bad idea. 
If I send you 100 dollars, it's really important that I don't still have the money — (Laughter) and that I can't send it to you. 
This has been called the "" double-spend "" problem by cryptographers for a long time. 
So today, we rely entirely on big intermediaries — middlemen like banks, government, big social media companies, credit card companies and so on — to establish trust in our economy. 
And these intermediaries perform all the business and transaction logic of every kind of commerce, from authentication, identification of people, through to clearing, settling and record keeping. 
And overall, they do a pretty good job. 
But there are growing problems. 
To begin, they're centralized. 
That means they can be hacked, and increasingly are — JP Morgan, the US Federal Government, LinkedIn, Home Depot and others found that out the hard way. 
They exclude billions of people from the global economy, for example, people who don't have enough money to have a bank account. 
They slow things down. 
It can take a second for an email to go around the world, but it can take days or weeks for money to move through the banking system across a city. 
And they take a big piece of the action — 10 to 20 percent just to send money to another country. 
They capture our data, and that means we can't monetize it or use it to better manage our lives. 
Our privacy is being undermined. 
And the biggest problem is that overall, they've appropriated the largesse of the digital age asymmetrically: we have wealth creation, but we have growing social inequality. 
So what if there were not only an internet of information, what if there were an internet of value — some kind of vast, global, distributed ledger running on millions of computers and available to everybody. 
And where every kind of asset, from money to music, could be stored, moved, transacted, exchanged and managed, all without powerful intermediaries? 
What if there were a native medium for value? 
Well, in 2008, the financial industry crashed and, perhaps propitiously, an anonymous person or persons named Satoshi Nakamoto created a paper where he developed a protocol for a digital cash that used an underlying cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. 
And this cryptocurrency enabled people to establish trust and do transactions without a third party. 
And this seemingly simple act set off a spark that ignited the world, that has everyone excited or terrified or otherwise interested in many places. 
Now, don't be confused about Bitcoin — Bitcoin is an asset; it goes up and down, and that should be of interest to you if you're a speculator. 
More broadly, it's a cryptocurrency. 
It's not a fiat currency controlled by a nation-state. 
And that's of greater interest. 
But the real pony here is the underlying technology. 
It's called blockchain. 
So for the first time now in human history, people everywhere can trust each other and transact peer to peer. 
And trust is established, not by some big institution, but by collaboration, by cryptography and by some clever code. 
And because trust is native to the technology, I call this, "" The Trust Protocol. "" Now, you're probably wondering: How does this thing work? 
Fair enough. 
Assets — digital assets like money to music and everything in between — are not stored in a central place, but they're distributed across a global ledger, using the highest level of cryptography. 
And when a transaction is conducted, it's posted globally, across millions and millions of computers. 
And out there, around the world, is a group of people called "" miners. "" These are not young people, they're Bitcoin miners. 
They have massive computing power at their fingertips — 10 to 100 times bigger than all of Google worldwide. 
These miners do a lot of work. 
And every 10 minutes, kind of like the heartbeat of a network, a block gets created that has all the transactions from the previous 10 minutes. 
Then the miners get to work, trying to solve some tough problems. 
And they compete: the first miner to find out the truth and to validate the block, is rewarded in digital currency, in the case of the Bitcoin blockchain, with Bitcoin. 
And then — this is the key part — that block is linked to the previous block and the previous block to create a chain of blocks. 
And every one is time-stamped, kind of like with a digital waxed seal. 
So if I wanted to go and hack a block and, say, pay you and you with the same money, I'd have to hack that block, plus all the preceding blocks, the entire history of commerce on that blockchain, not just on one computer but across millions of computers, simultaneously, all using the highest levels of encryption, in the light of the most powerful computing resource in the world that's watching me. 
Tough to do. 
This is infinitely more secure than the computer systems that we have today. 
Blockchain. That's how it works. 
So the Bitcoin blockchain is just one. 
There are many. 
The Ethereum blockchain was developed by a Canadian named Vitalik Buterin. 
He's [22] years old, and this blockchain has some extraordinary capabilities. 
One of them is that you can build smart contracts. 
It's kind of what it sounds like. 
It's a contract that self-executes, and the contract handles the enforcement, the management, performance and payment — the contract kind of has a bank account, too, in a sense — of agreements between people. 
And today, on the Ethereum blockchain, there are projects underway to do everything from create a new replacement for the stock market to create a new model of democracy, where politicians are accountable to citizens. 
(Applause) So to understand what a radical change this is going to bring, let's look at one industry, financial services. 
Recognize this? 
Rube Goldberg machine. 
It's a ridiculously complicated machine that does something really simple, like crack an egg or shut a door. 
Well, it kind of reminds me of the financial services industry, honestly. 
I mean, you tap your card in the corner store, and a bitstream goes through a dozen companies, each with their own computer system, some of them being 1970s mainframes older than many of the people in this room, and three days later, a settlement occurs. 
Well, with a blockchain financial industry, there would be no settlement, because the payment and the settlement is the same activity, it's just a change in the ledger. 
So Wall Street and all around the world, the financial industry is in a big upheaval about this, wondering, can we be replaced, or how do we embrace this technology for success? 
Now, why should you care? 
Well, let me describe some applications. 
Prosperity. 
The first era of the internet, the internet of information, brought us wealth but not shared prosperity, because social inequality is growing. 
And this is at the heart of all of the anger and extremism and protectionism and xenophobia and worse that we're seeing growing in the world today, Brexit being the most recent case. 
So could we develop some new approaches to this problem of inequality? 
Because the only approach today is to redistribute wealth, tax people and spread it around more. 
Could we pre-distribute wealth? 
Could we change the way that wealth gets created in the first place by democratizing wealth creation, engaging more people in the economy, and then ensuring that they got fair compensation? 
Let me describe five ways that this can be done. 
Number one: Did you know that 70 percent of the people in the world who have land have a tenuous title to it? 
So, you've got a little farm in Honduras, some dictator comes to power, he says, "" I know you've got a piece of paper that says you own your farm, but the government computer says my friend owns your farm. "" This happened on a mass scale in Honduras, and this problem exists everywhere. 
Hernando de Soto, the great Latin American economist, says this is the number one issue in the world in terms of economic mobility, more important than having a bank account, because if you don't have a valid title to your land, you can't borrow against it, and you can't plan for the future. 
So today, companies are working with governments to put land titles on a blockchain. 
And once it's there, this is immutable. 
You can't hack it. 
This creates the conditions for prosperity for potentially billions of people. 
Secondly: a lot of writers talk about Uber and Airbnb and TaskRabbit and Lyft and so on as part of the sharing economy. 
This is a very powerful idea, that peers can come together and create and share wealth. 
My view is that... 
these companies are not really sharing. 
In fact, they're successful precisely because they don't share. 
They aggregate services together, and they sell them. 
What if, rather than Airbnb being a $25 billion corporation, there was a distributed application on a blockchain, we'll call it B-Airbnb, and it was essentially owned by all of the people who have a room to rent. 
And when someone wants to rent a room, they go onto the blockchain database and all the criteria, they sift through, it helps them find the right room, and then the blockchain helps with the contracting, it identifies the party, it handles the payments just through digital payments — they're built into the system. 
And it even handles reputation, because if she rates a room as a five-star room, that room is there, and it's rated, and it's immutable. 
So, the big sharing-economy disruptors in Silicon Valley could be disrupted, and this would be good for prosperity. 
Number three: the biggest flow of funds from the developed world to the developing world is not corporate investment, and it's not even foreign aid. 
It's remittances. 
This is the global diaspora; people have left their ancestral lands, and they're sending money back to their families at home. 
This is 600 billion dollars a year, and it's growing, and these people are getting ripped off. 
Analie Domingo is a housekeeper. 
She lives in Toronto, and every month she goes to the Western Union office with some cash to send her remittances to her mom in Manila. 
It costs her around 10 percent; the money takes four to seven days to get there; her mom never knows when it's going to arrive. 
It takes five hours out of her week to do this. 
Six months ago, Analie Domingo used a blockchain application called Abra. 
And from her mobile device, she sent 300 bucks. 
It went directly to her mom's mobile device without going through an intermediary. 
And then her mom looked at her mobile device — it's kind of like an Uber interface, there's Abra "" tellers "" moving around. 
She clicks on a teller that's a five-star teller, who's seven minutes away. 
The guy shows up at the door, gives her Filipino pesos, she puts them in her wallet. 
The whole thing took minutes, and it cost her two percent. 
This is a big opportunity for prosperity. 
Number four: the most powerful asset of the digital age is data. 
And data is really a new asset class, maybe bigger than previous asset classes, like land under the agrarian economy, or an industrial plant, or even money. 
And all of you — we — create this data. 
We create this asset, and we leave this trail of digital crumbs behind us as we go throughout life. 
And these crumbs are collected into a mirror image of you, the virtual you. 
And the virtual you may know more about you than you do, because you can't remember what you bought a year ago, or said a year ago, or your exact location a year ago. 
And the virtual you is not owned by you — that's the big problem. 
So today, there are companies working to create an identity in a black box, the virtual you owned by you. 
And this black box moves around with you as you travel throughout the world, and it's very, very stingy. 
It only gives away the shred of information that's required to do something. 
A lot of transactions, the seller doesn't even need to know who you are. 
They just need to know that they got paid. 
And then this avatar is sweeping up all of this data and enabling you to monetize it. 
And this is a wonderful thing, because it can also help us protect our privacy, and privacy is the foundation of a free society. 
Let's get this asset that we create back under our control, where we can own our own identity and manage it responsibly. 
Finally — (Applause) Finally, number five: there are a whole number of creators of content who don't receive fair compensation, because the system for intellectual property is broken. 
It was broken by the first era of the internet. 
Take music. 
Musicians are left with crumbs at the end of the whole food chain. 
You know, if you were a songwriter, 25 years ago, you wrote a hit song, it got a million singles, you could get royalties of around 45,000 dollars. 
Today, you're a songwriter, you write a hit song, it gets a million streams, you don't get 45k, you get 36 dollars, enough to buy a nice pizza. 
So Imogen Heap, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, is now putting music on a blockchain ecosystem. 
She calls it "" Mycelia. "" And the music has a smart contract surrounding it. 
And the music protects her intellectual property rights. 
You want to listen to the song? 
It's free, or maybe a few micro-cents that flow into a digital account. 
You want to put the song in your movie, that's different, and the IP rights are all specified. 
She describes that the song becomes a business. 
It's out there on this platform marketing itself, protecting the rights of the author, and because the song has a payment system in the sense of bank account, all the money flows back to the artist, and they control the industry, rather than these powerful intermediaries. 
Now, this is — (Applause) This is not just songwriters, it's any creator of content, like art, like inventions, scientific discoveries, journalists. 
There are all kinds of people who don't get fair compensation, and with blockchains, they're going to be able to make it rain on the blockchain. 
And that's a wonderful thing. 
So, these are five opportunities out of a dozen to solve one problem, prosperity, which is one of countless problems that blockchains are applicable to. 
Now, technology doesn't create prosperity, of course — people do. 
But my case to you is that, once again, the technology genie has escaped from the bottle, and it was summoned by an unknown person or persons at this uncertain time in human history, and it's giving us another kick at the can, another opportunity to rewrite the economic power grid and the old order of things, and solve some of the world's most difficult problems, if we will it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

In case you are wondering, no, I'm not wearing a dress, and no, I'm not saying what I'm wearing underneath. 
(Laughter) This is a gho. 
This is my national dress. 
This is how all men dress in Bhutan. 
That is how our women dress. 
Like our women, we men get to wear pretty bright colors, but unlike our women, we get to show off our legs. 
(Laughter) Our national dress is unique, but this is not the only thing that's unique about my country. 
Our promise to remain carbon neutral is also unique, and this is what I'd like to speak about today, our promise to remain carbon neutral. 
But before I proceed, I should set you the context. 
I should tell you our story. 
Bhutan is a small country in the Himalayas. 
We've been called Shangri-La, even the last Shangri-La. 
But let me tell you right off the bat, we are not Shangri-La. 
My country is not one big monastery populated with happy monks. 
(Laughter) The reality is that there are barely 700,000 of us sandwiched between two of the most populated countries on earth, China and India. 
The reality is that we are a small, underdeveloped country doing our best to survive. 
But we are doing OK. We are surviving. 
In fact, we are thriving, and the reason we are thriving is because we've been blessed with extraordinary kings. 
Our enlightened monarchs have worked tirelessly to develop our country, balancing economic growth carefully with social development, environmental sustainability and cultural preservation, all within the framework of good governance. 
We call this holistic approach to development "" Gross National Happiness, "" or GNH. 
Back in the 1970s, our fourth king famously pronounced that for Bhutan, Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product. 
(Applause) Ever since, all development in Bhutan is driven by GNH, a pioneering vision that aims to improve the happiness and well-being of our people. 
But that's easier said than done, especially when you are one of the smallest economies in the world. 
Our entire GDP is less than two billion dollars. 
I know that some of you here are worth more — (Laughter) individually than the entire economy of my country. 
So our economy is small, but here is where it gets interesting. 
Education is completely free. 
All citizens are guaranteed free school education, and those that work hard are given free college education. 
Healthcare is also completely free. 
Medical consultation, medical treatment, medicines: they are all provided by the state. 
We manage this because we use our limited resources very carefully, and because we stay faithful to the core mission of GNH, which is development with values. 
Our economy is small, and we must strengthen it. 
Economic growth is important, but that economic growth must not come from undermining our unique culture or our pristine environment. 
Today, our culture is flourishing. 
We continue to celebrate our art and architecture, food and festivals, monks and monasteries. 
And yes, we celebrate our national dress, too. 
This is why I can wear my gho with pride. 
Here's a fun fact: you're looking at the world's biggest pocket. 
(Laughter) It starts here, goes around the back, and comes out from inside here. 
In this pocket we store all manner of personal goods from phones and wallets to iPads, office files and books. 
(Laughter) (Applause) But sometimes — sometimes even precious cargo. 
So our culture is flourishing, but so is our environment. 
72 percent of my country is under forest cover. 
Our constitution demands that a minimum of 60 percent of Bhutan's total land shall remain under forest cover for all time. 
(Applause) Our constitution, this constitution, imposes forest cover on us. 
Incidentally, our king used this constitution to impose democracy on us. 
You see, we the people didn't want democracy. 
We didn't ask for it, we didn't demand it, and we certainly didn't fight for it. 
Instead, our king imposed democracy on us by insisting that he include it in the constitution. 
But he went further. 
He included provisions in the constitution that empower the people to impeach their kings, and included provisions in here that require all our kings to retire at the age of 65. 
(Applause) Fact is, we already have a king in retirement: our previous king, the Great Fourth, retired 10 years ago at the peak of his popularity. 
He was all of 51 years at that time. 
So as I was saying, 72 percent of our country is under forest cover, and all that forest is pristine. 
That's why we are one of the few remaining global biodiversity hotspots in the world, and that's why we are a carbon neutral country. 
Turns out, it's a big deal. 
Of the 200-odd countries in the world today, it looks like we are the only one that's carbon neutral. 
Actually, that's not quite accurate. 
Bhutan is not carbon neutral. 
Bhutan is carbon negative. 
Our entire country generates 2.2 million tons of carbon dioxide, but our forests, they sequester more than three times that amount, so we are a net carbon sink for more than four million tons of carbon dioxide each year. 
But that's not all. 
(Applause) We export most of the renewable electricity we generate from our fast-flowing rivers. 
So today, the clean energy that we export offsets about six million tons of carbon dioxide in our neighborhood. 
By 2020, we'll be exporting enough electricity to offset 17 million tons of carbon dioxide. 
And if we were to harness even half our hydropower potential, and that's exactly what we are working at, the clean, green energy that we export would offset something like 50 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. 
That is more CO2 than what the entire city of New York generates in one year. 
So inside our country, we are a net carbon sink. 
Outside, we are offsetting carbon. 
And this is important stuff. 
You see, the world is getting warmer, and climate change is a reality. 
Climate change is affecting my country. 
Our glaciers are melting, causing flash floods and landslides, which in turn are causing disaster and widespread destruction in our country. 
I was at that lake recently. 
It's stunning. 
That's how it looked 10 years ago, and that's how it looked 20 years ago. 
Just 20 years ago, that lake didn't exist. 
It was a solid glacier. 
A few years ago, a similar lake breached its dams and wreaked havoc in the valleys below. 
That destruction was caused by one glacier lake. 
The point is this: my country and my people have done nothing to contribute to global warming, but we are already bearing the brunt of its consequences. 
And for a small, poor country, one that is landlocked and mountainous, it is very difficult. 
But we are not going to sit on our hands doing nothing. 
We first made this promise in 2009 during COP 15 in Copenhagen, but nobody noticed. 
Governments were so busy arguing with one another and blaming each other for causing climate change, that when a small country raised our hands and announced, "We promise to remain carbon neutral for all time," nobody heard us. 
Nobody cared. 
Last December in Paris, at COP 21, we reiterated our promise to remain carbon neutral for all time to come. 
This time, we were heard. 
We were noticed, and everybody cared. 
What was different in Paris was that governments came round together to accept the realities of climate change, and were willing to come together and act together and work together. 
All countries, from the very small to the very large, committed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions. 
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change says that if these so-called intended commitments are kept, we'd be closer to containing global warming by two degrees Celsius. 
By the way, I've requested the TED organizers here to turn up the heat in here by two degrees, so if some of you are feeling warmer than usual, you know who to blame. 
It's crucial that all of us keep our commitments. 
As far as Bhutan is concerned, we will keep our promise to remain carbon neutral. 
Here are some of the ways we are doing it. 
We are providing free electricity to our rural farmers. 
The idea is that, with free electricity, they will no longer have to use firewood to cook their food. 
We are investing in sustainable transport and subsidizing the purchase of electric vehicles. 
Similarly, we are subsidizing the cost of LED lights, and our entire government is trying to go paperless. 
We are cleaning up our entire country through Clean Bhutan, a national program, and we are planting trees throughout our country through Green Bhutan, another national program. 
But it is our protected areas that are at the core of our carbon neutral strategy. 
Our protected areas are our carbon sink. 
Today, more than half our country is protected, as national parks, nature reserves and wildlife sanctuaries. 
But the beauty is that we've connected them all with one another through a network of biological corridors. 
Now, what this means is that our animals are free to roam throughout our country. 
Take this tiger, for example. 
It was spotted at 250 meters above sea level in the hot, subtropical jungles. 
Two years later, that same tiger was spotted near 4,000 meters in our cold alpine mountains. 
Isn't that awesome? 
(Applause) We must keep it that way. 
We must keep our parks awesome. 
So every year, we set aside resources to prevent poaching, hunting, mining and pollution in our parks, and resources to help communities who live in those parks manage their forests, adapt to climate change, and lead better lives while continuing to live in harmony with Mother Nature. 
But that is expensive. 
Over the next few years, our small economy won't have the resources to cover all the costs that are required to protect our environment. 
In fact, when we run the numbers, it looks like it'll take us at least 15 years before we can fully finance all our conservation efforts. 
But neither Bhutan, nor the world can afford to spend 15 years going backwards. 
This is why His Majesty the King started Bhutan For Life. 
Bhutan For Life gives us the time we need. 
It gives us breathing room. 
It is essentially a funding mechanism to look after our parks, to protect our parks, until our government can take over on our own fully. 
The idea is to raise a transition fund from individual donors, corporations and institutions, but the deal is closed only after predetermined conditions are met and all funds committed. 
So multiparty, single closing: an idea we borrowed from Wall Street. 
This means that individual donors can commit without having to worry that they'll be left supporting an underfunded plan. 
It's something like a Kickstarter project, only with a 15-year time horizon and millions of tons of carbon dioxide at stake. 
Once the deal is closed, we use the transition fund to protect our parks, giving our government time to increase our own funding gradually until the end of the 15-year period. 
After that, our government guarantees full funding forever. 
We are almost there. 
Naturally, I'm pretty excited. 
(Applause) The World Wildlife Fund is our principle partner in this journey, and I want to give them a big shoutout for the excellent work they are doing in Bhutan and across the world. (Applause) 
Whew, it is getting warm in here. 
I thank you for listening to our story, a story of how we are keeping our promise to remain carbon neutral, a story of how we are keeping our country pristine, for ourselves, our children, for your children and for the world. 
But we are not here to tell stories, are we? 
We are here to dream together. 
So in closing, I'd like to share one more dream that I have. 
What if we could mobilize our leadership and our resources, our influence and our passion, to replicate the Bhutan For Life idea to other countries so that they too can conserve their protected areas for all time. 
After all, there are many other countries who face the same issues that we face. 
They too have natural resources that can help win the world's fight for sustainability, only they may not have the ability to invest in them now. 
So what if we set up Earth For Life, a global fund, to kickstart the Bhutan For Life throughout the world? 
I invite you to help me, to carry this dream beyond our borders to all those who care about our planet's future. 
After all, we're here to dream together, to work together, to fight climate change together, to protect our planet together. 
Because the reality is we are in it together. 
Some of us might dress differently, but we are in it together. 
Thank you very much, and kadrin chhe la. Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you, thank you, thank you. 

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

If you go on the TED website, you can currently find there over a full week of TEDTalk videos, over 1.3 million words of transcripts and millions of user ratings. 
And that's a huge amount of data. 
And it got me wondering: If you took all this data and put it through statistical analysis, could you reverse engineer a TEDTalk? 
Could you create the ultimate TEDTalk? 
(Laughter) (Applause) And also, could you create the worst possible TEDTalk that they would still let you get away with? 
To find this out, I looked at three things: I looked at the topic that you should choose, I looked at how you should deliver it and the visuals onstage. 
Now, with the topic: There's a whole range of topics you can choose, but you should choose wisely, because your topic strongly correlates with how users will react to your talk. 
Now, to make this more concrete, let's look at the list of top 10 words that statistically stick out in the most favorite TEDTalks and in the least favorite TEDTalks. 
So if you came here to talk about how French coffee will spread happiness in our brains, that's a go. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Whereas, if you wanted to talk about your project involving oxygen, girls, aircraft — actually, I would like to hear that talk, (Laughter) but statistics say it's not so good. 
Oh, well. 
If you generalize this, the most favorite TEDTalks are those that feature topics we can connect with, both easily and deeply, such as happiness, our own body, food, emotions. 
And the more technical topics, such as architecture, materials and, strangely enough, men, those are not good topics to talk about. 
How should you deliver your talk? 
TED is famous for keeping a very sharp eye on the clock, so they're going to hate me for revealing this, because, actually, you should talk as long as they will let you. (Laughter) Because the most favorite TEDTalks are, on average, over 50 percent longer than the least favorite ones. 
And this holds true for all ranking lists on TED.com except if you want to have a talk that's beautiful, inspiring or funny. 
Then, you should be brief. (Laughter) But other than that, talk until they drag you off the stage. (Laughter) 
Now, while... 
(Applause) While you're pushing the clock, there's a few rules to obey. 
I found these rules out by comparing the statistics of four-word phrases that appear more often in the most favorite TEDTalks as opposed to the least favorite TEDTalks. 
I'll give you three examples. 
First of all, I must, as a speaker, provide a service to the audience and talk about what I will give you, instead of saying what I can't have. 
Secondly, it's imperative that you do not cite The New York Times. 
(Laughter) And finally, it's okay for the speaker — that's the good news — to fake intellectual capacity. 
If I don't understand something, I can just say, "" etc., etc. "" You'll all stay with me. 
It's perfectly fine. 
(Applause) Now, let's go to the visuals. 
The most obvious visual thing on stage is the speaker. 
And analysis shows if you want to be among the most favorite TED speakers, you should let your hair grow a little bit longer than average, make sure you wear your glasses and be slightly more dressed-up than the average TED speaker. 
Slides are okay, though you might consider going for props. 
And now the most important thing, that is the mood onstage. 
Color plays a very important role. 
Color closely correlates with the ratings that talks get on the website. 
(Applause) For example, fascinating talks contain a statistically high amount of exactly this blue color, (Laughter) much more than the average TEDTalk. 
Ingenious TEDTalks, much more this green color, etc., et. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Now, personally, I think I'm not the first one who has done this analysis, but I'll leave this to your good judgment. 
So, now it's time to put it all together and design the ultimate TEDTalk. 
Now, since this is TEDActive, and I learned from my analysis that I should actually give you something, I will not impose the ultimate or worst TEDTalk on you, but rather give you a tool to create your own. 
And I call this tool the TEDPad. 
(Laughter) And the TEDPad is a matrix of 100 specifically selected, highly curated sentences that you can easily piece together to get your own TEDTalk. 
You only have to make one decision, and that is: Are you going to use the white version for very good TEDTalks, about creativity, human genius? 
Or are you going to go with a black version, which will allow you to create really bad TEDTalks, mostly about blogs, politics and stuff? 
So, download it and have fun with it. 
Now I hope you enjoy the session. 
I hope you enjoy designing your own ultimate and worst possible TEDTalks. 
And I hope some of you will be inspired for next year to create this, which I really want to see. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thanks. 

(Whistling) (Whistling ends) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
What is a chubby, curly-haired guy from Holland — why is he whistling? 
And actually, until I was 34, I always annoyed and irritated people with whistling, because, to be honest, my whistling is a kind of deviant behavior. 
And I would have lost my face. 
(Applause) And she thought, "" He will never go there. "" But actually, I did. 
(Applause) That was great fun, of course. 
So what happened now is I'm standing here in Rotterdam, in the beautiful city, on a big stage, and I'm talking about whistling. 
(Applause) And I try to live my dream — well, actually, it was never my dream, but it sounds so good. 
(Laughter) OK, I'm not the only one whistling here. 
And I want to first rehearse with you your whistling. 
(Whistling) (Laughter) Sorry, I forgot one thing — you whistle the same tone as me. (Laughter) 
And if it's started, I just point where you whistle along, and we will see what happens. 
OK, here it is. (Laughter) 
It's easy, isn't it? (Whistling) 
(Music) (Whistling) (Applause) Max Westerman: Geert Chatrou, the World Champion of Whistling. 

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

I'm going to have a pretty simple idea that I'm just going to tell you over and over until I get you to believe it, and that is all of us are makers. 
I really believe that. 
All of us are makers. 
We're born makers. 
We have this ability to make things, to grasp things with our hands. 
We use words like "" grasp "" metaphorically to also think about understanding things. 
We don't just live, but we make. 
We create things. 
Well I'm going to show you a group of makers from Maker Faire and various places. 
It doesn't come out particularly well, but that's a particularly tall bicycle. 
It's a scraper bike; it's called — from Oakland. 
And this is a particularly small scooter for a gentleman of this size. 
But he's trying to power it, or motorize it, with a drill. 
(Laughter) And the question he had is, "Can I do it? Can it be done?" 
Apparently it can. 
So makers are enthusiasts; they're amateurs; they're people who love doing what they do. 
They don't always even know why they're doing it. 
We have begun organizing makers at our Maker Faire. 
There was one held in Detroit here last summer, and it will be held again next summer, at the Henry Ford. 
But we hold them in San Francisco — (Applause) — and in New York. 
And it's a fabulous event to just meet and talk to these people who make things and are there to just show them to you and talk about them and have a great conversation. 
(Video) Guy: I might get one of those. 
Dale Dougherty: These are electric muffins. 
Guy: Where did you guys get those? 
Muffin: Will you glide with us? (Guy: No.) DD: I know Ford has new electric vehicles coming out. 
We got there first. 
Lady: Will you glide with us? 
DD: This is something I call "" swinging in the rain. "" And you can barely see it, but it's — a controller at top cycles the water to fall just before and after you pass through the bottom of the arc. 
So imagine a kid: "" Am I going to get wet? Am I going to get wet? 
No, I didn't get wet. Am I going to get wet? Am I going to get wet? "" That's the experience of a clever ride. 
And of course, we have fashion. 
People are remaking things into fashion. 
I don't know if this is called a basket-bra, but it ought to be something like that. 
We have art students getting together, taking old radiator parts and doing an iron-pour to make something new out of it. 
They did that in the summer, and it was very warm. 
Now this one takes a little bit of explaining. 
You know what those are, right? 
Billy-Bob, or Billy Bass, or something like that. 
Now the background is — the guy who did this is a physicist. 
And here he'll explain a little bit about what it does. 
(Video) Richard Carter: I'm Richard Carter, and this is the Sashimi Tabernacle Choir. 
Choir: ♫ When you hold me in your arms ♫ DD: This is all computer-controlled in an old Volvo. 
Choir: ♫ I'm hooked on a feelin '♫ ♫ I'm high on believin' ♫ ♫ That you're in love with me ♫ DD: So Richard came up from Houston last year to visit us in Detroit here and show the wonderful Sashimi Tabernacle Choir. 
So, are you a maker? 
How many people here would say you're a maker, if you raise your hand? 
That's a pretty good — but there's some of you out there that won't admit that you're makers. 
And again, think about it. 
You're makers of food; you're makers of shelter; you're makers of lots of different things, and partly what interests me today is you're makers of your own world, and particularly the role that technology has in your life. 
You're really a driver or a passenger — to use a Volkswagen phrase. 
Makers are in control. 
That's what fascinates them. That's why they do what they do. 
They want to figure out how things work; they want to get access to it; and they want to control it. 
They want to use it to their own purpose. 
Makers today, to some degree, are out on the edge. 
They're not mainstream. 
They're a little bit radical. 
They're a bit subversive in what they do. 
But at one time, it was fairly commonplace to think of yourself as a maker. 
It was not something you'd even remark upon. 
And I found this old video. 
And I'll tell you more about it, but just... 
(Music) (Video) Narrator: Of all things Americans are, we are makers. 
With our strengths and our minds and spirit, we gather, we form, and we fashion. 
Makers and shapers and put-it-togetherers. 
DD: So it goes on to show you people making things out of wood, a grandfather making a ship in a bottle, a woman making a pie — somewhat standard fare of the day. 
But it was a sense of pride that we made things, that the world around us was made by us. 
It didn't just exist. 
We made it, and we were connected to it that way. 
And I think that's tremendously important. 
Now I'm going to tell you one funny thing about this. 
This particular reel — it's an industrial video — but it was shown in drive-in theaters in 1961 — in the Detroit area, in fact — and it preceded Alfred Hitchcock's "" Psycho. "" (Laughter) So I like to think there was something going on there of the new generation of makers coming out of this, plus "" Psycho. "" This is Andrew Archer. 
I met Andrew at one of our community meetings putting together Maker Faire. 
Andrew had moved to Detroit from Duluth, Minnesota. 
And I talked to his mom, and I ended up doing a story on him for a magazine called Kidrobot. 
He's just a kid that grew up playing with tools instead of toys. 
He liked to take things apart. 
His mother gave him a part of the garage, and he collected things from yard sales, and he made stuff. 
And then he didn't particularly like school that much, but he got involved in robotics competitions, and he realized he had a talent, and, more importantly, he had a real passion for it. 
And he began building robots. 
And when I sat down next to him, he was telling me about a company he formed, and he was building some robots for automobile factories to move things around on the factory floor. 
And that's why he moved to Michigan. 
But he also moved here to meet other people doing what he's doing. 
And this kind of gets to this important idea today. 
This is Jeff and Bilal and several others here in a hackerspace. 
And there's about three hackerspaces or more in Detroit. 
And there's probably even some new ones since I've been here last. 
But these are like clubs — they're sharing tools, sharing space, sharing expertise in what to make. 
And so it's a very interesting phenomenon that's going across the world. 
But essentially these are people that are playing with technology. 
Let me say that again: playing. 
They don't necessarily know what they're doing or why they're doing it. 
They're playing to discover what the technology can do, and probably to discover what they can do themselves, what their own capabilities are. 
Now the other thing that I think is taking off, another reason making is taking off today, is there's some great new tools out there. 
And you can't see this very well on the screen, but Arduino — Arduino is an open-source hardware platform. 
It's a micro-controller. 
If you don't know what those are, they're just the "" brains. "" So they're the brains of maker projects, and here's an example of one. 
And I don't know if you can see it that well, but that's a mailbox — so an ordinary mailbox and an Arduino. 
So you figure out how to program this, and you put this in your mailbox. 
And when someone opens your mailbox, you get a notification, an alert message goes to your iPhone. 
Now that could be a dog door, it could be someone going somewhere where they shouldn't, like a little brother into a little sister's room. 
There's all kinds of different things that you can imagine for that. 
Now here's something — a 3D printer. 
That's another tool that's really taken off — really, really interesting. 
This is Makerbot. 
And there are industrial versions of this — about 20,000 dollars. 
These guys came up with a kit version for 750 dollars, and that means that hobbyists and ordinary folks can get a hold of this and begin playing with 3D printers. 
Now they don't know what they want to do with it, but they're going to figure it out. 
They will only figure it out by getting their hands on it and playing with it. 
One of the coolest things is, Makerbot sent out an upgrade, some new brackets for the box. 
Well you printed out the brackets and then replaced the old brackets with the new ones. 
Isn't that cool? 
So makers harvest technology from all the places around us. 
This is a radar speed detector that was developed from a Hot Wheels toy. 
And they do interesting things. 
They're really creating new areas and exploring areas that you might only think — the military is doing drones — well, there is a whole community of people building autonomous airplanes, or vehicles — something that you could program to fly on its own, without a stick or anything, to figure out what path it's going. 
Fascinating work they're doing. 
We just had an issue on space exploration, DIY space exploration. 
This is probably the best time in the history of mankind to love space. 
You could build your own satellite and get it into space for like 8,000 dollars. 
Think how much money and how many years it took NASA to get satellites into space. 
In fact, these guys actually work for NASA, and they're trying to pioneer using off-the-shelf components, cheap things that aren't specialized that they can combine and send up into space. 
Makers are a source of innovation, and I think it relates back to something like the birth of the personal computer industry. 
This is Steve Wozniak. Where does he learn about computers? 
It's the Homebrew Computer Club — just like a hackerspace. 
And he says, "" I could go there all day long and talk to people and share ideas for free. "" Well he did a little bit better than free. 
But it's important to understand that a lot of the origins of our industries — even like Henry Ford — come from this idea of playing and figuring things out in groups. 
Well, if I haven't convinced you that you're a maker, I hope I could convince you that our next generation should be makers, that kids are particularly interested in this, in this ability to control the physical world and be able to use things like micro-controllers and build robots. 
And we've got to get this into schools, or into communities in many, many ways — the ability to tinker, to shape and reshape the world around us. 
There's a great opportunity today — and that's what I really care about the most. 
An the answer to the question: what will America make? 
It's more makers. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Ten years ago, I wrote a book which I entitled "" Our Final Century? "" Question mark. 
My publishers cut out the question mark. (Laughter) The American publishers changed our title to "" Our Final Hour. "" Americans like instant gratification and the reverse. (Laughter) 
And my theme was this: Our Earth has existed for 45 million centuries, but this one is special — it's the first where one species, ours, has the planet's future in its hands. 
Over nearly all of Earth's history, threats have come from nature — disease, earthquakes, asteroids and so forth — but from now on, the worst dangers come from us. 
And it's now not just the nuclear threat; in our interconnected world, network breakdowns can cascade globally; air travel can spread pandemics worldwide within days; and social media can spread panic and rumor literally at the speed of light. 
We fret too much about minor hazards — improbable air crashes, carcinogens in food, low radiation doses, and so forth — but we and our political masters are in denial about catastrophic scenarios. 
The worst have thankfully not yet happened. 
Indeed, they probably won't. 
But if an event is potentially devastating, it's worth paying a substantial premium to safeguard against it, even if it's unlikely, just as we take out fire insurance on our house. 
And as science offers greater power and promise, the downside gets scarier too. 
We get ever more vulnerable. 
Within a few decades, millions will have the capability to misuse rapidly advancing biotech, just as they misuse cybertech today. 
Freeman Dyson, in a TED Talk, foresaw that children will design and create new organisms just as routinely as his generation played with chemistry sets. 
Well, this may be on the science fiction fringe, but were even part of his scenario to come about, our ecology and even our species would surely not survive long unscathed. 
For instance, there are some eco-extremists who think that it would be better for the planet, for Gaia, if there were far fewer humans. 
What happens when such people have mastered synthetic biology techniques that will be widespread by 2050? 
And by then, other science fiction nightmares may transition to reality: dumb robots going rogue, or a network that develops a mind of its own threatens us all. 
Well, can we guard against such risks by regulation? 
We must surely try, but these enterprises are so competitive, so globalized, and so driven by commercial pressure, that anything that can be done will be done somewhere, whatever the regulations say. 
It's like the drug laws — we try to regulate, but can't. 
And the global village will have its village idiots, and they'll have a global range. 
So as I said in my book, we'll have a bumpy ride through this century. 
There may be setbacks to our society — indeed, a 50 percent chance of a severe setback. 
But are there conceivable events that could be even worse, events that could snuff out all life? 
When a new particle accelerator came online, some people anxiously asked, could it destroy the Earth or, even worse, rip apart the fabric of space? 
Well luckily, reassurance could be offered. 
I and others pointed out that nature has done the same experiments zillions of times already, via cosmic ray collisions. 
But scientists should surely be precautionary about experiments that generate conditions without precedent in the natural world. 
Biologists should avoid release of potentially devastating genetically modified pathogens. 
And by the way, our special aversion to the risk of truly existential disasters depends on a philosophical and ethical question, and it's this: Consider two scenarios. 
Scenario A wipes out 90 percent of humanity. 
Scenario B wipes out 100 percent. 
How much worse is B than A? 
Some would say 10 percent worse. 
The body count is 10 percent higher. 
But I claim that B is incomparably worse. 
As an astronomer, I can't believe that humans are the end of the story. 
It is five billion years before the sun flares up, and the universe may go on forever, so post-human evolution, here on Earth and far beyond, could be as prolonged as the Darwinian process that's led to us, and even more wonderful. 
And indeed, future evolution will happen much faster, on a technological timescale, not a natural selection timescale. 
So we surely, in view of those immense stakes, shouldn't accept even a one in a billion risk that human extinction would foreclose this immense potential. 
Some scenarios that have been envisaged may indeed be science fiction, but others may be disquietingly real. 
It's an important maxim that the unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable, and in fact, that's why we at Cambridge University are setting up a center to study how to mitigate these existential risks. 
It seems it's worthwhile just for a few people to think about these potential disasters. 
And we need all the help we can get from others, because we are stewards of a precious pale blue dot in a vast cosmos, a planet with 50 million centuries ahead of it. 
And so let's not jeopardize that future. 
And I'd like to finish with a quote from a great scientist called Peter Medawar. 
I quote, "" The bells that toll for mankind are like the bells of Alpine cattle. 
They are attached to our own necks, and it must be our fault if they do not make a tuneful and melodious sound. "" Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Over a million people are killed each year in disasters. 
Two and a half million people will be permanently disabled or displaced, and the communities will take 20 to 30 years to recover and billions of economic losses. 
If you can reduce the initial response by one day, you can reduce the overall recovery by a thousand days, or three years. 
See how that works? 
If the initial responders can get in, save lives, mitigate whatever flooding danger there is, that means the other groups can get in to restore the water, the roads, the electricity, which means then the construction people, the insurance agents, all of them can get in to rebuild the houses, which then means you can restore the economy, and maybe even make it better and more resilient to the next disaster. 
A major insurance company told me that if they can get a homeowner's claim processed one day earlier, it'll make a difference of six months in that person getting their home repaired. 
And that's why I do disaster robotics — because robots can make a disaster go away faster. 
Now, you've already seen a couple of these. 
These are the UAVs. 
These are two types of UAVs: a rotorcraft, or hummingbird; a fixed-wing, a hawk. 
And they're used extensively since 2005 — Hurricane Katrina. 
Let me show you how this hummingbird, this rotorcraft, works. 
Fantastic for structural engineers. 
Being able to see damage from angles you can't get from binoculars on the ground or from a satellite image, or anything flying at a higher angle. 
But it's not just structural engineers and insurance people who need this. 
You've got things like this fixed-wing, this hawk. 
That's where you're pulling imagery together and getting 3D reconstruction. 
We used both of these at the Oso mudslides up in Washington State, because the big problem was geospatial and hydrological understanding of the disaster — not the search and rescue. 
The search and rescue teams had it under control and knew what they were doing. 
The bigger problem was that river and mudslide might wipe them out and flood the responders. 
In seven hours, going from Arlington, driving from the Incident Command Post to the site, flying the UAVs, processing the data, driving back to Arlington command post — seven hours. 
It goes underwater and uses sonar. 
That was a huge problem at the Haiti earthquake. 
The biggest problem is not making the robots smaller, though. 
So wouldn't it be great if we could have experts immediately access the robots without having to waste any time of driving to the site, so whoever's there, use their robots over the Internet. 
So we're using these kinds of interfaces to allow people to use the robots without knowing what robot they're using, or even if they're using a robot or not. 
The problem becomes: who gets what data when? 
So it's the data. 
Going back to the World Trade Center, we tried to solve that problem by just recording the data from Bujold only when she was deep in the rubble, because that's what the USAR team said they wanted. 
We lost valuable data. 
So the challenge is getting all the data and getting it to the right people. 
They may be underground, they may be underwater, they may be in the sky, but they should be there. 

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

Natalie MacMaster: I'm going to just quickly start out with a little bit of music here. (Applause) (Music) (Applause) Thank you! (Applause) I took my shoes off to dance, but maybe I'll get at that later. 
Anyways, I... where to start? 
Well, I'm really excited to talk a bit about my own upbringing in music and family and all of that, but I'm even more excited for you people to hear about Donnell's amazing family and maybe even a little bit about how we met, and all that sort of thing, but for those of you that may not be familiar with my upbringing, I'm from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, eastern Canada, which is a very, very musical island, and its origins come from Scotland with the music and all the traditions, the dancing, the language, which unfortunately is dying out 
in Cape Breton. 
The traditional language is Gaelic, but a lot of the music came from the Gaelic language, and the dancing and the singing and everything, and my bloodline is Scottish through and through, but my mother and father are two very, very musical people. 
My mom taught me to dance when I was five, and my dad taught me to play fiddle when I was nine. 
My uncle is a very well-known Cape Breton fiddler. 
His name's Buddy MacMaster, and just a wonderful guy, and we have a great tradition at home called square dancing, and we had parties, great parties at our house and the neighbors' houses, and you talk about kitchen cèilidhs. 
Well, cèilidh first of all is Gaelic for party, but kitchen party in Cape Breton is very common, and basically somebody drops into the house, and no matter what house you go to in Cape Breton, there's a fiddle there, guaranteed, and I'd say, well there's first of all more fiddlers per capita in Cape Breton than anywhere in the world, so ten chances to one, the fellow who walked in the door could play it, so you'd have someone come into the house, you'd invite them to play a tune, and lo and behold a little party would start up and somebody would dance, 
and somebody would sing, and all that sort of thing, so it was a wonderful, wonderful way to grow up, and that is where my beginnings in music come from: my surroundings, my family, just my bloodline in itself, and, oh, I've done lots of things with my music. 
I've recorded lots of CDs. 
I was nominated for a Grammy and I've won some awards and stuff like that, so that's awesome, but the best part was meeting my husband, and I've actually known Donnell for probably 12 years now, and I'm going to get into a little bit of, I guess, how music brought us together, but I'm going to introduce you right now to my new husband as of October 5, Donnell Leahy. (Applause) (Applause) Donnell Leahy: Thank you. I'm kind of new to the TED experience and I'm glad to be here, but I'm just trying to put it all together, trying to figure all you people out, and I've 
been here for a short while, and I'm starting to understand a little bit better. 
So I asked Natalie, what do I do? 
And she said, just talk about yourself. 
It's kind of boring, but I'll just tell you a little bit about my family. I'm one of 11 brothers and sisters from Lakefield, Ontario, an hour and a half northeast of Toronto, and we grew up on a farm. 
Mom and Dad raised beef cattle, and I'm the oldest boy. 
There are four girls a little bit older than me. 
We grew up without a television. 
People find that strange, but I think it was a great blessing for us. 
We had a television for a few years, but of course we wasted so much time and the work wasn't getting done, so out went the television. 
We grew up playing — Mom's from Cape Breton, coincidentally. 
Mom and Natalie's mother knew each other. We grew up playing, and used to dance together, right, yeah. 
(Laughter) We grew up playing a bunch of, we played by ear and I think that's important for us because we were not really exposed to a lot of different styles of music. 
We learned to play the instruments, but we kind of had to come from within or go from within, because we didn't watch television, we didn't listen to a lot of radio. We went to church and to school sometimes, and farmed and played music, so we were able, I think, at a very critical age to develop our own style, our own self, and my mother plays, my father plays, and the style that came from the Ottawa Valley in Ontario, we call it French-Canadian style but it originated in logging camps. 
Years ago, hundreds of men would go up for the winter to the camps in Northern Ontario and in Quebec, and they were all different cultures, and the Irish, the French, Scottish, German, they'd all meet, and of course at night, they'd play cards and step dance and play fiddles, and over the course of many years, the Ottawa Valley fiddling kind of evolved and the Ottawa Valley step dancing evolved, so that's, I kind of started out with that style and I quickly started doing my own thing, and then I met Natalie, and I was exposed to the great Cape Breton fiddling. 
That's how we met. (Laughter) You tell them. (Laughter) NM: You want to or no? (Laughter) Well I guess I have to now. 
Well, it's just so interesting that Donnell's upbringing was very similar to mine, and I actually saw Donnell play when I was about 12 years old, and he and his family came to Inverness, which is about 45 minutes from where I lived, and I was just blown away, like, it was just amazing, and you'll find out why pretty soon here, but I couldn't believe the fiddling and Mom was there with me, and she was saying — Donnell's mother came up on stage and danced with her children, and Mom was saying, "" That's Julie MacDonnell, I used to dance with her when we 
were kids. Little did I think our children would be playing instruments, you know, playing music, yeah. "" Twelve years, er, 20 years later little did she think her kids would be getting married, but anyway, so, then I got a phone call about, I dunno, seven years later. I was 19, first or second year of college, and it was Donnell, and he said "" Hi, you probably don't know me but my name is Donnell Leahy. "" And I said, "" I know you. 
I have a tape of yours at home. "" And he said, "" Well, I'm in Truro, "" which is where I was, and he asked me out for supper. 
That's it. (Laughter) (Applause) Then — Will I keep going? (Laughs) (Laughter) Then we dated for two years, broke up for 10, got back together and got married. (Laughter) (Applause) DL: So anyway, we're running out of time, so I'll just get to it. 
I'm going to play a piece of music for you. 
It's actually a Scottish piece I've chosen. 
I starts out with a slow air. 
Airs were played in Europe at burials, as a body was carried out from the wake site to the burial site, the procession was led by a piper or a fiddle player. 
I'll quickly play a short part of the air, and then I'm going to get into kind of a crazy tune that is very difficult to play when you're not warmed up, so, if I mess it up, pretend you like it anyway. It's called The Banks. 
(Tuning) (Laughter) (Music) (Applause) NM: Well, we're gonna play one together now. (Applause) We're laughing, like, because our styles are totally different, as you can hear. 
And so, you know, Donnell and I are actually in the process of writing new pieces of music together that we can play, but we don't have any of those ready. 
We just started yesterday. (Laughter) So we're gonna play something together anyway. 
DL: With one minute. 
NM: With one minute. 
(Audience reaction) DL: You start. NM: No, you have to start, because you've got to do your thing. 
(Music) NM: I'm not tuned. Hold on. 
(Tuning) NM: I feel like I'm in the duck or the bird pose right now. (Laughter) (Music) (Audience claps along) (Applause) Announcer: Great news, they're running late downstairs. 
We've got another 10 minutes. 
(Applause) NM: Okay. Sure. 
All right, okay. 
Let's get her going. (Applause) (Tuning) DL: What do you want to play? 
NM: Well, um... 
(Music) (Laughter) NM: Uh, sure. 
DL: How fast? 
NM: Not too fast. 
(Music) (Audience claps along) (Cheering) (Audience claps along) (Music) (Applause) DL: We're going to play a tune and Natalie's going to accompany me on the piano. 
The Cape Breton piano playing is just awesome. It's very rhythmic and, you'll see it. 
My mom plays piano, and she learned to play before they had a piano at home in Cape Breton. Before Mom's family had a piano in Cape Breton, she learned to play the rhythms on a piece of board, and the fiddlers would all congregate to play on the cold winter's evenings and Mom would be banging on this board, so when they bought a piano, they bought it in Toronto and had it taken by train and brought in on a horse, a horse and sleigh to the house. 
It became the only piano in the region, and Mom said she could basically play as soon as the piano arrived, she could play it because she had learned all these rhythms. Anyway, we found the piano last year and were able to bring it back home. We purchased it. 
It had gone through, like, five or six families, and it was just a big thing for us, and we found actually an old picture of somebody and their family years ago. 
Anyway, I'm blabbering on here. 
NM: No, I want you to tell them about Leahy. 
DL: What about Leahy? (Laughter) NM: Just tell them what — DL: She wants me to talk about — We have a band named Leahy. 
There's 11 siblings. We, um — What will I tell them? (Laughter) We opened — NM: No surgeries. 
DL: No surgeries, oh yeah. 
We had a great opportunity. 
We opened for Shania Twain for two years on her international tour. 
It was a big thing for us, and now all my sisters are off having babies and the boys are all getting married, so we're staying close to home for, I guess, another couple of weeks. 
What can I say? I don't know what to say, Natalie. We, uh... (Laughter) (Laughter) NM: Is this what marriage is about? 
(Applause) I like it. (Applause) (Laughter) DL: Oh yeah, okay, in my family we had seven girls, four boys, we had two fiddles and one piano, and of course we were all fighting to play on the instruments, so dad and mom set a rule that you couldn't kick anyone off the instrument. You had to wait until they were finished, so of course, what we would do is we'd get on the piano and you wouldn't even get off to eat, because you wouldn't want to give it up to your brother or sister, and they'd wait and wait and wait, and it'd be midnight 
and you'd be still sitting there on the piano, but it was their way to get us to practice. 
Will we play a tune? 
NM: It worked. DL: It worked. 
Sorry, I hate to carry on... 
So this is our last number, and we'll feature Nat on piano. 
Okay, play in, how about A? 
(Music) (Applause) 

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it is my job, my responsibility, as an astronomer to remind people that alien hypotheses should always be a last resort. 
Now, I want to tell you a story about that. 
It involves data from a NASA mission, ordinary people and one of the most extraordinary stars in our galaxy. 
It began in 2009 with the launch of NASA's Kepler mission. 
Kepler's main scientific objective was to find planets outside of our solar system. 
It did this by staring at a single field in the sky, this one, with all the tiny boxes. 
And in this one field, it monitored the brightness of over 150,000 stars continuously for four years, taking a data point every 30 minutes. 
It was looking for what astronomers call a transit. 
This is when the planet's orbit is aligned in our line of sight, just so that the planet crosses in front of a star. 
And when this happens, it blocks out a tiny bit of starlight, which you can see as a dip in this curve. 
And so the team at NASA had developed very sophisticated computers to search for transits in all the Kepler data. 
At the same time of the first data release, astronomers at Yale were wondering an interesting thing: What if computers missed something? 
And so we launched the citizen science project called Planet Hunters to have people look at the same data. 
The human brain has an amazing ability for pattern recognition, sometimes even better than a computer. 
However, there was a lot of skepticism around this. 
My colleague, Debra Fischer, founder of the Planet Hunters project, said that people at the time were saying, "You're crazy. There's no way that a computer will miss a signal." 
And so it was on, the classic human versus machine gamble. 
And if we found one planet, we would be thrilled. 
When I joined the team four years ago, we had already found a couple. 
And today, with the help of over 300,000 science enthusiasts, we have found dozens, and we've also found one of the most mysterious stars in our galaxy. 
So to understand this, let me show you what a normal transit in Kepler data looks like. 
On this graph on the left-hand side you have the amount of light, and on the bottom is time. 
The white line is light just from the star, what astronomers call a light curve. 
Now, when a planet transits a star, it blocks out a little bit of this light, and the depth of this transit reflects the size of the object itself. 
And so, for example, let's take Jupiter. 
Planets don't get much bigger than Jupiter. 
Jupiter will make a one percent drop in a star's brightness. 
Earth, on the other hand, is 11 times smaller than Jupiter, and the signal is barely visible in the data. 
So back to our mystery. 
A few years ago, Planet Hunters were sifting through data looking for transits, and they spotted a mysterious signal coming from the star KIC 8462852. 
The observations in May of 2009 were the first they spotted, and they started talking about this in the discussion forums. 
They said and object like Jupiter would make a drop like this in the star's light, but they were also saying it was giant. 
You see, transits normally only last for a few hours, and this one lasted for almost a week. 
They were also saying that it looks asymmetric, meaning that instead of the clean, U-shaped dip that we saw with Jupiter, it had this strange slope that you can see on the left side. 
This seemed to indicate that whatever was getting in the way and blocking the starlight was not circular like a planet. 
There are few more dips that happened, but for a couple of years, it was pretty quiet. 
And then in March of 2011, we see this. 
The star's light drops by a whole 15 percent, and this is huge compared to a planet, which would only make a one percent drop. 
We described this feature as both smooth and clean. 
It also is asymmetric, having a gradual dimming that lasts almost a week, and then it snaps right back up to normal in just a matter of days. 
And again, after this, not much happens until February of 2013. 
Things start to get really crazy. 
There is a huge complex of dips in the light curve that appear, and they last for like a hundred days, all the way up into the Kepler mission's end. 
These dips have variable shapes. 
Some are very sharp, and some are broad, and they also have variable durations. 
Some last just for a day or two, and some for more than a week. 
And there's also up and down trends within some of these dips, almost like several independent events were superimposed on top of each other. 
And at this time, this star drops in its brightness over 20 percent. 
This means that whatever is blocking its light has an area of over 1,000 times the area of our planet Earth. 
This is truly remarkable. 
And so the citizen scientists, when they saw this, they notified the science team that they found something weird enough that it might be worth following up. 
And so when the science team looked at it, we're like, "" Yeah, there's probably just something wrong with the data. "" But we looked really, really, really hard, and the data were good. 
And so what was happening had to be astrophysical, meaning that something in space was getting in the way and blocking starlight. 
And so at this point, we set out to learn everything we could about the star to see if we could find any clues to what was going on. 
And the citizen scientists who helped us in this discovery, they joined along for the ride watching science in action firsthand. 
First, somebody said, you know, what if this star was very young and it still had the cloud of material it was born from surrounding it. 
And then somebody else said, well, what if the star had already formed planets, and two of these planets had collided, similar to the Earth-Moon forming event. 
Well, both of these theories could explain part of the data, but the difficulties were that the star showed no signs of being young, and there was no glow from any of the material that was heated up by the star's light, and you would expect this if the star was young or if there was a collision and a lot of dust was produced. 
And so somebody else said, well, how about a huge swarm of comets that are passing by this star in a very elliptical orbit? 
Well, it ends up that this is actually consistent with our observations. 
But I agree, it does feel a little contrived. 
You see, it would take hundreds of comets to reproduce what we're observing. 
And these are only the comets that happen to pass between us and the star. 
And so in reality, we're talking thousands to tens of thousands of comets. 
But of all the bad ideas we had, this one was the best. 
And so we went ahead and published our findings. 
Now, let me tell you, this was one of the hardest papers I ever wrote. 
Scientists are meant to publish results, and this situation was far from that. 
And so we decided to give it a catchy title, and we called it: "" Where's The Flux? "" I will let you work out the acronym. 
(Laughter) So this isn't the end of the story. 
Around the same time I was writing this paper, I met with a colleague of mine, Jason Wright, and he was also writing a paper on Kepler data. 
And he was saying that with Kepler's extreme precision, it could actually detect alien megastructures around stars, but it didn't. 
And then I showed him this weird data that our citizen scientists had found, and he said to me, "" Aw crap, Tabby. 
Now I have to rewrite my paper. "" So yes, the natural explanations were weak, and we were curious now. 
So we had to find a way to rule out aliens. 
So together, we convinced a colleague of ours who works on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, that this would be an extraordinary target to pursue. 
We wrote a proposal to observe the star with the world's largest radio telescope at the Green Bank Observatory. 
A couple months later, news of this proposal got leaked to the press and now there are thousands of articles, over 10,000 articles, on this star alone. 
And if you search Google Images, this is what you'll find. 
Now, you may be wondering, OK, Tabby, well, how do aliens actually explain this light curve? 
OK, well, imagine a civilization that's much more advanced than our own. 
In this hypothetical circumstance, this civilization would have exhausted the energy supply of their home planet, so where could they get more energy? 
Well, they have a host star just like we have a sun, and so if they were able to capture more energy from this star, then that would solve their energy needs. 
So they would go and build huge structures. 
These giant megastructures, like ginormous solar panels, are called Dyson spheres. 
This image above are lots of artists' impressions of Dyson spheres. 
It's really hard to provide perspective on the vastness of these things, but you can think of it this way. 
The Earth-Moon distance is a quarter of a million miles. 
The simplest element on one of these structures is 100 times that size. 
They're enormous. 
And now imagine one of these structures in motion around a star. 
You can see how it would produce anomalies in the data such as uneven, unnatural looking dips. 
But it remains that even alien megastructures cannot defy the laws of physics. 
You see, anything that uses a lot of energy is going to produce heat, and we don't observe this. 
But it could be something as simple as they're just reradiating it away in another direction, just not at Earth. 
Another idea that's one of my personal favorites is that we had just witnessed an interplanetary space battle and the catastrophic destruction of a planet. 
Now, I admit that this would produce a lot of dust that we don't observe. 
But if we're already invoking aliens in this explanation, then who is to say they didn't efficiently clean up all this mess for recycling purposes? 
(Laughter) You can see how this quickly captures your imagination. 
Well, there you have it. 
We're in a situation that could unfold to be a natural phenomenon we don't understand or an alien technology we don't understand. 
Personally, as a scientist, my money is on the natural explanation. 
But don't get me wrong, I do think it would be awesome to find aliens. 
Either way, there is something new and really interesting to discover. 
So what happens next? 
We need to continue to observe this star to learn more about what's happening. 
But professional astronomers, like me, we have limited resources for this kind of thing, and Kepler is on to a different mission. 
And I'm happy to say that once again, citizen scientists have come in and saved the day. 
You see, this time, amateur astronomers with their backyard telescopes stepped up immediately and started observing this star nightly at their own facilities, and I am so excited to see what they find. 
What's amazing to me is that this star would have never been found by computers because we just weren't looking for something like this. 
And what's more exciting is that there's more data to come. 
There are new missions that are coming up that are observing millions more stars all over the sky. 
And just think: What will it mean when we find another star like this? 
And what will it mean if we don't find another star like this? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

My job is to design, build and study robots that communicate with people. 
I'm not using this phrase metaphorically — the ceiling actually collapsed one day in our living room. 
One of them was that when you want to arouse emotions, it doesn't matter so much how something looks; it's all in the motion, in the timing of how the thing moves. 
He actually did the weasel in "" Ice Age. "" And he said, "" As an animator, you're not a director — you're an actor. "" So, if you want to find the right motion for a character, don't think about it — go use your body to find it. 
(Laughter) I wanted it to be less of a mechanical structure giving me light, and more of a helpful, kind of quiet apprentice that's always there when you need it and doesn't really interfere. 
Just laying there, eyes glazed over! "" (Laughter) But, moving in a graceful way is just one building block of this whole structure called human-robot interaction. 
But I wanted my robot to be less of a chess player, and more like a doer that just clicks and works together. 
So I made my second horrible career choice: I decided to study acting for a semester. 
I actually participated in a play — I hope there ’ s no video of that around still. 
I went back to my office, I wrote this paper, which I never really published, called "" Acting Lessons for Artificial Intelligence. "" And I even took another month to do what was then the first theater play with a human and a robot acting together. 
So I worked for quite a long time on these models and I implemented them on a number of robots. 
It's sort of like a game. 
And it's a little bit like what you might see actors do when they try to mirror each other to find the right synchrony between them. 
And then, I did another experiment, and I got people off the street to use the robotic desk lamp, and try out this idea of embodied artificial intelligence. 
The robot is the same lamp that you saw, and I put two brains in it. 
For one half of the people, I put in a brain that's kind of the traditional, calculated robotic brain. 
It sometimes acts without knowing everything it has to know. 
It sometimes makes mistakes and corrects them. 
And I had them do this very tedious task that took almost 20 minutes, and they had to work together, somehow simulating, like, a factory job of repetitively doing the same thing. 
They even called it "" he "" and "" she, "" whereas people with the calculated brain called it "" it, "" and nobody ever called it "" he "" or "" she. "" When they talked about it after the task, with the adventurous brain, they said, "" By the end, we were good friends and high-fived mentally. "" Whatever that means. 
(Laughter) Sounds painful. 
It only did what it was supposed to do and nothing more, which is almost what people expect robots to do, so I was surprised that people had higher expectations of robots than what anybody in robotics thought robots should be doing. 
And in a way, I thought, maybe it's time — just like method acting changed the way people thought about acting in the 19th century, from going from the very calculated, planned way of behaving, to a more intuitive, risk-taking, embodied way of behaving — maybe it's time for robots to have the same kind of revolution. 
But I thought, if I use the same ideas I used in the theater play and in the teamwork studies, maybe I can make the robots jam together like a band. 
And then, look how the human musician also responds to what the robot is doing and picking up from its behavior, and at some point can even be surprised by what the robot came up with. 
And I started designing a socially expressive head for the robot. 
The head doesn ’ t actually touch the marimba, it just expresses what the music is like. 
I think. 
So we ended up actually getting the money to build this robot, which was nice. 
I'm going to show you now the same kind of performance, this time with a socially expressive head. 
And notice one thing — how the robot is really showing us the beat it's picking up from the human, while also giving the human a sense that the robot knows what it's doing. 
And also how it changes the way it moves as soon as it starts its own solo. 
(Music) Now it's looking at me, showing that it's listening. (Music) 
And this time the robot communicates with its body when it's busy doing its own thing, and when it's ready to coordinate the final chord with me. 
(Music) (Music ending) (Final chord) (Applause) Thanks. 
This time it wasn't a desk lamp, it was a speaker dock, one of those things you plug your smartphone in. 
And so again, here are some animation tests from an early stage. 
(Laughter) And this is what the final product looked like. 
(Music) (Music ends) So, a lot of bobbing heads. 
(Applause) A lot of bobbing heads in the audience, so we can still see robots influence people. 
And it's not just fun and games. 
I think one of the reasons I care so much about robots that use their body to communicate and use their body to move is — I'm going to let you in on a little secret we roboticists are hiding — is that every one of you is going to be living with a robot at some point in your life. 
Somewhere in your future, there will be a robot in your life. 
Maybe they should be able to anticipate what you're about to do. 
And maybe as humans, robots that are a little less than perfect are just perfect for us. 

So yesterday, I was out in the street in front of this building, and I was walking down the sidewalk, and I had company, several of us, and we were all abiding by the rules of walking down sidewalks. 
We're not talking each other. We're facing forward. 
We're moving. 
When the person in front of me slows down. 
And so I'm watching him, and he slows down, and finally he stops. 
Well, that wasn't fast enough for me, so I put on my turn signal, and I walked around him, and as I walked, I looked to see what he was doing, and he was doing this. 
He was texting, and he couldn't text and walk at the same time. 
Now we could approach this from a working memory perspective or from a multitasking perspective. 
We're going to do working memory today. 
Now, working memory is that part of our consciousness that we are aware of at any given time of day. 
You're going it right now. 
It's not something we can turn off. 
If you turn it off, that's called a coma, okay? 
So right now, you're doing just fine. 
Now working memory has four basic components. 
It allows us to store some immediate experiences and a little bit of knowledge. 
It allows us to reach back into our long-term memory and pull some of that in as we need it, mixes it, processes it in light of whatever our current goal is. 
Now the current goal isn't something like, I want to be president or the best surfer in the world. 
It's more mundane. I'd like that cookie, or I need to figure out how to get into my hotel room. 
Now working memory capacity is our ability to leverage that, our ability to take what we know and what we can hang onto and leverage it in ways that allow us to satisfy our current goal. Now working memory capacity 
has a fairly long history, and it's associated with a lot of positive effects. 
People with high working memory capacity tend to be good storytellers. 
They tend to solve and do well on standardized tests, however important that is. 
They're able to have high levels of writing ability. 
They're also able to reason at high levels. 
So what we're going to do here is play a little bit with some of that. 
So I'm going to ask you to perform a couple tasks, and we're going to take your working memory out for a ride. 
You up for that? Okay. 
I'm going to give you five words, and I just want you to hang on to them. 
Don't write them down. Just hang on to them. 
Five words. 
While you're hanging on to them, I'm going to ask you to answer three questions. 
I want to see what happens with those words. 
So here's the words: tree, highway, mirror, Saturn and electrode. 
So far so good? 
Okay. What I want you to do is I want you to tell me what the answer is to 23 times eight. 
Just shout it out. 
(Mumbling) (Laughter) In fact it's — (Mumbling) — exactly. (Laughter) All right. I want you to take out your left hand and I want you to go, "" One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. "" It's a neurological test, just in case you were wondering. 
All right, now what I want you to do is to recite the last five letters of the English alphabet backwards. 
You should have started with Z. 
(Laughter) All right. How many people here are still pretty sure you've got all five words? 
Okay. Typically we end up with about less than half, right, which is normal. There will be a range. 
Some people can hang on to five. 
Some people can hang on to 10. 
Some will be down to two or three. 
What we know is this is really important to the way we function, right? 
And it's going to be really important here at TED because you're going to be exposed to so many different ideas. 
Now the problem that we have is that life comes at us, and it comes at us very quickly, and what we need to do is to take that amorphous flow of experience and somehow extract meaning from it with a working memory that's about the size of a pea. 
Now don't get me wrong, working memory is awesome. 
Working memory allows us to investigate our current experience as we move forward. 
It allows us to make sense of the world around us. 
But it does have certain limits. 
Now working memory is great for allowing us to communicate. 
We can have a conversation, and I can build a narrative around that so I know where we've been and where we're going and how to contribute to this conversation. 
It allows us to problem-solve, critical think. 
We can be in the middle of a meeting, listen to somebody's presentation, evaluate it, decide whether or not we like it, ask follow-up questions. 
All of that occurs within working memory. 
It also allows us to go to the store and allows us to get milk and eggs and cheese when what we're really looking for is Red Bull and bacon. (Laughter) Gotta make sure we're getting what we're looking for. 
Now, a central issue with working memory is that it's limited. 
It's limited in capacity, limited in duration, limited in focus. 
We tend to remember about four things. 
Okay? It used to be seven, but with functional MRIs, apparently it's four, and we were overachieving. 
Now we can remember those four things for about 10 to 20 seconds unless we do something with it, unless we process it, unless we apply it to something, unless we talk to somebody about it. 
When we think about working memory, we have to realize that this limited capacity has lots of different impacts on us. 
Have you ever walked from one room to another and then forgotten why you're there? 
You do know the solution to that, right? 
You go back to that original room. (Laughter) Have you ever forgotten your keys? 
You ever forgotten your car? 
You ever forgotten your kids? 
Have you ever been involved in a conversation, and you realize that the conversation to your left is actually more interesting? (Laughter) So you're nodding and you're smiling, but you're really paying attention to this one over here, until you hear that last word go up, and you realize, you've been asked a question. (Laughter) And you're really hoping the answer is no, because that's what you're about to say. 
All of that talks about working memory, what we can do and what we can't do. 
We need to realize that working memory has a limited capacity, and that working memory capacity itself is how we negotiate that. 
We negotiate that through strategies. 
So what I want to do is talk a little bit about a couple of strategies here, and these will be really important because you are now in an information target-rich environment for the next several days. 
Now the first part of this that we need to think about and we need to process our existence, our life, immediately and repeatedly. 
We need to process what's going on the moment it happens, not 10 minutes later, not a week later, at the moment. 
So we need to think about, well, do I agree with him? 
What's missing? What would I like to know? 
Do I agree with the assumptions? 
How can I apply this in my life? 
It's a way of processing what's going on so that we can use it later. 
Now we also need to repeat it. We need to practice. 
So we need to think about it here. 
In between, we want to talk to people about it. 
We're going to write it down, and when you get home, pull out those notes and think about them and end up practicing over time. 
Practice for some reason became a very negative thing. 
It's very positive. 
The next thing is, we need to think elaboratively and we need to think illustratively. 
Oftentimes, we think that we have to relate new knowledge to prior knowledge. 
What we want to do is spin that around. 
We want to take all of our existence and wrap it around that new knowledge and make all of these connections and it becomes more meaningful. 
We also want to use imagery. We are built for images. 
We need to take advantage of that. 
Think about things in images, write things down that way. 
If you read a book, pull things up. 
I just got through reading "" The Great Gatsby, "" and I have a perfect idea of what he looks like in my head, so my own version. 
The last one is organization and support. 
We are meaning-making machines. It's what we do. 
We try to make meaning out of everything that happens to us. 
Organization helps, so we need to structure what we're doing in ways that make sense. 
If we are providing knowledge and experience, we need to structure that. 
And the last one is support. 
We all started as novices. 
Everything we do is an approximation of sophistication. 
We should expect it to change over time. We have to support that. 
The support may come in asking people questions, giving them a sheet of paper that has an organizational chart on it or has some guiding images, but we need to support it. 
Now, the final piece of this, the take-home message from a working memory capacity standpoint is this: what we process, we learn. 
If we're not processing life, we're not living it. 
Live life. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

What started as a platform for hobbyists is poised to become a multibillion-dollar industry. 
Inspection, environmental monitoring, photography and film and journalism: these are some of the potential applications for commercial drones, and their enablers are the capabilities being developed at research facilities around the world. 
For example, before aerial package delivery entered our social consciousness, an autonomous fleet of flying machines built a six-meter-tall tower composed of 1,500 bricks in front of a live audience at the FRAC Centre in France, and several years ago, they started to fly with ropes. 
By tethering flying machines, they can achieve high speeds and accelerations in very tight spaces. 
They can also autonomously build tensile structures. 
Skills learned include how to carry loads, how to cope with disturbances, and in general, how to interact with the physical world. 
Today we want to show you some new projects that we've been working on. 
Their aim is to push the boundary of what can be achieved with autonomous flight. 
Now, for a system to function autonomously, it must collectively know the location of its mobile objects in space. 
Each flying machine uses onboard sensors to determine its location in space and onboard computation to determine what its actions should be. 
The only external commands are high-level ones such as "" take off "" and "" land. "" This is a so-called tail-sitter. 
Unlike most other fixed-wing aircraft, however, it is capable of hovering, which has huge advantages for takeoff, landing and general versatility. 
There is no free lunch, unfortunately. 
One of the limitations with tail-sitters is that they're susceptible to disturbances such as wind gusts. 
The idea is for the aircraft to recover no matter what state it finds itself in, and through practice, improve its performance over time. 
(Applause) OK. 
When doing research, we often ask ourselves fundamental abstract questions that try to get at the heart of a matter. 
For example, one such question would be, what is the minimum number of moving parts needed for controlled flight? 
Now, there are practical reasons why you may want to know the answer to such a question. 
Helicopters, for example, are affectionately known as machines with a thousand moving parts all conspiring to do you bodily harm. 
It turns out that decades ago, skilled pilots were able to fly remote-controlled aircraft that had only two moving parts: a propeller and a tail rudder. 
We recently discovered that it could be done with just one. 
This is the monospinner, the world's mechanically simplest controllable flying machine, invented just a few months ago. 
It has no flaps, no hinges, no ailerons, no other actuators, no other control surfaces, just a simple propeller. 
Even so, it doesn't yet have the sophisticated algorithms of the tail-sitter, which means that in order to get it to fly, I have to throw it just right. 
And because the probability of me throwing it just right is very low, given everybody watching me, what we're going to do instead is show you a video that we shot last night. 
(Laughter) (Applause) If the monospinner is an exercise in frugality, this machine here, the omnicopter, with its eight propellers, is an exercise in excess. 
As a result, it is ambivalent to orientation. 
This gives it an extraordinary capability. 
It can move anywhere it wants in space irrespective of where it is facing and even of how it is rotating. 
It has its own complexities, mainly having to do with the interacting flows from its eight propellers. 
Some of this can be modeled, while the rest can be learned on the fly. 
Let's take a look. 
(Applause) If flying machines are going to enter part of our daily lives, they will need to become extremely safe and reliable. 
This machine over here is actually two separate two-propeller flying machines. 
This one wants to spin clockwise. 
This other one wants to spin counterclockwise. 
When you put them together, they behave like one high-performance quadrocopter. 
If anything goes wrong, however — a motor fails, a propeller fails, electronics, even a battery pack — the machine can still fly, albeit in a degraded fashion. 
We're going to demonstrate this to you now by disabling one of its halves. 
(Applause) This last demonstration is an exploration of synthetic swarms. 
The large number of autonomous, coordinated entities offers a new palette for aesthetic expression. 
We've taken commercially available micro quadcopters, each weighing less than a slice of bread, by the way, and outfitted them with our localization technology and custom algorithms. 
(Applause) (Applause) (Applause) Hopefully, these demonstrations will motivate you to dream up new revolutionary roles for flying machines. 
(Laughter) The reality is that it is difficult to predict the impact of nascent technology. 
And for folks like us, the real reward is the journey and the act of creation. 
It's a continual reminder of how wonderful and magical the universe we live in is, that it allows creative, clever creatures to sculpt it in such spectacular ways. 
The fact that this technology has such huge commercial and economic potential is just icing on the cake. 

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

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

Sometimes I go browsing [through] a very old magazine. 
I found this observation test about the story of the ark. 
And the artist that drew this observation test did some errors, had some mistakes — there are more or less 12 mistakes. 
Some of them are very easy. 
There is a funnel, an aerial part, a lamp and clockwork key on the ark. 
Some of them are about the animals, the number. 
But there is a much more fundamental mistake in the overall story of the ark that's not reported here. 
And this problem is: where are the plants? 
So now we have God that is going to submerge Earth permanently or at least for a very long period, and no one is taking care of plants. 
Noah needed to take two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal, of every kind of creature that moves, but no mention about plants. 
Why? 
In another part of the same story, all the living creatures are just the living creatures that came out from the ark, so birds, livestock and wild animals. 
Plants are not living creatures — this is the point. 
That is a point that is not coming out from the Bible, but it's something that really accompanied humanity. 
Let's have a look at this nice code that is coming from a Renaissance book. 
Here we have the description of the order of nature. 
It's a nice description because it's starting from left — you have the stones — immediately after the stones, the plants that are just able to live. 
We have the animals that are able to live and to sense, and on the top of the pyramid, there is the man. 
This is not the common man. 
The "" Homo studiosus "" — the studying man. 
This is quite comforting for people like me — I'm a professor — this to be over there on the top of creation. 
But it's something completely wrong. 
You know very well about professors. 
But it's also wrong about plants, because plants are not just able to live; they are able to sense. 
They are much more sophisticated in sensing than animals. 
Just to give you an example, every single root apex is able to detect and to monitor concurrently and continuously at least 15 different chemical and physical parameters. 
And they also are able to show and to exhibit such a wonderful and complex behavior that can be described just with the term of intelligence. 
Well, but this is something — this underestimation of plants is something that is always with us. 
Let's have a look at this short movie now. 
We have David Attenborough. 
Now David Attenborough is really a plant lover; he did some of the most beautiful movies about plant behavior. 
Now, when he speaks about plants, everything is correct. 
When he speaks about animals, [he] tends to remove the fact that plants exist. 
The blue whale, the biggest creature that exists on the planet — that is wrong, completely wrong. 
The blue whale, it's a dwarf if compared with the real biggest creature that exists on the planet — that is, this wonderful, magnificent Sequoiadendron giganteum. 
(Applause) And this is a living organism that has a mass of at least 2,000 tons. 
Now, the story that plants are some low-level organisms has been formalized many times ago by Aristotle, that in "" De Anima "" — that is a very influential book for the Western civilization — wrote that the plants are on the edge between living and not living. 
They have just a kind of very low-level soul. 
It's called the vegetative soul, because they lack movement, and so they don't need to sense. 
Let's see. 
Okay, some of the movements of the plants are very well-known. 
This is a very fast movement. 
This is a Dionaea, a Venus fly trap hunting snails — sorry for the snail. 
This has been something that has been refused for centuries, despite the evidence. 
No one can say that the plants were able to eat an animal, because it was against the order of nature. 
But plants are also able to show a lot of movement. 
Some of them are very well known, like the flowering. 
It's just a question to use some techniques like the time lapse. 
Some of them are much more sophisticated. 
Look at this young bean that is moving to catch the light every time. 
And it's really so graceful; it's like a dancing angel. 
They are also able to play — they are really playing. 
These are young sunflowers, and what they are doing cannot be described with any other terms than playing. 
They are training themselves, as many young animals do, to the adult life where they will be called to track the sun all the day. 
They are able to respond to gravity, of course, so the shoots are growing against the vector of gravity and the roots toward the vector of gravity. 
But they are also able to sleep. 
This is one, Mimosa pudica. 
So during the night, they curl the leaves and reduce the movement, and during the day, you have the opening of the leaves — there is much more movement. 
This is interesting because this sleeping machinery, it's perfectly conserved. 
It's the same in plants, in insects and in animals. 
And so if you need to study this sleeping problem, it's easy to study on plants, for example, than in animals and it's much more easy even ethically. 
It's a kind of vegetarian experimentation. 
Plants are even able to communicate — they are extraordinary communicators. 
They communicate with other plants. 
They are able to distinguish kin and non-kin. 
They communicate with plants of other species and they communicate with animals by producing chemical volatiles, for example, during the pollination. 
Now with the pollination, it's a very serious issue for plants, because they move the pollen from one flower to the other, yet they cannot move from one flower to the other. 
So they need a vector — and this vector, it's normally an animal. 
Many insects have been used by plants as vectors for the transport of the pollination, but not just insects; even birds, reptiles, and mammals like bats rats are normally used for the transportation of the pollen. 
This is a serious business. 
We have the plants that are giving to the animals a kind of sweet substance — very energizing — having in change this transportation of the pollen. 
But some plants are manipulating animals, like in the case of orchids that promise sex and nectar and give in change nothing for the transportation of the pollen. 
Now, there is a big problem behind all this behavior that we have seen. 
How is it possible to do this without a brain? 
We need to wait until 1880, when this big man, Charles Darwin, publishes a wonderful, astonishing book that starts a revolution. 
The title is "" The Power of Movement in Plants. "" No one was allowed to speak about movement in plants before Charles Darwin. 
In his book, assisted by his son, Francis — who was the first professor of plant physiology in the world, in Cambridge — they took into consideration every single movement for 500 pages. 
And in the last paragraph of the book, it's a kind of stylistic mark, because normally Charles Darwin stored, in the last paragraph of a book, the most important message. 
He wrote that, "" It's hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radical acts like the brain of one of the lower animals. "" This is not a metaphor. 
He wrote some very interesting letters to one of his friends who was J.D. Hooker, or at that time, president of the Royal Society, so the maximum scientific authority in Britain speaking about the brain in the plants. 
Now, this is a root apex growing against a slope. 
So you can recognize this kind of movement, the same movement that worms, snakes and every animal that are moving on the ground without legs is able to display. 
And it's not an easy movement because, to have this kind of movement, you need to move different regions of the root and to synchronize these different regions without having a brain. 
So we studied the root apex and we found that there is a specific region that is here, depicted in blue — that is called the "" transition zone. "" And this region, it's a very small region — it's less than one millimeter. 
And in this small region you have the highest consumption of oxygen in the plants and more important, you have these kinds of signals here. 
The signals that you are seeing here are action potential, are the same signals that the neurons of my brain, of our brain, use to exchange information. 
Now we know that a root apex has just a few hundred cells that show this kind of feature, but we know how big the root apparatus of a small plant, like a plant of rye. 
We have almost 14 million roots. 
We have 11 and a half million root apex and a total length of 600 or more kilometers and a very high surface area. 
Now let's imagine that each single root apex is working in network with all the others. 
Here were have on the left, the Internet and on the right, the root apparatus. 
They work in the same way. 
They are a network of small computing machines, working in networks. 
And why are they so similar? 
Because they evolved for the same reason: to survive predation. 
They work in the same way. 
So you can remove 90 percent of the root apparatus and the plants [continue] to work. 
You can remove 90 percent of the Internet and it is [continuing] to work. 
So, a suggestion for the people working with networks: plants are able to give you good suggestions about how to evolve networks. 
And another possibility is a technological possibility. 
Let's imagine that we can build robots and robots that are inspired by plants. 
Until now, the man was inspired just by man or the animals in producing a robot. 
We have the animaloid — and the normal robots inspired by animals, insectoid, so on. 
We have the androids that are inspired by man. 
But why have we not any plantoid? 
Well, if you want to fly, it's good that you look at birds — to be inspired by birds. 
But if you want to explore soils, or if you want to colonize new territory, to best thing that you can do is to be inspired by plants that are masters in doing this. 
We have another possibility we are working [on] in our lab, [which] is to build hybrids. 
It's much more easy to build hybrids. 
Hybrid means it's something that's half living and half machine. 
It's much more easy to work with plants than with animals. 
They have computing power, they have electrical signals. 
The connection with the machine is much more easy, much more even ethically possible. 
And these are three possibilities that we are working on to build hybrids, driven by algae or by the leaves at the end, by the most, most powerful parts of the plants, by the roots. 
Well, thank you for your attention. 
And before I finish, I would like to reassure that no snails were harmed in making this presentation. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Phyllis Rodriguez: We are here today because of the fact that we have what most people consider an unusual friendship. 
And it is. 
And yet, it feels natural to us now. 
I first learned that my son had been in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11th, 2001. 
We didn't know if he had perished yet until 36 hours later. 
At the time, we knew that it was political. 
We were afraid of what our country was going to do in the name of our son — my husband, Orlando, and I and our family. 
And when I saw it — and yet, through the shock, the terrible shock, and the terrible explosion in our lives, literally, we were not vengeful. 
And a couple of weeks later when Zacarias Moussaoui was indicted on six counts of conspiracy to commit terrorism, and the U.S. government called for a death penalty for him, if convicted, my husband and I spoke out in opposition to that, publicly. 
Through that and through human rights groups, we were brought together with several other victims' families. 
When I saw Aicha in the media, coming over when her son was indicted, and I thought, "" What a brave woman. 
Someday I want to meet that woman when I'm stronger. "" I was still in deep grief; I knew I didn't have the strength. 
I knew I would find her someday, or we would find each other. 
Because, when people heard that my son was a victim, I got immediate sympathy. 
But when people learned what her son was accused of, she didn't get that sympathy. 
But her suffering is equal to mine. 
So we met in November 2002, and Aicha will now tell you how that came about. 
(Translator) Aicha el-Wafi: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. 
I am the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui. 
And I asked the Organization of Human Rights to put me in touch with the parents of the victims. 
So they introduced me to five families. 
And I saw Phyllis, and I watched her. 
She was the only mother in the group. 
The others were brothers, sisters. 
And I saw in her eyes that she was a mother, just like me. 
I suffered a lot as a mother. 
I was married when I was 14. 
I lost a child when I was 15, a second child when I was 16. 
So the story with Zacarias was too much really. 
And I still suffer, because my son is like he's buried alive. 
I know she really cried for her son. 
But she knows where he is. 
My son, I don't know where he is. 
I don't know if he's alive. I don't know if he's tortured. 
I don't know what happened to him. 
So that's why I decided to tell my story, so that my suffering is something positive for other women. 
For all the women, all the mothers that give life, you can give back, you can change. 
It's up to us women, because we are women, because we love our children. 
We must be hand-in-hand and do something together. 
It's not against women, it's for us, for us women, for our children. 
I talk against violence, against terrorism. 
I go to schools to talk to young, Muslim girls so they don't accept to be married against their will very young. 
So if I can save one of the young girls, and avoid that they get married and suffer as much as I did, well this is something good. 
This is why I'm here in front of you. 
PR: I would like to say that I have learned so much from Aicha, starting with that day we had our very first meeting with other family members — which was a very private meeting with security, because it was November 2002, and, frankly, we were afraid of the super-patriotism of that time in the country — those of us family members. 
But we were all so nervous. 
"Why does she want to meet us?" 
And then she was nervous. 
"Why did we want to meet her?" 
What did we want from each other? 
Before we knew each others' names, or anything, we had embraced and wept. 
Then we sat in a circle with support, with help, from people experienced in this kind of reconciliation. 
And Aicha started, and she said, "" I don't know if my son is guilty or innocent, but I want to tell you how sorry I am for what happened to your families. 
I know what it is to suffer, and I feel that if there is a crime, a person should be tried fairly and punished. "" But she reached out to us in that way, and it was, I'd like to say, it was an ice-breaker. 
And what happened then is we all told our stories, and we all connected as human beings. 
By the end of the afternoon — it was about three hours after lunch — we'd felt as if we'd known each other forever. 
Now what I learned from her, is a woman, not only who could be so generous under these present circumstances and what it was then, and what was being done to her son, but the life she's had. 
I never had met someone with such a hard life, from such a totally different culture and environment from my own. 
And I feel that we have a special connection, which I value very much. 
And I think it's all about being afraid of the other, but making that step and then realizing, "" Hey, this wasn't so hard. 
Who else can I meet that I don't know, or that I'm so different from? "" So, Aicha, do you have a couple of words for conclusion? 
Because our time is up. 
(Laughter) (Translator) AW: I wanted to say that we have to try to know other people, the other. 
You have to be generous, and your hearts must be generous, your mind must be generous. 
You must be tolerant. 
You have to fight against violence. 
And I hope that someday we'll all live together in peace and respecting each other. 
This is what I wanted to say. 
(Applause) 

I'd like to introduce you to an emerging area of science, one that is still speculative but hugely exciting, and certainly one that's growing very rapidly. 
Quantum biology asks a very simple question: Does quantum mechanics — that weird and wonderful and powerful theory of the subatomic world of atoms and molecules that underpins so much of modern physics and chemistry — also play a role inside the living cell? 
In other words: Are there processes, mechanisms, phenomena in living organisms that can only be explained with a helping hand from quantum mechanics? 
Now, quantum biology isn't new; it's been around since the early 1930s. 
But it's only in the last decade or so that careful experiments — in biochemistry labs, using spectroscopy — have shown very clear, firm evidence that there are certain specific mechanisms that require quantum mechanics to explain them. 
Quantum biology brings together quantum physicists, biochemists, molecular biologists — it's a very interdisciplinary field. 
I come from quantum physics, so I'm a nuclear physicist. 
I've spent more than three decades trying to get my head around quantum mechanics. 
One of the founders of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, said, If you're not astonished by it, then you haven't understood it. 
So I sort of feel happy that I'm still astonished by it. 
That's a good thing. 
But it means I study the very smallest structures in the universe — the building blocks of reality. 
If we think about the scale of size, start with an everyday object like the tennis ball, and just go down orders of magnitude in size — from the eye of a needle down to a cell, down to a bacterium, down to an enzyme — you eventually reach the nano-world. 
Now, nanotechnology may be a term you've heard of. 
A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. 
My area is the atomic nucleus, which is the tiny dot inside an atom. 
It's even smaller in scale. 
This is the domain of quantum mechanics, and physicists and chemists have had a long time to try and get used to it. 
Biologists, on the other hand, have got off lightly, in my view. 
They are very happy with their balls-and-sticks models of molecules. 
(Laughter) The balls are the atoms, the sticks are the bonds between the atoms. 
And when they can't build them physically in the lab, nowadays, they have very powerful computers that will simulate a huge molecule. 
This is a protein made up of 100,000 atoms. 
It doesn't really require much in the way of quantum mechanics to explain it. 
Quantum mechanics was developed in the 1920s. 
It is a set of beautiful and powerful mathematical rules and ideas that explain the world of the very small. 
And it's a world that's very different from our everyday world, made up of trillions of atoms. 
It's a world built on probability and chance. 
It's a fuzzy world. 
It's a world of phantoms, where particles can also behave like spread-out waves. 
If we imagine quantum mechanics or quantum physics, then, as the fundamental foundation of reality itself, then it's not surprising that we say quantum physics underpins organic chemistry. 
After all, it gives us the rules that tell us how the atoms fit together to make organic molecules. 
Organic chemistry, scaled up in complexity, gives us molecular biology, which of course leads to life itself. 
So in a way, it's sort of not surprising. 
It's almost trivial. 
You say, "" Well, of course life ultimately must depend of quantum mechanics. "" But so does everything else. 
So does all inanimate matter, made up of trillions of atoms. 
Ultimately, there's a quantum level where we have to delve into this weirdness. 
But in everyday life, we can forget about it. 
Because once you put together trillions of atoms, that quantum weirdness just dissolves away. 
Quantum biology isn't about this. 
Quantum biology isn't this obvious. 
Of course quantum mechanics underpins life at some molecular level. 
Quantum biology is about looking for the non-trivial — the counterintuitive ideas in quantum mechanics — and to see if they do, indeed, play an important role in describing the processes of life. 
Here is my perfect example of the counterintuitiveness of the quantum world. 
This is the quantum skier. 
He seems to be intact, he seems to be perfectly healthy, and yet, he seems to have gone around both sides of that tree at the same time. 
Well, if you saw tracks like that you'd guess it was some sort of stunt, of course. 
But in the quantum world, this happens all the time. 
Particles can multitask, they can be in two places at once. 
They can do more than one thing at the same time. 
Particles can behave like spread-out waves. 
It's almost like magic. 
Physicists and chemists have had nearly a century of trying to get used to this weirdness. 
I don't blame the biologists for not having to or wanting to learn quantum mechanics. 
You see, this weirdness is very delicate; and we physicists work very hard to maintain it in our labs. 
We cool our system down to near absolute zero, we carry out our experiments in vacuums, we try and isolate it from any external disturbance. 
That's very different from the warm, messy, noisy environment of a living cell. 
Biology itself, if you think of molecular biology, seems to have done very well in describing all the processes of life in terms of chemistry — chemical reactions. 
And these are reductionist, deterministic chemical reactions, showing that, essentially, life is made of the same stuff as everything else, and if we can forget about quantum mechanics in the macro world, then we should be able to forget about it in biology, as well. 
Well, one man begged to differ with this idea. 
Erwin Schrödinger, of Schrödinger's Cat fame, was an Austrian physicist. 
He was one of the founders of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. 
In 1944, he wrote a book called "" What is Life? "" It was tremendously influential. 
It influenced Francis Crick and James Watson, the discoverers of the double-helix structure of DNA. 
To paraphrase a description in the book, he says: At the molecular level, living organisms have a certain order, a structure to them that's very different from the random thermodynamic jostling of atoms and molecules in inanimate matter of the same complexity. 
In fact, living matter seems to behave in this order, in a structure, just like inanimate matter cooled down to near absolute zero, where quantum effects play a very important role. 
There's something special about the structure — the order — inside a living cell. 
So, Schrödinger speculated that maybe quantum mechanics plays a role in life. 
It's a very speculative, far-reaching idea, and it didn't really go very far. 
But as I mentioned at the start, in the last 10 years, there have been experiments emerging, showing where some of these certain phenomena in biology do seem to require quantum mechanics. 
I want to share with you just a few of the exciting ones. 
This is one of the best-known phenomena in the quantum world, quantum tunneling. 
The box on the left shows the wavelike, spread-out distribution of a quantum entity — a particle, like an electron, which is not a little ball bouncing off a wall. 
It's a wave that has a certain probability of being able to permeate through a solid wall, like a phantom leaping through to the other side. 
You can see a faint smudge of light in the right-hand box. 
Quantum tunneling suggests that a particle can hit an impenetrable barrier, and yet somehow, as though by magic, disappear from one side and reappear on the other. 
The nicest way of explaining it is if you want to throw a ball over a wall, you have to give it enough energy to get over the top of the wall. 
In the quantum world, you don't have to throw it over the wall, you can throw it at the wall, and there's a certain non-zero probability that it'll disappear on your side, and reappear on the other. 
This isn't speculation, by the way. 
We're happy — well, "" happy "" is not the right word — (Laughter) we are familiar with this. (Laughter) 
Quantum tunneling takes place all the time; in fact, it's the reason our Sun shines. 
The particles fuse together, and the Sun turns hydrogen into helium through quantum tunneling. 
Back in the 70s and 80s, it was discovered that quantum tunneling also takes place inside living cells. 
Enzymes, those workhorses of life, the catalysts of chemical reactions — enzymes are biomolecules that speed up chemical reactions in living cells, by many, many orders of magnitude. 
And it's always been a mystery how they do this. 
Well, it was discovered that one of the tricks that enzymes have evolved to make use of, is by transferring subatomic particles, like electrons and indeed protons, from one part of a molecule to another via quantum tunneling. 
It's efficient, it's fast, it can disappear — a proton can disappear from one place, and reappear on the other. 
Enzymes help this take place. 
This is research that's been carried out back in the 80s, particularly by a group in Berkeley, Judith Klinman. 
Other groups in the UK have now also confirmed that enzymes really do this. 
Research carried out by my group — so as I mentioned, I'm a nuclear physicist, but I've realized I've got these tools of using quantum mechanics in atomic nuclei, and so can apply those tools in other areas as well. 
One question we asked is whether quantum tunneling plays a role in mutations in DNA. 
Again, this is not a new idea; it goes all the way back to the early 60s. 
The two strands of DNA, the double-helix structure, are held together by rungs; it's like a twisted ladder. 
And those rungs of the ladder are hydrogen bonds — protons, that act as the glue between the two strands. 
So if you zoom in, what they're doing is holding these large molecules — nucleotides — together. 
Zoom in a bit more. 
So, this a computer simulation. 
The two white balls in the middle are protons, and you can see that it's a double hydrogen bond. 
One prefers to sit on one side; the other, on the other side of the two strands of the vertical lines going down, which you can't see. 
It can happen that these two protons can hop over. 
Watch the two white balls. 
They can jump over to the other side. 
If the two strands of DNA then separate, leading to the process of replication, and the two protons are in the wrong positions, this can lead to a mutation. 
This has been known for half a century. 
The question is: How likely are they to do that, and if they do, how do they do it? 
Do they jump across, like the ball going over the wall? 
Or can they quantum-tunnel across, even if they don't have enough energy? 
Early indications suggest that quantum tunneling can play a role here. 
We still don't know yet how important it is; this is still an open question. 
It's speculative, but it's one of those questions that is so important that if quantum mechanics plays a role in mutations, surely this must have big implications, to understand certain types of mutations, possibly even those that lead to turning a cell cancerous. 
Another example of quantum mechanics in biology is quantum coherence, in one of the most important processes in biology, photosynthesis: plants and bacteria taking sunlight, and using that energy to create biomass. 
Quantum coherence is the idea of quantum entities multitasking. 
It's the quantum skier. 
It's an object that behaves like a wave, so that it doesn't just move in one direction or the other, but can follow multiple pathways at the same time. 
Some years ago, the world of science was shocked when a paper was published showing experimental evidence that quantum coherence takes place inside bacteria, carrying out photosynthesis. 
The idea is that the photon, the particle of light, the sunlight, the quantum of light captured by a chlorophyll molecule, is then delivered to what's called the reaction center, where it can be turned into chemical energy. 
And in getting there, it doesn't just follow one route; it follows multiple pathways at once, to optimize the most efficient way of reaching the reaction center without dissipating as waste heat. 
Quantum coherence taking place inside a living cell. 
A remarkable idea, and yet evidence is growing almost weekly, with new papers coming out, confirming that this does indeed take place. 
My third and final example is the most beautiful, wonderful idea. 
It's also still very speculative, but I have to share it with you. 
The European robin migrates from Scandinavia down to the Mediterranean, every autumn, and like a lot of other marine animals and even insects, they navigate by sensing the Earth's magnetic field. 
Now, the Earth's magnetic field is very, very weak; it's 100 times weaker than a fridge magnet, and yet it affects the chemistry — somehow — within a living organism. 
That's not in doubt — a German couple of ornithologists, Wolfgang and Roswitha Wiltschko, in the 1970s, confirmed that indeed, the robin does find its way by somehow sensing the Earth's magnetic field, to give it directional information — a built-in compass. 
The puzzle, the mystery was: How does it do it? 
Well, the only theory in town — we don't know if it's the correct theory, but the only theory in town — is that it does it via something called quantum entanglement. 
Inside the robin's retina — I kid you not — inside the robin's retina is a protein called cryptochrome, which is light-sensitive. 
Within cryptochrome, a pair of electrons are quantum-entangled. 
Now, quantum entanglement is when two particles are far apart, and yet somehow remain in contact with each other. 
Even Einstein hated this idea; he called it "" spooky action at a distance. "" (Laughter) So if Einstein doesn't like it, then we can all be uncomfortable with it. 
Two quantum-entangled electrons within a single molecule dance a delicate dance that is very sensitive to the direction the bird flies in the Earth's magnetic field. 
We don't know if it's the correct explanation, but wow, wouldn't it be exciting if quantum mechanics helps birds navigate? 
Quantum biology is still in it infancy. 
It's still speculative. 
But I believe it's built on solid science. 
I also think that in the coming decade or so, we're going to start to see that actually, it pervades life — that life has evolved tricks that utilize the quantum world. 
Watch this space. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Embracing otherness. 
When I first heard this theme, I thought, well, embracing otherness is embracing myself. 
And the journey to that place of understanding and acceptance has been an interesting one for me, and it's given me an insight into the whole notion of self, which I think is worth sharing with you today. 
We each have a self, but I don't think that we're born with one. 
You know how newborn babies believe they're part of everything; they're not separate? 
Well that fundamental sense of oneness is lost on us very quickly. 
It's like that initial stage is over — oneness: infancy, unformed, primitive. 
It's no longer valid or real. 
What is real is separateness, and at some point in early babyhood, the idea of self starts to form. 
Our little portion of oneness is given a name, is told all kinds of things about itself, and these details, opinions and ideas become facts, which go towards building ourselves, our identity. 
And that self becomes the vehicle for navigating our social world. 
But the self is a projection based on other people's projections. 
Is it who we really are? 
Or who we really want to be, or should be? 
So this whole interaction with self and identity was a very difficult one for me growing up. 
The self that I attempted to take out into the world was rejected over and over again. 
And my panic at not having a self that fit, and the confusion that came from my self being rejected, created anxiety, shame and hopelessness, which kind of defined me for a long time. 
But in retrospect, the destruction of my self was so repetitive that I started to see a pattern. 
The self changed, got affected, broken, destroyed, but another one would evolve — sometimes stronger, sometimes hateful, sometimes not wanting to be there at all. 
The self was not constant. 
And how many times would my self have to die before I realized that it was never alive in the first place? 
I grew up on the coast of England in the '70s. 
My dad is white from Cornwall, and my mom is black from Zimbabwe. 
Even the idea of us as a family was challenging to most people. 
But nature had its wicked way, and brown babies were born. 
But from about the age of five, I was aware that I didn't fit. 
I was the black atheist kid in the all-white Catholic school run by nuns. 
I was an anomaly, and my self was rooting around for definition and trying to plug in. 
Because the self likes to fit, to see itself replicated, to belong. 
That confirms its existence and its importance. 
And it is important. 
It has an extremely important function. 
Without it, we literally can't interface with others. 
We can't hatch plans and climb that stairway of popularity, of success. 
But my skin color wasn't right. 
My hair wasn't right. 
My history wasn't right. 
My self became defined by otherness, which meant that, in that social world, I didn't really exist. 
And I was "" other "" before being anything else — even before being a girl. 
I was a noticeable nobody. 
Another world was opening up around this time: performance and dancing. 
That nagging dread of self-hood didn't exist when I was dancing. 
I'd literally lose myself. 
And I was a really good dancer. 
I would put all my emotional expression into my dancing. 
I could be in the movement in a way that I wasn't able to be in my real life, in myself. 
And at 16, I stumbled across another opportunity, and I earned my first acting role in a film. 
I can hardly find the words to describe the peace I felt when I was acting. 
My dysfunctional self could actually plug in to another self, not my own, and it felt so good. 
It was the first time that I existed inside a fully-functioning self — one that I controlled, that I steered, that I gave life to. 
But the shooting day would end, and I'd return to my gnarly, awkward self. 
By 19, I was a fully-fledged movie actor, but still searching for definition. 
I applied to read anthropology at university. 
Dr. Phyllis Lee gave me my interview, and she asked me, "" How would you define race? "" Well, I thought I had the answer to that one, and I said, "" Skin color. "" "" So biology, genetics? "" she said. 
"" Because, Thandie, that's not accurate. 
Because there's actually more genetic difference between a black Kenyan and a black Ugandan than there is between a black Kenyan and, say, a white Norwegian. 
Because we all stem from Africa. 
So in Africa, there's been more time to create genetic diversity. "" In other words, race has no basis in biological or scientific fact. 
On the one hand, result. 
Right? 
On the other hand, my definition of self just lost a huge chunk of its credibility. 
But what was credible, what is biological and scientific fact, is that we all stem from Africa — in fact, from a woman called Mitochondrial Eve who lived 160,000 years ago. 
And race is an illegitimate concept which our selves have created based on fear and ignorance. 
Strangely, these revelations didn't cure my low self-esteem, that feeling of otherness. 
My desire to disappear was still very powerful. 
I had a degree from Cambridge; I had a thriving career, but my self was a car crash, and I wound up with bulimia and on a therapist's couch. 
And of course I did. 
I still believed my self was all I was. 
I still valued self-worth above all other worth, and what was there to suggest otherwise? 
We've created entire value systems and a physical reality to support the worth of self. 
Look at the industry for self-image and the jobs it creates, the revenue it turns over. 
We'd be right in assuming that the self is an actual living thing. 
But it's not. It's a projection which our clever brains create in order to cheat ourselves from the reality of death. 
But there is something that can give the self ultimate and infinite connection — and that thing is oneness, our essence. 
The self's struggle for authenticity and definition will never end unless it's connected to its creator — to you and to me. 
And that can happen with awareness — awareness of the reality of oneness and the projection of self-hood. 
For a start, we can think about all the times when we do lose ourselves. 
It happens when I dance, when I'm acting. 
I'm earthed in my essence, and my self is suspended. 
In those moments, I'm connected to everything — the ground, the air, the sounds, the energy from the audience. 
All my senses are alert and alive in much the same way as an infant might feel — that feeling of oneness. 
And when I'm acting a role, I inhabit another self, and I give it life for awhile, because when the self is suspended so is divisiveness and judgment. 
And I've played everything from a vengeful ghost in the time of slavery to Secretary of State in 2004. 
And no matter how other these selves might be, they're all related in me. 
And I honestly believe the key to my success as an actor and my progress as a person has been the very lack of self that used to make me feel so anxious and insecure. 
I always wondered why I could feel others' pain so deeply, why I could recognize the somebody in the nobody. 
It's because I didn't have a self to get in the way. 
I thought I lacked substance, and the fact that I could feel others' meant that I had nothing of myself to feel. 
The thing that was a source of shame was actually a source of enlightenment. 
And when I realized and really understood that my self is a projection and that it has a function, a funny thing happened. 
I stopped giving it so much authority. 
I give it its due. 
I take it to therapy. 
I've become very familiar with its dysfunctional behavior. 
But I'm not ashamed of my self. 
In fact, I respect my self and its function. 
And over time and with practice, I've tried to live more and more from my essence. 
And if you can do that, incredible things happen. 
I was in Congo in February, dancing and celebrating with women who've survived the destruction of their selves in literally unthinkable ways — destroyed because other brutalized, psychopathic selves all over that beautiful land are fueling our selves' addiction to iPods, Pads, and bling, which further disconnect ourselves from ever feeling their pain, their suffering, their death. 
Because, hey, if we're all living in ourselves and mistaking it for life, then we're devaluing and desensitizing life. 
And in that disconnected state, yeah, we can build factory farms with no windows, destroy marine life and use rape as a weapon of war. 
So here's a note to self: The cracks have started to show in our constructed world, and oceans will continue to surge through the cracks, and oil and blood, rivers of it. 
Crucially, we haven't been figuring out how to live in oneness with the Earth and every other living thing. 
We've just been insanely trying to figure out how to live with each other — billions of each other. 
Only we're not living with each other; our crazy selves are living with each other and perpetuating an epidemic of disconnection. 
Let's live with each other and take it a breath at a time. 
If we can get under that heavy self, light a torch of awareness, and find our essence, our connection to the infinite and every other living thing. 
We knew it from the day we were born. 
Let's not be freaked out by our bountiful nothingness. 
It's more a reality than the ones our selves have created. 
Imagine what kind of existence we can have if we honor inevitable death of self, appreciate the privilege of life and marvel at what comes next. 
Simple awareness is where it begins. 
Thank you for listening. 
(Applause) 

So, we used to solve big problems. 
On July 21st, 1969, Buzz Aldrin climbed out of Apollo 11's lunar module and descended onto the Sea of Tranquility. 
Armstrong and Aldrin were alone, but their presence on the moon's gray surface was the culmination of a convulsive, collective effort. 
The Apollo program was the greatest peacetime mobilization in the history of the United States. 
To get to the moon, NASA spent around 180 billion dollars in today's money, or four percent of the federal budget. 
Apollo employed around 400,000 people and demanded the collaboration of 20,000 companies, universities and government agencies. 
People died, including the crew of Apollo 1. 
But before the Apollo program ended, 24 men flew to the moon. 
Twelve walked on its surface, of whom Aldrin, following the death of Armstrong last year, is now the most senior. 
So why did they go? 
They didn't bring much back: 841 pounds of old rocks, and something all 24 later emphasized — a new sense of the smallness and the fragility of our common home. 
Why did they go? The cynical answer is they went because President Kennedy wanted to show the Soviets that his nation had the better rockets. 
But Kennedy's own words at Rice University in 1962 provide a better clue. 
(Video) John F. Kennedy: But why, some say, the moon? 
Why choose this as our goal? 
And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? 
Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? 
Why does Rice play Texas? 
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon. 
(Applause) 
We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. 
Jason Pontin: To contemporaries, Apollo wasn't only a victory of West over East in the Cold War. 
At the time, the strongest emotion was of wonder at the transcendent powers of technology. 
They went because it was a big thing to do. 
Landing on the moon occurred in the context of a long series of technological triumphs. 
The first half of the 20th century produced the assembly line and the airplane, penicillin and a vaccine for tuberculosis. 
In the middle years of the century, polio was eradicated and smallpox eliminated. 
Technology itself seemed to possess what Alvin Toffler in 1970 called "" accelerative thrust. "" For most of human history, we could go no faster than a horse or a boat with a sail, but in 1969, the crew of Apollo 10 flew at 25,000 miles an hour. 
Since 1970, no human beings have been back to the moon. 
No one has traveled faster than the crew of Apollo 10, and blithe optimism about technology's powers has evaporated as big problems we had imagined technology would solve, such as going to Mars, creating clean energy, curing cancer, or feeding the world have come to seem intractably hard. 
I remember watching the liftoff of Apollo 17. 
I was five years old, and my mother told me not to stare at the fiery exhaust of a Saturn V rocket. 
I vaguely knew this was to be the last of the moon missions, but I was absolutely certain there would be Mars colonies in my lifetime. 
So "" Something happened to our capacity to solve big problems with technology "" has become a commonplace. 
You hear it all the time. 
We've heard it over the last two days here at TED. 
It feels as if technologists have diverted us and enriched themselves with trivial toys, with things like iPhones and apps and social media, or algorithms that speed automated trading. 
There's nothing wrong with most of these things. 
They've expanded and enriched our lives. 
But they don't solve humanity's big problems. 
What happened? 
So there is a parochial explanation in Silicon Valley, which admits that it has been funding less ambitious companies than it did in the years when it financed Intel, Microsoft, Apple and Genentech. 
Silicon Valley says the markets are to blame, in particular the incentives that venture capitalists offer to entrepreneurs. 
Silicon Valley says that venture investing shifted away from funding transformational ideas and towards funding incremental problems or even fake problems. 
But I don't think that explanation is good enough. 
It mostly explains what's wrong with Silicon Valley. 
Even when venture capitalists were at their most risk-happy, they preferred small investments, tiny investments that offered an exit within 10 years. 
V.C.s have always struggled to invest profitably in technologies such as energy whose capital requirements are huge and whose development is long and lengthy, and V.C.s have never, never funded the development of technologies meant to solve big problems that possess no immediate commercial value. 
No, the reasons we can't solve big problems are more complicated and more profound. 
Sometimes we choose not to solve big problems. 
We could go to Mars if we want. 
NASA even has the outline of a plan. 
But going to Mars would follow a political decision with popular appeal, and that will never happen. 
We won't go to Mars, because everyone thinks there are more important things to do here on Earth. 
Sometimes, we can't solve big problems because our political systems fail. 
Today, less than two percent of the world's energy consumption derives from advanced, renewable sources such as solar, wind and biofuels, less than two percent, and the reason is purely economic. 
Coal and natural gas are cheaper than solar and wind, and petroleum is cheaper than biofuels. 
We want alternative energy sources that can compete on price. None exist. 
Now, technologists, business leaders and economists all basically agree on what national policies and international treaties would spur the development of alternative energy: mostly, a significant increase in energy research and development, and some kind of price on carbon. 
But there's no hope in the present political climate that we will see U.S. energy policy or international treaties that reflect that consensus. 
Sometimes, big problems that had seemed technological turn out not to be so. 
Famines were long understood to be caused by failures in food supply. 
But 30 years of research have taught us that famines are political crises that catastrophically affect food distribution. 
Technology can improve things like crop yields or systems for storing and transporting food, but there will be famines so long as there are bad governments. 
Finally, big problems sometimes elude solution because we don't really understand the problem. 
President Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971, but we soon discovered there are many kinds of cancer, most of them fiendishly resistant to therapy, and it is only in the last 10 years that effective, viable therapies have come to seem real. 
Hard problems are hard. 
It's not true that we can't solve big problems through technology. 
We can, we must, but these four elements must all be present: Political leaders and the public must care to solve a problem; institutions must support its solution; It must really be a technological problem; and we must understand it. 
The Apollo mission, which has become a kind of metaphor for technology's capacity to solve big problems, met these criteria. 
But it is an irreproducible model for the future. 
It is not 1961. 
There is no galvanizing contest like the Cold War, no politician like John Kennedy who can heroize the difficult and the dangerous, and no popular science fictional mythology such as exploring the solar system. 
Most of all, going to the moon turned out to be easy. 
It was just three days away. 
And arguably it wasn't even solving much of a problem. 
We are left alone with our day, and the solutions of the future will be harder won. 
God knows, we don't lack for the challenges. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

We're seen as the organization that is the bucket for failed social policy. 
I can't define who comes to us or how long they stay. 
We get the people for whom nothing else has worked, people who have fallen through all of the other social safety nets. 
They can't contain them, so we must. 
That's our job: contain them, control them. 
Over the years, as a prison system, as a nation, and as a society, we've become very good at that, but that shouldn't make you happy. 
Today we incarcerate more people per capita than any other country in the world. 
We have more black men in prison today than were under slavery in 1850. 
We house the parents of almost three million of our community's children, and we've become the new asylum, the largest mental health provider in this nation. 
When we lock someone up, that is no small thing. 
And yet, we are called the Department of Corrections. 
Today I want to talk about changing the way we think about corrections. 
I believe, and my experience tells me, that when we change the way we think, we create new possibilities, or futures, and prisons need a different future. 
I've spent my entire career in corrections, over 30 years. 
I followed my dad into this field. 
He was a Vietnam veteran. Corrections suited him. 
He was strong, steady, disciplined. 
I was not so much any of those things, and I'm sure that worried him about me. 
Eventually I decided, if I was going to end up in prison, I'd better end up on the right side of the bars, so I thought I'd check it out, take a tour of the place my dad worked, the McNeil Island Penitentiary. 
Now this was the early '80s, and prisons weren't quite what you see on TV or in the movies. 
In many ways, it was worse. 
I walked into a cell house that was five tiers high. 
There were eight men to a cell. 
there were 550 men in that living unit. 
And just in case you wondered, they shared one toilet in those small confines. 
An officer put a key in a lockbox, and hundreds of men streamed out of their cells. 
Hundreds of men streamed out of their cells. 
I walked away as fast as I could. 
Eventually I went back and I started as an officer there. 
My job was to run one of those cell blocks and to control those hundreds of men. 
When I went to work at our receptions center, I could actually hear the inmates roiling from the parking lot, shaking cell doors, yelling, tearing up their cells. 
Take hundreds of volatile people and lock them up, and what you get is chaos. 
Contain and control — that was our job. 
One way we learned to do this more effectively was a new type of housing unit called the Intensive Management Unit, IMU, a modern version of a "" hole. "" We put inmates in cells behind solid steel doors with cuff ports so we could restrain them and feed them. 
Guess what? 
It got quieter. 
Disturbances died down in the general population. 
Places became safer because those inmates who were most violent or disruptive could now be isolated. 
But isolation isn't good. 
Deprive people of social contact and they deteriorate. 
It was hard getting them out of IMU, for them and for us. 
Even in prison, it's no small thing to lock someone up. 
My next assignment was to one of the state's deep-end prisons where some of our more violent or disruptive inmates are housed. 
By then, the industry had advanced a lot, and we had different tools and techniques to manage disruptive behavior. 
We had beanbag guns and pepper spray and plexiglass shields, flash bangs, emergency response teams. 
We met violence with force and chaos with chaos. 
We were pretty good at putting out fires. 
While I was there, I met two experienced correctional workers who were also researchers, an anthropologist and a sociologist. 
One day, one of them commented to me and said, "" You know, you're pretty good at putting out fires. 
Have you ever thought about how to prevent them? "" I was patient with them, explaining our brute force approach to making prisons safer. 
They were patient with me. 
Out of those conversations grew some new ideas and we started some small experiments. 
First, we started training our officers in teams rather than sending them one or two at a time to the state training academy. 
Instead of four weeks of training, we gave them 10. 
Then we experimented with an apprenticeship model where we paired new staff with veteran staff. 
They both got better at the work. 
Second, we added verbal de-escalation skills into the training continuum and made it part of the use of force continuum. 
It was the non-force use of force. 
And then we did something even more radical. 
We trained the inmates on those same skills. 
We changed the skill set, reducing violence, not just responding to it. 
Third, when we expanded our facility, we tried a new type of design. 
Now the biggest and most controversial component of this design, of course, was the toilet. 
There were no toilets. 
Now that might not sound significant to you here today, but at the time, it was huge. 
No one had ever heard of a cell without a toilet. 
We all thought it was dangerous and crazy. 
Even eight men to a cell had a toilet. 
That small detail changed the way we worked. 
Inmates and staff started interacting more often and openly and developing a rapport. 
It was easier to detect conflict and intervene before it escalated. 
The unit was cleaner, quieter, safer and more humane. 
This was more effective at keeping the peace than any intimidation technique I'd seen to that point. 
Interacting changes the way you behave, both for the officer and the inmate. 
We changed the environment and we changed the behavior. 
Now, just in case I hadn't learned this lesson, they assigned me to headquarters next, and that's where I ran straight up against system change. 
Now, many things work against system change: politics and politicians, bills and laws, courts and lawsuits, internal politics. 
System change is difficult and slow, and oftentimes it doesn't take you where you want to go. 
It's no small thing to change a prison system. 
So what I did do is I reflected on my earlier experiences and I remembered that when we interacted with offenders, the heat went down. 
When we changed the environment, the behavior changed. 
And these were not huge system changes. 
These were small changes, and these changes created new possibilities. 
So next, I got reassigned as superintendent of a small prison. 
And at the same time, I was working on my degree at the Evergreen State College. 
I interacted with a lot of people who were not like me, people who had different ideas and came from different backgrounds. 
One of them was a rainforest ecologist. 
She looked at my small prison and what she saw was a laboratory. 
We talked and discovered how prisons and inmates could actually help advance science by helping them complete projects they couldn't complete on their own, like repopulating endangered species: frogs, butterflies, endangered prairie plants. 
At the same time, we found ways to make our operation more efficient through the addition of solar power, rainwater catchment, organic gardening, recycling. 
This initiative has led to many projects that have had huge system-wide impact, not just in our system, but in other state systems as well, small experiments making a big difference to science, to the community. 
The way we think about our work changes our work. 
The project just made my job more interesting and exciting. 
I was excited. Staff were excited. 
Officers were excited. Inmates were excited. 
They were inspired. 
Everybody wanted to be part of this. 
They were making a contribution, a difference, one they thought was meaningful and important. 
Let me be clear on what's going on here, though. 
Inmates are highly adaptive. 
They have to be. 
Oftentimes, they know more about our own systems than the people who run them. 
And they're here for a reason. 
I don't see my job as to punish them or forgive them, but I do think they can have decent and meaningful lives even in prison. 
So that was the question: Could inmates live decent and meaningful lives, and if so, what difference would that make? 
So I took that question back to the deep end, where some of our most violent offenders are housed. 
Remember, IMUs are for punishment. 
You don't get perks there, like programming. 
That was how we thought. 
But then we started to realize that if any inmates needed programming, it was these particular inmates. 
In fact, they needed intensive programming. 
So we changed our thinking 180 degrees, and we started looking for new possibilities. 
What we found was a new kind of chair. 
Instead of using the chair for punishment, we put it in classrooms. 
Okay, we didn't forget our responsibility to control, but now inmates could interact safely, face-to-face with other inmates and staff, and because control was no longer an issue, everybody could focus on other things, like learning. Behavior changed. 
We changed our thinking, and we changed what was possible, and this gives me hope. 
Now, I can't tell you that any of this stuff will work. 
What I can tell you, though, it is working. 
Our prisons are getting safer for both staff and inmates, and when our prisons are safe, we can put our energies into a lot more than just controlling. 
Reducing recidivism may be our ultimate goal, but it's not our only goal. 
To be honest with you, preventing crime takes so much more from so many more people and institutions. 
If we rely on just prisons to reduce crime, I'm afraid we'll never get there. 
But prisons can do some things we never thought they could do. 
Prisons can be the source of innovation and sustainability, repopulating endangered species and environmental restoration. 
Inmates can be scientists and beekeepers, dog rescuers. 
Prisons can be the source of meaningful work and opportunity for staff and the inmates who live there. 
We can contain and control and provide humane environments. 
These are not opposing qualities. 
We can't wait 10 to 20 years to find out if this is worth doing. 
Our strategy is not massive system change. 
Our strategy is hundreds of small changes that take place in days or months, not years. 
We need more small pilots where we learn as we go, pilots that change the range of possibility. 
We need new and better ways to measure impacts on engagement, on interaction, on safe environments. 
We need more opportunities to participate in and contribute to our communities, your communities. 
Prisons need to be secure, yes, safe, yes. 
We can do that. 
Prisons need to provide humane environments where people can participate, contribute, and learn meaningful lives. 
We're learning how to do that. 
That's why I'm hopeful. 
We don't have to stay stuck in old ideas about prison. 
We can define that. We can create that. 
And when we do that thoughtfully and with humanity, prisons can be more than the bucket for failed social policy. 
Maybe finally, we will earn our title: a department of corrections. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Einstein said that "I never think about the future — it comes soon enough." 
And he was right, of course. 
So today, I'm here to ask you to think of how the future is happening now. 
Over the past 200 years, the world has experienced two major waves of innovation. 
First, the Industrial Revolution brought us machines and factories, railways, electricity, air travel, and our lives have never been the same. 
Then the Internet revolution brought us computing power, data networks, unprecedented access to information and communication, and our lives have never been the same. 
Now we are experiencing another metamorphic change: the industrial Internet. 
It brings together intelligent machines, advanced analytics, and the creativity of people at work. 
It's the marriage of minds and machines. 
And our lives will never be the same. 
In my current role, I see up close how technology is beginning to transform industrial sectors that play a huge role in our economy and in our lives: energy, aviation, transportation, health care. 
For an economist, this is highly unusual, and it's extremely exciting, because this is a transformation as powerful as the Industrial Revolution and more, and before the Industrial Revolution, there was no economic growth to speak of. 
So what is this industrial Internet? 
Industrial machines are being equipped with a growing number of electronic sensors that allow them to see, hear, feel a lot more than ever before, generating prodigious amounts of data. 
Increasingly sophisticated analytics then sift through the data, providing insights that allow us to operate the machines in entirely new ways, a lot more efficiently. 
And not just individual machines, but fleets of locomotives, airplanes, entire systems like power grids, hospitals. 
It is asset optimization and system optimization. 
Of course, electronic sensors have been around for some time, but something has changed: a sharp decline in the cost of sensors and, thanks to advances in cloud computing, a rapid decrease in the cost of storing and processing data. 
So we are moving to a world where the machines we work with are not just intelligent; they are brilliant. 
They are self-aware, they are predictive, reactive and social. 
It's jet engines, locomotives, gas turbines, medical devices, communicating seamlessly with each other and with us. 
It's a world where information itself becomes intelligent and comes to us automatically when we need it without having to look for it. 
We are beginning to deploy throughout the industrial system embedded virtualization, multi-core processor technology, advanced cloud-based communications, a new software-defined machine infrastructure which allows machine functionality to become virtualized in software, decoupling machine software from hardware, and allowing us to remotely and automatically monitor, manage and upgrade industrial assets. 
Why does any of this matter at all? 
Well first of all, it's already allowing us to shift towards preventive, condition-based maintenance, which means fixing machines just before they break, without wasting time servicing them on a fixed schedule. 
And this, in turn, is pushing us towards zero unplanned downtime, which means there will be no more power outages, no more flight delays. 
So let me give you a few examples of how these brilliant machines work, and some of the examples may seem trivial, some are clearly more profound, but all of them are going to have a very powerful impact. 
Let's start with aviation. 
Today, 10 percent of all flights cancellations and delays are due to unscheduled maintenance events. 
Something goes wrong unexpectedly. 
This results in eight billion dollars in costs for the airline industry globally every year, not to mention the impact on all of us: stress, inconvenience, missed meetings as we sit helplessly in an airport terminal. 
So how can the industrial Internet help here? 
We've developed a preventive maintenance system which can be installed on any aircraft. 
It's self-learning and able to predict issues that a human operator would miss. 
The aircraft, while in flight, will communicate with technicians on the ground. 
By the time it lands, they will already know if anything needs to be serviced. 
Just in the U.S., a system like this can prevent over 60,000 delays and cancellations every year, helping seven million passengers get to their destinations on time. 
Or take healthcare. 
Today, nurses spend an average of 21 minutes per shift looking for medical equipment. 
That seems trivial, but it's less time spent caring for patients. 
St. Luke's Medical Center in Houston, Texas, which has deployed industrial Internet technology to electronically monitor and connect patients, staff and medical equipment, has reduced bed turnaround times by nearly one hour. 
If you need surgery, one hour matters. 
It means more patients can be treated, more lives can be saved. 
Another medical center, in Washington state, is piloting an application that allows medical images from city scanners and MRIs to be analyzed in the cloud, developing better analytics at a lower cost. 
Imagine a patient who has suffered a severe trauma, and needs the attention of several specialists: a neurologist, a cardiologist, an orthopedic surgeon. 
If all of them can have instantaneous and simultaneous access to scans and images as they are taken, they will be able to deliver better healthcare faster. 
So all of this translates into better health outcomes, but it can also deliver substantial economic benefits. 
Just a one-percent reduction in existing inefficiencies could yield savings of over 60 billion dollars to the healthcare industry worldwide, and that is just a drop in the sea compared to what we need to do to make healthcare affordable on a sustainable basis. 
Similar advances are happening in energy, including renewable energy. 
Wind farms equipped with new remote monitorings and diagnostics that allow wind turbines to talk to each other and adjust the pitch of their blades in a coordinated way, depending on how the wind is blowing, can now produce electricity at a cost of less than five cents per kilowatt / hour. 
Ten years ago, that cost was 30 cents, six times as much. 
The list goes on, and it will grow fast, because industrial data are now growing exponentially. 
By 2020, they will account for over 50 percent of all digital information. 
But this is not just about data, so let me switch gears and tell you how this is impacting already the jobs we do every day, because this new wave of innovation is bringing about new tools and applications that will allow us to collaborate in a smarter and faster way, making our jobs not just more efficient but more rewarding. 
Imagine a field engineer arriving at the wind farm with a handheld device telling her which turbines need servicing. 
She already has all the spare parts, because the problems were diagnosed in advanced. 
And if she faces an unexpected issue, the same handheld device will allow her to communicate with colleagues at the service center, let them see what she sees, transmit data that they can run through diagnostics, and they can stream videos that will guide her, step by step, through whatever complex procedure is needed to get the machines back up and running. 
And their interaction gets documented and stored in a searchable database. 
Let's stop and think about this for a minute, because this is a very important point. 
This new wave of innovation is fundamentally changing the way we work. 
And I know that many of you will be concerned about the impact that innovation might have on jobs. 
Unemployment is already high, and there is always a fear that innovation will destroy jobs. 
And innovation is disruptive. 
But let me stress two things here. 
First, we've already lived through mechanization of agriculture, automation of industry, and employment has gone up, because innovation is fundamentally about growth. 
It makes products more affordable. 
It creates new demand, new jobs. 
Second, there is a concern that in the future, there will only be room for engineers, data scientists, and other highly-specialized workers. 
And believe me, as an economist, I am also scared. 
But think about it: Just as a child can easily figure out how to operate an iPad, so a new generation of mobile and intuitive industrial applications will make life easier for workers of all skill levels. 
The worker of the future will be more like Iron Man than the Charlie Chaplin of "" Modern Times. "" And to be sure, new high-skilled jobs will be created: mechanical digital engineers who understand both the machines and the data; managers who understand their industry and the analytics and can reorganize the business to take full advantage of the technology. 
But now let's take a step back. 
Let's look at the big picture. 
There are people who argue that today's innovation is all about social media and silly games, with nowhere near the transformational power of the Industrial Revolution. 
They say that all the growth-enhancing innovations are behind us. 
And every time I hear this, I can't help thinking that even back in the Stone Age, there must have been a group of cavemen sitting around a fire one day looking very grumpy, and looking disapprovingly at another group of cavemen rolling a stone wheel up and down a hill, and saying to each other, "" Yeah, this wheel thing, cool toy, sure, but compared to fire, it will have no impact. 
The big discoveries are all behind us. "" (Laughter) This technological revolution is as inspiring and transformational as anything we have ever seen. 
Human creativity and innovation have always propelled us forward. 
They've created jobs. 
They've raised living standards. 
They've made our lives healthier and more rewarding. 
And the new wave of innovation which is beginning to sweep through industry is no different. 
In the U.S. alone, the industrial Internet could raise average income by 25 to 40 percent over the next 15 years, boosting growth to rates we haven't seen in a long time, and adding between 10 and 15 trillion dollars to global GDP. 
That is the size of the entire U.S. economy today. 
But this is not a foregone conclusion. 
We are just at the beginning of this transformation, and there will be barriers to break, obstacles to overcome. 
We will need to invest in the new technologies. 
We will need to adapt organizations and managerial practices. 
We will need a robust cybersecurity approach that protects sensitive information and intellectual property and safeguards critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. 
And the education system will need to evolve to ensure students are equipped with the right skills. 
It's not going to be easy, but it is going to be worth it. 
The economic challenges facing us are hard, but when I walk the factory floor, and I see how humans and brilliant machines are becoming interconnected, and I see the difference this makes in a hospital, in an airport, in a power generation plant, I'm not just optimistic, I'm enthusiastic. 
This new technological revolution is upon us. 
So think about the future — it will be here soon enough. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I got my start in writing and research as a surgical trainee, as someone who was a long ways away from becoming any kind of an expert at anything. 
So the natural question you ask then at that point is, how do I get good at what I'm trying to do? 
And it became a question of, how do we all get good at what we're trying to do? 
It's hard enough to learn to get the skills, try to learn all the material you have to absorb at any task you're taking on. 
I had to think about how I sew and how I cut, but then also how I pick the right person to come to an operating room. 
And then in the midst of all this came this new context for thinking about what it meant to be good. 
In the last few years we realized we were in the deepest crisis of medicine's existence due to something you don't normally think about when you're a doctor concerned with how you do good for people, which is the cost of health care. 
There's not a country in the world that now is not asking whether we can afford what doctors do. 
The political fight that we've developed has become one around whether it's the government that's the problem or is it insurance companies that are the problem. 
And the answer is yes and no; it's deeper than all of that. 
The cause of our troubles is actually the complexity that science has given us. 
And in order to understand this, I'm going to take you back a couple of generations. 
I want to take you back to a time when Lewis Thomas was writing in his book, "" The Youngest Science. "" Lewis Thomas was a physician-writer, one of my favorite writers. 
And he wrote this book to explain, among other things, what it was like to be a medical intern at the Boston City Hospital in the pre-penicillin year of 1937. 
It was a time when medicine was cheap and very ineffective. 
If you were in a hospital, he said, it was going to do you good only because it offered you some warmth, some food, shelter, and maybe the caring attention of a nurse. 
Doctors and medicine made no difference at all. 
That didn't seem to prevent the doctors from being frantically busy in their days, as he explained. 
What they were trying to do was figure out whether you might have one of the diagnoses for which they could do something. 
And there were a few. 
You might have a lobar pneumonia, for example, and they could give you an antiserum, an injection of rabid antibodies to the bacterium streptococcus, if the intern sub-typed it correctly. 
If you had an acute congestive heart failure, they could bleed a pint of blood from you by opening up an arm vein, giving you a crude leaf preparation of digitalis and then giving you oxygen by tent. 
If you had early signs of paralysis and you were really good at asking personal questions, you might figure out that this paralysis someone has is from syphilis, in which case you could give this nice concoction of mercury and arsenic — as long as you didn't overdose them and kill them. 
Beyond these sorts of things, a medical doctor didn't have a lot that they could do. 
This was when the core structure of medicine was created — what it meant to be good at what we did and how we wanted to build medicine to be. 
It was at a time when what was known you could know, you could hold it all in your head, and you could do it all. 
If you had a prescription pad, if you had a nurse, if you had a hospital that would give you a place to convalesce, maybe some basic tools, you really could do it all. 
You set the fracture, you drew the blood, you spun the blood, looked at it under the microscope, you plated the culture, you injected the antiserum. 
This was a life as a craftsman. 
As a result, we built it around a culture and set of values that said what you were good at was being daring, at being courageous, at being independent and self-sufficient. 
Autonomy was our highest value. 
Go a couple generations forward to where we are, though, and it looks like a completely different world. 
We have now found treatments for nearly all of the tens of thousands of conditions that a human being can have. 
We can't cure it all. 
We can't guarantee that everybody will live a long and healthy life. 
But we can make it possible for most. 
But what does it take? 
Well, we've now discovered 4,000 medical and surgical procedures. 
We've discovered 6,000 drugs that I'm now licensed to prescribe. 
And we're trying to deploy this capability, town by town, to every person alive — in our own country, let alone around the world. 
And we've reached the point where we've realized, as doctors, we can't know it all. 
We can't do it all by ourselves. 
There was a study where they looked at how many clinicians it took to take care of you if you came into a hospital, as it changed over time. 
And in the year 1970, it took just over two full-time equivalents of clinicians. 
That is to say, it took basically the nursing time and then just a little bit of time for a doctor who more or less checked in on you once a day. 
By the end of the 20th century, it had become more than 15 clinicians for the same typical hospital patient — specialists, physical therapists, the nurses. 
We're all specialists now, even the primary care physicians. 
Everyone just has a piece of the care. 
But holding onto that structure we built around the daring, independence, self-sufficiency of each of those people has become a disaster. 
We have trained, hired and rewarded people to be cowboys. 
But it's pit crews that we need, pit crews for patients. 
There's evidence all around us: 40 percent of our coronary artery disease patients in our communities receive incomplete or inappropriate care. 
60 percent of our asthma, stroke patients receive incomplete or inappropriate care. 
Two million people come into hospitals and pick up an infection they didn't have because someone failed to follow the basic practices of hygiene. 
Our experience as people who get sick, need help from other people, is that we have amazing clinicians that we can turn to — hardworking, incredibly well-trained and very smart — that we have access to incredible technologies that give us great hope, but little sense that it consistently all comes together for you from start to finish in a successful way. 
There's another sign that we need pit crews, and that's the unmanageable cost of our care. 
Now we in medicine, I think, are baffled by this question of cost. 
We want to say, "" This is just the way it is. 
This is just what medicine requires. "" When you go from a world where you treated arthritis with aspirin, that mostly didn't do the job, to one where, if it gets bad enough, we can do a hip replacement, a knee replacement that gives you years, maybe decades, without disability, a dramatic change, well is it any surprise that that $40,000 hip replacement replacing the 10-cent aspirin is more expensive? 
It's just the way it is. 
But I think we're ignoring certain facts that tell us something about what we can do. 
As we've looked at the data about the results that have come as the complexity has increased, we found that the most expensive care is not necessarily the best care. 
And vice versa, the best care often turns out to be the least expensive — has fewer complications, the people get more efficient at what they do. 
And what that means is there's hope. 
Because [if] to have the best results, you really needed the most expensive care in the country, or in the world, well then we really would be talking about rationing who we're going to cut off from Medicare. 
That would be really our only choice. 
But when we look at the positive deviants — the ones who are getting the best results at the lowest costs — we find the ones that look the most like systems are the most successful. 
That is to say, they found ways to get all of the different pieces, all of the different components, to come together into a whole. 
Having great components is not enough, and yet we've been obsessed in medicine with components. 
We want the best drugs, the best technologies, the best specialists, but we don't think too much about how it all comes together. 
It's a terrible design strategy actually. 
There's a famous thought experiment that touches exactly on this that said, what if you built a car from the very best car parts? 
Well it would lead you to put in Porsche brakes, a Ferrari engine, a Volvo body, a BMW chassis. 
And you put it all together and what do you get? 
A very expensive pile of junk that does not go anywhere. 
And that is what medicine can feel like sometimes. 
It's not a system. 
Now a system, however, when things start to come together, you realize it has certain skills for acting and looking that way. 
Skill number one is the ability to recognize success and the ability to recognize failure. 
When you are a specialist, you can't see the end result very well. 
You have to become really interested in data, unsexy as that sounds. 
One of my colleagues is a surgeon in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and he got interested in the question of, well how many CT scans did they do for their community in Cedar Rapids? 
He got interested in this because there had been government reports, newspaper reports, journal articles saying that there had been too many CT scans done. 
He didn't see it in his own patients. 
And so he asked the question, "" How many did we do? "" and he wanted to get the data. 
It took him three months. 
No one had asked this question in his community before. 
And what he found was that, for the 300,000 people in their community, in the previous year they had done 52,000 CT scans. 
They had found a problem. 
Which brings us to skill number two a system has. 
Skill one, find where your failures are. 
Skill two is devise solutions. 
I got interested in this when the World Health Organization came to my team asking if we could help with a project to reduce deaths in surgery. 
The volume of surgery had spread around the world, but the safety of surgery had not. 
Now our usual tactics for tackling problems like these are to do more training, give people more specialization or bring in more technology. 
Well in surgery, you couldn't have people who are more specialized and you couldn't have people who are better trained. 
And yet we see unconscionable levels of death, disability that could be avoided. 
And so we looked at what other high-risk industries do. 
We looked at skyscraper construction, we looked at the aviation world, and we found that they have technology, they have training, and then they have one other thing: They have checklists. 
I did not expect to be spending a significant part of my time as a Harvard surgeon worrying about checklists. 
And yet, what we found were that these were tools to help make experts better. 
We got the lead safety engineer for Boeing to help us. 
Could we design a checklist for surgery? 
Not for the lowest people on the totem pole, but for the folks who were all the way around the chain, the entire team including the surgeons. 
And what they taught us was that designing a checklist to help people handle complexity actually involves more difficulty than I had understood. 
You have to think about things like pause points. 
You need to identify the moments in a process when you can actually catch a problem before it's a danger and do something about it. 
You have to identify that this is a before-takeoff checklist. 
And then you need to focus on the killer items. 
An aviation checklist, like this one for a single-engine plane, isn't a recipe for how to fly a plane, it's a reminder of the key things that get forgotten or missed if they're not checked. 
So we did this. 
We created a 19-item two-minute checklist for surgical teams. 
We had the pause points immediately before anesthesia is given, immediately before the knife hits the skin, immediately before the patient leaves the room. 
And we had a mix of dumb stuff on there — making sure an antibiotic is given in the right time frame because that cuts the infection rate by half — and then interesting stuff, because you can't make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery. 
Instead, you can make a recipe for how to have a team that's prepared for the unexpected. 
And we had items like making sure everyone in the room had introduced themselves by name at the start of the day, because you get half a dozen people or more who are sometimes coming together as a team for the very first time that day that you're coming in. 
We implemented this checklist in eight hospitals around the world, deliberately in places from rural Tanzania to the University of Washington in Seattle. 
We found that after they adopted it the complication rates fell 35 percent. 
It fell in every hospital it went into. 
The death rates fell 47 percent. 
This was bigger than a drug. 
(Applause) And that brings us to skill number three, the ability to implement this, to get colleagues across the entire chain to actually do these things. 
And it's been slow to spread. 
This is not yet our norm in surgery — let alone making checklists to go onto childbirth and other areas. 
There's a deep resistance because using these tools forces us to confront that we're not a system, forces us to behave with a different set of values. 
Just using a checklist requires you to embrace different values from the ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork. 
This is the opposite of what we were built on: independence, self-sufficiency, autonomy. 
I met an actual cowboy, by the way. 
I asked him, what was it like to actually herd a thousand cattle across hundreds of miles? 
How did you do that? 
And he said, "" We have the cowboys stationed at distinct places all around. "" They communicate electronically constantly, and they have protocols and checklists for how they handle everything — (Laughter) — from bad weather to emergencies or inoculations for the cattle. 
Even the cowboys are pit crews now. 
And it seemed like time that we become that way ourselves. 
Making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists. 
But I would go further and say that making systems work, whether in health care, education, climate change, making a pathway out of poverty, is the great task of our generation as a whole. 
In every field, knowledge has exploded, but it has brought complexity, it has brought specialization. 
And we've come to a place where we have no choice but to recognize, as individualistic as we want to be, complexity requires group success. 
We all need to be pit crews now. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

This is the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, where I work as a curator. 
It's my job to make sure the collection stays okay, and that it grows, and basically it means I collect dead animals. 
Back in 1995, we got a new wing next to the museum. 
It was made of glass, and this building really helped me to do my job good. 
The building was a true bird-killer. 
You may know that birds don't understand the concept of glass. They don't see it, so they fly into the windows and get killed. 
The only thing I had to do was go out, pick them up, and have them stuffed for the collection. 
(Laughter) And in those days, I developed an ear to identify birds just by the sound of the bangs they made against the glass. 
And it was on June 5, 1995, that I heard a loud bang against the glass that changed my life and ended that of a duck. 
And this is what I saw when I looked out of the window. 
This is the dead duck. It flew against the window. 
It's laying dead on its belly. 
But next to the dead duck is a live duck, and please pay attention. 
Both are of the male sex. 
And then this happened. 
The live duck mounted the dead duck, and started to copulate. 
Well, I'm a biologist. I'm an ornithologist. 
I said, "" Something's wrong here. "" One is dead, one is alive. That must be necrophilia. 
I look. Both are of the male sex. 
Homosexual necrophilia. 
So I — (Laughter) I took my camera, I took my notebook, took a chair, and started to observe this behavior. 
After 75 minutes — (Laughter) — I had seen enough, and I got hungry, and I wanted to go home. 
So I went out, collected the duck, and before I put it in the freezer, I checked if the victim was indeed of the male sex. 
And here's a rare picture of a duck's penis, so it was indeed of the male sex. 
It's a rare picture because there are 10,000 species of birds and only 300 possess a penis. 
[The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae)] I knew I'd seen something special, but it took me six years to decide to publish it. 
(Laughter) I mean, it's a nice topic for a birthday party or at the coffee machine, but to share this among your peers is something different. 
I didn't have the framework. 
So after six years, my friends and colleagues urged me to publish, so I published "" The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard. "" And here's the situation again. 
A is my office, B is the place where the duck hit the glass, and C is from where I watched it. 
And here are the ducks again. 
As you probably know, in science, when you write a kind of special paper, only six or seven people read it. 
(Laughter) But then something good happened. 
I got a phone call from a person called Marc Abrahams, and he told me, "" You've won a prize with your duck paper: the Ig Nobel Prize. "" And the Ig Nobel Prize — (Laughter) (Applause) — the Ig Nobel Prize honors research that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think, with the ultimate goal to make more people interested in science. 
That's a good thing, so I accepted the prize. 
(Laughter) I went — let me remind you that Marc Abrahams didn't call me from Stockholm. 
He called me from Cambridge, Massachusetts. 
So I traveled to Boston, to Cambridge, and I went to this wonderful Ig Nobel Prize ceremony held at Harvard University, and this ceremony is a very nice experience. 
Real Nobel laureates hand you the prize. 
That's the first thing. 
And there are nine other winners who get prizes. 
Here's one of my fellow winners. That's Charles Paxton who won the 2000 biology prize for his paper, "" Courtship behavior of ostriches towards humans under farming conditions in Britain. "" (Laughter) And I think there are one or two more Ig Nobel Prize winners in this room. 
Dan, where are you? Dan Ariely? 
Applause for Dan. 
(Applause) Dan won his prize in medicine for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine works better than low-priced fake medicine. 
(Laughter) So here's my one minute of fame, my acceptance speech, and here's the duck. 
This is its first time on the U.S. West Coast. 
I'm going to pass it around. 
(Laughter) Yeah? 
You can pass it around. 
Please note it's a museum specimen, but there's no chance you'll get the avian flu. 
After winning this prize, my life changed. 
In the first place, people started to send me all kinds of duck-related things, and I got a real nice collection. 
(Laughter) More importantly, people started to send me their observations of remarkable animal behavior, and believe me, if there's an animal misbehaving on this planet, I know about it. (Laughter) 
This is a moose. 
It's a moose trying to copulate with a bronze statue of a bison. 
This is in Montana, 2008. 
This is a frog that tries to copulate with a goldfish. 
This is the Netherlands, 2011. 
These are cane toads in Australia. 
This is roadkill. 
Please note that this is necrophilia. 
It's remarkable: the position. 
The missionary position is very rare in the animal kingdom. 
These are pigeons in Rotterdam. 
Barn swallows in Hong Kong, 2004. 
This is a turkey in Wisconsin on the premises of the Ethan Allen juvenile correctional institution. 
It took all day, and the prisoners had a great time. 
So what does this mean? 
I mean, the question I ask myself, why does this happen in nature? 
Well, what I concluded from reviewing all these cases is that it is important that this happens only when death is instant and in a dramatic way and in the right position for copulation. 
At least, I thought it was till I got these slides. 
And here you see a dead duck. 
It's been there for three days, and it's laying on its back. 
So there goes my theory of necrophilia. 
Another example of the impact of glass buildings on the life of birds. 
This is Mad Max, a blackbird who lives in Rotterdam. 
The only thing this bird did was fly against this window from 2004 to 2008, day in and day out. 
Here he goes, and here's a short video. 
(Music) (Clunk) (Clunk) (Clunk) (Clunk) So what this bird does is fight his own image. 
He sees an intruder in his territory, and it's coming all the time and he's there, so there is no end to it. 
And I thought, in the beginning — I studied this bird for a couple of years — that, well, shouldn't the brain of this bird be damaged? 
It's not. I show you here some slides, some frames from the video, and at the last moment before he hits the glass, he puts his feet in front, and then he bangs against the glass. 
So I'll conclude to invite you all to Dead Duck Day. 
That's on June 5 every year. 
At five minutes to six in the afternoon, we come together at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, the duck comes out of the museum, and we try to discuss new ways to prevent birds from colliding with windows. 
And as you know, or as you may not know, this is one of the major causes of death for birds in the world. 
In the U.S. alone, a billion birds die in collision with glass buildings. 
And when it's over, we go to a Chinese restaurant and we have a six-course duck dinner. 
So I hope to see you next year in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for Dead Duck Day. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Oh, sorry. 
May I have my duck back, please? 
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. 

Those of you who may remember me from TEDGlobal remember me asking a few questions which still preoccupy me. 
One of them was: Why is it necessary to spend six billion pounds speeding up the Eurostar train when, for about 10 percent of that money, you could have top supermodels, male and female, serving free Chateau Petrus to all the passengers for the entire duration of the journey? 
You'd still have five billion left in change, and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down. 
Now, you may remember me asking the question as well, a very interesting observation, that actually those strange little signs that actually flash "" 35 "" at you, occasionally accompanying a little smiley face or a frown, according to whether you're within or outside the speed limit — those are actually more effective at preventing road accidents than speed cameras, which come with the actual threat of real punishment. 
So there seems to be a strange disproportionality at work, I think, in many areas of human problem solving, particularly those which involve human psychology, which is: The tendency of the organization or the institution is to deploy as much force as possible, as much compulsion as possible, whereas actually, the tendency of the person is to be almost influenced in absolute reverse proportion to the amount of force being applied. 
So there seems to be a complete disconnect here. 
So what I'm asking for is the creation of a new job title — I'll come to this a little later — and perhaps the addition of a new word into the English language. 
Because it does seem to me that large organizations including government, which is, of course, the largest organization of all, have actually become completely disconnected with what actually matters to people. 
Let me give you one example of this. 
You may remember this as the AOL-Time Warner merger, okay, heralded at the time as the largest single deal of all time. 
It may still be, for all I know. 
Now, all of you in this room, in one form or other, are probably customers of one or both of those organizations that merged. 
Just interested, did anybody notice anything different as a result of this at all? 
So unless you happened to be a shareholder of one or the other organizations or one of the dealmakers or lawyers involved in the no-doubt lucrative activity, you're actually engaging in a huge piece of activity that meant absolutely bugger-all to anybody, okay? 
By contrast, years of marketing have taught me that if you actually want people to remember you and to appreciate what you do, the most potent things are actually very, very small. 
This is from Virgin Atlantic upper-class, it's the cruet salt and pepper set. 
Quite nice in itself, they're little, sort of, airplane things. 
What's really, really sweet is every single person looking at these things has exactly the same mischievous thought, which is, "" I reckon I can heist these. "" However, you pick them up and underneath, actually engraved in the metal, are the words, "Stolen from Virgin Atlantic Airways upper-class." 
(Laughter) Now, years after you remember the strategic question of whether you're flying in a 777 or an Airbus, you remember those words and that experience. 
Similarly, this is from a hotel in Stockholm, the Lydmar. 
Has anybody stayed there? 
It's the lift, it's a series of buttons in the lift. 
Nothing unusual about that at all, except that these are actually not the buttons that take you to an individual floor. 
It starts with garage at the bottom, I suppose, appropriately, but it doesn't go up garage, grand floor, mezzanine, one, two, three, four. 
It actually says garage, funk, rhythm and blues. 
You have a series of buttons. You actually choose your lift music. 
My guess is that the cost of installing this in the lift in the Lydmar Hotel in Stockholm is probably 500 to 1,000 pounds max. 
It's frankly more memorable than all those millions of hotels we've all stayed at that tell you that your room has actually been recently renovated at a cost of 500,000 dollars, in order to make it resemble every other hotel room you've ever stayed in in the entire course of your life. 
Now, these are trivial marketing examples, I accept. 
But I was at a TED event recently and Esther Duflo, probably one of the leading experts in, effectively, the eradication of poverty in the developing world, actually spoke. 
And she came across a similar example of something that fascinated me as being something which, in a business context or a government context, would simply be so trivial a solution as to seem embarrassing. 
It was simply to encourage the inoculation of children by, not only making it a social event — I think good use of behavioral economics in that, if you turn up with several other mothers to have your child inoculated, your sense of confidence is much greater than if you turn up alone. 
But secondly, to incentivize that inoculation by giving a kilo of lentils to everybody who participated. 
It's a tiny, tiny thing. 
If you're a senior person at UNESCO and someone says, "" So what are you doing to eradicate world poverty? "" you're not really confident standing up there saying, "" I've got it cracked; it's the lentils, "" are you? 
Our own sense of self-aggrandizement feels that big important problems need to have big important, and most of all, expensive solutions attached to them. 
And yet, what behavioral economics shows time after time after time is in human behavioral and behavioral change there's a very, very strong disproportionality at work, that actually what changes our behavior and what changes our attitude to things is not actually proportionate to the degree of expense entailed, or the degree of force that's applied. 
But everything about institutions makes them uncomfortable with that disproportionality. 
So what happens in an institution is the very person who has the power to solve the problem also has a very, very large budget. 
And once you have a very, very large budget, you actually look for expensive things to spend it on. 
What is completely lacking is a class of people who have immense amounts of power, but no money at all. 
(Laughter) It's those people I'd quite like to create in the world going forward. 
Now, here's another thing that happens, which is what I call sometimes "" Terminal 5 syndrome, "" which is that big, expensive things get big, highly-intelligent attention, and they're great, and Terminal 5 is absolutely magnificent, until you get down to the small detail, the usability, which is the signage, which is catastrophic. 
You come out of "" Arrive "" at the airport, and you follow a big yellow sign that says "" Trains "" and it's in front of you. 
So you walk for another hundred yards, expecting perhaps another sign, that might courteously be yellow, in front of you and saying "" Trains. "" No, no, no, the next one is actually blue, to your left, and says "" Heathrow Express. "" I mean, it could almost be rather like that scene from the film "" Airplane. "" A yellow sign? That's exactly what they'll be expecting. 
Actually, what happens in the world increasingly — now, all credit to the British Airport Authority. 
I spoke about this before, and a brilliant person got in touch with me and said, "" Okay, what can you do? "" So I did come up with five suggestions, which they are actually actioning. 
One of them also being, although logically it's quite a good idea to have a lift with no up and down button in it, if it only serves two floors, it's actually bloody terrifying, okay? 
Because when the door closes and there's nothing for you to do, you've actually just stepped into a Hammer film. 
(Laughter) So these questions... what is happening in the world is the big stuff, actually, is done magnificently well. 
But the small stuff, what you might call the user interface, is done spectacularly badly. 
But also, there seems to be a complete sort of gridlock in terms of solving these small solutions. 
Because the people who can actually solve them actually are too powerful and too preoccupied with something they think of as "" strategy "" to actually solve them. 
I tried this exercise recently, talking about banking. 
They said, "" Can we do an advertising campaign? 
What can we do and encourage more online banking? "" I said, "" It's really, really easy. "" I said, "" When people login to their online bank there are lots and lots of things they'd probably quite like to look at. 
The last thing in the world you ever want to see is your balance. "" I've got friends who actually never use their own bank cash machines because there's the risk that it might display their balance on the screen. 
Why would you willingly expose yourself to bad news? 
Okay, you simply wouldn't. 
I said, "" If you make, actually, 'Tell me my balance.' If you make that an option rather than the default, you'll find twice as many people log on to online banking, and they do it three times as often. "" Let's face it, most of us — how many of you actually check your balance before you remove cash from a cash machine? 
And you're pretty rich by the standards of the world at large. 
Now, interesting that no single person does that, or at least can admit to being so anal as to do it. 
But what's interesting about that suggestion was that, to implement that suggestion wouldn't cost 10 million pounds; it wouldn't involve large amounts of expenditure; it would actually cost about 50 quid. 
And yet, it never happens. 
Because there's a fundamental disconnect, as I said, that actually, the people with the power want to do big expensive things. 
And there's to some extent a big strategy myth that's prevalent in business now. 
And if you think about it, it's very, very important that the strategy myth is maintained. 
Because, if the board of directors convince everybody that the success of any organization is almost entirely dependent on the decisions made by the board of directors, it makes the disparity in salaries slightly more justifiable than if you actually acknowledge that quite a lot of the credit for a company's success might actually lie somewhere else, in small pieces of tactical activity. 
But what is happening is that effectively — and the invention of the spreadsheet hasn't helped this; lots of things haven't helped this — business and government suffers from a kind of physics envy. 
It wants the world to be the kind of place where the input and the change are proportionate. 
It's a kind of mechanistic world that we'd all love to live in where, effectively, it sits very nicely on spreadsheets, everything is numerically expressible, and the amount you spend on something is proportionate to the scale of your success. 
That's the world people actually want. 
In truth, we do live in a world that science can understand. 
Unfortunately, the science is probably closer to being climatology in that in many cases, very, very small changes can have disproportionately huge effects, and equally, vast areas of activity, enormous mergers, can actually accomplish absolutely bugger-all. 
But it's very, very uncomfortable for us to actually acknowledge that we're living in such a world. 
But what I'm saying is we could just make things a little bit better for ourselves if we looked at it in this very simple four-way approach. 
That is actually strategy, and I'm not denying that strategy has a role. 
You know, there are cases where you spend quite a lot of money and you accomplish quite a lot. 
And I'd be wrong to dis that completely. 
Moving over, we come, of course, to consultancy. 
(Laughter) I thought it was very indecent of Accenture to ditch Tiger Woods in such a sort of hurried and hasty way. 
I mean, Tiger surely was actually obeying the Accenture model. 
He developed an interesting outsourcing model for sexual services, (Laughter) no longer tied to a single monopoly provider, in many cases, sourcing things locally, and of course, the ability to have between one and three girls delivered at any time led for better load-balancing. 
So what Accenture suddenly found so unattractive about that, I'm not sure. 
Then there are other things that don't cost much and achieve absolutely nothing. 
That's called trivia. 
But there's a fourth thing. 
And the fundamental problem is we don't actually have a word for this stuff. 
We don't know what to call it. 
And actually we don't spend nearly enough money looking for those things, looking for those tiny things that may or may not work, but which, if they do work, can have a success absolutely out of proportion to their expense, their efforts and the disruption they cause. 
So the first thing I'd like is a competition — to anybody watching this as a film — is to come up with a name for that stuff on the bottom right. 
And the second thing, I think, is that the world needs to have people in charge of that. 
That's why I call for the "" Chief Detail Officer. "" Every corporation should have one, and every government should have a Ministry of Detail. 
The people who actually have no money, who have no extravagant budget, but who realize that actually you might achieve greater success in uptake of a government program by actually doubling the level of benefits you pay, but you'll probably achieve exactly that same effect simply by redesigning the form and writing it in comprehensible English. 
And if actually we created a Ministry of Detail and business actually had Chief Detail Officers, then that fourth quadrant, which is so woefully neglected at the moment, might finally get the attention it deserves. 
Thank you very much. 

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

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

In 1962, with Rachel Carson's "" Silent Spring, "" I think for people like me in the world of the making of things, the canary in the mine wasn't singing. 
And so the question that we might not have birds became kind of fundamental to those of us wandering around looking for the meadowlarks that seemed to have all disappeared. 
And the question was, were the birds singing? 
Now, I'm not a scientist, that'll be really clear. 
But, you know, we've just come from this discussion of what a bird might be. 
What is a bird? 
Well, in my world, this is a rubber duck. 
It comes in California with a warning — "" This product contains chemicals known by the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm. "" This is a bird. 
What kind of culture would produce a product of this kind and then label it and sell it to children? 
I think we have a design problem. 
Someone heard the six hours of talk that I gave called "" The Monticello Dialogues "" on NPR, and sent me this as a thank you note — "" We realize that design is a signal of intention, but it also has to occur within a world, and we have to understand that world in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence, and so as we look back at the basic state of affairs in which we design, we, in a way, need to go to the primordial condition to understand the operating system and the frame conditions of a planet, and I think the exciting part of that is the good news that's there, 
because the news is the news of abundance, and not the news of limits, and I think as our culture tortures itself now with tyrannies and concerns over limits and fear, we can add this other dimension of abundance that is coherent, driven by the sun, and start to imagine what that would be like to share. "" That was a nice thing to get. 
That was one sentence. 
Henry James would be proud. 
This is — I put it down at the bottom, but that was extemporaneous, obviously. 
The fundamental issue is that, for me, design is the first signal of human intentions. 
So what are our intentions, and what would our intentions be — if we wake up in the morning, we have designs on the world — well, what would our intention be as a species now that we're the dominant species? 
And it's not just stewardship and dominion debate, because really, dominion is implicit in stewardship — because how could you dominate something you had killed? 
And stewardship's implicit in dominion, because you can't be steward of something if you can't dominate it. 
So the question is, what is the first question for designers? 
Now, as guardians — let's say the state, for example, which reserves the right to kill, the right to be duplicitous and so on — the question we're asking the guardian at this point is are we meant, how are we meant, to secure local societies, create world peace and save the environment? 
But I don't know that that's the common debate. 
Commerce, on the other hand, is relatively quick, essentially creative, highly effective and efficient, and fundamentally honest, because we can't exchange value for very long if we don't trust each other. 
So we use the tools of commerce primarily for our work, but the question we bring to it is, how do we love all the children of all species for all time? 
And so we start our designs with that question. 
Because what we realize today is that modern culture appears to have adopted a strategy of tragedy. 
If we come here and say, "" Well, I didn't intend to cause global warming on the way here, "" and we say, "" That's not part of my plan, "" then we realize it's part of our de facto plan. 
Because it's the thing that's happening because we have no other plan. 
And I was at the White House for President Bush, meeting with every federal department and agency, and I pointed out that they appear to have no plan. 
If the end game is global warming, they're doing great. 
If the end game is mercury toxification of our children downwind of coal fire plants as they scuttled the Clean Air Act, then I see that our education programs should be explicitly defined as, "Brain death for all children. No child left behind." 
(Applause) So, the question is, how many federal officials are ready to move to Ohio and Pennsylvania with their families? 
So if you don't have an endgame of something delightful, then you're just moving chess pieces around, if you don't know you're taking the king. 
So perhaps we could develop a strategy of change, which requires humility. And in my business as an architect, it's unfortunate the word "" humility "" and the word "" architect "" have not appeared in the same paragraph since "" The Fountainhead. "" So if anybody here has trouble with the concept of design humility, reflect on this — it took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage. 
So, as Kevin Kelly pointed out, there is no endgame. 
There is an infinite game, and we're playing in that infinite game. 
And so we call it "" cradle to cradle, "" and our goal is very simple. 
This is what I presented to the White House. 
Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy and just world, with clean air, clean water, soil and power — economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed, period. 
(Applause) What don't you like about this? 
Which part of this don't you like? 
So we realized we want full diversity, even though it can be difficult to remember what De Gaulle said when asked what it was like to be President of France. 
He said, "" What do you think it's like trying to run a country with 400 kinds of cheese? "" But at the same time, we realize that our products are not safe and healthy. 
So we've designed products and we analyzed chemicals down to the parts per million. 
This is a baby blanket by Pendleton that will give your child nutrition instead of Alzheimer's later in life. 
We can ask ourselves, what is justice, and is justice blind, or is justice blindness? 
And at what point did that uniform turn from white to black? 
Water has been declared a human right by the United Nations. 
Air quality is an obvious thing to anyone who breathes. 
Is there anybody here who doesn't breathe? 
Clean soil is a critical problem — the nitrification, the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. 
A fundamental issue that's not being addressed. 
We've seen the first form of solar energy that's beat the hegemony of fossil fuels in the form of wind here in the Great Plains, and so that hegemony is leaving. 
And if we remember Sheikh Yamani when he formed OPEC, they asked him, "" When will we see the end of the age of oil? "" I don't know if you remember his answer, but it was, "The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones." 
We see that companies acting ethically in this world are outperforming those that don't. 
We see the flows of materials in a rather terrifying prospect. 
This is a hospital monitor from Los Angeles, sent to China. 
This woman will expose herself to toxic phosphorous, release four pounds of toxic lead into her childrens' environment, which is from copper. 
On the other hand, we see great signs of hope. 
Here's Dr. Venkataswamy in India, who's figured out how to do mass-produced health. 
He has given eyesight to two million people for free. 
We see in our material flows that car steels don't become car steel again because of the contaminants of the coatings — bismuth, antimony, copper and so on. 
They become building steel. 
On the other hand, we're working with Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett and Shaw Carpet, the largest carpet company in the world. 
We've developed a carpet that is continuously recyclable, down to the parts per million. 
The upper is Nylon 6 that can go back to caprolactam, the bottom, a polyolephine — infinitely recyclable thermoplastic. 
Now if I was a bird, the building on my left is a liability. 
The building on my right, which is our corporate campus for The Gap with an ancient meadow, is an asset — its nesting grounds. 
Here's where I come from. I grew up in Hong Kong, with six million people in 40 square miles. 
During the dry season, we had four hours of water every fourth day. 
And the relationship to landscape was that of farmers who have been farming the same piece of ground for 40 centuries. 
You can't farm the same piece of ground for 40 centuries without understanding nutrient flow. 
My childhood summers were in the Puget Sound of Washington, among the first growth and big growth. 
My grandfather had been a lumberjack in the Olympics, so I have a lot of tree karma I am working off. 
I went to Yale for graduate school, studied in a building of this style by Le Corbusier, affectionately known in our business as Brutalism. 
If we look at the world of architecture, we see with Mies' 1928 tower for Berlin, the question might be, "" Well, where's the sun? "" And this might have worked in Berlin, but we built it in Houston, and the windows are all closed. And with most products appearing not to have been designed for indoor use, this is actually a vertical gas chamber. 
When I went to Yale, we had the first energy crisis, and I was designing the first solar-heated house in Ireland as a student, which I then built — which would give you a sense of my ambition. 
And Richard Meier, who was one of my teachers, kept coming over to my desk to give me criticism, and he would say, "" Bill, you've got to understand- — solar energy has nothing to do with architecture. "" I guess he didn't read Vitruvius. 
In 1984, we did the first so-called "" green office "" in America for Environmental Defense. 
We started asking manufacturers what were in their materials. 
They said, "" They're proprietary, they're legal, go away. "" The only indoor quality work done in this country at that time was sponsored by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, and it was to prove there was no danger from secondhand smoke in the workplace. 
So, all of a sudden, here I am, graduating from high school in 1969, and this happens, and we realize that "" away "" went away. 
Remember we used to throw things away, and we'd point to away? 
And yet, NOAA has now shown us, for example — you see that little blue thing above Hawaii? 
That's the Pacific Gyre. 
It was recently dragged for plankton by scientists, and they found six times as much plastic as plankton. 
When asked, they said, "" It's kind of like a giant toilet that doesn't flush. "" Perhaps that's away. 
So we're looking for the design rules of this — this is the highest biodiversity of trees in the world, Irian Jaya, 259 species of tree, and we described this in the book, "" Cradle to Cradle. "" The book itself is a polymer. It is not a tree. 
That's the name of the first chapter — "" This Book is Not a Tree. "" Because in poetics, as Margaret Atwood pointed out, "" we write our history on the skin of fish with the blood of bears. "" And with so much polymer, what we really need is technical nutrition, and to use something as elegant as a tree — imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colors with the seasons and self-replicates. 
Well, why don't we knock that down and write on it? 
(Laughter) So, we're looking at the same criteria as most people — you know, can I afford it? 
Does it work? Do I like it? 
We're adding the Jeffersonian agenda, and I come from Charlottesville, where I've had the privilege of living in a house designed by Thomas Jefferson. 
We're adding life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. 
Now if we look at the word "" competition, "" I'm sure most of you've used it. 
You know, most people don't realize it comes from the Latin competere, which means strive together. 
It means the way Olympic athletes train with each other. 
They get fit together, and then they compete. 
The Williams sisters compete — one wins Wimbledon. 
So we've been looking at the idea of competition as a way of cooperating in order to get fit together. 
And the Chinese government has now — I work with the Chinese government now — has taken this up. 
We're also looking at survival of the fittest, not in just competition terms in our modern context of destroy the other or beat them to the ground, but really to fit together and build niches and have growth that is good. 
Now most environmentalists don't say growth is good, because, in our lexicon, asphalt is two words: assigning blame. 
But if we look at asphalt as our growth, then we realize that all we're doing is destroying the planetary's fundamental underlying operating system. 
So when we see E equals mc squared come along, from a poet's perspective, we see energy as physics, chemistry as mass, and all of a sudden, you get this biology. 
And we have plenty of energy, so we'll solve that problem, but the biology problem's tricky, because as we put through all these toxic materials that we disgorge, we will never be able to recover that. 
And as Francis Crick pointed out, nine years after discovering DNA with Mr. Watson, that life itself has to have growth as a precondition — it has to have free energy, sunlight and it needs to be an open system of chemicals. 
So we're asking for human artifice to become a living thing, and we want growth, we want free energy from sunlight and we want an open metabolism for chemicals. 
Then, the question becomes not growth or no growth, but what do you want to grow? 
So instead of just growing destruction, we want to grow the things that we might enjoy, and someday the FDA will allow us to make French cheese. 
So therefore, we have these two metabolisms, and I worked with a German chemist, Michael Braungart, and we've identified the two fundamental metabolisms. 
The biological one I'm sure you understand, but also the technical one, where we take materials and put them into closed cycles. 
We call them biological nutrition and technical nutrition. 
Technical nutrition will be in an order of magnitude of biological nutrition. 
Biological nutrition can supply about 500 million humans, which means that if we all wore Birkenstocks and cotton, the world would run out of cork and dry up. 
So we need materials in closed cycles, but we need to analyze them down to the parts per million for cancer, birth defects, mutagenic effects, disruption of our immune systems, biodegradation, persistence, heavy metal content, knowledge of how we're making them and their production and so on. 
Our first product was a textile where we analyzed 8,000 chemicals in the textile industry. 
Using those intellectual filters, we eliminated [7,962.] We were left with 38 chemicals. 
We have since databased the 4000 most commonly used chemicals in human manufacturing, and we're releasing this database into the public in six weeks. 
So designers all over the world can analyze their products down to the parts per million for human and ecological health. 
(Applause) We've developed a protocol so that companies can send these same messages all the way through their supply chains, because when we asked most companies we work with — about a trillion dollars — and say, "" Where does your stuff come from? "" They say, "" Suppliers. "" "And where does it go?" 
"Customers." 
So we need some help there. 
So the biological nutrients, the first fabrics — the water coming out was clean enough to drink. 
Technical nutrients — this is for Shaw Carpet, infinitely reusable carpet. 
Here's nylon going back to caprolactam back to carpet. 
Biotechnical nutrients — the Model U for Ford Motor, a cradle to cradle car — concept car. 
Shoes for Nike, where the uppers are polyesters, infinitely recyclable, the bottoms are biodegradable soles. 
Wear your old shoes in, your new shoes out. 
There is no finish line. 
The idea here of the car is that some of the materials go back to the industry forever, some of the materials go back to soil — it's all solar-powered. 
Here's a building at Oberlin College we designed that makes more energy than it needs to operate and purifies its own water. 
Here's a building for The Gap, where the ancient grasses of San Bruno, California, are on the roof. 
And this is our project for Ford Motor Company. 
It's the revitalization of the River Rouge in Dearborn. 
This is obviously a color photograph. 
These are our tools. These are how we sold it to Ford. 
We saved Ford 35 million dollars doing it this way, day one, which is the equivalent of the Ford Taurus at a four percent margin of an order for 900 million dollars worth of cars. 
Here it is. It's the world's largest green roof, 10 and a half acres. 
This is the roof, saving money, and this is the first species to arrive here. These are killdeer. 
They showed up in five days. 
And we now have 350-pound auto workers learning bird songs on the Internet. 
We're developing now protocols for cities — that's the home of technical nutrients. 
The country — the home of biological. And putting them together. 
And so I will finish by showing you a new city we're designing for the Chinese government. 
We're doing 12 cities for China right now, based on cradle to cradle as templates. 
Our assignment is to develop protocols for the housing for 400 million people in 12 years. 
We did a mass energy balance — if they use brick, they will lose all their soil and burn all their coal. 
They'll have cities with no energy and no food. 
We signed a Memorandum of Understanding — here's Madam Deng Nan, Deng Xiaoping's daughter — for China to adopt cradle to cradle. 
Because if they toxify themselves, being the lowest-cost producer, send it to the lowest-cost distribution — Wal-Mart — and then we send them all our money, what we'll discover is that we have what, effectively, when I was a student, was called mutually assured destruction. 
Now we do it by molecule. These are our cities. 
We're building a new city next to this city; look at that landscape. 
This is the site. 
We don't normally do green fields, but this one is about to be built, so they brought us in to intercede. 
This is their plan. 
It's a rubber stamp grid that they laid right on that landscape. 
And they brought us in and said, "" What would you do? "" This is what they would end up with, which is another color photograph. 
So this is the existing site, so this is what it looks like now, and here's our proposal. 
(Applause) So the way we approached this is we studied the hydrology very carefully. 
We studied the biota, the ancient biota, the current farming and the protocols. 
We studied the winds and the sun to make sure everybody in the city will have fresh air, fresh water and direct sunlight in every single apartment at some point during the day. 
We then take the parks and lay them out as ecological infrastructure. 
We lay out the building areas. 
We start to integrate commercial and mixed use so the people all have centers and places to be. 
The transportation is all very simple, everybody's within a five-minute walk of mobility. 
We have a 24-hour street, so that there's always a place that's alive. 
The waste systems all connect. 
If you flush a toilet, your feces will go to the sewage treatment plants, which are sold as assets, not liabilities. 
Because who wants the fertilizer factory that makes natural gas? 
The waters are all taken in to construct the wetlands for habitat restorations. 
And then it makes natural gas, which then goes back into the city to power the fuel for the cooking for the city. 
So this is — these are fertilizer gas plants. 
And then the compost is all taken back to the roofs of the city, where we've got farming, because what we've done is lifted up the city, the landscape, into the air to — to restore the native landscape on the roofs of the buildings. 
The solar power of all the factory centers and all the industrial zones with their light roofs powers the city. 
And this is the concept for the top of the city. 
We've lifted the earth up onto the roofs. 
The farmers have little bridges to get from one roof to the next. 
We inhabit the city with work / live space on all the ground floors. 
And so this is the existing city, and this is the new city. 
(Applause) 

This is the Qalandar community. They are a marginalized Islamic community who live across India, and have been in India since the 13th century. 
We went about getting evidence of what was going on. 
And we went in, pretending to be buyers. 
And we found this right in this very state, in Karnataka. 
And the bear cubs were being harvested from across the country and being sold and traded. 
These were being sold for about 2,000 dollars each, and they are used for bear paw soup, and also being trained, later on, to become dancing bears like the one you just saw. 
Sadly, the family of Qalandars depended on this bear. 
They already have four children beside them. You can see them. 
And the economy of the family and their livelihood depended on those animals. 
So, we had to deal with it in a very practical and sustainable manner. 
These guys could go to jail for up to seven years if they were caught by authorities. 
And what they were doing to the bears was really appalling. 
The mother bears are usually killed. 
The cubs, which are taken, are separated. 
Their teeth are basically bashed out with a metal rod. 
And they use a red hot iron needle to make a hole through the muzzle. 
So, this is Bitu Qalandar, who was our first experiment. 
And we were so unsure that this would work. 
We weren't sure at all. And we managed to convince him. 
Then there was no looking back at all for us. 
We set up carpet-weaving units, vocational training for the women. 
The women were just not allowed to come out of the community and work with mainstream society. So, we were able to address that. 
This is what happens to the bears when they come in. 
So, basically in 2002 there were 1,200 dancing bears. 
We rescued over 550 dancing bears. 
We've been able to ensure better futures for the people and the bears. 
The big news that I want to announce today is that next month we will be bringing in the very last bear of India, into our rescue center. 
(Applause) And India will no longer have to witness this cruel barbaric practice which has been here for centuries. 
And the people can hold their heads up high. 
And the Qalandar people will rise above all this cruel barbaric past that they've lived all their lives. 
And the beautiful bears can of course live in the wild again. 
And there will be no more removing of these bears. 
And the children, both humans and bear cubs can live peacefully. Thank you. 

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

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

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

So sometimes I get invited to give weird talks. 
I got invited to speak to the people who dress up in big stuffed animal costumes to perform at sporting events. 
Unfortunately I couldn't go. 
But it got me thinking about the fact that these guys, at least most of them, know what it is that they do for a living. 
What they do is they dress up as stuffed animals and entertain people at sporting events. 
Shortly after that I got invited to speak at the convention of the people who make balloon animals. 
And again, I couldn't go. But it's a fascinating group. They make balloon animals. 
There is a big schism between the ones who make gospel animals and porn animals, but — (Laughter) they do a lot of really cool stuff with balloons. 
Sometimes they get in trouble, but not often. 
And the other thing about these guys is, they also know what they do for a living. 
They make balloon animals. 
But what do we do for a living? 
What exactly to the people watching this do every day? 
And I want to argue that what we do is we try to change everything. 
That we try to find a piece of the status quo — something that bothers us, something that needs to be improved, something that is itching to be changed — and we change it. 
We try to make big, permanent, important change. 
But we don't think about it that way. 
And we haven't spent a lot of time talking about what that process is like. 
And I've been studying it for a couple years. 
And I want to share a couple stories with you today. 
First, about a guy named Nathan Winograd. 
Nathan was the number two person at the San Francisco SPCA. 
And what you may not know about the history of the SPCA is, it was founded to kill dogs and cats. 
Cities gave them a charter to get rid of the stray animals on the street and destroy them. 
In a typical year four million dogs and cats were killed, most of them within 24 hours of being scooped off of the street. 
Nathan and his boss saw this, and they could not tolerate it. 
So they set out to make San Francisco a no-kill city: create an entire city where every dog and cat, unless it was ill or dangerous, would be adopted, not killed. 
And everyone said it was impossible. 
Nathan and his boss went to the city council to get a change in the ordinance. 
And people from SPCAs and humane shelters around the country flew to San Francisco to testify against them — to say it would hurt the movement and it was inhumane. 
They persisted. And Nathan went directly to the community. 
He connected with people who cared about this: nonprofessionals, people with passion. 
And within just a couple years, San Francisco became the first no-kill city, running no deficit, completely supported by the community. 
Nathan left and went to Tompkins County, New York — a place as different from San Francisco as you can be and still be in the United States. And he did it again. 
He went from being a glorified dogcatcher to completely transforming the community. 
And then he went to North Carolina and did it again. 
And he went to Reno and he did it again. 
And when I think about what Nathan did, and when I think about what people here do, I think about ideas. 
And I think about the idea that creating an idea, spreading an idea has a lot behind it. 
I don't know if you've ever been to a Jewish wedding, but what they do is, they take a light bulb and they smash it. 
Now there is a bunch of reasons for that, and stories about it. 
But one reason is because it indicates a change, from before to after. 
It is a moment in time. 
And I want to argue that we are living through and are right at the key moment of a change in the way ideas are created and spread and implemented. 
We started with the factory idea: that you could change the whole world if you had an efficient factory that could churn out change. 
We then went to the TV idea, that said if you had a big enough mouthpiece, if you could get on TV enough times, if you could buy enough ads, you could win. 
And now we're in this new model of leadership, where the way we make change is not by using money or power to lever a system, but by leading. 
So let me tell you about the three cycles. The first one is the factory cycle. 
Henry Ford comes up with a really cool idea. 
It enables him to hire men who used to get paid 50 cents a day and pay them five dollars a day. 
Because he's got an efficient enough factory. 
Well with that sort of advantage you can churn out a lot of cars. 
You can make a lot of change. You can get roads built. 
You can change the fabric of an entire country. 
That the essence of what you're doing is you need ever-cheaper labor, and ever-faster machines. 
And the problem we've run into is, we're running out of both. 
Ever-cheaper labor and ever-faster machines. 
(Laughter) So we shift gears for a minute, and say, "" I know: television; advertising. Push push. 
Take a good idea and push it on the world. 
I have a better mousetrap. 
And if I can just get enough money to tell enough people, I'll sell enough. "" And you can build an entire industry on that. 
If necessary you can put babies in your ads. 
If necessary you can use babies to sell other stuff. 
And if babies don't work, you can use doctors. 
But be careful. 
Because you don't want to get an unfortunate juxtaposition, where you're talking about one thing instead of the other. 
(Laughter) This model requires you to act like the king, like the person in the front of the room throwing things to the peons in the back. 
That you are in charge, and you're going to tell people what to do next. 
The quick little diagram of it is, you're up here, and you are pushing it out to the world. 
This method — mass marketing — requires average ideas, because you're going to the masses, and plenty of ads. 
What we've done as spammers is tried to hypnotize everyone into buying our idea, hypnotize everyone into donating to our cause, hypnotize everyone into voting for our candidate. 
And, unfortunately, it doesn't work so well anymore either. 
(Laughter) But there is good news around the corner — really good news. 
I call it the idea of tribes. 
What tribes are, is a very simple concept that goes back 50,000 years. 
It's about leading and connecting people and ideas. 
And it's something that people have wanted forever. 
Lots of people are used to having a spiritual tribe, or a church tribe, having a work tribe, having a community tribe. 
But now, thanks to the internet, thanks to the explosion of mass media, thanks to a lot of other things that are bubbling through our society around the world, tribes are everywhere. 
The Internet was supposed to homogenize everyone by connecting us all. 
Instead what it's allowed is silos of interest. 
So you've got the red-hat ladies over here. 
You've got the red-hat triathletes over there. 
You've got the organized armies over here. 
You've got the disorganized rebels over here. 
You've got people in white hats making food. 
And people in white hats sailing boats. 
The point is that you can find Ukrainian folk dancers and connect with them, because you want to be connected. 
That people on the fringes can find each other, connect and go somewhere. 
Every town that has a volunteer fire department understands this way of thinking. 
(Laughter) Now it turns out this is a legitimate non-photoshopped photo. 
People I know who are firemen told me that this is not uncommon. 
And that what firemen do to train sometimes is they take a house that is going to be torn down, and they burn it down instead, and practice putting it out. 
But they always stop and take a picture. 
(Laughter) You know the pirate tribe is a fascinating one. 
They've got their own flag. They've got the eye patches. 
You can tell when you're running into someone in a tribe. 
And it turns out that it's tribes — not money, not factories — that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. 
Not because you force them to do something against their will, but because they wanted to connect. 
That what we do for a living now, all of us, I think, is find something worth changing, and then assemble tribes that assemble tribes that spread the idea and spread the idea. 
And it becomes something far bigger than ourselves, it becomes a movement. 
So when Al Gore set out to change the world again, he didn't do it by himself. 
And he didn't do it by buying a lot of ads. 
He did it by creating a movement. 
Thousands of people around the country who could give his presentation for him, because he can't be in 100 or 200 or 500 cities in each night. 
You don't need everyone. 
What Kevin Kelley has taught us is you just need, I don't know, a thousand true fans — a thousand people who care enough that they will get you the next round and the next round and the next round. 
And that means that the idea you create, the product you create, the movement you create isn't for everyone, it's not a mass thing. That's not what this is about. 
What it's about instead is finding the true believers. 
It's easy to look at what I've said so far, and say, "" Wait a minute, I don't have what it takes to be that kind of leader. "" So here are two leaders. They don't have a lot in common. 
They're about the same age. But that's about it. 
What they did, though, is each in their own way, created a different way of navigating your way through technology. 
So some people will go out and get people to be on one team. 
And some people will get people to be on the other team. 
It also informs the decisions you make when you make products or services. 
You know, this is one of my favorite devices. 
But what a shame that it's not organized to help authors create movements. 
What would happen if, when you're using your Kindle, you could see the comments and quotes and notes from all the other people reading the same book as you in that moment. 
Or from your book group. Or from your friends, or from the circle you want. 
What would happen if authors, or people with ideas could use version two, which comes out on Monday, and use it to organize people who want to talk about something. 
Now there is a million things I could share with you about the mechanics here. 
But let me just try a couple. 
The Beatles did not invent teenagers. 
They merely decided to lead them. 
That most movements, most leadership that we're doing is about finding a group that's disconnected but already has a yearning — not persuading people to want something they don't have yet. 
When Diane Hatz worked on "" The Meatrix, "" her video that spread all across the internet about the way farm animals are treated, she didn't invent the idea of being a vegan. 
She didn't invent the idea of caring about this issue. 
But she helped organize people, and helped turn it into a movement. 
Hugo Chavez did not invent the disaffected middle and lower class of Venezuela. He merely led them. 
Bob Marley did not invent Rastafarians. 
He just stepped up and said, "" Follow me. "" Derek Sivers invented CD Baby, which allowed independent musicians to have a place to sell their music without selling out to the man — to have place to take the mission they already wanted to go to, and connect with each other. 
What all these people have in common is that they are heretics. 
That heretics look at the status quo and say, "" This will not stand. I can't abide this status quo. 
I am willing to stand up and be counted and move things forward. 
I see what the status quo is; I don't like it. "" That instead of looking at all the little rules and following each one of them, that instead of being what I call a sheepwalker — somebody who's half asleep, following instructions, keeping their head down, fitting in — every once in a while someone stands up and says, "" Not me. "" Someone stands up and says, "" This one is important. 
We need to organize around it. "" And not everyone will. But you don't need everyone. 
You just need a few people — (Laughter) — who will look at the rules, realize they make no sense, and realize how much they want to be connected. 
So Tony Hsieh does not run a shoe store. 
Zappos isn't a shoe store. 
Zappos is the one, the only, the best-there-ever-was place for people who are into shoes to find each other, to talk about their passion, to connect with people who care more about customer service than making a nickel tomorrow. 
It can be something as prosaic as shoes, and something as complicated as overthrowing a government. 
It's exactly the same behavior though. 
What it requires, as Geraldine Carter has discovered, is to be able to say, "" I can't do this by myself. 
But if I can get other people to join my Climb and Ride, then together we can get something that we all want. 
We're just waiting for someone to lead us. "" Michelle Kaufman has pioneered new ways of thinking about environmental architecture. 
She doesn't do it by quietly building one house at a time. 
She does it by telling a story to people who want to hear it. 
By connecting a tribe of people who are desperate to be connected to each other. 
By leading a movement and making change. 
And around and around and around it goes. 
So three questions I'd offer you. 
The first one is, who exactly are you upsetting? 
Because if you're not upsetting anyone, you're not changing the status quo. 
The second question is, who are you connecting? 
Because for a lot of people, that's what they're in it for: the connections that are being made, one to the other. 
And the third one is, who are you leading? 
Because focusing on that part of it — not the mechanics of what you're building, but the who, and the leading part — is where change comes. 
So Blake, at Tom's Shoes, had a very simple idea. 
"" What would happen if every time someone bought a pair of these shoes I gave exactly the same pair to someone who doesn't even own a pair of shoes? "" This is not the story of how you get shelf space at Neiman Marcus. 
It's a story of a product that tells a story. 
And as you walk around with this remarkable pair of shoes and someone says, "" What are those? "" You get to tell the story on Blake's behalf, on behalf of the people who got the shoes. 
And suddenly it's not one pair of shoes or 100 pairs of shoes. 
It's tens of thousands of pairs of shoes. 
My friend Red Maxwell has spent the last 10 years fighting against juvenile diabetes. 
Not fighting the organization that's fighting it — fighting with them, leading them, connecting them, challenging the status quo because it's important to him. 
And the people he surrounds himself with need the connection. 
They need the leadership. It makes a difference. 
You don't need permission from people to lead them. 
But in case you do, here it is: they're waiting, we're waiting for you to show us where to go next. 
So here is what leaders have in common. The first thing is, they challenge the status quo. 
They challenge what's currently there. 
The second thing is, they build a culture. 
A secret language, a seven-second handshake, a way of knowing that you're in or out. 
They have curiosity. Curiosity about people in the tribe, curiosity about outsiders. They're asking questions. 
They connect people to one another. 
Do you know what people want more than anything? 
They want to be missed. 
They want to be missed the day they don't show up. 
They want to be missed when they're gone. 
And tribe leaders can do that. 
It's fascinating, because all tribe leaders have charisma, but you don't need charisma to become a leader. 
Being a leader gives you charisma. 
If you look and study the leaders who have succeeded, that's where charisma comes from — from the leading. 
Finally, they commit. 
They commit to the cause. They commit to the tribe. 
They commit to the people who are there. 
So I'd like you to do something for me. 
And I hope you'll think about it before you reject it out-of-hand. 
What I want you to do, it only takes 24 hours, is: create a movement. 
Something that matters. Start. Do it. We need it. 
Thank you very much. I appreciate it. 
(Applause) 

So I was privileged to train in transplantation under two great surgical pioneers: Thomas Starzl, who performed the world's first successful liver transplant in 1967, and Sir Roy Calne, who performed the first liver transplant in the U.K. 
in the following year. 
I returned to Singapore and, in 1990, performed Asia's first successful cadaveric liver transplant procedure, but against all odds. 
Now when I look back, the transplant was actually the easiest part. 
Next, raising the money to fund the procedure. 
But perhaps the most challenging part was to convince the regulators — a matter which was debated in the parliament — that a young female surgeon be allowed the opportunity to pioneer for her country. 
But 20 years on, my patient, Surinder, is Asia's longest surviving cadaveric liver transplant to date. 
(Applause) And perhaps more important, I am the proud godmother to her 14 year-old son. (Applause) 
But not all patients on the transplant wait list are so fortunate. 
The truth is, there are just simply not enough donor organs to go around. 
As the demand for donor organs continues to rise, in large part due to the aging population, the supply has remained relatively constant. 
In the United States alone, 100,000 men, women and children are on the waiting list for donor organs, and more than a dozen die each day because of a lack of donor organs. 
The transplant community has actively campaigned in organ donation. 
And the gift of life has been extended from brain-dead donors to living, related donors — relatives who might donate an organ or a part of an organ, like a split liver graft, to a relative or loved one. 
But as there was still a dire shortage of donor organs, the gift of life was then extended from living, related donors to now living, unrelated donors. 
And this then has given rise to unprecedented and unexpected moral controversy. 
How can one distinguish a donation that is voluntary and altruistic from one that is forced or coerced from, for example, a submissive spouse, an in-law, a servant, a slave, an employee? 
Where and how can we draw the line? 
In my part of the world, too many people live below the poverty line. 
And in some areas, the commercial gifting of an organ in exchange for monetary reward has led to a flourishing trade in living, unrelated donors. 
Shortly after I performed the first liver transplant, I received my next assignment, and that was to go to the prisons to harvest organs from executed prisoners. 
I was also pregnant at the time. 
Pregnancies are meant to be happy and fulfilling moments in any woman's life. 
But my joyful period was marred by solemn and morbid thoughts — thoughts of walking through the prison's high-security death row, as this was the only route to take me to the makeshift operating room. 
And at each time, I would feel the chilling stares of condemned prisoners' eyes follow me. 
And for two years, I struggled with the dilemma of waking up at 4: 30 am on a Friday morning, driving to the prison, getting down, gloved and scrubbed, ready to receive the body of an executed prisoner, remove the organs and then transport these organs to the recipient hospital and then graft the gift of life to a recipient the same afternoon. 
No doubt, I was informed, the consent had been obtained. 
But, in my life, the one fulfilling skill that I had was now invoking feelings of conflict — conflict ranging from extreme sorrow and doubt at dawn to celebratory joy at engrafting the gift of life at dusk. 
In my team, the lives of one or two of my colleagues were tainted by this experience. 
Some of us may have been sublimated, but really none of us remained the same. 
I was troubled that the retrieval of organs from executed prisoners was at least as morally controversial as the harvesting of stem cells from human embryos. 
And in my mind, I realized as a surgical pioneer that the purpose of my position of influence was surely to speak up for those who have no influence. 
It made me wonder if there could be a better way — a way to circumvent death and yet deliver the gift of life that might exponentially impact millions of patients worldwide. 
Now just about that time, the practice of surgery evolved from big to small, from wide open incisions to keyhole procedures, tiny incisions. 
And in transplantation, concepts shifted from whole organs to cells. 
In 1988, at the University of Minnesota, I participated in a small series of whole organ pancreas transplants. 
I witnessed the technical difficulty. 
And this inspired in my mind a shift from transplanting whole organs to perhaps transplanting cells. 
I thought to myself, why not take the individual cells out of the pancreas — the cells that secrete insulin to cure diabetes — and transplant these cells? — technically a much simpler procedure than having to grapple with the complexities of transplanting a whole organ. 
And at that time, stem cell research had gained momentum, following the isolation of the world's first human embryonic stem cells in the 1990s. 
The observation that stem cells, as master cells, could give rise to a whole variety of different cell types — heart cells, liver cells, pancreatic islet cells — captured the attention of the media and the imagination of the public. 
I too was fascinated by this new and disruptive cell technology, and this inspired a shift in my mindset, from transplanting whole organs to transplanting cells. 
And I focused my research on stem cells as a possible source for cell transplants. 
Today we realize that there are many different types of stem cells. 
Embryonic stem cells have occupied center stage, chiefly because of their pluripotency — that is their ease in differentiating into a variety of different cell types. 
But the moral controversy surrounding embryonic stem cells — the fact that these cells are derived from five-day old human embryos — has encouraged research into other types of stem cells. 
Now to the ridicule of my colleagues, I inspired my lab to focus on what I thought was the most non-controversial source of stem cells, adipose tissue, or fat, yes fat — nowadays available in abundant supply — you and I, I think, would be very happy to get rid of anyway. 
Fat-derived stem cells are adult stem cells. 
And adult stem cells are found in you and me — in our blood, in our bone marrow, in our fat, our skin and other organs. 
And as it turns out, fat is one of the best sources of adult stem cells. 
But adult stem cells are not embryonic stem cells. 
And here is the limitation: adult stem cells are mature cells, and, like mature human beings, these cells are more restricted in their thought and more restricted in their behavior and are unable to give rise to the wide variety of specialized cell types, as embryonic stem cells [can]. 
But in 2007, two remarkable individuals, Shinya Yamanaka of Japan and Jamie Thomson of the United States, made an astounding discovery. 
They discovered that adult cells, taken from you and me, could be reprogrammed back into embryonic-like cells, which they termed IPS cells, or induced pluripotent stem cells. 
And so guess what, scientists around the world and in the labs are racing to convert aging adult cells — aging adult cells from you and me — they are racing to reprogram these cells back into more useful IPS cells. 
And in our lab, we are focused on taking fat and reprogramming mounds of fat into fountains of youthful cells — cells that we may use to then form other, more specialized, cells, which one day may be used as cell transplants. 
If this research is successful, it may then reduce the need to research and sacrifice human embryos. 
Indeed, there is a lot of hype, but also hope that the promise of stem cells will one day provide cures for a whole range of conditions. 
Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, spinal cord injury, muscular dystrophy, retinal eye diseases — are any of these conditions relevant, personally, to you? 
In May 2006, something horrible happened to me. 
I was about to start a robotic operation, but stepping out of the elevator into the bright and glaring lights of the operating room, I realized that my left visual field was fast collapsing into darkness. 
Earlier that week, I had taken a rather hard knock during late spring skiing — yes, I fell. 
And I started to see floaters and stars, which I casually dismissed as too much high-altitude sun exposure. 
What happened to me might have been catastrophic, if not for the fact that I was in reach of good surgical access. 
And I had my vision restored, but not before a prolonged period of convalescence — three months — in a head down position. 
This experience taught me to empathize more with my patients, and especially those with retinal diseases. 
37 million people worldwide are blind, and 127 million more suffer from impaired vision. 
Stem cell-derived retinal transplants, now in a research phase, may one day restore vision, or part vision, to millions of patients with retinal diseases worldwide. 
Indeed, we live in both challenging as well as exciting times. 
As the world population ages, scientists are racing to discover new ways to enhance the power of the body to heal itself through stem cells. 
It is a fact that when our organs or tissues are injured, our bone marrow releases stem cells into our circulation. 
And these stem cells then float in the bloodstream and hone in to damaged organs to release growth factors to repair the damaged tissue. 
Stem cells may be used as building blocks to repair damaged scaffolds within our body, or to provide new liver cells to repair damaged liver. 
As we speak, there are 117 or so clinical trials researching the use of stem cells for liver diseases. 
What lies ahead? 
Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. 
1.1 million Americans suffer heart attacks yearly. 
4.8 million suffer cardiac failure. 
Stem cells may be used to deliver growth factors to repair damaged heart muscle or be differentiated into heart muscle cells to restore heart function. 
There are 170 clinical trials investigating the role of stem cells in heart disease. 
While still in a research phase, stem cells may one day herald a quantum leap in the field of cardiology. 
Stem cells provide hope for new beginnings — small, incremental steps, cells rather than organs, repair rather than replacement. 
Stem cell therapies may one day reduce the need for donor organs. 
Powerful new technologies always present enigmas. 
As we speak, the world's first human embryonic stem cell trial for spinal cord injury is currently underway following the USFDA approval. 
And in the U.K., neural stem cells to treat stroke are being investigated in a phase one trial. 
The research success that we celebrate today has been made possible by the curiosity and contribution and commitment of individual scientists and medical pioneers. 
Each one has his story. 
My story has been about my journey from organs to cells — a journey through controversy, inspired by hope — hope that, as we age, you and I may one day celebrate longevity with an improved quality of life. 
Thank you. 

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

So, I was in the hospital for a long time. 
And a few years after I left, I went back, and the chairman of the burn department was very excited to see me — said, "" Dan, I have a fantastic new treatment for you. "" I was very excited. I walked with him to his office. 
And he explained to me that, when I shave, I have little black dots on the left side of my face where the hair is, but on the right side of my face I was badly burned so I have no hair, and this creates lack of symmetry. 
And what's the brilliant idea he had? 
He was going to tattoo little black dots on the right side of my face and make me look very symmetric. 
It sounded interesting. He asked me to go and shave. 
Let me tell you, this was a strange way to shave, because I thought about it and I realized that the way I was shaving then would be the way I would shave for the rest of my life — because I had to keep the width the same. 
When I got back to his office, I wasn't really sure. 
I said, "" Can I see some evidence for this? "" So he showed me some pictures of little cheeks with little black dots — not very informative. 
I said, "" What happens when I grow older and my hair becomes white? 
What would happen then? "" "" Oh, don't worry about it, "" he said. 
"We have lasers; we can whiten it out." 
But I was still concerned, so I said, "" You know what, I'm not going to do it. "" And then came one of the biggest guilt trips of my life. 
This is coming from a Jewish guy, all right, so that means a lot. 
(Laughter) And he said, "" Dan, what's wrong with you? 
Do you enjoy looking non-symmetric? 
Do you have some kind of perverted pleasure from this? 
Do women feel pity for you and have sex with you more frequently? "" None of those happened. 
And this was very surprising to me, because I've gone through many treatments — there were many treatments I decided not to do — and I never got this guilt trip to this extent. 
But I decided not to have this treatment. 
And I went to his deputy and asked him, "" What was going on? 
Where was this guilt trip coming from? "" And he explained that they have done this procedure on two patients already, and they need the third patient for a paper they were writing. 
(Laughter) Now you probably think that this guy's a schmuck. 
Right, that's what he seems like. 
But let me give you a different perspective on the same story. 
A few years ago, I was running some of my own experiments in the lab. 
And when we run experiments, we usually hope that one group will behave differently than another. 
So we had one group that I hoped their performance would be very high, another group that I thought their performance would be very low, and when I got the results, that's what we got — I was very happy — aside from one person. 
There was one person in the group that was supposed to have very high performance that was actually performing terribly. 
And he pulled the whole mean down, destroying my statistical significance of the test. 
So I looked carefully at this guy. 
He was 20-some years older than anybody else in the sample. 
And I remembered that the old and drunken guy came one day to the lab wanting to make some easy cash and this was the guy. 
"" Fantastic! "" I thought. "" Let's throw him out. 
Who would ever include a drunken guy in a sample? "" But a couple of days later, we thought about it with my students, and we said, "" What would have happened if this drunken guy was not in that condition? 
What would have happened if he was in the other group? 
Would we have thrown him out then? "" We probably wouldn't have looked at the data at all, and if we did look at the data, we'd probably have said, "" Fantastic! What a smart guy who is performing this low, "" because he would have pulled the mean of the group lower, giving us even stronger statistical results than we could. 
So we decided not to throw the guy out and to rerun the experiment. 
But you know, these stories, and lots of other experiments that we've done on conflicts of interest, basically kind of bring two points to the foreground for me. 
The first one is that in life we encounter many people who, in some way or another, try to tattoo our faces. 
They just have the incentives that get them to be blinded to reality and give us advice that is inherently biased. 
And I'm sure that it's something that we all recognize, and we see that it happens. 
Maybe we don't recognize it every time, but we understand that it happens. 
The most difficult thing, of course, is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. 
And that's a much, much more difficult lesson to take into account. 
Because we don't see how conflicts of interest work on us. 
When I was doing these experiments, in my mind, I was helping science. 
I was eliminating the data to get the true pattern of the data to shine through. 
I wasn't doing something bad. 
In my mind, I was actually a knight trying to help science move along. 
But this was not the case. 
I was actually interfering with the process with lots of good intentions. 
And I think the real challenge is to figure out where are the cases in our lives where conflicts of interest work on us, and try not to trust our own intuition to overcome it, but to try to do things that prevent us from falling prey to these behaviors, because we can create lots of undesirable circumstances. 
I do want to leave you with one positive thought. 
I mean, this is all very depressing, right — people have conflicts of interest, we don't see it, and so on. 
The positive perspective, I think, of all of this is that, if we do understand when we go wrong, if we understand the deep mechanisms of why we fail and where we fail, we can actually hope to fix things. 
And that, I think, is the hope. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

You all know the truth of what I'm going to say. 
I think the intuition that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive has been around since before the French Revolution. 
What's changed is we now can look at the evidence, we can compare societies, more and less equal societies, and see what inequality does. 
I'm going to take you through that data and then explain why the links I'm going to be showing you exist. 
But first, see what a miserable lot we are. 
(Laughter) I want to start though with a paradox. 
This shows you life expectancy against gross national income — how rich countries are on average. 
And you see the countries on the right, like Norway and the USA, are twice as rich as Israel, Greece, Portugal on the left. 
And it makes no difference to their life expectancy at all. 
There's no suggestion of a relationship there. 
But if we look within our societies, there are extraordinary social gradients in health running right across society. 
This, again, is life expectancy. 
These are small areas of England and Wales — the poorest on the right, the richest on the left. 
A lot of difference between the poor and the rest of us. 
Even the people just below the top have less good health than the people at the top. 
So income means something very important within our societies, and nothing between them. 
The explanation of that paradox is that, within our societies, we're looking at relative income or social position, social status — where we are in relation to each other and the size of the gaps between us. 
And as soon as you've got that idea, you should immediately wonder: what happens if we widen the differences, or compress them, make the income differences bigger or smaller? 
And that's what I'm going to show you. 
I'm not using any hypothetical data. 
I'm taking data from the U.N. — it's the same as the World Bank has — on the scale of income differences in these rich developed market democracies. 
The measure we've used, because it's easy to understand and you can download it, is how much richer the top 20 percent than the bottom 20 percent in each country. 
And you see in the more equal countries on the left — Japan, Finland, Norway, Sweden — the top 20 percent are about three and a half, four times as rich as the bottom 20 percent. 
But on the more unequal end — U.K., Portugal, USA, Singapore — the differences are twice as big. 
On that measure, we are twice as unequal as some of the other successful market democracies. 
Now I'm going to show you what that does to our societies. 
We collected data on problems with social gradients, the kind of problems that are more common at the bottom of the social ladder. 
Internationally comparable data on life expectancy, on kids' maths and literacy scores, on infant mortality rates, homicide rates, proportion of the population in prison, teenage birthrates, levels of trust, obesity, mental illness — which in standard diagnostic classification includes drug and alcohol addiction — and social mobility. 
We put them all in one index. 
They're all weighted equally. 
Where a country is is a sort of average score on these things. 
And there, you see it in relation to the measure of inequality I've just shown you, which I shall use over and over again in the data. 
The more unequal countries are doing worse on all these kinds of social problems. 
It's an extraordinarily close correlation. 
But if you look at that same index of health and social problems in relation to GNP per capita, gross national income, there's nothing there, no correlation anymore. 
We were a little bit worried that people might think we'd been choosing problems to suit our argument and just manufactured this evidence, so we also did a paper in the British Medical Journal on the UNICEF index of child well-being. 
It has 40 different components put together by other people. 
It contains whether kids can talk to their parents, whether they have books at home, what immunization rates are like, whether there's bullying at school. 
Everything goes into it. 
Here it is in relation to that same measure of inequality. 
Kids do worse in the more unequal societies. 
Highly significant relationship. 
But once again, if you look at that measure of child well-being, in relation to national income per person, there's no relationship, no suggestion of a relationship. 
What all the data I've shown you so far says is the same thing. 
The average well-being of our societies is not dependent any longer on national income and economic growth. 
That's very important in poorer countries, but not in the rich developed world. 
But the differences between us and where we are in relation to each other now matter very much. 
I'm going to show you some of the separate bits of our index. 
Here, for instance, is trust. 
It's simply the proportion of the population who agree most people can be trusted. 
It comes from the World Values Survey. 
You see, at the more unequal end, it's about 15 percent of the population who feel they can trust others. 
But in the more equal societies, it rises to 60 or 65 percent. 
And if you look at measures of involvement in community life or social capital, very similar relationships closely related to inequality. 
I may say, we did all this work twice. 
We did it first on these rich, developed countries, and then as a separate test bed, we repeated it all on the 50 American states — asking just the same question: do the more unequal states do worse on all these kinds of measures? 
So here is trust from a general social survey of the federal government related to inequality. 
Very similar scatter over a similar range of levels of trust. 
Same thing is going on. 
Basically we found that almost anything that's related to trust internationally is related to trust amongst the 50 states in that separate test bed. 
We're not just talking about a fluke. 
This is mental illness. 
WHO put together figures using the same diagnostic interviews on random samples of the population to allow us to compare rates of mental illness in each society. 
This is the percent of the population with any mental illness in the preceding year. 
And it goes from about eight percent up to three times that — whole societies with three times the level of mental illness of others. 
And again, closely related to inequality. 
This is violence. 
These red dots are American states, and the blue triangles are Canadian provinces. 
But look at the scale of the differences. 
It goes from 15 homicides per million up to 150. 
This is the proportion of the population in prison. 
There's a about a tenfold difference there, log scale up the side. 
But it goes from about 40 to 400 people in prison. 
That relationship is not mainly driven by more crime. 
In some places, that's part of it. 
But most of it is about more punitive sentencing, harsher sentencing. 
And the more unequal societies are more likely also to retain the death penalty. 
Here we have children dropping out of high school. 
Again, quite big differences. 
Extraordinarily damaging, if you're talking about using the talents of the population. 
This is social mobility. 
It's actually a measure of mobility based on income. 
Basically, it's asking: do rich fathers have rich sons and poor fathers have poor sons, or is there no relationship between the two? 
And at the more unequal end, fathers' income is much more important — in the U.K., USA. 
And in Scandinavian countries, fathers' income is much less important. 
There's more social mobility. 
And as we like to say — and I know there are a lot of Americans in the audience here — if Americans want to live the American dream, they should go to Denmark. 
(Laughter) (Applause) I've shown you just a few things in italics here. 
I could have shown a number of other problems. 
They're all problems that tend to be more common at the bottom of the social gradient. 
But there are endless problems with social gradients that are worse in more unequal countries — not just a little bit worse, but anything from twice as common to 10 times as common. 
Think of the expense, the human cost of that. 
I want to go back though to this graph that I showed you earlier where we put it all together to make two points. 
One is that, in graph after graph, we find the countries that do worse, whatever the outcome, seem to be the more unequal ones, and the ones that do well seem to be the Nordic countries and Japan. 
So what we're looking at is general social disfunction related to inequality. 
It's not just one or two things that go wrong, it's most things. 
The other really important point I want to make on this graph is that, if you look at the bottom, Sweden and Japan, they're very different countries in all sorts of ways. 
The position of women, how closely they keep to the nuclear family, are on opposite ends of the poles in terms of the rich developed world. 
But another really important difference is how they get their greater equality. 
Sweden has huge differences in earnings, and it narrows the gap through taxation, general welfare state, generous benefits and so on. 
Japan is rather different though. 
It starts off with much smaller differences in earnings before tax. 
It has lower taxes. 
It has a smaller welfare state. 
And in our analysis of the American states, we find rather the same contrast. 
There are some states that do well through redistribution, some states that do well because they have smaller income differences before tax. 
So we conclude that it doesn't much matter how you get your greater equality, as long as you get there somehow. 
I am not talking about perfect equality, I'm talking about what exists in rich developed market democracies. 
Another really surprising part of this picture is that it's not just the poor who are affected by inequality. 
There seems to be some truth in John Donne's "No man is an island." 
And in a number of studies, it's possible to compare how people do in more and less equal countries at each level in the social hierarchy. 
This is just one example. 
It's infant mortality. 
Some Swedes very kindly classified a lot of their infant deaths according to the British register of general socioeconomic classification. 
And so it's anachronistically a classification by fathers' occupations, so single parents go on their own. 
But then where it says "" low social class, "" that's unskilled manual occupations. 
It goes through towards the skilled manual occupations in the middle, then the junior non-manual, going up high to the professional occupations — doctors, lawyers, directors of larger companies. 
You see there that Sweden does better than Britain all the way across the social hierarchy. 
The biggest differences are at the bottom of society. 
But even at the top, there seems to be a small benefit to being in a more equal society. 
We show that on about five different sets of data covering educational outcomes and health in the United States and internationally. 
And that seems to be the general picture — that greater equality makes most difference at the bottom, but has some benefits even at the top. 
But I should say a few words about what's going on. 
I think I'm looking and talking about the psychosocial effects of inequality. 
More to do with feelings of superiority and inferiority, of being valued and devalued, respected and disrespected. 
And of course, those feelings of the status competition that comes out of that drives the consumerism in our society. 
It also leads to status insecurity. 
We worry more about how we're judged and seen by others, whether we're regarded as attractive, clever, all that kind of thing. 
The social-evaluative judgments increase, the fear of those social-evaluative judgments. 
Interestingly, some parallel work going on in social psychology: some people reviewed 208 different studies in which volunteers had been invited into a psychological laboratory and had their stress hormones, their responses to doing stressful tasks, measured. 
And in the review, what they were interested in seeing is what kind of stresses most reliably raise levels of cortisol, the central stress hormone. 
And the conclusion was it was tasks that included social-evaluative threat — threats to self-esteem or social status in which others can negatively judge your performance. 
Those kind of stresses have a very particular effect on the physiology of stress. 
Now we have been criticized. 
Of course, there are people who dislike this stuff and people who find it very surprising. 
I should tell you though that when people criticize us for picking and choosing data, we never pick and choose data. 
We have an absolute rule that if our data source has data for one of the countries we're looking at, it goes into the analysis. 
Our data source decides whether it's reliable data, we don't. 
Otherwise that would introduce bias. 
What about other countries? 
There are 200 studies of health in relation to income and equality in the academic peer-reviewed journals. 
This isn't confined to these countries here, hiding a very simple demonstration. 
The same countries, the same measure of inequality, one problem after another. 
Why don't we control for other factors? 
Well we've shown you that GNP per capita doesn't make any difference. 
And of course, others using more sophisticated methods in the literature have controlled for poverty and education and so on. 
What about causality? 
Correlation in itself doesn't prove causality. 
We spend a good bit of time. 
And indeed, people know the causal links quite well in some of these outcomes. 
The big change in our understanding of drivers of chronic health in the rich developed world is how important chronic stress from social sources is affecting the immune system, the cardiovascular system. 
Or for instance, the reason why violence becomes more common in more unequal societies is because people are sensitive to being looked down on. 
I should say that to deal with this, we've got to deal with the post-tax things and the pre-tax things. 
We've got to constrain income, the bonus culture incomes at the top. 
I think we must make our bosses accountable to their employees in any way we can. 
I think the take-home message though is that we can improve the real quality of human life by reducing the differences in incomes between us. 
Suddenly we have a handle on the psychosocial well-being of whole societies, and that's exciting. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

The story I want to tell you about, started to me, in 1996 when I was studying in England. 
One day, I was glancing through my bank statement (I didn't have much to look at) and I've noticed that in the upper corner there was a symbol, that I'm going to show you, saying that document had been made in plain language, for me to understand it. 
The idea interested me; I tried to find out what that was and I found out that there was a campaign for the simplification of language, which was the "" Plain English Campaign "". 
I thought it was a fabulous idea, for about one day or two, and I've never thought about it since. 
When I came back to Portugal, for good, I came across with several documents - for example, my work contract, the papers I had to sign to buy a house, the electricity bill — a series of documents that reminded me of that bank statement. 
Not because they were equally clear and simple, but because they were the exact opposite. 
Because I had to read everything twice or thrice, to begin to understand what was written there. 
And then, that little seed that had been sown in 1996, started germinating. 
And one day, I found myself entering through my boss' office and quitting my job to dedicate myself to this. 
And so, what did I find out, right off the start? 
I found out that it was a much more severe problem than I thought. 
It wasn't only about these documents being complex and annoying, it was the fact that Portuguese people's literacy — literacy is the hability to understand written documents — is extremely low. I'm going to show you a chart about Portuguese people's literacy [rate]. 
You know that about 10, 11% of people, in Portugal, don't know how to read nor write at all, yet. 
Over there are those who know, or say they know, how to read and write. So, what do we have? 
We have that group of red people in level 1, which is the lowest in literacy [rate]. 
They are persons who are able to join letters, but they can't, actually, understand. 
For example, if a person, from that red group, has to pick up the package leaflet of a medicinal product, to give a dose of medicine to his / her child, he / she can't, can't understand the information. 
50% of the Portuguese. Then we have 30% more, those yellow ones, over there, people who get by on the daily basis. 
That is, if they don't have to read anything too new or too different, they will manage. 
But, for example, if they work in a factory and a new machine arrives and they have to read the machine's manual to be able to work with it, they can't do it anymore. 
And there they go, 80% of the Portuguese people. 
Then we have a few more that can handle documents, as long as they are not too complex, and we have 5% of the population that can handle really complex documents. 
Now, just so you don't think this is normal, that over there is Sweden. 
While we have 20% of people with the literacy considered essential for a daily basis, Sweden has 75%. 
And looking at that, what did I realize? 
I realized we live in an apartheid of information. 
I realized that there's a small minority of people who has indeed access to information and can use it to their advantage and a huge majority that can't. 
And because they can't, they are excluded and they are impaired. 
Let me give you an example. 
That one is Mr. Domingos, my building's doorkeeper. Mr. Domingos started to read at the age of 27, so, he falls in that yellow group that we have seen a little while ago. 
From time to time, I'm arriving home and he says: "Miss Sandra!"; "Yes, Mr. Domingos." 
"" Here is a little letter. "" So, the deal is: when Mr. Domingos or someone in the family or in the neighbourhood receives something that they don't understand, they come to me and I help them to translate it. 
And so, that time he said to me like this: "Oh, Miss Sandra, I'm about to throw this away, but check it if this is important." 
It was very important. He had been waiting, for quite a while, to have a knee surgery and that was the letter of the famous surgery-bank checks. When a person is waiting for a long time, they get a bank check and with that bank check they can have that surgery in the private sector. 
It was almost thrown away into the garbage, Mr. Domingos' letter. 
In that same year, I've found out, only 20% of people had used these surgery-bank checks. 
The other 80%, I don't believe they had been cured while they were waiting. 
They most likely did the same as Mr. Domingos: "" Ah! What's this? I'm not understanding, it's going to the garbage "". 
They lost the opportunity to have the surgery they needed. 
What happens here? When people don't understand this has severe consequences — to the individual, but also for the country. 
When I don't understand which are my rights, the benefits I can have access to, I can't understand my duties and I'm not an active and participative citizen either. 
Now, maybe, you are sitting there and thinking: "Yeah, poor Mr. Domingos... Bad luck, isn't it? Me?! I'm in the green ones." 
"" I'm absolutely sure that I'm one of the green ones. I was selected to come to TED! Hum? "" (Laughter) So the deal is: I have here some texts to read to you and I'm going to see what color are you when I finish reading. 
So, come on, this is an automobile insurance contract. It says this: "" Unless contrary stipulation, the decease of the ensured person, the ensured capital is provided, in case of predeceasing of the beneficiary relatively to the ensured person, to the heirs of the last, in case of the simultaneous decease of the ensured person and of the beneficiary, to the heirs of the last "". Hum? (Laughter) Next, there's another one, from the medicines' package leaflet, that says the following: "Warning! It may also occur erythema, edema, vesiculation, keratolysis and urticaria." 
Hum? Are you clear? 
And this one is really good. This one, I signed a renting contract to the new office on Friday and I laughed my head off. 
So, it said: "" I, as a cosigner, assume the opportune payment of the rents, waiving the benefits of the division and prior foreclosure. "" When I heard "" opportune payment "" ["" storm payment "" in Portuguese], I imagined myself bursting in there, slamming the door and saying: "" Here's the money!!! "" (Laughter) But it's not! (Laughter) (Applause) But it's not! (Applause) (Applause) (Applause) So, it's this: when we leave our area of expertise — and it only takes a little; there is no need to go to the string theory or something like that, it only takes a little... (Laughter) What happens? 
We get as lost as Mr. Domingos. 
And these documents are not written by experts to experts, as the ones from the string theory. 
No! These are documents written for me, these are the public documents, the public documents I need to understand in my daily life, to govern myself, to live my life. 
These are the renting contracts, the package leaflet of the medicines. 
It's all this. The electricity bills. 
This has to be clear, so that I can understand. 
Because, if I can't understand, what happens? 
I make mistakes, I get wrong. 
I'm going to give you an example of mistakes that were committed, bad decisions made for not being able to understand documents. 
Do you remember the subprime crisis that took place in the United States? 
What happened? 
People signed those loans to buy houses, without truly understanding what they were signing. 
Because if they knew what they were signing, they'd know that as soon as the interest rate started to rise, the monthly payment would also increase, they wouldn't be able to pay anymore and they would end up without a house. 
So, the rest, after that, next, everything crumbled down and we know the rest. 
Do you think that if there was a culture of clarity in the financial sector things would have got up to where they've got? 
I don't think so. So, how do you solve this problem, this such big difference between the literacy [rate] of the Portuguese, that is down here, and the complexity of the public documents, those ones we need to understand in our daily lives, sorry, that are up here? 
So, the first think that comes to mind is, "" If literacy is down here, let's make it rise "" — isn't it? 
Let's educate people. 
Let's, let's... of course we will, of course we will educate people. 
The thing is, it's hard and it's slow. And I don't even want to imagine how many generations it will take until we are at Sweden's level. 
But, besides that, it's not only because it is slow. There is another problem. 
If the language of the documents isn't simpler, we've already seen that people, even with a high literacy level, like you, if the language is hard, they don't get cleared, they continue to be unable to understand these documents. 
So, besides increasing literacy [rate], and for now, it's much more important to reduce the complexity of documents and simplify the language. 
I'm going to show you an example. 
When I talk about simplifying the language. Notice! 
On the left side of a contract: "It is agreed that the insurance company, bla bla bla, bla bla bla, bla bla..." 
This is a before and after example. What do we mean with simplifying language? 
It's communicating in a simple and clear way, enabling our reader to understand it at first glance. 
What do you prefer? Before or after? 
There isn't much doubt, is there? 
So, how is this achieved? How can you make the State and companies communicate with citizens in a language they can understand at first glance? 
There are several ways. There are countries that are going by the path of legislation. 
For example, Sweden and the United States introduced, last year, a legislation that forces the State to communicate with people in a language they can understand. 
And you think, "" Well, that's normal. They are countries that are a bit ahead. 
"" Sweden, maybe, much more than the United States. 
"" But they are countries that are a bit ahead. 
"It would be nice if in our country there was also legislation towards that, wouldn't it be?" 
So it would. And there is! Since 1999. 
The Law of the Administrative Modernization says that the communication between the State and the people should be simple, clear, concise, meaningful, without acronyms, bla bla bla... 
But the thing is: it is not applied. So, the question, the path of going through legislation, enforcing through legislation, works in those countries where laws are made to be applied. 
Now, there is another way, the way of marketing. 
How does that work? It's like this: private companies change their language; communicate in a clearer and simpler way, they make a big fuss about it, consumers love it, the sales rise, it works beautifully. 
But it works for the private sector. 
Now, what is the third path, and to me, the most important one? 
It's the path of civil movements, that are based in a mentality shift. 
In countries where this really went forward — do you remember the English label, of the "" Plain English Campaign ""? — this is all based on a consumers' movement. 
So, what does it take for that civic movement to happen? 
We need to understand two very important things: First, wanting to understand these public documents is not a whim, is not an intellectual curiosity. 
It is a necessity that I have in my daily life. 
And above all, it is a right, it is everyone's right. 
On this side we have: understanding is a right. 
And we have to understand another thing too, which is: he who writes, has to write in order to be understood. 
How do we get there? 
First of all: we have to become demanding consumers and citizens. 
Think it this way: next time someone gives you a document that you just simply don't understand, don't be shy, don't keep quiet, pretending that you are understanding everything. 
No! Demand to understand. Ask. 
I know that this is not easy. Turn to the gentleman in the little suite and say: "Look here, this contract, this part, what does this mean?" 
It's not easy, and perhaps it's even a bit embarrassing, isn't it? 
But it is not. It's a sign of intelligence. 
What do you teach your children when they have doubts in school? 
"Don't say nothing to anyone, shut up really good and act smart." 
No, you don't, right? You say: "Look, when you don't understand, you put your hand up in the air and ask the teacher until you are cleared." 
And that is exactly what we have to do, as consumers and citizens. 
So, next time you come across with a document you don't understand, demand to understand, put aside your pride and ask until you get completely cleared. 
Then, there's the other side, which is: "" Okay, these awful documents "" which are in circulation, they don't grow on trees. 
"" Someone wrote them. "" Hum? 
Maybe, among this big group, some persons... 
I don't know, some lawyers, some public employees — I'm not asking you to identify yourselves, but I ask you to search your own conscience. 
How many times do you write documents for the general public, for people that don't share your language, and you write them in a language that only you will understand? 
And you'll say: "" Ah, that's because there is a reason, here! "" Dear friends, I already heard all the reasons. 
There are thousands of reasons. They go like these: "Ah, it's the house's culture"; "Oh, my boss!" 
"Oh, the judge! And what if this goes to court?" 
"What you want is to destroy language. We have to educate people." 
"" We can't lower the level ""; bla, bla, bla... 
I've seen all of this. These are excuses. 
A while ago, they told us about Einstein. 
Einstein said this: "" If you can't write about a subject, in a simple way, it's because, in fact, you don't understand it. "" So, if you... (Applause) To Einstein... (Applause) To Einstein... (Applause) So — ah, ah, I don't have time! — so, if you do know what you want to say — don't you? — you are aware of what you want to say, you just have to do one thing: believe that it is possible to write in a simple way. 
And how do you do that? 
It's very easy. You write to your grandmother. Hum? 
You write to your grandmother. I'm going to show grandma to you. 
(Laughter) You write with respect and without paternalism. 
And you use three techniques that I'm going to teach you. First of all: Start by the most important. 
Grandma has a lot to do. She is not going to read three pages to get to the main idea. 
Start by the most important. 
Next, use short sentences, because grandma, like anyone of us, if you make very long sentences, she gets to the end and she can't remember what you said in the beginning, anymore. 
And lastly, the third, use plain words, those ones that grandma knows. 
Alright? It's easy! 
Before I leave, I would like to talk to you about "" Clara "" (Clear). "" Clara "" is a project of social responsibility. 
It has this mission: to change the way how public communication is made. 
What do we do? 
We are going to launch this year a collection of "" Claro "" guides, that is, we are going to pick very, very, very complex subjects and put them simple. 
We are going to start with the "" Claro "" Guide of Justice. 
I think it is an area... that comes in handy. (Applause) And now I'm going to follow Manuel [Forjaz] 's advise. If it's time to ask, whoever wants to sponsor the "" Claro "" Guide of Justice — I don't know... 
for example, the EDP Foundation, or... ha? — come talk to me later. 
Another thing we will do is to grant prizes to the worse and best documents, because, indeed, there are people who are working to communicate in a clearer way, and that have to be rewarded, and there are lazy people that do nothing about it and need to be humiliated. 
So, we'll give prizes to the worst and to the best. 
I'm counting on your help. (Applause) (Applause) We are going to launch... we are going to launch the campaign via Clara's Facebook, so, send your friendship request and you'll be up to date. 
But, lastly, above all, what does "" Clara "" want? 
It wants to put two little things in your heads. 
The first one: demand to understand. Don't be shy. 
And write in order to be understood. Write to your grandma. 
And if you don't have a grandmother, write to Mr. Domingos, he will like it. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

Talking about empowerment is odd, because when we talk about empowerment, what affects us most are the stories. 
What is it really like to be a young woman in India? 
Now, I've spent the last 27 years of my life in India, lived in three small towns, two major cities, and I've had several experiences. 
When I was seven, a private tutor who used to come home to teach me mathematics molested me. 
He would put his hand up my skirt. 
He put his hand up my skirt and told me he knew how to make me feel good. 
At 17, a boy from my high school circulated an email detailing all the sexually aggressive things he could do to me because I didn't pay attention to him. 
At 19, I helped a friend whose parents had forcefully married her to an older man escape an abusive marriage. 
At 21, when my friend and I were walking down the road one afternoon, a man pulled down his pants and masturbated in front of us. 
We called people for help, and nobody came. 
At 25, when I was walking home one evening, two men on a motorcycle attacked me. 
I spent two nights in the hospital recovering from trauma and injuries. 
So throughout my life, I've seen women — family, friends, colleagues — live through these experiences, and they seldom talk about it. 
So in simple words, life in India is not easy. 
But today I'm not going to talk to you about this fear. 
I'm going to talk to you about an interesting path of learning that this fear took me on. 
So, what happened one night in December 2012 changed my life. 
So a young girl, a 23-year-old student, boarded a bus in Delhi with her male friend. 
There were six men on the bus, young men who you might encounter every day in India, and the chilling account of what followed was played over and over again in the Indian and international media. 
This girl was raped repeatedly, forcefully penetrated with a blunt rod, beaten, bitten, and left to die. 
Her friend was gagged, attacked, and knocked unconscious. 
She died on the 29th of December. 
And at a time when most of us here were preparing to welcome the new year, India plunged into darkness. 
For the first time in our history, men and women in Indian cities woke up to the horrific truth about the true state of women in the country. 
Now, like many other young women, I was absolutely terrified. 
I couldn't believe that something like this could happen in a national capital. 
I was angry and I was frustrated, but most of all, I felt utterly, completely helpless. 
But really, what do you do, right? 
Some write blogs, some ignore it, some join protests. 
I did all of it. In fact, that was what everyone was doing two years ago. 
So the media was filled with stories about all the horrific deeds that Indian men are capable of. 
They were compared to animals, sexually repressed beasts. 
In fact, so alien and unthinkable was this event in an Indian mind that the response from the Indian media, public and politicians proved one point: No one knew what to do. 
And no one wanted to be responsible for it. 
In fact, these were a few insensitive comments which were made in the media by prominent people in response to sexual violence against women in general. 
So the first one is made by a member of parliament, the second one is made by a spiritual leader, and the third one was actually the defendants' lawyer when the girl was fighting for her life and she passed away. 
Now, as a woman watching this day after day, I was tired. 
So as a writer and gender activist, I have written extensively on women, but this time, I realized it was different, because a part of me realized I was a part of that young woman too, and I decided I wanted to change this. 
So I did something spontaneous, hasty. 
I logged on to a citizen journalism platform called iReport, and I recorded a video talking about what the scene was like in Bangalore. 
I talked about how I felt, I talked about the ground realities, and I talked about the frustrations of living in India. 
In a few hours, the blog was shared widely, and comments and thoughts poured in from across the world. 
In that moment, a few things occurred to me. 
One, technology was always at hand for many young women like me. 
Two, like me, most young women hardly use it to express their views. 
Three, I realized for the first time that my voice mattered. 
So in the months that followed, I covered a trail of events in Bangalore which had no space in the mainstream news. 
In Cubbon Park, which is a big park in Bangalore, I gathered with over 100 others when groups of young men came forward to wear skirts to prove that clothing does not invite rape. 
When I reported about these events, I felt I had charge, I felt like I had a channel to release all the emotions I had inside me. 
I attended the town hall march when students held up signs saying "Kill them, hang them." 
"You wouldn't do this to your mothers or sisters." 
I went to a candlelight vigil where citizens gathered together to talk about the issue of sexual violence openly, and I recorded a lot of blogs in response to how worrying the situation was in India at that point. 
["" I am born with sisters and cousin who now live in cities and abroad but they never talk to me or complain about their daily difficulties like you say ""] Now, the reactions confused me. 
While supportive comments poured in from across the world, as did vicious ones. 
So some called me a hypocrite. 
Some called me a victim, a rape apologist. 
Some even said I had a political motive. 
But this one comment kind of describes what we are discussing here today. 
But I was soon to learn that this was not all. 
As empowered as I felt with the new liberty that this citizen journalism channel gave me, I found myself in an unfamiliar situation. 
So sometime last August, I logged onto Facebook and I was looking through my news feed, and I noticed there was a link that was being shared by my friends. 
I clicked on the link; it led me back to a report uploaded by an American girl called Michaela Cross. 
The report was titled, "India: The story you never wanted to hear." 
And in this report, she recounted her firsthand account of facing sexual harassment in India. 
She wrote, "" There is no way to prepare for the eyes, the eyes that every day stared with such entitlement at my body, with no change of expression whether I met their gaze or not. 
Walking to the fruit seller's or the tailor's, I got stares so sharp that they sliced away bits of me piece by piece. "" She called India a traveler's heaven and a woman's hell. 
She said she was stalked, groped, and masturbated at. 
Now, late that evening, the report went viral. 
It was on news channels across the world. 
Everyone was discussing it. 
It had over a million views, a thousand comments and shares, and I found myself witnessing a very similar thing. 
The media was caught in this vicious cycle of opinion and outburst and no outcome whatsoever. 
So that night, as I sat wondering how I should respond, I found myself filled with doubt. 
You see, as a writer, I approached this issue as an observer, as an Indian, I felt embarrassment and disbelief, and as an activist, I looked at it as a defender of rights, but as a citizen journalist, I suddenly felt very vulnerable. 
I mean, here she was, a young woman who was using a channel to talk about her experience just as I was, and yet I felt unsettled. 
You see, no one ever tells you that true empowerment comes from giving yourself the permission to think and act. 
Empowerment is often made to sound as if it's an ideal, it's a wonderful outcome. 
When we talk about empowerment, we often talk about giving people access to materials, giving them access to tools. 
But the thing is, empowerment is an emotion. 
It's a feeling. 
The first step to empowerment is to give yourself the authority, the key to independent will, and for women everywhere, no matter who we are or where we come from, that is the most difficult step. 
We fear the sound of our own voice, for it means admission, but it is this that gives us the power to change our environment. 
Now in this situation where I was faced with so many different kinds of realities, I was unsure how to judge, because I didn't know what it would mean for me. 
I feared to judge because I didn't know what it would be if I didn't support the same view as this girl. 
I didn't know what it would mean for me if I was challenging someone else's truth. 
But yet, it was simple. 
I had to make a decision: Should I speak up or should I stay quiet? 
So after a lot of thought, I recorded a video blog in response, and I told Michaela, well, there are different sides to India, and I also tried to explain that things would be okay and I expressed my regret for what she had faced. 
And a few days later, I was invited to talk on air with her, and for the first time, I reached out to this girl who I had never met, who was so far away, but yet I felt so close to. 
Since this report came to light, more young people than ever were discussing sexual harassment on the campus, and the university that Michaela belonged to gave her the assistance she needed. 
The university even took measures to train its students to equip them with the skills that they need to confront challenges such as harassment, and for the first the time, I felt I wasn't alone. 
You see, if there's anything that I've learned as an active citizen journalist over the past few years, it is our dire lack as a society to actively find avenues where our voices can be heard. 
We don't realize that when we are standing up, we are not just standing up as individuals, we are standing up for our communities, our friends, our peers. 
Most of us say that women are denied their rights, but the truth is, oftentimes, women deny themselves these rights. 
In a recent survey in India, 95 percent of the women who work in I.T., aviation, hospitality and call centers, said they didn't feel safe returning home alone after work in the late hours or in the evening. 
In Bangalore, where I come from, this number is 85 percent. 
In rural areas in India, if anything is to go by the recent gang rapes in Badaun and acid attacks in Odisha and Aligarh are supposed to go by, we need to act really soon. 
Don't get me wrong, the challenges that women will face in telling their stories is real, but we need to start pursuing and trying to identify mediums to participate in our system and not just pursue the media blindly. 
Today, more women than ever are standing up and questioning the government in India, and this is a result of that courage. 
There is a sixfold increase in women reporting harassment, and the government passed the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act in 2013 to protect women against sexual assault. 
As I end this talk, I just want to say that I know a lot of us in this room have our secrets, but let us speak up. 
Let us fight the shame and talk about it. 
It could be a platform, a community, your loved one, whoever or whatever you choose, but let us speak up. 
The truth is, the end to this problem begins with us. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The global economic financial crisis has reignited public interest in something that's actually one of the oldest questions in economics, dating back to at least before Adam Smith. 
And that is, why is it that countries with seemingly similar economies and institutions can display radically different savings behavior? 
Now, many brilliant economists have spent their entire lives working on this question, and as a field we've made a tremendous amount of headway and we understand a lot about this. 
What I'm here to talk with you about today is an intriguing new hypothesis and some surprisingly powerful new findings that I've been working on about the link between the structure of the language you speak and how you find yourself with the propensity to save. 
Let me tell you a little bit about savings rates, a little bit about language, and then I'll draw that connection. 
Let's start by thinking about the member countries of the OECD, or the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. 
OECD countries, by and large, you should think about these as the richest, most industrialized countries in the world. 
And by joining the OECD, they were affirming a common commitment to democracy, open markets and free trade. 
Despite all of these similarities, we see huge differences in savings behavior. 
So all the way over on the left of this graph, what you see is many OECD countries saving over a quarter of their GDP every year, and some OECD countries saving over a third of their GDP per year. 
Holding down the right flank of the OECD, all the way on the other side, is Greece. 
And what you can see is that over the last 25 years, Greece has barely managed to save more than 10 percent of their GDP. 
It should be noted, of course, that the United States and the U.K. are the next in line. 
Now that we see these huge differences in savings rates, how is it possible that language might have something to do with these differences? 
Let me tell you a little bit about how languages fundamentally differ. 
Linguists and cognitive scientists have been exploring this question for many years now. 
And then I'll draw the connection between these two behaviors. 
Many of you have probably already noticed that I'm Chinese. 
I grew up in the Midwest of the United States. 
And something I realized quite early on was that the Chinese language forced me to speak about and — in fact, more fundamentally than that — ever so slightly forced me to think about family in very different ways. 
Now, how might that be? Let me give you an example. 
Suppose I were talking with you and I was introducing you to my uncle. 
You understood exactly what I just said in English. 
If we were speaking Mandarin Chinese with each other, though, I wouldn't have that luxury. 
I wouldn't have been able to convey so little information. 
What my language would have forced me to do, instead of just telling you, "" This is my uncle, "" is to tell you a tremendous amount of additional information. 
My language would force me to tell you whether or not this was an uncle on my mother's side or my father's side, whether this was an uncle by marriage or by birth, and if this man was my father's brother, whether he was older than or younger than my father. 
All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn't let me ignore it. 
And in fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it. 
Now, that fascinated me endlessly as a child, but what fascinates me even more today as an economist is that some of these same differences carry through to how languages speak about time. 
So for example, if I'm speaking in English, I have to speak grammatically differently if I'm talking about past rain, "" It rained yesterday, "" current rain, "" It is raining now, "" or future rain, "" It will rain tomorrow. "" Notice that English requires a lot more information with respect to the timing of events. 
Why? Because I have to consider that and I have to modify what I'm saying to say, "" It will rain, "" or "" It's going to rain. "" It's simply not permissible in English to say, "" It rain tomorrow. "" In contrast to that, that's almost exactly what you would say in Chinese. 
A Chinese speaker can basically say something that sounds very strange to an English speaker's ears. 
They can say, "" Yesterday it rain, "" "" Now it rain, "" "" Tomorrow it rain. "" In some deep sense, Chinese doesn't divide up the time spectrum in the same way that English forces us to constantly do in order to speak correctly. 
Is this difference in languages only between very, very distantly related languages, like English and Chinese? 
Actually, no. 
So many of you know, in this room, that English is a Germanic language. 
What you may not have realized is that English is actually an outlier. 
It is the only Germanic language that requires this. 
For example, most other Germanic language speakers feel completely comfortable talking about rain tomorrow by saying, "" Morgen regnet es, "" quite literally to an English ear, "" It rain tomorrow. "" This led me, as a behavioral economist, to an intriguing hypothesis. 
Could how you speak about time, could how your language forces you to think about time, affect your propensity to behave across time? 
You speak English, a futured language. 
And what that means is that every time you discuss the future, or any kind of a future event, grammatically you're forced to cleave that from the present and treat it as if it's something viscerally different. 
Now suppose that that visceral difference makes you subtly dissociate the future from the present every time you speak. 
If that's true and it makes the future feel like something more distant and more different from the present, that's going to make it harder to save. 
If, on the other hand, you speak a futureless language, the present and the future, you speak about them identically. 
If that subtly nudges you to feel about them identically, that's going to make it easier to save. 
Now this is a fanciful theory. 
I'm a professor, I get paid to have fanciful theories. 
But how would you actually go about testing such a theory? 
Well, what I did with that was to access the linguistics literature. 
And interestingly enough, there are pockets of futureless language speakers situated all over the world. 
This is a pocket of futureless language speakers in Northern Europe. 
Interestingly enough, when you start to crank the data, these pockets of futureless language speakers all around the world turn out to be, by and large, some of the world's best savers. 
Just to give you a hint of that, let's look back at that OECD graph that we were talking about. 
What you see is that these bars are systematically taller and systematically shifted to the left compared to these bars which are the members of the OECD that speak futured languages. 
What is the average difference here? 
Five percentage points of your GDP saved per year. 
Over 25 years that has huge long-run effects on the wealth of your nation. 
Now while these findings are suggestive, countries can be different in so many different ways that it's very, very difficult sometimes to account for all of these possible differences. 
What I'm going to show you, though, is something that I've been engaging in for a year, which is trying to gather all of the largest datasets that we have access to as economists, and I'm going to try and strip away all of those possible differences, hoping to get this relationship to break. 
And just in summary, no matter how far I push this, I can't get it to break. 
Let me show you how far you can do that. 
One way to imagine that is I gather large datasets from around the world. 
So for example, there is the Survey of Health, [Aging] and Retirement in Europe. 
From this dataset you actually learn that retired European families are extremely patient with survey takers. 
(Laughter) So imagine that you're a retired household in Belgium and someone comes to your front door. 
"" Excuse me, would you mind if I peruse your stock portfolio? 
Do you happen to know how much your house is worth? Do you mind telling me? 
Would you happen to have a hallway that's more than 10 meters long? 
If you do, would you mind if I timed how long it took you to walk down that hallway? 
Would you mind squeezing as hard as you can, in your dominant hand, this device so I can measure your grip strength? 
How about blowing into this tube so I can measure your lung capacity? "" The survey takes over a day. 
(Laughter) Combine that with a Demographic and Health Survey collected by USAID in developing countries in Africa, for example, which that survey actually can go so far as to directly measure the HIV status of families living in, for example, rural Nigeria. 
Combine that with a world value survey, which measures the political opinions and, fortunately for me, the savings behaviors of millions of families in hundreds of countries around the world. 
Take all of that data, combine it, and this map is what you get. 
What you find is nine countries around the world that have significant native populations which speak both futureless and futured languages. 
And what I'm going to do is form statistical matched pairs between families that are nearly identical on every dimension that I can measure, and then I'm going to explore whether or not the link between language and savings holds even after controlling for all of these levels. 
What are the characteristics we can control for? 
Well I'm going to match families on country of birth and residence, the demographics — what sex, their age — their income level within their own country, their educational achievement, a lot about their family structure. 
It turns out there are six different ways to be married in Europe. 
And most granularly, I break them down by religion where there are 72 categories of religions in the world — so an extreme level of granularity. 
There are 1.4 billion different ways that a family can find itself. 
Now effectively everything I'm going to tell you from now on is only comparing these basically nearly identical families. 
It's getting as close as possible to the thought experiment of finding two families both of whom live in Brussels who are identical on every single one of these dimensions, but one of whom speaks Flemish and one of whom speaks French; or two families that live in a rural district in Nigeria, one of whom speaks Hausa and one of whom speaks Igbo. 
Now even after all of this granular level of control, do futureless language speakers seem to save more? 
Yes, futureless language speakers, even after this level of control, are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year. 
Does this have cumulative effects? 
Yes, by the time they retire, futureless language speakers, holding constant their income, are going to retire with 25 percent more in savings. 
Can we push this data even further? 
Yes, because I just told you, we actually collect a lot of health data as economists. 
Now how can we think about health behaviors to think about savings? 
Well, think about smoking, for example. 
Smoking is in some deep sense negative savings. 
If savings is current pain in exchange for future pleasure, smoking is just the opposite. 
It's current pleasure in exchange for future pain. 
What we should expect then is the opposite effect. 
And that's exactly what we find. 
Futureless language speakers are 20 to 24 percent less likely to be smoking at any given point in time compared to identical families, and they're going to be 13 to 17 percent less likely to be obese by the time they retire, and they're going to report being 21 percent more likely to have used a condom in their last sexual encounter. 
I could go on and on with the list of differences that you can find. 
It's almost impossible not to find a savings behavior for which this strong effect isn't present. 
My linguistics and economics colleagues at Yale and I are just starting to do this work and really explore and understand the ways that these subtle nudges cause us to think more or less about the future every single time we speak. 
Ultimately, the goal, once we understand how these subtle effects can change our decision making, we want to be able to provide people tools so that they can consciously make themselves better savers and more conscious investors in their own future. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

A computer is an incredibly powerful means of creative expression, but for the most part, that expression is confined to the screens of our laptops and mobile phones. 
And I'd like to tell you a story about bringing this power of the computer to move things around and interact with us off of the screen and into the physical world in which we live. 
A few years ago, I got a call from a luxury fashion store called Barneys New York, and the next thing I knew, I was designing storefront kinetic sculptures for their window displays. 
This one's called "" The Chase. "" There are two pairs of shoes, a man's pair and a woman's pair, and they play out this slow, tense chase around the window in which the man scoots up behind the woman and gets in her personal space, and then she moves away. 
Each of the shoes has magnets in it, and there are magnets underneath the table that move the shoes around. 
My friend Andy Cavatorta was building a robotic harp for Bjork's Biophilia tour and I wound up building the electronics and motion control software to make the harps move and play music. 
The harp has four separate pendulums, and each pendulum has 11 strings, so the harp swings on its axis and also rotates in order to play different musical notes, and the harps are all networked together so that they can play the right notes at the right time in the music. 
I built an interactive chemistry exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and this exhibit lets people use physical objects to grab chemical elements off of the periodic table and bring them together to cause chemical reactions to happen. 
And the museum noticed that people were spending a lot of time with this exhibit, and a researcher from a science education center in Australia decided to study this exhibit and try to figure out what was going on. 
And she found that the physical objects that people were using were helping people understand how to use the exhibit, and were helping people learn in a social way. 
And when you think about it, this makes a lot of sense, that using specialized physical objects would help people use an interface more easily. 
I mean, our hands and our minds are optimized to think about and interact with tangible objects. 
Think about which you find easier to use, a physical keyboard or an onscreen keyboard like on a phone? 
But the thing that struck me about all of these different projects is that they really had to be built from scratch, down to the level of the electronics and the printed circuit boards and all the mechanisms all the way up to the software. 
I wanted to create something where we could move objects under computer control and create interactions around that idea without having to go through this process of building something from scratch every single time. 
So my first attempt at this was at the MIT Media Lab with Professor Hiroshi Ishii, and we built this array of 512 different electromagnets, and together they were able to move objects around on top of their surface. 
But the problem with this was that these magnets cost over 10,000 dollars. 
Although each one was pretty small, altogether they weighed so much that the table that they were on started to sag. 

So, I've known a lot of fish in my life. 
I've loved only two. 
That first one, it was more like a passionate affair. 
It was a beautiful fish: flavorful, textured, meaty, a bestseller on the menu. 
What a fish. 
(Laughter) Even better, it was farm-raised to the supposed highest standards of sustainability. 
So you could feel good about selling it. 
I was in a relationship with this beauty for several months. 
One day, the head of the company called and asked if I'd speak at an event about the farm's sustainability. 
"" Absolutely, "" I said. 
Here was a company trying to solve what's become this unimaginable problem for us chefs: How do we keep fish on our menus? 
For the past 50 years, we've been fishing the seas like we clear-cut forests. 
It's hard to overstate the destruction. 
Ninety percent of large fish, the ones we love — the tunas, the halibuts, the salmons, swordfish — they've collapsed. 
There's almost nothing left. 
So, for better or for worse, aquaculture, fish farming, is going to be a part of our future. 
A lot of arguments against it: Fish farms pollute — most of them do anyway — and they're inefficient. Take tuna, a major drawback. 
It's got a feed conversion ratio of 15 to one. 
That means it takes fifteen pounds of wild fish to get you one pound of farm tuna. 
Not very sustainable. 
It doesn't taste very good either. 
So here, finally, was a company trying to do it right. 
I wanted to support them. 
The day before the event, I called the head of P.R. for the company. 
Let's call him Don. 
"" Don, "" I said, "" just to get the facts straight, you guys are famous for farming so far out to sea, you don't pollute. "" "" That's right, "" he said. "" We're so far out, the waste from our fish gets distributed, not concentrated. "" And then he added, "" We're basically a world unto ourselves. 
That feed conversion ratio? 2.5 to one, "" he said. 
"Best in the business." 
2.5 to one, great. 
"2.5 what? What are you feeding?" 
"" Sustainable proteins, "" he said. 
"" Great, "" I said. Got off the phone. 
And that night, I was lying in bed, and I thought: What the hell is a sustainable protein? 
(Laughter) So the next day, just before the event, I called Don. 
I said, "" Don, what are some examples of sustainable proteins? "" He said he didn't know. He would ask around. 
Well, I got on the phone with a few people in the company; no one could give me a straight answer until finally, I got on the phone with the head biologist. 
Let's call him Don too. 
(Laughter) "" Don, "" I said, "what are some examples of sustainable proteins?" 
Well, he mentioned some algaes and some fish meals, and then he said chicken pellets. 
I said, "" Chicken pellets? "" He said, "" Yeah, feathers, skin, bone meal, scraps, dried and processed into feed. "" I said, "" What percentage of your feed is chicken? "" Thinking, you know, two percent. 
"" Well, it's about 30 percent, "" he said. 
I said, "" Don, what's sustainable about feeding chicken to fish? "" (Laughter) There was a long pause on the line, and he said, "" There's just too much chicken in the world. "" (Laughter) I fell out of love with this fish. (Laughter) 
No, not because I'm some self-righteous, goody-two shoes foodie. 
I actually am. 
(Laughter) No, I actually fell out of love with this fish because, I swear to God, after that conversation, the fish tasted like chicken. (Laughter) 
This second fish, it's a different kind of love story. 
It's the romantic kind, the kind where the more you get to know your fish, you love the fish. 
I first ate it at a restaurant in southern Spain. 
A journalist friend had been talking about this fish for a long time. 
She kind of set us up. 
(Laughter) It came to the table a bright, almost shimmering, white color. 
The chef had overcooked it. 
Like twice over. 
Amazingly, it was still delicious. 
Who can make a fish taste good after it's been overcooked? 
I can't, but this guy can. 
Let's call him Miguel — actually his name is Miguel. 
(Laughter) And no, he didn't cook the fish, and he's not a chef, at least in the way that you and I understand it. 
He's a biologist at Veta La Palma. 
It's a fish farm in the southwestern corner of Spain. 
It's at the tip of the Guadalquivir river. 
Until the 1980s, the farm was in the hands of the Argentinians. 
They raised beef cattle on what was essentially wetlands. 
They did it by draining the land. 
They built this intricate series of canals, and they pushed water off the land and out into the river. 
Well, they couldn't make it work, not economically. 
And ecologically, it was a disaster. 
It killed like 90 percent of the birds, which, for this place, is a lot of birds. 
And so in 1982, a Spanish company with an environmental conscience purchased the land. 
What did they do? 
They reversed the flow of water. 
They literally flipped the switch. 
Instead of pushing water out, they used the channels to pull water back in. 
They flooded the canals. 
They created a 27,000-acre fish farm — bass, mullet, shrimp, eel — and in the process, Miguel and this company completely reversed the ecological destruction. 
The farm's incredible. 
I mean, you've never seen anything like this. 
You stare out at a horizon that is a million miles away, and all you see are flooded canals and this thick, rich marshland. 
I was there not long ago with Miguel. 
He's an amazing guy, like three parts Charles Darwin and one part Crocodile Dundee. 
(Laughter) Okay? There we are slogging through the wetlands, and I'm panting and sweating, got mud up to my knees, and Miguel's calmly conducting a biology lecture. 
Here, he's pointing out a rare Black-shouldered Kite. 
Now, he's mentioning the mineral needs of phytoplankton. 
And here, here he sees a grouping pattern that reminds him of the Tanzanian Giraffe. 
It turns out, Miguel spent the better part of his career in the Mikumi National Park in Africa. 
I asked him how he became such an expert on fish. 
He said, "" Fish? I didn't know anything about fish. 
I'm an expert in relationships. "" And then he's off, launching into more talk about rare birds and algaes and strange aquatic plants. 
And don't get me wrong, that was really fascinating, you know, the biotic community unplugged, kind of thing. 
It's great, but I was in love. 
And my head was swooning over that overcooked piece of delicious fish I had the night before. 
So I interrupted him. I said, "Miguel, what makes your fish taste so good?" 
He pointed at the algae. 
"" I know, dude, the algae, the phytoplankton, the relationships: It's amazing. 
But what are your fish eating? 
What's the feed conversion ratio? "" Well, he goes on to tell me it's such a rich system that the fish are eating what they'd be eating in the wild. 
The plant biomass, the phytoplankton, the zooplankton, it's what feeds the fish. 
The system is so healthy, it's totally self-renewing. 
There is no feed. 
Ever heard of a farm that doesn't feed its animals? 
Later that day, I was driving around this property with Miguel, and I asked him, I said, "" For a place that seems so natural, unlike like any farm I'd ever been at, how do you measure success? "" At that moment, it was as if a film director called for a set change. 
And we rounded the corner and saw the most amazing sight: thousands and thousands of pink flamingos, a literal pink carpet for as far as you could see. 
"" That's success, "" he said. 
"" Look at their bellies, pink. 
They're feasting. "" Feasting? I was totally confused. 
I said, "" Miguel, aren't they feasting on your fish? "" (Laughter) "" Yes, "" he said. (Laughter) 
"" We lose 20 percent of our fish and fish eggs to birds. 
Well, last year, this property had 600,000 birds on it, more than 250 different species. 
It's become, today, the largest and one of the most important private bird sanctuaries in all of Europe. "" I said, "" Miguel, isn't a thriving bird population like the last thing you want on a fish farm? "" (Laughter) He shook his head, no. 
He said, "" We farm extensively, not intensively. 
This is an ecological network. 
The flamingos eat the shrimp. 
The shrimp eat the phytoplankton. 
So the pinker the belly, the better the system. "" Okay, so let's review: a farm that doesn't feed its animals, and a farm that measures its success on the health of its predators. 
A fish farm, but also a bird sanctuary. 
Oh, and by the way, those flamingos, they shouldn't even be there in the first place. 
They brood in a town 150 miles away, where the soil conditions are better for building nests. 
Every morning, they fly 150 miles into the farm. 
And every evening, they fly 150 miles back. 
(Laughter) They do that because they're able to follow the broken white line of highway A92. (Laughter) 
No kidding. 
I was imagining a "" March of the Penguins "" thing, so I looked at Miguel. 
I said, "" Miguel, do they fly 150 miles to the farm, and then do they fly 150 miles back at night? 
Do they do that for the children? "" He looked at me like I had just quoted a Whitney Houston song. 
(Laughter) He said, "" No; they do it because the food's better. "" (Laughter) I didn't mention the skin of my beloved fish, which was delicious — and I don't like fish skin; I don't like it seared, I don't like it crispy. 
It's that acrid, tar-like flavor. 
I almost never cook with it. 
Yet, when I tasted it at that restaurant in southern Spain, it tasted not at all like fish skin. 
It tasted sweet and clean, like you were taking a bite of the ocean. 
I mentioned that to Miguel, and he nodded. 
He said, "" The skin acts like a sponge. 
It's the last defense before anything enters the body. 
It evolved to soak up impurities. "" And then he added, "But our water has no impurities." 
OK. A farm that doesn't feed its fish, a farm that measures its success by the success of its predators. 
And then I realized when he says, "A farm that has no impurities," he made a big understatement, because the water that flows through that farm comes in from the Guadalquivir River. 
It's a river that carries with it all the things that rivers tend to carry these days: chemical contaminants, pesticide runoff. 
And when it works its way through the system and leaves, the water is cleaner than when it entered. 
The system is so healthy, it purifies the water. 
So, not just a farm that doesn't feed its animals, not just a farm that measures its success by the health of its predators, but a farm that's literally a water purification plant — and not just for those fish, but for you and me as well. 
Because when that water leaves, it dumps out into the Atlantic. 
A drop in the ocean, I know, but I'll take it, and so should you, because this love story, however romantic, is also instructive. 
You might say it's a recipe for the future of good food, whether we're talking about bass or beef cattle. 
What we need now is a radically new conception of agriculture, one in which the food actually tastes good. 
(Laughter) (Applause) But for a lot people, that's a bit too radical. 
We're not realists, us foodies; we're lovers. 
We love farmers' markets, we love small family farms, we talk about local food, we eat organic. 
And when you suggest these are the things that will ensure the future of good food, someone, somewhere stands up and says, "" Hey guy, I love pink flamingos, but how are you going to feed the world? "" How are you going to feed the world? 
Can I be honest? 
I don't love that question. 
No, not because we already produce enough calories to more than feed the world. 
One billion people will go hungry today. 
One billion — that's more than ever before — because of gross inequalities in distribution, not tonnage. 
Now, I don't love this question because it's determined the logic of our food system for the last 50 years. 
Feed grain to herbivores, pesticides to monocultures, chemicals to soil, chicken to fish, and all along agribusiness has simply asked, "" If we're feeding more people more cheaply, how terrible could that be? "" That's been the motivation, it's been the justification: it's been the business plan of American agriculture. 
We should call it what it is: a business in liquidation, a business that's quickly eroding ecological capital that makes that very production possible. 
That's not a business, and it isn't agriculture. 
Our breadbasket is threatened today, not because of diminishing supply, but because of diminishing resources. 
Not by the latest combine and tractor invention, but by fertile land; not by pumps, but by fresh water; not by chainsaws, but by forests; and not by fishing boats and nets, but by fish in the sea. 
Want to feed the world? 
Let's start by asking: How are we going to feed ourselves? 
Or better: How can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself? 
(Applause) To do that, don't look at the agribusiness model for the future. 
It's really old, and it's tired. 
It's high on capital, chemistry and machines, and it's never produced anything really good to eat. 
Instead, let's look to the ecological model. 
That's the one that relies on two billion years of on-the-job experience. 
Look to Miguel, farmers like Miguel. 
Farms that aren't worlds unto themselves; farms that restore instead of deplete; farms that farm extensively instead of just intensively; farmers that are not just producers, but experts in relationships. 
Because they're the ones that are experts in flavor, too. 
And if I'm going to be really honest, they're a better chef than I'll ever be. 
You know, I'm okay with that, because if that's the future of good food, it's going to be delicious. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

And I actually feel at home here, because there's a lot of autism genetics here. 
In fact, I loved the movie, how they duplicated all my projects. 
Now, visual thinking was a tremendous asset in my work designing cattle-handling facilities. 
(Laughter) But one of the things that I was able to do in my design work is I could test-run a piece of equipment in my mind, just like a virtual reality computer system. 
And some of the research now is showing that people on the spectrum actually think with the primary visual cortex. 
Some of these oftentimes have problems with reading. 
Now, the animal mind, and also my mind, puts sensory-based information into categories. 
You have another horse, where maybe the horseshoer beat him up, and he'll be terrible for anything on the ground with the veterinarian, but a person can ride him. 
Let's just look at something like, you know, solving problems with making airlines safer. 
I do lots and lots of flying, and if I was at the FAA, what would I be doing a lot of direct observation of? 
This brings up the whole thing of you've got to show kids interesting stuff. 
In the normal human mind, language covers up the visual thinking we share with animals. 
We've got to think about all these different kinds of minds, and we've got to absolutely work with these kind of minds, because we absolutely are going to need these kinds of people in the future. 
And let's talk about jobs. 
Because the thing about being autistic is, I had to learn social skills like being in a play. 
And we need to be working with these students. 
And this brings up mentors. 
Some states now are getting it to where, if you have a degree in biology or in chemistry, you can come into the school and teach biology or chemistry. 
And if you bring them in for internships in your companies, the thing about the autism, Asperger-y kind of mind, you've got to give them a specific task. 
Don't just say, "" Design new software. "" You've got to tell them something more specific: "" We're designing software for a phone and it has to do some specific thing, and it can only use so much memory. "" That's the kind of specificity you need. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) Oh — you have a question for me? OK. (Applause) 

Food crisis. 
It's in the news every day. 
But what is it? 
Some places in the world it's too little food, maybe too much. 
Other places, GMO is saving the world. 
Maybe GMO is the problem? 
Too much agricultural runoff creating bad oceans, toxic oceans, attenuation of nutrition. 
They go on and on. 
And I find the current climate of this discussion incredibly disempowering. 
So how do we bring that to something that we understand? 
How is this apple food crisis? 
You've all eaten an apple in the last week, I'm sure. 
How old do you think it was from when it was picked? 
Two weeks? 
Two months? 
Eleven months — the average age of an apple in a grocery store in the United States. 
And I don't expect it to be much different in Europe or anywhere else in the world. 
We pick them, we put them in cold storage, we gas the cold storage — there's actually documented proof of workers trying to go into these environments to retrieve an apple, and dying, because the atmosphere that they slow down the process of the apple with is also toxic to humans. 
How is it that none of you knew this? 
Why didn't I know this? 
Ninety percent of the quality of that apple — all of the antioxidants — are gone by the time we get it. 
It's basically a little ball of sugar. 
How did we get so information poor and how can we do better? 
I think what's missing is a platform. 
I know platforms — I know computers, they put me on the Internet when I was young. 
I did very weird things — (Laughter) on this platform. 
But I met people, and I could express myself. 
How do you express yourself in food? 
If we had a platform, we might feel empowered to question: What if? 
For me, I questioned: What if climate was democratic? 
So, this is a map of climate in the world. 
The most productive areas in green, the least productive in red. 
They shift and they change, and Californian farmers now become Mexican farmers. 
China picks up land in Brazil to grow better food, and we're a slave to climate. 
What if each country had its own productive climate? 
What would that change about how we live? 
What would that change about quality of life and nutrition? 
The last generation's problem was, we need more food and we need it cheap. 
Welcome to your global farm. 
We built a huge analog farm. 
All these traces — these are cars, planes, trains and automobiles. 
It's a miracle that we feed seven billion people with just a few of us involved in the production of food. 
What if... 
we built a digital farm? 
A digital world farm. 
What if you could take this apple, digitize it somehow, send it through particles in the air and reconstitute it on the other side? 
What if? 
Going through some of these quotes, you know, they inspire me to do what I do. 
First one: ["" Japanese farming has no youth, no water, no land and no future. ""] That's what I landed to the day that I went to Minamisanriku, one stop south of Fukushima, after the disaster. 
The kids have headed to Sendai and Tokyo, the land is contaminated, they already import 70 percent of their own food. 
But it's not unique to Japan. 
Two percent of the American population is involved in farming. 
What good answer comes from two percent of any population? 
As we go around the world, 50 percent of the African population is under 18. 
Eighty percent don't want to be farmers. 
Farming is hard. 
The life of a small-shareholder farmer is miserable. 
They go into the city. 
In India: farmers' families not being able to have basic access to utilities, more farmer suicides this year and the previous 10 before that. 
It's uncomfortable to talk about. 
Where are they going? 
Into the city. 
No young people, and everyone's headed in. 
So how do we build this platform that inspires the youth? 
Welcome to the new tractor. 
This is my combine. 
A number of years ago now, I went to Bed Bath and Beyond and Home Depot and I started hacking. 
And I built silly things and I made plants dance and I attached them to my computer and I killed them all — a lot. 
(Laughter) I eventually got them to survive. 
And I created one of the most intimate relationships I've ever had in my life, because I was learning the language of plants. 
I wanted to make it bigger. 
They said, "" Knock yourself out, kid! 
Here's an old electronics room that nobody wants. 
What can you do? "" With my team, we built a farm inside of the media lab, a place historically known not for anything about biology but everything about digital life. 
Inside of these 60 square feet, we produced enough food to feed about 300 people once a month — not a lot of food. 
And there's a lot of interesting technology in there. 
But the most interesting thing? 
Beautiful, white roots, deep, green colors and a monthly harvest. 
Is this a new cafeteria? 
Is this a new retail experience? 
Is this a new grocery store? 
I can tell you one thing for sure: this is the first time anybody in the media lab ripped the roots off of anything. 
(Laughter) We get our salad in bags; there's nothing wrong with that. 
But what happens when you have an image-based processing expert, a data scientist, a roboticist, ripping roots off and thinking, "" Huh. I know something about — I could make this happen, I want to try. "" In that process we would bring the plants out and we would take some back to the lab, because if you grew it, you don't throw it away; it's kind of precious to you. 
I have this weird tongue now, because I'm afraid to let anybody eat anything until I've eaten it first, because I want it to be good. 
So I eat lettuce every day and I can tell the pH of a lettuce within .1. 
(Laughter) I'm like, "" No, that's 6.1 — no, no, you can't eat it today. "" (Applause) This lettuce that day was hyper sweet. 
It was hyper sweet because the plant had been stressed and it created a chemical reaction in the plant to protect itself: "I'm not going to die!" 
And the plants not-going-to-die, taste sweet to me. 
Technologists falling backwards into plant physiology. 
So we thought other people needed to be able to try this. 
We want to see what people can create, so we conceived of a lab that could be shipped anywhere. 
And then we built it. 
So on the facade of the media lab is my lab, that has about 30 points of sensing per plant. 
If you know about the genome or genetics, this is the phenome, right? 
The phenomena. 
When you say, "" I like the strawberries from Mexico, "" you really like the strawberries from the climate that produced the expression that you like. 
So if you're coding climate — this much CO2, this much O2 creates a recipe — you're coding the expression of that plant, the nutrition of that plant, the size of that plant, the shape, the color, the texture. 
We need data, so we put a bunch of sensors in there to tell us what's going on. 
If you think of your houseplants, and you look at your houseplant and you're super sad, because you're like, "Why are you dying? Won't you talk to me?" 
(Laughter) Farmers develop the most beautiful fortune-telling eyes by the time they're in their late 60s and 70s. 
They can tell you when you see that plant dying that it's a nitrogen deficiency, a calcium deficiency or it needs more humidity. 
Those beautiful eyes are not being passed down. 
These are eyes in the cloud of a farmer. 
We trend those data points over time. 
We correlate those data points to individual plants. 
These are all the broccoli in my lab that day, by IP address. 
(Laughter) We have IP-addressable broccoli. 
(Applause) So if that's not weird enough, you can click one and you get a plant profile. 
And what this tells you is downloadable progress on that plant, but not like you'd think, it's not just when it's ready. 
When does it achieve the nutrition that I need? 
When does it achieve the taste that I desire? 
Is it getting too much water? 
Is it getting too much sun? 
Alerts. 
It can talk to me, it's conversant, we have a language. 
(Laughter) (Applause) I think of that as the first user on the plant Facebook, right? 
That's a plant profile and that plant will start making friends. 
(Laughter) And I mean it — it will make friends with other plants that use less nitrogen, more phosphorus, less potassium. 
We're going to learn about a complexity that we can only guess at now. 
And they may not friend us back — I don't know, they might friend us back, it depends on how we act. 
So this is my lab now. 
It's a little bit more systematized, my background is designing data centers in hospitals of all things, so I know a little bit about creating a controlled environment. 
And so — inside of this environment, we're experimenting with all kinds of things. 
This process, aeroponics, was developed by NASA for Mir Space Station for reducing the amount of water they send into space. 
What it really does is give the plant exactly what it wants: water, minerals and oxygen. 
Roots are not that complicated, so when you give them that, you get this amazing expression. 
It's like the plant has two hearts. 
And because it has two hearts, it grows four or five times faster. 
It's a perfect world. 
We've gone a long way into technology and seed for an adverse world and we're going to continue to do that, but we're going to have a new tool, too, which is perfect world. 
So we've grown all kinds of things. 
These tomatoes hadn't been in commercial production for 150 years. 
Do you know that we have rare and ancient seed banks? 
Banks of seed. 
It's amazing. 
They have germplasm alive and things that you've never eaten. 
I am the only person in this room that's eaten that kind of tomato. 
Problem is it was a sauce tomato and we don't know how to cook, so we ate a sauce tomato, which is not that great. 
But we've done things with protein — we've grown all kinds of things. 
We've grown humans — (Laughter) Well maybe you could, but we didn't. 
But what we realized is, the tool was too big, it was too expensive. 
I was starting to put them around the world and they were about 100,000 dollars. 
Finding somebody with 100 grand in their back pocket isn't easy, so we wanted to make a small one. 
This project was actually one of my student's — mechanical engineering undergraduate, Camille. 
So Camille and I and my team, we iterated all summer, how to make it cheaper, how to make it work better, how to make it so other people can make it. 
Then we dropped them off in schools, seventh through eleventh grade. 
And if you want to be humbled, try to teach a kid something. 
So I went into this school and I said, "Set it to 65 percent humidity." 
The seventh grader said, "" What's humidity? "" And I said, "" Oh, it's water in air. "" He said, "" There's no water in air, you're an idiot. "" (Laughter) And I was like, "" Alright, don't trust me. 
Actually — don't trust me, right? 
Set it to 100. 
He sets it to 100 and what happens? 
It starts to condense, make a fog and eventually drip. 
And he says, "" Oh. Humidity is rain. 
Why didn't you just tell me that? "" (Laughter) We've created an interface for this that's much like a game. 
They have a 3D environment, they can log into it anywhere in the world on their smartphone, on their tablet. 
They have different parts of the bots — the physical, the sensors. 
They select recipes that have been created by other kids anywhere in the world. 
They select and activate that recipe, they plant a seedling. 
While it's growing, they make changes. 
They're like, "" Why does a plant need CO2 anyway? Isn't CO2 bad? 
It kills people. "" Crank up CO2, plant dies. 
Or crank down CO2, plant does very well. 
Harvest plant, and you've created a new digital recipe. 
It's an iterative design and development and exploration process. 
They can download, then, all of the data about that new plant that they developed or the new digital recipe and what did it do — was it better or was it worse? 
Imagine these as little cores of processing. 
We're going to learn so much. 
Here's one of the food computers, as we call them, in a school in three weeks' time. 
This is three weeks of growth. 
But more importantly, it was the first time that this kid ever thought he could be a farmer — or that he would want to be a farmer. 
So, we've open-sourced all of this. 
It's all online; go home, try to build your first food computer. 
It's going to be difficult — I'm just telling you. 
We're in the beginning, but it's all there. 
It's very important to me that this is easily accessible. 
We're going to keep making it more so. 
These are farmers, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, environmental engineer, computer scientist, plant scientist, economist, urban planners. 
On one platform, doing what they're good at. 
But we got a little too big. 
This is my new facility that I'm just starting. 
This warehouse could be anywhere. 
That's why I chose it. 
And inside of this warehouse we're going to build something kind of like this. 
These exist right now. 
Take a look at it. 
These exist, too. 
One grows greens, one grows Ebola vaccine. 
Pretty amazing that plants and this DARPA Grand Challenge winner is one of the reasons we're getting ahead of Ebola. 
The plants are producing the protein that's Ebola resistant. 
So pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, all they way down to lettuce. 
But these two things look nothing alike, and that's where I am with my field. 
Everything is different. 
We're in that weird "" We're alright "" stage and it's like, "" Here's my black box — "" "No, buy mine." 
"" No, no, no — I've got intellectual property that's totally valuable. 
Don't buy his, buy mine. "" And the reality is, we're just at the beginning, in a time when society is shifting, too. 
When we ask for more, cheaper food, we're now asking for better, environmentally friendly food. 
And when you have McDonald's advertising what's in the Chicken McNugget, the most mysterious food item of all time — they are now basing their marketing plan on that — everything is changing. 
So into the world now. 
Personal food computers, food servers and food data centers run on the open phenome. 
Think open genome, but we're going to put little climate recipes, like Wikipedia, that you can pull down, actuate and grow. 
What does this look like in a world? 
You remember the world connected by strings? 
We start having beacons. 
We start sending information about food, rather than sending food. 
This is not just my fantasy, this is where we're already deploying. 
Food computers, food servers, soon-to-be food data centers, connecting people together to share information. 
The future of food is not about fighting over what's wrong with this. 
We know what's wrong with this. 
The future of food is about networking the next one billion farmers and empowering them with a platform to ask and answer the question, "What if?" 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hello, everybody. 
I brought with me today a baby diaper. 
You'll see why in a second. 
Baby diapers have interesting properties. 
They can swell enormously when you add water to them, an experiment done by millions of kids every day. 
(Laughter) But the reason why is that they're designed in a very clever way. 
They're made out of a thing called a swellable material. 
It's a special kind of material that, when you add water, it will swell up enormously, maybe a thousand times in volume. 
And this is a very useful, industrial kind of polymer. 
But what we're trying to do in my group at MIT is to figure out if we can do something similar to the brain. 
Can we make it bigger, big enough that you can peer inside and see all the tiny building blocks, the biomolecules, how they're organized in three dimensions, the structure, the ground truth structure of the brain, if you will? 
If we could get that, maybe we could have a better understanding of how the brain is organized to yield thoughts and emotions and actions and sensations. 
Maybe we could try to pinpoint the exact changes in the brain that result in diseases, diseases like Alzheimer's and epilepsy and Parkinson's, for which there are few treatments, much less cures, and for which, very often, we don't know the cause or the origins and what's really causing them to occur. 
Now, our group at MIT is trying to take a different point of view from the way neuroscience has been done over the last hundred years. 
We're designers. We're inventors. 
We're trying to figure out how to build technologies that let us look at and repair the brain. 
And the reason is, the brain is incredibly, incredibly complicated. 
So what we've learned over the first century of neuroscience is that the brain is a very complicated network, made out of very specialized cells called neurons with very complex geometries, and electrical currents will flow through these complexly shaped neurons. 
Furthermore, neurons are connected in networks. 
They're connected by little junctions called synapses that exchange chemicals and allow the neurons to talk to each other. 
The density of the brain is incredible. 
In a cubic millimeter of your brain, there are about 100,000 of these neurons and maybe a billion of those connections. 
But it's worse. 
So, if you could zoom in to a neuron, and, of course, this is just our artist's rendition of it. 
What you would see are thousands and thousands of kinds of biomolecules, little nanoscale machines organized in complex, 3D patterns, and together they mediate those electrical pulses, those chemical exchanges that allow neurons to work together to generate things like thoughts and feelings and so forth. 
Now, we don't know how the neurons in the brain are organized to form networks, and we don't know how the biomolecules are organized within neurons to form these complex, organized machines. 
If we really want to understand this, we're going to need new technologies. 
But if we could get such maps, if we could look at the organization of molecules and neurons and neurons and networks, maybe we could really understand how the brain conducts information from sensory regions, mixes it with emotion and feeling, and generates our decisions and actions. 
Maybe we could pinpoint the exact set of molecular changes that occur in a brain disorder. 
And once we know how those molecules have changed, whether they've increased in number or changed in pattern, we could use those as targets for new drugs, for new ways of delivering energy into the brain in order to repair the brain computations that are afflicted in patients who suffer from brain disorders. 
We've all seen lots of different technologies over the last century to try to confront this. 
I think we've all seen brain scans taken using MRI machines. 
These, of course, have the great power that they are noninvasive, they can be used on living human subjects. 
But also, they're spatially crude. 
Each of these blobs that you see, or voxels, as they're called, can contain millions and millions of neurons. 
So it's not at the level of resolution where it can pinpoint the molecular changes that occur or the changes in the wiring of these networks that contributes to our ability to be conscious and powerful beings. 
At the other extreme, you have microscopes. 
Microscopes, of course, will use light to look at little tiny things. 
For centuries, they've been used to look at things like bacteria. 
For neuroscience, microscopes are actually how neurons were discovered in the first place, about 130 years ago. 
But light is fundamentally limited. 
You can't see individual molecules with a regular old microscope. 
You can't look at these tiny connections. 
So if we want to make our ability to see the brain more powerful, to get down to the ground truth structure, we're going to need to have even better technologies. 
My group, a couple years ago, started thinking: Why don't we do the opposite? 
If it's so darn complicated to zoom in to the brain, why can't we make the brain bigger? 
It initially started with two grad students in my group, Fei Chen and Paul Tillberg. 
Now many others in my group are helping with this process. 
We decided to try to figure out if we could take polymers, like the stuff in the baby diaper, and install it physically within the brain. 
If we could do it just right, and you add water, you can potentially blow the brain up to where you could distinguish those tiny biomolecules from each other. 
You would see those connections and get maps of the brain. 
This could potentially be quite dramatic. 
We brought a little demo here. 
We got some purified baby diaper material. 
It's much easier just to buy it off the Internet than to extract the few grains that actually occur in these diapers. 
I'm going to put just one teaspoon here of this purified polymer. 
And here we have some water. 
What we're going to do is see if this teaspoon of the baby diaper material can increase in size. 
You're going to see it increase in volume by about a thousandfold before your very eyes. 
I could pour much more of this in there, but I think you've got the idea that this is a very, very interesting molecule, and if can use it in the right way, we might be able to really zoom in on the brain in a way that you can't do with past technologies. 
OK. So a little bit of chemistry now. 
What's going on in the baby diaper polymer? 
If you could zoom in, it might look something like what you see on the screen. 
Polymers are chains of atoms arranged in long, thin lines. 
The chains are very tiny, about the width of a biomolecule, and these polymers are really dense. 
They're separated by distances that are around the size of a biomolecule. 
This is very good because we could potentially move everything apart in the brain. 
If we add water, what will happen is, this swellable material is going to absorb the water, the polymer chains will move apart from each other, and the entire material is going to become bigger. 
And because these chains are so tiny and spaced by biomolecular distances, we could potentially blow up the brain and make it big enough to see. 
Here's the mystery, then: How do we actually make these polymer chains inside the brain so we can move all the biomolecules apart? 
If we could do that, maybe we could get ground truth maps of the brain. 
We could look at the wiring. 
We can peer inside and see the molecules within. 
To explain this, we made some animations where we actually look at, in these artist renderings, what biomolecules might look like and how we might separate them. 
Step one: what we'd have to do, first of all, is attach every biomolecule, shown in brown here, to a little anchor, a little handle. 
We need to pull the molecules of the brain apart from each other, and to do that, we need to have a little handle that allows those polymers to bind to them and to exert their force. 
Now, if you just take baby diaper polymer and dump it on the brain, obviously, it's going to sit there on top. 
So we need to find a way to make the polymers inside. 
And this is where we're really lucky. 
It turns out, you can get the building blocks, monomers, as they're called, and if you let them go into the brain and then trigger the chemical reactions, you can get them to form those long chains, right there inside the brain tissue. 
They're going to wind their way around biomolecules and between biomolecules, forming those complex webs that will allow you, eventually, to pull apart the molecules from each other. 
And every time one of those little handles is around, the polymer will bind to the handle, and that's exactly what we need in order to pull the molecules apart from each other. 
All right, the moment of truth. 
We have to treat this specimen with a chemical to kind of loosen up all the molecules from each other, and then, when we add water, that swellable material is going to start absorbing the water, the polymer chains will move apart, but now, the biomolecules will come along for the ride. 
And much like drawing a picture on a balloon, and then you blow up the balloon, the image is the same, but the ink particles have moved away from each other. 
And that's what we've been able to do now, but in three dimensions. 
There's one last trick. 
As you can see here, we've color-coded all the biomolecules brown. 
That's because they all kind of look the same. 
Biomolecules are made out of the same atoms, but just in different orders. 
So we need one last thing in order to make them visible. 
We have to bring in little tags, with glowing dyes that will distinguish them. 
So one kind of biomolecule might get a blue color. 
Another kind of biomolecule might get a red color. 
And so forth. 
And that's the final step. 
Now we can look at something like a brain and look at the individual molecules, because we've moved them far apart enough from each other that we can tell them apart. 
So the hope here is that we can make the invisible visible. 
We can turn things that might seem small and obscure and blow them up until they're like constellations of information about life. 
Here's an actual video of what it might look like. 
We have here a little brain in a dish — a little piece of a brain, actually. 
We've infused the polymer in, and now we're adding water. 
What you'll see is that, right before your eyes — this video is sped up about sixtyfold — this little piece of brain tissue is going to grow. 
It can increase by a hundredfold or even more in volume. 
And the cool part is, because those polymers are so tiny, we're separating biomolecules evenly from each other. 
It's a smooth expansion. 
We're not losing the configuration of the information. 
We're just making it easier to see. 
So now we can take actual brain circuitry — here's a piece of the brain involved with, for example, memory — and we can zoom in. 
We can start to actually look at how circuits are configured. 
Maybe someday we could read out a memory. 
Maybe we could actually look at how circuits are configured to process emotions, how the actual wiring of our brain is organized in order to make us who we are. 
And of course, we can pinpoint, hopefully, the actual problems in the brain at a molecular level. 
What if we could actually look into cells in the brain and figure out, wow, here are the 17 molecules that have altered in this brain tissue that has been undergoing epilepsy or changing in Parkinson's disease or otherwise being altered? 
If we get that systematic list of things that are going wrong, those become our therapeutic targets. 
We can build drugs that bind those. 
We can maybe aim energy at different parts of the brain in order to help people with Parkinson's or epilepsy or other conditions that affect over a billion people around the world. 
Now, something interesting has been happening. 
It turns out that throughout biomedicine, there are other problems that expansion might help with. 
This is an actual biopsy from a human breast cancer patient. 
It turns out that if you look at cancers, if you look at the immune system, if you look at aging, if you look at development — all these processes are involving large-scale biological systems. 
But of course, the problems begin with those little nanoscale molecules, the machines that make the cells and the organs in our body tick. 
So what we're trying to do now is to figure out if we can actually use this technology to map the building blocks of life in a wide variety of diseases. 
Can we actually pinpoint the molecular changes in a tumor so that we can actually go after it in a smart way and deliver drugs that might wipe out exactly the cells that we want to? 
You know, a lot of medicine is very high risk. 
Sometimes, it's even guesswork. 
My hope is we can actually turn what might be a high-risk moon shot into something that's more reliable. 
If you think about the original moon shot, where they actually landed on the moon, it was based on solid science. 
We understood gravity; we understood aerodynamics. 
We knew how to build rockets. 
The science risk was under control. 
It was still a great, great feat of engineering. 
But in medicine, we don't necessarily have all the laws. 
Do we have all the laws that are analogous to gravity, that are analogous to aerodynamics? 
I would argue that with technologies like the kinds I'm talking about today, maybe we can actually derive those. 
We can map the patterns that occur in living systems, and figure out how to overcome the diseases that plague us. 
You know, my wife and I have two young kids, and one of my hopes as a bioengineer is to make life better for them than it currently is for us. 
And my hope is, if we can turn biology and medicine from these high-risk endeavors that are governed by chance and luck, and make them things that we win by skill and hard work, then that would be a great advance. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Hi. This is my mobile phone. 
A mobile phone can change your life, and a mobile phone gives you individual freedom. 
With a mobile phone, you can shoot a crime against humanity in Syria. With a mobile phone, 
you can tweet a message and start a protest in Egypt. 
And with a mobile phone, you can record a song, load it up to SoundCloud and become famous. 
All this is possible with your mobile phone. 
I'm a child of 1984, and I live in the city of Berlin. 
Let's go back to that time, to this city. 
Here you can see how hundreds of thousands of people stood up and protested for change. 
This is autumn 1989, and imagine that all those people standing up and protesting for change had a mobile phone in their pocket. 
Who in the room has a mobile phone with you? 
Hold it up. 
Hold your phones up, hold your phones up! 
Hold it up. An Android, a Blackberry, wow. 
That's a lot. Almost everybody today has a mobile phone. 
But today I will talk about me and my mobile phone, and how it changed my life. 
And I will talk about this. 
These are 35,830 lines of information. 
Raw data. 
And why are these informations there? 
Because in the summer of 2006, the E.U. Commission tabled a directive. 
This directive [is] called Data Retention Directive. 
This directive says that each phone company in Europe, each Internet service company all over Europe, has to store a wide range of information about the users. 
Who calls whom? Who sends whom an email? 
Who sends whom a text message? 
And if you use your mobile phone, where you are. 
All this information is stored for at least six months, up to two years by your phone company or your Internet service provider. 
And all over Europe, people stood up and said, "We don't want this." 
They said, we don't want this data retention. 
We want self-determination in the digital age, and we don't want that phone companies and Internet companies have to store all this information about us. 
They were lawyers, journalists, priests, they all said: "" We don't want this. "" And here you can see, like 10 thousands of people went out on the streets of Berlin and said, "Freedom, not fear." 
And some even said, this would be Stasi 2.0. 
Stasi was the secret police in East Germany. 
And I also ask myself, does it really work? 
Can they really store all this information about us? 
Every time I use my mobile phone? 
So I asked my phone company, Deutsche Telekom, which was at that time the largest phone company in Germany, and I asked them, please, send me all the information you have stored about me. 
And I asked them once, and I asked them again, and I got no real answer. It was only blah blah answers. 
But then I said, I want to have this information, because this is my life you are protocoling. 
So I decided to start a lawsuit against them, because I wanted to have this information. 
But Deutsche Telekom said, no, we will not give you this information. 
So at the end, I had a settlement with them. 
I'll put down the lawsuit and they will send me all the information I ask for. 
Because in the mean time, the German Constitutional Court ruled that the implementation of this E.U. directive into German law was unconstitutional. 
So I got this ugly brown envelope with a C.D. inside. 
And on the C.D., this was on. 
Thirty-five thousand eight hundred thirty lines of information. 
At first I saw it, and I said, okay, it's a huge file. Okay. 
But then after a while I realized, this is my life. 
This is six months of my life, into this file. 
So I was a little bit skeptical, what should I do with it? 
Because you can see where I am, where I sleep at night, what I am doing. 
But then I said, I want to go out with this information. 
I want to make them public. 
Because I want to show the people what does data retention mean. 
So together with Zeit Online and Open Data City, I did this. 
This is a visualization of six months of my life. 
You can zoom in and zoom out, you can wind back and fast forward. 
You can see every step I take. 
And you can even see how I go from Frankfurt by train to Cologne, and how often I call in between. 
All this is possible with this information. 
That's a little bit scary. 
But it is not only about me. 
It's about all of us. 
First, it's only like, I call my wife and she calls me, and we talk to each other a couple of times. 
And then there are some friends calling me, and they call each other. 
And after a while you are calling you, and you are calling you, and you have this great communication network. 
But you can see how your people are communicating with each other, what times they call each other, when they go to bed. 
You can see all of this. 
You can see the hubs, like who are the leaders in the group. 
If you have access to this information, you can see what your society is doing. If you have access to this information, 
you can control your society. 
This is a blueprint for countries like China and Iran. 
This is a blueprint how to survey your society, because you know who talks to whom, who sends whom an email, all this is possible if you have access to this information. 
And this information is stored for at least six months in Europe, up to two years. 
Like I said at the beginning, imagine that all those people on the streets of Berlin in autumn of 1989 had a mobile phone in their pocket. 
And the Stasi would have known who took part at this protest, and if the Stasi would have known who are the leaders behind it, this may never have happened. 
The fall of the Berlin Wall would maybe not [have been] there. 
And in the aftermath, also not the fall of the Iron Curtain. 
Because today, state agencies and companies want to store as much information as they can get about us, online and offline. 
They want to have the possibility to track our lives, and they want to store them for all time. 
But self-determination and living in the digital age is no contradiction. 
But you have to fight for your self-determination today. 
You have to fight for it every day. 
So, when you go home, tell your friends that privacy is a value of the 21st century, and it's not outdated. 
When you go home, tell your representative only because companies and state agencies have the possibility to store certain information, they don't have to do it. 
And if you don't believe me, ask your phone company what information they store about you. 
So, in the future, every time you use your mobile phone, let it be a reminder to you that you have to fight for self-determination in the digital age. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So, this book that I have in my hand is a directory of everybody who had an email address in 1982. (Laughter) Actually, it's deceptively large. 
There's actually only about 20 people on each page, because we have the name, address and telephone number of every single person. 
And, in fact, everybody's listed twice, because it's sorted once by name and once by email address. 
Obviously a very small community. 
There were only two other Dannys on the Internet then. 
I knew them both. 
We didn't all know each other, but we all kind of trusted each other, and that basic feeling of trust permeated the whole network, and there was a real sense that we could depend on each other to do things. 
So just to give you an idea of the level of trust in this community, let me tell you what it was like to register a domain name in the early days. 
Now, it just so happened that I got to register the third domain name on the Internet. 
So I could have anything I wanted other than bbn.com and symbolics.com. 
So I picked think.com, but then I thought, you know, there's a lot of really interesting names out there. 
Maybe I should register a few extras just in case. 
And then I thought, "" Nah, that wouldn't be very nice. "" (Laughter) That attitude of only taking what you need was really what everybody had on the network in those days, and in fact, it wasn't just the people on the network, but it was actually kind of built into the protocols of the Internet itself. 
So the basic idea of I.P., or Internet protocol, and the way that the — the routing algorithm that used it, were fundamentally "" from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. "" And so, if you had some extra bandwidth, you'd deliver a message for someone. 
If they had some extra bandwidth, they would deliver a message for you. 
You'd kind of depend on people to do that, and that was the building block. 
It was actually interesting that such a communist principle was the basis of a system developed during the Cold War by the Defense Department, but it obviously worked really well, and we all saw what happened with the Internet. 
It was incredibly successful. 
In fact, it was so successful that there's no way that these days you could make a book like this. 
My rough calculation is it would be about 25 miles thick. 
But, of course, you couldn't do it, because we don't know the names of all the people with Internet or email addresses, and even if we did know their names, I'm pretty sure that they would not want their name, address and telephone number published to everyone. 
So the fact is that there's a lot of bad guys on the Internet these days, and so we dealt with that by making walled communities, secure subnetworks, VPNs, little things that aren't really the Internet but are made out of the same building blocks, but we're still basically building it out of those same building blocks with those same assumptions of trust. 
And that means that it's vulnerable to certain kinds of mistakes that can happen, or certain kinds of deliberate attacks, but even the mistakes can be bad. 
So, for instance, in all of Asia recently, it was impossible to get YouTube for a little while because Pakistan made some mistakes in how it was censoring YouTube in its internal network. 
They didn't intend to screw up Asia, but they did because of the way that the protocols work. 
Another example that may have affected many of you in this audience is, you may remember a couple of years ago, all the planes west of the Mississippi were grounded because a single routing card in Salt Lake City had a bug in it. 
Now, you don't really think that our airplane system depends on the Internet, and in some sense it doesn't. 
I'll come back to that later. 
But the fact is that people couldn't take off because something was going wrong on the Internet, and the router card was down. 
And so, there are many of those things that start to happen. 
Now, there was an interesting thing that happened last April. 
All of a sudden, a very large percentage of the traffic on the whole Internet, including a lot of the traffic between U.S. military installations, started getting re-routed through China. 
So for a few hours, it all passed through China. 
Now, China Telecom says it was just an honest mistake, and it is actually possible that it was, the way things work, but certainly somebody could make a dishonest mistake of that sort if they wanted to, and it shows you how vulnerable the system is even to mistakes. 
Imagine how vulnerable the system is to deliberate attacks. 
So if somebody really wanted to attack the United States or Western civilization these days, they're not going to do it with tanks. 
That will not succeed. 
What they'll probably do is something very much like the attack that happened on the Iranian nuclear facility. 
Nobody has claimed credit for that. 
There was basically a factory of industrial machines. 
It didn't think of itself as being on the Internet. 
It thought of itself as being disconnected from the Internet, but it was possible for somebody to smuggle a USB drive in there, or something like that, and software got in there that causes the centrifuges, in that case, to actually destroy themselves. 
Now that same kind of software could destroy an oil refinery or a pharmaceutical factory or a semiconductor plant. 
And so there's a lot of — I'm sure you've read a lot in papers, about worries about cyberattacks and defenses against those. 
But the fact is, people are mostly focused on defending the computers on the Internet, and there's been surprisingly little attention to defending the Internet itself as a communications medium. 
And I think we probably do need to pay some more attention to that, because it's actually kind of fragile. 
So actually, in the early days, back when it was the ARPANET, there were actually times — there was a particular time it failed completely because one single message processor actually got a bug in it. 
And the way the Internet works is the routers are basically exchanging information about how they can get messages to places, and this one processor, because of a broken card, decided it could actually get a message to some place in negative time. 
So, in other words, it claimed it could deliver a message before you sent it. 
So of course, the fastest way to get a message anywhere was to send it to this guy, who would send it back in time and get it there super early, so every message in the Internet started getting switched through this one node, and of course that clogged everything up. 
Everything started breaking. 
The interesting thing was, though, that the sysadmins were able to fix it, but they had to basically turn every single thing on the Internet off. 
Now, of course you couldn't do that today. 
I mean, everything off, it's like the service call you get from the cable company, except for the whole world. 
Now, in fact, they couldn't do it for a lot of reasons today. 
One of the reasons is a lot of their telephones use IP protocol and use things like Skype and so on that go through the Internet right now, and so in fact we're becoming dependent on it for more and more different things, like when you take off from LAX, you're really not thinking you're using the Internet. 
When you pump gas, you really don't think you're using the Internet. 
What's happening increasingly, though, is these systems are beginning to use the Internet. 
Most of them aren't based on the Internet yet, but they're starting to use the Internet for service functions, for administrative functions, and so if you take something like the cell phone system, which is still relatively independent of the Internet for the most part, Internet pieces are beginning to sneak into it in terms of some of the control and administrative functions, and it's so tempting to use these same building blocks because they work so well, they're cheap, they're repeated, and so on. 
So all of our systems, more and more, are starting to use the same technology and starting to depend on this technology. 
And so even a modern rocket ship these days actually uses Internet protocol to talk from one end of the rocket ship to the other. 
That's crazy. It was never designed to do things like that. 
So we've built this system where we understand all the parts of it, but we're using it in a very, very different way than we expected to use it, and it's gotten a very, very different scale than it was designed for. 
And in fact, nobody really exactly understands all the things it's being used for right now. 
It's turning into one of these big emergent systems like the financial system, where we've designed all the parts but nobody really exactly understands how it operates and all the little details of it and what kinds of emergent behaviors it can have. 
And so if you hear an expert talking about the Internet and saying it can do this, or it does do this, or it will do that, you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather, or something like that. 
They have an informed opinion, but it's changing so quickly that even the experts don't know exactly what's going on. 
So if you see one of these maps of the Internet, it's just somebody's guess. 
Nobody really knows what the Internet is right now because it's different than it was an hour ago. 
It's constantly changing. It's constantly reconfiguring. 
And the problem with it is, I think we are setting ourselves up for a kind of disaster like the disaster we had in the financial system, where we take a system that's basically built on trust, was basically built for a smaller-scale system, and we've kind of expanded it way beyond the limits of how it was meant to operate. 
And so right now, I think it's literally true that we don't know what the consequences of an effective denial-of-service attack on the Internet would be, and whatever it would be is going to be worse next year, and worse next year, and so on. 
But so what we need is a plan B. 
There is no plan B right now. 
There's no clear backup system that we've very carefully kept to be independent of the Internet, made out of completely different sets of building blocks. 
So what we need is something that doesn't necessarily have to have the performance of the Internet, but the police department has to be able to call up the fire department even without the Internet, or the hospitals have to order fuel oil. 
This doesn't need to be a multi-billion-dollar government project. 
It's actually relatively simple to do, technically, because it can use existing fibers that are in the ground, existing wireless infrastructure. 
It's basically a matter of deciding to do it. 
But people won't decide to do it until they recognize the need for it, and that's the problem that we have right now. 
So there's been plenty of people, plenty of us have been quietly arguing that we should have this independent system for years, but it's very hard to get people focused on plan B when plan A seems to be working so well. 
So I think that, if people understand how much we're starting to depend on the Internet, and how vulnerable it is, we could get focused on just wanting this other system to exist, and I think if enough people say, "" Yeah, I would like to use it, I'd like to have such a system, "" then it will get built. 
It's not that hard a problem. 
It could definitely be done by people in this room. 
And so I think that this is actually, of all the problems you're going to hear about at the conference, this is probably one of the very easiest to fix. 
So I'm happy to get a chance to tell you about it. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Well, I'm an ocean chemist. 
I look at the chemistry of the ocean today. 
I look at the chemistry of the ocean in the past. 
The way I look back in the past is by using the fossilized remains of deepwater corals. 
You can see an image of one of these corals behind me. 
It was collected from close to Antarctica, thousands of meters below the sea, so, very different than the kinds of corals you may have been lucky enough to see if you've had a tropical holiday. 
So I'm hoping that this talk will give you a four-dimensional view of the ocean. 
Two dimensions, such as this beautiful two-dimensional image of the sea surface temperature. 
This was taken using satellite, so it's got tremendous spatial resolution. 
The overall features are extremely easy to understand. 
The equatorial regions are warm because there's more sunlight. 
The polar regions are cold because there's less sunlight. 
And that allows big icecaps to build up on Antarctica and up in the Northern Hemisphere. 
If you plunge deep into the sea, or even put your toes in the sea, you know it gets colder as you go down, and that's mostly because the deep waters that fill the abyss of the ocean come from the cold polar regions where the waters are dense. 
If we travel back in time 20,000 years ago, the earth looked very much different. 
And I've just given you a cartoon version of one of the major differences you would have seen if you went back that long. 
The icecaps were much bigger. 
They covered lots of the continent, and they extended out over the ocean. 
Sea level was 120 meters lower. 
Carbon dioxide [levels] were very much lower than they are today. 
So the earth was probably about three to five degrees colder overall, and much, much colder in the polar regions. 
What I'm trying to understand, and what other colleagues of mine are trying to understand, is how we moved from that cold climate condition to the warm climate condition that we enjoy today. 
We know from ice core research that the transition from these cold conditions to warm conditions wasn't smooth, as you might predict from the slow increase in solar radiation. 
And we know this from ice cores, because if you drill down into ice, you find annual bands of ice, and you can see this in the iceberg. 
You can see those blue-white layers. 
Gases are trapped in the ice cores, so we can measure CO2 — that's why we know CO2 was lower in the past — and the chemistry of the ice also tells us about temperature in the polar regions. 
And if you move in time from 20,000 years ago to the modern day, you see that temperature increased. 
It didn't increase smoothly. 
Sometimes it increased very rapidly, then there was a plateau, then it increased rapidly. 
It was different in the two polar regions, and CO2 also increased in jumps. 
So we're pretty sure the ocean has a lot to do with this. 
The ocean stores huge amounts of carbon, about 60 times more than is in the atmosphere. 
It also acts to transport heat across the equator, and the ocean is full of nutrients and it controls primary productivity. 
So if we want to find out what's going on down in the deep sea, we really need to get down there, see what's there and start to explore. 
This is some spectacular footage coming from a seamount about a kilometer deep in international waters in the equatorial Atlantic, far from land. 
You're amongst the first people to see this bit of the seafloor, along with my research team. 
You're probably seeing new species. 
We don't know. 
You'd have to collect the samples and do some very intense taxonomy. 
You can see beautiful bubblegum corals. 
There are brittle stars growing on these corals. 
Those are things that look like tentacles coming out of corals. 
There are corals made of different forms of calcium carbonate growing off the basalt of this massive undersea mountain, and the dark sort of stuff, those are fossilized corals, and we're going to talk a little more about those as we travel back in time. 
To do that, we need to charter a research boat. 
This is the James Cook, an ocean-class research vessel moored up in Tenerife. 
Looks beautiful, right? 
Great, if you're not a great mariner. 
Sometimes it looks a little more like this. 
This is us trying to make sure that we don't lose precious samples. 
Everyone's scurrying around, and I get terribly seasick, so it's not always a lot of fun, but overall it is. 
So we've got to become a really good mapper to do this. 
You don't see that kind of spectacular coral abundance everywhere. 
It is global and it is deep, but we need to really find the right places. 
We just saw a global map, and overlaid was our cruise passage from last year. 
This was a seven-week cruise, and this is us, having made our own maps of about 75,000 square kilometers of the seafloor in seven weeks, but that's only a tiny fraction of the seafloor. 
We're traveling from west to east, over part of the ocean that would look featureless on a big-scale map, but actually some of these mountains are as big as Everest. 
So with the maps that we make on board, we get about 100-meter resolution, enough to pick out areas to deploy our equipment, but not enough to see very much. 
To do that, we need to fly remotely-operated vehicles about five meters off the seafloor. 
And if we do that, we can get maps that are one-meter resolution down thousands of meters. 
Here is a remotely-operated vehicle, a research-grade vehicle. 
You can see an array of big lights on the top. 
There are high-definition cameras, manipulator arms, and lots of little boxes and things to put your samples. 
Here we are on our first dive of this particular cruise, plunging down into the ocean. 
We go pretty fast to make sure the remotely operated vehicles are not affected by any other ships. 
And we go down, and these are the kinds of things you see. 
These are deep sea sponges, meter scale. 
This is a swimming holothurian — it's a small sea slug, basically. 
This is slowed down. 
Most of the footage I'm showing you is speeded up, because all of this takes a lot of time. 
This is a beautiful holothurian as well. 
And this animal you're going to see coming up was a big surprise. 
I've never seen anything like this and it took us all a bit surprised. 
This was after about 15 hours of work and we were all a bit trigger-happy, and suddenly this giant sea monster started rolling past. 
It's called a pyrosome or colonial tunicate, if you like. 
This wasn't what we were looking for. 
We were looking for corals, deep sea corals. 
You're going to see a picture of one in a moment. 
It's small, about five centimeters high. 
It's made of calcium carbonate, so you can see its tentacles there, moving in the ocean currents. 
An organism like this probably lives for about a hundred years. 
And as it grows, it takes in chemicals from the ocean. 
And the chemicals, or the amount of chemicals, depends on the temperature; it depends on the pH, it depends on the nutrients. 
And if we can understand how these chemicals get into the skeleton, we can then go back, collect fossil specimens, and reconstruct what the ocean used to look like in the past. 
And here you can see us collecting that coral with a vacuum system, and we put it into a sampling container. 
We can do this very carefully, I should add. 
Some of these organisms live even longer. 
This is a black coral called Leiopathes, an image taken by my colleague, Brendan Roark, about 500 meters below Hawaii. 
Four thousand years is a long time. 
If you take a branch from one of these corals and polish it up, this is about 100 microns across. 
And Brendan took some analyses across this coral — you can see the marks — and he's been able to show that these are actual annual bands, so even at 500 meters deep in the ocean, corals can record seasonal changes, which is pretty spectacular. 
But 4,000 years is not enough to get us back to our last glacial maximum. 
So what do we do? 
We go in for these fossil specimens. 
This is what makes me really unpopular with my research team. 
So going along, there's giant sharks everywhere, there are pyrosomes, there are swimming holothurians, there's giant sponges, but I make everyone go down to these dead fossil areas and spend ages kind of shoveling around on the seafloor. 
And we pick up all these corals, bring them back, we sort them out. 
But each one of these is a different age, and if we can find out how old they are and then we can measure those chemical signals, this helps us to find out what's been going on in the ocean in the past. 
So on the left-hand image here, I've taken a slice through a coral, polished it very carefully and taken an optical image. 
On the right-hand side, we've taken that same piece of coral, put it in a nuclear reactor, induced fission, and every time there's some decay, you can see that marked out in the coral, so we can see the uranium distribution. 
Why are we doing this? 
Uranium is a very poorly regarded element, but I love it. 
The decay helps us find out about the rates and dates of what's going on in the ocean. 
And if you remember from the beginning, that's what we want to get at when we're thinking about climate. 
So we use a laser to analyze uranium and one of its daughter products, thorium, in these corals, and that tells us exactly how old the fossils are. 
This beautiful animation of the Southern Ocean I'm just going to use illustrate how we're using these corals to get at some of the ancient ocean feedbacks. 
You can see the density of the surface water in this animation by Ryan Abernathey. 
It's just one year of data, but you can see how dynamic the Southern Ocean is. 
The intense mixing, particularly the Drake Passage, which is shown by the box, is really one of the strongest currents in the world coming through here, flowing from west to east. 
It's very turbulently mixed, because it's moving over those great big undersea mountains, and this allows CO2 and heat to exchange with the atmosphere in and out. 
And essentially, the oceans are breathing through the Southern Ocean. 
We've collected corals from back and forth across this Antarctic passage, and we've found quite a surprising thing from my uranium dating: the corals migrated from south to north during this transition from the glacial to the interglacial. 
We don't really know why, but we think it's something to do with the food source and maybe the oxygen in the water. 
So here we are. 
I'm going to illustrate what I think we've found about climate from those corals in the Southern Ocean. 
We went up and down sea mountains. We collected little fossil corals. 
This is my illustration of that. 
We think back in the glacial, from the analysis we've made in the corals, that the deep part of the Southern Ocean was very rich in carbon, and there was a low-density layer sitting on top. 
That stops carbon dioxide coming out of the ocean. 
We then found corals that are of an intermediate age, and they show us that the ocean mixed partway through that climate transition. 
That allows carbon to come out of the deep ocean. 
And then if we analyze corals closer to the modern day, or indeed if we go down there today anyway and measure the chemistry of the corals, we see that we move to a position where carbon can exchange in and out. 
So this is the way we can use fossil corals to help us learn about the environment. 
So I want to leave you with this last slide. 
It's just a still taken out of that first piece of footage that I showed you. 
This is a spectacular coral garden. 
We didn't even expect to find things this beautiful. 
It's thousands of meters deep. 
There are new species. 
It's just a beautiful place. 
There are fossils in amongst, and now I've trained you to appreciate the fossil corals that are down there. 
So next time you're lucky enough to fly over the ocean or sail over the ocean, just think — there are massive sea mountains down there that nobody's ever seen before, and there are beautiful corals. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The most massive tsunami perfect storm is bearing down upon us. 
This perfect storm is mounting a grim reality, increasingly grim reality, and we are facing that reality with the full belief that we can solve our problems with technology, and that's very understandable. 
Now, this perfect storm that we are facing is the result of our rising population, rising towards 10 billion people, land that is turning to desert, and, of course, climate change. 
Now there's no question about it at all: we will only solve the problem of replacing fossil fuels with technology. 
But fossil fuels, carbon — coal and gas — are by no means the only thing that is causing climate change. 
Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert, and this happens only when we create too much bare ground. 
There's no other cause. 
And I intend to focus on most of the world's land that is turning to desert. 
But I have for you a very simple message that offers more hope than you can imagine. 
We have environments where humidity is guaranteed throughout the year. 
On those, it is almost impossible to create vast areas of bare ground. 
No matter what you do, nature covers it up so quickly. 
And we have environments where we have months of humidity followed by months of dryness, and that is where desertification is occurring. 
Fortunately, with space technology now, we can look at it from space, and when we do, you can see the proportions fairly well. 
Generally, what you see in green is not desertifying, and what you see in brown is, and these are by far the greatest areas of the Earth. 
About two thirds, I would guess, of the world is desertifying. 
I took this picture in the Tihamah Desert while 25 millimeters — that's an inch of rain — was falling. 
Think of it in terms of drums of water, each containing 200 liters. 
Over 1,000 drums of water fell on every hectare of that land that day. 
The next day, the land looked like this. 
Where had that water gone? 
Some of it ran off as flooding, but most of the water that soaked into the soil simply evaporated out again, exactly as it does in your garden if you leave the soil uncovered. 
Now, because the fate of water and carbon are tied to soil organic matter, when we damage soils, you give off carbon. 
Carbon goes back to the atmosphere. 
Now you're told over and over, repeatedly, that desertification is only occurring in arid and semi-arid areas of the world, and that tall grasslands like this one in high rainfall are of no consequence. 
But if you do not look at grasslands but look down into them, you find that most of the soil in that grassland that you've just seen is bare and covered with a crust of algae, leading to increased runoff and evaporation. 
That is the cancer of desertification that we do not recognize till its terminal form. 
Now we know that desertification is caused by livestock, mostly cattle, sheep and goats, overgrazing the plants, leaving the soil bare and giving off methane. 
Almost everybody knows this, from nobel laureates to golf caddies, or was taught it, as I was. 
Now, the environments like you see here, dusty environments in Africa where I grew up, and I loved wildlife, and so I grew up hating livestock because of the damage they were doing. 
And then my university education as an ecologist reinforced my beliefs. 
Well, I have news for you. 
We were once just as certain that the world was flat. 
We were wrong then, and we are wrong again. 
And I want to invite you now to come along on my journey of reeducation and discovery. 
When I was a young man, a young biologist in Africa, I was involved in setting aside marvelous areas as future national parks. 
Now no sooner — this was in the 1950s — and no sooner did we remove the hunting, drum-beating people to protect the animals, than the land began to deteriorate, as you see in this park that we formed. 
Now, no livestock were involved, but suspecting that we had too many elephants now, I did the research and I proved we had too many, and I recommended that we would have to reduce their numbers and bring them down to a level that the land could sustain. 
Now, that was a terrible decision for me to have to make, and it was political dynamite, frankly. 
So our government formed a team of experts to evaluate my research. 
They did. They agreed with me, and over the following years, we shot 40,000 elephants to try to stop the damage. 
And it got worse, not better. 
Loving elephants as I do, that was the saddest and greatest blunder of my life, and I will carry that to my grave. 
One good thing did come out of it. 
It made me absolutely determined to devote my life to finding solutions. 
When I came to the United States, I got a shock, to find national parks like this one desertifying as badly as anything in Africa. 
And there'd been no livestock on this land for over 70 years. 
And I found that American scientists had no explanation for this except that it is arid and natural. 
So I then began looking at all the research plots I could over the whole of the Western United States where cattle had been removed to prove that it would stop desertification, but I found the opposite, as we see on this research station, where this grassland that was green in 1961, by 2002 had changed to that situation. 
And the authors of the position paper on climate change from which I obtained these pictures attribute this change to "" unknown processes. "" Clearly, we have never understood what is causing desertification, which has destroyed many civilizations and now threatens us globally. 
We have never understood it. 
Take one square meter of soil and make it bare like this is down here, and I promise you, you will find it much colder at dawn and much hotter at midday than that same piece of ground if it's just covered with litter, plant litter. 
You have changed the microclimate. 
Now, by the time you are doing that and increasing greatly the percentage of bare ground on more than half the world's land, you are changing macroclimate. 
But we have just simply not understood why was it beginning to happen 10,000 years ago? 
Why has it accelerated lately? 
We had no understanding of that. 
What we had failed to understand was that these seasonal humidity environments of the world, the soil and the vegetation developed with very large numbers of grazing animals, and that these grazing animals developed with ferocious pack-hunting predators. 
Now, the main defense against pack-hunting predators is to get into herds, and the larger the herd, the safer the individuals. 
Now, large herds dung and urinate all over their own food, and they have to keep moving, and it was that movement that prevented the overgrazing of plants, while the periodic trampling ensured good cover of the soil, as we see where a herd has passed. 
This picture is a typical seasonal grassland. 
It has just come through four months of rain, and it's now going into eight months of dry season. 
And watch the change as it goes into this long dry season. 
Now, all of that grass you see aboveground has to decay biologically before the next growing season, and if it doesn't, the grassland and the soil begin to die. 
Now, if it does not decay biologically, it shifts to oxidation, which is a very slow process, and this smothers and kills grasses, leading to a shift to woody vegetation and bare soil, releasing carbon. 
To prevent that, we have traditionally used fire. 
But fire also leaves the soil bare, releasing carbon, and worse than that, burning one hectare of grassland gives off more, and more damaging, pollutants than 6,000 cars. 
And we are burning in Africa, every single year, more than one billion hectares of grasslands, and almost nobody is talking about it. 
We justify the burning, as scientists, because it does remove the dead material and it allows the plants to grow. 
Now, looking at this grassland of ours that has gone dry, what could we do to keep that healthy? 
And bear in mind, I'm talking of most of the world's land now. 
Okay? We cannot reduce animal numbers to rest it more without causing desertification and climate change. 
We cannot burn it without causing desertification and climate change. 
What are we going to do? 
There is only one option, I'll repeat to you, only one option left to climatologists and scientists, and that is to do the unthinkable, and to use livestock, bunched and moving, as a proxy for former herds and predators, and mimic nature. 
There is no other alternative left to mankind. 
So let's do that. 
So on this bit of grassland, we'll do it, but just in the foreground. 
We'll impact it very heavily with cattle to mimic nature, and we've done so, and look at that. 
All of that grass is now covering the soil as dung, urine and litter or mulch, as every one of the gardeners amongst you would understand, and that soil is ready to absorb and hold the rain, to store carbon, and to break down methane. 
And we did that, without using fire to damage the soil, and the plants are free to grow. 
When I first realized that we had no option as scientists but to use much-vilified livestock to address climate change and desertification, I was faced with a real dilemma. 
How were we to do it? 
We'd had 10,000 years of extremely knowledgeable pastoralists bunching and moving their animals, but they had created the great manmade deserts of the world. 
Then we'd had 100 years of modern rain science, and that had accelerated desertification, as we first discovered in Africa and then confirmed in the United States, and as you see in this picture of land managed by the federal government. 
Clearly more was needed than bunching and moving the animals, and humans, over thousands of years, had never been able to deal with nature's complexity. 
But we biologists and ecologists had never tackled anything as complex as this. 
So rather than reinvent the wheel, I began studying other professions to see if anybody had. 
And I found there were planning techniques that I could take and adapt to our biological need, and from those I developed what we call holistic management and planned grazing, a planning process, and that does address all of nature's complexity and our social, environmental, economic complexity. 
Today, we have young women like this one teaching villages in Africa how to put their animals together into larger herds, plan their grazing to mimic nature, and where we have them hold their animals overnight — we run them in a predator-friendly manner, because we have a lot of lands, and so on — and where they do this and hold them overnight to prepare the crop fields, we are getting very great increases in crop yield as well. 
Let's look at some results. 
This is land close to land that we manage in Zimbabwe. 
It has just come through four months of very good rains it got that year, and it's going into the long dry season. 
But as you can see, all of that rain, almost of all it, has evaporated from the soil surface. 
Their river is dry despite the rain just having ended, and we have 150,000 people on almost permanent food aid. 
Now let's go to our land nearby on the same day, with the same rainfall, and look at that. 
Our river is flowing and healthy and clean. 
It's fine. 
The production of grass, shrubs, trees, wildlife, everything is now more productive, and we have virtually no fear of dry years. 
And we did that by increasing the cattle and goats 400 percent, planning the grazing to mimic nature and integrate them with all the elephants, buffalo, giraffe and other animals that we have. 
But before we began, our land looked like that. 
This site was bare and eroding for over 30 years regardless of what rain we got. 
Okay? Watch the marked tree and see the change as we use livestock to mimic nature. 
This was another site where it had been bare and eroding, and at the base of the marked small tree, we had lost over 30 centimeters of soil. Okay? 
And again, watch the change just using livestock to mimic nature. 
And there are fallen trees in there now, because the better land is now attracting elephants, etc. 
This land in Mexico was in terrible condition, and I've had to mark the hill because the change is so profound. 
(Applause) I began helping a family in the Karoo Desert in the 1970s turn the desert that you see on the right there back to grassland, and thankfully, now their grandchildren are on the land with hope for the future. 
And look at the amazing change in this one, where that gully has completely healed using nothing but livestock mimicking nature, and once more, we have the third generation of that family on that land with their flag still flying. 
The vast grasslands of Patagonia are turning to desert as you see here. 
The man in the middle is an Argentinian researcher, and he has documented the steady decline of that land over the years as they kept reducing sheep numbers. 
They put 25,000 sheep in one flock, really mimicking nature now with planned grazing, and they have documented a 50-percent increase in the production of the land in the first year. 
We now have in the violent Horn of Africa pastoralists planning their grazing to mimic nature and openly saying it is the only hope they have of saving their families and saving their culture. 
Ninety-five percent of that land can only feed people from animals. 
I remind you that I am talking about most of the world's land here that controls our fate, including the most violent region of the world, where only animals can feed people from about 95 percent of the land. 
What we are doing globally is causing climate change as much as, I believe, fossil fuels, and maybe more than fossil fuels. 
But worse than that, it is causing hunger, poverty, violence, social breakdown and war, and as I am talking to you, millions of men, women and children are suffering and dying. 
And if this continues, we are unlikely to be able to stop the climate changing, even after we have eliminated the use of fossil fuels. 
I believe I've shown you how we can work with nature at very low cost to reverse all this. 
We are already doing so on about 15 million hectares on five continents, and people who understand far more about carbon than I do calculate that, for illustrative purposes, if we do what I am showing you here, we can take enough carbon out of the atmosphere and safely store it in the grassland soils for thousands of years, and if we just do that on about half the world's grasslands that I've shown you, we can take us back to pre-industrial levels, while feeding people. 
I can think of almost nothing that offers more hope for our planet, for your children, and their children, and all of humanity. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, Chris. 
Chris Anderson: Thank you. I have, and I'm sure everyone here has, A) a hundred questions, B) wants to hug you. 
I'm just going to ask you one quick question. 
When you first start this and you bring in a flock of animals, it's desert. What do they eat? How does that part work? 
How do you start? 
Allan Savory: Well, we have done this for a long time, and the only time we have ever had to provide any feed is during mine reclamation, where it's 100 percent bare. 
But many years ago, we took the worst land in Zimbabwe, where I offered a £5 note in a hundred-mile drive if somebody could find one grass in a hundred-mile drive, and on that, we trebled the stocking rate, the number of animals, in the first year with no feeding, just by the movement, mimicking nature, and using a sigmoid curve, that principle. 
It's a little bit technical to explain here, but just that. 
CA: Well, I would love to — I mean, this such an interesting and important idea. 
The best people on our blog are going to come and talk to you and try and — I want to get more on this that we could share along with the talk.AS: Wonderful. 
CA: That is an astonishing talk, truly an astonishing talk, and I think you heard that we all are cheering you on your way. 
Thank you so much.AS: Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. 
(Applause) 

(Hammer) (Laughter) (Microwave beeps) (Laughter) You probably all agree with me that this is a very nice road. 
It's made of asphalt, and asphalt is a very nice material to drive on, but not always, especially not on these days as today, when it's raining a lot. 
Then you can have a lot of splash water in the asphalt. 
And especially if you then ride with your bicycle, and pass these cars, then that's not very nice. 
Also, asphalt can create a lot of noise. 
It's a noisy material, and if we produce roads like in the Netherlands, very close to cities, then we would like a silent road. 
The solution for that is to make roads out of porous asphalt. 
Porous asphalt, a material that we use now in most of the highways in the Netherlands, it has pores and water can just rain through it, so all the rainwater will flow away to the sides, and you have a road that's easy to drive on, so no splash water anymore. 
Also the noise will disappear in these pores. 
Because it's very hollow, all the noise will disappear, so it's a very silent road. 
It also has disadvantages, of course, and the disadvantage of this road is that raveling can occur. 
What is raveling? You see that in this road that the stones at the surface come off. 
First you get one stone, then several more, and more and more and more and more, and then they — well, I will not do that. (Laughter) But they can damage your windshield, so you're not happy with that. 
And finally, this raveling can also lead to more and more damage. 
Sometimes you can create potholes with that. 
Ha. He's ready. 
Potholes, of course, that can become a problem, but we have a solution. 
Here you see actually how the damage appears in this material. 
It's a porous asphalt, like I said, so you have only a small amount of binder between the stones. 
Due to weathering, due to U.V. light, due to oxidation, this binder, this bitumen, the glue between the aggregates is going to shrink, and if it shrinks, it gets micro-cracks, and it delaminates from the aggregates. 
Then if you drive over the road, you take out the aggregates — what we just saw here. 
To solve this problem, we thought of self-healing materials. 
If we can make this material self-healing, then probably we have a solution. 
So what we can do is use steel wool just to clean pans, and the steel wool we can cut in very small pieces, and these very small pieces we can mix to the bitumen. 
So then you have asphalt with very small pieces of steel wool in it. 
Then you need a machine, like you see here, that you can use for cooking — an induction machine. 
Induction can heat, especially steel; it's very good at that. 
Then what you do is you heat up the steel, you melt the bitumen, and the bitumen will flow into these micro-cracks, and the stones are again fixed to the surface. 
Today I use a microwave because I cannot take the big induction machine here onstage. 
So a microwave is a similar system. 
So I put the specimen in, which I'm now going to take out to see what happened. 
So this is the specimen coming out now. 
So I said we have such an industrial machine in the lab to heat up the specimens. 
We tested a lot of specimens there, and then the government, they actually saw our results, and they thought, "" Well, that's very interesting. We have to try that. "" So they donated to us a piece of highway, 400 meters of the A58, where we had to make a test track to test this material. 
So that's what we did here. You see where we were making the test road, and then of course this road will last several years without any damage. That's what we know from practice. 
So we took a lot of samples from this road and we tested them in the lab. 
So we did aging on the samples, did a lot of loading on it, healed them with our induction machine, and healed them and tested them again. 
Several times we can repeat that. 
So actually, the conclusion from this research is that if we go on the road every four years with our healing machine — this is the big version we have made to go on the real road — if we go on the road every four years we can double the surface life of this road, which of course saves a lot of money. 
Well, to conclude, I can say that we made a material using steel fibers, the addition of steel fibers, using induction energy to really increase the surface life of the road, double the surface life you can even do, so it will really save a lot of money with very simple tricks. 
And now you're of course curious if it also worked. 
So we still have the specimen here. It's quite warm. 
Actually, it still has to cool down first before I can show you that the healing works. 
But I will do a trial. 
Let's see. Yeah, it worked. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

George and Charlotte Blonsky, who were a married couple living in the Bronx in New York City, invented something. 
They got a patent in 1965 for what they call, "a device to assist women in giving birth." 
This device consists of a large, round table and some machinery. 
When the woman is ready to deliver her child, she lies on her back, she is strapped down to the table, and the table is rotated at high speed. 
The child comes flying out through centrifugal force. 
If you look at their patent carefully, especially if you have any engineering background or talent, you may decide that you see one or two points where the design is not perfectly adequate. (Laughter) Doctor Ivan Schwab in California is one of the people, one of the main people, who helped answer the question, "Why don't woodpeckers get headaches?" 
And it turns out the answer to that is because their brains are packaged inside their skulls in a way different from the way our brains, we being human beings, true, have our brains packaged. 
They, the woodpeckers, typically will peck, they will bang their head on a piece of wood thousands of times every day. Every day! 
And as far as anyone knows, that doesn't bother them in the slightest. 
How does this happen? 
Their brain does not slosh around like ours does. 
Their brain is packed in very tightly, at least for blows coming right from the front. 
Not too many people paid attention to this research until the last few years when, in this country especially, people are becoming curious about what happens to the brains of football players who bang their heads repeatedly. 
And the woodpecker maybe relates to that. 
There was a paper published in the medical journal The Lancet in England a few years ago called "A man who pricked his finger and smelled putrid for 5 years." 
Dr. Caroline Mills and her team received this patient and didn't really know what to do about it. 
The man had cut his finger, he worked processing chickens, and then he started to smell really, really bad. 
So bad that when he got in a room with the doctors and the nurses, they couldn't stand being in the room with him. 
It was intolerable. 
They tried every drug, every other treatment they could think of. 
After a year, he still smelled putrid. 
After two years, still smelled putrid. 
Three years, four years, still smelled putrid. 
After five years, it went away on its own. 
It's a mystery. 
In New Zealand, Dr. Lianne Parkin and her team tested an old tradition in her city. 
They live in a city that has huge hills, San Francisco-grade hills. 
And in the winter there, it gets very cold and very icy. 
There are lots of injuries. 
The tradition that they tested, they tested by asking people who were on their way to work in the morning, to stop and try something out. 
Try one of two conditions. 
The tradition is that in the winter, in that city, you wear your socks on the outside of your boots. 
And what they discovered by experiment, and it was quite graphic when they saw it, was that it's true. 
That if you wear your socks on the outside rather than the inside, you're much more likely to survive and not slip and fall. 
Now, I hope you will agree with me that these things I've just described to you, each of them, deserves some kind of prize. (Laughter) And that's what they got, each of them got an Ig Nobel prize. 
In 1991, I, together with bunch of other people, started the Ig Nobel prize ceremony. 
Every year we give out 10 prizes. 
The prizes are based on just one criteria. It's very simple. 
It's that you've done something that makes people laugh and then think. 
What you've done makes people laugh and then think. 
Whatever it is, there's something about it that when people encounter it at first, their only possible reaction is to laugh. 
And then a week later, it's still rattling around in their heads and all they want to do is tell their friends about it. 
That's the quality we look for. 
Every year, we get in the neighborhood of 9,000 new nominations for the Ig Nobel prize. 
Of those, consistently between 10 percent and 20 percent of those nominations are people who nominate themselves. 
Those self-nominees almost never win. 
It's very difficult, numerically, to win a prize if you want to. 
Even if you don't want to, it's very difficult numerically. 
You should know that when we choose somebody to win an Ig Nobel prize, We get in touch with that person, very quietly. 
We offer them the chance to decline this great honor if they want to. 
Happily for us, almost everyone who's offered a prize decides to accept. 
What do you get if you win an Ig Nobel prize? 
Well, you get several things. 
You get an Ig Nobel prize. 
The design is different every year. 
These are always handmade from extremely cheap materials. 
You're looking at a picture of the prize we gave last year, 2013. 
Most prizes in the world also give their winners some cash, some money. 
We don't have any money, so we can't give them. 
In fact, the winners have to pay their own way to come to the Ig Nobel ceremony, which most of them do. 
Last year, though, we did manage to scrape up some money. 
Last year, each of the 10 Ig Nobel prize winners received from us 10 trillion dollars. 
A $10 trillion bill from Zimbabwe. (Laughter) You may remember that Zimbabwe had a little adventure for a few years there of inflation. 
They ended up printing bills that were in denominations as large as 100 trillion dollars. 
The man responsible, who runs the national bank there, by the way, won an Ig Nobel prize in mathematics. 
The other thing you win is an invitation to come to the ceremony, which happens at Harvard University. 
And when you get there, you come to Harvard's biggest meeting place and classroom. 
It fits 1,100 people, it's jammed to the gills, and up on the stage, waiting to shake your hand, waiting to hand you your Ig Nobel prize, are a bunch of Nobel prize winners. 
That's the heart of the ceremony. 
The winners are kept secret until that moment, even the Nobel laureates who will shake their hand don't know who they are until they're announced. 
I am going to tell you about just a very few of the other medical-related prizes we've given. 
Keep in mind, we've given 230 prizes. 
There are lots of these people who walk among you. 
Maybe you have one. 
A paper was published about 30 years ago called "" Injuries due to Falling Coconuts. "" It was written by Dr. Peter Barss, who is Canadian. 
Dr. Barss came to the ceremony and explained that as a young doctor, he wanted to see the world. 
So he went to Papua New Guinea. 
When he got there, he went to work in a hospital, and he was curious what kinds of things happen to people that bring them to the hospital. 
He looked through the records, and he discovered that a surprisingly large number of people in that hospital were there because of injuries due to falling coconuts. 
One typical thing that happens is people will come from the highlands, where there are not many coconut trees, down to visit their relatives on the coast, where there are lots. 
And they'll think that a coconut tree is a fine place to stand and maybe lie down. 
A coconut tree that is 90 feet tall, and has coconuts that weigh two pounds that can drop off at any time. 
A team of doctors in Europe published a series of papers about colonoscopies. 
You're all familiar with colonoscopies, one way or another. 
Or in some cases, one way and another. 
They, in these papers, explained to their fellow doctors who perform colonoscopies, how to minimize the chance that when you perform a colonoscopy, your patient will explode. (Laughter) Dr. Emmanuel Ben-Soussan one of the authors, flew in from Paris to the ceremony, where he explained the history of this, that in the 1950s, when colonoscopies were becoming a common technique for the first time, people were figuring out how to do it well. 
And there were some difficulties at first. 
The basic problem, I'm sure you're familiar with, that you're looking inside a long, narrow, dark place. 
And so, you want to have a larger space. 
You add some gas to inflate it so you have room to look around. 
Now, that's added to the gas, the methane gas, that's already inside. 
The gas that they used at first, in many cases, was oxygen. 
So they added oxygen to methane gas. 
And then they wanted to be able to see, they needed light, so they'd put in a light source, which in the 1950s was very hot. 
So you had methane gas, which is flammable, oxygen and heat. 
They stopped using oxygen pretty quickly. (Laughter) Now it's rare that patients will explode, but it does still happen. 
The final thing that I want to tell you about is a prize we gave to Dr. Elena Bodnar. 
Dr. Elena Bodnar invented a brassiere that in an emergency can be quickly separated into a pair of protective face masks. 
One to save your life, one to save the life of some lucky bystander. (Laughter) Why would someone do this, you might wonder. 
Dr. Bodnar came to the ceremony and she explained that she grew up in Ukraine. 
She was one of the doctors who treated victims of the Chernobyl power plant meltdown. 
And they later discovered that a lot of the worst medical problems came from the particles people breathed in. 
So she was always thinking after that about could there be some simple mask that was available everywhere when the unexpected happens. 
Years later, she moved to America. 
She had a baby, One day she looked, and on the floor, her infant son had picked up her bra, and had her bra on his face. 
And that's where the idea came from. 
She came to the Ig Nobel ceremony with the first prototype of the bra and she demonstrated: (Laughter) (Applause) ["" Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate (2008) in economics ""] ["" Wolfgang Ketterle, Nobel laureate (2001) in physics ""] I myself own an emergency bra. (Laughter) It's my favorite bra, but I would be happy to share it with any of you, should the need arise. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

At least good work, hopefully, at least it's good work — hopefully great work. 
And so what they typically do is they decide that all these people need to come together in one place to do that work. 
So a company, or a charity, or an organization of any kind, unless you're working in Africa, if you're really lucky to do that — most people have to go to an office every day. 
They go out and they buy a building, or they rent a building, or they lease some space, and they fill this space with stuff. 
They fill it with tables, or desks, chairs, computer equipment, software, Internet access, maybe a fridge, maybe a few other things, and they expect their employees, or their volunteers, to come to that location every day to do great work. 
I didn't actually get meaningful work done. "" And what you find is that, especially with creative people — designers, programmers, writers, engineers, thinkers — that people really need long stretches of uninterrupted time to get something done. 
If you're interrupted while you're going through the early ones — if someone bumps you in bed, or there's a sound, or whatever happens — you don't just pick up where you left off. 
If you're interrupted and woken up, you have to start again. 
And what ends up happening — you might have days like this where you wake up at eight or seven in the morning, or whenever you get up, and you're like, "" I didn't sleep very well. 
Because in other places, you can have interruptions like the TV, or you could go for a walk, or there's a fridge downstairs, or you've got your own couch, or whatever you want to do. 
No one cared about letting people take a smoke break for 15 minutes 10 years ago, so why does anyone care if someone goes to Facebook or Twitter or YouTube here and there? 
The manager calls the meeting so the employees can all come together, and it's an incredibly disruptive thing to do to people — to say, "" Hey look, we're going to bring 10 people together right now and have a meeting. 
So they go into a meeting room, they get together, and they talk about stuff that doesn't really matter, usually. 
But instead, there's a long scheduled meeting, because meetings are scheduled the way software works, which is in increments of 15 minutes, or 30 minutes, or an hour. 
What can managers do — enlightened managers, hopefully — what can they do to make the office a better place for people to work, so it's not the last resort, but it's the first resort, so that people start to say, "When I really want to get stuff done, I go to the office." 
And what you'll find is that a tremendous amount of work gets done when no one talks to each other. 
So maybe it's every other week, or every week, once a week, afternoons no one can talk to each other. 
Another thing you can try, is switching from active communication and collaboration, which is like face-to-face stuff — tapping people on the shoulder, saying hi to them, having meetings, and replace that with more passive models of communication, using things like email and instant messaging, or collaboration products, things like that. 
You can put these things away, and then you can be interrupted on your own schedule, at your own time, when you're available, when you're ready to go again. 
So you'll be going up, doing some work, and then you'll come down from that work, and then maybe it's time to check that email or I.M. 
And the last suggestion I have is that, if you do have a meeting coming up, if you have the power, just cancel it. 

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

I would like to show you how architecture has helped to change the life of my community and has opened opportunities to hope. 
I am a native of Burkina Faso. 
According to the World Bank, Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world, but what does it look like to grow up in a place like that? 
I am an example of that. 
I was born in a little village called Gando. 
In Gando, there was no electricity, no access to clean drinking water, and no school. 
But my father wanted me to learn how to read and write. 
For this reason, I had to leave my family when I was seven and to stay in a city far away from my village with no contact with my family. 
In this place I sat in a class like that with more than 150 other kids, and for six years. 
In this time, it just happened to me to come to school to realize that my classmate died. 
Today, not so much has changed. 
There is still no electricity in my village. 
People still are dying in Burkina Faso, and access to clean drinking water is still a big problem. 
I had luck. I was lucky, because this is a fact of life when you grow up in a place like that. 
But I was lucky. 
I had a scholarship. 
I could go to Germany to study. 
So now, I suppose, I don't need to explain to you how great a privilege it is for me to be standing before you today. 
From Gando, my home village in Burkina Faso, to Berlin in Germany to become an architect is a big, big step. 
But what to do with this privilege? 
Since I was a student, I wanted to open up better opportunities to other kids in Gando. 
I just wanted to use my skills and build a school. 
But how do you do it when you're still a student and you don't have money? 
Oh yes, I started to make drawings and asked for money. 
Fundraising was not an easy task. 
I even asked my classmates to spend less money on coffee and cigarettes, but to sponsor my school project. 
In real wonder, two years later, I was able to collect 50,000 U.S. dollars. 
When I came home to Gando to bring the good news, my people were over the moon, but when they realized that I was planning to use clay, they were shocked. 
"" A clay building is not able to stand a rainy season, and Francis wants us to use it and build a school. 
Is this the reason why he spent so much time in Europe studying instead of working in the field with us? "" My people build all the time with clay, but they don't see any innovation with mud. 
So I had to convince everybody. 
I started to speak with the community, and I could convince everybody, and we could start to work. 
And the women, the men, everybody from the village, was part of this building process. 
I was allowed to use even traditional techniques. 
So clay floor for example, the young men come and stand like that, beating, hours for hours, and then their mothers came, and they are beating in this position, for hours, giving water and beating. 
And then the polishers come. 
They start polishing it with a stone for hours. 
And then you have this result, very fine, like a baby bottom. 
(Laughter) It's not photoshopped. (Laughter) This is the school, built with the community. 
The walls are totally made out of compressed clay blocks from Gando. 
The roof structure is made with cheap steel bars normally hiding inside concrete. 
And the classroom, the ceiling is made out of both of them used together. 
In this school, there was a simple idea: to create comfort in a classroom. 
Don't forget, it can be 45 degrees in Burkina Faso, so with simple ventilation, I wanted to make the classroom good for teaching and learning. 
And this is the project today, 12 years old, still in best condition. 
And the kids, they love it. 
And for me and my community, this project was a huge success. 
It has opened up opportunities to do more projects in Gando. 
So I could do a lot of projects, and here I am going to share with you only three of them. 
The first one is the school extension, of course. 
How do you explain drawings and engineering to people who are neither able to read nor write? 
I started to build a prototype like that. 
The innovation was to build a clay vault. 
So then, I jumped on the top like that, with my team, and it works. 
The community is looking. It still works. 
So we can build. (Laughter) And we kept building, and that is the result. 
The kids are happy, and they love it. 
The community is very proud. We made it. 
And even animals, like these donkeys, love our buildings. 
(Laughter) The next project is the library in Gando. 
And see now, we tried to introduce different ideas in our buildings, but we often don't have so much material. 
Something we have in Gando are clay pots. 
We wanted to use them to create openings. 
So we just bring them like you can see to the building site. 
we start cutting them, and then we place them on top of the roof before we pour the concrete, and you have this result. 
The openings are letting the hot air out and light in. 
Very simple. 
My most recent project in Gando is a high school project. 
I would like to share with you this. 
The innovation in this project is to cast mud like you cast concrete. 
How do you cast mud? 
We start making a lot of mortars, like you can see, and when everything is ready, when you know what is the best recipe and the best form, you start working with the community. 
And sometimes I can leave. 
They will do it themselves. 
I came to speak to you like that. 
Another factor in Gando is rain. 
When the rains come, we hurry up to protect our fragile walls against the rain. 
Don't confound with Christo and Jeanne-Claude. 
It is simply how we protect our walls. 
(Laughter) The rain in Burkina comes very fast, and after that, you have floods everywhere in the country. 
But for us, the rain is good. 
It brings sand and gravel to the river we need to use to build. 
We just wait for the rain to go. 
We take the sand, we mix it with clay, and we keep building. 
That is it. 
The Gando project was always connected to training the people, because I just wanted, one day when I fall down and die, that at least one person from Gando keeps doing this work. 
But you will be surprised. I'm still alive. 
(Laughter) And my people now can use their skills to earn money themselves. 
Usually, for a young man from Gando to earn money, you have to leave the country to the city, sometimes leave the country and some never come back, making the community weaker. 
But now they can stay in the country and work on different building sites and earn money to feed their family. 
There's a new quality in this work. 
Yes, you know it. 
I have won a lot of awards through this work. 
For sure, it has opened opportunities. 
I have become myself known. 
But the reason why I do what I do is my community. 
When I was a kid, I was going to school, I was coming back every holiday to Gando. 
By the end of every holidays, I had to say goodbye to the community, going from one compound to another one. 
All women in Gando will open their clothes like that and give me the last penny. 
In my culture, this is a symbol of deep affection. 
As a seven-year-old guy, I was impressed. 
I just asked my mother one day, "Why do all these women love me so much?" 
(Laughter) She just answered, "" They are contributing to pay for your education hoping that you will be successful and one day come back and help improve the quality of life of the community. "" I hope now that I was able to make my community proud through this work, and I hope I was able to prove you the power of community, and to show you that architecture can be inspiring for communities to shape their own future. 
Merci beaucoup. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 
Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) 

This year, Germany is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the peaceful revolution in East Germany. 
In 1989, the Communist regime was moved away, the Berlin Wall came down, and one year later, the German Democratic Republic, the GDR, in the East was unified with the Federal Republic of Germany in the West to found today's Germany. 
Among many other things, Germany inherited the archives of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi. 
Only two years after its dissolution, its documents were opened to the public, and historians such as me started to study these documents to learn more about how the GDR surveillance state functioned. 
Perhaps you have watched the movie "The Lives of Others." 
This movie made the Stasi known worldwide, and as we live in an age where words such as "" surveillance "" or "" wiretapping "" are on the front pages of newspapers, I would like to speak about how the Stasi really worked. 
At the beginning, let's have a short look at the history of the Stasi, because it's really important for understanding its self-conception. 
Its origins are located in Russia. 
In 1917, the Russian Communists founded the Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, shortly Cheka. 
It was led by Felix Dzerzhinsky. 
The Cheka was an instrument of the Communists to establish their regime by terrorizing the population and executing their enemies. 
It evolved later into the well-known KGB. 
The Cheka was the idol of the Stasi officers. 
They called themselves Chekists, and even the emblem was very similar, as you can see here. 
In fact, the secret police of Russia was the creator and instructor of the Stasi. 
When the Red Army occupied East Germany in 1945, it immediately expanded there, and soon it started to train the German Communists to build up their own secret police. 
By the way, in this hall where we are now, the ruling party of the GDR was founded in 1946. 
Five years later, the Stasi was established, and step by step, the dirty job of oppression was handed over to it. 
For instance, the central jail for political prisoners, which was established by the Russians, was taken over by the Stasi and used until the end of Communism. 
You see it here. 
At the beginning, every important step took place under the attendance of the Russians. 
But the Germans are known to be very effective, so the Stasi grew very quickly, and already in 1953, it had more employees than the Gestapo had, the secret police of Nazi Germany. 
The number doubled in each decade. 
In 1989, more than 90,000 employees worked for the Stasi. 
This meant that one employee was responsible for 180 inhabitants, which was really unique in the world. 
At the top of this tremendous apparatus, there was one man, Erich Mielke. 
He ruled the Ministry of State Security for more than 30 years. 
He was a scrupulous functionary — in his past, he killed two policemen not far away from here — who in fact personalized the Stasi. 
But what was so exceptional about the Stasi? 
Foremost, it was its enormous power, because it united different functions in one organization. 
First of all, the Stasi was an intelligence service. 
It used all the imaginable instruments for getting information secretly, such as informers, or tapping phones, as you can see it on the picture here. 
And it was not only active in East Germany, but all over the world. 
Secondly, the Stasi was a secret police. 
It could stop people on the street and arrest them in its own prisons. 
Thirdly, the Stasi worked as a kind of public prosecutor. 
It had the right to open preliminary investigations and to interrogate people officially. 
Last but not least, the Stasi had its own armed forces. 
More than 11,000 soldiers were serving in its so-called Guards Regiment. 
It was founded to crash down protests and uprisings. 
Due to this concentration of power, the Stasi was called a state in the state. 
But let's look in more and more detail at the tools of the Stasi. 
Please keep in mind that at that time the web and smartphones were not yet invented. 
Of course, the Stasi used all kinds of technical instruments to survey people. 
Telephones were wiretapped, including the phone of the German chancellor in the West, and often also the apartments. 
Every day, 90,000 letters were being opened by these machines. 
The Stasi also shadowed tens of thousands of people using specially trained agents and secret cameras to document every step one took. 
In this picture, you can see me as a young man just in front of this building where we are now, photographed by a Stasi agent. 
The Stasi even collected the smell of people. 
It stored samples of it in closed jars which were found after the peaceful revolution. 
For all these tasks, highly specialized departments were responsible. 
The one which was tapping phone calls was completely separated from the one which controlled the letters, for good reasons, because if one agent quit the Stasi, his knowledge was very small. 
Contrast that with Snowden, for example. 
But the vertical specialization was also important to prevent all kinds of empathy with the object of observation. 
The agent who shadowed me didn't know who I was or why I was surveyed. 
In fact, I smuggled forbidden books from West to East Germany. 
But what was even more typical for the Stasi was the use of human intelligence, people who reported secretly to the Stasi. 
For the Minister of State Security, these so-called unofficial employees were the most important tools. 
From 1975 on, nearly 200,000 people collaborated constantly with the Stasi, more than one percent of the population. 
And in a way, the minister was right, because technical instruments can only register what people are doing, but agents and spies can also report what people are planning to do and what they are thinking. 
Therefore, the Stasi recruited so many informants. 
The system of how to get them and how to educate them, as it was called, was very sophisticated. 
The Stasi had its own university, not far away from here, where the methods were explored and taught to the officers. 
This guideline gave a detailed description of every step you have to take if you want to convince human beings to betray their fellow citizens. 
Sometimes it's said that informants were pressured to becoming one, but that's mostly not true, because a forced informant is a bad informant. 
Only someone who wants to give you the information you need is an effective whistleblower. 
The main reasons why people cooperated with the Stasi were political conviction and material benefits. 
The officers also tried to create a personal bond between themselves and the informant, and to be honest, the example of the Stasi shows that it's not so difficult to win someone in order to betray others. 
Even some of the top dissidents in East Germany collaborated with the Stasi, as for instance Ibrahim Böhme. 
In 1989, he was the leader of the peaceful revolution and he nearly became the first freely elected Prime Minister of the GDR until it came out that he was an informant. 
The net of spies was really broad. 
In nearly every institution, even in the churches or in West Germany, there were many of them. 
I remember telling a leading Stasi officer, "" If you had sent an informant to me, I would surely have recognized him. "" His answer was, "" We didn't send anyone. 
We took those who were around you. "" And in fact, two of my best friends reported about me to the Stasi. 
Not only in my case, informers were very close. 
For example, Vera Lengsfeld, another leading dissident, in her case it was her husband who spied on her. 
A famous writer was betrayed by his brother. 
This reminds me of the novel "" 1984 "" by George Orwell, where the only apparently trustable person was an informer. 
But why did the Stasi collect all this information in its archives? 
The main purpose was to control the society. 
In nearly every speech, the Stasi minister gave the order to find out who is who, which meant who thinks what. 
He didn't want to wait until somebody tried to act against the regime. 
He wanted to know in advance what people were thinking and planning. 
The East Germans knew, of course, that they were surrounded by informers, in a totalitarian regime that created mistrust and a state of widespread fear, the most important tools to oppress people in any dictatorship. 
That's why not many East Germans tried to fight against the Communist regime. 
If yes, the Stasi often used a method which was really diabolic. 
It was called Zersetzung, and it's described in another guideline. 
The word is difficult to translate because it means originally "" biodegradation. "" But actually, it's a quite accurate description. 
The goal was to destroy secretly the self-confidence of people, for example by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships. 
Considering this, East Germany was a very modern dictatorship. 
The Stasi didn't try to arrest every dissident. 
It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions. 
Detaining someone was used only as a last resort. 
For this, the Stasi owned 17 remand prisons, one in every district. 
Here, the Stasi also developed quite modern methods of detention. 
Normally, the interrogation officer didn't torture the prisoner. 
Instead, he used a sophisticated system of psychological pressure in which strict isolation was central. 
Nearly no prisoner resisted without giving a testimony. 
If you have the occasion, do visit the former Stasi prison in Berlin and attend a guided tour with a former political prisoner who will explain to you how this worked. 
One more question needs to be answered: If the Stasi were so well organized, why did the Communist regime collapse? 
First, in 1989, the leadership in East Germany was uncertain what to do against the growing protest of people. 
It was especially confused because in the mother country of socialism, the Soviet Union, a more liberal policy took place. 
In addition, the regime was dependent on the loans from the West. 
Therefore, no order to crash down the uprising was given to the Stasi. 
Secondly, in the Communist ideology, there's no place for criticism. 
Instead, the leadership stuck to the belief that socialism is a perfect system, and the Stasi had to confirm that, of course. 
The consequence was that despite all the information, the regime couldn't analyze its real problems, and therefore it couldn't solve them. 
In the end, the Stasi died because of the structures that it was charged with protecting. 
The ending of the Stasi was something tragic, because these officers were kept busy during the peaceful revolution with only one thing: to destroy the documents they had produced during decades. 
Fortunately, they had been stopped by human rights activists. 
That's why today we can use the files to get a better understanding of how a surveillance state functions. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Thank you very much. 
So Hubertus, I want to ask you a couple of questions because I have here Der Spiegel from last week. 
"" Mein Nachbar NSA. "" My neighbor, the NSA. 
And you just told us about my neighbor, the spies and the informant from East Germany. 
So there is a direct link between these two stories or there isn't? 
What's your reaction as a historian when you see this? 
Hubertus Knabe: I think there are several aspects to mention. 
At first, I think there's a difference of why you are collecting this data. 
Are you doing that for protecting your people against terrorist attacks, or are you doing that for oppressing your people? 
So that makes a fundamental difference. 
But on the other hand, also in a democracy, these instruments can be abused, and that is something where we really have to be aware to stop that, and that also the intelligence services are respecting the rules we have. 
The third point, probably, we really can be happy that we live in a democracy, because you can be sure that Russia and China are doing the same, but nobody speaks about that because nobody could do that. 
(Applause) BG: When the story came out first, last July, last year, you filed a criminal complaint with a German tribunal. Why? 
HK: Yeah, I did so because of the second point I mentioned, that I think especially in a democracy, the rules are for everybody. 
They are made for everybody, so it's not allowed that any institution doesn't respect the rules. 
In the criminal code of Germany, it's written that it's not allowed to tap somebody without the permission of the judge. 
Fortunately, it's written in the criminal code of Germany, so if it's not respected, then I think an investigation is necessary, and it took a very long time that the public prosecutor of Germany started this, and he started it only in the case of Angela Merkel, and not in the case of all the other people living in Germany. 
BG: That doesn't surprise me because — (Applause) — because of the story you told. 
Seen from the outside, I live outside of Germany, and I expected the Germans to react much more strongly, immediately. 
And instead, the reaction really came only when Chancellor Merkel was revealed as being wiretapped. Why so? 
HK: I take it as a good sign, because people feel secure in this democracy. 
They aren't afraid that they will be arrested, and if you leave this hall after the conference, nobody has to be afraid that the secret police is standing out and is arresting you. 
So that's a good sign, I think. 
People are not really scared, as they could be. 
But of course, I think, the institutions are responsible to stop illegal actions in Germany or wherever they happen. 
BG: A personal question, and this is the last one. 
There has been a debate in Germany about granting asylum to Edward Snowden. 
Would you be in favor or against? 
HK: Oh, that's a difficult question, but if you ask me, and if I answer honestly, I would give him the asylum, because I think it was really brave what he did, and he destroyed his whole life and his family and everything. 
So I think, for these people, we should do something, and especially if you see the German history, where so many people had to escape and they asked for asylum in other countries and they didn't get it, so it would be a good sign to give him asylum. 
(Applause) BG: Hubertus, thank you very much. 

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

Do you know how many choices you make in a typical day? Do you know how many choices you make 
in typical week? 
I recently did a survey with over 2,000 Americans, and the average number of choices that the typical American reports making is about 70 in a typical day. 
There was also recently a study done with CEOs in which they followed CEOs around for a whole week. 
And these scientists simply documented all the various tasks that these CEOs engaged in and how much time they spent engaging in making decisions related to these tasks. 
And they found that the average CEO engaged in about 139 tasks in a week. 
Each task was made up of many, many, many sub-choices of course. 
50 percent of their decisions were made in nine minutes or less. 
Only about 12 percent of the decisions did they make an hour or more of their time. 
Think about your own choices. 
Do you know how many choices make it into your nine minute category versus your one hour category? 
How well do you think you're doing at managing those choices? 
Today I want to talk about one of the biggest modern day choosing problems that we have, which is the choice overload problem. 
I want to talk about the problem and some potential solutions. 
Now as I talk about this problem, I'm going to have some questions for you and I'm going to want to know your answers. 
So when I ask you a question, since I'm blind, only raise your hand if you want to burn off some calories. 
(Laughter) Otherwise, when I ask you a question, and if your answer is yes, I'd like you to clap your hands. 
So for my first question for you today: Are you guys ready to hear about the choice overload problem? 
(Applause) Thank you. 
So when I was a graduate student at Stanford University, I used to go to this very, very upscale grocery store; at least at that time it was truly upscale. 
It was a store called Draeger's. 
Now this store, it was almost like going to an amusement park. 
They had 250 different kinds of mustards and vinegars and over 500 different kinds of fruits and vegetables and more than two dozen different kinds of bottled water — and this was during a time when we actually used to drink tap water. 
I used to love going to this store, but on one occasion I asked myself, well how come you never buy anything? 
Here's their olive oil aisle. 
They had over 75 different kinds of olive oil, including those that were in a locked case that came from thousand-year-old olive trees. 
So I one day decided to pay a visit to the manager, and I asked the manager, "Is this model of offering people all this choice really working?" 
And he pointed to the busloads of tourists that would show up everyday, with cameras ready usually. 
We decided to do a little experiment, and we picked jam for our experiment. 
Here's their jam aisle. 
They had 348 different kinds of jam. 
We set up a little tasting booth right near the entrance of the store. 
We there put out six different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam, and we looked at two things: First, in which case were people more likely to stop, sample some jam? 
More people stopped when there were 24, about 60 percent, than when there were six, about 40 percent. 
The next thing we looked at is in which case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam. 
Now we see the opposite effect. 
Of the people who stopped when there were 24, only three percent of them actually bought a jar of jam. 
Of the people who stopped when there were six, well now we saw that 30 percent of them actually bought a jar of jam. 
Now if you do the math, people were at least six times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they encountered six than if they encountered 24. 
Now choosing not to buy a jar of jam is probably good for us — at least it's good for our waistlines — but it turns out that this choice overload problem affects us even in very consequential decisions. 
We choose not to choose, even when it goes against our best self-interests. 
So now for the topic of today: financial savings. 
Now I'm going to describe to you a study I did with Gur Huberman, Emir Kamenica, Wei Jang where we looked at the retirement savings decisions of nearly a million Americans from about 650 plans all in the U.S. 
And what we looked at was whether the number of fund offerings available in a retirement savings plan, the 401 (k) plan, does that affect people's likelihood to save more for tomorrow. 
And what we found was that indeed there was a correlation. 
So in these plans, we had about 657 plans that ranged from offering people anywhere from two to 59 different fund offerings. 
And what we found was that, the more funds offered, indeed, there was less participation rate. 
So if you look at the extremes, those plans that offered you two funds, participation rates were around in the mid-70s — still not as high as we want it to be. 
In those plans that offered nearly 60 funds, participation rates have now dropped to about the 60th percentile. 
Now it turns out that even if you do choose to participate when there are more choices present, even then, it has negative consequences. 
So for those people who did choose to participate, the more choices available, the more likely people were to completely avoid stocks or equity funds. 
The more choices available, the more likely they were to put all their money in pure money market accounts. 
Now neither of these extreme decisions are the kinds of decisions that any of us would recommend for people when you're considering their future financial well-being. 
Well, over the past decade, we have observed three main negative consequences to offering people more and more choices. 
They're more likely to delay choosing — procrastinate even when it goes against their best self-interest. 
They're more likely to make worse choices — worse financial choices, medical choices. 
They're more likely to choose things that make them less satisfied, even when they do objectively better. 
The main reason for this is because, we might enjoy gazing at those giant walls of mayonnaises, mustards, vinegars, jams, but we can't actually do the math of comparing and contrasting and actually picking from that stunning display. 
So what I want to propose to you today are four simple techniques — techniques that we have tested in one way or another in different research venues — that you can easily apply in your businesses. 
The first: Cut. 
You've heard it said before, but it's never been more true than today, that less is more. 
People are always upset when I say, "" Cut. "" They're always worried they're going to lose shelf space. 
But in fact, what we're seeing more and more is that if you are willing to cut, get rid of those extraneous redundant options, well there's an increase in sales, there's a lowering of costs, there is an improvement of the choosing experience. 
When Proctor & Gamble went from 26 different kinds of Head & Shoulders to 15, they saw an increase in sales by 10 percent. 
When the Golden Cat Corporation got rid of their 10 worst-selling cat litter products, they saw an increase in profits by 87 percent — a function of both increase in sales and lowering of costs. 
You know, the average grocery store today offers you 45,000 products. 
The typical Walmart today offers you 100,000 products. 
But the ninth largest retailer, the ninth biggest retailer in the world today is Aldi, and it offers you only 1,400 products — one kind of canned tomato sauce. 
Now in the financial savings world, I think one of the best examples that has recently come out on how to best manage the choice offerings has actually been something that David Laibson was heavily involved in designing, which was the program that they have at Harvard. 
Every single Harvard employee is now automatically enrolled in a lifecycle fund. 
For those people who actually want to choose, they're given 20 funds, not 300 or more funds. 
You know, often, people say, "" I don't know how to cut. 
They're all important choices. "" And the first thing I do is I ask the employees, "" Tell me how these choices are different from one another. 
And if your employees can't tell them apart, neither can your consumers. "" Now before we started our session this afternoon, I had a chat with Gary. 
And Gary said that he would be willing to offer people in this audience an all-expenses-paid free vacation to the most beautiful road in the world. 
Here's a description of the road. 
And I'd like you to read it. 
And now I'll give you a few seconds to read it and then I want you to clap your hands if you're ready to take Gary up on his offer. 
(Light clapping) Okay. Anybody who's ready to take him up on his offer. 
Is that all? 
All right, let me show you some more about this. 
(Laughter) You guys knew there was a trick, didn't you. 
(Honk) Now who's ready to go on this trip. 
(Applause) (Laughter) I think I might have actually heard more hands. 
All right. 
Now in fact, you had objectively more information the first time around than the second time around, but I would venture to guess that you felt that it was more real the second time around. 
Because the pictures made it feel more real to you. 
Which brings me to the second technique for handling the choice overload problem, which is concretization. 
That in order for people to understand the differences between the choices, they have to be able to understand the consequences associated with each choice, and that the consequences need to be felt in a vivid sort of way, in a very concrete way. 
Why do people spend an average of 15 to 30 percent more when they use an ATM card or a credit card as opposed to cash? 
Because it doesn't feel like real money. 
And it turns out that making it feel more concrete can actually be a very positive tool to use in getting people to save more. 
So a study that I did with Shlomo Benartzi and Alessandro Previtero, we did a study with people at ING — employees that are all working at ING — and now these people were all in a session where they're doing enrollment for their 401 (k) plan. 
And during that session, we kept the session exactly the way it used to be, but we added one little thing. 
The one little thing we added was we asked people to just think about all the positive things that would happen in your life if you saved more. 
By doing that simple thing, there was an increase in enrollment by 20 percent and there was an increase in the amount of people willing to save or the amount that they were willing to put down into their savings account by four percent. 
The third technique: Categorization. 
We can handle more categories than we can handle choices. 
So for example, here's a study we did in a magazine aisle. 
It turns out that in Wegmans grocery stores up and down the northeast corridor, the magazine aisles range anywhere from 331 different kinds of magazines all the way up to 664. 
But you know what? 
If I show you 600 magazines and I divide them up into 10 categories, versus I show you 400 magazines and divide them up into 20 categories, you believe that I have given you more choice and a better choosing experience if I gave you the 400 than if I gave you the 600. 
Because the categories tell me how to tell them apart. 
Here are two different jewelry displays. 
One is called "" Jazz "" and the other one is called "" Swing. "" If you think the display on the left is Swing and the display on the right is Jazz, clap your hands. 
(Light Clapping) Okay, there's some. 
If you think the one on the left is Jazz and the one on the right is Swing, clap your hands. 
Okay, a bit more. 
Now it turns out you're right. 
The one on the left is Jazz and the one on the right is Swing, but you know what? 
This is a highly useless categorization scheme. 
(Laughter) The categories need to say something to the chooser, not the choice-maker. 
And you often see that problem when it comes down to those long lists of all these funds. 
Who are they actually supposed to be informing? 
My fourth technique: Condition for complexity. 
It turns out we can actually handle a lot more information than we think we can, we've just got to take it a little easier. 
We have to gradually increase the complexity. 
I'm going to show you one example of what I'm talking about. 
Let's take a very, very complicated decision: buying a car. 
Here's a German car manufacturer that gives you the opportunity to completely custom make your car. 
You've got to make 60 different decisions, completely make up your car. 
Now these decisions vary in the number of choices that they offer per decision. 
Car colors, exterior car colors — I've got 56 choices. 
Engines, gearshift — four choices. 
So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to vary the order in which these decisions appear. 
So half of the customers are going to go from high choice, 56 car colors, to low choice, four gearshifts. 
The other half of the customers are going to go from low choice, four gearshifts, to 56 car colors, high choice. 
What am I going to look at? 
How engaged you are. 
If you keep hitting the default button per decision, that means you're getting overwhelmed, that means I'm losing you. 
What you find is the people who go from high choice to low choice, they're hitting that default button over and over and over again. 
We're losing them. 
They go from low choice to high choice, they're hanging in there. 
It's the same information. It's the same number of choices. 
The only thing that I have done is I have varied the order in which that information is presented. 
If I start you off easy, I learn how to choose. 
Even though choosing gearshift doesn't tell me anything about my preferences for interior decor, it still prepares me for how to choose. 
It also gets me excited about this big product that I'm putting together, so I'm more willing to be motivated to be engaged. 
So let me recap. 
I have talked about four techniques for mitigating the problem of choice overload — cut — get rid of the extraneous alternatives; concretize — make it real; categorize — we can handle more categories, less choices; condition for complexity. 
All of these techniques that I'm describing to you today are designed to help you manage your choices — better for you, you can use them on yourself, better for the people that you are serving. 
Because I believe that the key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing. 
And the more we're able to be choosy about choosing the better we will be able to practice the art of choosing. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I went farther inside and I suddenly saw inmates moving across the corridors. 
Then it was as if I stepped back and thought that I could have very well been one of them. 
In 2009, I was invited to join a project that San Martín National University conducted at the Unit 48 penitentiary, to coordinate a writing workshop. 
So I said to them why don't we work with poetry, if they knew what poetry was. 
You can never sleep in jail. You can never close your eyelids. "" And so, like I ’ m doing now, I gave them a moment of silence, then said, “That's what poetry is, you guys. 
In prison there are things that can't be done. 
What I see week after week, is how they're turning into different people; how they're being transformed. 
It creates a mirror, which is the poem. 
(Applause) Martín Bustamante: The heart chews tears of time; blinded by that light, it hides the speed of existence where the images go rowing by. 
The heart cracks under sad gazes, rides on storms that spread fire, lifts chests lowered by shame, knows that it's not just reading and going on, it also wishes to see the infinite blue. 
The heart sits down to think about things, fights to avoid being ordinary, tries to love without hurting, breathes the sun, giving courage to itself, surrenders, travels toward reason. 

It's time to start designing for our ears. 
Architects and designers tend to focus exclusively on these. 
They use these to design with and they design for them, which is why we end up sitting in restaurants that look like this — (loud crowd noise) — and sound like this, shouting from a foot away to try and be heard by our dinner companion, or why we get on airplanes — (flight attendant announcements) — which cost 200 million pounds, with somebody talking through an old-fashioned telephone handset on a cheap stereo system, making us jump out of our skins. 
We're designing environments that make us crazy. (Laughter) And it's not just our quality of life which suffers. 
It's our health, our social behavior, and our productivity as well. 
How does this work? Well, two ways. 
First of all, ambience. I have a whole TEDTalk about this. 
Sound affects us physiologically, psychologically, cognitively and behaviorally all the time. 
The sound around us is affecting us even though we're not conscious of it. 
There's a second way though, as well. 
That's interference. Communication requires sending and receiving, and I have another whole TEDTalk about the importance of conscious listening, but I can send as well as I like, and you can be brilliant conscious listeners. 
If the space I'm sending it in is not effective, that communication can't happen. 
Spaces tend to include noise and acoustics. 
A room like this has acoustics, this one very good acoustics. 
Many rooms are not so good. 
Let me give you some examples from a couple of areas which I think we all care about: health and education. 
(Hospital noises) When I was visiting my terminally ill father in a hospital, I was asking myself, how does anybody get well in a place that sounds like this? 
Hospital sound is getting worse all the time. 
Noise levels in hospitals have doubled in the last few years, and it affects not just the patients but also the people working there. 
I think we would like for dispensing errors to be zero, wouldn't we? And yet, as noise levels go up, so do the errors in dispensing made by the staff in hospitals. 
Most of all, though, it affects the patients, and that could be you, it could be me. 
Sleep is absolutely crucial for recovery. 
It's when we regenerate, when we rebuild ourselves, and with threatening noise like this going on, your body, even if you are able to sleep, your body is telling you, "" I'm under threat. This is dangerous. "" And the quality of sleep is degraded, and so is our recovery. 
There are just huge benefits to come from designing for the ears in our health care. 
This is an area I intend to take on this year. 
Education. 
When I see a classroom that looks like this, can you imagine how this sounds? 
I am forced to ask myself a question. 
("" Do architects have ears? "") (Laughter) Now, that's a little unfair. Some of my best friends are architects. (Laughter) And they definitely do have ears. 
But I think sometimes they don't use them when they're designing buildings. Here's a case in point. 
This is a 32-million-pound flagship academy school which was built quite recently in the U.K. and designed by one of Britain's top architects. 
Unfortunately, it was designed like a corporate headquarters, with a vast central atrium and classrooms leading off it with no back walls at all. 
The children couldn't hear their teachers. 
They had to go back in and spend 600,000 pounds putting the walls in. Let's stop this madness of open plan classrooms right now, please. 
It's not just these modern buildings which suffer. 
Old-fashioned classrooms suffer too. 
A study in Florida just a few years ago found that if you're sitting where this photograph was taken in the classroom, row four, speech intelligibility is just 50 percent. 
Children are losing one word in two. 
Now that doesn't mean they only get half their education, but it does mean they have to work very hard to join the dots and understand what's going on. 
This is affected massively by reverberation time, how reverberant a room is. 
In a classroom with a reverberation time of 1.2 seconds, which is pretty common, this is what it sounds like. 
(Inaudible echoing voice) Not so good, is it? 
If you take that 1.2 seconds down to 0.4 seconds by installing acoustic treatments, sound absorbing materials and so forth, this is what you get. 
Voice: In language, infinitely many words can be written with a small set of letters. In arithmetic, infinitely many numbers can be composed from just a few digits with the help of the simple zero. 
Julian Treasure: What a difference. 
Now that education you would receive, and thanks to the British acoustician Adrian James for those simulations. The signal was the same, the background noise was the same. 
All that changed was the acoustics of the classroom in those two examples. 
If education can be likened to watering a garden, which is a fair metaphor, sadly, much of the water is evaporating before it reaches the flowers, especially for some groups, for example, those with hearing impairment. 
Now that's not just deaf children. That could be any child who's got a cold, glue ear, an ear infection, even hay fever. On a given day, one in eight children fall into that group, on any given day. 
Then you have children for whom English is a second language, or whatever they're being taught in is a second language. 
In the U.K., that's more than 10 percent of the school population. 
And finally, after Susan Cain's wonderful TEDTalk in February, we know that introverts find it very difficult to relate when they're in a noisy environment doing group work. 
Add those up. That is a lot of children who are not receiving their education properly. 
It's not just the children who are affected, though. 
(Noisy conversation) This study in Germany found the average noise level in classrooms is 65 decibels. 
I have to really raise my voice to talk over 65 decibels of sound, and teachers are not just raising their voices. 
This chart maps the teacher's heart rate against the noise level. 
Noise goes up, heart rate goes up. 
That is not good for you. 
In fact, 65 decibels is the very level at which this big survey of all the evidence on noise and health found that, that is the threshold for the danger of myocardial infarction. 
To you and me, that's a heart attack. 
It may not be pushing the boat out too far to suggest that many teachers are losing significant life expectancy by teaching in environments like that day after day. 
What does it cost to treat a classroom down to that 0.4-second reverberation time? 
Two and a half thousand pounds. 
And the Essex study which has just been done in the U.K., which incidentally showed that when you do this, you do not just make a room that's suitable for hearing-impaired children, you make a room where behavior improves, and results improve significantly, this found that sending a child out of area to a school that does have such a room, if you don't have one, costs 90,000 pounds a year. 
I think the economics are pretty clear on this. 
I'm glad that debate is happening on this. 
I just moderated a major conference in London a few weeks ago called Sound Education, which brought together top acousticians, government people, teachers, and so forth. 
We're at last starting to debate this issue, and the benefits that are available for designing for the ears in education, unbelievable. 
Out of that conference, incidentally, also came a free app which is designed to help children study if they're having to work at home, for example, in a noisy kitchen. 
And that's free out of that conference. 
Let's broaden the perspective a little bit and look at cities. 
We have urban planners. 
Where are the urban sound planners? 
I don't know of one in the world, and the opportunity is there to transform our experience in our cities. 
The World Health Organization estimates that a quarter of Europe's population is having its sleep degraded by noise in cities. We can do better than that. 
And in our offices, we spend a lot of time at work. 
Where are the office sound planners? 
People who say, don't sit that team next to this team, because they like noise and they need quiet. 
Or who say, don't spend all your budget on a huge screen in the conference room, and then place one tiny microphone in the middle of a table for 30 people. (Laughter) If you can hear me, you can understand me without seeing me. If you can see me without hearing me, that does not work. 
So office sound is a huge area, and incidentally, noise in offices has been shown to make people less helpful, less enjoy their teamwork, and less productive at work. 
Finally, we have homes. We use interior designers. 
Where are the interior sound designers? 
Hey, let's all be interior sound designers, take on listening to our rooms and designing sound that's effective and appropriate. 
My friend Richard Mazuch, an architect in London, coined the phrase "" invisible architecture. "" I love that phrase. 
It's about designing, not appearance, but experience, so that we have spaces that sound as good as they look, that are fit for purpose, that improve our quality of life, our health and well being, our social behavior and our productivity. 
It's time to start designing for the ears. 
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

I started Improv Everywhere about 10 years ago when I moved to New York City with an interest in acting and comedy. 
Because I was new to the city, I didn't have access to a stage, so I decided to create my own in public places. 
So the first project we're going to take a look at is the very first No Pants Subway Ride. 
Now this took place in January of 2002. 
And this woman is the star of the video. 
She doesn't know she's being filmed. 
She's being filmed with a hidden camera. 
This is on the 6 train in New York City. 
And this is the first stop along the line. 
These are two Danish guys who come out and sit down next to the hidden camera. 
And that's me right there in a brown coat. 
It's about 30 degrees outside. 
I'm wearing a hat. I'm wearing a scarf. 
And the girl's going to notice me right here. 
(Laughter) And as you'll see now, I'm not wearing pants. (Laughter) 
So at this point — at this point she's noticed me, but in New York there's weirdos on any given train car. 
One person's not that unusual. 
She goes back to reading her book, which is unfortunately titled "" Rape. "" (Laughter) So she's noticed the unusual thing, but she's gone back to her normal life. 
Now in the meantime, I have six friends who are waiting at the next six consecutive stops in their underwear as well. 
They're going to be entering this car one by one. 
We'll act as though we don't know each other. 
And we'll act as if it's just an unfortunate mistake we've made, forgetting our pants on this cold January day. 
(Laughter) So at this point, she decides to put the rape book away. (Laughter) 
And she decides to be a little bit more aware of her surroundings. 
Now in the meantime, the two Danish guys to the left of the camera, they're cracking up. 
They think this is the funniest thing they've ever seen before. 
And watch her make eye contact with them right about now. 
(Laughter) And I love that moment in this video, because before it became a shared experience, it was something that was maybe a little bit scary, or something that was at least confusing to her. 
And then once it became a shared experience, it was funny and something that she could laugh at. 
So the train is now pulling into the third stop along the 6 line. 
(Laughter) So the video won't show everything. 
This goes on for another four stops. 
A total of seven guys enter anonymously in their underwear. 
At the eighth stop, a girl came in with a giant duffel bag and announced she had pants for sale for a dollar — like you might sell batteries or candy on the train. 
We all very matter of factly bought a pair of pants, put them on and said, "" Thank you. That's exactly what I needed today, "" and then exited without revealing what had happened and went in all different directions. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
So that's a still from the video there. 
And I love that girl's reaction so much. 
And watching that videotape later that day inspired me to keep doing what I do. 
And really one of the points of Improv Everywhere is to cause a scene in a public place that is a positive experience for other people. 
It's a prank, but it's a prank that gives somebody a great story to tell. 
And her reaction inspired me to do a second annual No Pants Subway Ride. 
And we've continued to do it every year. 
This January, we did the 10th annual No Pants Subway Ride where a diverse group of 3,500 people rode the train in their underwear in New York — almost every single train line in the city. 
And also in 50 other cities around the world, people participated. 
(Laughter) As I started taking improv class at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater and meeting other creative people and other performers and comedians, I started amassing a mailing list of people who wanted to do these types of projects. 
So I could do more large-scale projects. 
Well one day I was walking through Union Square, and I saw this building, which had just been built in 2005. 
And there was a girl in one of the windows and she was dancing. 
And it was very peculiar, because it was dark out, but she was back-lit with florescent lighting, and she was very much onstage, and I couldn't figure out why she was doing it. 
After about 15 seconds, her friend appeared — she had been hiding behind a display — and they laughed and hugged each other and ran away. 
So it seemed like maybe she had been dared to do this. 
So I got inspired by that. 
Looking at the entire facade — there were 70 total windows — and I knew what I had to do. 
(Laughter) So this project is called Look Up More. We had 70 actors dress in black. 
This was completely unauthorized. 
We didn't let the stores know we were coming. 
And I stood in the park giving signals. 
The first signal was for everybody to hold up these four-foot tall letters that spelled out "" Look Up More, "" the name of the project. 
The second signal was for everybody to do Jumping jacks together. 
You'll see that start right here. 
(Laughter) And then we had dancing. We had everyone dance. 
And then we had dance solos where only one person would dance and everybody would point to them. 
(Laughter) So then I gave a new hand signal, which signaled the next soloist down below in Forever 21, and he danced. 
There were several other activities. 
We had people jumping up and down, people dropping to the ground. 
And I was standing just anonymously in a sweatshirt, putting my hand on and off of a trashcan to signal the advancement. 
And because it was in Union Square Park, right by a subway station, there were hundreds of people by the end who stopped and looked up and watched what we were doing. 
There's a better photo of it. 
So that particular event was inspired by a moment that I happened to stumble upon. 
The next project I want to show was given to me in an email from a stranger. 
A high school kid in Texas wrote me in 2006 and said, "" You should get as many people as possible to put on blue polo shirts and khaki pants and go into a Best Buy and stand around. "" (Laughter) (Applause) So I wrote this high school kid back immediately, and I said, "" Yes, you are correct. 
I think I'll try to do that this weekend. Thank you. "" So here's the video. 
So again, this is 2005. 
This is the Best Buy in New York City. 
We had about 80 people show up to participate, entering one-by-one. 
There was an eight year-old girl, a 10 year-old girl. 
There was also a 65 year-old man who participated. 
So a very diverse group of people. 
And I told people, "" Don't work. Don't actually do work. 
But also, don't shop. 
Just stand around and don't face products. "" Now you can see the regular employees by the ones that have the yellow tags on their shirt. 
Everybody else is one of our actors. 
(Laughter) The lower level employees thought it was very funny. 
And in fact, several of them went to go get their camera from the break room and took photos with us. 
A lot of them made jokes about trying to get us to go to the back to get heavy television sets for customers. 
The managers and the security guards, on the other hand, did not find it particularly funny. 
You can see them in this footage. 
They're wearing either a yellow shirt or a black shirt. 
And we were there probably 10 minutes before the managers decided to dial 911. 
(Laughter) So they started running around telling everybody the cops were coming, watch out, the cops were coming. 
And you can see the cops in this footage right here. 
That's a cop wearing black right there, being filmed with a hidden camera. 
Ultimately, the police had to inform Best Buy management that it was not, in fact, illegal to wear a blue polo shirt and khaki pants. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
So we had been there for 20 minutes; we were happy to exit the store. 
One thing the managers were trying to do was to track down our cameras. 
And they caught a couple of my guys who had hidden cameras in duffel bags. 
But the one camera guy they never caught was the guy that went in just with a blank tape and went over to the Best Buy camera department and just put his tape in one of their cameras and pretended to shop. 
So I like that concept of using their own technology against them. 
(Laughter) I think our best projects are ones that are site specific and happen at a particular place for a reason. 
And one morning, I was riding the subway. 
I had to make a transfer at the 53rd St. stop where there are these two giant escalators. 
And it's a very depressing place to be in the morning, it's very crowded. 
So I decided to try and stage something that could make it as happy as possible for one morning. 
So this was in the winter of 2009 — 8: 30 in the morning. 
It's morning rush hour. 
It's very cold outside. 
People are coming in from Queens, transferring from the E train to the 6 train. 
And they're going up these giant escalators on their way to their jobs. 
(Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. 
So there's a photograph that illustrates it a little bit better. 
He gave 2,000 high fives that day, and he washed his hands before and afterward and did not get sick. 
And that was done also without permission, although no one seemed to care. 
So I'd say over the years, one of the most common criticisms I see of Improv Everywhere left anonymously on YouTube comments is: "" These people have too much time on their hands. "" And you know, not everybody's going to like everything you do, and I've certainly developed a thick skin thanks to Internet comments, but that one's always bothered me, because we don't have too much time on our hands. 
The participants at Improv Everywhere events have just as much leisure time as any other New Yorkers, they just occasionally choose to spend it in an unusual way. 
You know, every Saturday and Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people each fall gather in football stadiums to watch games. 
And I've never seen anybody comment, looking at a football game, saying, "" All those people in the stands, they have too much time on their hands. "" And of course they don't. 
It's a perfectly wonderful way to spent a weekend afternoon, watching a football game in a stadium. 
But I think it's also a perfectly valid way to spend an afternoon freezing in place with 200 people in the Grand Central terminal or dressing up like a ghostbuster and running through the New York Public Library. 
(Laughter) Or listening to the same MP3 as 3,000 other people and dancing silently in a park, or bursting into song in a grocery store as part of a spontaneous musical, or diving into the ocean in Coney Island wearing formal attire. 
You know, as kids, we're taught to play. 
And we're never given a reason why we should play. 
It's just acceptable that play is a good thing. 
And I think that's sort of the point of Improv Everywhere. 
It's that there is no point and that there doesn't have to be a point. 
We don't need a reason. 
As long as it's fun and it seems like it's going to be a funny idea and it seems like the people who witness it will also have a fun time, then that's enough for us. 
And I think, as adults, we need to learn that there's no right or wrong way to play. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

When I go to parties, it doesn't usually take very long for people to find out that I'm a scientist and I study sex. 
And then I get asked questions. 
And the questions usually have a very particular format. 
They start with the phrase, "A friend told me," and then they end with the phrase, "Is this true?" 
And most of the time I'm glad to say that I can answer them, but sometimes I have to say, "" I'm really sorry, but I don't know because I'm not that kind of a doctor. "" That is, I'm not a clinician, I'm a comparative biologist who studies anatomy. 
And my job is to look at lots of different species of animals and try to figure out how their tissues and organs work when everything's going right, rather than trying to figure out how to fix things when they go wrong, like so many of you. 
And what I do is I look for similarities and differences in the solutions that they've evolved for fundamental biological problems. 
So today I'm here to argue that this is not at all an esoteric Ivory Tower activity that we find at our universities, but that broad study across species, tissue types and organ systems can produce insights that have direct implications for human health. 
And this is true both of my recent project on sex differences in the brain, and my more mature work on the anatomy and function of penises. 
And now you know why I'm fun at parties. 
(Laughter) So today I'm going to give you an example drawn from my penis study to show you how knowledge drawn from studies of one organ system provided insights into a very different one. 
Now I'm sure as everyone in the audience already knows — I did have to explain it to my nine-year-old late last week — penises are structures that transfer sperm from one individual to another. 
And the slide behind me barely scratches the surface of how widespread they are in animals. 
There's an enormous amount of anatomical variation. 
You find muscular tubes, modified legs, modified fins, as well as the mammalian fleshy, inflatable cylinder that we're all familiar with — or at least half of you are. 
(Laughter) And I think we see this tremendous variation because it's a really effective solution to a very basic biological problem, and that is getting sperm in a position to meet up with eggs and form zygotes. 
Now the penis isn't actually required for internal fertiliztion, but when internal fertilization evolves, penises often follow. 
And the question I get when I start talking about this most often is, "What made you interested in this subject?" 
And the answer is skeletons. 
You wouldn't think that skeletons and penises have very much to do with one another. 
And that's because we tend to think of skeletons as stiff lever systems that produce speed or power. 
And my first forays into biological research, doing dinosaur paleontology as an undergraduate, were really squarely in that realm. 
But when I went to graduate school to study biomechanics, I really wanted to find a dissertation project that would expand our knowledge of skeletal function. 
I tried a bunch of different stuff. 
A lot of it didn't pan out. 
But then one day I started thinking about the mammalian penis. 
And it's really an odd sort of structure. 
Before it can be used for internal fertilization, its mechanical behavior has to change in a really dramatic fashion. 
Most of the time it's a flexible organ. 
It's easy to bend. 
But before it's brought into use during copulation it has to become rigid, it has to become difficult to bend. 
And moreover, it has to work. 
A reproductive system that fails to function produces an individual that has no offspring, and that individual is then kicked out of the gene pool. 
And so I thought, "" Here's a problem that just cries out for a skeletal system — not one like this one, but one like this one — because, functionally, a skeleton is any system that supports tissue and transmits forces. 
And I already knew that animals like this earthworm, indeed most animals, don't support their tissues by draping them over bones. 
Instead they're more like reinforced water balloons. 
They use a skeleton that we call a hydrostatic skeleton. 
And a hydrostatic skeleton uses two elements. 
The skeletal support comes from an interaction between a pressurized fluid and a surrounding wall of tissue that's held in tension and reinforced with fibrous proteins. 
And the interaction is crucial. 
Without both elements you have no support. 
If you have fluid with no wall to surround it and keep pressure up, you have a puddle. 
And if you have just the wall with no fluid inside of it to put the wall in tension, you've got a little wet rag. 
When you look at a penis in cross section, it has a lot of the hallmarks of a hydrostatic skeleton. 
It has a central space of spongy erectile tissue that fills with fluid — in this case blood — surrounded by a wall of tissue that's rich in a stiff structural protein called collagen. 
But at the time when I started this project, the best explanation I could find for penal erection was that the wall surrounded these spongy tissues, and the spongy tissues filled with blood and pressure rose and voila! it became erect. 
And that explained to me expansion — made sense: more fluid, you get tissues that expand — but it didn't actually explain erection. 
Because there was no mechanism in this explanation for making this structure hard to bend. 
And no one had systematically looked at the wall tissue. 
So I thought, wall tissue's important in skeletons. 
It has to be part of the explanation. 
And this was the point at which my graduate adviser said, "Whoa! Hold on. Slow down." 
Because after about six months of me talking about this, I think he finally figured out that I was really serious about the penis thing. 
(Laughter) So he sat me down, and he warned me. 
He was like, "" Be careful going down this path. 
I'm not sure this project's going to pan out. "" Because he was afraid I was walking into a trap. 
I was taking on a socially embarrassing question with an answer that he thought might not be particularly interesting. 
And that was because every hydrostatic skeleton that we had found in nature up to that point had the same basic elements. 
It had the central fluid, it had the surrounding wall, and the reinforcing fibers in the wall were arranged in crossed helices around the long axis of the skeleton. 
So the image behind me shows a piece of tissue in one of these cross helical skeletons cut so that you're looking at the surface of the wall. 
The arrow shows you the long axis. 
And you can see two layers of fibers, one in blue and one in yellow, arranged in left-handed and right-handed angles. 
And if you weren't just looking at a little section of the fibers, those fibers would be going in helices around the long axis of the skeleton — something like a Chinese finger trap, where you stick your fingers in and they get stuck. 
And these skeletons have a particular set of behaviors, which I'm going to demonstrate in a film. 
It's a model skeleton that I made out of a piece of cloth that I wrapped around an inflated balloon. 
The cloth's cut on the bias. 
So you can see that the fibers wrap in helices, and those fibers can reorient as the skeleton moves, which means the skeleton's flexible. 
It lengthens, shortens and bends really easily in response to internal or external forces. 
Now my adviser's concern was what if the penile wall tissue is just the same as any other hydrostatic skeleton. 
What are you going to contribute? 
What new thing are you contributing to our knowledge of biology? 
And I thought, "" Yeah, he does have a really good point here. "" So I spent a long, long time thinking about it. 
And one thing kept bothering me, and that's, when they're functioning, penises don't wiggle. 
(Laughter) So something interesting had to be going on. 
So I went ahead, collected wall tissue, prepared it so it was erect, sectioned it, put it on slides and then stuck it under the microscope to have a look, fully expecting to see crossed helices of collagen of some variety. 
But instead I saw this. 
There's an outer layer and an inner layer. 
The arrow shows you the long axis of the skeleton. 
I was really surprised at this. 
Everyone I showed it was really surprised at this. 
Why was everyone surprised at this? 
That's because we knew theoretically that there was another way of arranging fibers in a hydrostatic skeleton, and that was with fibers at zero degrees and 90 degrees to the long axis of the structure. 
The thing is, no one had ever seen it before in nature. 
And now I was looking at one. 
Those fibers in that particular orientation give the skeleton a very, very different behavior. 
I'm going to show a model made out of exactly the same materials. 
So it'll be made of the same cotton cloth, same balloon, same internal pressure. 
But the only difference is that the fibers are arranged differently. 
And you'll see that, unlike the cross helical model, this model resists extension and contraction and resists bending. 
Now what that tells us is that wall tissues are doing so much more than just covering the vascular tissues. 
They're an integral part of the penile skeleton. 
If the wall around the erectile tissue wasn't there, if it wasn't reinforced in this way, the shape would change, but the inflated penis would not resist bending, and erection simply wouldn't work. 
It's an observation with obvious medical applications in humans as well, but it's also relevant in a broad sense, I think, to the design of prosthetics, soft robots, basically anything where changes of shape and stiffness are important. 
So to sum up: Twenty years ago, I had a college adviser tell me, when I went to the college and said, "I'm kind of interested in anatomy," they said, "" Anatomy's a dead science. "" He couldn't have been more wrong. 
I really believe that we still have a lot to learn about the normal structure and function of our bodies. 
Not just about its genetics and molecular biology, but up here in the meat end of the scale. 
We've got limits on our time. 
We often focus on one disease, one model, one problem, but my experience suggests that we should take the time to apply ideas broadly between systems and just see where it takes us. 
After all, if ideas about invertebrate skeletons can give us insights about mammalian reproductive systems, there could be lots of other wild and productive connections lurking out there just waiting to be found. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I was excited to be a part of the "" Dream "" theme, and then I found out I'm leading off the "" Nightmare? "" section of it. 
(Laughter) And certainly there are things about the climate crisis that qualify. 
And I have some bad news, but I have a lot more good news. 
I'm going to propose three questions and the answer to the first one necessarily involves a little bad news. 
But — hang on, because the answers to the second and third questions really are very positive. 
So the first question is, "" Do we really have to change? "" And of course, the Apollo Mission, among other things changed the environmental movement, really launched the modern environmental movement. 
18 months after this Earthrise picture was first seen on earth, the first Earth Day was organized. 
And we learned a lot about ourselves looking back at our planet from space. 
And one of the things that we learned confirmed what the scientists have long told us. 
One of the most essential facts about the climate crisis has to do with the sky. 
As this picture illustrates, the sky is not the vast and limitless expanse that appears when we look up from the ground. 
It is a very thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet. 
That right now is the open sewer for our industrial civilization as it's currently organized. 
We are spewing 110 million tons of heat-trapping global warming pollution into it every 24 hours, free of charge, go ahead. 
And there are many sources of the greenhouse gases, I'm certainly not going to go through them all. 
I'm going to focus on the main one, but agriculture is involved, diet is involved, population is involved. 
Management of forests, transportation, the oceans, the melting of the permafrost. 
But I'm going to focus on the heart of the problem, which is the fact that we still rely on dirty, carbon-based fuels for 85 percent of all the energy that our world burns every year. 
And you can see from this image that after World War II, the emission rates started really accelerating. 
And the accumulated amount of man-made, global warming pollution that is up in the atmosphere now traps as much extra heat energy as would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours, 365 days a year. 
Fact-checked over and over again, conservative, it's the truth. 
Now it's a big planet, but — (Explosion sound) that is a lot of energy, particularly when you multiply it 400,000 times per day. 
And all that extra heat energy is heating up the atmosphere, the whole earth system. 
Let's look at the atmosphere. 
This is a depiction of what we used to think of as the normal distribution of temperatures. 
The white represents normal temperature days; 1951-1980 are arbitrarily chosen. 
The blue are cooler than average days, the red are warmer than average days. 
But the entire curve has moved to the right in the 1980s. 
And you'll see in the lower right-hand corner the appearance of statistically significant numbers of extremely hot days. 
In the 90s, the curve shifted further. 
And in the last 10 years, you see the extremely hot days are now more numerous than the cooler than average days. 
In fact, they are 150 times more common on the surface of the earth than they were just 30 years ago. 
So we're having record-breaking temperatures. 
Fourteen of the 15 of the hottest years ever measured with instruments have been in this young century. 
The hottest of all was last year. 
Last month was the 371st month in a row warmer than the 20th-century average. 
And for the first time, not only the warmest January, but for the first time, it was more than two degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average. 
These higher temperatures are having an effect on animals, plants, people, ecosystems. 
But on a global basis, 93 percent of all the extra heat energy is trapped in the oceans. 
And the scientists can measure the heat buildup much more precisely now at all depths: deep, mid-ocean, the first few hundred meters. 
And this, too, is accelerating. 
It goes back more than a century. 
And more than half of the increase has been in the last 19 years. 
This has consequences. 
The first order of consequence: the ocean-based storms get stronger. 
Super Typhoon Haiyan went over areas of the Pacific five and a half degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal before it slammed into Tacloban, as the most destructive storm ever to make landfall. 
Pope Francis, who has made such a difference to this whole issue, visited Tacloban right after that. 
Superstorm Sandy went over areas of the Atlantic nine degrees warmer than normal before slamming into New York and New Jersey. 
The second order of consequences are affecting all of us right now. 
The warmer oceans are evaporating much more water vapor into the skies. 
Average humidity worldwide has gone up four percent. 
And it creates these atmospheric rivers. 
The Brazilian scientists call them "" flying rivers. "" And they funnel all of that extra water vapor over the land where storm conditions trigger these massive record-breaking downpours. 
This is from Montana. 
Take a look at this storm last August. 
As it moves over Tucson, Arizona. 
It literally splashes off the city. 
These downpours are really unusual. 
Last July in Houston, Texas, it rained for two days, 162 billion gallons. 
That represents more than two days of the full flow of Niagara Falls in the middle of the city, which was, of course, paralyzed. 
These record downpours are creating historic floods and mudslides. 
This one is from Chile last year. 
And you'll see that warehouse going by. 
There are oil tankers cars going by. 
This is from Spain last September, you could call this the running of the cars and trucks, I guess. 
Every night on the TV news now is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation. 
(Laughter) I mean, really. 
The insurance industry has certainly noticed, the losses have been mounting up. 
They're not under any illusions about what's happening. 
And the causality requires a moment of discussion. 
We're used to thinking of linear cause and linear effect — one cause, one effect. 
This is systemic causation. 
As the great Kevin Trenberth says, "" All storms are different now. 
There's so much extra energy in the atmosphere, there's so much extra water vapor. 
Every storm is different now. "" So, the same extra heat pulls the soil moisture out of the ground and causes these deeper, longer, more pervasive droughts and many of them are underway right now. 
It dries out the vegetation and causes more fires in the western part of North America. 
There's certainly been evidence of that, a lot of them. 
More lightning, as the heat energy builds up, there's a considerable amount of additional lightning also. 
These climate-related disasters also have geopolitical consequences and create instability. 
The climate-related historic drought that started in Syria in 2006 destroyed 60 percent of the farms in Syria, killed 80 percent of the livestock, and drove 1.5 million climate refugees into the cities of Syria, where they collided with another 1.5 million refugees from the Iraq War. 
And along with other factors, that opened the gates of Hell that people are trying to close now. 
The US Defense Department has long warned of consequences from the climate crisis, including refugees, food and water shortages and pandemic disease. 
Right now we're seeing microbial diseases from the tropics spread to the higher latitudes; the transportation revolution has had a lot to do with this. 
But the changing conditions change the latitudes and the areas where these microbial diseases can become endemic and change the range of the vectors, like mosquitoes and ticks that carry them. 
The Zika epidemic now — we're better positioned in North America because it's still a little too cool and we have a better public health system. 
But when women in some regions of South and Central America are advised not to get pregnant for two years — that's something new, that ought to get our attention. 
The Lancet, one of the two greatest medical journals in the world, last summer labeled this a medical emergency now. 
And there are many factors because of it. 
This is also connected to the extinction crisis. 
We're in danger of losing 50 percent of all the living species on earth by the end of this century. 
And already, land-based plants and animals are now moving towards the poles at an average rate of 15 feet per day. 
Speaking of the North Pole, last December 29, the same storm that caused historic flooding in the American Midwest, raised temperatures at the North Pole 50 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, causing the thawing of the North Pole in the middle of the long, dark, winter, polar night. 
And when the land-based ice of the Arctic melts, it raises sea level. 
Paul Nicklen's beautiful photograph from Svalbard illustrates this. 
It's more dangerous coming off Greenland and particularly, Antarctica. 
The 10 largest risk cities for sea-level rise by population are mostly in South and Southeast Asia. 
When you measure it by assets at risk, number one is Miami: three and a half trillion dollars at risk. 
Number three: New York and Newark. 
I was in Miami last fall during the supermoon, one of the highest high-tide days. 
And there were fish from the ocean swimming in some of the streets of Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale and Del Rey. 
And this happens regularly during the highest-tide tides now. 
Not with rain — they call it "" sunny-day flooding. "" It comes up through the storm sewers. 
And the Mayor of Miami speaks for many when he says it is long past time this can be viewed through a partisan lens. 
This is a crisis that's getting worse day by day. 
We have to move beyond partisanship. 
And I want to take a moment to honor these House Republicans — (Applause) who had the courage last fall to step out and take a political risk, by telling the truth about the climate crisis. 
So the cost of the climate crisis is mounting up, there are many of these aspects I haven't even mentioned. 
It's an enormous burden. 
I'll mention just one more, because the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, after their annual survey of 750 economists, said the climate crisis is now the number one risk to the global economy. 
So you get central bankers like Mark Carney, the head of the UK Central Bank, saying the vast majority of the carbon reserves are unburnable. 
Subprime carbon. 
I'm not going to remind you what happened with subprime mortgages, but it's the same thing. 
If you look at all of the carbon fuels that were burned since the beginning of the industrial revolution, this is the quantity burned in the last 16 years. 
Here are all the ones that are proven and left on the books, 28 trillion dollars. 
The International Energy Agency says only this amount can be burned. 
So the rest, 22 trillion dollars — unburnable. 
Risk to the global economy. 
That's why divestment movement makes practical sense and is not just a moral imperative. 
So the answer to the first question, "" Must we change? "" is yes, we have to change. 
Second question, "" Can we change? "" This is the exciting news! 
The best projections in the world 16 years ago were that by 2010, the world would be able to install 30 gigawatts of wind capacity. 
We beat that mark by 14 and a half times over. 
We see an exponential curve for wind installations now. 
We see the cost coming down dramatically. 
Some countries — take Germany, an industrial powerhouse with a climate not that different from Vancouver's, by the way — one day last December, got 81 percent of all its energy from renewable resources, mainly solar and wind. 
A lot of countries are getting more than half on an average basis. 
More good news: energy storage, from batteries particularly, is now beginning to take off because the cost has been coming down very dramatically to solve the intermittency problem. 
With solar, the news is even more exciting! 
The best projections 14 years ago were that we would install one gigawatt per year by 2010. 
When 2010 came around, we beat that mark by 17 times over. 
Last year, we beat it by 58 times over. 
This year, we're on track to beat it 68 times over. 
We're going to win this. 
We are going to prevail. 
The exponential curve on solar is even steeper and more dramatic. 
When I came to this stage 10 years ago, this is where it was. 
We have seen a revolutionary breakthrough in the emergence of these exponential curves. 
(Applause) And the cost has come down 10 percent per year for 30 years. 
And it's continuing to come down. 
Now, the business community has certainly noticed this, because it's crossing the grid parity point. 
Cheaper solar penetration rates are beginning to rise. 
Grid parity is understood as that line, that threshold, below which renewable electricity is cheaper than electricity from burning fossil fuels. 
That threshold is a little bit like the difference between 32 degrees Fahrenheit and 33 degrees Fahrenheit, or zero and one Celsius. 
It's a difference of more than one degree, it's the difference between ice and water. 
And it's the difference between markets that are frozen up, and liquid flows of capital into new opportunities for investment. 
This is the biggest new business opportunity in the history of the world, and two-thirds of it is in the private sector. 
We are seeing an explosion of new investment. 
Starting in 2010, investments globally in renewable electricity generation surpassed fossils. 
The gap has been growing ever since. 
The projections for the future are even more dramatic, even though fossil energy is now still subsidized at a rate 40 times larger than renewables. 
And by the way, if you add the projections for nuclear on here, particularly if you assume that the work many are doing to try to break through to safer and more acceptable, more affordable forms of nuclear, this could change even more dramatically. 
So is there any precedent for such a rapid adoption of a new technology? 
Well, there are many, but let's look at cell phones. 
In 1980, AT & T, then Ma Bell, commissioned McKinsey to do a global market survey of those clunky new mobile phones that appeared then. 
"" How many can we sell by the year 2000? "" they asked. 
McKinsey came back and said, "" 900,000. "" And sure enough, when the year 2000 arrived, they did sell 900,000 — in the first three days. 
And for the balance of the year, they sold 120 times more. 
And now there are more cell connections than there are people in the world. 
So, why were they not only wrong, but way wrong? 
I've asked that question myself, "" Why? "" (Laughter) And I think the answer is in three parts. 
First, the cost came down much faster than anybody expected, even as the quality went up. 
And low-income countries, places that did not have a landline grid — they leap-frogged to the new technology. 
The big expansion has been in the developing counties. 
So what about the electricity grids in the developing world? 
Well, not so hot. 
And in many areas, they don't exist. 
There are more people without any electricity at all in India than the entire population of the United States of America. 
So now we're getting this: solar panels on grass huts and new business models that make it affordable. 
Muhammad Yunus financed this one in Bangladesh with micro-credit. 
This is a village market. 
Bangladesh is now the fastest-deploying country in the world: two systems per minute on average, night and day. 
And we have all we need: enough energy from the Sun comes to the earth every hour to supply the full world's energy needs for an entire year. 
It's actually a little bit less than an hour. 
So the answer to the second question, "" Can we change? "" is clearly "" Yes. "" And it's an ever-firmer "" yes. "" Last question, "" Will we change? "" Paris really was a breakthrough, some of the provisions are binding and the regular reviews will matter a lot. 
But nations aren't waiting, they're going ahead. 
China has already announced that starting next year, they're adopting a nationwide cap and trade system. 
They will likely link up with the European Union. 
The United States has already been changing. 
All of these coal plants were proposed in the next 10 years and canceled. 
All of these existing coal plants were retired. 
All of these coal plants have had their retirement announced. 
All of them — canceled. 
We are moving forward. 
Last year — if you look at all of the investment in new electricity generation in the United States, almost three-quarters was from renewable energy, mostly wind and solar. 
We are solving this crisis. 
The only question is: how long will it take to get there? 
So, it matters that a lot of people are organizing to insist on this change. 
Almost 400,000 people marched in New York City before the UN special session on this. 
Many thousands, tens of thousands, marched in cities around the world. 
And so, I am extremely optimistic. 
As I said before, we are going to win this. 
I'll finish with this story. 
When I was 13 years old, I heard that proposal by President Kennedy to land a person on the Moon and bring him back safely in 10 years. 
And I heard adults of that day and time say, "That's reckless, expensive, may well fail." 
But eight years and two months later, in the moment that Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, there was great cheer that went up in NASA's mission control in Houston. 
Here's a little-known fact about that: the average age of the systems engineers, the controllers in the room that day, was 26, which means, among other things, their age, when they heard that challenge, was 18. 
We now have a moral challenge that is in the tradition of others that we have faced. 
One of the greatest poets of the last century in the US, Wallace Stevens, wrote a line that has stayed with me: "" After the final 'no,' there comes a 'yes,' and on that 'yes', the future world depends. "" When the abolitionists started their movement, they met with no after no after no. 
And then came a yes. 
The Women's Suffrage and Women's Rights Movement met endless no's, until finally, there was a yes. 
The Civil Rights Movement, the movement against apartheid, and more recently, the movement for gay and lesbian rights here in the United States and elsewhere. 
After the final "" no "" comes a "" yes. "" When any great moral challenge is ultimately resolved into a binary choice between what is right and what is wrong, the outcome is fore-ordained because of who we are as human beings. 
Ninety-nine percent of us, that is where we are now and it is why we're going to win this. 
We have everything we need. 
Some still doubt that we have the will to act, but I say the will to act is itself a renewable resource. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: You've got this incredible combination of skills. 
You've got this scientist mind that can understand the full range of issues, and the ability to turn it into the most vivid language. 
No one else can do that, that's why you led this thing. 
It was amazing to see it 10 years ago, it was amazing to see it now. 
Al Gore: Well, you're nice to say that, Chris. 
But honestly, I have a lot of really good friends in the scientific community who are incredibly patient and who will sit there and explain this stuff to me over and over and over again until I can get it into simple enough language that I can understand it. 
And that's the key to trying to communicate. 
CA: So, your talk. First part: terrifying, second part: incredibly hopeful. 
How do we know that all those graphs, all that progress, is enough to solve what you showed in the first part? 
AG: I think that the crossing — you know, I've only been in the business world for 15 years. 
But one of the things I've learned is that apparently it matters if a new product or service is more expensive than the incumbent, or cheaper than. 
Turns out, it makes a difference if it's cheaper than. 
(Laughter) And when it crosses that line, then a lot of things really change. 
We are regularly surprised by these developments. 
The late Rudi Dornbusch, the great economist said, "" Things take longer to happen then you think they will, and then they happen much faster than you thought they could. "" I really think that's where we are. 
Some people are using the phrase "" The Solar Singularity "" now, meaning when it gets below the grid parity, unsubsidized in most places, then it's the default choice. 
Now, in one of the presentations yesterday, the jitney thing, there is an effort to use regulations to slow this down. 
And I just don't think it's going to work. 
There's a woman in Atlanta, Debbie Dooley, who's the Chairman of the Atlanta Tea Party. 
They enlisted her in this effort to put a tax on solar panels and regulations. 
And she had just put solar panels on her roof and she didn't understand the request. 
(Laughter) And so she went and formed an alliance with the Sierra Club and they formed a new organization called the Green Tea Party. (Laughter) 
(Applause) And they defeated the proposal. 
So, finally, the answer to your question is, this sounds a little corny and maybe it's a cliché, but 10 years ago — and Christiana referred to this — there are people in this audience who played an incredibly significant role in generating those exponential curves. 
And it didn't work out economically for some of them, but it kick-started this global revolution. 
And what people in this audience do now with the knowledge that we are going to win this. 
But it matters a lot how fast we win it. 
CA: Al Gore, that was incredibly powerful. 
If this turns out to be the year, that the partisan thing changes, as you said, it's no longer a partisan issue, but you bring along people from the other side together, backed by science, backed by these kinds of investment opportunities, backed by reason that you win the day — boy, that's really exciting. 
Thank you so much. 
AG: Thank you so much for bringing me back to TED. 
Thank you! 
(Applause) 

Ah yes, those university days, a heady mix of Ph.D-level pure mathematics and world debating championships, or, as I like to say, "" Hello, ladies. Oh yeah. "" Didn't get much sexier than the Spence at university, let me tell you. 
It is such a thrill for a humble breakfast radio announcer from Sydney, Australia, to be here on the TED stage literally on the other side of the world. 
And I wanted to let you know, a lot of the things you've heard about Australians are true. 
From the youngest of ages, we display a prodigious sporting talent. 
On the field of battle, we are brave and noble warriors. 
What you've heard is true. 
Australians, we don't mind a bit of a drink, sometimes to excess, leading to embarrassing social situations. (Laughter) This is my father's work Christmas party, December 1973. 
I'm almost five years old. Fair to say, I'm enjoying the day a lot more than Santa was. 
But I stand before you today not as a breakfast radio host, not as a comedian, but as someone who was, is, and always will be a mathematician. 
And anyone who's been bitten by the numbers bug knows that it bites early and it bites deep. 
I cast my mind back when I was in second grade at a beautiful little government-run school called Boronia Park in the suburbs of Sydney, and as we came up towards lunchtime, our teacher, Ms. Russell, said to the class, "" Hey, year two. What do you want to do after lunch? 
I've got no plans. "" It was an exercise in democratic schooling, and I am all for democratic schooling, but we were only seven. 
So some of the suggestions we made as to what we might want to do after lunch were a little bit impractical, and after a while, someone made a particularly silly suggestion and Ms. Russell patted them down with that gentle aphorism, "" That wouldn't work. 
That'd be like trying to put a square peg through a round hole. "" Now I wasn't trying to be smart. 
I wasn't trying to be funny. 
I just politely raised my hand, and when Ms. Russell acknowledged me, I said, in front of my year two classmates, and I quote, "" But Miss, surely if the diagonal of the square is less than the diameter of the circle, well, the square peg will pass quite easily through the round hole. "" (Laughter) "It'd be like putting a piece of toast through a basketball hoop, wouldn't it?" 
And there was that same awkward silence from most of my classmates, until sitting next to me, one of my friends, one of the cool kids in class, Steven, leaned across and punched me really hard in the head. 
(Laughter) Now what Steven was saying was, "" Look, Adam, you are at a critical juncture in your life here, my friend. 
You can keep sitting here with us. 
Any more of that sort of talk, you've got to go and sit over there with them. "" I thought about it for a nanosecond. 
I took one look at the road map of life, and I ran off down the street marked "" Geek "" as fast as my chubby, asthmatic little legs would carry me. 
I fell in love with mathematics from the earliest of ages. 
I explained it to all my friends. Maths is beautiful. 
It's natural. It's everywhere. 
Numbers are the musical notes with which the symphony of the universe is written. 
The great Descartes said something quite similar. 
The universe "" is written in the mathematical language. "" And today, I want to show you one of those musical notes, a number so beautiful, so massive, I think it will blow your mind. 
Today we're going to talk about prime numbers. 
Most of you I'm sure remember that six is not prime because it's 2 x 3. 
Seven is prime because it's 1 x 7, but we can't break it down into any smaller chunks, or as we call them, factors. 
Now a few things you might like to know about prime numbers. 
One is not prime. 
The proof of that is a great party trick that admittedly only works at certain parties. 
(Laughter) Another thing about primes, there is no final biggest prime number. 
They keep going on forever. 
We know there are an infinite number of primes due to the brilliant mathematician Euclid. 
Over thousands of years ago, he proved that for us. 
But the third thing about prime numbers, mathematicians have always wondered, well at any given moment in time, what is the biggest prime that we know about? 
Today we're going to hunt for that massive prime. 
Don't freak out. 
All you need to know, of all the mathematics you've ever learned, unlearned, crammed, forgotten, never understood in the first place, all you need to know is this: When I say 2 ^ 5, I'm talking about five little number twos next to each other all multiplied together, 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2. 
So 2 ^ 5 is 2 x 2 = 4, 8, 16, 32. 
If you've got that, you're with me for the entire journey. Okay? 
So 2 ^ 5, those five little twos multiplied together. 
(2 ^ 5) - 1 = 31. 
31 is a prime number, and that five in the power is also a prime number. 
And the vast bulk of massive primes we've ever found are of that form: two to a prime number, take away one. 
I won't go into great detail as to why, because most of your eyes will bleed out of your head if I do, but suffice to say, a number of that form is fairly easy to test for primacy. 
A random odd number is a lot harder to test. 
But as soon as we go hunting for massive primes, we realize it's not enough just to put in any prime number in the power. 
(2 ^ 11) - 1 = 2,047, and you don't need me to tell you that's 23 x 89. 
(Laughter) But (2 ^ 13) - 1, (2 ^ 17) - 1 (2 ^ 19) - 1, are all prime numbers. 
After that point, they thin out a lot. 
And one of the things about the search for massive primes that I love so much is some of the great mathematical minds of all time have gone on this search. 
This is the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. 
In the 1700s, other mathematicians said he is simply the master of us all. 
He was so respected, they put him on European currency back when that was a compliment. 
(Laughter) Euler discovered at the time the world's biggest prime: (2 ^ 31) - 1. 
It's over two billion. 
He proved it was prime with nothing more than a quill, ink, paper and his mind. 
You think that's big. 
We know that (2 ^ 127) - 1 is a prime number. 
It's an absolute brute. 
Look at it here: 39 digits long, proven to be prime in 1876 by a mathematician called Lucas. 
Word up, L-Dog. 
(Laughter) But one of the great things about the search for massive primes, it's not just finding the primes. 
Sometimes proving another number not to be prime is just as exciting. 
Lucas again, in 1876, showed us (2 ^ 67) - 1, 21 digits long, was not prime. 
But he didn't know what the factors were. 
We knew it was like six, but we didn't know what are the 2 x 3 that multiply together to give us that massive number. 
We didn't know for almost 40 years until Frank Nelson Cole came along. 
And at a gathering of prestigious American mathematicians, he walked to the board, took up a piece of chalk, and started writing out the powers of two: two, four, eight, 16 — come on, join in with me, you know how it goes — 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024, 2,048. 
I'm in geek heaven. We'll stop it there for a second. 
Frank Nelson Cole did not stop there. 
He went on and on and calculated 67 powers of two. 
He took away one and wrote that number on the board. 
A frisson of excitement went around the room. 
It got even more exciting when he then wrote down these two large prime numbers in your standard multiplication format — and for the rest of the hour of his talk Frank Nelson Cole busted that out. 
He had found the prime factors of (2 ^ 67) - 1. 
The room went berserk — (Laughter) — as Frank Nelson Cole sat down, having delivered the only talk in the history of mathematics with no words. 
He admitted afterwards it wasn't that hard to do. 
It took focus. It took dedication. 
It took him, by his estimate, "three years of Sundays." 
But then in the field of mathematics, as in so many of the fields that we've heard from in this TED, the age of the computer goes along and things explode. 
These are the largest prime numbers we knew decade by decade, each one dwarfing the one before as computers took over and our power to calculate just grew and grew. 
This is the largest prime number we knew in 1996, a very emotional year for me. 
It was the year I left university. 
I was torn between mathematics and media. 
It was a tough decision. I loved university. 
My arts degree was the best nine and a half years of my life. 
(Laughter) But I came to a realization about my own ability. 
Put simply, in a room full of randomly selected people, I'm a maths genius. 
In a roomful of maths Ph.Ds, I'm as dumb as a box of hammers. 
My skill is not in the mathematics. 
It is in telling the story of the mathematics. 
And during that time, since I've left university, these numbers have got bigger and bigger, each one dwarfing the last, until along came this man, Dr. Curtis Cooper, who a few years ago held the record for the largest ever prime, only to see it snatched away by a rival university. 
And then Curtis Cooper got it back. 
Not years ago, not months ago, days ago. 
In an amazing moment of serendipity, I had to send TED a new slide to show you what this guy had done. 
I still remember — (Applause) — I still remember when it happened. 
I was doing my breakfast radio show. 
I looked down on Twitter. There was a tweet: "Adam, have you seen the new largest prime number?" 
I shivered — (Laughter) — contacted the women who produced my radio show out in the other room, and said "" Girls, hold the front page. 
We're not talking politics today. 
We're not talking sport today. 
They found another megaprime. "" The girls just shook their heads, put them in their hands, and let me go my own way. 
It's because of Curtis Cooper that we know, currently the largest prime number we know, is 2 ^ 57,885,161. 
Don't forget to subtract the one. 
This number is almost 17 and a half million digits long. 
If you typed it out on a computer and saved it as a text file, that's 22 meg. 
For the slightly less geeky of you, think about the Harry Potter novels, okay? 
This is the first Harry Potter novel. 
This is all seven Harry Potter novels, because she did tend to faff on a bit near the end. 
(Laughter) Written out as a book, this number would run the length of the Harry Potter novels and half again. 
Here's a slide of the first 1,000 digits of this prime. 
If, when TED had begun, at 11 o'clock on Tuesday, we'd walked out and simply hit one slide every second, it would have taken five hours to show you that number. 
I was keen to do it, could not convince Bono. 
That's the way it goes. 
This number is 17 and a half thousand slides long, and we know it is prime as confidently as we know the number seven is prime. 
That fills me with almost sexual excitement. 
And who am I kidding when I say almost? 
(Laughter) I know what you're thinking: Adam, we're happy that you're happy, but why should we care? 
Let me give you just three reasons why this is so beautiful. 
First of all, as I explained, to ask a computer "" Is that number prime? "" to type it in its abbreviated form, and then only about six lines of code is the test for primacy, is a remarkably simple question to ask. 
It's got a remarkably clear yes / no answer, and just requires phenomenal grunt. 
Large prime numbers are a great way of testing the speed and accuracy of computer chips. 
But secondly, as Curtis Cooper was looking for that monster prime, he wasn't the only guy searching. 
My laptop at home was looking through four potential candidate primes myself as part of a networked computer hunt around the world for these large numbers. 
The discovery of that prime is similar to the work people are doing in unraveling RNA sequences, in searching through data from SETI and other astronomical projects. 
We live in an age where some of the great breakthroughs are not going to happen in the labs or the halls of academia but on laptops, desktops, in the palms of people's hands who are simply helping out for the search. 
But for me it's amazing because it's a metaphor for the time in which we live, when human minds and machines can conquer together. 
We've heard a lot about robots in this TED. 
We've heard a lot about what they can and can't do. 
It is true, you can now download onto your smartphone an app that would beat most grandmasters at chess. 
You think that's cool. 
Here's a machine doing something cool. 
This is the CubeStormer II. 
It can take a randomly shuffled Rubik's Cube. 
Using the power of the smartphone, it can examine the cube and solve the cube in five seconds. 
(Applause) That scares some people. That excites me. 
How lucky are we to live in this age when mind and machine can work together? 
I was asked in an interview last year in my capacity as a lower-case "" c "" celebrity in Australia, "What was your highlight of 2012?" 
People were expecting me to talk about my beloved Sydney Swans football team. 
In our beautiful, indigenous sport of Australian football, they won the equivalent of the Super Bowl. 
I was there. It was the most emotional, exciting day. 
It wasn't my highlight of 2012. 
People thought it might have been an interview I'd done on my show. 
It might have been a politician. It might have been a breakthrough. 
It might have been a book I read, the arts. No, no, no. 
It might have been something my two gorgeous daughters had done. 
No, it wasn't. The highlight of 2012, so clearly, was the discovery of the Higgs boson. 
Give it up for the fundamental particle that bequeaths all other fundamental particles their mass. 
(Applause) And what was so gorgeous about this discovery was 50 years ago Peter Higgs and his team considered one of the deepest of all questions: How is it that the things that make us up have no mass? 
I've clearly got mass. Where does it come from? 
And he postulated a suggestion that there's this infinite, incredibly small field stretching throughout the universe, and as other particles go through those particles and interact, that's where they get their mass. 
The rest of the scientific community said, "" Great idea, Higgsy. 
We've got no idea if we could ever prove it. 
It's beyond our reach. "" And within just 50 years, in his lifetime, with him sitting in the audience, we had designed the greatest machine ever to prove this incredible idea that originated just in a human mind. 
That's what is so exciting for me about this prime number. 
We thought it might be there, and we went and found it. 
That is the essence of being human. 
That is what we are all about. 
Or as my friend Descartes might put it, we think, therefore we are. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Let's talk about billions. Let's talk about 
past and future billions. 
We know that about 106 billion people have ever lived. 
And we know that most of them are dead. 
And we also know that most of them live or lived in Asia. And we also know 
that most of them were or are very poor — did not live for very long. 
Let's talk about billions. Let's talk about 
the 195,000 billion dollars of wealth in the world today. 
We know that most of that wealth was made after the year 1800. 
And we know that most of it is currently owned by people we might call Westerners: Europeans, North Americans, Australasians. 
19 percent of the world's population today, Westerners own two-thirds of its wealth. 
Economic historians call this "" The Great Divergence. "" And this slide here is the best simplification of the Great Divergence story I can offer you. 
It's basically two ratios of per capita GDP, per capita gross domestic product, so average income. 
One, the red line, is the ratio of British to Indian per capita income. 
And the blue line is the ratio of American to Chinese. 
And this chart goes back to 1500. 
And you can see here that there's an exponential Great Divergence. 
They start off pretty close together. 
In fact, in 1500, the average Chinese was richer than the average North American. 
When you get to the 1970s, which is where this chart ends, the average Briton is more than 10 times richer than the average Indian. 
And that's allowing for differences in the cost of living. 
It's based on purchasing power parity. 
The average American is nearly 20 times richer than the average Chinese by the 1970s. 
So why? 
This wasn't just an economic story. 
If you take the 10 countries that went on to become the Western empires, in 1500 they were really quite tiny — five percent of the world's land surface, 16 percent of its population, maybe 20 percent of its income. 
By 1913, these 10 countries, plus the United States, controlled vast global empires — 58 percent of the world's territory, about the same percentage of its population, and a really huge, nearly three-quarters share of global economic output. 
And notice, most of that went to the motherland, to the imperial metropoles, not to their colonial possessions. 
Now you can't just blame this on imperialism — though many people have tried to do so — for two reasons. 
One, empire was the least original thing that the West did after 1500. 
Everybody did empire. 
They beat preexisting Oriental empires like the Mughals and the Ottomans. 
So it really doesn't look like empire is a great explanation for the Great Divergence. 
In any case, as you may remember, the Great Divergence reaches its zenith in the 1970s, some considerable time after decolonization. 
This is not a new question. 
Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer, [posed] it through his character Rasselas in his novel "" Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, "" published in 1759. 
"" By what means are the Europeans thus powerful; or why, since they can so easily visit Asia and Africa for trade or conquest, cannot the Asiaticks and Africans invade their coasts, plant colonies in their ports, and give laws to their natural princes? 
The same wind that carries them back would bring us thither? "" That's a great question. 
And you know what, it was also being asked at roughly the same time by the Resterners — by the people in the rest of the world — like Ibrahim Muteferrika, an Ottoman official, the man who introduced printing, very belatedly, to the Ottoman Empire — who said in a book published in 1731, "" Why do Christian nations which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies? "" Unlike Rasselas, Muteferrika had an answer to that question, which was correct. 
He said it was "" because they have laws and rules invented by reason. "" It's not geography. 
You may think we can explain the Great Divergence in terms of geography. 
We know that's wrong, because we conducted two great natural experiments in the 20th century to see if geography mattered more than institutions. 
We took all the Germans, we divided them roughly in two, and we gave the ones in the East communism, and you see the result. 
Within an incredibly short period of time, people living in the German Democratic Republic produced Trabants, the Trabbi, one of the world's worst ever cars, while people in the West produced the Mercedes Benz. 
If you still don't believe me, we conducted the experiment also in the Korean Peninsula. 
And we decided we'd take Koreans in roughly the same geographical place with, notice, the same basic traditional culture, and we divided them in two, and we gave the Northerners communism. 
And the result is an even bigger divergence in a very short space of time than happened in Germany. 
Not a big divergence in terms of uniform design for border guards admittedly, but in almost every other respect, it's a huge divergence. 
Which leads me to think that neither geography nor national character, popular explanations for this kind of thing, are really significant. 
It's the ideas. 
It's the institutions. 
This must be true because a Scotsman said it. 
And I think I'm the only Scotsman here at the Edinburgh TED. 
So let me just explain to you that the smartest man ever was a Scotsman. 
He was Adam Smith — not Billy Connolly, not Sean Connery — though he is very smart indeed. 
(Laughter) Smith — and I want you to go and bow down before his statue in the Royal Mile; it's a wonderful statue — Smith, in the "" Wealth of Nations "" published in 1776 — that's the most important thing that happened that year... (Laughter) 
You bet. 
There was a little local difficulty in some of our minor colonies, but... 
(Laughter) "" China seems to have been long stationary, and probably long ago acquired that full complement of riches which is consistent with the nature of its laws and institutions. 
But this complement may be much inferior to what, with other laws and institutions, the nature of its soil, climate, and situation might admit of. "" That is so right and so cool. 
And he said it such a long time ago. 
But you know, this is a TED audience, and if I keep talking about institutions, you're going to turn off. 
So I'm going to translate this into language that you can understand. 
Let's call them the killer apps. 
I want to explain to you that there were six killer apps that set the West apart from the rest. 
And they're kind of like the apps on your phone, in the sense that they look quite simple. 
They're just icons; you click on them. 
But behind the icon, there's complex code. 
It's the same with institutions. 
There are six which I think explain the Great Divergence. 
One, competition. 
Two, the scientific revolution. 
Three, property rights. 
Four, modern medicine. 
Five, the consumer society. 
And six, the work ethic. 
You can play a game and try and think of one I've missed at, or try and boil it down to just four, but you'll lose. 
(Laughter) Let me very briefly tell you what I mean by this, synthesizing the work of many economic historians in the process. 
Competition means, not only were there a hundred different political units in Europe in 1500, but within each of these units, there was competition between corporations as well as sovereigns. 
The ancestor of the modern corporation, the City of London Corporation, existed in the 12th century. 
Nothing like this existed in China, where there was one monolithic state covering a fifth of humanity, and anyone with any ambition had to pass one standardized examination, which took three days and was very difficult and involved memorizing vast numbers of characters and very complex Confucian essay writing. 
The scientific revolution was different from the science that had been achieved in the Oriental world in a number of crucial ways, the most important being that, through the experimental method, it gave men control over nature in a way that had not been possible before. 
Example: Benjamin Robins's extraordinary application of Newtonian physics to ballistics. 
Once you do that, your artillery becomes accurate. 
Think of what that means. 
That really was a killer application. 
(Laughter) Meanwhile, there's no scientific revolution anywhere else. 
The Ottoman Empire's not that far from Europe, but there's no scientific revolution there. 
In fact, they demolish Taqi al-Din's observatory, because it's considered blasphemous to inquire into the mind of God. 
Property rights: It's not the democracy, folks; it's having the rule of law based on private property rights. 
That's what makes the difference between North America and South America. 
You could turn up in North America having signed a deed of indenture saying, "" I'll work for nothing for five years. 
You just have to feed me. "" But at the end of it, you've got a hundred acres of land. 
That's the land grant on the bottom half of the slide. 
That's not possible in Latin America where land is held onto by a tiny elite descended from the conquistadors. 
And you can see here the huge divergence that happens in property ownership between North and South. 
Most people in rural North America owned some land by 1900. 
Hardly anyone in South America did. 
That's another killer app. 
Modern medicine in the late 19th century began to make major breakthroughs against the infectious diseases that killed a lot of people. 
And this was another killer app — the very opposite of a killer, because it doubled, and then more than doubled, human life expectancy. 
It even did that in the European empires. 
Even in places like Senegal, beginning in the early 20th century, there were major breakthroughs in public health, and life expectancy began to rise. 
It doesn't rise any faster after these countries become independent. 
The empires weren't all bad. 
The consumer society is what you need for the Industrial Revolution to have a point. 
You need people to want to wear tons of clothes. 
You've all bought an article of clothing in the last month; I guarantee it. 
That's the consumer society, and it propels economic growth more than even technological change itself. 
Japan was the first non-Western society to embrace it. 
The alternative, which was proposed by Mahatma Gandhi, was to institutionalize and make poverty permanent. 
Very few Indians today wish that India had gone down Mahatma Gandhi's road. 
Finally, the work ethic. 
Max Weber thought that was peculiarly Protestant. 
He was wrong. 
Any culture can get the work ethic if the institutions are there to create the incentive to work. 
We know this because today the work ethic is no longer a Protestant, Western phenomenon. 
In fact, the West has lost its work ethic. 
Today, the average Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German — a thousand. 
And this is part of a really extraordinary phenomenon, and that is the end of the Great Divergence. 
Who's got the work ethic now? 
Take a look at mathematical attainment by 15 year-olds. 
At the top of the international league table according to the latest PISA study, is the Shanghai district of China. 
The gap between Shanghai and the United Kingdom and the United States is as big as the gap between the U.K. and the U.S. 
and Albania and Tunisia. 
You probably assume that because the iPhone was designed in California but assembled in China that the West still leads in terms of technological innovation. 
You're wrong. 
In terms of patents, there's no question that the East is ahead. 
Not only has Japan been ahead for some time, South Korea has gone into third place, and China is just about to overtake Germany. 
Why? 
Because the killer apps can be downloaded. 
It's open source. 
Any society can adopt these institutions, and when they do, they achieve what the West achieved after 1500 — only faster. 
This is the Great Reconvergence, and it's the biggest story of your lifetime. 
Because it's on your watch that this is happening. 
It's our generation that is witnessing the end of Western predominance. 
The average American used to be more than 20 times richer than the average Chinese. 
Now it's just five times, and soon it will be 2.5 times. 
So I want to end with three questions for the future billions, just ahead of 2016, when the United States will lose its place as number one economy to China. 
The first is, can you delete these apps, and are we in the process of doing so in the Western world? 
The second question is, does the sequencing of the download matter? 
And could Africa get that sequencing wrong? 
One obvious implication of modern economic history is that it's quite hard to transition to democracy before you've established secure private property rights. 
Warning: that may not work. 
And third, can China do without killer app number three? 
That's the one that John Locke systematized when he said that freedom was rooted in private property rights and the protection of law. 
That's the basis for the Western model of representative government. 
Now this picture shows the demolition of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's studio in Shanghai earlier this year. 
He's now free again, having been detained, as you know, for some time. 
But I don't think his studio has been rebuilt. 
Winston Churchill once defined civilization in a lecture he gave in the fateful year of 1938. 
And I think these words really nail it: "" It means a society based upon the opinion of civilians. 
It means that violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare, of riot and tyranny, give place to parliaments where laws are made, and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained. 
That is civilization — and in its soil grow continually freedom, comfort and culture, "" what all TEDsters care about most. 
"" When civilization reigns in any country, a wider and less harassed life is afforded to the masses of the people. "" That's so true. 
I don't think the decline of Western civilization is inevitable, because I don't think history operates in this kind of life-cycle model, beautifully illustrated by Thomas Cole's "" Course of Empire "" paintings. 
That's not the way history works. 
That's not the way the West rose, and I don't think it's the way the West will fall. 
The West may collapse very suddenly. 
Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos. 
That's one of the most profound insights to come out of the historical study of complex institutions like civilizations. 
No, we may hang on, despite the huge burdens of debt that we've accumulated, despite the evidence that we've lost our work ethic and other parts of our historical mojo. 
But one thing is for sure, the Great Divergence is over, folks. 
Thanks very much. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Niall, I am just curious about your take on the other region of the world that's booming, which is Latin America. 
What's your view on that? 
Niall Ferguson: Well I really am not just talking about the rise of the East; I'm talking about the rise of the Rest, and that includes South America. 
I once asked one of my colleagues at Harvard, "Hey, is South America part of the West?" 
He was an expert in Latin American history. 
He said, "" I don't know; I'll have to think about that. "" That tells you something really important. 
I think if you look at what is happening in Brazil in particular, but also Chile, which was in many ways the one that led the way in transforming the institutions of economic life, there's a very bright future indeed. 
So my story really is as much about that convergence in the Americas as it's a convergence story in Eurasia. 
BG: And there is this impression that North America and Europe are not really paying attention to these trends. 
Mostly they're worried about each other. 
The Americans think that the European model is going to crumble tomorrow. 
The Europeans think that the American budget is going to explode tomorrow. 
And that's all we seem to be caring about recently. 
NF: I think the fiscal crisis that we see in the developed World right now — both sides of the Atlantic — is essentially the same thing taking different forms in terms of political culture. 
And it's a crisis that has its structural facet — it's partly to do with demographics. 
But it's also, of course, to do with the massive crisis that followed excessive leverage, excessive borrowing in the private sector. 
That crisis, which has been the focus of so much attention, including by me, I think is an epiphenomenon. 
The financial crisis is really a relatively small historic phenomenon, which has just accelerated this huge shift, which ends half a millennium of Western ascendancy. 
I think that's its real importance. 
BG: Niall, thank you. (NF: Thank you very much, Bruno.) (Applause) 

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

How would you like to be better than you are? 
Suppose I said that, with just a few changes in your genes, you could get a better memory — more precise, more accurate and quicker. 
Or maybe you'd like to be more fit, stronger, with more stamina. 
Would you like to be more attractive and self-confident? 
How about living longer with good health? 
Or perhaps you're one of those who's always yearned for more creativity. 
Which one would you like the most? 
Which would you like, if you could have just one? 
(Audience Member: Creativity.) Creativity. 
How many people would choose creativity? 
Raise your hands. Let me see. 
A few. Probably about as many as there are creative people here. 
(Laughter) That's very good. 
How many would opt for memory? 
Quite a few more. 
How about fitness? 
A few less. 
What about longevity? 
Ah, the majority. That makes me feel very good as a doctor. 
If you could have any one of these, it would be a very different world. 
Is it just imaginary? 
Or, is it, perhaps, possible? 
Evolution has been a perennial topic here at the TED Conference, but I want to give you today one doctor's take on the subject. 
The great 20th-century geneticist, T.G. Dobzhansky, who was also a communicant in the Russian Orthodox Church, once wrote an essay that he titled "" Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution. "" Now if you are one of those who does not accept the evidence for biological evolution, this would be a very good time to turn off your hearing aid, take out your personal communications device — I give you permission — and perhaps take another look at Kathryn Schultz's book on being wrong, because nothing in the rest of this talk is going to make any sense whatsoever to you. 
(Laughter) But if you do accept biological evolution, consider this: is it just about the past, or is it about the future? 
Does it apply to others, or does it apply to us? 
This is another look at the tree of life. 
In this picture, I've put a bush with a center branching out in all directions, because if you look at the edges of the tree of life, every existing species at the tips of those branches has succeeded in evolutionary terms: it has survived; it has demonstrated a fitness to its environment. 
The human part of this branch, way out on one end, is, of course, the one that we are most interested in. 
We branch off of a common ancestor to modern chimpanzees about six or eight million years ago. 
In the interval, there have been perhaps 20 or 25 different species of hominids. 
Some have come and gone. 
We have been here for about 130,000 years. 
It may seem like we're quite remote from other parts of this tree of life, but actually, for the most part, the basic machinery of our cells is pretty much the same. 
Do you realize that we can take advantage and commandeer the machinery of a common bacterium to produce the protein of human insulin used to treat diabetics? 
This is not like human insulin; this is the same protein that is chemically indistinguishable from what comes out of your pancreas. 
And speaking of bacteria, do you realize that each of us carries in our gut more bacteria than there are cells in the rest of our body? 
Maybe 10 times more. 
I mean think of it, when Antonio Damasio asks about your self-image, do you think about the bacteria? 
Our gut is a wonderfully hospitable environment for those bacteria. 
It's warm, it's dark, it's moist, it's very cozy. 
And you're going to provide all the nutrition that they could possibly want with no effort on their part. 
It's really like an Easy Street for bacteria, with the occasional interruption of the unintended forced rush to the exit. 
But otherwise, you are a wonderful environment for those bacteria, just as they are essential to your life. 
They help in the digestion of essential nutrients, and they protect you against certain diseases. 
But what will come in the future? 
Are we at some kind of evolutionary equipoise as a species? 
Or, are we destined to become something different — something, perhaps, even better adapted to the environment? 
Now let's take a step back in time to the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago — the Earth, the solar system, about four and a half billion years — the first signs of proto-life, maybe three to four billion years ago on Earth — the first multi-celled organisms, perhaps as much as 800 or a billion years ago — and then the human species, finally emerging in the last 130,000 years. 
In this vast unfinished symphony of the universe, life on Earth is like a brief measure; the animal kingdom, like a single measure; and human life, a small grace note. 
That was us. 
That also constitutes the entertainment portion of this talk, so I hope you enjoyed it. 
(Laughter) Now when I was a freshman in college, I took my first biology class. 
I was fascinated by the elegance and beauty of biology. 
I became enamored of the power of evolution, and I realized something very fundamental: in most of the existence of life in single-celled organisms, each cell simply divides, and all of the genetic energy of that cell is carried on in both daughter cells. 
But at the time multi-celled organisms come online, things start to change. 
Sexual reproduction enters the picture. 
And very importantly, with the introduction of sexual reproduction that passes on the genome, the rest of the body becomes expendable. 
In fact, you could say that the inevitability of the death of our bodies enters in evolutionary time at the same moment as sexual reproduction. 
Now I have to confess, when I was a college undergraduate, I thought, okay, sex / death, sex / death, death for sex — it seemed pretty reasonable at the time, but with each passing year, I've come to have increasing doubts. 
I've come to understand the sentiments of George Burns, who was performing still in Las Vegas well into his 90s. 
And one night, there's a knock at his hotel room door. 
He answers the door. 
Standing before him is a gorgeous, scantily clad showgirl. 
She looks at him and says, "I'm here for super sex." 
"That's fine," says George, "I'll take the soup." 
(Laughter) I came to realize, as a physician, that I was working toward a goal which was different from the goal of evolution — not necessarily contradictory, just different. 
I was trying to preserve the body. 
I wanted to keep us healthy. 
I wanted to restore health from disease. 
I wanted us to live long and healthy lives. 
Evolution is all about passing on the genome to the next generation, adapting and surviving through generation after generation. 
From an evolutionary point of view, you and I are like the booster rockets designed to send the genetic payload into the next level of orbit and then drop off into the sea. 
I think we would all understand the sentiment that Woody Allen expressed when he said, "" I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. 
I want to achieve it through not dying. "" (Laughter) Evolution does not necessarily favor the longest-lived. 
It doesn't necessarily favor the biggest or the strongest or the fastest, and not even the smartest. 
Evolution favors those creatures best adapted to their environment. 
That is the sole test of survival and success. 
At the bottom of the ocean, bacteria that are thermophilic and can survive at the steam vent heat that would otherwise produce, if fish were there, sous-vide cooked fish, nevertheless, have managed to make that a hospitable environment for them. 
So what does this mean, as we look back at what has happened in evolution, and as we think about the place again of humans in evolution, and particularly as we look ahead to the next phase, I would say that there are a number of possibilities. 
The first is that we will not evolve. 
We have reached a kind of equipoise. 
And the reasoning behind that would be, first, we have, through medicine, managed to preserve a lot of genes that would otherwise be selected out and be removed from the population. 
And secondly, we as a species have so configured our environment that we have managed to make it adapt to us as well as we adapt to it. 
And by the way, we immigrate and circulate and intermix so much that you can't any longer have the isolation that is necessary for evolution to take place. 
A second possibility is that there will be evolution of the traditional kind, natural, imposed by the forces of nature. 
And the argument here would be that the wheels of evolution grind slowly, but they are inexorable. 
And as far as isolation goes, when we as a species do colonize distant planets, there will be the isolation and the environmental changes that could produce evolution in the natural way. 
But there's a third possibility, an enticing, intriguing and frightening possibility. 
I call it neo-evolution — the new evolution that is not simply natural, but guided and chosen by us as individuals in the choices that we will make. 
Now how could this come about? 
How could it be possible that we would do this? 
Consider, first, the reality that people today, in some cultures, are making choices about their offspring. 
They're, in some cultures, choosing to have more males than females. 
It's not necessarily good for the society, but it's what the individual and the family are choosing. 
Think also, if it were possible ever for you to choose, not simply to choose the sex of your child, but for you in your body to make the genetic adjustments that would cure or prevent diseases. 
What if you could make the genetic changes to eliminate diabetes or Alzheimer's or reduce the risk of cancer or eliminate stroke? 
Wouldn't you want to make those changes in your genes? 
If we look ahead, these kind of changes are going to be increasingly possible. 
The Human Genome Project started in 1990, and it took 13 years. 
It cost 2.7 billion dollars. 
The year after it was finished in 2004, you could do the same job for 20 million dollars in three to four months. 
Today, you can have a complete sequence of the three billion base pairs in the human genome at a cost of about 20,000 dollars and in the space of about a week. 
It won't be very long before the reality will be the 1,000-dollar human genome, and it will be increasingly available for everyone. 
Just a week ago, the National Academy of Engineering awarded its Draper Prize to Francis Arnold and Willem Stemmer, two scientists who independently developed techniques to encourage the natural process of evolution to work faster and to lead to desirable proteins in a more efficient way — what Frances Arnold calls "" directed evolution. "" A couple of years ago, the Lasker Prize was awarded to the scientist Shinya Yamanaka for his research in which he took an adult skin cell, a fibroblast, and by manipulating just four genes, he induced that cell to revert to a pluripotential stem cell — a cell potentially capable 
of becoming any cell in your body. 
These changes are coming. 
The same technology that has produced the human insulin in bacteria can make viruses that will not only protect you against themselves, but induce immunity against other viruses. 
Believe it or not, there's an experimental trial going on with vaccine against influenza that has been grown in the cells of a tobacco plant. 
Can you imagine something good coming out of tobacco? 
These are all reality today, and [in] the future, will be evermore possible. 
Imagine then just two other little changes. 
You can change the cells in your body, but what if you could change the cells in your offspring? 
What if you could change the sperm and the ova, or change the newly fertilized egg, and give your offspring a better chance at a healthier life — eliminate the diabetes, eliminate the hemophilia, reduce the risk of cancer? 
Who doesn't want healthier children? 
And then, that same analytic technology, that same engine of science that can produce the changes to prevent disease, will also enable us to adopt super-attributes, hyper-capacities — that better memory. 
Why not have the quick wit of a Ken Jennings, especially if you can augment it with the next generation of the Watson machine? 
Why not have the quick twitch muscle that will enable you to run faster and longer? 
Why not live longer? 
These will be irresistible. 
And when we are at a position where we can pass it on to the next generation, and we can adopt the attributes we want, we will have converted old-style evolution into neo-evolution. 
We'll take a process that normally might require 100,000 years, and we can compress it down to a thousand years — and maybe even in the next 100 years. 
These are choices that your grandchildren, or their grandchildren, are going to have before them. 
Will we use these choices to make a society that is better, that is more successful, that is kinder? 
Or, will we selectively choose different attributes that we want for some of us and not for others of us? 
Will we make a society that is more boring and more uniform, or more robust and more versatile? 
These are the kinds of questions that we will have to face. 
And most profoundly of all, will we ever be able to develop the wisdom, and to inherit the wisdom, that we'll need to make these choices wisely? 
For better or worse, and sooner than you may think, these choices will be up to us. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

And this is when the Americans beat the Russians, and this was — yes, it was technically a game. 
I happened to be living in Springfield at the time, and the best part of it was, you would close the women's door in the bathroom, and I remember seeing "" Go Sox, "" and I thought, really? 
So this is Zig in this photograph, this is also one of Zig's photographs. 
And that was fascinating to me as a game designer, because it never occurs to me, should I make the game about this difficult topic or not? 
This is Maezza, and when she was seven years old, she came home from school one day, and like I do every single day, I asked her, "" What did you do today? "" So she said, "" We talked about the Middle Passage. "" Now, this was a big moment. Maezza's dad is black, and I knew this day was coming. 
"" The ships start in England, they come down from England, they go to Africa, they go across the ocean — that's the Middle Passage part — they come to America, where the slaves are sold, "" she's telling me. 
(Laughter) And so, to me, I wanted more value in this, so when she asked if she could play a game, I said, "" Yes. "" (Laughter) And so I happened to have all of these little pieces. 
And so the basic gist of it is, I grabbed a bunch of families, and she's like, "" Mommy, but you forgot the pink baby and you forgot the blue daddy and you forgot all these other things. "" And she says, "" They want to go. "" And I said, "" Honey, no, they don't want to go. 
It wasn't abstract stuff in a brochure or in a movie. 
And so it was just an incredibly powerful experience. 
This is the game, which I've ended up calling "" The New World, "" because I like the phrase. 
My history is Irish. 
This is a game with 50,000 individual pieces. 
I was crazy when I decided to start it, but I'm in the middle of it now. 
I'm hoping that I'll teach culture through these games. 
We change as people through games, because we're involved, and we're playing, and we're learning as we do so. 

So this is a talk about gene drives, but I'm going to start by telling you a brief story. 
20 years ago, a biologist named Anthony James got obsessed with the idea of making mosquitos that didn't transmit malaria. 
It was a great idea, and pretty much a complete failure. 
For one thing, it turned out to be really hard to make a malaria-resistant mosquito. 
James managed it, finally, just a few years ago, by adding some genes that make it impossible for the malaria parasite to survive inside the mosquito. 
But that just created another problem. 
Now that you've got a malaria-resistant mosquito, how do you get it to replace all the malaria-carrying mosquitos? 
There are a couple options, but plan A was basically to breed up a bunch of the new genetically-engineered mosquitos release them into the wild and hope that they pass on their genes. 
The problem was that you'd have to release literally 10 times the number of native mosquitos to work. 
So in a village with 10,000 mosquitos, you release an extra 100,000. 
As you might guess, this was not a very popular strategy with the villagers. 
(Laughter) Then, last January, Anthony James got an email from a biologist named Ethan Bier. 
Bier said that he and his grad student Valentino Gantz had stumbled on a tool that could not only guarantee that a particular genetic trait would be inherited, but that it would spread incredibly quickly. 
If they were right, it would basically solve the problem that he and James had been working on for 20 years. 
As a test, they engineered two mosquitos to carry the anti-malaria gene and also this new tool, a gene drive, which I'll explain in a minute. 
Finally, they set it up so that any mosquitos that had inherited the anti-malaria gene wouldn't have the usual white eyes, but would instead have red eyes. 
That was pretty much just for convenience so they could tell just at a glance which was which. 
So they took their two anti-malarial, red-eyed mosquitos and put them in a box with 30 ordinary white-eyed ones, and let them breed. 
In two generations, those had produced 3,800 grandchildren. 
That is not the surprising part. 
This is the surprising part: given that you started with just two red-eyed mosquitos and 30 white-eyed ones, you expect mostly white-eyed descendants. 
Instead, when James opened the box, all 3,800 mosquitos had red eyes. 
When I asked Ethan Bier about this moment, he became so excited that he was literally shouting into the phone. 
That's because getting only red-eyed mosquitos violates a rule that is the absolute cornerstone of biology, Mendelian genetics. 
I'll keep this quick, but Mendelian genetics says when a male and a female mate, their baby inherits half of its DNA from each parent. 
So if our original mosquito was aa and our new mosquito is aB, where B is the anti-malarial gene, the babies should come out in four permutations: aa, aB, aa, Ba. 
Instead, with the new gene drive, they all came out aB. 
Biologically, that shouldn't even be possible. 
So what happened? 
The first thing that happened was the arrival of a gene-editing tool known as CRISPR in 2012. 
Many of you have probably heard about CRISPR, so I'll just say briefly that CRISPR is a tool that allows researchers to edit genes very precisely, easily and quickly. 
It does this by harnessing a mechanism that already existed in bacteria. 
Basically, there's a protein that acts like a scissors and cuts the DNA, and there's an RNA molecule that directs the scissors to any point on the genome you want. 
The result is basically a word processor for genes. 
You can take an entire gene out, put one in, or even edit just a single letter within a gene. 
And you can do it in nearly any species. 
OK, remember how I said that gene drives originally had two problems? 
The first was that it was hard to engineer a mosquito to be malaria-resistant. 
That's basically gone now, thanks to CRISPR. 
But the other problem was logistical. 
How do you get your trait to spread? 
This is where it gets clever. 
A couple years ago, a biologist at Harvard named Kevin Esvelt wondered what would happen if you made it so that CRISPR inserted not only your new gene but also the machinery that does the cutting and pasting. 
In other words, what if CRISPR also copied and pasted itself. 
You'd end up with a perpetual motion machine for gene editing. 
And that's exactly what happened. 
This CRISPR gene drive that Esvelt created not only guarantees that a trait will get passed on, but if it's used in the germline cells, it will automatically copy and paste your new gene into both chromosomes of every single individual. 
It's like a global search and replace, or in science terms, it makes a heterozygous trait homozygous. 
So, what does this mean? 
For one thing, it means we have a very powerful, but also somewhat alarming new tool. 
Up until now, the fact that gene drives didn't work very well was actually kind of a relief. 
Normally when we mess around with an organism's genes, we make that thing less evolutionarily fit. 
So biologists can make all the mutant fruit flies they want without worrying about it. 
If some escape, natural selection just takes care of them. 
What's remarkable and powerful and frightening about gene drives is that that will no longer be true. 
Assuming that your trait does not have a big evolutionary handicap, like a mosquito that can't fly, the CRISPR-based gene drive will spread the change relentlessly until it is in every single individual in the population. 
Now, it isn't easy to make a gene drive that works that well, but James and Esvelt think that we can. 
The good news is that this opens the door to some remarkable things. 
If you put an anti-malarial gene drive in just 1 percent of Anopheles mosquitoes, the species that transmits malaria, researchers estimate that it would spread to the entire population in a year. 
So in a year, you could virtually eliminate malaria. 
In practice, we're still a few years out from being able to do that, but still, a 1,000 children a day die of malaria. 
In a year, that number could be almost zero. 
The same goes for dengue fever, chikungunya, yellow fever. 
And it gets better. 
Say you want to get rid of an invasive species, like get Asian carp out of the Great Lakes. 
All you have to do is release a gene drive that makes the fish produce only male offspring. 
In a few generations, there'll be no females left, no more carp. 
In theory, this means we could restore hundreds of native species that have been pushed to the brink. 
OK, that's the good news, this is the bad news. 
Gene drives are so effective that even an accidental release could change an entire species, and often very quickly. 
Anthony James took good precautions. 
He bred his mosquitos in a bio-containment lab and he also used a species that's not native to the US so that even if some did escape, they'd just die off, there'd be nothing for them to mate with. 
But it's also true that if a dozen Asian carp with the all-male gene drive accidentally got carried from the Great Lakes back to Asia, they could potentially wipe out the native Asian carp population. 
And that's not so unlikely, given how connected our world is. 
In fact, it's why we have an invasive species problem. 
And that's fish. 
Things like mosquitos and fruit flies, there's literally no way to contain them. 
They cross borders and oceans all the time. 
OK, the other piece of bad news is that a gene drive might not stay confined to what we call the target species. 
That's because of gene flow, which is a fancy way of saying that neighboring species sometimes interbreed. 
If that happens, it's possible a gene drive could cross over, like Asian carp could infect some other kind of carp. 
That's not so bad if your drive just promotes a trait, like eye color. 
In fact, there's a decent chance that we'll see a wave of very weird fruit flies in the near future. 
But it could be a disaster if your drive is deigned to eliminate the species entirely. 
The last worrisome thing is that the technology to do this, to genetically engineer an organism and include a gene drive, is something that basically any lab in the world can do. 
An undergraduate can do it. 
A talented high schooler with some equipment can do it. 
Now, I'm guessing that this sounds terrifying. 
(Laughter) Interestingly though, nearly every scientist I talk to seemed to think that gene drives were not actually that frightening or dangerous. 
Partly because they believe that scientists will be very cautious and responsible about using them. 
(Laughter) So far, that's been true. 
But gene drives also have some actual limitations. 
So for one thing, they work only in sexually reproducing species. 
So thank goodness, they can't be used to engineer viruses or bacteria. 
Also, the trait spreads only with each successive generation. 
So changing or eliminating a population is practical only if that species has a fast reproductive cycle, like insects or maybe small vertebrates like mice or fish. 
In elephants or people, it would take centuries for a trait to spread widely enough to matter. 
Also, even with CRISPR, it's not that easy to engineer a truly devastating trait. 
Say you wanted to make a fruit fly that feeds on ordinary fruit instead of rotting fruit, with the aim of sabotaging American agriculture. 
First, you'd have to figure out which genes control what the fly wants to eat, which is already a very long and complicated project. 
Then you'd have to alter those genes to change the fly's behavior to whatever you'd want it to be, which is an even longer and more complicated project. 
And it might not even work, because the genes that control behavior are complex. 
So if you're a terrorist and have to choose between starting a grueling basic research program that will require years of meticulous lab work and still might not pan out, or just blowing stuff up? 
You'll probably choose the later. 
This is especially true because at least in theory, it should be pretty easy to build what's called a reversal drive. 
That's one that basically overwrites the change made by the first gene drive. 
So if you don't like the effects of a change, you can just release a second drive that will cancel it out, at least in theory. 
OK, so where does this leave us? 
We now have the ability to change entire species at will. 
Should we? 
Are we gods now? 
I'm not sure I'd say that. 
But I would say this: first, some very smart people are even now debating how to regulate gene drives. 
At the same time, some other very smart people are working hard to create safeguards, like gene drives that self-regulate or peter out after a few generations. 
That's great. 
But this technology still requires a conversation. 
And given the nature of gene drives, that conversation has to be global. 
What if Kenya wants to use a drive but Tanzania doesn't? 
Who decides whether to release a gene drive that can fly? 
I don't have the answer to that question. 
All we can do going forward, I think, is talk honestly about the risks and benefits and take responsibility for our choices. 
By that I mean, not just the choice to use a gene drive, but also the choice not to use one. 
Humans have a tendency to assume that the safest option is to preserve the status quo. 
But that's not always the case. 
Gene drives have risks, and those need to be discussed, but malaria exists now and kills 1,000 people a day. 
To combat it, we spray pesticides that do grave damage to other species, including amphibians and birds. 
So when you hear about gene drives in the coming months, and trust me, you will be hearing about them, remember that. 
It can be frightening to act, but sometimes, not acting is worse. 
(Applause) 

So I'm a neurosurgeon. 
And like most of my colleagues, I have to deal, every day, with human tragedies. 
I realize how your life can change from one second to the other after a major stroke or after a car accident. 
And what is very frustrating for us neurosurgeons is to realize that unlike other organs of the body, the brain has very little ability for self-repair. 
And after a major injury of your central nervous system, the patients often remain with a severe handicap. 
And that's probably the reason why I've chosen to be a functional neurosurgeon. 
What is a functional neurosurgeon? 
It's a doctor who is trying to improve a neurological function through different surgical strategies. 
You've certainly heard of one of the famous ones called deep brain stimulation, where you implant an electrode in the depths of the brain in order to modulate a circuit of neurons to improve a neurological function. 
It's really an amazing technology in that it has improved the destiny of patients with Parkinson's disease, with severe tremor, with severe pain. 
However, neuromodulation does not mean neuro-repair. 
And the dream of functional neurosurgeons is to repair the brain. 
I think that we are approaching this dream. 
And I would like to show you that we are very close to this. 
And that with a little bit of help, the brain is able to help itself. 
So the story started 15 years ago. 
At that time, I was a chief resident working days and nights in the emergency room. 
I often had to take care of patients with head trauma. 
You have to imagine that when a patient comes in with a severe head trauma, his brain is swelling and he's increasing his intracranial pressure. 
And in order to save his life, you have to decrease this intracranial pressure. 
And to do that, you sometimes have to remove a piece of swollen brain. 
So instead of throwing away these pieces of swollen brain, we decided with Jean-François Brunet, who is a colleague of mine, a biologist, to study them. 
What do I mean by that? 
We wanted to grow cells from these pieces of tissue. 
It's not an easy task. 
Growing cells from a piece of tissue is a bit the same as growing very small children out from their family. 
So you need to find the right nutrients, the warmth, the humidity and all the nice environments to make them thrive. 
So that's exactly what we had to do with these cells. 
And after many attempts, Jean-François did it. 
And that's what he saw under his microscope. 
And that was, for us, a major surprise. 
Why? 
Because this looks exactly the same as a stem cell culture, with large green cells surrounding small, immature cells. 
And you may remember from biology class that stem cells are immature cells, able to turn into any type of cell of the body. 
The adult brain has stem cells, but they're very rare and they're located in deep and small niches in the depths of the brain. 
So it was surprising to get this kind of stem cell culture from the superficial part of swollen brain we had in the operating theater. 
And there was another intriguing observation: Regular stem cells are very active cells — cells that divide, divide, divide very quickly. 
And they never die, they're immortal cells. 
But these cells behave differently. 
They divide slowly, and after a few weeks of culture, they even died. 
So we were in front of a strange new cell population that looked like stem cells but behaved differently. 
And it took us a long time to understand where they came from. 
They come from these cells. 
These blue and red cells are called doublecortin-positive cells. 
All of you have them in your brain. 
They represent four percent of your cortical brain cells. 
They have a very important role during the development stage. 
When you were fetuses, they helped your brain to fold itself. 
But why do they stay in your head? 
This, we don't know. 
We think that they may participate in brain repair because we find them in higher concentration close to brain lesions. 
But it's not so sure. 
But there is one clear thing — that from these cells, we got our stem cell culture. 
And we were in front of a potential new source of cells to repair the brain. 
And we had to prove this. 
So to prove it, we decided to design an experimental paradigm. 
The idea was to biopsy a piece of brain in a non-eloquent area of the brain, and then to culture the cells exactly the way Jean-François did it in his lab. 
And then label them, to put color in them in order to be able to track them in the brain. 
And the last step was to re-implant them in the same individual. 
We call these autologous grafts — autografts. 
So the first question we had, "" What will happen if we re-implant these cells in a normal brain, and what will happen if we re-implant the same cells in a lesioned brain? "" Thanks to the help of professor Eric Rouiller, we worked with monkeys. 
So in the first-case scenario, we re-implanted the cells in the normal brain and what we saw is that they completely disappeared after a few weeks, as if they were taken from the brain, they go back home, the space is already busy, they are not needed there, so they disappear. 
In the second-case scenario, we performed the lesion, we re-implanted exactly the same cells, and in this case, the cells remained — and they became mature neurons. 
And that's the image of what we could observe under the microscope. 
Those are the cells that were re-implanted. 
And the proof they carry, these little spots, those are the cells that we've labeled in vitro, when they were in culture. 
But we could not stop here, of course. 
Do these cells also help a monkey to recover after a lesion? 
So for that, we trained monkeys to perform a manual dexterity task. 
They had to retrieve food pellets from a tray. 
They were very good at it. 
And when they had reached a plateau of performance, we did a lesion in the motor cortex corresponding to the hand motion. 
So the monkeys were plegic, they could not move their hand anymore. 
And exactly the same as humans would do, they spontaneously recovered to a certain extent, exactly the same as after a stroke. 
Patients are completely plegic, and then they try to recover due to a brain plasticity mechanism, they recover to a certain extent, exactly the same for the monkey. 
So when we were sure that the monkey had reached his plateau of spontaneous recovery, we implanted his own cells. 
So on the left side, you see the monkey that has spontaneously recovered. 
He's at about 40 to 50 percent of his previous performance before the lesion. 
He's not so accurate, not so quick. 
And look now when we re-implant the cells: Two months after re-implantation, the same individual. 
(Applause) It was also very exciting results for us, I tell you. 
Since that time, we've understood much more about these cells. 
We know that we can cryopreserve them, we can use them later on. 
We know that we can apply them in other neuropathological models, like Parkinson's disease, for example. 
But our dream is still to implant them in humans. 
And I really hope that I'll be able to show you soon that the human brain is giving us the tools to repair itself. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Jocelyne, this is amazing, and I'm sure that right now, there are several dozen people in the audience, possibly even a majority, who are thinking, "" I know somebody who can use this. "" I do, in any case. 
And of course the question is, what are the biggest obstacles before you can go into human clinical trials? 
Jocelyne Bloch: The biggest obstacles are regulations. (Laughs) So, from these exciting results, you need to fill out about two kilograms of papers and forms to be able to go through these kind of trials. 
BG: Which is understandable, the brain is delicate, etc. 
JB: Yes, it is, but it takes a long time and a lot of patience and almost a professional team to do it, you know? 
BG: If you project yourself — having done the research and having tried to get permission to start the trials, if you project yourself out in time, how many years before somebody gets into a hospital and this therapy is available? 
JB: So, it's very difficult to say. 
It depends, first, on the approval of the trial. 
Will the regulation allow us to do it soon? 
And then, you have to perform this kind of study in a small group of patients. 
So it takes, already, a long time to select the patients, do the treatment and evaluate if it's useful to do this kind of treatment. 
And then you have to deploy this to a multicentric trial. 
You have to really prove first that it's useful before offering this treatment up for everybody. 
BG: And safe, of course. JB: Of course. 
BG: Jocelyne, thank you for coming to TED and sharing this. 
BG: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

It's a bit funny to be at a conference dedicated to things not seen, and present my proposal to build a 6,000-kilometer-long wall across the entire African continent. 
About the size of the Great Wall of China, this would hardly be an invisible structure. 
And yet it's made from parts that are invisible, or near-invisible, to the naked eye: bacteria and grains of sand. 
Now, as architects we're trained to solve problems. 
But I don't really believe in architectural problems; I only believe in opportunities. 
Which is why I'll show you a threat, and an architectural response. 
The threat is desertification. 
My response is a sandstone wall made from bacteria and solidified sand, stretching across the desert. 
Now, sand is a magical material of beautiful contradictions. 
It is simple and complex. 
It is peaceful and violent. 
It is always the same, never the same, endlessly fascinating. 
One billion grains of sand come into existence in the world each second. 
That's a cyclical process. 
As rocks and mountains die, grains of sand are born. 
Some of those grains may then cement naturally into sandstone. 
And as the sandstone weathers, new grains break free. 
Some of those grains may then accumulate on a massive scale, into a sand dune. 
In a way, the static, stone mountain becomes a moving mountain of sand. 
But, moving mountains can be dangerous. Let me try and explain why. 
Dry areas cover more than one third of the Earth's land surfaces. 
Some are already deserts; others are being seriously degraded by the sand. 
Just south of the Sahara we find the Sahel. 
The name means "" edge of the desert. "" And this is the region most closely associated with desertification. 
It was here in the late '60s and early' 70s that major droughts brought three million people to become dependent upon emergency food aid, with about up to 250,000 dying. 
This is a catastrophe waiting to happen again. 
And it's one that gets very little attention. 
In our accelerated media culture, desertification is simply too slow to reach the headlines. 
It's nothing like a tsunami or a Katrina: too few crying children and smashed up houses. 
And yet desertification is a major threat on all continents, affecting some 110 countries and about 70 percent of the world's agricultural drylands. 
It seriously threatens the livelihoods of millions of people, and especially in Africa and China. 
And it is largely an issue that we've created for ourselves through unsustainable use of scarce resources. 
So, we get climate change. 
We get droughts, increased desertification, crashing food systems, water scarcity, famine, forced migration, political instability, warfare, crisis. 
That's a potential scenario if we fail to take this seriously. 
But, how far away is it? 
I went to Sokoto in northern Nigeria to try and find out how far away it is. 
The dunes here move southward at a pace of around 600 meters a year. 
That's the Sahara eating up almost [two meters] a day of the arable land, physically pushing people away from their homes. 
Here I am — I'm the second person on the left — (Laughter) with the elders in Gidan-Kara, a tiny village outside of Sokoto. 
They had to move this village in 1987 as a huge dune threatened to swallow it. 
So, they moved the entire village, hut by hut. 
This is where the village used to be. 
It took us about 10 minutes to climb up to the top of that dune, which goes to show why they had to move to a safer location. 
That's the kind of forced migration that desertification can lead to. 
If you happen to live close to the desert border, you can pretty much calculate how long it will be before you have to carry your kids away, and abandon your home and your life as you know it. 
Now, sand dunes cover only about one fifth of our deserts. 
And still, those extreme environments are very good places if we want to stop the shifting sands. 
Four years ago, 23 African countries came together to create the Great Green Wall Sahara. 
A fantastic project, the initial plan called for a shelter belt of trees to be planted right across the African continent, from Mauritania in the west, all the way to Djibouti in the east. 
If you want to stop a sand dune from moving, what you need to make sure to do is to stop the grains from avalanching over its crest. 
And a good way of doing that, the most efficient way, is to use some kind of sand catcher. 
Trees or cacti are good for this. 
But, one of the problems with planting trees is that the people in these regions are so poor that they chop them down for firewood. 
Now there is an alternative to just planting trees and hoping that they won't get chopped down. 
This sandstone wall that I'm proposing essentially does three things. 
It adds roughness to the dune's surface, to the texture of the dune's surface, binding the grains. 
It provides a physical support structure for the trees, and it creates physical spaces, habitable spaces inside of the sand dunes. 
If people live inside of the green barrier they can help support the trees, protect them from humans, and from some of the forces of nature. 
Inside of the dunes we find shade. 
We can start harvesting condensation, and start greening the desert from within. 
Sand dunes are almost like ready-made buildings in a way. 
All we need to do is solidify the parts that we need to be solid, and then excavate the sand, and we have our architecture. 
We can either excavate it by hand or we can have the wind excavate it for us. 
So, the wind carries the sand onto the site and then it carries the redundant sand away from the structure for us. 
But, by now, you're probably asking, how am I planning to solidify a sand dune? 
How do we glue those grains of sand together? 
And the answer is, perhaps, that you use these guys, Bacillus pasteurii, a micro-organism that is readily available in wetlands and marshes, and does precisely that. 
It takes a pile of loose sand and it creates sandstone out of it. 
These images from the American Society for Microbiology show us the process. 
What happens is, you pour Bacillus pasteurii onto a pile of sand, and it starts filling up the voids in between the grains. 
A chemical process produces calcite, which is a kind of natural cement that binds the grains together. 
The whole cementation process takes about 24 hours. 
I learned about this from a professor at U.C. Davis called Jason DeJong. 
He managed to do it in a mere 1,400 minutes. 
Here I am, playing the part of the mad scientist, working with the bugs at UCL in London, trying to solidify them. 
So, how much would this cost? 
I'm not an economist, very much not, but I did, quite literally, a back of the envelope calculation — (Laughter) — and it seems that for a cubic meter of concrete we would have to pay in the region of 90 dollars. 
And, after an initial cost of 60 bucks to buy the bacteria, which you'll never have to pay again, one cubic meter of bacterial sand would be about 11 dollars. 
How do we construct something like this? 
Well, I'll quickly show you two options. 
The first is to create a kind of balloon structure, fill it with bacteria, then allow the sand to wash over the balloon, pop the balloon, as it were, disseminating the bacteria into the sand and solidifying it. 
Then, a few years afterwards, using permacultural strategies, we green that part of the desert. 
The second alternative would be to use injection piles. 
So, we pushed the piles down through the dune, and we create an initial bacterial surface. 
We then pull the piles up through the dune and we're able to create almost any conceivable shape inside of the sand with the sand acting as a mold as we go up. 
So, we have a way of turning sand into sandstone, and then creating these habitable spaces inside of the desert dunes. 
But, what should they look like? 
Well, I was inspired, for my architectural form, by tafoni, which look a little bit like this, this is a model representation of it. 
These are cavernous rock structures that I found on the site in Sokoto. 
And I realized that if I scaled them up, they would provide me with good spatial qualities, for ventilation, for thermal comfort, and for other things. 
Now, part of the formal control over this structure would be lost to nature, obviously, as the bacteria do their work. 
And I think this creates a kind of boundless beauty actually. 
I think there is really something in that articulation that is quite nice. 
We see the result, the traces, if you like, of the Bacillus pasteurii being harnessed to sculpt the desert into these habitable environments. 
Some people believe that this would spread uncontrollably, and that the bacteria would kill everything in its way. 
That's not true at all. 
It's a natural process. It goes on in nature today, and the bacteria die as soon as we stop feeding them. 
So, there it is — architectural anti-desertification structures made from the desert itself. 
Sand-stopping devices, made from sand. 
The world is likely to lose one third of its arable land by the end of the century. 
In a period of unprecedented population growth and increased food demands, this could prove disastrous. 
And quite frankly, we're putting our heads in the sand. 
If nothing else, I would like for this scheme to initiate a discussion. 
But, if I had something like a TED wish, it would be to actually get it built, to start building this habitable wall, this very, very long, but very narrow city in the desert, built into the dunescape itself. 
It's not only something that supports trees, but something that connects people and countries together. 
I would like to conclude by showing you an animation of the structure, and leave you with a sentence by Jorge Luis Borges. 
Borges said that "" nothing is built on stone, everything is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone. "" Now, there are many details left to explore in this scheme — political, practical, ethical, financial. 
My design, as it takes you down the rabbit hole, is fraught with many challenges and difficulties in the real world. 
But, it's a beginning, it's a vision. 
As Borges would have it, it's the sand. 
And I think now is really the time to turn it into stone. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

One thing the world needs, one thing this country desperately needs is a better way of conducting our political debates. 
We need to rediscover the lost art of democratic argument. 
(Applause) If you think about the arguments we have, most of the time it's shouting matches on cable television, ideological food fights on the floor of Congress. 
I have a suggestion. 
Look at all the arguments we have these days over health care, over bonuses and bailouts on Wall Street, over the gap between rich and poor, over affirmative action and same-sex marriage. 
Lying just beneath the surface of those arguments, with passions raging on all sides, are big questions of moral philosophy, big questions of justice. 
But we too rarely articulate and defend and argue about those big moral questions in our politics. 
So what I would like to do today is have something of a discussion. 
First, let me take a famous philosopher who wrote about those questions of justice and morality, give you a very short lecture on Aristotle of ancient Athens, Aristotle's theory of justice, and then have a discussion here to see whether Aristotle's ideas actually inform the way we think and argue about questions today. 
So, are you ready for the lecture? 
According to Aristotle, justice means giving people what they deserve. 
That's it; that's the lecture. 
(Laughter) Now, you may say, well, that's obvious enough. 
The real questions begin when it comes to arguing about who deserves what and why. 
Take the example of flutes. 
Suppose we're distributing flutes. 
Who should get the best ones? 
Let's see what people — What would you say? 
Who should get the best flute? 
You can just call it out. 
(Audience: Random.) Michael Sandel: At random. You would do it by lottery. 
Or by the first person to rush into the hall to get them. 
Who else? 
(Audience: The best flute players.) MS: The best flute players. (Audience: The worst flute players.) MS: The worst flute players. 
How many say the best flute players? 
Why? 
Actually, that was Aristotle's answer too. 
(Laughter) But here's a harder question. 
Why do you think, those of you who voted this way, that the best flutes should go to the best flute players? 
Peter: The greatest benefit to all. 
MS: The greatest benefit to all. 
We'll hear better music if the best flutes should go to the best flute players. 
That's Peter? (Audience: Peter.) MS: All right. 
Well, it's a good reason. 
We'll all be better off if good music is played rather than terrible music. 
But Peter, Aristotle doesn't agree with you that that's the reason. 
That's all right. 
Aristotle had a different reason for saying the best flutes should go to the best flute players. 
He said, that's what flutes are for — to be played well. 
He says that to reason about just distribution of a thing, we have to reason about, and sometimes argue about, the purpose of the thing, or the social activity — in this case, musical performance. 
And the point, the essential nature, of musical performance is to produce excellent music. 
It'll be a happy byproduct that we'll all benefit. 
But when we think about justice, Aristotle says, what we really need to think about is the essential nature of the activity in question and the qualities that are worth honoring and admiring and recognizing. 
One of the reasons that the best flute players should get the best flutes is that musical performance is not only to make the rest of us happy, but to honor and recognize the excellence of the best musicians. 
Now, flutes may seem... the distribution of flutes may seem a trivial case. 
Let's take a contemporary example of the dispute about justice. 
It had to do with golf. 
Casey Martin — a few years ago, Casey Martin — did any of you hear about him? 
He was a very good golfer, but he had a disability. 
He had a bad leg, a circulatory problem, that made it very painful for him to walk the course. 
In fact, it carried risk of injury. 
He asked the PGA, the Professional Golfers' Association, for permission to use a golf cart in the PGA tournaments. 
They said, "" No. 
Now that would give you an unfair advantage. "" He sued, and his case went all the way to the Supreme Court, believe it or not, the case over the golf cart, because the law says that the disabled must be accommodated, provided the accommodation does not change the essential nature of the activity. 
He says, "" I'm a great golfer. 
I want to compete. 
But I need a golf cart to get from one hole to the next. "" Suppose you were on the Supreme Court. 
Suppose you were deciding the justice of this case. 
How many here would say that Casey Martin does have a right to use a golf cart? 
And how many say, no, he doesn't? 
All right, let's take a poll, show of hands. 
How many would rule in favor of Casey Martin? 
And how many would not? How many would say he doesn't? 
All right, we have a good division of opinion here. 
Someone who would not grant Casey Martin the right to a golf cart, what would be your reason? 
Raise your hand, and we'll try to get you a microphone. 
What would be your reason? 
(Audience: It'd be an unfair advantage.) MS: It would be an unfair advantage if he gets to ride in a golf cart. 
All right, those of you, I imagine most of you who would not give him the golf cart worry about an unfair advantage. 
What about those of you who say he should be given a golf cart? 
How would you answer the objection? 
Yes, all right. 
Audience: The cart's not part of the game. 
MS: What's your name? (Audience: Charlie.) MS: Charlie says — We'll get Charlie a microphone in case someone wants to reply. 
Tell us, Charlie, why would you say he should be able to use a golf cart? 
Charlie: The cart's not part of the game. 
MS: But what about walking from hole to hole? 
Charlie: It doesn't matter; it's not part of the game. 
MS: Walking the course is not part of the game of golf? 
Charlie: Not in my book, it isn't. 
MS: All right. Stay there, Charlie. 
(Laughter) Who has an answer for Charlie? 
All right, who has an answer for Charlie? 
What would you say? 
Audience: The endurance element is a very important part of the game, walking all those holes. 
MS: Walking all those holes? 
That's part of the game of golf? (Audience: Absolutely.) MS: What's your name? (Audience: Warren.) MS: Warren. 
Charlie, what do you say to Warren? 
Charley: I'll stick to my original thesis. 
(Laughter) MS: Warren, are you a golfer? 
Warren: I am not a golfer. 
Charley: And I am. (MS: Okay.) (Laughter) (Applause) You know, it's interesting. 
In the case, in the lower court, they brought in golfing greats to testify on this very issue. 
Is walking the course essential to the game? 
And they brought in Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer. 
And what do you suppose they all said? 
Yes. They agreed with Warren. 
They said, yes, walking the course is strenuous physical exercise. 
The fatigue factor is an important part of golf. 
And so it would change the fundamental nature of the game to give him the golf cart. 
Now, notice, something interesting — Well, I should tell you about the Supreme Court first. 
The Supreme Court decided. 
What do you suppose they said? 
They said yes, that Casey Martin must be provided a golf cart. 
Seven to two, they ruled. 
What was interesting about their ruling and about the discussion we've just had is that the discussion about the right, the justice, of the matter depended on figuring out what is the essential nature of golf. 
And the Supreme Court justices wrestled with that question. 
And Justice Stevens, writing for the majority, said he had read all about the history of golf, and the essential point of the game is to get very small ball from one place into a hole in as few strokes as possible, and that walking was not essential, but incidental. 
Now, there were two dissenters, one of whom was Justice Scalia. 
He wouldn't have granted the cart, and he had a very interesting dissent. 
It's interesting because he rejected the Aristotelian premise underlying the majority's opinion. 
He said it's not possible to determine the essential nature of a game like golf. 
Here's how he put it. 
"" To say that something is essential is ordinarily to say that it is necessary to the achievement of a certain object. 
But since it is the very nature of a game to have no object except amusement, (Laughter) that is, what distinguishes games from productive activity, (Laughter) it is quite impossible to say that any of a game's arbitrary rules is essential. "" So there you have Justice Scalia taking on the Aristotelian premise of the majority's opinion. 
Justice Scalia's opinion is questionable for two reasons. 
First, no real sports fan would talk that way. 
(Laughter) If we had thought that the rules of the sports we care about are merely arbitrary, rather than designed to call forth the virtues and the excellences that we think are worthy of admiring, we wouldn't care about the outcome of the game. 
It's also objectionable on a second ground. 
On the face of it, it seemed to be — this debate about the golf cart — an argument about fairness, what's an unfair advantage. 
But if fairness were the only thing at stake, there would have been an easy and obvious solution. 
What would it be? (Audience: Let everyone use the cart.) Let everyone ride in a golf cart if they want to. 
Then the fairness objection goes away. 
But letting everyone ride in a cart would have been, I suspect, more anathema to the golfing greats and to the PGA, even than making an exception for Casey Martin. 
Why? 
Because what was at stake in the dispute over the golf cart was not only the essential nature of golf, but, relatedly, the question: What abilities are worthy of honor and recognition as athletic talents? 
Let me put the point as delicately as possible: Golfers are a little sensitive about the athletic status of their game. 
(Laughter) After all, there's no running or jumping, and the ball stands still. (Laughter) 
So if golfing is the kind of game that can be played while riding around in a golf cart, it would be hard to confer on the golfing greats the status that we confer, the honor and recognition that goes to truly great athletes. 
That illustrates that with golf, as with flutes, it's hard to decide the question of what justice requires, without grappling with the question, "" What is the essential nature of the activity in question, and what qualities, what excellences connected with that activity, are worthy of honor and recognition? "" Let's take a final example that's prominent in contemporary political debate: same-sex marriage. 
There are those who favor state recognition only of traditional marriage between one man and one woman, and there are those who favor state recognition of same-sex marriage. 
How many here favor the first policy: the state should recognize traditional marriage only? 
And how many favor the second, same-sex marriage? 
Now, put it this way: What ways of thinking about justice and morality underlie the arguments we have over marriage? 
The opponents of same-sex marriage say that the purpose of marriage, fundamentally, is procreation, and that's what's worthy of honoring and recognizing and encouraging. 
And the defenders of same-sex marriage say no, procreation is not the only purpose of marriage; what about a lifelong, mutual, loving commitment? 
That's really what marriage is about. 
So with flutes, with golf carts, and even with a fiercely contested question like same-sex marriage, Aristotle has a point. 
Very hard to argue about justice without first arguing about the purpose of social institutions and about what qualities are worthy of honor and recognition. 
So let's step back from these cases and see how they shed light on the way we might improve, elevate, the terms of political discourse in the United States, and for that matter, around the world. 
There is a tendency to think that if we engage too directly with moral questions in politics, that's a recipe for disagreement, and for that matter, a recipe for intolerance and coercion. 
So better to shy away from, to ignore, the moral and the religious convictions that people bring to civic life. 
It seems to me that our discussion reflects the opposite, that a better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter. 
That, it seems to me, is a way to begin to restore the art of democratic argument. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
Thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you. Chris. Thanks, Chris. Chris Anderson: From flutes to golf courses 
to same-sex marriage — that was a genius link. 
Now look, you're a pioneer of open education. 
Your lecture series was one of the first to do it big. 
What's your vision for the next phase of this? 
MS: Well, I think that it is possible. 
In the classroom, we have arguments on some of the most fiercely held moral convictions that students have about big public questions. 
And I think we can do that in public life more generally. 
And so my real dream would be to take the public television series that we've created of the course — it's available now, online, free for everyone anywhere in the world — and to see whether we can partner with institutions, at universities in China, in India, in Africa, around the world, to try to promote civic education and also a richer kind of democratic debate. 
CA: So you picture, at some point, live, in real time, you could have this kind of conversation, inviting questions, but with people from China and India joining in? 
MS: Right. We did a little bit of it here with 1,500 people in Long Beach, and we do it in a classroom at Harvard with about 1,000 students. 
Wouldn't it be interesting to take this way of thinking and arguing, engaging seriously with big moral questions, exploring cultural differences and connect through a live video hookup, students in Beijing and Mumbai and in Cambridge, Massachusetts and create a global classroom. 
That's what I would love to do. 
(Applause) CA: So, I would imagine that there are a lot of people who would love to join you in that endeavor. 
Michael Sandel. Thank you so much. (MS: Thanks so much.) 

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

Our grandparents' generation created an amazing system of canals and reservoirs that made it possible for people to live in places where there wasn't a lot of water. 
For example, during the Great Depression, they created the Hoover Dam, which in turn, created Lake Mead and made it possible for the cities of Las Vegas and Phoenix and Los Angeles to provide water for people who lived in a really dry place. 
In the 20th century, we literally spent trillions of dollars building infrastructure to get water to our cities. 
In terms of economic development, it was a great investment. 
But in the last decade, we've seen the combined effects of climate change, population growth and competition for water resources threaten these vital lifelines and water resources. 
This figure shows you the change in the lake level of Lake Mead that happened in the last 15 years. 
You can see starting around the year 2000, the lake level started to drop. 
And it was dropping at such a rate that it would have left the drinking water intakes for Las Vegas high and dry. 
The city became so concerned about this that they recently constructed a new drinking water intake structure that they referred to as the "" Third Straw "" to pull water out of the greater depths of the lake. 
The challenges associated with providing water to a modern city are not restricted to the American Southwest. 
In the year 2007, the third largest city in Australia, Brisbane, came within 6 months of running out of water. 
A similar drama is playing out today in São Paulo, Brazil, where the main reservoir for the city has gone from being completely full in 2010, to being nearly empty today as the city approaches the 2016 Summer Olympics. 
For those of us who are fortunate enough to live in one of the world's great cities, we've never truly experienced the effects of a catastrophic drought. 
We like to complain about the navy showers we have to take. 
We like our neighbors to see our dirty cars and our brown lawns. 
But we've never really faced the prospect of turning on the tap and having nothing come out. 
And that's because when things have gotten bad in the past, it's always been possible to expand a reservoir or dig a few more groundwater wells. 
Well, in a time when all of the water resources are spoken for, it's not going to be possible to rely on this tried and true way of providing ourselves with water. 
Some people think that we're going to solve the urban water problem by taking water from our rural neighbors. 
But that's an approach that's fraught with political, legal and social dangers. 
And even if we succeed in grabbing the water from our rural neighbors, we're just transferring the problem to someone else and there's a good chance it will come back and bite us in the form of higher food prices and damage to the aquatic ecosystems that already rely upon that water. 
I think that there's a better way to solve our urban water crisis and I think that's to open up four new local sources of water that I liken to faucets. 
If we can make smart investments in these new sources of water in the coming years, we can solve our urban water problem and decrease the likelihood that we'll ever run across the effects of a catastrophic drought. 
Now, if you told me 20 years ago that a modern city could exist without a supply of imported water, I probably would have dismissed you as an unrealistic and uninformed dreamer. 
But my own experiences working with some of the world's most water-starved cities in the last decades have shown me that we have the technologies and the management skills to actually transition away from imported water, and that's what I want to tell you about tonight. 
The first source of local water supply that we need to develop to solve our urban water problem will flow with the rainwater that falls in our cities. 
One of the great tragedies of urban development is that as our cities grew, we started covering all the surfaces with concrete and asphalt. 
And when we did that, we had to build storm sewers to get the water that fell on the cities out before it could cause flooding, and that's a waste of a vital water resource. 
Let me give you an example. 
This figure here shows you the volume of water that could be collected in the city of San Jose if they could harvest the stormwater that fell within the city limits. 
You can see from the intersection of the blue line and the black dotted line that if San Jose could just capture half of the water that fell within the city, they'd have enough water to get them through an entire year. 
Now, I know what some of you are probably thinking. 
"" The answer to our problem is to start building great big tanks and attaching them to the downspouts of our roof gutters, rainwater harvesting. "" Now, that's an idea that might work in some places. 
But if you live in a place where it mainly rains in the winter time and most of the water demand is in the summertime, it's not a very cost-effective way to solve a water problem. 
And if you experience the effects of a multiyear drought, like California's currently experiencing, you just can't build a rainwater tank that's big enough to solve your problem. 
I think there's a lot more practical way to harvest the stormwater and the rainwater that falls in our cities, and that's to capture it and let it percolate into the ground. 
After all, many of our cities are sitting on top of a natural water storage system that can accommodate huge volumes of water. 
For example, historically, Los Angeles has obtained about a third of its water supply from a massive aquifer that underlies the San Fernando Valley. 
Now, when you look at the water that comes off of your roof and runs off of your lawn and flows down the gutter, you might say to yourself, "" Do I really want to drink that stuff? "" Well, the answer is you don't want to drink it until it's been treated a little bit. 
And so the challenge that we face in urban water harvesting is to capture the water, clean the water and get it underground. 
And that's exactly what the city of Los Angeles is doing with a new project that they're building in Burbank, California. 
This figure here shows the stormwater park that they're building by hooking a series of stormwater collection systems, or storm sewers, and routing that water into an abandoned gravel quarry. 
The water that's captured in the quarry is slowly passed through a man-made wetland, and then it goes into that ball field there and percolates into the ground, recharging the drinking water aquifer of the city. 
And in the process of passing through the wetland and percolating through the ground, the water encounters microbes that live on the surfaces of the plants and the surfaces of the soil, and that purifies the water. 
And if the water's still not clean enough to drink after it's been through this natural treatment process, the city can treat it again when they pump if back out of the groundwater aquifers before they deliver it to people to drink. 
The second tap that we need to open up to solve our urban water problem will flow with the wastewater that comes out of our sewage treatment plants. 
Now, many of you are probably familiar with the concept of recycled water. 
You've probably seen signs like this that tell you that the shrubbery and the highway median and the local golf course is being watered with water that used to be in a sewage treatment plant. 
We've been doing this for a couple of decades now. 
But what we're learning from our experience is that this approach is much more expensive that we expected it to be. 
Because once we build the first few water recycling systems close to the sewage treatment plant, we have to build longer and longer pipe networks to get that water to where it needs to go. 
And that becomes prohibitive in terms of cost. 
What we're finding is that a much more cost-effective and practical way of recycling wastewater is to turn treated wastewater into drinking water through a two-step process. 
In the first step in this process we pressurize the water and pass it through a reverse osmosis membrane: a thin, permeable plastic membrane that allows water molecules to pass through but traps and retains the salts, the viruses and the organic chemicals that might be present in the wastewater. 
In the second step in the process, we add a small amount of hydrogen peroxide and shine ultraviolet light on the water. 
The ultraviolet light cleaves the hydrogen peroxide into two parts that are called hydroxyl radicals, and these hydroxyl radicals are very potent forms of oxygen that break down most organic chemicals. 
After the water's been through this two-stage process, it's safe to drink. 
I know, I've been studying recycled water using every measurement technique known to modern science for the past 15 years. 
We've detected some chemicals that can make it through the first step in the process, but by the time we get to the second step, the advanced oxidation process, we rarely see any chemicals present. 
And that's in stark contrast to the taken-for-granted water supplies that we regularly drink all the time. 
There's another way we can recycle water. 
This is an engineered treatment wetland that we recently built on the Santa Ana River in Southern California. 
The treatment wetland receives water from a part of the Santa Ana River that in the summertime consists almost entirely of wastewater effluent from cities like Riverside and San Bernardino. 
The water comes into our treatment wetland, it's exposed to sunlight and algae and those break down the organic chemicals, remove the nutrients and inactivate the waterborne pathogens. 
The water gets put back in the Santa Ana River, it flows down to Anaheim, gets taken out at Anaheim and percolated into the ground, and becomes the drinking water of the city of Anaheim, completing the trip from the sewers of Riverside County to the drinking water supply of Orange County. 
Now, you might think that this idea of drinking wastewater is some sort of futuristic fantasy or not commonly done. 
Well, in California, we already recycle about 40 billion gallons a year of wastewater through the two-stage advanced treatment process I was telling you about. 
That's enough water to be the supply of about a million people if it were their sole water supply. 
The third tap that we need to open up will not be a tap at all, it will be a kind of virtual tap, it will be the water conservation that we manage to do. 
And the place where we need to think about water conservation is outdoors because in California and other modern American cities, about half of our water use happens outdoors. 
In the current drought, we've seen that it's possible to have our lawns survive and our plants survive with about half as much water. 
So there's no need to start painting concrete green and putting in Astroturf and buying cactuses. 
We can have California-friendly landscaping with soil moisture detectors and smart irrigation controllers and have beautiful green landscapes in our cities. 
The fourth and final water tap that we need to open up to solve our urban water problem will flow with desalinated seawater. 
Now, I know what you probably heard people say about seawater desalination. 
"" It's a great thing to do if you have lots of oil, not a lot of water and you don't care about climate change. "" Seawater desalination is energy-intensive no matter how you slice it. 
But that characterization of seawater desalination as being a nonstarter is hopelessly out of date. 
We've made tremendous progress in seawater desalination in the past two decades. 
This picture shows you the largest seawater desalination plant in the Western hemisphere that's currently being built north of San Diego. 
Compared to the seawater desalination plant that was built in Santa Barbara 25 years ago, this treatment plant will use about half the energy to produce a gallon of water. 
But just because seawater desalination has become less energy-intensive, doesn't mean we should start building desalination plants everywhere. 
Among the different choices we have, it's probably the most energy-intensive and potentially environmentally damaging of the options to create a local water supply. 
So there it is. 
With these four sources of water, we can move away from our reliance on imported water. 
Through reform in the way we landscape our surfaces and our properties, we can reduce outdoor water use by about 50 percent, thereby increasing the water supply by 25 percent. 
We can recycle the water that makes it into the sewer, thereby increasing our water supply by 40 percent. 
And we can make up the difference through a combination of stormwater harvesting and seawater desalination. 
So, let's create a water supply that will be able to withstand any of the challenges that climate change throws at us in the coming years. 
Let's create a water supply that uses local sources and leaves more water in the environment for fish and for food. 
Let's create a water system that's consistent with out environmental values. 
And let's do it for our children and our grandchildren and let's tell them this is the system that they have to take care of in the future because it's our last chance to create a new kind of water system. 
Thank you very much for your attention. 
(Applause) 

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

Along the ancient path of the Monongahela River, Braddock, Pennsylvania sits in the eastern region of Allegheny County, approximately nine miles outside of Pittsburgh. 
An industrial suburb, Braddock is home to Andrew Carnegie's first steel mill, the Edgar Thomson Works. 
Operating since 1875, it is the last functioning steel mill in the region. 
For 12 years, I have produced collaborative portraits, still lifes, landscapes and aerial views in order to build a visual archive to address the intersection of the steel industry, the environment, and the health care system's impact on the bodies of my family and community. 
The tradition and grand narrative of Braddock is mostly comprised of stories of industrialists and trade unions. 
Currently, the new narrative about Braddock, a poster child for Rust Belt revitalization, is a story of urban pioneers discovering a new frontier. 
Mass media has omitted the fact that Braddock is predominantly black. 
Our existence has been co-opted, silenced and erased. 
Fourth generation in a lineage of women, I was raised under the protection and care of Grandma Ruby, off 8th Street at 805 Washington Avenue. 
She worked as a manager for Goodwill. 
Mom was a nurse's aid. 
She watched the steel mills close and white flight to suburban developments. 
By the time my generation walked the streets, disinvestment at the local, state and federal level, eroded infrastructure, and the War on Drugs dismantled my family and community. 
Grandma Ruby's stepfather Gramps was one of few black men to retire from Carnegie's mill with his pension. 
He worked in high temperatures, tearing down and rebuilding furnaces, cleaning up spilt metal and slag. 
The history of a place is written on the body and the landscape. 
Areas of heavy truck traffic, exposure to benzene and atomized metals, risk cancer and lupus. 
One hundred twenty-three licensed beds, 652 employees, rehabilitation programs decimated. 
A housing discrimination lawsuit against Allegheny County removed where the projects Talbot Towers once stood. 
Recent rezoning for more light industry has since appeared. 
Google Maps and Google Earth pixelations conceal the flammable waste being used to squeeze the Bunn family off their home and land. 
In 2013, I chartered a helicopter with my cameras to document this aggressive dispossession. 
In flight, my observation reveals thousands of plastic white bundles owned by a conservation industry that claims it's eco-friendly and recycles millions of tires to preserve people's lives and to improve people's lives. 
My work spirals from the micro to the macro level, excavating hidden histories. 
Recently, at the Seattle Art Museum, Isaac Bunn and I mounted this exhibition, and the exhibition was used as a platform to launch his voice. 
Through reclamation of our narrative, we will continue to fight historic erasure and socioeconomic inequality. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

It used to be that if you wanted to get a computer to do something new, you would have to program it. 
Now, programming, for those of you here that haven't done it yourself, requires laying out in excruciating detail every single step that you want the computer to do in order to achieve your goal. 
Now, if you want to do something that you don't know how to do yourself, then this is going to be a great challenge. 
So this was the challenge faced by this man, Arthur Samuel. 
In 1956, he wanted to get this computer to be able to beat him at checkers. 
How can you write a program, lay out in excruciating detail, how to be better than you at checkers? 
So he came up with an idea: he had the computer play against itself thousands of times and learn how to play checkers. 
And indeed it worked, and in fact, by 1962, this computer had beaten the Connecticut state champion. 
So Arthur Samuel was the father of machine learning, and I have a great debt to him, because I am a machine learning practitioner. 
I was the president of Kaggle, a community of over 200,000 machine learning practictioners. 
Kaggle puts up competitions to try and get them to solve previously unsolved problems, and it's been successful hundreds of times. 
So from this vantage point, I was able to find out a lot about what machine learning can do in the past, can do today, and what it could do in the future. 
Perhaps the first big success of machine learning commercially was Google. 
Google showed that it is possible to find information by using a computer algorithm, and this algorithm is based on machine learning. 
Since that time, there have been many commercial successes of machine learning. 
Companies like Amazon and Netflix use machine learning to suggest products that you might like to buy, movies that you might like to watch. 
Sometimes, it's almost creepy. 
Companies like LinkedIn and Facebook sometimes will tell you about who your friends might be and you have no idea how it did it, and this is because it's using the power of machine learning. 
These are algorithms that have learned how to do this from data rather than being programmed by hand. 
This is also how IBM was successful in getting Watson to beat the two world champions at "" Jeopardy, "" answering incredibly subtle and complex questions like this one. 
["" The ancient 'Lion of Nimrud' went missing from this city's national museum in 2003 (along with a lot of other stuff) ""] This is also why we are now able to see the first self-driving cars. 
If you want to be able to tell the difference between, say, a tree and a pedestrian, well, that's pretty important. 
We don't know how to write those programs by hand, but with machine learning, this is now possible. 
And in fact, this car has driven over a million miles without any accidents on regular roads. 
So we now know that computers can learn, and computers can learn to do things that we actually sometimes don't know how to do ourselves, or maybe can do them better than us. 
One of the most amazing examples I've seen of machine learning happened on a project that I ran at Kaggle where a team run by a guy called Geoffrey Hinton from the University of Toronto won a competition for automatic drug discovery. 
Now, what was extraordinary here is not just that they beat all of the algorithms developed by Merck or the international academic community, but nobody on the team had any background in chemistry or biology or life sciences, and they did it in two weeks. 
How did they do this? 
They used an extraordinary algorithm called deep learning. 
So important was this that in fact the success was covered in The New York Times in a front page article a few weeks later. 
This is Geoffrey Hinton here on the left-hand side. 
Deep learning is an algorithm inspired by how the human brain works, and as a result it's an algorithm which has no theoretical limitations on what it can do. 
The more data you give it and the more computation time you give it, the better it gets. 
The New York Times also showed in this article another extraordinary result of deep learning which I'm going to show you now. 
It shows that computers can listen and understand. 
(Video) Richard Rashid: Now, the last step that I want to be able to take in this process is to actually speak to you in Chinese. 
Now the key thing there is, we've been able to take a large amount of information from many Chinese speakers and produce a text-to-speech system that takes Chinese text and converts it into Chinese language, and then we've taken an hour or so of my own voice and we've used that to modulate the standard text-to-speech system so that it would sound like me. 
Again, the result's not perfect. 
There are in fact quite a few errors. 
(In Chinese) (Applause) There's much work to be done in this area. (In Chinese) (Applause) 
Jeremy Howard: Well, that was at a machine learning conference in China. 
It's not often, actually, at academic conferences that you do hear spontaneous applause, although of course sometimes at TEDx conferences, feel free. 
Everything you saw there was happening with deep learning. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
The transcription in English was deep learning. 
The translation to Chinese and the text in the top right, deep learning, and the construction of the voice was deep learning as well. 
So deep learning is this extraordinary thing. 
It's a single algorithm that can seem to do almost anything, and I discovered that a year earlier, it had also learned to see. 
In this obscure competition from Germany called the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark, deep learning had learned to recognize traffic signs like this one. 
Not only could it recognize the traffic signs better than any other algorithm, the leaderboard actually showed it was better than people, about twice as good as people. 
So by 2011, we had the first example of computers that can see better than people. 
Since that time, a lot has happened. 
In 2012, Google announced that they had a deep learning algorithm watch YouTube videos and crunched the data on 16,000 computers for a month, and the computer independently learned about concepts such as people and cats just by watching the videos. 
This is much like the way that humans learn. 
Humans don't learn by being told what they see, but by learning for themselves what these things are. 
Also in 2012, Geoffrey Hinton, who we saw earlier, won the very popular ImageNet competition, looking to try to figure out from one and a half million images what they're pictures of. 
As of 2014, we're now down to a six percent error rate in image recognition. 
This is better than people, again. 
So machines really are doing an extraordinarily good job of this, and it is now being used in industry. 
For example, Google announced last year that they had mapped every single location in France in two hours, and the way they did it was that they fed street view images into a deep learning algorithm to recognize and read street numbers. 
Imagine how long it would have taken before: dozens of people, many years. 
This is also happening in China. 
Baidu is kind of the Chinese Google, I guess, and what you see here in the top left is an example of a picture that I uploaded to Baidu's deep learning system, and underneath you can see that the system has understood what that picture is and found similar images. 
The similar images actually have similar backgrounds, similar directions of the faces, even some with their tongue out. 
This is not clearly looking at the text of a web page. 
All I uploaded was an image. 
So we now have computers which really understand what they see and can therefore search databases of hundreds of millions of images in real time. 
So what does it mean now that computers can see? 
Well, it's not just that computers can see. 
In fact, deep learning has done more than that. 
Complex, nuanced sentences like this one are now understandable with deep learning algorithms. 
As you can see here, this Stanford-based system showing the red dot at the top has figured out that this sentence is expressing negative sentiment. 
Deep learning now in fact is near human performance at understanding what sentences are about and what it is saying about those things. 
Also, deep learning has been used to read Chinese, again at about native Chinese speaker level. 
This algorithm developed out of Switzerland by people, none of whom speak or understand any Chinese. 
As I say, using deep learning is about the best system in the world for this, even compared to native human understanding. 
This is a system that we put together at my company which shows putting all this stuff together. 
These are pictures which have no text attached, and as I'm typing in here sentences, in real time it's understanding these pictures and figuring out what they're about and finding pictures that are similar to the text that I'm writing. 
So you can see, it's actually understanding my sentences and actually understanding these pictures. 
I know that you've seen something like this on Google, where you can type in things and it will show you pictures, but actually what it's doing is it's searching the webpage for the text. 
This is very different from actually understanding the images. 
This is something that computers have only been able to do for the first time in the last few months. 
So we can see now that computers can not only see but they can also read, and, of course, we've shown that they can understand what they hear. 
Perhaps not surprising now that I'm going to tell you they can write. 
Here is some text that I generated using a deep learning algorithm yesterday. 
And here is some text that an algorithm out of Stanford generated. 
Each of these sentences was generated by a deep learning algorithm to describe each of those pictures. 
This algorithm before has never seen a man in a black shirt playing a guitar. 
It's seen a man before, it's seen black before, it's seen a guitar before, but it has independently generated this novel description of this picture. 
We're still not quite at human performance here, but we're close. 
In tests, humans prefer the computer-generated caption one out of four times. 
Now this system is now only two weeks old, so probably within the next year, the computer algorithm will be well past human performance at the rate things are going. 
So computers can also write. 
So we put all this together and it leads to very exciting opportunities. 
For example, in medicine, a team in Boston announced that they had discovered dozens of new clinically relevant features of tumors which help doctors make a prognosis of a cancer. 
Very similarly, in Stanford, a group there announced that, looking at tissues under magnification, they've developed a machine learning-based system which in fact is better than human pathologists at predicting survival rates for cancer sufferers. 
In both of these cases, not only were the predictions more accurate, but they generated new insightful science. 
In the radiology case, they were new clinical indicators that humans can understand. 
In this pathology case, the computer system actually discovered that the cells around the cancer are as important as the cancer cells themselves in making a diagnosis. 
This is the opposite of what pathologists had been taught for decades. 
In each of those two cases, they were systems developed by a combination of medical experts and machine learning experts, but as of last year, we're now beyond that too. 
This is an example of identifying cancerous areas of human tissue under a microscope. 
The system being shown here can identify those areas more accurately, or about as accurately, as human pathologists, but was built entirely with deep learning using no medical expertise by people who have no background in the field. 
Similarly, here, this neuron segmentation. 
We can now segment neurons about as accurately as humans can, but this system was developed with deep learning using people with no previous background in medicine. 
So myself, as somebody with no previous background in medicine, I seem to be entirely well qualified to start a new medical company, which I did. 
I was kind of terrified of doing it, but the theory seemed to suggest that it ought to be possible to do very useful medicine using just these data analytic techniques. 
And thankfully, the feedback has been fantastic, not just from the media but from the medical community, who have been very supportive. 
The theory is that we can take the middle part of the medical process and turn that into data analysis as much as possible, leaving doctors to do what they're best at. 
I want to give you an example. 
It now takes us about 15 minutes to generate a new medical diagnostic test and I'll show you that in real time now, but I've compressed it down to three minutes by cutting some pieces out. 
Rather than showing you creating a medical diagnostic test, I'm going to show you a diagnostic test of car images, because that's something we can all understand. 
So here we're starting with about 1.5 million car images, and I want to create something that can split them into the angle of the photo that's being taken. 
So these images are entirely unlabeled, so I have to start from scratch. 
With our deep learning algorithm, it can automatically identify areas of structure in these images. 
So the nice thing is that the human and the computer can now work together. 
So the human, as you can see here, is telling the computer about areas of interest which it wants the computer then to try and use to improve its algorithm. 
Now, these deep learning systems actually are in 16,000-dimensional space, so you can see here the computer rotating this through that space, trying to find new areas of structure. 
And when it does so successfully, the human who is driving it can then point out the areas that are interesting. 
So here, the computer has successfully found areas, for example, angles. 
So as we go through this process, we're gradually telling the computer more and more about the kinds of structures we're looking for. 
You can imagine in a diagnostic test this would be a pathologist identifying areas of pathosis, for example, or a radiologist indicating potentially troublesome nodules. 
And sometimes it can be difficult for the algorithm. 
In this case, it got kind of confused. 
The fronts and the backs of the cars are all mixed up. 
So here we have to be a bit more careful, manually selecting these fronts as opposed to the backs, then telling the computer that this is a type of group that we're interested in. 
So we do that for a while, we skip over a little bit, and then we train the machine learning algorithm based on these couple of hundred things, and we hope that it's gotten a lot better. 
You can see, it's now started to fade some of these pictures out, showing us that it already is recognizing how to understand some of these itself. 
We can then use this concept of similar images, and using similar images, you can now see, the computer at this point is able to entirely find just the fronts of cars. 
So at this point, the human can tell the computer, okay, yes, you've done a good job of that. 
Sometimes, of course, even at this point it's still difficult to separate out groups. 
In this case, even after we let the computer try to rotate this for a while, we still find that the left sides and the right sides pictures are all mixed up together. 
So we can again give the computer some hints, and we say, okay, try and find a projection that separates out the left sides and the right sides as much as possible using this deep learning algorithm. 
And giving it that hint — ah, okay, it's been successful. 
It's managed to find a way of thinking about these objects that's separated out these together. 
So you get the idea here. 
This is a case not where the human is being replaced by a computer, but where they're working together. 
What we're doing here is we're replacing something that used to take a team of five or six people about seven years and replacing it with something that takes 15 minutes for one person acting alone. 
So this process takes about four or five iterations. 
You can see we now have 62 percent of our 1.5 million images classified correctly. 
And at this point, we can start to quite quickly grab whole big sections, check through them to make sure that there's no mistakes. 
Where there are mistakes, we can let the computer know about them. 
And using this kind of process for each of the different groups, we are now up to an 80 percent success rate in classifying the 1.5 million images. 
And at this point, it's just a case of finding the small number that aren't classified correctly, and trying to understand why. 
And using that approach, by 15 minutes we get to 97 percent classification rates. 
So this kind of technique could allow us to fix a major problem, which is that there's a lack of medical expertise in the world. 
The World Economic Forum says that there's between a 10x and a 20x shortage of physicians in the developing world, and it would take about 300 years to train enough people to fix that problem. 
So imagine if we can help enhance their efficiency using these deep learning approaches? 
So I'm very excited about the opportunities. 
I'm also concerned about the problems. 
The problem here is that every area in blue on this map is somewhere where services are over 80 percent of employment. 
What are services? 
These are services. 
These are also the exact things that computers have just learned how to do. 
So 80 percent of the world's employment in the developed world is stuff that computers have just learned how to do. 
What does that mean? 
Well, it'll be fine. They'll be replaced by other jobs. 
For example, there will be more jobs for data scientists. 
Well, not really. 
It doesn't take data scientists very long to build these things. 
For example, these four algorithms were all built by the same guy. 
So if you think, oh, it's all happened before, we've seen the results in the past of when new things come along and they get replaced by new jobs, what are these new jobs going to be? 
It's very hard for us to estimate this, because human performance grows at this gradual rate, but we now have a system, deep learning, that we know actually grows in capability exponentially. 
And we're here. 
So currently, we see the things around us and we say, "" Oh, computers are still pretty dumb. "" Right? 
But in five years' time, computers will be off this chart. 
So we need to be starting to think about this capability right now. 
We have seen this once before, of course. 
In the Industrial Revolution, we saw a step change in capability thanks to engines. 
The thing is, though, that after a while, things flattened out. 
There was social disruption, but once engines were used to generate power in all the situations, things really settled down. 
The Machine Learning Revolution is going to be very different from the Industrial Revolution, because the Machine Learning Revolution, it never settles down. 
The better computers get at intellectual activities, the more they can build better computers to be better at intellectual capabilities, so this is going to be a kind of change that the world has actually never experienced before, so your previous understanding of what's possible is different. 
This is already impacting us. 
In the last 25 years, as capital productivity has increased, labor productivity has been flat, in fact even a little bit down. 
So I want us to start having this discussion now. 
I know that when I often tell people about this situation, people can be quite dismissive. 
Well, computers can't really think, they don't emote, they don't understand poetry, we don't really understand how they work. 
So what? 
Computers right now can do the things that humans spend most of their time being paid to do, so now's the time to start thinking about how we're going to adjust our social structures and economic structures to be aware of this new reality. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Let me tell you a story. 
It's my first year as a new high school science teacher, and I'm so eager. 
I'm so excited, I'm pouring myself into my lesson plans. 
But I'm slowly coming to this horrifying realization that my students just might not be learning anything. 
This happens one day: I'd just assigned my class to read this textbook chapter about my favorite subject in all of biology: viruses and how they attack. 
And so I'm so excited to discuss this with them, and I come in and I say, "" Can somebody please explain the main ideas and why this is so cool? "" There's silence. 
Finally, my favorite student, she looks me straight in the eye, and she says, "" The reading sucked. "" And then she clarified. She said, "" You know what, I don't mean that it sucks. It means that I didn't understand a word of it. 
It's boring. Um, who cares, and it sucks. "" These sympathetic smiles spread all throughout the room now, and I realize that all of my other students are in the same boat, that maybe they took notes or they memorized definitions from the textbook, but not one of them really understood the main ideas. 
Not one of them can tell me why this stuff is so cool, why it's so important. 
I'm totally clueless. 
I have no idea what to do next. 
So the only thing I can think of is say, "" Listen. Let me tell you a story. 
The main characters in the story are bacteria and viruses. 
These guys are blown up a couple million times. 
The real bacteria and viruses are so small we can't see them without a microscope, and you guys might know bacteria and viruses because they both make us sick. 
But what a lot of people don't know is that viruses can also make bacteria sick. "" Now, the story that I start telling my kids, it starts out like a horror story. 
Once upon a time there's this happy little bacterium. 
Don't get too attached to him. 
Maybe he's floating around in your stomach or in some spoiled food somewhere, and all of a sudden he starts to not feel so good. 
Maybe he ate something bad for lunch, and then things get really horrible, as his skin rips apart, and he sees a virus coming out from his insides. 
And then it gets horrible when he bursts open and an army of viruses floods out from his insides. 
If — Ouch is right! — If you see this, and you're a bacterium, this is like your worst nightmare. 
But if you're a virus and you see this, you cross those little legs of yours and you think, "We rock." 
Because it took a lot of crafty work to infect this bacterium. 
Here's what had to happen. 
A virus grabbed onto a bacterium and it slipped its DNA into it. 
The next thing is, that virus DNA made stuff that chopped up the bacteria DNA. 
And now that we've gotten rid of the bacteria DNA, the virus DNA takes control of the cell and it tells it to start making more viruses. 
Because, you see, DNA is like a blueprint that tells living things what to make. 
So this is kind of like going into a car factory and replacing the blueprints with blueprints for killer robots. 
The workers still come the next day, they do their job, but they're following different instructions. 
So replacing the bacteria DNA with virus DNA turns the bacteria into a factory for making viruses — that is, until it's so filled with viruses that it bursts. 
But that's not the only way that viruses infect bacteria. 
Some are much more crafty. 
When a secret agent virus infects a bacterium, they do a little espionage. 
Here, this cloaked, secret agent virus is slipping his DNA into the bacterial cell, but here's the kicker: It doesn't do anything harmful — not at first. 
Instead, it silently slips into the bacteria's own DNA, and it just stays there like a terrorist sleeper cell, waiting for instructions. 
And what's interesting about this is now whenever this bacteria has babies, the babies also have the virus DNA in them. 
So now we have a whole extended bacteria family, filled with virus sleeper cells. 
They're just happily living together until a signal happens and — BAM! — all of the DNA pops out. 
It takes control of these cells, turns them into virus-making factories, and they all burst, a huge, extended bacteria family, all dying with viruses spilling out of their guts, the viruses taking over the bacterium. 
So now you understand how viruses can attack cells. 
There are two ways: On the left is what we call the lytic way, where the viruses go right in and take over the cells. 
On the [right] is the lysogenic way that uses secret agent viruses. 
So this stuff is not that hard, right? 
And now all of you understand it. 
But if you've graduated from high school, I can almost guarantee you've seen this information before. 
But I bet it was presented in a way that it didn't exactly stick in your mind. 
So when my students were first learning this, why did they hate it so much? 
Well, there were a couple of reasons. 
First of all, I can guarantee you that their textbooks didn't have secret agent viruses, and they didn't have horror stories. 
You know, in the communication of science there is this obsession with seriousness. 
It kills me. I'm not kidding. 
I used to work for an educational publisher, and as a writer, I was always told never to use stories or fun, engaging language, because then my work might not be viewed as "" serious "" and "" scientific. "" Right? I mean, because God forbid somebody have fun when they're learning science. 
So we have this field of science that's all about slime, and color changes. Check this out. 
And then we have, of course, as any good scientist has to have, explosions! 
But if a textbook seems too much fun, it's somehow unscientific. 
Now another problem was that the language in their textbook was truly incomprehensible. 
If we want to summarize that story that I told you earlier, we could start by saying something like, "" These viruses make copies of themselves by slipping their DNA into a bacterium. "" The way this showed up in the textbook, it looked like this: "" Bacteriophage replication is initiated through the introduction of viral nucleic acid into a bacterium. "" That's great, perfect for 13-year-olds. 
But here's the thing. There are plenty of people in science education who would look at this and say there's no way that we could ever give that to students, because it contains some language that isn't completely accurate. 
For example, I told you that viruses have DNA. 
Well, a very tiny fraction of them don't. 
They have something called RNA instead. 
So a professional science writer would circle that and say, "" That has to go. 
We have to change it to something much more technical. "" And after a team of professional science editors went over this really simple explanation, they'd find fault with almost every word I've used, and they'd have to change anything that wasn't serious enough, and they'd have to change everything that wasn't 100 percent perfect. 
Then it would be accurate, but it would be completely impossible to understand. 
This is horrifying. 
You know, I keep talking about this idea of telling a story, and it's like science communication has taken on this idea of what I call the tyranny of precision, where you can't just tell a story. 
It's like science has become that horrible storyteller that we all know, who gives us all the details nobody cares about, where you're like, "" Oh, I met my friend for lunch the other day, and she was wearing these ugly jeans. 
I mean, they weren't really jeans, they were more kind of, like, leggings, but, like, I guess they're actually kind of more like jeggings, like, but I think — "" and you're just like, "" Oh my God. 
What is the point? "" Or even worse, science education is becoming like that guy who always says, "" Actually. "" Right? You want to be like, "" Oh, dude, we had to get up in the middle of the night and drive a hundred miles in total darkness. "" And that guy's like, "" Actually, it was 87.3 miles. "" And you're like, "" Actually, shut up! 
I'm just trying to tell a story. "" Because good storytelling is all about emotional connection. 
We have to convince our audience that what we're talking about matters. 
But just as important is knowing which details we should leave out so that the main point still comes across. 
I'm reminded of what the architect Mies van der Rohe said, and I paraphrase, when he said that sometimes you have to lie in order to tell the truth. 
I think this sentiment is particularly relevant to science education. 
Now, finally, I am often so disappointed when people think that I'm advocating a dumbing down of science. 
That's not true at all. 
I'm currently a Ph.D. student at MIT, and I absolutely understand the importance of detailed, specific scientific communication between experts, but not when we're trying to teach 13-year-olds. 
If a young learner thinks that all viruses have DNA, that's not going to ruin their chances of success in science. 
But if a young learner can't understand anything in science and learns to hate it because it all sounds like this, that will ruin their chances of success. 
This needs to stop, and I wish that the change could come from the institutions at the top that are perpetuating these problems, and I beg them, I beseech them to just stop it. 
But I think that's unlikely. 
So we are so lucky that we have resources like the Internet, where we can circumvent these institutions from the bottom up. 
There's a growing number of online resources that are dedicated to just explaining science in simple, understandable ways. 
I dream of a Wikipedia-like website that would explain any scientific concept you can think of in simple language any middle schooler can understand. 
And I myself spend most of my free time making these science videos that I put on YouTube. 
I explain chemical equilibrium using analogies to awkward middle school dances, and I talk about fuel cells with stories about boys and girls at a summer camp. 
The feedback that I get is sometimes misspelled and it's often written in LOLcats, but nonetheless it's so appreciative, so thankful that I know this is the right way we should be communicating science. 
There's still so much work left to be done, though, and if you're involved with science in any way I urge you to join me. 
Pick up a camera, start to write a blog, whatever, but leave out the seriousness, leave out the jargon. 
Make me laugh. Make me care. 
Leave out those annoying details that nobody cares about and just get to the point. 
How should you start? 
Why don't you say, "" Listen, let me tell you a story ""? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

These realities are experienced separately by each individual. 
This seems weird to us, because each of us only experiences an individual existence, and we don't get to see other branches. 
These four different forces interact with matter according to the corresponding charges that each particle has. 
In a strong interaction, a strong force particle, such as this one, interacts with a colored quark, such as this green one, to give a quark with a different color charge — this red one. 
But these four charges corresponding to three forces are not the end of the story. 
From their location in this pattern, we know that these new particles should be scalar fields like the Higgs particle, but have color charge and interact with the strong force. 
If the LHC finds particles that fit this E8 pattern, that will be very, very cool. 
(Laughter) I try to balance my life equally between physics, love and surfing — my own three charge directions. (Laughter) 

I'm a pediatrician and an anesthesiologist, so I put children to sleep for a living. 
(Laughter) And I'm an academic, so I put audiences to sleep for free. (Laughter) 
But what I actually mostly do is I manage the pain management service at the Packard Children's Hospital up at Stanford in Palo Alto. 
And it's from the experience from about 20 or 25 years of doing that that I want to bring to you the message this morning, that pain is a disease. 
Now most of the time, you think of pain as a symptom of a disease, and that's true most of the time. 
It's the symptom of a tumor or an infection or an inflammation or an operation. 
But about 10 percent of the time, after the patient has recovered from one of those events, pain persists. 
It persists for months and oftentimes for years, and when that happens, it is its own disease. 
And before I tell you about how it is that we think that happens and what we can do about it, I want to show you how it feels for my patients. 
So imagine, if you will, that I'm stroking your arm with this feather, as I'm stroking my arm right now. 
Now, I want you to imagine that I'm stroking it with this. 
Please keep your seat. 
(Laughter) A very different feeling. 
Now what does it have to do with chronic pain? 
Imagine, if you will, these two ideas together. 
Imagine what your life would be like if I were to stroke it with this feather, but your brain was telling you that this is what you are feeling — and that is the experience of my patients with chronic pain. 
In fact, imagine something even worse. 
Imagine I were to stroke your child's arm with this feather, and their brain [was] telling them that they were feeling this hot torch. 
That was the experience of my patient, Chandler, whom you see in the photograph. 
As you can see, she's a beautiful, young woman. 
She was 16 years old last year when I met her, and she aspired to be a professional dancer. 
And during the course of one of her dance rehearsals, she fell on her outstretched arm and sprained her wrist. 
Now you would probably imagine, as she did, that a wrist sprain is a trivial event in a person's life. 
Wrap it in an ACE bandage, take some ibuprofen for a week or two, and that's the end of the story. 
But in Chandler's case, that was the beginning of the story. 
This is what her arm looked like when she came to my clinic about three months after her sprain. 
You can see that the arm is discolored, purplish in color. 
It was cadaverically cold to the touch. 
The muscles were frozen, paralyzed — dystonic is how we refer to that. 
The pain had spread from her wrist to her hands, to her fingertips, from her wrist up to her elbow, almost all the way to her shoulder. 
But the worst part was, not the spontaneous pain that was there 24 hours a day. 
The worst part was that she had allodynia, the medical term for the phenomenon that I just illustrated with the feather and with the torch. 
The lightest touch of her arm — the touch of a hand, the touch even of a sleeve, of a garment, as she put it on — caused excruciating, burning pain. 
How can the nervous system get this so wrong? How can the nervous system 
misinterpret an innocent sensation like the touch of a hand and turn it into the malevolent sensation of the touch of the flame? 
Well you probably imagine that the nervous system in the body is hardwired like your house. 
In your house, wires run in the wall, from the light switch to a junction box in the ceiling and from the junction box to the light bulb. 
And when you turn the switch on, the light goes on. 
And when you turn the switch off, the light goes off. 
So people imagine the nervous system is just like that. 
If you hit your thumb with a hammer, these wires in your arm — that, of course, we call nerves — transmit the information into the junction box in the spinal cord where new wires, new nerves, take the information up to the brain where you become consciously aware that your thumb is now hurt. 
But the situation, of course, in the human body is far more complicated than that. 
Instead of it being the case that that junction box in the spinal cord is just simple where one nerve connects with the next nerve by releasing these little brown packets of chemical information called neurotransmitters in a linear one-on-one fashion, in fact, what happens is the neurotransmitters spill out in three dimensions — laterally, vertically, up and down in the spinal cord — and they start interacting with other adjacent cells. 
These cells, called glial cells, were once thought to be unimportant structural elements of the spinal cord that did nothing more than hold all the important things together, like the nerves. 
But it turns out the glial cells have a vital role in the modulation, amplification and, in the case of pain, the distortion of sensory experiences. 
These glial cells become activated. 
Their DNA starts to synthesize new proteins, which spill out and interact with adjacent nerves, and they start releasing their neurotransmitters, and those neurotransmitters spill out and activate adjacent glial cells, and so on and so forth, until what we have is a positive feedback loop. 
It's almost as if somebody came into your home and rewired your walls so that the next time you turned on the light switch, the toilet flushed three doors down, or your dishwasher went on, or your computer monitor turned off. 
That's crazy, but that's, in fact, what happens with chronic pain. 
And that's why pain becomes its own disease. 
The nervous system has plasticity. 
It changes, and it morphs in response to stimuli. 
Well, what do we do about that? 
What can we do in a case like Chandler's? 
We treat these patients in a rather crude fashion at this point in time. 
We treat them with symptom-modifying drugs — painkillers — which are, frankly, not very effective for this kind of pain. 
We take nerves that are noisy and active that should be quiet, and we put them to sleep with local anesthetics. 
And most importantly, what we do is we use a rigorous, and often uncomfortable, process of physical therapy and occupational therapy to retrain the nerves in the nervous system to respond normally to the activities and sensory experiences that are part of everyday life. 
And we support all of that with an intensive psychotherapy program to address the despondency, despair and depression that always accompanies severe, chronic pain. 
It's successful, as you can see from this video of Chandler, who, two months after we first met her, is now doings a back flip. 
And I had lunch with her yesterday because she's a college student studying dance at Long Beach here, and she's doing absolutely fantastic. 
But the future is actually even brighter. 
The future holds the promise that new drugs will be developed that are not symptom-modifying drugs that simply mask the problem, as we have now, but that will be disease-modifying drugs that will actually go right to the root of the problem and attack those glial cells, or those pernicious proteins that the glial cells elaborate, that spill over and cause this central nervous system wind-up, or plasticity, that so is capable of distorting and amplifying the sensory experience that we call pain. 
So I have hope that in the future, the prophetic words of George Carlin will be realized, who said, "" My philosophy: No pain, no pain. "" Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

So I work in marketing, which I love, but my first passion was physics, a passion brought to me by a wonderful school teacher, when I had a little less gray hair. 
So he taught me that physics is cool because it teaches us so much about the world around us. 
And I'm going to spend the next few minutes trying to convince you that physics can teach us something about marketing. 
So quick show of hands — who studied some marketing in university? 
Who studied some physics in university? 
Pretty good. And at school? 
Okay, lots of you. 
So, hopefully this will bring back some happy, or possibly some slightly disturbing memories. 
So, physics and marketing. 
We'll start with something very simple — Newton's Law: "The force equals mass times acceleration." 
This is something that perhaps Turkish Airlines should have studied a bit more carefully before they ran this campaign. 
(Laughter) But if we rearrange this formula quickly, we can get to acceleration equals force over mass, which means that for a larger particle — a larger mass — it requires more force to change its direction. 
It's the same with brands: the more massive a brand, the more baggage it has, the more force is needed to change its positioning. 
And that's one of the reasons why Arthur Andersen chose to launch Accenture rather than try to persuade the world that Andersen's could stand for something other than accountancy. 
It explains why Hoover found it very difficult to persuade the world that it was more than vacuum cleaners, and why companies like Unilever and P & G keep brands separate, like Ariel and Pringles and Dove rather than having one giant parent brand. 
So the physics is that the bigger the mass of an object the more force is needed to change its direction. 
The marketing is, the bigger a brand, the more difficult it is to reposition it. 
So think about a portfolio of brands or maybe new brands for new ventures. 
Now, who remembers Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? 
Getting a little more technical now. 
So this says that it's impossible, by definition, to measure exactly the state — i.e., the position — and the momentum of a particle, because the act of measuring it, by definition, changes it. 
So to explain that — if you've got an elementary particle and you shine a light on it, then the photon of light has momentum, which knocks the particle, so you don't know where it was before you looked at it. 
By measuring it, the act of measurement changes it. 
The act of observation changes it. 
It's the same in marketing. 
So with the act of observing consumers, changes their behavior. 
Think about the group of moms who are talking about their wonderful children in a focus group, and almost none of them buy lots of junk food. 
And yet, McDonald's sells hundreds of millions of burgers every year. 
Think about the people who are on accompanied shops in supermarkets, who stuff their trolleys full of fresh green vegetables and fruit, but don't shop like that any other day. 
And if you think about the number of people who claim in surveys to regularly look for porn on the Web, it's very few. 
Yet, at Google, we know it's the number-one searched for category. 
So luckily, the science — no, sorry — the marketing is getting easier. 
Luckily, with now better point-of-sale tracking, more digital media consumption, you can measure more what consumers actually do, rather than what they say they do. 
So the physics is you can never accurately and exactly measure a particle, because the observation changes it. 
The marketing is — the message for marketing is — that try to measure what consumers actually do, rather than what they say they'll do or anticipate they'll do. 
So next, the scientific method — an axiom of physics, of all science — says you cannot prove a hypothesis through observation, you can only disprove it. 
What this means is you can gather more and more data around a hypothesis or a positioning, and it will strengthen it, but it will not conclusively prove it. 
And only one contrary data point can blow your theory out of the water. 
So if we take an example — Ptolemy had dozens of data points to support his theory that the planets would rotate around the Earth. 
It only took one robust observation from Copernicus to blow that idea out of the water. 
And there are parallels for marketing — you can invest for a long time in a brand, but a single contrary observation of that positioning will destroy consumers' belief. 
Take BP — they spent millions of pounds over many years building up its credentials as an environmentally friendly brand, but then one little accident. 
Think about Toyota. 
It was, for a long time, revered as the most reliable of cars, and then they had the big recall incident. 
And Tiger Woods, for a long time, the perfect brand ambassador. 
Well, you know the story. 
(Laughter) So the physics is that you cannot prove a hypothesis, but it's easy to disprove it — any hypothesis is shaky. 
And the marketing is that not matter how much you've invested in your brand, one bad week can undermine decades of good work. 
So be really careful to try and avoid the screw-ups that can undermine your brand. 
And lastly, to the slightly obscure world of entropy — the second law of thermodynamics. 
This says that entropy, which is a measure of the disorder of a system, will always increase. 
The same is true of marketing. 
If we go back 20 years, the one message pretty much controlled by one marketing manager could pretty much define a brand. 
But where we are today, things have changed. 
You can get a strong brand image or a message and put it out there like the Conservative Party did earlier this year with their election poster. 
But then you lose control of it. 
With the kind of digital comment creation and distribution tools that are available now to every consumer, it's impossible to control where it goes. 
Your brand starts being dispersed, (Laughter) it gets more chaotic. (Laughter) 
It's out of your control. (Laughter) 
I actually saw him speak — he did a good job. 
But while this may be unsettling for marketers, it's actually a good thing. 
This distribution of brand energy gets your brand closer to the people, more in with the people. 
It makes this distribution of energy a democratizing force, which is ultimately good for your brand. 
So, the lesson from physics is that entropy will always increase; it's a fundamental law. 
The message for marketing is that your brand is more dispersed. 
You can't fight it, so embrace it and find a way to work with it. 
So to close, my teacher, Mr. Vutter, told me that physics is cool, and hopefully, I've convinced you that physics can teach all of us, even in the world of marketing, something special. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Even nature's most disgusting creatures have important secrets, but who would want a swarm of cockroaches coming towards them? 
Yet one of the greatest differences between natural and human technologies relates to robustness. 
Robust systems are stable in complex and new environments. 
Remarkably, cockroaches can self-stabilize running over rough terrain. 
When we put a jet pack on them, or give them a perturbation like an earthquake, we discovered that their wonderfully tuned legs allow them to self-stabilize without using any of their brainpower. 
They can go over complex terrain like grass, no problem, and not get destabilized. 
We discovered a new behavior where, because of their shape, they actually roll automatically to their side to go through this artificial test bit of grass. 
Robust systems can perform multiple tasks with the same structure. 
Here's a new behavior we've discovered. 
The animals rapidly invert and disappear in less than 150 milliseconds — you never see them — using the same structures that they use to run, their legs. 
They can run upside down very rapidly on rods, branches and wires, and if you perturb one of those branches, they can do this. 
They can perform gymnastic maneuvers like no robot we have yet. 
And they have nearly unlimited maneuverability with that same structure and unprecedented access to a variety of different areas. 
They have wings for flying when they get warm, but they use those same wings to flip over if they get destabilized. 
Very effective. 
Robust systems are also fault tolerant and fail-safe. 
This is the foot of a cockroach. 
It has spines, gluey pads and claws, but if you take off those feet, they can still go over rough terrain, like the bottom video that you see, without hardly slowing down. Extraordinary. 
They can run up mesh without their feet. 
Here's an animal using a normal, alternating tripod: three legs, three legs, three legs, but in nature, the insects often have lost their legs. 
Here's one moving with two middle legs gone. 
It can even lose three legs, in a tripod, and adopt a new gait, a hopping gait. 
And I point out that all of these videos are slowed down 20 times, so they're actually really fast, when you see this. 
Robust systems are also damage resistant. 
Here's an animal climbing up a wall. 
It looks like a rapid, smooth, vertical climb, but when you slow it down, you see something very different. 
Here's what they do. 
They intentionally have a head-on collision with the wall so they don't slow down and can transition up it in 75 milliseconds. 
And they can do this in part because they have extraordinary exoskeletons. 
And they're really just made up of compliant joints that are tubes and plates connected to one another. 
Here's a dissection of an abdomen of a cockroach. 
You see these plates, and you see the compliant membrane. 
My engineering colleague at Berkeley designed with his students a novel manufacturing technique where you essentially origami the exoskeleton, you laser cut it, laminate it, and you fold it up into a robot. 
And you can do that now in less than 15 minutes. 
These robots, called DASH, for Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod, are highly compliant robots, and they're remarkably robust as a result of these features. 
They're certainly incredibly damage resistant. 
(Laughter) They even have some of the behaviors of the cockroaches. 
So they can use their smart, compliant body to transition up a wall in a very simple way. 
They even have some of the beginnings of the rapid inversion behavior where they disappear. 
Now we want to know why they can go anywhere. 
We discovered that they can go through three-millimeter gaps, the height of two pennies, two stacked pennies, and when they do this, they can actually run through those confined spaces at high speeds, although you never see it. 
To understand it better, we did a CT scan of the exoskeleton and showed that they can compress their body by over 40 percent. 
We put them in a materials testing machine to look at the stress strain analysis and showed that they can withstand forces 800 times their body weight, and after this they can fly and run absolutely normally. 
So you never know where curiosity-based research will lead, and someday you may want a swarm of cockroach-inspired robots to come at you. 
(Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

We are going to take a quick voyage over the cognitive history of the 20th century, because during that century, our minds have altered dramatically. 
As you all know, the cars that people drove in 1900 have altered because the roads are better and because of technology. 
And our minds have altered, too. 
We've gone from people who confronted a concrete world and analyzed that world primarily in terms of how much it would benefit them to people who confront a very complex world, and it's a world where we've had to develop new mental habits, new habits of mind. 
And these include things like clothing that concrete world with classification, introducing abstractions that we try to make logically consistent, and also taking the hypothetical seriously, that is, wondering about what might have been rather than what is. 
Now, this dramatic change was drawn to my attention through massive I.Q. gains over time, and these have been truly massive. 
That is, we don't just get a few more questions right on I.Q. tests. 
We get far more questions right on I.Q. tests than each succeeding generation back to the time that they were invented. 
Indeed, if you score the people a century ago against modern norms, they would have an average I.Q. of 70. 
If you score us against their norms, we would have an average I.Q. of 130. 
Now this has raised all sorts of questions. 
Were our immediate ancestors on the verge of mental retardation? 
Because 70 is normally the score for mental retardation. 
Or are we on the verge of all being gifted? 
Because 130 is the cutting line for giftedness. 
Now I'm going to try and argue for a third alternative that's much more illuminating than either of those, and to put this into perspective, let's imagine that a Martian came down to Earth and found a ruined civilization. 
And this Martian was an archaeologist, and they found scores, target scores, that people had used for shooting. 
And first they looked at 1865, and they found that in a minute, people had only put one bullet in the bullseye. 
And then they found, in 1898, that they'd put about five bullets in the bullseye in a minute. 
And then about 1918 they put a hundred bullets in the bullseye. 
And initially, that archaeologist would be baffled. 
They would say, look, these tests were designed to find out how much people were steady of hand, how keen their eyesight was, whether they had control of their weapon. 
How could these performances have escalated to this enormous degree? 
Well we now know, of course, the answer. 
If that Martian looked at battlefields, they would find that people had only muskets at the time of the Civil War and that they had repeating rifles at the time of the Spanish-American War, and then they had machine guns by the time of World War I. 
And, in other words, it was the equipment that was in the hands of the average soldier that was responsible, not greater keenness of eye or steadiness of hand. 
Now what we have to imagine is the mental artillery that we have picked up over those hundred years, and I think again that another thinker will help us here, and that's Luria. 
Luria looked at people just before they entered the scientific age, and he found that these people were resistant to classifying the concrete world. 
They wanted to break it up into little bits that they could use. 
He found that they were resistant to deducing the hypothetical, to speculating about what might be, and he found finally that they didn't deal well with abstractions or using logic on those abstractions. 
Now let me give you a sample of some of his interviews. 
He talked to the head man of a person in rural Russia. 
They'd only had, as people had in 1900, about four years of schooling. 
And he asked that particular person, what do crows and fish have in common? 
And the fellow said, "" Absolutely nothing. 
You know, I can eat a fish. I can't eat a crow. 
A crow can peck at a fish. 
A fish can't do anything to a crow. "" And Luria said, "" But aren't they both animals? "" And he said, "" Of course not. 
One's a fish. 
The other is a bird. "" And he was interested, effectively, in what he could do with those concrete objects. 
And then Luria went to another person, and he said to them, "" There are no camels in Germany. 
Hamburg is a city in Germany. 
Are there camels in Hamburg? "" And the fellow said, "Well, if it's large enough, there ought to be camels there." 
And Luria said, "" But what do my words imply? "" And he said, "" Well, maybe it's a small village, and there's no room for camels. "" In other words, he was unwilling to treat this as anything but a concrete problem, and he was used to camels being in villages, and he was quite unable to use the hypothetical, to ask himself what if there were no camels in Germany. 
A third interview was conducted with someone about the North Pole. 
And Luria said, "" At the North Pole, there is always snow. 
Wherever there is always snow, the bears are white. 
What color are the bears at the North Pole? "" And the response was, "" Such a thing is to be settled by testimony. 
If a wise person came from the North Pole and told me the bears were white, I might believe him, but every bear that I have seen is a brown bear. "" Now you see again, this person has rejected going beyond the concrete world and analyzing it through everyday experience, and it was important to that person what color bears were — that is, they had to hunt bears. 
They weren't willing to engage in this. 
One of them said to Luria, "" How can we solve things that aren't real problems? 
None of these problems are real. 
How can we address them? "" Now, these three categories — classification, using logic on abstractions, taking the hypothetical seriously — how much difference do they make in the real world beyond the testing room? 
And let me give you a few illustrations. 
First, almost all of us today get a high school diploma. 
That is, we've gone from four to eight years of education to 12 years of formal education, and 52 percent of Americans have actually experienced some type of tertiary education. 
Now, not only do we have much more education, and much of that education is scientific, and you can't do science without classifying the world. 
You can't do science without proposing hypotheses. 
You can't do science without making it logically consistent. 
In 1910, they looked at the examinations that the state of Ohio gave to 14-year-olds, and they found that they were all for socially valued concrete information. 
They were things like, what are the capitals of the 44 or 45 states that existed at that time? 
When they looked at the exams that the state of Ohio gave in 1990, they were all about abstractions. 
They were things like, why is the largest city of a state rarely the capital? 
And you were supposed to think, well, the state legislature was rural-controlled, and they hated the big city, so rather than putting the capital in a big city, they put it in a county seat. 
They put it in Albany rather than New York. 
They put it in Harrisburg rather than Philadelphia. 
And so forth. 
So the tenor of education has changed. 
We are educating people to take the hypothetical seriously, to use abstractions, and to link them logically. 
What about employment? 
Well, in 1900, three percent of Americans practiced professions that were cognitively demanding. 
Only three percent were lawyers or doctors or teachers. 
Today, 35 percent of Americans practice cognitively demanding professions, not only to the professions proper like lawyer or doctor or scientist or lecturer, but many, many sub-professions having to do with being a technician, a computer programmer. 
A whole range of professions now make cognitive demands. 
And we can only meet the terms of employment in the modern world by being cognitively far more flexible. 
And it's not just that we have many more people in cognitively demanding professions. 
The professions have been upgraded. 
Compare the doctor in 1900, who really had only a few tricks up his sleeve, with the modern general practitioner or specialist, with years of scientific training. 
Compare the banker in 1900, who really just needed a good accountant and to know who was trustworthy in the local community for paying back their mortgage. 
Well, the merchant bankers who brought the world to their knees may have been morally remiss, but they were cognitively very agile. 
They went far beyond that 1900 banker. 
They had to look at computer projections for the housing market. 
They had to get complicated CDO-squared in order to bundle debt together and make debt look as if it were actually a profitable asset. 
They had to prepare a case to get rating agencies to give it a AAA, though in many cases, they had virtually bribed the rating agencies. 
And they also, of course, had to get people to accept these so-called assets and pay money for them even though they were highly vulnerable. 
Or take a farmer today. 
I take the farm manager of today as very different from the farmer of 1900. 
So it hasn't just been the spread of cognitively demanding professions. 
It's also been the upgrading of tasks like lawyer and doctor and what have you that have made demands on our cognitive faculties. 
But I've talked about education and employment. 
Some of the habits of mind that we have developed over the 20th century have paid off in unexpected areas. 
I'm primarily a moral philosopher. 
I merely have a holiday in psychology, and what interests me in general is moral debate. 
Now over the last century, in developed nations like America, moral debate has escalated because we take the hypothetical seriously, and we also take universals seriously and look for logical connections. 
When I came home in 1955 from university at the time of Martin Luther King, a lot of people came home at that time and started having arguments with their parents and grandparents. 
My father was born in 1885, and he was mildly racially biased. 
As an Irishman, he hated the English so much he didn't have much emotion for anyone else. 
(Laughter) But he did have a sense that black people were inferior. 
And when we said to our parents and grandparents, "How would you feel if tomorrow morning you woke up black?" 
they said that is the dumbest thing you've ever said. 
Who have you ever known who woke up in the morning — (Laughter) — that turned black? 
In other words, they were fixed in the concrete mores and attitudes they had inherited. 
They would not take the hypothetical seriously, and without the hypothetical, it's very difficult to get moral argument off the ground. 
You have to say, imagine you were in Iran, and imagine that your relatives all suffered from collateral damage even though they had done no wrong. 
How would you feel about that? 
And if someone of the older generation says, well, our government takes care of us, and it's up to their government to take care of them, they're just not willing to take the hypothetical seriously. 
Or take an Islamic father whose daughter has been raped, and he feels he's honor-bound to kill her. 
Well, he's treating his mores as if they were sticks and stones and rocks that he had inherited, and they're unmovable in any way by logic. 
They're just inherited mores. 
Today we would say something like, well, imagine you were knocked unconscious and sodomized. 
Would you deserve to be killed? 
And he would say, well that's not in the Koran. 
That's not one of the principles I've got. 
Well you, today, universalize your principles. 
You state them as abstractions and you use logic on them. 
If you have a principle such as, people shouldn't suffer unless they're guilty of something, then to exclude black people you've got to make exceptions, don't you? 
You have to say, well, blackness of skin, you couldn't suffer just for that. 
It must be that blacks are somehow tainted. 
And then we can bring empirical evidence to bear, can't we, and say, well how can you consider all blacks tainted when St. Augustine was black and Thomas Sowell is black. 
And you can get moral argument off the ground, then, because you're not treating moral principles as concrete entities. 
You're treating them as universals, to be rendered consistent by logic. 
Now how did all of this arise out of I.Q. tests? 
That's what initially got me going on cognitive history. 
If you look at the I.Q. test, you find the gains have been greatest in certain areas. 
The similarities subtest of the Wechsler is about classification, and we have made enormous gains on that classification subtest. 
There are other parts of the I.Q. test battery that are about using logic on abstractions. 
Some of you may have taken Raven's Progressive Matrices, and it's all about analogies. 
And in 1900, people could do simple analogies. 
That is, if you said to them, cats are like wildcats. 
What are dogs like? 
They would say wolves. 
But by 1960, people could attack Raven's on a much more sophisticated level. 
If you said, we've got two squares followed by a triangle, what follows two circles? 
They could say a semicircle. 
Just as a triangle is half of a square, a semicircle is half of a circle. 
By 2010, college graduates, if you said two circles followed by a semicircle, two sixteens followed by what, they would say eight, because eight is half of 16. 
That is, they had moved so far from the concrete world that they could even ignore the appearance of the symbols that were involved in the question. 
Now, I should say one thing that's very disheartening. 
We haven't made progress on all fronts. 
One of the ways in which we would like to deal with the sophistication of the modern world is through politics, and sadly you can have humane moral principles, you can classify, you can use logic on abstractions, and if you're ignorant of history and of other countries, you can't do politics. 
We've noticed, in a trend among young Americans, that they read less history and less literature and less material about foreign lands, and they're essentially ahistorical. 
They live in the bubble of the present. 
They don't know the Korean War from the war in Vietnam. 
They don't know who was an ally of America in World War II. 
Think how different America would be if every American knew that this is the fifth time Western armies have gone to Afghanistan to put its house in order, and if they had some idea of exactly what had happened on those four previous occasions. 
(Laughter) And that is, they had barely left, and there wasn't a trace in the sand. 
Or imagine how different things would be if most Americans knew that we had been lied into four of our last six wars. 
You know, the Spanish didn't sink the battleship Maine, the Lusitania was not an innocent vessel but was loaded with munitions, the North Vietnamese did not attack the Seventh Fleet, and, of course, Saddam Hussein hated al Qaeda and had nothing to do with it, and yet the administration convinced 45 percent of the people that they were brothers in arms, when he would hang one from the nearest lamppost. 
But I don't want to end on a pessimistic note. 
The 20th century has shown enormous cognitive reserves in ordinary people that we have now realized, and the aristocracy was convinced that the average person couldn't make it, that they could never share their mindset or their cognitive abilities. 
Lord Curzon once said he saw people bathing in the North Sea, and he said, "" Why did no one tell me what white bodies the lower orders have? "" As if they were a reptile. 
Well, Dickens was right and he was wrong. [Correction: Rudyard Kipling] [Kipling] said, "" The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters underneath the skin. "" (Applause) 

(Laughter) So this is a vending machine for crows. 
(Laughter) And in doing so, we were breeding them for parasitism. 
For example, in Sweden, crows will wait for fishermen to drop lines through holes in the ice. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Joshua Klein: Yeah, pretty interesting. 
So, what's significant about this to me isn't that we can train crows to pick up peanuts. 
The main point of all this for me is, we can find mutually beneficial systems for these species. 

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

When I moved to Harare in 1985, social justice was at the core of Zimbabwe's national health policy. 
The new government emerged from a long war of independence and immediately proclaimed a socialist agenda: health care services, primary education became essentially free. 
A massive expansion of rural health centers placed roughly 80 percent of the population less than a two-hour walk from these facilities, a truly remarkable accomplishment. 
In 1980, the year of independence, 25 percent of Zimbabwean children were fully immunized. 
By 1990, a mere decade later, this proportion stood at 80 percent. 
I felt tremendously privileged to be part of this transformation, a revolution. 
The excitement, the camaraderie, was palpable. 
Working side by side with brilliant Zimbabweans — scientists, doctors, activists — I felt connected not only to an African independence movement, but to a global progressive public health movement. 
But there were daunting challenges. 
Zimbabwe reported its first AIDS case in 1985, the year I arrived. 
I had taken care of a few patients with AIDS in the early 1980s, when I did my medical training at Harlem Hospital, but — we had no idea what lay in store for Africa. 
Infection rate stood at about two percent in my early days there. 
These would soar to one out of every four adults by the time I left Harare 17 years later. 
By the mid-1990s, I'd told hundreds of people in the prime of life that they were HIV-positive. 
I saw colleagues and friends die, my students, hospital patients, die. 
In response, my colleagues and I set up a clinic. 
We did condom demonstrations. 
We launched school education and workplace interventions. 
We did research. We counseled the partners of infected men about how to protect themselves. 
We worked hard, and at the time, I believed that I was doing my best. 
I was providing excellent treatment, such as it was. 
But I was not talking about structural change. 
Former UN Secretary Kofi Annan has spoken candidly about his personal failure leading to the Rwandan genocide. 
In 1994, he was head of the UN peacekeeping department. 
At a 10-year memorial for the genocide, he reflected, "" I believed at the time I was doing my best, but I realized after the genocide that there was more I could and should have done to sound the alarm and rally support. "" The AIDS epidemic caught the health community unprepared, and today, when the World Health Organization estimates that 39 million people have lost their lives to this disease, I'm not alone in feeling remorse and regret at not having done more earlier. 
But while living in Zimbabwe, I didn't see my role as an advocacy or a political one. 
I was there for my technical skills, both my clinical and my research epidemiology skills. 
And in my mind, my job was to take care of patients and to do research to better understand the population patterns of transmission, and I hoped that we'd slow the spread of the virus. 
I was aware that socially marginalized populations were at disproportionate risk of getting and dying of AIDS. 
And on the sugar plantations, which really more closely resembled feudal fiefdoms than any modern enterprise, 60 percent of pregnant women tested HIV-positive. 
I worked to show how getting infected was not a moral failure but instead related to a culture of male superiority, to forced migrant labor and to colonialism. 
Whites were largely unscathed. 
As health professionals, our tools were pitifully weak: imploring people to change their individual behaviors, use condoms, reduce number of partners. 
Infection rates climbed, and when treatment became available in the West, treatment that remains our most potent weapon against this virus, it was unaffordable to the public sector across Africa. 
I didn't speak out about the unequal access to these life-saving drugs or about the underlying economic and political systems that were driving infection rates in such huge swaths of the population. 
I rationalized my silence by reminding myself that I was a guest in the country, that sounding the alarm could even get me kicked out, keep me from doing good work, taking care of my patients, doing much-needed research. 
So I didn't speak out about the government's early stance on AIDS. 
I didn't voice my concerns loudly enough. 
Many doctors, health professionals, may think I did nothing wrong. 
Our pact with our patients, the Hippocratic Oath and its variants, is about the sanctity of the patient-doctor relationship. 
And I did everything I could for each and every patient of mine. 
But I knew that epidemics emerge along the fissures of our society, reflecting not only biology, but more importantly patterns of marginalization, exclusion, discrimination related to race, gender, sexuality, class and more. 
It was true of AIDS. 
It was true just recently of Ebola. 
Medical anthropologists such as Paul Farmer, who worked on AIDS in Haiti, call this structural violence: structural because inequities are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world, often in ways that are invisible to those with privilege and power; and violence because its impact — premature deaths, suffering, illness — is violent. 
We do little for our patients if we fail to recognize these social injustices. 
Sounding the alarm is the first step towards doing public health right, and it's how we may rally support to break through and create real change together. 
So these days, I'm not staying quiet. 
I'm speaking up about a lot of things, even when it makes listeners uncomfortable, even when it makes me uncomfortable. 
And a lot of this is about racial disparities and institutionalized racism, things that we're not supposed to have in this country anymore, certainly not in the practice of medicine or public health. 
But we have them, and we pay for them in lives cut short. 
That's why sounding the alarm about the impact of racism on health in the United States, the ongoing institutional and interpersonal violence that people of color face, compounded by our tragic legacy of 250 years of slavery, 90 years of Jim Crow and 60 years of imperfect equality, sounding the alarm about this is central to doing my job right as New York City's Health Commissioner. 
In New York City, premature mortality — that's death before the age of 65 — is 50 percent higher for black men than white ones. 
A black woman in 2012 faced more than 10 times the risk of dying related to childbirth as a white woman. 
And though we've made enormous strides in reducing infant mortality rates, a black baby still faces nearly three times the risk of death in its first year of life as compared to a white baby. 
New York City's not exceptional. 
These statistics are paralleled by statistics found across the United States. 
A recent New York Times analysis reported that there are 1.5 million missing black men across the country. 
They noted that more than one out of every six black men who today should be between the ages of 25 and 54 years have disappeared from daily life, lost either to prison or premature death. 
There is great injustice in the daily and disproportionate violence faced by young black men, the focus of recent protests under the banner # BlackLivesMatter. 
But we have to remember that enduring and disparate rates and the occurrence and outcome of common medical conditions — heart disease, cancer, diabetes, HIV — diseases that may kill slowly and quietly and take even more black lives prematurely. 
As the # BlackLivesMatter movement unfolded, I felt frustrated and angry that the medical community has been reluctant to even use the word "" racism "" in our research and our work. 
You've probably felt something every time I've said it. 
Our medical students held die-ins in their white coats, but the medical community has largely stood by passively as ongoing discrimination continues to affect the disease profile and mortality. 
And I worry that the trend towards personalized and precision medicine, looking for biological or genetic targets to better tailor treatment, may inadvertently cause us to lose sight of the big picture, that it is the daily context, where a person lives, grows, works, loves, that most importantly determines population health, and for too many of us, poor health. 
As health professionals in our daily work, whether in the clinic or doing research, we are witness to great injustice: the homeless person who is unable to follow medical advice because he has more pressing priorities; the transgender youth who is contemplating suicide because our society is just so harsh; the single mother who has been made to feel that she is responsible for the poor health of her child. 
Our role as health professionals is not just to treat our patients but to sound the alarm and advocate for change. 
Rightfully or not, our societal position gives our voices great credibility, and we shouldn't waste that. 
I regret not speaking up in Zimbabwe, and I've promised myself that as New York City's Health Commissioner, I will use every opportunity I have to sound the alarm and rally support for health equity. 
I will speak out against racism, and I hope you will join me, and I will join you when you speak out against sexism or any other form of inequality. 
It's time for us to rise up and collectively speak up about structural inequality. 
We don't have to have all the answers to call for change. 
We just need courage. 
The health of our patients, the health of us all, depends on it. 
(Applause) 

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

Here's a question that matters. 
[Is it ethical to evolve the human body?] Because we're beginning to get all the tools together to evolve ourselves. 
And we can evolve bacteria and we can evolve plants and we can evolve animals, and we're now reaching a point where we really have to ask, is it really ethical and do we want to evolve human beings? 
And as you're thinking about that, let me talk about that in the context of prosthetics, prosthetics past, present, future. 
So this is the iron hand that belonged to one of the German counts. 
Loved to fight, lost his arm in one of these battles. 
No problem, he just made a suit of armor, put it on, perfect prosthetic. 
That's where the concept of ruling with an iron fist comes from. 
And of course these prosthetics have been getting more and more useful, more and more modern. 
You can hold soft-boiled eggs. 
You can have all types of controls, and as you're thinking about that, there are wonderful people like Hugh Herr who have been building absolutely extraordinary prosthetics. 
So the wonderful Aimee Mullins will go out and say, how tall do I want to be tonight? 
Or Hugh will say what type of cliff do I want to climb? 
Or does somebody want to run a marathon, or does somebody want to ballroom dance? 
And as you adapt these things, the interesting thing about prosthetics is they've been coming inside the body. 
So these external prosthetics have now become artificial knees. 
They've become artificial hips. 
And then they've evolved further to become not just nice to have but essential to have. 
So when you're talking about a heart pacemaker as a prosthetic, you're talking about something that isn't just, "" I'm missing my leg, "" it's, "" if I don't have this, I can die. "" And at that point, a prosthetic becomes a symbiotic relationship with the human body. 
And four of the smartest people that I've ever met — Ed Boyden, Hugh Herr, Joe Jacobson, Bob Lander — are working on a Center for Extreme Bionics. 
And the interesting thing of what you're seeing here is these prosthetics now get integrated into the bone. 
They get integrated into the skin. 
They get integrated into the muscle. 
And one of the other sides of Ed is he's been thinking about how to connect the brain using light or other mechanisms directly to things like these prosthetics. 
And if you can do that, then you can begin changing fundamental aspects of humanity. 
So how quickly you react to something depends on the diameter of a nerve. 
And of course, if you have nerves that are external or prosthetic, say with light or liquid metal, then you can increase that diameter and you could even increase it theoretically to the point where, as long as you could see the muzzle flash, you could step out of the way of a bullet. 
Those are the order of magnitude of changes you're talking about. 
This is a fourth sort of level of prosthetics. 
These are Phonak hearing aids, and the reason why these are so interesting is because they cross the threshold from where prosthetics are something for somebody who is "" disabled "" and they become something that somebody who is "" normal "" might want to actually have, because what this prosthetic does, which is really interesting, is not only does it help you hear, you can focus your hearing, so it can hear the conversation going on over there. 
You can have superhearing. 
You can have hearing in 360 degrees. You can have white noise. 
You can record, and oh, by the way, they also put a phone into this. 
So this functions as your hearing aid and also as your phone. 
And at that point, somebody might actually want to have a prosthetic voluntarily. 
All of these thousands of loosely connected little pieces are coming together, and it's about time we ask the question, how do we want to evolve human beings over the next century or two? 
And for that we turn to a great philosopher who was a very smart man despite being a Yankee fan. 
(Laughter) And Yogi Berra used to say, of course, that it's very tough to make predictions, especially about the future. (Laughter) 
So instead of making a prediction about the future to begin with, let's take what's happening in the present with people like Tony Atala, who is redesigning 30-some-odd organs. 
And maybe the ultimate prosthetic isn't having something external, titanium. 
Maybe the ultimate prosthetic is take your own gene code, remake your own body parts, because that's a whole lot more effective than any kind of a prosthetic. 
But while you're at it, then you can take the work of Craig Venter and Ham Smith. 
And one of the things that we've been doing is trying to figure out how to reprogram cells. 
And if you can reprogram a cell, then you can change the cells in those organs. 
So if you can change the cells in those organs, maybe you make those organs more radiation-resistant. 
Maybe you make them absorb more oxygen. 
Maybe you make them more efficient to filter out stuff that you don't want in your body. 
And over the last few weeks, George Church has been in the news a lot because he's been talking about taking one of these programmable cells and inserting an entire human genome into that cell. 
And once you can insert an entire human genome into a cell, then you begin to ask the question, would you want to enhance any of that genome? 
Do you want to enhance a human body? 
How would you want to enhance a human body? 
Where is it ethical to enhance a human body and where is it not ethical to enhance a human body? 
And all of a sudden, what we're doing is we've got this multidimensional chess board where we can change human genetics by using viruses to attack things like AIDS, or we can change the gene code through gene therapy to do away with some hereditary diseases, or we can change the environment, and change the expression of those genes in the epigenome and pass that on to the next generations. 
And all of a sudden, it's not just one little bit, it's all these stacked little bits that allow you to take little portions of it until all the portions coming together lead you to something that's very different. 
And a lot of people are very scared by this stuff. 
And it does sound scary, and there are risks to this stuff. 
So why in the world would you ever want to do this stuff? 
Why would we really want to alter the human body in a fundamental way? 
The answer lies in part with Lord Rees, astronomer royal of Great Britain. 
And one of his favorite sayings is the universe is 100 percent malevolent. 
So what does that mean? 
It means if you take any one of your bodies at random, drop it anywhere in the universe, drop it in space, you die. 
Drop it on the Sun, you die. 
Drop it on the surface of Mercury, you die. 
Drop it near a supernova, you die. 
But fortunately, it's only about 80 percent effective. 
So as a great physicist once said, there's these little upstream eddies of biology that create order in this rapid torrent of entropy. 
So as the universe dissipates energy, there's these upstream eddies that create biological order. 
Now, the problem with eddies is, they tend to disappear. 
They shift. They move in rivers. 
And because of that, when an eddy shifts, when the Earth becomes a snowball, when the Earth becomes very hot, when the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, when you have supervolcanoes, when you have solar flares, when you have potentially extinction-level events like the next election — (Laughter) then all of a sudden, you can have periodic extinctions. 
And by the way, that's happened five times on Earth, and therefore it is very likely that the human species on Earth is going to go extinct someday. 
Not next week, not next month, maybe in November, but maybe 10,000 years after that. 
As you're thinking of the consequence of that, if you believe that extinctions are common and natural and normal and occur periodically, it becomes a moral imperative to diversify our species. 
And it becomes a moral imperative because it's going to be really hard to live on Mars if we don't fundamentally modify the human body. 
Right? 
You go from one cell, mom and dad coming together to make one cell, in a cascade to 10 trillion cells. 
We don't know, if you change the gravity substantially, if the same thing will happen to create your body. 
We do know that if you expose our bodies as they currently are to a lot of radiation, we will die. 
So as you're thinking of that, you have to really redesign things just to get to Mars. 
Forget about the moons of Neptune or Jupiter. 
And to borrow from Nikolai Kardashev, let's think about life in a series of scales. 
So Life One civilization is a civilization that begins to alter his or her looks. 
And we've been doing that for thousands of years. 
You've got tummy tucks and you've got this and you've got that. 
You alter your looks, and I'm told that not all of those alterations take place for medical reasons. 
(Laughter) Seems odd. 
A Life Two civilization is a different civilization. 
A Life Two civilization alters fundamental aspects of the body. 
So you put human growth hormone in, the person grows taller, or you put x in and the person gets fatter or loses metabolism or does a whole series of things, but you're altering the functions in a fundamental way. 
To become an intrasolar civilization, we're going to have to create a Life Three civilization, and that looks very different from what we've got here. 
Maybe you splice in Deinococcus radiodurans so that the cells can resplice after a lot of exposure to radiation. 
Maybe you breathe by having oxygen flow through your blood instead of through your lungs. 
But you're talking about really radical redesigns, and one of the interesting things that's happened in the last decade is we've discovered a whole lot of planets out there. 
And some of them may be Earth-like. 
The problem is, if we ever want to get to these planets, the fastest human objects — Juno and Voyager and the rest of this stuff — take tens of thousands of years to get from here to the nearest solar system. 
So if you want to start exploring beaches somewhere else, or you want to see two-sun sunsets, then you're talking about something that is very different, because you have to change the timescale and the body of humans in ways which may be absolutely unrecognizable. 
And that's a Life Four civilization. 
Now, we can't even begin to imagine what that might look like, but we're beginning to get glimpses of instruments that might take us even that far. 
And let me give you two examples. 
So this is the wonderful Floyd Romesberg, and one of the things that Floyd's been doing is he's been playing with the basic chemistry of life. 
So all life on this planet is made in ATCGs, the four letters of DNA. 
All bacteria, all plants, all animals, all humans, all cows, everything else. 
And what Floyd did is he changed out two of those base pairs, so it's ATXY. 
And that means that you now have a parallel system to make life, to make babies, to reproduce, to evolve, that doesn't mate with most things on Earth or in fact maybe with nothing on Earth. 
Maybe you make plants that are immune to all bacteria. 
Maybe you make plants that are immune to all viruses. 
But why is that so interesting? 
It means that we are not a unique solution. 
It means you can create alternate chemistries to us that could be chemistries adaptable to a very different planet that could create life and heredity. 
The second experiment, or the other implication of this experiment, is that all of you, all life is based on 20 amino acids. 
If you don't substitute two amino acids, if you don't say ATXY, if you say ATCG + XY, then you go from 20 building blocks to 172, and all of a sudden you've got 172 building blocks of amino acids to build life-forms in very different shapes. 
The second experiment to think about is a really weird experiment that's been taking place in China. 
So this guy has been transplanting hundreds of mouse heads. 
Right? 
And why is that an interesting experiment? 
Well, think of the first heart transplants. 
One of the things they used to do is they used to bring in the wife or the daughter of the donor so the donee could tell the doctors, "" Do you recognize this person? Do you love this person? 
Do you feel anything for this person? "" We laugh about that today. 
We laugh because we know the heart is a muscle, but for hundreds of thousands of years, or tens of thousands of years, "I gave her my heart. She took my heart. She broke my heart." 
We thought this was emotion and we thought maybe emotions were transplanted with the heart. Nope. 
So how about the brain? 
Two possible outcomes to this experiment. 
If you can get a mouse that is functional, then you can see, is the new brain a blank slate? 
And boy, does that have implications. 
Second option: the new mouse recognizes Minnie Mouse. 
The new mouse remembers what it's afraid of, remembers how to navigate the maze, and if that is true, then you can transplant memory and consciousness. 
And then the really interesting question is, if you can transplant this, is the only input-output mechanism this down here? 
Or could you transplant that consciousness into something that would be very different, that would last in space, that would last tens of thousands of years, that would be a completely redesigned body that could hold consciousness for a long, long period of time? 
And let's come back to the first question: Why would you ever want to do that? 
Well, I'll tell you why. 
Because this is the ultimate selfie. 
(Laughter) This is taken from six billion miles away, and that's Earth. 
And that's all of us. 
And if that little thing goes, all of humanity goes. 
And the reason you want to alter the human body is because you eventually want a picture that says, that's us, and that's us, and that's us, because that's the way humanity survives long-term extinction. 
And that's the reason why it turns out it's actually unethical not to evolve the human body even though it can be scary, even though it can be challenging, but it's what's going to allow us to explore, live and get to places we can't even dream of today, but which our great-great-great-great- grandchildren might someday. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

So let's start with some good news, and the good news has to do with what do we know based on biomedical research that actually has changed the outcomes for many very serious diseases? 
Let's start with leukemia, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, ALL, the most common cancer of children. 
When I was a student, the mortality rate was about 95 percent. 
Today, some 25, 30 years later, we're talking about a mortality rate that's reduced by 85 percent. 
Six thousand children each year who would have previously died of this disease are cured. 
If you want the really big numbers, look at these numbers for heart disease. 
Heart disease used to be the biggest killer, particularly for men in their 40s. 
Today, we've seen a 63-percent reduction in mortality from heart disease — remarkably, 1.1 million deaths averted every year. 
AIDS, incredibly, has just been named, in the past month, a chronic disease, meaning that a 20-year-old who becomes infected with HIV is expected not to live weeks, months, or a couple of years, as we said only a decade ago, but is thought to live decades, probably to die in his' 60s or '70s from other causes altogether. 
These are just remarkable, remarkable changes in the outlook for some of the biggest killers. 
And one in particular that you probably wouldn't know about, stroke, which has been, along with heart disease, one of the biggest killers in this country, is a disease in which now we know that if you can get people into the emergency room within three hours of the onset, some 30 percent of them will be able to leave the hospital without any disability whatsoever. 
Remarkable stories, good-news stories, all of which boil down to understanding something about the diseases that has allowed us to detect early and intervene early. 
Early detection, early intervention, that's the story for these successes. 
Unfortunately, the news is not all good. 
Let's talk about one other story which has to do with suicide. 
Now this is, of course, not a disease, per se. 
It's a condition, or it's a situation that leads to mortality. 
What you may not realize is just how prevalent it is. 
There are 38,000 suicides each year in the United States. 
That means one about every 15 minutes. 
Third most common cause of death amongst people between the ages of 15 and 25. 
It's kind of an extraordinary story when you realize that this is twice as common as homicide and actually more common as a source of death than traffic fatalities in this country. 
Now, when we talk about suicide, there is also a medical contribution here, because 90 percent of suicides are related to a mental illness: depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anorexia, borderline personality. There's a long list of disorders that contribute, and as I mentioned before, often early in life. 
But it's not just the mortality from these disorders. 
It's also morbidity. 
If you look at disability, as measured by the World Health Organization with something they call the Disability Adjusted Life Years, it's kind of a metric that nobody would think of except an economist, except it's one way of trying to capture what is lost in terms of disability from medical causes, and as you can see, virtually 30 percent of all disability from all medical causes can be attributed to mental disorders, neuropsychiatric syndromes. 
You're probably thinking that doesn't make any sense. 
I mean, cancer seems far more serious. 
Heart disease seems far more serious. 
But you can see actually they are further down this list, and that's because we're talking here about disability. 
What drives the disability for these disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar and depression? 
Why are they number one here? 
Well, there are probably three reasons. 
One is that they're highly prevalent. 
About one in five people will suffer from one of these disorders in the course of their lifetime. 
A second, of course, is that, for some people, these become truly disabling, and it's about four to five percent, perhaps one in 20. 
But what really drives these numbers, this high morbidity, and to some extent the high mortality, is the fact that these start very early in life. 
Fifty percent will have onset by age 14, 75 percent by age 24, a picture that is very different than what one would see if you're talking about cancer or heart disease, diabetes, hypertension — most of the major illnesses that we think about as being sources of morbidity and mortality. 
These are, indeed, the chronic disorders of young people. 
Now, I started by telling you that there were some good-news stories. 
This is obviously not one of them. 
This is the part of it that is perhaps most difficult, and in a sense this is a kind of confession for me. 
My job is to actually make sure that we make progress on all of these disorders. 
I work for the federal government. 
Actually, I work for you. You pay my salary. 
And maybe at this point, when you know what I do, or maybe what I've failed to do, you'll think that I probably ought to be fired, and I could certainly understand that. 
But what I want to suggest, and the reason I'm here is to tell you that I think we're about to be in a very different world as we think about these illnesses. 
What I've been talking to you about so far is mental disorders, diseases of the mind. 
That's actually becoming a rather unpopular term these days, and people feel that, for whatever reason, it's politically better to use the term behavioral disorders and to talk about these as disorders of behavior. 
Fair enough. They are disorders of behavior, and they are disorders of the mind. 
But what I want to suggest to you is that both of those terms, which have been in play for a century or more, are actually now impediments to progress, that what we need conceptually to make progress here is to rethink these disorders as brain disorders. 
Now, for some of you, you're going to say, "" Oh my goodness, here we go again. 
We're going to hear about a biochemical imbalance or we're going to hear about drugs or we're going to hear about some very simplistic notion that will take our subjective experience and turn it into molecules, or maybe into some sort of very flat, unidimensional understanding of what it is to have depression or schizophrenia. 
When we talk about the brain, it is anything but unidimensional or simplistic or reductionistic. 
It depends, of course, on what scale or what scope you want to think about, but this is an organ of surreal complexity, and we are just beginning to understand how to even study it, whether you're thinking about the 100 billion neurons that are in the cortex or the 100 trillion synapses that make up all the connections. 
We have just begun to try to figure out how do we take this very complex machine that does extraordinary kinds of information processing and use our own minds to understand this very complex brain that supports our own minds. 
It's actually a kind of cruel trick of evolution that we simply don't have a brain that seems to be wired well enough to understand itself. 
In a sense, it actually makes you feel that when you're in the safe zone of studying behavior or cognition, something you can observe, that in a way feels more simplistic and reductionistic than trying to engage this very complex, mysterious organ that we're beginning to try to understand. 
Now, already in the case of the brain disorders that I've been talking to you about, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, while we don't have an in-depth understanding of how they are abnormally processed or what the brain is doing in these illnesses, we have been able to already identify some of the connectional differences, or some of the ways in which the circuitry is different for people who have these disorders. 
We call this the human connectome, and you can think about the connectome sort of as the wiring diagram of the brain. 
You'll hear more about this in a few minutes. 
The important piece here is that as you begin to look at people who have these disorders, the one in five of us who struggle in some way, you find that there's a lot of variation in the way that the brain is wired, but there are some predictable patterns, and those patterns are risk factors for developing one of these disorders. 
It's a little different than the way we think about brain disorders like Huntington's or Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease where you have a bombed-out part of your cortex. 
Here we're talking about traffic jams, or sometimes detours, or sometimes problems with just the way that things are connected and the way that the brain functions. 
You could, if you want, compare this to, on the one hand, a myocardial infarction, a heart attack, where you have dead tissue in the heart, versus an arrhythmia, where the organ simply isn't functioning because of the communication problems within it. 
Either one would kill you; in only one of them will you find a major lesion. 
As we think about this, probably it's better to actually go a little deeper into one particular disorder, and that would be schizophrenia, because I think that's a good case for helping to understand why thinking of this as a brain disorder matters. 
These are scans from Judy Rapoport and her colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health in which they studied children with very early onset schizophrenia, and you can see already in the top there's areas that are red or orange, yellow, are places where there's less gray matter, and as they followed them over five years, comparing them to age match controls, you can see that, particularly in areas like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or the superior temporal gyrus, there's a profound loss of gray matter. 
And it's important, if you try to model this, you can think about normal development as a loss of cortical mass, loss of cortical gray matter, and what's happening in schizophrenia is that you overshoot that mark, and at some point, when you overshoot, you cross a threshold, and it's that threshold where we say, this is a person who has this disease, because they have the behavioral symptoms of hallucinations and delusions. 
That's something we can observe. 
But look at this closely and you can see that actually they've crossed a different threshold. 
They've crossed a brain threshold much earlier, that perhaps not at age 22 or 20, but even by age 15 or 16 you can begin to see the trajectory for development is quite different at the level of the brain, not at the level of behavior. 
Why does this matter? Well first because, for brain disorders, behavior is the last thing to change. 
We know that for Alzheimer's, for Parkinson's, for Huntington's. 
There are changes in the brain a decade or more before you see the first signs of a behavioral change. 
The tools that we have now allow us to detect these brain changes much earlier, long before the symptoms emerge. 
But most important, go back to where we started. 
The good-news stories in medicine are early detection, early intervention. 
If we waited until the heart attack, we would be sacrificing 1.1 million lives every year in this country to heart disease. 
That is precisely what we do today when we decide that everybody with one of these brain disorders, brain circuit disorders, has a behavioral disorder. 
We wait until the behavior becomes manifest. 
That's not early detection. That's not early intervention. 
Now to be clear, we're not quite ready to do this. 
We don't have all the facts. We don't actually even know what the tools will be, nor what to precisely look for in every case to be able to get there before the behavior emerges as different. 
But this tells us how we need to think about it, and where we need to go. 
Are we going to be there soon? 
I think that this is something that will happen over the course of the next few years, but I'd like to finish with a quote about trying to predict how this will happen by somebody who's thought a lot about changes in concepts and changes in technology. 
"" We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10. "" — Bill Gates. 
Thanks very much. 
(Applause) 

You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt. 
But when I met her, she was 50, and I said to her, "Do you often think about the man who raped you?" 
And I said, "" Pity? "" And she said, "" Yes, because he has a beautiful daughter and two beautiful grandchildren, and he doesn't know that, and I do. 
It involves substituting "" and "" for "" but "" — not "" I am here but I have cancer, "" but rather, "" I have cancer and I am here. "" When we're ashamed, we can't tell our stories, and stories are the foundation of identity. 
All of us with stigmatized identities face this question daily: How much to accommodate society by constraining ourselves, and how much to break the limits of what constitutes a valid life? 
Dr. Ma Thida, a leading human rights activist who had nearly died in prison and had spent many years in solitary confinement, told me she was grateful to her jailers for the time she had had to think, for the wisdom she had gained, for the chance to hone her meditation skills. 

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

The National Portrait Gallery is the place dedicated to presenting great American lives, amazing people. 
And that's what it's about. 
We use portraiture as a way to deliver those lives, but that's it. 
And so I'm not going to talk about the painted portrait today. 
I'm going to talk about a program I started there, which, from my point of view, is the proudest thing I did. 
I started to worry about the fact that a lot of people don't get their portraits painted anymore, and they're amazing people, and we want to deliver them to future generations. 
So, how do we do that? 
And so I came up with the idea of the living self-portrait series. 
And the living self-portrait series was the idea of basically my being a brush in the hand of amazing people who would come and I would interview. 
And so what I'm going to do is, not so much give you the great hits of that program, as to give you this whole notion of how you encounter people in that kind of situation, what you try to find out about them, and when people deliver and when they don't and why. 
Now, I had two preconditions. 
One was that they be American. 
That's just because, in the nature of the National Portrait Gallery, it's created to look at American lives. 
That was easy, but then I made the decision, maybe arbitrary, that they needed to be people of a certain age, which at that point, when I created this program, seemed really old. 
Sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. 
For obvious reasons, it doesn't seem that old anymore to me. 
And why did I do that? 
Well, for one thing, we're a youth-obsessed culture. 
And I thought really what we need is an elders program to just sit at the feet of amazing people and hear them talk. 
But the second part of it — and the older I get, the more convinced I am that that's true. 
It's amazing what people will say when they know how the story turned out. 
That's the one advantage that older people have. 
Well, they have other, little bit of advantage, but they also have some disadvantages, but the one thing they or we have is that we've reached the point in life where we know how the story turned out. 
So, we can then go back in our lives, if we've got an interviewer who gets that, and begin to reflect on how we got there. 
All of those accidents that wound up creating the life narrative that we inherited. 
So, I thought okay, now, what is it going to take to make this work? 
There are many kinds of interviews. We know them. 
There are the journalist interviews, which are the interrogation that is expected. 
This is somewhat against resistance and caginess on the part of the interviewee. 
Then there's the celebrity interview, where it's more important who's asking the question than who answers. 
That's Barbara Walters and others like that, and we like that. 
That's Frost-Nixon, where Frost seems to be as important as Nixon in that process. 
Fair enough. 
But I wanted interviews that were different. 
I wanted to be, as I later thought of it, empathic, which is to say, to feel what they wanted to say and to be an agent of their self-revelation. 
By the way, this was always done in public. 
This was not an oral history program. 
This was all about 300 people sitting at the feet of this individual, and having me be the brush in their self-portrait. 
Now, it turns out that I was pretty good at that. 
I didn't know it coming into it. 
And the only reason I really know that is because of one interview I did with Senator William Fulbright, and that was six months after he'd had a stroke. 
And he had never appeared in public since that point. 
This was not a devastating stroke, but it did affect his speaking and so forth. 
And I thought it was worth a chance, he thought it was worth a chance, and so we got up on the stage, and we had an hour conversation about his life, and after that a woman rushed up to me, essentially did, and she said, "" Where did you train as a doctor? "" And I said, "" I have no training as a doctor. I never claimed that. "" And she said, "" Well, something very weird was happening. 
When he started a sentence, particularly in the early parts of the interview, and paused, you gave him the word, the bridge to get to the end of the sentence, and by the end of it, he was speaking complete sentences on his own. "" I didn't know what was going on, but I was so part of the process of getting that out. 
So I thought, okay, fine, I've got empathy, or empathy, at any rate, is what's critical to this kind of interview. 
But then I began to think of other things. 
Who makes a great interview in this context? 
It had nothing to do with their intellect, the quality of their intellect. 
Some of them were very brilliant, some of them were, you know, ordinary people who would never claim to be intellectuals, but it was never about that. 
It was about their energy. 
It's energy that creates extraordinary interviews and extraordinary lives. 
I'm convinced of it. 
And it had nothing to do with the energy of being young. 
These were people through their 90s. 
In fact, the first person I interviewed was George Abbott, who was 97, and Abbott was filled with the life force — I guess that's the way I think about it — filled with it. 
And so he filled the room, and we had an extraordinary conversation. 
He was supposed to be the toughest interview that anybody would ever do because he was famous for being silent, for never ever saying anything except maybe a word or two. 
And, in fact, he did wind up opening up — by the way, his energy is evidenced in other ways. 
He subsequently got married again at 102, so he, you know, he had a lot of the life force in him. 
But after the interview, I got a call, very gruff voice, from a woman. 
I didn't know who she was, and she said, "" Did you get George Abbott to talk? "" And I said, "" Yeah. Apparently I did. "" And she said, "" I'm his old girlfriend, Maureen Stapleton, and I could never do it. "" And then she made me go up with the tape of it and prove that George Abbott actually could talk. 
So, you know, you want energy, you want the life force, but you really want them also to think that they have a story worth sharing. 
The worst interviews that you can ever have are with people who are modest. 
Never ever get up on a stage with somebody who's modest, because all of these people have been assembled to listen to them, and they sit there and they say, "Aw, shucks, it was an accident." 
There's nothing that ever happens that justifies people taking good hours of the day to be with them. 
The worst interview I ever did: William L. Shirer. 
The journalist who did "" The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. "" This guy had met Hitler and Gandhi within six months, and every time I'd ask him about it, he'd say, "" Oh, I just happened to be there. 
Didn't matter. "" Whatever. 
Awful. 
I never would ever agree to interview a modest person. 
They have to think that they did something and that they want to share it with you. 
But it comes down, in the end, to how do you get through all the barriers we have. 
All of us are public and private beings, and if all you're going to get from the interviewee is their public self, there's no point in it. 
It's pre-programmed. It's infomercial, and we all have infomercials about our lives. 
We know the great lines, we know the great moments, we know what we're not going to share, and the point of this was not to embarrass anybody. 
This wasn't — and some of you will remember Mike Wallace's old interviews — tough, aggressive and so forth. They have their place. 
I was trying to get them to say what they probably wanted to say, to break out of their own cocoon of the public self, and the more public they had been, the more entrenched that person, that outer person was. 
And let me tell you at once the worse moment and the best moment that happened in this interview series. 
It all has to do with that shell that most of us have, and particularly certain people. 
There's an extraordinary woman named Clare Boothe Luce. 
It'll be your generational determinant as to whether her name means much to you. 
She did so much. She was a playwright. 
She did an extraordinary play called "" The Women. "" She was a congresswoman when there weren't very many congresswomen. 
She was editor of Vanity Fair, one of the great phenomenal women of her day. 
And, incidentally, I call her the Eleanor Roosevelt of the Right. 
She was sort of adored on the Right the way Eleanor Roosevelt was on the Left. 
And, in fact, when we did the interview — I did the living self-portrait with her — there were three former directors of the CIA basically sitting at her feet, just enjoying her presence. 
And I thought, this is going to be a piece of cake, because I always have preliminary talks with these people for just maybe 10 or 15 minutes. 
We never talk before that because if you talk before, you don't get it on the stage. 
So she and I had a delightful conversation. 
We were on the stage and then — by the way, spectacular. 
It was all part of Clare Boothe Luce's look. 
She was in a great evening gown. 
She was 80, almost that day of the interview, and there she was and there I was, and I just proceeded into the questions. 
And she stonewalled me. It was unbelievable. 
Anything that I would ask, she would turn around, dismiss, and I was basically up there — any of you in the moderate-to-full entertainment world know what it is to die onstage. 
And I was dying. She was absolutely not giving me a thing. 
And I began to wonder what was going on, and you think while you talk, and basically, I thought, I got it. 
When we were alone, I was her audience. 
Now I'm her competitor for the audience. 
That's the problem here, and she's fighting me for that, and so then I asked her a question — I didn't know how I was going to get out of it — I asked her a question about her days as a playwright, and again, characteristically, instead of saying, "" Oh yes, I was a playwright, and this is what blah blah blah, "" she said, "" Oh, playwright. Everybody knows I was a playwright. 
Most people think that I was an actress. I was never an actress. "" But I hadn't asked that, and then she went off on a tear, and she said, "" Oh, well, there was that one time that I was an actress. 
It was for a charity in Connecticut when I was a congresswoman, and I got up there, "" and she went on and on, "" And then I got on the stage. "" And then she turned to me and said, "" And you know what those young actors did? 
They upstaged me. "" And she said, "" Do you know what that is? "" Just withering in her contempt. 
And I said, "" I'm learning. "" (Laughter) And she looked at me, and it was like the successful arm-wrestle, and then, after that, she delivered an extraordinary account of what her life really was like. 
I have to end that one. This is my tribute to Clare Boothe Luce. 
Again, a remarkable person. 
I'm not politically attracted to her, but through her life force, I'm attracted to her. 
And the way she died — she had, toward the end, a brain tumor. 
That's probably as terrible a way to die as you can imagine, and very few of us were invited to a dinner party. 
And she was in horrible pain. 
We all knew that. 
She stayed in her room. 
Everybody came. The butler passed around canapes. 
The usual sort of thing. 
Then at a certain moment, the door opened and she walked out perfectly dressed, completely composed. 
The public self, the beauty, the intellect, and she walked around and talked to every person there and then went back into the room and was never seen again. 
She wanted the control of her final moment, and she did it amazingly. 
Now, there are other ways that you get somebody to open up, and this is just a brief reference. 
It wasn't this arm-wrestle, but it was a little surprising for the person involved. 
I interviewed Steve Martin. It wasn't all that long ago. 
And we were sitting there, and almost toward the beginning of the interview, I turned to him and I said, "" Steve, "" or "" Mr. Martin, it is said that all comedians have unhappy childhoods. 
Was yours unhappy? "" And he looked at me, you know, as if to say, "This is how you're going to start this thing, right off?" 
And then he turned to me, not stupidly, and he said, "" What was your childhood like? "" And I said — these are all arm wrestles, but they're affectionate — and I said, "" My father was loving and supportive, which is why I'm not funny. "" (Laughter) And he looked at me, and then we heard the big sad story. 
His father was an SOB, and, in fact, he was another comedian with an unhappy childhood, but then we were off and running. 
So the question is: What is the key that's going to allow this to proceed? 
Now, these are arm wrestle questions, but I want to tell you about questions that are more related to empathy and that really, very often, are the questions that people have been waiting their whole lives to be asked. 
And I'll just give you two examples of this because of the time constraints. 
One was an interview I did with one of the great American biographers. 
Again, some of you will know him, most of you won't, Dumas Malone. 
He did a five-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, spent virtually his whole life with Thomas Jefferson, and by the way, at one point I asked him, "Would you like to have met him?" 
And he said, "" Well, of course, but actually, I know him better than anyone who ever met him, because I got to read all of his letters. "" So, he was very satisfied with the kind of relationship they had over 50 years. 
And I asked him one question. 
I said, "" Did Jefferson ever disappoint you? "" And here is this man who had given his whole life to uncovering Jefferson and connecting with him, and he said, "" Well... "" — I'm going to do a bad southern accent. 
Dumas Malone was from Mississippi originally. 
But he said, "" Well, "" he said, "" I'm afraid so. "" He said, "" You know, I've read everything, and sometimes Mr. Jefferson would smooth the truth a bit. "" And he basically was saying that this was a man who lied more than he wished he had, because he saw the letters. 
He said, "" But I understand that. "" He said, "" I understand that. "" He said, "" We southerners do like a smooth surface, so that there were times when he just didn't want the confrontation. "" And he said, "" Now, John Adams was too honest. "" And he started to talk about that, and later on he invited me to his house, and I met his wife who was from Massachusetts, and he and she had exactly the relationship of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. 
She was the New Englander and abrasive, and he was this courtly fellow. 
But really the most important question I ever asked, and most of the times when I talk about it, people kind of suck in their breath at my audacity, or cruelty, but I promise you it was the right question. 
This was to Agnes de Mille. 
Agnes de Mille is one of the great choreographers in our history. 
She basically created the dances in "" Oklahoma, "" transforming the American theater. 
An amazing woman. 
At the time that I proposed to her that — by the way, I would have proposed to her; she was extraordinary — but proposed to her that she come on. 
She said, "" Come to my apartment. "" She lived in New York. 
"" Come to my apartment and we'll talk for those 15 minutes, and then we'll decide whether we proceed. "" And so I showed up in this dark, rambling New York apartment, and she called out to me, and she was in bed. 
I had known that she had had a stroke, and that was some 10 years before. 
And so she spent almost all of her life in bed, but — I speak of the life force — her hair was askew. 
She wasn't about to make up for this occasion. 
And she was sitting there surrounded by books, and her most interesting possession she felt at that moment was her will, which she had by her side. 
She wasn't unhappy about this. She was resigned. 
She said, "" I keep this will by my bed, memento mori, and I change it all the time just because I want to. "" And she was loving the prospect of death as much as she had loved life. 
I thought, this is somebody I've got to get in this series. 
She agreed. 
She came on. Of course she was wheelchaired on. 
Half of her body was stricken, the other half not. 
She was, of course, done up for the occasion, but this was a woman in great physical distress. 
And we had a conversation, and then I asked her this unthinkable question. 
I said, "" Was it a problem for you in your life that you were not beautiful? "" And the audience just — you know, they're always on the side of the interviewee, and they felt that this was a kind of assault, but this was the question she had wanted somebody to ask her whole life. 
And she began to talk about her childhood, when she was beautiful, and she literally turned — here she was, in this broken body — and she turned to the audience and described herself as the fair demoiselle with her red hair and her light steps and so forth, and then she said, "" And then puberty hit. "" And she began to talk about things that had happened to her body and her face, and how she could no longer count on her beauty, and her family then treated her like the ugly sister of the beautiful one for whom all the ballet lessons were given. 
And she had to go along just to be with her sister for company, and in that process, she made a number of decisions. 
First of all, was that dance, even though it hadn't been offered to her, was her life. 
And secondly, she had better be, although she did dance for a while, a choreographer because then her looks didn't matter. 
But she was thrilled to get that out as a real, real fact in her life. 
It was an amazing privilege to do this series. 
There were other moments like that, very few moments of silence. 
The key point was empathy because everybody in their lives is really waiting for people to ask them questions, so that they can be truthful about who they are and how they became what they are, and I commend that to you, even if you're not doing interviews. 
Just be that way with your friends and particularly the older members of your family. 
Thank you very much. 

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

Can any of you remember what you wanted to be when you were 17? 
Do you know what I wanted to be? 
I wanted to be a biker chick. 
(Laughter) I wanted to race cars, and I wanted to be a cowgirl, and I wanted to be Mowgli from "" The Jungle Book. "" Because they were all about being free, the wind in your hair — just to be free. 
And on my seventeenth birthday, my parents, knowing how much I loved speed, gave me one driving lesson for my seventeenth birthday. 
Not that we could have afforded I drive, but to give me the dream of driving. 
And on my seventeenth birthday, I accompanied my little sister in complete innocence, as I always had all my life — my visually impaired sister — to go to see an eye specialist. 
Because big sisters are always supposed to support their little sisters. 
And my little sister wanted to be a pilot — God help her. 
So I used to get my eyes tested just for fun. 
And on my seventeenth birthday, after my fake eye exam, the eye specialist just noticed it happened to be my birthday. 
And he said, "" So what are you going to do to celebrate? "" And I took that driving lesson, and I said, "" I'm going to learn how to drive. "" And then there was a silence — one of those awful silences when you know something's wrong. 
And he turned to my mother, and he said, "" You haven't told her yet? "" On my seventeenth birthday, as Janis Ian would best say, I learned the truth at 17. 
I am, and have been since birth, legally blind. 
And you know, how on earth did I get to 17 and not know that? 
Well, if anybody says country music isn't powerful, let me tell you this: I got there because my father's passion for Johnny Cash and a song, "" A Boy Named Sue. "" I'm the eldest of three. I was born in 1971. 
And very shortly after my birth, my parents found out I had a condition called ocular albinism. 
And what the hell does that mean to you? 
So let me just tell you, the great part of all of this? 
I can't see this clock and I can't see the timing, so holy God, woohoo! (Laughter) I might buy some more time. 
But more importantly, let me tell you — I'm going to come up really close here. Don't freak out, Pat. 
Hey. 
See this hand? 
Beyond this hand is a world of Vaseline. 
Every man in this room, even you, Steve, is George Clooney. 
(Laughter) And every woman, you are so beautiful. 
And when I want to look beautiful, I step three feet away from the mirror, and I don't have to see these lines etched in my face from all the squinting I've done all my life from all the dark lights. 
The really strange part is that, at three and a half, just before I was going to school, my parents made a bizarre, unusual and incredibly brave decision. 
No special needs schools. 
No labels. 
No limitations. 
My ability and my potential. 
And they decided to tell me that I could see. 
So just like Johnny Cash's Sue, a boy given a girl's name, I would grow up and learn from experience how to be tough and how to survive, when they were no longer there to protect me, or just take it all away. 
But more significantly, they gave me the ability to believe, totally, to believe that I could. 
And so when I heard that eye specialist tell me all the things, a big fat "" no, "" everybody imagines I was devastated. 
And don't get me wrong, because when I first heard it — aside from the fact that I thought he was insane — I got that thump in my chest, just that "" huh? "" But very quickly I recovered. It was like that. 
The first thing I thought about was my mom, who was crying over beside me. 
And I swear to God, I walked out of his office, "" I will drive. I will drive. 
You're mad. I'll drive. I know I can drive. "" And with the same dogged determination that my father had bred into me since I was such a child — he taught me how to sail, knowing I could never see where I was going, I could never see the shore, and I couldn't see the sails, and I couldn't see the destination. 
But he told me to believe and feel the wind in my face. 
And that wind in my face made me believe that he was mad and I would drive. 
And for the next 11 years, I swore nobody would ever find out that I couldn't see, because I didn't want to be a failure, and I didn't want to be weak. 
And I believed I could do it. 
So I rammed through life as only a Casey can do. 
And I was an archeologist, and then I broke things. 
And then I managed a restaurant, and then I slipped on things. 
And then I was a masseuse. And then I was a landscape gardener. 
And then I went to business school. 
And you know, disabled people are hugely educated. 
And then I went in and I got a global consulting job with Accenture. 
And they didn't even know. 
And it's extraordinary how far belief can take you. 
In 1999, two and a half years into that job, something happened. 
Wonderfully, my eyes decided, enough. 
And temporarily, very unexpectedly, they dropped. 
And I'm in one of the most competitive environments in the world, where you work hard, play hard, you gotta be the best, you gotta be the best. 
And two years in, I really could see very little. 
And I found myself in front of an HR manager in 1999, saying something I never imagined that I would say. 
I was 28 years old. 
I had built a persona all around what I could and couldn't do. 
And I simply said, "" I'm sorry. 
I can't see, and I need help. "" Asking for help can be incredibly difficult. 
And you all know what it is. You don't need to have a disability to know that. 
We all know how hard it is to admit weakness and failure. 
And it's frightening, isn't it? 
But all that belief had fueled me so long. 
And can I tell you, operating in the sighted world when you can't see, it's kind of difficult — it really is. 
Can I tell you, airports are a disaster. 
Oh, for the love of God. 
And please, any designers out there? 
OK, designers, please put up your hands, even though I can't even see you. 
I always end up in the gents' toilets. 
And there's nothing wrong with my sense of smell. 
But can I just tell you, the little sign for a gents' toilet or a ladies' toilet is determined by a triangle. 
Have you ever tried to see that if you have Vaseline in front of your eyes? 
It's such a small thing, right? 
And you know how exhausting it can be to try to be perfect when you're not, or to be somebody that you aren't? 
And so after admitting I couldn't see to HR, they sent me off to an eye specialist. 
And I had no idea that this man was going to change my life. 
But before I got to him, I was so lost. 
I had no idea who I was anymore. 
And that eye specialist, he didn't bother testing my eyes. 
God no, it was therapy. 
And he asked me several questions, of which many were, "" Why? 
Why are you fighting so hard not to be yourself? 
And do you love what you do, Caroline? "" And you know, when you go to a global consulting firm, they put a chip in your head, and you're like, "" I love Accenture. I love Accenture. I love my job. I love Accenture. 
I love Accenture. I love Accenture. I love my job. I love Accenture. "" (Laughter) To leave would be failure. 
And he said, "" Do you love it? "" I couldn't even speak I was so choked up. 
I just was so — how do I tell him? 
And then he said to me, "" What did you want to be when you were little? "" Now listen, I wasn't going to say to him, "" Well, I wanted to race cars and motorbikes. "" Hardly appropriate at this moment in time. 
He thought I was mad enough anyway. 
And as I left his office, he called me back and he said, "" I think it's time. I think it's time 
to stop fighting and do something different. "" And that door closed. 
And that silence just outside a doctor's office, that many of us know. 
And my chest ached. 
And I had no idea where I was going. I had no idea. 
But I did know the game was up. 
And I went home, and, because the pain in my chest ached so much, I thought, "" I'll go out for a run. "" Really not a very sensible thing to do. 
And I went on a run that I know so well. 
I know this run so well, by the back of my hand. 
I always run it perfectly fine. 
I count the steps and the lampposts and all those things that visually impaired people have a tendency to have a lot of meetings with. 
And there was a rock that I always missed. 
And I'd never fallen on it, never. 
And there I was crying away, and smash, bash on my rock. 
Broken, fallen over on this rock in the middle of March in 2000, typical Irish weather on a Wednesday — gray, snot, tears everywhere, ridiculously self-pitying. 
And I was floored, and I was broken, and I was angry. 
And I didn't know what to do. 
And I sat there for quite some time going, "" How am I going to get off this rock and go home? 
Because who am I going to be? 
What am I going to be? "" And I thought about my dad, and I thought, "" Good God, I'm so not Sue now. "" And I kept thinking over and over in my mind, what had happened? Where did it go wrong? Why didn't I understand? 
And you know, the extraordinary part of it is I just simply had no answers. 
I had lost my belief. 
Look where my belief had brought me to. 
And now I had lost it. And now I really couldn't see. 
I was crumpled. 
And then I remember thinking about that eye specialist asking me, "" What do you want to be? What do you want to be? 
What did you want to be when you were little? Do you love what you do? 
Do something different. What do you want to be? 
Do something different. What do you want to be? "" And really slowly, slowly, slowly, it happened. 
And it did happen this way. 
And then the minute it came, it blew up in my head and bashed in my heart — something different. 
"" Well, how about Mowgli from 'The Jungle Book'? 
You don't get more different than that. "" And the moment, and I mean the moment, the moment that hit me, I swear to God, it was like woo hoo! You know — something to believe in. 
And nobody can tell me no. 
Yes, you can say I can't be an archeologist. 
But you can't tell me, no, I can't be Mowgli, because guess what? 
Nobody's ever done it before, so I'm going to go do it. 
And it doesn't matter whether I'm a boy or a girl, I'm just going to scoot. 
And so I got off that rock, and, oh my God, did I run home. 
And I sprinted home, and I didn't fall, and I didn't crash. 
And I ran up the stairs, and there was one of my favorite books of all time, "" Travels on My Elephant "" by Mark Shand — I don't know if any of you know it. 
And I grabbed this book off, and I'm sitting on the couch going, "" I know what I'm going to do. 
I know how to be Mowgli. 
I'm going to go across India on the back of an elephant. 
I'm going to be an elephant handler. "" And I had no idea how I was going to be an elephant handler. 
From global management consultant to elephant handler. 
I had no idea how. I had no idea how you hire an elephant, get an elephant. 
I didn't speak Hindi. I'd never been to India. Hadn't a clue. 
But I knew I would. 
Because, when you make a decision at the right time and the right place, God, that universe makes it happen for you. 
Nine months later, after that day on snot rock, I had the only blind date in my life with a seven and a half foot elephant called Kanchi. 
And together we would trek a thousand kilometers across India. 
(Applause) The most powerful thing of all, it's not that I didn't achieve before then. Oh my God, I did. 
But you know, I was believing in the wrong thing. 
Because I wasn't believing in me, really me, all the bits of me — all the bits of all of us. 
Do you know how much of us all pretend to be somebody we're not? 
And you know what, when you really believe in yourself and everything about you, it's extraordinary what happens. 
And you know what, that trip, that thousand kilometers, it raised enough money for 6,000 cataract eye operations. 
Six thousand people got to see because of that. 
When I came home off that elephant, do you know what the most amazing part was? 
I chucked in my job at Accenture. 
I left, and I became a social entrepreneur, and I set up an organization with Mark Shand called Elephant Family, which deals with Asian elephant conservation. 
And I set up Kanchi, because my organization was always going to be named after my elephant, because disability is like the elephant in the room. 
And I wanted to make you see it in a positive way — no charity, no pity. 
But I wanted to work only and truly with business and media leadership to totally reframe disability in a way that was exciting and possible. 
It was extraordinary. 
That's what I wanted to do. 
And I never thought about noes anymore, or not seeing, or any of that kind of nothing. 
It just seemed that it was possible. 
And you know, the oddest part is, when I was on my way traveling here to TED, I'll be honest, I was petrified. 
And I speak, but this is an amazing audience, and what am I doing here? 
But as I was traveling here, you'll be very happy to know, I did use my white symbol stick cane, because it's really good to skip queues in the airport. 
And I got my way here being happily proud that I couldn't see. 
And the one thing is that a really good friend of mine, he texted me on the way over, knowing I was scared. 
Even though I present confident, I was scared. 
He said, "" Be you. "" And so here I am. 
This is me, all of me. 
(Applause) And I have learned, you know what, cars and motorbikes and elephants, that's not freedom. 
Being absolutely true to yourself is freedom. 
And I never needed eyes to see — never. 
I simply needed vision and belief. 
And if you truly believe — and I mean believe from the bottom of your heart — you can make change happen. 
And we need to make it happen, because every single one of us — woman, man, gay, straight, disabled, perfect, normal, whatever — everyone of us must be the very best of ourselves. 
I no longer want anybody to be invisible. 
We all have to be included. 
And stop with the labels, the limiting. 
Losing of labels, because we are not jam jars. 
We are extraordinary, different, wonderful people. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Once upon a time, at the age of 24, I was a student at St. John's Medical College in Bangalore. 
I was a guest student during one month of a public health course. 
And that changed my mindset forever. 
The course was good, but it was not the course content in itself that changed the mindset. 
It was the brutal realization, the first morning, that the Indian students were better than me. 
(Laughter) You see, I was a study nerd. 
I loved statistics from a young age. 
And I studied very much in Sweden. 
I used to be in the upper quarter of all courses I attended. 
But in St. John's, I was in the lower quarter. 
And the fact was that Indian students studied harder than we did in Sweden. 
They read the textbook twice, or three times or four times. 
In Sweden we read it once and then we went partying. 
(Laugher) And that, to me, that personal experience was the first time in my life that the mindset I grew up with was changed. 
And I realized that perhaps the Western world will not continue to dominate the world forever. 
And I think many of you have the same sort of personal experience. 
It's that realization of someone you meet that really made you change your ideas about the world. 
It's not the statistics, although I tried to make it funny. 
And I will now, here, onstage, try to predict when that will happen — that Asia will regain its dominant position as the leading part of the world, as it used to be, over thousands of years. 
And I will do that by trying to predict precisely at what year the average income per person in India, in China, will reach that of the West. 
And I don't mean the whole economy, because to grow an economy of India to the size of U.K. — that's a piece of cake, with one billion people. 
But I want to see when will the average pay, the money for each person, per month, in India and China, when will that have reached that of U.K. and the United States? 
But I will start with a historical background. 
And you can see my map if I get it up here. You know? 
I will start at 1858. 
1858 was a year of great technological advancement in the West. 
That was the year when Queen Victoria was able, for the first time, to communicate with President Buchanan, through the Transatlantic Telegraphic Cable. 
And they were the first to "" Twitter "" transatlantically. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And I've been able, through this wonderful Google and Internet, to find the text of the telegram sent back from President Buchanan to Queen Victoria. 
And it ends like this: "" This telegraph is a fantastic instrument to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty and law throughout the world. "" Those are nice words. But I got sort of curious of what he meant with liberty, and liberty for whom. 
And we will think about that when we look at the wider picture of the world in 1858. 
Because 1858 was also watershed year in the history of Asia. 
1858 was the year when the courageous uprising against the foreign occupation of India was defeated by the British forces. 
And India was up to 89 years more of foreign domination. 
1858 in China was the victory in the Opium War by the British forces. 
And that meant that foreigners, as it said in the treaty, were allowed to trade freely in China. 
It meant paying with opium for Chinese goods. 
And 1858 in Japan was the year when Japan had to sign the Harris Treaty and accept trade on favorable condition for the U.S. 
And they were threatened by those black ships there, that had been in Tokyo harbor over the last year. 
But, Japan, in contrast to India and China, maintained its national sovereignty. 
And let's see how much difference that can make. 
And I will do that by bringing these bubbles back to a Gapminder graph here, where you can see each bubble is a country. 
The size of the bubble here is the population. 
On this axis, as I used to have income per person in comparable dollar. 
And on that axis I have life expectancy, the health of people. 
And I also bring an innovation here. 
I have transformed the laser beam into an ecological, recyclable version here, in green India. 
(Applause) And we will see, you know. 
Look here, 1858, India was here, China was here, Japan was there, United States and United Kingdom was richer over there. 
And I will start the world like this. 
India was not always like this level. 
Actually if we go back into the historical record, there was a time hundreds of years ago when the income per person in India and China was even above that of Europe. 
But 1850 had already been many, many years of foreign domination, and India had been de-industrialized. 
And you can see that the countries who were growing their economy was United States and United Kingdom. 
And they were also, by the end of the century, getting healthy, and Japan was starting to catch up. 
India was trying down here. 
Can you see how it starts to move there? 
But really, really natural sovereignty was good for Japan. 
And Japan is trying to move up there. 
And it's the new century now. Health is getting better, United Kingdom, United States. 
But careful now — we are approaching the First World War. 
And the First World War, you know, we'll see a lot of deaths and economical problems here. 
United Kingdom is going down. 
And now comes the Spanish flu also. 
And then after the First World War, they continue up. 
Still under foreign domination, and without sovereignty, India and China are down in the corner. 
Not much has happened. 
They have grown their population but not much more. 
In the 1930's now, you can see that Japan is going to a period of war, with lower life expectancy. 
And the Second World War was really a terrible event, also economically for Japan. 
But they did recover quite fast afterwards. 
And we are moving into the new world. 
In 1947 India finally gained its independence. 
And they could raise the Indian flag and become a sovereign nation, but in very big difficulties down there. 
(Applause) In 1949 we saw the emergence of the modern China in a way which surprised the world. 
And what happened? 
What happens in the after independence? 
You can see that the health started to improve. 
Children started to go to school. 
Health services were provided. 
This is the Great Leap Forward, when China fell down. 
It was central planning by Mao Tse Tung. 
China recovered. Then they said, "Nevermore, stupid central planning." 
But they went up here, and India was trying to follow. 
And they were catching up indeed. 
And both countries had the better health, but still a very low economy. 
And we came to 1978, and Mao Tse Tung died, and a new guy turned up from the left. 
And it was Deng Xiaoping coming out here. 
And he said, "" Doesn't matter if a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice. "" Because catching mice is what the two cats wanted to do. 
And you can see the two cats being here, China and India, wanting to catch the mices over there, you know. 
And they decided to go not only for health and education, but also starting to grow their economy. 
And the market reformer was successful there. 
In '92 India follows with a market reform. 
And they go quite closely together, and you can see that the similarity with India and China, in many ways, are greater than the differences with them. 
And here they march on. And will they catch up? 
This is the big question today. 
There they are today. 
Now what does it mean that the — (Applause) the averages there — this is the average of China. 
If I would split China, look here, Shanghai has already catched up. 
Shanghai is already there. 
And it's healthier than the United States. 
But on the other hand, Guizhou, one of the poorest inland provinces of China, is there. 
And if I split Guizhou into urban and rural, the rural part of Guizhou goes down there. 
You see this enormous inequity in China, in the midst of fast economic growth. 
And if I would also look at India, you have another type of inequity, actually, in India. 
The geographical, macro-geographical difference is not so big. 
Uttar Pradesh, the biggest of the states here, is poorer and has a lower health than the rest of India. 
Kerala is flying on top there, matching United States in health, but not in economy. 
And here, Maharashtra, with Mumbai, is forging forward. 
Now in India, the big inequities are within the state, rather than between the states. 
And that is not a bad thing, in itself. 
If you have a lot inequity, macro-geographical inequities can be more difficult in the long term to deal with, than if it is in the same area where you have a growth center relatively close to where poor people are living. 
No, there is one more inequity. Look there, United States. 
(Laughter) Oh, they broke my frame. 
Washington, D.C. went out here. 
My friends at Gapminder wanted me to show this because there is a new leader in Washington who is really concerned about the health system. 
And I can understand him, because Washington, D.C. 
is so rich over there but they are not as healthy as Kerala. 
It's quite interesting, isn't it? 
(Applause) I can see a business opportunity for Kerala, helping fix the health system in the United States. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Now here we have the whole world. You have the legend down there. 
And when you see the two giant cats here, pushing forward, you see that in between them and ahead of them, is the whole emerging economies of the world, which Thomas Friedman so correctly called the "" flat world. "" You can see that in health and education, a large part of the world population is putting forward, but in Africa, and other parts, as in rural Guizhou in China, there is still people with low health and very low economy. 
We have an enormous disparity in the world. 
But most of the world in the middle are pushing forwards very fast. 
Now, back to my projections. 
When will it catch up? I have to go back to very conventional graph. 
I will show income per person on this axis instead, poor down here, rich up there. 
And then time here, from 1858 I start the world. 
And we shall see what will happen with these countries. 
You see, China under foreign domination actually lowered their income and came down to the Indian level here. 
Whereas U.K. and United States is getting richer and richer. 
And after Second World War, United States is richer than U.K. 
But independence is coming here. 
Growth is starting, economic reform. 
Growth is faster, and with projection from IMF you can see where you expect them to be in 2014. 
Now, the question is, "" When will the catch up take place? "" Look at, look at the United States. 
Can you see the bubble? 
The bubbles, not my bubbles, but the financial bubbles. 
That's the dot com bubble. This is the Lehman Brothers doorstep there. 
You see it came down there. 
And it seems this is another rock coming down there, you know. 
So they doesn't seem to go this way, these countries. 
They seem to go in a more humble growth way, you know. 
And people interested in growth are turning their eyes towards Asia. 
I can compare to Japan. This is Japan coming up. 
You see, Japan did it like that. 
We add Japan to it. 
And there is no doubt that fast catch up can take place. 
Can you see here what Japan did? 
Japan did it like this, until full catch up, and then they follow with the other high-income economies. 
But the real projections for those ones, I would like to give it like this. 
Can be worse, can be better. 
It's always difficult to predict, especially about the future. 
Now, a historian tells me it's even more difficult to predict about the past. 
(Laughter) I think I'm in a difficult position here. 
Inequalities in China and India I consider really the big obstacle because to bring the entire population into growth and prosperity is what will create a domestic market, what will avoid social instability, and which will make use of the entire capacity of the population. 
So, social investments in health, education and infrastructure, and electricity is really what is needed in India and China. 
You know the climate. We have great international experts within India telling us that the climate is changing, and actions has to be taken, otherwise China and India would be the countries most to suffer from climate change. 
And I consider India and China the best partners in the world in a good global climate policy. 
But they ain't going to pay for what others, who have more money, have largely created, and I can agree on that. 
But what I'm really worried about is war. 
Will the former rich countries really accept a completely changed world economy, and a shift of power away from where it has been the last 50 to 100 to 150 years, back to Asia? 
And will Asia be able to handle that new position of being in charge of being the most mighty, and the governors of the world? 
So, always avoid war, because that always pushes human beings backward. 
Now if these inequalities, climate and war can be avoided, get ready for a world in equity, because this is what seems to be happening. 
And that vision that I got as a young student, 1972, that Indians can be much better than Swedes, is just about to happen. 
And it will happen precisely the year 2048 in the later part of the summer, in July, more precisely, the 27th of July. 
(Applause) The 27th of July, 2048 is my 100th birthday. 
(Laughter) And I expect to speak in the first session of the 39th TED India. 
Get your bookings in time. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Illegal wildlife trade in Brazil is one of the major threats against our fauna, especially birds, and mainly to supply the pet market with thousands of animals taken from nature every month, and transported far from their origins, to be sold mainly in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. 
It is estimated that all kinds of illegal wildlife trade in Brazil withdraw from nature almost 38 million animals every year, a business worth almost two billion dollars. 
The police intercepts these huge cargos with live animals, intended to supply the pet market, or they seize the animals directly from the people's houses, and this is how we end up, every month, with thousands of seized animals. 
And for us to understand what happens with them, we're going to follow Brad. 
In the eyes of many people, after the animals are seized, they say, "" Yay, justice has been served. 
The good guys arrived, took the cute, mistreated animals from the hands of the evil traffickers, and everyone lived happily ever after. "" But did they? Actually, no, and this is where many of our problems begin. 
Because we have to figure out what to do with all these animals. 
In Brazil, they are usually first sent to governmental triage facilities, in which most of the cases, the conditions are as bad as with the traffickers. 
In 2002, these centers received 45,000 animals, of which 37,000 were birds. 
And the police estimates that we seize only five percent of what's being trafficked. 
Some lucky ones — and among them, Brad — go to serious rehabilitation centers after that. 
And in these places they are cared for. 
They train their flying, they learn how to recognize the food they will find in nature, and they are able to socialize with others from the same species. 
(Laughter) But then what? 
The Brazil Ornithological Society — so now we're talking only birds — claims that we have too little knowledge about the species in nature. 
Therefore, it would be too risky to release these animals, both for the released and for the natural populations. 
They also claim that we spend too many resources in their rehabilitation. 
Following this argument, they suggest that all the birds seized from non-threatened species should be euthanized. 
However, this would mean having killed 26,267 birds, only in the state of São Paulo, only in 2006. 
But, some researchers, myself included — some NGOs and some people from the Brazilian government — believe there is an alternative. 
We think that if and when the animals meet certain criteria concerning their health, behavior, inferred origin and whatever we know about the natural populations, then technically responsible releases are possible, both for the well-being of the individual, and for the conservation of the species and their ecosystems, because we will be returning genes for these populations — which could be important for them in facing environmental challenges — and also we could be returning potential seed dispersers, predators, preys, etc. 
All of these were released by us. 
On the top, the turtles are just enjoying freedom. 
(Laughter) On the middle, this guy nested a couple of weeks after the release. 
And on the bottom, my personal favorite, the little male over there, four hours after his release he was together with a wild female. 
So, this is not new, people have been doing this around the world. 
But it's still a big issue in Brazil. 
We believe we have performed responsible releases. 
We've registered released animals mating in nature and having chicks. 
So, these genes are indeed going back to the populations. 
However this is still a minority for the very lack of knowledge. 
So, I say, "" Let's study more, let's shed light on this issue, let's do whatever we can. "" I'm devoting my career to that. 
And I'm here to urge each and every one of you to do whatever is in your reach: Talk to your neighbor, teach your children, make sure your pet is from a legal breeder. 
We need to act, and act now, before these ones are the only ones left. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

A few years ago, I got one of those spam emails. 
And it managed to get through my spam filter. 
I'm not quite sure how, but it turned up in my inbox, and it was from a guy called Solomon Odonkoh. 
(Laughter) I know. (Laughter) 
It went like this: it said, "" Hello James Veitch, I have an interesting business proposal I want to share with you, Solomon. "" Now, my hand was kind of hovering on the delete button, right? 
I was looking at my phone. I thought, I could just delete this. 
Or I could do what I think we've all always wanted to do. 
(Laughter) And I said, "" Solomon, Your email intrigues me. "" (Laughter) (Applause) And the game was afoot. 
He said, "" Dear James Veitch, We shall be shipping Gold to you. "" (Laughter) "You will earn 10% of any gold you distributes." (Laughter) 
So I knew I was dealing with a professional. (Laughter) 
I said, "" How much is it worth? "" He said, "" We will start with smaller quantity, "" — I was like, aww — and then he said, "" of 25 kgs. (Laughter) 
The worth should be about $2.5 million. "" I said, "" Solomon, if we're going to do it, let's go big. 
(Applause) I can handle it. How much gold do you have? "" (Laughter) He said, "" It is not a matter of how much gold I have, what matters is your capability of handling. 
We can start with 50 kgs as trial shipment. "" I said, "" 50 kgs? 
There's no point doing this at all unless you're shipping at least a metric ton. "" (Laughter) (Applause) He said, "" What do you do for a living? "" (Laughter) I said, "" I'm a hedge fund executive bank manager. "" (Laughter) This isn't the first time I've shipped bullion, my friend, no no no. 
Then I started to panic. 
I was like, "" Where are you based? "" I don't know about you, but I think if we're going via the postal service, it ought to be signed for. 
That's a lot of gold. "" He said, "" It will not be easy to convince my company to do larger quantity shipment. "" I said, "" Solomon, I'm completely with you on this one. 
I'm putting together a visual for you to take into the board meeting. 
Hold tight. "" (Laughter) This is what I sent Solomon. (Laughter) 
(Applause) I don't know if we have any statisticians in the house, but there's definitely something going on. (Laughter) 
I said, "" Solomon, attached to this email you'll find a helpful chart. 
I've had one of my assistants run the numbers. 
(Laughter) We're ready for shipping as much gold as possible. "" There's always a moment where they try to tug your heartstrings, and this was it for Solomon. 
He said, "" I will be so much happy if the deal goes well, because I'm going to get a very good commission as well. "" And I said, "" That's amazing, What are you going to spend your cut on? "" And he said, "" On RealEstate, what about you? "" I thought about it for a long time. 
And I said, "" One word; Hummus. "" (Laughter) "" It's going places. (Laughter) 
Have you ever done that, Solomon? "" (Laughter) He said, "" I have to go bed now. "" (Laughter) (Applause) "" Till morrow. 
Have sweet dream. "" I didn't know what to say! 
I said, "" Bonsoir my golden nugget, bonsoir. "" (Laughter) Guys, you have to understand, this had been going for, like, weeks, albeit hitherto the greatest weeks of my life, but I had to knock it on the head. 
When we email each other, we need to use a code. "" And he agreed. 
(Laughter) I said, "" Solomon, I spent all night coming up with this code we need to use in all further correspondence: Lawyer: Gummy Bear. 
Bank: Cream Egg. 
Legal: Fizzy Cola Bottle. Claim: Peanut M & Ms. 
Documents: Jelly Beans. 
Western Union: A Giant Gummy Lizard. "" (Laughter) I knew these were all words they use, right? 
I said, "" Please call me Kitkat in all further correspondence. "" (Laughter) I didn't hear back. I thought, I've gone too far. 
I've gone too far. So I had to backpedal a little. 
I said, "" Solomon, Is the deal still on? 
KitKat. "" (Laughter) Because you have to be consistent. 
Then I did get an email back from him. 
He said, "" The Business is on and I am trying to blah blah blah... "" I said, "" Dude, you have to use the code! "" What followed is the greatest email I've ever received. 
(Laughter) I'm not joking, this is what turned up in my inbox. 
This was a good day. 
"" The business is on. 
I am trying to raise the balance for the Gummy Bear — (Laughter) so he can submit all the needed Fizzy Cola Bottle Jelly Beans to the Creme Egg, for the Peanut M & Ms process to start. (Laughter) 
Send 1,500 pounds via a Giant Gummy Lizard. "" (Applause) And that was so much fun, right, that it got me thinking: like, what would happen if I just spent as much time as could replying to as many scam emails as I could? 
And that's what I've been doing for three years on your behalf. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Crazy stuff happens when you start replying to scam emails. 
It's really difficult, and I highly recommend we do it. 
I don't think what I'm doing is mean. 
There are a lot of people who do mean things to scammers. 
All I'm doing is wasting their time. 
And I think any time they're spending with me is time they're not spending scamming vulnerable adults out of their savings, right? 
And if you're going to do this — and I highly recommend you do — get yourself a pseudonymous email address. 
I'd wake up in the morning and have a thousand emails about penis enlargements, only one of which was a legitimate response — (Laughter) to a medical question I had. 
But I'll tell you what, though, guys, I'll tell you what: any day is a good day, any day is a good day if you receive an email that begins like this: (Laughter) "" I AM WINNIE MANDELA, THE SECOND WIFE OF NELSON MANDELA THE FORMER SOUTH AFRICAN PRESIDENT. "" I was like, oh! — that Winnie Mandela. (Laughter) 
I know so many. 
"" I NEED TO TRANSFER 45 MILLION DOLLARS OUT OF THE COUNTRY BECAUSE OF MY HUSBAND NELSON MANDELA'S HEALTH CONDITION. "" Let that sink in. 
She sent me this, which is hysterical. 
(Laughter) And this. 
And this looks fairly legitimate, this is a letter of authorization. 
(Laughter) I said, "" Winnie, I'm really sorry to hear of this. 
Given that Nelson died three months ago, I'd describe his health condition as fairly serious. "" (Laughter) That's the worst health condition you can have, not being alive. 
She said, "" KINDLY COMPLY WITH MY BANKERS INSTRUCTIONS. 
ONE LOVE. "" (Laughter) I said, "" Of course. NO WOMAN, NO CRY. "" (Laughter) (Applause) She said, "" MY BANKER WILL NEED TRANSFER OF 3000 DOLLARS. ONE LOVE. "" (Laughter) I said, "" no problemo. 
I SHOT THE SHERIFF. "" [(BUT I DID NOT SHOOT THE DEPUTY)] (Laughter) Thank you. 

I'm going to take you on a journey very quickly. 
To explain the wish, I'm going to have to take you somewhere where many people haven't been, and that's around the world. 
When I was about 24 years old, Kate Stohr and myself started an organization to get architects and designers involved in humanitarian work, not only about responding to natural disasters, but involved in systemic issues. 
We believe that where the resources and expertise are scarce, innovative, sustainable design can really make a difference in people's lives. 
So I started my life as an architect, or training as an architect, and I was always interested in socially responsible design, and how you can really make an impact. 
But when I went to architecture school, it seemed that I was a black sheep in the family. 
Many architects seemed to think that when you design, you design a jewel, and it's a jewel that you try and crave for; whereas I felt that when you design, you either improve or you create a detriment to the community in which you're designing. 
So you're not just doing a building for the residents or for the people who are going to use it, but for the community as a whole. 
And in 1999, we started by responding to the issue of the housing crisis for returning refugees in Kosovo. 
And I didn't know what I was doing — like I said, mid-20s — and I'm the Internet generation, so we started a website. 
We put a call out there, and to my surprise, in a couple of months, we had hundreds of entries from around the world. 
That led to a number of prototypes being built and really experimenting with some ideas. 
Two years later we started doing a project on developing mobile health clinics in sub-Saharan Africa, responding to the HIV / AIDS pandemic. 
That led to 550 entries from 53 countries. 
We also have designers from around the world that participate. 
And we had an exhibit of work that followed that. 
2004 was the tipping point for us. 
We started responding to natural disasters and getting involved in Iran, in Bam, also following up on our work in Africa. 
Working within the United States — most people look at poverty and they see the face of a foreigner. 
But I live in Bozeman, Montana — go up to the north plains on the reservations, or go down to Alabama or Mississippi, pre-Katrina, and I could have shown you places that have far worse conditions than many developing countries that I've been to. 
So we got involved in and worked in inner cities and elsewhere; and also, I will go into some more projects. 
2005: Mother Nature kicked our ass. 
I think we can pretty much assume that 2005 was a horrific year when it comes to natural disasters. 
And because of the Internet, and because of connections to blogs and so forth, within literally hours of the tsunami, we were already raising funds, getting involved, working with people on the ground. 
We run from a couple of laptops, and in the first couple of days, I had 4,000 emails from people needing help. 
So we began to get involved in projects there, and I'll talk about some others. 
And then of course, this year we've been responding to Katrina, as well as following up on our reconstruction work. 
So this is a brief overview. 
In 2004, I really couldn't manage the number of people who wanted to help, or the number of requests that I was getting. 
It was all coming into my laptop and cell phone. 
So we decided to embrace an open-source model of business — so that anyone, anywhere in the world, could start a local chapter, and they can get involved in local problems. 
Because I believe there is no such thing as Utopia. 
All problems are local. All solutions are local. 
So that means, you know, somebody who's based in Mississippi knows more about Mississippi than I do. 
So what happened is, we used Meetup and all these other Internet tools, and we ended up having 40 chapters starting up, thousands of architects in 104 countries. 
So the bullet point — sorry, I never do a suit, so I knew that I was going to take this off. 
OK, because I'm going to do it very quick. 
This isn't just about nonprofit. 
What it showed me is that there's a grassroots movement going on, of socially responsible designers who really believe that this world has got a lot smaller, and that we have the opportunity — not the responsibility, but the opportunity — to really get involved in making change. 
(Laughter) (Laughter) I'm adding that to my time. (Laughter) 
So what you don't know is, we've got these thousands of designers working around the world, connected basically by a website, and we have a staff of three. 
The fact that nobody told us we couldn't do it, we did it. 
And so there's something to be said about naïveté. 
So seven years later, we've developed so that we've got advocacy, instigation and implementation. 
We advocate for good design, not only through student workshops and lectures and public forums, op-eds; we have a book on humanitarian work; but also disaster mitigation and dealing with public policy. 
We can talk about FEMA, but that's another talk. 
Instigation, developing ideas with communities and NGOs, doing open-source design competitions. 
Referring, matchmaking with communities. 
And then implementing — actually going out there and doing the work, because when you invent, it's never a reality until it's built. 
So it's really important that if we're designing and trying to create change, we build that change. 
So here's a select number of projects. 
Kosovo. 
This is Kosovo in '99. 
We did an open design competition, like I said. 
It led to a whole variety of ideas. 
And this wasn't about emergency shelter, but transitional shelter that would last five to 10 years, that would be placed next to the land the resident lived in, and that they would rebuild their own home. 
This wasn't imposing an architecture on a community; this was giving them the tools and the space to allow them to rebuild and regrow the way they want to. 
We had from the sublime to the ridiculous, but they worked. 
This is an inflatable hemp house. It was built; it works. 
This is a shipping container. 
Built and works. 
And a whole variety of ideas that not only dealt with architectural building, but also the issues of governance, and the idea of creating communities through complex networks. 
So we've engaged not just designers, but also a whole variety of technology-based professionals. 
Using rubble from destroyed homes to create new homes. 
Using straw bale construction, creating heat walls. 
And then something remarkable happened in '99. 
We went to Africa originally to look at the housing issue. 
Within three days, we realized the problem was not housing; it was the growing pandemic of HIV / AIDS. 
And it wasn't doctors telling us this; it was actual villagers that we were staying with. 
And so we came up with the bright idea that instead of getting people to walk 10, 15 kilometers to see doctors, you get the doctors to the people. 
And we started engaging the medical community, and you know, we thought we were real bright sparks — "" We've come up with this great idea: mobile health clinics, widely distributed throughout sub-Saharan Africa. "" And the medical community there said, "" We've said this for the last decade. 
We know this. We just don't know how to show this. "" So in a way, we had taken pre-existing needs and shown solutions. 
And so again, we had a whole variety of ideas that came in. 
This one I personally love, because the idea is that architecture is not just about solutions, but about raising awareness. 
This is a kenaf clinic. 
You get seed and you grow it in a plot of land, and it grows 14 feet in a month. 
And on the fourth week, the doctors come and they mow out an area, put a tensile structure on the top, and when the doctors have finished treating and seeing patients and villagers, you cut down the clinic and you eat it. 
It's an eat-your-own-clinic. 
So it's dealing with the fact that if you have AIDS, you also need to have nutrition rates, and the idea of nutrition is as important as getting antiretrovirals out there. 
So you know, this is a serious solution. 
This one I love. 
The idea is it's not just a clinic, it's a community center. 
This looked at setting up trade routes and economic engines within the community, so it can be a self-sustaining project. 
Every one of these projects is sustainable. 
That's not because I'm a tree-hugging green person. 
It's because when you live on four dollars a day, you're living on survival and you have to be sustainable. 
You have to know where your energy is coming from, you have to know where your resource is coming from, and you have to keep the maintenance down. 
So this is about getting an economic engine, and then at night, it turns into a movie theater. 
So it's not an AIDS clinic. It's a community center. 
So you can see ideas. 
And these ideas developed into prototypes, and they were eventually built. 
And currently, as of this year, there are clinics rolling out in Nigeria and Kenya. 
From that, we also developed Siyathemba. 
The community came to us and said, "The problem is that the girls don't have education." 
And we're working in an area where young women between the ages of 16 and 24 have a 50 percent HIV / AIDS rate. 
And that's not because they're promiscuous, it's because there's no knowledge. 
And so we decided to look at the idea of sports, and create a youth sports center that doubled as an HIV / AIDS outreach center, and the coaches of the girls' team were also trained doctors. 
So that there would be a very slow way of developing confidence in health care. 
And we picked nine finalists, and then those nine finalists were distributed throughout the entire region, and then the community picked their design. 
They said, this is our design, because it's not only about engaging a community; it's about empowering a community, and about getting them to be a part of the rebuilding process. 
So, the winning design is here. 
And then, of course, we actually go and work with the community and the clients. 
So this is the designer. 
He's out there working with the first ever women's soccer team in KwaZulu-Natal, Siyathemba. 
And they can tell it better. 
(A cappella singing in a South African language) Video: Well, my name is Cee Cee Mkhonza. 
I work at the Africa Centre, I'm an IT user consultant. 
I'm also the national football player for South Africa, Banyana Banyana. 
And I also play in the Vodacom League, for the team called Tembisa, which has now changed to Siyathemba. 
This is our home ground. 
Cameron Sinclair: I'm going to show that later because I'm running out of time. 
I can see Chris looking at me slyly. 
This was a connection, just a meeting with somebody who wanted to develop Africa's first telemedicine center, in Tanzania. 
And we met, literally, a couple of months ago. 
We've already developed a design. 
The team is over there, working in partnership. 
This was a matchmaking, thanks to a couple of TEDsters — Sun [Microsystems], Cheryl Heller and Andrew Zolli, who connected me with this amazing African woman. 
And we start construction in June, and it will be opened by TEDGlobal. 
So when you come to TEDGlobal, you can check it out. 
But what we're known probably most for is dealing with disasters and development, and we've been involved in a lot of issues, such as the tsunami and also things like Hurricane Katrina. 
This is a 370-dollar shelter that can be easily assembled. 
This is a community-designed community center. 
And what that means is we actually live and work with the community, and they're part of the design process. 
The kids actually get involved in mapping out where the community center should be. 
And then eventually, the community, through skills training, end up building the building with us. 
Here is another school. 
This is what the UN gave these guys for six months — 12 plastic tarps. 
This was in August. 
This was the replacement; that's supposed to last for two years. 
When the rain comes down, you can't hear a thing, and in the summer, it's about 140 degrees inside. 
So we said, if the rain's coming down, let's get fresh water. 
So every one of our schools has a rainwater collection system. 
Very low cost: three classrooms and rainwater collection is 5,000 dollars. 
This was raised by hot chocolate sales in Atlanta. 
It's built by the parents of the kids. 
The kids are out there on-site, building the buildings. 
And it opened a couple of weeks ago, and there's 600 kids that are now using the schools. 
(Applause) So, disaster hits home. 
We see the bad stories on CNN and Fox and all that, but we don't see the good stories. 
Here is a community that got together, and they said "" no "" to waiting. 
They formed a partnership, a diverse partnership of players, to actually map out East Biloxi, to figure out who's getting involved. 
We've had over 1,500 volunteers rebuilding, rehabbing homes. 
Figuring out what FEMA regulations are, not waiting for them to dictate to us how you should rebuild. 
Working with residents, getting them out of their homes, so they don't get ill. 
This is what they're cleaning up on their own. 
Designing housing. 
This house is going in in a couple of weeks. 
This is a rehabbed home, done in four days. 
This is a utility room for a woman who is on a walker. 
She's 70 years old. This is what FEMA gave her. 
600 bucks, happened two days ago. 
We put together, very quickly, a washroom. 
It's built, it's running and she just started a business today, where she's washing other people's clothes. 
These are the Calhouns. 
They're photographers who had documented the Lower Ninth for the last 40 years. 
That was their home, and these are the photographs they took. 
And we're helping, working with them to create a new building. 
Projects we've done. 
Projects we've been a part of, support. 
Why don't aid agencies do this? 
This is the UN tent. 
This is the new UN tent, just introduced this year. 
Quick to assemble. 
It's got a flap — that's the invention. 
It took 20 years to design this and get it implemented in the field. 
I was 12 years old. 
There's a problem here. 
Luckily, we're not alone. 
There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of architects and designers and inventors around the world that are getting involved in humanitarian work. 
More hemp houses — it's a theme in Japan, apparently. 
I'm not sure what they're smoking. 
(Laughter) This is a Grip Clip, designed by somebody who said, "" All you need is some way to attach membrane structures to physical support beams. "" This guy designed for NASA, is now doing housing. 
I'm going to whip through this quickly, because I know I've got only a couple of minutes. 
So this is all done in the last two years. 
I showed you something that took 20 years to do. 
And this is just a selection of things that were built in the last couple of years. 
From Brazil to India, Mexico, Alabama, China, Israel, Palestine, Vietnam. 
The average age of a designer who gets involved in this project is 32 — that's how old I am. 
So it's a young — I just have to stop here, because Arup is in the room, and this is the best-designed toilet in the world. 
If you're ever, ever in India, go use this toilet. 
(Laughter) Chris Luebkeman will tell you why. 
I'm sure that's how he wanted to spend the party. 
But the future is not going to be the sky-scraping cities of New York, but this. 
And when you look at this, you see crisis. 
What I see is many, many inventors. 
One billion people live in abject poverty. 
We hear about them all the time. 
Four billion live in growing but fragile economies. 
One in seven live in unplanned settlements. 
If we do nothing about the housing crisis that's about to happen, in 20 years, one in three people will live in an unplanned settlement or a refugee camp. 
Look left, look right: one of you will be there. 
How do we improve the living standards of five billion people? 
With 10 million solutions. 
So I wish to develop a community that actively embraces innovative and sustainable design to improve the living conditions for everyone. 
Chris Anderson: Wait a sec — that's your wish? 
CS: That's my wish. 
CA: That's his wish! 
(Applause) CS: We started Architecture for Humanity with 700 dollars and a website. 
So Chris somehow decided to give me 100,000. 
So why not this many people? 
Open-source architecture is the way to go. 
You have a diverse community of participants — and we're not just talking about inventors and designers, but we're talking about the funding model. 
My role is not as a designer; it's as a conduit between the design world and the humanitarian world. 
And what we need is something that replicates me globally, because I haven't slept in seven years. 
(Laughter) Secondly, what will this thing be? 
Designers want to respond to issues of humanitarian crisis, but they don't want some company in the West taking their idea and basically profiting from it. 
So Creative Commons has developed the Developing Nations license. 
And what that means is that a designer can — The Siyathemba project I showed was the first ever building to have a Creative Commons license on it. 
As soon as that is built, anyone in Africa or any developing nation can take the construction documents and replicate it for free. 
(Applause) So why not allow designers the opportunity to do this, but still protect their rights here? 
We want to have a community where you can upload ideas, and those ideas can be tested in an earthquake, in flood, in all sorts of austere environments. 
The reason that's important is I don't want to wait for the next Katrina to find out if my house works. 
That's too late, we need to do it now. 
So doing that globally — and I want this whole thing to work multi-lingually. 
When you look at the face of an architect, most people think a gray-haired white guy. 
I don't see that; I see the face of the world. 
So I want everyone from all over the planet to be able to be a part of this design and development. 
The idea of needs-based competitions — XPRIZE for the other 98 percent, if you want to call it that. 
We also want to look at ways of matchmaking and putting funding partners together, and the idea of integrating manufacturers — fab labs in every country. 
When I hear about the $100 laptop and it's going to educate every child — educate every designer in the world. 
Put one in every favela, every slum settlement. 
Because you know what? Innovation will happen. 
And I need to know that. It's called the leap-back. 
We talk about leapfrog technologies. 
I write with Worldchanging, and the one thing we've been talking about is, I learn more on the ground than I've ever learned here. 
So let's take those ideas, adapt them, and we can use them. 
These ideas are supposed to be adaptable; they should have the potential for evolution; they should be developed by every nation in the world and useful for every nation in the world. 
What will it take? 
There should be a sheet. 
I don't have time to read this, because I'm going to be yanked off. 
CA: Let's just leave it up for a sec. 
CS: Well, what will it take? You guys are smart. 
So it's going to take a lot of computing power, because I want the idea that any laptop anywhere in the world can plug into the system and be able to not only participate in developing these designs, but utilize the designs. 
Also, a process of reviewing the designs. 
I want every Arup engineer in the world to check and make sure that we're doing stuff that's standing, because those guys are the best in the world. 
Plug. 
And so, you know, I want these — I just should note: I have two laptops and one of them is there, and that has 3000 designs on it. 
If I drop that laptop... 
What happens? 
So it's important to have these proven ideas put up there, easy to use, easy to get ahold of. 
My mom once said, "" There's nothing worse than being all mouth and no trousers. "" (Laughter) I'm fed up of talking about making change. 
You only make it by doing it. 
We've changed FEMA guidelines; we've changed public policy; we've changed international response — based on building things. 
So for me, it's important that we create a real conduit for innovation, and that it's free innovation. 
Think of free culture — this is free innovation. 
Somebody said this a couple of years back. 
I will give points for those who know it. 
But I think the man was maybe 25 years too early. 
So let's do it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

How do you find a dinosaur? 
Sounds impossible, doesn't it? 
It's not. 
And the answer relies on a formula that all paleontologists use. 
And I'm going to tell you the secret. 
First, find rocks of the right age. 
Second, those rocks must be sedimentary rocks. 
And third, layers of those rocks must be naturally exposed. 
That's it. 
Find those three things and get yourself on the ground, chances are good that you will find fossils. 
Now let me break down this formula. 
Organisms exist only during certain geological intervals. 
So you have to find rocks of the right age, depending on what your interests are. 
If you want to find trilobites, you have to find the really, really old rocks of the Paleozoic — rocks between a half a billion and a quarter-billion years old. 
Now, if you want to find dinosaurs, don't look in the Paleozoic, you won't find them. 
They hadn't evolved yet. 
You have to find the younger rocks of the Mesozoic, and in the case of dinosaurs, between 235 and 66 million years ago. 
Now, it's fairly easy to find rocks of the right age at this point, because the Earth is, to a coarse degree, geologically mapped. 
This is hard-won information. 
The annals of Earth history are written in rocks, one chapter upon the next, such that the oldest pages are on bottom and the youngest on top. 
Now, were it quite that easy, geologists would rejoice. 
It's not. 
The library of Earth is an old one. 
It has no librarian to impose order. 
Operating over vast swaths of time, myriad geological processes offer every possible insult to the rocks of ages. 
Most pages are destroyed soon after being written. 
Some pages are overwritten, creating difficult-to-decipher palimpsests of long-gone landscapes. 
Pages that do find sanctuary under the advancing sands of time are never truly safe. 
Unlike the Moon — our dead, rocky companion — the Earth is alive, pulsing with creative and destructive forces that power its geological metabolism. 
Lunar rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts all date back to about the age of the Solar System. 
Moon rocks are forever. 
Earth rocks, on the other hand, face the perils of a living lithosphere. 
All will suffer ruination, through some combination of mutilation, compression, folding, tearing, scorching and baking. 
Thus, the volumes of Earth history are incomplete and disheveled. 
The library is vast and magnificent — but decrepit. 
And it was this tattered complexity in the rock record that obscured its meaning until relatively recently. 
Nature provided no card catalog for geologists — this would have to be invented. 
Five thousand years after the Sumerians learned to record their thoughts on clay tablets, the Earth's volumes remained inscrutable to humans. 
We were geologically illiterate, unaware of the antiquity of our own planet and ignorant of our connection to deep time. 
It wasn't until the turn of the 19th century that our blinders were removed, first, with the publication of James Hutton's "" Theory of the Earth, "" in which he told us that the Earth reveals no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end; and then, with the printing of William Smith's map of Britain, the first country-scale geological map, giving us for the first time predictive insight into where certain types of rocks might occur. 
After that, you could say things like, "If we go over there, we should be in the Jurassic," or, "" If we go up over that hill, we should find the Cretaceous. "" So now, if you want to find trilobites, get yourself a good geological map and go to the rocks of the Paleozoic. 
If you want to find dinosaurs like I do, find the rocks of Mesozoic and go there. 
Now of course, you can only make a fossil in a sedimentary rock, a rock made by sand and mud. 
You can't have a fossil in an igneous rock formed by magma, like a granite, or in a metamorphic rock that's been heated and squeezed. 
And you have to get yourself in a desert. 
It's not that dinosaurs particularly lived in deserts; they lived on every land mass and in every imaginable environment. 
It's that you need to go to a place that's a desert today, a place that doesn't have too many plants covering up the rocks, and a place where erosion is always exposing new bones at the surface. 
So find those three things: rocks of the right age, that are sedimentary rocks, in a desert, and get yourself on the ground, and you literally walk until you see a bone sticking out of the rock. 
Here's a picture that I took in Southern Patagonia. 
Every pebble that you see on the ground there is a piece of dinosaur bone. 
So when you're in that right situation, it's not a question of whether you'll find fossils or not; you're going to find fossils. 
The question is: Will you find something that is scientifically significant? 
And to help with that, I'm going to add a fourth part to our formula, which is this: get as far away from other paleontologists as possible. 
(Laughter) It's not that I don't like other paleontologists. 
When you go to a place that's relatively unexplored, you have a much better chance of not only finding fossils but of finding something that's new to science. 
So that's my formula for finding dinosaurs, and I've applied it all around the world. 
In the austral summer of 2004, I went to the bottom of South America, to the bottom of Patagonia, Argentina, to prospect for dinosaurs: a place that had terrestrial sedimentary rocks of the right age, in a desert, a place that had been barely visited by paleontologists. 
And we found this. 
This is a femur, a thigh bone, of a giant, plant-eating dinosaur. 
That bone is 2.2 meters across. 
That's over seven feet long. 
Now, unfortunately, that bone was isolated. 
We dug and dug and dug, and there wasn't another bone around. 
But it made us hungry to go back the next year for more. 
And on the first day of that next field season, I found this: another two-meter femur, only this time not isolated, this time associated with 145 other bones of a giant plant eater. 
And after three more hard, really brutal field seasons, the quarry came to look like this. 
And there you see the tail of that great beast wrapping around me. 
The giant that lay in this grave, the new species of dinosaur, we would eventually call "" Dreadnoughtus schrani. "" Dreadnoughtus was 85 feet from snout to tail. 
It stood two-and-a-half stories at the shoulder, and all fleshed out in life, it weighed 65 tons. 
People ask me sometimes, "" Was Dreadnoughtus bigger than a T. rex? "" That's the mass of eight or nine T. rex. 
Now, one of the really cool things about being a paleontologist is when you find a new species, you get to name it. 
And I've always thought it a shame that these giant, plant-eating dinosaurs are too often portrayed as passive, lumbering platters of meat on the landscape. 
(Laughter) They're not. 
Big herbivores can be surly, and they can be territorial — you do not want to mess with a hippo or a rhino or a water buffalo. 
The bison in Yellowstone injure far more people than do the grizzly bears. 
So can you imagine a big bull, 65-ton Dreadnoughtus in the breeding season, defending a territory? 
That animal would have been incredibly dangerous, a menace to all around, and itself would have had nothing to fear. 
And thus the name, "" Dreadnoughtus, "" or, "" fears nothing. "" Now, to grow so large, an animal like Dreadnoughtus would've had to have been a model of efficiency. 
That long neck and long tail help it radiate heat into the environment, passively controlling its temperature. 
And that long neck also serves as a super-efficient feeding mechanism. 
Dreadnoughtus could stand in one place and with that neck clear out a huge envelope of vegetation, taking in tens of thousands of calories while expending very few. 
And these animals evolved a bulldog-like wide-gait stance, giving them immense stability, because when you're 65 tons, when you're literally as big as a house, the penalty for falling over is death. 
Yeah, these animals are big and tough, but they won't take a blow like that. 
Dreadnoughtus falls over, ribs break and pierce lungs. 
Organs burst. 
If you're a big 65-ton Dreadnoughtus, you don't get to fall down in life — even once. 
Now, after this particular Dreadnoughtus carcass was buried and de-fleshed by a multitude of bacteria, worms and insects, its bones underwent a brief metamorphosis, exchanging molecules with the groundwater and becoming more and more like the entombing rock. 
As layer upon layer of sediment accumulated, pressure from all sides weighed in like a stony glove whose firm and enduring grip held each bone in a stabilizing embrace. 
And then came the long... 
nothing. 
Epoch after epoch of sameness, nonevents without number. 
All the while, the skeleton lay everlasting and unchanging in perfect equilibrium within its rocky grave. 
Meanwhile, Earth history unfolded above. 
The dinosaurs would reign for another 12 million years before their hegemony was snuffed out in a fiery apocalypse. 
The continents drifted. The mammals rose. 
The Ice Age came. 
And then, in East Africa, an unpromising species of ape evolved the odd trick of sentient thought. 
These brainy primates were not particularly fast or strong. 
But they excelled at covering ground, and in a remarkable diaspora surpassing even the dinosaurs' record of territorial conquest, they dispersed across the planet, ravishing every ecosystem they encountered, along the way, inventing culture and metalworking and painting and dance and music and science and rocket ships that would eventually take 12 particularly excellent apes to the surface of the Moon. 
With seven billion peripatetic Homo sapiens on the planet, it was perhaps inevitable that one of them would eventually trod on the grave of the magnificent titan buried beneath the badlands of Southern Patagonia. 
I was that ape. 
And standing there, alone in the desert, it was not lost on me that the chance of any one individual entering the fossil record is vanishingly small. 
But the Earth is very, very old. 
And over vast tracts of time, the improbable becomes the probable. 
That's the magic of the geological record. 
Thus, multitudinous creatures living and dying on an old planet leave behind immense numbers of fossils, each one a small miracle, but collectively, inevitable. 
Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hits the Earth and wipes out the dinosaurs. 
This easily might not have been. 
But we only get one history, and it's the one that we have. 
But this particular reality was not inevitable. 
The tiniest perturbation of that asteroid far from Earth would have caused it to miss our planet by a wide margin. 
The pivotal, calamitous day during which the dinosaurs were wiped out, setting the stage for the modern world as we know it didn't have to be. 
It could've just been another day — a Thursday, perhaps — among the 63 billion days already enjoyed by the dinosaurs. 
But over geological time, improbable, nearly impossible events do occur. 
Along the path from our wormy, Cambrian ancestors to primates dressed in suits, innumerable forks in the road led us to this very particular reality. 
The bones of Dreadnoughtus lay underground for 77 million years. 
Who could have imagined that a single species of shrew-like mammal living in the cracks of the dinosaur world would evolve into sentient beings capable of characterizing and understanding the very dinosaurs they must have dreaded? 
I once stood at the head of the Missouri River and bestraddled it. 
There, it's nothing more than a gurgle of water that issues forth from beneath a rock in a boulder in a pasture, high in the Bitterroot Mountains. 
The stream next to it runs a few hundred yards and ends in a small pond. 
Those two streams — they look identical. 
But one is an anonymous trickle of water, and the other is the Missouri River. 
Now go down to the mouth of the Missouri, near St. Louis, and it's pretty obvious that that river is a big deal. 
But go up into the Bitterroots and look at the Missouri, and human prospection does not allow us to see it as anything special. 
Now go back to the Cretaceous Period and look at our tiny, fuzzball ancestors. 
You would never guess that they would amount to anything special, and they probably wouldn't have, were it not for that pesky asteroid. 
Now, make a thousand more worlds and a thousand more solar systems and let them run. 
You will never get the same result. 
No doubt, those worlds would be both amazing and amazingly improbable, but they would not be our world and they would not have our history. 
There are an infinite number of histories that we could've had. 
We only get one, and wow, did we ever get a good one. 
Dinosaurs like Dreadnoughtus were real. 
Sea monsters like the mosasaur were real. 
Dragonflies with the wingspan of an eagle and pill bugs the length of a car really existed. 
Why study the ancient past? 
Because it gives us perspective and humility. 
The dinosaurs died in the world's fifth mass extinction, snuffed out in a cosmic accident through no fault of their own. 
They didn't see it coming, and they didn't have a choice. 
We, on the other hand, do have a choice. 
And the nature of the fossil record tells us that our place on this planet is both precarious and potentially fleeting. 
Right now, our species is propagating an environmental disaster of geological proportions that is so broad and so severe, it can rightly be called the sixth extinction. 
Only unlike the dinosaurs, we can see it coming. 
And unlike the dinosaurs, we can do something about it. 
That choice is ours. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

There's this fact that I love that I read somewhere once, that one of the things that's contributed to homo sapiens' success as a species is our lack of body hair — that our hairlessness, our nakedness combined with our invention of clothing, gives us the ability to modulate our body temperature and thus be able to survive in any climate we choose. 
And now we've evolved to the point where we can't survive without clothing. 
And it's more than just utility, now it's a communication. 
Everything that we choose to put on is a narrative, a story about where we've been, what we're doing, who we want to be. 
I was a lonely kid. 
I didn't have an easy time finding friends to play with, and I ended up making a lot of my own play. 
I made a lot of my own toys. 
It began with ice cream. 
There was a Baskin-Robbins in my hometown, and they served ice cream from behind the counter in these giant, five-gallon, cardboard tubs. 
And someone told me — I was eight years old — someone told me that when they were done with those tubs, they washed them out and kept them in the back, and if you asked they would give you one. 
It took me a couple of weeks to work up the courage, but I did, and they did. 
They gave me one — I went home with this beautiful cardboard tub. 
I was trying to figure out what I could do with this exotic material — metal ring, top and bottom. 
I started turning it over in my head, and I realized, "" Wait a minute — my head actually fits inside this thing. "" (Laughter) Yeah, I cut a hole out, I put some acetate in there and I made myself a space helmet. (Laughter) 
I needed a place to wear the space helmet, so I found a refrigerator box a couple blocks from home. 
I pushed it home, and in my parents' guest room closet, I turned it into a spaceship. 
I started with a control panel out of cardboard. 
I cut a hole for a radar screen and put a flashlight underneath it to light it. 
I put a view screen up, which I offset off the back wall — and this is where I thought I was being really clever — without permission, I painted the back wall of the closet black and put a star field, which I lit up with some Christmas lights I found in the attic, and I went on some space missions. 
A couple years later, the movie "" Jaws "" came out. 
I was way too young to see it, but I was caught up in "" Jaws "" fever, like everyone else in America at the time. 
There was a store in my town that had a "" Jaws "" costume in their window, and my mom must have overheard me talking to someone about how awesome I thought this costume was, because a couple days before Halloween, she blew my freaking mind by giving me this "" Jaws "" costume. 
Now, I recognize it's a bit of a trope for people of a certain age to complain that kids these days have no idea how good they have it, but let me just show you a random sampling of entry-level kids' costumes you can buy online right now... 
... and this is the "" Jaws "" costume my mom bought for me. 
(Laughter) This is a paper-thin shark face and a vinyl bib with the poster of "" Jaws "" on it. (Laughter) 
And I loved it. 
A couple years later, my dad took me to a film called "" Excalibur. "" I actually got him to take me to it twice, which is no small thing, because it is a hard, R-rated film. 
But it wasn't the blood and guts or the boobs that made me want to go see it again. 
They helped — (Laughter) It was the armor. 
The armor in "" Excalibur "" was intoxicatingly beautiful to me. 
These were literally knights in shining, mirror-polished armor. 
And moreover, the knights in "" Excalibur "" wear their armor everywhere. 
All the time — they wear it at dinner, they wear it to bed. 
(Laughter) I was like, "" Are they reading my mind? 
I want to wear armor all the time! "" (Laughter) So I went back to my favorite material, the gateway drug for making, corrugated cardboard, and I made myself a suit of armor, replete with the neck shields and a white horse. 
Now that I've oversold it, here's a picture of the armor that I made. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Now, this is only the first suit of armor I made inspired by "" Excalibur. "" A couple of years later, I convinced my dad to embark on making me a proper suit of armor. 
Over about a month, he graduated me from cardboard to roofing aluminum called flashing and still, one of my all-time favorite attachment materials, POP rivets. 
We carefully, over that month, constructed an articulated suit of aluminum armor with compound curves. 
We drilled holes in the helmet so that I could breathe, and I finished just in time for Halloween and wore it to school. 
Now, this is the one thing in this talk that I don't have a slide to show you, because no photo exists of this armor. 
I did wear it to school, there was a yearbook photographer patrolling the halls, but he never found me, for reasons that are about to become clear. 
There were things I didn't anticipate about wearing a complete suit of aluminum armor to school. 
In third period math, I was standing in the back of class, and I'm standing in the back of class because the armor did not allow me to sit down. 
(Laughter) This is the first thing I didn't anticipate. 
And then my teacher looks at me sort of concerned about halfway through the class and says, "" Are you feeling OK? "" I'm thinking, "" Are you kidding? Am I feeling OK? 
I'm wearing a suit of armor! I am having the time of my — "" And I'm just about to tell her how great I feel, when the classroom starts to list to the left and disappear down this long tunnel, and then I woke up in the nurse's office. 
I had passed out from heat exhaustion, wearing the armor. 
And when I woke up, I wasn't embarrassed about having passed out in front of my class, I was wondering, "" Who took my armor? Where's my armor? "" OK, fast-forward a whole bunch of years, some colleagues and I get hired to make a show for Discovery Channel, called "" MythBusters. "" And over 14 years, I learn on the job how to build experimental methodologies and how to tell stories about them for television. 
I also learn early on that costuming can play a key role in this storytelling. 
I use costumes to add humor, comedy, color and narrative clarity to the stories we're telling. 
And then we do an episode called "" Dumpster Diving, "" and I learn a little bit more about the deeper implications of what costuming means to me. 
In the episode "" Dumpster Diving, "" the question we were trying to answer is: Is jumping into a dumpster as safe as the movies would lead you to believe? 
(Laughter) The episode was going to have two distinct parts to it. 
One was where we get trained to jump off buildings by a stuntman into an air bag. 
And the second was the graduation to the experiment: we'd fill a dumpster full of material and we'd jump into it. 
I wanted to visually separate these two elements, and I thought, "" Well, for the first part we're training, so we should wear sweatsuits — Oh! Let's put 'Stunt Trainee' on the back of the sweatsuits. 
That's for the training. "" But for the second part, I wanted something really visually striking — "I know! I'll dress as Neo from 'The Matrix.'" (Laughter) So I went to Haight Street. 
I bought some beautiful knee-high, buckle boots. 
I found a long, flowing coat on eBay. 
I got sunglasses, which I had to wear contact lenses in order to wear. 
The day of the experiment shoot comes up, and I step out of my car in this costume, and my crew takes a look at me... 
and start suppressing their church giggles. 
They're like, "" (Laugh sound). "" And I feel two distinct things at this moment. 
I feel total embarrassment over the fact that it's so nakedly clear to my crew that I'm completely into wearing this costume. 
(Laughter) But the producer in my mind reminds myself that in the high-speed shot in slow-mo, that flowing coat is going to look beautiful behind me. (Laughter) 
Five years into the "" MythBusters "" run, we got invited to appear at San Diego Comic-Con. 
I'd known about Comic-Con for years and never had time to go. 
This was the big leagues — this was costuming mecca. 
People fly in from all over the world to show their amazing creations on the floor in San Diego. 
And I wanted to participate. 
I decided that I would put together an elaborate costume that covered me completely, and I would walk the floor of San Diego Comic-Con anonymously. 
The costume I chose? 
Hellboy. 
That's not my costume, that's actually Hellboy. 
(Laughter) But I spent months assembling the most screen-accurate Hellboy costume I could, from the boots to the belt to the pants to the right hand of doom. 
I found a guy who made a prosthetic Hellboy head and chest and I put them on. 
I even had contact lenses made in my prescription. 
I wore it onto the floor at Comic-Con and I can't even tell you how balls hot it was in that costume. 
(Laughter) Sweating! I should've remembered this. 
I'm sweating buckets and the contact lenses hurt my eyes, and none of it matters because I'm totally in love. 
(Laughter) Not just with the process of putting on this costume and walking the floor, but also with the community of other costumers. 
It's not called costuming at Cons, it's called "" cosplay. "" Now ostensibly, cosplay means people who dress up as their favorite characters from film and television and especially anime, but it is so much more than that. 
These aren't just people who find a costume and put it on — they mash them up. 
They bend them to their will. 
They change them to be the characters they want to be in those productions. 
They're super clever and genius. 
They let their freak flag fly and it's beautiful. 
(Laughter) But more than that, they rehearse their costumes. 
At Comic-Con or any other Con, you don't just take pictures of people walking around. 
You go up and say, "Hey, I like your costume, can I take your picture?" 
And then you give them time to get into their pose. 
They've worked hard on their pose to make their costume look great for your camera. 
And it's so beautiful to watch. 
And I take this to heart. 
At subsequent Cons, I learn Heath Ledger's shambling walk as the Joker from "" The Dark Knight. "" I learn how to be a scary Ringwraith from "" Lord of the Rings, "" and I actually frighten some children. 
I learned that "" hrr hrr hrr "" — that head laugh that Chewbacca does. 
And then I dressed up as No-Face from "" Spirited Away. "" If you don't know about "" Spirited Away "" and its director, Hayao Miyazaki, first of all, you're welcome. 
(Laughter) This is a masterpiece, and one of my all-time favorite films. 
It's about a young girl named Chihiro who gets lost in the spirit world in an abandoned Japanese theme park. 
And she finds her way back out again with the help of a couple of friends she makes — a captured dragon named Haku and a lonely demon named No-Face. 
No-Face is lonely and he wants to make friends, and he thinks the way to do it is by luring them to him and producing gold in his hand. 
But this doesn't go very well, and so he ends up going on kind of a rampage until Chihiro saves him, rescues him. 
So I put together a No-Face costume, and I wore it on the floor at Comic-Con. 
And I very carefully practiced No-Face's gestures. 
I resolved I would not speak in this costume at all. 
When people asked to take my picture, I would nod and I would shyly stand next to them. 
They would take the picture and then I would secret out from behind my robe a chocolate gold coin. 
And at the end of the photo process, I'd make it appear for them. 
Ah, ah ah! — like that. 
And people were freaking out. 
"Holy crap! Gold from No-Face! Oh my god, this is so cool!" 
And I'm feeling and I'm walking the floor and it's fantastic. 
And about 15 minutes in something happens. 
Somebody grabs my hand, and they put a coin back into it. 
And I think maybe they're giving me a coin as a return gift, but no, this is one of the coins that I'd given away. 
I don't know why. 
And I keep on going, I take some more pictures. 
And then it happens again. 
Understand, I can't see anything inside this costume. 
I can see through the mouth — I can see people's shoes. 
I can hear what they're saying and I can see their feet. 
But the third time someone gives me back a coin, I want to know what's going on. 
So I sort of tilt my head back to get a better view, and what I see is someone walking away from me going like this. 
And then it hits me: it's bad luck to take gold from No-Face. 
In the film "" Spirited Away, "" bad luck befalls those who take gold from No-Face. 
This isn't a performer-audience relationship; this is cosplay. 
We are, all of us on that floor, injecting ourselves into a narrative that meant something to us. 
And we're making it our own. 
We're connecting with something important inside of us. 
And the costumes are how we reveal ourselves to each other. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I run a design studio in New York. 
Every seven years, I close it for one year to pursue some little experiments, things that are always difficult to accomplish during the regular working year. 
In that year, we are not available for any of our clients. 
We are totally closed. 
And as you can imagine, it is a lovely and very energetic time. 
I originally had opened the studio in New York to combine my two loves, music and design. 
And we created videos and packaging for many musicians that you know, and for even more that you've never heard of. 
As I realized, just like with many many things in my life that I actually love, I adapt to it. 
And I get, over time, bored by them. 
And for sure, in our case, our work started to look the same. 
You see here a glass eye in a die cut of a book. 
Quite the similar idea, then, a perfume packaged in a book, in a die cut. 
So I decided to close it down for one year. 
Also is the knowledge that right now we spend about in the first 25 years of our lives learning, then there is another 40 years that's really reserved for working. 
And then tacked on at the end of it are about 15 years for retirement. 
And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and intersperse them in between those working years. 
(Applause) That's clearly enjoyable for myself. 
But probably even more important is that the work that comes out of these years flows back into the company and into society at large, rather than just benefiting a grandchild or two. 
There is a fellow TEDster who spoke two years ago, Jonathan Haidt, who defined his work into three different levels. 
And they rang very true for me. 
I can see my work as a job. I do it for money. 
I likely already look forward to the weekend on Thursdays. 
And I probably will need a hobby as a leveling mechanism. 
In a career I'm definitely more engaged. 
But at the same time, there will be periods when I think is all that really hard work really worth my while? 
While in the third one, in the calling, very much likely I would do it also if I wouldn't be financially compensated for it. 
I am not a religious person myself, but I did look for nature. 
I had spent my first sabbatical in New York City. 
Looked for something different for the second one. 
Europe and the U.S. didn't really feel enticing because I knew them too well. So Asia it was. 
The most beautiful landscapes I had seen in Asia were Sri Lanka and Bali. 
Sri Lanka still had the civil war going on, so Bali it was. 
It's a wonderful, very craft-oriented society. 
I arrived there in September 2008, and pretty much started to work right away. 
There is wonderful inspiration coming from the area itself. 
However the first thing that I needed was mosquito repellent typography because they were definitely around heavily. 
And then I needed some sort of way to be able to get back to all the wild dogs that surround my house, and attacked me during my morning walks. 
So we created this series of 99 portraits on tee shirts. 
Every single dog on one tee shirt. 
As a little retaliation with a just ever so slightly menacing message (Laughter) on the back of the shirt. (Laughter) 
Just before I left New York I decided I could actually renovate my studio. 
And then just leave it all to them. 
And I don't have to do anything. 
So I looked for furniture. 
And it turned out that all the furniture that I really liked, I couldn't afford. 
And all the stuff I could afford, I didn't like. 
So one of the things that we pursued in Bali was pieces of furniture. 
This one, of course, still works with the wild dogs. 
It's not quite finished yet. 
And I think by the time this lamp came about, (Laughter) I had finally made peace with those dogs. (Laughter) 
Then there is a coffee table. I also did a coffee table. 
It's called Be Here Now. 
It includes 330 compasses. 
And we had custom espresso cups made that hide a magnet inside, and make those compasses go crazy, always centering on them. 
Then this is a fairly talkative, verbose kind of chair. 
I also started meditating for the first time in my life in Bali. 
And at the same time, I'm extremely aware how boring it is to hear about other people's happinesses. 
So I will not really go too far into it. 
Many of you will know this TEDster, Danny Gilbert, whose book, actually, I got it through the TED book club. 
I think it took me four years to finally read it, while on sabbatical. 
And I was pleased to see that he actually wrote the book while he was on sabbatical. 
And I'll show you a couple of people that did well by pursuing sabbaticals. 
This is Ferran Adria. Many people think he is right now the best chef in the world with his restaurant north of Barcelona, El Bulli. 
His restaurant is open seven months every year. 
He closes it down for five months to experiment with a full kitchen staff. 
His latest numbers are fairly impressive. 
He can seat, throughout the year, he can seat 8,000 people. 
And he has 2.2 million requests for reservations. 
If I look at my cycle, seven years, one year sabbatical, it's 12.5 percent of my time. 
And if I look at companies that are actually more successful than mine, 3M since the 1930s is giving all their engineers 15 percent to pursue whatever they want. 
There is some good successes. 
Scotch tape came out of this program, as well as Art Fry developed sticky notes from during his personal time for 3M. 
Google, of course, very famously gives 20 percent for their software engineers to pursue their own personal projects. 
Anybody in here has actually ever conducted a sabbatical? 
That's about five percent of everybody. 
So I'm not sure if you saw your neighbor putting their hand up. 
Talk to them about if it was successful or not. 
I've found that finding out about what I'm going to like in the future, my very best way is to talk to people who have actually done it much better than myself envisioning it. 
When I had the idea of doing one, the process was I made the decision and I put it into my daily planner book. 
And then I told as many, many people as I possibly could about it so that there was no way that I could chicken out later on. 
(Laughter) In the beginning, on the first sabbatical, it was rather disastrous. 
I had thought that I should do this without any plan, that this vacuum of time somehow would be wonderful and enticing for idea generation. It was not. 
I just, without a plan, I just reacted to little requests, not work requests, those I all said no to, but other little requests. 
Sending mail to Japanese design magazines and things like that. 
So I became my own intern. 
(Laughter) And I very quickly made a list of the things I was interested in, put them in a hierarchy, divided them into chunks of time and then made a plan, very much like in grade school. 
What does it say here? Monday, 8 to 9: story writing; 9 to 10: future thinking. 
Was not very successful. And so on and so forth. 
And that actually, specifically as a starting point of the first sabbatical, worked really well for me. 
What came out of it? 
I really got close to design again. 
I had fun. 
Financially, seen over the long term, it was actually successful. 
Because of the improved quality, we could ask for higher prices. 
And probably most importantly, basically everything we've done in the seven years following the first sabbatical came out of thinking of that one single year. 
And I'll show you a couple of projects that came out of the seven years following that sabbatical. 
One of the strands of thinking I was involved in was that sameness is so incredibly overrated. 
This whole idea that everything needs to be exactly the same works for a very very few strand of companies, and not for everybody else. 
We were asked to design an identity for Casa da Musica, the Rem Koolhaas-built music center in Porto, in Portugal. 
And even though I desired to do an identity that doesn't use the architecture, I failed at that. 
And mostly also because I realized out of a Rem Koolhaas presentation to the city of Porto, where he talked about a conglomeration of various layers of meaning. 
Which I understood after I translated it from architecture speech in to regular English, basically as logo making. 
And I understood that the building itself was a logo. 
So then it became quite easy. 
We put a mask on it, looked at it deep down in the ground, checked it out from all sides, west, north, south, east, top and bottom. 
Colored them in a very particular way by having a friend of mine write a piece of software, the Casa da Musica Logo Generator. 
That's connected to a scanner. 
You put any image in there, like that Beethoven image. 
And the software, in a second, will give you the Casa da Musica Beethoven logo. 
Which, when you actually have to design a Beethoven poster, comes in handy, because the visual information of the logo and the actual poster is exactly the same. 
So it will always fit together, conceptually, of course. 
If Zappa's music is performed, it gets its own logo. 
Or Philip Glass or Lou Reed or the Chemical Brothers, who all performed there, get their own Casa da Musica logo. 
It works the same internally with the president or the musical director, whose Casa da Musica portraits wind up on their business cards. 
There is a full-blown orchestra living inside the building. 
It has a more transparent identity. 
The truck they go on tour with. 
Or there's a smaller contemporary orchestra, 12 people that remixes its own title. 
And one of the handy things that came about was that you could take the logo type and create advertising out of it. 
Like this Donna Toney poster, or Chopin, or Mozart, or La Monte Young. 
You can take the shape and make typography out of it. 
You can grow it underneath the skin. 
You can have a poster for a family event in front of the house, or a rave underneath the house or a weekly program, as well as educational services. 
Second insight. So far, until that point I had been mostly involved or used the language of design for promotional purposes, which was fine with me. 
On one hand I have nothing against selling. 
My parents are both salespeople. 
But I did feel that I spent so much time learning this language, why do I only promote with it? 
There must be something else. 
And the whole series of work came out of it. 
Some of you might have seen it. 
I showed some of it at earlier TEDs before, under the title "" Things I've Learned in My Life So Far. "" I'll just show two now. 
This is a whole wall of bananas at different ripenesses on the opening day in this gallery in New York. 
It says, "" Self-confidence produces fine results. "" This is after a week. 
After two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks. 
And you see the self confidence almost comes back, but not quite. 
These are some pictures visitors sent to me. 
(Laughter) And then the city of Amsterdam gave us a plaza and asked us to do something. 
We used the stone plates as a grid for our little piece. 
We got 250,000 coins from the central bank, at different darknesses. 
So we got brand new ones, shiny ones, medium ones, and very old, dark ones. 
And with the help of 100 volunteers, over a week, created this fairly floral typography that spelled, "" Obsessions make my life worse and my work better. "" And the idea of course was to make the type so precious that as an audience you would be in between, "" Should I really take as much money as I can? 
Or should I leave the piece intact as it is right now? "" While we built all this up during that week, with the 100 volunteers, a good number of the neighbors surrounding the plaza got very close to it and quite loved it. 
So when it was finally done, and in the first night a guy came with big plastic bags and scooped up as many coins as he could possibly carry, one of the neighbors called the police. 
And the Amsterdam police in all their wisdom, came, saw, and they wanted to protect the artwork. 
And they swept it all up and put it into custody at police headquarters. 
(Laughter) I think you see, you see them sweeping. You see them sweeping right here. 
That's the police, getting rid of it all. 
So after eight hours that's pretty much all that was left of the whole thing. 
(Laughter) We are also working on the start of a bigger project in Bali. 
It's a movie about happiness. 
And here we asked some nearby pigs to do the titles for us. 
They weren't quite slick enough. 
So we asked the goose to do it again, and hoped she would do somehow, a more elegant or pretty job. 
And I think she overdid it. 
Just a bit too ornamental. 
And my studio is very close to the monkey forest. 
And the monkeys in that monkey forest looked, actually, fairly happy. 
So we asked those guys to do it again. 
They did a fine job, but had a couple of readability problems. 
So of course whatever you don't really do yourself doesn't really get done properly. 
That film we'll be working on for the next two years. 
So it's going to be a while. 
And of course you might think that doing a film on happiness might not really be worthwhile. 
Then you can of course always go and see this guy. 
Video: (Laughter) And I'm happy I'm alive. 
I'm happy I'm alive. I'm happy I'm alive. 
Stefan Sagmeister: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Twenty-five years ago, scientists at CERN created the World Wide Web. 
Since then, the Internet has transformed the way we communicate, the way we do business, and even the way we live. 
In many ways, the ideas that gave birth to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and so many others, have now really transformed our lives, and this has brought us many real benefits such as a more connected society. 
However, there are also some downsides to this. 
Today, the average person has an astounding amount of personal information online, and we add to this online information every single time we post on Facebook, each time we search on Google, and each time we send an email. 
Now, many of us probably think, well, one email, there's nothing in there, right? 
But if you consider a year's worth of emails, or maybe even a lifetime of email, collectively, this tells a lot. 
It tells where we have been, who we have met, and in many ways, even what we're thinking about. 
And the more scary part about this is our data now lasts forever, so your data can and will outlive you. 
What has happened is that we've largely lost control over our data and also our privacy. 
So this year, as the web turns 25, it's very important for us to take a moment and think about the implications of this. 
We've lost privacy, yes, but actually what we've also lost is the idea of privacy itself. 
If you think about it, most of us here today probably remember what life was like before the Internet, but today, there's a new generation that is being taught from a very young age to share everything online, and this is a generation that is not going to remember when data was private. 
So we keep going down this road, 20 years from now, the word 'privacy' is going to have a completely different meaning from what it means to you and I. 
So, it's time for us to take a moment and think, is there anything we can do about this? 
And I believe there is. 
Let's take a look at one of the most widely used forms of communication in the world today: email. 
Before the invention of email, we largely communicated using letters, and the process was quite simple. 
You would first start by writing your message on a piece of paper, then you would place it into a sealed envelope, and from there, you would go ahead and send it after you put a stamp and address on it. 
Unfortunately, today, when we actually send an email, we're not sending a letter. 
What you are sending, in many ways, is actually a postcard, and it's a postcard in the sense that everybody that sees it from the time it leaves your computer to when it gets to the recipient can actually read the entire contents. 
So, the solution to this has been known for some time, and there's many attempts to do it. 
The most basic solution is to use encryption, and the idea is quite simple. 
First, you encrypt the connection between your computer and the email server. 
Then, you also encrypt the data as it sits on the server itself. 
But there's a problem with this, and that is, the email servers also hold the encryption keys, so now you have a really big lock with a key placed right next to it. 
But not only that, any government could lawfully ask for and get the key to your data, and this is all without you being aware of it. 
So the way we fix this problem is actually relatively easy, in principle: You give everybody their own keys, and then you make sure the server doesn't actually have the keys. 
This seems like common sense, right? 
So the question that comes up is, why hasn't this been done yet? 
Well, if we really think about it, we see that the business model of the Internet today really isn't compatible with privacy. 
Just take a look at some of the biggest names on the web, and you see that advertising plays a huge role. 
In fact, this year alone, advertising is 137 billion dollars, and to optimize the ads that are shown to us, companies have to know everything about us. 
They need to know where we live, how old we are, what we like, what we don't like, and anything else they can get their hands on. 
And if you think about it, the best way to get this information is really just to invade our privacy. 
So these companies aren't going to give us our privacy. 
If we want to have privacy online, what we have to do is we've got to go out and get it ourselves. 
For many years, when it came to email, the only solution was something known as PGP, which was quite complicated and only accessible to the tech-savvy. 
Here's a diagram that basically shows the process for encrypting and decrypting messages. 
So needless to say, this is not a solution for everybody, and this actually is part of the problem, because if you think about communication, by definition, it involves having someone to communicate with. 
So while PGP does a great job of what it's designed to do, for the people out there who can't understand how to use it, the option to communicate privately simply does not exist. 
And this is a problem that we need to solve. 
So if we want to have privacy online, the only way we can succeed is if we get the whole world on board, and this is only possible if we bring down the barrier to entry. 
I think this is actually the key challenge that lies in the tech community. 
What we really have to do is work and make privacy more accessible. 
So last summer, when the Edward Snowden story came out, several colleagues and I decided to see if we could make this happen. 
At that time, we were working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research at the world's largest particle collider, which collides protons, by the way. 
We were all scientists, so we used our scientific creativity and came up with a very creative name for our project: ProtonMail. (Laughter) Many startups these days actually begin in people's garages or people's basements. 
We were a bit different. 
We started out at the CERN cafeteria, which actually is great, because look, you have all the food and water you could ever want. 
But even better than this is that every day between 12 p.m. and 2 p.m., free of charge, the CERN cafeteria comes with several thousand scientists and engineers, and these guys basically know the answers to everything. 
So it was in this environment that we began working. 
What we actually want to do is we want to take your email and turn it into something that looks more like this, but more importantly, we want to do it in a way that you can't even tell that it's happened. 
So to do this, we actually need a combination of technology and also design. 
So how do we go about doing something like this? 
Well, it's probably a good idea not to put the keys on the server. 
So what we do is we generate encryption keys on your computer, and we don't generate a single key, but actually a pair of keys, so there's an RSA private key and an RSA public key, and these keys are mathematically connected. 
So let's have a look and see how this works when multiple people communicate. 
So here we have Bob and Alice, who want to communicate privately. 
So the key challenge is to take Bob's message and to get it to Alice in such a way that the server cannot read that message. 
So what we have to do is we have to encrypt it before it even leaves Bob's computer, and one of the tricks is, we encrypt it using the public key from Alice. 
Now this encrypted data is sent through the server to Alice, and because the message was encrypted using Alice's public key, the only key that can now decrypt it is a private key that belongs to Alice, and it turns out Alice is the only person that actually has this key. 
So we've now accomplished the objective, which is to get the message from Bob to Alice without the server being able to read what's going on. 
Actually, what I've shown here is a highly simplified picture. 
The reality is much more complex and it requires a lot of software that looks a bit like this. 
And that's actually the key design challenge: How do we take all this complexity, all this software, and implement it in a way that the user cannot see it. 
I think with ProtonMail, we have gotten pretty close to doing this. 
So let's see how it works in practice. 
Here, we've got Bob and Alice again, who also want to communicate securely. 
They simply create accounts on ProtonMail, which is quite simple and takes a few moments, and all the key encryption and generation is happening automatically in the background as Bob is creating his account. 
Once his account is created, he just clicks "" compose, "" and now he can write his email like he does today. 
So he fills in his information, and then after that, all he has to do is click "" send, "" and just like that, without understanding cryptography, and without doing anything different from how he writes email today, Bob has just sent an encrypted message. 
What we have here is really just the first step, but it shows that with improving technology, privacy doesn't have to be difficult, it doesn't have to be disruptive. 
If we change the goal from maximizing ad revenue to protecting data, we can actually make it accessible. 
Now, I know a question on everybody's minds is, okay, protecting privacy, this is a great goal, but can you actually do this without the tons of money that advertisements give you? 
And I think the answer is actually yes, because today, we've reached a point where people around the world really understand how important privacy is, and when you have that, anything is possible. 
Earlier this year, ProtonMail actually had so many users that we ran out of resources, and when this happened, our community of users got together and donated half a million dollars. 
So this is just an example of what can happen when you bring the community together towards a common goal. 
We can also leverage the world. 
Right now, we have a quarter of a million people that have signed up for ProtonMail, and these people come from everywhere, and this really shows that privacy is not just an American or a European issue, it's a global issue that impacts all of us. 
It's something that we really have to pay attention to going forward. 
So what do we have to do to solve this problem? 
Well, first of all, we need to support a different business model for the Internet, one that does not rely entirely on advertisements for revenue and for growth. 
We actually need to build a new Internet where our privacy and our ability to control our data is first and foremost. 
But even more importantly, we have to build an Internet where privacy is no longer just an option but is also the default. 
We have done the first step with ProtonMail, but this is really just the first step in a very, very long journey. 
The good news I can share with you guys today, the exciting news, is that we're not traveling alone. 
The movement to protect people's privacy and freedom online is really gaining momentum, and today, there are dozens of projects from all around the world who are working together to improve our privacy. 
These projects protect things from our chat to voice communications, also our file storage, our online search, our online browsing, and many other things. 
And these projects are not backed by billions of dollars in advertising, but they've found support really from the people, from private individuals like you and I from all over the world. 
This really matters, because ultimately, privacy depends on each and every one of us, and we have to protect it now because our online data is more than just a collection of ones and zeros. 
It's actually a lot more than that. 
It's our lives, our personal stories, our friends, our families, and in many ways, also our hopes and our aspirations. 
We need to spend time now to really protect our right to share this only with people that we want to share this with, because without this, we simply can't have a free society. 
So now's the time for us to collectively stand up and say, yes, we do want to live in a world with online privacy, and yes, we can work together to turn this vision into a reality. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So a chip, a poet and a boy. 
It's just about 20 years ago, June 1994, when Intel announced that there was a flaw at the core of their Pentium chip. 
Deep in the code of the SRT algorithm to calculate intermediate quotients necessary for iterative floating points of divisions — I don't know what that means, but it's what it says on Wikipedia — there was a flaw and an error that meant that there was a certain probability that the result of the calculation would be an error, and the probability was one out of every 360 billion calculations. 
So Intel said your average spreadsheet would be flawed once every 27,000 years. 
They didn't think it was significant, but there was an outrage in the community. 
The community, the techies, said, this flaw has to be addressed. 
They were not going to stand by quietly as Intel gave them these chips. 
So there was a revolution across the world. 
People marched to demand — okay, not really exactly like that — but they rose up and they demanded that Intel fix the flaw. 
And Intel set aside 475 million dollars to fund the replacement of millions of chips to fix the flaw. 
So billions of dollars in our society was spent to address a problem which would come once out of every 360 billion calculations. 
Number two, a poet. 
This is Martin Niemöller. 
You're familiar with his poetry. 
Around the height of the Nazi period, he started repeating the verse, "" First they came for the communists, and I did nothing, did not speak out because I was not a communist. 
Then they came for the socialists. 
Then they came for the trade unions. 
Then they came for the Jews. 
And then they came for me. 
But there was no one left to speak for me. "" Now, Niemöller is offering a certain kind of insight. 
This is an insight at the core of intelligence. 
We could call it cluefulness. 
It's a certain kind of test: Can you recognize an underlying threat and respond? 
Can you save yourself or save your kind? 
Turns out ants are pretty good at this. 
Cows, not so much. 
So can you see the pattern? 
Can you see a pattern and then recognize and do something about it? Number two. 
Number three, a boy. 
This is my friend Aaron Swartz. 
He's Tim's friend. 
He's friends of many of you in this audience, and seven years ago, Aaron came to me with a question. 
It was just before I was going to give my first TED Talk. 
I was so proud. I was telling him about my talk, "Laws that choke creativity." 
And Aaron looked at me and was a little impatient, and he said, "" So how are you ever going to solve the problems you're talking about? 
Copyright policy, Internet policy, how are you ever going to address those problems so long as there's this fundamental corruption in the way our government works? "" So I was a little put off by this. 
He wasn't sharing in my celebration. 
And I said to him, "" You know, Aaron, it's not my field, not my field. "" He said, "" You mean as an academic, it's not your field? "" I said, "" Yeah, as an academic, it's not my field. "" He said, "" What about as a citizen? 
As a citizen. "" Now, this is the way Aaron was. 
He didn't tell. He asked questions. 
But his questions spoke as clearly as my four-year-old's hug. 
He was saying to me, "" You've got to get a clue. 
You have got to get a clue, because there is a flaw at the core of the operating system of this democracy, and it's not a flaw every one out of 360 billion times our democracy tries to make a decision. 
It is every time, every single important issue. 
We've got to end the bovinity of this political society. 
We've got to adopt, it turns out, the word is fourmi-formatic attitude — that's what the Internet tells me the word is — the ant's appreciative attitude that gets us to recognize this flaw, save our kind and save our demos. 
Now if you know Aaron Swartz, you know that we lost him just over a year ago. 
It was about six weeks before I gave my TED Talk, and I was so grateful to Chris that he asked me to give this TED Talk, not because I had the chance to talk to you, although that was great, but because it pulled me out of an extraordinary depression. 
I couldn't begin to describe the sadness. 
Because I had to focus. 
I had to focus on, what was I going to say to you? 
It saved me. 
But after the buzz, the excitement, the power that comes from this community, I began to yearn for a less sterile, less academic way to address these issues, the issues that I was talking about. 
We'd begun to focus on New Hampshire as a target for this political movement, because the primary in New Hampshire is so incredibly important. 
It was a group called the New Hampshire Rebellion that was beginning to talk about, how would we make this issue of this corruption central in 2016? 
But it was another soul that caught my imagination, a woman named Doris Haddock, aka Granny D. 
On January 1, 1999, 15 years ago, at the age of 88, Granny D started a walk. 
She started in Los Angeles and began to walk to Washington, D.C. 
with a single sign on her chest that said, "campaign finance reform." 
Eighteen months later, at the age of 90, she arrived in Washington with hundreds following her, including many congressmen who had gotten in a car and driven out about a mile outside of the city to walk in with her. 
(Laughter) Now, I don't have 13 months to walk across the country. 
I've got three kids who hate to walk, and a wife who, it turns out, still hates when I'm not there for mysterious reasons, so this was not an option, but the question I asked, could we remix Granny D a bit? 
What about a walk not of 3,200 miles but of 185 miles across New Hampshire in January? 
So on January 11, the anniversary of Aaron's death, we began a walk that ended on January 24th, the day that Granny D was born. 
A total of 200 people joined us across this walk, as we went from the very top to the very bottom of New Hampshire talking about this issue. 
And what was astonishing to me, something I completely did not expect to find, was the passion and anger that there was among everyone that we talked to about this issue. 
We had found in a poll that 96 percent of Americans believe it important to reduce the influence of money in politics. 
Now politicians and pundits tell you, there's nothing we can do about this issue, Americans don't care about it, but the reason for that is that 91 percent of Americans think there's nothing that can be done about this issue. 
And it's this gap between 96 and 91 that explains our politics of resignation. 
I mean, after all, at least 96 percent of us wish we could fly like Superman, but because at least 91 percent of us believe we can't, we don't leap off of tall buildings every time we have that urge. 
That's because we accept our limits, and so too with this reform. 
But when you give people the sense of hope, you begin to thaw that absolute sense of impossibility. 
As Harvey Milk said, if you give 'em hope, you give' em a chance, a way to think about how this change is possible. 
Hope. 
And hope is the one thing that we, Aaron's friends, failed him with, because we let him lose that sense of hope. 
I loved that boy like I love my son. 
But we failed him. 
And I love my country, and I'm not going to fail that. I'm not going to fail that. 
That sense of hope, we're going to hold, 
and we're going to fight for, however impossible this battle looks. 
What's next? 
Well, we started with this march with 200 people, and next year, there will be 1,000 on different routes that march in the month of January and meet in Concord to celebrate this cause, and then in 2016, before the primary, there will be 10,000 who march across that state, meeting in Concord to celebrate this cause. 
And as we have marched, people around the country have begun to say, "" Can we do the same thing in our state? "" So we've started a platform called G.D. Walkers, that is, Granny D walkers, and Granny D walkers across the country will be marching for this reform. Number one. 
Number two, on this march, one of the founders of Thunderclap, David Cascino, was with us, and he said, "" Well what can we do? "" And so they developed a platform, which we are announcing today, that allows us to pull together voters who are committed to this idea of reform. 
Regardless of where you are, in New Hampshire or outside of New Hampshire, you can sign up and directly be informed where the candidates are on this issue so you can decide who to vote for as a function of which is going to make this possibility real. 
And then finally number three, the hardest. 
Indeed yesterday, Merriam announced that Merriam-Webster will have Super PAC as a word. 
It is now an official word in the dictionary. 
So on May 1, aka May Day, we're going to try an experiment. 
We're going to try a launching of what we can think of as a Super PAC to end all Super PACs. 
And the basic way this works is this. 
For the last year, we have been working with analysts and political experts to calculate, how much would it cost to win enough votes in the United States Congress to make fundamental reform possible? 
What is that number? Half a billion? A billion? What is that number? 
And then whatever that number is, 
we are going to kickstart, sort of, because you can't use KickStarter for political work, but anyway, kickstart, sort of, first a bottom-up campaign where people will make small dollar commitments contingent on reaching very ambitious goals, and when those goals have been reached, we will turn to the large dollar contributors, to get them to contribute to make it possible for us to run the kind of Super PAC necessary to win this issue, to change the way money influences politics, so that on November 8, which I discovered yesterday is the day that Aaron would have been 30 years old, on November 8, 
we will celebrate 218 representatives in the House and 60 Senators in the United States Senate who have committed to this idea of fundamental reform. 
Here's my wish. 
May one. 
May the ideals of one boy unite one nation behind one critical idea that we are one people, we are the people who were promised a government, a government that was promised to be dependent upon the people alone, the people, who, as Madison told us, meant not the rich more than the poor. 
May one. 
And then may you, may you join this movement, not because you're a politician, not because you're an expert, not because this is your field, but because if you are, you are a citizen. 
Aaron asked me that. 
Now I've asked you. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Cancer affects all of us — especially the ones that come back over and over again, the highly invasive and drug-resistant ones, the ones that defy medical treatment, even when we throw our best drugs at them. 
Engineering at the molecular level, working at the smallest of scales, can provide exciting new ways to fight the most aggressive forms of cancer. 
Cancer is a very clever disease. 
There are some forms of cancer, which, fortunately, we've learned how to address relatively well with known and established drugs and surgery. 
But there are some forms of cancer that don't respond to these approaches, and the tumor survives or comes back, even after an onslaught of drugs. 
We can think of these very aggressive forms of cancer as kind of supervillains in a comic book. 
They're clever, they're adaptable, and they're very good at staying alive. 
And, like most supervillains these days, their superpowers come from a genetic mutation. 
The genes that are modified inside these tumor cells can enable and encode for new and unimagined modes of survival, allowing the cancer cell to live through even our best chemotherapy treatments. 
One example is a trick in which a gene allows a cell, even as the drug approaches the cell, to push the drug out, before the drug can have any effect. 
Imagine — the cell effectively spits out the drug. 
This is just one example of the many genetic tricks in the bag of our supervillain, cancer. 
All due to mutant genes. 
So, we have a supervillain with incredible superpowers. 
And we need a new and powerful mode of attack. 
Actually, we can turn off a gene. 
The key is a set of molecules known as siRNA. 
siRNA are short sequences of genetic code that guide a cell to block a certain gene. 
Each siRNA molecule can turn off a specific gene inside the cell. 
For many years since its discovery, scientists have been very excited about how we can apply these gene blockers in medicine. 
But, there is a problem. 
siRNA works well inside the cell. 
But if it gets exposed to the enzymes that reside in our bloodstream or our tissues, it degrades within seconds. 
It has to be packaged, protected through its journey through the body on its way to the final target inside the cancer cell. 
So, here's our strategy. 
First, we'll dose the cancer cell with siRNA, the gene blocker, and silence those survival genes, and then we'll whop it with a chemo drug. 
But how do we carry that out? 
Using molecular engineering, we can actually design a superweapon that can travel through the bloodstream. 
It has to be tiny enough to get through the bloodstream, it's got to be small enough to penetrate the tumor tissue, and it's got to be tiny enough to be taken up inside the cancer cell. 
To do this job well, it has to be about one one-hundredth the size of a human hair. 
Let's take a closer look at how we can build this nanoparticle. 
First, let's start with the nanoparticle core. 
It's a tiny capsule that contains the chemotherapy drug. 
This is the poison that will actually end the tumor cell's life. 
Around this core, we'll wrap a very thin, nanometers-thin blanket of siRNA. 
This is our gene blocker. 
Because siRNA is strongly negatively charged, we can protect it with a nice, protective layer of positively charged polymer. 
The two oppositely charged molecules stick together through charge attraction, and that provides us with a protective layer that prevents the siRNA from degrading in the bloodstream. 
We're almost done. 
(Laughter) But there is one more big obstacle we have to think about. 
In fact, it may be the biggest obstacle of all. 
How do we deploy this superweapon? 
I mean, every good weapon needs to be targeted, we have to target this superweapon to the supervillain cells that reside in the tumor. 
But our bodies have a natural immune-defense system: cells that reside in the bloodstream and pick out things that don't belong, so that it can destroy or eliminate them. 
And guess what? Our nanoparticle is considered a foreign object. 
We have to sneak our nanoparticle past the tumor defense system. 
We have to get it past this mechanism of getting rid of the foreign object by disguising it. 
So we add one more negatively charged layer around this nanoparticle, which serves two purposes. 
First, this outer layer is one of the naturally charged, highly hydrated polysaccharides that resides in our body. 
It creates a cloud of water molecules around the nanoparticle that gives us an invisibility cloaking effect. 
This invisibility cloak allows the nanoparticle to travel through the bloodstream long and far enough to reach the tumor, without getting eliminated by the body. 
Second, this layer contains molecules which bind specifically to our tumor cell. 
Once bound, the cancer cell takes up the nanoparticle, and now we have our nanoparticle inside the cancer cell and ready to deploy. 
Alright! I feel the same way. Let's go! 
(Applause) The siRNA is deployed first. 
It acts for hours, giving enough time to silence and block those survival genes. 
We have now disabled those genetic superpowers. 
What remains is a cancer cell with no special defenses. 
Then, the chemotherapy drug comes out of the core and destroys the tumor cell cleanly and efficiently. 
With sufficient gene blockers, we can address many different kinds of mutations, allowing the chance to sweep out tumors, without leaving behind any bad guys. 
So, how does our strategy work? 
We've tested these nanostructure particles in animals using a highly aggressive form of triple-negative breast cancer. 
This triple-negative breast cancer exhibits the gene that spits out cancer drug as soon as it is delivered. 
Usually, doxorubicin — let's call it "" dox "" — is the cancer drug that is the first line of treatment for breast cancer. 
So, we first treated our animals with a dox core, dox only. 
The tumor slowed their rate of growth, but they still grew rapidly, doubling in size over a period of two weeks. 
Then, we tried our combination superweapon. 
A nanolayer particle with siRNA against the chemo pump, plus, we have the dox in the core. 
And look — we found that not only did the tumors stop growing, they actually decreased in size and were eliminated in some cases. 
The tumors were actually regressing. 
(Applause) What's great about this approach is that it can be personalized. 
We can add many different layers of siRNA to address different mutations and tumor defense mechanisms. 
And we can put different drugs into the nanoparticle core. 
As doctors learn how to test patients and understand certain tumor genetic types, they can help us determine which patients can benefit from this strategy and which gene blockers we can use. 
Ovarian cancer strikes a special chord with me. 
It is a very aggressive cancer, in part because it's discovered at very late stages, when it's highly advanced and there are a number of genetic mutations. 
After the first round of chemotherapy, this cancer comes back for 75 percent of patients. 
And it usually comes back in a drug-resistant form. 
High-grade ovarian cancer is one of the biggest supervillains out there. 
And we're now directing our superweapon toward its defeat. 
As a researcher, I usually don't get to work with patients. 
But I recently met a mother who is an ovarian cancer survivor, Mimi, and her daughter, Paige. 
I was deeply inspired by the optimism and strength that both mother and daughter displayed and by their story of courage and support. 
At this event, we spoke about the different technologies directed at cancer. 
And Mimi was in tears as she explained how learning about these efforts gives her hope for future generations, including her own daughter. 
This really touched me. 
It's not just about building really elegant science. 
It's about changing people's lives. 
It's about understanding the power of engineering on the scale of molecules. 
I know that as students like Paige move forward in their careers, they'll open new possibilities in addressing some of the big health problems in the world — including ovarian cancer, neurological disorders, infectious disease — just as chemical engineering has found a way to open doors for me, and has provided a way of engineering on the tiniest scale, that of molecules, to heal on the human scale. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hi. So, this chap here, he thinks he can tell you the future. 
His name is Nostradamus, although here the Sun have made him look a little bit like Sean Connery. (Laughter) And like most of you, I suspect, I don't really believe that people can see into the future. 
I don't believe in precognition, and every now and then, you hear that somebody has been able to predict something that happened in the future, and that's probably because it was a fluke, and we only hear about the flukes and about the freaks. 
We don't hear about all the times that people got stuff wrong. 
Now we expect that to happen with silly stories about precognition, but the problem is, we have exactly the same problem in academia and in medicine, and in this environment, it costs lives. 
So firstly, thinking just about precognition, as it turns out, just last year a researcher called Daryl Bem conducted a piece of research where he found evidence of precognitive powers in undergraduate students, and this was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal and most of the people who read this just said, "" Okay, well, fair enough, but I think that's a fluke, that's a freak, because I know that if I did a study where I found no evidence that undergraduate students had precognitive powers, it probably wouldn't get published in a journal. 
And in fact, we know that that's true, because several different groups of research scientists tried to replicate the findings of this precognition study, and when they submitted it to the exact same journal, the journal said, "" No, we're not interested in publishing replication. We're not interested in your negative data. "" So this is already evidence of how, in the academic literature, we will see a biased sample of the true picture of all of the scientific studies that have been conducted. 
But it doesn't just happen in the dry academic field of psychology. 
It also happens in, for example, cancer research. 
So in March, 2012, just one month ago, some researchers reported in the journal Nature how they had tried to replicate 53 different basic science studies looking at potential treatment targets in cancer, and out of those 53 studies, they were only able to successfully replicate six. 
Forty-seven out of those 53 were unreplicable. 
And they say in their discussion that this is very likely because freaks get published. 
People will do lots and lots and lots of different studies, and the occasions when it works they will publish, and the ones where it doesn't work they won't. 
And their first recommendation of how to fix this problem, because it is a problem, because it sends us all down blind alleys, their first recommendation of how to fix this problem is to make it easier to publish negative results in science, and to change the incentives so that scientists are encouraged to post more of their negative results in public. 
But it doesn't just happen in the very dry world of preclinical basic science cancer research. 
It also happens in the very real, flesh and blood of academic medicine. So in 1980, some researchers did a study on a drug called lorcainide, and this was an anti-arrhythmic drug, a drug that suppresses abnormal heart rhythms, and the idea was, after people have had a heart attack, they're quite likely to have abnormal heart rhythms, so if we give them a drug that suppresses abnormal heart rhythms, this will increase the chances of them surviving. 
Early on its development, they did a very small trial, just under a hundred patients. 
Fifty patients got lorcainide, and of those patients, 10 died. 
Another 50 patients got a dummy placebo sugar pill with no active ingredient, and only one of them died. 
So they rightly regarded this drug as a failure, and its commercial development was stopped, and because its commercial development was stopped, this trial was never published. 
Unfortunately, over the course of the next five, 10 years, other companies had the same idea about drugs that would prevent arrhythmias in people who have had heart attacks. 
These drugs were brought to market. They were prescribed very widely because heart attacks are a very common thing, and it took so long for us to find out that these drugs also caused an increased rate of death that before we detected that safety signal, over 100,000 people died unnecessarily in America from the prescription of anti-arrhythmic drugs. 
Now actually, in 1993, the researchers who did that 1980 study, that early study, published a mea culpa, an apology to the scientific community, in which they said, "" When we carried out our study in 1980, we thought that the increased death rate that occurred in the lorcainide group was an effect of chance. "" The development of lorcainide was abandoned for commercial reasons, and this study was never published; it's now a good example of publication bias. 
That's the technical term for the phenomenon where unflattering data gets lost, gets unpublished, is left missing in action, and they say the results described here "might have provided an early warning of trouble ahead." 
Now these are stories from basic science. 
These are stories from 20, 30 years ago. 
The academic publishing environment is very different now. 
There are academic journals like "" Trials, "" the open access journal, which will publish any trial conducted in humans regardless of whether it has a positive or a negative result. 
But this problem of negative results that go missing in action is still very prevalent. In fact it's so prevalent that it cuts to the core of evidence-based medicine. 
So this is a drug called reboxetine, and this is a drug that I myself have prescribed. It's an antidepressant. 
And I'm a very nerdy doctor, so I read all of the studies that I could on this drug. I read the one study that was published that showed that reboxetine was better than placebo, and I read the other three studies that were published that showed that reboxetine was just as good as any other antidepressant, and because this patient hadn't done well on those other antidepressants, I thought, well, reboxetine is just as good. It's one to try. 
But it turned out that I was misled. In fact, seven trials were conducted comparing reboxetine against a dummy placebo sugar pill. One of them was positive and that was published, but six of them were negative and they were left unpublished. 
Three trials were published comparing reboxetine against other antidepressants in which reboxetine was just as good, and they were published, but three times as many patients' worth of data was collected which showed that reboxetine was worse than those other treatments, and those trials were not published. 
I felt misled. 
Now you might say, well, that's an extremely unusual example, and I wouldn't want to be guilty of the same kind of cherry-picking and selective referencing that I'm accusing other people of. 
But it turns out that this phenomenon of publication bias has actually been very, very well studied. 
So here is one example of how you approach it. 
The classic model is, you get a bunch of studies where you know that they've been conducted and completed, and then you go and see if they've been published anywhere in the academic literature. So this took all of the trials that had ever been conducted on antidepressants that were approved over a 15-year period by the FDA. 
They took all of the trials which were submitted to the FDA as part of the approval package. 
So that's not all of the trials that were ever conducted on these drugs, because we can never know if we have those, but it is the ones that were conducted in order to get the marketing authorization. 
And then they went to see if these trials had been published in the peer-reviewed academic literature. And this is what they found. 
It was pretty much a 50-50 split. Half of these trials were positive, half of them were negative, in reality. 
But when they went to look for these trials in the peer-reviewed academic literature, what they found was a very different picture. 
Only three of the negative trials were published, but all but one of the positive trials were published. 
Now if we just flick back and forth between those two, you can see what a staggering difference there was between reality and what doctors, patients, commissioners of health services, and academics were able to see in the peer-reviewed academic literature. 
We were misled, and this is a systematic flaw in the core of medicine. 
In fact, there have been so many studies conducted on publication bias now, over a hundred, that they've been collected in a systematic review, published in 2010, that took every single study on publication bias that they could find. 
Publication bias affects every field of medicine. 
About half of all trials, on average, go missing in action, and we know that positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. 
This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine. 
If I flipped a coin 100 times but then withheld the results from you from half of those tosses, I could make it look as if I had a coin that always came up heads. 
But that wouldn't mean that I had a two-headed coin. 
That would mean that I was a chancer and you were an idiot for letting me get away with it. (Laughter) But this is exactly what we blindly tolerate in the whole of evidence-based medicine. 
And to me, this is research misconduct. 
If I conducted one study and I withheld half of the data points from that one study, you would rightly accuse me, essentially, of research fraud. 
And yet, for some reason, if somebody conducts 10 studies but only publishes the five that give the result that they want, we don't consider that to be research misconduct. 
And when that responsibility is diffused between a whole network of researchers, academics, industry sponsors, journal editors, for some reason we find it more acceptable, but the effect on patients is damning. 
And this is happening right now, today. 
This is a drug called Tamiflu. Tamiflu is a drug which governments around the world have spent billions and billions of dollars on stockpiling, and we've stockpiled Tamiflu in panic, in the belief that it will reduce the rate of complications of influenza. 
Complications is a medical euphemism for pneumonia and death. (Laughter) Now when the Cochrane systematic reviewers were trying to collect together all of the data from all of the trials that had ever been conducted on whether Tamiflu actually did this or not, they found that several of those trials were unpublished. 
The results were unavailable to them. 
And when they started obtaining the writeups of those trials through various different means, through Freedom of Information Act requests, through harassing various different organizations, what they found was inconsistent. 
And when they tried to get a hold of the clinical study reports, the 10,000-page long documents that have the best possible rendition of the information, they were told they weren't allowed to have them. 
And if you want to read the full correspondence and the excuses and the explanations given by the drug company, you can see that written up in this week's edition of PLOS Medicine. 
And the most staggering thing of all of this, to me, is that not only is this a problem, not only do we recognize that this is a problem, but we've had to suffer fake fixes. 
We've had people pretend that this is a problem that's been fixed. 
First of all, we had trials registers, and everybody said, oh, it's okay. We'll get everyone to register their trials, they'll post the protocol, they'll say what they're going to do before they do it, and then afterwards we'll be able to check and see if all the trials which have been conducted and completed have been published. 
But people didn't bother to use those registers. 
And so then the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors came along, and they said, oh, well, we will hold the line. 
We won't publish any journals, we won't publish any trials, unless they've been registered before they began. 
But they didn't hold the line. In 2008, a study was conducted which showed that half of all of trials published by journals edited by members of the ICMJE weren't properly registered, and a quarter of them weren't registered at all. 
And then finally, the FDA Amendment Act was passed a couple of years ago saying that everybody who conducts a trial must post the results of that trial within one year. 
And in the BMJ, in the first edition of January, 2012, you can see a study which looks to see if people kept to that ruling, and it turns out that only one in five have done so. 
This is a disaster. 
We cannot know the true effects of the medicines that we prescribe if we do not have access to all of the information. 
And this is not a difficult problem to fix. 
We need to force people to publish all trials conducted in humans, including the older trials, because the FDA Amendment Act only asks that you publish the trials conducted after 2008, and I don't know what world it is in which we're only practicing medicine on the basis of trials that completed in the past two years. 
We need to publish all trials in humans, including the older trials, for all drugs in current use, and you need to tell everyone you know that this is a problem and that it has not been fixed. 
Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause) 

I want to talk about sex for money. 
I'm not like most of the people you'll have heard speaking about prostitution before. 
I'm not a police officer or a social worker. 
I'm not an academic, a journalist or a politician. 
And as you'll probably have picked up from Maryam's blurb, I'm not a nun, either. 
(Laughter) Most of those people would tell you that selling sex is degrading; that no one would ever choose to do it; that it's dangerous; women get abused and killed. 
In fact, most of those people would say, "There should be a law against it!" 
Maybe that sounds reasonable to you. 
It sounded reasonable to me until the closing months of 2009, when I was working two dead-end, minimum-wage jobs. 
Every month my wages would just replenish my overdraft. 
I was exhausted and my life was going nowhere. 
Like many others before me, I decided sex for money was a better option. 
Now don't get me wrong — I would have loved to have won the lottery instead. 
But it wasn't going to happen anytime soon, and my rent needed paying. 
So I signed up for my first shift in a brothel. 
In the years that have passed, I've had a lot of time to think. 
I've reconsidered the ideas I once had about prostitution. 
I've given a lot of thought to consent and the nature of work under capitalism. 
I've thought about gender inequality and the sexual and reproductive labor of women. 
I've experienced exploitation and violence at work. 
I've thought about what's needed to protect other sex workers from these things. 
Maybe you've thought about them, too. 
In this talk, I'll take you through the four main legal approaches applied to sex work throughout the world, and explain why they don't work; why prohibiting the sex industry actually exacerbates every harm that sex workers are vulnerable to. 
Then I'm going tell you about what we, as sex workers, actually want. 
The first approach is full criminalization. 
Half the world, including Russia, South Africa and most of the US, regulates sex work by criminalizing everyone involved. 
So that's seller, buyer and third parties. 
Lawmakers in these countries apparently hope that the fear of getting arrested will deter people from selling sex. 
But if you're forced to choose between obeying the law and feeding yourself or your family, you're going to do the work anyway, and take the risk. 
It's hard to get a conventional job when you have a criminal record. 
Assuming you still need money, you'll stay in the more flexible, informal economy. 
The law forces you to keep selling sex, which is the exact opposite of its intended effect. 
Being criminalized leaves you exposed to mistreatment by the state itself. 
In many places you may be coerced into paying a bribe or even into having sex with a police officer to avoid arrest. 
Police and prison guards in Cambodia, for example, have been documented subjecting sex workers to what can only be described as torture: threats at gunpoint, beatings, electric shocks, rape and denial of food. 
Another worrying thing: if you're selling sex in places like Kenya, South Africa or New York, a police officer can arrest you if you're caught carrying condoms, because condoms can legally be used as evidence that you're selling sex. 
Obviously, this increases HIV risk. 
Imagine knowing if you're busted carrying condoms, it'll be used against you. 
It's a pretty strong incentive to leave them at home, right? 
Sex workers working in these places are forced to make a tough choice between risking arrest or having risky sex. 
What would you choose? 
Would you pack condoms to go to work? 
How about if you're worried the police officer would rape you when he got you in the van? 
The second approach to regulating sex work seen in these countries is partial criminalization, where the buying and selling of sex are legal, but surrounding activities, like brothel-keeping or soliciting on the street, are banned. 
Laws like these — we have them in the UK and in France — essentially say to us sex workers, "" Hey, we don't mind you selling sex, just make sure it's done behind closed doors and all alone. "" And brothel-keeping, by the way, is defined as just two or more sex workers working together. 
Making that illegal means that many of us work alone, which obviously makes us vulnerable to violent offenders. 
But we're also vulnerable if we choose to break the law by working together. 
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine was nervous after she was attacked at work, so I said that she could see her clients from my place for a while. 
During that time, we had another guy turn nasty. 
I told the guy to leave or I'd call the police. 
And he looked at the two of us and said, "" You girls can't call the cops. 
You're working together, this place is illegal. "" He was right. 
He eventually left without getting physically violent, but the knowledge that we were breaking the law empowered that man to threaten us. 
He felt confident he'd get away with it. 
The prohibition of street prostitution also causes more harm than it prevents. 
Firstly, to avoid getting arrested, street workers take risks to avoid detection, and that means working alone or in isolated locations like dark forests where they're vulnerable to attack. 
If you're caught selling sex outdoors, you pay a fine. 
How do you pay that fine without going back to the streets? 
It was the need for money that saw you in the streets in the first place. 
And so the fines stack up, and you're caught in a vicious cycle of selling sex to pay the fines you got for selling sex. 
Let me tell you about Mariana Popa who worked in Redbridge, East London. 
The street workers on her patch would normally wait for clients in groups for safety in numbers and to warn each other about how to avoid dangerous guys. 
But during a police crackdown on sex workers and their clients, she was forced to work alone to avoid being arrested. 
She was stabbed to death in the early hours of October 29, 2013. 
She had been working later than usual to try to pay off a fine she had received for soliciting. 
So if criminalizing sex workers hurts them, why not just criminalize the people who buy sex? 
This is the aim of the third approach I want to talk about — the Swedish or Nordic model of sex-work law. 
The idea behind this law is that selling sex is intrinsically harmful and so you're, in fact, helping sex workers by removing the option. 
Despite growing support for what's often described as the "" end demand "" approach, there's no evidence that it works. 
There's just as much prostitution in Sweden as there was before. 
Why might that be? 
It's because people selling sex often don't have other options for income. 
If you need that money, the only effect that a drop in business is going have is to force you to lower your prices or offer more risky sexual services. 
If you need to find more clients, you might seek the help of a manager. 
So you see, rather than putting a stop to what's often descried as pimping, a law like this actually gives oxygen to potentially abusive third parties. 
To keep safe in my work, I try not to take bookings from someone who calls me from a withheld number. 
If it's a home or a hotel visit, I try to get a full name and details. 
If I worked under the Swedish model, a client would be too scared to give me that information. 
I might have no other choice but to accept a booking from a man who is untraceable if he later turns out to be violent. 
If you need their money, you need to protect your clients from the police. 
If you work outdoors, that means working alone or in isolated locations, just as if you were criminalized yourself. 
It might mean getting into cars quicker, less negotiating time means snap decisions. 
Is this guy dangerous or just nervous? 
Can you afford to take the risk? 
Can you afford not to? 
Something I'm often hearing is, "" Prostitution would be fine if we made it legal and regulated it. "" We call that approach legalization, and it's used by countries like the Netherlands, Germany and Nevada in the US. 
But it's not a great model for human rights. 
And in state-controlled prostitution, commercial sex can only happen in certain legally-designated areas or venues, and sex workers are made to comply with special restrictions, like registration and forced health checks. 
Regulation sounds great on paper, but politicians deliberately make regulation around the sex industry expensive and difficult to comply with. 
It creates a two-tiered system: legal and illegal work. 
We sometimes call it "" backdoor criminalization. "" Rich, well-connected brothel owners can comply with the regulations, but more marginalized people find those hoops impossible to jump through. 
And even if it's possible in principle, getting a license or proper venue takes time and costs money. 
It's not going to be an option for someone who's desperate and needs money tonight. 
They might be a refugee or fleeing domestic abuse. 
In this two-tiered system, the most vulnerable people are forced to work illegally, so they're still exposed to all the dangers of criminalization I mentioned earlier. 
So. 
It's looking like all attempts to control or prevent sex work from happening makes things more dangerous for people selling sex. 
Fear of law enforcement makes them work alone in isolated locations, and allows clients and even cops to get abusive in the knowledge they'll get away with it. 
Fines and criminal records force people to keep selling sex, rather than enabling them to stop. 
Crackdowns on buyers drive sellers to take dangerous risks and into the arms of potentially abusive managers. 
These laws also reinforce stigma and hatred against sex workers. 
When France temporarily brought in the Swedish model two years ago, ordinary citizens took it as a cue to start carrying out vigilante attacks against people working on the street. 
In Sweden, opinion surveys show that significantly more people want sex workers to be arrested now than before the law was brought in. 
If prohibition is this harmful, you might ask, why it so popular? 
Firstly, sex work is and always has been a survival strategy for all kinds of unpopular minority groups: people of color, migrants, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, particularly trans women. 
These are the groups most heavily profiled and punished through prohibitionist law. 
I don't think this is an accident. 
These laws have political support precisely because they target people that voters don't want to see or know about. 
Why else might people support prohibition? 
Well, lots of people have understandable fears about trafficking. 
Folks think that foreign women kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery can be saved by shutting a whole industry down. 
So let's talk about trafficking. 
Forced labor does occur in many industries, especially those where the workers are migrants or otherwise vulnerable, and this needs to be addressed. 
But it's best addressed with legislation targeting those specific abuses, not an entire industry. 
When 23 undocumented Chinese migrants drowned while picking cockles in Morecambe Bay in 2004, there were no calls to outlaw the entire seafood industry to save trafficking victims. 
The solution is clearly to give workers more legal protections, allowing them to resist abuse and report it to authorities without fear of arrest. 
The way the term trafficking is thrown around implies that all undocumented migration into prostitution is forced. 
In fact, many migrants have made a decision, out of economic need, to place themselves into the hands of people smugglers. 
Many do this with the full knowledge that they'll be selling sex when they reach their destination. 
And yes, it can often be the case that these people smugglers demand exorbitant fees, coerce migrants into work they don't want to do and abuse them when they're vulnerable. 
That's true of prostitution, but it's also true of agricultural work, hospitality work and domestic work. 
Ultimately, nobody wants to be forced to do any kind of work, but that's a risk many migrants are willing to take, because of what they're leaving behind. 
If people were allowed to migrate legally they wouldn't have to place their lives into the hands of people smugglers. 
The problems arise from the criminalization of migration, just as they do from the criminalization of sex work itself. 
This is a lesson of history. 
If you try to prohibit something that people want or need to do, whether that's drinking alcohol or crossing borders or getting an abortion or selling sex, you create more problems than you solve. 
Prohibition barely makes a difference to the amount of people actually doing those things. 
But it makes a huge difference as to whether or not they're safe when they do them. 
Why else might people support prohibition? 
As a feminist, I know that the sex industry is a site of deeply entrenched social inequality. 
It's a fact that most buyers of sex are men with money, and most sellers are women without. 
You can agree with all that — I do — and still think prohibition is a terrible policy. 
In a better, more equal world, maybe there would be far fewer people selling sex to survive, but you can't simply legislate a better world into existence. 
If someone needs to sell sex because they're poor or because they're homeless or because they're undocumented and they can't find legal work, taking away that option doesn't make them any less poor or house them or change their immigration status. 
People worry that selling sex is degrading. 
Ask yourself: is it more degrading than going hungry or seeing your children go hungry? 
There's no call to ban rich people from hiring nannies or getting manicures, even though most of the people doing that labor are poor, migrant women. 
It's the fact of poor migrant women selling sex specifically that has some feminists uncomfortable. 
And I can understand why the sex industry provokes strong feelings. 
People have all kinds of complicated feelings when it comes to sex. 
But we can't make policy on the basis of mere feelings, especially not over the heads of the people actually effected by those policies. 
If we get fixated on the abolition of sex work, we end up worrying more about a particular manifestation of gender inequality, rather than about the underlying causes. 
People get really hung up on the question, "Well, would you want your daughter doing it?" 
That's the wrong question. 
Instead, imagine she is doing it. 
How safe is she at work tonight? 
Why isn't she safer? 
So we've looked at full criminalization, partial criminalization, the Swedish or Nordic Model and legalization, and how they all cause harm. 
Something I never hear asked is: "What do sex workers want?" 
After all, we're the ones most affected by these laws. 
New Zealand decriminalized sex work in 2003. 
It's crucial to remember that decriminalization and legalization are not the same thing. 
Decriminalization means the removal of laws that punitively target the sex industry, instead treating sex work much like any other kind of work. 
In New Zealand, people can work together for safety, and employers of sex workers are accountable to the state. 
A sex worker can refuse to see a client at any time, for any reason, and 96 percent of street workers report that they feel the law protects their rights. 
New Zealand hasn't actually seen an increase in the amount of people doing sex work, but decriminalizing it has made it a lot safer. 
But the lesson from New Zealand isn't just that its particular legislation is good, but that crucially, it was written in collaboration with sex workers; namely, the New Zealand Prostitutes' Collective. 
When it came to making sex work safer, they were ready to hear it straight from sex workers themselves. 
Here in the UK, I'm part of sex worker-led groups like the Sex Worker Open University and the English Collective of Prostitutes. 
And we form part of a global movement demanding decriminalization and self-determination. 
The universal symbol of our movement is the red umbrella. 
We're supported in our demands by global bodies like UNAIDS, the World Health Organization and Amnesty International. 
But we need more allies. 
If you care about gender equality or poverty or migration or public health, then sex worker rights matter to you. 
Make space for us in your movements. 
That means not only listening to sex workers when we speak but amplifying our voices. 
Resist those who silence us, those who say that a prostitute is either too victimized, too damaged to know what's best for herself, or else too privileged and too removed from real hardship, not representative of the millions of voiceless victims. 
This distinction between victim and empowered is imaginary. 
It exists purely to discredit sex workers and make it easy to ignore us. 
No doubt many of you work for a living. 
Well, sex work is work, too. 
Just like you, some of us like our jobs, some of us hate them. 
Ultimately, most of us have mixed feelings. 
But how we feel about our work isn't the point. 
And how others feel about our work certainly isn't. 
What's important is that we have the right to work safely and on our own terms. 
Sex workers are real people. 
We've had complicated experiences and complicated responses to those experiences. 
But our demands are not complicated. 
You can ask expensive escorts in New York City, brothel workers in Cambodia, street workers in South Africa and every girl on the roster at my old job in Soho, and they will all tell you the same thing. 
You can speak to millions of sex workers and countless sex work-led organizations. 
We want full decriminalization and labor rights as workers. 
I'm just one sex worker on the stage today, but I'm bringing a message from all over the world. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I was three months pregnant with twins when my husband Ross and I went to my second sonogram. 
I was 35 years old at the time, and I knew that that meant we had a higher risk of having a child with a birth defect. 
So, Ross and I researched the standard birth defects, and we felt reasonably prepared. 
Well, nothing would have prepared us for the bizarre diagnosis that we were about to face. 
The doctor explained that one of our twins, Thomas, had a fatal birth defect called anencephaly. 
This means that his brain was not formed correctly because part of his skull was missing. 
Babies with this diagnosis typically die in utero or within a few minutes, hours or days of being born. 
But the other twin, Callum, appeared to be healthy, as far as the doctor could tell, and these twins were identical, genetically identical. 
So after a lot of questions about how this could have possibly happened, a selective reduction was mentioned, and while this procedure was not impossible, it posed some unique risks for the healthy twin and for me, so we decided to carry the pregnancy to term. 
So there I was, three months pregnant, with two trimesters ahead of me, and I had to find a way to manage my blood pressure and my stress. 
And it felt like having a roommate point a loaded gun at you for six months. 
But I stared down the barrel of that gun for so long that I saw a light at the end of the tunnel. 
While there was nothing we could do to prevent the tragedy, I wanted to find a way for Thomas's brief life to have some kind of positive impact. 
So I asked my nurse about organ, eye and tissue donation. 
She connected with our local organ-procurement organization, the Washington Regional Transplant Community. 
WRTC explained to me that Thomas would probably be too small at birth to donate for transplant, and I was shocked: I didn't even know you could be rejected for that. 
But they said that he would be a good candidate to donate for research. 
This helped me see Thomas in a new light. 
As opposed to just a victim of a disease, I started to see him as a possible key to unlock a medical mystery. 
On March 23, 2010, the twins were born, and they were both born alive. 
And just like the doctor said, Thomas was missing the top part of his skull, but he could nurse, drink from a bottle, cuddle and grab our fingers like a normal baby, and he slept in our arms. 
After six days, Thomas died in Ross's arms surrounded by our family. 
We called WRTC, who sent a van to our home and brought him to Children's National Medical Center. 
A few hours later, we got a call to say that the recovery was a success, and Thomas's donations would be going to four different places. 
His cord blood would go to Duke University. 
His liver would go to a cell-therapy company called Cytonet in Durham. 
His corneas would go to Schepens Eye Research Institute, which is part of Harvard Medical School, and his retinas would go to the University of Pennsylvania. 
A few days later, we had a funeral with our immediate family, including baby Callum, and we basically closed this chapter in our lives. 
But I did find myself wondering, what's happening now? 
What are the researchers learning? 
And was it even worthwhile to donate? 
WRTC invited Ross and I to a grief retreat, and we met about 15 other grieving families who had donated their loved one's organs for transplant. 
Some of them had even received letters from the people who received their loved one's organs, saying thank you. 
I learned that they could even meet each other if they'd both sign a waiver, almost like an open adoption. 
And I was so excited, I thought maybe I could write a letter or I could get a letter and learn about what happened. 
But I was disappointed to learn that this process only exists for people who donate for transplant. 
So I was jealous. I had transplant envy, I guess. 
(Laughter) But over the years that followed, I learned a lot more about donation, and I even got a job in the field. 
And I came up with an idea. 
I wrote a letter that started out, "Dear Researcher." 
I explained who I was, and I asked if they could tell me why they requested infant retinas in March of 2010, and I asked if my family could visit their lab. 
I emailed it to the eye bank that arranged the donation, the Old Dominion Eye Foundation, and asked if they could send it to the right person. 
They said that they had never done this before, and they couldn't guarantee a response, but they wouldn't be an obstacle, and they would deliver it. 
Two days later, I got a response from Dr. Arupa Ganguly of the University of Pennsylvania. 
She thanked me for the donation, and she explained that she is studying retinoblastoma, which is a deadly cancer of the retina that affects children under the age of five, and she said that yes, we were invited to visit her lab. 
So next we talked on the phone, and one of the first things she said to me was that she couldn't possibly imagine how we felt, and that Thomas had given the ultimate sacrifice, and that she seemed to feel indebted to us. 
So I said, "" Nothing against your study, but we didn't actually pick it. 
We donated to the system, and the system chose your study. 
I said, "" And second of all, bad things happen to children every day, and if you didn't want these retinas, they would probably be buried in the ground right now. 
So to be able to participate in your study gives Thomas's life a new layer of meaning. 
So, never feel guilty about using this tissue. "" Next, she explained to me how rare it was. 
She had placed a request for this tissue six years earlier with the National Disease Research Interchange. 
She got only one sample of tissue that fit her criteria, and it was Thomas's. 
Next, we arranged a date for me to come visit the lab, and we chose March 23, 2015, which was the twins' fifth birthday. 
After we hung up, I emailed her some pictures of Thomas and Callum, and a few weeks later, we received this T-shirt in the mail. 
A few months later, Ross, Callum and I piled in the car and we went for a road trip. 
We met Arupa and her staff, and Arupa said that when I told her not to feel guilty, that it was a relief, and that she hadn't seen it from our perspective. 
She also explained that Thomas had a secret code name. 
The same way Henrietta Lacks is called HeLa, Thomas was called RES 360. 
RES means research, and 360 means he was the 360th specimen over the course of about 10 years. 
She also shared with us a unique document, and it was the shipping label that sent his retinas from DC to Philadelphia. 
This shipping label is like an heirloom to us now. 
It's the same way that a military medal or a wedding certificate might be. 
Arupa also explained that she is using Thomas's retina and his RNA to try to inactivate the gene that causes tumor formation, and she even showed us some results that were based on RES 360. 
Then she took us to the freezer and she showed us the two samples that she still has that are still labeled RES 360. 
There's two little ones left. 
She said she saved it because she doesn't know when she might get more. 
After this, we went to the conference room and we relaxed and we had lunch together, and the lab staff presented Callum with a birthday gift. 
It was a child's lab kit. 
And they also offered him an internship. 
(Laughter) So in closing, I have two simple messages today. 
One is that most of us probably don't think about donating to research. 
I know I didn't. I think I'm a normal person. 
But I did it. 
It was a good experience, and I recommend it, and it brought my family a lot of peace. 
And second is if you work with human tissue and you wonder about the donor and about the family, write them a letter. 
Tell them you received it, tell them what you're working on, and invite them to visit your lab, because that visit may be even more gratifying for you than it is for them. 
And I'd also like to ask you a favor. 
If you're ever successful in arranging one of these visits, please tell me about it. 
The other part of my family's story is that we ended up visiting all four facilities that received Thomas's donations. 
And we met amazing people doing inspiring work. 
The way I see it now is that Thomas got into Harvard, Duke and Penn — (Laughter) And he has a job at Cytonet, and he has colleagues and he has coworkers who are in the top of their fields. 
And they need him in order to do their job. 
And a life that once seemed brief and insignificant revealed itself to be vital, everlasting and relevant. 
And I only hope that my life can be as relevant. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hello, my name is Thomas Heatherwick. 
I have a studio in London that has a particular approach to designing buildings. 
When I was growing up, I was exposed to making and crafts and materials and invention on a small scale. 
And I was there looking at the larger scale of buildings and finding that the buildings that were around me and that were being designed and that were there in the publications I was seeing felt soulless and cold. 
And there on the smaller scale, the scale of an earring or a ceramic pot or a musical instrument, was a materiality and a soulfulness. 
And this influenced me. 
The first building I built was 20 years ago. 
And since, in the last 20 years, I've developed a studio in London. 
Sorry, this was my mother, by the way, in her bead shop in London. 
I spent a lot of time counting beads and things like that. 
I'm just going to show, for people who don't know my studio's work, a few projects that we've worked on. 
This is a hospital building. 
This is a shop for a bag company. 
This is studios for artists. 
This is a sculpture made from a million yards of wire and 150,000 glass beads the size of a golf ball. 
And this is a window display. 
And this is pair of cooling towers for an electricity substation next to St. Paul's Cathedral in London. 
And this is a temple in Japan for a Buddhist monk. 
And this is a cafe by the sea in Britain. 
And just very quickly, something we've been working on very recently is we were commissioned by the mayor of London to design a new bus that gave the passenger their freedom again. 
Because the original Routemaster bus that some of you may be familiar with, which had this open platform at the back — in fact, I think all our Routemasters are here in California now actually. 
And so you're stuck on a bus. 
And if the bus is going to stop and it's three yards away from the bus stop, you're just a prisoner. 
But the mayor of London wanted to reintroduce buses with this open platform. 
So we've been working with Transport for London, and that organization hasn't actually been responsible as a client for a new bus for 50 years. 
And so we've been very lucky to have a chance to work. 
The brief is that the bus should use 40 percent less energy. 
So it's got hybrid drive. 
And we've been working to try to improve everything from the fabric to the format and structure and aesthetics. 
I was going to show four main projects. 
And this is a project for a bridge. 
And so we were commissioned to design a bridge that would open. 
And openings seemed — everyone loves opening bridges, but it's quite a basic thing. 
I think we all kind of stand and watch. 
But the bridges that we saw that opened and closed — I'm slightly squeamish — but I once saw a photograph of a footballer who was diving for a ball. 
And as he was diving, someone had stamped on his knee, and it had broken like this. 
And then we looked at these kinds of bridges and just couldn't help feeling that it was a beautiful thing that had broken. 
And so this is in Paddington in London. 
But instead of what it is, our focus was on the way it worked. 
(Applause) So we liked the idea that the two farthest bits of it would end up kissing each other. (Applause) 
A project that we've been working on very recently is to design a new biomass power station — so a power station that uses organic waste material. 
In the news, the subject of where our future water is going to come from and where our power is going to come from is in all the papers all the time. 
But recently, any annual report of a power company doesn't have a power station on it. 
It has a child running through a field, or something like that. 
And instead, we had to learn — we kind of forced them to teach us. 
And so we spent time traveling with them and learning about all the different elements, and finding that there were plenty of inefficiencies that weren't being capitalized on. 
So we looked at how we could compose all those elements — instead of just litter, create one composition. 
And what we found — this area is one of the poorest parts of Britain. 
It has a symbolic importance. 
And we should be proud of where our power is coming from, rather than something we are necessarily ashamed of. 
So we were looking at how we could make a power station, that, instead of keeping people out and having a big fence around the outside, could be a place that pulls you in. 
And it has to be — I'm trying to get my — 250 feet high. 
So it felt that what we could try to do is make a power park and actually bring the whole area in, and using the spare soil that's there on the site, we could make a power station that was silent as well. 
Because just that soil could make the acoustic difference. 
And we also found that we could make a more efficient structure and have a cost-effective way of making a structure to do this. 
The finished project is meant to be more than just a power station. 
It has a space where you could have a bar mitzvah at the top. 
(Laughter) So we won the competition to build the U.K. pavilion. 
So there are up to a million people there everyday. 
And 250 countries all competing. 
So our sense was we had to do one thing, and only one thing, instead of trying to have everything. 
And the world's first public park of modern times was in Britain. 
And the world's first major botanical institution is in London, and they have this extraordinary project where they've been collecting 25 percent of all the world's plant species. 
So we suddenly realized that there was this thing. 
And everyone agrees that trees are beautiful, and I've never met anyone who says, "" I don't like trees. "" And the same with flowers. 
I've never met anyone who says, "" I don't like flowers. "" But we realized that seeds — there's been this very serious project happening — but that seeds — at these major botanical gardens, seeds aren't on show. 
But you just have to go to a garden center, and they're in little paper packets. 
So we realized we had to make a project that would be seeds, some kind of seed cathedral. 
And the film "" Jurassic Park "" actually really helped us. 
Because the DNA of the dinosaur that was trapped in the amber gave us some kind of clue that these tiny things could be trapped and be made to seem precious, rather than looking like nuts. 
So the challenge was, how are we going to bring light and expose these things? 
We didn't want to make a separate building and have separate content. 
So we were trying to think, how could we make a whole thing emanate. 
So that was also in the mix with the site the size of a football pitch. 
And so there was one particular toy that gave us a clue. 
(Video) Voice Over: The new Play-Doh Mop Top Hair Shop. 
Song: ♫ We've got the Mop Tops, the Play-Doh Mop Tops ♫ ♫ Just turn the chair and grow Play-Doh hair ♫ ♫ They're the Mop Tops ♫ Thomas Heatherwick: Okay, you get the idea. 
So the idea was to take these 66,000 seeds that they agreed to give us, and to take each seed and trap it in this precious optical hair and grow that through this box, very simple box element, and make it a building that could move in the wind. 
So the whole thing can gently move when the wind blows. 
And inside, the daylight — each one is an optic and it brings light into the center. 
And by night, artificial light in each one emanates and comes out to the outside. 
And to make the project affordable, we focused our energy. 
And the government agreed to do that and not do anything else, and focus our energy on that. 
And so the rest of the site was a public space. 
And with a million people there a day, it just felt like offering some public space. 
We worked with an AstroTurf manufacturer to develop a mini-me version of the seed cathedral, so that, even if you're partially-sighted, that it was kind of crunchy and soft, that piece of landscape that you see there. 
And inside there's nothing; there's no famous actor's voice; there's no projections; there's no televisions; there's no color changing. 
There's just silence and a cool temperature. 
And if a cloud goes past, you can see a cloud on the tips where it's letting the light through. 
This is the only project that we've done where the finished thing looked more like a rendering than our renderings. 
(Laughter) A key thing was how people would interact. 
The British government — any government is potentially the worst client in the world you could ever possibly want to have. 
And there was a lot of terror. 
But there was an underlying support. 
And so there was a moment when suddenly — actually, the next thing. 
This is the head of U.K. Trade and Investment, who was our client, with the Chinese children, using the landscape. 
(Video) Children: One, two, three, go. 
(Laughter) TH: I'm sorry about my stupid voice there. (Laughter) 
So finally, texture is something. 
In the projects we've been working on, these slick buildings, where they might be a fancy shape, but the materiality feels the same, is something that we've been trying to research really, and explore alternatives. 
And the project that we're building in Malaysia is apartment buildings for a property developer. 
And the conventional thing with apartment buildings in this part of the world is you have your tower, and you squeeze a few trees around the edge, and you see cars parked. 
It's actually only the first couple of floors that you really experience, and the rest of it is just for postcards. 
The lowest value is actually the bottom part of a tower like this. 
So if we could chop that away and give the building a small bottom, we could take that bit and put it at the top where the greater commercial value is for a property developer. 
And by linking these together, we could have 90 percent of the site as a rainforest, instead of only 10 percent of scrubby trees and bits of road around buildings. 
(Applause) So we're building these buildings. 
They're actually identical, so it's quite cost-effective. 
But the key part is trying to give back an extraordinary piece of landscape, rather than engulf it. 
And that's my final slide. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
June Cohen: So thank you. Thank you, Thomas. You're a delight. 
This optic was 22 feet long. 
And so the daylight was just coming — it was caught on the outside of the box and was coming down to illuminate each seed. 
Waterproofing the building was a bit crazy. 
Because it's quite hard to waterproof buildings anyway, but if you say you're going to drill 66,000 holes in it — we had quite a time. 
There was one person in the contractors who was the right size — and it wasn't a child — who could fit between them for the final waterproofing of the building. 

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

My subject today is learning. 
And in that spirit, I want to spring on you all a pop quiz. 
Ready? 
When does learning begin? 
Now as you ponder that question, maybe you're thinking about the first day of preschool or kindergarten, the first time that kids are in a classroom with a teacher. 
Or maybe you've called to mind the toddler phase when children are learning how to walk and talk and use a fork. 
Maybe you've encountered the Zero-to-Three movement, which asserts that the most important years for learning are the earliest ones. 
And so your answer to my question would be: Learning begins at birth. 
Well today I want to present to you an idea that may be surprising and may even seem implausible, but which is supported by the latest evidence from psychology and biology. 
And that is that some of the most important learning we ever do happens before we're born, while we're still in the womb. 
Now I'm a science reporter. 
I write books and magazine articles. 
And I'm also a mother. 
And those two roles came together for me in a book that I wrote called "" Origins. "" "" Origins "" is a report from the front lines of an exciting new field called fetal origins. 
Fetal origins is a scientific discipline that emerged just about two decades ago, and it's based on the theory that our health and well-being throughout our lives is crucially affected by the nine months we spend in the womb. 
Now this theory was of more than just intellectual interest to me. 
I was myself pregnant while I was doing the research for the book. 
And one of the most fascinating insights I took from this work is that we're all learning about the world even before we enter it. 
When we hold our babies for the first time, we might imagine that they're clean slates, unmarked by life, when in fact, they've already been shaped by us and by the particular world we live in. 
Today I want to share with you some of the amazing things that scientists are discovering about what fetuses learn while they're still in their mothers' bellies. 
First of all, they learn the sound of their mothers' voices. 
Because sounds from the outside world have to travel through the mother's abdominal tissue and through the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus, the voices fetuses hear, starting around the fourth month of gestation, are muted and muffled. 
One researcher says that they probably sound a lot like the the voice of Charlie Brown's teacher in the old "" Peanuts "" cartoon. 
But the pregnant woman's own voice reverberates through her body, reaching the fetus much more readily. 
And because the fetus is with her all the time, it hears her voice a lot. 
Once the baby's born, it recognizes her voice and it prefers listening to her voice over anyone else's. 
How can we know this? 
Newborn babies can't do much, but one thing they're really good at is sucking. 
Researchers take advantage of this fact by rigging up two rubber nipples, so that if a baby sucks on one, it hears a recording of its mother's voice on a pair of headphones, and if it sucks on the other nipple, it hears a recording of a female stranger's voice. 
Babies quickly show their preference by choosing the first one. 
Scientists also take advantage of the fact that babies will slow down their sucking when something interests them and resume their fast sucking when they get bored. 
This is how researchers discovered that, after women repeatedly read aloud a section of Dr. Seuss' "" The Cat in the Hat "" while they were pregnant, their newborn babies recognized that passage when they hear it outside the womb. 
My favorite experiment of this kind is the one that showed that the babies of women who watched a certain soap opera every day during pregnancy recognized the theme song of that show once they were born. 
So fetuses are even learning about the particular language that's spoken in the world that they'll be born into. 
A study published last year found that from birth, from the moment of birth, babies cry in the accent of their mother's native language. 
French babies cry on a rising note while German babies end on a falling note, imitating the melodic contours of those languages. 
Now why would this kind of fetal learning be useful? 
It may have evolved to aid the baby's survival. 
From the moment of birth, the baby responds most to the voice of the person who is most likely to care for it — its mother. 
It even makes its cries sound like the mother's language, which may further endear the baby to the mother, and which may give the baby a head start in the critical task of learning how to understand and speak its native language. 
But it's not just sounds that fetuses are learning about in utero. 
It's also tastes and smells. 
By seven months of gestation, the fetus' taste buds are fully developed, and its olfactory receptors, which allow it to smell, are functioning. 
The flavors of the food a pregnant woman eats find their way into the amniotic fluid, which is continuously swallowed by the fetus. 
Babies seem to remember and prefer these tastes once they're out in the world. 
In one experiment, a group of pregnant women was asked to drink a lot of carrot juice during their third trimester of pregnancy, while another group of pregnant women drank only water. 
Six months later, the women's infants were offered cereal mixed with carrot juice, and their facial expressions were observed while they ate it. 
The offspring of the carrot juice drinking women ate more carrot-flavored cereal, and from the looks of it, they seemed to enjoy it more. 
A sort of French version of this experiment was carried out in Dijon, France where researchers found that mothers who consumed food and drink flavored with licorice-flavored anise during pregnancy showed a preference for anise on their first day of life, and again, when they were tested later, on their fourth day of life. 
Babies whose mothers did not eat anise during pregnancy showed a reaction that translated roughly as "" yuck. "" What this means is that fetuses are effectively being taught by their mothers about what is safe and good to eat. 
Fetuses are also being taught about the particular culture that they'll be joining through one of culture's most powerful expressions, which is food. 
They're being introduced to the characteristic flavors and spices of their culture's cuisine even before birth. 
Now it turns out that fetuses are learning even bigger lessons. 
But before I get to that, I want to address something that you may be wondering about. 
The notion of fetal learning may conjure up for you attempts to enrich the fetus — like playing Mozart through headphones placed on a pregnant belly. 
But actually, the nine-month-long process of molding and shaping that goes on in the womb is a lot more visceral and consequential than that. 
Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life — the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she's exposed to, even the emotions she feels — are shared in some fashion with her fetus. 
They make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself. 
The fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood. 
And often it does something more. 
It treats these maternal contributions as information, as what I like to call biological postcards from the world outside. 
So what a fetus is learning about in utero is not Mozart's "" Magic Flute "" but answers to questions much more critical to its survival. 
Will it be born into a world of abundance or scarcity? 
Will it be safe and protected, or will it face constant dangers and threats? 
Will it live a long, fruitful life or a short, harried one? 
The pregnant woman's diet and stress level in particular provide important clues to prevailing conditions like a finger lifted to the wind. 
The resulting tuning and tweaking of a fetus' brain and other organs are part of what give us humans our enormous flexibility, our ability to thrive in a huge variety of environments, from the country to the city, from the tundra to the desert. 
To conclude, I want to tell you two stories about how mothers teach their children about the world even before they're born. 
In the autumn of 1944, the darkest days of World War II, German troops blockaded Western Holland, turning away all shipments of food. 
The opening of the Nazi's siege was followed by one of the harshest winters in decades — so cold the water in the canals froze solid. 
Soon food became scarce, with many Dutch surviving on just 500 calories a day — a quarter of what they consumed before the war. 
As weeks of deprivation stretched into months, some resorted to eating tulip bulbs. 
By the beginning of May, the nation's carefully rationed food reserve was completely exhausted. 
The specter of mass starvation loomed. 
And then on May 5th, 1945, the siege came to a sudden end when Holland was liberated by the Allies. 
The "" Hunger Winter, "" as it came to be known, killed some 10,000 people and weakened thousands more. 
But there was another population that was affected — the 40,000 fetuses in utero during the siege. 
Some of the effects of malnutrition during pregnancy were immediately apparent in higher rates of stillbirths, birth defects, low birth weights and infant mortality. 
But others wouldn't be discovered for many years. 
Decades after the "" Hunger Winter, "" researchers documented that people whose mothers were pregnant during the siege have more obesity, more diabetes and more heart disease in later life than individuals who were gestated under normal conditions. 
These individuals' prenatal experience of starvation seems to have changed their bodies in myriad ways. 
They have higher blood pressure, poorer cholesterol profiles and reduced glucose tolerance — a precursor of diabetes. 
Why would undernutrition in the womb result in disease later? 
One explanation is that fetuses are making the best of a bad situation. 
When food is scarce, they divert nutrients towards the really critical organ, the brain, and away from other organs like the heart and liver. 
This keeps the fetus alive in the short-term, but the bill comes due later on in life when those other organs, deprived early on, become more susceptible to disease. 
But that may not be all that's going on. 
It seems that fetuses are taking cues from the intrauterine environment and tailoring their physiology accordingly. 
They're preparing themselves for the kind of world they will encounter on the other side of the womb. 
The fetus adjusts its metabolism and other physiological processes in anticipation of the environment that awaits it. 
And the basis of the fetus' prediction is what its mother eats. 
The meals a pregnant woman consumes constitute a kind of story, a fairy tale of abundance or a grim chronicle of deprivation. 
This story imparts information that the fetus uses to organize its body and its systems — an adaptation to prevailing circumstances that facilitates its future survival. 
Faced with severely limited resources, a smaller-sized child with reduced energy requirements will, in fact, have a better chance of living to adulthood. 
The real trouble comes when pregnant women are, in a sense, unreliable narrators, when fetuses are led to expect a world of scarcity and are born instead into a world of plenty. 
This is what happened to the children of the Dutch "" Hunger Winter. "" And their higher rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease are the result. 
Bodies that were built to hang onto every calorie found themselves swimming in the superfluous calories of the post-war Western diet. 
The world they had learned about while in utero was not the same as the world into which they were born. 
Here's another story. 
At 8: 46 a.m. on September 11th, 2001, there were tens of thousands of people in the vicinity of the World Trade Center in New York — commuters spilling off trains, waitresses setting tables for the morning rush, brokers already working the phones on Wall Street. 
1,700 of these people were pregnant women. 
When the planes struck and the towers collapsed, many of these women experienced the same horrors inflicted on other survivors of the disaster — the overwhelming chaos and confusion, the rolling clouds of potentially toxic dust and debris, the heart-pounding fear for their lives. 
About a year after 9 / 11, researchers examined a group of women who were pregnant when they were exposed to the World Trade Center attack. 
In the babies of those women who developed post-traumatic stress syndrome, or PTSD, following their ordeal, researchers discovered a biological marker of susceptibility to PTSD — an effect that was most pronounced in infants whose mothers experienced the catastrophe in their third trimester. 
In other words, the mothers with post-traumatic stress syndrome had passed on a vulnerability to the condition to their children while they were still in utero. 
Now consider this: post-traumatic stress syndrome appears to be a reaction to stress gone very wrong, causing its victims tremendous unnecessary suffering. 
But there's another way of thinking about PTSD. 
What looks like pathology to us may actually be a useful adaptation in some circumstances. 
In a particularly dangerous environment, the characteristic manifestations of PTSD — a hyper-awareness of one's surroundings, a quick-trigger response to danger — could save someone's life. 
The notion that the prenatal transmission of PTSD risk is adaptive is still speculative, but I find it rather poignant. 
It would mean that, even before birth, mothers are warning their children that it's a wild world out there, telling them, "" Be careful. "" Let me be clear. 
Fetal origins research is not about blaming women for what happens during pregnancy. 
It's about discovering how best to promote the health and well-being of the next generation. 
That important effort must include a focus on what fetuses learn during the nine months they spend in the womb. 
Learning is one of life's most essential activities, and it begins much earlier than we ever imagined. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When I was growing up, I really liked playing hide-and-seek a lot. 
One time, though, I thought climbing a tree would lead to a great hiding spot, but I fell and broke my arm. 
I actually started first grade with a big cast all over my torso. 
It was taken off six weeks later, but even then, I couldn't extend my elbow, and I had to do physical therapy to flex and extend it, 100 times per day, seven days per week. 
I barely did it, because I found it boring and painful, and as a result, it took me another six weeks to get better. 
Many years later, my mom developed frozen shoulder, which leads to pain and stiffness in the shoulder. 
The person I believed for half of my life to have superpowers suddenly needed help to get dressed or to cut food. 
She went each week to physical therapy, but just like me, she barely followed the home treatment, and it took her over five months to feel better. 
Both my mom and I required physical therapy, a process of doing a suite of repetitive exercises in order to regain the range of movement lost due to an accident or injury. 
At first, a physical therapist works with patients, but then it's up to the patients to do their exercises at home. 
But patients find physical therapy boring, frustrating, confusing and lengthy before seeing results. 
Sadly, patient noncompliance can be as high as 70 percent. 
This means the majority of patients don't do their exercises and therefore take a lot longer to get better. 
All physical therapists agree that special exercises reduce the time needed for recovery, but patients lack the motivation to do them. 
So together with three friends, all of us software geeks, we asked ourselves, wouldn't it be interesting if patients could play their way to recovery? 
We started building MIRA, A P.C. software platform that uses this Kinect device, a motion capture camera, to transform traditional exercises into video games. 
My physical therapist has already set up a schedule for my particular therapy. 
Let's see how this looks. 
The first game asks me to fly a bee up and down to gather pollen to deposit in beehives, all while avoiding the other bugs. 
I control the bee by doing elbow extension and flexion, just like when I was seven years old after the cast was taken off. 
When designing a game, we speak to physical therapists at first to understand what movement patients need to do. 
We then make that a video game to give patients simple, motivating objectives to follow. 
But the software is very customizable, and physical therapists can also create their own exercises. 
Using the software, my physical therapist recorded herself performing a shoulder abduction, which is one of the movements my mom had to do when she had frozen shoulder. 
I can follow my therapist's example on the left side of the screen, while on the right, I see myself doing the recommended movement. 
I feel more engaged and confident, as I'm exercising alongside my therapist with the exercises my therapist thinks are best for me. 
This basically extends the application for physical therapists to create whatever exercises they think are best. 
This is an auction house game for preventing falls, designed to strengthen muscles and improve balance. 
As a patient, I need to do sit and stand movements, and when I stand up, I bid for the items I want to buy. 
(Laughter) In two days, my grandmother will be 82 years old, and there's a 50 percent chance for people over 80 to fall at least once per year, which could lead to a broken hip or even worse. 
Poor muscle tone and impaired balance are the number one cause of falls, so reversing these problems through targeted exercise will help keep older people like my grandmother safer and independent for longer. 
When my schedule ends, MIRA briefly shows me how I progressed throughout my session. 
I have just shown you three different games for kids, adults and seniors. 
These can be used with orthopedic or neurologic patients, but we'll soon have options for children with autism, mental health or speech therapy. 
My physical therapist can go back to my profile and see the data gathered during my sessions. 
She can see how much I moved, how many points I scored, with what speed I moved my joints, and so on. 
My physical therapist can use all of this to adapt my treatment. 
I'm so pleased this version is now in use in over 10 clinics across Europe and the U.S., and we're working on the home version. 
We want to enable physical therapists to prescribe this digital treatment and help patients play their way to recovery at home. 
If my mom or I had a tool like this when we needed physical therapy, then we would have been more successful following the treatment, and perhaps gotten better a lot sooner. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Tom Rielly: So Cosmin, tell me what hardware is this that they're rapidly putting away? 
What is that made of, and how much does it cost? 
Cosmin Milhau: So it's a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 for the demo, but you just need a computer and a Kinect, which is 120 dollars. 
TR: Right, and the Kinect is the thing that people use for their Xboxes to do 3D games, right? 
CM: Exactly, but you don't need the Xbox, you only need a camera. 
TR: Right, so this is less than a $1,000 solution. 
CM: Definitely, 400 dollars, you can definitely use it. 
TR: So right now, you're doing clinical trials in clinics. 
CM: Yes. 
TR: And then the hope is to get it so it's a home version and I can do my exercise remotely, and the therapist at the clinic can see how I'm doing and stuff like that. 
CM: Exactly. 
TR: Cool. Thanks so much. CM: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

It's not very good. It's cluttered. 
They're not very well-designed. 
And the tools, the resources that we use to build a game layer, are game dynamics themselves. 
And so the crux of this presentation is going to go through four really important game dynamics, really interesting things, that, if you use consciously, you can use to influence behavior, both for good, for bad, for in-between. 
They own half a billion people. 
I mean, we want to build frameworks in a way that makes it acceptable and makes it productive down the road. 
And this is so powerful that when they tweak their stats, when they say your crops wilt after eight hours, or after six hours, or after 24 hours, it changes the life cycle of some 70 million people during the day. 
It's used in your wallets, right now. 
And you see someone at CVS or — not CVS — like, Christian Dior — (Laughter) I don't know. I don't have a black card; I've got a debit card. (Laughter) 
And that's very powerful to me. 
It can be used in interesting ways. 
This is used all over the place, including LinkedIn, where I am an unwhole individual. 
And this is so deep-seated in our psyche that when we're presented with a progress bar and presented with easy, granular steps to take to try and complete that progress bar, we will do it. 
And if you were going to fight Orcs on the fields of Mordor against the Ra's Al Ghul, you'd probably want to be the bigger one, right? 
The final one I want to talk about — and it's a great one to end on — is this concept of communal discovery, a dynamic in which everyone has to work together to achieve something. 
Digg is a communal dynamic to try to find and source the best news, the most interesting stories. 
And they made this into a game, initially. 
But it became so powerful, there was actually a cabal, a group of people, the top seven on the leader board, who would work together to make sure they maintained that position, recommending people's stories. 
They ended up shutting down the leader board because, while it was effective, it was so powerful that it stopped sourcing the best stories, and started having people work to maintain leadership. 
And so, I've got about 20 seconds left, so if I'm going to leave you with anything, last decade was the decade of social. 
We use game dynamics to build on it. We build with mindshare. 

When we use the word "" architect "" or "" designer, "" what we usually mean is a professional, someone who gets paid, and we tend to assume that it's those professionals who are going to be the ones to help us solve the really big, systemic design challenges that we face like climate change, urbanization and social inequality. 
That's our kind of working presumption. 
And I think it's wrong, actually. 
In 2008, I was just about to graduate from architecture school after several years, and go out and get a job, and this happened. 
The economy ran out of jobs. 
And a couple of things struck me about this. 
One, don't listen to career advisers. 
And two, actually this is a fascinating paradox for architecture, which is that, as a society, we've never needed design thinking more, and yet architecture was literally becoming unemployed. 
It strikes me that we talk very deeply about design, but actually there's an economics behind architecture that we don't talk about, and I think we need to. 
And a good place to start is your own paycheck. 
So, as a bottom-of-the-rung architecture graduate, I might expect to earn about 24,000 pounds. 
That's about 36,000, 37,000 dollars. 
Now in terms of the whole world's population, that already puts me in the top 1.95 richest people, which raises the question of, who is it I'm working for? 
The uncomfortable fact is that actually almost everything that we call architecture today is actually the business of designing for about the richest one percent of the world's population, and it always has been. 
The reason why we forgot that is because the times in history when architecture did the most to transform society were those times when, actually, the one percent would build on behalf of the 99 percent, for various different reasons, whether that was through philanthropy in the 19th century, communism in the early 20th, the welfare state, and most recently, of course, through this inflated real estate bubble. 
And all of those booms, in their own various ways, have now kicked the bucket, and we're back in this situation where the smartest designers and architects in the world are only really able to work for one percent of the population. 
Now it's not just that that's bad for democracy, though I think it probably is, it's actually not a very clever business strategy, actually. 
I think the challenge facing the next generation of architects is, how are we going to turn our client from the one percent to the 100 percent? 
And I want to offer three slightly counterintuitive ideas for how it might be done. 
The first is, I think we need to question this idea that architecture is about making buildings. 
Actually, a building is about the most expensive solution you can think of to almost any given problem. 
And fundamentally, design should be much, much more interested in solving problems and creating new conditions. 
So here's a story. 
The office was working with a school, and they had an old Victorian school building. 
And they said to the architects, "" Look, our corridors are an absolute nightmare. 
They're far too small. They get congested between classes. 
There's bullying. We can't control them. 
So what we want you to do is re-plan our entire building, and we know it's going to cost several million pounds, but we're reconciled to the fact. "" And the team thought about this, and they went away, and they said, "" Actually, don't do that. 
Instead, get rid of the school bell. 
And instead of having one school bell that goes off once, have several smaller school bells that go off in different places and different times, distribute the traffic through the corridors. "" It solves the same problem, but instead of spending several million pounds, you spend several hundred pounds. 
Now, it looks like you're doing yourself out of a job, but you're not. You're actually making yourself more useful. 
Architects are actually really, really good at this kind of resourceful, strategic thinking. 
And the problem is that, like a lot of design professions, we got fixated on the idea of providing a particular kind of consumer product, and I don't think that needs to be the case anymore. 
The second idea worth questioning is this 20th-century thing that mass architecture is about big — big buildings and big finance. 
Actually, we've got ourselves locked into this Industrial Era mindset which says that the only people who can make cities are large organizations or corporations who build on our behalf, procuring whole neighborhoods in single, monolithic projects, and of course, form follows finance. 
So what you end up with are single, monolithic neighborhoods based on this kind of one-size-fits-all model. 
And a lot of people can't even afford them. 
But what if, actually, it's possible now for cities to be made not just by the few with a lot but also by the many with a bit? 
And when they do, they bring with them a completely different set of values about the place that they want to live. 
And it raises really interesting questions about, how will we plan cities? How will finance development? 
How will we sell design services? 
What would it mean for democratic societies to offer their citizens a right to build? 
And in a way it should be kind of obvious, right, that in the 21st century, maybe cities can be developed by citizens. 
And thirdly, we need to remember that, from a strictly economic point of view, design shares a category with sex and care of the elderly — mostly it's done by amateurs. 
And that's a good thing. 
Most of the work takes place outside of the monetary economy in what's called the social economy or the core economy, which is people doing it for themselves. 
And the problem is that, up until now, it was the monetary economy which had all the infrastructure and all the tools. 
So the challenge we face is, how are we going to build the tools, the infrastructure and the institutions for architecture's social economy? 
And that began with open-source software. 
And over the last few years, it's been moving into the physical world with open-source hardware, which are freely shared blueprints that anyone can download and make for themselves. 
And that's where 3D printing gets really, really interesting. 
Right? When suddenly you had a 3D printer that was open-source, the parts for which could be made on another 3D printer. 
Or the same idea here, which is for a CNC machine, which is like a large printer that can cut sheets of plywood. 
What these technologies are doing is radically lowering the thresholds of time and cost and skill. 
They're challenging the idea that if you want something to be affordable it's got to be one-size-fits-all. 
And they're distributing massively really complex manufacturing capabilities. 
We're moving into this future where the factory is everywhere, and increasingly that means that the design team is everyone. 
That really is an industrial revolution. 
And when we think that the major ideological conflicts that we inherited were all based around this question of who should control the means of production, and these technologies are coming back with a solution: actually, maybe no one. All of us. 
And we were fascinated by what that might mean for architecture. 
So about a year and a half ago, we started working on a project called WikiHouse, and WikiHouse is an open-source construction system. 
And the idea is to make it possible for anyone to go online, access a freely shared library of 3D models which they can download and adapt in, at the moment, SketchUp, because it's free, and it's easy to use, and almost at the click of a switch they can generate a set of cutting files which allow them, in effect, to print out the parts from a house using a CNC machine and a standard sheet material like plywood. 
And the parts are all numbered, and basically what you end up with is a really big IKEA kit. 
(Laughter) And it goes together without any bolts. 
It uses wedge and peg connections. 
And even the mallets to make it can be provided on the cutting sheets as well. 
And a team of about two or three people, working together, can build this. 
They don't need any traditional construction skills. 
They don't need a huge array of power tools or anything like that, and they can build a small house of about this size in about a day. 
(Applause) And what you end up with is just the basic chassis of a house onto which you can then apply systems like windows and cladding and insulation and services based on what's cheap and what's available. 
Of course, the house is never finished. 
We're shifting our heads here, so the house is not a finished product. 
With the CNC machine, you can make new parts for it over its life or even use it to make the house next door. 
So we can begin to see the seed of a completely open-source, citizen-led urban development model, potentially. 
And we and others have built a few prototypes around the world now, and some really interesting lessons here. 
One of them is that it's always incredibly sociable. 
People get confused between construction work and having fun. 
But the principles of openness go right down into the really mundane, physical details. 
Like, never designing a piece that can't be lifted up. 
Or, when you're designing a piece, make sure you either can't put it in the wrong way round, or, if you do, it doesn't matter, because it's symmetrical. 
Probably the principal which runs deepest with us is the principal set out by Linus Torvalds, the open-source pioneer, which was that idea of, "" Be lazy like a fox. "" Don't reinvent the wheel every time. 
Take what already works, and adapt it for your own needs. 
Contrary to almost everything that you might get taught at an architecture school, copying is good. 
Which is appropriate, because actually, this approach is not innovative. 
It's actually how we built buildings for hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution in these sorts of community barn-raisings. 
The only difference between traditional vernacular architecture and open-source architecture might be a web connection, but it's a really, really big difference. 
We shared the whole of WikiHouse under a Creative Commons license, and now what's just beginning to happen is that groups around the world are beginning to take it and use it and hack it and tinker with it, and it's amazing. 
There's a cool group over in Christchurch in New Zealand looking at post-earthquake development housing, and thanks to the TED city Prize, we're working with an awesome group in one of Rio's favelas to set up a kind of community factory and micro-university. 
These are very, very small beginnings, and actually there's more people in the last week who have got in touch and they're not even on this map. 
I hope next time you see it, you won't even be able to see the map. 
We're aware that WikiHouse is a very, very small answer, but it's a small answer to a really, really big question, which is that globally, right now, the fastest-growing cities are not skyscraper cities. 
They're self-made cities in one form or another. 
If we're talking about the 21st-century city, these are the guys who are going to be making it. 
You know, like it or not, welcome to the world's biggest design team. 
So if we're serious about problems like climate change, urbanization and health, actually, our existing development models aren't going to do it. 
As I think Robert Neuwirth said, there isn't a bank or a corporation or a government or an NGO who's going to be able to do it if we treat citizens only as consumers. 
How extraordinary would it be, though, if collectively we were to develop solutions not just to the problem of structure that we've been working on, but to infrastructure problems like solar-powered air conditioning, off-grid energy, off-grid sanitation — low-cost, open-source, high-performance solutions that anyone can very, very easily make, and to put them all into a commons where they're owned by everyone and they're accessible by everyone? 
A kind of Wikipedia for stuff? 
And once something's in the commons, it will always be there. 
How much would that change the rules? 
And I think the technology's on our side. 
If design's great project in the 20th century was the democratization of consumption — that was Henry Ford, Levittown, Coca-Cola, IKEA — I think design's great project in the 21st century is the democratization of production. 
And when it comes to architecture in cities, that really matters. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

As an architect, I often ask myself, what is the origin of the forms that we design? 
What kind of forms could we design if we wouldn't work with references anymore? 
If we had no bias, if we had no preconceptions, what kind of forms could we design if we could free ourselves from our experience? 
If we could free ourselves from our education? 
What would these unseen forms look like? 
Would they surprise us? Would they intrigue us? 
Would they delight us? 
If so, then how can we go about creating something that is truly new? 
I propose we look to nature. 
Nature has been called the greatest architect of forms. 
And I'm not saying that we should copy nature, I'm not saying we should mimic biology, instead I propose that we can borrow nature's processes. 
We can abstract them and to create something that is new. 
Nature's main process of creation, morphogenesis, is the splitting of one cell into two cells. 
And these cells can either be identical, or they can be distinct from each other through asymmetric cell division. 
If we abstract this process, and simplify it as much as possible, then we could start with a single sheet of paper, one surface, and we could make a fold and divide the surface into two surfaces. 
We're free to choose where we make the fold. 
And by doing so, we can differentiate the surfaces. 
Through this very simple process, we can create an astounding variety of forms. 
Now, we can take this form and use the same process to generate three-dimensional structures, but rather than folding things by hand, we'll bring the structure into the computer, and code it as an algorithm. 
And in doing so, we can suddenly fold anything. 
We can fold a million times faster, we can fold in hundreds and hundreds of variations. 
And as we're seeking to make something three-dimensional, we start not with a single surface, but with a volume. 
A simple volume, the cube. 
If we take its surfaces and fold them again and again and again and again, then after 16 iterations, 16 steps, we end up with 400,000 surfaces and a shape that looks, for instance, like this. 
And if we change where we make the folds, if we change the folding ratio, then this cube turns into this one. 
We can change the folding ratio again to produce this shape, or this shape. 
So we exert control over the form by specifying the position of where we're making the fold, but essentially you're looking at a folded cube. 
And we can play with this. 
We can apply different folding ratios to different parts of the form to create local conditions. 
We can begin to sculpt the form. 
And because we're doing the folding on the computer, we are completely free of any physical constraints. 
So that means that surfaces can intersect themselves, they can become impossibly small. 
We can make folds that we otherwise could not make. 
Surfaces can become porous. 
They can stretch. They can tear. 
And all of this expounds the scope of forms that we can produce. 
But in each case, I didn't design the form. 
I designed the process that generated the form. 
In general, if we make a small change to the folding ratio, which is what you're seeing here, then the form changes correspondingly. 
But that's only half of the story — 99.9 percent of the folding ratios produce not this, but this, the geometric equivalent of noise. 
The forms that I showed before were made actually through very long trial and error. 
A far more effective way to create forms, I have found, is to use information that is already contained in forms. 
A very simple form such as this one actually contains a lot of information that may not be visible to the human eye. 
So, for instance, we can plot the length of the edges. 
White surfaces have long edges, black ones have short ones. 
We can plot the planarity of the surfaces, their curvature, how radial they are — all information that may not be instantly visible to you, but that we can bring out, that we can articulate, and that we can use to control the folding. 
So now I'm not specifying a single ratio anymore to fold it, but instead I'm establishing a rule, I'm establishing a link between a property of a surface and how that surface is folded. 
And because I've designed the process and not the form, I can run the process again and again and again to produce a whole family of forms. 
These forms look elaborate, but the process is a very minimal one. 
There is a simple input, it's always a cube that I start with, and it's a very simple operation — it's making a fold, and doing this over and over again. 
So let's bring this process to architecture. 
How? And at what scale? 
I chose to design a column. 
Columns are architectural archetypes. 
They've been used throughout history to express ideals about beauty, about technology. 
A challenge to me was how we could express this new algorithmic order in a column. 
I started using four cylinders. 
Through a lot of experimentation, these cylinders eventually evolved into this. 
And these columns, they have information at very many scales. 
We can begin to zoom into them. 
The closer one gets, the more new features one discovers. 
Some formations are almost at the threshold of human visibility. 
And unlike traditional architecture, it's a single process that creates both the overall form and the microscopic surface detail. 
These forms are undrawable. 
An architect who's drawing them with a pen and a paper would probably take months, or it would take even a year to draw all the sections, all of the elevations, you can only create something like this through an algorithm. 
The more interesting question, perhaps, is, are these forms imaginable? 
Usually, an architect can somehow envision the end state of what he is designing. 
In this case, the process is deterministic. 
There's no randomness involved at all, but it's not entirely predictable. 
There's too many surfaces, there's too much detail, one can't see the end state. 
So this leads to a new role for the architect. 
One needs a new method to explore all of the possibilities that are out there. 
For one thing, one can design many variants of a form, in parallel, and one can cultivate them. 
And to go back to the analogy with nature, one can begin to think in terms of populations, one can talk about permutations, about generations, about crossing and breeding to come up with a design. 
And the architect is really, he moves into the position of being an orchestrator of all of these processes. 
But enough of the theory. 
At one point I simply wanted to jump inside this image, so to say, I bought these red and blue 3D glasses, got up very close to the screen, but still that wasn't the same as being able to walk around and touch things. 
So there was only one possibility — to bring the column out of the computer. 
There's been a lot of talk now about 3D printing. 
For me, or for my purpose at this moment, there's still too much of an unfavorable tradeoff between scale, on the one hand, and resolution and speed, on the other. 
So instead, we decided to take the column, and we decided to build it as a layered model, made out of very many slices, thinly stacked over each other. 
What you're looking at here is an X-ray of the column that you just saw, viewed from the top. 
Unbeknownst to me at the time, because we had only seen the outside, the surfaces were continuing to fold themselves, to grow on the inside of the column, which was quite a surprising discovery. 
From this shape, we calculated a cutting line, and then we gave this cutting line to a laser cutter to produce — and you're seeing a segment of it here — very many thin slices, individually cut, on top of each other. 
And this is a photo now, it's not a rendering, and the column that we ended up with after a lot of work, ended up looking remarkably like the one that we had designed in the computer. 
Almost all of the details, almost all of the surface intricacies were preserved. 
But it was very labor intensive. 
There's a huge disconnect at the moment still between the virtual and the physical. 
It took me several months to design the column, but ultimately it takes the computer about 30 seconds to calculate all of the 16 million faces. 
The physical model, on the other hand, is 2,700 layers, one millimeter thick, it weighs 700 kilos, it's made of sheet that can cover this entire auditorium. 
And the cutting path that the laser followed goes from here to the airport and back again. 
But it is increasingly possible. 
Machines are getting faster, it's getting less expensive, and there's some promising technological developments just on the horizon. 
These are images from the Gwangju Biennale. 
And in this case, I used ABS plastic to produce the columns, we used the bigger, faster machine, and they have a steel core inside, so they're structural, they can bear loads for once. 
Each column is effectively a hybrid of two columns. 
You can see a different column in the mirror, if there's a mirror behind the column that creates a sort of an optical illusion. 
So where does this leave us? 
I think this project gives us a glimpse of the unseen objects that await us if we as architects begin to think about designing not the object, but a process to generate objects. 
I've shown one simple process that was inspired by nature; there's countless other ones. 
In short, we have no constraints. 
Instead, we have processes in our hands right now that allow us to create structures at all scales that we couldn't even have dreamt up. 
And, if I may add, at one point we will build them. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

I have had the distinct blessing in my life to have worked on a bunch of amazing projects. 
But the coolest I ever worked on was around this guy. 
This guy's name is TEMPT. 
TEMPT was one of the foremost graffiti artists in the 80s. 
And he came up home from a run one day and said, "" Dad, my legs are tingling. "" And that was the onset of ALS. 
So TEMPT is now completely paralyzed. 
He only has use of his eyes. 
I was exposed to him. 
I have a company that does design and animation, so obviously graffiti is definitely an intricate part of what we admire and respect in the art world. 
And so we decided that we were going to sponsor Tony, TEMPT, and his cause. 
So I went and met with his brother and father and said, "" We're going to give you this money. 
What are you going to do with it? "" And his brother said, "" I just want to be able to talk to Tony again. 
I just want to be able to communicate with him and him to be able to communicate with me. "" And I said, "" Wait a second, isn't that — I've seen Stephen Hawking — don't all paralyzed people have the ability to communicate via these devices? "" And he said, "" No, unless you're in the upper echelon and you've got really amazing insurance, you can't actually do that. 
These devices aren't accessible to people. "" And I said, "" Well, how do you actually communicate? "" Has everyone seen the movie "" The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? "" That's how they communicate — so run their finger along. 
I said, "" That's archaic. How can that be? "" So I showed up with the desire to just write a check, and instead, I wrote a check that I had no freaking idea how I was going to cash. 
I committed to his brother and his father right then and there — I'm like, "" All right, here's the deal: Tony's going to speak, we're going to get him a machine, and we're going to figure out a way for him to do his art again. 
Because it's a travesty that someone who still has all of that in him isn't able to communicate it. "" So I spoke at a conference a couple months after that. 
I met these guys called GRL, Graffiti Research Lab, and they have a technology that allows them to project a light onto any surface and then, with a laser pointer, draw on it, and it just registers the negative space. 
So they go around and do art installations like this. 
All the things that go up there, they said there's a life cycle. 
First it starts with the sexual organs, then it starts with cuss words, then it was Bush slanders and then people actually got to art. 
But there was always a life cycle to their presentations. 
So I went home and was having dinner with my wife and was telling her about this, and we were like, "" Well wait a second. If we know that this technology exists where you can use your eyes to control things, why don't we figure out a way for TEMPT to control a laser and he could do graf again? Well that would be awesome. "" So that started the journey. 
And about two years later, about a year later, after a bunch of organization and a bunch of moving things around, we'd accomplished a couple things. 
One, we battered down the doors of the insurance companies, and we actually got TEMPT a machine that let him communicate — a Stephen Hawking machine. 
(Applause) Which was awesome. 
And he's seriously one of the funniest — I call him Yoda, because you talk to the guy, you get an email from him, and you're like, "" I'm not worthy. This guy's so amazing. "" The other thing we did is we flew seven programmers from all over the world — literally every corner of the world — into our house. 
My wife and kids and I moved to our back garage, and these hackers and programmers and conspiracy theorists and anarchists took over our house. 
A lot of our friends thought we were absolutely stupid to do that and that we were going to come back and all the pictures on the wall would be removed and graf on the walls. 
But for over two weeks, we programmed, we went to the Venice boardwalk, my kids got involved, my dog got involved, and we created this. 
This is called the EyeWriter, and you can see the description. 
This is a cheap pair of sunglasses that we bought at the Venice Beach boardwalk, some copper wire and some stuff from Home Depot and Radio Shack. 
We took a PS3 camera, hacked it open, mounted it to an LED light, and now there's a device that is free — you build this yourself, we publish the code for free, you download the software for free. 
And now we've created a device that has absolutely no limitations. 
There's no insurance company that can say "" No. "" There's no hospital that can say "" No. "" Anybody who's paralyzed now has access to actually draw or communicate using only their eyes. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
Thank you guys very much. That was awesome. 
So at the end of the two weeks, we went back to TEMPT's room. 
I love this picture, because this is someone else's room and that's his room. 
So there's all this hustle and bustle going on for the big unveiling. 
And after over a year of planning, two weeks of programming, carb-fest and all-night sessions, Tony drew again for the first time in seven years. 
And this is an amazing picture, because this is his life support system, and he's looking over his life support system. 
We kicked his bed so that he could see out. 
And we set up a projector on a wall out in the parking lot outside of his hospital. 
And he drew again for the first time, in front of his family and friends — and you can only imagine what the feeling in the parking lot was. 
The funny thing was, we had to break into the parking lot too, so we totally felt like we were legit in the whole graf scene too. 
(Laughter) So at the end of this, he sent us an email, and this is what the email said: "" That was the first time I've drawn anything for seven years. 
I feel like I had been held underwater, and someone finally reached down and pulled my head up so I could breathe. "" Isn't that awesome? 
(Applause) So that's kind of our battle cry. 
That's what keeps us going and keeps us developing. 
And we've got such a long way to go with this. 
This is an amazing device, but it's the equivalent of an Etch A Sketch. 
And someone who has that kind of artistic potential deserves so much more. 
So we're in the process of trying to figure out how to make it better, faster, stronger. 
Since that time, we've had all kinds of acknowledgment. 
We've won a bunch of awards. 
Remember, it's free; none of us are making any money on this thing. 
It's all coming out of our own pockets. 
So the awards were like, "" Oh, this is fantastic. "" Armstrong Twittered about us, and then in December, Time magazine honored us as one of the top 50 inventions of 2010, which was really cool. 
(Applause) The coolest thing about this — and this is what's completing the whole circle — is that in April of this year, at the Geffen MOCA in downtown Los Angeles, there's going to be an exhibition called "" Art of the Streets. "" And "" Art of the Streets "" is going to have pretty much the bad-asses of the street art scene — Banksy, Shepard Fairey, KAWS — all of these guys will be there. 
TEMPT's going to be in the show, which is pretty awesome. 
(Applause) So basically this is my point: If you see something that's not possible, make it possible. 
Everything in this room wasn't possible — this stage, this computer, this mic, the EyeWriter — wasn't possible at one point. 
Make it possible, everyone in this room. 
I'm not a programmer, never done anything with ocular recognition technology, but I just recognized something and associated myself with amazing people so that we could make something happen. 
And this is the question I want everyone to ask yourself every single day when you come up with something you feel that needs to be done: if not now, then when? And if not me, then who? 
Thank you guys. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

I'm here to tell you about the real search for alien life. 
Not little green humanoids arriving in shiny UFOs, although that would be nice. 
But it's the search for planets orbiting stars far away. 
Every star in our sky is a sun. 
And if our sun has planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, etc., surely those other stars should have planets also, and they do. 
And in the last two decades, astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets. 
Our night sky is literally teeming with exoplanets. 
We know, statistically speaking, that every star has at least one planet. 
And in the search for planets, and in the future, planets that might be like Earth, we're able to help address some of the most amazing and mysterious questions that have faced humankind for centuries. 
Why are we here? 
Why does our universe exist? 
How did Earth form and evolve? 
How and why did life originate and populate our planet? 
The second question that we often think about is: Are we alone? 
Is there life out there? 
Who is out there? 
You know, this question has been around for thousands of years, since at least the time of the Greek philosophers. 
But I'm here to tell you just how close we're getting to finding out the answer to this question. 
It's the first time in human history that this really is within reach for us. 
Now when I think about the possibilities for life out there, I think of the fact that our sun is but one of many stars. 
This is a photograph of a real galaxy, we think our Milky Way looks like this galaxy. 
It's a collection of bound stars. 
But our [sun] is one of hundreds of billions of stars and our galaxy is one of upwards of hundreds of billions of galaxies. 
Knowing that small planets are very common, you can just do the math. 
And there are just so many stars and so many planets out there, that surely, there must be life somewhere out there. 
Well, the biologists get furious with me for saying that, because we have absolutely no evidence for life beyond Earth yet. 
Well, if we were able to look at our galaxy from the outside and zoom in to where our sun is, we see a real map of the stars. 
And the highlighted stars are those with known exoplanets. 
This is really just the tip of the iceberg. 
Here, this animation is zooming in onto our solar system. 
And you'll see here the planets as well as some spacecraft that are also orbiting our sun. 
Now if we can imagine going to the West Coast of North America, and looking out at the night sky, here's what we'd see on a spring night. 
And you can see the constellations overlaid and again, so many stars with planets. 
There's a special patch of the sky where we have thousands of planets. 
This is where the Kepler Space Telescope focused for many years. 
Let's zoom in and look at one of the favorite exoplanets. 
This star is called Kepler-186f. 
It's a system of about five planets. 
And by the way, most of these exoplanets, we don't know too much about. 
We know their size, and their orbit and things like that. 
But there's a very special planet here called Kepler-186f. 
This planet is in a zone that is not too far from the star, so that the temperature may be just right for life. 
Here, the artist's conception is just zooming in and showing you what that planet might be like. 
So, many people have this romantic notion of astronomers going to the telescope on a lonely mountaintop and looking at the spectacular night sky through a big telescope. 
But actually, we just work on our computers like everyone else, and we get our data by email or downloading from a database. 
So instead of coming here to tell you about the somewhat tedious nature of the data and data analysis and the complex computer models we make, I have a different way to try to explain to you some of the things that we're thinking about exoplanets. 
Here's a travel poster: "" Kepler-186f: Where the grass is always redder on the other side. "" That's because Kepler-186f orbits a red star, and we're just speculating that perhaps the plants there, if there is vegetation that does photosynthesis, it has different pigments and looks red. 
"" Enjoy the gravity on HD 40307g, a Super-Earth. "" This planet is more massive than Earth and has a higher surface gravity. 
"" Relax on Kepler-16b, where your shadow always has company. "" (Laughter) We know of a dozen planets that orbit two stars, and there's likely many more out there. 
If we could visit one of those planets, you literally would see two sunsets and have two shadows. 
So actually, science fiction got some things right. 
Tatooine from Star Wars. 
And I have a couple of other favorite exoplanets to tell you about. 
This one is Kepler-10b, it's a hot, hot planet. 
It orbits over 50 times closer to its star than our Earth does to our sun. 
And actually, it's so hot, we can't visit any of these planets, but if we could, we would melt long before we got there. 
We think the surface is hot enough to melt rock and has liquid lava lakes. 
Gliese 1214b. 
This planet, we know the mass and the size and it has a fairly low density. 
It's somewhat warm. 
We actually don't know really anything about this planet, but one possibility is that it's a water world, like a scaled-up version of one of Jupiter's icy moons that might be 50 percent water by mass. 
And in this case, it would have a thick steam atmosphere overlaying an ocean, not of liquid water, but of an exotic form of water, a superfluid — not quite a gas, not quite a liquid. 
And under that wouldn't be rock, but a form of high-pressure ice, like ice IX. 
So out of all these planets out there, and the variety is just simply astonishing, we mostly want to find the planets that are Goldilocks planets, we call them. 
Not too big, not too small, not too hot, not too cold — but just right for life. 
But to do that, we'd have to be able to look at the planet's atmosphere, because the atmosphere acts like a blanket trapping heat — the greenhouse effect. 
We have to be able to assess the greenhouse gases on other planets. 
Well, science fiction got some things wrong. 
The Star Trek Enterprise had to travel vast distances at incredible speeds to orbit other planets so that First Officer Spock could analyze the atmosphere to see if the planet was habitable or if there were lifeforms there. 
Well, we don't need to travel at warp speeds to see other planet atmospheres, although I don't want to dissuade any budding engineers from figuring out how to do that. 
We actually can and do study planet atmospheres from here, from Earth orbit. 
This is a picture, a photograph of the Hubble Space Telescope taken by the shuttle Atlantis as it was departing after the last human space flight to Hubble. 
They installed a new camera, actually, that we use for exoplanet atmospheres. 
And so far, we've been able to study dozens of exoplanet atmospheres, about six of them in great detail. 
But those are not small planets like Earth. 
They're big, hot planets that are easy to see. 
We're not ready, we don't have the right technology yet to study small exoplanets. 
But nevertheless, I wanted to try to explain to you how we study exoplanet atmospheres. 
I want you to imagine, for a moment, a rainbow. 
And if we could look at this rainbow closely, we would see that some dark lines are missing. 
And here's our sun, the white light of our sun split up, not by raindrops, but by a spectrograph. 
And you can see all these dark, vertical lines. 
Some are very narrow, some are wide, some are shaded at the edges. 
And this is actually how astronomers have studied objects in the heavens, literally, for over a century. 
So here, each different atom and molecule has a special set of lines, a fingerprint, if you will. 
And that's how we study exoplanet atmospheres. 
And I'll just never forget when I started working on exoplanet atmospheres 20 years ago, how many people told me, "" This will never happen. 
We'll never be able to study them. Why are you bothering? "" And that's why I'm pleased to tell you about all the atmospheres studied now, and this is really a field of its own. 
So when it comes to other planets, other Earths, in the future when we can observe them, what kind of gases would we be looking for? 
Well, you know, our own Earth has oxygen in the atmosphere to 20 percent by volume. 
That's a lot of oxygen. 
But without plants and photosynthetic life, there would be no oxygen, virtually no oxygen in our atmosphere. 
So oxygen is here because of life. 
And our goal then is to look for gases in other planet atmospheres, gases that don't belong, that we might be able to attribute to life. 
But which molecules should we search for? 
I actually told you how diverse exoplanets are. 
We expect that to continue in the future when we find other Earths. 
And that's one of the main things I'm working on now, I have a theory about this. 
It reminds me that nearly every day, I receive an email or emails from someone with a crazy theory about physics of gravity or cosmology or some such. 
So, please don't email me one of your crazy theories. 
(Laughter) Well, I had my own crazy theory. 
But, who does the MIT professor go to? 
Well, I emailed a Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine and he said, "" Sure, come and talk to me. "" So I brought my two biochemistry friends and we went to talk to him about our crazy theory. 
And that theory was that life produces all small molecules, so many molecules. 
Like, everything I could think of, but not being a chemist. 
Think about it: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, molecular hydrogen, molecular nitrogen, methane, methyl chloride — so many gases. 
They also exist for other reasons, but just life even produces ozone. 
So we go to talk to him about this, and immediately, he shot down the theory. 
He found an example that didn't exist. 
So, we went back to the drawing board and we think we have found something very interesting in another field. 
But back to exoplanets, the point is that life produces so many different types of gases, literally thousands of gases. 
And so what we're doing now is just trying to figure out on which types of exoplanets, which gases could be attributed to life. 
And so when it comes time when we find gases in exoplanet atmospheres that we won't know if they're being produced by intelligent aliens or by trees, or a swamp, or even just by simple, single-celled microbial life. 
So working on the models and thinking about biochemistry, it's all well and good. 
But a really big challenge ahead of us is: how? 
How are we going to find these planets? 
There are actually many ways to find planets, several different ways. 
But the one that I'm most focused on is how can we open a gateway so that in the future, we can find hundreds of Earths. 
We have a real shot at finding signs of life. 
And actually, I just finished leading a two-year project in this very special phase of a concept we call the starshade. 
And the starshade is a very specially shaped screen and the goal is to fly that starshade so it blocks out the light of a star so that the telescope can see the planets directly. 
Here, you can see myself and two team members holding up one small part of the starshade. 
It's shaped like a giant flower, and this is one of the prototype petals. 
The concept is that a starshade and telescope could launch together, with the petals unfurling from the stowed position. 
The central truss would expand, with the petals snapping into place. 
Now, this has to be made very precisely, literally, the petals to microns and they have to deploy to millimeters. 
And this whole structure would have to fly tens of thousands of kilometers away from the telescope. 
It's about tens of meters in diameter. 
And the goal is to block out the starlight to incredible precision so that we'd be able to see the planets directly. 
And it has to be a very special shape, because of the physics of defraction. 
Now this is a real project that we worked on, literally, you would not believe how hard. 
Just so you believe it's not just in movie format, here's a real photograph of a second-generation starshade deployment test bed in the lab. 
And in this case, I just wanted you to know that that central truss has heritage left over from large radio deployables in space. 
So after all of that hard work where we try to think of all the crazy gases that might be out there, and we build the very complicated space telescopes that might be out there, what are we going to find? 
Well, in the best case, we will find an image of another exo-Earth. 
Here is Earth as a pale blue dot. 
And this is actually a real photograph of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, four billion miles away. 
And that red light is just scattered light in the camera optics. 
But what's so awesome to consider is that if there are intelligent aliens orbiting on a planet around a star near to us and they build complicated space telescopes of the kind that we're trying to build, all they'll see is this pale blue dot, a pinprick of light. 
And so sometimes, when I pause to think about my professional struggle and huge ambition, it's hard to think about that in contrast to the vastness of the universe. 
But nonetheless, I am devoting the rest of my life to finding another Earth. 
And I can guarantee that in the next generation of space telescopes, in the second generation, we will have the capability to find and identity other Earths. 
And the capability to split up the starlight so that we can look for gases and assess the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, estimate the surface temperature, and look for signs of life. 
But there's more. 
In this case of searching for other planets like Earth, we are making a new kind of map of the nearby stars and of the planets orbiting them, including [planets] that actually might be inhabitable by humans. 
And so I envision that our descendants, hundreds of years from now, will embark on an interstellar journey to other worlds. 
And they will look back at all of us as the generation who first found the Earth-like worlds. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) June Cohen: And I give you, for a question, Rosetta Mission Manager Fred Jansen. 
Fred Jansen: You mentioned halfway through that the technology to actually look at the spectrum of an exoplanet like Earth is not there yet. 
When do you expect this will be there, and what's needed? 
Actually, what we expect is what we call our next-generation Hubble telescope. 
And this is called the James Webb Space Telescope, and that will launch in 2018, and that's what we're going to do, we're going to look at a special kind of planet called transient exoplanets, and that will be our first shot at studying small planets for gases that might indicate the planet is habitable. 
JC: I'm going to ask you one follow-up question, too, Sara, as the generalist. 
So I am really struck by the notion in your career of the opposition you faced, that when you began thinking about exoplanets, there was extreme skepticism in the scientific community that they existed, and you proved them wrong. 
What did it take to take that on? 
SS: Well, the thing is that as scientists, we're supposed to be skeptical, because our job to make sure that what the other person is saying actually makes sense or not. 
But being a scientist, I think you've seen it from this session, it's like being an explorer. 
You have this immense curiosity, this stubbornness, this sort of resolute will that you will go forward no matter what other people say. 
JC: I love that. Thank you, Sara. 
(Applause) 

Have you ever wondered what animals think and feel? 
Let's start with a question: Does my dog really love me, or does she just want a treat? 
Well, it's easy to see that our dog really loves us, easy to see, right, what's going on in that fuzzy little head. 
What is going on? 
Something's going on. 
But why is the question always do they love us? 
Why is it always about us? 
Why are we such narcissists? 
I found a different question to ask animals. 
Who are you? 
There are capacities of the human mind that we tend to think are capacities only of the human mind. 
But is that true? 
What are other beings doing with those brains? 
What are they thinking and feeling? 
Is there a way to know? 
I think there is a way in. 
I think there are several ways in. 
We can look at evolution, we can look at their brains and we can watch what they do. 
The first thing to remember is: our brain is inherited. 
The first neurons came from jellyfish. 
Jellyfish gave rise to the first chordates. 
The first chordates gave rise to the first vertebrates. 
The vertebrates came out of the sea, and here we are. 
But it's still true that a neuron, a nerve cell, looks the same in a crayfish, a bird or you. 
What does that say about the minds of crayfish? 
Can we tell anything about that? 
Well, it turns out that if you give a crayfish a lot of little tiny electric shocks every time it tries to come out of its burrow, it will develop anxiety. 
If you give the crayfish the same drug used to treat anxiety disorder in humans, it relaxes and comes out and explores. 
How do we show how much we care about crayfish anxiety? 
Mostly, we boil them. 
(Laughter) Octopuses use tools, as well as do most apes and they recognize human faces. 
How do we celebrate the ape-like intelligence of this invertebrate? 
Mostly boiled. 
If a grouper chases a fish into a crevice in the coral, it will sometimes go to where it knows a moray eel is sleeping and it will signal to the moray, "" Follow me, "" and the moray will understand that signal. 
The moray may go into the crevice and get the fish, but the fish may bolt and the grouper may get it. 
This is an ancient partnership that we have just recently found out about. 
How do we celebrate that ancient partnership? 
Mostly fried. 
A pattern is emerging and it says a lot more about us than it does about them. 
Sea otters use tools and they take time away from what they're doing to show their babies what to do, which is called teaching. 
Chimpanzees don't teach. 
Killer whales teach and killer whales share food. 
When evolution makes something new, it uses the parts it has in stock, off the shelf, before it fabricates a new twist. 
And our brain has come to us through the enormity of the deep sweep of time. 
If you look at the human brain compared to a chimpanzee brain, what you see is we have basically a very big chimpanzee brain. 
It's a good thing ours is bigger, because we're also really insecure. 
(Laughter) But, uh oh, there's a dolphin, a bigger brain with more convolutions. 
OK, maybe you're saying, all right, well, we see brains, but what does that have to say about minds? 
Well, we can see the working of the mind in the logic of behaviors. 
So these elephants, you can see, obviously, they are resting. 
They have found a patch of shade under the palm trees under which to let their babies sleep, while they doze but remain vigilant. 
We make perfect sense of that image just as they make perfect sense of what they're doing because under the arc of the same sun on the same plains, listening to the howls of the same dangers, they became who they are and we became who we are. 
We've been neighbors for a very long time. 
No one would mistake these elephants as being relaxed. 
They're obviously very concerned about something. 
What are they concerned about? 
It turns out that if you record the voices of tourists and you play that recording from a speaker hidden in bushes, elephants will ignore it, because tourists never bother elephants. 
But if you record the voices of herders who carry spears and often hurt elephants in confrontations at water holes, the elephants will bunch up and run away from the hidden speaker. 
Not only do elephants know that there are humans, they know that there are different kinds of humans, and that some are OK and some are dangerous. 
They have been watching us for much longer than we have been watching them. 
They know us better than we know them. 
We have the same imperatives: take care of our babies, find food, try to stay alive. 
Whether we're outfitted for hiking in the hills of Africa or outfitted for diving under the sea, we are basically the same. 
We are kin under the skin. 
The elephant has the same skeleton, the killer whale has the same skeleton, as do we. 
We see helping where help is needed. 
We see curiosity in the young. 
We see the bonds of family connections. 
We recognize affection. 
Courtship is courtship. 
And then we ask, "" Are they conscious? "" When you get general anesthesia, it makes you unconscious, which means you have no sensation of anything. 
Consciousness is simply the thing that feels like something. 
If you see, if you hear, if you feel, if you're aware of anything, you are conscious, and they are conscious. 
Some people say well, there are certain things that make humans humans, and one of those things is empathy. 
Empathy is the mind's ability to match moods with your companions. 
It's a very useful thing. 
If your companions start to move quickly, you have to feel like you need to hurry up. 
We're all in a hurry now. 
The oldest form of empathy is contagious fear. 
If your companions suddenly startle and fly away, it does not work very well for you to say, "Jeez, I wonder why everybody just left." 
(Laughter) Empathy is old, but empathy, like everything else in life, comes on a sliding scale and has its elaboration. 
So there's basic empathy: you feel sad, it makes me sad. 
I see you happy, it makes me happy. 
Then there's something that I call sympathy, a little more removed: "" I'm sorry to hear that your grandmother has just passed away. 
I don't feel that same grief, but I get it; I know what you feel and it concerns me. "" And then if we're motivated to act on sympathy, I call that compassion. 
Far from being the thing that makes us human, human empathy is far from perfect. 
We round up empathic creatures, we kill them and we eat them. 
Now, maybe you say OK, well, those are different species. 
That's just predation, and humans are predators. 
But we don't treat our own kind too well either. 
People who seem to know only one thing about animal behavior know that you must never attribute human thoughts and emotions to other species. 
Well, I think that's silly, because attributing human thoughts and emotions to other species is the best first guess about what they're doing and how they're feeling, because their brains are basically the same as ours. 
They have the same structures. 
The same hormones that create mood and motivation in us are in those brains as well. 
It is not scientific to say that they are hungry when they're hunting and they're tired when their tongues are hanging out, and then say when they're playing with their children and acting joyful and happy, we have no idea if they can possibly be experiencing anything. 
That is not scientific. 
So OK, so a reporter said to me, "Maybe, but how do you really know that other animals can think and feel?" 
And I started to rifle through all the hundreds of scientific references that I put in my book and I realized that the answer was right in the room with me. 
When my dog gets off the rug and comes over to me — not to the couch, to me — and she rolls over on her back and exposes her belly, she has had the thought, "" I would like my belly rubbed. 
I know that I can go over to Carl, he will understand what I'm asking. 
I know I can trust him because we're family. 
He'll get the job done, and it will feel good. "" (Laughter) She has thought and she has felt, and it's really not more complicated than that. 
But we see other animals and we say, "" Oh look, killer whales, wolves, elephants: that's not how they see it. "" That tall-finned male is L41. 
He's 38 years old. 
The female right on his left side is L22. 
She's 44. 
They've known each other for decades. 
They know exactly who they are. 
They know who their friends are. 
They know who their rivals are. 
Their life follows the arc of a career. 
They know where they are all the time. 
This is an elephant named Philo. 
He was a young male. 
This is him four days later. 
Humans not only can feel grief, we create an awful lot of it. 
We want to carve their teeth. 
Why can't we wait for them to die? 
Elephants once ranged from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope. 
In 1980, there were vast strongholds of elephant range in Central and Eastern Africa. 
And now their range is shattered into little shards. 
This is the geography of an animal that we are driving to extinction, a fellow being, the most magnificent creature on land. 
Of course, we take much better care of our wildlife in the United States. 
In Yellowstone National Park, we killed every single wolf. 
We killed every single wolf south of the Canadian border, actually. 
But in the park, park rangers did that in the 1920s, and then 60 years later they had to bring them back, because the elk numbers had gotten out of control. 
And then people came. 
People came by the thousands to see the wolves, the most accessibly visible wolves in the world. 
And I went there and I watched this incredible family of wolves. 
A pack is a family. 
It has some breeding adults and the young of several generations. 
And I watched the most famous, most stable pack in Yellowstone National Park. 
And then, when they wandered just outside the border, two of their adults were killed, including the mother, which we sometimes call the alpha female. 
The rest of the family immediately descended into sibling rivalry. 
Sisters kicked out other sisters. 
That one on the left tried for days to rejoin her family. 
They wouldn't let her because they were jealous of her. 
She was getting too much attention from two new males, and she was the precocious one. 
That was too much for them. 
She wound up wandering outside the park and getting shot. 
The alpha male wound up being ejected from his own family. 
As winter was coming in, he lost his territory, his hunting support, the members of his family and his mate. 
We cause so much pain to them. 
The mystery is, why don't they hurt us more than they do? 
This whale had just finished eating part of a grey whale with his companions who had killed that whale. 
Those people in the boat had nothing at all to fear. 
This whale is T20. 
He had just finished tearing a seal into three pieces with two companions. 
The seal weighed about as much as the people in the boat. 
They had nothing to fear. 
They eat seals. 
Why don't they eat us? 
Why can we trust them around our toddlers? 
Why is it that killer whales have returned to researchers lost in thick fog and led them miles until the fog parted and the researchers' home was right there on the shoreline? 
And that's happened more than one time. 
In the Bahamas, there's a woman named Denise Herzing, and she studies spotted dolphins and they know her. 
She knows them very well. She knows who they all are. 
They know her. They recognize the research boat. 
When she shows up, it's a big happy reunion. 
Except, one time showed up and they didn't want to come near the boat, and that was really strange. 
And they couldn't figure out what was going on until somebody came out on deck and announced that one of the people onboard had died during a nap in his bunk. 
How could dolphins know that one of the human hearts had just stopped? 
Why would they care? 
And why would it spook them? 
These mysterious things just hint at all of the things that are going on in the minds that are with us on Earth that we almost never think about at all. 
At an aquarium in South Africa was a little baby bottle-nosed dolphin named Dolly. 
She was nursing, and one day a keeper took a cigarette break and he was looking into the window into their pool, smoking. 
Dolly came over and looked at him, went back to her mother, nursed for a minute or two, came back to the window and released a cloud of milk that enveloped her head like smoke. 
Somehow, this baby bottle-nosed dolphin got the idea of using milk to represent smoke. 
When human beings use one thing to represent another, we call that art. 
(Laughter) The things that make us human are not the things that we think make us human. 
What makes us human is that, of all these things that our minds and their minds have, we are the most extreme. 
We are the most compassionate, most violent, most creative and most destructive animal that has ever been on this planet, and we are all of those things all jumbled up together. 
But love is not the thing that makes us human. 
It's not special to us. 
We are not the only ones who care about our mates. 
We are not the only ones who care about our children. 
Albatrosses frequently fly six, sometimes ten thousand miles over several weeks to deliver one meal, one big meal, to their chick who is waiting for them. 
They nest on the most remote islands in the oceans of the world, and this is what it looks like. 
Passing life from one generation to the next is the chain of being. 
If that stops, it all goes away. 
If anything is sacred, that is, and into that sacred relationship comes our plastic trash. 
All of these birds have plastic in them now. 
This is an albatross six months old, ready to fledge — died, packed with red cigarette lighters. 
This is not the relationship we are supposed to have with the rest of the world. 
But we, who have named ourselves after our brains, never think about the consequences. 
When we welcome new human life into the world, we welcome our babies into the company of other creatures. 
We paint animals on the walls. 
We don't paint cell phones. 
We don't paint work cubicles. 
We paint animals to show them that we are not alone. 
We have company. 
And every one of those animals in every painting of Noah's ark, deemed worthy of salvation is in mortal danger now, and their flood is us. 
So we started with a question: Do they love us? 
We're going to ask another question. 
Are we capable of using what we have to care enough to simply let them continue? 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

The idea behind the Stuxnet computer worm is actually quite simple. 
We don't want Iran to get the bomb. 
Their major asset for developing nuclear weapons is the Natanz uranium enrichment facility. 
The gray boxes that you see, these are real-time control systems. 
Now if we manage to compromise these systems that control drive speeds and valves, we can actually cause a lot of problems with the centrifuge. 
The gray boxes don't run Windows software; they are a completely different technology. 
But if we manage to place a good Windows virus on a notebook that is used by a maintenance engineer to configure this gray box, then we are in business. 
And this is the plot behind Stuxnet. 
So we start with a Windows dropper. 
The payload goes onto the gray box, damages the centrifuge, and the Iranian nuclear program is delayed — mission accomplished. 
That's easy, huh? 
I want to tell you how we found that out. 
When we started our research on Stuxnet six months ago, it was completely unknown what the purpose of this thing was. 
The only thing that was known is it's very, very complex on the Windows part, the dropper part, used multiple zero-day vulnerabilities. 
And it seemed to want to do something with these gray boxes, these real-time control systems. 
So that got our attention, and we started a lab project where we infected our environment with Stuxnet and checked this thing out. 
And then some very funny things happened. 
Stuxnet behaved like a lab rat that didn't like our cheese — sniffed, but didn't want to eat. 
Didn't make sense to me. 
And after we experimented with different flavors of cheese, I realized, well, this is a directed attack. 
It's completely directed. 
The dropper is prowling actively on the gray box if a specific configuration is found, and even if the actual program code that it's trying to infect is actually running on that target. 
And if not, Stuxnet does nothing. 
So that really got my attention, and we started to work on this nearly around the clock, because I thought, "" Well, we don't know what the target is. 
It could be, let's say for example, a U.S. power plant, or a chemical plant in Germany. 
So we better find out what the target is soon. "" So we extracted and decompiled the attack code, and we discovered that it's structured in two digital bombs — a smaller one and a bigger one. 
And we also saw that they are very professionally engineered by people who obviously had all insider information. 
They knew all the bits and bites that they had to attack. 
They probably even know the shoe size of the operator. 
So they know everything. 
And if you have heard that the dropper of Stuxnet is complex and high-tech, let me tell you this: the payload is rocket science. 
It's way above everything that we have ever seen before. 
Here you see a sample of this actual attack code. 
We are talking about — around about 15,000 lines of code. 
Looks pretty much like old-style assembly language. 
And I want to tell you how we were able to make sense out of this code. 
So what we were looking for is, first of all, system function calls, because we know what they do. 
And then we were looking for timers and data structures and trying to relate them to the real world — to potential real world targets. 
So we do need target theories that we can prove or disprove. 
In order to get target theories, we remember that it's definitely hardcore sabotage, it must be a high-value target and it is most likely located in Iran, because that's where most of the infections had been reported. 
Now you don't find several thousand targets in that area. 
It basically boils down to the Bushehr nuclear power plant and to the Natanz fuel enrichment plant. 
So I told my assistant, "Get me a list of all centrifuge and power plant experts from our client base." 
And I phoned them up and picked their brain in an effort to match their expertise with what we found in code and data. 
And that worked pretty well. 
So we were able to associate the small digital warhead with the rotor control. 
The rotor is that moving part within the centrifuge, that black object that you see. 
And if you manipulate the speed of this rotor, you are actually able to crack the rotor and eventually even have the centrifuge explode. 
What we also saw is that the goal of the attack was really to do it slowly and creepy — obviously in an effort to drive maintenance engineers crazy, that they would not be able to figure this out quickly. 
The big digital warhead — we had a shot at this by looking very closely at data and data structures. 
So for example, the number 164 really stands out in that code; you can't overlook it. 
I started to research scientific literature on how these centrifuges are actually built in Natanz and found they are structured in what is called a cascade, and each cascade holds 164 centrifuges. 
So that made sense, that was a match. 
And it even got better. 
These centrifuges in Iran are subdivided into 15, what is called, stages. 
And guess what we found in the attack code? 
An almost identical structure. 
So again, that was a real good match. 
And this gave us very high confidence for what we were looking at. 
Now don't get me wrong here, it didn't go like this. 
These results have been obtained over several weeks of really hard labor. 
And we often went into just a dead end and had to recover. 
Anyway, so we figured out that both digital warheads were actually aiming at one and the same target, but from different angles. 
The small warhead is taking one cascade, and spinning up the rotors and slowing them down, and the big warhead is talking to six cascades and manipulating valves. 
So in all, we are very confident that we have actually determined what the target is. 
It is Natanz, and it is only Natanz. 
So we don't have to worry that other targets might be hit by Stuxnet. 
Here's some very cool stuff that we saw — really knocked my socks off. 
Down there is the gray box, and on the top you see the centrifuges. 
Now what this thing does is it intercepts the input values from sensors — so for example, from pressure sensors and vibration sensors — and it provides legitimate program code, which is still running during the attack, with fake input data. 
And as a matter of fact, this fake input data is actually prerecorded by Stuxnet. 
So it's just like from the Hollywood movies where during the heist, the observation camera is fed with prerecorded video. 
That's cool, huh? 
The idea here is obviously not only to fool the operators in the control room. 
It actually is much more dangerous and aggressive. 
The idea is to circumvent a digital safety system. 
We need digital safety systems where a human operator could not act quick enough. 
So for example, in a power plant, when your big steam turbine gets too over speed, you must open relief valves within a millisecond. 
Obviously, this cannot be done by a human operator. 
So this is where we need digital safety systems. 
And when they are compromised, then real bad things can happen. 
Your plant can blow up. 
And neither your operators nor your safety system will notice it. 
That's scary. 
But it gets worse. 
And this is very important, what I'm going to say. 
Think about this: this attack is generic. 
It doesn't have anything to do, in specifics, with centrifuges, with uranium enrichment. 
So it would work as well, for example, in a power plant or in an automobile factory. 
It is generic. 
And you don't have — as an attacker — you don't have to deliver this payload by a USB stick, as we saw it in the case of Stuxnet. 
You could also use conventional worm technology for spreading. 
Just spread it as wide as possible. 
And if you do that, what you end up with is a cyber weapon of mass destruction. 
That's the consequence that we have to face. 
So unfortunately, the biggest number of targets for such attacks are not in the Middle East. 
They're in the United States and Europe and in Japan. 
So all of the green areas, these are your target-rich environments. 
We have to face the consequences, and we better start to prepare right now. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: I've got a question. 
Ralph, it's been quite widely reported that people assume that Mossad is the main entity behind this. 
Is that your opinion? 
Ralph Langner: Okay, you really want to hear that? 
Yeah. Okay. 
My opinion is that the Mossad is involved, but that the leading force is not Israel. 
So the leading force behind that is the cyber superpower. 
There is only one, and that's the United States — fortunately, fortunately. 
Because otherwise, our problems would even be bigger. 
CA: Thank you for scaring the living daylights out of us. Thank you, Ralph. 
(Applause) 

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

The phenomenon you saw here for a brief moment is called quantum levitation and quantum locking. 
And the object that was levitating here is called a superconductor. 
Superconductivity is a quantum state of matter, and it occurs only below a certain critical temperature. 
Now, it's quite an old phenomenon; it was discovered 100 years ago. 
However, only recently, due to several technological advancements, we are now able to demonstrate to you quantum levitation and quantum locking. 
So, a superconductor is defined by two properties. 
The first is zero electrical resistance, and the second is the expulsion of a magnetic field from the interior of the superconductor. 
That sounds complicated, right? 
But what is electrical resistance? 
So, electricity is the flow of electrons inside a material. 
And these electrons, while flowing, they collide with the atoms, and in these collisions they lose a certain amount of energy. 
And they dissipate this energy in the form of heat, and you know that effect. 
However, inside a superconductor there are no collisions, so there is no energy dissipation. 
It's quite remarkable. Think about it. 
In classical physics, there is always some friction, some energy loss. 
But not here, because it is a quantum effect. 
But that's not all, because superconductors don't like magnetic fields. 
So a superconductor will try to expel magnetic field from the inside, and it has the means to do that by circulating currents. 
Now, the combination of both effects — the expulsion of magnetic fields and zero electrical resistance — is exactly a superconductor. 
But the picture isn't always perfect, as we all know, and sometimes strands of magnetic field remain inside the superconductor. 
Now, under proper conditions, which we have here, these strands of magnetic field can be trapped inside the superconductor. 
And these strands of magnetic field inside the superconductor, they come in discrete quantities. 
Why? Because it is a quantum phenomenon. It's quantum physics. 
And it turns out that they behave like quantum particles. 
In this movie here, you can see how they flow one by one discretely. 
This is strands of magnetic field. These are not particles, but they behave like particles. 
So, this is why we call this effect quantum levitation and quantum locking. 
But what happens to the superconductor when we put it inside a magnetic field? 
Well, first there are strands of magnetic field left inside, but now the superconductor doesn't like them moving around, because their movements dissipate energy, which breaks the superconductivity state. 
So what it actually does, it locks these strands, which are called fluxons, and it locks these fluxons in place. 
And by doing that, what it actually does is locking itself in place. 
Why? Because any movement of the superconductor will change their place, will change their configuration. 
So we get quantum locking. And let me show you how this works. 
I have here a superconductor, which I wrapped up so it'd stay cold long enough. 
And when I place it on top of a regular magnet, it just stays locked in midair. 
(Applause) Now, this is not just levitation. It's not just repulsion. 
I can rearrange the fluxons, and it will be locked in this new configuration. 
Like this, or move it slightly to the right or to the left. 
So, this is quantum locking — actually locking — three-dimensional locking of the superconductor. 
Of course, I can turn it upside down, and it will remain locked. 
Now, now that we understand that this so-called levitation is actually locking, Yeah, we understand that. 
You won't be surprised to hear that if I take this circular magnet, in which the magnetic field is the same all around, the superconductor will be able to freely rotate around the axis of the magnet. 
Why? Because as long as it rotates, the locking is maintained. 
You see? I can adjust and I can rotate the superconductor. 
We have frictionless motion. It is still levitating, but can move freely all around. 
So, we have quantum locking and we can levitate it on top of this magnet. 
But how many fluxons, how many magnetic strands are there in a single disk like this? 
Well, we can calculate it, and it turns out, quite a lot. 
One hundred billion strands of magnetic field inside this three-inch disk. 
But that's not the amazing part yet, because there is something I haven't told you yet. 
And, yeah, the amazing part is that this superconductor that you see here is only half a micron thick. It's extremely thin. 
And this extremely thin layer is able to levitate more than 70,000 times its own weight. 
It's a remarkable effect. It's very strong. 
Now, I can extend this circular magnet, and make whatever track I want. 
For example, I can make a large circular rail here. 
And when I place the superconducting disk on top of this rail, it moves freely. 
(Applause) And again, that's not all. I can adjust its position like this, and rotate, and it freely moves in this new position. 
And I can even try a new thing; let's try it for the first time. 
I can take this disk and put it here, and while it stays here — don't move — I will try to rotate the track, and hopefully, if I did it correctly, it stays suspended. 
(Applause) You see, it's quantum locking, not levitation. 
Now, while I'll let it circulate for a little more, let me tell you a little bit about superconductors. 
Now — (Laughter) — So we now know that we are able to transfer enormous amount of currents inside superconductors, so we can use them to produce strong magnetic fields, such as needed in MRI machines, particle accelerators and so on. 
But we can also store energy using superconductors, because we have no dissipation. 
And we could also produce power cables, to transfer enormous amounts of current between power stations. 
Imagine you could back up a single power station with a single superconducting cable. 
But what is the future of quantum levitation and quantum locking? 
Well, let me answer this simple question by giving you an example. 
Imagine you would have a disk similar to the one I have here in my hand, three-inch diameter, with a single difference. 
The superconducting layer, instead of being half a micron thin, being two millimeters thin, quite thin. 
This two-millimeter-thin superconducting layer could hold 1,000 kilograms, a small car, in my hand. 
Amazing. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

About 75 years ago, my grandfather, a young man, walked into a tent that was converted into a movie theater like that, and he fell hopelessly in love with the woman he saw on the silver screen: none other than Mae West, the heartthrob of the '30s, and he could never forget her. 
In fact, when he had his daughter many years later, he wanted to name her after Mae West, but can you imagine an Indian child name Mae West? 
The Indian family said, no way! 
So when my twin brother Kaesava was born, he decided to tinker with the spelling of Keshava's name. 
He said, if Mae West can be M-A-E, why can't Keshava be K-A-E? 
So he changed Kaesava's spelling. 
Now Kaesava had a baby boy called Rehan a couple of weeks ago. 
He decided to spell, or, rather, misspell Raehan with an A-E. 
You know, my grandfather died many years ago when I was little, but his love for Mae West lives on as a misspelling in the DNA of his progeny. 
That for me is successful legacy. (Laughs) You know, as for me, my wife and I have our own crazy legacy project. 
We actually sit every few years, argue, disagree, fight, and actually come up with our very own 200-year plan. 
Our friends think we're mad. 
Our parents think we're cuckoo. 
Because, you know, we both come from families that really look up to humility and wisdom, but we both like to live larger than life. 
I believe in the concept of a Raja Yogi: Be a dude before you can become an ascetic. 
This is me being a rock star, even if it's in my own house. 
You know? 
So when Netra and I sat down to make our first plan 10 years ago, we said we want the focus of this plan to go way beyond ourselves. 
What do we mean by beyond ourselves? 
Well 200 years, we calculated, is at the end of our direct contact with the world. 
There's nobody I'll meet in my life will ever live beyond 200 years, so we thought that's a perfect place where we should situate our plan and let our imagination take flight. 
You know, I never really believed in legacy. What am I going to leave behind? I'm an artist. 
Until I made a cartoon about 9 / 11. 
It caused so much trouble for me. 
I was so upset. 
You know, a cartoon that was meant to be a cartoon of the week ended up staying so much longer. 
Now I'm in the business of creating art that will definitely even outlive me, and I think about what I want to leave behind through those paintings. 
You know, the 9 / 11 cartoon upset me so much that I decided I'll never cartoon again. 
I said, I'm never going to make any honest public commentary again. 
But of course I continued creating artwork that was honest and raw, because I forgot about how people reacted to my work. 
You know, sometimes forgetting is so important to remain idealistic. 
Perhaps loss of memory is so crucial for our survival as human beings. 
One of the most important things in my 200-year plan that Netra and I write is what to forget about ourselves. 
You know, we carry so much baggage, from our parents, from our society, from so many people — fears, insecurities — and our 200-year plan really lists all our childhood problems that we have to expire. 
We actually put an expiry date on all our childhood problems. 
The latest date I put was, I said, I am going to expire my fear of my leftist, feminist mother-in-law, and this today is the date! (Laughs) She's watching. (Laughter) Anyway, you know, I really make decisions all the time about how I want to remember myself, and that's the most important kind of decisions I make. 
And this directly translates into my paintings. 
But like my friends, I can do that really well on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube. 
Name it, I'm on it. 
I've started outsourcing my memory to the digital world, you know? But that comes with a problem. 
It's so easy to think of technology as a metaphor for memory, but our brains are not perfect storage devices like technology. 
We only remember what we want to. At least I do. 
And I rather think of our brains as biased curators of our memory, you know? And if technology is not a metaphor for memory, what is it? 
Netra and I use our technology as a tool in our 200-year plan to really curate our digital legacy. 
That is a picture of my mother, and she recently got a Facebook account. 
You know where this is going. 
And I've been very supportive until this picture shows up on my Facebook page. (Laughter) And I actually untagged myself first, then I picked up the phone. I said, "" Mom, you will never put a picture of me in a bikini ever again. "" And she said, "" Why? You look so cute, darling. "" I said, "You just don't understand." 
Maybe we are among the first generation that really understands this digital curating of ourselves. 
Maybe we are the first to even actively record our lives. 
You know, whether you agree with, you know, legacy or not, we are actually leaving behind digital traces all the time. 
So Netra and I really wanted to use our 200-year plan to curate this digital legacy, and not only digital legacy but we believe in curating the legacy of my past and future. 
How, you may ask? 
Well, when I think of the future, I never see myself moving forward in time. I actually see time moving backward towards me. 
I can actually visualize my future approaching. 
I can dodge what I don't want and pull in what I want. 
It's like a video game obstacle course. And I've gotten better and better at doing this. Even when I make a painting, I actually imagine I'm behind the painting, it already exists, and someone's looking at it, and I see whether they're feeling it from their gut. 
Are they feeling it from their heart, or is it just a cerebral thing? 
And it really informs my painting. 
Even when I do an art show, I really think about, what should people walk away with? 
I remember when I was 19, I did, I wanted to do my first art exhibition, and I wanted the whole world to know about it. 
I didn't know TED then, but what I did was I closed my eyes tight, and I started dreaming. I could imagine people coming in, dressed up, looking beautiful, my paintings with all the light, and in my visualization I actually saw a very famous actress launching my show, giving credibility to me. 
And I woke up from my visualization and I said, who was that? I couldn't tell if it was Shabana Azmi or Rekha, two very famous Indian actresses, like the Meryl Streeps of India. 
As it turned out, next morning I wrote a letter to both of them, and Shabana Azmi replied, and came and launched my very first show 12 years ago. 
And what a bang it started my career with! You know, when we think of time in this way, we can curate not only the future but also the past. 
This is a picture of my family, and that is Netra, my wife. 
She's the co-creator of my 200-year plan. 
Netra's a high school history teacher. I love Netra, but I hate history. 
I keep saying, "" Nets, you live in the past while I'll create the future, and when I'm done, you can study about it. "" (Laughter) She gave me an indulgent smile, and as punishment, she said, "" Tomorrow I'm teaching a class on Indian history, and you are sitting in it, and I'm grading you. "" I'm like, "" Oh, God. "" I went. 
I actually went and sat in on her class. She started by giving students primary source documents from India, Pakistan, from Britain, and I said, "" Wow. "" Then she asked them to separate fact from bias. 
I said, "" Wow, "" again. 
Then she said, "" Choose your facts and biases and create an image of your own story of dignity. "" History as an imaging tool? 
I was so inspired. 
I went and created my own version of Indian history. 
I actually included stories from my grandmother. 
She used to work for the telephone exchange, and she used to actually overhear conversations between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten. 
And she used to hear all kinds of things she shouldn't have heard. But, you know, I include things like that. 
This is my version of Indian history. 
You know, if this is so, it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, the primary objective of our brains is to serve our dignity. 
Go tell Facebook to figure that out! 
Netra and I don't write our 200-year plan for someone else to come and execute it in 150 years. Imagine receiving a parcel saying, from the past, okay now you're supposed to spend the rest of your life doing all of this. No. 
We actually write it only to set our attitudes right. 
You know, I used to believe that education is the most important tool to leave a meaningful legacy. 
Education is great. 
It really teaches us who we are, and helps us contextualize ourselves in the world, but it's really my creativity that's taught me that I can be much more than what my education told me I am. 
I'd like to make the argument that creativity is the most important tool we have. 
It lets us create who we are, and curate what is to come. 
I like to think — Thank you. 
I like to think of myself as a storyteller, where my past and my future are only stories, my stories, waiting to be told and retold. I hope all of you one day get a chance to share and write your own 200-year story. 
Thank you so much. 
Shukran! (Applause) 

And why does good intimacy not guarantee good sex, contrary to popular belief? 
Or, the next question would be, can we want what we already have? 
That's the million-dollar question, right? 
And why is the forbidden so erotic? 
What is it about transgression that makes desire so potent? 
And why does sex make babies, and babies spell erotic disaster in couples? 
And when you desire, how is it different? 
These are some of the questions that are at the center of my exploration on the nature of erotic desire and its concomitant dilemmas in modern love. 
So I travel the globe, and what I'm noticing is that everywhere where romanticism has entered, there seems to be a crisis of desire. 
A crisis of desire, as in owning the wanting — desire as an expression of our individuality, of our free choice, of our preferences, of our identity — desire that has become a central concept as part of modern love and individualistic societies. 
You know, this is the first time in the history of humankind where we are trying to experience sexuality in the long term not because we want 14 children, for which we need to have even more because many of them won't make it, and not because it is exclusively a woman's marital duty. 
This is the first time that we want sex over time about pleasure and connection that is rooted in desire. 
So what sustains desire, and why is it so difficult? 
And at the heart of sustaining desire in a committed relationship, I think, is the reconciliation of two fundamental human needs. 
On the one hand, our need for security, for predictability, for safety, for dependability, for reliability, for permanence. 
All these anchoring, grounding experiences of our lives that we call home. 
But we also have an equally strong need — men and women — for adventure, for novelty, for mystery, for risk, for danger, for the unknown, for the unexpected, surprise — you get the gist. 
So reconciling our need for security and our need for adventure into one relationship, or what we today like to call a passionate marriage, used to be a contradiction in terms. 
Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. 
But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. 
(Laughter) So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide. 
Give me novelty, give me familiarity. 
Give me predictability, give me surprise. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So now we get to the existential reality of the story, right? 
So why does good sex so often fade? 
What is the relationship between love and desire? 
How do they relate, and how do they conflict? 
We want to neutralize the tensions. 
Forgone conclusion does not keep our interest. 
Or in other words, I sometimes say, fire needs air. 
Desire needs space. 
But then I took a question with me. 
And I've gone to more than 20 countries in the last few years with "" Mating in Captivity, "" and I asked people, when do you find yourself most drawn to your partner? 
Basically, when I get back in touch with my ability to imagine myself with my partner, when my imagination comes back in the picture, and when I can root it in absence and in longing, which is a major component of desire. 
But then the second group is even more interesting. 
I am most drawn to my partner when I see him in the studio, when she is onstage, when he is in his element, when she's doing something she's passionate about, when I see him at a party and other people are really drawn to him, when I see her hold court. 
Probably the biggest turn-on across the board. 
I look at this person — by the way, in desire people rarely talk about it, when we are blended into one, five centimeters from each other. 
But it's also not when the other person is that far apart that you no longer see them. 
It's when I'm looking at my partner from a comfortable distance, where this person that is already so familiar, so known, is momentarily once again somewhat mysterious, somewhat elusive. 
And in this space between me and the other lies the erotic élan, lies that movement toward the other. 
Because sometimes, as Proust says, mystery is not about traveling to new places, but it's about looking with new eyes. 
And so, when I see my partner on his own or her own, doing something in which they are enveloped, I look at this person and I momentarily get a shift in perception, and I stay open to the mysteries that are living right next to me. 
And then, more importantly, in this description about the other or myself — it's the same — what is most interesting is that there is no neediness in desire. 
Nobody needs anybody. 
There is no caretaking in desire. 
(Laughter) I have yet to see somebody who is so turned on by somebody who needs them. 
Wanting them is one thing. 
Needing them is a shot down and women have known that forever, because anything that will bring up parenthood will usually decrease the erotic charge. 
And then the third group of answers usually would be: when I'm surprised, when we laugh together, as somebody said to me in the office today, when he's in his tux, so I said, you know, it's either the tux or the cowboy boots. 
But novelty isn't about new positions. 
Because in some way one could say sex isn't something you do, eh? 
Sex is a place you go. 
It's a space you enter inside yourself and with another, or others. 
Is it a place where you can finally surrender and not have to take responsibility for everything? 
It isn't just a behavior. 
We are the only ones who can make love for hours, have a blissful time, multiple orgasms, and touch nobody, just because we can imagine it. 
We can experience that powerful thing called anticipation, which is a mortar to desire. 
The ability to imagine it, as if it's happening, to experience it as if it's happening, while nothing is happening and everything is happening, at the same time. 
So when I began to think about eroticism, I began to think about the poetics of sex. 
And if I look at it as an intelligence, then it's something that you cultivate. 
Imagination, playfulness, novelty, curiosity, mystery. 
But more importantly, for me to begin to understand who are the couples who have an erotic spark, what sustains desire, I had to go back to the original definition of eroticism, the mystical definition, and I went through it through a bifurcation by looking, actually, at trauma, which is the other side. 
And I looked at it, looking at the community that I had grown up in, which was a community in Belgium, all Holocaust survivors, and in my community, there were two groups: those who didn't die, and those who came back to life. 
And those who didn't die lived often very tethered to the ground, could not experience pleasure, could not trust, because when you're vigilant, worried, anxious, and insecure, you can't lift your head to go and take off in space and be playful and safe and imaginative. 
And when I began to listen to the sexlessness of the couples that I work with, I sometimes would hear people say, "" I want more sex, "" but generally, people want better sex, and better is to reconnect with that quality of aliveness, of vibrancy, of renewal, of vitality, of Eros, of energy that sex used to afford them, or that they've hoped it would afford them. 
"I turn off my desires when..." 
Now, if you are dead inside, the other person can do a lot of things for Valentine's. 
(Laughter) So I turn myself on when, I turn on my desires, I wake up when... 
Now, in this paradox between love and desire, what seems to be so puzzling is that the very ingredients that nurture love — mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other — are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire. 
Because desire comes with a host of feelings that are not always such favorites of love: jealousy, possessiveness, aggression, power, dominance, naughtiness, mischief. 
You know, the erotic mind is not very politically correct. 
(Laughter) But no, in our mind up there are a host of things going on that we don't always know how to bring to the person that we love, because we think love comes with selflessness and in fact desire comes with a certain amount of selfishness in the best sense of the word: the ability to stay connected to one's self in the presence of another. 
So I want to draw that little image for you, because this need to reconcile these two sets of needs, we are born with that. 
Our need for connection, our need for separateness, or our need for security and adventure, or our need for togetherness and for autonomy, and if you think about the little kid who sits on your lap and who is cozily nested here and very secure and comfortable, and at some point all of us need to go out into the world to discover and to explore. 
That's the beginning of desire, that exploratory need, curiosity, discovery. 
And if you tell them, "" Hey kiddo, the world's a great place. 
Go for it. There's so much fun out there, "" then they can turn away and they can experience connection and separateness at the same time. 
They can go off in their imagination, off in their body, off in their playfulness, all the while knowing that there's somebody when they come back. 
Don't we have everything you need together, you and I? "" then there are a few little reactions that all of us can pretty much recognize. 
Some of us will come back, came back a long time ago, and that little child who comes back is the child who will forgo a part of himself in order not to lose the other. 
And I will learn to love in a certain way that will become burdened with extra worry and extra responsibility and extra protection, and I won't know how to leave you in order to go play, in order to go experience pleasure, in order to discover, to enter inside myself. 
Translate this into adult language. 
It starts very young. 
Child number two comes back but looks like that over their shoulder all the time. 
Are you going to curse me, scold me? 
Are you going to be angry with me? "" And they may be gone, but they're never really away. 
And those are often the people that will tell you, "In the beginning, it was super hot." 
The more connected I became, the more responsible I felt, the less I was able to let go in your presence. 
So what happens, if you want to sustain desire, it's that real dialectic piece. 
On the one hand you want the security in order to be able to go. 
On the other hand if you can't go, you can't have pleasure, you can't culminate, you don't have an orgasm, you don't get excited because you spend your time in the body and the head of the other and not in your own. 
They understand that there is an erotic space that belongs to each of them. 
They also understand that foreplay is not something you do five minutes before the real thing. 
It's about you create a space where you leave Management Inc., maybe where you leave the Agile program — (Laughter) And you actually just enter that place where you stop being the good citizen who is taking care of things and being responsible. 
Responsibility and desire just butt heads. 
They don't really do well together. 
It's pretty much like the moon. 
But what they know is they know how to resurrect it. 
They know how to bring it back. 
And they know how to bring it back because they have demystified one big myth, which is the myth of spontaneity, which is that it's just going to fall from heaven while you're folding the laundry like a deus ex machina, and in fact they understood that whatever is going to just happen in a long-term relationship, already has. 
Committed sex is premeditated sex. 

Chris Anderson asked me if I could put the last 25 years of anti-poverty campaigning into 10 minutes for TED. 
That's an Englishman asking an Irishman to be succinct. 
(Laughter) I said, "" Chris, that would take a miracle. "" He said, "" Bono, wouldn't that be a good use of your messianic complex? "" So, yeah. 
Then I thought, let's go even further than 25 years. 
Let's go back before Christ, three millennia, to a time when, at least in my head, the journey for justice, the march against inequality and poverty really began. 
Three thousand years ago, civilization just getting started on the banks of the Nile, some slaves, Jewish shepherds in this instance, smelling of sheep shit, I guess, proclaimed to the Pharaoh, sitting high on his throne, "We, your majesty-ness, are equal to you." 
And the Pharaoh replies, "" Oh, no. 
You, your miserableness, have got to be kidding. "" And they say, "" No, no, that's what it says here in our holy book. "" Cut to our century, same country, same pyramids, another people spreading the same idea of equality with a different book. 
This time it's called the Facebook. 
Crowds are gathered in Tahrir Square. 
They turn a social network from virtual to actual, and kind of rebooted the 21st century. 
Not to undersell how messy and ugly the aftermath of the Arab Spring has been, neither to oversell the role of technology, but these things have given a sense of what's possible when the age-old model of power, the pyramid, gets turned upside down, putting the people on top and the pharaohs of today on the bottom, as it were. 
It's also shown us that something as powerful as information and the sharing of it can challenge inequality, because facts, like people, want to be free, and when they're free, liberty is usually around the corner, even for the poorest of the poor — facts that can challenge cynicism and the apathy that leads to inertia, facts that tell us what's working and, more importantly, what's not, so we can fix it, facts that if we hear them and heed them could help us meet the challenge that Nelson Mandela made back in 2005, when he asked us to be that great generation 
that overcomes that most awful offense to humanity, extreme poverty, facts that build a powerful momentum. 
So I thought, forget the rock opera, forget the bombast, my usual tricks. 
The only thing singing today would be the facts, for I have truly embraced by inner nerd. 
So exit the rock star. 
Enter the evidence-based activist, the factivist. 
Because what the facts are telling us is that the long, slow journey, humanity's long, slow journey of equality, is actually speeding up. 
Look at what's been achieved. 
Look at the pictures these data sets print. 
Since the year 2000, since the turn of the millennium, there are eight million more AIDS patients getting life-saving antiretroviral drugs. 
Malaria: There are eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have their death rates cut by 75 percent. 
For kids under five, child mortality, kids under five, it's down by 2.65 million a year. 
That's a rate of 7,256 children's lives saved each day. 
Wow. Wow. (Applause) Let's just stop for a second, actually, and think about that. 
Have you read anything anywhere in the last week that is remotely as important as that number? Wow. 
Great news. It drives me nuts that most people don't seem to know this news. 
Seven thousand kids a day. Here's two of them. 
This is Michael and Benedicta, and they're alive thanks in large part to Dr. Patricia Asamoah — she's amazing — and the Global Fund, which all of you financially support, whether you know it or not. 
And the Global Fund provides antiretroviral drugs that stop mothers from passing HIV to their kids. 
This fantastic news didn't happen by itself. 
It was fought for, it was campaigned for, it was innovated for. 
And this great news gives birth to even more great news, because the historic trend is this. 
The number of people living in back-breaking, soul-crushing extreme poverty has declined from 43 percent of the world's population in 1990 to 33 percent by 2000 and then to 21 percent by 2010. 
Give it up for that. (Applause) Halved. Halved. 
Now, the rate is still too high — still too many people unnecessarily losing their lives. 
There's still work to do. 
But it's heart-stopping. It's mind-blowing stuff. 
And if you live on less than $1.25 a day, if you live in that kind of poverty, this is not just data. 
This is everything. 
If you're a parent who wants the best for your kids — and I am — this rapid transition is a route out of despair and into hope. 
And guess what? If the trajectory continues, look where the amount of people living on $1.25 a day gets to by 2030. 
Can't be true, can it? 
That's what the data is telling us. If the trajectory continues, we get to, wow, the zero zone. 
For number-crunchers like us, that is the erogenous zone, and it's fair to say that I am, by now, sexually aroused by the collating of data. 
So virtual elimination of extreme poverty, as defined by people living on less than $1.25 a day, adjusted, of course, for inflation from a 1990 baseline. 
We do love a good baseline. 
That's amazing. 
Now I know that some of you think this progress is all in Asia or Latin America or model countries like Brazil — and who doesn't love a Brazilian model? — but look at sub-Saharan Africa. 
There's a collection of 10 countries, some call them the lions, who in the last decade have had a combination of 100 percent debt cancellation, a tripling of aid, a tenfold increase in FDI — that's foreign direct investment — which has unlocked a quadrupling of domestic resources — that's local money — which, when spent wisely — that's good governance — cut childhood mortality by a third, doubled education completion rates, and they, too, halved extreme poverty, and at this rate, these 10 get to zero too. 
So the pride of lions is the proof of concept. 
There are all kinds of benefits to this. 
For a start, you won't have to listen to an insufferable little jumped-up Jesus like myself. 
How about that? (Applause) And 2028, 2030? It's just around the corner. 
I mean, it's about three Rolling Stones farewell concerts away. 
(Laughter) I hope. I'm hoping. 
Makes us look really young. 
So why aren't we jumping up and down about this? 
Well, the opportunity is real, but so is the jeopardy. 
We can't get this done until we really accept that we can get this done. 
Look at this graph. 
It's called inertia. It's how we screw it up. 
And the next one is really beautiful. 
It's called momentum. 
And it's how we can bend the arc of history down towards zero, just doing the things that we know work. 
So inertia versus momentum. 
There is jeopardy, and of course, the closer you get, it gets harder. 
We know the obstacles that are in our way right now, in difficult times. 
In fact, today in your capital, in difficult times, some who mind the nation's purse want to cut life-saving programs like the Global Fund. 
But you can do something about that. 
You can tell politicians that these cuts [can cost] lives. 
Right now today, in Oslo as it happens, oil companies are fighting to keep secret their payments to governments for extracting oil in developing countries. 
You can do something about that too. 
You can join the One Campaign, and leaders like Mo Ibrahim, the telecom entrepreneur. 
We're pushing for laws that make sure that at least some of the wealth under the ground ends up in the hands of the people living above it. 
And right now, we know that the biggest disease of all is not a disease. It's corruption. 
But there's a vaccine for that too. 
It's called transparency, open data sets, something the TED community is really on it. 
Daylight, you could call it, transparency. 
And technology is really turbocharging this. 
It's getting harder to hide if you're doing bad stuff. 
So let me tell you about the U-report, which I'm really excited about. It's 150,000 millennials all across Uganda, young people armed with 2G phones, an SMS social network exposing government corruption and demanding to know what's in the budget and how their money is being spent. 
This is exciting stuff. 
Look, once you have these tools, you can't not use them. 
Once you have this knowledge, you can't un-know it. 
You can't delete this data from your brain, but you can delete the cliched image of supplicant, impoverished peoples not taking control of their own lives. 
You can erase that, you really can, because it's not true anymore. (Applause) It's transformational. 
2030? By 2030, robots, not just serving us Guinness, but drinking it. 
By the time we get there, every place with a rough semblance of governance might actually be on their way. 
So I'm here to — I guess we're here to try and infect you with this virtuous, data-based virus, the one we call factivism. 
It's not going to kill you. 
In fact, it could save countless lives. 
I guess we in the One Campaign would love you to be contagious, spread it, share it, pass it on. 
By doing so, you will join us and countless others in what I truly believe is the greatest adventure ever taken, the ever-demanding journey of equality. 
Could we really be the great generation that Mandela asked us to be? 
Might we answer that clarion call with science, with reason, with facts, and, dare I say it, emotions? 
Because as is obvious, factivists have feelings too. 
I'm thinking of Wael Ghonim, though. 
Some of you know him. He set up one of the Facebook groups behind the Tahrir Square in Cairo. 
He got thrown in jail for it, but I have his words tattooed on my brain. 
"" We are going to win because we don't understand politics. 
We are going to win because we don't play their dirty games. 
We are going to win because we don't have a party political agenda. 
We are going to win because the tears that come from our eyes actually come from our hearts. 
We are going to win because we have dreams, and we're willing to stand up for those dreams. "" Wael is right. 
We're going to win if we work together as one, because the power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you so much. (Applause) 

I'm here today to talk about a disturbing question, which has an equally disturbing answer. 
My topic is the secrets of domestic violence, and the question I'm going to tackle is the one question everyone always asks: Why does she stay? 
Why would anyone stay with a man who beats her? 
I'm not a psychiatrist, a social worker or an expert in domestic violence. 
I'm just one woman with a story to tell. 
I was 22. I had just graduated from Harvard College. 
I had moved to New York City for my first job as a writer and editor at Seventeen magazine. 
I had my first apartment, my first little green American Express card, and I had a very big secret. 
My secret was that I had this gun loaded with hollow-point bullets pointed at my head by the man who I thought was my soulmate, many, many times. 
The man who I loved more than anybody on Earth held a gun to my head and threatened to kill me more times than I can even remember. 
I'm here to tell you the story of crazy love, a psychological trap disguised as love, one that millions of women and even a few men fall into every year. 
It may even be your story. 
I don't look like a typical domestic violence survivor. 
I have a B.A. in English from Harvard College, an MBA in marketing from Wharton Business School. 
I've spent most of my career working for Fortune 500 companies including Johnson & Johnson, Leo Burnett and The Washington Post. 
I've been married for almost 20 years to my second husband and we have three kids together. 
My dog is a black lab, and I drive a Honda Odyssey minivan. 
(Laughter) So my first message for you is that domestic violence happens to everyone — all races, all religions, all income and education levels. 
It's everywhere. 
And my second message is that everyone thinks domestic violence happens to women, that it's a women's issue. 
Not exactly. 
Over 85 percent of abusers are men, and domestic abuse happens only in intimate, interdependent, long-term relationships, in other words, in families, the last place we would want or expect to find violence, which is one reason domestic abuse is so confusing. 
I would have told you myself that I was the last person on Earth who would stay with a man who beats me, but in fact I was a very typical victim because of my age. 
I was 22, and in the United States, women ages 16 to 24 are three times as likely to be domestic violence victims as women of other ages, and over 500 women and girls this age are killed every year by abusive partners, boyfriends, and husbands in the United States. 
I was also a very typical victim because I knew nothing about domestic violence, its warning signs or its patterns. 
I met Conor on a cold, rainy January night. 
He sat next to me on the New York City subway, and he started chatting me up. 
He told me two things. 
One was that he, too, had just graduated from an Ivy League school, and that he worked at a very impressive Wall Street bank. 
But what made the biggest impression on me that first meeting was that he was smart and funny and he looked like a farm boy. 
He had these big cheeks, these big apple cheeks and this wheat-blond hair, and he seemed so sweet. 
One of the smartest things Conor did, from the very beginning, was to create the illusion that I was the dominant partner in the relationship. 
He did this especially at the beginning by idolizing me. 
We started dating, and he loved everything about me, that I was smart, that I'd gone to Harvard, that I was passionate about helping teenage girls, and my job. 
He wanted to know everything about my family and my childhood and my hopes and dreams. 
Conor believed in me, as a writer and a woman, in a way that no one else ever had. 
And he also created a magical atmosphere of trust between us by confessing his secret, which was that, as a very young boy starting at age four, he had been savagely and repeatedly physically abused by his stepfather, and the abuse had gotten so bad that he had had to drop out of school in eighth grade, even though he was very smart, and he'd spent almost 20 years rebuilding his life. 
Which is why that Ivy League degree and the Wall Street job and his bright shiny future meant so much to him. 
If you had told me that this smart, funny, sensitive man who adored me would one day dictate whether or not I wore makeup, how short my skirts were, where I lived, what jobs I took, who my friends were and where I spent Christmas, I would have laughed at you, because there was not a hint of violence or control or anger in Conor at the beginning. 
I didn't know that the first stage in any domestic violence relationship is to seduce and charm the victim. 
I also didn't know that the second step is to isolate the victim. 
Now, Conor did not come home one day and announce, "" You know, hey, all this Romeo and Juliet stuff has been great, but I need to move into the next phase where I isolate you and I abuse you "" — (Laughter) — "" so I need to get you out of this apartment where the neighbors can hear you scream and out of this city where you have friends and family and coworkers who can see the bruises. "" Instead, Conor came home one Friday evening and he told me that he had quit his job that day, his dream job, and he said that he had quit his job because of me, 
because I had made him feel so safe and loved that he didn't need to prove himself on Wall Street anymore, and he just wanted to get out of the city and away from his abusive, dysfunctional family, and move to a tiny town in New England where he could start his life over with me by his side. 
Now, the last thing I wanted to do was leave New York, and my dream job, but I thought you made sacrifices for your soulmate, so I agreed, and I quit my job, and Conor and I left Manhattan together. 
I had no idea I was falling into crazy love, that I was walking headfirst into a carefully laid physical, financial and psychological trap. 
The next step in the domestic violence pattern is to introduce the threat of violence and see how she reacts. 
And here's where those guns come in. 
As soon as we moved to New England — you know, that place where Connor was supposed to feel so safe — he bought three guns. 
He kept one in the glove compartment of our car. 
He kept one under the pillows on our bed, and the third one he kept in his pocket at all times. 
And he said that he needed those guns because of the trauma he'd experienced as a young boy. 
He needed them to feel protected. 
But those guns were really a message for me, and even though he hadn't raised a hand to me, my life was already in grave danger every minute of every day. 
Conor first physically attacked me five days before our wedding. 
It was 7 a.m. I still had on my nightgown. 
I was working on my computer trying to finish a freelance writing assignment, and I got frustrated, and Conor used my anger as an excuse to put both of his hands around my neck and to squeeze so tightly that I could not breathe or scream, and he used the chokehold to hit my head repeatedly against the wall. 
Five days later, the ten bruises on my neck had just faded, and I put on my mother's wedding dress, and I married him. 
Despite what had happened, I was sure we were going to live happily ever after, because I loved him, and he loved me so much. 
And he was very, very sorry. 
He had just been really stressed out by the wedding and by becoming a family with me. 
It was an isolated incident, and he was never going to hurt me again. 
It happened twice more on the honeymoon. 
The first time, I was driving to find a secret beach and I got lost, and he punched me in the side of my head so hard that the other side of my head repeatedly hit the driver's side window. 
And then a few days later, driving home from our honeymoon, he got frustrated by traffic, and he threw a cold Big Mac in my face. 
Conor proceeded to beat me once or twice a week for the next two and a half years of our marriage. 
I was mistaken in thinking that I was unique and alone in this situation. 
One in three American women experiences domestic violence or stalking at some point in her life, and the CDC reports that 15 million children are abused every year, 15 million. 
So actually, I was in very good company. 
Back to my question: Why did I stay? 
The answer is easy. 
I didn't know he was abusing me. 
Even though he held those loaded guns to my head, pushed me down stairs, threatened to kill our dog, pulled the key out of the car ignition as I drove down the highway, poured coffee grinds on my head as I dressed for a job interview, I never once thought of myself as a battered wife. 
Instead, I was a very strong woman in love with a deeply troubled man, and I was the only person on Earth who could help Conor face his demons. 
The other question everybody asks is, why doesn't she just leave? 
Why didn't I walk out? I could have left any time. 
To me, this is the saddest and most painful question that people ask, because we victims know something you usually don't: It's incredibly dangerous to leave an abuser. 
Because the final step in the domestic violence pattern is kill her. 
Over 70 percent of domestic violence murders happen after the victim has ended the relationship, after she's gotten out, because then the abuser has nothing left to lose. 
Other outcomes include long-term stalking, even after the abuser remarries; denial of financial resources; and manipulation of the family court system to terrify the victim and her children, who are regularly forced by family court judges to spend unsupervised time with the man who beat their mother. 
And still we ask, why doesn't she just leave? 
I was able to leave, because of one final, sadistic beating that broke through my denial. 
I realized that the man who I loved so much was going to kill me if I let him. 
So I broke the silence. 
I told everyone: the police, my neighbors, my friends and family, total strangers, and I'm here today because you all helped me. 
We tend to stereotype victims as grisly headlines, self-destructive women, damaged goods. 
The question, "" Why does she stay? "" is code for some people for, "" It's her fault for staying, "" as if victims intentionally choose to fall in love with men intent upon destroying us. 
But since publishing "" Crazy Love, "" I have heard hundreds of stories from men and women who also got out, who learned an invaluable life lesson from what happened, and who rebuilt lives — joyous, happy lives — as employees, wives and mothers, lives completely free of violence, like me. 
Because it turns out that I'm actually a very typical domestic violence victim and a typical domestic violence survivor. 
I remarried a kind and gentle man, and we have those three kids. 
I have that black lab, and I have that minivan. 
What I will never have again, ever, is a loaded gun held to my head by someone who says that he loves me. 
Right now, maybe you're thinking, "Wow, this is fascinating," or, "" Wow, how stupid was she, "" but this whole time, I've actually been talking about you. 
I promise you there are several people listening to me right now who are currently being abused or who were abused as children or who are abusers themselves. 
Abuse could be affecting your daughter, your sister, your best friend right now. 
I was able to end my own crazy love story by breaking the silence. 
I'm still breaking the silence today. 
It's my way of helping other victims, and it's my final request of you. 
Talk about what you heard here. 
Abuse thrives only in silence. 
You have the power to end domestic violence simply by shining a spotlight on it. 
We victims need everyone. 
We need every one of you to understand the secrets of domestic violence. 
Show abuse the light of day by talking about it with your children, your coworkers, your friends and family. 
Recast survivors as wonderful, lovable people with full futures. 
Recognize the early signs of violence and conscientiously intervene, deescalate it, show victims a safe way out. 
Together we can make our beds, our dinner tables and our families the safe and peaceful oases they should be. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Laughter) And so I just came, two days ago, from the Himalayas to your kind invitation. 
This is from Marlboro country. 
(Laughter) This is a turquoise lake. 
And the night before, we camped, and my Tibetan friends said, "We are going to sleep outside." 
As a Frenchman, I must say that there are a lot of French intellectuals that think happiness is not at all interesting. 
(Laughter) I just wrote an essay on happiness, and there was a controversy. 
(Laughter) "" We don't care about being happy. We need to live with passion. 
We like our suffering because it's so good when it ceases for a while. "" (Laughter) This is what I see from the balcony of my hermitage in the Himalayas. 
It's about two meters by three, and you are all welcome any time. 
And first of all, you know, despite what the French intellectuals say, it seems that no one wakes up in the morning thinking, "May I suffer the whole day?" 
(Laughter) Which means that somehow, consciously or not, directly or indirectly, in the short or the long term, whatever we do, whatever we hope, whatever we dream — somehow, is related to a deep, profound desire for well-being or happiness. 
Some people say, I only believed in remembering the past, imagining the future, never the present. 
And that led Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, to say, "" All the great thinkers of humanity have left happiness in the vague so that each of them could define their own terms. "" Well, that would be fine if it was just a secondary preoccupation in life. 
And probably, the fact that we don't know that is why, so often, although we seek happiness, it seems we turn our back to it. 
One of the most common ones is happiness and pleasure. 
It is something that — changes of nature. 
Beautiful chocolate cake: first serving is delicious, second one not so much, then we feel disgust. 
I used to be a fan of Bach. 
And also, again, it can — also, it's something that you — it is not something that is radiating outside. 
And happiness, of course, is such a vague word, so let's say well-being. 
Look at the waves coming near the shore. 
It can only be a state of being, not just a fleeting emotion, sensation. 
We think that if we could gather this and that, all the conditions, something that we say, "" Everything to be happy — to have everything to be happy. "" That very sentence already reveals the doom, destruction of happiness. 
We know, by experience, that we can be what we call "" a little paradise, "" and yet, be completely unhappy within. 
The Dalai Lama was once in Portugal, and there was a lot of construction going on everywhere. 
So one evening, he said, "" Look, you are doing all these things, but isn't it nice, also, to build something within? "" And he said, "" [Without] that — even if you get a high-tech flat on the 100th floor of a super-modern and comfortable building, if you are deeply unhappy within, all you are going to look for is a window from which to jump. "" So now, at the opposite, we know a lot of people who, in very difficult circumstances, manage to keep serenity, inner strength, inner freedom, confidence. 
So now, if the inner conditions are stronger — of course, the outer conditions do influence, and it's wonderful to live longer, healthier, to have access to information, education, to be able to travel, to have freedom. 
So we may consider that the more those are invading our mind, and, like a chain reaction, the more we feel miserable, we feel tormented. 
So is that possible, to change our way of being, to transform one's mind? 
Aren't those negative emotions, or destructive emotions, inherent to the nature of mind? 
Is change possible in our emotions, in our traits, in our moods? 
And if we look from the experiential point of view, there is a primary quality of consciousness that's just the mere fact to be cognitive, to be aware. 
You can have ugly faces, beautiful faces in the mirror. 
Likewise, behind every single thought there is the bare consciousness, pure awareness. 
So, because the basic fabric of consciousness is this pure cognitive quality that differentiates it from a stone, there is a possibility for change because all emotions are fleeting. 
Mind training is based on the idea that two opposite mental factors cannot happen at the same time. 
But, of course, each emotion then would need a particular antidote. 
Another way is to try to find a general antidote to all emotions, and that's by looking at the very nature. 
If you do this again and again, the propensity, the tendencies for anger to arise again will be less and less each time you dissolve it. 
And, at the end, although it may rise, it will just cross the mind, like a bird crossing the sky without leaving any track. 
It means familiarization with a new way of being, new way of perceiving things, which is more in adequation with reality, with interdependence, with the stream and continuous transformation, which our being and our consciousness is. 
So that's what those great meditators have been doing. 
The scientific embargo — if it's ever submitted to "" Nature, "" hopefully, it will be accepted. 
We asked meditators, who have been doing that for years and years, to put their mind in a state where there's nothing but loving kindness, total availability to sentient being. 
It's the opposite on the left side: more tendency to altruism, to happiness, to express, and curiosity and so forth. 
It's something that is totally out of the bell curve. 
Hopefully, they will come. 
Also, it has been shown in other labs — for instance, Paul Ekman's labs in Berkeley — that some meditators are able, also, to control their emotional response more than it could be thought. 
If you sit a guy on a chair with all this apparatus measuring your physiology, and there's kind of a bomb that goes off, it's such an instinctive response that, in 20 years, they never saw anyone who would not jump. 
Some meditators, without trying to stop it, but simply by being completely open, thinking that that bang is just going to be a small event like a shooting star, they are able not to move at all. 
So the whole point of that is not, sort of, to make, like, a circus thing of showing exceptional beings who can jump, or whatever. 
We love to do jogging, fitness. 
We do all kinds of things to remain beautiful. 
Just this one example is worth a lot of work. 
Different schools and clinics we've been doing in Tibet. 
Flying monks. 

It's easy to forget that last night, one billion people went to sleep without access to electricity. 
One billion people. 
Two and a half billion people did not have access to clean cooking fuels or clean heating fuels. 
Those are the problems in the developing world. 
And it's easy for us not to be empathetic with those people who seem so distanced from us. 
But even in our own world, the developed world, we see the tension of stagnant economies impacting the lives of people around us. 
We see it in whole pieces of the economy, where the people involved have lost hope about the future and despair about the present. 
We see that in the Brexit vote. 
We see that in the Sanders / Trump campaigns in my own country. 
But even in countries as recently turning the corner towards being in the developed world, in China, we see the difficulty that President Xi has as he begins to un-employ so many people in his coal and mining industries who see no future for themselves. 
As we as a society figure out how to manage the problems of the developed world and the problems of the developing world, we have to look at how we move forward and manage the environmental impact of those decisions. 
We've been working on this problem for 25 years, since Rio, the Kyoto Protocols. 
Our most recent move is the Paris treaty, and the resulting climate agreements that are being ratified by nations around the world. 
I think we can be very hopeful that those agreements, which are bottom-up agreements, where nations have said what they think they can do, are genuine and forthcoming for the vast majority of the parties. 
The unfortunate thing is that now, as we look at the independent analyses of what those climate treaties are liable to yield, the magnitude of the problem before us becomes clear. 
This is the United States Energy Information Agency's assessment of what will happen if the countries implement the climate commitments that they've made in Paris between now and 2040. 
It shows basically CO2 emissions around the world over the next 30 years. 
There are three things that you need to look at and appreciate. 
One, CO2 emissions are expected to continue to grow for the next 30 years. 
In order to control climate, CO2 emissions have to literally go to zero because it's the cumulative emissions that drive heating on the planet. 
This should tell you that we are losing the race to fossil fuels. 
The second thing you should notice is that the bulk of the growth comes from the developing countries, from China, from India, from the rest of the world, which includes South Africa and Indonesia and Brazil, as most of these countries move their people into the lower range of lifestyles that we literally take for granted in the developed world. 
The final thing that you should notice is that each year, about 10 gigatons of carbon are getting added to the planet's atmosphere, and then diffusing into the ocean and into the land. 
That's on top of the 550 gigatons that are in place today. 
At the end of 30 years, we will have put 850 gigatons of carbon into the air, and that probably goes a long way towards locking in a 2-4 degree C increase in global mean surface temperatures, locking in ocean acidification and locking in sea level rise. 
Now, this is a projection made by men by the actions of society, and it's ours to change, not to accept. 
But the magnitude of the problem is something we need to appreciate. 
Different nations make different energy choices. 
It's a function of their natural resources. 
It's a function of their climate. 
It's a function of the development path that they've followed as a society. 
It's a function of where on the surface of the planet they are. 
Are they where it's dark a lot of the time, or are they at the mid-latitudes? 
Many, many, many things go into the choices of countries, and they each make a different choice. 
The overwhelming thing that we need to appreciate is the choice that China has made. 
China has made the choice, and will make the choice, to run on coal. 
The United States has an alternative. 
It can run on natural gas as a result of the inventions of fracking and shale gas, which we have here. 
They provide an alternative. 
The OECD Europe has a choice. 
It has renewables that it can afford to deploy in Germany because it's rich enough to afford to do it. 
The French and the British show interest in nuclear power. 
Eastern Europe, still very heavily committed to natural gas and to coal, and with natural gas that comes from Russia, with all of its entanglements. 
China has many fewer choices and a much harder row to hoe. 
If you look at China, and you ask yourself why has coal been important to it, you have to remember what China's done. 
China brought people to power, not power to people. 
It didn't do rural electrification. 
It urbanized. 
It urbanized by taking low-cost labor and low-cost energy, creating export industries that could fund a tremendous amount of growth. 
If we look at China's path, all of us know that prosperity in China has dramatically increased. 
In 1980, 80 percent of China's population lived below the extreme poverty level, below the level of having $1.90 per person per day. 
By the year 2000, only 20 percent of China's population lived below the extreme poverty level — a remarkable feat, admittedly, with some costs in civil liberties that would be tough to accept in the Western world. 
But the impact of all that wealth allowed people to get massively better nutrition. 
It allowed water pipes to be placed. 
It allowed sewage pipes to be placed, dramatic decrease in diarrheal diseases, at the cost of some outdoor air pollution. 
But in 1980, and even today, the number one killer in China is indoor air pollution, because people do not have access to clean cooking and heating fuels. 
In fact, in 2040, it's still estimated that 200 million people in China will not have access to clean cooking fuels. 
They have a remarkable path to follow. 
India also needs to meet the needs of its own people, and it's going to do that by burning coal. 
When we look at the EIA's projections of coal burning in India, India will supply nearly four times as much of its energy from coal as it will from renewables. 
It's not because they don't know the alternatives; it's because rich countries can do what they choose, poor countries do what they must. 
So what can we do to stop coal's emissions in time? 
What can we do that changes this forecast that's in front of us? 
Because it's a forecast that we can change if we have the will to do it. 
First of all, we have to think about the magnitude of the problem. 
Between now and 2040, 800 to 1,600 new coal plants are going to be built around the world. 
This week, between one and three one-gigawatt coal plants are being turned on around the world. 
That's happening regardless of what we want, because the people that rule their countries, assessing the interests of their citizens, have decided it's in the interest of their citizens to do that. 
And that's going to happen unless they have a better alternative. 
And every 100 of those plants will use up between one percent and three percent of the Earth's climate budget. 
So every day that you go home thinking that you should do something about global warming, at the end of that week, remember: somebody fired up a coal plant that's going to run for 50 years and take away your ability to change it. 
What we've forgotten is something that Vinod Khosla used to talk about, a man of Indian ethnicity but an American venture capitalist. 
And he said, back in the early 2000s, that if you needed to get China and India off of fossil fuels, you had to create a technology that passed the "" Chindia test, "" "" Chindia "" being the appending of the two words. 
It had to be first of all viable, meaning that technically, they could implement it in their country, and that it would be accepted by the people in the country. 
Two, it had to be a technology that was scalable, that it could deliver the same benefits on the same timetable as fossil fuels, so that they can enjoy the kind of life, again, that we take for granted. 
And third, it had to be cost-effective without subsidy or without mandate. 
It had to stand on its own two feet; it could not be maintained for that many people if in fact, those countries had to go begging or had some foreign country say, "" I won't trade with you, "" in order to get the technology shift to occur. 
If you look at the Chindia test, we simply have not come up with alternatives that meet that test. 
That's what the EIA forecast tells us. 
China's building 800 gigawatts of coal, 400 gigawatts of hydro, about 200 gigawatts of nuclear, and on an energy-equivalent basis, adjusting for intermittency, about 100 gigawatts of renewables. 
800 gigawatts of coal. 
They're doing that, knowing the costs better than any other country, knowing the need better than any other country. 
But that's what they're aiming for in 2040 unless we give them a better choice. 
To give them a better choice, it's going to have to meet the Chindia test. 
If you look at all the alternatives that are out there, there are really two that come near to meeting it. 
First is this area of new nuclear that I'll talk about in just a second. 
It's a new generation of nuclear plants that are on the drawing boards around the world, and the people who are developing these say we can get them in position to demo by 2025 and to scale by 2030, if you will just let us. 
The second alternative that could be there in time is utility-scale solar backed up with natural gas, which we can use today, versus the batteries which are still under development. 
So what's holding new nuclear back? 
Outdated regulations and yesterday's mindsets. 
We have not used our latest scientific thinking on radiological health to think how we communicate with the public and govern the testing of new nuclear reactors. 
We have new scientific knowledge that we need to use in order to improve the way we regulate nuclear industry. 
The second thing is we've got a mindset that it takes 25 years and 2 to 5 billion dollars to develop a nuclear power plant. 
That comes from the historical, military mindset of the places nuclear power came from. 
These new nuclear ventures are saying that they can deliver power for 5 cents a kilowatt hour; they can deliver it for 100 gigawatts a year; they can demo it by 2025; and they can deliver it in scale by 2030, if only we give them a chance. 
Right now, we're basically waiting for a miracle. 
What we need is a choice. 
If they can't make it safe, if they can't make it cheap, it should not be deployed. 
But what I want you to do is not carry an idea forward, but write your leaders, write the head of the NGOs you support, and tell them to give you the choice, not the past. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

This is your conference, and I think you have a right to know a little bit right now, in this transition period, about this guy who's going to be looking after it for you for a bit. 
So, I'm just going to grab a chair here. 
Two years ago at TED, I think — I've come to this conclusion — I think I may have been suffering from a strange delusion. 
I think that I may have believed unconsciously, then, that I was kind of a business hero. 
I had this company that I'd spent 15 years building. It's called Future; it was a magazine publishing company. 
It had recently gone public and the market said that it was apparently worth two billion dollars, a number I didn't really understand. 
A magazine I'd recently launched called Business 2.0 was fatter than a telephone directory, busy pumping hot air into the bubble. 
(Laughter) And I was the 40 percent owner of a dotcom that was about to go public and no doubt be worth billions more. 
And all this had come from nothing. 
Fifteen years earlier, I was a science journalist who people just laughed at when I said, "" I really would like to start my own computer magazine. "" And 15 years later, there are 100 of them and 2,000 people on staff and it was just such heady times. 
The date was February 2000. 
I thought the little graph of my business life that kind of looked a bit like Moore's Law — ever upward and to the right — it was going to go on forever. 
I mean, it had to. Right? I was in for quite a surprise. 
The dotcom, ironically called Snowball, was the very last consumer web company to go public the next month before NASDAQ exploded, and I entered 18 months of business hell. 
I watched everything that I'd built crumbling, and it looked like all this stuff was going to die and 15 years work would have come for nothing. 
And it was gut wrenching. 
It took eight years of blood, sweat and tears to reach 350 employees, something which I was very proud of in the business. 
February 2001 — in one day we laid off 350 people, and before the bloodshed was finished, 1,000 people had lost their jobs from my companies. I felt sick. 
I watched my own net worth falling by about a million dollars a day, every day, for 18 months. 
And worse than that, far worse than that, my sense of self-worth was kind of evaporating. 
I was going around with this big sign on my forehead: "" LOSER. "" (Laughter) And I think what disgusts me more than anything, looking back, is how the hell did I let my personal happiness get so tied up with this business thing? 
Well, in the end, we were able to save Future and Snowball, but I was, at that point, ready to move on. 
And to cut a long story short, here's where I came to. 
And the reason I'm telling this story is that I believe, from many conversations, that a lot of people in this room have been through a similar kind of rollercoaster — emotional rollercoaster — in the last couple years. 
This has been a big, big transition time, and I believe that this conference can play a big part for all of us in taking us forward to the next stage to whatever's next. 
The theme next year is re-birth. 
It was at the same TED two years ago when Richard and I reached an agreement on the future of TED. 
And at about the same time, and I think partly because of that, I started doing something that I'd forgotten about in my business focus: I started to read again. 
And I discovered that while I'd been busy playing business games, there'd been this incredible revolution in so many areas of interest: cosmology to psychology to evolutionary psychology to anthropology to... all this stuff had changed. 
And the way in which you could think about us as a species and us as a planet had just changed so much, and it was incredibly exciting. 
And what was really most exciting — and I think Richard Wurman discovered this at least 20 years before I did — was that all this stuff is connected. 
It's connected; it all hooks into each other. 
We talk about this a lot, and I thought about trying to give an example of this. So, just one example: Madame de Gaulle, the wife of the French president, was famously asked once, "" What do you most desire? "" And she answered, "" A penis. "" And when you think about it, it's very true: what we all most desire is a penis — or "" happiness "" as we say in English. 
(Laughter) And something... good luck with that one in the Japanese translation room. (Laughter) 
(Applause) But something as basic as happiness, which 20 years ago would have been just something for discussion in the church or mosque or synagogue, today it turns out that there's dozens of TED-like questions that you can ask about it, which are really interesting. 
You can ask about what causes it biochemically: neuroscience, serotonin, all that stuff. 
You can ask what are the psychological causes of it: nature? Nurture? Current circumstance? 
Turns out that the research done on that is absolutely mind-blowing. 
You can view it as a computing problem, an artificial intelligence problem: do you need to incorporate some sort of analog of happiness into a computer brain to make it work properly? 
You can view it in sort of geopolitical terms and say, why is it that a billion people on this planet are so desperately needy that they have no possibility of happiness, and whereas almost all the rest of them, regardless of how much money they have — whether it's two dollars a day or whatever — are almost equally happy on average? 
Or you can view it as an evolutionary psychology kind of thing: did our genes invent this as a kind of trick to get us to behave in certain ways? The ant's brain, parasitized, to make us behave in certain ways so that our genes would propagate? 
Are we the victims of a mass delusion? 
And so on, and so on. 
To understand even something as important to us as happiness, you kind of have to branch off in all these different directions, and there's nowhere that I've discovered — other than TED — where you can ask that many questions in that many different directions. 
And so, it's the profound thing that Richard talks about: to understand anything, you just need to understand the little bits; a little bit about everything that surrounds it. 
And so, gradually over these three days, you start off kind of trying to figure out, "Why am I listening to all this irrelevant stuff?" 
And at the end of the four days, your brain is humming and you feel energized, alive and excited, and it's because all these different bits have been put together. 
It's the total brain experience, we're going to... 
it's the mental equivalent of the full body massage. 
(Laughter) Every mental organ addressed. It really is. 
Enough of the theory, Chris. Tell us what you're actually going to do, all right? 
So, I will. Here's the vision for TED. 
Number one: do nothing. This thing ain't broke, so I ain't gonna fix it. 
Jeff Bezos kindly remarked to me, "" Chris, TED is a really great conference. 
You're going to have to fuck up really badly to make it bad. "" (Laughter) So, I gave myself the job title of TED Custodian for a reason, and I will promise you right here and now that the core values that make TED special are not going to be interfered with. 
Truth, curiosity, diversity, no selling, no corporate bullshit, no bandwagoning, no platforms. 
Just the pursuit of interest, wherever it lies, across all the disciplines that are represented here. 
That's not going to be changed at all. 
Number two: I am going to put together an incredible line up of speakers for next year. 
The time scale on which TED operates is just fantastic after coming out of a magazine business with monthly deadlines. 
There's a year to do this, and already — I hope to show you a bit later — there's 25 or so terrific speakers signed up for next year. 
And I'm getting fantastic help from the community; this is just such a great community. And combined, our contacts reach pretty much everyone who's interesting in the country, if not the planet. 
It's true. 
Number three: I do want to, if I can, find a way of extending the TED experience throughout the year a little bit. 
And one key way that we're going to do this is to introduce this book club. 
Books kind of saved me in the last couple years, and that's a gift that I would like to pass on. 
So, when you sign up for TED2003, every six weeks you'll get a care package with a book or two and a reason why they're linked to TED. 
They may well be by a TED speaker, and so we can get the conversation going during the year and come back next year having had the same intellectual, emotional journey. 
I think it will be great. 
And then, fourthly: I want to mention the Sapling Foundation, which is the new owner of TED. 
What Sapling's ownership means is that all of the proceeds of TED will go towards the causes that Sapling stands for. 
And more important, I think, the ideas that are exhibited and realized here are ideas that the foundation can use, because there's fantastic synergy. 
Already, just in the last few days, we've had so many people talking about stuff that they care about, that they're passionate about, that can make a difference in the world, and the idea of getting this group of people together — some of the causes that we believe in, the money that this conference can raise and the ideas — I really believe that that combination will, over time, make a difference. 
I'm incredibly excited about that. 
In fact, I don't think, overall, that I've been as excited by anything ever in my life. 
I'm in this for the long run, and I would be greatly honored and excited if you'll come on this journey with me. 

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

I'm going to talk to you about some stuff that's in this book of mine that I hope will resonate with other things you've already heard, and I'll try to make some connections myself, in case you missed them. 
The reason for this is both that freedom is in and of itself good, valuable, worthwhile, essential to being human. 
And because if people have freedom, then each of us can act on our own to do the things that will maximize our welfare, and no one has to decide on our behalf. 
This, I think, is so deeply embedded in the water supply that it wouldn't occur to anyone to question it. 
This is my supermarket. 
175 salad dressings in my supermarket, if you don't count the 10 extra-virgin olive oils and 12 balsamic vinegars you could buy to make a very large number of your own salad dressings, in the off-chance that none of the 175 the store has on offer suit you. 
And then you go to the consumer electronics store to set up a stereo system — speakers, CD player, tape player, tuner, amplifier — and in this one single consumer electronics store, there are that many stereo systems. 
One consequence of that, by the way, is that the phone never broke. 
We now have an almost unlimited variety of phones, especially in the world of cell phones. 
These are cell phones of the future. 
My favorite is the middle one — the MP3 player, nose hair trimmer, and crème brûlée torch. 
(Laughter) And if by some chance you haven't seen that in your store yet, you can rest assured that one day soon, you will. 
So, in other aspects of life that are much more significant than buying things, the same explosion of choice is true. 
What do you want to do? "" And you say, "" Doc, what should I do? "" And the doc says, "" A has these benefits and risks, and B has these benefits and risks. What do you want to do? "" 
And you say, "" If you were me, Doc, what would you do? "" And the doc says, "" But I'm not you. "" And the result is — we call it "" patient autonomy, "" which makes it sound like a good thing, but it really is a shifting of the burden and the responsibility for decision-making from somebody who knows something — namely, the doctor — to somebody who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick and thus not in the best shape to be making decisions — namely, the patient. 
The answer is that they expect us to call our doctors the next morning and ask for our prescriptions to be changed. 
And that means that every day, when you wake up in the morning, you have to decide what kind of person you want to be. 
I teach wonderfully intelligent students, and I assign 20 percent less work than I used to. 
And it's not because they're less smart, and it's not because they're less diligent. 
And they're going to answer these questions, whether or not it means not doing all the work I assign and not getting a good grade in my courses. 
(Laughter) (Applause) There is one corner, by the way, that I'm not going to tell anybody about, where the WiFi actually works. 
We can go to watch our kid play soccer, and we have our cell phone on one hip, and our Blackberry on our other hip, and our laptop, presumably, on our laps. 
Should I respond to this email? Should I draft this letter? "" And even if the answer to the question is "" no, "" it's certainly going to make the experience of your kid's soccer game very different than it would've been. 
And the answer is, "" yes. "" (Laughter) We all know what's good about it, so I'm going to talk about what's bad about it. 
All of this choice has two effects, two negative effects on people. 
With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all. 
I'll give you one very dramatic example of this: a study that was done of investments in voluntary retirement plans. 
And what she found is that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down two percent. 
Because with 50 funds to choose from, it's so damn hard to decide which fund to choose, that you'll just put it off until tomorrow. 
By not participating, they are passing up as much as 5,000 dollars a year from the employer, who would happily match their contribution. 
So paralysis is a consequence of having too many choices. 
[And lastly, for all eternity, French, bleu cheese, or ranch?] (Laughter) You really want to get the decision right if it's for all eternity, right? 
And what happens is this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made, even if it was a good decision. 
Second, what economists call "" opportunity costs. "" Dan Gilbert made a big point this morning of talking about how much the way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to. 
Well, when there are lots of alternatives to consider, it is easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you've chosen. 
Opportunity costs subtract from the satisfaction we get out of what we choose, even when what we choose is terrific. 
But one point it makes is that whenever you're choosing one thing, you're choosing not to do other things that may have lots of attractive features, and it's going to make what you're doing less attractive. 
Third: escalation of expectations. 
There was a time when jeans came in one flavor, and you bought them, and they fit like crap, they were incredibly uncomfortable, if you wore them and washed them enough times, they started to feel OK. 
I went to replace my jeans after years of wearing these old ones, and I said, "" I want a pair of jeans. Here's my size. "" And the shopkeeper said, "" Do you want slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit? 
You want button fly or zipper fly? You want stonewashed or acid-washed? 
(Laughter) He had no idea what that was, (Laughter) so I spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans, and I walked out of the store — truth! — with the best-fitting jeans I had ever had. 
The reason — (Laughter) The reason I felt worse is that, with all of these options available, my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up. 
I had very low, no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor. 
And what that's going to produce is less satisfaction with results, even when they're good results. 
Nowadays, the world we live in — we affluent, industrialized citizens, with perfection the expectation — the best you can ever hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be. 
I couldn't have done better. 
Finally — One consequence of buying a bad-fitting pair of jeans when there is only one kind to buy is that when you are dissatisfied, and you ask why, who's responsible, the answer is clear: the world is responsible. 
It is equally clear that the answer to the question is "" you. "" You could have done better. 
With a hundred different kinds of jeans on display, there is no excuse for failure. 
And so when people make decisions, and even though the results of the decisions are good, they feel disappointed about them; they blame themselves. 
I believe a significant — not the only, but a significant — contributor to this explosion of depression, and also suicide, is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high, and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves, they think they're at fault. 
And so the net result is that we do better in general, objectively, and we feel worse. 
So let me remind you. 
This is the official dogma, the one that we all take to be true, and it's all false. 
There's some magical amount. I don't know what it is. 
So the stuff I'm talking about is the peculiar problem of modern, affluent, Western societies. 
They actually make us worse off. 
If some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options, not only would those people's lives be improved, but ours would be improved also, which is what economists call a "" Pareto-improving move. "" Income redistribution will make everyone better off — not just poor people — because of how all this excess choice plagues us. 
Because the truth of the matter is that if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible, you don't have freedom. 
This one is almost certainly too limited — perhaps even for the fish, certainly for us. 
Thank you very much. 

Everybody talks about happiness these days. 
I had somebody count the number of books with "" happiness "" in the title published in the last five years and they gave up after about 40, and there were many more. 
There is a huge wave of interest in happiness, among researchers. 
There is a lot of happiness coaching. 
Everybody would like to make people happier. 
But in spite of all this flood of work, there are several cognitive traps that sort of make it almost impossible to think straight about happiness. 
And my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps. 
This applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness, and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness, because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else is. 
The first of these traps is a reluctance to admit complexity. 
It turns out that the word "" happiness "" is just not a useful word anymore, because we apply it to too many different things. 
I think there is one particular meaning to which we might restrict it, but by and large, this is something that we'll have to give up and we'll have to adopt the more complicated view of what well-being is. 
The second trap is a confusion between experience and memory; basically, it's between being happy in your life, and being happy about your life or happy with your life. 
And those are two very different concepts, and they're both lumped in the notion of happiness. 
And the third is the focusing illusion, and it's the unfortunate fact that we can't think about any circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its importance. 
I mean, this is a real cognitive trap. 
There's just no way of getting it right. 
Now, I'd like to start with an example of somebody who had a question-and-answer session after one of my lectures reported a story, and that was a story — He said he'd been listening to a symphony, and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the recording, there was a dreadful screeching sound. 
And then he added, really quite emotionally, it ruined the whole experience. 
But it hadn't. 
What it had ruined were the memories of the experience. 
He had had the experience. 
He had had 20 minutes of glorious music. 
They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory; the memory was ruined, and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep. 
What this is telling us, really, is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves. 
There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present. 
It's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches — you know, when the doctor asks, "Does it hurt now when I touch you here?" 
And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life, and it's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question, "How have you been feeling lately?" 
or "" How was your trip to Albania? "" or something like that. 
Those are two very different entities, the experiencing self and the remembering self, and getting confused between them is part of the mess about the notion of happiness. 
Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. 
And that really starts with a basic response of our memories — it starts immediately. 
We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. 
Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story. 
And let me begin with one example. 
This is an old study. 
Those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure. 
I won't go into detail. It's no longer painful these days, but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s. 
They were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds. 
Here are two patients, those are their recordings. 
And you are asked, "" Who of them suffered more? "" And it's a very easy question. 
Clearly, Patient B suffered more — his colonoscopy was longer, and every minute of pain that Patient A had, Patient B had, and more. 
But now there is another question: "How much did these patients think they suffered?" 
And here is a surprise. 
The surprise is that Patient A had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than Patient B. 
The stories of the colonoscopies were different, and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends. 
And neither of these stories is very inspiring or great — but one of them is this distinct... (Laughter) but one of them is distinctly worse than the other. 
And the one that is worse is the one where pain was at its peak at the very end; it's a bad story. 
How do we know that? 
Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy, and much later, too, "How bad was the whole thing, in total?" 
And it was much worse for A than for B, in memory. 
Now this is a direct conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self. 
From the point of view of the experiencing self, clearly, B had a worse time. 
Now, what you could do with Patient A, and we actually ran clinical experiments, and it has been done, and it does work — you could actually extend the colonoscopy of Patient A by just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much. 
That will cause the patient to suffer, but just a little and much less than before. 
And if you do that for a couple of minutes, you have made the experiencing self of Patient A worse off, and you have the remembering self of Patient A a lot better off, because now you have endowed Patient A with a better story about his experience. 
What defines a story? 
And that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us, and it's also true of the stories that we make up. 
What defines a story are changes, significant moments and endings. 
Endings are very, very important and, in this case, the ending dominated. 
Now, the experiencing self lives its life continuously. 
It has moments of experience, one after the other. 
And you can ask: What happens to these moments? 
And the answer is really straightforward: They are lost forever. 
I mean, most of the moments of our life — and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 — most of them don't leave a trace. 
Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self. 
And yet, somehow you get the sense that they should count, that what happens during these moments of experience is our life. 
It's the finite resource that we're spending while we're on this earth. 
And how to spend it would seem to be relevant, but that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us. 
So we have the remembering self and the experiencing self, and they're really quite distinct. 
The biggest difference between them is in the handling of time. 
From the point of view of the experiencing self, if you have a vacation, and the second week is just as good as the first, then the two-week vacation is twice as good as the one-week vacation. 
That's not the way it works at all for the remembering self. 
For the remembering self, a two-week vacation is barely better than the one-week vacation because there are no new memories added. 
You have not changed the story. 
And in this way, time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self; time has very little impact on the story. 
Now, the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories. 
It is actually the one that makes decisions because, if you have a patient who has had, say, two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose, then the one that chooses is the one that has the memory that is less bad, and that's the surgeon that will be chosen. 
The experiencing self has no voice in this choice. 
We actually don't choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. 
And even when we think about the future, we don't think of our future normally as experiences. 
We think of our future as anticipated memories. 
And basically you can look at this, you know, as a tyranny of the remembering self, and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn't need. 
I have that sense that when we go on vacations this is very frequently the case; that is, we go on vacations, to a very large extent, in the service of our remembering self. 
And this is a bit hard to justify I think. 
I mean, how much do we consume our memories? 
That is one of the explanations that is given for the dominance of the remembering self. 
And when I think about that, I think about a vacation we had in Antarctica a few years ago, which was clearly the best vacation I've ever had, and I think of it relatively often, relative to how much I think of other vacations. 
And I probably have consumed my memories of that three-week trip, I would say, for about 25 minutes in the last four years. 
Now, if I had ever opened the folder with the 600 pictures in it, I would have spent another hour. 
Now, that is three weeks, and that is at most an hour and a half. 
There seems to be a discrepancy. 
Now, I may be a bit extreme, you know, in how little appetite I have for consuming memories, but even if you do more of this, there is a genuine question: Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences? 
So I want you to think about a thought experiment. 
Imagine that for your next vacation, you know that at the end of the vacation all your pictures will be destroyed, and you'll get an amnesic drug so that you won't remember anything. 
Now, would you choose the same vacation? (Laughter) And if you would choose a different vacation, there is a conflict between your two selves, and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict, and it's actually not at all obvious, because if you think in terms of time, then you get one answer, and if you think in terms of memories, you might get another answer. 
Why do we pick the vacations we do is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves. 
Now, the two selves bring up two notions of happiness. 
There are really two concepts of happiness that we can apply, one per self. 
So you can ask: How happy is the experiencing self? 
And then you would ask: How happy are the moments in the experiencing self's life? 
And they're all — happiness for moments is a fairly complicated process. 
What are the emotions that can be measured? 
And, by the way, now we are capable of getting a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experiencing self over time. 
If you ask for the happiness of the remembering self, it's a completely different thing. 
This is not about how happily a person lives. 
It is about how satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her life. 
Very different notion. 
Anyone who doesn't distinguish those notions is going to mess up the study of happiness, and I belong to a crowd of students of well-being, who've been messing up the study of happiness for a long time in precisely this way. 
The distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the remembering self has been recognized in recent years, and there are now efforts to measure the two separately. 
The Gallup Organization has a world poll where more than half a million people have been asked questions about what they think of their life and about their experiences, and there have been other efforts along those lines. 
So in recent years, we have begun to learn about the happiness of the two selves. 
And the main lesson I think that we have learned is they are really different. 
You can know how satisfied somebody is with their life, and that really doesn't teach you much about how happily they're living their life, and vice versa. 
Just to give you a sense of the correlation, the correlation is about .5. 
What that means is if you met somebody, and you were told, "" Oh his father is six feet tall, "" how much would you know about his height? 
Well, you would know something about his height, but there's a lot of uncertainty. 
You have that much uncertainty. 
If I tell you that somebody ranked their life eight on a scale of ten, you have a lot of uncertainty about how happy they are with their experiencing self. 
So the correlation is low. 
We know something about what controls satisfaction of the happiness self. 
We know that money is very important, goals are very important. 
We know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like, spending time with people that we like. 
There are other pleasures, but this is dominant. 
So if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves, you are going to end up doing very different things. 
The bottom line of what I've said here is that we really should not think of happiness as a substitute for well-being. 
It is a completely different notion. 
Now, very quickly, another reason we cannot think straight about happiness is that we do not attend to the same things when we think about life, and we actually live. 
So, if you ask the simple question of how happy people are in California, you are not going to get to the correct answer. 
When you ask that question, you think people must be happier in California if, say, you live in Ohio. 
(Laughter) And what happens is when you think about living in California, you are thinking of the contrast between California and other places, and that contrast, say, is in climate. 
Well, it turns out that climate is not very important to the experiencing self and it's not even very important to the reflective self that decides how happy people are. 
But now, because the reflective self is in charge, you may end up — some people may end up moving to California. 
And it's sort of interesting to trace what is going to happen to people who move to California in the hope of getting happier. 
Well, their experiencing self is not going to get happier. 
We know that. 
But one thing will happen: They will think they are happier, because, when they think about it, they'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in Ohio, and they will feel they made the right decision. 
It is very difficult to think straight about well-being, and I hope I have given you a sense of how difficult it is. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. I've got a question for you. 
Thank you so much. 
Now, when we were on the phone a few weeks ago, you mentioned to me that there was quite an interesting result came out of that Gallup survey. 
Is that something you can share since you do have a few moments left now? 
Daniel Kahneman: Sure. 
I think the most interesting result that we found in the Gallup survey is a number, which we absolutely did not expect to find. 
We found that with respect to the happiness of the experiencing self. 
When we looked at how feelings, vary with income. 
And it turns out that, below an income of 60,000 dollars a year, for Americans — and that's a very large sample of Americans, like 600,000, so it's a large representative sample — below an income of 600,000 dollars a year... 
CA: 60,000. 
DK: 60,000. 
(Laughter) 60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. 
Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. 
I mean I've rarely seen lines so flat. 
Clearly, what is happening is money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery, and we can measure that misery very, very clearly. 
In terms of the other self, the remembering self, you get a different story. 
The more money you earn, the more satisfied you are. 
That does not hold for emotions. 
CA: But Danny, the whole American endeavor is about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. 
If people took seriously that finding, I mean, it seems to turn upside down everything we believe about, like for example, taxation policy and so forth. 
Is there any chance that politicians, that the country generally, would take a finding like that seriously and run public policy based on it? 
DK: You know I think that there is recognition of the role of happiness research in public policy. 
The recognition is going to be slow in the United States, no question about that, but in the U.K., it is happening, and in other countries it is happening. 
People are recognizing that they ought to be thinking of happiness when they think of public policy. 
It's going to take a while, and people are going to debate whether they want to study experience happiness, or whether they want to study life evaluation, so we need to have that debate fairly soon. 
How to enhance happiness goes very different ways depending on how you think, and whether you think of the remembering self or you think of the experiencing self. 
This is going to influence policy, I think, in years to come. 
In the United States, efforts are being made to measure the experience happiness of the population. 
This is going to be, I think, within the next decade or two, part of national statistics. 
CA: Well, it seems to me that this issue will — or at least should be — the most interesting policy discussion to track over the next few years. 
Thank you so much for inventing behavioral economics. 
Thank you, Danny Kahneman. 

For the next few minutes we're going to talk about energy, and it's going to be a bit of a varied talk. 
I'll try to spin a story about energy, and oil's a convenient starting place. 
The talk will be broadly about energy, but oil's a good place to start. 
And one of the reasons is this is remarkable stuff. 
You take about eight or so carbon atoms, about 20 hydrogen atoms, you put them together in exactly the right way and you get this marvelous liquid: very energy-dense and very easy to refine into a number of very useful products and fuels. 
It's great stuff. 
Now, as far as it goes, there's a lot of oil out there in the world. 
Here's my little pocket map of where it's all located. 
A bigger one for you to look at. 
But this is it, this is the oil in the world. 
Geologists have a pretty good idea of where the oil is. 
This is about 100 trillion gallons of crude oil still to be developed and produced in the world today. 
Now, that's just one story about oil, and we could end it there and say, "" Well, oil's going to last forever because, well, there's just a lot of it. "" But there's actually more to the story than that. 
Oh, by the way, if you think you're very far from some of this oil, 1000 meters below where you're all sitting is one of the largest producing oil fields in the world. 
Come talk to me about it, I'll fill in some of the details if you want. 
So, that's one of the stories of oil; there's just a lot of it. 
But what about oil? Where is it in the energy system? 
Here's a little snapshot of 150 years of oil, and it's been a dominant part of our energy system for most of those 150 years. 
Now, here's another little secret I'm going to tell you about: For the last 25 years, oil has been playing less and less of a role in global energy systems. 
There was one kind of peak oil in 1985, when oil represented 50 percent of global energy supply. 
Now, it's about 35 percent. 
It's been declining and I believe it will continue to decline. 
Gasoline consumption in the U.S. probably peaked in 2007 and is declining. 
So oil is playing a less significant role every year. 
And so, 25 years ago, there was a peak oil; just like, in the 1920s, there was a peak coal; and a hundred years before that, there was a peak wood. 
This is a very important picture of the evolution of energy systems. 
And what's been taking up the slack in the last few decades? 
Well, a lot of natural gas and a little bit of nuclear, for starters. 
And what goes on in the future? 
Well, I think out ahead of us a few decades is peak gas, and beyond that, peak renewables. 
Now, I'll tell you another little, very important story about this picture. 
Now, I'm not pretending that energy use in total isn't increasing, it is — that's another part of the story. Come talk to me about it, we'll fill in some of the details — but there's a very important message here: This is 200 years of history, and for 200 years we've been systematically decarbonizing our energy system. 
Energy systems of the world becoming progressively — year on year, decade on decade, century on century — becoming less carbon intense. 
And that continues into the future with the renewables that we're developing today, reaching maybe 30 percent of primary energy by mid century. 
Now that might be the end of the story — Okay, we just replace it all with conventional renewables — but I think, actually, there's more to the story than that. 
And to tell the next part of the story — and this is looking out say 2100 and beyond. 
What is the future of truly sustainable, carbon-free energy? 
Well, we have to take a little excursion, and we'll start in central Texas. 
Here's a piece of limestone. 
I picked it up outside of Marble Falls, Texas. 
It's about 400 million years old. 
And it's just limestone, nothing really special about it. 
Now, here's a piece of chalk. 
I picked this up at MIT. It's a little younger. 
And it's different than this limestone, you can see that. 
You wouldn't build a building out of this stuff, and you wouldn't try to give a lecture and write on the chalkboard with this. 
Yeah, it's very different — no, it's not different. 
It's not different, it's the same stuff: calcium carbonate, calcium carbonate. 
What's different is how the molecules are put together. 
Now, if you think that's kind of neat, the story gets really neat right now. 
Off the coast of California comes this: It's an abalone shell. 
Now, millions of abalone every year make this shell. 
Oh, by the way, just in case you weren't already guessing, it's calcium carbonate. 
It's the same stuff as this and the same stuff as this. 
But it's not the same stuff; it's different. 
It's thousands of times, maybe 3,000 times tougher than this. 
And why? Because the lowly abalone is able to lay down the calcium carbonate crystals in layers, making this beautiful, iridescent mother of pearl. 
Very specialized material that the abalone self-assembles, millions of abalone, all the time, every day, every year. 
This is pretty incredible stuff. 
All the same, what's different? 
How the molecules are put together. 
Now, what does this have to do with energy? 
Here's a piece of coal. 
And I'll suggest that this coal is about as exciting as this chalk. 
Now, whether we're talking about fuels or energy carriers, or perhaps novel materials for batteries or fuel cells, nature hasn't ever built those perfect materials yet because nature didn't need to. 
Nature didn't need to because, unlike the abalone shell, the survival of a species didn't depend on building those materials, until maybe now when it might just matter. 
So, when we think about the future of energy, imagine what would it be like if instead of this, we could build the energy equivalent of this just by rearranging the molecules differently. 
And so that is my story. 
The oil will never run out. 
It's not because we have a lot of it. 
It's not because we're going to build a bajillion windmills. 
It's because, well, thousands of years ago, people invented ideas — they had ideas, innovations, technology — and the Stone Age ended, not because we ran out of stones. 
(Laughter) It's ideas, it's innovation, it's technology that will end the age of oil, long before we run out of oil. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

G'day, my name's Kevin. 
I'm from Australia. I'm here to help. 
(Laughter) Tonight, I want to talk about a tale of two cities. 
One of those cities is called Washington, and the other is called Beijing. 
Because how these two capitals shape their future and the future of the United States and the future of China doesn't just affect those two countries, it affects all of us in ways, perhaps, we've never thought of: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the fish we eat, the quality of our oceans, the languages we speak in the future, the jobs we have, the political systems we choose, and, of course, the great questions of war and peace. 
You see that bloke? He's French. 
His name is Napoleon. 
A couple of hundred years ago, he made this extraordinary projection: "" China is a sleeping lion, and when she awakes, the world will shake. "" Napoleon got a few things wrong; he got this one absolutely right. 
Because China is today not just woken up, China has stood up and China is on the march, and the question for us all is where will China go and how do we engage this giant of the 21st century? 
You start looking at the numbers, they start to confront you in a big way. 
It's projected that China will become, by whichever measure — PPP, market exchange rates — the largest economy in the world over the course of the decade ahead. 
They're already the largest trading nation, already the largest exporting nation, already the largest manufacturing nation, and they're also the biggest emitters of carbon in the world. 
America comes second. 
So if China does become the world's largest economy, think about this: It'll be the first time since this guy was on the throne of England — George III, not a good friend of Napoleon's — that in the world we will have as the largest economy a non-English speaking country, a non-Western country, a non-liberal democratic country. 
And if you don't think that's going to affect the way in which the world happens in the future, then personally, I think you've been smoking something, and it doesn't mean you're from Colorado. 
So in short, the question we have tonight is, how do we understand this mega-change, which I believe to be the biggest change for the first half of the 21st century? 
It'll affect so many things. 
It will go to the absolute core. 
It's happening quietly. It's happening persistently. 
It's happening in some senses under the radar, as we are all preoccupied with what's going in Ukraine, what's going on in the Middle East, what's going on with ISIS, what's going on with ISIL, what's happening with the future of our economies. 
This is a slow and quiet revolution. 
And with a mega-change comes also a mega-challenge, and the mega-challenge is this: Can these two great countries, China and the United States — China, the Middle Kingdom, and the United States, Měiguó — which in Chinese, by the way, means "" the beautiful country. "" Think about that — that's the name that China has given this country for more than a hundred years. 
Whether these two great civilizations, these two great countries, can in fact carve out a common future for themselves and for the world? 
In short, can we carve out a future which is peaceful and mutually prosperous, or are we looking at a great challenge of war or peace? 
And I have 15 minutes to work through war or peace, which is a little less time than they gave this guy to write a book called "" War and Peace. "" People ask me, why is it that a kid growing up in rural Australia got interested in learning Chinese? 
Well, there are two reasons for that. 
Here's the first of them. 
That's Betsy the cow. 
Now, Betsy the cow was one of a herd of dairy cattle that I grew up with on a farm in rural Australia. 
See those hands there? These are not built for farming. 
So very early on, I discovered that in fact, working in a farm was not designed for me, and China was a very safe remove from any career in Australian farm life. 
Here's the second reason. 
That's my mom. 
Anyone here ever listen to what their mom told them to do? 
Everyone ever do what their mom told them to do? 
I rarely did, but what my mom said to me was, one day, she handed me a newspaper, a headline which said, here we have a huge change. 
And that change is China entering the United Nations. 
1971, I had just turned 14 years of age, and she handed me this headline. 
And she said, "" Understand this, learn this, because it's going to affect your future. "" So being a very good student of history, I decided that the best thing for me to do was, in fact, to go off and learn Chinese. 
The great thing about learning Chinese is that your Chinese teacher gives you a new name. 
And so they gave me this name: Kè, which means to overcome or to conquer, and Wén, and that's the character for literature or the arts. 
Kè Wén, Conqueror of the Classics. 
Any of you guys called "" Kevin ""? 
It's a major lift from being called Kevin to be called Conqueror of the Classics. 
(Laughter) I've been called Kevin all my life. 
Have you been called Kevin all your life? 
Would you prefer to be called Conqueror of the Classics? 
And so I went off after that and joined the Australian Foreign Service, but here is where pride — before pride, there always comes a fall. 
So there I am in the embassy in Beijing, off to the Great Hall of the People with our ambassador, who had asked me to interpret for his first meeting in the Great Hall of the People. 
And so there was I. 
If you've been to a Chinese meeting, it's a giant horseshoe. 
At the head of the horsehoe are the really serious pooh-bahs, and down the end of the horseshoe are the not-so-serious pooh-bahs, the junior woodchucks like me. 
And so the ambassador began with this inelegant phrase. 
He said, "" China and Australia are currently enjoying a relationship of unprecedented closeness. "" And I thought to myself, "" That sounds clumsy. That sounds odd. 
I will improve it. "" Note to file: Never do that. 
It needed to be a little more elegant, a little more classical, so I rendered it as follows. 
[In Chinese] There was a big pause on the other side of the room. 
You could see the giant pooh-bahs at the head of the horseshoe, the blood visibly draining from their faces, and the junior woodchucks at the other end of the horseshoe engaged in peals of unrestrained laughter. 
Because when I rendered his sentence, "" Australia and China are enjoying a relationship of unprecedented closeness, "" in fact, what I said was that Australia and China were now experiencing fantastic orgasm. 
(Laughter) That was the last time I was asked to interpret. 
But in that little story, there's a wisdom, which is, as soon as you think you know something about this extraordinary civilization of 5,000 years of continuing history, there's always something new to learn. 
History is against us when it comes to the U.S. and China forging a common future together. 
This guy up here? 
He's not Chinese and he's not American. 
He's Greek. His name's Thucydides. 
He wrote the history of the Peloponnesian Wars. 
And he made this extraordinary observation about Athens and Sparta. 
"" It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable. "" And hence, a whole literature about something called the Thucydides Trap. 
This guy here? He's not American and he's not Greek. He's Chinese. 
His name is Sun Tzu. He wrote "" The Art of War, "" and if you see his statement underneath, it's along these lines: "Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected." 
Not looking good so far for China and the United States. 
This guy is an American. His name's Graham Allison. 
In fact, he's a teacher at the Kennedy School over there in Boston. 
He's working on a single project at the moment, which is, does the Thucydides Trap about the inevitably of war between rising powers and established great powers apply to the future of China-U.S. relations? 
It's a core question. 
And what Graham has done is explore 15 cases in history since the 1500s to establish what the precedents are. 
And in 11 out of 15 of them, let me tell you, they've ended in catastrophic war. 
You may say, "" But Kevin — or Conqueror of the Classics — that was the past. 
We live now in a world of interdependence and globalization. 
It could never happen again. "" Guess what? 
The economic historians tell us that in fact, the time which we reached the greatest point of economic integration and globalization was in 1914, just before that happened, World War I, a sobering reflection from history. 
So if we are engaged in this great question of how China thinks, feels, and positions itself towards the United States, and the reverse, how do we get to the baseline of how these two countries and civilizations can possibly work together? 
Let me first go to, in fact, China's views of the U.S. and the rest of the West. 
Number one: China feels as if it's been humiliated at the hands of the West through a hundred years of history, beginning with the Opium Wars. 
When after that, the Western powers carved China up into little pieces, so that by the time it got to the '20s and' 30s, signs like this one appeared on the streets of Shanghai. 
["" No dogs and Chinese allowed ""] How would you feel if you were Chinese, in your own country, if you saw that sign appear? 
China also believes and feels as if, in the events of 1919, at the Peace Conference in Paris, when Germany's colonies were given back to all sorts of countries around in the world, what about German colonies in China? 
They were, in fact, given to Japan. 
When Japan then invaded China in the 1930s the world looked away and was indifferent to what would happen to China. 
And then, on top of that, the Chinese to this day believe that the United States and the West do not accept the legitimacy of their political system because it's so radically different from those of us who come from liberal democracies, and believe that the United States to this day is seeking to undermine their political system. 
China also believes that it is being contained by U.S. allies and by those with strategic partnerships with the U.S. 
right around its periphery. 
And beyond all that, the Chinese have this feeling in their heart of hearts and in their gut of guts that those of us in the collective West are just too damned arrogant. 
That is, we don't recognize the problems in our own system, in our politics and our economics, and are very quick to point the finger elsewhere, and believe that, in fact, we in the collective West are guilty of a great bunch of hypocrisy. 
Of course, in international relations, it's not just the sound of one hand clapping. 
There's another country too, and that's called the U.S. 
So how does the U.S. respond to all of the above? 
The U.S. has a response to each of those. 
On the question of is the U.S. containing China, they say, "" No, look at the history of the Soviet Union. That was containment. "" Instead, what we have done in the U.S. and the West is welcome China into the global economy, and on top of that, welcome them into the World Trade Organization. 
The U.S. and the West say China cheats on the question of intellectual property rights, and through cyberattacks on U.S. and global firms. 
Furthermore, the United States says that the Chinese political system is fundamentally wrong because it's at such fundamental variance to the human rights, democracy, and rule of law that we enjoy in the U.S. and the collective West. 
And on top of all the above, what does the United States say? 
That they fear that China will, when it has sufficient power, establish a sphere of influence in Southeast Asia and wider East Asia, boot the United States out, and in time, when it's powerful enough, unilaterally seek to change the rules of the global order. 
So apart from all of that, it's just fine and dandy, the U.S.-China relationship. 
No real problems there. 
The challenge, though, is given those deep-rooted feelings, those deep-rooted emotions and thought patterns, what the Chinese call "" Sīwéi, "" ways of thinking, how can we craft a basis for a common future between these two? 
I argue simply this: We can do it on the basis on a framework of constructive realism for a common purpose. 
What do I mean by that? 
Be realistic about the things that we disagree on, and a management approach that doesn't enable any one of those differences to break into war or conflict until we've acquired the diplomatic skills to solve them. 
Be constructive in areas of the bilateral, regional and global engagement between the two, which will make a difference for all of humankind. 
Build a regional institution capable of cooperation in Asia, an Asia-Pacific community. 
And worldwide, act further, like you've begun to do at the end of last year by striking out against climate change with hands joined together rather than fists apart. 
Of course, all that happens if you've got a common mechanism and political will to achieve the above. 
These things are deliverable. 
But the question is, are they deliverable alone? 
This is what our head tells us we need to do, but what about our heart? 
I have a little experience in the question back home of how you try to bring together two peoples who, frankly, haven't had a whole lot in common in the past. 
And that's when I apologized to Australia's indigenous peoples. 
This was a day of reckoning in the Australian government, the Australian parliament, and for the Australian people. 
After 200 years of unbridled abuse towards the first Australians, it was high time that we white folks said we were sorry. 
The important thing — (Applause) The important thing that I remember is staring in the faces of all those from Aboriginal Australia as they came to listen to this apology. 
It was extraordinary to see, for example, old women telling me the stories of when they were five years old and literally ripped away from their parents, like this lady here. 
It was extraordinary for me to then be able to embrace and to kiss Aboriginal elders as they came into the parliament building, and one woman said to me, it's the first time a white fella had ever kissed her in her life, and she was over 70. 
That's a terrible story. 
And then I remember this family saying to me, "" You know, we drove all the way from the far North down to Canberra to come to this thing, drove our way through redneck country. 
On the way back, stopped at a cafe after the apology for a milkshake. "" And they walked into this cafe quietly, tentatively, gingerly, a little anxious. 
I think you know what I'm talking about. 
But the day after the apology, what happened? 
Everyone in that cafe, every one of the white folks, stood up and applauded. 
Something had happened in the hearts of these people in Australia. 
The white folks, our Aboriginal brothers and sisters, and we haven't solved all these problems together, but let me tell you, there was a new beginning because we had gone not just to the head, we'd gone also to the heart. 
So where does that conclude in terms of the great question that we've been asked to address this evening, which is the future of U.S.-China relations? 
The head says there's a way forward. 
The head says there is a policy framework, there's a common narrative, there's a mechanism through regular summitry to do these things and to make them better. 
But the heart must also find a way to reimagine the possibilities of the America-China relationship, and the possibilities of China's future engagement in the world. 
Sometimes, folks, we just need to take a leap of faith not quite knowing where we might land. 
In China, they now talk about the Chinese Dream. 
In America, we're all familiar with the term "" the American Dream. "" I think it's time, across the world, that we're able to think also of something we might also call a dream for all humankind. 
Because if we do that, we might just change the way that we think about each other. 
[In Chinese] That's my challenge to America. That's my challenge to China. 
That's my challenge to all of us, but I think where there's a will and where there is imagination we can turn this into a future driven by peace and prosperity and not once again repeat the tragedies of war. 
I thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thanks so much for that. Thanks so much for that. 
It feels like you yourself have a role to play in this bridging. 
You, in a way, are uniquely placed to speak to both sides. 
Kevin Rudd: Well, what we Australians do best is organize the drinks, so you get them together in one room, and we suggest this and suggest that, then we go and get the drinks. 
But no, look, for all of us who are friends of these two great countries, America and China, you can do something. 
You can make a practical contribution, and for all you good folks here, next time you meet someone from China, sit down and have a conversation. 
See what you can find out about where they come from and what they think, and my challenge for all the Chinese folks who are going to watch this TED Talk at some time is do the same. 
Two of us seeking to change the world can actually make a huge difference. 
Those of us up the middle, we can make a small contribution. 
CA: Kevin, all power to you, my friend. Thank you. 
KR: Thank you. Thank you, folks. 
(Applause) 

We invent. 
My company invents all kinds of new technology in lots of different areas. 
And we do that for a couple of reasons. 
We invent for fun — invention is a lot of fun to do — and we also invent for profit. 
The two are related because the profit actually takes long enough that if it isn't fun, you wouldn't have the time to do it. 
So we do this fun and profit-oriented inventing for most of what we do, but we also have a program where we invent for humanity — where we take some of our best inventors, and we say, "" Are there problems where we have a good idea for solving a problem the world has? "" — and to solve it in the way we try to solve problems, which is with dramatic, crazy, out-of-the-box solutions. 
Bill Gates is one of those smartest guys of ours that work on these problems and he also funds this work, so thank you. 
So I'm going to briefly discuss a couple of problems that we have and a couple of problems where we've got some solutions underway. 
Vaccination is one of the key techniques in public health, a fantastic thing. 
But in the developing world a lot of vaccines spoil before they're administered, and that's because they need to be kept cold. 
Almost all vaccines need to be kept at refrigerator temperatures. 
They go bad very quickly if you don't, and if you don't have stable power grid, this doesn't happen, so kids die. 
It's not just the loss of the vaccine that matters; it's the fact that those kids don't get vaccinated. 
This is one of the ways that vaccines are carried: These are Styrofoam chests. These are being carried by people, but they're also put on the backs of pickup trucks. 
We've got a different solution. 
Now, one of these Styrofoam chests will last for about four hours with ice in it. 
And we thought, well, that's not really good enough. 
So we made this thing. 
This lasts six months with no power; absolutely zero power, because it loses less than a half a watt. 
Now, this is our second generations prototype. 
The third generation prototype is, right now, in Uganda being tested. 
Now, the reason we were able to come up with this is two key ideas: One is that this is similar to a cryogenic Dewar, something you'd keep liquid nitrogen or liquid helium in. 
They have incredible insulation, so let's put some incredible insulation here. 
The other idea is kind of interesting, which is, you can't reach inside anymore. 
Because if you open it up and reach inside, you'd let the heat in, the game would be over. 
So the inside of this thing actually looks like a Coke machine. 
It vends out little individual vials. 
So a simple idea, which we hope is going to change the way vaccines are distributed in Africa and around the world. 
We'll move on to malaria. 
Malaria is one of the great public health problems. 
Esther Duflo talked a little bit about this. 
Two hundred million people a year. 
Every 43 seconds a child in Africa dies; 27 will die during my talk. 
And there's no way for us here in this country to grasp really what that means to the people involved. 
Another comment of Esther's was that we react when there's a tragedy like Haiti, but that tragedy is ongoing. 
So what can we do about it? 
Well, there are a lot of things people have tried for many years for solving malaria. 
You can spray; the problem is there are environmental issues. 
You can try to treat people and create awareness. 
That's great, except the places that have malaria really bad, they don't have health care systems. 
A vaccine would be a terrific thing, only they don't work yet. 
People have tried for a long time. There are a couple of interesting candidates. 
It's a very difficult thing to make a vaccine for. 
You can distribute bed nets, and bed nets are very effective if you use them. 
You don't always use them for that. People fish with them. 
They don't always get to everyone. 
And bed nets have an effect on the epidemic, but you're never going to make it extinct with bed nets. 
Now, malaria is an incredibly complicated disease. 
We could spend hours going over this. 
It's got this sort of soap opera-like lifestyle; they have sex, they burrow into your liver, they tunnel into your blood cells... 
it's an incredibly complicated disease, but that's actually one of the things we find interesting about it and why we work on malaria: There's a lot of potential ways in. 
One of those ways might be better diagnosis. 
So we hope this year to prototype each of these devices. 
One does an automatic malaria diagnosis in the same way that a diabetic's glucose meter works: You take a drop of blood, you put it in there and it automatically tells you. 
Today, you need to do a complicated laboratory procedure, create a bunch of microscope slides and have a trained person examine it. 
The other thing is, you know, it would be even better if you didn't have to draw the blood. 
And if you look through the eye, or you look at the vessels on the white of the eye, in fact, you may be able to do this directly, without drawing any blood at all, or through your nail beds. 
Because if you actually look through your fingernails, you can see blood vessels, and once you see blood vessels, we think we can see the malaria. 
We can see it because of this molecule called hemozoin. 
It's produced by the malaria parasite and it's a very interesting crystalline substance. 
Interesting, anyway, if you're a solid-state physicist. 
There's a lot of cool stuff we can do with it. 
This is our femtosecond laser lab. 
So this creates pulses of light that last a femtosecond. 
That's really, really, really short. 
This is a pulse of light that's only about one wavelength of light long, so it's a whole bunch of photons all coming and hitting simultaneously. 
It creates a very high peak power and it lets you do all kinds of interesting things; in particular, it lets you find hemozoin. 
So here's an image of red blood cells, and now we can actually map where the hemozoin and where the malaria parasites are inside those red blood cells. 
And using both this technique and other optical techniques, we think we can make those diagnostics. 
We also have another hemozoin-oriented therapy for malaria: a way, in acute cases, to actually take the malaria parasite and filter it out of the blood system. 
Sort of like doing dialysis, but for relieving the parasite load. 
This is our thousand-core supercomputer. 
We're kind of software guys, and so nearly any problem that you pose, we like to try to solve with some software. 
One of the problems that you have if you're trying to eradicate malaria or reduce it is you don't know what's the most effective thing to do. 
Okay, we heard about bed nets earlier. 
You spend a certain amount per bed net. 
Or you could spray. 
You can give drug administration. 
There's all these different interventions but they have different kinds of effectiveness. 
How can you tell? 
So we've created, using our supercomputer, the world's best computer model of malaria, which we'll show you now. 
We picked Madagascar. 
We have every road, every village, every, almost, square inch of Madagascar. 
We have all of the precipitation data and the temperature data. 
That's very important because the humidity and precipitation tell you whether you've got standing pools of water for the mosquitoes to breed. 
So that sets the stage on which you do this. 
You then have to introduce the mosquitoes, and you have to model that and how they come and go. 
Ultimately, it gives you this. 
This is malaria spreading across Madagascar. 
And this is this latter part of the rainy season. 
We're going to the dry season now. 
It nearly goes away in the dry season, because there's no place for the mosquitoes to breed. 
And then, of course, the next year it comes roaring back. 
By doing these kinds of simulations, we want to eradicate or control malaria thousands of times in software before we actually have to do it in real life; to be able to simulate both the economic trade-offs — how many bed nets versus how much spraying? — or the social trade-offs — what happens if unrest breaks out? 
We also try to study our foe. 
This is a high-speed camera view of a mosquito. 
And, in a moment, we're going to see a view of the airflow. 
Here, we're trying to visualize the airflow around the wings of the mosquito with little particles we're illuminating with a laser. 
By understanding how mosquitoes fly, we hope to understand how to make them not fly. 
Now, one of the ways you can make them not fly is with DDT. 
This is a real ad. 
This is one of those things you just can't make up. 
Once upon a time, this was the primary technique, and, in fact, many countries got rid of malaria through DDT. 
The United States did. 
In 1935, there were 150,000 cases a year of malaria in the United States, but DDT and a massive public health effort managed to squelch it. 
So we thought, "" Well, we've done all these things that are focused on the Plasmodium, the parasite involved. 
What can we do to the mosquito? 
Well, let's try to kill it with consumer electronics. "" Now, that sounds silly, but each of these devices has something interesting in it that maybe you could use. 
Your Blu-ray player has a very cheap blue laser. 
Your laser printer has a mirror galvanometer that's used to steer a laser beam very accurately; that's what makes those little dots on the page. 
And, of course, there's signal processing and digital cameras. 
So what if we could put all that together to shoot them out of the sky with lasers? 
(Laughter) (Applause) Now, in our company, this is what we call "the pinky-suck moment." (Laughter) 
What if we could do that? 
Now, just suspend disbelief for a moment, and let's think of what could happen if we could do that. 
Well, we could protect very high-value targets like clinics. 
Clinics are full of people that have malaria. 
They're sick, and so they're less able to defend themselves from the mosquitoes. 
You really want to protect them. 
Of course, if you do that, you could also protect your backyard. 
And farmers could protect their crops that they want to sell to Whole Foods because our photons are 100 percent organic. (Laughter) They're completely natural. 
Now, it actually gets better than this. 
You could, if you're really smart, you could shine a nonlethal laser on the bug before you zap it, and you could listen to the wing beat frequency and you could measure the size. 
And then you could decide: "" Is this an insect I want to kill, or an insect I don't want to kill? "" Moore's law made computing cheap; so cheap we can weigh the life of an individual insect and decide thumbs up or thumbs down. (Laughter) Now, it turns out we only kill the female mosquitoes. 
They're the only ones that are dangerous. 
Mosquitoes only drink blood to lay eggs. 
Mosquitoes actually live... their day-to-day nutrition comes from nectar, from flowers — in fact, in the lab, we feed ours raisins — but the female needs the blood meal. 
So, this sounds really crazy, right? 
Would you like to see it? 
Audience: Yeah! 
Nathan Myhrvold: Okay, so our legal department prepared a disclaimer, and here it is. 
(Laughter) Now, after thinking about this a little bit we thought, you know, it probably would be simpler to do this with a nonlethal laser. 
So, Eric Johanson, who built the device, actually, with parts from eBay; and Pablos Holman over here, he's got mosquitoes in the tank. 
We have the device over here. 
And we're going to show you, instead of the kill laser, which will be a very brief, instantaneous pulse, we're going to have a green laser pointer that's going to stay on the mosquito for, actually, quite a long period of time; otherwise, you can't see it very well. 
Take it away Eric. 
Eric Johanson: What we have here is a tank on the other side of the stage. 
And we have... this computer screen can actually see the mosquitoes as they fly around. 
And Pablos, if he stirs up our mosquitoes a little bit we can see them flying around. 
Now, that's a fairly straightforward image processing routine, and let me show you how it works. 
Here you can see that the insects are being tracked as they're flying around, which is kind of fun. 
Next we can actually light them up with a laser. (Laughter) Now, this is a low powered laser, and we can actually pick up a wing-beat frequency. 
So you may be able to hear some mosquitoes flying around. 
NM: That's a mosquito wing beat you're hearing. 
EJ: Finally, let's see what this looks like. 
There you can see mosquitoes as they fly around, being lit up. 
This is slowed way down so that you have an opportunity to see what's happening. 
Here we have it running at high-speed mode. 
So this system that was built for TED is here to illustrate that it is technically possible to actually deploy a system like this, and we're looking very hard at how to make it highly cost-effective to use in places like Africa and other parts of the world. 
(Applause) NM: So it wouldn't be any fun to show you that without showing you what actually happens when we hit 'em. 
(Laughter) (Laughter) This is very satisfying. (Laughter) 
This is one of the first ones we did. 
The energy's a little bit high here. 
(Laughter) We'll loop around here in just a second, and you'll see another one. 
Here's another one. Bang. 
An interesting thing is, we kill them all the time; we've never actually gotten the wings to shut off in midair. 
The wing motor is very resilient. 
I mean, here we're blowing wings off but the wing motor keeps all the way down. 
So, that's what I have. Thanks very much. 
(Applause) 

There is an ancient proverb that says it's very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat. 
I find this a particularly apt description of science and how science works — bumbling around in a dark room, bumping into things, trying to figure out what shape this might be, what that might be, there are reports of a cat somewhere around, they may not be reliable, they may be, and so forth and so on. 
Now I know this is different than the way most people think about science. 
Science, we generally are told, is a very well-ordered mechanism for understanding the world, for gaining facts, for gaining data, that it's rule-based, that scientists use this thing called the scientific method and we've been doing this for 14 generations or so now, and the scientific method is a set of rules for getting hard, cold facts out of the data. 
I'd like to tell you that's not the case. 
So there's the scientific method, but what's really going on is this. (Laughter) [The Scientific Method vs. Farting Around] And it's going on kind of like that. 
[... in the dark] (Laughter) So what is the difference, then, between the way I believe science is pursued and the way it seems to be perceived? 
So this difference first came to me in some ways in my dual role at Columbia University, where I'm both a professor and run a laboratory in neuroscience where we try to figure out how the brain works. 
We do this by studying the sense of smell, the sense of olfaction, and in the laboratory, it's a great pleasure and fascinating work and exciting to work with graduate students and post-docs and think up cool experiments to understand how this sense of smell works and how the brain might be working, and, well, frankly, it's kind of exhilarating. 
But at the same time, it's my responsibility to teach a large course to undergraduates on the brain, and that's a big subject, and it takes quite a while to organize that, and it's quite challenging and it's quite interesting, but I have to say, it's not so exhilarating. 
So what was the difference? 
Well, the course I was and am teaching is called Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience - I. (Laughs) It's 25 lectures full of all sorts of facts, it uses this giant book called "" Principles of Neural Science "" by three famous neuroscientists. 
This book comes in at 1,414 pages, it weighs a hefty seven and a half pounds. 
Just to put that in some perspective, that's the weight of two normal human brains. 
(Laughter) So I began to realize, by the end of this course, that the students maybe were getting the idea that we must know everything there is to know about the brain. 
That's clearly not true. 
And they must also have this idea, I suppose, that what scientists do is collect data and collect facts and stick them in these big books. 
And that's not really the case either. 
When I go to a meeting, after the meeting day is over and we collect in the bar over a couple of beers with my colleagues, we never talk about what we know. 
We talk about what we don't know. 
We talk about what still has to get done, what's so critical to get done in the lab. 
Indeed, this was, I think, best said by Marie Curie who said that one never notices what has been done but only what remains to be done. 
This was in a letter to her brother after obtaining her second graduate degree, I should say. 
I have to point out this has always been one of my favorite pictures of Marie Curie, because I am convinced that that glow behind her is not a photographic effect. (Laughter) That's the real thing. 
It is true that her papers are, to this day, stored in a basement room in the Bibliothèque Française in a concrete room that's lead-lined, and if you're a scholar and you want access to these notebooks, you have to put on a full radiation hazmat suit, so it's pretty scary business. 
Nonetheless, this is what I think we were leaving out of our courses and leaving out of the interaction that we have with the public as scientists, the what-remains-to-be-done. 
This is the stuff that's exhilarating and interesting. 
It is, if you will, the ignorance. 
That's what was missing. 
So I thought, well, maybe I should teach a course on ignorance, something I can finally excel at, perhaps, for example. 
So I did start teaching this course on ignorance, and it's been quite interesting and I'd like to tell you to go to the website. 
You can find all sorts of information there. It's wide open. 
And it's been really quite an interesting time for me to meet up with other scientists who come in and talk about what it is they don't know. 
Now I use this word "" ignorance, "" of course, to be at least in part intentionally provocative, because ignorance has a lot of bad connotations and I clearly don't mean any of those. 
So I don't mean stupidity, I don't mean a callow indifference to fact or reason or data. 
The ignorant are clearly unenlightened, unaware, uninformed, and present company today excepted, often occupy elected offices, it seems to me. 
That's another story, perhaps. 
I mean a different kind of ignorance. 
I mean a kind of ignorance that's less pejorative, a kind of ignorance that comes from a communal gap in our knowledge, something that's just not there to be known or isn't known well enough yet or we can't make predictions from, the kind of ignorance that's maybe best summed up in a statement by James Clerk Maxwell, perhaps the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein, who said, "" Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science. "" I think it's a wonderful idea: thoroughly conscious ignorance. 
So that's the kind of ignorance that I want to talk about today, but of course the first thing we have to clear up is what are we going to do with all those facts? 
So it is true that science piles up at an alarming rate. 
We all have this sense that science is this mountain of facts, this accumulation model of science, as many have called it, and it seems impregnable, it seems impossible. 
How can you ever know all of this? 
And indeed, the scientific literature grows at an alarming rate. 
In 2006, there were 1.3 million papers published. 
There's about a two-and-a-half-percent yearly growth rate, and so last year we saw over one and a half million papers being published. 
Divide that by the number of minutes in a year, and you wind up with three new papers per minute. 
So I've been up here a little over 10 minutes, I've already lost three papers. 
I have to get out of here actually. I have to go read. 
So what do we do about this? Well, the fact is that what scientists do about it is a kind of a controlled neglect, if you will. 
We just don't worry about it, in a way. 
The facts are important. You have to know a lot of stuff to be a scientist. That's true. 
But knowing a lot of stuff doesn't make you a scientist. 
You need to know a lot of stuff to be a lawyer or an accountant or an electrician or a carpenter. 
But in science, knowing a lot of stuff is not the point. 
Knowing a lot of stuff is there to help you get to more ignorance. 
So knowledge is a big subject, but I would say ignorance is a bigger one. 
So this leads us to maybe think about, a little bit about, some of the models of science that we tend to use, and I'd like to disabuse you of some of them. 
So one of them, a popular one, is that scientists are patiently putting the pieces of a puzzle together to reveal some grand scheme or another. 
This is clearly not true. For one, with puzzles, the manufacturer has guaranteed that there's a solution. 
We don't have any such guarantee. 
Indeed, there are many of us who aren't so sure about the manufacturer. 
(Laughter) So I think the puzzle model doesn't work. 
Another popular model is that science is busy unraveling things the way you unravel the peels of an onion. 
So peel by peel, you take away the layers of the onion to get at some fundamental kernel of truth. 
I don't think that's the way it works either. 
Another one, a kind of popular one, is the iceberg idea, that we only see the tip of the iceberg but underneath is where most of the iceberg is hidden. 
But all of these models are based on the idea of a large body of facts that we can somehow or another get completed. 
We can chip away at this iceberg and figure out what it is, or we could just wait for it to melt, I suppose, these days, but one way or another we could get to the whole iceberg. Right? 
Or make it manageable. But I don't think that's the case. 
I think what really happens in science is a model more like the magic well, where no matter how many buckets you take out, there's always another bucket of water to be had, or my particularly favorite one, with the effect and everything, the ripples on a pond. 
So if you think of knowledge being this ever-expanding ripple on a pond, the important thing to realize is that our ignorance, the circumference of this knowledge, also grows with knowledge. 
So the knowledge generates ignorance. 
This is really well said, I thought, by George Bernard Shaw. 
This is actually part of a toast that he delivered to celebrate Einstein at a dinner celebrating Einstein's work, in which he claims that science just creates more questions than it answers. ["" Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating 10 more. ""] I find that kind of glorious, and I think he's precisely right, plus it's a kind of job security. 
As it turns out, he kind of cribbed that from the philosopher Immanuel Kant who a hundred years earlier had come up with this idea of question propagation, that every answer begets more questions. 
I love that term, "" question propagation, "" this idea of questions propagating out there. 
So I'd say the model we want to take is not that we start out kind of ignorant and we get some facts together and then we gain knowledge. 
It's rather kind of the other way around, really. 
What do we use this knowledge for? 
What are we using this collection of facts for? 
We're using it to make better ignorance, to come up with, if you will, higher-quality ignorance. 
Because, you know, there's low-quality ignorance and there's high-quality ignorance. It's not all the same. 
Scientists argue about this all the time. 
Sometimes we call them bull sessions. 
Sometimes we call them grant proposals. 
But nonetheless, it's what the argument is about. 
It's the ignorance. It's the what we don't know. 
It's what makes a good question. 
So how do we think about these questions? 
I'm going to show you a graph that shows up quite a bit on happy hour posters in various science departments. 
This graph asks the relationship between what you know and how much you know about it. 
So what you know, you can know anywhere from nothing to everything, of course, and how much you know about it can be anywhere from a little to a lot. 
So let's put a point on the graph. There's an undergraduate. 
Doesn't know much but they have a lot of interest. 
They're interested in almost everything. 
Now you look at a master's student, a little further along in their education, and you see they know a bit more, but it's been narrowed somewhat. 
And finally you get your Ph.D., where it turns out you know a tremendous amount about almost nothing. (Laughter) What's really disturbing is the trend line that goes through that because, of course, when it dips below the zero axis, there, it gets into a negative area. 
That's where you find people like me, I'm afraid. 
So the important thing here is that this can all be changed. 
This whole view can be changed by just changing the label on the x-axis. 
So instead of how much you know about it, we could say, "" What can you ask about it? "" So yes, you do need to know a lot of stuff as a scientist, but the purpose of knowing a lot of stuff is not just to know a lot of stuff. That just makes you a geek, right? 
Knowing a lot of stuff, the purpose is to be able to ask lots of questions, to be able to frame thoughtful, interesting questions, because that's where the real work is. 
Let me give you a quick idea of a couple of these sorts of questions. 
I'm a neuroscientist, so how would we come up with a question in neuroscience? 
Because it's not always quite so straightforward. 
So, for example, we could say, well what is it that the brain does? 
Well, one thing the brain does, it moves us around. 
We walk around on two legs. 
That seems kind of simple, somehow or another. 
I mean, virtually everybody over 10 months of age walks around on two legs, right? 
So that maybe is not that interesting. 
So instead maybe we want to choose something a little more complicated to look at. 
How about the visual system? 
There it is, the visual system. 
I mean, we love our visual systems. We do all kinds of cool stuff. 
Indeed, there are over 12,000 neuroscientists who work on the visual system, from the retina to the visual cortex, in an attempt to understand not just the visual system but to also understand how general principles of how the brain might work. 
But now here's the thing: Our technology has actually been pretty good at replicating what the visual system does. 
We have TV, we have movies, we have animation, we have photography, we have pattern recognition, all of these sorts of things. 
They work differently than our visual systems in some cases, but nonetheless we've been pretty good at making a technology work like our visual system. 
Somehow or another, a hundred years of robotics, you never saw a robot walk on two legs, because robots don't walk on two legs because it's not such an easy thing to do. 
A hundred years of robotics, and we can't get a robot that can move more than a couple steps one way or the other. 
You ask them to go up an inclined plane, and they fall over. 
Turn around, and they fall over. It's a serious problem. 
So what is it that's the most difficult thing for a brain to do? 
What ought we to be studying? 
Perhaps it ought to be walking on two legs, or the motor system. 
I'll give you an example from my own lab, my own particularly smelly question, since we work on the sense of smell. 
But here's a diagram of five molecules and sort of a chemical notation. 
These are just plain old molecules, but if you sniff those molecules up these two little holes in the front of your face, you will have in your mind the distinct impression of a rose. 
If there's a real rose there, those molecules will be the ones, but even if there's no rose there, you'll have the memory of a molecule. 
How do we turn molecules into perceptions? 
What's the process by which that could happen? 
Here's another example: two very simple molecules, again in this kind of chemical notation. 
It might be easier to visualize them this way, so the gray circles are carbon atoms, the white ones are hydrogen atoms and the red ones are oxygen atoms. 
Now these two molecules differ by only one carbon atom and two little hydrogen atoms that ride along with it, and yet one of them, heptyl acetate, has the distinct odor of a pear, and hexyl acetate is unmistakably banana. 
So there are two really interesting questions here, it seems to me. 
One is, how can a simple little molecule like that create a perception in your brain that's so clear as a pear or a banana? 
And secondly, how the hell can we tell the difference between two molecules that differ by a single carbon atom? 
I mean, that's remarkable to me, clearly the best chemical detector on the face of the planet. 
And you don't even think about it, do you? 
So this is a favorite quote of mine that takes us back to the ignorance and the idea of questions. 
I like to quote because I think dead people shouldn't be excluded from the conversation. 
And I also think it's important to realize that the conversation's been going on for a while, by the way. 
So Erwin Schrodinger, a great quantum physicist and, I think, philosopher, points out how you have to "" abide by ignorance for an indefinite period "" of time. 
And it's this abiding by ignorance that I think we have to learn how to do. 
This is a tricky thing. This is not such an easy business. 
I guess it comes down to our education system, so I'm going to talk a little bit about ignorance and education, because I think that's where it really has to play out. 
So for one, let's face it, in the age of Google and Wikipedia, the business model of the university and probably secondary schools is simply going to have to change. 
We just can't sell facts for a living anymore. 
They're available with a click of the mouse, or if you want to, you could probably just ask the wall one of these days, wherever they're going to hide the things that tell us all this stuff. 
So what do we have to do? We have to give our students a taste for the boundaries, for what's outside that circumference, for what's outside the facts, what's just beyond the facts. 
How do we do that? 
Well, one of the problems, of course, turns out to be testing. 
We currently have an educational system which is very efficient but is very efficient at a rather bad thing. 
So in second grade, all the kids are interested in science, the girls and the boys. 
They like to take stuff apart. They have great curiosity. 
They like to investigate things. They go to science museums. 
They like to play around. They're in second grade. 
They're interested. 
But by 11th or 12th grade, fewer than 10 percent of them have any interest in science whatsoever, let alone a desire to go into science as a career. 
So we have this remarkably efficient system for beating any interest in science out of everybody's head. 
Is this what we want? 
I think this comes from what a teacher colleague of mine calls "" the bulimic method of education. "" You know. You can imagine what it is. 
We just jam a whole bunch of facts down their throats over here and then they puke it up on an exam over here and everybody goes home with no added intellectual heft whatsoever. 
This can't possibly continue to go on. 
So what do we do? Well the geneticists, I have to say, have an interesting maxim they live by. 
Geneticists always say, you always get what you screen for. 
And that's meant as a warning. 
So we always will get what we screen for, and part of what we screen for is in our testing methods. 
Well, we hear a lot about testing and evaluation, and we have to think carefully when we're testing whether we're evaluating or whether we're weeding, whether we're weeding people out, whether we're making some cut. 
Evaluation is one thing. You hear a lot about evaluation in the literature these days, in the educational literature, but evaluation really amounts to feedback and it amounts to an opportunity for trial and error. 
It amounts to a chance to work over a longer period of time with this kind of feedback. 
That's different than weeding, and usually, I have to tell you, when people talk about evaluation, evaluating students, evaluating teachers, evaluating schools, evaluating programs, that they're really talking about weeding. 
And that's a bad thing, because then you will get what you select for, which is what we've gotten so far. 
So I'd say what we need is a test that says, "" What is x? "" and the answers are "" I don't know, because no one does, "" or "" What's the question? "" Even better. 
Or, "" You know what, I'll look it up, I'll ask someone, I'll phone someone. I'll find out. "" Because that's what we want people to do, and that's how you evaluate them. 
And maybe for the advanced placement classes, it could be, "" Here's the answer. What's the next question? "" That's the one I like in particular. 
So let me end with a quote from William Butler Yeats, who said "" Education is not about filling buckets; it is lighting fires. "" So I'd say, let's get out the matches. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

This is one of the most amazing animals on the face of the Earth. 
This is a tapir. 
Now this, this is a baby tapir, the cutest animal offspring in the animal kingdom. 
(Laughter) By far. 
There is no competition here. 
I have dedicated the past 20 years of my life to the research and conservation of tapirs in Brazil, and it has been absolutely amazing. 
But at the moment, I've been thinking really, really hard about the impact of my work. 
I've been questioning myself about the real contributions I have made for the conservation of these animals I love so much. 
Am I being effective in safeguarding their survival? 
Am I doing enough? 
I guess the big question here is, am I studying tapirs and contributing to their conservation, or am I just documenting their extinction? 
The world is facing so many different conservation crises. 
We all know that. It's all over the news every day. 
Tropical forests and other ecosystems are being destroyed, climate change, so many species on the brink of extinction: tigers, lions, elephants, rhinos, tapirs. 
This is the lowland tapir, the tapir species I work with, the largest terrestrial mammal of South America. 
They're massive. They're powerful. 
Adults can weigh up to 300 kilos. 
That's half the size of a horse. 
They're gorgeous. 
Tapirs are mostly found in tropical forests such as the Amazon, and they absolutely need large patches of habitat in order to find all the resources they need to reproduce and survive. 
But their habitat is being destroyed, and they have been hunted out of several parts of their geographic distribution. 
And you see, this is very, very unfortunate because tapirs are extremely important for the habitats where they are found. 
They're herbivores. 
Fifty percent of their diet consists of fruit, and when they eat the fruit, they swallow the seeds, which they disperse throughout the habitat through their feces. 
They play this major role in shaping and maintaining the structure and diversity of the forest, and for that reason, tapirs are known as gardeners of the forest. 
Isn't that amazing? 
If you think about it, the extinction of tapirs would seriously affect biodiversity as a whole. 
I started my tapir work in 1996, still very young, fresh out of college, and it was a pioneer research and conservation program. 
At that point, we had nearly zero information about tapirs, mostly because they're so difficult to study. 
They're nocturnal, solitary, very elusive animals, and we got started getting very basic data about these animals. 
But what is it that a conservationist does? 
Well, first, we need data. 
We need field research. 
We need those long-term datasets to support conservation action, and I told you tapirs are very hard to study, so we have to rely on indirect methods to study them. 
We have to capture and anesthetize them so that we can install GPS collars around their necks and follow their movements, which is a technique used by many other conservationists around the world. 
And then we can gather information about how they use space, how they move through the landscape, what are their priority habitats, and so much more. 
Next, we must disseminate what we learn. 
We have to educate people about tapirs and how important these animals are. 
And it's amazing how many people around the world do not know what a tapir is. 
In fact, many people think this is a tapir. 
Let me tell you, this is not a tapir. 
(Laughter) This is a giant anteater. 
Tapirs do not eat ants. Never. Ever. 
And then next we have to provide training, capacity building. 
It is our responsibility to prepare the conservationists of the future. 
We are losing several conservation battles, and we need more people doing what we do, and they need the skills, and they need the passion to do that. 
Ultimately, we conservationists, we must be able to apply our data, to apply our accumulated knowledge to support actual conservation action. 
Our first tapir program took place in the Atlantic Forest in the eastern part of Brazil, one of the most threatened biomes in the world. 
The destruction of the Atlantic Forest began in the early 1500s, when the Portuguese first arrived in Brazil, beginning European colonization in the eastern part of South America. 
This forest was almost completely cleared for timber, agriculture, cattle ranching and the construction of cities, and today only seven percent of the Atlantic forest is still left standing. 
And tapirs are found in very, very small, isolated, disconnected populations. 
In the Atlantic Forest, we found out that tapirs move through open areas of pastureland and agriculture going from one patch of forest to patch of forest. 
So our main approach in this region was to use our tapir data to identify the potential places for the establishment of wildlife corridors in between those patches of forest, reconnecting the habitat so that tapirs and many other animals could cross the landscape safely. 
After 12 years in the Atlantic Forest, in 2008, we expanded our tapir conservation efforts to the Pantanal in the western part of Brazil near the border with Bolivia and Paraguay. 
This is the largest continuous freshwater floodplain in the world, an incredible place and one of the most important strongholds for lowland tapirs in South America. 
And working in the Pantanal has been extremely refreshing because we found large, healthy tapir populations in the area, and we have been able to study tapirs in the most natural conditions we'll ever find, very much free of threats. 
In the Pantanal, besides the GPS collars, we are using another technique: camera traps. 
This camera is equipped with a movement sensor and it photographs animals when they walk in front of it. 
So thanks to these amazing devices, we have been able to gather precious information about tapir reproduction and social organization which are very important pieces of the puzzle when you're trying to develop those conservation strategies. 
And right now, 2015, we are expanding our work once again to the Brazilian Cerrado, the open grasslands and shrub forests in the central part of Brazil. 
Today this region is the very epicenter of economic development in my country, where natural habitat and wildlife populations are rapidly being eradicated by several different threats, including once again cattle ranching, large sugarcane and soybean plantations, poaching, roadkill, just to name a few. 
And somehow, tapirs are still there, which gives me a lot of hope. 
But I have to say that starting this new program in the Cerrado was a bit of a slap in the face. 
When you drive around and you find dead tapirs along the highways and signs of tapirs wandering around in the middle of sugarcane plantations where they shouldn't be, and you talk to kids and they tell you that they know how tapir meat tastes because their families poach and eat them, it really breaks your heart. 
The situation in the Cerrado made me realize — it gave me the sense of urgency. 
I am swimming against the tide. 
It made me realize that despite two decades of hard work trying to save these animals, we still have so much work to do if we are to prevent them from disappearing. 
We have to find ways to solve all these problems. 
We really do, and you know what? 
We really came to a point in the conservation world where we have to think out of the box. 
We'll have to be a lot more creative than we are right now. 
And I told you, roadkill is a big problem for tapirs in the Cerrado, so we just came up with the idea of putting reflective stickers on the GPS collars we put on the tapirs. 
These are the same stickers used on big trucks to avoid collision. 
Tapirs cross the highways after dark, so the stickers will hopefully help drivers see this shining thing crossing the highway, and maybe they will slow down a little bit. 
For now, this is just a crazy idea. 
We don't know. We'll see if it will reduce the amount of tapir roadkill. 
But the point is, maybe this is the kind of stuff that needs to be done. 
And although I'm struggling with all these questions in my mind right now, I have a pact with tapirs. 
I know in my heart that tapir conservation is my cause. 
This is my passion. 
I am not alone. 
I have this huge network of supporters behind me, and there is no way I'm ever going to stop. 
I will continue doing this, most probably for the rest of my life. 
And I'll keep doing this for Patrícia, my namesake, one of the first tapirs we captured and monitored in the Atlantic Forest many, many years ago; for Rita and her baby Vincent in the Pantanal. 
And I'll keep doing this for Ted, a baby tapir we captured in December last year also in the Pantanal. 
And I will keep doing this for the hundreds of tapirs that I've had the pleasure to meet over the years and the many others I know I will encounter in the future. 
These animals deserve to be cared for. 
They need me. They need us. 
And you know? We human beings deserve to live in a world where we can get out there and see and benefit from not only tapirs but all the other beautiful species, now and in the future. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

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

It's Monday morning. 
In Washington, the president of the United States is sitting in the Oval Office, assessing whether or not to strike Al Qaeda in Yemen. 
At Number 10 Downing Street, David Cameron is trying to work out whether to cut more public sector jobs in order to stave off a double-dip recession. 
In Madrid, Maria Gonzalez is standing at the door, listening to her baby crying and crying, trying to work out whether she should let it cry until it falls asleep or pick it up and hold it. 
And I am sitting by my father's bedside in hospital, trying to work out whether I should let him drink the one-and-a-half-liter bottle of water that his doctors just came in and said, "" You must make him drink today, "" — my father's been nil by mouth for a week — or whether, by giving him this bottle, I might actually kill him. 
We face momentous decisions with important consequences throughout our lives, and we have strategies for dealing with these decisions. 
We talk things over with our friends, we scour the Internet, we search through books. 
But still, even in this age of Google and TripAdvisor and Amazon Recommends, it's still experts that we rely upon most — especially when the stakes are high and the decision really matters. 
Because in a world of data deluge and extreme complexity, we believe that experts are more able to process information than we can — that they are able to come to better conclusions than we could come to on our own. 
And in an age that is sometimes nowadays frightening or confusing, we feel reassured by the almost parental-like authority of experts who tell us so clearly what it is we can and cannot do. 
But I believe that this is a big problem, a problem with potentially dangerous consequences for us as a society, as a culture and as individuals. 
It's not that experts have not massively contributed to the world — of course they have. 
The problem lies with us: we've become addicted to experts. 
We've become addicted to their certainty, their assuredness, their definitiveness, and in the process, we have ceded our responsibility, substituting our intellect and our intelligence for their supposed words of wisdom. 
We've surrendered our power, trading off our discomfort with uncertainty for the illusion of certainty that they provide. 
This is no exaggeration. 
In a recent experiment, a group of adults had their brains scanned in an MRI machine as they were listening to experts speak. 
The results were quite extraordinary. 
As they listened to the experts' voices, the independent decision-making parts of their brains switched off. 
It literally flat-lined. 
And they listened to whatever the experts said and took their advice, however right or wrong. 
But experts do get things wrong. 
Did you know that studies show that doctors misdiagnose four times out of 10? Did you know 
that if you file your tax returns yourself, you're statistically more likely to be filing them correctly than if you get a tax adviser to do it for you? 
And then there's, of course, the example that we're all too aware of: financial experts getting it so wrong that we're living through the worst recession since the 1930s. 
For the sake of our health, our wealth and our collective security, it's imperative that we keep the independent decision-making parts of our brains switched on. 
And I'm saying this as an economist who, over the past few years, has focused my research on what it is we think and who it is we trust and why, but also — and I'm aware of the irony here — as an expert myself, as a professor, as somebody who advises prime ministers, heads of big companies, international organizations, but an expert who believes that the role of experts needs to change, that we need to become more open-minded, more democratic and be more open to people rebelling against our points of view. 
So in order to help you understand where I'm coming from, let me bring you into my world, the world of experts. 
Now there are, of course, exceptions, wonderful, civilization-enhancing exceptions. 
But what my research has shown me is that experts tend on the whole to form very rigid camps, that within these camps, a dominant perspective emerges that often silences opposition, that experts move with the prevailing winds, often hero-worshipping their own gurus. 
Alan Greenspan's proclamations that the years of economic growth would go on and on, not challenged by his peers, until after the crisis, of course. 
You see, we also learn that experts are located, are governed, by the social and cultural norms of their times — whether it be the doctors in Victorian England, say, who sent women to asylums for expressing sexual desire, or the psychiatrists in the United States who, up until 1973, were still categorizing homosexuality as a mental illness. 
And what all this means is that paradigms take far too long to shift, that complexity and nuance are ignored and also that money talks — because we've all seen the evidence of pharmaceutical companies funding studies of drugs that conveniently leave out their worst side effects, or studies funded by food companies of their new products, massively exaggerating the health benefits of the products they're about to bring by market. 
The study showed that food companies exaggerated typically seven times more than an independent study. 
And we've also got to be aware that experts, of course, also make mistakes. 
They make mistakes every single day — mistakes born out of carelessness. 
A recent study in the Archives of Surgery reported surgeons removing healthy ovaries, operating on the wrong side of the brain, carrying out procedures on the wrong hand, elbow, eye, foot, and also mistakes born out of thinking errors. 
A common thinking error of radiologists, for example — when they look at CT scans — is that they're overly influenced by whatever it is that the referring physician has said that he suspects the patient's problem to be. 
So if a radiologist is looking at the scan of a patient with suspected pneumonia, say, what happens is that, if they see evidence of pneumonia on the scan, they literally stop looking at it — thereby missing the tumor sitting three inches below on the patient's lungs. 
I've shared with you so far some insights into the world of experts. 
These are, of course, not the only insights I could share, but I hope they give you a clear sense at least of why we need to stop kowtowing to them, why we need to rebel and why we need to switch our independent decision-making capabilities on. 
But how can we do this? 
Well for the sake of time, I want to focus on just three strategies. 
First, we've got to be ready and willing to take experts on and dispense with this notion of them as modern-day apostles. 
This doesn't mean having to get a Ph.D. 
in every single subject, you'll be relieved to hear. 
But it does mean persisting in the face of their inevitable annoyance when, for example, we want them to explain things to us in language that we can actually understand. 
Why was it that, when I had an operation, my doctor said to me, "" Beware, Ms. Hertz, of hyperpyrexia, "" when he could have just as easily said, "Watch out for a high fever." 
You see, being ready to take experts on is about also being willing to dig behind their graphs, their equations, their forecasts, their prophecies, and being armed with the questions to do that — questions like: What are the assumptions that underpin this? 
What is the evidence upon which this is based? 
What has your investigation focused on? 
And what has it ignored? 
It recently came out that experts trialing drugs before they come to market typically trial drugs first, primarily on male animals and then, primarily on men. 
It seems that they've somehow overlooked the fact that over half the world's population are women. 
And women have drawn the short medical straw because it now turns out that many of these drugs don't work nearly as well on women as they do on men — and the drugs that do work well work so well that they're actively harmful for women to take. 
Being a rebel is about recognizing that experts' assumptions and their methodologies can easily be flawed. 
Second, we need to create the space for what I call "" managed dissent. "" If we are to shift paradigms, if we are to make breakthroughs, if we are to destroy myths, we need to create an environment in which expert ideas are battling it out, in which we're bringing in new, diverse, discordant, heretical views into the discussion, fearlessly, in the knowledge that progress comes about, not only from the creation of ideas, but also from their destruction — and also from the knowledge that, by surrounding ourselves by divergent, discordant, heretical views. 
All the research now shows us that this actually makes us smarter. 
Encouraging dissent is a rebellious notion because it goes against our very instincts, which are to surround ourselves with opinions and advice that we already believe or want to be true. 
And that's why I talk about the need to actively manage dissent. 
Google CEO Eric Schmidt is a practical practitioner of this philosophy. 
In meetings, he looks out for the person in the room — arms crossed, looking a bit bemused — and draws them into the discussion, trying to see if they indeed are the person with a different opinion, so that they have dissent within the room. 
Managing dissent is about recognizing the value of disagreement, discord and difference. 
But we need to go even further. 
We need to fundamentally redefine who it is that experts are. 
The conventional notion is that experts are people with advanced degrees, fancy titles, diplomas, best-selling books — high-status individuals. 
But just imagine if we were to junk this notion of expertise as some sort of elite cadre and instead embrace the notion of democratized expertise — whereby expertise was not just the preserve of surgeons and CEO's, but also shop-girls — yeah. 
Best Buy, the consumer electronics company, gets all its employees — the cleaners, the shop assistants, the people in the back office, not just its forecasting team — to place bets, yes bets, on things like whether or not a product is going to sell well before Christmas, on whether customers' new ideas are going to be or should be taken on by the company, on whether a project will come in on time. 
By leveraging and by embracing the expertise within the company, Best Buy was able to discover, for example, that the store that it was going to open in China — its big, grand store — was not going to open on time. 
Because when it asked its staff, all its staff, to place their bets on whether they thought the store would open on time or not, a group from the finance department placed all their chips on that not happening. 
It turned out that they were aware, as no one else within the company was, of a technological blip that neither the forecasting experts, nor the experts on the ground in China, were even aware of. 
The strategies that I have discussed this evening — embracing dissent, taking experts on, democratizing expertise, rebellious strategies — are strategies that I think would serve us all well to embrace as we try to deal with the challenges of these very confusing, complex, difficult times. 
For if we keep our independent decision-making part of our brains switched on, if we challenge experts, if we're skeptical, if we devolve authority, if we are rebellious, but also if we become much more comfortable with nuance, uncertainty and doubt, and if we allow our experts to express themselves using those terms too, we will set ourselves up much better for the challenges of the 21st century. 
For now, more than ever, is not the time to be blindly following, blindly accepting, blindly trusting. 
Now is the time to face the world with eyes wide open — yes, using experts to help us figure things out, for sure — I don't want to completely do myself out of a job here — but being aware of their limitations and, of course, also our own. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Erez Lieberman Aiden: Everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words. 
But we at Harvard were wondering if this was really true. 
(Laughter) So we assembled a team of experts, spanning Harvard, MIT, The American Heritage Dictionary, The Encyclopedia Britannica and even our proud sponsors, the Google. 
And we cogitated about this for about four years. 
And we came to a startling conclusion. 
Ladies and gentlemen, a picture is not worth a thousand words. 
In fact, we found some pictures that are worth 500 billion words. 
Jean-Baptiste Michel: So how did we get to this conclusion? 
So Erez and I were thinking about ways to get a big picture of human culture and human history: change over time. 
So many books actually have been written over the years. 
So we were thinking, well the best way to learn from them is to read all of these millions of books. 
Now of course, if there's a scale for how awesome that is, that has to rank extremely, extremely high. 
Now the problem is there's an X-axis for that, which is the practical axis. 
This is very, very low. 
(Applause) Now people tend to use an alternative approach, which is to take a few sources and read them very carefully. 
This is extremely practical, but not so awesome. 
What you really want to do is to get to the awesome yet practical part of this space. 
So it turns out there was a company across the river called Google who had started a digitization project a few years back that might just enable this approach. 
They have digitized millions of books. 
So what that means is, one could use computational methods to read all of the books in a click of a button. 
That's very practical and extremely awesome. 
ELA: Let me tell you a little bit about where books come from. 
Since time immemorial, there have been authors. 
These authors have been striving to write books. 
And this became considerably easier with the development of the printing press some centuries ago. 
Since then, the authors have won on 129 million distinct occasions, publishing books. 
Now if those books are not lost to history, then they are somewhere in a library, and many of those books have been getting retrieved from the libraries and digitized by Google, which has scanned 15 million books to date. 
Now when Google digitizes a book, they put it into a really nice format. 
Now we've got the data, plus we have metadata. 
We have information about things like where was it published, who was the author, when was it published. 
And what we do is go through all of those records and exclude everything that's not the highest quality data. 
What we're left with is a collection of five million books, 500 billion words, a string of characters a thousand times longer than the human genome — a text which, when written out, would stretch from here to the Moon and back 10 times over — a veritable shard of our cultural genome. 
Of course what we did when faced with such outrageous hyperbole... 
(Laughter) was what any self-respecting researchers would have done. 
We took a page out of XKCD, and we said, "" Stand back. 
We're going to try science. "" (Laughter) JM: Now of course, we were thinking, well let's just first put the data out there for people to do science to it. 
Now we're thinking, what data can we release? 
Well of course, you want to take the books and release the full text of these five million books. 
Now Google, and Jon Orwant in particular, told us a little equation that we should learn. 
So you have five million, that is, five million authors and five million plaintiffs is a massive lawsuit. 
So, although that would be really, really awesome, again, that's extremely, extremely impractical. 
(Laughter) Now again, we kind of caved in, and we did the very practical approach, which was a bit less awesome. 
We said, well instead of releasing the full text, we're going to release statistics about the books. 
So take for instance "" A gleam of happiness. "" It's four words; we call that a four-gram. 
We're going to tell you how many times a particular four-gram appeared in books in 1801, 1802, 1803, all the way up to 2008. 
That gives us a time series of how frequently this particular sentence was used over time. 
We do that for all the words and phrases that appear in those books, and that gives us a big table of two billion lines that tell us about the way culture has been changing. 
ELA: So those two billion lines, we call them two billion n-grams. 
What do they tell us? 
Well the individual n-grams measure cultural trends. 
Let me give you an example. 
Let's suppose that I am thriving, then tomorrow I want to tell you about how well I did. 
And so I might say, "" Yesterday, I throve. "" Alternatively, I could say, "" Yesterday, I thrived. "" Well which one should I use? 
How to know? 
As of about six months ago, the state of the art in this field is that you would, for instance, go up to the following psychologist with fabulous hair, and you'd say, "" Steve, you're an expert on the irregular verbs. 
What should I do? "" And he'd tell you, "" Well most people say thrived, but some people say throve. "" And you also knew, more or less, that if you were to go back in time 200 years and ask the following statesman with equally fabulous hair, (Laughter) "Tom, what should I say?" 
He'd say, "" Well, in my day, most people throve, but some thrived. "" So now what I'm just going to show you is raw data. 
Two rows from this table of two billion entries. 
What you're seeing is year by year frequency of "" thrived "" and "" throve "" over time. 
Now this is just two out of two billion rows. 
So the entire data set is a billion times more awesome than this slide. 
(Laughter) (Applause) JM: Now there are many other pictures that are worth 500 billion words. 
For instance, this one. 
If you just take influenza, you will see peaks at the time where you knew big flu epidemics were killing people around the globe. 
ELA: If you were not yet convinced, sea levels are rising, so is atmospheric CO2 and global temperature. 
JM: You might also want to have a look at this particular n-gram, and that's to tell Nietzsche that God is not dead, although you might agree that he might need a better publicist. 
(Laughter) ELA: You can get at some pretty abstract concepts with this sort of thing. 
For instance, let me tell you the history of the year 1950. 
Pretty much for the vast majority of history, no one gave a damn about 1950. 
In 1700, in 1800, in 1900, no one cared. 
Through the 30s and 40s, no one cared. 
Suddenly, in the mid-40s, there started to be a buzz. 
People realized that 1950 was going to happen, and it could be big. 
(Laughter) But nothing got people interested in 1950 like the year 1950. (Laughter) 
People were walking around obsessed. 
They couldn't stop talking about all the things they did in 1950, all the things they were planning to do in 1950, all the dreams of what they wanted to accomplish in 1950. 
In fact, 1950 was so fascinating that for years thereafter, people just kept talking about all the amazing things that happened, in '51,' 52, '53. 
Finally in 1954, someone woke up and realized that 1950 had gotten somewhat passé. 
(Laughter) And just like that, the bubble burst. (Laughter) 
And the story of 1950 is the story of every year that we have on record, with a little twist, because now we've got these nice charts. 
And because we have these nice charts, we can measure things. 
We can say, "" Well how fast does the bubble burst? "" And it turns out that we can measure that very precisely. 
Equations were derived, graphs were produced, and the net result is that we find that the bubble bursts faster and faster with each passing year. 
We are losing interest in the past more rapidly. 
JM: Now a little piece of career advice. 
So for those of you who seek to be famous, we can learn from the 25 most famous political figures, authors, actors and so on. 
So if you want to become famous early on, you should be an actor, because then fame starts rising by the end of your 20s — you're still young, it's really great. 
Now if you can wait a little bit, you should be an author, because then you rise to very great heights, like Mark Twain, for instance: extremely famous. 
But if you want to reach the very top, you should delay gratification and, of course, become a politician. 
So here you will become famous by the end of your 50s, and become very, very famous afterward. 
So scientists also tend to get famous when they're much older. 
Like for instance, biologists and physics tend to be almost as famous as actors. 
One mistake you should not do is become a mathematician. 
(Laughter) If you do that, you might think, "" Oh great. I'm going to do my best work when I'm in my 20s. "" But guess what, nobody will really care. (Laughter) 
ELA: There are more sobering notes among the n-grams. 
For instance, here's the trajectory of Marc Chagall, an artist born in 1887. 
And this looks like the normal trajectory of a famous person. 
He gets more and more and more famous, except if you look in German. 
If you look in German, you see something completely bizarre, something you pretty much never see, which is he becomes extremely famous and then all of a sudden plummets, going through a nadir between 1933 and 1945, before rebounding afterward. 
And of course, what we're seeing is the fact Marc Chagall was a Jewish artist in Nazi Germany. 
Now these signals are actually so strong that we don't need to know that someone was censored. 
We can actually figure it out using really basic signal processing. 
Here's a simple way to do it. 
Well, a reasonable expectation is that somebody's fame in a given period of time should be roughly the average of their fame before and their fame after. 
So that's sort of what we expect. 
And we compare that to the fame that we observe. 
And we just divide one by the other to produce something we call a suppression index. 
If the suppression index is very, very, very small, then you very well might be being suppressed. 
If it's very large, maybe you're benefiting from propaganda. 
JM: Now you can actually look at the distribution of suppression indexes over whole populations. 
So for instance, here — this suppression index is for 5,000 people picked in English books where there's no known suppression — it would be like this, basically tightly centered on one. 
What you expect is basically what you observe. 
This is distribution as seen in Germany — very different, it's shifted to the left. 
People talked about it twice less as it should have been. 
But much more importantly, the distribution is much wider. 
There are many people who end up on the far left on this distribution who are talked about 10 times fewer than they should have been. 
But then also many people on the far right who seem to benefit from propaganda. 
This picture is the hallmark of censorship in the book record. 
ELA: So culturomics is what we call this method. 
It's kind of like genomics. 
Except genomics is a lens on biology through the window of the sequence of bases in the human genome. 
Culturomics is similar. 
It's the application of massive-scale data collection analysis to the study of human culture. 
Here, instead of through the lens of a genome, through the lens of digitized pieces of the historical record. 
The great thing about culturomics is that everyone can do it. 
Why can everyone do it? 
Everyone can do it because three guys, Jon Orwant, Matt Gray and Will Brockman over at Google, saw the prototype of the Ngram Viewer, and they said, "" This is so fun. 
We have to make this available for people. "" So in two weeks flat — the two weeks before our paper came out — they coded up a version of the Ngram Viewer for the general public. 
And so you too can type in any word or phrase that you're interested in and see its n-gram immediately — also browse examples of all the various books in which your n-gram appears. 
JM: Now this was used over a million times on the first day, and this is really the best of all the queries. 
So people want to be their best, put their best foot forward. 
But it turns out in the 18th century, people didn't really care about that at all. 
They didn't want to be their best, they wanted to be their beft. 
So what happened is, of course, this is just a mistake. 
It's not that strove for mediocrity, it's just that the S used to be written differently, kind of like an F. 
Now of course, Google didn't pick this up at the time, so we reported this in the science article that we wrote. 
But it turns out this is just a reminder that, although this is a lot of fun, when you interpret these graphs, you have to be very careful, and you have to adopt the base standards in the sciences. 
ELA: People have been using this for all kinds of fun purposes. 
(Laughter) Actually, we're not going to have to talk, we're just going to show you all the slides and remain silent. 
This person was interested in the history of frustration. 
There's various types of frustration. 
If you stub your toe, that's a one A "" argh. "" If the planet Earth is annihilated by the Vogons to make room for an interstellar bypass, that's an eight A "" aaaaaaaargh. "" This person studies all the "" arghs, "" from one through eight A's. 
And it turns out that the less-frequent "" arghs "" are, of course, the ones that correspond to things that are more frustrating — except, oddly, in the early 80s. 
We think that might have something to do with Reagan. 
(Laughter) JM: There are many usages of this data, but the bottom line is that the historical record is being digitized. 
Google has started to digitize 15 million books. 
That's 12 percent of all the books that have ever been published. 
It's a sizable chunk of human culture. 
There's much more in culture: there's manuscripts, there newspapers, there's things that are not text, like art and paintings. 
These all happen to be on our computers, on computers across the world. 
And when that happens, that will transform the way we have to understand our past, our present and human culture. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

If we look around us, much of what surrounds us started life as various rocks and sludge buried in the ground in various places in the world. 
But, of course, they don't look like rocks and sludge now. 
They look like TV cameras, monitors, annoying radio mics. 
And so this magical transformation is what I was trying to get at with my project, which became known as the Toaster Project. 
And it was also inspired by this quote from Douglas Adams, and the situation is from "" The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "" And the situation it describes is the hero of the book — he's a 20th-century man — finds himself alone on a strange planet populated only by a technologically primitive people. 
And he kind of assumes that, yes, he'll become — these villagers — he'll become their emperor and transform their society with his wonderful command of technology and science and the elements, but, of course, realizes that without the rest of human society, he can barely make a sandwich, let alone a toaster. 
But he didn't have Wikipedia. 
So I thought, okay, I'll try and make an electric toaster from scratch. 
And, working on the idea that the cheapest electric toaster would also be the simplest to reverse-engineer, I went and bought the cheapest toaster I could find, took it home and was kind of dismayed to discover that, inside this object, which I'd bought for just 3.49 pounds, there were 400 different bits made out of a hundred-plus different materials. 
I didn't have the rest of my life to do this project. 
I had maybe nine months. 
So I thought, okay, I'll start with five. 
And these were steel, mica, plastic, copper and nickel. 
So, starting with steel: how do you make steel? 
I went and knocked on the door of the Rio Tinto Chair of Advanced Mineral Extraction at the Royal School of Mines and said, "" How do you make steel? "" And Professor Cilliers was very kind and talked me through it. 
And my vague rememberings from GCSE science — well, steel comes from iron, so I phoned up an iron mine. 
And said, "" Hi, I'm trying to make a toaster. 
Can I come up and get some iron? "" Unfortunately, when I got there — emerges Ray. 
He had misheard me and thought I was coming up because I was trying to make a poster, and so wasn't prepared to take me into the mines. 
But after some nagging, I got him to do that. 
(Video) Ray: It was Crease Limestone, and that was produced by sea creatures 350 million years ago in a nice, warm, sunny atmosphere. 
When you study geology, you can see what's happened in the past, and there were terrific changes in the earth. 
Thomas Thwaites: As you can see, they had the Christmas decorations up. 
And of course, it wasn't actually a working mine anymore, because, though Ray was a miner there, the mine had closed and had been reopened as a kind of tourist attraction, because, of course, it can't compete on the scale of operations which are happening in South America, Australia, wherever. 
But anyway, I got my suitcase of iron ore and dragged it back to London on the train, and then was faced with the problem: Okay, how do you make this rock into components for a toaster? 
So I went back to Professor Cilliers, and he said, "" Go to the library. "" So I did and was looking through the undergraduate textbooks on metallurgy — completely useless for what I was trying to do. 
Because, of course, they don't actually tell you how to do it if you want to do it yourself and you don't have a smelting plant. 
So I ended up going to the History of Science Library and looking at this book. 
This is the first textbook on metallurgy written in the West, at least. 
And there you can see that woodcut is basically what I ended up doing. 
But instead of a bellows, I had a leaf blower. 
(Laughter) And that was something that reoccurred throughout the project, was, the smaller the scale you want to work on, the further back in time you have to go. 
And so this is after a day and about half a night smelting this iron. 
I dragged out this stuff, and it wasn't iron. 
But luckily, I found a patent online for industrial furnaces that use microwaves, and at 30 minutes at full power, and I was able to finish off the process. 
So, my next — (Applause) The next thing I was trying to get was copper. 
Again, this mine was once the largest copper mine in the world. 
It's not anymore, but I found a retired geology professor to take me down, and he said, "" Okay, I'll let you have some water from the mine. "" And the reason I was interested in getting water is because water which goes through mines becomes kind of acidic and will start picking up, dissolving the minerals from the mine. 
And a good example of this is the Rio Tinto, which is in Portugal. 
As you can see, it's got lots and lots of minerals dissolved in it. 
So many such that it's now just a home for bacteria who really like acidic, toxic conditions. 
But anyway, the water I dragged back from the Isle of Anglesey where the mine was — there was enough copper in it such that I could cast the pins of my metal electric plug. 
So my next thing: I was off to Scotland to get mica. 
And mica is a mineral which is a very good insulator and very good at insulating electricity. 
That's me getting mica. 
And the last material I'm going to talk about today is plastic, and, of course, my toaster had to have a plastic case. 
Plastic is the defining feature of cheap electrical goods. 
And so plastic comes from oil, so I phoned up BP and spent a good half an hour trying to convince the PR office at BP that it would be fantastic for them if they flew me to an oil rig and let me have a jug of oil. 
BP obviously has a bit more on their mind now. 
But even then they weren't convinced and said, "" Okay, we'll phone you back "" — never did. 
So I looked at other ways of making plastic. 
And you can actually make plastic from obviously oils which come from plants, but also from starches. 
So this is attempting to make potato starch plastic. 
And for a while that was looking really good. 
I poured it into the mold, which you can see there, which I've made from a tree trunk. 
And it was looking good for a while, but I left it outside, because you had to leave it outside to dry, and unfortunately I came back and there were snails eating the unhydrolyzed bits of potato. 
So kind of out of desperation, I decided that I could think laterally. 
And geologists have actually christened — well, they're debating whether to christen — the age that we're living in — they're debating whether to make it a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene, the age of Man. 
And that's because geologists of the future would kind of see a sharp shift in the strata of rock that is being laid down now. 
So suddenly, it will become kind of radioactive from Chernobyl and the 2,000 or so nuclear bombs that have been set off since 1945. 
And there'd also be an extinction event — like fossils would suddenly disappear. 
And also, I thought that there would be synthetic polymers, plastics, embedded in the rock. 
So I looked up a plastic — so I decided that I could mine some of this modern-day rock. 
And I went up to Manchester to visit a place called Axion Recycling. 
And they're at the sharp end of what's called the WEEE, which is this European electrical and electronic waste directive. 
And that was brought into force to try and deal with the mountain of stuff that is just being made and then living for a while in our homes and then going to landfill. 
But this is it. 
(Music) (Laughter) So there's a picture of my toaster. 
(Applause) That's it without the case on. 
And there it is on the shelves. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: I'm told you did plug it in once. 
TT: Yeah, I did plug it in. 
I don't know if you could see, but I was never able to make insulation for the wires. 
Kew Gardens were insistent that I couldn't come and hack into their rubber tree. 
So the wires were uninsulated. 
So there was 240 volts going through these homemade copper wires, homemade plug. 
And for about five seconds, the toaster toasted, but then, unfortunately, the element kind of melted itself. 
But I considered it a partial success, to be honest. 
BG: Thomas Thwaites. TT: Thanks. 

This is from Britain's "" leading "" diet nutritionist in the Daily Mirror, our second-biggest selling newspaper. 
What I find really fascinating is that the pharmaceutical industry uses exactly the same kinds of tricks and devices, but slightly more sophisticated versions of them, in order to distort the evidence they give to doctors and patients, and which we use to make vitally important decisions. 

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

Thank you. I have to tell you I'm both challenged and excited. 
(Laughter) I'm not exaggerating. I do weekends — I do more, obviously, I also coach people — but I'm into immersion, because how did you learn language? 
It doesn't mean I won't some day, but I haven't yet. 
I've had an interesting laboratory to try to answer the real question how somebody's life changes if you look at them like those people that you've given everything to? 
Some people have been through ultimate pain, psychologically, sexually, spiritually, emotionally abused — and not always, but often, they become some of the people that contribute the most to society. 
And you wouldn't be in this room if you bought that, but most of society thinks biography is destiny. 
TR: Thanks for the interaction on a high level there. 
But if you ask people, why didn't you achieve something? 
Somebody who's working for you, or a partner, or even yourself. 
(Laughter) (Applause) (Cheering) (Applause continues) TR: And — (Applause) What do all those, including the Supreme Court, have in common? (Laughter) 
You may not have the money, or the Supreme Court, but that is not the defining factor. 
(Applause) (Laughter) And you correct me if I'm wrong. 
And what I mean specifically, rather than just some phrase, is if you have emotion, human emotion, something that I experienced from you the day before yesterday at a level that is as profound as I've ever experienced and I believe with that emotion you would have beat his ass and won. 
(Laughter) Idiot, Robbins. 
So, think about your own life, the decisions that have shaped your destiny. 
Or being in a position like Lance Armstrong, "You've got testicular cancer." 
(Laughter) You've got it in your brain; you've got it in your lungs. 
We all have had times, you did something, and after, you thought to yourself, "I can't believe I said or did that, that was so stupid." 
Who's been there? Say, "" Aye. "" Audience: Aye. 
Or after you did something, you go, "" That was me! "" (Laughter) It wasn't your ability; it was your state. 
You can get your desires or goals. 
Second, once you know what the target that's driving you is and you uncover it for the truth — you don't form it — then you find out what's your map, what's the belief systems that tell you how to get those needs. 
Let me tell you what they are. First one: certainty. 
And if you got totally certain, ironically, even though we need that — you're not certain about your health, or your children, or money. 
We need variety. We need surprise. 
How many of you here love surprises? Say, "" Aye. "" Audience: Aye. 
(Laughter) Why are you doing it? 

I want to tell you the story about the time I almost got kidnapped in the trunk of a red Mazda Miata. 
It's the day after graduating from design school and I'm having a yard sale. 
And this guy pulls up in this red Mazda and he starts looking through my stuff. 
And he buys a piece of art that I made. 
And it turns out he's alone in town for the night, driving cross-country on a road trip before he goes into the Peace Corps. 
So I invite him out for a beer and he tells me all about his passion for making a difference in the world. 
Now it's starting to get late, and I'm getting pretty tired. 
As I motion for the tab, I make the mistake of asking him, "So where are you staying tonight?" 
And he makes it worse by saying, "Actually, I don't have a place." 
And I'm thinking, "" Oh, man! "" What do you do? 
We've all been there, right? 
Do I offer to host this guy? 
But, I just met him — I mean, he says he's going to the Peace Corps, but I don't really know if he's going to the Peace Corps and I don't want to end up kidnapped in the trunk of a Miata. 
That's a small trunk! 
So then I hear myself saying, "Hey, I have an airbed you can stay on in my living room." 
And the voice in my head goes, "Wait, what?" 
That night, I'm laying in bed, I'm staring at the ceiling and thinking, "" Oh my god, what have I done? 
There's a complete stranger sleeping in my living room. 
What if he's psychotic? "" My anxiety grows so much, I leap out of bed, I sneak on my tiptoes to the door, and I lock the bedroom door. 
It turns out he was not psychotic. 
We've kept in touch ever since. 
And the piece of art he bought at the yard sale is hanging in his classroom; he's a teacher now. 
This was my first hosting experience, and it completely changed my perspective. 
Maybe the people that my childhood taught me to label as strangers were actually friends waiting to be discovered. 
The idea of hosting people on airbeds gradually became natural to me and when I moved to San Francisco, I brought the airbed with me. 
So now it's two years later. 
I'm unemployed, I'm almost broke, my roommate moves out, and then the rent goes up. 
And then I learn there's a design conference coming to town, and all the hotels are sold out. 
And I've always believed that turning fear into fun is the gift of creativity. 
So here's what I pitch my best friend and my new roommate Brian Chesky: "" Brian, thought of a way to make a few bucks — turning our place into 'designers bed and breakfast,' offering young designers who come to town a place to crash, complete with wireless Internet, a small desk space, sleeping mat, and breakfast each morning. 
Ha! "" We built a basic website and Airbed and Breakfast was born. 
Three lucky guests got to stay on a 20-dollar airbed on the hardwood floor. 
But they loved it, and so did we. 
I swear, the ham and Swiss cheese omelets we made tasted totally different because we made them for our guests. 
We took them on adventures around the city, and when we said goodbye to the last guest, the door latch clicked, Brian and I just stared at each other. 
Did we just discover it was possible to make friends while also making rent? 
The wheels had started to turn. 
My old roommate, Nate Blecharczyk, joined as engineering co-founder. 
And we buckled down to see if we could turn this into a business. 
Here's what we pitched investors: "" We want to build a website where people publicly post pictures of their most intimate spaces, their bedrooms, the bathrooms — the kinds of rooms you usually keep closed when people come over. 
And then, over the Internet, they're going to invite complete strangers to come sleep in their homes. 
It's going to be huge! "" (Laughter) We sat back, and we waited for the rocket ship to blast off. 
It did not. 
No one in their right minds would invest in a service that allows strangers to sleep in people's homes. 
Why? 
Because we've all been taught as kids, strangers equal danger. 
Now, when you're faced with a problem, you fall back on what you know, and all we really knew was design. 
In art school, you learn that design is much more than the look and feel of something — it's the whole experience. 
We learned to do that for objects, but here, we were aiming to build Olympic trust between people who had never met. 
Could design make that happen? 
Is it possible to design for trust? 
I want to give you a sense of the flavor of trust that we were aiming to achieve. 
I've got a 30-second experiment that will push you past your comfort zone. 
If you're up for it, give me a thumbs-up. 
OK, I need you to take out your phones. 
Now that you have your phone out, I'd like you to unlock your phone. 
Now hand your unlocked phone to the person on your left. 
(Laughter) That tiny sense of panic you're feeling right now — (Laughter) is exactly how hosts feel the first time they open their home. 
Because the only thing more personal than your phone is your home. 
People don't just see your messages, they see your bedroom, your kitchen, your toilet. 
Now, how does it feel holding someone's unlocked phone? 
Most of us feel really responsible. 
That's how most guests feel when they stay in a home. 
And it's because of this that our company can even exist. 
By the way, who's holding Al Gore's phone? 
(Laughter) Would you tell Twitter he's running for President? (Laughter) 
(Applause) OK, you can hand your phones back now. 
So now that you've experienced the kind of trust challenge we were facing, I'd love to share a few discoveries we've made along the way. 
What if we changed one small thing about the design of that experiment? 
What if your neighbor had introduced themselves first, with their name, where they're from, the name of their kids or their dog? 
Imagine that they had 150 reviews of people saying, "They're great at holding unlocked phones!" 
(Laughter) Now how would you feel about handing your phone over? 
It turns out, a well-designed reputation system is key for building trust. 
And we didn't actually get it right the first time. 
It's hard for people to leave bad reviews. 
Eventually, we learned to wait until both guests and hosts left the review before we reveal them. 
Now, here's a discovery we made just last week. 
We did a joint study with Stanford, where we looked at people's willingness to trust someone based on how similar they are in age, location and geography. 
The research showed, not surprisingly, we prefer people who are like us. 
The more different somebody is, the less we trust them. 
Now, that's a natural social bias. 
But what's interesting is what happens when you add reputation into the mix, in this case, with reviews. 
Now, if you've got less than three reviews, nothing changes. 
But if you've got more than 10, everything changes. 
High reputation beats high similarity. 
The right design can actually help us overcome one of our most deeply rooted biases. 
Now we also learned that building the right amount of trust takes the right amount of disclosure. 
This is what happens when a guest first messages a host. 
If you share too little, like, "" Yo, "" acceptance rates go down. 
And if you share too much, like, "I'm having issues with my mother," (Laughter) acceptance rates also go down. 
But there's a zone that's just right, like, "" Love the artwork in your place. Coming for vacation with my family. "" So how do we design for just the right amount of disclosure? 
We use the size of the box to suggest the right length, and we guide them with prompts to encourage sharing. 
We bet our whole company on the hope that, with the right design, people would be willing to overcome the stranger-danger bias. 
What we didn't realize is just how many people were ready and waiting to put the bias aside. 
This is a graph that shows our rate of adoption. 
There's three things happening here. 
The first, an unbelievable amount of luck. 
The second is the efforts of our team. 
And third is the existence of a previously unsatisfied need. 
Now, things have been going pretty well. 
Obviously, there are times when things don't work out. 
Guests have thrown unauthorized parties and trashed homes. 
Hosts have left guests stranded in the rain. 
In the early days, I was customer service, and those calls came right to my cell phone. 
I was at the front lines of trust breaking. 
And there's nothing worse than those calls, it hurts to even think about them. 
And the disappointment in the sound of someone's voice was and, I would say, still is our single greatest motivator to keep improving. 
Thankfully, out of the 123 million nights we've ever hosted, less than a fraction of a percent have been problematic. 
Turns out, people are justified in their trust. 
And when trust works out right, it can be absolutely magical. 
We had a guest stay with a host in Uruguay, and he suffered a heart attack. 
The host rushed him to the hospital. 
They donated their own blood for his operation. 
Let me read you his review. 
(Laughter) "" Excellent house for sedentary travelers prone to myocardial infarctions. (Laughter) 
The area is beautiful and has direct access to the best hospitals. (Laughter) 
Javier and Alejandra instantly become guardian angels who will save your life without even knowing you. 
They will rush you to the hospital in their own car while you're dying and stay in the waiting room while the doctors give you a bypass. 
They don't want you to feel lonely, they bring you books to read. 
And they let you stay at their house extra nights without charging you. 
Highly recommended! "" (Applause) Of course, not every stay is like that. 
But this connection beyond the transaction is exactly what the sharing economy is aiming for. 
Now, when I heard that term, I have to admit, it tripped me up. 
How do sharing and transactions go together? 
So let's be clear; it is about commerce. 
But if you just called it the rental economy, it would be incomplete. 
The sharing economy is commerce with the promise of human connection. 
People share a part of themselves, and that changes everything. 
You know how most travel today is, like, I think of it like fast food — it's efficient and consistent, at the cost of local and authentic. 
What if travel were like a magnificent buffet of local experiences? 
What if anywhere you visited, there was a central marketplace of locals offering to get you thoroughly drunk on a pub crawl in neighborhoods you didn't even know existed. 
Or learning to cook from the chef of a five-star restaurant? 
Today, homes are designed around the idea of privacy and separation. 
What if homes were designed to be shared from the ground up? 
What would that look like? 
What if cities embraced a culture of sharing? 
I see a future of shared cities that bring us community and connection instead of isolation and separation. 
In South Korea, in the city of Seoul, they've actually even started this. 
They've repurposed hundreds of government parking spots to be shared by residents. 
They're connecting students who need a place to live with empty-nesters who have extra rooms. 
And they've started an incubator to help fund the next generation of sharing economy start-ups. 
Tonight, just on our service, 785,000 people in 191 countries will either stay in a stranger's home or welcome one into theirs. 
Clearly, it's not as crazy as we were taught. 
We didn't invent anything new. 
Hospitality has been around forever. 
There's been many other websites like ours. 
So, why did ours eventually take off? 
Luck and timing aside, I've learned that you can take the components of trust, and you can design for that. 
Design can overcome our most deeply rooted stranger-danger bias. 
And that's amazing to me. 
It blows my mind. 
I think about this every time I see a red Miata go by. 
Now, we know design won't solve all the world's problems. 
But if it can help out with this one, if it can make a dent in this, it makes me wonder, what else can we design for next? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I want you to put off your preconceptions, your preconceived fears and thoughts about reptiles. 
Because that is the only way I'm going to get my story across to you. 
And by the way, if I come across as a sort of rabid, hippie conservationist, it's purely a figment of your imagination. 
(Laughter) Okay. We are actually the first species on Earth to be so prolific to actually threaten our own survival. 
And I know we've all seen images enough to make us numb, of the tragedies that we're perpetrating on the planet. 
We're kind of like greedy kids, using it all up, aren't we? 
And today is a time for me to talk to you about water. 
It's not only because we like to drink lots of it, and its marvelous derivatives, beer, wine, etc. 
And, of course, watch it fall from the sky and flow in our wonderful rivers, but for several other reasons as well. 
When I was a kid, growing up in New York, I was smitten by snakes, the same way most kids are smitten by tops, marbles, cars, trains, cricket balls. 
And my mother, brave lady, was partly to blame, taking me to the New York Natural History Museum, buying me books on snakes, and then starting this infamous career of mine, which has culminated in of course, arriving in India 60 years ago, brought by my mother, Doris Norden, and my stepfather, Rama Chattopadhyaya. 
It's been a roller coaster ride. 
Two animals, two iconic reptiles really captivated me very early on. 
One of them was the remarkable gharial. 
This crocodile, which grows to almost 20 feet long in the northern rivers, and this charismatic snake, the king cobra. 
What my purpose of the talk today really is, is to sort of indelibly scar your minds with these charismatic and majestic creatures. 
Because this is what you will take away from here, a reconnection with nature, I hope. 
The king cobra is quite remarkable for several reasons. 
What you're seeing here is very recently shot images in a forest nearby here, of a female king cobra making her nest. 
Here is a limbless animal, capable of gathering a huge mound of leaves, and then laying her eggs inside, to withstand 5 to 10 [meters of rainfall], in order that the eggs can incubate over the next 90 days, and hatch into little baby king cobras. 
So, she protects her eggs, and after three months, the babies finally do hatch out. 
A majority of them will die, of course. There is very high mortality in little baby reptiles who are just 10 to 12 inches long. 
My first experience with king cobras was in '72 at a magical place called Agumbe, in Karnataka, this state. 
And it is a marvelous rain forest. 
This first encounter was kind of like the Maasai boy who kills the lion to become a warrior. 
It really changed my life totally. 
And it brought me straight into the conservation fray. 
I ended up starting this research and education station in Agumbe, which you are all of course invited to visit. 
This is basically a base wherein we are trying to gather and learn virtually everything about the biodiversity of this incredibly complex forest system, and try to hang on to what's there, make sure the water sources are protected and kept clean, and of course, having a good time too. 
You can almost hear the drums throbbing back in that little cottage where we stay when we're there. 
It was very important for us to get through to the people. 
And through the children is usually the way to go. 
They are fascinated with snakes. They haven't got that steely thing that you end up either fearing or hating or despising or loathing them in some way. 
They are interested. 
And it really works to start with them. 
This gives you an idea of the size of some of these snakes. 
This is an average size king cobra, about 12 feet long. 
And it actually crawled into somebody's bathroom, and was hanging around there for two or three days. 
The people of this part of India worship the king cobra. 
And they didn't kill it. They called us to catch it. 
Now we've caught more than 100 king cobras over the last three years, and relocated them in nearby forests. 
But in order to find out the real secrets of these creatures [it was necessary] for us to actually insert a small radio transmitter inside [each] snake. 
Now we are able to follow them and find out their secrets, where the babies go after they hatch, and remarkable things like this you're about to see. 
This was just a few days ago in Agumbe. 
I had the pleasure of being close to this large king cobra who had caught a venomous pit viper. 
And it does it in such a way that it doesn't get bitten itself. 
And king cobras feed only on snakes. 
This [little snake] was kind of a tid-bit for it, what we'd call a "" vadai "" or a donut or something like that. 
(Laughter) Usually they eat something a bit larger. 
In this case a rather strange and inexplicable activity happened over the last breeding season, wherein a large male king cobra actually grabbed a female king cobra, didn't mate with it, actually killed it and swallowed it. 
We're still trying to explain and come to terms with what is the evolutionary advantage of this. 
But they do also a lot of other remarkable things. 
This is again, something [we were able to see] by virtue of the fact that we had a radio transmitter in one of the snakes. 
This male snake, 12 feet long, met another male king cobra. 
And they did this incredible ritual combat dance. 
It's very much like the rutting of mammals, including humans, you know, sorting out our differences, but gentler, no biting allowed. 
It's just a wresting match, but a remarkable activity. 
Now, what are we doing with all this information? 
What's the point of all this? 
Well, the king cobra is literally a keystone species in these rainforests. 
And our job is to convince the authorities that these forests have to be protected. 
And this is one of the ways we do it, by learning as much as we can about something so remarkable and so iconic in the rainforests there, in order to help protect trees, animals and of course the water sources. 
You've all heard, perhaps, of Project Tiger which started back in the early '70s, which was, in fact, a very dynamic time for conservation. 
We were piloted, I could say, by a highly autocratic stateswoman, but who also had an incredible passion for environment. 
And this is the time when Project Tiger emerged. 
And, just like Project Tiger, our activities with the king cobra is to look at a species of animal so that we protect its habitat and everything within it. 
So, the tiger is the icon. 
And now the king cobra is a new one. 
All the major rivers in south India are sourced in the Western Ghats, the chain of hills running along the west coast of India. 
It pours out millions of gallons every hour, and supplies drinking water to at least 300 million people, and washes many, many babies, and of course feeds many, many animals, both domestic and wild, produces thousands of tons of rice. 
And what do we do? How do we respond to this? 
Well, basically, we dam it, we pollute it, we pour in pesticides, weedicides, fungicides. 
You drink it in peril of your life. 
And the thing is, it's not just big industry. 
It's not misguided river engineers who are doing all this; it's us. 
It seems that our citizens find the best way to dispose of garbage are in water sources. 
Okay. Now we're going north, very far north. 
North central India, the Chambal River is where we have our base. 
This is the home of the gharial, this incredible crocodile. 
It is an animal which has been on the Earth for just about 100 million years. 
It survived even during the time that the dinosaurs died off. 
It has remarkable features. 
Even though it grows to 20 feet long, since it eats only fish it's not dangerous to human beings. 
It does have big teeth, however, and it's kind of hard to convince people if an animal has big teeth, that it's a harmless creature. 
But we, actually, back in the early '70s, did surveys, and found that gharial were extremely rare. 
In fact, if you see the map, the range of their original habitat was all the way from the Indus in Pakistan to the Irrawaddy in Burma. 
And now it's just limited to a couple of spots in Nepal and India. 
So, in fact at this point there are only 200 breeding gharial left in the wild. 
So, starting in the mid- '70s when conservation was at the fore, we were actually able to start projects which were basically government supported to collect eggs from the wild from the few remaining nests and release 5,000 baby gharial back to the wild. 
And pretty soon we were seeing sights like this. 
I mean, just incredible to see bunches of gharial basking on the river again. 
But complacency does have a tendency to breed contempt. 
And, sure enough, with all the other pressures on the river, like sand mining, for example, very, very heavy cultivation all the way down to the river's edge, not allowing the animals to breed anymore, we're looking at even more problems building up for the gharial, despite the early good intentions. 
Their nests hatching along the riverside producing hundreds of hatchlings. It's just an amazing sight. 
This was actually just taken last year. 
But then the monsoon arrives, and unfortunately downriver there is always a dam or there is always a barrage, and, shoop, they get washed down to their doom. 
Luckily there is still a lot of interest. 
My pals in the Crocodile Specialist Group of the IUCN, the [Madras Crocodile Bank], an NGO, the World Wildlife Fund, the Wildlife Institute of India, State Forest Departments, and the Ministry of Environment, we all work together on stuff. 
But it's possibly, and definitely not enough. 
For example, in the winter of 2007 and 2008, there was this incredible die-off of gharial, in the Chambal River. 
Suddenly dozens of gharial appearing on the river, dead. 
Why? How could it happen? 
This is a relatively clean river. 
The Chambal, if you look at it, has clear water. 
People scoop water out of the Chambal and drink it, something you wouldn't do in most north Indian rivers. 
So, in order to try to find out the answer to this, we got veterinarians from all over the world working with Indian vets to try to figure out what was happening. 
I was there for a lot of the necropsies on the riverside. 
And we actually looked through all their organs and tried to figure out what was going on. 
And it came down to something called gout, which, as a result of kidney breakdown is actually uric acid crystals throughout the body, and worse in the joints, which made the gharial unable to swim. 
And it's a horribly painful death. 
Just downriver from the Chambal is the filthy Yamuna river, the sacred Yamuna river. 
And I hate to be so ironic and sarcastic about it but it's the truth. It's just one of the filthiest cesspools you can imagine. 
It flows down through Delhi, Mathura, Agra, and gets just about every bit of effluent you can imagine. 
So, it seemed that the toxin that was killing the gharial was something in the food chain, something in the fish they were eating. 
And, you know, once a toxin is in the food chain everything is affected, including us. 
Because these rivers are the lifeblood of people all along their course. 
In order to try to answer some of these questions, we again turn to technology, to biological technology, in this case, again, telemetry, putting radios on 10 gharial, and actually following their movements. They're being watched everyday as we speak, to try to find out what this mysterious toxin is. 
The Chambal river is an absolutely incredible place. 
It's a place that's famous to a lot of you who know about the bandits, the dacoits who used to work up there. And there still are quite a few around. 
But Poolan Devi was one [of them]. Which actually Shekhar Kapur made an incredible movie, "" The Bandit Queen, "" which I urge you to see. 
You'll get to see the incredible [Chambal] landscape as well. 
But, again, heavy fishing pressures. 
This is one of the last repositories of the Ganges river dolphin, various species of turtles, thousands of migratory birds, and fishing is causing problems like this. 
And now [these] new elements of human intolerance for river creatures like the gharial means that if they don't drown in the net, then they simply cut their beaks off. 
Animals like the Ganges river dolphin which is just down to a few left, and it is also critically endangered. 
So, who is next? Us? 
Because we are all dependent on these water sources. 
So, we all know about the Narmada river, the tragedies of dams, the tragedies of huge projects which displace people and wreck river systems without providing livelihoods. 
And development just basically going berserk, for a double figure growth index, basically. 
And climate change is certainly going to turn all of our theories and predictions on their heads. 
We're still working hard at it. 
We've got a lot of a good team of people working up there. 
And the thing is, you know, the decision makers, the folks in power, they're up in their bungalows and so on in Delhi, in the city capitals. They are all supplied with plenty of water. It's cool. 
But out on the rivers there are still millions of people who are in really bad shape. 
And it's a bleak future for them. 
So, we have our Ganges and Yamuna cleanup project. 
We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it, and nothing to show for it. Incredible. 
So, people talk about political will. 
During the die-off of the gharial we did galvanize a lot of action. 
Government cut through all the red tape, we got foreign vets on it. It was great. 
So, we can do it. 
But if you stroll down to the Yamuna or to the Gomati in Lucknow, or to the Adyar river in Chennai, or the Mula-Mutha river in Pune, just see what we're capable of doing to a river. It's sad. 
But I think the final note really is that we can do it. 
The corporates, the artists, the wildlife nuts, the good old everyday folks can actually bring these rivers back. 
And the final word is that there is a king cobra looking over our shoulders. 
And there is a gharial looking at us from the river. 
And these are powerful water totems. 
And they are going to disturb our dreams until we do the right thing. 
Namaste. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thanks, Rom. Thanks a lot. 
You know, most people are terrified of snakes. 
And there might be quite a few people here who would be very glad to see the last king cobra bite the dust. 
Do you have those conversations with people? 
How do you really get them to care? 
Romulus Whitaker: I take the sort of humble approach, I guess you could say. I don't say that snakes are huggable exactly. 
It's not like the teddy bear. 
But I sort of — there is an innocence in these animals. 
And when the average person looks at a cobra going "" Ssssss! "" like that, they say, "" My god, look at that angry, dangerous creature. "" I look at it as a creature who is totally frightened of something so dangerous as a human being. 
And that is the truth. And that's what I try to get out. 
(Applause) CA: Now, incredible footage you showed of the viper being killed. 
You were saying that that hasn't been filmed before. 
RW: Yes, this is actually the first time anyone of us knew about it, for one thing. 
As I said, it's just like a little snack for him, you know? 
Usually they eat larger snakes like rat snakes, or even cobras. 
But this guy who we're following right now is in the deep jungle. 
Whereas other king cobras very often come into the human interface, you know, the plantations, to find big rat snakes and stuff. 
This guy specializes in pit vipers. 
And the guy who is working there with them, he's from Maharashtra, he said, "" I think he's after the nusha. "" (Laughter) Now, the nusha means the high. 
Whenever he eats the pit viper he gets this little venom rush. 
(Laughter) CA: Thanks Rom. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

They've done a lot of good for girls in these situations, and we ought to be thinking about how we can make that happen for boys too in their younger years. 
Even in their older years, what we find is that there's still a problem. 
And in fact, university administrators are a little uncomfortable about the idea that we may be getting close to 70 percent female population in universities. 
You can't have plastic knives and swords and axes and all that kind of thing in a kindergarten classroom. 
But here he stands as testament to the fact that you can't roughhouse on the playground today. 
The reason that this is a problem is because the message that boys are getting is, "" You need to do what the teacher asks you to do all the time. "" The teacher's salary depends on "" No Child Left Behind "" and "" Race to the Top "" and accountability and testing and all of this. 
So she has to figure out a way to get all these boys through this curriculum — and girls. 
And so this is a very serious problem. 
We want to live in Lake Wobegon where every child is above average... 
Most of the educational games that are out there today are really flashcards. 
We need to think about how to uncompress this curriculum if we can, trying to bring boys back into a space that is comfortable for them. 
All of those conversations need to be happening. 
A game designer from the New School put together a wonderful video gaming school. 
Where we started: my colleagues Mike Petner, Shawn Vashaw, myself, we started by trying to look at the teachers' attitudes and find out how do they really feel about gaming, what do they say about it. 
It's very uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of that kind of language. 

I was offered a position as associate professor of medicine and chief of scientific visualization at Yale University in the department of medicine. 
And my job was to write many of the algorithms and code for NASA to do virtual surgery in preparation for the astronauts going into deep-space flight, so they could be kept in robotic pods. 
One of the fascinating things about what we were working on is that we were seeing, using new scanning technologies, things that had never been seen before. 
Not only in disease management, but also things that allowed us to see things about the body that just made you marvel. 
I remember one of the first times we were looking at collagen. 
And your entire body, everything — your hair, skin, bone, nails — everything is made of collagen. 
And it's a kind of rope-like structure that twirls and swirls like this. 
So perfectly organized a structure, it was hard not to attribute divinity to it. 
One of the opportunities I had was one person was working on a really interesting micromagnetic resonance imaging machine with the NIH. 
And what we were going to do was scan a new project on the development of the fetus from conception to birth using these new technologies. 
So I wrote the algorithms and code, and he built the hardware — Paul Lauterbur — then went onto win the Nobel Prize for inventing the MRI. 
And I'm going to show you a sample of the piece, "From Conception to Birth." 
(Music) [From Conception to Birth] [Oocyte] [Sperm] [Egg Inseminated] [24 Hours: Baby's first division] [The fertilized ovum divides a few hours after fusion...] [And divides anew every 12 to 15 hours.] [Early Embryo] [Yolk sack still feeding baby.] [25 Days: Heart chamber developing.] [32 Days: Arms & hands are developing] [36 Days: Beginning of the primitive vertebrae] [These weeks are the period of the most rapid development of the fetus.] [If the fetus continues to grow at this speed for the entire 9 months, it would be 1.5 tons at birth.] [45 Days] [Embryo's heart is beating twice as fast as the mother's.] 
[51 Days] [Developing retina, nose and fingers] [The fetus' continual movement in the womb is necessary for muscular and skeletal growth.] [12 Weeks: Indifferent penis] [Girl or boy yet to be determined] [8 Months] [Delivery: The expulsion stage] [The moment of birth] (Applause) Alexander Tsiaras: Thank you. 
And as we kept on scanning more and more, working on this project, looking at these two simple cells that have this unbelievable machinery that will become the magic of you. 
And as we kept on working on this data, looking at small clusters of the body, these little pieces of tissue that were the trophoblasts coming off of the blastocyst, all of a sudden burrowing itself into the side of the uterus, saying, "" I'm here to stay. "" Having conversation and communications with the estrogens, the progesterones, saying, "" I'm here to stay, plant me, "" building this incredible trilinear fetus that becomes, within 44 days, something that you can recognize, and then at nine weeks is really kind of a little human being. 
The marvel of this information: How do we actually have this biological mechanism inside our body to actually see this information? 
And like this magnificent origami, cells are developing at one million cells per second at four weeks, as it's just folding on itself. 
Within five weeks, you start to see the early atrium and the early ventricles. 
Six weeks, these folds are now beginning with the papilla on the inside of the heart actually being able to pull down each one of those valves in your heart until you get a mature heart — and then basically the development of the entire human body. 
The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go — the complexity of these, the mathematical models of how these things are indeed done are beyond human comprehension. 
Even though I am a mathematician, I look at this with marvel of how do these instruction sets not make these mistakes as they build what is us? 
It's a mystery, it's magic, it's divinity. 
Take a look at this little tuft of capillaries. 
But basically by the time you're nine months and you're given birth, you have almost 60,000 miles of vessels inside your body. 
59,999 miles that are basically bringing nutrients and taking waste away. 
The complexity of building that within a single system is, again, beyond any comprehension or any existing mathematics today. 
And then instructions set, from the brain to every other part of the body — look at the complexity of the folding. 
Every six months until they're six years old, we're going to be doing about 250 children, watching exactly how the gyri and the sulci of the brains fold to see how this magnificent development actually turns into memories and the marvel that is us. 
And it's not just our own existence, but how does the woman's body understand to have genetic structure that not only builds her own, but then has the understanding that allows her to become a walking immunological, cardiovascular system that basically is a mobile system that can actually nurture, treat this child with a kind of marvel that is beyond, again, our comprehension — the magic that is existence, that is us? 

I would like to talk to you about a very special group of animals. 
There are 10,000 species of birds in the world. 
Vultures are amongst the most threatened group of birds. 
When you see a vulture like this, the first thing that comes to your mind is, these are disgusting, ugly, greedy creatures that are just after your flesh, associated with politicians. (Laughter) (Applause) I want to change that perception. I want to change those feelings you have for these birds, because they need our sympathy. They really do. (Laughter) And I'll tell you why. 
First of all, why do they have such a bad press? 
When Charles Darwin went across the Atlantic in 1832 on the Beagle, he saw the turkey vulture, and he said, "" These are disgusting birds with bald scarlet heads that are formed to revel in putridity. "" (Laughter) You could not get a worse insult, and that from Charles Darwin. (Laughter) You know, he changed his mind when he came back, and I'll tell you why. 
They've also be associated with Disney — (Laughter) — personified as goofy, dumb, stupid characters. 
More recently, if you've been following the Kenyan press — (Laughter) (Applause) (Cheers) — these are the attributes that they associated the Kenyan MPs with. But I want to challenge that. 
I want to challenge that. Do you know why? 
Because MPs do not keep the environment clean. (Laughter) MPs do not help to prevent the spread of diseases. 
They are hardly monogamous. (Laughter) (Applause) They are far from being extinct. (Laughter) And, my favorite is, vultures are better looking. (Applause) (Laughter) So there's two types of vultures in this planet. 
There are the New World vultures that are mainly found in the Americas, like the condors and the caracaras, and then the Old World vultures, where we have 16 species. From these 16, 11 of them are facing a high risk of extinction. 
So why are vultures important? First of all, they provide vital ecological services. They clean up. 
They're our natural garbage collectors. 
They clean up carcasses right to the bone. 
They help to kill all the bacteria. They help absorb anthrax that would otherwise spread and cause huge livestock losses and diseases in other animals. 
Recent studies have shown that in areas where there are no vultures, carcasses take up to three to four times to decompose, and this has huge ramifications for the spread of diseases. 
Vultures also have tremendous historical significance. 
They have been associated in ancient Egyptian culture. 
Nekhbet was the symbol of the protector and the motherhood, and together with the cobra, symbolized the unity between Upper and Lower Egypt. 
In Hindu mythology, Jatayu was the vulture god, and he risked his life in order to save the goddess Sita from the 10-headed demon Ravana. 
In Tibetan culture, they are performing very important sky burials. In places like Tibet, there are no places to bury the dead, or wood to cremate them, so these vultures provide a natural disposal system. 
So what is the problem with vultures? 
We have eight species of vultures that occur in Kenya, of which six are highly threatened with extinction. 
The reason is that they're getting poisoned, and the reason that they're getting poisoned is because there's human-wildlife conflicts. The pastoral communities are using this poison to target predators, and in return, the vultures are falling victim to this. 
In South Asia, in countries like India and Pakistan, four species of vultures are listed as critically endangered, which means they have less than 10 or 15 years to go extinct, and the reason is because they are falling prey by consuming livestock that has been treated with a painkilling drug like Diclofenac. 
This drug has now been banned for veterinary use in India, and they have taken a stand. 
Because there are no vultures, there's been a spread in the numbers of feral dogs at carcass dump sites, and when you have feral dogs, you have a huge time bomb of rabies. The number of cases of rabies has increased tremendously in India. 
Kenya is going to have one of the largest wind farms in Africa: 353 wind turbines are going to be up at Lake Turkana. 
I am not against wind energy, but we need to work with the governments, because wind turbines do this to birds. They slice them in half. 
They are bird-blending machines. 
In West Africa, there's a horrific trade of dead vultures to serve the witchcraft and the fetish market. 
So what's being done? Well, we're conducting research on these birds. We're putting transmitters on them. 
We're trying to determine their basic ecology, and see where they go. 
We can see that they travel different countries, so if you focus on a problem locally, it's not going to help you. 
We need to work with governments in regional levels. 
We're working with local communities. 
We're talking to them about appreciating vultures, about the need from within to appreciate these wonderful creatures and the services that they provide. 
How can you help? You can become active, make noise. You can write a letter to your government and tell them that we need to focus on these very misunderstood creatures. Volunteer your time to spread the word. Spread the word. 
When you walk out of this room, you will be informed about vultures, but speak to your families, to your children, to your neighbors about vultures. 
They are very graceful. Charles Darwin said he changed his mind because he watched them fly effortlessly without energy in the skies. 
Kenya, this world, will be much poorer without these wonderful species. 
Thank you very much. (Applause) 

When we think about mapping cities, we tend to think about roads and streets and buildings, and the settlement narrative that led to their creation, or you might think about the bold vision of an urban designer, but there's other ways to think about mapping cities and how they got to be made. 
Today, I want to show you a new kind of map. 
This is not a geographic map. 
This is a map of the relationships between people in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, and what you can see here is that each dot represents a person, each line represents a relationship between those people, and each color represents a community within the network. 
Now, I'm here on the green side, down on the far right where the geeks are, and TEDx also is down on the far right. (Laughter) Now, on the other side of the network, you tend to have primarily African-American and Latino folks who are really concerned about somewhat different things than the geeks are, but just to give some sense, the green part of the network we call Smalltimore, for those of us that inhabit it, because it seems as though we're living in a very small town. 
We see the same people over and over again, but that's because we're not really exploring the full depth and breadth of the city. 
On the other end of the network, you have folks who are interested in things like hip-hop music and they even identify with living in the DC / Maryland / Virginia area over, say, the Baltimore city designation proper. 
But in the middle, you see that there's something that connects the two communities together, and that's sports. 
We have the Baltimore Orioles, the Baltimore Ravens football team, Michael Phelps, the Olympian. 
Under Armour, you may have heard of, is a Baltimore company, and that community of sports acts as the only bridge between these two ends of the network. 
Let's take a look at San Francisco. 
You see something a little bit different happening in San Francisco. 
On the one hand, you do have the media, politics and news lobe that tends to exist in Baltimore and other cities, but you also have this very predominant group of geeks and techies that are sort of taking over the top half of the network, and there's even a group that's so distinct and clear that we can identify it as Twitter employees, next to the geeks, in between the gamers and the geeks, at the opposite end of the hip-hop spectrum. 
So you can see, though, that the tensions that we've heard about in San Francisco in terms of people being concerned about gentrification and all the new tech companies that are bringing new wealth and settlement into the city are real, and you can actually see that documented here. 
You can see the LGBT community is not really getting along with the geek community that well, the arts community, the music community. 
And so it leads to things like this. 
["" Evict Twitter ""] Somebody sent me this photo a few weeks ago, and it shows what is happening on the ground in San Francisco, and I think you can actually try to understand that through looking at a map like this. 
Let's take a look at Rio de Janeiro. 
I spent the last few weeks gathering data about Rio, and one of the things that stood out to me about this city is that everything's really kind of mixed up. 
It's a very heterogenous city in a way that Baltimore or San Francisco is not. 
You still have the lobe of people involved with government, newspapers, politics, columnists. 
TEDxRio is down in the lower right, right next to bloggers and writers. 
But then you also have this tremendous diversity of people that are interested in different kinds of music. 
Even Justin Bieber fans are represented here. 
Other boy bands, country singers, gospel music, funk and rap and stand-up comedy, and there's even a whole section around drugs and jokes. 
How cool is that? 
And then the Flamengo football team is also represented here. 
So you have that same kind of spread of sports and civics and the arts and music, but it's represented in a very different way, and I think that maybe fits with our understanding of Rio as being a very multicultural, musically diverse city. 
So we have all this data. 
It's an incredibly rich set of data that we have about cities now, maybe even richer than any data set that we've ever had before. 
So what can we do with it? 
Well, I think the first thing that we can try to understand is that segregation is a social construct. 
It's something that we choose to do, and we could choose not to do it, and if you kind of think about it, what we're doing with this data is aiming a space telescope at a city and looking at it as if was a giant high school cafeteria, and seeing how everybody arranged themselves in a seating chart. 
Well maybe it's time to shake up the seating chart a little bit. 
The other thing that we start to realize is that race is a really poor proxy for diversity. 
We've got people represented from all different types of races across the entire map here — only looking at race doesn't really contribute to our development of diversity. 
So if we're trying to use diversity as a way to tackle some of our more intractable problems, we need to start to think about diversity in a new way. 
And lastly, we have the ability to create interventions to start to reshape our cities in a new way, and I believe that if we have that capability, we may even bear some responsibility to do so. 
So what is a city? 
I think some might say that it is a geographical area or a collection of streets and buildings, but I believe that a city is the sum of the relationships of the people that live there, and I believe that if we can start to document those relationships in a real way then maybe we have a real shot at creating those kinds of cities that we'd like to have. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So whenever I visit a school and talk to students, I always ask them the same thing: Why do you Google? 
Why is Google the search engine of choice for you? 
Strangely enough, I always get the same three answers. 
One, "" Because it works, "" which is a great answer; that's why I Google, too. 
Two, somebody will say, "I really don't know of any alternatives." 
It's not an equally great answer and my reply to that is usually, "" Try to Google the word 'search engine,' you may find a couple of interesting alternatives. "" And last but not least, thirdly, inevitably, one student will raise her or his hand and say, "With Google, I'm certain to always get the best, unbiased search result." 
Certain to always get the best, unbiased search result. 
Now, as a man of the humanities, albeit a digital humanities man, that just makes my skin curl, even if I, too, realize that that trust, that idea of the unbiased search result is a cornerstone in our collective love for and appreciation of Google. 
I will show you why that, philosophically, is almost an impossibility. 
But let me first elaborate, just a little bit, on a basic principle behind each search query that we sometimes seem to forget. 
So whenever you set out to Google something, start by asking yourself this: "" Am I looking for an isolated fact? "" What is the capital of France? 
What are the building blocks of a water molecule? 
Great — Google away. 
There's not a group of scientists who are this close to proving that it's actually London and H30. 
You don't see a big conspiracy among those things. 
We agree, on a global scale, what the answers are to these isolated facts. 
But if you complicate your question just a little bit and ask something like, "Why is there an Israeli-Palestine conflict?" 
You're not exactly looking for a singular fact anymore, you're looking for knowledge, which is something way more complicated and delicate. 
And to get to knowledge, you have to bring 10 or 20 or 100 facts to the table and acknowledge them and say, "" Yes, these are all true. "" But because of who I am, young or old, black or white, gay or straight, I will value them differently. 
And I will say, "" Yes, this is true, but this is more important to me than that. "" And this is where it becomes interesting, because this is where we become human. 
This is when we start to argue, to form society. 
And to really get somewhere, we need to filter all our facts here, through friends and neighbors and parents and children and coworkers and newspapers and magazines, to finally be grounded in real knowledge, which is something that a search engine is a poor help to achieve. 
So, I promised you an example just to show you why it's so hard to get to the point of true, clean, objective knowledge — as food for thought. 
I will conduct a couple of simple queries, search queries. 
We'll start with "" Michelle Obama, "" the First Lady of the United States. 
And we'll click for pictures. 
It works really well, as you can see. 
It's a perfect search result, more or less. 
It's just her in the picture, not even the President. 
How does this work? 
Quite simple. 
Google uses a lot of smartness to achieve this, but quite simply, they look at two things more than anything. 
First, what does it say in the caption under the picture on each website? 
Does it say "" Michelle Obama "" under the picture? 
Pretty good indication it's actually her on there. 
Second, Google looks at the picture file, the name of the file as such uploaded to the website. 
Again, is it called "" MichelleObama.jpeg ""? 
Pretty good indication it's not Clint Eastwood in the picture. 
So, you've got those two and you get a search result like this — almost. 
Now, in 2009, Michelle Obama was the victim of a racist campaign, where people set out to insult her through her search results. 
There was a picture distributed widely over the Internet where her face was distorted to look like a monkey. 
And that picture was published all over. 
And people published it very, very purposefully, to get it up there in the search results. 
They made sure to write "" Michelle Obama "" in the caption and they made sure to upload the picture as "" MichelleObama.jpeg, "" or the like. 
You get why — to manipulate the search result. 
And it worked, too. 
So when you picture-Googled for "" Michelle Obama "" in 2009, that distorted monkey picture showed up among the first results. 
Now, the results are self-cleansing, and that's sort of the beauty of it, because Google measures relevance every hour, every day. 
However, Google didn't settle for that this time, they just thought, "" That's racist and it's a bad search result and we're going to go back and clean that up manually. 
We are going to write some code and fix it, "" which they did. 
And I don't think anyone in this room thinks that was a bad idea. 
Me neither. 
But then, a couple of years go by, and the world's most-Googled Anders, Anders Behring Breivik, did what he did. 
This is July 22 in 2011, and a terrible day in Norwegian history. 
This man, a terrorist, blew up a couple of government buildings walking distance from where we are right now in Oslo, Norway and then he traveled to the island of Utøya and shot and killed a group of kids. 
Almost 80 people died that day. 
And a lot of people would describe this act of terror as two steps, that he did two things: he blew up the buildings and he shot those kids. 
It's not true. 
It was three steps. 
He blew up those buildings, he shot those kids, and he sat down and waited for the world to Google him. 
And he prepared all three steps equally well. 
And if there was somebody who immediately understood this, it was a Swedish web developer, a search engine optimization expert in Stockholm, named Nikke Lindqvist. 
He's also a very political guy and he was right out there in social media, on his blog and Facebook. 
And he told everybody, "" If there's something that this guy wants right now, it's to control the image of himself. 
Let's see if we can distort that. 
Let's see if we, in the civilized world, can protest against what he did through insulting him in his search results. "" And how? 
He told all of his readers the following, "" Go out there on the Internet, find pictures of dog poop on sidewalks — find pictures of dog poop on sidewalks — publish them in your feeds, on your websites, on your blogs. 
Make sure to write the terrorist's name in the caption, make sure to name the picture file "" Breivik.jpeg. "" Let's teach Google that that's the face of the terrorist. "" And it worked. 
Two years after that campaign against Michelle Obama, this manipulation campaign against Anders Behring Breivik worked. 
If you picture-Googled for him weeks after the July 22 events from Sweden, you'd see that picture of dog poop high up in the search results, as a little protest. 
Strangely enough, Google didn't intervene this time. 
They did not step in and manually clean those search results up. 
So the million-dollar question, is there anything different between these two happenings here? 
Is there anything different between what happened to Michelle Obama and what happened to Anders Behring Breivik? 
Of course not. 
It's the exact same thing, yet Google intervened in one case and not in the other. 
Why? 
Because Michelle Obama is an honorable person, that's why, and Anders Behring Breivik is a despicable person. 
See what happens there? 
An evaluation of a person takes place and there's only one power-player in the world with the authority to say who's who. 
"" We like you, we dislike you. 
We believe in you, we don't believe in you. 
You're right, you're wrong. You're true, you're false. 
You're Obama, and you're Breivik. "" That's power if I ever saw it. 
So I'm asking you to remember that behind every algorithm is always a person, a person with a set of personal beliefs that no code can ever completely eradicate. 
And my message goes out not only to Google, but to all believers in the faith of code around the world. 
You need to identify your own personal bias. 
You need to understand that you are human and take responsibility accordingly. 
And I say this because I believe we've reached a point in time when it's absolutely imperative that we tie those bonds together again, tighter: the humanities and the technology. 
Tighter than ever. 
And, if nothing else, to remind us that that wonderfully seductive idea of the unbiased, clean search result is, and is likely to remain, a myth. 
Thank you for your time. 
(Applause) 

Now I want to share with you three things I learned about myself that day. 
As I thought about that later on, I came up with a saying, which is, "" I collect bad wines. "" Because if the wine is ready and the person is there, I'm opening it. 
The second thing I learned that day — and this is as we clear the George Washington Bridge, which was by not a lot — (Laughter) I thought about, wow, I really feel one real regret. 
In my own humanity and mistakes, I've tried to get better at everything I tried. 
I'm saying, "" Please blow up. "" I don't want this thing to break in 20 pieces like you've seen in those documentaries. 
And as we're coming down, I had a sense of, wow, dying is not scary. 
It's almost like we've been preparing for it our whole lives. 
I challenge you guys that are flying today, imagine the same thing happens on your plane — and please don't — but imagine, and how would you change? 

First of all, I'm a geek. 
I'm an organic food-eating, carbon footprint-minimizing, robotic surgery geek. 
And I really want to build green, but I'm very suspicious of all of these well-meaning articles, people long on moral authority and short on data, telling me how to do these kinds of things. 
And so I have to figure this out for myself. 
For example: Is this evil? 
I have dropped a blob of organic yogurt from happy self-actualized local cows on my counter top, and I grab a paper towel and I want to wipe it up. 
But can I use a paper towel? (Laughter) The answer to this can be found in embodied energy. 
This is the amount of energy that goes into any paper towel or embodied water, and every time I use a paper towel, I am using this much virtual energy and water. 
Wipe it up, throw it away. 
Now, if I compare that to a cotton towel that I can use a thousand times, I don't have a whole lot of embodied energy until I wash that yogurty towel. 
This is now operating energy. 
So if I throw my towel in the washing machine, I've now put energy and water back into that towel... 
unless I use a front-loading, high-efficiency washing machine, (Laughter) and then it looks a little bit better. 
But what about a recycled paper towel that comes in those little half sheets? 
Well, now a paper towel looks better. 
Screw the paper towels. Let's go to a sponge. 
I wipe it up with a sponge, and I put it under the running water, and I have a lot less energy and a lot more water. 
Unless you're like me and you leave the handle in the position of hot even when you turn it on, and then you start to use more energy. 
Or worse, you let it run until it's warm to rinse out your towel. 
And now all bets are off. 
(Laughter) So what this says is that sometimes the things that you least expect — the position in which you put the handle — have a bigger effect than any of those other things that you were trying to optimize. 
Now imagine someone as twisted as me trying to build a house. 
(Laughter) That's what my husband and I are doing right now. 
And so, we wanted to know, how green could we be? 
And there's a thousand and one articles out there telling us how to make all these green trade-offs. 
And they are just as suspect in telling us to optimize these little things around the edges and missing the elephant in the living room. 
Now, the average house has about 300 megawatt hours of embodied energy in it; this is the energy it takes to make it — millions and millions of paper towels. 
We wanted to know how much better we could do. 
And so, like many people, we start with a house on a lot, and I'm going to show you a typical construction on the top and what we're doing on the bottom. 
So first, we demolish it. 
It takes some energy, but if you deconstruct it — you take it all apart, you use the bits — you can get some of that energy back. 
We then dug a big hole to put in a rainwater catchment tank to take our yard water independent. 
And then we poured a big foundation for passive solar. 
Now, you can reduce the embodied energy by about 25 percent by using high fly ash concrete. 
We then put in framing. 
And so this is framing — lumber, composite materials — and it's kind of hard to get the embodied energy out of that, but it can be a sustainable resource if you use FSC-certified lumber. 
We then go on to the first thing that was very surprising. 
If we put aluminum windows in this house, we would double the energy use right there. 
Now, PVC is a little bit better, but still not as good as the wood that we chose. 
We then put in plumbing, electrical and HVAC, and insulate. 
Now, spray foam is an excellent insulator — it fills in all the cracks — but it is pretty high embodied energy, and, sprayed-in cellulose or blue jeans is a much lower energy alternative to that. 
We also used straw bale infill for our library, which has zero embodied energy. 
When it comes time to sheetrock, if you use EcoRock it's about a quarter of the embodied energy of standard sheetrock. 
And then you get to the finishes, the subject of all of those "" go green "" articles, and on the scale of a house they almost make no difference at all. 
And yet, all the press is focused on that. 
Except for flooring. 
If you put carpeting in your house, it's about a tenth of the embodied energy of the entire house, unless you use concrete or wood for a much lower embodied energy. 
So now we add in the final construction energy, we add it all up, and we've built a house for less than half of the typical embodied energy for building a house like this. 
But before we pat ourselves too much on the back, we have poured 151 megawatt hours of energy into constructing this house when there was a house there before. 
And so the question is: How could we make that back? 
And so if I run my new energy-efficient house forward, compared with the old, non-energy-efficient house, we make it back in about six years. 
Now, I probably would have upgraded the old house to be more energy-efficient, and in that case, it would take me more about 20 years to break even. 
Now, if I hadn't paid attention to embodied energy, it would have taken us over 50 years to break even compared to the upgraded house. 
So what does this mean? 
On the scale of my portion of the house, this is equivalent to about as much as I drive in a year, it's about five times as much as if I went entirely vegetarian. 
But my elephant in the living room flies. 
Clearly, I need to walk home from TED. 
But all the calculations for embodied energy are on the blog. 
And, remember, it's sometimes the things that you are not expecting to be the biggest changes that are. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

I want to introduce you to an amazing woman. 
Her name is Davinia. 
Davinia was born in Jamaica, emigrated to the US at the age of 18, and now lives just outside of Washington, DC. 
She's not a high-powered political staffer, nor a lobbyist. 
She'd probably tell you she's quite unremarkable, but she's having the most remarkable impact. 
What's incredible about Davinia is that she's willing to spend time every single week focused on people who are not her: people not her in her neighborhood, her state, nor even in her country — people she'd likely never meet. 
Davinia's impact started a few years ago when she reached out to all of her friends on Facebook, and asked them to donate their pennies so she could fund girls' education. 
She wasn't expecting a huge response, but 700,000 pennies later, she's now sent over 120 girls to school. 
When we spoke last week, she told me she's become a little infamous at the local bank every time she rocks up with a shopping cart full of pennies. 
Now — Davinia is not alone. 
Far from it. 
She's part of a growing movement. 
And there's a name for people like Davinia: global citizens. 
A global citizen is someone who self-identifies first and foremost not as a member of a state, a tribe or a nation, but as a member of the human race, and someone who is prepared to act on that belief, to tackle our world's greatest challenges. 
Our work is focused on finding, supporting and activating global citizens. 
They exist in every country and among every demographic. 
I want to make the case to you today that the world's future depends on global citizens. 
I'm convinced that if we had more global citizens active in our world, then every single one of the major challenges we face — from poverty, climate change, gender inequality — these issues become solvable. 
They are ultimately global issues, and they can ultimately only be solved by global citizens demanding global solutions from their leaders. 
Now, some people's immediate reaction to this idea is that it's either a bit utopian or even threatening. 
So I'd like to share with you a little of my story today, how I ended up here, how it connects with Davinia and, hopefully, with you. 
Growing up in Melbourne, Australia, I was one of those seriously irritating little kids that never, ever stopped asking, "" Why? "" You might have been one yourself. 
I used to ask my mum the most annoying questions. 
I'd ask her questions like, "" Mum, why I can't I dress up and play with puppets all day? "" "Why do you want fries with that?" 
"" What is a shrimp, and why do we have to keep throwing them on the barbie? "" (Laughter) "" And mum — this haircut. 
Why? "" (Laughter) The worst haircut, I think. 
Still terrible. 
As a "" why "" kid, I thought I could change the world, and it was impossible to convince me otherwise. 
And when I was 12 and in my first year of high school, I started raising money for communities in the developing world. 
We were a really enthusiastic group of kids, and we raised more money than any other school in Australia. 
And so I was awarded the chance to go to the Philippines to learn more. 
It was 1998. 
We were taken into a slum in the outskirts of Manila. 
It was there I became friends with Sonny Boy, who lived on what was literally a pile of steaming garbage. 
"" Smoky Mountain "" was what they called it. 
But don't let the romance of that name fool you, because it was nothing more than a rancid landfill that kids like Sonny Boy spent hours rummaging through every single day to find something, anything of value. 
That night with Sonny Boy and his family changed my life forever, because when it came time to go to sleep, we simply laid down on this concrete slab the size of half my bedroom with myself, Sonny Boy, and the rest of his family, seven of us in this long line, with the smell of rubbish all around us and cockroaches crawling all around. 
And I didn't sleep a wink, but I lay awake thinking to myself, "" Why should anyone have to live like this when I have so much? 
Why should Sonny Boy's ability to live out his dreams be determined by where he's born, or what Warren Buffett called 'the ovarian lottery?' "" I just didn't get it, and I needed to understand why. 
Now, I only later came to understand that the poverty I'd seen in the Philippines was the result of decisions made or not made, man-made, by a succession of colonial powers and corrupt governments who had anything but the interests of Sonny Boy at heart. 
Sure, they didn't create Smoky Mountain, but they may as well have. 
And if we're to try to help kids like Sonny Boy, it wouldn't work just to try to send him a few dollars or to try to clean up the garbage dump on which he lived, because the core of the problem lay elsewhere. 
And as I worked on community development projects over the coming years trying to help build schools, train teachers, and tackle HIV and AIDS, I came to see that community development should be driven by communities themselves, and that although charity is necessary, it's not sufficient. 
We need to confront these challenges on a global scale and in a systemic way. 
And the best thing I could do is try to mobilize a large group of citizens back home to insist that our leaders engage in that systemic change. 
That's why, a few years later, I joined with a group of college friends in bringing the Make Poverty History campaign to Australia. 
We had this dream of staging this small concert around the time of the G20 with local Aussie artists, and it suddenly exploded one day when we got a phone call from Bono, the Edge and Pearl Jam, who all agreed to headline our concert. 
I got a little bit excited that day, as you can see. 
(Laughter) But to our amazement, the Australian government heard our collective voices, and they agreed to double investment into global health and development — an additional 6.2 billion dollars. 
It felt like — (Applause) It felt like this incredible validation. 
By rallying citizens together, we helped persuade our government to do the unthinkable, and act to fix a problem miles outside of our borders. 
But here's the thing: it didn't last. 
See, there was a change in government, and six years later, all that new money disappeared. 
What did we learn? 
We learned that one-off spikes are not enough. 
We needed a sustainable movement, not one that is susceptible to the fluctuating moods of a politician or the hint of an economic downturn. 
And it needed to happen everywhere; otherwise, every individual government would have this built-in excuse mechanism that they couldn't possibly carry the burden of global action alone. 
And so this is what we embarked upon. 
And as we embarked upon this challenge, we asked ourselves, how do we gain enough pressure and build a broad enough army to win these fights for the long term? 
We could only think of one way. 
We needed to somehow turn that short-term excitement of people involved with the Make Poverty History campaign into long-term passion. 
It had to be part of their identity. 
So in 2012, we cofounded an organization that had exactly that as its goal. 
And there was only one name for it: Global Citizen. 
But this is not about any one organization. 
This is about citizens taking action. 
And research data tells us that of the total population who even care about global issues, only 18 percent have done anything about it. 
It's not that people don't want to act. 
It's often that they don't know how to take action, or that they believe that their actions will have no effect. 
So we had to somehow recruit and activate millions of citizens in dozens of countries to put pressure on their leaders to behave altruistically. 
And as we did so, we discovered something really thrilling, that when you make global citizenship your mission, you suddenly find yourself with some extraordinary allies. 
See, extreme poverty isn't the only issue that's fundamentally global. 
So, too, is climate change, human rights, gender equality, even conflict. 
We found ourselves shoulder to shoulder with people who are passionate about targeting all these interrelated issues. 
But how did we actually go about recruiting and engaging those global citizens? 
Well, we used the universal language: music. 
We launched the Global Citizen Festival in the heart of New York City in Central Park, and we persuaded some of the world's biggest artists to participate. 
We made sure that these festivals coincided with the UN General Assembly meeting, so that leaders who need to hear our voices couldn't possible ignore them. 
But there was a twist: you couldn't buy a ticket. 
You had to earn it. 
You had to take action on behalf of a global cause, and only once you'd done that could you earn enough points to qualify. 
Activism is the currency. 
I had no interest in citizenship purely as some sort of feel-good thing. 
For me, citizenship means you have to act, and that's what we required. 
And amazingly, it worked. 
Last year, more than 155,000 citizens in the New York area alone earned enough points to qualify. 
Globally, we've now signed up citizens in over 150 countries around the world. 
And last year, we signed up more than 100,000 new members each and every week of the whole year. 
See, we don't need to create global citizens from nothing. 
We're already everywhere. 
We just need to be organized and motivated to start acting. 
And this is where I believe we can learn a lot from Davinia, who started taking action as a global citizen back in 2012. 
Here's what she did. 
It wasn't rocket science. 
She started writing letters, emailing politicians' offices. 
She volunteered her time in her local community. 
That's when she got active on social media and started to collect pennies — a lot of pennies. 
Now, maybe that doesn't sound like a lot to you. 
How will that achieve anything? 
Well, it achieved a lot because she wasn't alone. 
Her actions, alongside 142,000 other global citizens', led the US government to double their investment into Global Partnership for Education. 
And here's Dr. Raj Shah, the head of USAID, making that announcement. 
See, when thousands of global citizens find inspiration from each other, it's amazing to see their collective power. 
Global citizens like Davinia helped persuade the World Bank to boost their investment into water and sanitation. 
Here's the Bank's president Jim Kim announcing 15 billion dollars onstage at Global Citizen, and Prime Minister Modi of India affirmed his commitment to put a toilet in every household and school across India by 2019. 
Global citizens encouraged by the late-night host Stephen Colbert launched a Twitter invasion on Norway. 
Erna Solberg, the country's Prime Minister, got the message, committing to double investment into girls' education. 
Global citizens together with Rotarians called on the Canadian, UK, and Australian governments to boost their investment into polio eradication. 
They got together and committed 665 million dollars. 
But despite all of this momentum, we face some huge challenges. 
See, you might be thinking to yourself, how can we possibly persuade world leaders to sustain a focus on global issues? 
Indeed, the powerful American politician Tip O'Neill once said, "All politics is local." 
That's what always got politicians elected: to seek, gain and hold onto power through the pursuit of local or at very best national interests. 
I experienced this for the first time when I was 21 years old. 
I took a meeting with a then-Australian Foreign Minister who shall remain nameless — [Alexander Downer] (Laughter) And behind closed doors, I shared with him my passion to end extreme poverty. 
I said, "" Minister — Australia has this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals. 
We can do this. "" And he paused, looked down on me with cold, dismissive eyes, and he said, "" Hugh, no one gives a funk about foreign aid. "" Except he didn't use the word "" funk. "" He went on. 
He said we need to look after our own backyard first. 
This is, I believe, outdated, even dangerous thinking. 
Or as my late grandfather would say, complete BS. 
Parochialism offers this false dichotomy because it pits the poor in one country against the poor in another. 
It pretends we can isolate ourselves and our nations from one another. 
The whole world is our backyard, and we ignore it at our peril. 
See, look what happened when we ignored Rwanda, when we ignore Syria, when we ignore climate change. 
Political leaders ought to give a "" funk "" because the impact of climate change and extreme poverty comes right to our shore. 
Now, global citizens — they understand this. 
We live in a time that favors the global citizen, in an age where every single voice can be heard. 
See, do you remember when the Millennium Development Goals were signed back in the year 2000? 
The most we could do in those days was fire off a letter and wait for the next election. 
There was no social media. 
Today, billions of citizens have more tools, more access to information, more capacity to influence than ever before. 
Both the problems and the tools to solve them are right before us. 
The world has changed, and those of us who look beyond our borders are on the right side of history. 
So where are we? 
So we run this amazing festival, we've scored some big policy wins, and citizens are signing up all over the world. 
But have we achieved our mission? 
No. 
We have such a long way to go. 
But this is the opportunity that I see. 
The concept of global citizenship, self-evident in its logic but until now impractical in many ways, has coincided with this particular moment in which we are privileged to live. 
We, as global citizens, now have a unique opportunity to accelerate large-scale positive change around the world. 
So in the months and years ahead, global citizens will hold world leaders accountable to ensure that the new Global Goals for Sustainable Development are tracked and implemented. 
Global citizens will partner with the world's leading NGOs to end diseases like polio and malaria. 
Global citizens will sign up in every corner of this globe, increasing the frequency, quality and impact of their actions. 
These dreams are within reach. 
Imagine an army of millions growing into tens of millions, connected, informed, engaged and unwilling to take no for an answer. 
Over all these years, I've tried to reconnect with Sonny Boy. 
Sadly, I've been unable to. 
We met long before social media, and his address has now been relocated by the authorities, as often happens with slums. 
I'd love to sit down with him, wherever he is, and share with him how much the time I spent on Smoky Mountain inspired me. 
Thanks to him and so many others, I came to understand the importance of being part of a movement of people — the kids willing to look up from their screens and out to the world, the global citizens. 
Global citizens who stand together, who ask the question "" Why?, "" who reject the naysayers, and embrace the amazing possibilities of the world we share. 
I'm a global citizen. 
Are you? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

"" Iran is Israel's best friend, and we do not intend to change our position in relation to Tehran. "" Believe it or not, this is a quote from an Israeli prime minister, but it's not Ben-Gurion or Golda Meir from the era of the Shah. 
It's actually from Yitzhak Rabin. 
The year is 1987. 
Ayatollah Khomeini is still alive, and much like Ahmadinejad today, he's using the worst rhetoric against Israel. 
Yet, Rabin referred to Iran as a geostrategic friend. 
Today, when we hear the threats of war and the high rhetoric, we're oftentimes led to believe that this is yet another one of those unsolvable Middle Eastern conflicts with roots as old as the region itself. 
Nothing could be further from the truth, and I hope today to show you why that is. 
The relations between the Iranian and the Jewish people throughout history has actually been quite positive, starting in 539 B.C., when King Cyrus the Great of Persia liberated the Jewish people from their Babylonian captivity. 
A third of the Jewish population stayed in Babylonia. 
They're today's Iraqi Jews. 
A third migrated to Persia. 
They're today's Iranian Jews, still 25,000 of them living in Iran, making them the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel itself. 
And a third returned to historic Palestine, did the second rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, financed, incidentally, by Persian tax money. 
But even in modern times, relations have been close at times. 
Rabin's statement was a reflection of decades of security and intelligence collaboration between the two, which in turn was born out of perception of common threats. 
Both states feared the Soviet Union and strong Arab states such as Egypt and Iraq. 
And, in addition, the Israeli doctrine of the periphery, the idea that Israel's security was best achieved by creating alliances with the non-Arab states in the periphery of the region in order to balance the Arab states in its vicinity. 
Now, from the Shah's perspective, though, he wanted to keep this as secret as possible, so when Yitzhak Rabin, for instance, traveled to Iran in the '70s, he usually wore a wig so that no one would recognize him. 
The Iranians built a special tarmac at the airport in Tehran, far away from the central terminal, so that no one would notice the large number of Israeli planes shuttling between Tel Aviv and Tehran. 
Now, did all of this end with the Islamic revolution in 1979? 
In spite of the very clear anti-Israeli ideology of the new regime, the geopolitical logic for their collaboration lived on, because they still had common threats. 
And when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, Israel feared an Iraqi victory and actively helped Iran by selling it arms and providing it with spare parts for Iran's American weaponry at a moment when Iran was very vulnerable because of an American arms embargo that Israel was more than happy to violate. 
In fact, back in the 1980s, it was Israel that lobbied Washington to talk to Iran, to sell arms to Iran, and not pay attention to Iran's anti-Israeli ideology. 
And this, of course, climaxed in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. 
But with the end of the Cold War came also the end of the Israeli-Iranian cold peace. 
Suddenly, the two common threats that had pushed them closer together throughout decades, more or less evaporated. 
The Soviet Union collapsed, Iraq was defeated, and a new environment was created in the region in which both of them felt more secure, but they were also now left unchecked. 
Without Iraq balancing Iran, Iran could now become a threat, some in Israel argued. 
In fact, the current dynamic that you see between Iran and Israel has its roots more so in the geopolitical reconfiguration of the region after the Cold War than in the events of 1979, because at this point, Iran and Israel emerge as two of the most powerful states in the region, and rather than viewing each other as potential security partners, they increasingly came to view each other as rivals and competitors. 
So Israel, who in the 1980s lobbied for and improved U.S.-Iran relations now feared a U.S.-Iran rapprochement, thinking that it would come at Israel's security interests' expense, and instead sought to put Iran in increased isolation. 
Ironically, this was happening at a time when Iran was more interested in peacemaking with Washington than to see to Israel's destruction. 
Iran had put itself in isolation because of its radicalism, and after having helped the United States indirectly in the war against Iraq in 1991, the Iranians were hoping that they would be rewarded by being included in the post-war security architecture of the region. 
But Washington chose to ignore Iran's outreach, as it would a decade later in Afghanistan, and instead moved to intensify Iran's isolation, and it is at this point, around 1993, '94, that Iran begins to translate its anti-Israeli ideology into operational policy. 
The Iranians believed that whatever they did, even if they moderated their policies, the U.S. would continue to seek Iran's isolation, and the only way Iran could compel Washington to change its position was by imposing a cost on the U.S. if it didn't. 
The easiest target was the peace process, and now the Iranian ideological bark was to be accompanied by a nonconventional bite, and Iran began supporting extensively Palestinian Islamist groups that it previously had shunned. 
In some ways, this sounds paradoxical, but according to Martin Indyk of the Clinton administration, the Iranians had not gotten it entirely wrong, because the more peace there would be between Israel and Palestine, the U.S. believed, the more Iran would get isolated. 
The more Iran got isolated, the more peace there would be. 
So according to Indyk, and these are his words, the Iranians had an interest to do us in on the peace process in order to defeat our policy of containment. 
To defeat our policy of containment, not about ideology. 
But throughout even the worst times of their entanglement, all sides have reached out to each other. 
Netanyahu, when he got elected in 1996, reached out to the Iranians to see if there were any ways that the doctrine of the periphery could be resurrected. 
Tehran was not interested. 
A few years later, the Iranians sent a comprehensive negotiation proposal to the Bush administration, a proposal that revealed that there was some potential of getting Iran and Israel back on terms again. 
The Bush administration did not even respond. 
All sides have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. 
But this is not an ancient conflict. 
This is not even an ideological conflict. 
The ebbs and flows of hostility have not shifted with ideological zeal, but rather with changes in the geopolitical landscape. 
When Iran and Israel's security imperatives dictated collaboration, they did so in spite of lethal ideological opposition to each other. 
When Iran's ideological impulses collided with its strategic interests, the strategic interests always prevailed. 
This is good news, because it means that neither war nor enmity is a foregone conclusion. 
But some want war. 
Some believe or say that it's 1938, Iran is Germany, and Ahmadinejad is Hitler. 
If we accept this to be true, that indeed it is 1938, Iran is Germany, Ahmadinejad is Hitler, then the question we have to ask ourself is, who wishes to play the role of Neville Chamberlain? 
Who will risk peace? 
This is an analogy that is deliberately aimed at eliminating diplomacy, and when you eliminate diplomacy, you make war inevitable. 
In an ideological conflict, there can be no truce, no draw, no compromise, only victory or defeat. 
But rather than making war inevitable by viewing this as ideological, we would be wise to seek ways to make peace possible. 
Iran and Israel's conflict is a new phenomenon, only a few decades old in a history of 2,500 years, and precisely because its roots are geopolitical, it means that solutions can be found, compromises can be struck, however difficult it yet may be. 
After all, it was Yitzhak Rabin himself who said, "" You don't make peace with your friends. 
You make it with your enemies. "" Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When I wrote my memoir, the publishers were really confused. 
Was it about me as a child refugee, or as a woman who set up a high-tech software company back in the 1960s, one that went public and eventually employed over 8,500 people? 
Or was it as a mother of an autistic child? 
Or as a philanthropist that's now given away serious money? 
Well, it turns out, I'm all of these. 
So let me tell you my story. 
All that I am stems from when I got onto a train in Vienna, part of the Kindertransport that saved nearly 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Europe. 
I was five years old, clutching the hand of my nine-year-old sister and had very little idea as to what was going on. 
"What is England and why am I going there?" 
I'm only alive because so long ago, I was helped by generous strangers. 
I was lucky, and doubly lucky to be later reunited with my birth parents. 
But, sadly, I never bonded with them again. 
But I've done more in the seven decades since that miserable day when my mother put me on the train than I would ever have dreamed possible. 
And I love England, my adopted country, with a passion that perhaps only someone who has lost their human rights can feel. 
I decided to make mine a life that was worth saving. 
And then, I just got on with it. 
(Laughter) Let me take you back to the early 1960s. 
To get past the gender issues of the time, I set up my own software house at one of the first such startups in Britain. 
But it was also a company of women, a company for women, an early social business. 
And people laughed at the very idea because software, at that time, was given away free with hardware. 
Nobody would buy software, certainly not from a woman. 
Although women were then coming out of the universities with decent degrees, there was a glass ceiling to our progress. 
And I'd hit that glass ceiling too often, and I wanted opportunities for women. 
I recruited professionally qualified women who'd left the industry on marriage, or when their first child was expected and structured them into a home-working organization. 
We pioneered the concept of women going back into the workforce after a career break. 
We pioneered all sorts of new, flexible work methods: job shares, profit-sharing, and eventually, co-ownership when I took a quarter of the company into the hands of the staff at no cost to anyone but me. 
For years, I was the first woman this, or the only woman that. 
And in those days, I couldn't work on the stock exchange, I couldn't drive a bus or fly an airplane. 
Indeed, I couldn't open a bank account without my husband's permission. 
My generation of women fought the battles for the right to work and the right for equal pay. 
Nobody really expected much from people at work or in society because all the expectations then were about home and family responsibilities. 
And I couldn't really face that, so I started to challenge the conventions of the time, even to the extent of changing my name from "" Stephanie "" to "" Steve "" in my business development letters, so as to get through the door before anyone realized that he was a she. 
(Laughter) My company, called Freelance Programmers, and that's precisely what it was, couldn't have started smaller: on the dining room table, and financed by the equivalent of 100 dollars in today's terms, and financed by my labor and by borrowing against the house. 
My interests were scientific, the market was commercial — things such as payroll, which I found rather boring. 
So I had to compromise with operational research work, which had the intellectual challenge that interested me and the commercial value that was valued by the clients: things like scheduling freight trains, time-tabling buses, stock control, lots and lots of stock control. 
And eventually, the work came in. 
We disguised the domestic and part-time nature of the staff by offering fixed prices, one of the very first to do so. 
And who would have guessed that the programming of the black box flight recorder of Supersonic Concord would have been done by a bunch of women working in their own homes. 
(Applause) All we used was a simple "" trust the staff "" approach and a simple telephone. 
We even used to ask job applicants, "" Do you have access to a telephone? "" An early project was to develop software standards on management control protocols. 
And software was and still is a maddeningly hard-to-control activity, so that was enormously valuable. 
We used the standards ourselves, we were even paid to update them over the years, and eventually, they were adopted by NATO. 
Our programmers — remember, only women, including gay and transgender — worked with pencil and paper to develop flowcharts defining each task to be done. 
And they then wrote code, usually machine code, sometimes binary code, which was then sent by mail to a data center to be punched onto paper tape or card and then re-punched, in order to verify it. 
All this, before it ever got near a computer. 
That was programming in the early 1960s. 
In 1975, 13 years from startup, equal opportunity legislation came in in Britain and that made it illegal to have our pro-female policies. 
And as an example of unintended consequences, my female company had to let the men in. 
(Laughter) When I started my company of women, the men said, "" How interesting, because it only works because it's small. "" And later, as it became sizable, they accepted, "" Yes, it is sizable now, but of no strategic interest. "" And later, when it was a company valued at over three billion dollars, and I'd made 70 of the staff into millionaires, they sort of said, "" Well done, Steve! "" (Laughter) (Applause) You can always tell ambitious women by the shape of our heads: They're flat on top for being patted patronizingly. (Laughter) (Applause) 
And we have larger feet to stand away from the kitchen sink. (Laughter) 
Let me share with you two secrets of success: Surround yourself with first-class people and people that you like; and choose your partner very, very carefully. 
Because the other day when I said, "" My husband's an angel, "" a woman complained — "" You're lucky, "" she said, "mine's still alive." 
(Laughter) If success were easy, we'd all be millionaires. 
But in my case, it came in the midst of family trauma and indeed, crisis. 
Our late son, Giles, was an only child, a beautiful, contented baby. 
And then, at two and a half, like a changeling in a fairy story, he lost the little speech that he had and turned into a wild, unmanageable toddler. 
Not the terrible twos; he was profoundly autistic and he never spoke again. 
Giles was the first resident in the first house of the first charity that I set up to pioneer services for autism. 
And then there's been a groundbreaking Prior's Court school for pupils with autism and a medical research charity, again, all for autism. 
Because whenever I found a gap in services, I tried to help. 
I like doing new things and making new things happen. 
And I've just started a three-year think tank for autism. 
And so that some of my wealth does go back to the industry from which it stems, I've also founded the Oxford Internet Institute and other IT ventures. 
The Oxford Internet Institute focuses not on the technology, but on the social, economic, legal and ethical issues of the Internet. 
Giles died unexpectedly 17 years ago now. 
And I have learned to live without him, and I have learned to live without his need of me. 
Philanthropy is all that I do now. 
I need never worry about getting lost because several charities would quickly come and find me. 
(Laughter) It's one thing to have an idea for an enterprise, but as many people in this room will know, making it happen is a very difficult thing and it demands extraordinary energy, self-belief and determination, the courage to risk family and home, and a 24 / 7 commitment that borders on the obsessive. 
So it's just as well that I'm a workaholic. 
I believe in the beauty of work when we do it properly and in humility. 
Work is not just something I do when I'd rather be doing something else. 
We live our lives forward. 
So what has all that taught me? 
I learned that tomorrow's never going to be like today, and certainly nothing like yesterday. 
And that made me able to cope with change, indeed, eventually to welcome change, though I'm told I'm still very difficult. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

There's something that I'd like you to see. 
(Video) Reporter: It's a story that's deeply unsettled millions in China: footage of a two-year-old girl hit by a van and left bleeding in the street by passersby, footage too graphic to be shown. 
The entire accident is caught on camera. 
The driver pauses after hitting the child, his back wheels seen resting on her for over a second. 
Within two minutes, three people pass two-year-old Wang Yue by. 
The first walks around the badly injured toddler completely. 
Others look at her before moving off. 
Peter Singer: There were other people who walked past Wang Yue, and a second van ran over her legs before a street cleaner raised the alarm. 
She was rushed to hospital, but it was too late. She died. 
I wonder how many of you, looking at that, said to yourselves just now, "" I would not have done that. 
I would have stopped to help. "" Raise your hands if that thought occurred to you. 
As I thought, that's most of you. 
And I believe you. I'm sure you're right. 
But before you give yourself too much credit, look at this. 
UNICEF reports that in 2011, 6.9 million children under five died from preventable, poverty-related diseases. 
UNICEF thinks that that's good news because the figure has been steadily coming down from 12 million in 1990. That is good. 
But still, 6.9 million is 19,000 children dying every day. 
Does it really matter that we're not walking past them in the street? 
Does it really matter that they're far away? 
I don't think it does make a morally relevant difference. 
The fact that they're not right in front of us, the fact, of course, that they're of a different nationality or race, none of that seems morally relevant to me. 
What is really important is, can we reduce that death toll? Can we save some of those 19,000 children dying every day? 
And the answer is, yes we can. 
Each of us spends money on things that we do not really need. 
You can think what your own habit is, whether it's a new car, a vacation or just something like buying bottled water when the water that comes out of the tap is perfectly safe to drink. 
You could take the money you're spending on those unnecessary things and give it to this organization, the Against Malaria Foundation, which would take the money you had given and use it to buy nets like this one to protect children like this one, and we know reliably that if we provide nets, they're used, and they reduce the number of children dying from malaria, just one of the many preventable diseases that are responsible for some of those 19,000 children dying every day. 
Fortunately, more and more people are understanding this idea, and the result is a growing movement: effective altruism. 
It's important because it combines both the heart and the head. 
The heart, of course, you felt. 
You felt the empathy for that child. 
But it's really important to use the head as well to make sure that what you do is effective and well-directed, and not only that, but also I think reason helps us to understand that other people, wherever they are, are like us, that they can suffer as we can, that parents grieve for the deaths of their children, as we do, and that just as our lives and our well-being matter to us, it matters just as much to all of these people. 
So I think reason is not just some neutral tool to help you get whatever you want. 
It does help us to put perspective on our situation. 
And I think that's why many of the most significant people in effective altruism have been people who have had backgrounds in philosophy or economics or math. 
And that might seem surprising, because a lot of people think, "" Philosophy is remote from the real world; economics, we're told, just makes us more selfish, and we know that math is for nerds. "" But in fact it does make a difference, and in fact there's one particular nerd who has been a particularly effective altruist because he got this. 
This is the website of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and if you look at the words on the top right-hand side, it says, "" All lives have equal value. "" That's the understanding, the rational understanding of our situation in the world that has led to these people being the most effective altruists in history, Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett. 
(Applause) No one, not Andrew Carnegie, not John D. Rockefeller, has ever given as much to charity as each one of these three, and they have used their intelligence to make sure that it is highly effective. 
According to one estimate, the Gates Foundation has already saved 5.8 million lives and many millions more, people, getting diseases that would have made them very sick, even if eventually they survived. 
Over the coming years, undoubtably the Gates Foundation is going to give a lot more, is going to save a lot more lives. 
Well, you might say, that's fine if you're a billionaire, you can have that kind of impact. 
But if I'm not, what can I do? 
So I'm going to look at four questions that people ask that maybe stand in the way of them giving. 
They worry how much of a difference they can make. 
But you don't have to be a billionaire. 
This is Toby Ord. He's a research fellow in philosophy at the University of Oxford. 
He became an effective altruist when he calculated that with the money that he was likely to earn throughout his career, an academic career, he could give enough to cure 80,000 people of blindness in developing countries and still have enough left for a perfectly adequate standard of living. 
So Toby founded an organization called Giving What We Can to spread this information, to unite people who want to share some of their income, and to ask people to pledge to give 10 percent of what they earn over their lifetime to fighting global poverty. 
Toby himself does better than that. 
He's pledged to live on 18,000 pounds a year — that's less than 30,000 dollars — and to give the rest to those organizations. 
And yes, Toby is married and he does have a mortgage. 
This is a couple at a later stage of life, Charlie Bresler and Diana Schott, who, when they were young, when they met, were activists against the Vietnam War, fought for social justice, and then moved into careers, as most people do, didn't really do anything very active about those values, although they didn't abandon them. 
And then, as they got to the age at which many people start to think of retirement, they returned to them, and they've decided to cut back on their spending, to live modestly, and to give both money and time to helping to fight global poverty. 
Now, mentioning time might lead you to think, "" Well, should I abandon my career and put all of my time into saving some of these 19,000 lives that are lost every day? "" One person who's thought quite a bit about this issue of how you can have a career that will have the biggest impact for good in the world is Will Crouch. 
He's a graduate student in philosophy, and he's set up a website called 80,000 Hours, the number of hours he estimates most people spend on their career, to advise people on how to have the best, most effective career. 
But you might be surprised to know that one of the careers that he encourages people to consider, if they have the right abilities and character, is to go into banking or finance. 
Why? Because if you earn a lot of money, you can give away a lot of money, and if you're successful in that career, you could give enough to an aid organization so that it could employ, let's say, five aid workers in developing countries, and each one of them would probably do about as much good as you would have done. 
So you can quintuple the impact by leading that kind of career. 
Here's one young man who's taken this advice. 
His name is Matt Weiger. 
He was a student at Princeton in philosophy and math, actually won the prize for the best undergraduate philosophy thesis last year when he graduated. 
But he's gone into finance in New York. 
He's already earning enough so that he's giving a six-figure sum to effective charities and still leaving himself with enough to live on. 
Matt has also helped me to set up an organization that I'm working with that has the name taken from the title of a book I wrote, "The Life You Can Save," which is trying to change our culture so that more people think that if we're going to live an ethical life, it's not enough just to follow the thou-shalt-nots and not cheat, steal, maim, kill, but that if we have enough, we have to share some of that with people who have so little. 
And the organization draws together people of different generations, like Holly Morgan, who's an undergraduate, who's pledged to give 10 percent of the little amount that she has, and on the right, Ada Wan, who has worked directly for the poor, but has now gone to Yale to do an MBA to have more to give. 
Many people will think, though, that charities aren't really all that effective. 
So let's talk about effectiveness. 
Toby Ord is very concerned about this, and he's calculated that some charities are hundreds or even thousands of times more effective than others, so it's very important to find the effective ones. 
Take, for example, providing a guide dog for a blind person. 
That's a good thing to do, right? 
Well, right, it is a good thing to do, but you have to think what else you could do with the resources. 
It costs about 40,000 dollars to train a guide dog and train the recipient so that the guide dog can be an effective help to a blind person. 
It costs somewhere between 20 and 50 dollars to cure a blind person in a developing country if they have trachoma. 
So you do the sums, and you get something like that. 
You could provide one guide dog for one blind American, or you could cure between 400 and 2,000 people of blindness. 
I think it's clear what's the better thing to do. 
But if you want to look for effective charities, this is a good website to go to. 
GiveWell exists to really assess the impact of charities, not just whether they're well-run, and it's screened hundreds of charities and currently is recommending only three, of which the Against Malaria Foundation is number one. 
So it's very tough. If you want to look for other recommendations, thelifeyoucansave.com and Giving What We Can both have a somewhat broader list, but you can find effective organizations, and not just in the area of saving lives from the poor. 
I'm pleased to say that there is now also a website looking at effective animal organizations. 
That's another cause that I've been concerned about all my life, the immense amount of suffering that humans inflict on literally tens of billions of animals every year. 
So if you want to look for effective organizations to reduce that suffering, you can go to Effective Animal Activism. 
And some effective altruists think it's very important to make sure that our species survives at all. 
So they're looking at ways to reduce the risk of extinction. 
Here's one risk of extinction that we all became aware of recently, when an asteroid passed close to our planet. 
Possibly research could help us not only to predict the path of asteroids that might collide with us, but actually to deflect them. 
So some people think that would be a good thing to give to. 
There's many possibilities. 
My final question is, some people will think it's a burden to give. 
I don't really believe it is. 
I've enjoyed giving all of my life since I was a graduate student. 
It's been something fulfilling to me. 
Charlie Bresler said to me that he's not an altruist. 
He thinks that the life he's saving is his own. 
And Holly Morgan told me that she used to battle depression until she got involved with effective altruism, and now is one of the happiest people she knows. 
I think one of the reasons for this is that being an effective altruist helps to overcome what I call the Sisyphus problem. 
Here's Sisyphus as portrayed by Titian, condemned by the gods to push a huge boulder up to the top of the hill. 
Just as he gets there, the effort becomes too much, the boulder escapes, rolls all the way down the hill, he has to trudge back down to push it up again, and the same thing happens again and again for all eternity. 
Does that remind you of a consumer lifestyle, where you work hard to get money, you spend that money on consumer goods which you hope you'll enjoy using? 
But then the money's gone, you have to work hard to get more, spend more, and to maintain the same level of happiness, it's kind of a hedonic treadmill. 
You never get off, and you never really feel satisfied. 
Becoming an effective altruist gives you that meaning and fulfillment. 
It enables you to have a solid basis for self-esteem on which you can feel your life was really worth living. 
I'm going to conclude by telling you about an email that I received while I was writing this talk just a month or so ago. 
It's from a man named Chris Croy, who I'd never heard of. 
This is a picture of him showing him recovering from surgery. 
Why was he recovering from surgery? 
The email began, "" Last Tuesday, I anonymously donated my right kidney to a stranger. 
That started a kidney chain which enabled four people to receive kidneys. "" There's about 100 people each year in the U.S. 
and more in other countries who do that. 
I was pleased to read it. Chris went on to say that he'd been influenced by my writings in what he did. 
Well, I have to admit, I'm also somewhat embarrassed by that, because I still have two kidneys. 
But Chris went on to say that he didn't think that what he'd done was all that amazing, because he calculated that the number of life-years that he had added to people, the extension of life, was about the same that you could achieve if you gave 5,000 dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation. 
And that did make me feel a little bit better, because I have given more than 5,000 dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation and to various other effective charities. 
So if you're feeling bad because you still have two kidneys as well, there's a way for you to get off the hook. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I need to start by telling you a little bit about my social life, which I know may not seem relevant, but it is. 
When people meet me at parties and they find out that I'm an English professor who specializes in language, they generally have one of two reactions. 
One set of people look frightened. (Laughter) They often say something like, "" Oh, I'd better be careful what I say. 
I'm sure you'll hear every mistake I make. "" And then they stop talking. (Laughter) And they wait for me to go away and talk to someone else. 
The other set of people, their eyes light up, and they say, "You are just the person I want to talk to." 
And then they tell me about whatever it is they think is going wrong with the English language. 
(Laughter) A couple of weeks ago, I was at a dinner party and the man to my right started telling me about all the ways that the Internet is degrading the English language. 
He brought up Facebook, and he said, "To defriend? I mean, is that even a real word?" 
I want to pause on that question: What makes a word real? 
My dinner companion and I both know what the verb "" defriend "" means, so when does a new word like "" defriend "" become real? 
Who has the authority to make those kinds of official decisions about words, anyway? 
Those are the questions I want to talk about today. 
I think most people, when they say a word isn't real, what they mean is, it doesn't appear in a standard dictionary. 
That, of course, raises a host of other questions, including, who writes dictionaries? 
Before I go any further, let me clarify my role in all of this. 
I do not write dictionaries. 
I do, however, collect new words much the way dictionary editors do, and the great thing about being a historian of the English language is that I get to call this "" research. "" When I teach the history of the English language, I require that students teach me two new slang words before I will begin class. 
Over the years, I have learned some great new slang this way, including "" hangry, "" which — (Applause) — which is when you are cranky or angry because you are hungry, and "" adorkable, "" which is when you are adorable in kind of a dorky way, clearly, terrific words that fill important gaps in the English language. 
(Laughter) But how real are they if we use them primarily as slang and they don't yet appear in a dictionary? 
With that, let's turn to dictionaries. 
I'm going to do this as a show of hands: How many of you still regularly refer to a dictionary, either print or online? 
Okay, so that looks like most of you. 
Now, a second question. Again, a show of hands: How many of you have ever looked to see who edited the dictionary you are using? 
Okay, many fewer. 
At some level, we know that there are human hands behind dictionaries, but we're really not sure who those hands belong to. 
I'm actually fascinated by this. 
Even the most critical people out there tend not to be very critical about dictionaries, not distinguishing among them and not asking a whole lot of questions about who edited them. 
Just think about the phrase "Look it up in the dictionary," which suggests that all dictionaries are exactly the same. 
Consider the library here on campus, where you go into the reading room, and there is a large, unabridged dictionary up on a pedestal in this place of honor and respect lying open so we can go stand before it to get answers. 
Now, don't get me wrong, dictionaries are fantastic resources, but they are human and they are not timeless. 
I'm struck as a teacher that we tell students to critically question every text they read, every website they visit, except dictionaries, which we tend to treat as un-authored, as if they came from nowhere to give us answers about what words really mean. 
Here's the thing: If you ask dictionary editors, what they'll tell you is they're just trying to keep up with us as we change the language. 
They're watching what we say and what we write and trying to figure out what's going to stick and what's not going to stick. 
They have to gamble, because they want to appear cutting edge and catch the words that are going to make it, such as LOL, but they don't want to appear faddish and include the words that aren't going to make it, and I think a word that they're watching right now is YOLO, you only live once. 
Now I get to hang out with dictionary editors, and you might be surprised by one of the places where we hang out. 
Every January, we go to the American Dialect Society annual meeting, where among other things, we vote on the word of the year. 
There are about 200 or 300 people who come, some of the best known linguists in the United States. 
To give you a sense of the flavor of the meeting, it occurs right before happy hour. 
Anyone who comes can vote. 
The most important rule is that you can vote with only one hand. 
In the past, some of the winners have been "" tweet "" in 2009 and "" hashtag "" in 2012. 
"" Chad "" was the word of the year in the year 2000, because who knew what a chad was before 2000, and "" WMD "" in 2002. 
Now, we have other categories in which we vote too, and my favorite category is most creative word of the year. 
Past winners in this category have included "recombobulation area," which is at the Milwaukee Airport after security, where you can recombobulate. 
(Laughter) You can put your belt back on, put your computer back in your bag. 
And then my all-time favorite word at this vote, which is "" multi-slacking. "" (Laughter) And multi-slacking is the act of having multiple windows up on your screen so it looks like you're working when you're actually goofing around on the web. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Will all of these words stick? Absolutely not. 
And we have made some questionable choices, for example in 2006 when the word of the year was "" Plutoed, "" to mean demoted. 
(Laughter) But some of the past winners now seem completely unremarkable, such as "" app "" and "" e "" as a prefix, and "" google "" as a verb. 
Now, a few weeks before our vote, Lake Superior State University issues its list of banished words for the year. 
What is striking about this is that there's actually often quite a lot of overlap between their list and the list that we are considering for words of the year, and this is because we're noticing the same thing. 
We're noticing words that are coming into prominence. 
It's really a question of attitude. 
Are you bothered by language fads and language change, or do you find it fun, interesting, something worthy of study as part of a living language? 
The list by Lake Superior State University continues a fairly long tradition in English of complaints about new words. 
So here is Dean Henry Alford in 1875, who was very concerned that "" desirability "" is really a terrible word. 
In 1760, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to David Hume giving up the word "" colonize "" as bad. 
Over the years, we've also seen worries about new pronunciations. 
Here is Samuel Rogers in 1855 who is concerned about some fashionable pronunciations that he finds offensive, and he says "" as if contemplate were not bad enough, balcony makes me sick. "" (Laughter) The word is borrowed in from Italian and it was pronounced bal-COE-nee. 
These complaints now strike us as quaint, if not downright adorkable — (Laughter) — but here's the thing: we still get quite worked up about language change. 
I have an entire file in my office of newspaper articles which express concern about illegitimate words that should not have been included in the dictionary, including "" LOL "" when it got into the Oxford English Dictionary and "" defriend "" when it got into the Oxford American Dictionary. 
I also have articles expressing concern about "" invite "" as a noun, "" impact "" as a verb, because only teeth can be impacted, and "" incentivize "" is described as "" boorish, bureaucratic misspeak. "" Now, it's not that dictionary editors ignore these kinds of attitudes about language. 
They try to provide us some guidance about words that are considered slang or informal or offensive, often through usage labels, but they're in something of a bind, because they're trying to describe what we do, and they know that we often go to dictionaries to get information about how we should use a word well or appropriately. 
In response, the American Heritage Dictionaries include usage notes. 
Usage notes tend to occur with words that are troublesome in one way, and one of the ways that they can be troublesome is that they're changing meaning. 
Now usage notes involve very human decisions, and I think, as dictionary users, we're often not as aware of those human decisions as we should be. 
To show you what I mean, we'll look at an example, but before we do, I want to explain what the dictionary editors are trying to deal with in this usage note. 
Think about the word "" peruse "" and how you use that word. 
I would guess many of you are thinking of skim, scan, reading quickly. 
Some of you may even have some walking involved, because you're perusing grocery store shelves, or something like that. 
You might be surprised to learn that if you look in most standard dictionaries, the first definition will be to read carefully, or pore over. 
American Heritage has that as the first definition. 
They then have, as the second definition, skim, and next to that, they say "" usage problem. "" (Laughter) And then they include a usage note, which is worth looking at. 
So here's the usage note: "" Peruse has long meant 'to read thoroughly'... 
But the word is often used more loosely, to mean simply 'to read.'... 
Further extension of the word to mean 'to glance over, skim,' has traditionally been considered an error, but our ballot results suggest that it is becoming somewhat more acceptable. 
When asked about the sentence, 'I only had a moment to peruse the manual quickly,' 66 percent of the [Usage] Panel found it unacceptable in 1988, 58 percent in 1999, and 48 percent in 2011. "" Ah, the Usage Panel, that trusted body of language authorities who is getting more lenient about this. 
Now, what I hope you're thinking right now is, "" Wait, who's on the Usage Panel? 
And what should I do with their pronouncements? "" If you look in the front matter of American Heritage Dictionaries, you can actually find the names of the people on the Usage Panel. 
But who looks at the front matter of dictionaries? 
There are about 200 people on the Usage Panel. 
They include academicians, journalists, creative writers. 
There's a Supreme Court justice on it and a few linguists. 
As of 2005, the list includes me. 
(Applause) Here's what we can do for you. 
We can give you a sense of the range of opinions about contested usage. 
That is and should be the extent of our authority. 
We are not a language academy. 
About once a year, I get a ballot that asks me about whether new uses, new pronunciations, new meanings, are acceptable. 
Now here's what I do to fill out the ballot. 
I listen to what other people are saying and writing. 
I do not listen to my own likes and dislikes about the English language. 
I will be honest with you: I do not like the word "" impactful, "" but that is neither here nor there in terms of whether "" impactful "" is becoming common usage and becoming more acceptable in written prose. 
So to be responsible, what I do is go look at usage, which often involves going to look at online databases such as Google Books. 
Well, if you look for "" impactful "" in Google Books, here is what you find. 
Well, it sure looks like "" impactful "" is proving useful for a certain number of writers, and has become more and more useful over the last 20 years. 
Now, there are going to be changes that all of us don't like in the language. 
There are going to be changes where you think, "" Really? 
Does the language have to change that way? "" What I'm saying is, we should be less quick to decide that that change is terrible, we should be less quick to impose our likes and dislikes about words on other people, and we should be entirely reluctant to think that the English language is in trouble. 
It's not. It is rich and vibrant and filled with the creativity of the speakers who speak it. 
In retrospect, we think it's fascinating that the word "" nice "" used to mean silly, and that the word "" decimate "" used to mean to kill one in every 10. 
(Laughter) We think that Ben Franklin was being silly to worry about "" notice "" as a verb. 
Well, you know what? 
We're going to look pretty silly in a hundred years for worrying about "" impact "" as a verb and "" invite "" as a noun. 
The language is not going to change so fast that we can't keep up. 
Language just doesn't work that way. 
I hope that what you can do is find language change not worrisome but fun and fascinating, just the way dictionary editors do. 
I hope you can enjoy being part of the creativity that is continually remaking our language and keeping it robust. 
So how does a word get into a dictionary? 
It gets in because we use it and we keep using it, and dictionary editors are paying attention to us. 
If you're thinking, "" But that lets all of us decide what words mean, "" I would say, "" Yes it does, and it always has. "" Dictionaries are a wonderful guide and resource, but there is no objective dictionary authority out there that is the final arbiter about what words mean. 
If a community of speakers is using a word and knows what it means, it's real. 
That word might be slangy, that word might be informal, that word might be a word that you think is illogical or unnecessary, but that word that we're using, that word is real. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

We've got a real problem with math education right now. 
Basically, no one's very happy. 
Those learning it think it's disconnected, uninteresting and hard. 
Those trying to employ them think they don't know enough. 
Governments realize that it's a big deal for our economies, but don't know how to fix it. 
And teachers are also frustrated. 
Yet math is more important to the world than at any point in human history. 
So at one end we've got falling interest in education in math, and at the other end we've got a more mathematical world, a more quantitative world than we ever have had. 
So what's the problem, why has this chasm opened up, and what can we do to fix it? 
Well actually, I think the answer is staring us right in the face: Use computers. 
I believe that correctly using computers is the silver bullet for making math education work. 
So to explain that, let me first talk a bit about what math looks like in the real world and what it looks like in education. 
See, in the real world math isn't necessarily done by mathematicians. 
It's done by geologists, engineers, biologists, all sorts of different people — modeling and simulation. 
It's actually very popular. 
But in education it looks very different — dumbed-down problems, lots of calculating, mostly by hand. 
Lots of things that seem simple and not difficult like in the real world, except if you're learning it. 
And another thing about math: math sometimes looks like math — like in this example here — and sometimes it doesn't — like "" Am I drunk? "" And then you get an answer that's quantitative in the modern world. 
You wouldn't have expected that a few years back. 
But now you can find out all about — unfortunately, my weight is a little higher than that, but — all about what happens. 
So let's zoom out a bit and ask, why are we teaching people math? 
What's the point of teaching people math? 
And in particular, why are we teaching them math in general? 
Why is it such an important part of education as a sort of compulsory subject? 
Well, I think there are about three reasons: technical jobs so critical to the development of our economies, what I call "" everyday living "" — to function in the world today, you've got to be pretty quantitative, much more so than a few years ago: figure out your mortgages, being skeptical of government statistics, those kinds of things — and thirdly, what I would call something like logical mind training, logical thinking. 
Over the years we've put so much in society into being able to process and think logically. It's part of human society. 
It's very important to learn that math is a great way to do that. 
So let's ask another question. 
What is math? 
What do we mean when we say we're doing math, or educating people to do math? 
Well, I think it's about four steps, roughly speaking, starting with posing the right question. 
What is it that we want to ask? What is it we're trying to find out here? 
And this is the thing most screwed up in the outside world, beyond virtually any other part of doing math. 
People ask the wrong question, and surprisingly enough, they get the wrong answer, for that reason, if not for others. 
So the next thing is take that problem and turn it from a real world problem into a math problem. 
That's stage two. 
Once you've done that, then there's the computation step. 
Turn it from that into some answer in a mathematical form. 
And of course, math is very powerful at doing that. 
And then finally, turn it back to the real world. 
Did it answer the question? 
And also verify it — crucial step. 
Now here's the crazy thing right now. 
In math education, we're spending about perhaps 80 percent of the time teaching people to do step three by hand. 
Yet, that's the one step computers can do better than any human after years of practice. 
Instead, we ought to be using computers to do step three and using the students to spend much more effort on learning how to do steps one, two and four — conceptualizing problems, applying them, getting the teacher to run them through how to do that. 
See, crucial point here: math is not equal to calculating. 
Math is a much broader subject than calculating. 
Now it's understandable that this has all got intertwined over hundreds of years. 
There was only one way to do calculating and that was by hand. 
But in the last few decades that has totally changed. 
We've had the biggest transformation of any ancient subject that I could ever imagine with computers. 
Calculating was typically the limiting step, and now often it isn't. 
So I think in terms of the fact that math has been liberated from calculating. 
But that math liberation didn't get into education yet. 
See, I think of calculating, in a sense, as the machinery of math. 
It's the chore. 
It's the thing you'd like to avoid if you can, like to get a machine to do. 
It's a means to an end, not an end in itself, and automation allows us to have that machinery. 
Computers allow us to do that — and this is not a small problem by any means. 
I estimated that, just today, across the world, we spent about 106 average world lifetimes teaching people how to calculate by hand. 
That's an amazing amount of human endeavor. 
So we better be damn sure — and by the way, they didn't even have fun doing it, most of them — so we better be damn sure that we know why we're doing that and it has a real purpose. 
I think we should be assuming computers for doing the calculating and only doing hand calculations where it really makes sense to teach people that. 
And I think there are some cases. 
For example: mental arithmetic. 
I still do a lot of that, mainly for estimating. 
People say, "" Is such and such true? "" And I'll say, "" Hmm, not sure. "" I'll think about it roughly. 
It's still quicker to do that and more practical. 
So I think practicality is one case where it's worth teaching people by hand. 
And then there are certain conceptual things that can also benefit from hand calculating, but I think they're relatively small in number. 
One thing I often ask about is ancient Greek and how this relates. 
See, the thing we're doing right now is we're forcing people to learn mathematics. 
It's a major subject. 
I'm not for one minute suggesting that, if people are interested in hand calculating or in following their own interests in any subject however bizarre — they should do that. 
That's absolutely the right thing, for people to follow their self-interest. 
I was somewhat interested in ancient Greek, but I don't think that we should force the entire population to learn a subject like ancient Greek. 
I don't think it's warranted. 
So I have this distinction between what we're making people do and the subject that's sort of mainstream and the subject that, in a sense, people might follow with their own interest and perhaps even be spiked into doing that. 
So what are the issues people bring up with this? 
Well one of them is, they say, you need to get the basics first. 
You shouldn't use the machine until you get the basics of the subject. 
So my usual question is, what do you mean by "" basics? "" Basics of what? 
Are the basics of driving a car learning how to service it, or design it for that matter? 
Are the basics of writing learning how to sharpen a quill? 
I don't think so. 
I think you need to separate the basics of what you're trying to do from how it gets done and the machinery of how it gets done and automation allows you to make that separation. 
A hundred years ago, it's certainly true that to drive a car you kind of needed to know a lot about the mechanics of the car and how the ignition timing worked and all sorts of things. 
But automation in cars allowed that to separate, so driving is now a quite separate subject, so to speak, from engineering of the car or learning how to service it. 
So automation allows this separation and also allows — in the case of driving, and I believe also in the future case of maths — a democratized way of doing that. 
It can be spread across a much larger number of people who can really work with that. 
So there's another thing that comes up with basics. 
People confuse, in my view, the order of the invention of the tools with the order in which they should use them for teaching. 
So just because paper was invented before computers, it doesn't necessarily mean you get more to the basics of the subject by using paper instead of a computer to teach mathematics. 
My daughter gave me a rather nice anecdote on this. 
She enjoys making what she calls "" paper laptops. "" (Laughter) So I asked her one day, "" You know, when I was your age, I didn't make these. 
Why do you think that was? "" And after a second or two, carefully reflecting, she said, "" No paper? "" (Laughter) If you were born after computers and paper, it doesn't really matter which order you're taught with them in, you just want to have the best tool. 
So another one that comes up is "" Computers dumb math down. "" That somehow, if you use a computer, it's all mindless button-pushing, but if you do it by hand, it's all intellectual. 
This one kind of annoys me, I must say. 
Do we really believe that the math that most people are doing in school practically today is more than applying procedures to problems they don't really understand, for reasons they don't get? 
I don't think so. 
And what's worse, what they're learning there isn't even practically useful anymore. 
Might have been 50 years ago, but it isn't anymore. 
When they're out of education, they do it on a computer. 
Just to be clear, I think computers can really help with this problem, actually make it more conceptual. 
Now, of course, like any great tool, they can be used completely mindlessly, like turning everything into a multimedia show, like the example I was shown of solving an equation by hand, where the computer was the teacher — show the student how to manipulate and solve it by hand. 
This is just nuts. 
Why are we using computers to show a student how to solve a problem by hand that the computer should be doing anyway? 
All backwards. 
Let me show you that you can also make problems harder to calculate. 
See, normally in school, you do things like solve quadratic equations. 
But you see, when you're using a computer, you can just substitute. 
You can make it a quartic equation. Make it kind of harder, calculating-wise. 
Same principles applied — calculations, harder. 
And problems in the real world look nutty and horrible like this. 
They've got hair all over them. 
They're not just simple, dumbed-down things that we see in school math. 
And think of the outside world. 
Do we really believe that engineering and biology and all of these other things that have so benefited from computers and maths have somehow conceptually gotten reduced by using computers? 
I don't think so — quite the opposite. 
So the problem we've really got in math education is not that computers might dumb it down, but that we have dumbed-down problems right now. 
Well, another issue people bring up is somehow that hand calculating procedures teach understanding. 
So if you go through lots of examples, you can get the answer, you can understand how the basics of the system work better. 
I think there is one thing that I think very valid here, which is that I think understanding procedures and processes is important. 
But there's a fantastic way to do that in the modern world. 
It's called programming. 
Programming is how most procedures and processes get written down these days, and it's also a great way to engage students much more and to check they really understand. 
If you really want to check you understand math then write a program to do it. 
So programming is the way I think we should be doing that. 
So to be clear, what I really am suggesting here is we have a unique opportunity to make maths both more practical and more conceptual, simultaneously. 
I can't think of any other subject where that's recently been possible. 
It's usually some kind of choice between the vocational and the intellectual. 
But I think we can do both at the same time here. 
And we open up so many more possibilities. 
You can do so many more problems. 
What I really think we gain from this is students getting intuition and experience in far greater quantities than they've ever got before. 
And experience of harder problems — being able to play with the math, interact with it, feel it. 
We want people who can feel the math instinctively. 
That's what computers allow us to do. 
Another thing it allows us to do is reorder the curriculum. 
Traditionally it's been by how difficult it is to calculate, but now we can reorder it by how difficult it is to understand the concepts, however hard the calculating. 
So calculus has traditionally been taught very late. 
Why is this? 
Well, it's damn hard doing the calculations, that's the problem. 
But actually many of the concepts are amenable to a much younger age group. 
This was an example I built for my daughter. 
And very, very simple. 
We were talking about what happens when you increase the number of sides of a polygon to a very large number. 
And of course, it turns into a circle. 
And by the way, she was also very insistent on being able to change the color, an important feature for this demonstration. 
You can see that this is a very early step into limits and differential calculus and what happens when you take things to an extreme — and very small sides and a very large number of sides. 
Very simple example. 
That's a view of the world that we don't usually give people for many, many years after this. 
And yet, that's a really important practical view of the world. 
So one of the roadblocks we have in moving this agenda forward is exams. 
In the end, if we test everyone by hand in exams, it's kind of hard to get the curricula changed to a point where they can use computers during the semesters. 
And one of the reasons it's so important — so it's very important to get computers in exams. 
And then we can ask questions, real questions, questions like, what's the best life insurance policy to get? — real questions that people have in their everyday lives. 
And you see, this isn't some dumbed-down model here. 
This is an actual model where we can be asked to optimize what happens. 
How many years of protection do I need? 
What does that do to the payments and to the interest rates and so forth? 
Now I'm not for one minute suggesting it's the only kind of question that should be asked in exams, but I think it's a very important type that right now just gets completely ignored and is critical for people's real understanding. 
So I believe [there is] critical reform we have to do in computer-based math. 
We have got to make sure that we can move our economies forward, and also our societies, based on the idea that people can really feel mathematics. 
This isn't some optional extra. 
And the country that does this first will, in my view, leapfrog others in achieving a new economy even, an improved economy, an improved outlook. 
In fact, I even talk about us moving from what we often call now the "" knowledge economy "" to what we might call a "" computational knowledge economy, "" where high-level math is integral to what everyone does in the way that knowledge currently is. 
We can engage so many more students with this, and they can have a better time doing it. 
And let's understand: this is not an incremental sort of change. 
We're trying to cross the chasm here between school math and the real-world math. 
And you know if you walk across a chasm, you end up making it worse than if you didn't start at all — bigger disaster. 
No, what I'm suggesting is that we should leap off, we should increase our velocity so it's high, and we should leap off one side and go the other — of course, having calculated our differential equation very carefully. 
(Laughter) So I want to see a completely renewed, changed math curriculum built from the ground up, based on computers being there, computers that are now ubiquitous almost. 
Calculating machines are everywhere and will be completely everywhere in a small number of years. 
Now I'm not even sure if we should brand the subject as math, but what I am sure is it's the mainstream subject of the future. 
Let's go for it, and while we're about it, let's have a bit of fun, for us, for the students and for TED here. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

And his work illuminated for me what the molecular world inside us is like. 
And that's how I really began. 
We're pulling out, we're zooming out, out through a nuclear pore, which is the gateway to this compartment that holds all the DNA, called the nucleus. 

So I want to talk today about an idea. It's a big idea. 
Actually, I think it'll eventually be seen as probably the single biggest idea that's emerged in the past century. 
It's the idea of computation. 
Now, of course, that idea has brought us all of the computer technology we have today and so on. 
But there's actually a lot more to computation than that. 
It's really a very deep, very powerful, very fundamental idea, whose effects we've only just begun to see. 
Well, I myself have spent the past 30 years of my life working on three large projects that really try to take the idea of computation seriously. 
So I started off at a young age as a physicist using computers as tools. 
Then, I started drilling down, thinking about the computations I might want to do, trying to figure out what primitives they could be built up from and how they could be automated as much as possible. 
Eventually, I created a whole structure based on symbolic programming and so on that let me build Mathematica. 
And for the past 23 years, at an increasing rate, we've been pouring more and more ideas and capabilities and so on into Mathematica, and I'm happy to say that that's led to many good things in R & D and education, lots of other areas. 
Well, I have to admit, actually, that I also had a very selfish reason for building Mathematica: I wanted to use it myself, a bit like Galileo got to use his telescope 400 years ago. 
But I wanted to look not at the astronomical universe, but at the computational universe. 
So we normally think of programs as being complicated things that we build for very specific purposes. 
But what about the space of all possible programs? 
Here's a representation of a really simple program. 
So, if we run this program, this is what we get. 
Very simple. 
So let's try changing the rule for this program a little bit. 
Now we get another result, still very simple. 
Try changing it again. 
You get something a little bit more complicated. 
But if we keep running this for a while, we find out that although the pattern we get is very intricate, it has a very regular structure. 
So the question is: Can anything else happen? 
Well, we can do a little experiment. 
Let's just do a little mathematical experiment, try and find out. 
Let's just run all possible programs of the particular type that we're looking at. 
They're called cellular automata. 
You can see a lot of diversity in the behavior here. 
Most of them do very simple things, but if you look along all these different pictures, at rule number 30, you start to see something interesting going on. 
So let's take a closer look at rule number 30 here. 
So here it is. 
We're just following this very simple rule at the bottom here, but we're getting all this amazing stuff. 
It's not at all what we're used to, and I must say that, when I first saw this, it came as a huge shock to my intuition. 
And, in fact, to understand it, I eventually had to create a whole new kind of science. 
(Laughter) This science is different, more general, than the mathematics-based science that we've had for the past 300 or so years. 
You know, it's always seemed like a big mystery: how nature, seemingly so effortlessly, manages to produce so much that seems to us so complex. 
Well, I think we've found its secret: It's just sampling what's out there in the computational universe and quite often getting things like Rule 30 or like this. 
And knowing that starts to explain a lot of long-standing mysteries in science. 
It also brings up new issues, though, like computational irreducibility. 
I mean, we're used to having science let us predict things, but something like this is fundamentally irreducible. 
The only way to find its outcome is, effectively, just to watch it evolve. 
It's connected to, what I call, the principle of computational equivalence, which tells us that even incredibly simple systems can do computations as sophisticated as anything. 
It doesn't take lots of technology or biological evolution to be able to do arbitrary computation; just something that happens, naturally, all over the place. 
Things with rules as simple as these can do it. 
Well, this has deep implications about the limits of science, about predictability and controllability of things like biological processes or economies, about intelligence in the universe, about questions like free will and about creating technology. 
You know, in working on this science for many years, I kept wondering, "What will be its first killer app?" 
Well, ever since I was a kid, I'd been thinking about systematizing knowledge and somehow making it computable. 
People like Leibniz had wondered about that too 300 years earlier. 
But I'd always assumed that to make progress, I'd essentially have to replicate a whole brain. 
Well, then I got to thinking: This scientific paradigm of mine suggests something different — and, by the way, I've now got huge computation capabilities in Mathematica, and I'm a CEO with some worldly resources to do large, seemingly crazy, projects — So I decided to just try to see how much of the systematic knowledge that's out there in the world we could make computable. 
So, it's been a big, very complex project, which I was not sure was going to work at all. 
But I'm happy to say it's actually going really well. 
And last year we were able to release the first website version of Wolfram Alpha. 
Its purpose is to be a serious knowledge engine that computes answers to questions. 
So let's give it a try. 
Let's start off with something really easy. 
Hope for the best. 
Very good. Okay. 
So far so good. 
(Laughter) Let's try something a little bit harder. 
Let's do some mathy thing, and with luck it'll work out the answer and try and tell us some interesting things things about related math. 
We could ask it something about the real world. 
Let's say — I don't know — what's the GDP of Spain? 
And it should be able to tell us that. 
Now we could compute something related to this, let's say... the GDP of Spain divided by, I don't know, the — hmmm... 
let's say the revenue of Microsoft. 
(Laughter) The idea is that we can just type this in, this kind of question in, however we think of it. 
So let's try asking a question, like a health related question. 
So let's say we have a lab finding that... 
you know, we have an LDL level of 140 for a male aged 50. 
So let's type that in, and now Wolfram Alpha will go and use available public health data and try and figure out what part of the population that corresponds to and so on. 
Or let's try asking about, I don't know, the International Space Station. 
And what's happening here is that Wolfram Alpha is not just looking up something; it's computing, in real time, where the International Space Station is right now at this moment, how fast it's going, and so on. 
So Wolfram Alpha knows about lots and lots of kinds of things. 
It's got, by now, pretty good coverage of everything you might find in a standard reference library. 
But the goal is to go much further and, very broadly, to democratize all of this knowledge, and to try and be an authoritative source in all areas. 
To be able to compute answers to specific questions that people have, not by searching what other people may have written down before, but by using built in knowledge to compute fresh new answers to specific questions. 
Now, of course, Wolfram Alpha is a monumentally huge, long-term project with lots and lots of challenges. 
For a start, one has to curate a zillion different sources of facts and data, and we built quite a pipeline of Mathematica automation and human domain experts for doing this. 
But that's just the beginning. 
Given raw facts or data to actually answer questions, one has to compute: one has to implement all those methods and models and algorithms and so on that science and other areas have built up over the centuries. 
Well, even starting from Mathematica, this is still a huge amount of work. 
So far, there are about 8 million lines of Mathematica code in Wolfram Alpha built by experts from many, many different fields. 
Well, a crucial idea of Wolfram Alpha is that you can just ask it questions using ordinary human language, which means that we've got to be able to take all those strange utterances that people type into the input field and understand them. 
And I must say that I thought that step might just be plain impossible. 
Two big things happened: First, a bunch of new ideas about linguistics that came from studying the computational universe; and second, the realization that having actual computable knowledge completely changes how one can set about understanding language. 
And, of course, now with Wolfram Alpha actually out in the wild, we can learn from its actual usage. 
And, in fact, there's been an interesting coevolution that's been going on between Wolfram Alpha and its human users, and it's really encouraging. 
Right now, if we look at web queries, more than 80 percent of them get handled successfully the first time. 
And if you look at things like the iPhone app, the fraction is considerably larger. 
So, I'm pretty pleased with it all. 
But, in many ways, we're still at the very beginning with Wolfram Alpha. 
I mean, everything is scaling up very nicely and we're getting more confident. 
You can expect to see Wolfram Alpha technology showing up in more and more places, working both with this kind of public data, like on the website, and with private knowledge for people and companies and so on. 
You know, I've realized that Wolfram Alpha actually gives one a whole new kind of computing that one can call knowledge-based computing, in which one's starting not just from raw computation, but from a vast amount of built-in knowledge. 
And when one does that, one really changes the economics of delivering computational things, whether it's on the web or elsewhere. 
You know, we have a fairly interesting situation right now. 
On the one hand, we have Mathematica, with its sort of precise, formal language and a huge network of carefully designed capabilities able to get a lot done in just a few lines. 
Let me show you a couple of examples here. 
So here's a trivial piece of Mathematica programming. 
Here's something where we're sort of integrating a bunch of different capabilities here. 
Here we'll just create, in this line, a little user interface that allows us to do something fun there. 
If you go on, that's a slightly more complicated program that's now doing all sorts of algorithmic things and creating user interface and so on. 
But it's something that is very precise stuff. 
It's a precise specification with a precise formal language that causes Mathematica to know what to do here. 
Then on the other hand, we have Wolfram Alpha, with all the messiness of the world and human language and so on built into it. 
So what happens when you put these things together? 
I think it's actually rather wonderful. 
With Wolfram Alpha inside Mathematica, you can, for example, make precise programs that call on real world data. 
Here's a real simple example. 
You can also just sort of give vague input and then try and have Wolfram Alpha figure out what you're talking about. 
Let's try this here. 
But actually I think the most exciting thing about this is that it really gives one the chance to democratize programming. 
I mean, anyone will be able to say what they want in plain language. 
Then, the idea is that Wolfram Alpha will be able to figure out what precise pieces of code can do what they're asking for and then show them examples that will let them pick what they need to build up bigger and bigger, precise programs. 
So, sometimes, Wolfram Alpha will be able to do the whole thing immediately and just give back a whole big program that you can then compute with. 
Here's a big website where we've been collecting lots of educational and other demonstrations about lots of kinds of things. 
I'll show you one example here. 
This is just an example of one of these computable documents. 
This is probably a fairly small piece of Mathematica code that's able to be run here. 
Okay. Let's zoom out again. 
So, given our new kind of science, is there a general way to use it to make technology? 
So, with physical materials, we're used to going around the world and discovering that particular materials are useful for particular technological purposes. 
Well, it turns out we can do very much the same kind of thing in the computational universe. 
There's an inexhaustible supply of programs out there. 
The challenge is to see how to harness them for human purposes. 
Something like Rule 30, for example, turns out to be a really good randomness generator. 
Other simple programs are good models for processes in the natural or social world. 
And, for example, Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica are actually now full of algorithms that we discovered by searching the computational universe. 
And, for example, this — if we go back here — this has become surprisingly popular among composers finding musical forms by searching the computational universe. 
In a sense, we can use the computational universe to get mass customized creativity. 
I'm hoping we can, for example, use that even to get Wolfram Alpha to routinely do invention and discovery on the fly, and to find all sorts of wonderful stuff that no engineer and no process of incremental evolution would ever come up with. 
Well, so, that leads to kind of an ultimate question: Could it be that someplace out there in the computational universe we might find our physical universe? 
Perhaps there's even some quite simple rule, some simple program for our universe. 
Well, the history of physics would have us believe that the rule for the universe must be pretty complicated. 
But in the computational universe, we've now seen how rules that are incredibly simple can produce incredibly rich and complex behavior. 
So could that be what's going on with our whole universe? 
If the rules for the universe are simple, it's kind of inevitable that they have to be very abstract and very low level; operating, for example, far below the level of space or time, which makes it hard to represent things. 
But in at least a large class of cases, one can think of the universe as being like some kind of network, which, when it gets big enough, behaves like continuous space in much the same way as having lots of molecules can behave like a continuous fluid. 
Well, then the universe has to evolve by applying little rules that progressively update this network. 
And each possible rule, in a sense, corresponds to a candidate universe. 
Actually, I haven't shown these before, but here are a few of the candidate universes that I've looked at. 
Some of these are hopeless universes, completely sterile, with other kinds of pathologies like no notion of space, no notion of time, no matter, other problems like that. 
But the exciting thing that I've found in the last few years is that you actually don't have to go very far in the computational universe before you start finding candidate universes that aren't obviously not our universe. 
Here's the problem: Any serious candidate for our universe is inevitably full of computational irreducibility. 
Which means that it is irreducibly difficult to find out how it will really behave, and whether it matches our physical universe. 
A few years ago, I was pretty excited to discover that there are candidate universes with incredibly simple rules that successfully reproduce special relativity, and even general relativity and gravitation, and at least give hints of quantum mechanics. 
So, will we find the whole of physics? 
I don't know for sure, but I think at this point it's sort of almost embarrassing not to at least try. 
Not an easy project. 
One's got to build a lot of technology. 
One's got to build a structure that's probably at least as deep as existing physics. 
And I'm not sure what the best way to organize the whole thing is. 
Build a team, open it up, offer prizes and so on. 
But I'll tell you, here today, that I'm committed to seeing this project done, to see if, within this decade, we can finally hold in our hands the rule for our universe and know where our universe lies in the space of all possible universes... 
and be able to type into Wolfram Alpha, "" the theory of the universe, "" and have it tell us. 
(Laughter) So I've been working on the idea of computation now for more than 30 years, building tools and methods and turning intellectual ideas into millions of lines of code and grist for server farms and so on. 
With every passing year, I realize how much more powerful the idea of computation really is. 
It's taken us a long way already, but there's so much more to come. 
From the foundations of science to the limits of technology to the very definition of the human condition, I think computation is destined to be the defining idea of our future. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: That was astonishing. 
Stay here. I've got a question. 
(Applause) So, that was, fair to say, an astonishing talk. 
Are you able to say in a sentence or two how this type of thinking could integrate at some point to things like string theory or the kind of things that people think of as the fundamental explanations of the universe? 
Stephen Wolfram: Well, the parts of physics that we kind of know to be true, things like the standard model of physics: what I'm trying to do better reproduce the standard model of physics or it's simply wrong. 
The things that people have tried to do in the last 25 years or so with string theory and so on have been an interesting exploration that has tried to get back to the standard model, but hasn't quite gotten there. 
My guess is that some great simplifications of what I'm doing may actually have considerable resonance with what's been done in string theory, but that's a complicated math thing that I don't yet know how it's going to work out. 
CA: Benoit Mandelbrot is in the audience. 
He also has shown how complexity can arise out of a simple start. 
Does your work relate to his? 
SW: I think so. 
I view Benoit Mandelbrot's work as one of the founding contributions to this kind of area. 
Benoit has been particularly interested in nested patterns, in fractals and so on, where the structure is something that's kind of tree-like, and where there's sort of a big branch that makes little branches and even smaller branches and so on. 
That's one of the ways that you get towards true complexity. 
I think things like the Rule 30 cellular automaton get us to a different level. 
In fact, in a very precise way, they get us to a different level because they seem to be things that are capable of complexity that's sort of as great as complexity can ever get... 
I could go on about this at great length, but I won't. (Laughter) (Applause) CA: Stephen Wolfram, thank you. (Applause) 

One of the things that defines a TEDster is you've taken your passion, and you've turned it into stewardship. 
You actually put action to the issues you care about. 
But what you're going to find eventually is you may need to actually get elected officials to help you out. 
So, how do you do that? 
One of the things I should probably tell you is, I worked for the Discovery Channel early in my career, and that sort of warped my framework. 
So, when you start to think about politicians, you've got to realize these are strange creatures. 
Other than the fact that they can't tell directions, and they have very strange breeding habits, how do you actually work with these things? (Laughter) What we need to understand is: What drives the political creature? 
And there are two things that are primary in a politician's heart: One is reputation and influence. 
These are the primary tools by which a politician can do his job. 
The second one — unlike most animals, which is survival of the species — this is preservation of self. 
Now you may think it's money, but that's actually sort of a proxy to what I can do to preserve myself. 
Now, the challenge with you moving your issue forward is these animals are getting broadcast to all the time. 
So, what doesn't work, in terms of getting your issue to be important? 
You can send them an email. 
Well, unfortunately, I've got so many Viagra ads coming at me, your email is lost. 
It doesn't matter, it's spam. 
How about you get on the phone? 
Well, chances are I've got a droid who's picking up the phone, "Yes, they called, and they said they didn't like it." 
That doesn't move. 
Face to face would work, but it's hard to set it up. 
It's hard to get the context and actually get the communication to work. 
Yes, contributions actually do make a difference and they set a context for having a conversation, but it takes some time to build up. 
So what actually works? 
And the answer is rather strange. 
It's a letter. 
We live in a digital world, but we're fairly analog creatures. 
Letters actually work. 
Even the top dog himself takes time every day to read 10 letters that are picked out by staff. 
I can tell you that every official that I've ever worked with will tell you about the letters they get and what they mean. 
So, how are you going to write your letter? 
First of all, you're going to pick up an analog device: a pen. 
I know these are tough, and you may have a hard time getting your hand bent around it, (Laughter) but this is actually critical. 
And it is critical that you actually handwrite your letter. 
It is so novel to see this, that somebody actually picked up an analog device and has written to me. 
Second of all, I'm going to recommend that you get into a proactive stance and write to your elected officials at least once a month. 
Here's my promise to you: If you are consistent and do this, within three months the elected official will start calling you when that issue comes up and say, "" What do you think? "" Now, I'm going to give you a four paragraph format to work with. 
Now, when you approach these animals, you need to understand there's a dangerous end to them, and you also need to approach them with some level of respect and a little bit of wariness. 
So in paragraph number one, what I'm going to tell you to do is very simply this: You appreciate them. 
You may not appreciate the person, you may not appreciate anything else, but maybe you appreciate the fact that they've got a tough gig. 
When animals are going to make a point, they make the point. 
They don't spend a lot of time dicking around. 
So, here you go. (Laughter) Paragraph number two: You may actually have to just get very blunt and say what's really on your mind. 
When you do this, don't attack people; you attack tactics. 
Ad hominem attacks will get you nowhere. 
Paragraph number three: When animals are attacked or cornered, they will fight to the death, so you have to give them an exit. 
Most of the time, if they have an exit strategy, they should take it. 
"" Obviously, you're intelligent. 
If you had the right information, you would have done the right thing. "" (Laughter) Lastly, you want to be the nurturing agent. 
You're the safe place to come in to. 
So, in paragraph number four, you're going to tell people, "" If no one is providing you with this information, let me help. "" (Laughter) Animals do displays. They do two things: They warn you or they try to attract you and say, "" We need to mate. "" You're going to do that by the way you sign your letter. 
You do a number of things: you're a vice president, you volunteer, you do something else. 
Why is is this important? 
Because this establishes the two primary criteria for the political creature: that you have influence in a large sphere, and that my preservation depends on you. 
Here is one very quick hack, especially for the feds in the audience. 
Here's how you mail your letter. 
First of all, you send the original to the district office. 
So, you send the copy to the main office. 
If they follow protocol, they'll pick up the phone and say, "" Hey, do you have the original? "" Then some droid in the back puts the name on a tickler and says, "" Oh, this is an important letter. "" And you actually get into the folder that the elected official actually has to read. 
So, what your letter means: I've got to tell you, we are all in a party, and political officials are the pinatas. 
(Laughter) We are harangued, lectured to, sold, marketed, but a letter is actually one of the few times that we have honest communication. 
I got this letter when I was first elected, and I still carry it to every council meeting I go to. 
This is an opportunity at real dialogue, and if you have stewardship and want to communicate, that dialogue is incredibly powerful. 
So when you do that, here's what I can promise: You're going to be the 800 pound gorilla in the forest. 
Get writing. 
(Applause) 

It's the Second World War. 
A German prison camp. 
And this man, Archie Cochrane, is a prisoner of war and a doctor, and he has a problem. 
The problem is that the men under his care are suffering from an excruciating and debilitating condition that Archie doesn't really understand. 
The symptoms are this horrible swelling up of fluids under the skin. 
But he doesn't know whether it's an infection, whether it's to do with malnutrition. 
He doesn't know how to cure it. 
And he's operating in a hostile environment. 
And people do terrible things in wars. 
The German camp guards, they've got bored. 
They've taken to just firing into the prison camp at random for fun. 
On one particular occasion, one of the guards threw a grenade into the prisoners' lavatory while it was full of prisoners. 
He said he heard suspicious laughter. 
And Archie Cochrane, as the camp doctor, was one of the first men in to clear up the mess. 
And one more thing: Archie was suffering from this illness himself. 
So the situation seemed pretty desperate. 
But Archie Cochrane was a resourceful person. 
He'd already smuggled vitamin C into the camp, and now he managed to get hold of supplies of marmite on the black market. 
Now some of you will be wondering what marmite is. 
Marmite is a breakfast spread beloved of the British. 
It looks like crude oil. 
It tastes... 
zesty. 
And importantly, it's a rich source of vitamin B12. 
So Archie splits the men under his care as best he can into two equal groups. 
He gives half of them vitamin C. 
He gives half of them vitamin B12. 
He very carefully and meticulously notes his results in an exercise book. 
And after just a few days, it becomes clear that whatever is causing this illness, marmite is the cure. 
So Cochrane then goes to the Germans who are running the prison camp. 
Now you've got to imagine at the moment — forget this photo, imagine this guy with this long ginger beard and this shock of red hair. 
He hasn't been able to shave — a sort of Billy Connolly figure. 
Cochrane, he starts ranting at these Germans in this Scottish accent — in fluent German, by the way, but in a Scottish accent — and explains to them how German culture was the culture that gave Schiller and Goethe to the world. 
And he can't understand how this barbarism can be tolerated, and he vents his frustrations. 
And then he goes back to his quarters, breaks down and weeps because he's convinced that the situation is hopeless. 
But a young German doctor picks up Archie Cochrane's exercise book and says to his colleagues, "" This evidence is incontrovertible. 
If we don't supply vitamins to the prisoners, it's a war crime. "" And the next morning, supplies of vitamin B12 are delivered to the camp, and the prisoners begin to recover. 
Now I'm not telling you this story because I think Archie Cochrane is a dude, although Archie Cochrane is a dude. 
I'm not even telling you the story because I think we should be running more carefully controlled randomized trials in all aspects of public policy, although I think that would also be completely awesome. 
I'm telling you this story because Archie Cochrane, all his life, fought against a terrible affliction, and he realized it was debilitating to individuals and it was corrosive to societies. 
And he had a name for it. 
He called it the God complex. 
Now I can describe the symptoms of the God complex very, very easily. 
So the symptoms of the complex are, no matter how complicated the problem, you have an absolutely overwhelming belief that you are infallibly right in your solution. 
Now Archie was a doctor, so he hung around with doctors a lot. 
And doctors suffer from the God complex a lot. 
Now I'm an economist, I'm not a doctor, but I see the God complex around me all the time in my fellow economists. 
I see it in our business leaders. 
I see it in the politicians we vote for — people who, in the face of an incredibly complicated world, are nevertheless absolutely convinced that they understand the way that the world works. 
And you know, with the future billions that we've been hearing about, the world is simply far too complex to understand in that way. 
Well let me give you an example. 
Imagine for a moment that, instead of Tim Harford in front of you, there was Hans Rosling presenting his graphs. 
You know Hans: the Mick Jagger of TED. 
(Laughter) And he'd be showing you these amazing statistics, these amazing animations. 
And they are brilliant; it's wonderful work. 
But a typical Hans Rosling graph: think for a moment, not what it shows, but think instead about what it leaves out. 
So it'll show you GDP per capita, population, longevity, that's about it. 
So three pieces of data for each country — three pieces of data. 
Three pieces of data is nothing. 
I mean, have a look at this graph. 
This is produced by the physicist Cesar Hidalgo. 
He's at MIT. 
Now you won't be able to understand a word of it, but this is what it looks like. 
Cesar has trolled the database of over 5,000 different products, and he's used techniques of network analysis to interrogate this database and to graph relationships between the different products. 
And it's wonderful, wonderful work. 
You show all these interconnections, all these interrelations. 
And I think it'll be profoundly useful in understanding how it is that economies grow. 
Brilliant work. 
Cesar and I tried to write a piece for The New York Times Magazine explaining how this works. 
And what we learned is Cesar's work is far too good to explain in The New York Times Magazine. 
Five thousand products — that's still nothing. Five thousand products — 
imagine counting every product category in Cesar Hidalgo's data. 
Imagine you had one second per product category. 
In about the length of this session, you would have counted all 5,000. 
Now imagine doing the same thing for every different type of product on sale in Walmart. 
There are 100,000 there. It would take you all day. 
Now imagine trying to count every different specific product and service on sale in a major economy such as Tokyo, London or New York. 
It's even more difficult in Edinburgh because you have to count all the whisky and the tartan. 
If you wanted to count every product and service on offer in New York — there are 10 billion of them — it would take you 317 years. 
This is how complex the economy we've created is. 
And I'm just counting toasters here. 
I'm not trying to solve the Middle East problem. 
The complexity here is unbelievable. 
And just a piece of context — the societies in which our brains evolved had about 300 products and services. 
You could count them in five minutes. 
So this is the complexity of the world that surrounds us. 
This perhaps is why we find the God complex so tempting. 
We tend to retreat and say, "" We can draw a picture, we can post some graphs, we get it, we understand how this works. "" And we don't. 
We never do. 
Now I'm not trying to deliver a nihilistic message here. 
I'm not trying to say we can't solve complicated problems in a complicated world. 
We clearly can. 
But the way we solve them is with humility — to abandon the God complex and to actually use a problem-solving technique that works. 
And we have a problem-solving technique that works. 
Now you show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error. 
Here's an example. 
This baby was produced through trial and error. 
I realize that's an ambiguous statement. 
Maybe I should clarify it. 
This baby is a human body: it evolved. 
What is evolution? 
Over millions of years, variation and selection, variation and selection — trial and error, trial and error. 
And it's not just biological systems that produce miracles through trial and error. 
You could use it in an industrial context. 
So let's say you wanted to make detergent. 
Let's say you're Unilever and you want to make detergent in a factory near Liverpool. 
How do you do it? 
Well you have this great big tank full of liquid detergent. 
You pump it at a high pressure through a nozzle. 
You create a spray of detergent. 
Then the spray dries. It turns into powder. 
It falls to the floor. 
You scoop it up. You put it in cardboard boxes. 
You sell it at a supermarket. 
You make lots of money. 
How do you design that nozzle? 
It turns out to be very important. 
Now if you ascribe to the God complex, what you do is you find yourself a little God. 
You find yourself a mathematician; you find yourself a physicist — somebody who understands the dynamics of this fluid. 
And he will, or she will, calculate the optimal design of the nozzle. 
Now Unilever did this and it didn't work — too complicated. 
Even this problem, too complicated. 
But the geneticist Professor Steve Jones describes how Unilever actually did solve this problem — trial and error, variation and selection. 
You take a nozzle and you create 10 random variations on the nozzle. 
You try out all 10; you keep the one that works best. 
You create 10 variations on that one. 
You try out all 10. You keep the one that works best. 
You try out 10 variations on that one. 
You see how this works, right? 
And after 45 generations, you have this incredible nozzle. 
It looks a bit like a chess piece — functions absolutely brilliantly. 
We have no idea why it works, no idea at all. 
And the moment you step back from the God complex — let's just try to have a bunch of stuff; let's have a systematic way of determining what's working and what's not — you can solve your problem. 
Now this process of trial and error is actually far more common in successful institutions than we care to recognize. 
And we've heard a lot about how economies function. 
The U.S. economy is still the world's greatest economy. 
How did it become the world's greatest economy? 
I could give you all kinds of facts and figures about the U.S. economy, but I think the most salient one is this: ten percent of American businesses disappear every year. 
That is a huge failure rate. 
It's far higher than the failure rate of, say, Americans. 
Ten percent of Americans don't disappear every year. 
Which leads us to conclude American businesses fail faster than Americans, and therefore American businesses are evolving faster than Americans. 
And eventually, they'll have evolved to such a high peak of perfection that they will make us all their pets — (Laughter) if, of course, they haven't already done so. 
I sometimes wonder. 
But it's this process of trial and error that explains this great divergence, this incredible performance of Western economies. 
It didn't come because you put some incredibly smart person in charge. 
It's come through trial and error. 
Now I've been sort of banging on about this for the last couple of months, and people sometimes say to me, "" Well Tim, it's kind of obvious. 
Obviously trial and error is very important. 
Obviously experimentation is very important. 
Now why are you just wandering around saying this obvious thing? "" So I say, okay, fine. 
You think it's obvious? 
I will admit it's obvious when schools start teaching children that there are some problems that don't have a correct answer. 
Stop giving them lists of questions every single one of which has an answer. 
And there's an authority figure in the corner behind the teacher's desk who knows all the answers. 
And if you can't find the answers, you must be lazy or stupid. 
When schools stop doing that all the time, I will admit that, yes, it's obvious that trial and error is a good thing. 
When a politician stands up campaigning for elected office and says, "" I want to fix our health system. 
I want to fix our education system. 
I have no idea how to do it. 
I have half a dozen ideas. 
We're going to test them out. They'll probably all fail. 
Then we'll test some other ideas out. 
We'll find some that work. We'll build on those. 
We'll get rid of the ones that don't. "" — when a politician campaigns on that platform, and more importantly, when voters like you and me are willing to vote for that kind of politician, then I will admit that it is obvious that trial and error works, and that — thank you. 
(Applause) Until then, until then I'm going to keep banging on about trial and error and why we should abandon the God complex. 
Because it's so hard to admit our own fallibility. 
It's so uncomfortable. 
And Archie Cochrane understood this as well as anybody. 
There's this one trial he ran many years after World War II. 
He wanted to test out the question of, where is it that patients should recover from heart attacks? 
Should they recover in a specialized cardiac unit in hospital, or should they recover at home? 
All the cardiac doctors tried to shut him down. 
They had the God complex in spades. 
They knew that their hospitals were the right place for patients, and they knew it was very unethical to run any kind of trial or experiment. 
Nevertheless, Archie managed to get permission to do this. 
He ran his trial. 
And after the trial had been running for a little while, he gathered together all his colleagues around his table, and he said, "" Well, gentlemen, we have some preliminary results. 
They're not statistically significant. 
But we have something. 
And it turns out that you're right and I'm wrong. 
It is dangerous for patients to recover from heart attacks at home. 
They should be in hospital. "" And there's this uproar, and all the doctors start pounding the table and saying, "" We always said you were unethical, Archie. 
You're killing people with your clinical trials. You need to shut it down now. 
Shut it down at once. "" And there's this huge hubbub. 
Archie lets it die down. 
And then he says, "" Well that's very interesting, gentlemen, because when I gave you the table of results, I swapped the two columns around. 
It turns out your hospitals are killing people, and they should be at home. 
Would you like to close down the trial now, or should we wait until we have robust results? "" Tumbleweed rolls through the meeting room. 
But Cochrane would do that kind of thing. 
And the reason he would do that kind of thing is because he understood it feels so much better to stand there and say, "" Here in my own little world, I am a god, I understand everything. 
I do not want to have my opinions challenged. 
I do not want to have my conclusions tested. "" It feels so much more comfortable simply to lay down the law. 
Cochrane understood that uncertainty, that fallibility, that being challenged, they hurt. 
And you sometimes need to be shocked out of that. 
Now I'm not going to pretend that this is easy. 
It isn't easy. 
It's incredibly painful. 
And since I started talking about this subject and researching this subject, I've been really haunted by something a Japanese mathematician said on the subject. 
So shortly after the war, this young man, Yutaka Taniyama, developed this amazing conjecture called the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture. 
It turned out to be absolutely instrumental many decades later in proving Fermat's Last Theorem. 
In fact, it turns out it's equivalent to proving Fermat's Last Theorem. 
You prove one, you prove the other. 
But it was always a conjecture. 
Taniyama tried and tried and tried and he could never prove that it was true. 
And shortly before his 30th birthday in 1958, Yutaka Taniyama killed himself. 
His friend, Goro Shimura — who worked on the mathematics with him — many decades later, reflected on Taniyama's life. 
He said, "" He was not a very careful person as a mathematician. 
He made a lot of mistakes. 
But he made mistakes in a good direction. 
I tried to emulate him, but I realized it is very difficult to make good mistakes. "" Thank you. 
(Applause) 

In the middle of my Ph.D., I was hopelessly stuck. 
Every research direction that I tried led to a dead end. 
It seemed like my basic assumptions just stopped working. 
I felt like a pilot flying through the mist, and I lost all sense of direction. 
I stopped shaving. 
I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. 
I felt unworthy of stepping across the gates of the university, because I wasn't like Einstein or Newton or any other scientist whose results I had learned about, because in science, we just learn about the results, not the process. 
And so obviously, I couldn't be a scientist. 
But I had enough support and I made it through and discovered something new about nature. 
This is an amazing feeling of calmness, being the only person in the world who knows a new law of nature. 
And I started the second project in my Ph.D, and it happened again. 
I got stuck and I made it through. 
And I started thinking, maybe there's a pattern here. 
I asked the other graduate students, and they said, "" Yeah, that's exactly what happened to us, except nobody told us about it. "" We'd all studied science as if it's a series of logical steps between question and answer, but doing research is nothing like that. 
At the same time, I was also studying to be an improvisation theater actor. 
So physics by day, and by night, laughing, jumping, singing, playing my guitar. 
Improvisation theater, just like science, goes into the unknown, because you have to make a scene onstage without a director, without a script, without having any idea what you'll portray or what the other characters will do. 
But unlike science, in improvisation theater, they tell you from day one what's going to happen to you when you get onstage. 
You're going to fail miserably. 
You're going to get stuck. 
And we would practice staying creative inside that stuck place. 
For example, we had an exercise where we all stood in a circle, and each person had to do the world's worst tap dance, and everybody else applauded and cheered you on, supporting you onstage. 
When I became a professor and had to guide my own students through their research projects, I realized again, I don't know what to do. 
I'd studied thousands of hours of physics, biology, chemistry, but not one hour, not one concept on how to mentor, how to guide someone to go together into the unknown, about motivation. 
So I turned to improvisation theater, and I told my students from day one what's going to happen when you start research, and this has to do with our mental schema of what research will be like. 
Because you see, whenever people do anything, for example if I want to touch this blackboard, my brain first builds up a schema, a prediction of exactly what my muscles will do before I even start moving my hand, and if I get blocked, if my schema doesn't match reality, that causes extra stress called cognitive dissonance. 
That's why your schemas had better match reality. 
But if you believe the way science is taught, and if you believe textbooks, you're liable to have the following schema of research. 
If A is the question, and B is the answer, then research is a direct path. 
The problem is that if an experiment doesn't work, or a student gets depressed, it's perceived as something utterly wrong and causes tremendous stress. 
And that's why I teach my students a more realistic schema. 
Here's an example where things don't match your schema. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So I teach my students a different schema. 
If A is the question, B is the answer, stay creative in the cloud, and you start going, and experiments don't work, experiments don't work, experiments don't work, experiments don't work, until you reach a place linked with negative emotions where it seems like your basic assumptions have stopped making sense, like somebody yanked the carpet beneath your feet. 
And I call this place the cloud. 
Now you can be lost in the cloud for a day, a week, a month, a year, a whole career, but sometimes, if you're lucky enough and you have enough support, you can see in the materials at hand, or perhaps meditating on the shape of the cloud, a new answer, C, and you decide to go for it. 
And experiments don't work, experiments don't work, but you get there, and then you tell everyone about it by publishing a paper that reads A arrow C, which is a great way to communicate, but as long as you don't forget the path that brought you there. 
Now this cloud is an inherent part of research, an inherent part of our craft, because the cloud stands guard at the boundary. 
It stands guard at the boundary between the known and the unknown, because in order to discover something truly new, at least one of your basic assumptions has to change, and that means that in science, we do something quite heroic. 
Every day, we try to bring ourselves to the boundary between the known and the unknown and face the cloud. 
Now notice that I put B in the land of the known, because we knew about it in the beginning, but C is always more interesting and more important than B. 
So B is essential in order to get going, but C is much more profound, and that's the amazing thing about resesarch. 
Now just knowing that word, the cloud, has been transformational in my research group, because students come to me and say, "Uri, I'm in the cloud," and I say, "" Great, you must be feeling miserable. "" (Laughter) But I'm kind of happy, because we might be close to the boundary between the known and the unknown, and we stand a chance of discovering something truly new, since the way our mind works, it's just knowing that the cloud is normal, it's essential, and in fact beautiful, we can join the Cloud Appreciation Society, and it detoxifies the feeling that something is deeply wrong with me. 
And as a mentor, I know what to do, which is to step up my support for the student, because research in psychology shows that if you're feeling fear and despair, your mind narrows down to very safe and conservative ways of thinking. 
If you'd like to explore the risky paths needed to get out of the cloud, you need other emotions — solidarity, support, hope — that come with your connection from somebody else, so like in improvisation theater, in science, it's best to walk into the unknown together. 
So knowing about the cloud, you also learn from improvisation theater a very effective way to have conversations inside the cloud. 
It's based on the central principle of improvisation theater, so here improvisation theater came to my help again. 
It's called saying "" Yes, and "" to the offers made by other actors. 
That means accepting the offers and building on them, saying, "" Yes, and. "" For example, if one actor says, "Here is a pool of water," and the other actor says, "No, that's just a stage," the improvisation is over. 
It's dead, and everybody feels frustrated. 
That's called blocking. 
If you're not mindful of communications, scientific conversations can have a lot of blocking. 
Saying "" Yes, and "" sounds like this. 
"Here is a pool of water." "Yeah, let's jump in." 
"" Look, there's a whale! Let's grab it by its tail. 
It's pulling us to the moon! "" So saying "" Yes, and "" bypasses our inner critic. 
We all have an inner critic that kind of guards what we say, so people don't think that we're obscene or crazy or unoriginal, and science is full of the fear of appearing unoriginal. 
Saying "" Yes, and "" bypasses the critic and unlocks hidden voices of creativity you didn't even know that you had, and they often carry the answer about the cloud. 
So you see, knowing about the cloud and about saying "" Yes, and "" made my lab very creative. 
Students started playing off of each others' ideas, and we made surprising discoveries in the interface between physics and biology. 
For example, we were stuck for a year trying to understand the intricate biochemical networks inside our cells, and we said, "" We are deeply in the cloud, "" and we had a playful conversation where my student Shai Shen Orr said, "Let's just draw this on a piece of paper, this network," and instead of saying, "" But we've done that so many times and it doesn't work, "" I said, "" Yes, and let's use a very big piece of paper, "" and then Ron Milo said, "" Let's use a gigantic architect's blueprint kind of paper, and I know where to print it, "" and we printed out the network and looked at it, 
and that's where we made our most important discovery, that this complicated network is just made of a handful of simple, repeating interaction patterns like motifs in a stained glass window. 
We call them network motifs, and they're the elementary circuits that help us understand the logic of the way cells make decisions in all organisms, including our body. 
Soon enough, after this, I started being invited to give talks to thousands of scientists across the world, but the knowledge about the cloud and saying "" Yes, and "" just stayed within my own lab, because you see, in science, we don't talk about the process, anything subjective or emotional. 
We talk about the results. 
So there was no way to talk about it in conferences. 
That was unthinkable. 
And I saw scientists in other groups get stuck without even having a word to describe what they're seeing, and their ways of thinking narrowed down to very safe paths, their science didn't reach its full potential, and they were miserable. 
I thought, that's the way it is. 
I'll try to make my lab as creative as possible, and if everybody else does the same, science will eventually become more and more better and better. 
That way of thinking got turned on its head when by chance I went to hear Evelyn Fox Keller give a talk about her experiences as a woman in science. 
And she asked, "" Why is it that we don't talk about the subjective and emotional aspects of doing science? 
It's not by chance. It's a matter of values. "" You see, science seeks knowledge that's objective and rational. 
That's the beautiful thing about science. 
But we also have a cultural myth that the doing of science, what we do every day to get that knowledge, is also only objective and rational, like Mr. Spock. 
And when you label something as objective and rational, automatically, the other side, the subjective and emotional, become labeled as non-science or anti-science or threatening to science, and we just don't talk about it. 
And when I heard that, that science has a culture, everything clicked into place for me, because if science has a culture, culture can be changed, and I can be a change agent working to change the culture of science wherever I could. 
And so the very next lecture I gave in a conference, I talked about my science, and then I talked about the importance of the subjective and emotional aspects of doing science and how we should talk about them, and I looked at the audience, and they were cold. 
They couldn't hear what I was saying in the context of a 10 back-to-back PowerPoint presentation conference. 
And I tried again and again, conference after conference, but I wasn't getting through. 
I was in the cloud. 
And eventually I managed to get out the cloud using improvisation and music. 
Since then, every conference I go to, I give a science talk and a second, special talk called "" Love and fear in the lab, "" and I start it off by doing a song about scientists' greatest fear, which is that we work hard, we discover something new, and somebody else publishes it before we do. 
We call it being scooped, and being scooped feels horrible. 
It makes us afraid to talk to each other, which is no fun, because we came to science to share our ideas and to learn from each other, and so I do a blues song, which — (Applause) — called "" Scooped Again, "" and I ask the audience to be my backup singers, and I tell them, "" Your text is' Scoop, Scoop. '"" It sounds like this: "" Scoop, scoop! "" Sounds like this. 
♪ I've been scooped again ♪ ♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪ And then we go for it. ♪ I've been scooped again ♪ ♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪ ♪ I've been scooped again ♪ ♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪ ♪ I've been scooped again ♪ ♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪ ♪ I've been scooped again ♪ ♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪ 
♪ Oh mama, can't you feel my pain ♪ ♪ Heavens help me, I've been scooped again ♪ (Applause) Thank you. 
Thank you for your backup singing. 
So everybody starts laughing, starts breathing, notices that there's other scientists around them with shared issues, and we start talking about the emotional and subjective things that go on in research. 
It feels like a huge taboo has been lifted. 
Finally, we can talk about this in a scientific conference. 
And scientists have gone on to form peer groups where they meet regularly and create a space to talk about the emotional and subjective things that happen as they're mentoring, as they're going into the unknown, and even started courses about the process of doing science, about going into the unknown together, and many other things. 
So my vision is that, just like every scientist knows the word "" atom, "" that matter is made out of atoms, every scientist would know the words like "" the cloud, "" saying "" Yes, and, "" and science will become much more creative, make many, many more unexpected discoveries for the benefit of us all, and would also be much more playful. 
And what I might ask you to remember from this talk is that next time you face a problem you can't solve in work or in life, there's a word for what you're going to see: the cloud. 
And you can go through the cloud not alone but together with someone who is your source of support to say "" Yes, and "" to your ideas, to help you say "" Yes, and "" to your own ideas, to increase the chance that, through the wisps of the cloud, you'll find that moment of calmness where you get your first glimpse of your unexpected discovery, your C. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown. 
The green agenda is probably the most important agenda and issue of the day. 
And I'd like to share some experience over the last 40 years — we celebrate our fortieth anniversary this year — and to explore and to touch on some observations about the nature of sustainability. 
How far you can anticipate, what follows from it, what are the threats, what are the possibilities, the challenges, the opportunities? 
I think that — I've said in the past, many, many years ago, before anybody even invented the concept of a green agenda, that it wasn't about fashion — it was about survival. 
But what I never said, and what I'm really going to make the point is, that really, green is cool. 
I mean, all the projects which have, in some way, been inspired by that agenda are about a celebratory lifestyle, in a way celebrating the places and the spaces which determine the quality of life. 
I rarely actually quote anything, so I'm going to try and find a piece of paper if I can, [in] which somebody, at the end of last year, ventured the thought about what for that individual, as a kind of important observer, analyst, writer — a guy called Thomas Friedman, who wrote in the Herald Tribune, about 2006. 
He said, "" I think the most important thing to happen in 2006 was that living and thinking green hit Main Street. 
We reached a tipping point this year where living, acting, designing, investing and manufacturing green came to be understood by a critical mass of citizens, entrepreneurs and officials as the most patriotic, capitalistic, geo-political and competitive thing they could do. 
Hence my motto: green is the new red, white and blue. "" And I asked myself, in a way, looking back, "When did that kind of awareness of the planet and its fragility first appear?" 
And I think it was July 20, 1969, when, for the first time, man could look back at planet Earth. 
And, in a way, it was Buckminster Fuller who coined that phrase. 
And before the kind of collapse of the communist system, I was privileged to meet a lot of cosmonauts in Space City and other places in Russia. 
And interestingly, as I think back, they were the first true environmentalists. 
They were filled with a kind of pioneering passion, fired about the problems of the Aral Sea. 
And at that period it was — in a way, a number of things were happening. 
Buckminster Fuller was the kind of green guru — again, a word that had not been coined. 
He was a design scientist, if you like, a poet, but he foresaw all the things that are happening now. 
It's another subject. It's another conversation. 
You can go back to his writings: it's quite extraordinary. 
It was at that time, with an awareness fired by Bucky's prophecies, his concerns as a citizen, as a kind of citizen of the planet, that influenced my thinking and what we were doing at that time. 
And it's a number of projects. 
I select this one because it was 1973, and it was a master plan for one of the Canary Islands. 
And this probably coincided with the time when you had the planet Earth's sourcebook, and you had the hippie movement. 
And there are some of those qualities in this drawing, which seeks to sum up the recommendations. 
And all the components are there which are now in common parlance, in our vocabulary, you know, 30-odd years later: wind energy, recycling, biomass, solar cells. 
And in parallel at that time, there was a very kind of exclusive design club. 
People who were really design conscious were inspired by the work of Dieter Rams, and the objects that he would create for the company called Braun. 
This is going back the mid- '50s,' 60s. 
And despite Bucky's prophecies that everything would be miniaturized and technology would make an incredible style — access to comfort, to amenities — it was very, very difficult to imagine that everything that we see in this image, would be very, very stylishly packaged. 
And that, and more besides, would be in the palm of your hand. 
And I think that that digital revolution now is coming to the point where, as the virtual world, which brings so many people together here, finally connects with the physical world, there is the reality that that has become humanized, so that digital world has all the friendliness, all the immediacy, the orientation of the analog world. 
Probably summed up in a way by the stylish or alternative available here, as we generously had gifted at lunchtime, the [unclear], which is a further kind of development — and again, inspired by the incredible sort of sensual feel. 
A very, very beautiful object. 
So, something which in [the] '50s,' 60s was very exclusive has now become, interestingly, quite inclusive. 
And the reference to the iPod as iconic, and in a way evocative of performance, delivery — quite interesting that [in] the beginning of the year 2007, the Financial Times commented that the Detroit companies envy the halo effect that Toyota has gained from the Prius as the hybrid, energy-conscious vehicle, which rivals the iPod as an iconic product. 
And I think it's very tempting to, in a way, seduce ourselves — as architects, or anybody involved with the design process — that the answer to our problems lies with buildings. 
Buildings are important, but they're only a component of a much bigger picture. 
In other words, as I might seek to demonstrate, if you could achieve the impossible, the equivalent of perpetual motion, you could design a carbon-free house, for example. 
That would be the answer. 
Unfortunately, it's not the answer. 
It's only the beginning of the problem. 
You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit. 
For example, if, in that Bucky-inspired phrase, we draw back and we look at planet Earth, and we take a kind of typical, industrialized society, then the energy consumed would be split between the buildings, 44 percent, transport, 34 percent, and industry. 
But again, that only shows part of the picture. 
If you looked at the buildings together with the associated transport, in other words, the transport of people, which is 26 percent, then 70 percent of the energy consumption is influenced by the way that our cites and infrastructure work together. 
So the problems of sustainability cannot be separated from the nature of the cities, of which the buildings are a part. 
For example, if you take, and you make a comparison between a recent kind of city, what I'll call, simplistically, a North American city — and Detroit is not a bad example, it is very car dependent. 
The city goes out in annular rings, consuming more and more green space, and more and more roads, and more and more energy in the transport of people between the city center — which again, the city center, as it becomes deprived of the living and just becomes commercial, again becomes dead. 
If you compared Detroit with a city of a Northern European example — and Munich is not a bad example of that, with the greater dependence on walking and cycling — then a city which is really only twice as dense, is only using one-tenth of the energy. 
In other words, you take these comparable examples and the energy leap is enormous. 
So basically, if you wanted to generalize, you can demonstrate that as the density increases along the bottom there, that the energy consumed reduces dramatically. 
Of course you can't separate this out from issues like social diversity, mass transit, the ability to be able to walk a convenient distance, the quality of civic spaces. 
But again, you can see Detroit, in yellow at the top, extraordinary consumption, down below Copenhagen. 
And Copenhagen, although it's a dense city, is not dense compared with the really dense cities. 
In the year 2000, a rather interesting thing happened. 
You had for the first time mega-cities, [of] 5 million or more, which were occurring in the developing world. 
And now, out of typically 46 cities, 33 of those mega-cities are in the developing world. 
So you have to ask yourself — the environmental impact of, for example, China or India. 
If you take China, and you just take Beijing, you can see on that traffic system, and the pollution associated with the consumption of energy as the cars expand at the price of the bicycles. 
In other words, if you put onto the roads, as is currently happening, 1,000 new cars every day — statistically, it's the biggest booming auto market in the world — and the half a billion bicycles serving one and a third billion people are reducing. 
And that urbanization is extraordinary, accelerated pace. 
So, if we think of the transition in our society of the movement from the land to the cities, which took 200 years, then that same process is happening in 20 years. 
In other words, it is accelerating by a factor of 10. 
And quite interestingly, over something like a 60-year period, we're seeing the doubling in life expectancy, over that period where the urbanization has trebled. 
If I pull back from that global picture, and I look at the implication over a similar period of time in terms of the technology — which, as a tool, is a tool for designers, and I cite our own experience as a company, and I just illustrate that by a small selection of projects — then how do you measure that change of technology? 
How does it affect the design of buildings? 
And particularly, how can it lead to the creation of buildings which consume less energy, create less pollution and are more socially responsible? 
That story, in terms of buildings, started in the late '60s, early' 70s. 
The one example I take is a corporate headquarters for a company called Willis and Faber, in a small market town in the northeast of England, commuting distance with London. 
And here, the first thing you can see is that this building, the roof is a very warm kind of overcoat blanket, a kind of insulating garden, which is also about the celebration of public space. 
In other words, for this community, they have this garden in the sky. 
So the humanistic ideal is very, very strong in all this work, encapsulated perhaps by one of my early sketches here, where you can see greenery, you can see sunlight, you have a connection with nature. 
And nature is part of the generator, the driver for this building. 
And symbolically, the colors of the interior are green and yellow. 
It has facilities like swimming pools, it has flextime, it has a social heart, a space, you have contact with nature. 
Now this was 1973. 
In 2001, this building received an award. 
And the award was about a celebration for a building which had been in use over a long period of time. 
And the people who'd created it came back: the project managers, the company chairmen then. 
And they were saying, you know, "" The architects, Norman was always going on about designing for the future, and you know, it didn't seem to cost us any more. 
So we humored him, we kept him happy. "" The image at the top, what it doesn't — if you look at it in detail, really what it is saying is you can wire this building. 
This building was wired for change. 
So, in 1975, the image there is of typewriters. 
And when the photograph was taken, it's word processors. 
And what they were saying on this occasion was that our competitors had to build new buildings for the new technology. 
We were fortunate, because in a way our building was future-proofed. 
It anticipated change, even though those changes were not known. 
Round about that design period leading up to this building, I did a sketch, which we pulled out of the archive recently. 
And I was saying, and I wrote, "" But we don't have the time, and we really don't have the immediate expertise at a technical level. "" In other words, we didn't have the technology to do what would be really interesting on that building. 
And that would be to create a kind of three-dimensional bubble — a really interesting overcoat that would naturally ventilate, would breathe and would seriously reduce the energy loads. 
Notwithstanding the fact that the building, as a green building, is very much a pioneering building. 
And if I fast-forward in time, what is interesting is that the technology is now available and celebratory. 
The library of the Free University, which opened last year, is an example of that. 
And again, the transition from one of the many thousands of sketches and computer images to the reality. 
And a combination of devices here, the kind of heavy mass concrete of these book stacks, and the way in which that is enclosed by this skin, which enables the building to be ventilated, to consume dramatically less energy, and where it's really working with the forces of nature. 
And what is interesting is that this is hugely popular by the people who use it. 
Again, coming back to that thing about the lifestyle, and in a way, the ecological agenda is very much at one with the spirit. 
So it's not a kind of sacrifice, quite the reverse. 
I think it's a great — it's a celebration. 
And you can measure the performance, in terms of energy consumption, of that building against a typical library. 
If I show another aspect of that technology then, in a completely different context — this apartment building in the Alps in Switzerland. 
Prefabricated from the most traditional of materials, but that material — because of the technology, the computing ability, the ability to prefabricate, make high-performance components out of timber — very much at the cutting edge. 
And just to give a sort of glimpse of that technology, the ability to plot points in the sky and to transmit, to transfer that information now, directly into the factory. 
So if you cross the border — just across the border — a small factory in Germany, and here you can see the guy with his computer screen, and those points in space are communicated. 
And on the left are the cutting machines, which then, in the factory, enable those individual pieces to be fabricated and plus or minus very, very few millimeters, to be slotted together on site. 
And then interestingly, that building to then be clad in the oldest technology, which is the kind of hand-cut shingles. 
One quarter of a million of them applied by hand as the final finish. 
And again, the way in which that works as a building, for those of us who can enjoy the spaces, to live and visit there. 
If I made the leap into these new technologies, then how did we — what happened before that? 
I mean, you know, what was life like before the mobile phone, the things that you take for granted? 
Well, obviously the building still happened. 
I mean, this is a glimpse of the interior of our Hong Kong bank of 1979, which opened in 1985, with the ability to be able to reflect sunlight deep into the heart of this space here. 
And in the absence of computers, you have to physically model. 
So for example, we would put models under an artificial sky. 
For wind tunnels, we would literally put them in a wind tunnel and blast air, and the many kilometers of cable and so on. 
And the turning point was probably, in our terms, when we had the first computer. 
And that was at the time that we sought to redesign, reinvent the airport. 
This is Terminal Four at Heathrow, typical of any terminal — big, heavy roof, blocking out the sunlight, lots of machinery, big pipes, whirring machinery. 
And Stansted, the green alternative, which uses natural light, is a friendly place: you know where you are, you can relate to the outside. 
And for a large part of its cycle, not needing electric light — electric light, which in turn creates more heat, which creates more cooling loads and so on. 
And at that particular point in time, this was one of the few solitary computers. 
And that's a little image of the tree of Stansted. 
Not going back very far in time, 1990, that's our office. 
And if you looked very closely, you'd see that people were drawing with pencils, and they were pushing, you know, big rulers and triangles. 
It's not that long ago, 17 years, and here we are now. 
I mean, major transformation. 
Going back in time, there was a lady called Valerie Larkin, and in 1987, she had all our information on one disk. 
Now, every week, we have the equivalent of 84 million disks, which record our archival information on past, current and future projects. 
That reaches 21 kilometers into the sky. 
This is the view you would get, if you looked down on that. 
But meanwhile, as you know, wonderful protagonists like Al Gore are noting the inexorable rise in temperature, set in the context of that, interestingly, those buildings which are celebratory and very, very relevant to this place. 
Our Reichstag project, which has a very familiar agenda, I'm sure, as a public place where we sought to, in a way, through a process of advocacy, reinterpret the relationship between society and politicians, public space. And maybe its hidden agenda, an energy manifesto — something that would be free, completely free of fuel as we know it. 
So it would be totally renewable. 
And again, the humanistic sketch, the translation into the public space, but this very, very much a part of the ecology. 
But here, not having to model it for real. 
Obviously the wind tunnel had a place, but the ability now with the computer to explore, to plan, to see how that would work in terms of the forces of nature: natural ventilation, to be able to model the chamber below, and to look at biomass. 
A combination of biomass, aquifers, burning vegetable oil — a process that, quite interestingly, was developed in Eastern Germany, at the time of its dependence on the Soviet Bloc. 
So really, retranslating that technology and developing something which was so clean, it was virtually pollution-free. 
You can measure it again. 
You can compare how that building, in terms of its emission in tons of carbon dioxide per year — at the time that we took that project, over 7,000 tons — what it would have been with natural gas and finally, with the vegetable oil, 450 tons. 
I mean, a 94 percent reduction — virtually clean. 
We can see the same processes at work in terms of the Commerce Bank — its dependence on natural ventilation, the way that you can model those gardens, the way they spiral around. 
But again, very much about the lifestyle, the quality — something that would be more enjoyable as a place to work. 
And again, we can measure the reduction in terms of energy consumption. 
There is an evolution here between the projects, and Swiss Re again develops that a little bit further — the project in the city in London. 
And this sequence shows the buildup of that model. 
But what it shows first, which I think is quite interesting, is that here you see the circle, you see the public space around it. 
What are the other ways of putting the same amount of space on the site? 
If, for example, you seek to do a building which goes right to the edge of the pavement, it's the same amount of space. 
And finally, you profile this, you cut grooves into it. 
The grooves become the kind of green lungs which give views, which give light, ventilation, make the building fresher. 
And you enclose that with something that also is central to its appearance, which is a mesh of triangulated structures — again, in a long connection evocative of some of those works of Buckminster Fuller, and the way in which triangulation can increase performance and also give that building its sense of identity. 
And here, if we look at a detail of the way that the building opens up and breathes into those atria, the way in which now, with a computer, we can model the forces, we can see the high pressure, the low pressure, the way in which the building behaves rather like an aircraft wing. 
So it also has the ability, all the time, regardless of the direction of the wind, to be able to make the building fresh and efficient. 
And unlike conventional buildings, the top of the building is celebratory. 
It's a viewing place for people, not machinery. 
And the base of the building is again about public space. 
Comparing it with a typical building, what happens if we seek to use such design strategies in terms of really large-scale thinking? 
And I'm just going to give two images out of a kind of company research project. 
It's been well known that the Dead Sea is dying. 
The level is dropping, rather like the Aral Sea. 
And the Dead Sea is obviously much lower than the oceans and seas around it. 
So there has been a project which rescues the Dead Sea by creating a pipeline, a pipe, sometimes above the surface, sometimes buried, that will redress that, and will feed from the Gulf of Aqaba into the Dead Sea. 
And our translation of that, using a lot of the thinking built up over the 40 years, is to say, what if that, instead of being just a pipe, what if it is a lifeline? 
What if it is the equivalent, depending on where you are, of the Grand Canal, in terms of tourists, habitation, desalination, agriculture? 
In other words, water is the lifeblood. 
And if you just go back to the previous image, and you look at this area of volatility and hostility, that a unifying design idea as a humanitarian gesture could have the affect of bringing all those warring factions together in a united cause, in terms of something that would be genuinely green and productive in the widest sense. 
Infrastructure at that large scale is also inseparable from communication. 
And whether that communication is the virtual world or it is the physical world, then it's absolutely central to society. 
And how do we make more legible in this growing world, especially in some of the places that I'm talking about — China, for example, which in the next ten years will create 400 new airports. 
Now what form do they take? 
How do you make them more friendly at that scale? 
Hong Kong I refer to as a kind of analog experience in a digital age, because you always have a point of reference. 
So what happens when we take that and you expand that further into the Chinese society? 
And what is interesting is that that produces in a way perhaps the ultimate mega-building. 
It is physically the largest project on the planet at the moment. 
250 — excuse me, 50,000 people working 24 hours, seven days. 
Larger by 17 percent than every terminal put together at Heathrow — built — plus the new, un-built Terminal Five. 
And the challenge here is a building that will be green, that is compact despite its size and is about the human experience of travel, is about friendly, is coming back to that starting point, is very, very much about the lifestyle. 
And perhaps these, in the end, as celebratory spaces. 
As Hubert was talking over lunch, as we sort of engaged in conversation, talked about this, talked about cities. 
Hubert was saying, absolutely correctly, "" These are the new cathedrals. "" And in a way, one aspect of this conversation was triggered on New Year's Eve, when I was talking about the Olympic agenda in China in terms of its green ambitions and aspirations. 
And I was voicing the thought that — it just crossed my mind that New Year's Eve, a sort of symbolic turning point as we move from 2006 to 2007 — that maybe, you know, the future was the most powerful, innovative sort of nation. 
The way in which somebody like Kennedy inspirationally could say, "We put a man on the moon." 
You know, who is going to say that we cracked this thing of the dependence on fossil fuels, with all that being held to ransom by rogue regimes, and so on. 
And that's a concerted platform. 
It's more than one device, you know, it's renewable. 
And I voiced the thought that maybe at the turn of the year, I thought that the inspiration was more likely to come from those other, larger countries out there — the Chinas, the Indias, the Asian-Pacific tigers. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

When I'm starting talks like this, I usually do a whole spiel about sustainability because a lot of people out there don't know what that is. 
This is a crowd that does know what it is, so I'll like just do like the 60-second crib-note version. Right? 
So just bear with me. We'll go real fast, you know? 
Fill in the blanks. 
So, you know, sustainability, small planet. 
Right? Picture a little Earth, circling around the sun. 
You know, about a million years ago, a bunch of monkeys fell out of trees, got a little clever, harnessed fire, invented the printing press, made, you know, luggage with wheels on it. 
And, you know, built the society that we now live in. 
Unfortunately, while this society is, without a doubt, the most prosperous and dynamic the world has ever created, it's got some major, major flaws. 
One of them is that every society has an ecological footprint. 
It has an amount of impact on the planet that's measurable. 
How much stuff goes through your life, how much waste is left behind you. 
And we, at the moment, in our society, have a really dramatically unsustainable level of this. 
We're using up about five planets. 
If everybody on the planet lived the way we did, we'd need between five, six, seven, some people even say 10 planets to make it. 
Clearly we don't have 10 planets. 
Again, you know, mental, visual, 10 planets, one planet, 10 planets, one planet. Right? 
We don't have that. So that's one problem. 
The second problem is that the planet that we have is being used in wildly unfair ways. Right? 
North Americans, such as myself, you know, we're basically sort of wallowing, gluttonous hogs, and we're eating all sorts of stuff. 
And, you know, then you get all the way down to people who live in the Asia-Pacific region, or even more, Africa. 
And people simply do not have enough to survive. 
This is producing all sorts of tensions, all sorts of dynamics that are deeply disturbing. 
And there's more and more people on the way. Right? 
So, this is what the planet's going to look like in 20 years. 
It's going to be a pretty crowded place, at least eight billion people. 
So to make matters even more difficult, it's a very young planet. 
A third of the people on this planet are kids. 
And those kids are growing up in a completely different way than their parents did, no matter where they live. 
They've been exposed to this idea of our society, of our prosperity. 
And they may not want to live exactly like us. 
They may not want to be Americans, or Brits, or Germans, or South Africans, but they want their own version of a life which is more prosperous, and more dynamic, and more, you know, enjoyable. 
And all of these things combine to create an enormous amount of torque on the planet. 
And if we cannot figure out a way to deal with that torque, we are going to find ourselves more and more and more quickly facing situations which are simply unthinkable. 
Everybody in this room has heard the worst-case scenarios. 
I don't need to go into that. 
But I will ask the question, what's the alternative? 
And I would say that, at the moment, the alternative is unimaginable. 
You know, so on the one hand we have the unthinkable; on the other hand we have the unimaginable. 
We don't know yet how to build a society which is environmentally sustainable, which is shareable with everybody on the planet, which promotes stability and democracy and human rights, and which is achievable in the time-frame necessary to make it through the challenges we face. 
We don't know how to do this yet. 
So what's Worldchanging? 
Well, Worldchanging you might think of as being a bit of a news service for the unimaginable future. 
You know, what we're out there doing is looking for examples of tools, models and ideas, which, if widely adopted, would change the game. 
A lot of times, when I do a talk like this, I talk about things that everybody in this room I'm sure has already heard of, but most people haven't. 
So I thought today I'd do something a little different, and talk about what we're looking for, rather than saying, you know, rather than giving you tried-and-true examples. 
Talk about the kinds of things we're scoping out. 
Give you a little peek into our editorial notebook. 
And given that I have 13 minutes to do this, this is going to go kind of quick. 
So, I don't know, just stick with me. Right? 
So, first of all, what are we looking for? Bright Green city. 
One of the biggest levers that we have in the developed world for changing the impact that we have on the planet is changing the way that we live in cities. 
We're already an urban planet; that's especially true in the developed world. 
And people who live in cities in the developed world tend to be very prosperous, and thus use a lot of stuff. 
If we can change the dynamic, by first of all creating cities that are denser and more livable... 
Here, for example, is Vancouver, which if you haven't been there, you ought to go for a visit. It's a fabulous city. 
And they are doing density, new density, better than probably anybody else on the planet right now. 
They're actually managing to talk North Americans out of driving cars, which is a pretty great thing. 
So you have density. You also have growth management. 
You leave aside what is natural to be natural. 
This is in Portland. That is an actual development. 
That land there will remain pasture in perpetuity. 
They've bounded the city with a line. 
Nature, city. Nothing changes. 
Once you do those things, you can start making all sorts of investments. 
You can start doing things like, you know, transit systems that actually work to transport people, in effective and reasonably comfortable manners. 
You can also start to change what you build. 
This is the Beddington Zero Energy Development in London, which is one of the greenest buildings in the world. It's a fabulous place. 
We're able to now build buildings that generate all their own electricity, that recycle much of their water, that are much more comfortable than standard buildings, use all-natural light, etc., and, over time, cost less. 
Green roofs. Bill McDonough covered that last night, so I won't dwell on that too much. 
But once you also have people living in close proximity to each other, one of the things you can do is — as information technologies develop — you can start to have smart places. 
You can start to know where things are. 
When you know where things are, it becomes easier to share them. 
When you share them, you end up using less. 
So one great example is car-share clubs, which are really starting to take off in the U.S., have already taken off in many places in Europe, and are a great example. 
If you're somebody who drives, you know, one day a week, do you really need your own car? 
Another thing that information technology lets us do is start figuring out how to use less stuff by knowing, and by monitoring, the amount we're actually using. 
So, here's a power cord which glows brighter the more energy that you use, which I think is a pretty cool concept, although I think it ought to work the other way around, that it gets brighter the more you don't use. 
But, you know, there may even be a simpler approach. 
We could just re-label things. 
This light switch that reads, on the one hand, flashfloods, and on the other hand, off. 
How we build things can change as well. 
This is a bio-morphic building. 
It takes its inspiration in form from life. 
Many of these buildings are incredibly beautiful, and also much more effective. 
This is an example of bio-mimicry, which is something we're really starting to look a lot more for. 
In this case, you have a shell design which was used to create a new kind of exhaust fan, which is greatly more effective. 
There's a lot of this stuff happening; it's really pretty remarkable. 
I encourage you to look on Worldchanging if you're into it. 
We're starting to cover this more and more. 
There's also neo-biological design, where more and more we're actually using life itself and the processes of life to become part of our industry. 
So this, for example, is hydrogen-generating algae. 
So we have a model in potential, an emerging model that we're looking for of how to take the cities most of us live in, and turn them into Bright Green cities. 
But unfortunately, most of the people on the planet don't live in the cites we live in. 
They live in the emerging megacities of the developing world. 
And there's a statistic I often like to use, which is that we're adding a city of Seattle every four days, a city the size of Seattle to the planet every four days. 
I was giving a talk about two months ago, and this guy, who'd done some work with the U.N., came up to me and was really flustered, and he said, look, you've got that totally wrong; it's totally wrong. 
It's every seven days. 
So, we're adding a city the size of Seattle every seven days, and most of those cities look more like this than the city that you or I live in. 
Most of those cites are growing incredibly quickly. 
They don't have existing infrastructure; they have enormous numbers of people who are struggling with poverty, and enormous numbers of people are trying to figure out how to do things in new ways. 
So what do we need in order to make developing nation megacities into Bright Green megacities? 
Well, the first thing we need is, we need leapfrogging. 
And this is one of the things that we are looking for everywhere. 
The idea behind leapfrogging is that if you are a person, or a country, who is stuck in a situation where you don't have the tools and technologies that you need, there's no reason for you to invest in last generation's technologies. Right? 
That you're much better off, almost universally, looking for a low-cost or locally applicable version of the newest technology. 
One place we're all familiar with seeing this is with cell phones. Right? 
All throughout the developing world, people are going directly to cell phones, skipping the whole landline stage. 
If there are landlines in many developing world cities, they're usually pretty crappy systems that break down a lot and cost enormous amounts of money. 
So I rather like this picture here. 
I particularly like the Ganesh in the background, talking on the cell phone. 
So what we have, increasingly, is cell phones just permeating out through society. 
We've heard all about this here this week, so I won't say too much more than that, other than to say what is true for cell phones is true for all sorts of technologies. 
The second thing is tools for collaboration, be they systems of collaboration, or intellectual property systems which encourage collaboration. Right? 
When you have free ability for people to freely work together and innovate, you get different kinds of solutions. 
And those solutions are accessible in a different way to people who don't have capital. Right? 
So, you know, we have open source software, we have Creative Commons and other kinds of Copyleft solutions. 
And those things lead to things like this. 
This is a Telecentro in Sao Paulo. 
This is a pretty remarkable program using free and open source software, cheap, sort of hacked-together machines, and basically sort of abandoned buildings — has put together a bunch of community centers where people can come in, get high-speed internet access, learn computer programming skills for free. 
And a quarter-million people every year use these now in Sao Paulo. 
And those quarter-million people are some of the poorest people in Sao Paolo. 
I particularly like the little Linux penguin in the back. (Laughter) So one of the things that that's leading to is a sort of southern cultural explosion. 
And one of the things we're really, really interested in at Worldchanging is the ways in which the south is re-identifying itself, and re-categorizing itself in ways that have less and less to do with most of us in this room. 
So it's not, you know, Bollywood isn't just answering Hollywood. Right? 
You know, Brazilian music scene isn't just answering the major labels. 
It's doing something new. There's new things happening. 
There's interplay between them. And, you know, you get amazing things. 
Like, I don't know if any of you have seen the movie "" City of God? "" Yeah, it's a fabulous movie if you haven't seen it. 
And it's all about this question, in a very artistic and indirect kind of way. 
You have other radical examples where the ability to use cultural tools is spreading out. 
These are people who have just been visited by the Internet bookmobile in Uganda. 
And who are waving their first books in the air, which, I just think that's a pretty cool picture. You know? 
So you also have the ability for people to start coming together and acting on their own behalf in political and civic ways, in ways that haven't happened before. 
And as we heard last night, as we've heard earlier this week, are absolutely, fundamentally vital to the ability to craft new solutions, is we've got to craft new political realities. 
And I would personally say that we have to craft new political realities, not only in places like India, Afghanistan, Kenya, Pakistan, what have you, but here at home as well. 
Another world is possible. 
And sort of the big motto of the anti-globalization movement. Right? 
We tweak that a lot. 
We talk about how another world isn't just possible; another world's here. 
That it's not just that we have to sort of imagine there being a different, vague possibility out there, but we need to start acting a little bit more on that possibility. 
We need to start doing things like Lula, President of Brazil. 
How many people knew of Lula before today? 
OK, so, much, much better than the average crowd, I can tell you that. 
So Lula, he's full of problems, full of contradictions, but one of the things that he's doing is, he is putting forward an idea of how we engage in international relations that completely shifts the balance from the standard sort of north-south dialogue into a whole new way of global collaboration. 
I would keep your eye on this fellow. 
Another example of this sort of second superpower thing is the rise of these games that are what we call "" serious play. "" We're looking a lot at this. This is spreading everywhere. 
This is from "" A Force More Powerful. "" It's a little screenshot. 
"" A Force More Powerful "" is a video game that, while you're playing it, it teaches you how to engage in non-violent insurrection and regime change. (Laughter) Here's another one. This is from a game called "" Food Force, "" which is a game that teaches children how to run a refugee camp. 
These things are all contributing in a very dynamic way to a huge rise in, especially in the developing world, in people's interest in and passion for democracy. 
We get so little news about the developing world that we often forget that there are literally millions of people out there struggling to change things to be fairer, freer, more democratic, less corrupt. 
And, you know, we don't hear those stories enough. 
But it's happening all over the place, and these tools are part of what's making it possible. 
Now when you add all those things together, when you add together leapfrogging and new kinds of tools, you know, second superpower stuff, etc., what do you get? 
Well, very quickly, you get a Bright Green future for the developing world. 
You get, for example, green power spread throughout the world. 
You get — this is a building in Hyderabad, India. 
It's the greenest building in the world. 
You get grassroots solutions, things that work for people who have no capital or limited access. 
You get barefoot solar engineers carrying solar panels into the remote mountains. 
You get access to distance medicine. 
These are Indian nurses learning how to use PDAs to access databases that have information that they don't have access to at home in a distant manner. 
You get new tools for people in the developing world. 
These are LED lights that help the roughly billion people out there, for whom nightfall means darkness, to have a new means of operating. 
These are refrigerators that require no electricity; they're pot within a pot design. 
And you get water solutions. Water's one of the most pressing problems. 
Here's a design for harvesting rainwater that's super cheap and available to people in the developing world. 
Here's a design for distilling water using sunlight. 
Here's a fog-catcher, which, if you live in a moist, jungle-like area, will distill water from the air that's clean and drinkable. 
Here's a way of transporting water. 
I just love this, you know — I mean carrying water is such a drag, and somebody just came up with the idea of well, what if you rolled it. Right? 
I mean, that's a great design. 
This is a fabulous invention, LifeStraw. 
Basically you can suck any water through this and it will become drinkable by the time it hits your lips. 
So, you know, people who are in desperate straits can get this. 
This is one of my favorite Worldchanging kinds of things ever. 
This is a merry-go-round invented by the company Roundabout, which pumps water as kids play. You know? 
Seriously — give that one a hand, it's pretty great. 
And the same thing is true for people who are in absolute crisis. Right? 
We're expecting to have upwards of 200 million refugees by the year 2020 because of climate change and political instability. 
How do we help people like that? 
Well, there's all sorts of amazing new humanitarian designs that are being developed in collaborative ways all across the planet. 
Some of those designs include models for acting, such as new models for village instruction in the middle of refugee camps. 
New models for pedagogy for the displaced. 
And we have new tools. 
This is one of my absolute favorite things anywhere. 
Does anyone know what this is? 
Audience: It detects landmines. 
Alex Steffen: Exactly, this is a landmine-detecting flower. 
If you are living in one of the places where the roughly half-billion unaccounted for mines are scattered, you can fling these seeds out into the field. 
And as they grow up, they will grow up around the mines, their roots will detect the chemicals in them, and where the flowers turn red you don't step. 
Yeah, so seeds that could save your life. You know? 
(Applause) I also love it because it seems to me that the example, the tools we use to change the world, ought to be beautiful in themselves. 
You know, that it's not just enough to survive. 
We've got to make something better than what we've got. 
And I think that we will. 
Just to wrap up, in the immortal words of H.G. Wells, I think that better things are on the way. 
I think that, in fact, that "" all of the past is but the beginning of a beginning. 
All that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the awakening. "" I hope that that turns out to be true. 
The people in this room have given me more confidence than ever that it will. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

How do you explain when things don't go as we assume? 
Or better, how do you explain when others are able to achieve things that seem to defy all of the assumptions? 
For example: Why is Apple so innovative? 
Year after year, after year, they're more innovative than all their competition. 
And yet, they're just a computer company. 
They're just like everyone else. 
They have the same access to the same talent, the same agencies, the same consultants, the same media. 
Why is it that Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights Movement? 
He wasn't the only man who suffered in pre-civil rights America, and he certainly wasn't the only great orator of the day. 
And why is it that the Wright brothers were able to figure out controlled, powered man flight when there were certainly other teams who were better qualified, better funded — and they didn't achieve powered man flight, and the Wright brothers beat them to it. 
And this discovery profoundly changed my view on how I thought the world worked, and it even profoundly changed the way in which I operate in it. 
As it turns out, there's a pattern. 
As it turns out, all the great inspiring leaders and organizations in the world, whether it's Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers, they all think, act and communicate the exact same way. 
And it's the complete opposite to everyone else. 
All I did was codify it, and it's probably the world's simplest idea. 
I call it the golden circle. 
This little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire where others aren't. 
Let me define the terms really quickly. 
Every single person, every single organization on the planet knows what they do, 100 percent. 
Some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiated value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP. 
But very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do. 
And by "" why "" I don't mean "" to make a profit. "" That's a result. It's always a result. 
By "" why, "" I mean: What's your purpose? 
What's your cause? What's your belief? 
Why do you get out of bed in the morning? 
As a result, the way we think, we act, the way we communicate is from the outside in, it's obvious. 
But the inspired leaders and the inspired organizations — regardless of their size, regardless of their industry — all think, act and communicate from the inside out. 
I use Apple because they're easy to understand and everybody gets it. 
They're beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. 
Want to buy one? "" "Meh." 
That's how most marketing and sales are done, that's how we communicate interpersonally. 
Here's our new car: It gets great gas mileage, it has leather seats. 
Here's how Apple actually communicates. 
"" Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. 
We believe in thinking differently. 
The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. 
We just happen to make great computers. 
This explains why every single person in this room is perfectly comfortable buying a computer from Apple. 
But we're also perfectly comfortable buying an MP3 player from Apple, or a phone from Apple, or a DVR from Apple. 
Their competitors are equally qualified to make all of these products. 
A few years ago, Gateway came out with flat-screen TVs. 
They're eminently qualified to make flat-screen TVs. 
Nobody bought one. 
Dell came out with MP3 players and PDAs, and they make great quality products, and they can make perfectly well-designed products — and nobody bought one. 
Here's the best part: None of what I'm telling you is my opinion. 
It's all grounded in the tenets of biology. 
Not psychology, biology. 
If you look at a cross-section of the human brain, from the top down, the human brain is actually broken into three major components that correlate perfectly with the golden circle. 
Our newest brain, our Homo sapien brain, our neocortex, corresponds with the "" what "" level. 
The neocortex is responsible for all of our rational and analytical thought and language. 
The middle two sections make up our limbic brains, and our limbic brains are responsible for all of our feelings, like trust and loyalty. 
It's also responsible for all human behavior, all decision-making, and it has no capacity for language. 
In other words, when we communicate from the outside in, yes, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information like features and benefits and facts and figures. 
It just doesn't drive behavior. 
When we can communicate from the inside out, we're talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do. 
This is where gut decisions come from. 
Sometimes you can give somebody all the facts and figures, and they say, "" I know what all the facts and details say, but it just doesn't feel right. "" Why would we use that verb, it doesn't "" feel "" right? 
The best we can muster up is, "I don't know. It just doesn't feel right." 
I hate to break it to you, those aren't other body parts controlling your behavior. 
It's all happening here in your limbic brain, the part of the brain that controls decision-making and not language. 
But if you don't know why you do what you do, and people respond to why you do what you do, then how will you ever get people to vote for you, or buy something from you, or, more importantly, be loyal and want to be a part of what it is that you do. 
The goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe. 
The goal is not just to hire people who need a job; it's to hire people who believe what you believe. 
I always say that, you know, if you hire people just because they can do a job, they'll work for your money, but if they believe what you believe, they'll work for you with blood and sweat and tears. 
Most people don't know about Samuel Pierpont Langley. 
And back in the early 20th century, the pursuit of powered man flight was like the dot com of the day. 
And Samuel Pierpont Langley had, what we assume, to be the recipe for success. 
Samuel Pierpont Langley was given 50,000 dollars by the War Department to figure out this flying machine. 
Money was no problem. 
He held a seat at Harvard and worked at the Smithsonian and was extremely well-connected; he knew all the big minds of the day. 
He hired the best minds money could find and the market conditions were fantastic. 
The New York Times followed him around everywhere, and everyone was rooting for Langley. 
Then how come we've never heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley? 
A few hundred miles away in Dayton Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright, they had none of what we consider to be the recipe for success. 
They had no money; they paid for their dream with the proceeds from their bicycle shop; not a single person on the Wright brothers' team had a college education, not even Orville or Wilbur; and The New York Times followed them around nowhere. 
The difference was, Orville and Wilbur were driven by a cause, by a purpose, by a belief. 
They believed that if they could figure out this flying machine, it'll change the course of the world. 
He was in pursuit of the result. 
He was in pursuit of the riches. 
And lo and behold, look what happened. 
The others just worked for the paycheck. 
They tell stories of how every time the Wright brothers went out, they would have to take five sets of parts, because that's how many times they would crash before supper. 
And, eventually, on December 17th, 1903, the Wright brothers took flight, and no one was there to even experience it. 
He could have said, "" That's an amazing discovery, guys, and I will improve upon your technology, "" but he didn't. 
He wasn't first, he didn't get rich, he didn't get famous, so he quit. 
If you talk about what you believe, you will attract those who believe what you believe. 
But why is it important to attract those who believe what you believe? 
The next 13.5% of our population are our early adopters. 
The only reason these people buy touch-tone phones is because you can't buy rotary phones anymore. 
(Laughter) We all sit at various places at various times on this scale, but what the law of diffusion of innovation tells us is that if you want mass-market success or mass-market acceptance of an idea, you cannot have it until you achieve this tipping point between 15 and 18 percent market penetration, and then the system tips. 
I love asking businesses, "" What's your conversion on new business? "" They love to tell you, "" It's about 10 percent, "" proudly. 
So it's this here, this little gap that you have to close, as Jeffrey Moore calls it, "" Crossing the Chasm "" — because, you see, the early majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first. 
And these guys, the innovators and the early adopters, they're comfortable making those gut decisions. 
They're more comfortable making those intuitive decisions that are driven by what they believe about the world and not just what product is available. 
These are the people who stood in line for six hours to buy an iPhone when they first came out, when you could have bought one off the shelf the next week. 
These are the people who spent 40,000 dollars on flat-screen TVs when they first came out, even though the technology was substandard. 
And, by the way, they didn't do it because the technology was so great; they did it for themselves. 
It's because they wanted to be first. 
People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe. 
In fact, people will do the things that prove what they believe. 
The reason that person bought the iPhone in the first six hours, stood in line for six hours, was because of what they believed about the world, and how they wanted everybody to see them: They were first. 
So let me give you a famous example, a famous failure and a famous success of the law of diffusion of innovation. 
It's a commercial example. 
As we said before, the recipe for success is money and the right people and the right market conditions. 
From the time TiVo came out about eight or nine years ago to this current day, they are the single highest-quality product on the market, hands down, there is no dispute. 
I TiVo stuff on my piece-of-junk Time Warner DVR all the time. 
They've never made money. 
And when they went IPO, their stock was at about 30 or 40 dollars and then plummeted, and it's never traded above 10. 
In fact, I don't think it's even traded above six, except for a couple of little spikes. 
Because you see, when TiVo launched their product, they told us all what they had. 
They said, "" We have a product that pauses live TV, skips commercials, rewinds live TV and memorizes your viewing habits without you even asking. "" And the cynical majority said, "" We don't believe you. 
We don't need it. We don't like it. 
You're scaring us. "" What if they had said, "" If you're the kind of person who likes to have total control over every aspect of your life, boy, do we have a product for you. 
It pauses live TV, skips commercials, memorizes your viewing habits, etc., etc. "" People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it, and what you do simply serves as the proof of what you believe. 
In the summer of 1963, 250,000 people showed up on the mall in Washington to hear Dr. King speak. 
They sent out no invitations, and there was no website to check the date. 
How do you do that? 
Well, Dr. King wasn't the only man in America who was a great orator. 
But he had a gift. 
And people who believed what he believed took his cause, and they made it their own, and they told people. 
And some of those people created structures to get the word out to even more people. 
And lo and behold, 250,000 people showed up on the right day at the right time to hear him speak. 
How many of them showed up for him? 
They showed up for themselves. 
It's what they believed about America that got them to travel in a bus for eight hours to stand in the sun in Washington in the middle of August. 
It's what they believed, and it wasn't about black versus white: 25% of the audience was white. 
And not until all the laws that are made by men are consistent with the laws made by the higher authority will we live in a just world. 
We followed, not for him, but for ourselves. 
By the way, he gave the "" I have a dream "" speech, not the "" I have a plan "" speech. 
(Laughter) Listen to politicians now, with their comprehensive 12-point plans. 
Because there are leaders and there are those who lead. 
Leaders hold a position of power or authority, but those who lead inspire us. 
Whether they're individuals or organizations, we follow those who lead, not because we have to, but because we want to. 
And it's those who start with "" why "" that have the ability to inspire those around them or find others who inspire them. 

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

Cities are the crucible of civilization. 
They have been expanding, urbanization has been expanding, at an exponential rate in the last 200 years so that by the second part of this century, the planet will be completely dominated by cities. 
Cities are the origins of global warming, impact on the environment, health, pollution, disease, finance, economies, energy — they're all problems that are confronted by having cities. 
That's where all these problems come from. 
And the tsunami of problems that we feel we're facing in terms of sustainability questions are actually a reflection of the exponential increase in urbanization across the planet. 
Here's some numbers. 
Two hundred years ago, the United States was less than a few percent urbanized. 
It's now more than 82 percent. 
The planet has crossed the halfway mark a few years ago. 
China's building 300 new cities in the next 20 years. 
Now listen to this: Every week for the foreseeable future, until 2050, every week more than a million people are being added to our cities. 
This is going to affect everything. 
Everybody in this room, if you stay alive, is going to be affected by what's happening in cities in this extraordinary phenomenon. 
However, cities, despite having this negative aspect to them, are also the solution. 
Because cities are the vacuum cleaners and the magnets that have sucked up creative people, creating ideas, innovation, wealth and so on. 
So we have this kind of dual nature. 
And so there's an urgent need for a scientific theory of cities. 
Now these are my comrades in arms. 
This work has been done with an extraordinary group of people, and they've done all the work, and I'm the great bullshitter that tries to bring it all together. 
(Laughter) So here's the problem: This is what we all want. 
The 10 billion people on the planet in 2050 want to live in places like this, having things like this, doing things like this, with economies that are growing like this, not realizing that entropy produces things like this, this, this and this. 
And the question is: Is that what Edinburgh and London and New York are going to look like in 2050, or is it going to be this? 
That's the question. 
I must say, many of the indicators look like this is what it's going to look like, but let's talk about it. 
So my provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious scientific theory of cities. 
And scientific theory means quantifiable — relying on underlying generic principles that can be made into a predictive framework. 
That's the quest. 
Is that conceivable? 
Are there universal laws? 
So here's two questions that I have in my head when I think about this problem. 
The first is: Are cities part of biology? 
Is London a great big whale? 
Is Edinburgh a horse? 
Is Microsoft a great big anthill? 
What do we learn from that? 
We use them metaphorically — the DNA of a company, the metabolism of a city, and so on — is that just bullshit, metaphorical bullshit, or is there serious substance to it? 
And if that is the case, how come that it's very hard to kill a city? 
You could drop an atom bomb on a city, and 30 years later it's surviving. 
Very few cities fail. 
All companies die, all companies. 
And if you have a serious theory, you should be able to predict when Google is going to go bust. 
So is that just another version of this? 
Well we understand this very well. 
That is, you ask any generic question about this — how many trees of a given size, how many branches of a given size does a tree have, how many leaves, what is the energy flowing through each branch, what is the size of the canopy, what is its growth, what is its mortality? 
We have a mathematical framework based on generic universal principles that can answer those questions. 
And the idea is can we do the same for this? 
So the route in is recognizing one of the most extraordinary things about life, is that it is scalable, it works over an extraordinary range. 
This is just a tiny range actually: It's us mammals; we're one of these. 
The same principles, the same dynamics, the same organization is at work in all of these, including us, and it can scale over a range of 100 million in size. 
And that is one of the main reasons life is so resilient and robust — scalability. 
We're going to discuss that in a moment more. 
But you know, at a local level, you scale; everybody in this room is scaled. 
That's called growth. 
Here's how you grew. 
Rat, that's a rat — could have been you. 
We're all pretty much the same. 
And you see, you're very familiar with this. 
You grow very quickly and then you stop. 
And that line there is a prediction from the same theory, based on the same principles, that describes that forest. 
And here it is for the growth of a rat, and those points on there are data points. 
This is just the weight versus the age. 
And you see, it stops growing. 
Very, very good for biology — also one of the reasons for its great resilience. 
Very, very bad for economies and companies and cities in our present paradigm. 
This is what we believe. 
This is what our whole economy is thrusting upon us, particularly illustrated in that left-hand corner: hockey sticks. 
This is a bunch of software companies — and what it is is their revenue versus their age — all zooming away, and everybody making millions and billions of dollars. 
Okay, so how do we understand this? 
So let's first talk about biology. 
This is explicitly showing you how things scale, and this is a truly remarkable graph. 
What is plotted here is metabolic rate — how much energy you need per day to stay alive — versus your weight, your mass, for all of us bunch of organisms. 
And it's plotted in this funny way by going up by factors of 10, otherwise you couldn't get everything on the graph. 
And what you see if you plot it in this slightly curious way is that everybody lies on the same line. 
Despite the fact that this is the most complex and diverse system in the universe, there's an extraordinary simplicity being expressed by this. 
It's particularly astonishing because each one of these organisms, each subsystem, each cell type, each gene, has evolved in its own unique environmental niche with its own unique history. 
And yet, despite all of that Darwinian evolution and natural selection, they've been constrained to lie on a line. 
Something else is going on. 
Before I talk about that, I've written down at the bottom there the slope of this curve, this straight line. 
It's three-quarters, roughly, which is less than one — and we call that sublinear. 
And here's the point of that. 
It says that, if it were linear, the steepest slope, then doubling the size you would require double the amount of energy. 
But it's sublinear, and what that translates into is that, if you double the size of the organism, you actually only need 75 percent more energy. 
So a wonderful thing about all of biology is that it expresses an extraordinary economy of scale. 
The bigger you are systematically, according to very well-defined rules, less energy per capita. 
Now any physiological variable you can think of, any life history event you can think of, if you plot it this way, looks like this. 
There is an extraordinary regularity. 
So you tell me the size of a mammal, I can tell you at the 90 percent level everything about it in terms of its physiology, life history, etc. 
And the reason for this is because of networks. 
All of life is controlled by networks — from the intracellular through the multicellular through the ecosystem level. 
And you're very familiar with these networks. 
That's a little thing that lives inside an elephant. 
And here's the summary of what I'm saying. 
If you take those networks, this idea of networks, and you apply universal principles, mathematizable, universal principles, all of these scalings and all of these constraints follow, including the description of the forest, the description of your circulatory system, the description within cells. 
One of the things I did not stress in that introduction was that, systematically, the pace of life decreases as you get bigger. 
Heart rates are slower; you live longer; diffusion of oxygen and resources across membranes is slower, etc. 
The question is: Is any of this true for cities and companies? 
So is London a scaled up Birmingham, which is a scaled up Brighton, etc., etc.? 
Is New York a scaled up San Francisco, which is a scaled up Santa Fe? 
Don't know. We will discuss that. 
But they are networks, and the most important network of cities is you. 
Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals. 
Here's just a symbolic picture of that. 
And here's scaling of cities. 
This shows that in this very simple example, which happens to be a mundane example of number of petrol stations as a function of size — plotted in the same way as the biology — you see exactly the same kind of thing. 
There is a scaling. 
That is that the number of petrol stations in the city is now given to you when you tell me its size. 
The slope of that is less than linear. 
There is an economy of scale. 
Less petrol stations per capita the bigger you are — not surprising. 
But here's what's surprising. 
It scales in the same way everywhere. 
This is just European countries, but you do it in Japan or China or Colombia, always the same with the same kind of economy of scale to the same degree. 
And any infrastructure you look at — whether it's the length of roads, length of electrical lines — anything you look at has the same economy of scale scaling in the same way. 
It's an integrated system that has evolved despite all the planning and so on. 
But even more surprising is if you look at socio-economic quantities, quantities that have no analog in biology, that have evolved when we started forming communities eight to 10,000 years ago. 
The top one is wages as a function of size plotted in the same way. 
And the bottom one is you lot — super-creatives plotted in the same way. 
And what you see is a scaling phenomenon. 
But most important in this, the exponent, the analog to that three-quarters for the metabolic rate, is bigger than one — it's about 1.15 to 1.2. 
Here it is, which says that the bigger you are the more you have per capita, unlike biology — higher wages, more super-creative people per capita as you get bigger, more patents per capita, more crime per capita. 
And we've looked at everything: more AIDS cases, flu, etc. 
And here, they're all plotted together. 
Just to show you what we plotted, here is income, GDP — GDP of the city — crime and patents all on one graph. 
And you can see, they all follow the same line. 
And here's the statement. 
If you double the size of a city from 100,000 to 200,000, from a million to two million, 10 to 20 million, it doesn't matter, then systematically you get a 15 percent increase in wages, wealth, number of AIDS cases, number of police, anything you can think of. 
It goes up by 15 percent, and you have a 15 percent savings on the infrastructure. 
This, no doubt, is the reason why a million people a week are gathering in cities. 
Because they think that all those wonderful things — like creative people, wealth, income — is what attracts them, forgetting about the ugly and the bad. 
What is the reason for this? 
Well I don't have time to tell you about all the mathematics, but underlying this is the social networks, because this is a universal phenomenon. 
This 15 percent rule is true no matter where you are on the planet — Japan, Chile, Portugal, Scotland, doesn't matter. 
Always, all the data shows it's the same, despite the fact that these cities have evolved independently. 
Something universal is going on. 
The universality, to repeat, is us — that we are the city. 
And it is our interactions and the clustering of those interactions. 
So there it is, I've said it again. 
So if it is those networks and their mathematical structure, unlike biology, which had sublinear scaling, economies of scale, you had the slowing of the pace of life as you get bigger. 
If it's social networks with super-linear scaling — more per capita — then the theory says that you increase the pace of life. 
The bigger you are, life gets faster. 
On the left is the heart rate showing biology. 
On the right is the speed of walking in a bunch of European cities, showing that increase. 
Lastly, I want to talk about growth. 
This is what we had in biology, just to repeat. 
Economies of scale gave rise to this sigmoidal behavior. 
You grow fast and then stop — part of our resilience. 
That would be bad for economies and cities. 
And indeed, one of the wonderful things about the theory is that if you have super-linear scaling from wealth creation and innovation, then indeed you get, from the same theory, a beautiful rising exponential curve — lovely. 
And in fact, if you compare it to data, it fits very well with the development of cities and economies. 
But it has a terrible catch, and the catch is that this system is destined to collapse. 
And it's destined to collapse for many reasons — kind of Malthusian reasons — that you run out of resources. 
And how do you avoid that? Well we've done it before. 
What we do is, as we grow and we approach the collapse, a major innovation takes place and we start over again, and we start over again as we approach the next one, and so on. 
So there's this continuous cycle of innovation that is necessary in order to sustain growth and avoid collapse. 
The catch, however, to this is that you have to innovate faster and faster and faster. 
So the image is that we're not only on a treadmill that's going faster, but we have to change the treadmill faster and faster. 
We have to accelerate on a continuous basis. 
And the question is: Can we, as socio-economic beings, avoid a heart attack? 
So lastly, I'm going to finish up in this last minute or two asking about companies. 
See companies, they scale. 
The top one, in fact, is Walmart on the right. 
It's the same plot. 
This happens to be income and assets versus the size of the company as denoted by its number of employees. 
We could use sales, anything you like. 
There it is: after some little fluctuations at the beginning, when companies are innovating, they scale beautifully. 
And we've looked at 23,000 companies in the United States, may I say. 
And I'm only showing you a little bit of this. 
What is astonishing about companies is that they scale sublinearly like biology, indicating that they're dominated, not by super-linear innovation and ideas; they become dominated by economies of scale. 
In that interpretation, by bureaucracy and administration, and they do it beautifully, may I say. 
So if you tell me the size of some company, some small company, I could have predicted the size of Walmart. 
If it has this sublinear scaling, the theory says we should have sigmoidal growth. 
There's Walmart. Doesn't look very sigmoidal. 
That's what we like, hockey sticks. 
But you notice, I've cheated, because I've only gone up to '94. 
Let's go up to 2008. 
That red line is from the theory. 
So if I'd have done this in 1994, I could have predicted what Walmart would be now. 
And then this is repeated across the entire spectrum of companies. 
There they are. That's 23,000 companies. 
They all start looking like hockey sticks, they all bend over, and they all die like you and me. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So my name is Amy Webb, and a few years ago I found myself at the end of yet another fantastic relationship that came burning down in a spectacular fashion. 
I don't understand why this keeps happening. 
I turned to my grandmother, who always had plenty of advice, and she said, "" Stop being so picky. 
You've got to date around. 
And most importantly, true love will find you when you least expect it. "" Now as it turns out, I'm somebody who thinks a lot about data, as you'll soon find. 
I also have a very tight-knit family, and I'm very, very close with my sister, and as a result, I wanted to have the same type of family when I grew up. 
So I'm at the end of this bad breakup, I'm 30 years old, I figure I'm probably going to have to date somebody for about six months before I'm ready to get monogamous and before we can sort of cohabitate, and we have to do that for a while before we can get engaged. 
And if I want to start having children by the time I'm 35, that meant that I would have had to have been on my way to marriage five years ago. 
So that wasn't going to work. 
Population of Philadelphia: it has 1.5 million people. 
I figure about half of that are men, so that takes the number down to 750,000. 
I'm looking for a guy between the ages of 30 and 36, which was only four percent of the population, so now I'm dealing with the possibility of 30,000 men. 
I figure I'm attracted to maybe one out of 10 of those men, and there was no way I was going to deal with somebody who was an avid golfer. 
So that basically meant there were 35 men for me that I could possibly date in the entire city of Philadelphia. 
In the meantime, my very large Jewish family was already all married and well on their way to having lots and lots of children, and I felt like I was under tremendous peer pressure to get my life going already. 
So I have two possible strategies at this point I'm sort of figuring out. 
One, I can take my grandmother's advice and sort of least-expect my way into maybe bumping into the one out of 35 possible men in the entire 1.5-million-person city of Philadelphia, or I could try online dating. 
Now, I like the idea of online dating, because it's predicated on an algorithm, and that's really just a simple way of saying I've got a problem, I'm going to use some data, run it through a system and get to a solution. 
So online dating is the second most popular way that people now meet each other, but as it turns out, algorithms have been around for thousands of years in almost every culture. 
In fact, in Judaism, there were matchmakers a long time ago, and though they didn't have an explicit algorithm per se, they definitely were running through formulas in their heads, like, is the girl going to like the boy? 
So I decided to sign on. 
Now, there was one small catch. 
As I'm signing on to the various dating websites, as it happens, I was really, really busy. 
But that actually wasn't the biggest problem. 
The biggest problem is that I hate filling out questionnaires of any kind, and I certainly don't like questionnaires that are like Cosmo quizzes. 
(Laughter) So in the descriptive part up top, I said that I was an award-winning journalist and a future thinker. 
I talked a lot about JavaScript. 
These algorithms had a sea full of men that wanted to take me out on lots of dates — what turned out to be truly awful dates. 
There was this guy Steve, the I.T. guy. 
The algorithm matched us up because we share a love of gadgets, we share a love of math and data and '80s music, and so I agreed to go out with him. 
And we went in, and right off the bat, our conversation really wasn't taking flight, but he was ordering a lot of food. 
In fact, he didn't even bother looking at the menu. 
He was ordering multiple appetizers, multiple entrées, for me as well, and suddenly there are piles and piles of food on our table, also lots and lots of bottles of wine. 
So we're nearing the end of our conversation and the end of dinner, and I've decided Steve the I.T. guy and I are really just not meant for each other, but we'll part ways as friends, when he gets up to go to the bathroom, and in the meantime, the bill comes to our table. 
I am totally down with splitting the bill. 
(Audience gasps) So needless to say, I was not having a good night. 
So I run home, I call my mother, I call my sister, and as I do, at the end of each one of these terrible, terrible dates, I regale them with the details. 
And they say to me, "Stop complaining." 
So I said, fine, from here on out I'm only going on dates where I know there's Wi-Fi, and I'm bringing my laptop. 
(Laughter) So I started tracking things like really stupid, awkward, sexual remarks; bad vocabulary; the number of times a man forced me to high-five him. (Laughter) 
So as it turns out, for some reason, men who drink Scotch reference kinky sex immediately. 
There were just bad for me. 
And as it happens, the algorithms that were setting us up, they weren't bad either. 
These algorithms were doing exactly what they were designed to do, which was to take our user-generated information, in my case, my résumé, and match it up with other people's information. 
See, the real problem here is that, while the algorithms work just fine, you and I don't, when confronted with blank windows where we're supposed to input our information online. 
The other problem is that these websites are asking us questions like, are you a dog person or a cat person? 
So I said fine, I've got a new plan. 
I'm going to keep using these online dating sites, but I'm going to treat them as databases, and rather than waiting for an algorithm to set me up, I think I'm going to try reverse-engineering this entire system. 
So knowing that there was superficial data that was being used to match me up with other people, I decided instead to ask my own questions. 
I wanted somebody was Jew-ish, so I was looking for somebody who had the same background and thoughts on our culture, but wasn't going to force me to go to shul every Friday and Saturday. 
I wanted somebody who worked hard, because work for me is extremely important, but not too hard. 
I also wanted somebody who not only wanted two children, but was going to have the same attitude toward parenting that I do, so somebody who was going to be totally okay with forcing our child to start taking piano lessons at age three, and also maybe computer science classes if we could wrangle it. 
(Laughter) So I now have these 72 different data points, which, to be fair, is a lot. 
I broke it into a top tier and a second tier of points, and I ranked everything starting at 100 and going all the way down to 91, and listing things like I was looking for somebody who was really smart, who would challenge and stimulate me, and balancing that with a second tier and a second set of points. 
These things were also important to me but not necessarily deal-breakers. 
(Laughter) So once I had all this done, I then built a scoring system, because what I wanted to do was to sort of mathematically calculate whether or not I thought the guy that I found online would be a match with me. 
I figured there would be a minimum of 700 points before I would agree to email somebody or respond to an email message. 
For 900 points, I'd agree to go out on a date, and I wouldn't even consider any kind of relationship before somebody had crossed the 1,500 point threshold. 
Well, as it turns out, this worked pretty well. 
I found Jewishdoc57 who's incredibly good-looking, incredibly well-spoken, he had hiked Mt. Fuji, he had walked along the Great Wall. 
And I guess the one variable that I haven't considered is the competition. 
Who are all of the other women on these dating sites? 
I found SmileyGirl1978. 
She said she was a "" Fun girl who is Happy and Outgoing. "" She listed her job as "" teacher. "" She said she is "" silly, nice and friendly. "" She likes to make people laugh "" alot. "" At this moment I knew, clicking profile after profile that looked like this, that I needed to do some market research. 
Now, before I lose all of you — (Laughter) — understand that I did this strictly to gather data about everybody else in the system. 
I didn't carry on crazy Catfish-style relationships with anybody. 
But I didn't want everybody's data. 
I only wanted data on the women who were going to be attracted to the type of man that I really, really wanted to marry. 
When I released these men into the wild, I did follow some rules. 
So I didn't reach out to any woman first. 
I just waited to see who these profiles were going to attract, and mainly what I was looking at was two different data sets. 
So I was looking at qualitative data, so what was the humor, the tone, the voice, the communication style that these women shared in common? 
And also quantitative data, so what was the average length of their profile, how much time was spent between messages? 
What I was trying to get at here was that I figured, in person, I would be just as competitive as a SmileyGirl1978. 
I wanted to figure out how to maximize my own profile online. 
Well, one month later, I had a lot of data, and I was able to do another analysis. 
And as it turns out, content matters a lot. 
So smart people tend to write a lot — 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 words about themselves, which may all be very, very interesting. 
The challenge here, though, is that the popular men and women are sticking to 97 words on average that are written very, very well, even though it may not seem like it all the time. 
The other hallmark of the people who do this well is that they're using non-specific language. 
So in my case, "" The English Patient "" is my most favorite movie ever, but it doesn't work to use that in a profile, because that's a superficial data point, and somebody may disagree and decide they don't want to go out because they didn't like sitting through the three-hour movie. 
So this is a word cloud highlighting the most popular words that were used by the most popular women, words like "" fun "" and "" girl "" and "" love. "" And what I realized was not that I had to dumb down my own profile. 
Remember, I'm somebody who said that I speak fluent Japanese and I know JavaScript and I was okay with that. 
And as it turns out, timing is also really, really important. 
Just because you have access to somebody's mobile phone number or their instant message account and it's 2 o'clock in the morning and you happen to be awake, doesn't mean that that's a good time to communicate with those people. 
The popular women on these online sites spend an average of 23 hours in between each communication. 
And finally — there were the photos. 
They all looked really great, which turned out to be in sharp contrast to what I had uploaded. 
(Laughter) Once I had all of this information, I was able to create a super profile, so it was still me, but it was me optimized now for this ecosystem. 
I was the most popular person online. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And as it turns out, lots and lots of men wanted to date me. 
So I call my mom, I call my sister, I call my grandmother. 
They said, "" What? You're still being too damn picky. "" Well, not too long after that, I found this guy, Thevenin, and he said that he was culturally Jewish, he said that his job was an arctic baby seal hunter, which I thought was very clever. 
He talked in detail about travel. 
He made a lot of really interesting cultural references. 
Three weeks later, we met up in person for what turned out to be a 14-hour-long conversation that went from coffee shop to restaurant to another coffee shop to another restaurant, and when he dropped me back off at my house that night I re-scored him — [1,050 points!] Thought, you know what, this entire time, I haven't been picky enough. 
Well, a year and a half after that, we were non-cruise ship traveling through Petra, Jordan, when he got down on his knee and proposed. 
A year after that, we were married, and about a year and a half after that, our daughter, Petra, was born. 
(Applause) [What it means...] Obviously, I'm having a fabulous life, so — (Laughter) The question is, what does all of this mean for you? 
Well, as it turns out, there is an algorithm for love. 
It's just not the ones that we're being presented with online. 
In fact, it's something that you write yourself. 
So whether you're looking for a husband or a wife or you're trying to find your passion or you're trying to start a business, all you have to really do is figure out your own framework and play by your own rules, and feel free to be as picky as you want. 
Well, on my wedding day, I had a conversation again with my grandmother, and she said, "" All right, maybe I was wrong. 
It looks like you did come up with a really, really great system. 

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

Like many of you, I'm one of the lucky people. 
I was born to a family where education was pervasive. 
I'm a third-generation PhD, a daughter of two academics. 
In my childhood, I played around in my father's university lab. 
So it was taken for granted that I attend some of the best universities, which in turn opened the door to a world of opportunity. 
Unfortunately, most of the people in the world are not so lucky. 
In some parts of the world, for example, South Africa, education is just not readily accessible. 
In South Africa, the educational system was constructed in the days of apartheid for the white minority. 
And as a consequence, today there is just not enough spots for the many more people who want and deserve a high quality education. 
That scarcity led to a crisis in January of this year at the University of Johannesburg. 
There were a handful of positions left open from the standard admissions process, and the night before they were supposed to open that for registration, thousands of people lined up outside the gate in a line a mile long, hoping to be first in line to get one of those positions. 
When the gates opened, there was a stampede, and 20 people were injured and one woman died. 
She was a mother who gave her life trying to get her son a chance at a better life. 
But even in parts of the world like the United States where education is available, it might not be within reach. 
There has been much discussed in the last few years about the rising cost of health care. 
What might not be quite as obvious to people is that during that same period the cost of higher education tuition has been increasing at almost twice the rate, for a total of 559 percent since 1985. 
This makes education unaffordable for many people. 
Finally, even for those who do manage to get the higher education, the doors of opportunity might not open. 
Only a little over half of recent college graduates in the United States who get a higher education actually are working in jobs that require that education. 
This, of course, is not true for the students who graduate from the top institutions, but for many others, they do not get the value for their time and their effort. 
Tom Friedman, in his recent New York Times article, captured, in the way that no one else could, the spirit behind our effort. 
He said the big breakthroughs are what happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary. 
I've talked about what's desperately necessary. 
Let's talk about what's suddenly possible. 
What's suddenly possible was demonstrated by three big Stanford classes, each of which had an enrollment of 100,000 people or more. 
So to understand this, let's look at one of those classes, the Machine Learning class offered by my colleague and cofounder Andrew Ng. 
Andrew teaches one of the bigger Stanford classes. 
It's a Machine Learning class, and it has 400 people enrolled every time it's offered. 
When Andrew taught the Machine Learning class to the general public, it had 100,000 people registered. 
So to put that number in perspective, for Andrew to reach that same size audience by teaching a Stanford class, he would have to do that for 250 years. 
Of course, he'd get really bored. 
So, having seen the impact of this, Andrew and I decided that we needed to really try and scale this up, to bring the best quality education to as many people as we could. 
So we formed Coursera, whose goal is to take the best courses from the best instructors at the best universities and provide it to everyone around the world for free. 
We currently have 43 courses on the platform from four universities across a range of disciplines, and let me show you a little bit of an overview of what that looks like. 
(Video) Robert Ghrist: Welcome to Calculus. 
Ezekiel Emanuel: Fifty million people are uninsured. 
Scott Page: Models help us design more effective institutions and policies. 
We get unbelievable segregation. 
Scott Klemmer: So Bush imagined that in the future, you'd wear a camera right in the center of your head. 
Mitchell Duneier: Mills wants the student of sociology to develop the quality of mind... 
RG: Hanging cable takes on the form of a hyperbolic cosine. 
Nick Parlante: For each pixel in the image, set the red to zero. 
Paul Offit:... Vaccine allowed us to eliminate polio virus. 
Dan Jurafsky: Does Lufthansa serve breakfast and San Jose? Well, that sounds funny. 
Daphne Koller: So this is which coin you pick, and this is the two tosses. 
Andrew Ng: So in large-scale machine learning, we'd like to come up with computational... 
(Applause) DK: It turns out, maybe not surprisingly, that students like getting the best content from the best universities for free. 
Since we opened the website in February, we now have 640,000 students from 190 countries. 
We have 1.5 million enrollments, 6 million quizzes in the 15 classes that have launched so far have been submitted, and 14 million videos have been viewed. 
But it's not just about the numbers, it's also about the people. 
Whether it's Akash, who comes from a small town in India and would never have access in this case to a Stanford-quality course and would never be able to afford it. 
Or Jenny, who is a single mother of two and wants to hone her skills so that she can go back and complete her master's degree. 
Or Ryan, who can't go to school, because his immune deficient daughter can't be risked to have germs come into the house, so he couldn't leave the house. 
I'm really glad to say — recently, we've been in correspondence with Ryan — that this story had a happy ending. 
Baby Shannon — you can see her on the left — is doing much better now, and Ryan got a job by taking some of our courses. 
So what made these courses so different? 
After all, online course content has been available for a while. 
What made it different was that this was real course experience. 
It started on a given day, and then the students would watch videos on a weekly basis and do homework assignments. 
And these would be real homework assignments for a real grade, with a real deadline. 
You can see the deadlines and the usage graph. 
These are the spikes showing that procrastination is global phenomenon. 
(Laughter) At the end of the course, the students got a certificate. 
They could present that certificate to a prospective employer and get a better job, and we know many students who did. 
Some students took their certificate and presented this to an educational institution at which they were enrolled for actual college credit. 
So these students were really getting something meaningful for their investment of time and effort. 
Let's talk a little bit about some of the components that go into these courses. 
The first component is that when you move away from the constraints of a physical classroom and design content explicitly for an online format, you can break away from, for example, the monolithic one-hour lecture. 
You can break up the material, for example, into these short, modular units of eight to 12 minutes, each of which represents a coherent concept. 
Students can traverse this material in different ways, depending on their background, their skills or their interests. 
So, for example, some students might benefit from a little bit of preparatory material that other students might already have. 
Other students might be interested in a particular enrichment topic that they want to pursue individually. 
So this format allows us to break away from the one-size-fits-all model of education, and allows students to follow a much more personalized curriculum. 
Of course, we all know as educators that students don't learn by sitting and passively watching videos. 
Perhaps one of the biggest components of this effort is that we need to have students who practice with the material in order to really understand it. 
There's been a range of studies that demonstrate the importance of this. 
This one that appeared in Science last year, for example, demonstrates that even simple retrieval practice, where students are just supposed to repeat what they already learned gives considerably improved results on various achievement tests down the line than many other educational interventions. 
We've tried to build in retrieval practice into the platform, as well as other forms of practice in many ways. 
For example, even our videos are not just videos. 
Every few minutes, the video pauses and the students get asked a question. 
(Video) SP:... These four things. Prospect theory, hyperbolic discounting, status quo bias, base rate bias. They're all well documented. 
So they're all well documented deviations from rational behavior. 
DK: So here the video pauses, and the student types in the answer into the box and submits. Obviously they weren't paying attention. 
(Laughter) So they get to try again, and this time they got it right. 
There's an optional explanation if they want. 
And now the video moves on to the next part of the lecture. 
This is a kind of simple question that I as an instructor might ask in class, but when I ask that kind of a question in class, 80 percent of the students are still scribbling the last thing I said, 15 percent are zoned out on Facebook, and then there's the smarty pants in the front row who blurts out the answer before anyone else has had a chance to think about it, and I as the instructor am terribly gratified that somebody actually knew the answer. 
And so the lecture moves on before, really, most of the students have even noticed that a question had been asked. 
Here, every single student has to engage with the material. 
And of course these simple retrieval questions are not the end of the story. 
One needs to build in much more meaningful practice questions, and one also needs to provide the students with feedback on those questions. 
Now, how do you grade the work of 100,000 students if you do not have 10,000 TAs? 
The answer is, you need to use technology to do it for you. 
Now, fortunately, technology has come a long way, and we can now grade a range of interesting types of homework. 
In addition to multiple choice and the kinds of short answer questions that you saw in the video, we can also grade math, mathematical expressions as well as mathematical derivations. 
We can grade models, whether it's financial models in a business class or physical models in a science or engineering class and we can grade some pretty sophisticated programming assignments. 
Let me show you one that's actually pretty simple but fairly visual. 
This is from Stanford's Computer Science 101 class, and the students are supposed to color-correct that blurry red image. 
They're typing their program into the browser, and you can see they didn't get it quite right, Lady Liberty is still seasick. 
And so, the student tries again, and now they got it right, and they're told that, and they can move on to the next assignment. 
This ability to interact actively with the material and be told when you're right or wrong is really essential to student learning. 
Now, of course we cannot yet grade the range of work that one needs for all courses. 
Specifically, what's lacking is the kind of critical thinking work that is so essential in such disciplines as the humanities, the social sciences, business and others. 
So we tried to convince, for example, some of our humanities faculty that multiple choice was not such a bad strategy. 
That didn't go over really well. 
So we had to come up with a different solution. 
And the solution we ended up using is peer grading. 
It turns out that previous studies show, like this one by Saddler and Good, that peer grading is a surprisingly effective strategy for providing reproducible grades. 
It was tried only in small classes, but there it showed, for example, that these student-assigned grades on the y-axis are actually very well correlated with the teacher-assigned grade on the x-axis. 
What's even more surprising is that self-grades, where the students grade their own work critically — so long as you incentivize them properly so they can't give themselves a perfect score — are actually even better correlated with the teacher grades. 
And so this is an effective strategy that can be used for grading at scale, and is also a useful learning strategy for the students, because they actually learn from the experience. 
So we now have the largest peer-grading pipeline ever devised, where tens of thousands of students are grading each other's work, and quite successfully, I have to say. 
But this is not just about students sitting alone in their living room working through problems. 
Around each one of our courses, a community of students had formed, a global community of people around a shared intellectual endeavor. 
What you see here is a self-generated map from students in our Princeton Sociology 101 course, where they have put themselves on a world map, and you can really see the global reach of this kind of effort. 
Students collaborated in these courses in a variety of different ways. 
First of all, there was a question and answer forum, where students would pose questions, and other students would answer those questions. 
And the really amazing thing is, because there were so many students, it means that even if a student posed a question at 3 o'clock in the morning, somewhere around the world, there would be somebody who was awake and working on the same problem. 
And so, in many of our courses, the median response time for a question on the question and answer forum was 22 minutes. 
Which is not a level of service I have ever offered to my Stanford students. 
(Laughter) And you can see from the student testimonials that students actually find that because of this large online community, they got to interact with each other in many ways that were deeper than they did in the context of the physical classroom. 
Students also self-assembled, without any kind of intervention from us, into small study groups. 
Some of these were physical study groups along geographical constraints and met on a weekly basis to work through problem sets. 
This is the San Francisco study group, but there were ones all over the world. 
Others were virtual study groups, sometimes along language lines or along cultural lines, and on the bottom left there, you see our multicultural universal study group where people explicitly wanted to connect with people from other cultures. 
There are some tremendous opportunities to be had from this kind of framework. 
The first is that it has the potential of giving us a completely unprecedented look into understanding human learning. 
Because the data that we can collect here is unique. 
You can collect every click, every homework submission, every forum post from tens of thousands of students. 
So you can turn the study of human learning from the hypothesis-driven mode to the data-driven mode, a transformation that, for example, has revolutionized biology. 
You can use these data to understand fundamental questions like, what are good learning strategies that are effective versus ones that are not? 
And in the context of particular courses, you can ask questions like, what are some of the misconceptions that are more common and how do we help students fix them? 
So here's an example of that, also from Andrew's Machine Learning class. 
This is a distribution of wrong answers to one of Andrew's assignments. 
The answers happen to be pairs of numbers, so you can draw them on this two-dimensional plot. 
Each of the little crosses that you see is a different wrong answer. 
The big cross at the top left is where 2,000 students gave the exact same wrong answer. 
Now, if two students in a class of 100 give the same wrong answer, you would never notice. 
But when 2,000 students give the same wrong answer, it's kind of hard to miss. 
So Andrew and his students went in, looked at some of those assignments, understood the root cause of the misconception, and then they produced a targeted error message that would be provided to every student whose answer fell into that bucket, which means that students who made that same mistake would now get personalized feedback telling them how to fix their misconception much more effectively. 
So this personalization is something that one can then build by having the virtue of large numbers. 
Personalization is perhaps one of the biggest opportunities here as well, because it provides us with the potential of solving a 30-year-old problem. 
Educational researcher Benjamin Bloom, in 1984, posed what's called the 2 sigma problem, which he observed by studying three populations. 
The first is the population that studied in a lecture-based classroom. 
The second is a population of students that studied using a standard lecture-based classroom, but with a mastery-based approach, so the students couldn't move on to the next topic before demonstrating mastery of the previous one. 
And finally, there was a population of students that were taught in a one-on-one instruction using a tutor. 
The mastery-based population was a full standard deviation, or sigma, in achievement scores better than the standard lecture-based class, and the individual tutoring gives you 2 sigma improvement in performance. 
To understand what that means, let's look at the lecture-based classroom, and let's pick the median performance as a threshold. 
So in a lecture-based class, half the students are above that level and half are below. 
In the individual tutoring instruction, 98 percent of the students are going to be above that threshold. 
Imagine if we could teach so that 98 percent of our students would be above average. 
Hence, the 2 sigma problem. 
Because we cannot afford, as a society, to provide every student with an individual human tutor. 
But maybe we can afford to provide each student with a computer or a smartphone. 
So the question is, how can we use technology to push from the left side of the graph, from the blue curve, to the right side with the green curve? 
Mastery is easy to achieve using a computer, because a computer doesn't get tired of showing you the same video five times. 
And it doesn't even get tired of grading the same work multiple times, we've seen that in many of the examples that I've shown you. 
And even personalization is something that we're starting to see the beginnings of, whether it's via the personalized trajectory through the curriculum or some of the personalized feedback that we've shown you. 
So the goal here is to try and push, and see how far we can get towards the green curve. 
So, if this is so great, are universities now obsolete? 
Well, Mark Twain certainly thought so. 
He said that, "" College is a place where a professor's lecture notes go straight to the students' lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either. "" (Laughter) I beg to differ with Mark Twain, though. 
I think what he was complaining about is not universities but rather the lecture-based format that so many universities spend so much time on. 
So let's go back even further, to Plutarch, who said that, "" The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting. "" And maybe we should spend less time at universities filling our students' minds with content by lecturing at them, and more time igniting their creativity, their imagination and their problem-solving skills by actually talking with them. 
So how do we do that? 
We do that by doing active learning in the classroom. 
So there's been many studies, including this one, that show that if you use active learning, interacting with your students in the classroom, performance improves on every single metric — on attendance, on engagement and on learning as measured by a standardized test. 
You can see, for example, that the achievement score almost doubles in this particular experiment. 
So maybe this is how we should spend our time at universities. 
So to summarize, if we could offer a top quality education to everyone around the world for free, what would that do? Three things. 
First it would establish education as a fundamental human right, where anyone around the world with the ability and the motivation could get the skills that they need to make a better life for themselves, their families and their communities. 
Second, it would enable lifelong learning. 
It's a shame that for so many people, learning stops when we finish high school or when we finish college. 
By having this amazing content be available, we would be able to learn something new every time we wanted, whether it's just to expand our minds or it's to change our lives. 
And finally, this would enable a wave of innovation, because amazing talent can be found anywhere. 
Maybe the next Albert Einstein or the next Steve Jobs is living somewhere in a remote village in Africa. 
And if we could offer that person an education, they would be able to come up with the next big idea and make the world a better place for all of us. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

Our lives depend on a world we can't see. 
Think about your week so far. 
Have you watched TV, used GPS, checked the weather or even ate a meal? 
These many things that enable our daily lives rely either directly or indirectly on satellites. 
And while we often take for granted the services that satellites provide us, the satellites themselves deserve our attention as they are leaving a lasting mark on the space they occupy. 
People around the world rely on satellite infrastructure every day for information, entertainment and to communicate. 
There's agricultural and environmental monitoring, Internet connectivity, navigation. 
Satellites even play a role in the operation of our financial and energy markets. 
But these satellites that we rely on day in and day out have a finite life. 
They might run out of propellant, they could malfunction, or they may just naturally reach the end of their mission life. 
At this point, these satellites effectively become space junk, cluttering the orbital environment. 
So imagine you're driving down the highway on a beautiful, sunny day out running errands. 
You've got your music cranked, your windows rolled down, with the cool breeze blowing through your hair. 
Feels nice, right? 
Everything is going smoothly until suddenly your car stutters and stalls right in the middle of the highway. 
So now you have no choice but to abandon your car where it is on the highway. 
Maybe you were lucky enough to be able to move it out of the way and into a shoulder lane so that it's out of the way of other traffic. 
A couple of hours ago, your car was a useful machine that you relied on in your everyday life. 
Now, it's a useless hunk of metal taking up space in a valuable transportation network. 
And imagine international roadways all cluttered with broken down vehicles that are just getting in the way of other traffic. 
And imagine the debris that would be strewn everywhere if a collision actually happened, thousands of smaller pieces of debris becoming new obstacles. 
This is the paradigm of the satellite industry. 
Satellites that are no longer working are often left to deorbit over many, many years, or only moved out of the way as a temporary solution. 
And there are no international laws in space to enforce us to clean up after ourselves. 
So the world's first satellite, Sputnik I, was launched in 1957, and in that year, there were only a total of three launch attempts. 
Decades later and dozens of countries from all around the world have launched thousands of more satellites into orbit, and the frequency of launches is only going to increase in the future, especially if you consider things like the possibility of 900-plus satellite constellations being launched. 
Now, we send satellites to different orbits depending on what they're needed for. 
One of the most common places we send satellites is the low Earth orbit, possibly to image the surface of Earth at up to about 2,000 kilometers altitude. 
Satellites there are naturally buffeted by Earth's atmosphere, so their orbits naturally decay, and they'll eventually burn up, probably within a couple of decades. 
Another common place we send satellites is the geostationary orbit at about 35,000 kilometers altitude. 
Satellites there remain in the same place above Earth as the Earth rotates, which enables things like communications or television broadcast, for example. 
Satellites in high orbits like these could remain there for centuries. 
And then there's the orbit coined "" the graveyard, "" the ominous junk or disposal orbits, where some satellites are intentionally placed at the end of their life so that they're out of the way of common operational orbits. 
Of the nearly 7,000 satellites launched since the late 1950s, only about one in seven is currently operational, and in addition to the satellites that are no longer working, there's also hundreds of thousands of marble-sized debris and millions of paint chip-sized debris that are also orbiting around the Earth. 
Space debris is a major risk to space missions, but also to the satellites that we rely on each and every day. 
Now, because space debris and junk has become increasingly worrisome, there have been some national and international efforts to develop technical standards to help us limit the generation of additional debris. 
So for example, there are recommendations for those low-Earth orbiting spacecraft to be made to deorbit in under 25 years, but that's still a really long time, especially if a satellite hasn't been working for years. 
There's also mandates for those dead geostationary spacecraft to be moved into a graveyard orbit. 
But neither of these guidelines is binding under international law, and the understanding is that they will be implemented through national mechanisms. 
These guidelines are also not long-term, they're not proactive, nor do they address the debris that's already up there. 
They're only in place to limit the future creation of debris. 
Space junk is no one's responsibility. 
Now, Mount Everest is actually an interesting comparison of a new approach to how we interact with our environments, as it's often given the dubious honor of being the world's highest garbage dump. 
Decades after the first conquest of the world's highest peak, tons of rubbish left behind by climbers has started to raise concern, and you may have read in the news that there's speculation that Nepal will crack down on mountaineers with stricter enforcement of penalties and legal obligations. 
The goal, of course, is to persuade climbers to clean up after themselves, so maybe local not-for-profits will pay climbers who bring down extra waste, or expeditions might organize voluntary cleanup trips. 
And yet still many climbers feel that independent groups should police themselves. 
There's no simple or easy answer, and even well-intentioned efforts at conservation often run into problems. 
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't do everything in our power to protect the environments that we rely and depend on, and like Everest, the remote location and inadequate infrastructure of the orbital environment make waste disposal a challenging problem. 
But we simply cannot reach new heights and create an even higher garbage dump, one that's out of this world. 
The reality of space is that if a component on a satellite breaks down, there really are limited opportunities for repairs, and only at great cost. 
But what if we were smarter about how we designed satellites? 
What if all satellites, regardless of what country they were built in, had to be standardized in some way for recycling, servicing or active deorbiting? 
What if there actually were international laws with teeth that enforced end-of-life disposal of satellites instead of moving them out of the way as a temporary solution? 
Or maybe satellite manufacturers need to be charged a deposit to even launch a satellite into orbit, and that deposit would only be returned if the satellite was disposed of properly or if they cleaned up some quota of debris. 
Or maybe a satellite needs to have technology on board to help accelerate deorbit. 
There are some encouraging signs. 
The UK's TechDemoSat-1, launched in 2014, for example, was designed for end-of-life disposal via a small drag sail. 
This works for the satellite because it's small, but satellites that are higher or in larger orbits or are larger altogether, like the size of school buses, will require other disposal options. 
So maybe you get into things like high-powered lasers or tugging using nets or tethers, as crazy as those sound in the short term. 
And then one really cool possibility is the idea of orbital tow trucks or space mechanics. 
Imagine if a robotic arm on some sort of space tow truck could fix the broken components on a satellite, making them usable again. 
Or what if that very same robotic arm could refuel the propellant tank on a spacecraft that relies on chemical propulsion just like you or I would refuel the fuel tanks on our cars? 
Robotic repair and maintenance could extend the lives of hundreds of satellites orbiting around the Earth. 
Whatever the disposal or cleanup options we come up with, it's clearly not just a technical problem. 
There's also complex space laws and politics that we have to sort out. 
Simply put, we haven't found a way to use space sustainably yet. 
Exploring, innovating to change the way we live and work are what we as humans do, and in space exploration, we're literally moving beyond the boundaries of Earth. 
But as we push thresholds in the name of learning and innovation, we must remember that accountability for our environments never goes away. 
There is without doubt congestion in the low Earth and geostationary orbits, and we cannot keep launching new satellites to replace the ones that have broken down without doing something about them first, just like we would never leave a broken down car in the middle of the highway. 
Next time you use your phone, check the weather or use your GPS, think about the satellite technologies that make those activities possible. 
But also think about the very impact that the satellites have on the environment surrounding Earth, and help spread the message that together we must reduce our impact. 
Earth orbit is breathtakingly beautiful and our gateway to exploration. 
It's up to us to keep it that way. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

If you take 10,000 people at random, 9,999 have something in common: their interests in business lie on or near the Earth's surface. 
The odd one out is an astronomer, and I am one of that strange breed. 
(Laughter) My talk will be in two parts. I'll talk first as an astronomer, and then as a worried member of the human race. 
But let's start off by remembering that Darwin showed how we're the outcome of four billion years of evolution. 
And what we try to do in astronomy and cosmology is to go back before Darwin's simple beginning, to set our Earth in a cosmic context. 
And let me just run through a few slides. 
This was the impact that happened last week on a comet. 
If they'd sent a nuke, it would have been rather more spectacular than what actually happened last Monday. 
So that's another project for NASA. 
That's Mars from the European Mars Express, and at New Year. 
This artist's impression turned into reality when a parachute landed on Titan, Saturn's giant moon. 
It landed on the surface. This is pictures taken on the way down. 
That looks like a coastline. 
It is indeed, but the ocean is liquid methane — the temperature minus 170 degrees centigrade. 
If we go beyond our solar system, we've learned that the stars aren't twinkly points of light. 
Each one is like a sun with a retinue of planets orbiting around it. 
And we can see places where stars are forming, like the Eagle Nebula. We see stars dying. 
In six billion years, the sun will look like that. 
And some stars die spectacularly in a supernova explosion, leaving remnants like that. 
On a still bigger scale, we see entire galaxies of stars. 
We see entire ecosystems where gas is being recycled. 
And to the cosmologist, these galaxies are just the atoms, as it were, of the large-scale universe. 
This picture shows a patch of sky so small that it would take about 100 patches like it to cover the full moon in the sky. 
Through a small telescope, this would look quite blank, but you see here hundreds of little, faint smudges. 
Each is a galaxy, fully like ours or Andromeda, which looks so small and faint because its light has taken 10 billion light-years to get to us. 
The stars in those galaxies probably don't have planets around them. 
There's scant chance of life there — that's because there's been no time for the nuclear fusion in stars to make silicon and carbon and iron, the building blocks of planets and of life. 
We believe that all of this emerged from a Big Bang — a hot, dense state. So how did that amorphous Big Bang turn into our complex cosmos? 
I'm going to show you a movie simulation 16 powers of 10 faster than real time, which shows a patch of the universe where the expansions have subtracted out. 
But you see, as time goes on in gigayears at the bottom, you will see structures evolve as gravity feeds on small, dense irregularities, and structures develop. 
And we'll end up after 13 billion years with something looking rather like our own universe. 
And we compare simulated universes like that — I'll show you a better simulation at the end of my talk — with what we actually see in the sky. 
Well, we can trace things back to the earlier stages of the Big Bang, but we still don't know what banged and why it banged. 
That's a challenge for 21st-century science. 
If my research group had a logo, it would be this picture here: an ouroboros, where you see the micro-world on the left — the world of the quantum — and on the right the large-scale universe of planets, stars and galaxies. 
We know our universes are united though — links between left and right. 
The everyday world is determined by atoms, how they stick together to make molecules. 
Stars are fueled by how the nuclei in those atoms react together. 
And, as we've learned in the last few years, galaxies are held together by the gravitational pull of so-called dark matter: particles in huge swarms, far smaller even than atomic nuclei. 
But we'd like to know the synthesis symbolized at the very top. 
The micro-world of the quantum is understood. 
On the right hand side, gravity holds sway. Einstein explained that. 
But the unfinished business for 21st-century science is to link together cosmos and micro-world with a unified theory — symbolized, as it were, gastronomically at the top of that picture. (Laughter) And until we have that synthesis, we won't be able to understand the very beginning of our universe because when our universe was itself the size of an atom, quantum effects could shake everything. 
And so we need a theory that unifies the very large and the very small, which we don't yet have. 
One idea, incidentally — and I had this hazard sign to say I'm going to speculate from now on — is that our Big Bang was not the only one. 
One idea is that our three-dimensional universe may be embedded in a high-dimensional space, just as you can imagine on these sheets of paper. 
You can imagine ants on one of them thinking it's a two-dimensional universe, not being aware of another population of ants on the other. 
So there could be another universe just a millimeter away from ours, but we're not aware of it because that millimeter is measured in some fourth spatial dimension, and we're imprisoned in our three. 
And so we believe that there may be a lot more to physical reality than what we've normally called our universe — the aftermath of our Big Bang. And here's another picture. 
Bottom right depicts our universe, which on the horizon is not beyond that, but even that is just one bubble, as it were, in some vaster reality. 
Many people suspect that just as we've gone from believing in one solar system to zillions of solar systems, one galaxy to many galaxies, we have to go to many Big Bangs from one Big Bang, perhaps these many Big Bangs displaying an immense variety of properties. 
Well, let's go back to this picture. 
There's one challenge symbolized at the top, but there's another challenge to science symbolized at the bottom. 
You want to not only synthesize the very large and the very small, but we want to understand the very complex. 
And the most complex things are ourselves, midway between atoms and stars. 
We depend on stars to make the atoms we're made of. 
We depend on chemistry to determine our complex structure. 
We clearly have to be large, compared to atoms, to have layer upon layer of complex structure. 
We clearly have to be small, compared to stars and planets — otherwise we'd be crushed by gravity. And in fact, we are midway. 
It would take as many human bodies to make up the sun as there are atoms in each of us. 
The geometric mean of the mass of a proton and the mass of the sun is 50 kilograms, within a factor of two of the mass of each person here. 
Well, most of you anyway. 
The science of complexity is probably the greatest challenge of all, greater than that of the very small on the left and the very large on the right. 
And it's this science, which is not only enlightening our understanding of the biological world, but also transforming our world faster than ever. 
And more than that, it's engendering new kinds of change. 
And I now move on to the second part of my talk, and the book "" Our Final Century "" was mentioned. 
If I was not a self-effacing Brit, I would mention the book myself, and I would add that it's available in paperback. 
(Laughter) And in America it was called "" Our Final Hour "" because Americans like instant gratification. (Laughter) 
But my theme is that in this century, not only has science changed the world faster than ever, but in new and different ways. 
Targeted drugs, genetic modification, artificial intelligence, perhaps even implants into our brains, may change human beings themselves. And human beings, their physique and character, has not changed for thousands of years. 
It may change this century. 
It's new in our history. 
And the human impact on the global environment — greenhouse warming, mass extinctions and so forth — is unprecedented, too. 
And so, this makes this coming century a challenge. 
Bio- and cybertechnologies are environmentally benign in that they offer marvelous prospects, while, nonetheless, reducing pressure on energy and resources. 
But they will have a dark side. 
In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind on disaster. 
Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure — error rather than terror. 
And even a tiny probability of catastrophe is unacceptable when the downside could be of global consequence. 
In fact, some years ago, Bill Joy wrote an article expressing tremendous concern about robots taking us over, etc. 
I don't go along with all that, but it's interesting that he had a simple solution. 
It was what he called "" fine-grained relinquishment. "" He wanted to give up the dangerous kind of science and keep the good bits. Now, that's absurdly naive for two reasons. 
First, any scientific discovery has benign consequences as well as dangerous ones. 
And also, when a scientist makes a discovery, he or she normally has no clue what the applications are going to be. 
And so what this means is that we have to accept the risks if we are going to enjoy the benefits of science. 
We have to accept that there will be hazards. 
And I think we have to go back to what happened in the post-War era, post-World War II, when the nuclear scientists who'd been involved in making the atomic bomb, in many cases were concerned that they should do all they could to alert the world to the dangers. 
And they were inspired not by the young Einstein, who did the great work in relativity, but by the old Einstein, the icon of poster and t-shirt, who failed in his scientific efforts to unify the physical laws. 
He was premature. But he was a moral compass — an inspiration to scientists who were concerned with arms control. 
And perhaps the greatest living person is someone I'm privileged to know, Joe Rothblatt. 
Equally untidy office there, as you can see. 
He's 96 years old, and he founded the Pugwash movement. 
He persuaded Einstein, as his last act, to sign the famous memorandum of Bertrand Russell. 
And he sets an example of the concerned scientist. 
And I think to harness science optimally, to choose which doors to open and which to leave closed, we need latter-day counterparts of people like Joseph Rothblatt. 
We need not just campaigning physicists, but we need biologists, computer experts and environmentalists as well. 
And I think academics and independent entrepreneurs have a special obligation because they have more freedom than those in government service, or company employees subject to commercial pressure. 
I wrote my book, "" Our Final Century, "" as a scientist, just a general scientist. But there's one respect, I think, in which being a cosmologist offered a special perspective, and that's that it offers an awareness of the immense future. 
The stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture — outside the American Bible Belt, anyway — (Laughter) but most people, even those who are familiar with evolution, aren't mindful that even more time lies ahead. 
The sun has been shining for four and a half billion years, but it'll be another six billion years before its fuel runs out. 
On that schematic picture, a sort of time-lapse picture, we're halfway. 
And it'll be another six billion before that happens, and any remaining life on Earth is vaporized. 
There's an unthinking tendency to imagine that humans will be there, experiencing the sun's demise, but any life and intelligence that exists then will be as different from us as we are from bacteria. 
The unfolding of intelligence and complexity still has immensely far to go, here on Earth and probably far beyond. 
So we are still at the beginning of the emergence of complexity in our Earth and beyond. 
If you represent the Earth's lifetime by a single year, say from January when it was made to December, the 21st-century would be a quarter of a second in June — a tiny fraction of the year. 
But even in this concertinaed cosmic perspective, our century is very, very special, the first when humans can change themselves and their home planet. 
As I should have shown this earlier, it will not be humans who witness the end point of the sun; it will be creatures as different from us as we are from bacteria. 
When Einstein died in 1955, one striking tribute to his global status was this cartoon by Herblock in the Washington Post. 
The plaque reads, "" Albert Einstein lived here. "" And I'd like to end with a vignette, as it were, inspired by this image. 
We've been familiar for 40 years with this image: the fragile beauty of land, ocean and clouds, contrasted with the sterile moonscape on which the astronauts left their footprints. 
But let's suppose some aliens had been watching our pale blue dot in the cosmos from afar, not just for 40 years, but for the entire 4.5 billion-year history of our Earth. 
What would they have seen? 
Over nearly all that immense time, Earth's appearance would have changed very gradually. 
The only abrupt worldwide change would have been major asteroid impacts or volcanic super-eruptions. 
Apart from those brief traumas, nothing happens suddenly. 
The continental landmasses drifted around. 
Ice cover waxed and waned. 
Successions of new species emerged, evolved and became extinct. 
But in just a tiny sliver of the Earth's history, the last one-millionth part, a few thousand years, the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before. 
This signaled the start of agriculture. 
Change has accelerated as human populations rose. 
Then other things happened even more abruptly. 
Within just 50 years — that's one hundredth of one millionth of the Earth's age — the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started to rise, and ominously fast. 
The planet became an intense emitter of radio waves — the total output from all TV and cell phones and radar transmissions. And something else happened. 
Metallic objects — albeit very small ones, a few tons at most — escaped into orbit around the Earth. 
Some journeyed to the moons and planets. 
A race of advanced extraterrestrials watching our solar system from afar could confidently predict Earth's final doom in another six billion years. 
But could they have predicted this unprecedented spike less than halfway through the Earth's life? 
These human-induced alterations occupying overall less than a millionth of the elapsed lifetime and seemingly occurring with runaway speed? 
If they continued their vigil, what might these hypothetical aliens witness in the next hundred years? 
Will some spasm foreclose Earth's future? 
Or will the biosphere stabilize? 
Or will some of the metallic objects launched from the Earth spawn new oases, a post-human life elsewhere? 
The science done by the young Einstein will continue as long as our civilization, but for civilization to survive, we'll need the wisdom of the old Einstein — humane, global and farseeing. 
And whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate into the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth, far beyond the Earth as depicted here. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Today I'm going to show you an electric vehicle that weighs less than a bicycle, that you can carry with you anywhere, that you can charge off a normal wall outlet in 15 minutes, and you can run it for 1,000 kilometers on about a dollar of electricity. 
But when I say the word electric vehicle, people think about vehicles. They think about cars and motorcycles and bicycles, and the vehicles that you use every day. 
But if you come about it from a different perspective, you can create some more interesting, more novel concepts. 
So we built something. 
I've got some of the pieces in my pocket here. 
So this is the motor. 
This motor has enough power to take you up the hills of San Francisco at about 20 miles per hour, about 30 kilometers an hour, and this battery, this battery right here has about six miles of range, or 10 kilometers, which is enough to cover about half of the car trips in the U.S. alone. 
But the best part about these components is that we bought them at a toy store. 
These are from remote control airplanes. 
And the performance of these things has gotten so good that if you think about vehicles a little bit differently, you can really change things. 
So today we're going to show you one example of how you can use this. 
Pay attention to not only how fun this thing is, but also how the portability that comes with this can totally change the way you interact with a city like San Francisco. 
(Music) [6 Mile Range] [Top Speed Near 20mph] [Uphill Climbing] [Regenerative Braking] (Applause) (Cheers) So we're going to show you what this thing can do. 
It's really maneuverable. You have a hand-held remote, so you can pretty easily control acceleration, braking, go in reverse if you like, also have braking. 
It's incredible just how light this thing is. 
I mean, this is something you can pick up and carry with you anywhere you go. 
So I'll leave you with one of the most compelling facts about this technology and these kinds of vehicles. 
This uses 20 times less energy for every mile or kilometer that you travel than a car, which means not only is this thing fast to charge and really cheap to build, but it also reduces the footprint of your energy use in terms of your transportation. 
So instead of looking at large amounts of energy needed for each person in this room to get around in a city, now you can look at much smaller amounts and more sustainable transportation. 
So next time you think about a vehicle, I hope, like us, you're thinking about something new. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I ’ m going around the world giving talks about Darwin, and usually what I ’ m talking about is Darwin ’ s strange inversion of reasoning. 
Now that title, that phrase, comes from a critic, an early critic, and this is a passage that I just love, and would like to read for you. 
"" In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. 
This proposition will be found on careful examination to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin ’ s meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in the achievements of creative skill. "" Exactly. Exactly. And it is a strange inversion. 
A creationist pamphlet has this wonderful page in it: "" Test Two: Do you know of any building that didn ’ t have a builder? Yes / No. 
Do you know of any painting that didn ’ t have a painter? Yes / No. 
Do you know of any car that didn ’ t have a maker? Yes / No. 
If you answered 'Yes' for any of the above, give details. "" A-ha! I mean, it really is a strange inversion of reasoning. 
You would have thought it stands to reason that design requires an intelligent designer. 
But Darwin shows that it ’ s just false. 
Today, though, I ’ m going to talk about Darwin ’ s other strange inversion, which is equally puzzling at first, but in some ways just as important. 
It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet. 
Guys go for girls like this because they are sexy. 
We adore babies because they ’ re so cute. 
And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. 
This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why. 
Let ’ s start with sweet. Our sweet tooth is basically an evolved sugar detector, because sugar is high energy, and it ’ s just been wired up to the preferer, to put it very crudely, and that ’ s why we like sugar. 
Honey is sweet because we like it, not "" we like it because honey is sweet. "" There ’ s nothing intrinsically sweet about honey. 
If you looked at glucose molecules till you were blind, you wouldn ’ t see why they tasted sweet. 
You have to look in our brains to understand why they ’ re sweet. 
So if you think first there was sweetness, and then we evolved to like sweetness, you ’ ve got it backwards; that ’ s just wrong. It ’ s the other way round. 
Sweetness was born with the wiring which evolved. 
And there ’ s nothing intrinsically sexy about these young ladies. 
And it ’ s a good thing that there isn ’ t, because if there were, then Mother Nature would have a problem: How on earth do you get chimps to mate? 
Now you might think, ah, there ’ s a solution: hallucinations. 
That would be one way of doing it, but there ’ s a quicker way. 
Just wire the chimps up to love that look, and apparently they do. 
That ’ s all there is to it. 
Over six million years, we and the chimps evolved our different ways. 
We became bald-bodied, oddly enough; for one reason or another, they didn ’ t. 
If we hadn ’ t, then probably this would be the height of sexiness. 
Our sweet tooth is an evolved and instinctual preference for high-energy food. 
It wasn ’ t designed for chocolate cake. 
Chocolate cake is a supernormal stimulus. 
The term is owed to Niko Tinbergen, who did his famous experiments with gulls, where he found that that orange spot on the gull ’ s beak — if he made a bigger, oranger spot the gull chicks would peck at it even harder. 
It was a hyperstimulus for them, and they loved it. 
What we see with, say, chocolate cake is it ’ s a supernormal stimulus to tweak our design wiring. 
And there are lots of supernormal stimuli; chocolate cake is one. 
There's lots of supernormal stimuli for sexiness. 
And there's even supernormal stimuli for cuteness. Here ’ s a pretty good example. 
It ’ s important that we love babies, and that we not be put off by, say, messy diapers. 
So babies have to attract our affection and our nurturing, and they do. 
And, by the way, a recent study shows that mothers prefer the smell of the dirty diapers of their own baby. 
So nature works on many levels here. 
But now, if babies didn ’ t look the way they do — if babies looked like this, that ’ s what we would find adorable, that ’ s what we would find — we would think, oh my goodness, do I ever want to hug that. 
This is the strange inversion. 
Well now, finally what about funny. My answer is, it ’ s the same story, the same story. 
This is the hard one, the one that isn ’ t obvious. That ’ s why I leave it to the end. 
And I won ’ t be able to say too much about it. 
But you have to think evolutionarily, you have to think, what hard job that has to be done — it ’ s dirty work, somebody ’ s got to do it — is so important to give us such a powerful, inbuilt reward for it when we succeed. 
Now, I think we've found the answer — I and a few of my colleagues. 
It ’ s a neural system that ’ s wired up to reward the brain for doing a grubby clerical job. 
Our bumper sticker for this view is that this is the joy of debugging. 
Now I ’ m not going to have time to spell it all out, but I ’ ll just say that only some kinds of debugging get the reward. 
And what we ’ re doing is we ’ re using humor as a sort of neuroscientific probe by switching humor on and off, by turning the knob on a joke — now it ’ s not funny... oh, now it ’ s funnier... 
now we ’ ll turn a little bit more... now it ’ s not funny — in this way, we can actually learn something about the architecture of the brain, the functional architecture of the brain. 
Matthew Hurley is the first author of this. We call it the Hurley Model. 
He ’ s a computer scientist, Reginald Adams a psychologist, and there I am, and we ’ re putting this together into a book. 
Thank you very much. 

As a researcher, every once in a while you encounter something a little disconcerting. 
And this is something that changes your understanding of the world around you, and teaches you that you're very wrong about something that you really believed firmly in. 
And these are unfortunate moments, because you go to sleep that night dumber than when you woke up. 
So, that's really the goal of my talk, is to A, communicate that moment to you and B, have you leave this session a little dumber than when you entered. 
So, I hope I can really accomplish that. 
So, this incident that I'm going to describe really began with some diarrhea. 
Now, we've known for a long time the cause of diarrhea. 
That's why there's a glass of water up there. 
For us, it's a problem, the people in this room. 
For babies, it's deadly. 
They lack nutrients, and diarrhea dehydrates them. 
And so, as a result, there is a lot of death, a lot of death. 
In India in 1960, there was a 24 percent child mortality rate, lots of people didn't make it. This is incredibly unfortunate. 
One of the big reasons this happened was because of diarrhea. 
Now, there was a big effort to solve this problem, and there was actually a big solution. 
This solution has been called, by some, "" potentially the most important medical advance this century. "" Now, the solution turned out to be simple. 
And what it was was oral rehydration salts. 
Many of you have probably used this. 
It's brilliant. It's a way to get sodium and glucose together so that when you add it to water the child is able to absorb it even during situations of diarrhea. 
Remarkable impact on mortality. 
Massive solution to the problem. 
Flash forward: 1960, 24 percent child mortality has dropped to 6.5 percent today. 
Still a big number, but a big drop. 
It looks like the technological problem is solved. 
But if you look, even today there are about 400,000 diarrhea-related deaths in India alone. 
What's going on here? 
Well the easy answer is, we just haven't gotten those salts to those people. 
That's actually not true. 
If you look in areas where these salts are completely available, the price is low or zero, these deaths still continue abated. 
Maybe there's a biological answer. 
Maybe these are the deaths that simple rehydration alone doesn't solve. That's not true either. 
Many of these deaths were completely preventable, and this what I want to think of as the disconcerting thing, what I want to call "" the last mile "" problem. 
See, we spent a lot of energy, in many domains — technological, scientific, hard work, creativity, human ingenuity — to crack important social problems with technology solutions. 
That's been the discoveries of the last 2,000 years, that's mankind moving forward. 
But in this case we cracked it, but a big part of the problem still remains. 
Nine hundred and ninety-nine miles went well, the last mile's proving incredibly stubborn. 
Now, that's for oral rehydration therapy. 
Maybe this is something unique about diarrhea. 
Well, it turns out — and this is where things get really disconcerting — it's not unique to diarrhea. 
It's not even unique to poor people in India. 
Here's an example from a variety of contexts. 
I've put a bunch of examples up here. 
I'll start with insulin, diabetes medication in the U.S. 
OK, the American population. 
On Medicaid — if you're fairly poor you get Medicaid, or if you have health insurance — insulin is pretty straightforward. 
You get it, either in pill form or you get it as an injection; you have to take it every day to maintain your blood sugar levels. 
Massive technological advance: took an incredibly deadly disease, made it solvable. 
Adherence rates. How many people are taking their insulin every day? 
About on average, a typical person is taking it 75 percent of the time. 
As a result, 25,000 people a year go blind, hundreds of thousands lose limbs, every year, for something that's solvable. 
Here I have a bunch of other examples, all suffer from the last mile problem. 
It's not just medicine. 
Here's another example from technology: agriculture. We think there's a food problem, so we create new seeds. 
We think there's an income problem, so we create new ways of farming that increase income. 
Well, look at some old ways, some ways that we'd already cracked. 
Intercropping. Intercropping really increases income. 
Sometimes in rice we found incredible increases in yield when you mix different varieties of rice side by side. 
Some people are doing that, many are not. What's going on? 
This is the last mile. 
The last mile is, everywhere, problematic. 
Alright, what's the problem? 
The problem is this little three-pound machine that's behind your eyes and between your ears. 
This machine is really strange, and one of the consequences is that people are weird. 
They do lots of inconsistent things. 
(Applause) They do lots of inconsistent things. 
And the inconsistencies create, fundamentally, this last mile problem. 
See, when we were dealing with our biology, bacteria, the genes, the things inside here, the blood? 
That's complex, but it's manageable. 
When we're dealing with people like this? 
The mind is more complex. 
That's not as manageable, and that's what we're struggling with. 
Let me go back to diarrhea for a second. 
Here's a question that was asked in the National Sample Survey, which is a survey asked of many Indian women: "" Your child has diarrhea. 
Should you increase, maintain or decrease the number of fluids? "" Just so you don't embarrass yourselves, I'll give you the right answer: It's increase. 
Now, diarrhea's interesting because it's been around for thousands of years, ever since humankind really lived side by side enough to have really polluted water. 
One Roman strategy that was very interesting was that — and it really gave them a comparative advantage — they made sure their soldiers didn't drink even remotely muddied waters. 
Because if some of your troops get diarrhea they're not that effective on the battlefield. 
So, if you think of Roman comparative advantage part of it was the breast shields, the breastplates, but part of it was drinking the right water. 
So, here are these women. They've seen their parents have struggled with diarrhea, they've struggled with diarrhea, they've seen lots of deaths. How do they answer this question? 
In India, 35 to 50 percent say "" Reduce. "" Think about what that means for a second. 
Thirty-five to 50 percent of women forget oral rehydration therapy, they are increasing — they are actually making their child more likely to die through their actions. 
How is that possible? 
Well, one possibility — I think that's how most people respond to this — is to say, "" That's just stupid. "" I don't think that's stupid. 
I think there is something very profoundly right in what these women are doing. 
And that is, you don't put water into a leaky bucket. 
So, think of the mental model that goes behind reducing the intake. 
Just doesn't make sense. 
Now, the model is intuitively right. 
It just doesn't happen to be right about the world. 
But it makes a whole lot of sense at some deep level. 
And that, to me, is the fundamental challenge of the last mile. 
This first challenge is what I refer to as the persuasion challenge. 
Convincing people to do something — take oral rehydration therapy, intercrop, whatever it might be — is not an act of information: "" Let's give them the data, and when they have data they'll do the right thing. "" It's more complex than that. 
And if you want to understand how it's more complex let me start with something kind of interesting. 
I'm going to give you a little math problem, and I want you to just yell out the answer as fast as possible. 
A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. 
The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. 
How much does the ball cost? Quick. 
So, somebody out there says, "" Five. "" A lot of you said, "" Ten. "" Let's think about 10 for a second. 
If the ball costs 10, the bat costs... 
this is easy, $1.10. 
Yeah. So, together they would cost $1.20. 
So, here you all are, ostensibly educated people. 
Most of you look smart. 
The combination of that produces something that is actually, you got this thing wrong. 
How is that possible? Let's go to something else. 
I know algebra can be complicated. 
So, let's dial this back. That's what? Fifth grade? Fourth grade? 
Let's go back to kindergarten. OK? 
There's a great show on American television that you have to watch. 
It's called "" Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? "" I think we've learned the answer to that here. 
Let's move to kindergarten. Let's see if we can beat five-year-olds. 
Here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to put objects on the screen. 
I just want you to name the color of the object. 
That's all it is. OK? 
I want you to do it fast, and say it out loud with me, and do it quickly. I'll make the first one easy for you. 
Ready? Black. 
Now the next ones I want you to do quickly and say it out loud. 
Ready? Go. 
Audience: Red. Green. 
Yellow. Blue. Red. 
(Laughter) Sendhil Mullainathan: That's pretty good. 
Almost out of kindergarten. 
What is all this telling us? 
You see, what's going on here, and in the bat and ball problem is that you have some intuitive ways of interacting with the world, some models that you use to understand the world. 
These models, like the leaky bucket, work well in most situations. 
I suspect most of you — I hope that's true for the rest of you — actually do pretty well with addition and subtraction in the real world. 
I found a problem, a specific problem that actually found an error with that. 
Diarrhea, and many last mile problems, are like that. 
They are situations where the mental model doesn't match the reality. 
Same thing here: You had an intuitive response to this that was very quick. 
You read "" blue "" and you wanted to say "" blue, "" even though you knew your task was red. 
Now, I do this stuff because it's fun. 
But it's more profound than fun. 
I'll give you a good example of how it actually effects persuasion. 
BMW is a pretty safe car. 
And they are trying to figure out, "" Safety is good. 
I want to advertise safety. How am I going to advertise safety? "" "I could give people numbers. We do well on crash tests." 
But the truth of the matter is, you look at that car, it doesn't look like a Volvo, and it doesn't look like a Hummer. 
So, what I want you to think about for a few minutes is: How would you convey safety of the BMW? Okay? 
So now, while you're thinking about that let's move to a second task. 
The second task is fuel efficiency. Okay? 
Here's another puzzle for all of you. 
One person walks into a car lot, and they're thinking about buying this Toyota Yaris. 
They are saying, "" This is 35 miles per gallon. I'm going to do the environmentally right thing, I'm going to buy the Prius, 50 miles per gallon. "" Another person walks into the lot, and they're about to buy a Hummer, nine miles per gallon, fully loaded, luxury. 
And they say, "" You know what? Do I need turbo? Do I need this heavyweight car? "" I'm going to do something good for the environment. 
I'm going to take off some of that weight, and I'm going to buy a Hummer that's 11 miles per gallon. "" Which one of these people has done more for the environment? 
See, you have a mental model. 
Fifty versus 35, that's a big move. Eleven versus nine? Come on. 
Turns out, go home and do the math, the nine to 11 is a bigger change. That person has saved more gallons. 
Why? Because we don't care about miles per gallon, we care about gallons per mile. 
Think about how powerful that is if you're trying to encourage fuel efficiency. 
Miles per gallon is the way we present things. 
If we want to encourage change of behavior, gallons per mile would have far more effectiveness. 
Researchers have found these type of anomalies. 
Okay, back to BMW. What should they do? 
The problem BMW faces is this car looks safe. 
This car, which is my Mini, doesn't look that safe. 
Here was BMW's brilliant insight, which they embodied into an ad campaign. 
They showed a BMW driving down the street. 
There's a truck on the right. Boxes fall out of the truck. 
The car swerves to avoid it, and therefore doesn't get into an accident. 
BWM realizes safety, in people's minds, has two components. 
You can be safe because when you're hit, you survive, or you can be safe because you avoid accidents. 
Remarkably successful campaign, but notice the power of it. 
It harnesses something you already believe. 
Now, even if I persuaded you to do something, it's hard sometimes to actually get action as a result. 
You all probably intended to wake up, I don't know, 6: 30, 7 a.m. 
This is a battle we all fight every day, along with trying to get to the gym. 
Now, this is an example of that battle, and makes us realize intentions don't always translate into action, and so one of the fundamental challenges is how we would actually do that. OK? 
So, let me now talk about the last mile problem. 
So far, I've been pretty negative. 
I've been trying to show you the oddities of human behavior. 
And I think maybe I'm being too negative. 
Maybe it's the diarrhea. 
Maybe the last mile problem really should be thought of as the last mile opportunity. 
Let's go back to diabetes. 
This is a typical insulin injection. 
Now, carrying this thing around is complicated. 
You gotta carry the bottle, you gotta carry the syringe. 
It's also painful. 
Now, you may think to yourself, "" Well, if my eyes depended on it, you know, I would obviously use it every day. "" But the pain, the discomfort, you know, paying attention, remembering to put it in your purse when you go on a long trip: These are the day-to-day of life, and they do pose problems. 
Here is an innovation, a design innovation. 
This is a pen, it's called an insulin pen, preloaded. 
The needle is particularly sharp. 
You just gotta carry this thing around. 
It's much easier to use, much less painful. 
Anywhere between five and 10 percent increase in adherence, just as a result of this. 
That's what I'm talking about as a last mile opportunity. 
You see, we tend to think the problem is solved when we solve the technology problem. 
But the human innovation, the human problem still remains, and that's a great frontier that we have left. 
This isn't about the biology of people; this is now about the brains, the psychology of people, and innovation needs to continue all the way through the last mile. 
Here's another example of this. 
This is from a company called Positive Energy. 
This is about energy efficiency. 
We're spending a lot of time on fuel cells right now. 
What this company does is they send a letter to households that say, "" Here's your energy use, here's your neighbor's energy use: You're doing well. "" Smiley face. 
"" You're doing worse. "" Frown. 
And what they find is just this letter, nothing else, has a two to three percent reduction in electricity use. 
And you want to think about the social value of that in terms of carbon offsets, reduced electricity, 900 million dollars per year. 
Why? Because for free, this isn't a new technology, this is a letter — we're getting a Big Bang in behavior. 
So, how do we tackle the last mile? 
I think this tells us there is an opportunity. 
And I think to tackle it, we need to combine psychology, marketing, art, we've seen that. 
But you know what we need to combine it with? 
We need to combine this with the scientific method. 
See what's really puzzling and frustrating about the last mile, to me, is that the first 999 miles are all about science. 
No one would say, "" Hey, I think this medicine works, go ahead and use it. "" We have testing, we go to the lab, we try it again, we have refinement. 
But you know what we do on the last mile? 
"Oh, this is a good idea. People will like this. Let's put it out there." 
The amount of resources we put in are disparate. 
We put billions of dollars into fuel-efficient technologies. 
How much are we putting into energy behavior change in a credible, systematic, testing way? 
Now, I think that we're on the verge of something big. 
We're on the verge of a whole new social science. 
It's a social science that recognizes — much like science recognizes the complexity of the body, biology recognizes the complexity of the body — we'll recognize the complexity of the human mind. 
The careful testing, retesting, design, are going to open up vistas of understanding, complexities, difficult things. 
And those vistas will both create new science, and fundamental change in the world as we see it, in the next hundred years. 
All right. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Sendhil, thank you so much. 
So, this whole area is so fascinating. 
I mean, it sometimes feels, listening to behavioral economists that they are kind of putting into place academically, what great marketers have sort of intuitively known for a long time. 
How much is your field talking to great marketers about their insights into human psychology? 
Because they've seen it on the ground. 
Sendhil Mullainathan: Yeah, we spend a lot of time talking to marketers, and I think 60 percent of it is exactly what you say, there are insights to be gleaned there. 
Forty percent of it is about what marketing is. 
Marketing is selling an ad to a firm. 
So, in some sense, a lot of marketing is about convincing a CEO, "" This is a good ad campaign. "" So, there is a little bit of slippage there. 
That's just a caveat. That's different from actually having an effective ad campaign. 
And one of the new movements in marketing is: How do we actually measure effectiveness? Are we effective? 
CA: How you take your insights here and actually get them integrated into working business models on the ground, in Indian villages, for example? 
SM: So, the scientific method I alluded to is pretty important. 
We work closely with companies that have operational capacity, or nonprofits that have operational capacity. 
And then we say, "" Well, you want to get this behavior change. 
Let's come up with a few ideas, test them, see which is working, go back, synthesize, and try to come up with a thing that works, "" and then we're able to scale with partners. 
It's kind of the model that has worked in other contexts. 
If you have biological problems we try and fix it, see if it works, and then work the scale. 
CA: Alright Sendhil, thanks so much for coming to TED. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

That's how we traveled in the year 1900. 
That's an open buggy. It doesn't have heating. 
It doesn't have air conditioning. 
That horse is pulling it along at one percent of the speed of sound, and the rutted dirt road turns into a quagmire of mud anytime it rains. 
That's a Boeing 707. 
Only 60 years later, it travels at 80 percent of the speed of sound, and we don't travel any faster today because commercial supersonic air travel turned out to be a bust. 
So I started wondering and pondering, could it be that the best years of American economic growth are behind us? 
And that leads to the suggestion, maybe economic growth is almost over. 
Some of the reasons for this are not really very controversial. 
There are four headwinds that are just hitting the American economy in the face. 
They're demographics, education, debt and inequality. 
They're powerful enough to cut growth in half. 
So we need a lot of innovation to offset this decline. 
And here's my theme: Because of the headwinds, if innovation continues to be as powerful as it has been in the last 150 years, growth is cut in half. 
If innovation is less powerful, invents less great, wonderful things, then growth is going to be even lower than half of history. 
Now here's eight centuries of economic growth. 
The vertical axis is just percent per year of growth, zero percent a year, one percent a year, two percent a year. 
The white line is for the U.K., and then the U.S. 
takes over as the leading nation in the year 1900, when the line switches to red. 
You'll notice that, for the first four centuries, there's hardly any growth at all, just 0.2 percent. 
Then growth gets better and better. 
It maxes out in the 1930s, '40s and' 50s, and then it starts slowing down, and here's a cautionary note. 
That last downward notch in the red line is not actual data. 
That is a forecast that I made six years ago that growth would slow down to 1.3 percent. 
But you know what the actual facts are? 
You know what the growth in per-person income has been in the United States in the last six years? 
Negative. 
This led to a fantasy. 
What if I try to fit a curved line to this historical record? 
I can make the curved line end anywhere I wanted, but I decided I would end it at 0.2, just like the U.K. growth for the first four centuries. 
Now the history that we've achieved is that we've grown at 2.0 percent per year over the whole period, 1891 to 2007, and remember it's been a little bit negative since 2007. 
But if growth slows down, instead of doubling our standard of living every generation, Americans in the future can't expect to be twice as well off as their parents, or even a quarter [more well off than] their parents. 
Now we're going to change and look at the level of per capita income. 
The vertical axis now is thousands of dollars in today's prices. 
You'll notice that in 1891, over on the left, we were at about 5,000 dollars. 
Today we're at about 44,000 dollars of total output per member of the population. 
Now what if we could achieve that historic two-percent growth for the next 70 years? 
Well, it's a matter of arithmetic. 
Two-percent growth quadruples your standard of living in 70 years. 
That means we'd go from 44,000 to 180,000. 
Well, we're not going to do that, and the reason is the headwinds. 
The first headwind is demographics. 
It's a truism that your standard of living rises faster than productivity, rises faster than output per hour, if hours per person increased. 
And we got that gift back in the '70s and' 80s when women entered the labor force. 
But now it's turned around. 
Now hours per person are shrinking, first because of the retirement of the baby boomers, and second because there's been a very significant dropping out of the labor force of prime age adult males who are in the bottom half of the educational distribution. 
The next headwind is education. 
We've got problems all over our educational system despite Race to the Top. 
In college, we've got cost inflation in higher education that dwarfs cost inflation in medical care. 
We have in higher education a trillion dollars of student debt, and our college completion rate is 15 points, 15 percentage points below Canada. 
We have a lot of debt. 
Our economy grew from 2000 to 2007 on the back of consumers massively overborrowing. 
Consumers paying off that debt is one of the main reasons why our economic recovery is so sluggish today. 
And everybody of course knows that the federal government debt is growing as a share of GDP at a very rapid rate, and the only way that's going to stop is some combination of faster growth in taxes or slower growth in entitlements, also called transfer payments. 
And that gets us down from the 1.5, where we've reached for education, down to 1.3. 
And then we have inequality. 
Over the 15 years before the financial crisis, the growth rate of the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution was half a point slower than the averages we've been talking about before. 
All the rest went to the top one percent. 
So that brings us down to 0.8. 
And that 0.8 is the big challenge. 
Are we going to grow at 0.8? 
If so, that's going to require that our inventions are as important as the ones that happened over the last 150 years. 
So let's see what some of those inventions were. 
If you wanted to read in 1875 at night, you needed to have an oil or a gas lamp. 
They created pollution, they created odors, they were hard to control, the light was dim, and they were a fire hazard. 
By 1929, electric light was everywhere. 
We had the vertical city, the invention of the elevator. 
Central Manhattan became possible. 
And then, in addition to that, at the same time, hand tools were replaced by massive electric tools and hand-powered electric tools, all achieved by electricity. 
Electricity was also very helpful in liberating women. 
Women, back in the late 19th century, spent two days a week doing the laundry. 
They did it on a scrub board. 
Then they had to hang the clothes out to dry. 
Then they had to bring them in. 
The whole thing took two days out of the seven-day week. 
And then we had the electric washing machine. 
And by 1950, they were everywhere. 
But the women still had to shop every day, but no they didn't, because electricity brought us the electric refrigerator. 
Back in the late 19th century, the only source of heat in most homes was a big fireplace in the kitchen that was used for cooking and heating. 
The bedrooms were cold. They were unheated. 
But by 1929, certainly by 1950, we had central heating everywhere. 
What about the internal combustion engine, which was invented in 1879? 
In America, before the motor vehicle, transportation depended entirely on the urban horse, which dropped, without restraint, 25 to 50 pounds of manure on the streets every day together with a gallon of urine. 
That comes out at five to 10 tons daily per square mile in cities. 
Those horses also ate up fully one quarter of American agricultural land. 
That's the percentage of American agricultural land it took to feed the horses. 
Of course, when the motor vehicle was invented, and it became almost ubiquitous by 1929, that agricultural land could be used for human consumption or for export. 
And here's an interesting ratio: Starting from zero in 1900, only 30 years later, the ratio of motor vehicles to the number of households in the United States reached 90 percent in just 30 years. 
Back before the turn of the century, women had another problem. 
All the water for cooking, cleaning and bathing had to be carried in buckets and pails in from the outside. 
It's a historical fact that in 1885, the average North Carolina housewife walked 148 miles a year carrying 35 tons of water. 
But by 1929, cities around the country had put in underground water pipes. 
They had put in underground sewer pipes, and as a result, one of the great scourges of the late 19th century, waterborne diseases like cholera, began to disappear. 
And an amazing fact for techno-optimists is that in the first half of the 20th century, the rate of improvement of life expectancy was three times faster than it was in the second half of the 19th century. 
So it's a truism that things can't be more than 100 percent of themselves. 
And I'll just give you a few examples. 
We went from one percent to 90 percent of the speed of sound. 
Electrification, central heat, ownership of motor cars, they all went from zero to 100 percent. 
Urban environments make people more productive than on the farm. 
We went from 25 percent urban to 75 percent by the early postwar years. 
What about the electronic revolution? 
Here's an early computer. 
It's amazing. The mainframe computer was invented in 1942. 
By 1960 we had telephone bills, bank statements were being produced by computers. 
The earliest cell phones, the earliest personal computers were invented in the 1970s. 
The 1980s brought us Bill Gates, DOS, ATM machines to replace bank tellers, bar code scanning to cut down on labor in the retail sector. 
Fast forward through the '90s, we had the dotcom revolution and a temporary rise in productivity growth. 
But I'm now going to give you an experiment. 
You have to choose either option A or option B. 
(Laughter) Option A is you get to keep everything invented up till 10 years ago. 
So you get Google, you get Amazon, you get Wikipedia, and you get running water and indoor toilets. 
Or you get everything invented to yesterday, including Facebook and your iPhone, but you have to give up, go out to the outhouse, and carry in the water. 
Hurricane Sandy caused a lot of people to lose the 20th century, maybe for a couple of days, in some cases for more than a week, electricity, running water, heating, gasoline for their cars, and a charge for their iPhones. 
The problem we face is that all these great inventions, we have to match them in the future, and my prediction that we're not going to match them brings us down from the original two-percent growth down to 0.2, the fanciful curve that I drew you at the beginning. 
So here we are back to the horse and buggy. 
I'd like to award an Oscar to the inventors of the 20th century, the people from Alexander Graham Bell to Thomas Edison to the Wright Brothers, I'd like to call them all up here, and they're going to call back to you. 
Your challenge is, can you match what we achieved? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

We humans have always been very concerned about the health of our bodies, but we haven't always been that good at figuring out what's important. 
Take the ancient Egyptians, for example: very concerned about the body parts they thought they'd need in the afterlife, but they left some parts out. 
This part, for example. 
Although they very carefully preserved the stomach, the lungs, the liver, and so forth, they just mushed up the brain, drained it out through the nose, and threw it away, which makes sense, really, because what does a brain do for us anyway? 
But imagine if there were a kind of neglected organ in our bodies that weighed just as much as the brain and in some ways was just as important to who we are, but we knew so little about and treated with such disregard. 
And imagine if, through new scientific advances, we were just beginning to understand its importance to how we think of ourselves. 
Wouldn't you want to know more about it? 
Well, it turns out that we do have something just like that: our gut, or rather, its microbes. 
But it's not just the microbes in our gut that are important. 
Microbes all over our body turn out to be really critical to a whole range of differences that make different people who we are. 
So for example, have you ever noticed how some people get bitten by mosquitos way more often than others? 
It turns out that everyone's anecdotal experience out camping is actually true. 
For example, I seldom get bitten by mosquitos, but my partner Amanda attracts them in droves, and the reason why is that we have different microbes on our skin that produce different chemicals that the mosquitos detect. 
Now, microbes are also really important in the field of medicine. 
So, for example, what microbes you have in your gut determine whether particular painkillers are toxic to your liver. 
They also determine whether or not other drugs will work for your heart condition. 
And, if you're a fruit fly, at least, your microbes determine who you want to have sex with. 
We haven't demonstrated this in humans yet but maybe it's just a matter of time before we find out. (Laughter) So microbes are performing a huge range of functions. 
They help us digest our food. 
They help educate our immune system. 
They help us resist disease, and they may even be affecting our behavior. 
So what would a map of all these microbial communities look like? 
Well, it wouldn't look exactly like this, but it's a helpful guide for understanding biodiversity. 
Different parts of the world have different landscapes of organisms that are immediately characteristic of one place or another or another. 
With microbiology, it's kind of the same, although I've got to be honest with you: All the microbes essentially look the same under a microscope. 
So instead of trying to identify them visually, what we do is we look at their DNA sequences, and in a project called the Human Microbiome Project, NIH funded this $173 million project where hundreds of researchers came together to map out all the A's, T's, G's, and C's, and all of these microbes in the human body. 
So when we take them together, they look like this. 
It's a bit more difficult to tell who lives where now, isn't it? 
What my lab does is develop computational techniques that allow us to take all these terabytes of sequence data and turn them into something that's a bit more useful as a map, and so when we do that with the human microbiome data from 250 healthy volunteers, it looks like this. 
Each point here represents all the complex microbes in an entire microbial community. 
See, I told you they basically all look the same. 
So what we're looking at is each point represents one microbial community from one body site of one healthy volunteer. 
And so you can see that there's different parts of the map in different colors, almost like separate continents. 
And what it turns out to be is that those, as the different regions of the body, have very different microbes in them. 
So what we have is we have the oral community up there in green. 
Over on the other side, we have the skin community in blue, the vaginal community in purple, and then right down at the bottom, we have the fecal community in brown. 
And we've just over the last few years found out that the microbes in different parts of the body are amazingly different from one another. 
So if I look at just one person's microbes in the mouth and in the gut, it turns out that the difference between those two microbial communities is enormous. 
It's bigger than the difference between the microbes in this reef and the microbes in this prairie. 
So this is incredible when you think about it. 
What it means is that a few feet of difference in the human body makes more of a difference to your microbial ecology than hundreds of miles on Earth. 
And this is not to say that two people look basically the same in the same body habitat, either. 
So you probably heard that we're pretty much all the same in terms of our human DNA. 
You're 99.99 percent identical in terms of your human DNA to the person sitting next to you. 
But that's not true of your gut microbes: you might only share 10 percent similarity with the person sitting next to you in terms of your gut microbes. 
So that's as different as the bacteria on this prairie and the bacteria in this forest. 
So these different microbes have all these different kinds of functions that I told you about, everything from digesting food to involvement in different kinds of diseases, metabolizing drugs, and so forth. 
So how do they do all this stuff? 
Well, in part it's because although there's just three pounds of those microbes in our gut, they really outnumber us. 
And so how much do they outnumber us? 
Well, it depends on what you think of as our bodies. 
Is it our cells? 
Well, each of us consists of about 10 trillion human cells, but we harbor as many as 100 trillion microbial cells. 
So they outnumber us 10 to one. 
Now, you might think, well, we're human because of our DNA, but it turns out that each of us has about 20,000 human genes, depending on what you count exactly, but as many as two million to 20 million microbial genes. 
So whichever way we look at it, we're vastly outnumbered by our microbial symbionts. 
And it turns out that in addition to traces of our human DNA, we also leave traces of our microbial DNA on everything we touch. 
We showed in a study a few years ago that you can actually match the palm of someone's hand up to the computer mouse that they use routinely with up to 95 percent accuracy. 
So this came out in a scientific journal a few years ago, but more importantly, it was featured on "" CSI: Miami, "" so you really know it's true. 
(Laughter) So where do our microbes come from in the first place? 
Well if, as I do, you have dogs or kids, you probably have some dark suspicions about that, all of which are true, by the way. 
So just like we can match you to your computer equipment by the microbes you share, we can also match you up to your dog. 
But it turns out that in adults, microbial communities are relatively stable, so even if you live together with someone, you'll maintain your separate microbial identity over a period of weeks, months, even years. 
It turns out that our first microbial communities depend a lot on how we're born. 
So babies that come out the regular way, all of their microbes are basically like the vaginal community, whereas babies that are delivered by C-section, all of their microbes instead look like skin. 
And this might be associated with some of the differences in health associated with Cesarean birth, such as more asthma, more allergies, even more obesity, all of which have been linked to microbes now, and when you think about it, until recently, every surviving mammal had been delivered by the birth canal, and so the lack of those protective microbes that we've co-evolved with might be really important for a lot of these different conditions that we now know involve the microbiome. 
When my own daughter was born a couple of years ago by emergency C-section, we took matters into our own hands and made sure she was coated with those vaginal microbes that she would have gotten naturally. 
Now, it's really difficult to tell whether this has had an effect on her health specifically, right? 
With a sample size of just one child, no matter how much we love her, you don't really have enough of a sample size to figure out what happens on average, but at two years old, she hasn't had an ear infection yet, so we're keeping our fingers crossed on that one. 
And what's more, we're starting to do clinical trials with more children to figure out whether this has a protective effect generally. 
So how we're born has a tremendous effect on what microbes we have initially, but where do we go after that? 
What I'm showing you again here is this map of the Human Microbiome Project Data, so each point represents a sample from one body site from one of 250 healthy adults. 
And you've seen children develop physically. 
You've seen them develop mentally. 
Now, for the first time, you're going to see one of my colleague's children develop microbially. 
So what we are going to look at is we're going to look at this one baby's stool, the fecal community, which represents the gut, sampled every week for almost two and a half years. 
And so we're starting on day one. 
What's going to happen is that the infant is going to start off as this yellow dot, and you can see that he's starting off basically in the vaginal community, as we would expect from his delivery mode. 
And what's going to happen over these two and a half years is that he's going to travel all the way down to resemble the adult fecal community from healthy volunteers down at the bottom. 
So I'm just going to start this going and we'll see how that happens. 
What you can see, and remember each step in this is just one week, what you can see is that week to week, the change in the microbial community of the feces of this one child, the differences week to week are much greater than the differences between individual healthy adults in the Human Microbiome Project cohort, which are those brown dots down at the bottom. 
And you can see he's starting to approach the adult fecal community. 
This is up to about two years. 
But something amazing is about to happen here. 
So he's getting antibiotics for an ear infection. 
What you can see is this huge change in the community, followed by a relatively rapid recovery. 
I'll just rewind that for you. 
And what we can see is that just over these few weeks, we have a much more radical change, a setback of many months of normal development, followed by a relatively rapid recovery, and by the time he reaches day 838, which is the end of this video, you can see that he has essentially reached the healthy adult stool community, despite that antibiotic intervention. 
So this is really interesting because it raises fundamental questions about what happens when we intervene at different ages in a child's life. 
So does what we do early on, where the microbiome is changing so rapidly, actually matter, or is it like throwing a stone into a stormy sea, where the ripples will just be lost? 
Well, fascinatingly, it turns out that if you give children antibiotics in the first six months of life, they're more likely to become obese later on than if they don't get antibiotics then or only get them later, and so what we do early on may have profound impacts on the gut microbial community and on later health that we're only beginning to understand. 
So this is fascinating, because one day, in addition to the effects that antibiotics have on antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which are very important, they may also be degrading our gut microbial ecosystems, and so one day we may come to regard antibiotics with the same horror that we currently reserve for those metal tools that the Egyptians used to use to mush up the brains before they drained them out for embalming. 
So I mentioned that microbes have all these important functions, and they've also now, just over the past few years, been connected to a whole range of different diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease, heart disease, colon cancer, and even obesity. 
Obesity has a really large effect, as it turns out, and today, we can tell whether you're lean or obese with 90 percent accuracy by looking at the microbes in your gut. 
Now, although that might sound impressive, in some ways it's a little bit problematic as a medical test, because you can probably tell which of these people is obese without knowing anything about their gut microbes, but it turns out that even if we sequence their complete genomes and had all their human DNA, we could only predict which one was obese with about 60 percent accuracy. 
So that's amazing, right? 
What it means that the three pounds of microbes that you carry around with you may be more important for some health conditions than every single gene in your genome. 
And then in mice, we can do a lot more. 
So in mice, microbes have been linked to all kinds of additional conditions, including things like multiple sclerosis, depression, autism, and again, obesity. 
But how can we tell whether these microbial differences that correlate with disease are cause or effect? 
Well, one thing we can do is we can raise some mice without any microbes of their own in a germ-free bubble. 
Then we can add in some microbes that we think are important, and see what happens. 
When we take the microbes from an obese mouse and transplant them into a genetically normal mouse that's been raised in a bubble with no microbes of its own, it becomes fatter than if it got them from a regular mouse. 
Why this happens is absolutely amazing, though. 
Sometimes what's going on is that the microbes are helping them digest food more efficiently from the same diet, so they're taking more energy from their food, but other times, the microbes are actually affecting their behavior. 
What they're doing is they're eating more than the normal mouse, so they only get fat if we let them eat as much as they want. 
So this is really remarkable, right? 
The implication is that microbes can affect mammalian behavior. 
So you might be wondering whether we can also do this sort of thing across species, and it turns out that if you take microbes from an obese person and transplant them into mice you've raised germ-free, those mice will also become fatter than if they received the microbes from a lean person, but we can design a microbial community that we inoculate them with that prevents them from gaining this weight. 
We can also do this for malnutrition. 
So in a project funded by the Gates Foundation, what we're looking at is children in Malawi who have kwashiorkor, a profound form of malnutrition, and mice that get the kwashiorkor community transplanted into them lose 30 percent of their body mass in just three weeks, but we can restore their health by using the same peanut butter-based supplement that is used for the children in the clinic, and the mice that receive the community from the healthy identical twins of the kwashiorkor children do fine. 
This is truly amazing because it suggests that we can pilot therapies by trying them out in a whole bunch of different mice with individual people's gut communities and perhaps tailor those therapies all the way down to the individual level. 
So I think it's really important that everyone has a chance to participate in this discovery. 
So, a couple of years ago, we started this project called American Gut, which allows you to claim a place for yourself on this microbial map. 
This is now the largest crowd-funded science project that we know of — over 8,000 people have signed up at this point. 
What happens is, they send in their samples, we sequence the DNA of their microbes and then release the results back to them. 
We also release them, de-identified, to scientists, to educators, to interested members of the general public, and so forth, so anyone can have access to the data. 
On the other hand, when we do tours of our lab at the BioFrontiers Institute, and we explain that we use robots and lasers to look at poop, it turns out that not everyone wants to know. 
(Laughter) But I'm guessing that many of you do, and so I brought some kits here if you're interested in trying this out for yourself. 
So why might we want to do this? 
Well, it turns out that microbes are not just important for finding out where we are in terms of our health, but they can actually cure disease. 
This is one of the newest things we've been able to visualize with colleagues at the University of Minnesota. 
So here's that map of the human microbiome again. 
What we're looking at now — I'm going to add in the community of some people with C. diff. 
So, this is a terrible form of diarrhea where you have to go up to 20 times a day, and these people have failed antibiotic therapy for two years before they're eligible for this trial. 
So what would happen if we transplanted some of the stool from a healthy donor, that star down at the bottom, into these patients. 
Would the good microbes do battle with the bad microbes and help to restore their health? 
So let's watch exactly what happens there. 
Four of those patients are about to get a transplant from that healthy donor at the bottom, and what you can see is that immediately, you have this radical change in the gut community. 
So one day after you do that transplant, all those symptoms clear up, the diarrhea vanishes, and they're essentially healthy again, coming to resemble the donor's community, and they stay there. 
(Applause) So we're just at the beginning of this discovery. 
We're just finding out that microbes have implications for all these different kinds of diseases, ranging from inflammatory bowel disease to obesity, and perhaps even autism and depression. 
What we need to do, though, is we need to develop a kind of microbial GPS, where we don't just know where we are currently but also where we want to go and what we need to do in order to get there, and we need to be able to make this simple enough that even a child can use it. (Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I wanted to talk to you today about creative confidence. 
I'm going to start way back in the third grade at Oakdale School in Barberton, Ohio. 
I remember one day my best friend Brian was working on a project. 
He was making a horse out of the clay that our teacher kept under the sink. 
And at one point, one of the girls who was sitting at his table, seeing what he was doing, leaned over and said to him, "That's terrible. That doesn't look anything like a horse." 
And Brian's shoulders sank. 
And he wadded up the clay horse and he threw it back in the bin. 
I never saw Brian do a project like that ever again. 
And I wonder how often that happens. 
It seems like when I tell that story of Brian to my class, a lot of them want to come up after class and tell me about their similar experience, how a teacher shut them down or how a student was particularly cruel to them. 
And some opt out thinking of themselves as creative at that point. 
And I see that opting out that happens in childhood, and it moves in and becomes more ingrained, even by the time you get to adult life. 
So we see a lot of this. 
When we have a workshop or when we have clients in to work with us side-by-side, eventually we get to the point in the process that's fuzzy or unconventional. 
And eventually these bigshot executives whip out their Blackberries and they say they have to make really important phone calls, and they head for the exits. 
And they're just so uncomfortable. 
When we track them down and ask them what's going on, they say something like, "" I'm just not the creative type. "" But we know that's not true. 
If they stick with the process, if they stick with it, they end up doing amazing things and they surprise themselves just how innovative they and their teams really are. 
So I've been looking at this fear of judgment that we have. 
That you don't do things, you're afraid you're going to be judged. 
If you don't say the right creative thing, you're going to be judged. 
And I had a major breakthrough when I met the psychologist Albert Bandura. 
I don't know if you know Albert Bandura. 
But if you go to Wikipedia, it says that he's the fourth most important psychologist in history — like Freud, Skinner, somebody and Bandura. 
Bandura's 86 and he still works at Stanford. 
And he's just a lovely guy. 
And so I went to see him because he has just worked on phobias for a long time, which I'm very interested in. 
He had developed this way, this kind of methodology, that ended up curing people in a very short amount of time. 
In four hours he had a huge cure rate of people who had phobias. 
And we talked about snakes. I don't know why we talked about snakes. 
We talked about snakes and fear of snakes as a phobia. 
And it was really enjoyable, really interesting. 
He told me that he'd invite the test subject in, and he'd say, "" You know, there's a snake in the next room and we're going to go in there. "" To which, he reported, most of them replied, "" Hell no, I'm not going in there, certainly if there's a snake in there. "" But Bandura has a step-by-step process that was super successful. 
So he'd take people to this two-way mirror looking into the room where the snake was, and he'd get them comfortable with that. 
And then through a series of steps, he'd move them and they'd be standing in the doorway with the door open and they'd be looking in there. 
And he'd get them comfortable with that. 
And then many more steps later, baby steps, they'd be in the room, they'd have a leather glove like a welder's glove on, and they'd eventually touch the snake. 
And when they touched the snake everything was fine. They were cured. 
In fact, everything was better than fine. 
These people who had life-long fears of snakes were saying things like, "Look how beautiful that snake is." 
And they were holding it in their laps. 
Bandura calls this process "" guided mastery. "" I love that term: guided mastery. 
And something else happened, these people who went through the process and touched the snake ended up having less anxiety about other things in their lives. 
They tried harder, they persevered longer, and they were more resilient in the face of failure. 
They just gained a new confidence. 
And Bandura calls that confidence self-efficacy — the sense that you can change the world and that you can attain what you set out to do. 
Well meeting Bandura was really cathartic for me because I realized that this famous scientist had documented and scientifically validated something that we've seen happen for the last 30 years. 
That we could take people who had the fear that they weren't creative, and we could take them through a series of steps, kind of like a series of small successes, and they turn fear into familiarity, and they surprise themselves. 
That transformation is amazing. 
We see it at the d.school all the time. 
People from all different kinds of disciplines, they think of themselves as only analytical. 
And they come in and they go through the process, our process, they build confidence and now they think of themselves differently. 
And they're totally emotionally excited about the fact that they walk around thinking of themselves as a creative person. 
So I thought one of the things I'd do today is take you through and show you what this journey looks like. 
To me, that journey looks like Doug Dietz. 
Doug Dietz is a technical person. 
He designs medical imaging equipment, large medical imaging equipment. 
He's worked for GE, and he's had a fantastic career. 
But at one point he had a moment of crisis. 
He was in the hospital looking at one of his MRI machines in use when he saw a young family. 
There was a little girl, and that little girl was crying and was terrified. 
And Doug was really disappointed to learn that nearly 80 percent of the pediatric patients in this hospital had to be sedated in order to deal with his MRI machine. 
And this was really disappointing to Doug, because before this time he was proud of what he did. 
He was saving lives with this machine. 
But it really hurt him to see the fear that this machine caused in kids. 
About that time he was at the d.school at Stanford taking classes. 
He was learning about our process about design thinking, about empathy, about iterative prototyping. 
And he would take this new knowledge and do something quite extraordinary. 
He would redesign the entire experience of being scanned. 
And this is what he came up with. 
He turned it into an adventure for the kids. 
He painted the walls and he painted the machine, and he got the operators retrained by people who know kids, like children's museum people. 
And now when the kid comes, it's an experience. 
And they talk to them about the noise and the movement of the ship. 
And when they come, they say, "" Okay, you're going to go into the pirate ship, but be very still because we don't want the pirates to find you. "" And the results were super dramatic. 
So from something like 80 percent of the kids needing to be sedated, to something like 10 percent of the kids needing to be sedated. 
And the hospital and GE were happy too. 
Because you didn't have to call the anesthesiologist all the time, they could put more kids through the machine in a day. 
So the quantitative results were great. 
But Doug's results that he cared about were much more qualitative. 
He was with one of the mothers waiting for her child to come out of the scan. 
And when the little girl came out of her scan, she ran up to her mother and said, "Mommy, can we come back tomorrow?" 
(Laughter) And so I've heard Doug tell the story many times, of his personal transformation and the breakthrough design that happened from it, but I've never really seen him tell the story of the little girl without a tear in his eye. 
Doug's story takes place in a hospital. 
I know a thing or two about hospitals. 
A few years ago I felt a lump on the side of my neck, and it was my turn in the MRI machine. 
It was cancer. It was the bad kind. 
I was told I had a 40 percent chance of survival. 
So while you're sitting around with the other patients in your pajamas and everybody's pale and thin and you're waiting for your turn to get the gamma rays, you think of a lot of things. 
Mostly you think about, Am I going to survive? 
And I thought a lot about, What was my daughter's life going to be like without me? 
But you think about other things. 
I thought a lot about, What was I put on Earth to do? 
What was my calling? What should I do? 
And I was lucky because I had lots of options. 
We'd been working in health and wellness, and K through 12, and the Developing World. 
And so there were lots of projects that I could work on. 
But I decided and I committed to at this point to the thing I most wanted to do — was to help as many people as possible regain the creative confidence they lost along their way. 
And if I was going to survive, that's what I wanted to do. 
I survived, just so you know. 
(Laughter) (Applause) I really believe that when people gain this confidence — and we see it all the time at the d.school and at IDEO — they actually start working on the things that are really important in their lives. 
We see people quit what they're doing and go in new directions. 
We see them come up with more interesting, and just more, ideas so they can choose from better ideas. 
And they just make better decisions. 
So I know at TED you're supposed to have a change-the-world kind of thing. 
Everybody has a change-the-world thing. 
If there is one for me, this is it. To help this happen. 
So I hope you'll join me on my quest — you as thought leaders. 
It would be really great if you didn't let people divide the world into the creatives and the non-creatives, like it's some God-given thing, and to have people realize that they're naturally creative. 
And those natural people should let their ideas fly. 
That they should achieve what Bandura calls self-efficacy, that you can do what you set out to do, and that you can reach a place of creative confidence and touch the snake. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Power. 
That is the word that comes to mind. 
We're the new technologists. 
We have a lot of data, so we have a lot of power. 
How much power do we have? 
Scene from a movie: "" Apocalypse Now "" — great movie. 
We've got to get our hero, Captain Willard, to the mouth of the Nung River so he can go pursue Colonel Kurtz. 
The way we're going to do this is fly him in and drop him off. 
So the scene: the sky is filled with this fleet of helicopters carrying him in. 
And there's this loud, thrilling music in the background, this wild music. 
♫ Dum da ta da dum ♫ ♫ Dum da ta da dum ♫ ♫ Da ta da da ♫ That's a lot of power. 
That's the kind of power I feel in this room. 
That's the kind of power we have because of all of the data that we have. 
Let's take an example. 
What can we do with just one person's data? What can we do 
with that guy's data? 
I can look at your financial records. 
I can tell if you pay your bills on time. 
I know if you're good to give a loan to. 
I can look at your medical records; I can see if your pump is still pumping — see if you're good to offer insurance to. 
I can look at your clicking patterns. 
When you come to my website, I actually know what you're going to do already because I've seen you visit millions of websites before. 
And I'm sorry to tell you, you're like a poker player, you have a tell. 
I can tell with data analysis what you're going to do before you even do it. 
I know what you like. I know who you are, and that's even before I look at your mail or your phone. 
Those are the kinds of things we can do with the data that we have. 
But I'm not actually here to talk about what we can do. 
I'm here to talk about what we should do. 
What's the right thing to do? 
Now I see some puzzled looks like, "" Why are you asking us what's the right thing to do? 
We're just building this stuff. Somebody else is using it. "" Fair enough. 
But it brings me back. 
I think about World War II — some of our great technologists then, some of our great physicists, studying nuclear fission and fusion — just nuclear stuff. 
We gather together these physicists in Los Alamos to see what they'll build. 
We want the people building the technology thinking about what we should be doing with the technology. 
So what should we be doing with that guy's data? 
Should we be collecting it, gathering it, so we can make his online experience better? 
So we can make money? 
So we can protect ourselves if he was up to no good? 
Or should we respect his privacy, protect his dignity and leave him alone? 
Which one is it? 
How should we figure it out? 
I know: crowdsource. Let's crowdsource this. 
So to get people warmed up, let's start with an easy question — something I'm sure everybody here has an opinion about: iPhone versus Android. 
Let's do a show of hands — iPhone. 
Uh huh. 
Android. 
You'd think with a bunch of smart people we wouldn't be such suckers just for the pretty phones. 
(Laughter) Next question, a little bit harder. 
Should we be collecting all of that guy's data to make his experiences better and to protect ourselves in case he's up to no good? 
Or should we leave him alone? 
Collect his data. 
Leave him alone. 
You're safe. It's fine. 
(Laughter) Okay, last question — harder question — when trying to evaluate what we should do in this case, should we use a Kantian deontological moral framework, or should we use a Millian consequentialist one? 
Kant. 
Mill. 
Not as many votes. 
(Laughter) Yeah, that's a terrifying result. 
Terrifying, because we have stronger opinions about our hand-held devices than about the moral framework we should use to guide our decisions. 
How do we know what to do with all the power we have if we don't have a moral framework? 
We know more about mobile operating systems, but what we really need is a moral operating system. 
What's a moral operating system? 
We all know right and wrong, right? 
You feel good when you do something right, you feel bad when you do something wrong. 
Our parents teach us that: praise with the good, scold with the bad. 
But how do we figure out what's right and wrong? 
And from day to day, we have the techniques that we use. 
Maybe we just follow our gut. 
Maybe we take a vote — we crowdsource. 
Or maybe we punt — ask the legal department, see what they say. 
In other words, it's kind of random, kind of ad hoc, how we figure out what we should do. 
And maybe, if we want to be on surer footing, what we really want is a moral framework that will help guide us there, that will tell us what kinds of things are right and wrong in the first place, and how would we know in a given situation what to do. 
So let's get a moral framework. 
We're numbers people, living by numbers. 
How can we use numbers as the basis for a moral framework? 
I know a guy who did exactly that. 
A brilliant guy — he's been dead 2,500 years. 
Plato, that's right. 
Remember him — old philosopher? 
You were sleeping during that class. 
And Plato, he had a lot of the same concerns that we did. 
He was worried about right and wrong. 
He wanted to know what is just. 
But he was worried that all we seem to be doing is trading opinions about this. 
He says something's just. She says something else is just. 
It's kind of convincing when he talks and when she talks too. 
I'm just going back and forth; I'm not getting anywhere. 
I don't want opinions; I want knowledge. 
I want to know the truth about justice — like we have truths in math. 
In math, we know the objective facts. 
Take a number, any number — two. 
Favorite number. I love that number. 
There are truths about two. 
If you've got two of something, you add two more, you get four. 
That's true no matter what thing you're talking about. 
It's an objective truth about the form of two, the abstract form. 
When you have two of anything — two eyes, two ears, two noses, just two protrusions — those all partake of the form of two. 
They all participate in the truths that two has. 
They all have two-ness in them. 
And therefore, it's not a matter of opinion. 
What if, Plato thought, ethics was like math? 
What if there were a pure form of justice? 
What if there are truths about justice, and you could just look around in this world and see which things participated, partook of that form of justice? 
Then you would know what was really just and what wasn't. 
It wouldn't be a matter of just opinion or just appearances. 
That's a stunning vision. 
I mean, think about that. How grand. How ambitious. 
That's as ambitious as we are. 
He wants to solve ethics. 
He wants objective truths. 
If you think that way, you have a Platonist moral framework. 
If you don't think that way, well, you have a lot of company in the history of Western philosophy, because the tidy idea, you know, people criticized it. 
Aristotle, in particular, he was not amused. 
He thought it was impractical. 
Aristotle said, "" We should seek only so much precision in each subject as that subject allows. "" Aristotle thought ethics wasn't a lot like math. 
He thought ethics was a matter of making decisions in the here-and-now using our best judgment to find the right path. 
If you think that, Plato's not your guy. 
But don't give up. 
Maybe there's another way that we can use numbers as the basis of our moral framework. 
How about this: What if in any situation you could just calculate, look at the choices, measure out which one's better and know what to do? 
That sound familiar? 
That's a utilitarian moral framework. 
John Stuart Mill was a great advocate of this — nice guy besides — and only been dead 200 years. 
So basis of utilitarianism — I'm sure you're familiar at least. 
The three people who voted for Mill before are familiar with this. 
But here's the way it works. 
What if morals, what if what makes something moral is just a matter of if it maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain? 
It does something intrinsic to the act. 
It's not like its relation to some abstract form. 
It's just a matter of the consequences. 
You just look at the consequences and see if, overall, it's for the good or for the worse. 
That would be simple. Then we know what to do. 
Let's take an example. 
Suppose I go up and I say, "" I'm going to take your phone. "" Not just because it rang earlier, but I'm going to take it because I made a little calculation. 
I thought, that guy looks suspicious. 
And what if he's been sending little messages to Bin Laden's hideout — or whoever took over after Bin Laden — and he's actually like a terrorist, a sleeper cell. 
I'm going to find that out, and when I find that out, I'm going to prevent a huge amount of damage that he could cause. 
That has a very high utility to prevent that damage. 
And compared to the little pain that it's going to cause — because it's going to be embarrassing when I'm looking on his phone and seeing that he has a Farmville problem and that whole bit — that's overwhelmed by the value of looking at the phone. 
If you feel that way, that's a utilitarian choice. 
But maybe you don't feel that way either. 
Maybe you think, it's his phone. 
It's wrong to take his phone because he's a person and he has rights and he has dignity, and we can't just interfere with that. 
He has autonomy. 
It doesn't matter what the calculations are. 
There are things that are intrinsically wrong — like lying is wrong, like torturing innocent children is wrong. 
Kant was very good on this point, and he said it a little better than I'll say it. 
He said we should use our reason to figure out the rules by which we should guide our conduct, and then it is our duty to follow those rules. 
It's not a matter of calculation. 
So let's stop. 
We're right in the thick of it, this philosophical thicket. 
And this goes on for thousands of years, because these are hard questions, and I've only got 15 minutes. 
So let's cut to the chase. 
How should we be making our decisions? 
Is it Plato, is it Aristotle, is it Kant, is it Mill? 
What should we be doing? What's the answer? 
What's the formula that we can use in any situation to determine what we should do, whether we should use that guy's data or not? 
What's the formula? 
There's not a formula. 
There's not a simple answer. 
Ethics is hard. 
Ethics requires thinking. 
And that's uncomfortable. 
I know; I spent a lot of my career in artificial intelligence, trying to build machines that could do some of this thinking for us, that could give us answers. 
But they can't. 
You can't just take human thinking and put it into a machine. 
We're the ones who have to do it. 
Happily, we're not machines, and we can do it. 
Not only can we think, we must. 
Hannah Arendt said, "" The sad truth is that most evil done in this world is not done by people who choose to be evil. 
It arises from not thinking. "" That's what she called the "" banality of evil. "" And the response to that is that we demand the exercise of thinking from every sane person. 
So let's do that. Let's think. 
In fact, let's start right now. 
Every person in this room do this: think of the last time you had a decision to make where you were worried to do the right thing, where you wondered, "" What should I be doing? "" Bring that to mind, and now reflect on that and say, "" How did I come up that decision? 
What did I do? Did I follow my gut? 
Did I have somebody vote on it? Or did I punt to legal? "" Or now we have a few more choices. 
"" Did I evaluate what would be the highest pleasure like Mill would? 
Or like Kant, did I use reason to figure out what was intrinsically right? "" Think about it. Really bring it to mind. This is important. 
It is so important we are going to spend 30 seconds of valuable TEDTalk time doing nothing but thinking about this. 
Are you ready? Go. 
Stop. Good work. 
What you just did, that's the first step towards taking responsibility for what we should do with all of our power. 
Now the next step — try this. 
Go find a friend and explain to them how you made that decision. 
Not right now. Wait till I finish talking. 
Do it over lunch. 
And don't just find another technologist friend; find somebody different than you. 
Find an artist or a writer — or, heaven forbid, find a philosopher and talk to them. 
In fact, find somebody from the humanities. 
Why? Because they think about problems differently than we do as technologists. 
Just a few days ago, right across the street from here, there was hundreds of people gathered together. 
It was technologists and humanists at that big BiblioTech Conference. 
And they gathered together because the technologists wanted to learn what it would be like to think from a humanities perspective. 
You have someone from Google talking to someone who does comparative literature. 
You're thinking about the relevance of 17th century French theater — how does that bear upon venture capital? 
Well that's interesting. That's a different way of thinking. 
And when you think in that way, you become more sensitive to the human considerations, which are crucial to making ethical decisions. 
So imagine that right now you went and you found your musician friend. 
And you're telling him what we're talking about, about our whole data revolution and all this — maybe even hum a few bars of our theme music. 
♫ Dum ta da da dum dum ta da da dum ♫ Well, your musician friend will stop you and say, "" You know, the theme music for your data revolution, that's an opera, that's Wagner. 
It's based on Norse legend. 
It's Gods and mythical creatures fighting over magical jewelry. "" That's interesting. 
Now it's also a beautiful opera, and we're moved by that opera. 
We're moved because it's about the battle between good and evil, about right and wrong. 
And we care about right and wrong. 
We care what happens in that opera. 
We care what happens in "" Apocalypse Now. "" And we certainly care what happens with our technologies. 
We have so much power today, it is up to us to figure out what to do, and that's the good news. 
We're the ones writing this opera. 
This is our movie. 
We figure out what will happen with this technology. 
We determine how this will all end. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Recently I visited Beloit, Wisconsin. 
And I was there to honor a great 20th century explorer, Roy Chapman Andrews. 
During his time at the American Museum of Natural History, Andrews led a range of expeditions to uncharted regions, like here in the Gobi Desert. 
He was quite a figure. 
He was later, it's said, the basis of the Indiana Jones character. 
And when I was in Beloit, Wisconsin, I gave a public lecture to a group of middle school students. 
And I'm here to tell you, if there's anything more intimidating than talking here at TED, it'll be trying to hold the attention of a group of a thousand 12-year-olds for a 45-minute lecture. 
Don't try that one. 
At the end of the lecture they asked a number of questions, but there was one that's really stuck with me since then. 
There was a young girl who stood up, and she asked the question: "Where should we explore?" 
I think there's a sense that many of us have that the great age of exploration on Earth is over, that for the next generation they're going to have to go to outer space or the deepest oceans in order to find something significant to explore. 
But is that really the case? 
Is there really nowhere significant for us to explore left here on Earth? 
It sort of made me think back to one of my favorite explorers in the history of biology. 
This is an explorer of the unseen world, Martinus Beijerinck. 
So Beijerinck set out to discover the cause of tobacco mosaic disease. 
What he did is he took the infected juice from tobacco plants and he would filter it through smaller and smaller filters. 
And he reached the point where he felt that there must be something out there that was smaller than the smallest forms of life that were ever known — bacteria, at the time. 
He came up with a name for his mystery agent. 
He called it the virus — Latin for "" poison. "" And in uncovering viruses, Beijerinck really opened this entirely new world for us. 
We now know that viruses make up the majority of the genetic information on our planet, more than the genetic information of all other forms of life combined. 
And obviously there's been tremendous practical applications associated with this world — things like the eradication of smallpox, the advent of a vaccine against cervical cancer, which we now know is mostly caused by human papillomavirus. 
And Beijerinck's discovery, this was not something that occurred 500 years ago. 
It was a little over 100 years ago that Beijerinck discovered viruses. 
So basically we had automobiles, but we were unaware of the forms of life that make up most of the genetic information on our planet. 
We now have these amazing tools to allow us to explore the unseen world — things like deep sequencing, which allow us to do much more than just skim the surface and look at individual genomes from a particular species, but to look at entire metagenomes, the communities of teeming microorganisms in, on and around us and to document all of the genetic information in these species. 
We can apply these techniques to things from soil to skin and everything in between. 
In my organization we now do this on a regular basis to identify the causes of outbreaks that are unclear exactly what causes them. 
And just to give you a sense of how this works, imagine that we took a nasal swab from every single one of you. 
And this is something we commonly do to look for respiratory viruses like influenza. 
The first thing we would see is a tremendous amount of genetic information. 
And if we started looking into that genetic information, we'd see a number of usual suspects out there — of course, a lot of human genetic information, but also bacterial and viral information, mostly from things that are completely harmless within your nose. 
But we'd also see something very, very surprising. 
As we started to look at this information, we would see that about 20 percent of the genetic information in your nose doesn't match anything that we've ever seen before — no plant, animal, fungus, virus or bacteria. 
Basically we have no clue what this is. 
And for the small group of us who actually study this kind of data, a few of us have actually begun to call this information biological dark matter. 
We know it's not anything that we've seen before; it's sort of the equivalent of an uncharted continent right within our own genetic information. 
And there's a lot of it. 
If you think 20 percent of genetic information in your nose is a lot of biological dark matter, if we looked at your gut, up to 40 or 50 percent of that information is biological dark matter. 
And even in the relatively sterile blood, around one to two percent of this information is dark matter — can't be classified, can't be typed or matched with anything we've seen before. 
At first we thought that perhaps this was artifact. 
These deep sequencing tools are relatively new. 
But as they become more and more accurate, we've determined that this information is a form of life, or at least some of it is a form of life. 
And while the hypotheses for explaining the existence of biological dark matter are really only in their infancy, there's a very, very exciting possibility that exists: that buried in this life, in this genetic information, are signatures of as of yet unidentified life. 
That as we explore these strings of A's, T's, C's and G's, we may uncover a completely new class of life that, like Beijerinck, will fundamentally change the way that we think about the nature of biology. 
That perhaps will allow us to identify the cause of a cancer that afflicts us or identify the source of an outbreak that we aren't familiar with or perhaps create a new tool in molecular biology. 
I'm pleased to announce that, along with colleagues at Stanford and Caltech and UCSF, we're currently starting an initiative to explore biological dark matter for the existence of new forms of life. 
A little over a hundred years ago, people were unaware of viruses, the forms of life that make up most of the genetic information on our planet. 
A hundred years from now, people may marvel that we were perhaps completely unaware of a new class of life that literally was right under our noses. 
It's true, we may have charted all the continents on the planet and we may have discovered all the mammals that are out there, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing left to explore on Earth. 
Beijerinck and his kind provide an important lesson for the next generation of explorers — people like that young girl from Beloit, Wisconsin. 
And I think if we phrase that lesson, it's something like this: Don't assume that what we currently think is out there is the full story. 
Go after the dark matter in whatever field you choose to explore. 
There are unknowns all around us and they're just waiting to be discovered. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I wanted to be a rock star. 
I dreamed of it, and that's all I dreamed of. 
To be more accurate, I wanted to be a pop star. 
This was in the late '80s. 
And mostly I wanted to be the fifth member of Depeche Mode or Duran Duran. 
They wouldn't have me. 
I didn't read music, but I played synthesizers and drum machines. 
And I grew up in this little farming town in northern Nevada. 
And I was certain that's what my life would be. 
And when I went to college at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas when I was 18, I was stunned to find that there was not a Pop Star 101, or even a degree program for that interest. 
And the choir conductor there knew that I sang and invited me to come and join the choir. 
And I said, "" Yes, I would love to do that. It sounds great. "" And I left the room and said, "" No way. "" The choir people in my high school were pretty geeky, and there was no way I was going to have anything to do with those people. 
And about a week later, a friend of mine came to me and said, "" Listen, you've got to join choir. 
At the end of the semester, we're taking a trip to Mexico, all expenses paid. 
And the soprano section is just full of hot girls. "" And so I figured for Mexico and babes, I could do just about anything. 
And I went to my first day in choir, and I sat down with the basses and sort of looked over my shoulder to see what they were doing. 
They opened their scores, the conductor gave the downbeat, and boom, they launched into the Kyrie from the "" Requiem "" by Mozart. 
In my entire life I had seen in black and white, and suddenly everything was in shocking Technicolor. 
The most transformative experience I've ever had — in that single moment, hearing dissonance and harmony and people singing, people together, the shared vision. 
And I felt for the first time in my life that I was part of something bigger than myself. 
And there were a lot of cute girls in the soprano section, as it turns out. 
I decided to write a piece for choir a couple of years later as a gift to this conductor who had changed my life. 
I had learned to read music by then, or slowly learning to read music. 
And that piece was published, and then I wrote another piece, and that got published. 
And then I started conducting, and I ended up doing my master's degree at the Juilliard School. 
And I find myself now in the unlikely position of standing in front of all of you as a professional classical composer and conductor. 
Well a couple of years ago, a friend of mine emailed me a link, a YouTube link, and said, "" You have got to see this. "" And it was this young woman who had posted a fan video to me, singing the soprano line to a piece of mine called "" Sleep. "" (Video) Britlin Losee: Hi Mr. Eric Whitacre. 
My name is Britlin Losee, and this is a video that I'd like to make for you. 
Here's me singing "" Sleep. "" I'm a little nervous, just to let you know. 
♫ If there are noises ♫ ♫ in the night ♫ Eric Whitacre: I was thunderstruck. 
Britlin was so innocent and so sweet, and her voice was so pure. 
And I even loved seeing behind her; I could see the little teddy bear sitting on the piano behind her in her room. 
Such an intimate video. 
And I had this idea: if I could get 50 people to all do this same thing, sing their parts — soprano, alto, tenor and bass — wherever they were in the world, post their videos to YouTube, we could cut it all together and create a virtual choir. 
So I wrote on my blog, "" OMG OMG. "" I actually wrote, "" OMG, "" hopefully for the last time in public ever. 
(Laughter) And I sent out this call to singers. 
And I made free the download of the music to a piece that I had written in the year 2000 called "" Lux Aurumque, "" which means "" light and gold. "" And lo and behold, people started uploading their videos. 
Now I should say, before that, what I did is I posted a conductor track of myself conducting. 
And it's in complete silence when I filmed it, because I was only hearing the music in my head, imagining the choir that would one day come to be. 
Afterwards, I played a piano track underneath so that the singers would have something to listen to. 
And then as the videos started to come in... 
(Singing) This is Cheryl Ang from Singapore. (Singing) 
This is Evangelina Etienne (Singing) from Massachusetts. (Singing) 
Stephen Hanson from Sweden. (Singing) 
This is Jamal Walker from Dallas, Texas. (Singing) 
There was even a little soprano solo in the piece, and so I had auditions. 
And a number of sopranos uploaded their parts. 
I was told later, and also by lots of singers who were involved in this, that they sometimes recorded 50 or 60 different takes until they got just the right take — they uploaded it. 
Here's our winner of the soprano solo. 
This is Melody Myers from Tennessee. 
(Singing) I love the little smile she does right over the top of the note — like, "" No problem, everything's fine. "" (Laughter) And from the crowd emerged this young man, Scott Haines. 
And he said, "" Listen, this is the project I've been looking for my whole life. 
I'd like to be the person to edit this all together. "" I said, "" Thank you, Scott. I'm so glad that you found me. "" And Scott aggregated all of the videos. 
He scrubbed the audio. 
He made sure that everything lined up. 
And then we posted this video to YouTube about a year and a half ago. 
This is "" Lux Aurumque "" sung by the Virtual Choir. 
(Singing) I'll stop it there in the interest of time. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. 
So there's more. There's more. Thank you so much. And I had the same reaction you did. I actually was moved to tears when I first saw it. I just couldn't believe the poetry of all of it — 
these souls all on their own desert island, sending electronic messages in bottles to each other. 
And the video went viral. 
We had a million hits in the first month and got a lot of attention for it. 
And because of that, then a lot of singers started saying, "All right, what's Virtual Choir 2.0?" 
And so I decided for Virtual Choir 2.0 that I would choose the same piece that Britlin was singing, "" Sleep, "" which is another work that I wrote in the year 2000 — poetry by my dear friend Charles Anthony Silvestri. 
And again, I posted a conductor video, and we started accepting submissions. 
This time we got some more mature members. 
(Singing) And some younger members. 
(Video) Soprano: ♫ Upon my pillow ♫ ♫ Safe in bed ♫ EW: That's Georgie from England. She's only nine. 
Isn't that the sweetest thing you've ever seen? 
Someone did all eight videos — a bass even singing the soprano parts. 
This is Beau Awtin. 
(Video) Beau Awtin: ♫ Safe in bed ♫ EW: And our goal — it was sort of an arbitrary goal — there was an MTV video where they all sang "" Lollipop "" and they got people from all over the world to just sing that little melody. 
And there were 900 people involved in that. 
So I told the singers, "" That's our goal. 
That's the number for us to beat. "" And we just closed submissions January 10th, and our final tally was 2,051 videos from 58 different countries. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) From Malta, Madagascar, Thailand, Vietnam, Jordan, Egypt, Israel, as far north as Alaska and as far south as New Zealand. 
And we also put a page on Facebook for the singers to upload their testimonials, what it was like for them, their experience singing it. 
And I've just chosen a few of them here. 
"" My sister and I used to sing in choirs together constantly. 
Now she's an airman in the air force constantly traveling. 
It's so wonderful to sing together again! "" I love the idea that she's singing with her sister. 
"" Aside from the beautiful music, it's great just to know I'm part of a worldwide community of people I never met before, but who are connected anyway. "" And my personal favorite, "" When I told my husband that I was going to be a part of this, he told me that I did not have the voice for it. "" Yeah, I'm sure a lot of you have heard that too. 
Me too. 
"" It hurt so much, and I shed some tears, but something inside of me wanted to do this despite his words. 
It is a dream come true to be part of this choir, as I've never been part of one. 
When I placed a marker on the Google Earth Map, I had to go with the nearest city, which is about 400 miles away from where I live. 
As I am in the Great Alaskan Bush, satellite is my connection to the world. "" So two things struck me deeply about this. 
The first is that human beings will go to any lengths necessary to find and connect with each other. 
It doesn't matter the technology. 
And the second is that people seem to be experiencing an actual connection. 
It wasn't a virtual choir. 
There are people now online that are friends; they've never met. 
But, I know myself too, I feel this virtual esprit de corps, if you will, with all of them. 
I feel a closeness to this choir — almost like a family. 
What I'd like to close with then today is the first look at "" Sleep "" by Virtual Choir 2.0. 
This will be a premiere today. 
We're not finished with the video yet. 
You can imagine, with 2,000 synchronized YouTube videos, the render time is just atrocious. 
But we do have the first three minutes. 
And it's a tremendous honor for me to be able to show it to you here first. 
You're the very first people to see this. 
This is "" Sleep, "" the Virtual Choir. 
(Video) Virtual Choir: ♫ The evening hangs ♫ ♫ beneath the moon ♫ ♫ A silver thread on darkened dune ♫ ♫ With closing eyes and resting head ♫ ♫ I know that sleep is coming soon ♫ ♫ Upon my pillow, ♫ ♫ safe in bed, ♫ ♫ a thousand pictures fill my head ♫ ♫ I cannot sleep ♫ ♫ my mind's aflight ♫ ♫ and yet my limbs seem made of lead ♫ ♫ If there are noises in the night ♫ Eric Whitacre: Thank you very, very much. Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) 

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

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

I'd like you to come back with me for a moment to the 19th century, specifically to June 24, 1833. 
The British Association for the Advancement of Science is holding its third meeting at the University of Cambridge. 
It's the first night of the meeting, and a confrontation is about to take place that will change science forever. 
An elderly, white-haired man stands up. 
The members of the Association are shocked to realize that it's the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who hadn't even left his house in years until that day. 
They're even more shocked by what he says. 
"You must stop calling yourselves natural philosophers." 
Coleridge felt that true philosophers like himself pondered the cosmos from their armchairs. 
They were not mucking around in the fossil pits or conducting messy experiments with electrical piles like the members of the British Association. 
The crowd grew angry and began to complain loudly. 
A young Cambridge scholar named William Whewell stood up and quieted the audience. 
He politely agreed that an appropriate name for the members of the association did not exist. 
"If 'philosophers' is taken to be too wide and lofty a term," he said, "" then, by analogy with 'artist,' we may form 'scientist.' "" This was the first time the word scientist was uttered in public, only 179 years ago. 
I first found out about this confrontation when I was in graduate school, and it kind of blew me away. 
I mean, how could the word scientist not have existed until 1833? 
What were scientists called before? 
What had changed to make a new name necessary precisely at that moment? 
Prior to this meeting, those who studied the natural world were talented amateurs. 
Think of the country clergyman or squire collecting his beetles or fossils, like Charles Darwin, for example, or, the hired help of a nobleman, like Joseph Priestley, who was the literary companion to the Marquis of Lansdowne when he discovered oxygen. 
After this, they were scientists, professionals with a particular scientific method, goals, societies and funding. 
Much of this revolution can be traced to four men who met at Cambridge University in 1812: Charles Babbage, John Herschel, Richard Jones and William Whewell. 
These were brilliant, driven men who accomplished amazing things. 
Charles Babbage, I think known to most TEDsters, invented the first mechanical calculator and the first prototype of a modern computer. 
John Herschel mapped the stars of the southern hemisphere, and, in his spare time, co-invented photography. 
I'm sure we could all be that productive without Facebook or Twitter to take up our time. 
Richard Jones became an important economist who later influenced Karl Marx. 
And Whewell not only coined the term scientist, as well as the words anode, cathode and ion, but spearheaded international big science with his global research on the tides. 
In the Cambridge winter of 1812 and 1813, the four met for what they called philosophical breakfasts. 
They talked about science and the need for a new scientific revolution. 
They felt science had stagnated since the days of the scientific revolution that had happened in the 17th century. 
It was time for a new revolution, which they pledged to bring about, and what's so amazing about these guys is, not only did they have these grandiose undergraduate dreams, but they actually carried them out, even beyond their wildest dreams. 
And I'm going to tell you today about four major changes to science these men made. 
About 200 years before, Francis Bacon and then, later, Isaac Newton, had proposed an inductive scientific method. 
Now that's a method that starts from observations and experiments and moves to generalizations about nature called natural laws, which are always subject to revision or rejection should new evidence arise. 
However, in 1809, David Ricardo muddied the waters by arguing that the science of economics should use a different, deductive method. 
The problem was that an influential group at Oxford began arguing that because it worked so well in economics, this deductive method ought to be applied to the natural sciences too. 
The members of the philosophical breakfast club disagreed. 
They wrote books and articles promoting inductive method in all the sciences that were widely read by natural philosophers, university students and members of the public. 
Reading one of Herschel's books was such a watershed moment for Charles Darwin that he would later say, "" Scarcely anything in my life made so deep an impression on me. 
It made me wish to add my might to the accumulated store of natural knowledge. "" It also shaped Darwin's scientific method, as well as that used by his peers. 
[Science for the public good] Previously, it was believed that scientific knowledge ought to be used for the good of the king or queen, or for one's own personal gain. 
For example, ship captains needed to know information about the tides in order to safely dock at ports. 
Harbormasters would gather this knowledge and sell it to the ship captains. 
The philosophical breakfast club changed that, working together. 
Whewell's worldwide study of the tides resulted in public tide tables and tidal maps that freely provided the harbormasters' knowledge to all ship captains. 
Herschel helped by making tidal observations off the coast of South Africa, and, as he complained to Whewell, he was knocked off the docks during a violent high tide for his trouble. 
The four men really helped each other in every way. 
They also relentlessly lobbied the British government for the money to build Babbage's engines because they believed these engines would have a huge practical impact on society. 
In the days before pocket calculators, the numbers that most professionals needed — bankers, insurance agents, ship captains, engineers — were to be found in lookup books like this, filled with tables of figures. 
These tables were calculated using a fixed procedure over and over by part-time workers known as — and this is amazing — computers, but these calculations were really difficult. 
I mean, this nautical almanac published the lunar differences for every month of the year. 
Each month required 1,365 calculations, so these tables were filled with mistakes. 
Babbage's difference engine was the first mechanical calculator devised to accurately compute any of these tables. 
Two models of his engine were built in the last 20 years by a team from the Science Museum of London using his own plans. 
This is the one now at the Computer History Museum in California, and it calculates accurately. It actually works. 
Later, Babbage's analytical engine was the first mechanical computer in the modern sense. 
It had a separate memory and central processor. 
It was capable of iteration, conditional branching and parallel processing, and it was programmable using punched cards, an idea Babbage took from Jacquard's loom. 
Tragically, Babbage's engines never were built in his day because most people thought that non-human computers would have no usefulness for the public. 
[New scientific institutions] Founded in Bacon's time, the Royal Society of London was the foremost scientific society in England and even in the rest of the world. 
By the 19th century, it had become a kind of gentleman's club populated mainly by antiquarians, literary men and the nobility. 
The members of the philosophical breakfast club helped form a number of new scientific societies, including the British Association. 
These new societies required that members be active researchers publishing their results. 
They reinstated the tradition of the Q & A after scientific papers were read, which had been discontinued by the Royal Society as being ungentlemanly. 
And for the first time, they gave women a foot in the door of science. 
Members were encouraged to bring their wives, daughters and sisters to the meetings of the British Association, and while the women were expected to attend only the public lectures and the social events like this one, they began to infiltrate the scientific sessions as well. 
The British Association would later be the first of the major national science organizations in the world to admit women as full members. 
[External funding for science] Up to the 19th century, natural philosophers were expected to pay for their own equipment and supplies. 
Occasionally, there were prizes, such as that given to John Harrison in the 18th century, for solving the so-called longitude problem, but prizes were only given after the fact, when they were given at all. 
On the advice of the philosophical breakfast club, the British Association began to use the extra money generated by its meetings to give grants for research in astronomy, the tides, fossil fish, shipbuilding, and many other areas. 
These grants not only allowed less wealthy men to conduct research, but they also encouraged thinking outside the box, rather than just trying to solve one pre-set question. 
Eventually, the Royal Society and the scientific societies of other countries followed suit, and this has become — fortunately it's become — a major part of the scientific landscape today. 
So the philosophical breakfast club helped invent the modern scientist. 
That's the heroic part of their story. 
There's a flip side as well. 
They did not foresee at least one consequence of their revolution. 
They would have been deeply dismayed by today's disjunction between science and the rest of culture. 
It's shocking to realize that only 28 percent of American adults have even a very basic level of science literacy, and this was tested by asking simple questions like, "Did humans and dinosaurs inhabit the Earth at the same time?" 
and "" What proportion of the Earth is covered in water? "" Once scientists became members of a professional group, they were slowly walled off from the rest of us. 
This is the unintended consequence of the revolution that started with our four friends. 
Charles Darwin said, "" I sometimes think that general and popular treatises are almost as important for the progress of science as original work. "" In fact, "" Origin of Species "" was written for a general and popular audience, and was widely read when it first appeared. 
Darwin knew what we seem to have forgotten, that science is not only for scientists. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

This is a lot of ones and zeros. 
It's what we call binary information. 
This is how computers talk. 
It's how they store information. 
It's how computers think. 
It's how computers do everything it is that computers do. 
I'm a cybersecurity researcher, which means my job is to sit down with this information and try to make sense of it, to try to understand what all the ones and zeroes mean. 
Unfortunately for me, we're not just talking about the ones and zeros I have on the screen here. 
We're not just talking about a few pages of ones and zeros. 
We're talking about billions and billions of ones and zeros, more than anyone could possibly comprehend. 
Now, as exciting as that sounds, when I first started doing cyber — (Laughter) — when I first started doing cyber, I wasn't sure that sifting through ones and zeros was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, because in my mind, cyber was keeping viruses off of my grandma's computer, it was keeping people's Myspace pages from being hacked, and maybe, maybe on my most glorious day, it was keeping someone's credit card information from being stolen. 
Those are important things, but that's not how I wanted to spend my life. 
But after 30 minutes of work as a defense contractor, I soon found out that my idea of cyber was a little bit off. 
In fact, in terms of national security, keeping viruses off of my grandma's computer was surprisingly low on their priority list. 
And the reason for that is cyber is so much bigger than any one of those things. 
Cyber is an integral part of all of our lives, because computers are an integral part of all of our lives, even if you don't own a computer. 
Computers control everything in your car, from your GPS to your airbags. 
They control your phone. 
They're the reason you can call 911 and get someone on the other line. 
They control our nation's entire infrastructure. 
They're the reason you have electricity, heat, clean water, food. 
Computers control our military equipment, everything from missile silos to satellites to nuclear defense networks. 
All of these things are made possible because of computers, and therefore because of cyber, and when something goes wrong, cyber can make all of these things impossible. 
But that's where I step in. 
A big part of my job is defending all of these things, keeping them working, but once in a while, part of my job is to break one of these things, because cyber isn't just about defense, it's also about offense. 
We're entering an age where we talk about cyberweapons. 
In fact, so great is the potential for cyber offense that cyber is considered a new domain of warfare. 
Warfare. 
It's not necessarily a bad thing. 
On the one hand, it means we have whole new front on which we need to defend ourselves, but on the other hand, it means we have a whole new way to attack, a whole new way to stop evil people from doing evil things. 
So let's consider an example of this that's completely theoretical. 
Suppose a terrorist wants to blow up a building, and he wants to do this again and again in the future. 
So he doesn't want to be in that building when it explodes. 
He's going to use a cell phone as a remote detonator. 
Now, it used to be the only way we had to stop this terrorist was with a hail of bullets and a car chase, but that's not necessarily true anymore. 
We're entering an age where we can stop him with the press of a button from 1,000 miles away, because whether he knew it or not, as soon as he decided to use his cell phone, he stepped into the realm of cyber. 
A well-crafted cyber attack could break into his phone, disable the overvoltage protections on his battery, drastically overload the circuit, cause the battery to overheat, and explode. 
No more phone, no more detonator, maybe no more terrorist, all with the press of a button from a thousand miles away. 
So how does this work? 
It all comes back to those ones and zeros. 
Binary information makes your phone work, and used correctly, it can make your phone explode. 
So when you start to look at cyber from this perspective, spending your life sifting through binary information starts to seem kind of exciting. 
But here's the catch: This is hard, really, really hard, and here's why. 
Think about everything you have on your cell phone. 
You've got the pictures you've taken. 
You've got the music you listen to. 
You've got your contacts list, your email, and probably 500 apps you've never used in your entire life, and behind all of this is the software, the code, that controls your phone, and somewhere, buried inside of that code, is a tiny piece that controls your battery, and that's what I'm really after, but all of this, just a bunch of ones and zeros, and it's all just mixed together. 
In cyber, we call this finding a needle in a stack of needles, because everything pretty much looks alike. 
I'm looking for one key piece, but it just blends in with everything else. 
So let's step back from this theoretical situation of making a terrorist's phone explode, and look at something that actually happened to me. 
Pretty much no matter what I do, my job always starts with sitting down with a whole bunch of binary information, and I'm always looking for one key piece to do something specific. 
In this case, I was looking for a very advanced, very high-tech piece of code that I knew I could hack, but it was somewhere buried inside of a billion ones and zeroes. 
Unfortunately for me, I didn't know quite what I was looking for. 
I didn't know quite what it would look like, which makes finding it really, really hard. 
When I have to do that, what I have to do is basically look at various pieces of this binary information, try to decipher each piece, and see if it might be what I'm after. 
So after a while, I thought I had found the piece I was looking for. 
I thought maybe this was it. 
It seemed to be about right, but I couldn't quite tell. 
I couldn't tell what those ones and zeros represented. 
So I spent some time trying to put this together, but wasn't having a whole lot of luck, and finally I decided, I'm going to get through this, I'm going to come in on a weekend, and I'm not going to leave until I figure out what this represents. 
So that's what I did. I came in on a Saturday morning, and about 10 hours in, I sort of had all the pieces to the puzzle. 
I just didn't know how they fit together. 
I didn't know what these ones and zeros meant. 
At the 15-hour mark, I started to get a better picture of what was there, but I had a creeping suspicion that what I was looking at was not at all related to what I was looking for. 
By 20 hours, the pieces started to come together very slowly — (Laughter) — and I was pretty sure I was going down the wrong path at this point, but I wasn't going to give up. 
After 30 hours in the lab, I figured out exactly what I was looking at, and I was right, it wasn't what I was looking for. 
I spent 30 hours piecing together the ones and zeros that formed a picture of a kitten. 
(Laughter) I wasted 30 hours of my life searching for this kitten that had nothing at all to do with what I was trying to accomplish. 
So I was frustrated, I was exhausted. 
After 30 hours in the lab, I probably smelled horrible. 
But instead of just going home and calling it quits, I took a step back and asked myself, what went wrong here? 
How could I make such a stupid mistake? 
I'm really pretty good at this. 
I do this for a living. 
So what happened? 
Well I thought, when you're looking at information at this level, it's so easy to lose track of what you're doing. 
It's easy to not see the forest through the trees. 
It's easy to go down the wrong rabbit hole and waste a tremendous amount of time doing the wrong thing. 
But I had this epiphany. 
We were looking at the data completely incorrectly since day one. 
This is how computers think, ones and zeros. 
It's not how people think, but we've been trying to adapt our minds to think more like computers so that we can understand this information. 
Instead of trying to make our minds fit the problem, we should have been making the problem fit our minds, because our brains have a tremendous potential for analyzing huge amounts of information, just not like this. 
So what if we could unlock that potential just by translating this to the right kind of information? 
So with these ideas in mind, I sprinted out of my basement lab at work to my basement lab at home, which looked pretty much the same. 
The main difference is, at work, I'm surrounded by cyber materials, and cyber seemed to be the problem in this situation. 
At home, I'm surrounded by everything else I've ever learned. 
So I poured through every book I could find, every idea I'd ever encountered, to see how could we translate a problem from one domain to something completely different? 
The biggest question was, what do we want to translate it to? 
What do our brains do perfectly naturally that we could exploit? 
My answer was vision. 
We have a tremendous capability to analyze visual information. 
We can combine color gradients, depth cues, all sorts of these different signals into one coherent picture of the world around us. 
That's incredible. 
So if we could find a way to translate these binary patterns to visual signals, we could really unlock the power of our brains to process this stuff. 
So I started looking at the binary information, and I asked myself, what do I do when I first encounter something like this? 
And the very first thing I want to do, the very first question I want to answer, is what is this? 
I don't care what it does, how it works. 
All I want to know is, what is this? 
And the way I can figure that out is by looking at chunks, sequential chunks of binary information, and I look at the relationships between those chunks. 
When I gather up enough of these sequences, I begin to get an idea of exactly what this information must be. 
So let's go back to that blow up the terrorist's phone situation. 
This is what English text looks like at a binary level. 
This is what your contacts list would look like if I were examining it. 
It's really hard to analyze this at this level, but if we take those same binary chunks that I would be trying to find, and instead translate that to a visual representation, translate those relationships, this is what we get. 
This is what English text looks like from a visual abstraction perspective. 
All of a sudden, it shows us all the same information that was in the ones and zeros, but show us it in an entirely different way, a way that we can immediately comprehend. 
We can instantly see all of the patterns here. 
It takes me seconds to pick out patterns here, but hours, days, to pick them out in ones and zeros. 
It takes minutes for anybody to learn what these patterns represent here, but years of experience in cyber to learn what those same patterns represent in ones and zeros. 
So this piece is caused by lower case letters followed by lower case letters inside of that contact list. 
This is upper case by upper case, upper case by lower case, lower case by upper case. 
This is caused by spaces. This is caused by carriage returns. 
We can go through every little detail of the binary information in seconds, as opposed to weeks, months, at this level. 
This is what an image looks like from your cell phone. 
But this is what it looks like in a visual abstraction. 
This is what your music looks like, but here's its visual abstraction. 
Most importantly for me, this is what the code on your cell phone looks like. 
This is what I'm after in the end, but this is its visual abstraction. 
If I can find this, I can't make the phone explode. 
I could spend weeks trying to find this in ones and zeros, but it takes me seconds to pick out a visual abstraction like this. 
One of those most remarkable parts about all of this is it gives us an entirely new way to understand new information, stuff that we haven't seen before. 
So I know what English looks like at a binary level, and I know what its visual abstraction looks like, but I've never seen Russian binary in my entire life. 
It would take me weeks just to figure out what I was looking at from raw ones and zeros, but because our brains can instantly pick up and recognize these subtle patterns inside of these visual abstractions, we can unconsciously apply those in new situations. 
So this is what Russian looks like in a visual abstraction. 
Because I know what one language looks like, I can recognize other languages even when I'm not familiar with them. 
This is what a photograph looks like, but this is what clip art looks like. 
This is what the code on your phone looks like, but this is what the code on your computer looks like. 
Our brains can pick up on these patterns in ways that we never could have from looking at raw ones and zeros. 
But we've really only scratched the surface of what we can do with this approach. 
We've only begun to unlock the capabilities of our minds to process visual information. 
If we take those same concepts and translate them into three dimensions instead, we find entirely new ways of making sense of information. 
In seconds, we can pick out every pattern here. 
we can see the cross associated with code. 
We can see cubes associated with text. 
We can even pick up the tiniest visual artifacts. 
Things that would take us weeks, months to find in ones and zeroes, are immediately apparent in some sort of visual abstraction, and as we continue to go through this and throw more and more information at it, what we find is that we're capable of processing billions of ones and zeros in a matter of seconds just by using our brain's built-in ability to analyze patterns. 
So this is really nice and helpful, but all this tells me is what I'm looking at. 
So at this point, based on visual patterns, I can find the code on the phone. 
But that's not enough to blow up a battery. 
The next thing I need to find is the code that controls the battery, but we're back to the needle in a stack of needles problem. 
That code looks pretty much like all the other code on that system. 
So I might not be able to find the code that controls the battery, but there's a lot of things that are very similar to that. 
You have code that controls your screen, that controls your buttons, that controls your microphones, so even if I can't find the code for the battery, I bet I can find one of those things. 
So the next step in my binary analysis process is to look at pieces of information that are similar to each other. 
It's really, really hard to do at a binary level, but if we translate those similarities to a visual abstraction instead, I don't even have to sift through the raw data. 
All I have to do is wait for the image to light up to see when I'm at similar pieces. 
I follow these strands of similarity like a trail of bread crumbs to find exactly what I'm looking for. 
So at this point in the process, I've located the code responsible for controlling your battery, but that's still not enough to blow up a phone. 
The last piece of the puzzle is understanding how that code controls your battery. 
For this, I need to identify very subtle, very detailed relationships within that binary information, another very hard thing to do when looking at ones and zeros. 
But if we translate that information into a physical representation, we can sit back and let our visual cortex do all the hard work. 
It can find all the detailed patterns, all the important pieces, for us. 
It can find out exactly how the pieces of that code work together to control that battery. 
All of this can be done in a matter of hours, whereas the same process would have taken months in the past. 
This is all well and good in a theoretical blow up a terrorist's phone situation. 
I wanted to find out if this would really work in the work I do every day. 
So I was playing around with these same concepts with some of the data I've looked at in the past, and yet again, I was trying to find a very detailed, specific piece of code inside of a massive piece of binary information. 
So I looked at it at this level, thinking I was looking at the right thing, only to see this doesn't have the connectivity I would have expected for the code I was looking for. 
In fact, I'm not really sure what this is, but when I stepped back a level and looked at the similarities within the code I saw, this doesn't have similarities like any code that exists out there. 
I can't even be looking at code. 
In fact, from this perspective, I could tell, this isn't code. 
This is an image of some sort. 
And from here, I can see, it's not just an image, this is a photograph. 
Now that I know it's a photograph, I've got dozens of other binary translation techniques to visualize and understand that information, so in a matter of seconds, we can take this information, shove it through a dozen other visual translation techniques in order to find out exactly what we were looking at. 
I saw — (Laughter) — it was that darn kitten again. 
All this is enabled because we were able to find a way to translate a very hard problem to something our brains do very naturally. 
So what does this mean? 
Well, for kittens, it means no more hiding in ones and zeros. 
For me, it means no more wasted weekends. 
For cyber, it means we have a radical new way to tackle the most impossible problems. 
It means we have a new weapon in the evolving theater of cyber warfare, but for all of us, it means that cyber engineers now have the ability to become first responders in emergency situations. 
When seconds count, we've unlocked the means to stop the bad guys. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Well, you know, sometimes the most important things come in the smallest packages. 
I am going to try to convince you, in the 15 minutes I have, that microbes have a lot to say about questions such as, "Are we alone?" 
and they can tell us more about not only life in our solar system but also maybe beyond, and this is why I am tracking them down in the most impossible places on Earth, in extreme environments where conditions are really pushing them to the brink of survival. 
Actually, sometimes me too, when I'm trying to follow them too close. 
But here's the thing: We are the only advanced civilization in the solar system, but that doesn't mean that there is no microbial life nearby. 
In fact, the planets and moons you see here could host life — all of them — and we know that, and it's a strong possibility. 
And if we were going to find life on those moons and planets, then we would answer questions such as, are we alone in the solar system? 
Where are we coming from? 
Do we have family in the neighborhood? 
Is there life beyond our solar system? 
And we can ask all those questions because there has been a revolution in our understanding of what a habitable planet is, and today, a habitable planet is a planet that has a zone where water can stay stable, but to me this is a horizontal definition of habitability, because it involves a distance to a star, but there is another dimension to habitability, and this is a vertical dimension. 
Think of it as conditions in the subsurface of a planet where you are very far away from a sun, but you still have water, energy, nutrients, which for some of them means food, and a protection. 
And when you look at the Earth, very far away from any sunlight, deep in the ocean, you have life thriving and it uses only chemistry for life processes. 
So when you think of it at that point, all walls collapse. 
You have no limitations, basically. 
And if you have been looking at the headlines lately, then you will see that we have discovered a subsurface ocean on Europa, on Ganymede, on Enceladus, on Titan, and now we are finding a geyser and hot springs on Enceladus, Our solar system is turning into a giant spa. 
For anybody who has gone to a spa knows how much microbes like that, right? 
(Laughter) So at that point, think also about Mars. 
There is no life possible at the surface of Mars today, but it might still be hiding underground. 
So, we have been making progress in our understanding of habitability, but we also have been making progress in our understanding of what the signatures of life are on Earth. 
And you can have what we call organic molecules, and these are the bricks of life, and you can have fossils, and you can minerals, biominerals, which is due to the reaction between bacteria and rocks, and of course you can have gases in the atmosphere. 
And when you look at those tiny green algae on the right of the slide here, they are the direct descendants of those who have been pumping oxygen a billion years ago in the atmosphere of the Earth. 
When they did that, they poisoned 90 percent of the life at the surface of the Earth, but they are the reason why you are breathing this air today. 
But as much as our understanding grows of all of these things, there is one question we still cannot answer, and this is, where are we coming from? 
And you know, it's getting worse, because we won't be able to find the physical evidence of where we are coming from on this planet, and the reason being is that anything that is older than four billion years is gone. 
All record is gone, erased by plate tectonics and erosion. 
This is what I call the Earth's biological horizon. 
Beyond this horizon we don't know where we are coming from. 
So is everything lost? Well, maybe not. 
And we might be able to find evidence of our own origin in the most unlikely place, and this place in Mars. 
How is this possible? 
Well clearly at the beginning of the solar system, Mars and the Earth were bombarded by giant asteroids and comets, and there were ejecta from these impacts all over the place. 
Earth and Mars kept throwing rocks at each other for a very long time. 
Pieces of rocks landed on the Earth. 
Pieces of the Earth landed on Mars. 
So clearly, those two planets may have been seeded by the same material. 
So yeah, maybe Granddady is sitting there on the surface and waiting for us. 
But that also means that we can go to Mars and try to find traces of our own origin. 
Mars may hold that secret for us. 
This is why Mars is so special to us. 
But for that to happen, Mars needed to be habitable at the time when conditions were right. 
So was Mars habitable? 
We have a number of missions telling us exactly the same thing today. 
At the time when life appeared on the Earth, Mars did have an ocean, it had volcanoes, it had lakes, and it had deltas like the beautiful picture you see here. 
This picture was sent by the Curiosity rover only a few weeks ago. 
It shows the remnants of a delta, and this picture tells us something: water was abundant and stayed founting at the surface for a very long time. 
This is good news for life. 
Life chemistry takes a long time to actually happen. 
So this is extremely good news, but does that mean that if we go there, life will be easy to find on Mars? 
Not necessarily. 
Here's what happened: At the time when life exploded at the surface of the Earth, then everything went south for Mars, literally. 
The atmosphere was stripped away by solar winds, Mars lost its magnetosphere, and then cosmic rays and U.V. bombarded the surface and water escaped to space and went underground. 
So if we want to be able to understand, if we want to be able to find those traces of the signatures of life at the surface of Mars, if they are there, we need to understand what was the impact of each of these events on the preservation of its record. 
Only then will we be able to know where those signatures are hiding, and only then will we be able to send our rover to the right places where we can sample those rocks that may be telling us something really important about who we are, or, if not, maybe telling us that somewhere, independently, life has appeared on another planet. 
So to do that, it's easy. 
You only need to go back 3.5 billion years ago in the past of a planet. 
We just need a time machine. 
Easy, right? 
Well, actually, it is. 
Look around you — that's planet Earth. 
This is our time machine. 
Geologists are using it to go back in the past of our own planet. 
I am using it a little bit differently. 
I use planet Earth to go in very extreme environments where conditions were similar to those of Mars at the time when the climate changed, and there I'm trying to understand what happened. 
What are the signatures of life? 
What is left? How are we going to find it? 
So for one moment now I'm going to take you with me on a trip into that time machine. 
And now, what you see here, we are at 4,500 meters in the Andes, but in fact we are less than a billion years after the Earth and Mars formed. 
The Earth and Mars will have looked pretty much exactly like that — volcanoes everywhere, evaporating lakes everywhere, minerals, hot springs, and then you see those mounds on the shore of those lakes? 
Those are built by the descendants of the first organisms that gave us the first fossil on Earth. 
But if we want to understand what's going on, we need to go a little further. 
And the other thing about those sites is that exactly like on Mars three and a half billion years ago, the climate is changing very fast, and water and ice are disappearing. 
But we need to go back to that time when everything changed on Mars, and to do that, we need to go higher. 
Why is that? 
Because when you go higher, the atmosphere is getting thinner, it's getting more unstable, the temperature is getting cooler, and you have a lot more U.V. radiation. 
Basically, you are getting to those conditions on Mars when everything changed. 
So I was not promising anything about a leisurely trip on the time machine. 
You are not going to be sitting in that time machine. 
You have to haul 1,000 pounds of equipment to the summit of this 20,000-foot volcano in the Andes here. 
That's about 6,000 meters. 
And you also have to sleep on 42-degree slopes and really hope that there won't be any earthquake that night. 
But when we get to the summit, we actually find the lake we came for. 
At this altitude, this lake is experiencing exactly the same conditions as those on Mars three and a half billion years ago. 
And now we have to change our voyage into an inner voyage inside that lake, and to do that, we have to remove our mountain gear and actually don suits and go for it. 
But at the time we enter that lake, at the very moment we enter that lake, we are stepping back three and a half billion years in the past of another planet, and then we are going to get the answer came for. 
Life is everywhere, absolutely everywhere. 
Everything you see in this picture is a living organism. 
Maybe not so the diver, but everything else. 
But this picture is very deceiving. 
Life is abundant in those lakes, but like in many places on Earth right now and due to climate change, there is a huge loss in biodiversity. 
In the samples that we took back home, 36 percent of the bacteria in those lakes were composed of three species, and those three species are the ones that have survived so far. 
Here's another lake, right next to the first one. 
The red color you see here is not due to minerals. 
It's actually due to the presence of a tiny algae. 
In this region, the U.V. radiation is really nasty. 
Anywhere on Earth, 11 is considered to be extreme. 
During U.V. storms there, the U.V. Index reaches 43. 
SPF 30 is not going to do anything to you over there, and the water is so transparent in those lakes that the algae has nowhere to hide, really, and so they are developing their own sunscreen, and this is the red color you see. 
But they can adapt only so far, and then when all the water is gone from the surface, microbes have only one solution left: They go underground. 
And those microbes, the rocks you see in that slide here, well, they are actually living inside rocks and they are using the protection of the translucence of the rocks to get the good part of the U.V. 
and discard the part that could actually damage their DNA. 
And this is why we are taking our rover to train them to search for life on Mars in these areas, because if there was life on Mars three and a half billion years ago, it had to use the same strategy to actually protect itself. 
Now, it is pretty obvious that going to extreme environments is helping us very much for the exploration of Mars and to prepare missions. 
So far, it has helped us to understand the geology of Mars. 
It has helped to understand the past climate of Mars and its evolution, but also its habitability potential. 
Our most recent rover on Mars has discovered traces of organics. 
Yeah, there are organics at the surface of Mars. 
And it also discovered traces of methane. 
And we don't know yet if the methane in question is really from geology or biology. 
Regardless, what we know is that because of the discovery, the hypothesis that there is still life present on Mars today remains a viable one. 
So by now, I think I have convinced you that Mars is very special to us, but it would be a mistake to think that Mars is the only place in the solar system that is interesting to find potential microbial life. 
And the reason is because Mars and the Earth could have a common root to their tree of life, but when you go beyond Mars, it's not that easy. 
Celestial mechanics is not making it so easy for an exchange of material between planets, and so if we were to discover life on those planets, it would be different from us. 
It would be a different type of life. 
But in the end, it might be just us, it might be us and Mars, or it can be many trees of life in the solar system. 
I don't know the answer yet, but I can tell you something: No matter what the result is, no matter what that magic number is, it is going to give us a standard by which we are going to be able to measure the life potential, abundance and diversity beyond our own solar system. 
And this can be achieved by our generation. 
This can be our legacy, but only if we dare to explore. 
Now, finally, if somebody tells you that looking for alien microbes is not cool because you cannot have a philosophical conversation with them, let me show you why and how you can tell them they're wrong. 
Well, organic material is going to tell you about environment, about complexity and about diversity. 
DNA, or any information carrier, is going to tell you about adaptation, about evolution, about survival, about planetary changes and about the transfer of information. 
All together, they are telling us what started as a microbial pathway, and why what started as a microbial pathway sometimes ends up as a civilization or sometimes ends up as a dead end. 
Look at the solar system, and look at the Earth. 
On Earth, there are many intelligent species, but only one has achieved technology. 
Right here in the journey of our own solar system, there is a very, very powerful message that says here's how we should look for alien life, small and big. 
So yeah, microbes are talking and we are listening, and they are taking us, one planet at a time and one moon at a time, towards their big brothers out there. 
And they are telling us about diversity, they are telling us about abundance of life, and they are telling us how this life has survived thus far to reach civilization, intelligence, technology and, indeed, philosophy. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

What I'm going to do is to just give a few notes, and this is from a book I'm preparing called "Letters to a Young Scientist." 
I'd thought it'd be appropriate to present it, on the basis that I have had extensive experience in teaching, counseling scientists across a broad array of fields. 
And you might like to hear some of the principles that I've developed in doing that teaching and counseling. 
So let me begin by urging you, particularly you on the youngsters' side, on this path you've chosen, to go as far as you can. 
The world needs you, badly. 
Humanity is now fully into the techno-scientific age. 
There is going to be no turning back. 
Although varying among disciplines — say, astrophysics, molecular genetics, the immunology, the microbiology, the public health, to the new area of the human body as a symbiont, to public health, environmental science. 
Knowledge in medical science and science overall is doubling every 15 to 20 years. 
Technology is increasing at a comparable rate. 
Between them, the two already pervade, as most of you here seated realize, every dimension of human life. 
So swift is the velocity of the techno-scientific revolution, so startling in its countless twists and turns, that no one can predict its outcome even a decade from the present moment. 
There will come a time, of course, when the exponential growth of discovery and knowledge, which actually began in the 1600s, has to peak and level off, but that's not going to matter to you. 
The revolution is going to continue for at least several more decades. 
It'll render the human condition radically different from what it is today. 
Traditional fields of study are going to continue to grow and in so doing, inevitably they will meet and create new disciplines. 
In time, all of science will come to be a continuum of description, an explanation of networks, of principles and laws. 
That's why you need not just be training in one specialty, but also acquire breadth in other fields, related to and even distant from your own initial choice. 
Keep your eyes lifted and your head turning. 
The search for knowledge is in our genes. 
It was put there by our distant ancestors who spread across the world, and it's never going to be quenched. 
To understand and use it sanely, as a part of the civilization yet to evolve requires a vastly larger population of scientifically trained people like you. 
In education, medicine, law, diplomacy, government, business and the media that exist today. 
Our political leaders need at least a modest degree of scientific literacy, which most badly lack today — no applause, please. 
It will be better for all if they prepare before entering office rather than learning on the job. 
Therefore you will do well to act on the side, no matter how far into the laboratory you may go, to serve as teachers during the span of your career. 
I'll now proceed quickly, and before else, to a subject that is both a vital asset and a potential barrier to a scientific career. 
If you are a bit short in mathematical skills, don't worry. 
Many of the most successful scientists at work today are mathematically semi-literate. 
A metaphor will serve here: Where elite mathematicians and statisticians and theorists often serve as architects in the expanding realm of science, the remaining large majority of basic applied scientists, including a large portion of those who could be said to be of the first rank, are the ones who map the terrain, they scout the frontiers, they cut the pathways, they raise the buildings along the way. 
Some may have considered me foolhardy, but it's been my habit to brush aside the fear of mathematics when talking to candidate scientists. 
During 41 years of teaching biology at Harvard, I watched sadly as bright students turned away from the possibility of a scientific career or even from taking non-required courses in science because they were afraid of failure. 
These math-phobes deprive science and medicine of immeasurable amounts of badly needed talent. 
Here's how to relax your anxieties, if you have them: Understand that mathematics is a language ruled like other verbal languages, or like verbal language generally, by its own grammar and system of logic. 
Any person with average quantitative intelligence who learns to read and write mathematics at an elementary level will, as in verbal language, have little difficulty picking up most of the fundamentals if they choose to master the mathspeak of most disciplines of science. 
The longer you wait to become at least semi-literate the harder the language of mathematics will be to master, just as again in any verbal language, but it can be done at any age. 
I speak as an authority on that subject, because I'm an extreme case. 
I didn't take algebra until my freshman year at the University of Alabama. 
They didn't teach it before then. 
I finally got around to calculus as a 32-year-old tenured professor at Harvard, where I sat uncomfortably in classes with undergraduate students, little more than half my age. 
A couple of them were students in a course I was giving on evolutionary biology. 
I swallowed my pride, and I learned calculus. 
I found out that in science and all its applications, what is crucial is not that technical ability, but it is imagination in all of its applications. 
The ability to form concepts with images of entities and processes pictured by intuition. 
I found out that advances in science rarely come upstream from an ability to stand at a blackboard and conjure images from unfolding mathematical propositions and equations. 
They are instead the products of downstream imagination leading to hard work, during which mathematical reasoning may or may not prove to be relevant. 
Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake. 
Of foremost importance is a thorough, well-organized knowledge of all that is known of the relevant entities and processes that might be involved in that domain you propose to enter. 
When something new is discovered, it's logical then that one of the follow-up steps is to find the mathematical and statistical methods to move its analysis forward. 
If that step proves too difficult for the person or team that made the discovery, a mathematician can then be added by them as a collaborator. 
Consider the following principle, which I will modestly call Wilson's Principle Number One: It is far easier for scientists including medical researchers, to require needed collaboration in mathematics and statistics than it is for mathematicians and statisticians to find scientists able to make use of their equations. 
It is important in choosing the direction to take in science to find the subject at your level of competence that interests you deeply, and focus on that. 
Keep in mind, then, Wilson's Second Principle: For every scientist, whether researcher, technician, teacher, manager or businessman, working at any level of mathematical competence, there exists a discipline in science or medicine for which that level is enough to achieve excellence. 
Now I'm going to offer quickly several more principles that will be useful in organizing your education and career, or if you're teaching, how you might enhance your own teaching and counseling of young scientists. 
In selecting a subject in which to conduct original research, or to develop world-class expertise, take a part of the chosen discipline that is sparsely inhabited. 
Judge opportunity by how few other students and researchers are on hand. 
This is not to de-emphasize the essential requirement of broad training, or the value of apprenticing yourself in ongoing research to programs of high quality. 
It is important also to acquire older mentors within these successful programs, and to make friends and colleagues of your age for mutual support. 
But through it all, look for a way to break out, to find a field and subject not yet popular. 
We have seen this demonstrated already in the talks preceding mine. 
There is the quickest way advances are likely to occur, as measured in discoveries per investigator per year. 
You may have heard the military dictum for the gathering of armies: March to the sound of the guns. 
In science, the exact opposite is the case: March away from the sound of the guns. 
So Wilson's Principle Number Three: March away from the sound of the guns. 
Observe from a distance, but do not join the fray. 
Make a fray of your own. 
Once you have settled on a specialty, and the profession you can love, and you've secured opportunity, your potential to succeed will be greatly enhanced if you study it enough to become an expert. 
There are thousands of professionally delimited subjects sprinkled through physics and chemistry to biology and medicine. 
And on then into the social sciences, where it is possible in short time to acquire the status of an authority. 
When the subject is still very thinly populated, you can with diligence and hard work become the world authority. 
The world needs this kind of expertise, and it rewards the kind of people willing to acquire it. 
The existing information and what you self-discover may at first seem skimpy and difficult to connect to other bodies of knowledge. 
Well, if that's the case, good. Why hard instead of easy? 
The answer deserves to be stated as Principle Number Four. 
In the attempt to make scientific discoveries, every problem is an opportunity, and the more difficult the problem, the greater will be the importance of its solution. 
Now this brings me to a basic categorization in the way scientific discoveries are made. 
Scientists, pure mathematicians among them, follow one or the other of two pathways: First through early discoveries, a problem is identified and a solution is sought. 
The problem may be relatively small; for example, where exactly in a cruise ship does the norovirus begin to spread? 
Or larger, what's the role of dark matter in the expansion of the universe? 
As the answer is sought, other phenomena are typically discovered and other questions are asked. 
This first of the two strategies is like a hunter, exploring a forest in search of a particular quarry, who finds other quarries along the way. 
The second strategy of research is to study a subject broadly searching for unknown phenomena or patterns of known phenomena like a hunter in what we call "" the naturalist's trance, "" the researcher of mind is open to anything interesting, any quarry worth taking. 
The search is not for the solution of the problem, but for problems themselves worth solving. 
The two strategies of research, original research, can be stated as follows, in the final principle I'm going to offer you: For every problem in a given discipline of science, there exists a species or entity or phenomenon ideal for its solution. 
And conversely, for every species or other entity or phenomenon, there exist important problems for the solution of which, those particular objects of research are ideally suited. 
Find out what they are. 
You'll find your own way to discover, to learn, to teach. 
The decades ahead will see dramatic advances in disease prevention, general health, the quality of life. 
All of humanity depends on the knowledge and practice of the medicine and the science behind it you will master. 
You have chosen a calling that will come in steps to give you satisfaction, at its conclusion, of a life well lived. 
And I thank you for having me here tonight. 
(Applause) Oh, thank you. 
Thank you very much. 
I salute you. 

Or another way to say it is, what's the most dangerous thing that you've ever done? 
And why did you do it? 
I know what the most dangerous thing is that I've ever done because NASA does the math. 
You look back to the first five shuttle launches, the odds of a catastrophic event during the first five shuttle launches was one in nine. 
And even when I first flew in the shuttle back in 1995, 74 shuttle flight, the odds were still now that we look back about one in 38 or so — one in 35, one in 40. 
Not great odds, so it's a really interesting day when you wake up at the Kennedy Space Center and you're going to go to space that day because you realize by the end of the day you're either going to be floating effortlessly, gloriously in space, or you'll be dead. 
You go into, at the Kennedy Space Center, the suit-up room, the same room that our childhood heroes got dressed in, that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got suited in to go ride the Apollo rocket to the moon. 
And I got my pressure suit built around me and rode down outside in the van heading out to the launchpad — in the Astro van — heading out to the launchpad, and as you come around the corner at the Kennedy Space Center, it's normally predawn, and in the distance, lit up by the huge xenon lights, is your spaceship — the vehicle that is going to take you off the planet. 
The crew is sitting in the Astro van sort of hushed, almost holding hands, looking at that as it gets bigger and bigger. 
We ride the elevator up and we crawl in, on your hands and knees into the spaceship, one at a time, and you worm your way up into your chair and plunk yourself down on your back. 
And the hatch is closed, and suddenly, what has been a lifetime of both dreams and denial is becoming real, something that I dreamed about, in fact, that I chose to do when I was nine years old, is now suddenly within not too many minutes of actually happening. 
In the astronaut business — the shuttle is a very complicated vehicle; it's the most complicated flying machine ever built. 
And in the astronaut business, we have a saying, which is, there is no problem so bad that you can't make it worse. 
(Laughter) And so you're very conscious in the cockpit; you're thinking about all of the things that you might have to do, all the switches and all the wickets you have to go through. 
And as the time gets closer and closer, this excitement is building. 
And then about three and a half minutes before launch, the huge nozzles on the back, like the size of big church bells, swing back and forth and the mass of them is such that it sways the whole vehicle, like the vehicle is alive underneath you, like an elephant getting up off its knees or something. 
And then about 30 seconds before launch, the vehicle is completely alive — it is ready to go — the APUs are running, the computers are all self-contained, it's ready to leave the planet. 
And 15 seconds before launch, this happens: (Video) Voice: 12, 11, 10, nine, eight, seven, six — (Space shuttle preparing for takeoff) — start, two, one, booster ignition, and liftoff of the space shuttle Discovery, returning to the space station, paving the way... 
(Space shuttle taking off) Chris Hadfield: It is incredibly powerful to be on board one of these things. 
You are in the grip of something that is vastly more powerful than yourself. 
It's shaking you so hard you can't focus on the instruments in front of you. 
It's like you're in the jaws of some enormous dog and there's a foot in the small of your back pushing you into space, accelerating wildly straight up, shouldering your way through the air, and you're in a very complex place — paying attention, watching the vehicle go through each one of its wickets with a steadily increasing smile on your face. 
After two minutes, those solid rockets explode off and then you just have the liquid engines, the hydrogen and oxygen, and it's as if you're in a dragster with your foot to the floor and accelerating like you've never accelerated. 
You get lighter and lighter, the force gets on us heavier and heavier. 
It feels like someone's pouring cement on you or something. 
Until finally, after about eight minutes and 40 seconds or so, we are finally at exactly the right altitude, exactly the right speed, the right direction, the engine shut off, and we're weightless. 
And we're alive. 
It's an amazing experience. 
But why would we take that risk? 
Why would you do something that dangerous? 
In my case the answer is fairly straightforward. 
I was inspired as a youngster that this was what I wanted to do. 
I watched the first people walk on the moon and to me, it was just an obvious thing — I want to somehow turn myself into that. 
But the real question is, how do you deal with the danger of it and the fear that comes from it? 
How do you deal with fear versus danger? 
And having the goal in mind, thinking about where it might lead, directed me to a life of looking at all of the small details to allow this to become possible, to be able to launch and go help build a space station where you are on board a million-pound creation that's going around the world at five miles a second, eight kilometers a second, around the world 16 times a day, with experiments on board that are teaching us what the substance of the universe is made of and running 200 experiments inside. 
But maybe even more importantly, allowing us to see the world in a way that is impossible through any other means, to be able to look down and have — if your jaw could drop, it would — the jaw-dropping gorgeousness of the turning orb like a self-propelled art gallery of fantastic, constantly changing beauty that is the world itself. 
And you see, because of the speed, a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes for half a year. 
And the most magnificent part of all that is to go outside on a spacewalk. 
You are in a one-person spaceship that is your spacesuit, and you're going through space with the world. 
It's an entirely different perspective, you're not looking up at the universe, you and the Earth are going through the universe together. 
And you're holding on with one hand, looking at the world turn beside you. 
It's roaring silently with color and texture as it pours by mesmerizingly next to you. 
And if you can tear your eyes away from that and you look under your arm down at the rest of everything, it's unfathomable blackness, with a texture you feel like you could stick your hand into. 
and you are holding on with one hand, one link to the other seven billion people. 
And I was outside on my first spacewalk when my left eye went blind, and I didn't know why. 
Suddenly my left eye slammed shut in great pain and I couldn't figure out why my eye wasn't working. 
I was thinking, what do I do next? 
I thought, well maybe that's why we have two eyes, so I kept working. 
But unfortunately, without gravity, tears don't fall. 
So you just get a bigger and bigger ball of whatever that is mixed with your tears on your eye until eventually, the ball becomes so big that the surface tension takes it across the bridge of your nose like a tiny little waterfall and goes "" goosh "" into your other eye, and now I was completely blind outside the spaceship. 
So what's the scariest thing you've ever done? 
(Laughter) Maybe it's spiders. 
A lot of people are afraid of spiders. 
I think you should be afraid of spiders — spiders are creepy and they've got long, hairy legs, and spiders like this one, the brown recluse — it's horrible. If a brown recluse bites you, you end with one of these horrible, big necrotic things on your leg and there might be one right now sitting on the chair behind you, in fact. 
And how do you know? 
And so a spider lands on you, and you go through this great, spasmy attack because spiders are scary. 
But then you could say, well is there a brown recluse sitting on the chair beside me or not? 
I don't know. Are there brown recluses here? 
So if you actually do the research, you find out that in the world there are about 50,000 different types of spiders, and there are about two dozen that are venomous out of 50,000. 
And if you're in Canada, because of the cold winters here in B.C., there's about 720, 730 different types of spiders and there's one — one — that is venomous, and its venom isn't even fatal, it's just kind of like a nasty sting. 
And that spider — not only that, but that spider has beautiful markings on it, it's like "" I'm dangerous. I got a big radiation symbol on my back, it's the black widow. "" So, if you're even slightly careful you can avoid running into the one spider — and it lives close the ground, you're walking along, you are never going to go through a spider web where a black widow bites you. 
Spider webs like this, it doesn't build those, it builds them down in the corners. 
And its a black widow because the female spider eats the male; it doesn't care about you. 
So in fact, the next time you walk into a spiderweb, you don't need to panic and go with your caveman reaction. 
The danger is entirely different than the fear. 
How do you get around it, though? 
How do you change your behavior? 
Well, next time you see a spiderweb, have a good look, make sure it's not a black widow spider, and then walk into it. 
And then you see another spiderweb and walk into that one. 
It's just a little bit of fluffy stuff. It's not a big deal. 
And the spider that may come out is no more threat to you than a lady bug or a butterfly. 
And then I guarantee you if you walk through 100 spiderwebs you will have changed your fundamental human behavior, your caveman reaction, and you will now be able to walk in the park in the morning and not worry about that spiderweb — or into your grandma's attic or whatever, into your own basement. 
And you can apply this to anything. 
If you're outside on a spacewalk and you're blinded, your natural reaction would be to panic, I think. 
It would make you nervous and worried. 
But we had considered all the venom, and we had practiced with a whole variety of different spiderwebs. 
We knew everything there is to know about the spacesuit and we trained underwater thousands of times. 
And we don't just practice things going right, we practice things going wrong all the time, so that you are constantly walking through those spiderwebs. 
And not just underwater, but also in virtual reality labs with the helmet and the gloves so you feel like it's realistic. 
So when you finally actually get outside on a spacewalk, it feels much different than it would if you just went out first time. 
And even if you're blinded, your natural, panicky reaction doesn't happen. 
Instead you kind of look around and go, "" Okay, I can't see, but I can hear, I can talk, Scott Parazynski is out here with me. 
He could come over and help me. "" We actually practiced incapacitated crew rescue, so he could float me like a blimp and stuff me into the airlock if he had to. 
I could find my own way back. 
It's not nearly as big a deal. 
And actually, if you keep on crying for a while, whatever that gunk was that's in your eye starts to dilute and you can start to see again, and Houston, if you negotiate with them, they will let you then keep working. 
We finished everything on the spacewalk and when we came back inside, Jeff got some cotton batting and took the crusty stuff around my eyes, and it turned out it was just the anti-fog, sort of a mixture of oil and soap, that got in my eye. 
And now we use Johnson's No More Tears, which we probably should've been using right from the very beginning. (Laughter) But the key to that is by looking at the difference between perceived danger and actual danger, where is the real risk? 
What is the real thing that you should be afraid of? 
Not just a generic fear of bad things happening. 
You can fundamentally change your reaction to things so that it allows you to go places and see things and do things that otherwise would be completely denied to you... 
where you could see the hardpan south of the Sahara, or you can see New York City in a way that is almost dreamlike, or the unconscious gingham of Eastern Europe fields or the Great Lakes as a collection of small puddles. 
You can see the fault lines of San Francisco and the way the water pours out under the bridge, just entirely different than any other way that you could have if you had not found a way to conquer your fear. 
You see a beauty that otherwise never would have happened. 
This is our spaceship, the Soyuz, that little one. 
Three of us climb in, and then this spaceship detaches from the station and falls into the atmosphere. 
These two parts here actually melt, we jettison them and they burn up in the atmosphere. 
The only part that survives is the little bullet that we're riding in, and it falls into the atmosphere, and in essence you are riding a meteorite home, and riding meteorites is scary, and it ought to be. 
But instead of riding into the atmosphere just screaming, like you would if suddenly you found yourself riding a meteorite back to Earth — (Laughter) — instead, 20 years previously we had started studying Russian, and then once you learn Russian, then we learned orbital mechanics in Russian, and then we learned vehicle control theory, and then we got into the simulator and practiced over and over and over again. 
And in fact, you can fly this meteorite and steer it and land in about a 15-kilometer circle anywhere on the Earth. 
So in fact, when our crew was coming back into the atmosphere inside the Soyuz, we weren't screaming, we were laughing; it was fun. 
And when the great big parachute opened, we knew that if it didn't open there's a second parachute, and it runs on a nice little clockwork mechanism. 
So we came back, we came thundering back to Earth and this is what it looked like to land in a Soyuz, in Kazakhstan. 
(Video) Reporter: And you can see one of those search and recovery helicopters, once again that helicopter part of dozen such Russian Mi-8 helicopters. 
Touchdown — 3: 14 and 48 seconds, a.m. Central Time. 
CH: And you roll to a stop as if someone threw your spaceship at the ground and it tumbles end over end, but you're ready for it you're in a custom-built seat, you know how the shock absorber works. 
And then eventually the Russians reach in, drag you out, plunk you into a chair, and you can now look back at what was an incredible experience. 
You have taken the dreams of that nine-year-old boy, which were impossible and dauntingly scary, dauntingly terrifying, and put them into practice, and figured out a way to reprogram yourself, to change your primal fear so that it allowed you to come back with a set of experiences and a level of inspiration for other people that never could have been possible otherwise. 
Just to finish, they asked me to play that guitar. 
I know this song, and it's really a tribute to the genius of David Bowie himself, but it's also, I think, a reflection of the fact that we are not machines exploring the universe, we are people, and we're taking that ability to adapt and that ability to understand and the ability to take our own self-perception into a new place. 
(Music) ♫ This is Major Tom to ground control ♫ ♫ I've left forevermore ♫ ♫ And I'm floating in a most peculiar way ♫ ♫ And the stars look very different today ♫ ♫ For here am I floating in the tin can ♫ ♫ A last glimpse of the world ♫ ♫ Planet Earth is blue and there's so much left to do ♫ (Music) Fear not. 
(Applause) That's very nice of you. Thank you very much. 
Thank you. 

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

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

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

Most of us think of motion as a very visual thing. 
If I walk across this stage or gesture with my hands while I speak, that motion is something that you can see. 
But there's a world of important motion that's too subtle for the human eye, and over the past few years, we've started to find that cameras can often see this motion even when humans can't. 
So let me show you what I mean. 
On the left here, you see video of a person's wrist, and on the right, you see video of a sleeping infant, but if I didn't tell you that these were videos, you might assume that you were looking at two regular images, because in both cases, these videos appear to be almost completely still. 
But there's actually a lot of subtle motion going on here, and if you were to touch the wrist on the left, you would feel a pulse, and if you were to hold the infant on the right, you would feel the rise and fall of her chest as she took each breath. 
And these motions carry a lot of significance, but they're usually too subtle for us to see, so instead, we have to observe them through direct contact, through touch. 
But a few years ago, my colleagues at MIT developed what they call a motion microscope, which is software that finds these subtle motions in video and amplifies them so that they become large enough for us to see. 
And so, if we use their software on the left video, it lets us see the pulse in this wrist, and if we were to count that pulse, we could even figure out this person's heart rate. 
And if we used the same software on the right video, it lets us see each breath that this infant takes, and we can use this as a contact-free way to monitor her breathing. 
And so this technology is really powerful because it takes these phenomena that we normally have to experience through touch and it lets us capture them visually and non-invasively. 
So a couple years ago, I started working with the folks that created that software, and we decided to pursue a crazy idea. 
We thought, it's cool that we can use software to visualize tiny motions like this, and you can almost think of it as a way to extend our sense of touch. 
But what if we could do the same thing with our ability to hear? 
What if we could use video to capture the vibrations of sound, which are just another kind of motion, and turn everything that we see into a microphone? 
Now, this is a bit of a strange idea, so let me try to put it in perspective for you. 
Traditional microphones work by converting the motion of an internal diaphragm into an electrical signal, and that diaphragm is designed to move readily with sound so that its motion can be recorded and interpreted as audio. 
But sound causes all objects to vibrate. 
Those vibrations are just usually too subtle and too fast for us to see. 
So what if we record them with a high-speed camera and then use software to extract tiny motions from our high-speed video, and analyze those motions to figure out what sounds created them? 
This would let us turn visible objects into visual microphones from a distance. 
And so we tried this out, and here's one of our experiments, where we took this potted plant that you see on the right and we filmed it with a high-speed camera while a nearby loudspeaker played this sound. 
(Music: "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "") And so here's the video that we recorded, and we recorded it at thousands of frames per second, but even if you look very closely, all you'll see are some leaves that are pretty much just sitting there doing nothing, because our sound only moved those leaves by about a micrometer. 
That's one ten-thousandth of a centimeter, which spans somewhere between a hundredth and a thousandth of a pixel in this image. 
So you can squint all you want, but motion that small is pretty much perceptually invisible. 
But it turns out that something can be perceptually invisible and still be numerically significant, because with the right algorithms, we can take this silent, seemingly still video and we can recover this sound. 
(Music: "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "") (Applause) So how is this possible? 
How can we get so much information out of so little motion? 
Well, let's say that those leaves move by just a single micrometer, and let's say that that shifts our image by just a thousandth of a pixel. 
That may not seem like much, but a single frame of video may have hundreds of thousands of pixels in it, and so if we combine all of the tiny motions that we see from across that entire image, then suddenly a thousandth of a pixel can start to add up to something pretty significant. 
On a personal note, we were pretty psyched when we figured this out. 
(Laughter) But even with the right algorithm, we were still missing a pretty important piece of the puzzle. 
You see, there are a lot of factors that affect when and how well this technique will work. 
There's the object and how far away it is; there's the camera and the lens that you use; how much light is shining on the object and how loud your sound is. 
And even with the right algorithm, we had to be very careful with our early experiments, because if we got any of these factors wrong, there was no way to tell what the problem was. 
We would just get noise back. 
And so a lot of our early experiments looked like this. 
And so here I am, and on the bottom left, you can kind of see our high-speed camera, which is pointed at a bag of chips, and the whole thing is lit by these bright lamps. 
And like I said, we had to be very careful in these early experiments, so this is how it went down. 
(Video) Abe Davis: Three, two, one, go. 
Mary had a little lamb! Little lamb! Little lamb! 
(Laughter) AD: So this experiment looks completely ridiculous. (Laughter) 
I mean, I'm screaming at a bag of chips — (Laughter) — and we're blasting it with so much light, we literally melted the first bag we tried this on. (Laughter) But ridiculous as this experiment looks, it was actually really important, because we were able to recover this sound. 
(Audio) Mary had a little lamb! Little lamb! Little lamb! 
(Applause) AD: And this was really significant, because it was the first time we recovered intelligible human speech from silent video of an object. 
And so it gave us this point of reference, and gradually we could start to modify the experiment, using different objects or moving the object further away, using less light or quieter sounds. 
And we analyzed all of these experiments until we really understood the limits of our technique, because once we understood those limits, we could figure out how to push them. 
And that led to experiments like this one, where again, I'm going to speak to a bag of chips, but this time we've moved our camera about 15 feet away, outside, behind a soundproof window, and the whole thing is lit by only natural sunlight. 
And so here's the video that we captured. 
And this is what things sounded like from inside, next to the bag of chips. 
(Audio) Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. 
AD: And here's what we were able to recover from our silent video captured outside behind that window. 
(Audio) Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. 
(Applause) AD: And there are other ways that we can push these limits as well. 
So here's a quieter experiment where we filmed some earphones plugged into a laptop computer, and in this case, our goal was to recover the music that was playing on that laptop from just silent video of these two little plastic earphones, and we were able to do this so well that I could even Shazam our results. 
(Laughter) (Music: "" Under Pressure "" by Queen) (Applause) And we can also push things by changing the hardware that we use. 
Because the experiments I've shown you so far were done with a camera, a high-speed camera, that can record video about a 100 times faster than most cell phones, but we've also found a way to use this technique with more regular cameras, and we do that by taking advantage of what's called a rolling shutter. 
You see, most cameras record images one row at a time, and so if an object moves during the recording of a single image, there's a slight time delay between each row, and this causes slight artifacts that get coded into each frame of a video. 
And so what we found is that by analyzing these artifacts, we can actually recover sound using a modified version of our algorithm. 
So here's an experiment we did where we filmed a bag of candy while a nearby loudspeaker played the same "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "" music from before, but this time, we used just a regular store-bought camera, and so in a second, I'll play for you the sound that we recovered, and it's going to sound distorted this time, but listen and see if you can still recognize the music. 
(Audio: "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "") And so, again, that sounds distorted, but what's really amazing here is that we were able to do this with something that you could literally run out and pick up at a Best Buy. 
So at this point, a lot of people see this work, and they immediately think about surveillance. 
And to be fair, it's not hard to imagine how you might use this technology to spy on someone. 
But keep in mind that there's already a lot of very mature technology out there for surveillance. 
In fact, people have been using lasers to eavesdrop on objects from a distance for decades. 
But what's really new here, what's really different, is that now we have a way to picture the vibrations of an object, which gives us a new lens through which to look at the world, and we can use that lens to learn not just about forces like sound that cause an object to vibrate, but also about the object itself. 
And so I want to take a step back and think about how that might change the ways that we use video, because we usually use video to look at things, and I've just shown you how we can use it to listen to things. 
But there's another important way that we learn about the world: that's by interacting with it. 
We push and pull and poke and prod things. 
We shake things and see what happens. 
And that's something that video still won't let us do, at least not traditionally. 
So I want to show you some new work, and this is based on an idea I had just a few months ago, so this is actually the first time I've shown it to a public audience. 
And the basic idea is that we're going to use the vibrations in a video to capture objects in a way that will let us interact with them and see how they react to us. 
So here's an object, and in this case, it's a wire figure in the shape of a human, and we're going to film that object with just a regular camera. 
So there's nothing special about this camera. 
In fact, I've actually done this with my cell phone before. 
But we do want to see the object vibrate, so to make that happen, we're just going to bang a little bit on the surface where it's resting while we record this video. 
So that's it: just five seconds of regular video, while we bang on this surface, and we're going to use the vibrations in that video to learn about the structural and material properties of our object, and we're going to use that information to create something new and interactive. 
And so here's what we've created. 
And it looks like a regular image, but this isn't an image, and it's not a video, because now I can take my mouse and I can start interacting with the object. 
And so what you see here is a simulation of how this object would respond to new forces that we've never seen before, and we created it from just five seconds of regular video. 
(Applause) And so this is a really powerful way to look at the world, because it lets us predict how objects will respond to new situations, and you could imagine, for instance, looking at an old bridge and wondering what would happen, how would that bridge hold up if I were to drive my car across it. 
And that's a question that you probably want to answer before you start driving across that bridge. 
And of course, there are going to be limitations to this technique, just like there were with the visual microphone, but we found that it works in a lot of situations that you might not expect, especially if you give it longer videos. 
So for example, here's a video that I captured of a bush outside of my apartment, and I didn't do anything to this bush, but by capturing a minute-long video, a gentle breeze caused enough vibrations that we could learn enough about this bush to create this simulation. 
(Applause) And so you could imagine giving this to a film director, and letting him control, say, the strength and direction of wind in a shot after it's been recorded. 
Or, in this case, we pointed our camera at a hanging curtain, and you can't even see any motion in this video, but by recording a two-minute-long video, natural air currents in this room created enough subtle, imperceptible motions and vibrations that we could learn enough to create this simulation. 
And ironically, we're kind of used to having this kind of interactivity when it comes to virtual objects, when it comes to video games and 3D models, but to be able to capture this information from real objects in the real world using just simple, regular video, is something new that has a lot of potential. 
So here are the amazing people who worked with me on these projects. 
(Applause) And what I've shown you today is only the beginning. 
We've just started to scratch the surface of what you can do with this kind of imaging, because it gives us a new way to capture our surroundings with common, accessible technology. 
And so looking to the future, it's going to be really exciting to explore what this can tell us about the world. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I spend most of my time thinking about little girls, which is kind of a weird thing for a grown man in our society to say. 
But I do. I spend most of my time thinking about little girls, and I think it's primarily because I have one. 
This one's mine, and I think you would really like her. 
She is smart and funny and kind to people and a good friend. 
But when I talk about my daughter, the word I find myself saying most is "" athlete. "" My kid's athletic. 
She is strong and fast and has great balance and good body control. 
She is a three-time, back-to-back-to-back state champion in Shaolin Kempo. 
At nine years old, she is already halfway to a black belt. 
My daughter is athletic. 
Now, when a man who is six feet two and 265 pounds stands in front of you and says his daughter is athletic, you might think that's a reflection of him. 
It is not. 
(Laughter) My wife in high school was a two-time all-state soccer player and a two-time all-state volleyball player, and I played "" Dungeons and Dragons. "" And that is why, although my daughter is an athlete, she's also a huge nerd, which I love. 
She walks around our house in a cloak of flames that she made herself. 
She sits on the Iron Throne — (Laughter) even though she has never seen "" Game of Thrones, "" primarily because we are not the worst parents who ever lived. 
But she knows there's someone called the Mother of Dragons, and she calls herself that and she loves it. 
She's a huge comic book fan. 
Right now, her favorite character is Groot. 
She loves Groot. 
She adores The Incredible Hulk. 
But my daughter really at heart, her thing is Star Wars. 
My kid is a Jedi. 
Although some days she's also a Sith, which is a choice that I can respect. 
(Laughter) But here's the question that I have to ask. 
Why is it that when my daughter dresses up, whether it's Groot or The Incredible Hulk, whether it's Obi-Wan Kenobi or Darth Maul, why is every character she dresses up as a boy? 
And where are all the female superheroes? 
And that is not actually the question, because there's plenty of female superheroes. 
My question really is, where is all the female superhero stuff? 
Where are the costumes? Where are the toys? 
Because every day when my daughter plays when she dresses up, she's learning stuff through a process that, in my own line of work, as a professor of media studies, we refer to as public pedagogy. 
That is, it is how societies are taught ideologies. 
It's how you learned what it meant to be a man or a woman, what it meant to behave yourself in public, what it meant to be a patriot and have good manners. 
It's all the constituent social relations that make us up as a people. 
It's, in short, how we learn what we know about other people and about the world. 
But we live in a 100-percent media-saturated society. 
What that means is that every single aspect of your human existence outside of your basic bodily functions is in some way touched by media. 
From the car that you drive to the food that you eat to the clothes that you wear to the way you construct your relationships to the very language you use to formulate thought — all of that is in some way mediated. 
So the answer in our society to how do we learn what we know about other people and about the world is largely through media. 
Well, there's a wrinkle in that, in that our society, media don't simply exist as information distribution technologies and devices. 
They also exist as corporate entities. 
And when the distribution of information is tied to financial gain, there's a problem. 
How big of a problem? 
Well think about this: in 1983, 90 percent of American media were owned by 50 companies. 
In any market, 50 companies doing something is a lot of companies. 
It's a lot of different worldviews. 
In 2015, that number has shrunk to six, six companies. 
They are NBCUniversal Comcast, AOL Time Warner, the Walt Disney Company, News Corp, Viacom and the CBS Corporation. 
These six companies produce nine out of every 10 movies you watch, nine out of every 10 television shows, nine out of every 10 songs, nine out of every 10 books. 
So my question to you is, if six companies control 90 percent of American media, how much influence do you think they have over what you're allowed to see every day? 
Because in media studies, we spend a lot of time saying that media can't tell us what to think, and they can't; they're terrible at that. 
But that's not their job. 
Media don't tell us what to think. 
Media tell us what to think about. 
They control the conversation, and in controlling the conversation, they don't have to get you to think what they want you to think. 
They'll just get you thinking about the things they want you to think about, and more importantly, not thinking about things they don't want you to think about. 
They control the conversation. 
How does this work in practice? 
Let's just take one of those companies. 
We'll do an easy one. 
Let's talk about the Walt Disney Company for a second. 
The reason why I always pick the Walt Disney Company is this. 
Is there a single person in this room who has never seen a Disney movie? 
Look around. Exactly. 
I picked Disney because they have what we call 100 percent penetration in our society. 
Every single person has been exposed to Disney, so it's an easy one for me to use. 
Since 1937, Disney has made most of its money selling princesses to girls. 
It's made a huge chunk of its money. 
Unless, of course, the princess your daughter is interested in, as my daughter is, is this one. 
See, in 2012, Disney purchased LucasFilm for the sum of four billion dollars, and immediately they flooded the Disney stores with Han Solo and Obi-Wan Kenobi, with Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker and Yoda and not Princess Leia. 
Why? Because this princess messes up the public pedagogy for these princesses. 
So Disney did not put Princess Leia merchandise in the store, and when people went to Disney and said, "Hey, where's all the Princess Leia stuff?" 
Disney said, "" We have no intention of putting Princess Leia merchandise in the store. "" And fans were angry and they took to Twitter with the hashtag # WeWantLeia. 
And Disney said, "" Wait, that's not what we meant. 
What we meant was, we don't have any Princess Leia merchandise yet, but we will. "" And that was in 2012, and it is 2015, and if you go to the Disney Store, as I recently have, and look for Princess Leia merchandise, do you know how many Princess Leia items there are in the Disney Store? 
Zero, because Disney has no intention of putting Princess Leia in the store. 
And we shouldn't be surprised because we found out that was their policy when they bought Marvel in 2009 for the sum of 4.5 billion dollars. 
Because when you make a lot of money selling princesses to girls, you also kind of want to make money from boys. 
And so what better to sell boys than superheroes? 
So now Disney had access to Captain America and to Thor, The Incredible Hulk, and they had access even to a group of superheroes no one had ever even heard of. 
That's how good Marvel was at selling superheroes. 
Last year, they released a film called "" Guardians of the Galaxy. "" It's a film that absolutely should not work. 
Nobody knew who they were except for comic book nerds like me. 
One of the characters is a talking tree. 
One of the characters is an anthropomorphic raccoon. 
It should not work. 
And they made a killing off of "" Guardians of the Galaxy. "" This character here in the middle, her name is Gamora. 
She's played by Zoe Saldana, and she is strong and smart and fast and fights like a ninja, and she is played by a beautiful black woman, and my daughter fell in love with her. 
So like any good nerd dad, I went to buy my daughter Gamora stuff, and when I got to the store, I learned a very interesting thing. 
If I wanted to buy her a Gamora backpack, well, Gamora's not on it. 
They probably should have marketed this as "" some "" of the Guardians of the Galaxy. 
(Laughter) And if I wanted to buy her a lunchbox, she wasn't on it, and if I wanted to buy her a t-shirt, she wasn't on it. 
And as a matter of fact, if I went to the store, as I did, and looked at the display, you would find a small picture of Gamora right here, but if you look at any of the actual merchandise on that shelf, Gamora is not on any of it. 
Now, I could have taken to Twitter with the hashtag # WheresGamora, like millions of fans did across the world, but the truth was I wasn't even really that surprised, because I was there when Disney had released "" The Avengers. "" And just this year, we got a new Avengers movie, the "" Age of Ultron, "" and we were very excited, because there was not one but two female superheroes, Scarlet Witch and Black Widow. 
And we were very excited. 
But here's the real thing about this. 
Even though Scarlett Johansson, who is one of the most popular actresses in America, plays Black Widow, and Black Widow is the star of not one, not two, but five different Marvel movies, there is not a single piece of Black Widow merchandise available. 
Not one. 
And if you go to the Disney store and look for a Black Widow costume, what you will find, is you will find Captain America and The Incredible Hulk. 
You will find Iron Man and Thor. 
You will even find War Machine, who isn't even really in the movie that long. 
Who you will not find is Black Widow. 
And I could have gone to Twitter with the hashtag, as many people did, # WheresNatasha. 
But I'm tired of doing that. 
I'm tired of having to do that. 
All over the country right now, there are kids playing with the Cycle Blast Quinjet play set, where Captain America rides a motorcycle out of a moving jet and it's really awesome. 
You know how awesome it is? 
So awesome that when it happened in the movie, it was Black Widow that did it. 
Not only has she been erased, but she has been replaced with a male figure. 
And so what is this teaching us? 
I mean, over the next five years, Disney and Warner Bros. and a bunch of movie studios are going to release over 30 feature-length films with comic book characters, and of those 30 feature-length films, exactly two of them will have female solo leads. 
Two. 
Now, there will be females in the rest of these movies, but they will be sidekicks, they will be love interests, they will be members of teams. 
They will not be the main character. 
And if what we learn, what we know about other people and about the world we learn through media, then these companies are teaching my daughter that even if she is strong and smart and fast and fights like a ninja, all four of which are true of her, it doesn't matter. 
She will either be ignored like Gamora or erased and replaced with a boy like Black Widow. 
And it's not fair. 
It's not fair to her and it's not fair to your sons and daughters either. 
But here's the thing: I'm raising a little girl, and she has a little tomboy in her, which by the way is a terrible thing to call a girl. 
What that basically is saying is, those traits that define you, they're not really yours, they're just on loan to you for a little while from boys. 
But do you know how much grief she's going to take in her life for having a little tomboy in her? 
Zero. None. 
People will think it's cute. 
They'll call her feisty, because in our society, adding so-called male traits to girls is seen as an upgrade, seen as a bonus. 
I'm not raising a little boy, like Mike. 
Mike is a little boy in Florida. He's 11 years old, and the thing that he loves most in the world is a show called "" My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, "" like millions of other children across America. 
Now, the show is marketed to girls ages five to nine, but there are millions of boys and grown men who enjoy "" My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. "" They have a club. 
They call themselves Bronies, pony bros, guys who like ponies. 
I happen to be one of them. 
And what are Mike and myself and millions of other boys and men learning in this feminine, sissified world of "" My Little Pony? "" Well, they're learning to study hard and to work hard and to party hard and to look good and to feel good and to do good, and heaven preserve us from teaching these wussified concepts to boys. 
So the other kids in his neighborhood pick on Mike and they beat him up and they make fun of him, and at 11 years old, Mike goes home, finds a belt, wraps it around his neck, and hangs himself from the top bunk of his bed. 
Because we have developed a society in which you would rather be dead as a boy than thought of as liking stuff for girls. 
And that is not Mike's fault. That is our fault. 
We have failed him. 
We have failed our children. 
And we have to do better for them. 
We have to stop making it so that the only female superheroes appear on shirts that are pink and cut for girls. 
We have to stop. 
And when I was putting this together, people said to me, "Well, that's never going to happen." And I said, "Oh really?" 
Because just this year, Target announced that they were going to stop gendering their toy aisles. 
They were going to mix it up. 
Now, before we break our shoulders patting Target on the back, just this week they released a shirt in which one of the most iconic scenes in "" Star Wars: A New Hope "" where Princess Leia stands up to the Dark Lord of the Sith, was released on a t-shirt in which she's mysteriously replaced by Luke. 
So let's don't pat ourselves on the back too much. 
Just this week also, Disney announced it was no longer going to gender its Halloween costumes, which I say, "" Thank you, Disney, except the only costumes you make are of male superheroes, so does it matter who you have wearing them? "" Just this week, Mattel, who makes Barbie, announced they're going to release a line of DC superhero girls. 
And the funny thing is, they met with girls and asked them what they wanted to see in dolls, and you can see, they have calves and elbows that bend so they can do superhero stuff. 
And please buy them. 
And don't just buy them for your daughters, buy them for your sons. 
Because it's important that boys play with and as female superheroes just as my daughter plays with and as male superheroes. 
As a matter of fact, what I would love is a world in which every person who goes to the store goes with a little flowchart in their head of whether or not they should buy this toy for a boy or a girl, and it's a real simple flowchart because it only has one question on it. 
It says, "" Is this toy operated with your genitals? "" (Laughter) If the answer is yes, then that is not a toy for children. (Laughter) 
And if the answer is no, then it's for boys and girls. 
It's really simple. 
Because today is about the future of the future, and in my future, boys and girls are equally respected, equally valued, and most importantly, equally represented. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'll begin today by sharing a poem written by my friend from Malawi, Eileen Piri. 
Eileen is only 13 years old, but when we were going through the collection of poetry that we wrote, I found her poem so interesting, so motivating. 
So I'll read it to you. 
She entitled her poem "" I'll Marry When I Want. "" (Laughter) "" I'll marry when I want. 
My mother can't force me to marry. 
My father cannot force me to marry. 
My uncle, my aunt, my brother or sister, cannot force me to marry. 
No one in the world can force me to marry. 
I'll marry when I want. 
Even if you beat me, even if you chase me away, even if you do anything bad to me, I'll marry when I want. 
I'll marry when I want, but not before I am well educated, and not before I am all grown up. 
I'll marry when I want. "" This poem might seem odd, written by a 13-year-old girl, but where I and Eileen come from, this poem, which I have just read to you, is a warrior's cry. 
I am from Malawi. 
Malawi is one of the poorest countries, very poor, where gender equality is questionable. 
Growing up in that country, I couldn't make my own choices in life. 
I couldn't even explore personal opportunities in life. 
I will tell you a story of two different girls, two beautiful girls. 
These girls grew up under the same roof. 
They were eating the same food. 
Sometimes, they would share clothes, and even shoes. 
But their lives ended up differently, in two different paths. 
The other girl is my little sister. 
My little sister was only 11 years old when she got pregnant. 
It's a hurtful thing. 
Not only did it hurt her, even me. 
As it is in my culture, once you reach puberty stage, you are supposed to go to initiation camps. 
In these initiation camps, you are taught how to sexually please a man. 
There is this special day, which they call "" Very Special Day "" where a man who is hired by the community comes to the camp and sleeps with the little girls. 
Imagine the trauma that these young girls go through every day. 
Most girls end up pregnant. 
They even contract HIV and AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. 
For my little sister, she ended up being pregnant. 
Today, she's only 16 years old and she has three children. 
Her first marriage did not survive, nor did her second marriage. 
On the other side, there is this girl. 
She's amazing. 
(Laughter) (Applause) I call her amazing because she is. 
She's very fabulous. 
That girl is me. (Laughter) When I was 13 years old, I was told, you are grown up, you have now reached of age, you're supposed to go to the initiation camp. 
I was like, "" What? 
I'm not going to go to the initiation camps. "" You know what the women said to me? 
"" You are a stupid girl. Stubborn. 
You do not respect the traditions of our society, of our community. "" I said no because I knew where I was going. 
I knew what I wanted in life. 
I had a lot of dreams as a young girl. 
I wanted to get well educated, to find a decent job in the future. 
I was imagining myself as a lawyer, seated on that big chair. 
Those were the imaginations that were going through my mind every day. 
And I knew that one day, I would contribute something, a little something to my community. 
But every day after refusing, women would tell me, "" Look at you, you're all grown up. Your little sister has a baby. 
What about you? "" That was the music that I was hearing every day, and that is the music that girls hear every day when they don't do something that the community needs them to do. 
When I compared the two stories between me and my sister, I said, "" Why can't I do something? 
Why can't I change something that has happened for a long time in our community? "" That was when I called other girls just like my sister, who have children, who have been in class but they have forgotten how to read and write. 
I said, "" Come on, we can remind each other how to read and write again, how to hold the pen, how to read, to hold the book. "" It was a great time I had with them. 
Nor did I just learn a little about them, but they were able to tell me their personal stories, what they were facing every day as young mothers. 
That was when I was like, 'Why can't we take all these things that are happening to us and present them and tell our mothers, our traditional leaders, that these are the wrong things? "" It was a scary thing to do, because these traditional leaders, they are already accustomed to the things that have been there for ages. 
A hard thing to change, but a good thing to try. 
So we tried. 
It was very hard, but we pushed. 
And I'm here to say that in my community, it was the first community after girls pushed so hard to our traditional leader, and our leader stood up for us and said no girl has to be married before the age of 18. 
(Applause) In my community, that was the first time a community, they had to call the bylaws, the first bylaw that protected girls in our community. 
We did not stop there. 
We forged ahead. 
We were determined to fight for girls not just in my community, but even in other communities. 
When the child marriage bill was being presented in February, we were there at the Parliament house. 
Every day, when the members of Parliament were entering, we were telling them, "" Would you please support the bill? "" And we don't have much technology like here, but we have our small phones. 
So we said, "" Why can't we get their numbers and text them? "" So we did that. It was a good thing. 
(Applause) So when the bill passed, we texted them back, "Thank you for supporting the bill." 
(Laughter) And when the bill was signed by the president, making it into law, it was a plus. 
Now, in Malawi, 18 is the legal marriage age, from 15 to 18. 
(Applause) It's a good thing to know that the bill passed, but let me tell you this: There are countries where 18 is the legal marriage age, but don't we hear cries of women and girls every day? 
Every day, girls' lives are being wasted away. 
This is high time for leaders to honor their commitment. 
In honoring this commitment, it means keeping girls' issues at heart every time. 
We don't have to be subjected as second, but they have to know that women, as we are in this room, we are not just women, we are not just girls, we are extraordinary. 
We can do more. 
And another thing for Malawi, and not just Malawi but other countries: The laws which are there, you know how a law is not a law until it is enforced? 
The law which has just recently passed and the laws that in other countries have been there, they need to be publicized at the local level, at the community level, where girls' issues are very striking. 
Girls face issues, difficult issues, at the community level every day. 
So if these young girls know that there are laws that protect them, they will be able to stand up and defend themselves because they will know that there is a law that protects them. 
And another thing I would say is that girls' voices and women's voices are beautiful, they are there, but we cannot do this alone. 
Male advocates, they have to jump in, to step in and work together. 
It's a collective work. 
What we need is what girls elsewhere need: good education, and above all, not to marry whilst 11. 
And furthermore, I know that together, we can transform the legal, the cultural and political framework that denies girls of their rights. 
I am standing here today and declaring that we can end child marriage in a generation. 
This is the moment where a girl and a girl, and millions of girls worldwide, will be able to say, "I will marry when I want." 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

I'd like to take you on the epic quest of the Rosetta spacecraft. 
To escort and land the probe on a comet, this has been my passion for the past two years. 
In order to do that, I need to explain to you something about the origin of the solar system. 
When we go back four and a half billion years, there was a cloud of gas and dust. 
In the center of this cloud, our sun formed and ignited. 
Along with that, what we now know as planets, comets and asteroids formed. 
What then happened, according to theory, is that when the Earth had cooled down a bit after its formation, comets massively impacted the Earth and delivered water to Earth. 
They probably also delivered complex organic material to Earth, and that may have bootstrapped the emergence of life. 
You can compare this to having to solve a 250-piece puzzle and not a 2,000-piece puzzle. 
Afterwards, the big planets like Jupiter and Saturn, they were not in their place where they are now, and they interacted gravitationally, and they swept the whole interior of the solar system clean, and what we now know as comets ended up in something called the Kuiper Belt, which is a belt of objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. 
And sometimes these objects run into each other, and they gravitationally deflect, and then the gravity of Jupiter pulls them back into the solar system. 
And they then become the comets as we see them in the sky. 
The important thing here to note is that in the meantime, the four and a half billion years, these comets have been sitting on the outside of the solar system, and haven't changed — deep, frozen versions of our solar system. 
In the sky, they look like this. 
We know them for their tails. 
There are actually two tails. 
One is a dust tail, which is blown away by the solar wind. 
The other one is an ion tail, which is charged particles, and they follow the magnetic field in the solar system. 
There's the coma, and then there is the nucleus, which here is too small to see, and you have to remember that in the case of Rosetta, the spacecraft is in that center pixel. 
We are only 20, 30, 40 kilometers away from the comet. 
So what's important to remember? 
Comets contain the original material from which our solar system was formed, so they're ideal to study the components that were present at the time when Earth, and life, started. 
Comets are also suspected of having brought the elements which may have bootstrapped life. 
In 1983, ESA set up its long-term Horizon 2000 program, which contained one cornerstone, which would be a mission to a comet. 
In parallel, a small mission to a comet, what you see here, Giotto, was launched, and in 1986, flew by the comet of Halley with an armada of other spacecraft. 
From the results of that mission, it became immediately clear that comets were ideal bodies to study to understand our solar system. 
And thus, the Rosetta mission was approved in 1993, and originally it was supposed to be launched in 2003, but a problem arose with an Ariane rocket. 
However, our P.R. department, in its enthusiasm, had already made 1,000 Delft Blue plates with the name of the wrong comets. 
So I've never had to buy any china since. That's the positive part. 
(Laughter) Once the whole problem was solved, we left Earth in 2004 to the newly selected comet, Churyumov-Gerasimenko. 
This comet had to be specially selected because A, you have to be able to get to it, and B, it shouldn't have been in the solar system too long. 
This particular comet has been in the solar system since 1959. 
That's the first time when it was deflected by Jupiter, and it got close enough to the sun to start changing. 
So it's a very fresh comet. 
Rosetta made a few historic firsts. 
It's the first satellite to orbit a comet, and to escort it throughout its whole tour through the solar system — closest approach to the sun, as we will see in August, and then away again to the exterior. 
It's the first ever landing on a comet. 
We actually orbit the comet using something which is not normally done with spacecraft. 
Normally, you look at the sky and you know where you point and where you are. 
In this case, that's not enough. 
We navigated by looking at landmarks on the comet. 
We recognized features — boulders, craters — and that's how we know where we are respective to the comet. 
And, of course, it's the first satellite to go beyond the orbit of Jupiter on solar cells. 
Now, this sounds more heroic than it actually is, because the technology to use radio isotope thermal generators wasn't available in Europe at that time, so there was no choice. 
But these solar arrays are big. 
This is one wing, and these are not specially selected small people. 
They're just like you and me. 
(Laughter) We have two of these wings, 65 square meters. 
Now later on, of course, when we got to the comet, you find out that 65 square meters of sail close to a body which is outgassing is not always a very handy choice. 
Now, how did we get to the comet? 
Because we had to go there for the Rosetta scientific objectives very far away — four times the distance of the Earth to the sun — and also at a much higher velocity than we could achieve with fuel, because we'd have to take six times as much fuel as the whole spacecraft weighed. 
So what do you do? 
You use gravitational flybys, slingshots, where you pass by a planet at very low altitude, a few thousand kilometers, and then you get the velocity of that planet around the sun for free. 
We did that a few times. 
We did Earth, we did Mars, we did twice Earth again, and we also flew by two asteroids, Lutetia and Steins. 
Then in 2011, we got so far from the sun that if the spacecraft got into trouble, we couldn't actually save the spacecraft anymore, so we went into hibernation. 
Everything was switched off except for one clock. 
Here you see in white the trajectory, and the way this works. 
You see that from the circle where we started, the white line, actually you get more and more and more elliptical, and then finally we approached the comet in May 2014, and we had to start doing the rendezvous maneuvers. 
On the way there, we flew by Earth and we took a few pictures to test our cameras. 
This is the moon rising over Earth, and this is what we now call a selfie, which at that time, by the way, that word didn't exist. (Laughter) It's at Mars. It was taken by the CIVA camera. 
That's one of the cameras on the lander, and it just looks under the solar arrays, and you see the planet Mars and the solar array in the distance. 
Now, when we got out of hibernation in January 2014, we started arriving at a distance of two million kilometers from the comet in May. 
However, the velocity the spacecraft had was much too fast. 
We were going 2,800 kilometers an hour faster than the comet, so we had to brake. 
We had to do eight maneuvers, and you see here, some of them were really big. 
We had to brake the first one by a few hundred kilometers per hour, and actually, the duration of that was seven hours, and it used 218 kilos of fuel, and those were seven nerve-wracking hours, because in 2007, there was a leak in the system of the propulsion of Rosetta, and we had to close off a branch, so the system was actually operating at a pressure which it was never designed or qualified for. 
Then we got in the vicinity of the comet, and these were the first pictures we saw. 
The true comet rotation period is 12 and a half hours, so this is accelerated, but you will understand that our flight dynamics engineers thought, this is not going to be an easy thing to land on. 
We had hoped for some kind of spud-like thing where you could easily land. 
But we had one hope: maybe it was smooth. 
No. That didn't work either. (Laughter) So at that point in time, it was clearly unavoidable: we had to map this body in all the detail you could get, because we had to find an area which is 500 meters in diameter and flat. 
Why 500 meters? That's the error we have on landing the probe. 
So we went through this process, and we mapped the comet. 
We used a technique called photoclinometry. 
You use shadows thrown by the sun. 
What you see here is a rock sitting on the surface of the comet, and the sun shines from above. 
From the shadow, we, with our brain, can immediately determine roughly what the shape of that rock is. 
You can program that in a computer, you then cover the whole comet, and you can map the comet. 
For that, we flew special trajectories starting in August. 
First, a triangle of 100 kilometers on a side at 100 kilometers' distance, and we repeated the whole thing at 50 kilometers. 
At that time, we had seen the comet at all kinds of angles, and we could use this technique to map the whole thing. 
Now, this led to a selection of landing sites. 
This whole process we had to do, to go from the mapping of the comet to actually finding the final landing site, was 60 days. 
We didn't have more. 
To give you an idea, the average Mars mission takes hundreds of scientists for years to meet about where shall we go? 
We had 60 days, and that was it. 
We finally selected the final landing site and the commands were prepared for Rosetta to launch Philae. 
The way this works is that Rosetta has to be at the right point in space, and aiming towards the comet, because the lander is passive. 
The lander is then pushed out and moves towards the comet. 
Rosetta had to turn around to get its cameras to actually look at Philae while it was departing and to be able to communicate with it. 
Now, the landing duration of the whole trajectory was seven hours. 
Now do a simple calculation: if the velocity of Rosetta is off by one centimeter per second, seven hours is 25,000 seconds. 
That means 252 meters wrong on the comet. 
So we had to know the velocity of Rosetta much better than one centimeter per second, and its location in space better than 100 meters at 500 million kilometers from Earth. 
That's no mean feat. 
Let me quickly take you through some of the science and the instruments. 
I won't bore you with all the details of all the instruments, but it's got everything. 
We can sniff gas, we can measure dust particles, the shape of them, the composition, there are magnetometers, everything. 
This is one of the results from an instrument which measures gas density at the position of Rosetta, so it's gas which has left the comet. 
The bottom graph is September of last year. 
There is a long-term variation, which in itself is not surprising, but you see the sharp peaks. 
This is a comet day. 
You can see the effect of the sun on the evaporation of gas and the fact that the comet is rotating. 
So there is one spot, apparently, where there is a lot of stuff coming from, it gets heated in the Sun, and then cools down on the back side. 
And we can see the density variations of this. 
These are the gases and the organic compounds that we already have measured. 
You will see it's an impressive list, and there is much, much, much more to come, because there are more measurements. 
Actually, there is a conference going on in Houston at the moment where many of these results are presented. 
Also, we measured dust particles. 
Now, for you, this will not look very impressive, but the scientists were thrilled when they saw this. 
Two dust particles: the right one they call Boris, and they shot it with tantalum in order to be able to analyze it. 
Now, we found sodium and magnesium. 
What this tells you is this is the concentration of these two materials at the time the solar system was formed, so we learned things about which materials were there when the planet was made. 
Of course, one of the important elements is the imaging. 
This is one of the cameras of Rosetta, the OSIRIS camera, and this actually was the cover of Science magazine on January 23 of this year. 
Nobody had expected this body to look like this. 
Boulders, rocks — if anything, it looks more like the Half Dome in Yosemite than anything else. 
We also saw things like this: dunes, and what look to be, on the righthand side, wind-blown shadows. 
Now we know these from Mars, but this comet doesn't have an atmosphere, so it's a bit difficult to create a wind-blown shadow. 
It may be local outgassing, stuff which goes up and comes back. 
We don't know, so there is a lot to investigate. 
Here, you see the same image twice. 
On the left-hand side, you see in the middle a pit. 
On the right-hand side, if you carefully look, there are three jets coming out of the bottom of that pit. 
So this is the activity of the comet. 
Apparently, at the bottom of these pits is where the active regions are, and where the material evaporates into space. 
There is a very intriguing crack in the neck of the comet. 
You see it on the right-hand side. 
It's a kilometer long, and it's two and a half meters wide. 
Some people suggest that actually, when we get close to the sun, the comet may split in two, and then we'll have to choose, which comet do we go for? 
The lander — again, lots of instruments, mostly comparable except for the things which hammer in the ground and drill, etc. 
But much the same as Rosetta, and that is because you want to compare what you find in space with what you find on the comet. 
These are called ground truth measurements. 
These are the landing descent images that were taken by the OSIRIS camera. 
You see the lander getting further and further away from Rosetta. 
On the top right, you see an image taken at 60 meters by the lander, 60 meters above the surface of the comet. 
The boulder there is some 10 meters. 
So this is one of the last images we took before we landed on the comet. 
Here, you see the whole sequence again, but from a different perspective, and you see three blown-ups from the bottom-left to the middle of the lander traveling over the surface of the comet. 
Then, at the top, there is a before and an after image of the landing. 
The only problem with the after image is, there is no lander. 
But if you carefully look at the right-hand side of this image, we saw the lander still there, but it had bounced. 
It had departed again. 
Now, on a bit of a comical note here is that originally Rosetta was designed to have a lander which would bounce. 
That was discarded because it was way too expensive. 
Now, we forgot, but the lander knew. 
(Laughter) During the first bounce, in the magnetometers, you see here the data from them, from the three axes, x, y and z. 
Halfway through, you see a red line. 
At that red line, there is a change. 
What happened, apparently, is during the first bounce, somewhere, we hit the edge of a crater with one of the legs of the lander, and the rotation velocity of the lander changed. 
So we've been rather lucky that we are where we are. 
This is one of the iconic images of Rosetta. 
It's a man-made object, a leg of the lander, standing on a comet. 
This, for me, is one of the very best images of space science I have ever seen. 
(Applause) One of the things we still have to do is to actually find the lander. 
The blue area here is where we know it must be. 
We haven't been able to find it yet, but the search is continuing, as are our efforts to start getting the lander to work again. 
We listen every day, and we hope that between now and somewhere in April, the lander will wake up again. 
The findings of what we found on the comet: This thing would float in water. 
It's half the density of water. 
So it looks like a very big rock, but it's not. 
The activity increase we saw in June, July, August last year was a four-fold activity increase. 
By the time we will be at the sun, there will be 100 kilos a second leaving this comet: gas, dust, whatever. 
That's 100 million kilos a day. 
Then, finally, the landing day. 
I will never forget — absolute madness, 250 TV crews in Germany. 
The BBC was interviewing me, and another TV crew who was following me all day were filming me being interviewed, and it went on like that for the whole day. 
The Discovery Channel crew actually caught me when leaving the control room, and they asked the right question, and man, I got into tears, and I still feel this. 
For a month and a half, I couldn't think about landing day without crying, and I still have the emotion in me. 
With this image of the comet, I would like to leave you. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

A few months ago, a 40 year-old woman came to an emergency room in a hospital close to where I live, and she was brought in confused. 
Her blood pressure was an alarming 230 over 170. 
Within a few minutes, she went into cardiac collapse. 
She was resuscitated, stabilized, whisked over to a CAT scan suite right next to the emergency room, because they were concerned about blood clots in the lung. 
And the CAT scan revealed no blood clots in the lung, but it showed bilateral, visible, palpable breast masses, breast tumors, that had metastasized widely all over the body. 
And the real tragedy was, if you look through her records, she had been seen in four or five other health care institutions in the preceding two years. 
Four or five opportunities to see the breast masses, touch the breast mass, intervene at a much earlier stage than when we saw her. 
Ladies and gentlemen, that is not an unusual story. 
Unfortunately, it happens all the time. 
I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI or orthopedic consult. 
I am not a Luddite. 
I teach at Stanford. 
I'm a physician practicing with cutting-edge technology. 
But I'd like to make the case to you in the next 17 minutes that when we shortcut the physical exam, when we lean towards ordering tests instead of talking to and examining the patient, we not only overlook simple diagnoses that can be diagnosed at a treatable, early stage, but we're losing much more than that. 
We're losing a ritual. 
We're losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship. 
This may actually be heresy to say this at TED, but I'd like to introduce you to the most important innovation, I think, in medicine to come in the next 10 years, and that is the power of the human hand — to touch, to comfort, to diagnose and to bring about treatment. 
I'd like to introduce you first to this person whose image you may or may not recognize. 
This is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 
Since we're in Edinburgh, I'm a big fan of Conan Doyle. 
You might not know that Conan Doyle went to medical school here in Edinburgh, and his character, Sherlock Holmes, was inspired by Sir Joseph Bell. 
Joseph Bell was an extraordinary teacher by all accounts. 
And Conan Doyle, writing about Bell, described the following exchange between Bell and his students. 
So picture Bell sitting in the outpatient department, students all around him, patients signing up in the emergency room and being registered and being brought in. 
And a woman comes in with a child, and Conan Doyle describes the following exchange. 
The woman says, "" Good Morning. "" Bell says, "" What sort of crossing did you have on the ferry from Burntisland? "" She says, "" It was good. "" And he says, "" What did you do with the other child? "" She says, "" I left him with my sister at Leith. "" And he says, "" And did you take the shortcut down Inverleith Row to get here to the infirmary? "" She says, "" I did. "" And he says, "" Would you still be working at the linoleum factory? "" And she says, "" I am. "" And Bell then goes on to explain to the students. 
He says, "" You see, when she said, 'Good morning,' I picked up her Fife accent. 
And the nearest ferry crossing from Fife is from Burntisland. 
And so she must have taken the ferry over. 
You notice that the coat she's carrying is too small for the child who is with her, and therefore, she started out the journey with two children, but dropped one off along the way. 
You notice the clay on the soles of her feet. 
Such red clay is not found within a hundred miles of Edinburgh, except in the botanical gardens. 
And therefore, she took a short cut down Inverleith Row to arrive here. 
And finally, she has a dermatitis on the fingers of her right hand, a dermatitis that is unique to the linoleum factory workers in Burntisland. "" And when Bell actually strips the patient, begins to examine the patient, you can only imagine how much more he would discern. 
And as a teacher of medicine, as a student myself, I was so inspired by that story. 
But you might not realize that our ability to look into the body in this simple way, using our senses, is quite recent. 
The picture I'm showing you is of Leopold Auenbrugger who, in the late 1700s, discovered percussion. 
And the story is that Leopold Auenbrugger was the son of an innkeeper. 
And his father used to go down into the basement to tap on the sides of casks of wine to determine how much wine was left and whether to reorder. 
And so when Auenbrugger became a physician, he began to do the same thing. 
He began to tap on the chests of his patients, on their abdomens. 
And basically everything we know about percussion, which you can think of as an ultrasound of its day — organ enlargement, fluid around the heart, fluid in the lungs, abdominal changes — all of this he described in this wonderful manuscript "Inventum Novum," "New Invention," which would have disappeared into obscurity, except for the fact that this physician, Corvisart, a famous French physician — famous only because he was physician to this gentleman — Corvisart repopularized and reintroduced the work. 
And it was followed a year or two later by Laennec discovering the stethoscope. 
Laennec, it is said, was walking in the streets of Paris and saw two children playing with a stick. 
One was scratching at the end of the stick, another child listened at the other end. 
And Laennec thought this would be a wonderful way to listen to the chest or listen to the abdomen using what he called "" the cylinder. "" Later he renamed it the stethoscope. 
And that is how stethoscope and auscultation was born. 
So within a few years, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, all of a sudden, the barber surgeon had given way to the physician who was trying to make a diagnosis. 
If you'll recall, prior to that time, no matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you. 
And, oh yes, if you wanted, he would give you a haircut — short on the sides, long in the back — and pull your tooth while he was at it. 
He made no attempt at diagnosis. 
In fact, some of you might well know that the barber pole, the red and white stripes, represents the blood bandages of the barber surgeon, and the receptacles on either end represent the pots in which the blood was collected. 
But the arrival of auscultation and percussion represented a sea change, a moment when physicians were beginning to look inside the body. 
And this particular painting, I think, represents the pinnacle, the peak, of that clinical era. 
This is a very famous painting: "" The Doctor "" by Luke Fildes. 
Luke Fildes was commissioned to paint this by Tate, who then established the Tate Gallery. 
And Tate asked Fildes to paint a painting of social importance. 
And it's interesting that Fildes picked this topic. 
Fildes' oldest son, Philip, died at the age of nine on Christmas Eve after a brief illness. 
And Fildes was so taken by the physician who held vigil at the bedside for two, three nights, that he decided that he would try and depict the physician in our time — almost a tribute to this physician. 
And hence the painting "" The Doctor, "" a very famous painting. 
It's been on calendars, postage stamps in many different countries. 
I've often wondered, what would Fildes have done had he been asked to paint this painting in the modern era, in the year 2011? 
Would he have substituted a computer screen for where he had the patient? 
I've gotten into some trouble in Silicon Valley for saying that the patient in the bed has almost become an icon for the real patient who's in the computer. 
I've actually coined a term for that entity in the computer. 
I call it the iPatient. 
The iPatient is getting wonderful care all across America. 
The real patient often wonders, where is everyone? 
When are they going to come by and explain things to me? 
Who's in charge? 
There's a real disjunction between the patient's perception and our own perceptions as physicians of the best medical care. 
I want to show you a picture of what rounds looked like when I was in training. 
The focus was around the patient. 
We went from bed to bed. The attending physician was in charge. 
Too often these days, rounds look very much like this, where the discussion is taking place in a room far away from the patient. 
The discussion is all about images on the computer, data. 
And the one critical piece missing is that of the patient. 
Now I've been influenced in this thinking by two anecdotes that I want to share with you. 
One had to do with a friend of mine who had a breast cancer, had a small breast cancer detected — had her lumpectomy in the town in which I lived. 
This is when I was in Texas. 
And she then spent a lot of time researching to find the best cancer center in the world to get her subsequent care. 
And she found the place and decided to go there, went there. 
Which is why I was surprised a few months later to see her back in our own town, getting her subsequent care with her private oncologist. 
And I pressed her, and I asked her, "Why did you come back and get your care here?" 
And she was reluctant to tell me. 
She said, "" The cancer center was wonderful. 
It had a beautiful facility, giant atrium, valet parking, a piano that played itself, a concierge that took you around from here to there. 
But, "" she said, "but they did not touch my breasts." 
Now you and I could argue that they probably did not need to touch her breasts. 
They had her scanned inside out. 
They understood her breast cancer at the molecular level; they had no need to touch her breasts. 
But to her, it mattered deeply. 
It was enough for her to make the decision to get her subsequent care with her private oncologist who, every time she went, examined both breasts including the axillary tail, examined her axilla carefully, examined her cervical region, her inguinal region, did a thorough exam. 
And to her, that spoke of a kind of attentiveness that she needed. 
I was very influenced by that anecdote. 
I was also influenced by another experience that I had, again, when I was in Texas, before I moved to Stanford. 
I had a reputation as being interested in patients with chronic fatigue. 
This is not a reputation you would wish on your worst enemy. 
I say that because these are difficult patients. 
They have often been rejected by their families, have had bad experiences with medical care and they come to you fully prepared for you to join the long list of people who's about to disappoint them. 
And I learned very early on with my first patient that I could not do justice to this very complicated patient with all the records they were bringing in a new patient visit of 45 minutes. 
There was just no way. 
And if I tried, I'd disappoint them. 
And so I hit on this method where I invited the patient to tell me the story for their entire first visit, and I tried not to interrupt them. 
We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds. 
And if I ever get to heaven, it will be because I held my piece for 45 minutes and did not interrupt my patient. 
I then scheduled the physical exam for two weeks hence, and when the patient came for the physical, I was able to do a thorough physical, because I had nothing else to do. 
I like to think that I do a thorough physical exam, but because the whole visit was now about the physical, I could do an extraordinarily thorough exam. 
And I remember my very first patient in that series continued to tell me more history during what was meant to be the physical exam visit. 
And I began my ritual. 
I always begin with the pulse, then I examine the hands, then I look at the nail beds, then I slide my hand up to the epitrochlear node, and I was into my ritual. 
And when my ritual began, this very voluble patient began to quiet down. 
And I remember having a very eerie sense that the patient and I had slipped back into a primitive ritual in which I had a role and the patient had a role. 
And when I was done, the patient said to me with some awe, "I have never been examined like this before." 
Now if that were true, it's a true condemnation of our health care system, because they had been seen in other places. 
I then proceeded to tell the patient, once the patient was dressed, the standard things that the person must have heard in other institutions, which is, "" This is not in your head. 
This is real. 
The good news, it's not cancer, it's not tuberculosis, it's not coccidioidomycosis or some obscure fungal infection. 
The bad news is we don't know exactly what's causing this, but here's what you should do, here's what we should do. "" And I would lay out all the standard treatment options that the patient had heard elsewhere. 
And I always felt that if my patient gave up the quest for the magic doctor, the magic treatment and began with me on a course towards wellness, it was because I had earned the right to tell them these things by virtue of the examination. 
Something of importance had transpired in the exchange. 
I took this to my colleagues at Stanford in anthropology and told them the same story. 
And they immediately said to me, "Well you are describing a classic ritual." 
And they helped me understand that rituals are all about transformation. 
We marry, for example, with great pomp and ceremony and expense to signal our departure from a life of solitude and misery and loneliness to one of eternal bliss. 
I'm not sure why you're laughing. 
That was the original intent, was it not? 
We signal transitions of power with rituals. 
We signal the passage of a life with rituals. 
Rituals are terribly important. 
They're all about transformation. 
Well I would submit to you that the ritual of one individual coming to another and telling them things that they would not tell their preacher or rabbi, and then, incredibly on top of that, disrobing and allowing touch — I would submit to you that that is a ritual of exceeding importance. 
And if you shortchange that ritual by not undressing the patient, by listening with your stethoscope on top of the nightgown, by not doing a complete exam, you have bypassed on the opportunity to seal the patient-physician relationship. 
I am a writer, and I want to close by reading you a short passage that I wrote that has to do very much with this scene. 
I'm an infectious disease physician, and in the early days of HIV, before we had our medications, I presided over so many scenes like this. 
I remember, every time I went to a patient's deathbed, whether in the hospital or at home, I remember my sense of failure — the feeling of I don't know what I have to say; I don't know what I can say; I don't know what I'm supposed to do. 
And out of that sense of failure, I remember, I would always examine the patient. 
I would pull down the eyelids. 
I would look at the tongue. 
I would percuss the chest. I would listen to the heart. 
I would feel the abdomen. 
I remember so many patients, their names still vivid on my tongue, their faces still so clear. 
I remember so many huge, hollowed out, haunted eyes staring up at me as I performed this ritual. 
And then the next day, I would come, and I would do it again. 
And I wanted to read you this one closing passage about one patient. 
"" I recall one patient who was at that point no more than a skeleton encased in shrinking skin, unable to speak, his mouth crusted with candida that was resistant to the usual medications. 
When he saw me on what turned out to be his last hours on this earth, his hands moved as if in slow motion. 
And as I wondered what he was up to, his stick fingers made their way up to his pajama shirt, fumbling with his buttons. 
I realized that he was wanting to expose his wicker-basket chest to me. 
It was an offering, an invitation. 
I did not decline. 
I percussed. I palpated. I listened to the chest. 
I think he surely must have known by then that it was vital for me just as it was necessary for him. 
Neither of us could skip this ritual, which had nothing to do with detecting rales in the lung, or finding the gallop rhythm of heart failure. 
No, this ritual was about the one message that physicians have needed to convey to their patients. 
Although, God knows, of late, in our hubris, we seem to have drifted away. 
We seem to have forgotten — as though, with the explosion of knowledge, the whole human genome mapped out at our feet, we are lulled into inattention, forgetting that the ritual is cathartic to the physician, necessary for the patient — forgetting that the ritual has meaning and a singular message to convey to the patient. 
And the message, which I didn't fully understand then, even as I delivered it, and which I understand better now is this: I will always, always, always be there. 
I will see you through this. 
I will never abandon you. 
I will be with you through the end. "" Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Now, I don't usually like cartoons, I don't think many of them are funny, I find them weird. But I love this cartoon from the New Yorker. 
(Text: Never, ever think outside the box.) (Laughter) So, the guy is telling the cat, don't you dare think outside the box. 
Well, I'm afraid I used to be the cat. 
I always wanted to be outside the box. 
And it's partly because I came to this field from a different background, chemist and a bacterial geneticist. 
So, what people were saying to me about the cause of cancer, sources of cancer, or, for that matter, why you are who you are, didn't make sense. 
So, let me quickly try and tell you why I thought that and how I went about it. 
So, to begin with, however, I have to give you a very, very quick lesson in developmental biology, with apologies to those of you who know some biology. 
So, when your mom and dad met, there is a fertilized egg, that round thing with that little blip. 
It grows and then it grows, and then it makes this handsome man. 
(Applause) So, this guy, with all the cells in his body, all have the same genetic information. 
So how did his nose become his nose, his elbow his elbow, and why doesn't he get up one morning and have his nose turn into his foot? 
It could. It has the genetic information. 
You all remember, dolly, it came from a single mammary cell. 
So, why doesn't it do it? 
So, have a guess of how many cells he has in his body. 
Somewhere between 10 trillion to 70 trillion cells in his body. 
Trillion! 
Now, how did these cells, all with the same genetic material, make all those tissues? 
And so, the question I raised before becomes even more interesting if you thought about the enormity of this in every one of your bodies. 
Now, the dominant cancer theory would say that there is a single oncogene in a single cancer cell, and it would make you a cancer victim. 
Well, this did not make sense to me. 
Do you even know how a trillion looks? 
Now, let's look at it. 
There it comes, these zeroes after zeroes after zeroes. 
Now, if .0001 of these cells got mutated, and .00001 got cancer, you will be a lump of cancer. 
You will have cancer all over you. And you're not. 
Why not? 
So, I decided over the years, because of a series of experiments that this is because of context and architecture. 
And let me quickly tell you some crucial experiment that was able to actually show this. 
To begin with, I came to work with this virus that causes that ugly tumor in the chicken. 
Rous discovered this in 1911. 
It was the first cancer virus discovered, and when I call it "" oncogene, "" meaning "" cancer gene. "" So, he made a filtrate, he took this filter which was the liquid after he passed the tumor through a filter, and he injected it to another chicken, and he got another tumor. 
So, scientists were very excited, and they said, a single oncogene can do it. 
All you need is a single oncogene. 
So, they put the cells in cultures, chicken cells, dumped the virus on it, and it would pile up, and they would say, this is malignant and this is normal. 
And again this didn't make sense to me. 
So for various reasons, we took this oncogene, attached it to a blue marker, and we injected it into the embryos. 
Now look at that. There is that beautiful feather in the embryo. 
Every one of those blue cells are a cancer gene inside a cancer cell, and they're part of the feather. 
So, when we dissociated the feather and put it in a dish, we got a mass of blue cells. 
So, in the chicken you get a tumor, in the embryo you don't, you dissociate, you put it in a dish, you get another tumor. 
What does that mean? 
That means that microenvironment and the context which surrounds those cells actually are telling the cancer gene and the cancer cell what to do. 
Now, let's take a normal example. 
The normal example, let's take the human mammary gland. 
I work on breast cancer. 
So, here is a lovely human breast. 
And many of you know how it looks, except that inside that breast, there are all these pretty, developing, tree-like structures. 
So, we decided that what we like to do is take just a bit of that mammary gland, which is called an "" acinus, "" where there are all these little things inside the breast where the milk goes, and the end of the nipple comes through that little tube when the baby sucks. 
And we said, wonderful! Look at this pretty structure. 
We want to make this a structure, and ask the question, how do the cells do that? 
So, we took the red cells — you see the red cells are surrounded by blue, other cells that squeeze them, and behind it is material that people thought was mainly inert, and it was just having a structure to keep the shape, and so we first photographed it with the electron microscope years and years ago, and you see this cell is actually quite pretty. 
It has a bottom, it has a top, it is secreting gobs and gobs of milk, because it just came from an early pregnant mouse. 
You take these cells, you put them in a dish, and within three days, they look like that. 
They completely forget. 
So you take them out, you put them in a dish, they don't make milk. They completely forget. 
For example, here is a lovely yellow droplet of milk on the left, there is nothing on the right. 
Look at the nuclei. The nuclei in the cell on the left is in the animal, the one on the right is in a dish. 
They are completely different from each other. 
So, what does this tell you? 
This tells you that here also, context overrides. 
In different contexts, cells do different things. 
But how does context signal? 
So, Einstein said that "For an idea that does not first seem insane, there is no hope." 
So, you can imagine the amount of skepticism I received — couldn't get money, couldn't do a whole lot of other things, but I'm so glad it all worked out. 
So, we made a section of the mammary gland of the mouse, and all those lovely acini are there, every one of those with the red around them are an acinus, and we said okay, we are going to try and make this, and I said, maybe that red stuff around the acinus that people think there's just a structural scaffold, maybe it has information, maybe it tells the cells what to do, maybe it tells the nucleus what to do. 
So I said, extracellular matrix, which is this stuff called ECM, signals and actually tells the cells what to do. 
So, we decided to make things that would look like that. 
We found some gooey material that had the right extracellular matrix in it, we put the cells in it, and lo and behold, in about four days, they got reorganized and on the right, is what we can make in culture. 
On the left is what's inside the animal, we call it in vivo, and the one in culture was full of milk, the lovely red there is full of milk. 
So, we Got Milk, for the American audience. 
All right. And here is this beautiful human cell, and you can imagine that here also, context goes. 
So, what do we do now? 
I made a radical hypothesis. 
I said, if it's true that architecture is dominant, architecture restored to a cancer cell should make the cancer cell think it's normal. 
Could this be done? 
So, we tried it. 
In order to do that, however, we needed to have a method of distinguishing normal from malignant, and on the left is the single normal cell, human breast, put in three-dimensional gooey gel that has extracellular matrix, it makes all these beautiful structures. 
On the right, you see it looks very ugly, the cells continue to grow, the normal ones stop. 
And you see here in higher magnification the normal acinus and the ugly tumor. 
So we said, what is on the surface of these ugly tumors? 
Could we calm them down — they were signaling like crazy and they have pathways all messed up — and make them to the level of the normal? 
Well, it was wonderful. Boggles my mind. 
This is what we got. 
We can revert the malignant phenotype. 
(Applause) And in order to show you that the malignant phenotype I didn't just choose one, here are little movies, sort of fuzzy, but you see that on the left are the malignant cells, all of them are malignant, we add one single inhibitor in the beginning, and look what happens, they all look like that. 
We inject them into the mouse, the ones on the right, and none of them would make tumors. 
We inject the other ones in the mouse, 100 percent tumors. 
So, it's a new way of thinking about cancer, it's a hopeful way of thinking about cancer. 
We should be able to be dealing with these things at this level, and these conclusions say that growth and malignant behavior is regulated at the level of tissue organization and that the tissue organization is dependent on the extracellular matrix and the microenvironment. 
All right, thus form and function interact dynamically and reciprocally. 
And here is another five seconds of repose, is my mantra. Form and function. 
And of course, we now ask, where do we go now? 
We'd like to take this kind of thinking into the clinic. 
But before we do that, I'd like you to think that at any given time when you're sitting there, in your 70 trillion cells, the extracellular matrix signaling to your nucleus, the nucleus is signaling to your extracellular matrix and this is how your balance is kept and restored. 
We have made a lot of discoveries, we have shown that extracellular matrix talks to chromatin. 
We have shown that there's little pieces of DNA on the specific genes of the mammary gland that actually respond to extracellular matrix. 
It has taken many years, but it has been very rewarding. 
And before I get to the next slide, I have to tell you that there are so many additional discoveries to be made. 
There is so much mystery we don't know. 
And I always say to the students and post-docs I lecture to, don't be arrogant, because arrogance kills curiosity. 
Curiosity and passion. 
You need to always think, what else needs to be discovered? 
And maybe my discovery needs to be added to or maybe it needs to be changed. 
So, we have now made an amazing discovery, a post-doc in the lab who is a physicist asked me, what do the cells do when you put them in? 
What do they do in the beginning when they do? 
I said, I don't know, we couldn't look at them. 
We didn't have high images in the old days. 
So she, being an imager and a physicist, did this incredible thing. 
This is a single human breast cell in three dimensions. 
Look at it. It's constantly doing this. 
Has a coherent movement. 
You put the cancer cells there, and they do go all over, they do this. They don't do this. 
And when we revert the cancer cell, it again does this. 
Absolutely boggles my mind. 
So the cell acts like an embryo. What an exciting thing. 
So I'd like to finish with a poem. 
Well I used to love English literature, and I debated in college, which one should I do? 
And unfortunately or fortunately, chemistry won. 
But here is a poem from Yeats. I'll just read you the last two lines. 
It's called "" Among the School Children. "" "" O body swayed to music / O brightening glance / How [can we know] the dancer from the dance? "" And here is Merce Cunningham, I was fortunate to dance with him when I was younger, and here he is a dancer, and while he is dancing, he is both the dancer and the dance. 
The minute he stops, we have neither. 
So it's like form and function. 
Now, I'd like to show you a current picture of my group. 
I have been fortunate to have had these magnificant students and post-docs who have taught me so much, and I have had many of these groups come and go. 
They are the future and I try to make them not be afraid of being the cat and being told, don't think outside the box. 
And I'd like to leave you with this thought. 
On the left is water coming through the shore, taken from a NASA satellite. 
On the right, there is a coral. 
Now if you take the mammary gland and spread it and take the fat away, on a dish it looks like that. 
Do they look the same? Do they have the same patterns? 
Why is it that nature keeps doing that over and over again? 
And I'd like to submit to you that we have sequenced the human genome, we know everything about the sequence of the gene, the language of the gene, the alphabet of the gene, But we know nothing, but nothing, about the language and alphabet of form. 
So, it's a wonderful new horizon, it's a wonderful thing to discover for the young and the passionate old, and that's me. 
So go to it! 
(Applause) 

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

But for myself, in the past, I've spent the last 20 years studying human behavior from a rather unorthodox way: picking pockets. 
When we think of misdirection, we think of something as looking off to the side, when actually the things right in front of us are often the hardest to see, the things that you look at every day that you're blinded to. 
For example, how many of you still have your cell phones on you right now? 
Great. Double-check. 
Make sure you still have them. 
No matter how you organize the icons, you still have a clock on the front. 
So, without looking at your phone, what time was it? 
Now, you've been watching me for about 30 seconds. 
Make your best guess. 
What color is my shirt? What color is my tie? 
Show of hands, were you right? 
For me, I like to think of it very simple, like a surveillance system. 
It's kind of like you have all these fancy sensors, and inside your brain is a little security guard. 
He's got lots of cool information in front of him, high-tech equipment, he's got cameras, he's got a little phone that he can pick up, listen to the ears, all these senses, all these perceptions. 
But attention is what steers your perceptions, it's what controls your reality. 
If you don't attend to something, you can't be aware of it. 
But ironically, you can attend to something without being aware of it. 
For example, the cocktail effect: You're in a party, having conversations with someone, and yet you can recognize your name without realizing you were listening to that. 
So if I could control how you spend your attention, if I could maybe steal your attention through a distraction. 
Now, instead of doing it like misdirection and throwing it off to the side, instead, what I choose to focus on is Frank, to be able to play with the Frank inside your head, your security guard, and get you, instead of focusing on your external senses, just to go internal for a second. 
So if I ask you to access a memory, like, what is that? 
What just happened? Do you have a wallet? 
He accesses the file. He has to rewind the tape. 
Wonderful job onstage. 
(Applause) AR: Pardon me. 
I don't think I need this clicker anymore. 
Thank you very much. I appreciate that. 
Come on up to the stage, Joe. Let's play a little game now. 
I'll cheat if you give me a chance. 
Grab my wrist, but squeeze, squeeze firm. 
Now, let's try that again. 
Hold your hand out flat. Open it up. 
(Laughter) Joe, we're going to keep doing this till you catch it. 
Yet you had something inside your pocket. 
(Laughter) Oh, there it was. Put it away. 
(Laughter) (Applause) J: That's pretty good. AR: Oh, thanks. (Applause) 
Hold your hands together. Your other hand on top. 
It falls out of the air, lands right back in the hand. 
Don't reach in your pocket. That's a different show. 
I have no idea how that works. We'll send that over there. 
J: Yeah. I'm saving it for later. 
AR: You've entertained all of these people in a wonderful way, better than you know. 
(Laughter) (Hesitant applause) (Applause ends) Attention is a powerful thing. 
Like I said, it shapes your reality. 
If you could control somebody's attention, what would you do with it? 

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

One out of two of you women will be impacted by cardiovascular disease in your lifetime. 
So this is the leading killer of women. 
It's a closely held secret for reasons I don't know. 
In addition to making this personal — so we're going to talk about your relationship with your heart and all women's relationship with their heart — we're going to wax into the politics. 
Because the personal, as you know, is political. 
And not enough is being done about this. 
And as we have watched women conquer breast cancer through the breast cancer campaign, this is what we need to do now with heart. 
Since 1984, more women die in the U.S. than men. 
So where we used to think of heart disease as being a man's problem primarily — which that was never true, but that was kind of how everybody thought in the 1950s and '60s, and it was in all the textbooks. 
It's certainly what I learned when I was training. 
If we were to remain sexist, and that was not right, but if we were going to go forward and be sexist, it's actually a woman's disease. 
So it's a woman's disease now. 
And one of the things that you see is that male line, the mortality is going down, down, down, down, down. 
And you see the female line since 1984, the gap is widening. 
More and more women, two, three, four times more women, dying of heart disease than men. 
And that's too short of a time period for all the different risk factors that we know to change. 
So what this really suggested to us at the national level was that diagnostic and therapeutic strategies, which had been developed in men, by men, for men for the last 50 years — and they work pretty well in men, don't they? — weren't working so well for women. 
So that was a big wake-up call in the 1980's. 
Heart disease kills more women at all ages than breast cancer. 
And the breast cancer campaign — again, this is not a competition. 
We're trying to be as good as the breast cancer campaign. 
We need to be as good as the breast cancer campaign to address this crisis. 
Now sometimes when people see this, I hear this gasp. 
We can all think of someone, often a young woman, who has been impacted by breast cancer. 
We often can't think of a young woman who has heart disease. 
I'm going to tell you why. 
Heart disease kills people, often very quickly. 
So the first time heart disease strikes in women and men, half of the time it's sudden cardiac death — no opportunity to say good-bye, no opportunity to take her to the chemotherapy, no opportunity to help her pick out a wig. 
Breast cancer, mortality is down to four percent. 
And that is the 40 years that women have advocated. 
Betty Ford, Nancy Reagan stood up and said, "" I'm a breast cancer survivor, "" and it was okay to talk about it. 
And then physicians have gone to bat. 
We've done the research. 
We have effective therapies now. 
Women are living longer than ever. 
That has to happen in heart disease, and it's time. 
It's not happening, and it's time. 
We owe an incredible debt of gratitude to these two women. 
As Barbara depicted in one of her amazing movies, "" Yentl, "" she portrayed a young woman who wanted an education. 
And she wanted to study the Talmud. 
And so how did she get educated then? 
She had to impersonate a man. 
She had to look like a man. 
She had to make other people believe that she looked like a man and she could have the same rights that the men had. 
Bernadine Healy, Dr. Healy, was a cardiologist. 
And right around that time, in the 1980's, that we saw women and heart disease deaths going up, up, up, up, up, she wrote an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine and said, the Yentl syndrome. 
Women are dying of heart disease, two, three, four times more than men. 
Mortality is not going down, it's going up. 
And she questioned, she hypothesized, is this a Yentl syndrome? 
And here's what the story is. 
Is it because women don't look like men, they don't look like that male-pattern heart disease that we've spent the last 50 years understanding and getting really good diagnostics and really good therapeutics, and therefore, they're not recognized for their heart disease. 
And they're just passed. 
They don't get treated, they don't get detected, they don't get the benefit of all the modern medicines. 
Doctor Healy then subsequently became the first female director of our National Institutes of Health. 
And this is the biggest biomedical enterprise research in the world. 
And it funds a lot of my research. 
It funds research all over the place. 
It was a very big deal for her to become director. 
And she started, in the face of a lot of controversy, the Women's Health Initiative. 
And every woman in the room here has benefited from that Women's Health Initiative. 
It told us about hormone replacement therapy. 
It's informed us about osteoporosis. 
It informed us about breast cancer, colon cancer in women. 
So a tremendous fund of knowledge despite, again, that so many people told her not to do it, it was too expensive. 
And the under-reading was women aren't worth it. 
She was like, "" Nope. Sorry. Women are worth it. "" Well there was a little piece of that Women's Health Initiative that went to National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, which is the cardiology part of the NIH. 
And we got to do the WISE study — and the WISE stands for Women's Ischemia Syndrome Evaluation — and I have chaired this study for the last 15 years. 
It was a study to specifically ask, what's going on with women? 
Why are more and more women dying of ischemic heart disease? 
So in the WISE, 15 years ago, we started out and said, "" Well wow, there's a couple of key observations and we should probably follow up on that. "" And our colleagues in Washington, D.C. 
had recently published that when women have heart attacks and die, compared to men who have heart attacks and die — and again, this is millions of people, happening every day — women, in their fatty plaque — and this is their coronary artery, so the main blood supply going into the heart muscle — women erode, men explode. 
You're going to find some interesting analogies in this physiology. 
(Laughter) So I'll describe the male-pattern heart attack first. 
Hollywood heart attack. Ughhhh. 
Horrible chest pain. 
EKG goes pbbrrhh, so the doctors can see this hugely abnormal EKG. 
There's a big clot in the middle of the artery. 
And they go up to the cath lab and boom, boom, boom get rid of the clot. 
That's a man heart attack. 
Some women have those heart attacks, but a whole bunch of women have this kind of heart attack, where it erodes, doesn't completely fill with clot, symptoms are subtle, EKG findings are different — female-pattern. 
So what do you think happens to these gals? 
They're often not recognized, sent home. 
I'm not sure what it was. Might have been gas. 
So we picked up on that and we said, "" You know, we now have the ability to look inside human beings with these special catheters called IVUS: intravascular ultrasound. "" And we said, "" We're going to hypothesize that the fatty plaque in women is actually probably different, and deposited differently, than men. "" And because of the common knowledge of how women and men get fat. 
When we watch people become obese, where do men get fat? 
Right here, it's just a focal — right there. 
Where do women get fat? 
All over. 
Cellulite here, cellulite here. 
So we said, "" Look, women look like they're pretty good about putting kind of the garbage away, smoothly putting it away. 
Men just have to dump it in a single area. "" So we said, "" Let's look at these. "" And so the yellow is the fatty plaque, and panel A is a man. 
And you can see, it's lumpy bumpy. 
He's got a beer belly in his coronary arteries. 
Panel B is the woman, very smooth. 
She's just laid it down nice and tidy. 
(Laughter) And if you did that angiogram, which is the red, you can see the man's disease. 
So 50 years of honing and crafting these angiograms, we easily recognize male-pattern disease. 
Kind of hard to see that female-pattern disease. 
So that was a discovery. 
Now what are the implications of that? 
Well once again, women get the angiogram and nobody can tell that they have a problem. 
So we are working now on a non-invasive — again, these are all invasive studies. 
Ideally you would love to do all this non-invasively. 
And again, 50 years of good non-invasive stress testing, we're pretty good at recognizing male-pattern disease with stress tests. 
So this is cardiac magnetic resonance imaging. 
We're doing this at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in the Women's Heart Center. 
We selected this for the research. 
This is not in your community hospital, but we would hope to translate this. 
And we're about two and a half years into a five-year study. 
This was the only modality that can see the inner lining of the heart. 
And if you look carefully, you can see that there's a black blush right there. 
And that is microvascular obstruction. 
The syndrome, the female-pattern now is called microvascular coronary dysfunction, or obstruction. 
The second reason we really liked MRI is that there's no radiation. 
So unlike the CAT scans, X-rays, thalliums, for women whose breast is in the way of looking at the heart, every time we order something that has even a small amount of radiation, we say, "" Do we really need that test? "" So we're very excited about M.R. 
You can't go and order it yet, but this is an area of active inquiry where actually studying women is going to advance the field for women and men. 
What are the downstream consequences then, when female-pattern heart disease is not recognized? 
This is a figure from an editorial that I published in the European Heart Journal this last summer. 
And it was just a pictogram to sort of show why more women are dying of heart disease, despite these good treatments that we know and we have work. 
And when the woman has male-pattern disease — so she looks like Barbara in the movie — they get treated. 
And when you have female-pattern and you look like a woman, as Barbara does here with her husband, they don't get the treatment. 
These are our life-saving treatments. 
And those little red boxes are deaths. 
So those are the consequences. 
And that is female-pattern and why we think the Yentl syndrome actually is explaining a lot of these gaps. 
There's been wonderful news also about studying women, finally, in heart disease. 
And one of the the cutting-edge areas that we're just incredibly excited about is stem cell therapy. 
If you ask, what is the big difference between women and men physiologically? 
Why are there women and men? 
Because women bring new life into the world. 
That's all stem cells. 
So we hypothesized that female stem cells might be better at identifying the injury, doing some cellular repair or even producing new organs, which is one of the things that we're trying to do with stem cell therapy. 
These are female and male stem cells. 
And if you had an injured organ, if you had a heart attack and we wanted to repair that injured area, do you want those robust, plentiful stem cells on the top? 
Or do you want these guys, that look like they're out to lunch? 
(Laughter) And some of our investigative teams have demonstrated that female stem cells — and this is in animals and increasingly we're showing this in humans — that female stem cells, when put even into a male body, do better than male stem cells going into a male body. 
One of the things that we say about all of this female physiology — because again, as much as we're talking about women and heart disease, women do, on average, have better longevity than men — is that unfolding the secrets of female physiology and understanding that is going to help men and women. 
So this is not a zero-sum game in anyway. 
Okay, so here's where we started. 
And remember, paths crossed in 1984, and more and more women were dying of cardiovascular disease. 
What has happened in the last 15 years with this work? 
We are bending the curve. 
We're bending the curve. 
So just like the breast cancer story, doing research, getting awareness going, it works, you just have to get it going. 
Now are we happy with this? 
We still have two to three more women dying for every man. 
And I would propose, with the better longevity that women have overall, that women probably should theoretically do better, if we could just get treated. 
So this is where we are, but we have a long row to hoe. 
We've worked on this for 15 years. 
And I've told you, we've been working on male-pattern heart disease for 50 years. 
So we're 35 years behind. 
And we'd like to think it's not going to take 35 years. 
And in fact, it probably won't. 
But we cannot stop now. 
Too many lives are at stake. 
So what do we need to do? 
You now, hopefully, have a more personal relationship with your heart. 
Women have heard the call for breast cancer and they have come out for awareness campaigns. 
The women are very good about getting mammograms now. 
And women do fundraising. 
Women participate. 
They have put their money where their mouth is and they have done advocacy and they have joined campaigns. 
This is what we need to do with heart disease now. 
And it's political. 
Women's health, from a federal funding standpoint, sometimes it's popular, sometimes it's not so popular. 
So we have these feast and famine cycles. 
So I implore you to join the Red Dress Campaign in this fundraising. 
Breast cancer, as we said, kills women, but heart disease kills a whole bunch more. 
So if we can be as good as breast cancer and give women this new charge, we have a lot of lives to save. 
So thank you for your attention. 
(Applause) 

Imagine that you invented a device that can record my memories, my dreams, my ideas, and transmit them to your brain. 
That would be a game-changing technology, right? 
But in fact, we already possess this device, and it's called human communication system and effective storytelling. 
To understand how this device works, we have to look into our brains. 
And we have to formulate the question in a slightly different manner. 
Now we have to ask how these neuron patterns in my brain that are associated with my memories and ideas are transmitted into your brains. 
And we think there are two factors that enable us to communicate. 
First, your brain is now physically coupled to the sound wave that I'm transmitting to your brain. 
And second, we developed a common neural protocol that enabled us to communicate. 
So how do we know that? 
In my lab in Princeton, we bring people to the fMRI scanner and we scan their brains while they are either telling or listening to real-life stories. 
And to give you a sense of the stimulus we are using, let me play 20 seconds from a story that we used, told by a very talented storyteller, Jim O'Grady. 
(Audio) Jim O'Grady: So I'm banging out my story and I know it's good, and then I start to make it better — (Laughter) by adding an element of embellishment. 
Reporters call this "" making shit up. "" (Laughter) And they recommend against crossing that line. 
But I had just seen the line crossed between a high-powered dean and assault with a pastry. 
And I kinda liked it. "" Uri Hasson: OK, so now let's look into your brain and see what's happening when you listen to these kinds of stories. 
And let's start simple — let's start with one listener and one brain area: the auditory cortex that processes the sounds that come from the ear. 
And as you can see, in this particular brain area, the responses are going up and down as the story is unfolding. 
Now we can take these responses and compare them to the responses in other listeners in the same brain area. 
And we can ask: How similar are the responses across all listeners? 
So here you can see five listeners. 
And we start to scan their brains before the story starts, when they're simply lying in the dark and waiting for the story to begin. 
As you can see, the brain area is going up and down in each one of them, but the responses are very different, and not in sync. 
However, immediately as the story is starting, something amazing is happening. 
(Audio) JO: So I'm banging out my story and I know it's good, and then I start to make it — UH: Suddenly, you can see that the responses in all of the subjects lock to the story, and now they are going up and down in a very similar way across all listeners. 
And in fact, this is exactly what is happening now in your brains when you listen to my sound speaking. 
We call this effect "" neural entrainment. "" And to explain to you what is neural entrainment, let me first explain what is physical entrainment. 
So, we'll look and see five metronomes. 
Think of these five metronomes as five brains. 
And similar to the listeners before the story starts, these metronomes are going to click, but they're going to click out of phase. 
(Clicking) Now see what will happen when I connect them together by placing them on these two cylinders. (Clicking) 
Now these two cylinders start to rotate. 
This rotation vibration is going through the wood and is going to couple all the metronomes together. 
And now listen to the click. 
(Synchronized clicking) This is what you call physical entrainment. 
Now let's go back to the brain and ask: What's driving this neural entrainment? 
Is it simply the sounds that the speaker is producing? 
Or maybe it's the words. 
Or maybe it's the meaning that the speaker is trying to convey. 
So to test it, we did the following experiment. 
First, we took the story and played it backwards. 
And that preserved many of the original auditory features, but removed the meaning. 
And it sounds something like that. 
(Audio) JO: (Unintelligible) And we flashed colors in the two brains to indicate brain areas that respond very similarly across people. 
And as you can see, this incoming sound induced entrainment or alignment in all of the brains in auditory cortices that process the sounds, but it didn't spread deeper into the brain. 
Now we can take these sounds and build words out of it. 
So if we take Jim O'Grady and scramble the words, we'll get a list of words. 
(Audio) JO:... an animal... assorted facts... 
and right on... pie man... potentially... my stories UH: And you can see that these words start to induce alignment in early language areas, but not more than that. 
Now we can take the words and start to build sentences out of them. 
(Audio) JO: And they recommend against crossing that line. 
He says: "" Dear Jim, Good story. Nice details. 
Didn't she only know about him through me? "" UH: Now you can see that the responses in all the language areas that process the incoming language become aligned or similar across all listeners. 
However, only when we use the full, engaging, coherent story do the responses spread deeper into the brain into higher-order areas, which include the frontal cortex and the parietal cortex, and make all of them respond very similarly. 
And we believe that these responses in higher-order areas are induced or become similar across listeners because of the meaning conveyed by the speaker, and not by words or sound. 
And if we are right, there's a strong prediction over here if I tell you the exact same ideas using two very different sets of words, your brain responses will still be similar. 
And to test it, we did the following experiment in my lab. 
We took the English story and translated it to Russian. 
Now you have two different sounds and linguistic systems that convey the exact same meaning. 
And you play the English story to the English listeners and the Russian story to the Russian listeners, and we can compare their responses across the groups. 
And when we did that, we didn't see responses that are similar in auditory cortices in language, because the language and sound are very different. 
However, you can see that the responses in high-order areas were still similar across these two groups. 
We believe this is because they understood the story in a very similar way, as we confirmed, using a test after the story ended. 
And we think that this alignment is necessary for communication. 
For example, as you can tell, I am not a native English speaker. 
I grew up with another language, and the same might be for many of you in the audience. 
And still, we can communicate. 
How come? 
We think we can communicate because we have this common code that presents meaning. 
So far, I've only talked about what's happening in the listener's brain, in your brain, when you're listening to talks. 
But what's happening in the speaker's brain, in my brain, when I'm speaking to you? 
To look in the speaker's brain, we asked the speaker to go into the scanner, we scan his brain and then compare his brain responses to the brain responses of the listeners listening to the story. 
You have to remember that producing speech and comprehending speech are very different processes. 
Here we're asking: How similar are they? 
To our surprise, we saw that all these complex patterns within the listeners actually came from the speaker brain. 
So production and comprehension rely on very similar processes. 
And we also found the stronger the similarity between the listener's brain and the speaker's brain, the better the communication. 
So I know that if you are completely confused now, and I do hope that this is not the case, your brain responses are very different than mine. 
But I also know that if you really understand me now, then your brain... and your brain... and your brain are really similar to mine. 
Now, let's take all this information together and ask: How can we use it to transmit a memory that I have from my brain to your brains? 
So we did the following experiment. 
We let people watch, for the first time in their life, a TV episode from the BBC series "" Sherlock, "" while we scanned their brains. 
And then we asked them to go back to the scanner and tell the story to another person that never watched the movie. 
So let's be specific. 
Think about this exact scene, when Sherlock is entering the cab in London driven by the murderer he is looking for. 
With me, as a viewer, there is a specific brain pattern in my brain when I watch it. 
Now, the exact same pattern, I can reactivate in my brain again by telling the word: Sherlock, London, murderer. 
And when I'm transmitting these words to your brains now, you have to reconstruct it in your mind. 
In fact, we see that pattern emerging now in your brains. 
And we were really surprised to see that the pattern you have now in your brains when I'm describing to you these scenes would be very similar to the pattern I had when I watched this movie a few months ago in the scanner. 
This starts to tell you about the mechanism by which we can tell stories and transmit information. 
Because, for example, now you're listening really hard and trying to understand what I'm saying. 
And I know that it's not easy. 
But I hope that at one point in the talk we clicked, and you got me. 
And I think that in a few hours, a few days, a few months, you're going to meet someone at a party, and you're going to tell him about this lecture, and suddenly it will be as if he is standing now here with us. 
Now you can see how we can take this mechanism and try to transmit memories and knowledge across people, which is wonderful, right? 
But our ability to communicate relies on our ability to have common ground. 
Because, for example, if I'm going to use the British synonym "hackney carriage" instead of "cab," I know that I'm going to be misaligned with most of you in the audience. 
This alignment depends not only on our ability to understand the basic concept; it also depends on our ability to develop common ground and understanding and shared belief systems. 
Because we know that in many cases, people understand the exact same story in very different ways. 
So to test it in the lab, we did the following experiment. 
We took a story by J.D. Salinger, in which a husband lost track of his wife in the middle of a party, and he's calling his best friend, asking, "" Did you see my wife? "" For half of the subjects, we said that the wife was having an affair with the best friend. 
For the other half, we said that the wife is loyal and the husband is very jealous. 
This one sentence before the story started was enough to make the brain responses of all the people that believed the wife was having an affair be very similar in these high-order areas and different than the other group. 
And if one sentence is enough to make your brain similar to people that think like you and very different than people that think differently than you, think how this effect is going to be amplified in real life, when we are all listening to the exact same news item after being exposed day after day after day to different media channels, like Fox News or The New York Times, that give us very different perspectives on reality. 
So let me summarize. 
If everything worked as planned tonight, I used my ability to vocalize sound to be coupled to your brains. 
And I used this coupling to transmit my brain patterns associated with my memories and ideas into your brains. 
In this, I start to reveal the hidden neural mechanism by which we communicate. 
And we know that in the future it will enable us to improve and facilitate communication. 
But these studies also reveal that communication relies on a common ground. 
And we have to be really worried as a society if we lose this common ground and our ability to speak with people that are slightly different than us because we let a few very strong media channels take control of the mic, and manipulate and control the way we all think. 
And I'm not sure how to fix it because I'm only a scientist. 
But maybe one way to do it is to go back to the more natural way of communication, which is a dialogue, in which it's not only me speaking to you now, but a more natural way of talking, in which I am speaking and I am listening, and together we are trying to come to a common ground and new ideas. 
Because after all, the people we are coupled to define who we are. 
And our desire to be coupled to another brain is something very basic that starts at a very early age. 
So let me finish with an example from my own private life that I think is a good example of how coupling to other people is really going to define who we are. 
This my son Jonathan at a very early age. 
See how he developed a vocal game together with my wife, only from the desire and pure joy of being coupled to another human being. 
(Both vocalizing) (Laughter) Now, think how the ability of my son to be coupled to us and other people in his life is going to shape the man he is going to become. 
And think how you change on a daily basis from the interaction and coupling to other people in your life. 
So keep being coupled to other people. 
Keep spreading your ideas, because the sum of all of us together, coupled, is greater than our parts. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

We live in in a remarkable time, the age of genomics. 
Your genome is the entire sequence of your DNA. 
Your sequence and mine are slightly different. 
That's why we look different. 
I've got brown eyes; you might have blue or gray. 
But it's not just skin-deep. 
The headlines tell us that genes can give us scary diseases, maybe even shape our personality, or give us mental disorders. 
Our genes seem to have awesome power over our destinies. 
And yet, I would like to think that I am more than my genes. 
What do you guys think? 
Are you more than your genes? 
(Audience: Yes.) Yes? 
I think some people agree with me. 
I think we should make a statement. 
I think we should say it all together. 
All right: "" I'm more than my genes "" — all together. 
Everybody: I am more than my genes. 
(Cheering) Sebastian Seung: What am I? 
(Laughter) I am my connectome. 
Now, since you guys are really great, maybe you can humor me and say this all together too. 
(Laughter) Right. All together now. 
Everybody: I am my connectome. 
SS: That sounded great. 
You know, you guys are so great, you don't even know what a connectome is, and you're willing to play along with me. 
I could just go home now. 
Well, so far only one connectome is known, that of this tiny worm. 
Its modest nervous system consists of just 300 neurons. 
And in the 1970s and '80s, a team of scientists mapped all 7,000 connections between the neurons. 
In this diagram, every node is a neuron, and every line is a connection. 
This is the connectome of the worm C. elegans. 
Your connectome is far more complex than this because your brain contains 100 billion neurons and 10,000 times as many connections. 
There's a diagram like this for your brain, but there's no way it would fit on this slide. 
Your connectome contains one million times more connections than your genome has letters. 
That's a lot of information. 
What's in that information? 
We don't know for sure, but there are theories. 
Since the 19th century, neuroscientists have speculated that maybe your memories — the information that makes you, you — maybe your memories are stored in the connections between your brain's neurons. 
And perhaps other aspects of your personal identity — maybe your personality and your intellect — maybe they're also encoded in the connections between your neurons. 
And so now you can see why I proposed this hypothesis: I am my connectome. 
I didn't ask you to chant it because it's true; I just want you to remember it. 
And in fact, we don't know if this hypothesis is correct, because we have never had technologies powerful enough to test it. 
Finding that worm connectome took over a dozen years of tedious labor. 
And to find the connectomes of brains more like our own, we need more sophisticated technologies, that are automated, that will speed up the process of finding connectomes. 
And in the next few minutes, I'll tell you about some of these technologies, which are currently under development in my lab and the labs of my collaborators. 
Now you've probably seen pictures of neurons before. 
You can recognize them instantly by their fantastic shapes. 
They extend long and delicate branches, and in short, they look like trees. 
But this is just a single neuron. 
In order to find connectomes, we have to see all the neurons at the same time. 
So let's meet Bobby Kasthuri, who works in the laboratory of Jeff Lichtman at Harvard University. 
Bobby is holding fantastically thin slices of a mouse brain. 
And we're zooming in by a factor of 100,000 times to obtain the resolution, so that we can see the branches of neurons all at the same time. 
Except, you still may not really recognize them, and that's because we have to work in three dimensions. 
If we take many images of many slices of the brain and stack them up, we get a three-dimensional image. 
And still, you may not see the branches. 
So we start at the top, and we color in the cross-section of one branch in red, and we do that for the next slice and for the next slice. 
And we keep on doing that, slice after slice. 
If we continue through the entire stack, we can reconstruct the three-dimensional shape of a small fragment of a branch of a neuron. 
And we can do that for another neuron in green. 
And you can see that the green neuron touches the red neuron at two locations, and these are what are called synapses. 
Let's zoom in on one synapse, and keep your eyes on the interior of the green neuron. 
You should see small circles — these are called vesicles. 
They contain a molecule know as a neurotransmitter. 
And so when the green neuron wants to communicate, it wants to send a message to the red neuron, it spits out neurotransmitter. 
At the synapse, the two neurons are said to be connected like two friends talking on the telephone. 
So you see how to find a synapse. 
How can we find an entire connectome? 
Well, we take this three-dimensional stack of images and treat it as a gigantic three-dimensional coloring book. 
We color every neuron in, in a different color, and then we look through all of the images, find the synapses and note the colors of the two neurons involved in each synapse. 
If we can do that throughout all the images, we could find a connectome. 
Now, at this point, you've learned the basics of neurons and synapses. 
And so I think we're ready to tackle one of the most important questions in neuroscience: how are the brains of men and women different? 
(Laughter) According to this self-help book, guys brains are like waffles; they keep their lives compartmentalized in boxes. 
Girls' brains are like spaghetti; everything in their life is connected to everything else. 
(Laughter) You guys are laughing, but you know, this book changed my life. (Laughter) 
But seriously, what's wrong with this? 
You already know enough to tell me — what's wrong with this statement? 
It doesn't matter whether you're a guy or girl, everyone's brains are like spaghetti. 
Or maybe really, really fine capellini with branches. 
Just as one strand of spaghetti contacts many other strands on your plate, one neuron touches many other neurons through their entangled branches. 
One neuron can be connected to so many other neurons, because there can be synapses at these points of contact. 
By now, you might have sort of lost perspective on how large this cube of brain tissue actually is. 
And so let's do a series of comparisons to show you. 
I assure you, this is very tiny. It's just six microns on a side. 
So, here's how it stacks up against an entire neuron. 
And you can tell that, really, only the smallest fragments of branches are contained inside this cube. 
And a neuron, well, that's smaller than brain. 
And that's just a mouse brain — it's a lot smaller than a human brain. 
So when show my friends this, sometimes they've told me, "" You know, Sebastian, you should just give up. 
Neuroscience is hopeless. "" Because if you look at a brain with your naked eye, you don't really see how complex it is, but when you use a microscope, finally the hidden complexity is revealed. 
In the 17th century, the mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, wrote of his dread of the infinite, his feeling of insignificance at contemplating the vast reaches of outer space. 
And, as a scientist, I'm not supposed to talk about my feelings — too much information, professor. 
(Laughter) But may I? (Laughter) 
(Applause) I feel curiosity, and I feel wonder, but at times I have also felt despair. 
Why did I choose to study this organ that is so awesome in its complexity that it might well be infinite? 
It's absurd. 
How could we even dare to think that we might ever understand this? 
And yet, I persist in this quixotic endeavor. 
And indeed, these days I harbor new hopes. 
Someday, a fleet of microscopes will capture every neuron and every synapse in a vast database of images. 
And some day, artificially intelligent supercomputers will analyze the images without human assistance to summarize them in a connectome. 
I do not know, but I hope that I will live to see that day, because finding an entire human connectome is one of the greatest technological challenges of all time. 
It will take the work of generations to succeed. 
At the present time, my collaborators and I, what we're aiming for is much more modest — just to find partial connectomes of tiny chunks of mouse and human brain. 
But even that will be enough for the first tests of this hypothesis that I am my connectome. 
For now, let me try to convince you of the plausibility of this hypothesis, that it's actually worth taking seriously. 
As you grow during childhood and age during adulthood, your personal identity changes slowly. 
Likewise, every connectome changes over time. 
What kinds of changes happen? 
Well, neurons, like trees, can grow new branches, and they can lose old ones. 
Synapses can be created, and they can be eliminated. 
And synapses can grow larger, and they can grow smaller. 
Second question: what causes these changes? 
Well, it's true. 
To some extent, they are programmed by your genes. 
But that's not the whole story, because there are signals, electrical signals, that travel along the branches of neurons and chemical signals that jump across from branch to branch. 
These signals are called neural activity. 
And there's a lot of evidence that neural activity is encoding our thoughts, feelings and perceptions, our mental experiences. And there's a lot of evidence that neural activity 
can cause your connections to change. 
And if you put those two facts together, it means that your experiences can change your connectome. 
And that's why every connectome is unique, even those of genetically identical twins. 
The connectome is where nature meets nurture. 
And it might true that just the mere act of thinking can change your connectome — an idea that you may find empowering. 
What's in this picture? 
A cool and refreshing stream of water, you say. 
What else is in this picture? 
Do not forget that groove in the Earth called the stream bed. 
Without it, the water would not know in which direction to flow. 
And with the stream, I would like to propose a metaphor for the relationship between neural activity and connectivity. 
Neural activity is constantly changing. 
It's like the water of the stream; it never sits still. 
The connections of the brain's neural network determines the pathways along which neural activity flows. 
And so the connectome is like bed of the stream; but the metaphor is richer than that, because it's true that the stream bed guides the flow of the water, but over long timescales, the water also reshapes the bed of the stream. 
And as I told you just now, neural activity can change the connectome. 
And if you'll allow me to ascend to metaphorical heights, I will remind you that neural activity is the physical basis — or so neuroscientists think — of thoughts, feelings and perceptions. 
And so we might even speak of the stream of consciousness. 
Neural activity is its water, and the connectome is its bed. 
So let's return from the heights of metaphor and return to science. 
Suppose our technologies for finding connectomes actually work. 
How will we go about testing the hypothesis "I am my connectome?" 
Well, I propose a direct test. 
Let us attempt to read out memories from connectomes. 
Consider the memory of long temporal sequences of movements, like a pianist playing a Beethoven sonata. 
According to a theory that dates back to the 19th century, such memories are stored as chains of synaptic connections inside your brain. 
Because, if the first neurons in the chain are activated, through their synapses they send messages to the second neurons, which are activated, and so on down the line, like a chain of falling dominoes. 
And this sequence of neural activation is hypothesized to be the neural basis of those sequence of movements. 
So one way of trying to test the theory is to look for such chains inside connectomes. 
But it won't be easy, because they're not going to look like this. 
They're going to be scrambled up. 
So we'll have to use our computers to try to unscramble the chain. 
And if we can do that, the sequence of the neurons we recover from that unscrambling will be a prediction of the pattern of neural activity that is replayed in the brain during memory recall. 
And if that were successful, that would be the first example of reading a memory from a connectome. 
(Laughter) What a mess — have you ever tried to wire up a system as complex as this? 
I hope not. 
But if you have, you know it's very easy to make a mistake. 
The branches of neurons are like the wires of the brain. 
Can anyone guess: what's the total length of wires in your brain? 
I'll give you a hint. It's a big number. 
(Laughter) I estimate, millions of miles, all packed in your skull. 
And if you appreciate that number, you can easily see there is huge potential for mis-wiring of the brain. 
And indeed, the popular press loves headlines like, "Anorexic brains are wired differently," or "" Autistic brains are wired differently. "" These are plausible claims, but in truth, we can't see the brain's wiring clearly enough to tell if these are really true. 
And so the technologies for seeing connectomes will allow us to finally read mis-wiring of the brain, to see mental disorders in connectomes. 
Sometimes the best way to test a hypothesis is to consider its most extreme implication. 
Philosophers know this game very well. 
If you believe that I am my connectome, I think you must also accept the idea that death is the destruction of your connectome. 
I mention this because there are prophets today who claim that technology will fundamentally alter the human condition and perhaps even transform the human species. 
One of their most cherished dreams is to cheat death by that practice known as cryonics. 
If you pay 100,000 dollars, you can arrange to have your body frozen after death and stored in liquid nitrogen in one of these tanks in an Arizona warehouse, awaiting a future civilization that is advanced to resurrect you. 
Should we ridicule the modern seekers of immortality, calling them fools? 
Or will they someday chuckle over our graves? 
I don't know — I prefer to test their beliefs, scientifically. 
I propose that we attempt to find a connectome of a frozen brain. 
We know that damage to the brain occurs after death and during freezing. 
The question is: has that damage erased the connectome? 
If it has, there is no way that any future civilization will be able to recover the memories of these frozen brains. 
Resurrection might succeed for the body, but not for the mind. 
On the other hand, if the connectome is still intact, we cannot ridicule the claims of cryonics so easily. 
I've described a quest that begins in the world of the very small, and propels us to the world of the far future. 
Connectomes will mark a turning point in human history. 
As we evolved from our ape-like ancestors on the African savanna, what distinguished us was our larger brains. 
We have used our brains to fashion ever more amazing technologies. 
Eventually, these technologies will become so powerful that we will use them to know ourselves by deconstructing and reconstructing our own brains. 
I believe that this voyage of self-discovery is not just for scientists, but for all of us. 
And I'm grateful for the opportunity to share this voyage with you today. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I think it was in my second grade that I was caught drawing the bust of a nude by Michelangelo. 
I was sent straight away to my school principal, and my school principal, a sweet nun, looked at my book with disgust, flipped through the pages, saw all the nudes — you know, I'd been seeing my mother draw nudes and I'd copy her — and the nun slapped me on my face and said, "Sweet Jesus, this kid has already begun." 
I had no clue what she was talking about, but it was convincing enough for me never to draw again until the ninth grade. 
Thanks to a really boring lecture, I started caricaturing my teachers in school. 
And, you know, I got a lot of popularity. 
I don't play sports. I'm really bad at sports. 
I don't have the fanciest gadgets at home. 
I'm not on top of the class. 
So for me, cartooning gave me a sense of identity. 
I got popular, but I was scared I'd get caught again. 
So what I did was I quickly put together a collage of all the teachers I had drawn, glorified my school principal, put him right on top, and gifted it to him. 
He had a good laugh at the other teachers and put it up on the notice board. 
(Laughter) This is a part of that. 
And I became a school hero. 
All my seniors knew me. I felt really special. 
I have to tell you a little bit about my family. 
That's my mother. I love her to bits. 
She's the one who taught me how to draw and, more importantly, how to love. 
She's a bit of a hippie. 
She said, "" Don't say that, "" but I'm saying it anyway. 
The rest of my family are boring academics, busy collecting Ivy League decals for our classic Ambassador car. 
My father's a little different. 
My father believed in a holistic approach to living, and, you know, every time he taught us, he'd say, "" I hate these books, because these books are hijacked by Industrial Revolution. "" While he still held that worldview, I was 16, I got the best lawyer in town, my older brother Karthik, and I sat him down, and I said, "" Pa, from today onwards I've decided I'm going to be disciplined, I'm going to be curious, I'm going to learn something new every day, I'm going to be very hard working, and I'm not going to depend on you emotionally or financially. "" 
And he was very impressed. He was all tearing up. Ready to hug me. 
And I said, "" Hold that thought. "" I said, "" Can I quit school then? "" But, to cut a long story short, I quit school to pursue a career as a cartoonist. 
I must have done about 30,000 caricatures. 
I would do birthday parties, weddings, divorces, anything for anyone who wanted to use my services. 
But, most importantly, while I was traveling, I taught children cartooning, and in exchange, I learned how to be spontaneous. 
And mad and crazy and fun. 
When I started teaching them, I said let me start doing this professionally. 
When I was 18 I started my own school. 
However, an 18 year-old trying to start a school is not easy unless you have a big patron or a big supporter. 
So I was flipping through the pages of the Times of India when I saw that the Prime Minister of India was visiting my home town, Bangalore. 
And, you know, just like how every cartoonist knows Bush here, and if you had to meet Bush, it would be the funnest thing because his face was a cartoonist's delight. 
I had to meet my Prime Minister. 
I went to the place where his helicopter was about to land. 
I saw layers of security. 
I caricatured my way through three layers by just impressing the guards, but I got stuck. I got stuck at the third. 
And what happened was, to my luck, I saw a nuclear scientist at whose party I had done cartoons. 
I ran up to him, and said, "" Hello, sir. How do you do? "" He said, "" What are you doing here, Raghava? "" I said, "" I'm here to meet the Prime Minister. "" He said, "" Oh, so am I. "" I hopped into his car, and off we went through the remaining layers of security. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
I sat him down, I caricatured him, and since then I've caricatured hundreds of celebrities. 
This is one I remember fondly. 
Salman Rushdie was pissed-off I think because I altered the map of New York, if you notice. 
(Laughter) Anyway, the next slide I'm about to show you — (Laughter) Should I just turn that off? 
The next slide I'm about to show you, is a little more serious. 
I was hesitant to include this in my presentation because this cartoon was published soon after 9 / 11. 
What was, for me, a very naive observation, turned out to be a disaster. 
That evening, I came home to hundreds of hate mails, hundreds of people telling me how they could have lived another day without seeing this. 
I was also asked to leave the organization, a cartoonists' organization in America, that for me was my lifeline. 
That's when I realized, you know, cartoons are really powerful, art comes with responsibility. 
Anyway, what I did was I decided that I need to take a break. 
I quit my job at the papers, I closed my school, and I wrapped up my pencils and my brushes and inks, and I decided to go traveling. 
When I went traveling, I remember, I met this fabulous old man, who I met when I was caricaturing, who turned out to be an artist, in Italy. 
He invited me to his studio. He said, "" Come and visit. "" When I went, I saw the ghastliest thing ever. 
I saw this dead, naked effigy of himself hanging from the ceiling. 
I said, "" Oh, my God. What is that? "" And I asked him, and he said, "" Oh, that thing? In the night, I die. 
In the morning, I am born again. "" I thought he was koo koo, but something about that really stuck. 
I loved it. I thought there was something really beautiful about that. 
So I said, "" I am dead, so I need to be born again. "" So, I wanted to be a painter like him, except, I don't know how to paint. 
So, I tried going to the art store. 
You know, there are a hundred types of brushes. 
Forget it, they will confuse you even if you know how to draw. 
So I decided, I'm going to learn to paint by myself. 
I'm going to show you a very quick clip to show you how I painted and a little bit about my city, Bangalore. 
(Music) They had to be larger than life. 
Everything had to be larger. The next painting was even bigger. 
And even bigger. 
And for me it was, I had to dance while I painted. 
It was so exciting. 
Except, I even started painting dancers. 
Here for example is a Flamenco dancer, except there was one problem. 
I didn't know the dance form, so I started following them, and I made some money, sold my paintings and would rush off to France or Spain and work with them. 
That's Pepe Linares, the renowned Flamenco singer. 
But I had one problem, my paintings never danced. 
As much energy as I put into them while making them, they never danced. 
So I decided — I had this crazy epiphany at two in the morning. 
I called my friends, painted on their bodies, and had them dance in front of a painting. 
And, all of a sudden, my paintings came alive. 
And then I was fortunate enough to actually perform this in California with Velocity Circus. 
And I sat like you guys there in the audience. 
And I saw my work come alive. 
You know, normally you work in isolation, and you show at a gallery, but here, the work was coming alive, and it had some other artists working with me. 
The collaborative effort was fabulous. 
I said, I'm going to collaborate with anybody and everybody I meet. 
I started doing fashion. 
This is a fashion show we held in London. 
The best collaboration, of course, is with children. 
They are ruthless, they are honest, but they're full of energy and fun. 
This is a work, a library I designed for the Robin Hood Foundation. 
And I must say, I spent time in the Bronx working with these kids. 
And, in exchange for me working with them, they taught me how to be cool. 
I don't think I've succeeded, but they've taught me. 
They said, "" Stop saying sorry. Say, my bad. "" (Laughter) Then I said, all this is good, but I want to paint like a real painter. 
American education is so expensive. 
I was in India, and I was walking down the streets, and I saw a billboard painter. 
And these guys paint humongous paintings, and they look really good. 
And I wondered how they did it from so close. 
So, one day I had the opportunity to meet one of these guys, and I said, "" How do you paint like that? Who taught you? "" And he said, "" Oh, it's very easy. I can teach you, but we're leaving the city, because billboard painters are a dying, extinct bunch of artists, because digital printing has totally replaced them and hijacked them. "" I said, in exchange for education in how to paint, I will support them, and I started a company. 
And since then, I've been painting all over the place. 
This is a painting I did of my wife in my apartment. 
This is another painting. 
And, in fact, I started painting on anything, and started sending them around town. 
Since I mentioned my wife, the most important collaboration has been with her, Netra. 
Netra and I met when she was 18. 
I must have been 19 and a half then, and it was love at first sight. 
I lived in India. She lived in America. 
She'd come every two months to visit me, and then I said I'm the man, I'm the man, and I have to reciprocate. 
I have to travel seven oceans, and I have to come and see you. 
I did that twice, and I went broke. 
So then I said, "" Nets, what do I do? "" She said, "" Why don't you send me your paintings? 
My dad knows a bunch of rich guys. 
We'll try and con them into buying it, and then... "" But it turned out, after I sent the works to her, that her dad's friends, like most of you, are geeks. 
I'm joking. 
(Laughter) No, they were really big geeks, and they didn't know much about art. 
So Netra was stuck with 30 paintings of mine. 
So what we did was we rented a little van and we drove all over the east coast trying to sell it. 
She contacted anyone and everyone who was willing to buy my work. 
She made enough money, she sold off the whole collection and made enough money to move me for four years with lawyers, a company, everything, and she became my manager. 
That's us in New York. 
Notice one thing, we're equal here. 
Something happened along the line. 
(Laughter) But this brought me — with Netra managing my career — it brought me a lot of success. 
I was really happy. I thought of myself as a bit of a rockstar. 
I loved the attention. 
This is all the press we got, and we said, it's time to celebrate. 
And I said that the best way to celebrate is to marry Netra. 
I said, "" Let's get married. "" And I said, "" Not just married. Let's invite everyone who's helped us, all the people who bought our work. "" And you won't believe it, we put together a list of 7,000 people, who had made a difference — a ridiculous list, but I was determined to bring them to India, so — a lot of them were in India. 
150 artists volunteered to help me with my wedding. 
We had fashion designers, installation artists, models, we had makeup artists, jewelry designers, all kinds of people working with me to make my wedding an art installation. 
And I had a special installation in tribute to my in-laws. 
I had the vegetable carvers work on that for me. 
But all this excitement led to the press writing about us. 
We were in the papers, we're still in the news three years later, but, unfortunately, something tragic happened right after. 
My mother fell very ill. 
I love my mother and I was told all of a sudden that she was going to die. 
And they said you have to say bye to her, you have to do what you have to do. 
And I was devastated. 
I had shows booked up for another year. 
I was on a high. 
And I couldn't. I could not. 
My life was not exuberant. 
I could not live this larger than life person. 
I started exploring the darker abscesses of the human mind. 
Of course, my work turned ugly, but another thing happened. 
I lost all my audiences. 
The Bollywood stars who I would party with and buy my work disappeared. 
The collectors, the friends, the press, everyone said, "" Nice, but thank you. "" "" No thank you, "" was more like it. 
But I wanted people to actually feel my work from their gut, because I was painting it from my gut. 
If they wanted beauty, I said, this is the beauty I'm willing to give you. It's politicized. 
Of course, none of them liked it. 
My works also turned autobiographical. 
At this point, something else happened. 
A very, very dear friend of mine came out of the closet, and in India at that time, it was illegal to be gay, and it's disgusting to see how people respond to a gay person. 
I was very upset. 
I remember the time when my mother used to dress me up as a little girl — that's me there — because she wanted a girl, and she has only boys. 
(Laughter) Anyway, I don't know what my friends are going to say after this talk. 
It's a secret. 
So, after this, my works turned a little violent. 
I talked about this masculinity that one need not perform. 
And I talked about the weakness of male sexuality. 
This time, not only did my collectors disappear, the political activists decided to ban me and to threaten me and to forbid me from showing. 
It turned nasty, and I'm a bit of a chicken. 
I can't deal with any threat. This was a big threat. 
So, I decided it was time to end and go back home. 
This time I said let's try something different. 
I need to be reborn again. 
And I thought the best way, as most of you know who have children, the best way to have a new lease on life, is to have a child. 
I decided to have a child, and before I did that, I quickly studied what can go wrong. 
How can a family get dysfunctional? 
And Rudra was born. 
That's my little son. 
And two magical things happened after he was born. 
My mother miraculously recovered after a serious operation, and this man was elected president of this country. 
You know I sat at home and I watched. 
I teared up and I said that's where I want to be. 
So Netra and I wound up our life, closed up everything we had, and we decided to move to New York. 
And this was just eight months ago. 
I moved back to New York, my work has changed. 
Everything about my work has become more whimsical. 
This one is called "" What the Fuck Was I Thinking? "" It talks about mental incest. 
You know, I may appear to be a very nice, clean, sweet boy. 
But I'm not. I'm capable of thinking anything. 
But I'm very civil in my action, I assure you. 
(Laughter) These are just different cartoons. 
And, before I go, I want to tell you a little story. 
I was talking to mother and father this morning, and my dad said, "" I know you have so much you want to say, but you have to talk about your work with children. "" So I said, okay. 
I work with children all over the world, and that's an entirely different talk, but I want to leave you with one story that really, really inspired me. 
I met Belinda when she was 16. 
I was 17. 
I was in Australia, and Belinda had cancer, and I was told she's not going to live very long. 
They, in fact, told me three weeks. 
I walk into her room, and there was a shy girl, and she was bald, and she was trying to hide her baldness. 
I whipped out my pen, and I started drawing on her head and I drew a crown for her. 
And then, we started talking, and we spent a lovely time — I told her how I ended up in Australia, how I backpacked and who I conned, and how I got a ticket, and all the stories. 
And I drew it out for her. 
And then I left. 
Belinda died and within a few days of her death, they published a book for her, and she used my cartoon on the cover. 
And she wrote a little note, she said, "Hey Rags, thank you for the magic carpet ride around the world." 
For me, my art is my magic carpet ride. 
I hope you will join me in this magic carpet ride, and touch children and be honest. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

I am a conductor, and I'm here today to talk to you about trust. 
My job depends upon it. 
There has to be, between me and the orchestra, an unshakable bond of trust, born out of mutual respect, through which we can spin a musical narrative that we all believe in. 
Now in the old days, conducting, music making, was less about trust and more, frankly, about coercion. 
Up to and around about the Second World War, conductors were invariably dictators — these tyrannical figures who would rehearse, not just the orchestra as a whole, but individuals within it, within an inch of their lives. 
But I'm happy to say now that the world has moved on, music has moved on with it. 
We now have a more democratic view and way of making music — a two-way street. 
I, as the conductor, have to come to the rehearsal with a cast-iron sense of the outer architecture of that music, within which there is then immense personal freedom for the members of the orchestra to shine. 
For myself, of course, I have to completely trust my body language. 
That's all I have at the point of sale. 
It's silent gesture. 
I can hardly bark out instructions while we're playing. 
(Music) Ladies and gentlemen, the Scottish Ensemble. 
(Applause) So in order for all this to work, obviously I have got to be in a position of trust. 
I have to trust the orchestra, and, even more crucially, I have to trust myself. 
Think about it: when you're in a position of not trusting, what do you do? 
You overcompensate. 
And in my game, that means you overgesticulate. 
You end up like some kind of rabid windmill. 
And the bigger your gesture gets, the more ill-defined, blurry and, frankly, useless it is to the orchestra. 
You become a figure of fun. There's no trust anymore, only ridicule. 
And I remember at the beginning of my career, again and again, on these dismal outings with orchestras, I would be going completely insane on the podium, trying to engender a small scale crescendo really, just a little upsurge in volume. 
Bugger me, they wouldn't give it to me. 
I spent a lot of time in those early years weeping silently in dressing rooms. 
And how futile seemed the words of advice to me from great British veteran conductor Sir Colin Davis who said, "" Conducting, Charles, is like holding a small bird in your hand. 
If you hold it too tightly, you crush it. 
If you hold it too loosely, it flies away. "" I have to say, in those days, I couldn't really even find the bird. 
Now a fundamental and really viscerally important experience for me, in terms of music, has been my adventures in South Africa, the most dizzyingly musical country on the planet in my view, but a country which, through its musical culture, has taught me one fundamental lesson: that through music making can come deep levels of fundamental life-giving trust. 
Back in 2000, I had the opportunity to go to South Africa to form a new opera company. 
So I went out there, and I auditioned, mainly in rural township locations, right around the country. 
I heard about 2,000 singers and pulled together a company of 40 of the most jaw-droppingly amazing young performers, the majority of whom were black, but there were a handful of white performers. 
Now it emerged early on in the first rehearsal period that one of those white performers had, in his previous incarnation, been a member of the South African police force. 
And in the last years of the old regime, he would routinely be detailed to go into the township to aggress the community. 
Now you can imagine what this knowledge did to the temperature in the room, the general atmosphere. 
Let's be under no illusions. 
In South Africa, the relationship most devoid of trust is that between a white policeman and the black community. 
So how do we recover from that, ladies and gentlemen? 
Simply through singing. 
We sang, we sang, we sang, and amazingly new trust grew, and indeed friendship blossomed. 
And that showed me such a fundamental truth, that music making and other forms of creativity can so often go to places where mere words cannot. 
So we got some shows off the ground. We started touring them internationally. 
One of them was "" Carmen. "" We then thought we'd make a movie of "" Carmen, "" which we recorded and shot outside on location in the township outside Cape Town called Khayelitsha. 
The piece was sung entirely in Xhosa, which is a beautifully musical language, if you don't know it. 
It's called "" U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha "" — literally "" Carmen of Khayelitsha. "" I want to play you a tiny clip of it now for no other reason than to give you proof positive that there is nothing tiny about South African music making. 
(Music) (Applause) Something which I find utterly enchanting about South African music making is that it's so free. 
South Africans just make music really freely. 
And I think, in no small way, that's due to one fundamental fact: they're not bound to a system of notation. 
They don't read music. 
They trust their ears. 
You can teach a bunch of South Africans a tune in about five seconds flat. 
And then, as if by magic, they will spontaneously improvise a load of harmony around that tune because they can. 
Now those of us that live in the West, if I can use that term, I think have a much more hidebound attitude or sense of music — that somehow it's all about skill and systems. 
Therefore it's the exclusive preserve of an elite, talented body. 
And yet, ladies and gentlemen, every single one of us on this planet probably engages with music on a daily basis. 
And if I can broaden this out for a second, I'm willing to bet that every single one of you sitting in this room would be happy to speak with acuity, with total confidence, about movies, probably about literature. 
But how many of you would be able to make a confident assertion about a piece of classical music? 
Why is this? 
And what I'm going to say to you now is I'm just urging you to get over this supreme lack of self-confidence, to take the plunge, to believe that you can trust your ears, you can hear some of the fundamental muscle tissue, fiber, DNA, what makes a great piece of music great. 
I've got a little experiment I want to try with you. 
Did you know that TED is a tune? 
A very simple tune based on three notes — T, E, D. 
Now hang on a minute. 
I know you're going to say to me, "" T doesn't exist in music. "" Well ladies and gentlemen, there's a time-honored system, which composers have been using for hundreds of years, which proves actually that it does. 
If I sing you a musical scale: A, B, C, D, E, F, G — and I just carry on with the next set of letters in the alphabet, same scale: H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T — there you go. 
T, see it's the same as F in music. 
So T is F. 
So T, E, D is the same as F, E, D. 
Now that piece of music that we played at the start of this session had enshrined in its heart the theme, which is TED. 
Have a listen. 
(Music) Do you hear it? 
Or do I smell some doubt in the room? 
Okay, we'll play it for you again now, and we're going to highlight, we're going to poke out the T, E, D. 
If you'll pardon the expression. 
(Music) Oh my goodness me, there it was loud and clear, surely. 
I think we should make this even more explicit. 
Ladies and gentlemen, it's nearly time for tea. 
Would you reckon you need to sing for your tea, I think? 
I think we need to sing for our tea. 
We're going to sing those three wonderful notes: T, E, D. 
Will you have a go for me? 
Audience: T, E, D. 
Charles Hazlewood: Yeah, you sound a bit more like cows really than human beings. 
Shall we try that one again? 
And look, if you're adventurous, you go up the octave. 
T, E, D. 
Audience: T, E, D. 
CH: Once more with vim. (Audience: T, E, D.) There I am like a bloody windmill again, you see. 
Now we're going to put that in the context of the music. 
The music will start, and then at a signal from me, you will sing that. 
(Music) One more time, with feeling, ladies and gentlemen. 
You won't make the key otherwise. 
Well done, ladies and gentlemen. 
It wasn't a bad debut for the TED choir, not a bad debut at all. 
Now there's a project that I'm initiating at the moment that I'm very excited about and wanted to share with you, because it is all about changing perceptions, and, indeed, building a new level of trust. 
The youngest of my children was born with cerebral palsy, which as you can imagine, if you don't have an experience of it yourself, is quite a big thing to take on board. 
But the gift that my gorgeous daughter has given me, aside from her very existence, is that it's opened my eyes to a whole stretch of the community that was hitherto hidden, the community of disabled people. 
And I found myself looking at the Paralympics and thinking how incredible how technology's been harnessed to prove beyond doubt that disability is no barrier to the highest levels of sporting achievement. 
Of course there's a grimmer side to that truth, which is that it's actually taken decades for the world at large to come to a position of trust, to really believe that disability and sports can go together in a convincing and interesting fashion. 
So I find myself asking: where is music in all of this? 
You can't tell me that there aren't millions of disabled people, in the U.K. alone, with massive musical potential. 
So I decided to create a platform for that potential. 
It's going to be Britain's first ever national disabled orchestra. 
It's called Paraorchestra. 
I'm going to show you a clip now of the very first improvisation session that we had. 
It was a really extraordinary moment. 
Just me and four astonishingly gifted disabled musicians. 
Normally when you improvise — and I do it all the time around the world — there's this initial period of horror, like everyone's too frightened to throw the hat into the ring, an awful pregnant silence. 
Then suddenly, as if by magic, bang! We're all in there and it's complete bedlam. You can't hear anything. 
No one's listening. No one's trusting. 
No one's responding to each other. 
Now in this room with these four disabled musicians, within five minutes a rapt listening, a rapt response and some really insanely beautiful music. 
(Video) (Music) Nicholas:: My name's Nicholas McCarthy. 
I'm 22, and I'm a left-handed pianist. 
And I was born without my left hand — right hand. 
Can I do that one again? 
(Music) Lyn: When I'm making music, I feel like a pilot in the cockpit flying an airplane. 
I become alive. 
(Music) Clarence: I would rather be able to play an instrument again than walk. 
There's so much joy and things I could get from playing an instrument and performing. 
It's removed some of my paralysis. 
(Music) (Applause) CH: I only wish that some of those musicians were here with us today, so you could see at firsthand how utterly extraordinary they are. 
Paraorchestra is the name of that project. 
If any of you thinks you want to help me in any way to achieve what is a fairly impossible and implausible dream still at this point, please let me know. 
Now my parting shot comes courtesy of the great Joseph Haydn, wonderful Austrian composer in the second half of the 18th century — spent the bulk of his life in the employ of Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy, along with his orchestra. 
Now this prince loved his music, but he also loved the country castle that he tended to reside in most of the time, which is just on the Austro-Hungarian border, a place called Esterhazy — a long way from the big city of Vienna. 
Now one day in 1772, the prince decreed that the musicians' families, the orchestral musicians' families, were no longer welcome in the castle. 
They weren't allowed to stay there anymore; they had to be returned to Vienna — as I say, an unfeasibly long way away in those days. 
You can imagine, the musicians were disconsolate. 
Haydn remonstrated with the prince, but to no avail. 
So given the prince loved his music, Haydn thought he'd write a symphony to make the point. 
And we're going to play just the very tail end of this symphony now. 
And you'll see the orchestra in a kind of sullen revolt. 
I'm pleased to say, the prince did take the tip from the orchestral performance, and the musicians were reunited with their families. 
But I think it sums up my talk rather well, this, that where there is trust, there is music — by extension life. 
Where there is no trust, the music quite simply withers away. 
(Music) (Applause) 

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

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

I am a neuroscientist with a mixed background in physics and medicine. 
My lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology focuses on spinal cord injury, which affects more than 50,000 people around the world every year, with dramatic consequences for affected individuals, whose life literally shatters in a matter of a handful of seconds. 
And for me, the Man of Steel, Christopher Reeve, has best raised the awareness on the distress of spinal cord injured people. 
And this is how I started my own personal journey in this field of research, working with the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. 
I still remember this decisive moment. 
It was just at the end of a regular day of work with the foundation. 
Chris addressed us, the scientists and experts, "" You have to be more pragmatic. 
When leaving your laboratory tomorrow, I want you to stop by the rehabilitation center to watch injured people fighting to take a step, struggling to maintain their trunk. 
And when you go home, think of what you are going to change in your research on the following day to make their lives better. "" These words, they stuck with me. 
This was more than 10 years ago, but ever since, my laboratory has followed the pragmatic approach to recovery after spinal cord injury. 
And my first step in this direction was to develop a new model of spinal cord injury that would more closely mimic some of the key features of human injury while offering well-controlled experimental conditions. 
And for this purpose, we placed two hemisections on opposite sides of the body. 
They completely interrupt the communication between the brain and the spinal cord, thus leading to complete and permanent paralysis of the leg. 
But, as observed, after most injuries in humans, there is this intervening gap of intact neural tissue through which recovery can occur. 
But how to make it happen? 
Well, the classical approach consists of applying intervention that would promote the growth of the severed fiber to the original target. 
And while this certainly remained the key for a cure, this seemed extraordinarily complicated to me. 
To reach clinical fruition rapidly, it was obvious: I had to think about the problem differently. 
It turned out that more than 100 years of research on spinal cord physiology, starting with the Nobel Prize Sherrington, had shown that the spinal cord, below most injuries, contained all the necessary and sufficient neural networks to coordinate locomotion, but because input from the brain is interrupted, they are in a nonfunctional state, like kind of dormant. 
My idea: We awaken this network. 
And at the time, I was a post-doctoral fellow in Los Angeles, after completing my Ph.D. in France, where independent thinking is not necessarily promoted. 
(Laughter) I was afraid to talk to my new boss, but decided to muster up my courage. 
I knocked at the door of my wonderful advisor, Reggie Edgerton, to share my new idea. 
He listened to me carefully, and responded with a grin. 
"Why don't you try?" 
And I promise to you, this was such an important moment in my career, when I realized that the great leader believed in young people and new ideas. 
And this was the idea: I'm going to use a simplistic metaphor to explain to you this complicated concept. 
Imagine that the locomotor system is a car. 
The engine is the spinal cord. 
The transmission is interrupted. The engine is turned off. 
How could we re-engage the engine? 
First, we have to provide the fuel; second, press the accelerator pedal; third, steer the car. 
It turned out that there are known neural pathways coming from the brain that play this very function during locomotion. 
My idea: Replace this missing input to provide the spinal cord with the kind of intervention that the brain would deliver naturally in order to walk. 
For this, I leveraged 20 years of past research in neuroscience, first to replace the missing fuel with pharmacological agents that prepare the neurons in the spinal cord to fire, and second, to mimic the accelerator pedal with electrical stimulation. 
So here imagine an electrode implanted on the back of the spinal cord to deliver painless stimulation. 
It took many years, but eventually we developed an electrochemical neuroprosthesis that transformed the neural network in the spinal cord from dormant to a highly functional state. 
Immediately, the paralyzed rat can stand. 
As soon as the treadmill belt starts moving, the animal shows coordinated movement of the leg, but without the brain. 
Here what I call "" the spinal brain "" cognitively processes sensory information arising from the moving leg and makes decisions as to how to activate the muscle in order to stand, to walk, to run, and even here, while sprinting, instantly stand if the treadmill stops moving. 
This was amazing. 
I was completely fascinated by this locomotion without the brain, but at the same time so frustrated. 
This locomotion was completely involuntary. 
The animal had virtually no control over the legs. 
Clearly, the steering system was missing. 
And it then became obvious from me that we had to move away from the classical rehabilitation paradigm, stepping on a treadmill, and develop conditions that would encourage the brain to begin voluntary control over the leg. 
With this in mind, we developed a completely new robotic system to support the rat in any direction of space. 
Imagine, this is really cool. 
So imagine the little 200-gram rat attached at the extremity of this 200-kilo robot, but the rat does not feel the robot. 
The robot is transparent, just like you would hold a young child during the first insecure steps. 
Let me summarize: The rat received a paralyzing lesion of the spinal cord. 
The electrochemical neuroprosthesis enabled a highly functional state of the spinal locomotor networks. 
The robot provided the safe environment to allow the rat to attempt anything to engage the paralyzed legs. 
And for motivation, we used what I think is the most powerful pharmacology of Switzerland: fine Swiss chocolate. 
(Laughter) Actually, the first results were very, very, very disappointing. 
Here is my best physical therapist completely failing to encourage the rat to take a single step, whereas the same rat, five minutes earlier, walked beautifully on the treadmill. 
We were so frustrated. 
But you know, one of the most essential qualities of a scientist is perseverance. 
We insisted. We refined our paradigm, and after several months of training, the otherwise paralyzed rat could stand, and whenever she decided, initiated full weight-bearing locomotion to sprint towards the rewards. 
This is the first recovery ever observed of voluntary leg movement after an experimental lesion of the spinal cord leading to complete and permanent paralysis. 
In fact — (Applause) Thank you. 
In fact, not only could the rat initiate and sustain locomotion on the ground, they could even adjust leg movement, for example, to resist gravity in order to climb a staircase. 
I can promise you this was such an emotional moment in my laboratory. 
It took us 10 years of hard work to reach this goal. 
But the remaining question was, how? 
I mean, how is it possible? 
And here, what we found was completely unexpected. 
This novel training paradigm encouraged the brain to create new connections, some relay circuits that relay information from the brain past the injury and restore cortical control over the locomotor networks below the injury. 
And here, you can see one such example, where we label the fibers coming from the brain in red. 
This blue neuron is connected with the locomotor center, and what this constellation of synaptic contacts means is that the brain is reconnected with the locomotor center with only one relay neuron. 
But the remodeling was not restricted to the lesion area. 
It occurred throughout the central nervous system, including in the brain stem, where we observed up to 300-percent increase in the density of fibers coming from the brain. 
We did not aim to repair the spinal cord, yet we were able to promote one of the more extensive remodeling of axonal projections ever observed in the central nervous system of adult mammal after an injury. 
And there is a very important message hidden behind this discovery. 
They are the result of a young team of very talented people: physical therapists, neurobiologists, neurosurgeons, engineers of all kinds, who have achieved together what would have been impossible by single individuals. 
This is truly a trans-disciplinary team. 
They are working so close to each other that there is horizontal transfer of DNA. 
We are creating the next generation of M.D. 's and engineers capable of translating discoveries all the way from bench to bedside. 
And me? 
I am only the maestro who orchestrated this beautiful symphony. 
Now, I am sure you are all wondering, aren't you, will this help injured people? 
Me too, every day. 
The truth is that we don't know enough yet. 
This is certainly not a cure for spinal cord injury, but I begin to believe that this may lead to an intervention to improve recovery and people's quality of life. 
I would like you all to take a moment and dream with me. 
Imagine a person just suffered a spinal cord injury. 
After a few weeks of recovery, we will implant a programmable pump to deliver a personalized pharmacological cocktail directly to the spinal cord. 
At the same time, we will implant an electrode array, a sort of second skin covering the area of the spinal cord controlling leg movement, and this array is attached to an electrical pulse generator that delivers stimulations that are tailored to the person's needs. 
This defines a personalized electrochemical neuroprosthesis that will enable locomotion during training with a newly designed supporting system. 
And my hope is that after several months of training, there may be enough remodeling of residual connection to allow locomotion without the robot, maybe even without pharmacology or stimulation. 
My hope here is to be able to create the personalized condition to boost the plasticity of the brain and the spinal cord. 
And this is a radically new concept that may apply to other neurological disorders, what I termed "" personalized neuroprosthetics, "" where by sensing and stimulating neural interfaces, I implanted throughout the nervous system, in the brain, in the spinal cord, even in peripheral nerves, based on patient-specific impairments. 
But not to replace the lost function, no — to help the brain help itself. 
And I hope this enticed your imagination, because I can promise to you this is not a matter of whether this revolution will occur, but when. 
And remember, we are only as great as our imagination, as big as our dream. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

15 years ago, I volunteered to participate in a research study that involved a genetic test. 
When I arrived at the clinic to be tested, I was handed a questionnaire. 
One of the very first questions asked me to check a box for my race: White, black, Asian, or Native American. 
I wasn't quite sure how to answer the question. 
Was it aimed at measuring the diversity of research participants' social backgrounds? 
In that case, I would answer with my social identity, and check the box for "" black. "" But what if the researchers were interested in investigating some association between ancestry and the risk for certain genetic traits? 
In that case, wouldn't they want to know something about my ancestry, which is just as much European as African? 
And how could they make scientific findings about my genes if I put down my social identity as a black woman? 
After all, I consider myself a black woman with a white father rather than a white woman with a black mother entirely for social reasons. 
Which racial identity I check has nothing to do with my genes. 
Well, despite the obvious importance of this question to the study's scientific validity, I was told, "" Don't worry about it, just put down however you identify yourself. "" So I check "" black, "" but I had no confidence in the results of a study that treated a critical variable so unscientifically. 
That personal experience with the use of race in genetic testing got me thinking: Where else in medicine is race used to make false biological predictions? 
Well, I found out that race runs deeply throughout all of medical practice. 
It shapes physicians' diagnoses, measurements, treatments, prescriptions, even the very definition of diseases. 
And the more I found out, the more disturbed I became. 
Sociologists like me have long explained that race is a social construction. 
When we identify people as black, white, Asian, Native American, Latina, we're referring to social groupings with made up demarcations that have changed over time and vary around the world. 
As a legal scholar, I've also studied how lawmakers, not biologists, have invented the legal definitions of races. 
And it's not just the view of social scientists. 
You remember when the map of the human genome was unveiled at a White House ceremony in June 2000? 
President Bill Clinton famously declared, "" I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms, human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same. "" And he might have added that that less than one percent of genetic difference doesn't fall into racial boxes. 
Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project and now heads NIH, echoed President Clinton. 
"" I am happy that today, the only race we're talking about is the human race. "" Doctors are supposed to practice evidence-based medicine, and they're increasingly called to join the genomic revolution. 
But their habit of treating patients by race lags far behind. 
Take the estimate of glomerular filtration rate, or GFR. 
Doctors routinely interpret GFR, this important indicator of kidney function, by race. 
As you can see in this lab test, the exact same creatinine level, the concentration in the blood of the patient, automatically produces a different GFR estimate depending on whether or not the patient is African-American. 
Why? 
I've been told it's based on an assumption that African-Americans have more muscle mass than people of other races. 
But what sense does it make for a doctor to automatically assume I have more muscle mass than that female bodybuilder? 
Wouldn't it be far more accurate and evidence-based to determine the muscle mass of individual patients just by looking at them? 
Well, doctors tell me they're using race as a shortcut. 
It's a crude but convenient proxy for more important factors, like muscle mass, enzyme level, genetic traits they just don't have time to look for. 
But race is a bad proxy. 
In many cases, race adds no relevant information at all. 
It's just a distraction. 
But race also tends to overwhelm the clinical measures. 
It blinds doctors to patients' symptoms, family illnesses, their history, their own illnesses they might have — all more evidence-based than the patient's race. 
Race can't substitute for these important clinical measures without sacrificing patient well-being. 
Doctors also tell me race is just one of many factors they take into account, but there are numerous medical tests, like the GFR, that use race categorically to treat black, white, Asian patients differently just because of their race. 
Race medicine also leaves patients of color especially vulnerable to harmful biases and stereotypes. 
Black and Latino patients are twice as likely to receive no pain medication as whites for the same painful long bone fractures because of stereotypes that black and brown people feel less pain, exaggerate their pain, and are predisposed to drug addiction. 
The Food and Drug Administration has even approved a race-specific medicine. 
It's a pill called BiDil to treat heart failure in self-identified African-American patients. 
A cardiologist developed this drug without regard to race or genetics, but it became convenient for commercial reasons to market the drug to black patients. 
The FDA then allowed the company, the drug company, to test the efficacy in a clinical trial that only included African-American subjects. 
It speculated that race stood in as a proxy for some unknown genetic factor that affects heart disease or response to drugs. 
But think about the dangerous message it sent, that black people's bodies are so substandard, a drug tested in them is not guaranteed to work in other patients. 
In the end, the drug company's marketing scheme failed. 
For one thing, black patients were understandably wary of using a drug just for black people. 
One elderly black woman stood up in a community meeting and shouted, "Give me what the white people are taking!" 
(Laughter) And if you find race-specific medicine surprising, wait until you learn that many doctors in the United States still use an updated version of a diagnostic tool that was developed by a physician during the slavery era, a diagnostic tool that is tightly linked to justifications for slavery. 
Dr. Samuel Cartwright graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. 
He practiced in the Deep South before the Civil War, and he was a well-known expert on what was then called "" Negro medicine. "" He promoted the racial concept of disease, that people of different races suffer from different diseases and experience common diseases differently. 
Cartwright argued in the 1850s that slavery was beneficial for black people for medical reasons. 
He claimed that because black people have lower lung capacity than whites, forced labor was good for them. 
He wrote in a medical journal, "" It is the red vital blood sent to the brain that liberates their minds when under the white man's control, and it is the want of sufficiency of red vital blood that chains their minds to ignorance and barbarism when in freedom. "" To support this theory, Cartwright helped to perfect a medical device for measuring breathing called the spirometer to show the presumed deficiency in black people's lungs. 
Today, doctors still uphold Cartwright's claim the black people as a race have lower lung capacity than white people. 
Some even use a modern day spirometer that actually has a button labeled "" race "" so the machine adjusts the measurement for each patient according to his or her race. 
It's a well-known function called "" correcting for race. "" The problem with race medicine extends far beyond misdiagnosing patients. 
Its focus on innate racial differences in disease diverts attention and resources from the social determinants that cause appalling racial gaps in health: lack of access to high-quality medical care; food deserts in poor neighborhoods; exposure to environmental toxins; high rates of incarceration; and experiencing the stress of racial discrimination. 
You see, race is not a biological category that naturally produces these health disparities because of genetic difference. 
Race is a social category that has staggering biological consequences, but because of the impact of social inequality on people's health. 
Yet race medicine pretends the answer to these gaps in health can be found in a race-specific pill. 
It's much easier and more lucrative to market a technological fix for these gaps in health than to deal with the structural inequities that produce them. 
The reason I'm so passionate about ending race medicine isn't just because it's bad medicine. 
I'm also on this mission because the way doctors practice medicine continues to promote a false and toxic view of humanity. 
Despite the many visionary breakthroughs in medicine we've been learning about, there's a failure of imagination when it comes to race. 
Would you imagine with me, just a moment: What would happen if doctors stopped treating patients by race? 
Suppose they rejected an 18th-century classification system and incorporated instead the most advanced knowledge of human genetic diversity and unity, that human beings cannot be categorized into biological races? 
What if, instead of using race as a crude proxy for some more important factor, doctors actually investigated and addressed that more important factor? 
What if doctors joined the forefront of a movement to end the structural inequities caused by racism, not by genetic difference? 
Race medicine is bad medicine, it's poor science and it's a false interpretation of humanity. 
It is more urgent than ever to finally abandon this backward legacy and to affirm our common humanity by ending the social inequalities that truly divide us. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. 

Liu Bolin: By making myself invisible, I try to question the inter-canceling relationship between our civilization and its development. 
Interpreter: By making myself invisible, I try to explore and question the contradictory and often inter-canceling relationship between our civilization and its development. 
LB: This is my first work, created in November 2005. 
And this is Beijing International Art Camp where I worked before the government forcibly demolished it.I used this work to express my objection. 
I also want to use this work to let more people pay attention to the living condition of artists and the condition of their creative freedom. 
In the meantime, from the beginning, this series has a protesting, reflective and uncompromising spirit. 
When applying makeup, I borrow a sniper's method to better protect myself and to detect the enemy, as he did. (Laughter) After finishing this series of protests, I started questioning why my fate was like this, and I realized that it's not just me — all Chinese are as confused as I am. 
As you can see, these works are about family planning, election in accordance with the law and propaganda of the institution of the People's Congress. 
This work is called Xia Gang ("" leaving post ""). 
"" Xia Gang "" is a Chinese euphemism for "" laid off "". 
It refers to those people who lost their jobs during China's transition from a planned economy to a market economy. 
From 1998 to 2000, 21.37 million people lost their jobs in China. 
The six people in the photo are Xia Gang workers. 
I made them invisible in the deserted shop wherethey had lived and worked all their lives. 
On the wall behind them is the slogan of the Cultural Revolution: "The core force leading our cause forward is the Chinese Communist Party." 
For half a month I looked for these 6 people to participate in my work. 
We can only see six men in this picture, but in fact, those who are hidden here are all people who were laid off. They have just been made invisible. 
This piece is called The Studio. 
This spring, I happened to have an opportunity during my solo exhibition in Paris to shoot a work in the news studio of France 3 — I picked the news photos of the day. 
One is about the war in the Middle East, and another one is about a public demonstration in France. 
I found that any culture has its irreconcilable contradictions. 
This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR. 
Interpreter: This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR. 
(Applause) LB: I tried to disappear into JR's eye, but the problem is JR only uses models with big eyes. 
So I tried to make my eyes bigger with my fingers. 
But still they are not big enough for JR, unfortunately. 
Interpreter: So I tried to disappear into JR's eye, but the problem is JR uses only models with big eyes. 
So I tried to make my eyes bigger with this gesture. 
But it doesn't work, my eyes are still small. 
LB: This one is about 9 / 11 memories. 
This is an aircraft carrier moored alongside the Hudson River. 
Kenny Scharf's graffiti. 
(Laughter) This is Venice, Italy. 
Because global temperatures rise, the sea level rises, and it is said thatVenice will disappear in the coming decades. 
This is the ancient city of Pompeii. 
Interpreter: This is the ancient city of Pompeii. 
LB: This is the Borghese Gallery in Rome. 
When I work on a new piece, I pay more attention to the expression of ideas. 
For instance, why would I make myself invisible? 
What will making myself invisible here cause people to think? 
This one is called Instant Noodles. 
Interpreter: This one is called Instant Noodles. (Laughter) LB: Since August 2012, harmful phosphors have been found in the instant noodle package cups from every famous brand sold in China's supermarkets. 
These phosphors can even cause cancer. 
To create this artwork, I bought a lot of packaged instant noodle cups and put them in my studio, making it look like a supermarket. 
And my task is to stand there, trying to be still, setting up the camera position and coordinating with my assistant and drawing the colors and shapes that are behind my body on the front of my body. If the background is simple, I usually have to stand for three to four hours. 
The background of this piece is more complex, so I need three to four days in advance for preparation. 
This is the suit I wore when I did the supermarket shoot. 
There is no Photoshop involved. 
Interpreter: This is the suit I [was] wearing when I did the supermarket shoot. 
There is no Photoshop involved. (Laughter) LB: These works are on China's cultural memories. 
And this one, this is about food safety in China. 
Unsafe food can harm people's health, and a deluge of magazines can confuse people's minds. (Laughter) The next pieces of work show how I made myself invisible in magazines of different languages, in different countries and at different times. 
I think that in art, an artist's attitude is the most important element. 
If an artwork is to touch someone, it must be the result of not only technique, but also the artist's thinking and struggle in life. 
And the repeated struggles in life create artwork, no matter in what form. 
(Music) That's all I want to say. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

I'm a contemporary artist with a bit of an unexpected background. 
I was in my 20s before I ever went to an art museum. 
I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road in rural Arkansas, an hour from the nearest movie theater. 
And I think it was a great place to grow up as an artist because I grew up around quirky, colorful characters who were great at making with their hands. 
And my childhood is more hick than I could ever possibly relate to you, and also more intellectual than you would ever expect. 
For instance, me and my sister, when we were little, we would compete to see who could eat the most squirrel brains. 
(Laughter) But on the other side of that, though, we were big readers in our house. 
And if the TV was on, we were watching a documentary. 
And my dad is the most voracious reader I know. 
He can read a novel or two a day. 
But when I was little, I remember, he would kill flies in our house with my BB gun. 
And what was so amazing to me about that — well he would be in his recliner, would holler for me to fetch the BB gun, and I'd go get it. 
And what was amazing to me — well it was pretty kickass; he was killing a fly in the house with a gun — but what was so amazing to me was that he knew just enough how to pump it. 
And he could shoot it from two rooms away and not damage what it was on because he knew how to pump it just enough to kill the fly and not damage what it landed on. 
So I should talk about art. 
(Laughter) Or we'll be here all day with my childhood stories. 
I love contemporary art, but I'm often really frustrated with the contemporary art world and the contemporary art scene. 
A few years ago, I spent months in Europe to see the major international art exhibitions that have the pulse of what is supposed to be going on in the art world. 
And I was struck by going to so many, one after the other, with some clarity of what it was that I was longing for. 
And I was longing for several things that I wasn't getting, or not getting enough of. 
But two of the main things: one of it, I was longing for more work that was appealing to a broad public, that was accessible. 
And the second thing that I was longing for was some more exquisite craftsmanship and technique. 
So I started thinking and listing what all it was that I thought would make a perfect biennial. 
So I decided, I'm going to start my own biennial. 
I'm going to organize it and direct it and get it going in the world. 
So I thought, okay, I have to have some criteria of how to choose work. 
So amongst all the criteria I have, there's two main things. 
One of them, I call my Mimaw's Test. 
And what that is is I imagine explaining a work of art to my grandmother in five minutes, and if I can't explain it in five minutes, then it's too obtuse or esoteric and it hasn't been refined enough yet. 
It needs to worked on until it can speak fluently. 
And then my other second set of rules — I hate to say "" rules "" because it's art — my criteria would be the three H's, which is head, heart and hands. 
And great art would have "" head "": it would have interesting intellectual ideas and concepts. 
It would have "" heart "" in that it would have passion and heart and soul. 
And it would have "" hand "" in that it would be greatly crafted. 
So I started thinking about how am I going to do this biennial, how am I going to travel the world and find these artists? 
And then I realized one day, there's an easier solution to this. 
I'm just going to make the whole thing myself. 
(Laughter) And so this is what I did. 
So I thought, a biennial needs artists. 
I'm going to do an international biennial; I need artists from all around the world. 
So what I did was I invented a hundred artists from around the world. 
I figured out their bios, their passions in life and their art styles, and I started making their work. 
(Laughter) (Applause) I felt, oh this is the kind of project that I could spend my whole life doing. 
So I decided, I'm going to make this a real biennial. 
It's going to be two years of studio work. 
And I'm going to create this in two years, and I have. 
So I should start to talk about these guys. 
Well the range is quite a bit. 
And I'm such a technician, so I loved this project, getting to play with all the techniques. 
So for example, in realist paintings, it ranges from this, which is kind of old masters style, to really realistic still-life, to this type of painting where I'm painting with a single hair. 
And then at the other end, there's performance and short films and indoor installations like this indoor installation and this one, and outdoor installations like this one and this one. 
I know I should mention: I'm making all these things. 
This isn't Photoshopped. 
I'm under the river with those fish. 
So now let me introduce some of my fictional artists to you. 
This is Nell Remmel. 
Nell is interested in agricultural processes, and her work is based in these practices. 
This piece, which is called "" Flipped Earth "" — she was interested in taking the sky and using it to cleanse barren ground. 
And by taking giant mirrors — (Applause) and here she's taking giant mirrors and pulling them into the dirt. 
And this is 22 feet long. 
And what I loved about her work is, when I would walk around it and look down into the sky, looking down to watch the sky, and it unfolded in a new way. 
And probably the best part of this piece is at dusk and dawn when the twilight wedge has fallen and the ground's dark, but there's still the light above, bright above. 
And so you're standing there and everything else is dark, but there's this portal that you want to jump in. 
This piece was great. This is in my parents' backyard in Arkansas. 
And I love to dig a hole. 
So this piece was great fun because it was two days of digging in soft dirt. 
The next artist is Kay Overstry, and she's interested in ephemerality and transience. 
And in her most recent project, it's called "" Weather I Made. "" And she's making weather on her body's scale. 
And this piece is "" Frost. "" And what she did was she went out on a cold, dry night and breathed back and forth on the lawn to leave — to leave her life's mark, the mark of her life. 
(Applause) And so this is five-foot, five-inches of frost that she left behind. 
The sun rises, and it melts away. 
And that was played by my mom. 
So the next artist, this is a group of Japanese artists, a collective of Japanese artists — (Laughter) in Tokyo. 
And they were interested in developing a new, alternative art space, and they needed funding for it, so they decided to come up with some interesting fundraising projects. 
One of these is scratch-off masterpieces. 
(Laughter) And so what they're doing — each of these artists on a nine-by-seven-inch card, which they sell for 10 bucks, they drew original works of art. 
And you buy one, and maybe you get a real piece, and maybe not. 
Well this has sparked a craze in Japan, because everyone's wanting a masterpiece. 
And the ones that are the most sought after are the ones that are only barely scratched off. 
And all these works, in some way, talk about luck or fate or chance. 
Those first two are portraits of mega-jackpot winners years before and after their win. 
And in this one it's called "" Drawing the Short Stick. "" (Laughter) I love this piece because I have a little cousin at home who introduced me — which I think is such a great introduction — to a friend one day as, "" This is my cousin Shea. 
He draws sticks real good. "" (Laughter) Which is one of the best compliments ever. 
This artist is Gus Weinmueller, and he's doing a project, a large project, called "" Art for the Peoples. "" And within this project, he's doing a smaller project called "" Artists in Residence. "" And what he does is — (Laughter) he spends a week at a time with a family. 
And he shows up on their porch, their doorstep, with a toothbrush and pajamas, and he's ready to spend the week with them. 
And using only what's present, he goes in and makes a little abode studio to work out of. 
And he spends that week talking to the family about what do they think great art is. 
He has all these discussions with their family, and he digs through everything they have, and he finds materials to make work. 
And he makes a work that answers what they think great art is. 
For this family, he made this still-life painting. 
And whatever he makes somehow references nesting and space and personal property. 
This next project, this is by Jaochim Parisvega, and he's interested in — he believes art is everywhere waiting — that it just needs a little bit of a push to happen. 
And he provides this push by harnessing natural forces, like in his series where he used rain to make paintings. 
This project is called "" Love Nests. "" What he did was to get wild birds to make his art for him. 
So he put the material in places where the birds were going to collect them, and they crafted his nests for him. 
And this one's called "" Lovelock's Nest. "" This one's called "" Mixtape Love Song's Nest. "" (Laughter) And this one's called "" Lovemaking Nest. "" (Laughted) Next is Sylvia Slater. 
Sylvia's interested in art training. 
She's a very serious Swiss artist. 
(Laughter) And she was thinking about her friends and family who work in chaos-ridden places and developing countries, and she was thinking, what can I make that would be of value to them, in case something bad happens and they have to buy their way across the border or pay off a gunman? 
And so she came up with creating these pocket-sized artworks that are portraits of the person that would carry them. 
And you would carry this around with you, and if everything went to hell, you could make payments and buy your life. 
So this life price is for an irrigation non-profit director. 
So hopefully what happens is you never use it, and it's an heirloom that you pass down. 
And she makes them so they could either be broken up into payments, or they could be like these, which are leaves that can be payments. 
And so they're valuable. This is precious metals and gemstones. 
And this one had to get broken up. 
He had to break off a piece to get out of Egypt recently. 
This is by a duo, Michael Abernathy and Bud Holland. 
And they're interested in creating culture, just tradition. 
So what they do is they move into an area and try to establish a new tradition in a small geographic area. 
So this is in Eastern Tennessee, and what they decided was that we need a positive tradition that goes with death. 
So they came up with "" dig jigs. "" And a dig jig — a dig jig is where, for a milestone anniversary or a birthday, you gather all your friends and family together and you dance on where you're going to be buried. 
(Laughter) And we got a lot of attention when we did it. 
I talked my family into doing this, and they didn't know what I was doing. 
And I was like, "" Get dressed for a funeral. We're going to go do some work. "" And so we got to the grave and made this, which was hilarious — the attention that we got. 
So what happens is you dance on the grave, and after you've done your dance, everyone toasts you and tells you how great you are. 
And you in essence have a funeral that you get to be present for. 
That's my mom and dad. 
This is by Jason Birdsong. 
He is interested in how we see as an animal, how we are interested in mimicry and camouflage. 
You know, we look down a dark alley or a jungle path, trying to make out a face or a creature. 
We just have that natural way of seeing. 
And he plays with this idea. 
And this piece: those aren't actually leaves. 
They're butterfly specimens who have a natural camouflage. 
So he pairs these up. 
There's another pile of leaves. 
Those are actually all real butterfly specimens. 
And he pairs these up with paintings. 
Like this is a painting of a snake in a box. 
So you open the box and you think, "" Whoa, there's a snake in there. "" But it's actually a painting. 
So he makes these interesting conversations about realism and mimicry and our drive to be fooled by great camouflage. 
(Laughter) The next artist is Hazel Clausen. 
Hazel Clausen is an anthropologist who took a sabbatical and decided, "" You know, I would learn a lot about culture if I created a culture that doesn't exist from scratch. "" So that's what she did. 
She created the Swiss people named the Uvulites, and they have this distinctive yodeling song that they use the uvula for. 
And also they reference how the uvula — everything they say is fallen because of the forbidden fruit. 
And that's the symbol of their culture. 
And this is from a documentary called "" Sexual Practices and Populations Control Among the Uvulites. "" This is a typical angora embroidery for them. 
This is one of their founders, Gert Schaeffer. 
(Laughter) And actually this is my Aunt Irene. 
It was so funny having a fake person who was making fake things. 
And I crack up at this piece, because when I see it I know that's French angora and all antique German ribbons and wool that I got in a Nebraska mill and carried around for 10 years and then antique Chinese skirts. 
The next is a collective of artists called the Silver Dobermans, and their motto is to spread pragmatism one person at a time. 
(Laughter) And they're really interested in how over-coddled we've become. 
So this is one of their comments on how over-coddled we've become. 
And what they've done is they put a warning sign on every single barb on this fence. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And this is called "" Horse Sense Fence. "" The next artist is K. M. Yoon, a really interesting South Korean artist. 
And he's reworking a Confucian art tradition of scholar stones. 
Next is Maynard Sipes. 
And I love Maynard Sipes, but he's off in his own world, and, bless his heart, he's so paranoid. 
Next is Roy Penig, a really interesting Kentucky artist, and he's the nicest guy. 
He even once traded a work of art for a block of government cheese because the person wanted it so badly. 
Next is an Australian artist, Janeen Jackson, and this is from a project of hers called "" What an Artwork Does When We're Not Watching. "" (Laughter) Next is by a Lithuanian fortune teller, Jurgi Petrauskas. 
Next is Ginger Cheshire. 
This is from a short film of hers called "" The Last Person. "" And that's my cousin and my sister's dog, Gabby. 
The next, this is by Sam Sandy. 
He's an Australian Aboriginal elder, and he's also an artist. 
And this is from a large traveling sculpture project that he's doing. 
This is from Estelle Willoughsby. 
She heals with color. 
And she's one of the most prolific of all these hundred artists, even though she's going to be 90 next year. 
(Laughter) This is by Z. Zhou, and he's interested in stasis. 
Next is by Hilda Singh, and she's doing a whole project called "" Social Outfits. "" Next is by Vera Sokolova. 
And I have to say, Vera kind of scares me. 
You can't look her directly in the eyes because she's kind of scary. 
And it's good that she's not real; she'd be mad that I said that. 
(Laughter) And she's an optometrist in St. Petersburg, and she plays with optics. 
Next, this is by Thomas Swifton. 
This is from a short film, "" Adventures with Skinny. "" (Laughter) And this is by Cicily Bennett, and it's from a series of short films. 
And after this one, there's 77 other artists. 
And all together with those other 77 you're not seeing, that's my biennial. 
Thank you. Thank you. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thanks. (Applause) 

I'm going to be talking to you about how we can tap a really underutilized resource in health care, which is the patient, or, as I like to use the scientific term, people. 
Because we are all patients, we are all people. 
Even doctors are patients at some point. 
So I want to talk about that as an opportunity that we really have failed to engage with very well in this country and, in fact, worldwide. 
If you want to get at the big part — I mean from a public health level, where my training is — you're looking at behavioral issues. 
You're looking at things where people are actually given information, and they're not following through with it. 
It's a problem that manifests itself in diabetes, obesity, many forms of heart disease, even some forms of cancer — when you think of smoking. 
Those are all behaviors where people know what they're supposed to do. 
They know what they're supposed to be doing, but they're not doing it. 
Now behavior change is something that is a long-standing problem in medicine. 
It goes all the way back to Aristotle. 
And doctors hate it, right? 
I mean, they complain about it all the time. 
We talk about it in terms of engagement, or non-compliance. 
When people don't take their pills, when people don't follow doctors' orders — these are behavior problems. 
But for as much as clinical medicine agonizes over behavior change, there's not a lot of work done in terms of trying to fix that problem. 
So the crux of it comes down to this notion of decision-making — giving information to people in a form that doesn't just educate them or inform them, but actually leads them to make better decisions, better choices in their lives. 
One part of medicine, though, has faced the problem of behavior change pretty well, and that's dentistry. 
Dentistry might seem — and I think it is — many dentists would have to acknowledge it's somewhat of a mundane backwater of medicine. 
Not a lot of cool, sexy stuff happening in dentistry. 
But they have really taken this problem of behavior change and solved it. 
It's the one great preventive health success we have in our health care system. 
People brush and floss their teeth. 
They don't do it as much as they should, but they do it. 
So I'm going to talk about one experiment that a few dentists in Connecticut cooked up about 30 years ago. 
So this is an old experiment, but it's a really good one, because it was very simple, so it's an easy story to tell. 
So these Connecticut dentists decided that they wanted to get people to brush their teeth and floss their teeth more often, and they were going to use one variable: they wanted to scare them. 
They wanted to tell them how bad it would be if they didn't brush and floss their teeth. 
They had a big patient population. 
They divided them up into two groups. 
They had a low-fear population, where they basically gave them a 13-minute presentation, all based in science, but told them that, if you didn't brush and floss your teeth, you could get gum disease. If you get gum disease, you will lose your teeth, but you'll get dentures, and it won't be that bad. 
So that was the low-fear group. 
The high-fear group, they laid it on really thick. 
They showed bloody gums. 
They showed puss oozing out from between their teeth. 
They told them that their teeth were going to fall out. 
They said that they could have infections that would spread from their jaws to other parts of their bodies, and ultimately, yes, they would lose their teeth. 
They would get dentures, and if you got dentures, you weren't going to be able to eat corn-on-the-cob, you weren't going to be able to eat apples, you weren't going to be able to eat steak. 
You'll eat mush for the rest of your life. 
So go brush and floss your teeth. 
That was the message. That was the experiment. 
Now they measured one other variable. 
They wanted to capture one other variable, which was the patients' sense of efficacy. 
This was the notion of whether the patients felt that they actually would go ahead and brush and floss their teeth. 
So they asked them at the beginning, "Do you think you'll actually be able to stick with this program?" 
And the people who said, "" Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty good about that, "" they were characterized as high efficacy, and the people who said, "Eh, I never get around to brushing and flossing as much as I should," they were characterized as low efficacy. 
So the upshot was this. 
The upshot of this experiment was that fear was not really a primary driver of the behavior at all. 
The people who brushed and flossed their teeth were not necessarily the people who were really scared about what would happen — it's the people who simply felt that they had the capacity to change their behavior. 
So fear showed up as not really the driver. 
It was the sense of efficacy. 
So I want to isolate this, because it was a great observation — 30 years ago, right, 30 years ago — and it's one that's laid fallow in research. 
It was a notion that really came out of Albert Bandura's work, who studied whether people could get a sense of empowerment. 
The notion of efficacy basically boils down to one — that if somebody believes that they have the capacity to change their behavior. 
In health care terms, you could characterize this as whether or not somebody feels that they see a path towards better health, that they can actually see their way towards getting better health, and that's a very important notion. 
It's an amazing notion. 
We don't really know how to manipulate it, though, that well. 
Except, maybe we do. 
So fear doesn't work, right? Fear doesn't work. 
And this is a great example of how we haven't learned that lesson at all. 
This is a campaign from the American Diabetes Association. 
This is still the way we're communicating messages about health. 
I mean, I showed my three-year-old this slide last night, and he's like, "" Papa, why is an ambulance in these people's homes? "" And I had to explain, "" They're trying to scare people. "" And I don't know if it works. 
Now here's what does work: personalized information works. 
Again, Bandura recognized this years ago, decades ago. 
When you give people specific information about their health, where they stand, and where they want to get to, where they might get to, that path, that notion of a path — that tends to work for behavior change. 
So let me just spool it out a little bit. 
So you start with personalized data, personalized information that comes from an individual, and then you need to connect it to their lives. 
You need to connect it to their lives, hopefully not in a fear-based way, but one that they understand. 
Okay, I know where I sit. I know where I'm situated. 
And that doesn't just work for me in terms of abstract numbers — this overload of health information that we're inundated with. 
But it actually hits home. 
It's not just hitting us in our heads; it's hitting us in our hearts. 
There's an emotional connection to information because it's from us. 
That information then needs to be connected to choices, needs to be connected to a range of options, directions that we might go to — trade-offs, benefits. 
Finally, we need to be presented with a clear point of action. 
We need to connect the information always with the action, and then that action feeds back into different information, and it creates, of course, a feedback loop. 
Now this is a very well-observed and well-established notion for behavior change. 
But the problem is that things — in the upper-right corner there — personalized data, it's been pretty hard to come by. 
It's a difficult and expensive commodity, until now. 
So I'm going to give you an example, a very simple example of how this works. 
So we've all seen these. These are the "" your speed limit "" signs. 
You've seen them all around, especially these days as radars are cheaper. 
And here's how they work in the feedback loop. 
So you start with the personalized data where the speed limit on the road that you are at that point is 25, and, of course, you're going faster than that. 
We always are. We're always going above the speed limit. 
The choice in this case is pretty simple. 
We either keep going fast, or we slow down. 
We should probably slow down, and that point of action is probably now. 
We should take our foot off the pedal right now, and generally we do. These things are shown to be pretty effective in terms of getting people to slow down. 
They reduce speeds by about five to 10 percent. 
They last for about five miles, in which case we put our foot back on the pedal. 
But it works, and it even has some health repercussions. 
Your blood pressure might drop a little bit. 
Maybe there's fewer accidents, so there's public health benefits. 
But by and large, this is a feedback loop that's so nifty and too rare. 
Because in health care, most health care, the data is very removed from the action. 
It's very difficult to line things up so neatly. 
But we have an opportunity. 
So I want to talk about, I want to shift now to think about how we deliver health information in this country, how we actually get information. 
This is a pharmaceutical ad. 
Actually, it's a spoof. It's not a real pharmaceutical ad. 
Nobody's had the brilliant idea of calling their drug Havidol quite yet. 
But it looks completely right. 
So it's exactly the way we get health information and pharmaceutical information, and it just sounds perfect. 
And then we turn the page of the magazine, and we see this — now this is the page the FDA requires pharmaceutical companies to put into their ads, or to follow their ads, and to me, this is one of the most cynical exercises in medicine. 
Because we know. 
Who among us would actually say that people read this? 
And who among us would actually say that people who do try to read this actually get anything out of it? 
This is a bankrupt effort at communicating health information. 
There is no good faith in this. 
So this is a different approach. 
This is an approach that has been developed by a couple researchers at Dartmouth Medical School, Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin. 
And they created this thing called the "" drug facts box. "" They took inspiration from, of all things, Cap'n Crunch. 
They went to the nutritional information box and saw that what works for cereal, works for our food, actually helps people understand what's in their food. 
God forbid we should use that same standard that we make Cap'n Crunch live by and bring it to drug companies. 
So let me just walk through this quickly. 
It says very clearly what the drug is for, specifically who it is good for, so you can start to personalize your understanding of whether the information is relevant to you or whether the drug is relevant to you. 
You can understand exactly what the benefits are. 
It isn't this kind of vague promise that it's going to work no matter what, but you get the statistics for how effective it is. 
And finally, you understand what those choices are. 
You can start to unpack the choices involved because of the side effects. 
Every time you take a drug, you're walking into a possible side effect. 
So it spells those out in very clean terms, and that works. 
So I love this. I love that drug facts box. 
And so I was thinking about, what's an opportunity that I could have to help people understand information? 
What's another latent body of information that's out there that people are really not putting to use? 
And so I came up with this: lab test results. 
Blood test results are this great source of information. 
They're packed with information. 
They're just not for us. They're not for people. They're not for patients. 
They go right to doctors. 
And God forbid — I think many doctors, if you really asked them, they don't really understand all this stuff either. 
This is the worst presented information. 
You ask Tufte, and he would say, "Yes, this is the absolute worst presentation of information possible." 
What we did at Wired was we went, and I got our graphic design department to re-imagine these lab reports. 
So that's what I want to walk you through. 
So this is the general blood work before, and this is the after, this is what we came up with. 
The after takes what was four pages — that previous slide was actually the first of four pages of data that's just the general blood work. 
It goes on and on and on, all these values, all these numbers you don't know. 
This is our one-page summary. 
We use the notion of color. 
It's an amazing notion that color could be used. 
So on the top-level you have your overall results, the things that might jump out at you from the fine print. 
Then you can drill down and understand how actually we put your level in context, and we use color to illustrate exactly where your value falls. 
In this case, this patient is slightly at risk of diabetes because of their glucose level. 
Likewise, you can go over your lipids and, again, understand what your overall cholesterol level is and then break down into the HDL and the LDL if you so choose. 
But again, always using color and personalized proximity to that information. 
All those other values, all those pages and pages of values that are full of nothing, we summarize. 
We tell you that you're okay, you're normal. 
But you don't have to wade through it. You don't have to go through the junk. 
And then we do two other very important things that kind of help fill in this feedback loop: we help people understand in a little more detail what these values are and what they might indicate. 
And then we go a further step — we tell them what they can do. 
We give them some insight into what choices they can make, what actions they can take. 
So that's our general blood work test. 
Then we went to CRP test. 
In this case, it's a sin of omission. 
They have this huge amount of space, and they don't use it for anything, so we do. 
Now the CRP test is often done following a cholesterol test, or in conjunction with a cholesterol test. 
So we take the bold step of putting the cholesterol information on the same page, which is the way the doctor is going to evaluate it. 
So we thought the patient might actually want to know the context as well. 
It's a protein that shows up when your blood vessels might be inflamed, which might be a risk for heart disease. 
What you're actually measuring is spelled out in clean language. 
Then we use the information that's already in the lab report. 
We use the person's age and their gender to start to fill in the personalized risks. 
So we start to use the data we have to run a very simple calculation that's on all sorts of online calculators to get a sense of what the actual risk is. 
The last one I'll show you is a PSA test. 
Here's the before, and here's the after. 
Now a lot of our effort on this one — as many of you probably know, a PSA test is a very controversial test. 
It's used to test for prostate cancer, but there are all sorts of reasons why your prostate might be enlarged. 
And so we spent a good deal of our time indicating that. 
We again personalized the risks. 
So this patient is in their 50s, so we can actually give them a very precise estimate of what their risk for prostate cancer is. 
In this case it's about 25 percent, based on that. 
And then again, the follow-up actions. 
So our cost for this was less than 10,000 dollars, all right. 
That's what Wired magazine spent on this. 
Why is Wired magazine doing this? 
(Laughter) Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, the two largest lab testing companies — last year, they made profits of over 700 million dollars and over 500 million dollars respectively. 
Now this is not a problem of resources; this is a problem of incentives. 
We need to recognize that the target of this information should not be the doctor, should not be the insurance company. 
It should be the patient. 
It's the person who actually, in the end, is going to be having to change their lives and then start adopting new behaviors. 
This is information that is incredibly powerful. 
It's an incredibly powerful catalyst to change. 
But we're not using it. It's just sitting there. 
It's being lost. 
So I want to just offer four questions that every patient should ask, because I don't actually expect people to start developing these lab test reports. 
But you can create your own feedback loop. 
Anybody can create their feedback loop by asking these simple questions: Can I have my results? 
And the only acceptable answer is — (Audience: Yes.) — yes. 
What does this mean? Help me understand what the data is. 
What are my options? What choices are now on the table? 
And then, what's next? 
How do I integrate this information into the longer course of my life? 
So I want to wind up by just showing that people have the capacity to understand this information. 
This is not beyond the grasp of ordinary people. 
You do not need to have the education level of people in this room. 
Ordinary people are capable of understanding this information, if we only go to the effort of presenting it to them in a form that they can engage with. 
And engagement is essential here, because it's not just giving them information; it's giving them an opportunity to act. 
That's what engagement is. It's different from compliance. 
It works totally different from the way we talk about behavior in medicine today. 
And this information is out there. 
I've been talking today about latent information, all this information that exists in the system that we're not putting to use. 
But there are all sorts of other bodies of information that are coming online, and we need to recognize the capacity of this information to engage people, to help people and to change the course of their lives. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

For the next 16 minutes, I'm going to take you on a journey that is probably the biggest dream of humanity: to understand the code of life. 
So for me, everything started many, many years ago when I met the first 3D printer. 
The concept was fascinating. 
A 3D printer needs three elements: a bit of information, some raw material, some energy, and it can produce any object that was not there before. 
I was doing physics, I was coming back home and I realized that I actually always knew a 3D printer. 
And everyone does. 
It was my mom. 
(Laughter) My mom takes three elements: a bit of information, which is between my father and my mom in this case, raw elements and energy in the same media, that is food, and after several months, produces me. 
And I was not existent before. 
So apart from the shock of my mom discovering that she was a 3D printer, I immediately got mesmerized by that piece, the first one, the information. 
What amount of information does it take to build and assemble a human? 
Is it much? Is it little? 
How many thumb drives can you fill? 
Well, I was studying physics at the beginning and I took this approximation of a human as a gigantic Lego piece. 
So, imagine that the building blocks are little atoms and there is a hydrogen here, a carbon here, a nitrogen here. 
So in the first approximation, if I can list the number of atoms that compose a human being, I can build it. 
Now, you can run some numbers and that happens to be quite an astonishing number. 
So the number of atoms, the file that I will save in my thumb drive to assemble a little baby, will actually fill an entire Titanic of thumb drives — multiplied 2,000 times. 
This is the miracle of life. 
Every time you see from now on a pregnant lady, she's assembling the biggest amount of information that you will ever encounter. 
Forget big data, forget anything you heard of. 
This is the biggest amount of information that exists. 
(Applause) But nature, fortunately, is much smarter than a young physicist, and in four billion years, managed to pack this information in a small crystal we call DNA. 
We met it for the first time in 1950 when Rosalind Franklin, an amazing scientist, a woman, took a picture of it. 
But it took us more than 40 years to finally poke inside a human cell, take out this crystal, unroll it, and read it for the first time. 
The code comes out to be a fairly simple alphabet, four letters: A, T, C and G. 
And to build a human, you need three billion of them. 
Three billion. 
How many are three billion? 
It doesn't really make any sense as a number, right? 
So I was thinking how I could explain myself better about how big and enormous this code is. 
But there is — I mean, I'm going to have some help, and the best person to help me introduce the code is actually the first man to sequence it, Dr. Craig Venter. 
So welcome onstage, Dr. Craig Venter. 
(Applause) Not the man in the flesh, but for the first time in history, this is the genome of a specific human, printed page-by-page, letter-by-letter: 262,000 pages of information, 450 kilograms, shipped from the United States to Canada thanks to Bruno Bowden, Lulu.com, a start-up, did everything. 
It was an amazing feat. 
But this is the visual perception of what is the code of life. 
And now, for the first time, I can do something fun. 
I can actually poke inside it and read. 
So let me take an interesting book... like this one. 
I have an annotation; it's a fairly big book. 
So just to let you see what is the code of life. 
Thousands and thousands and thousands and millions of letters. 
And they apparently make sense. 
Let's get to a specific part. 
Let me read it to you: (Laughter) "AAG, AAT, ATA." 
To you it sounds like mute letters, but this sequence gives the color of the eyes to Craig. 
I'll show you another part of the book. 
This is actually a little more complicated. 
Chromosome 14, book 132: (Laughter) As you might expect. (Laughter) 
"ATT, CTT, GATT." 
This human is lucky, because if you miss just two letters in this position — two letters of our three billion — he will be condemned to a terrible disease: cystic fibrosis. 
We have no cure for it, we don't know how to solve it, and it's just two letters of difference from what we are. 
A wonderful book, a mighty book, a mighty book that helped me understand and show you something quite remarkable. 
Every one of you — what makes me, me and you, you — is just about five million of these, half a book. 
For the rest, we are all absolutely identical. 
Five hundred pages is the miracle of life that you are. 
The rest, we all share it. 
So think about that again when we think that we are different. 
This is the amount that we share. 
So now that I have your attention, the next question is: How do I read it? 
How do I make sense out of it? 
Well, for however good you can be at assembling Swedish furniture, this instruction manual is nothing you can crack in your life. 
(Laughter) And so, in 2014, two famous TEDsters, Peter Diamandis and Craig Venter himself, decided to assemble a new company. 
Human Longevity was born, with one mission: trying everything we can try and learning everything we can learn from these books, with one target — making real the dream of personalized medicine, understanding what things should be done to have better health and what are the secrets in these books. 
An amazing team, 40 data scientists and many, many more people, a pleasure to work with. 
The concept is actually very simple. 
We're going to use a technology called machine learning. 
On one side, we have genomes — thousands of them. 
On the other side, we collected the biggest database of human beings: phenotypes, 3D scan, NMR — everything you can think of. 
Inside there, on these two opposite sides, there is the secret of translation. 
And in the middle, we build a machine. 
We build a machine and we train a machine — well, not exactly one machine, many, many machines — to try to understand and translate the genome in a phenotype. 
What are those letters, and what do they do? 
It's an approach that can be used for everything, but using it in genomics is particularly complicated. 
Little by little we grew and we wanted to build different challenges. 
We started from the beginning, from common traits. 
Common traits are comfortable because they are common, everyone has them. 
So we started to ask our questions: Can we predict height? 
Can we read the books and predict your height? 
Well, we actually can, with five centimeters of precision. 
BMI is fairly connected to your lifestyle, but we still can, we get in the ballpark, eight kilograms of precision. 
Can we predict eye color? 
Yeah, we can. 
Eighty percent accuracy. 
Can we predict skin color? 
Yeah we can, 80 percent accuracy. 
Can we predict age? 
We can, because apparently, the code changes during your life. 
It gets shorter, you lose pieces, it gets insertions. 
We read the signals, and we make a model. 
Now, an interesting challenge: Can we predict a human face? 
It's a little complicated, because a human face is scattered among millions of these letters. 
And a human face is not a very well-defined object. 
So, we had to build an entire tier of it to learn and teach a machine what a face is, and embed and compress it. 
And if you're comfortable with machine learning, you understand what the challenge is here. 
Now, after 15 years — 15 years after we read the first sequence — this October, we started to see some signals. 
And it was a very emotional moment. 
What you see here is a subject coming in our lab. 
This is a face for us. 
So we take the real face of a subject, we reduce the complexity, because not everything is in your face — lots of features and defects and asymmetries come from your life. 
We symmetrize the face, and we run our algorithm. 
The results that I show you right now, this is the prediction we have from the blood. 
(Applause) Wait a second. 
In these seconds, your eyes are watching, left and right, left and right, and your brain wants those pictures to be identical. 
So I ask you to do another exercise, to be honest. 
Please search for the differences, which are many. 
The biggest amount of signal comes from gender, then there is age, BMI, the ethnicity component of a human. 
And scaling up over that signal is much more complicated. 
But what you see here, even in the differences, lets you understand that we are in the right ballpark, that we are getting closer. 
And it's already giving you some emotions. 
This is another subject that comes in place, and this is a prediction. 
A little smaller face, we didn't get the complete cranial structure, but still, it's in the ballpark. 
This is a subject that comes in our lab, and this is the prediction. 
So these people have never been seen in the training of the machine. 
These are the so-called "" held-out "" set. 
But these are people that you will probably never believe. 
We're publishing everything in a scientific publication, you can read it. 
But since we are onstage, Chris challenged me. 
I probably exposed myself and tried to predict someone that you might recognize. 
So, in this vial of blood — and believe me, you have no idea what we had to do to have this blood now, here — in this vial of blood is the amount of biological information that we need to do a full genome sequence. 
We just need this amount. 
We ran this sequence, and I'm going to do it with you. 
And we start to layer up all the understanding we have. 
In the vial of blood, we predicted he's a male. 
And the subject is a male. 
We predict that he's a meter and 76 cm. 
The subject is a meter and 77 cm. 
So, we predicted that he's 76; the subject is 82. 
We predict his age, 38. 
The subject is 35. 
We predict his eye color. 
Too dark. 
We predict his skin color. 
We are almost there. 
That's his face. 
Now, the reveal moment: the subject is this person. 
(Laughter) And I did it intentionally. 
I am a very particular and peculiar ethnicity. 
Southern European, Italians — they never fit in models. 
And it's particular — that ethnicity is a complex corner case for our model. 
But there is another point. 
So, one of the things that we use a lot to recognize people will never be written in the genome. 
It's our free will, it's how I look. 
Not my haircut in this case, but my beard cut. 
So I'm going to show you, I'm going to, in this case, transfer it — and this is nothing more than Photoshop, no modeling — the beard on the subject. 
And immediately, we get much, much better in the feeling. 
So, why do we do this? 
We certainly don't do it for predicting height or taking a beautiful picture out of your blood. 
We do it because the same technology and the same approach, the machine learning of this code, is helping us to understand how we work, how your body works, how your body ages, how disease generates in your body, how your cancer grows and develops, how drugs work and if they work on your body. 
This is a huge challenge. 
This is a challenge that we share with thousands of other researchers around the world. 
It's called personalized medicine. 
It's the ability to move from a statistical approach where you're a dot in the ocean, to a personalized approach, where we read all these books and we get an understanding of exactly how you are. 
But it is a particularly complicated challenge, because of all these books, as of today, we just know probably two percent: four books of more than 175. 
And this is not the topic of my talk, because we will learn more. 
There are the best minds in the world on this topic. 
The prediction will get better, the model will get more precise. 
And the more we learn, the more we will be confronted with decisions that we never had to face before about life, about death, about parenting. 
So, we are touching the very inner detail on how life works. 
And it's a revolution that cannot be confined in the domain of science or technology. 
This must be a global conversation. 
We must start to think of the future we're building as a humanity. 
We need to interact with creatives, with artists, with philosophers, with politicians. 
Everyone is involved, because it's the future of our species. 
Without fear, but with the understanding that the decisions that we make in the next year will change the course of history forever. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Today 40 million Americans are indebted for their passage to the new economy. 
Too poor to pay their way through college, they now owe lenders more than one trillion US dollars. 
They do find what jobs they can get to pay off a debt that is secured on their person. 
In America, even a bankrupt gambler gets a second chance. 
But it is nearly impossible for an American to get discharged their student loan debts. 
Once upon a time in America, going to college did not mean graduating with debt. 
My friend Paul's father graduated from Colorado State University on the GI Bill. 
For his generation, higher education was free or almost free, because it was thought of as a public good. 
Not anymore. 
When Paul also graduated from Colorado State University, he paid for his English degree by working part-time. 
30 years ago, higher education tuition was affordable, reasonable, and what debts you accumulated, you paid off by graduation date. 
Not anymore. 
Paul's daughter followed in his footsteps, but with one difference: when she graduated five years ago, it was with a whopping debt. 
Students like Kate have to take on a loan because the cost of higher education has become unaffordable for many if not most American families. 
But so what? 
Getting into debt to buy an expensive education is not all bad if you could pay it off with the increased income that you earned from it. 
But that's where the rubber meets the road. 
Even a college grad earned 10 percent more in 2001 than she did in 2013. 
So... 
tuition costs up, public funding down, family incomes diminished, personal incomes weak. 
Is it any wonder that more than a quarter of those who must cannot make their student loan payments? 
The worst of times can be the best of times, because certain truths flash up in ways that you can't ignore. 
I want to speak of three of them today. 
1.2 trillion dollars of debts for diplomas make it abundantly obvious that higher education is a consumer product you can buy. 
All of us talk about education just as the economists do now, as an investment that you make to improve the human stock by training them for work. 
As an investment you make to sort and classify people so that employers can hire them more easily. 
The U.S. News & World Report ranks colleges just as the consumer report rates washing machines. 
The language is peppered with barbarisms. 
Teachers are called "" service providers, "" students are called "" consumers. "" Sociology and Shakespeare and soccer and science, all of these are "" content. "" Student debt is profitable. 
Only not on you. 
Your debt fattens the profit of the student loan industry. 
The two 800-pound gorillas of which — Sallie Mae and Navient — posted last year a combined profit of 1.2 billion dollars. 
And just like home mortgages, student loans can be bundled and packaged and sliced and diced, and sold on Wall Street. 
And colleges and universities that invest in these securitized loans profit twice. 
Once from your tuition, and then again from the interest on debt. 
With all that money to be made, are we surprised that some in the higher education business have begun to engage in false advertising, in bait and switch... 
in exploiting the very ignorance that they pretend to educate? 
Third: diplomas are a brand. 
Many years ago my teacher wrote, "" When students are treated as consumers, they're made prisoners of addiction and envy. "" Just as consumers can be sold and resold upgraded versions of an iPhone, so also people can be sold more and more education. 
College is the new high school, we already say that. 
But why stop there? 
People can be upsold on certifications and recertifications, master's degrees, doctoral degrees. 
Higher education is also marketed as a status object. 
Buy a degree, much like you do a Lexus of a Louis Vuitton bag, to distinguish yourself from others. 
So you can be the object of envy of others. 
Diplomas are a brand. 
But these truths are often times hidden by a very noisy sales pitch. 
There is not a day that goes by without some policy guy on television telling us, "" A college degree is absolutely essential to get on that up escalator to a middle-class life. "" And the usual evidence offered is the college premium: a college grad who makes on average 56 percent more than a high school grad. 
Let's look at that number more carefully, because on the face of it, it seems to belie the stories we all hear about college grads working as baristas and cashiers. 
Of 100 people who enroll in any form of post-secondary education, 45 do not complete it in a timely fashion, for a number of reasons, including financial. 
Of the 55 that do graduate, two will remain unemployed, and another 18 are underemployed. 
So, college grads earn more than high school grads, but does it pay for the exorbitant tuition and the lost wages while at college? 
Now even economists admit going to college pays off for only those who complete it. 
But that's only because high school wages have been cut to the bone, for decades now. 
For decades, workers with a high school degree have been denied a fair share of what they have produced. 
And had they received as they should have, then going to college would have been a bad investment for many. 
College premium? 
I think it's a high school discount. 
Two out of three people who enroll are not going to find an adequate job. 
And the future, for them, doesn't look particularly promising — in fact, it's downright bleak. 
And it is they who are going to suffer the most punishing forms of student debt. 
And it is they, curiously and sadly, who are marketed most loudly about this college premium thing. 
That's not just cynical marketing, that's cruel. 
So what do we do? 
What if students and parents treated higher education as a consumer product? 
Everybody else seems to. 
Then, like any other consumer product, you would demand to know what you're paying for. 
When you buy medicines, you get a list of side effects. 
When you buy a higher educational product, you should have a warning label that allows consumers to choose, make informed choices. 
When you buy a car, it tells you how many miles per gallon to expect. 
Who knows what to expect from a degree say, in Canadian Studies. 
There is such a thing, by the way. 
What if there was an app for that? 
One that linked up the cost of a major to the expected income. 
Let's call it Income-Based Tuition or IBT. 
One of you make this. 
(Laughter) Discover your reality. (Laughter) 
There are three advantages, three benefits to Income-Based Tuition. 
Any user can figure out how much money he or she will make from a given college and major. 
Such informed users are unlikely to fall victim to the huckster's ploy, to the sales pitch. 
But also to choose wisely. 
Why would anybody pay more for college than let's say, 15 percent of the additional income they earn? 
There's a second benefit to Income-Based Tuition. 
By tying the cost to the income, college administrators would be forced to manage costs better, to find innovative ways to do so. 
For instance, all of you students here pay roughly the same tuition for every major. 
That is manifestly unfair, and should change. 
An engineering student uses more resources and facilities and labs and faculty than a philosophy student. 
But the philosophy student, as a consequence, is subsidizing the engineering student. 
Who then, by the way, goes on and earns more money. 
Why should two people buy the same product, pay the same, but one person receive half or a third of the service. 
In fact, college grads, some majors, pay 25 percent of their income servicing their student debt, while others pay five percent. 
That kind if inequity would end when majors are priced more correctly. 
Now of course, all this data — and one of you is going to do this, right? 
All this data has to be well designed, maybe audited by public accounting firms to avoid statistical lies. 
We know about statistics, right? 
But be that as it may, the third and biggest benefit of Income-Based Tuition, is it would free Americans from the fear and the fact of financial ruin because they bought a defective product. 
Perhaps, in time, young and old Americans may rediscover, as the gentleman said earlier, their curiosity, their love of learning — begin to study what they love, love what they study, follow their passion... 
getting stimulated by their intelligence, follow paths of inquiry that they really want to. 
After all, it was Eric and Kevin, two years ago, just exactly these kinds of young men, who prompted me and worked with me, and still do, in the study of indebted students in America. 
Thank you for your attention. 
(Applause) 

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

My story begins right here actually in Rajasthan about two years ago. 
I was in the desert, under the starry skies with the Sufi singer Mukhtiar Ali. 
And we were in conversation about how nothing had changed since the time of the ancient Indian epic "" The Mahabharata. "" So back in the day, when us Indians wanted to travel we'd jump into a chariot and we'd zoom across the sky. 
Now we do the same with airplanes. 
Back then, when Arjuna, the great Indian warrior prince, when he was thirsty, he'd take out a bow, he'd shoot it into the ground and water would come out. 
Now we do the same with drills and machines. 
The conclusion that we came to was that magic had been replaced by machinery. 
And this made me really sad. 
I found myself becoming a little bit of a technophobe. 
I was terrified by this idea that I would lose the ability to enjoy and appreciate the sunset without having my camera on me, without tweeting it to my friends. 
And it felt like technology should enable magic, not kill it. 
When I was a little girl, my grandfather gave me his little silver pocket watch. 
And this piece of 50-year-old technology became the most magical thing to me. 
It became a gilded gateway into a world full of pirates and shipwrecks and images in my imagination. 
So I felt like our cellphones and our fancy watches and our cameras had stopped us from dreaming. 
They stopped us from being inspired. 
And so I jumped in, I jumped into this world of technology, to see how I could use it to enable magic as opposed to kill it. 
I've been illustrating books since I was 16. 
And so when I saw the iPad, I saw it as a storytelling device that could connect readers all over the world. 
It can know how we're holding it. 
It can know where we are. 
It brings together image and text and animation and sound and touch. 
Storytelling is becoming more and more multi-sensorial. 
But what are we doing with it? 
So I'm actually just going to go in and launch Khoya, an interactive app for the iPad. 
So it says, "" Place your fingers upon each light. "" And so — (Music) It says, "" This box belongs to... "" And so I type in my name. 
And actually I become a character in the book. 
At various points, a little letter drops down to me — and the iPad knows where you live because of GPS — which is actually addressed to me. 
The child in me is really excited by these kinds of possibilities. 
Now I've been talking a lot about magic. 
And I don't mean wizards and dragons, I mean the kind of childhood magic, those ideas that we all harbored as children. 
This idea of fireflies in a jar, for some reason, was always really exciting to me. 
And so over here you need to tilt your iPad, take the fireflies out. 
And they actually illuminate your way through the rest of the book. 
Another idea that really fascinated me as a child was that an entire galaxy could be contained within a single marble. 
And so over here, each book and each world becomes a little marble that I drag in to this magical device within the device. 
And it opens up a map. 
All along, all fantasy books have always had maps, but these maps have been static. 
This is a map that grows and glows and becomes your navigation for the rest of the book. 
It reveals itself to you at certain points in the book as well. 
So I'm just going to enter in. 
Another thing that's actually really important to me is creating content that is Indian and yet very contemporary. 
Over here, these are the Apsaras. 
So we've all heard about fairies and we've all heard about nymphs, but how many people outside of India know about their Indian counterparts, the Apsaras? 
These poor Apsaras have been trapped inside Indra's chambers for thousands of years in an old and musty book. 
And so we're bringing them back in a contemporary story for children. 
And a story that actually deals with new issues like the environmental crisis. 
(Music) Speaking of the environmental crisis, I think a big problem has been in the last 10 years is that children have been locked inside their rooms, glued to their PCs, they haven't been able to get out. 
But now with mobile technology, we can actually take our children outside into the natural world with their technology. 
One of the interactions in the book is that you're sent off on this quest where you need to go outside, take out your camera on the iPad and collect pictures of different natural objects. 
When I was a child, I had multiple collections of sticks and stones and pebbles and shells. 
And somehow kids don't do that anymore. 
So in bringing back this childhood ritual, you need to go out and, in one chapter, take a picture of a flower and then tag it. 
In another chapter, you need to take a picture of a piece of bark and then tag that. 
And what happens is that you actually create a digital collection of photographs that you can then put up online. 
A child in London puts up a picture of a fox and says, "" Oh, I saw a fox today. "" A child in India says, "" I saw a monkey today. "" And it creates this kind of social network around a collection of digital photographs that you've actually taken. 
In the possibilities of linking together magic, the earth and technology, there are multiple possibilities. 
In the next book, we plan on having an interaction where you take your iPad out with the video on and through augmented reality, you see this layer of animated pixies appear on a houseplant that's outside your house. 
At one point, your screen is filled up with leaves. 
And so you need to make the sound of wind and blow them away and read the rest of the book. 
We're moving, we're all moving here, to a world where the forces of nature come closer together to technology, and magic and technology can come closer together. 
We're harnessing energy from the sun. 
We're bringing our children and ourselves closer to the natural world and that magic and joy and childhood love that we had through the simple medium of a story. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm going to talk to you tonight about coming out of the closet, and not in the traditional sense, not just the gay closet. 
I think we all have closets. 
Your closet may be telling someone you love her for the first time, or telling someone that you're pregnant, or telling someone you have cancer, or any of the other hard conversations we have throughout our lives. 
All a closet is is a hard conversation, and although our topics may vary tremendously, the experience of being in and coming out of the closet is universal. 
It is scary, and we hate it, and it needs to be done. 
Several years ago, I was working at the South Side Walnut Cafe, a local diner in town, and during my time there I would go through phases of militant lesbian intensity: not shaving my armpits, quoting Ani DiFranco lyrics as gospel. 
And depending on the bagginess of my cargo shorts and how recently I had shaved my head, the question would often be sprung on me, usually by a little kid: "Um, are you a boy or are you a girl?" 
And there would be an awkward silence at the table. 
I'd clench my jaw a little tighter, hold my coffee pot with a little more vengeance. 
The dad would awkwardly shuffle his newspaper and the mom would shoot a chilling stare at her kid. 
But I would say nothing, and I would seethe inside. 
And it got to the point where every time I walked up to a table that had a kid anywhere between three and 10 years old, I was ready to fight. 
(Laughter) And that is a terrible feeling. 
So I promised myself, the next time, I would say something. 
I would have that hard conversation. 
So within a matter of weeks, it happens again. 
"Are you a boy or are you a girl?" 
Familiar silence, but this time I'm ready, and I am about to go all Women's Studies 101 on this table. (Laughter) I've got my Betty Friedan quotes. 
I've got my Gloria Steinem quotes. 
I've even got this little bit from "" Vagina Monologues "" I'm going to do. 
So I take a deep breath and I look down and staring back at me is a four-year-old girl in a pink dress, not a challenge to a feminist duel, just a kid with a question: "Are you a boy or are you a girl?" 
So I take another deep breath, squat down to next to her, and say, "" Hey, I know it's kind of confusing. 
My hair is short like a boy's, and I wear boy's clothes, but I'm a girl, and you know how sometimes you like to wear a pink dress, and sometimes you like to wear your comfy jammies? 
Well, I'm more of a comfy jammies kind of girl. "" And this kid looks me dead in the eye, without missing a beat, and says, "" My favorite pajamas are purple with fish. 
Can I get a pancake, please? "" (Laughter) And that was it. Just, "" Oh, okay. You're a girl. 
How about that pancake? "" It was the easiest hard conversation I have ever had. 
And why? Because Pancake Girl and I, we were both real with each other. 
So like many of us, I've lived in a few closets in my life, and yeah, most often, my walls happened to be rainbow. 
But inside, in the dark, you can't tell what color the walls are. 
You just know what it feels like to live in a closet. 
So really, my closet is no different than yours or yours or yours. 
Sure, I'll give you 100 reasons why coming out of my closet was harder than coming out of yours, but here's the thing: Hard is not relative. 
Hard is hard. 
Who can tell me that explaining to someone you've just declared bankruptcy is harder than telling someone you just cheated on them? 
Who can tell me that his coming out story is harder than telling your five-year-old you're getting a divorce? 
There is no harder, there is just hard. 
We need to stop ranking our hard against everyone else's hard to make us feel better or worse about our closets and just commiserate on the fact that we all have hard. 
At some point in our lives, we all live in closets, and they may feel safe, or at least safer than what lies on the other side of that door. 
But I am here to tell you, no matter what your walls are made of, a closet is no place for a person to live. 
Thanks. (Applause) So imagine yourself 20 years ago. 
Me, I had a ponytail, a strapless dress, and high-heeled shoes. 
I was not the militant lesbian ready to fight any four-year-old that walked into the cafe. 
I was frozen by fear, curled up in the corner of my pitch-black closet clutching my gay grenade, and moving one muscle is the scariest thing I have ever done. 
My family, my friends, complete strangers — I had spent my entire life trying to not disappoint these people, and now I was turning the world upside down on purpose. 
I was burning the pages of the script we had all followed for so long, but if you do not throw that grenade, it will kill you. 
One of my most memorable grenade tosses was at my sister's wedding. 
(Laughter) It was the first time that many in attendance knew I was gay, so in doing my maid of honor duties, in my black dress and heels, I walked around to tables and finally landed on a table of my parents' friends, folks that had known me for years. 
And after a little small talk, one of the women shouted out, "I love Nathan Lane!" 
And the battle of gay relatability had begun. 
"Ash, have you ever been to the Castro?" 
"Well, yeah, actually, we have friends in San Francisco." 
"Well, we've never been there but we've heard it's fabulous." 
"" Ash, do you know my hairdresser Antonio? 
He's really good and he has never talked about a girlfriend. "" "" Ash, what's your favorite TV show? 
Our favorite TV show? Favorite: Will & Grace. 
And you know who we love? Jack. 
Jack is our favorite. "" And then one woman, stumped but wanting so desperately to show her support, to let me know she was on my side, she finally blurted out, "Well, sometimes my husband wears pink shirts." 
(Laughter) And I had a choice in that moment, as all grenade throwers do. 
I could go back to my girlfriend and my gay-loving table and mock their responses, chastise their unworldliness and their inability to jump through the politically correct gay hoops I had brought with me, or I could empathize with them and realize that that was maybe one of the hardest things they had ever done, that starting and having that conversation was them coming out of their closets. 
Sure, it would have been easy to point out where they felt short. 
It's a lot harder to meet them where they are and acknowledge the fact that they were trying. 
And what else can you ask someone to do but try? 
If you're going to be real with someone, you gotta be ready for real in return. 
So hard conversations are still not my strong suit. 
Ask anybody I have ever dated. 
But I'm getting better, and I follow what I like to call the three Pancake Girl principles. 
Now, please view this through gay-colored lenses, but know what it takes to come out of any closet is essentially the same. 
Number one: Be authentic. 
Take the armor off. Be yourself. 
That kid in the cafe had no armor, but I was ready for battle. 
If you want someone to be real with you, they need to know that you bleed too. 
Number two: Be direct. Just say it. Rip the Band-Aid off. 
If you know you are gay, just say it. 
If you tell your parents you might be gay, they will hold out hope that this will change. 
Do not give them that sense of false hope. 
(Laughter) And number three, and most important — (Laughter) Be unapologetic. 
You are speaking your truth. 
Never apologize for that. 
And some folks may have gotten hurt along the way, so sure, apologize for what you've done, but never apologize for who you are. 
And yeah, some folks may be disappointed, but that is on them, not on you. 
Those are their expectations of who you are, not yours. 
That is their story, not yours. 
The only story that matters is the one that you want to write. 
So the next time you find yourself in a pitch-black closet clutching your grenade, know we have all been there before. 
And you may feel so very alone, but you are not. 
And we know it's hard but we need you out here, no matter what your walls are made of, because I guarantee you there are others peering through the keyholes of their closets looking for the next brave soul to bust a door open, so be that person and show the world that we are bigger than our closets and that a closet is no place for a person to truly live. 
Thank you, Boulder. Enjoy your night. (Applause) 

Sheryl Sandberg: First time back. Nice to see everyone. It's always so nice to look out and see so many women. 
It's so not my regular experience, as I know anyone else's. 
PM: So when we first started talking about, maybe the subject wouldn't be social media, which we assumed it would be, but that you had very much on your mind the missing leadership positions, particularly in the sector of technology and social media. 
But how did that evolve for you as a thought, and end up being the TED Talk that you gave? 
SS: So I was really scared to get on this stage and talk about women, because I grew up in the business world, as I think so many of us did. 
You never talk about being a woman, because someone might notice that you're a woman, right? 
They might notice. Or worse, if you say "" woman, "" people on the other end of the table think you're asking for special treatment, or complaining. 
Or worse, about to sue them. And so I went through — (Laughter) Right? I went through my entire business career, and never spoke about being a woman, never spoke about it publicly. 
But I also had noticed that it wasn't working. 
I came out of college over 20 years ago, and I thought that all of my peers were men and women, all the people above me were all men, but that would change, because your generation had done such an amazing job fighting for equality, equality was now ours for the taking. And it wasn't. 
Because year after year, I was one of fewer and fewer, and now, often the only woman in a room. 
And I talked to a bunch of people about, should I give a speech at TEDWomen about women, and they said, oh no, no. 
It will end your business career. You cannot be a serious business executive and speak about being a woman. You'll never be taken seriously again. 
But fortunately, there were the few, the proud — like you — who told me I should give the speech, and I asked myself the question Mark Zuckerberg might — the founder of Facebook and my boss — asks all of us, which is, what would I do if I wasn't afraid? 
And the answer to what would I do if I wasn't afraid is I would get on the TED stage, and talk about women, and leadership. And I did, and survived. (Applause) PM: I would say, not only survived. I'm thinking of that moment, Sheryl, when you and I were standing backstage together, and you turned to me, and you told me a story. 
And I said — very last minute — you know, you really should share that story. 
SS: Oh, yeah. PM: What was that story? 
SS: Well, it's an important part of the journey. So I had — TEDWomen — the original one was in D.C. — so I live here, so I had gotten on a plane the day before, and my daughter was three, she was clinging to my leg: "" Mommy, don't go. "" And Pat's a friend, and so, not related to the speech I was planning on giving, which was chock full of facts and figures, and nothing personal, I told Pat the story. I said, well, I'm having a hard day. 
Yesterday my daughter was clinging to my leg, and "" Don't go. "" And you looked at me and said, you have to tell that story. 
I said, on the TED stage? Are you kidding? 
I'm going to get on a stage and admit my daughter was clinging to my leg? 
And you said yes, because if you want to talk about getting more women into leadership roles, you have to be honest about how hard it is. 
And I did. And I think that's a really important part of the journey. 
The same thing happened when I wrote my book. I started writing the book. I wrote a first chapter, I thought it was fabulous. It was chock-full of data and figures, I had three pages on matrilineal Maasai tribes, and their sociological patterns. 
My husband read it and he was like, this is like eating your Wheaties. (Laughter) No one — and I apologize to Wheaties if there's someone — no one, no one will read this book. 
And I realized through the process that I had to be more honest and more open, and I had to tell my stories. My stories of still not feeling as self-confident as I should, in many situations. My first and failed marriage. Crying at work. 
Felling like I didn't belong there, feeling guilty to this day. 
And part of my journey, starting on this stage, going to "" Lean In, "" going to the foundation, is all about being more open and honest about those challenges, so that other women can be more open and honest, and all of us can work together towards real equality. 
PM: I think that one of the most striking parts about the book, and in my opinion, one of the reasons it's hit such a nerve and is resonating around the world, is that you are personal in the book, and that you do make it clear that, while you've observed some things that are very important for other women to know, that you've had the same challenges that many others of us have, as you faced the hurdles and the barriers and possibly the people who don't believe the same. 
So talk about that process: deciding you'd go public with the private part, and then you would also put yourself in the position of something of an expert on how to resolve those challenges. 
SS: After I did the TED Talk, what happened was — you know, I never really expected to write a book, I'm not an author, I'm not a writer, and it was viewed a lot, and it really started impacting people's lives. 
I got this great — - one of the first letters I got was from a woman who said that she was offered a really big promotion at work, and she turned it down, and she told her best friend she turned it down, and her best friend said, you really need to watch this TED Talk. 
And so she watched this TED Talk, and she went back the next day, she took the job, she went home, and she handed her husband the grocery list. (Laughter) And she said, I can do this. 
And what really mattered to me — it wasn't only women in the corporate world, even though I did hear from a lot of them, and it did impact a lot of them, it was also people of all different circumstances. 
There was a doctor I met who was an attending physician at Johns Hopkins, and he said that until he saw my TED Talk, it never really occurred to him that even though half the students in his med school classes were women, they weren't speaking as much as the men as he did his rounds. 
So he started paying attention, and as he waited for raised hands, he realized the men's hands were up. 
So he started encouraging the women to raise their hands more, and it still didn't work. 
So he told everyone, no more hand raising, I'm cold-calling. 
So he could call evenly on men and women. And what he proved to himself was that the women knew the answers just as well or better, and he was able to go back to them and tell them that. 
And then there was the woman, stay-at-home mom, lives in a really difficult neighborhood, with not a great school, she said that TED Talk — she's never had a corporate job, but that TED Talk inspired her to go to her school and fight for a better teacher for her child. 
And I guess it was part of was finding my own voice. 
And I realized that other women and men could find their voice through it, which is why I went from the talk to the book. 
PM: And in the book, you not only found your voice, which is clear and strong in the book, but you also share what you've learned — the experiences of other people in the lessons. 
And that's what I'm thinking about in terms of putting yourself in a — you became a sort of expert in how you lean in. 
So what did that feel like, and become like in your life? 
To launch not just a book, not just a best-selling, best-viewed talk, but a movement, where people began to literally describe their actions at work as, I'm leaning in. 
SS: I mean, I'm grateful, I'm honored, I'm happy, and it's the very beginning. 
So I don't know if I'm an expert, or if anyone is an expert. I certainly have done a lot of research. 
I have read every study, I have pored over the materials, and the lessons are very clear. Because here's what we know: What we know is that stereotypes are holding women back from leadership roles all over the world. 
It's so striking. "" Lean In "" is very global, I've been all over the world, talking about it, and — cultures are so different. 
Even within our own country, to Japan, to Korea, to China, to Asia, Europe, they're so different. Except for one thing: gender. 
All over the world, no matter what our cultures are, we think men should be strong, assertive, aggressive, have voice; we think women should speak when spoken to, help others. 
Now we have, all over the world, women are called "" bossy. "" There is a word for "" bossy, "" for little girls, in every language there's one. 
It's a word that's pretty much not used for little boys, because if a little boy leads, there's no negative word for it, it's expected. But if a little girl leads, she's bossy. 
Now I know there aren't a lot of men here, but bear with me. 
If you're a man, you'll have to represent your gender. 
Please raise your hand if you've been told you're too aggressive at work. 
(Laughter) There's always a few, it runs about five percent. Okay, get ready, gentlemen. 
If you're a woman, please raise your hand if you've ever been told you're too aggressive at work. 
(Laughter) That is what audiences have said in every country in the world, and it's deeply supported by the data. 
Now, do we think women are more aggressive than men? Of course not. 
It's just that we judge them through a different lens, and a lot of the character traits that you must exhibit to perform at work, to get results, to lead, are ones that we think, in a man, he's a boss, and in a woman, she's bossy. 
And the good news about this is that we can change this by acknowledging it. 
One of the happiest moments I had in this whole journey is, after the book came out, I stood on a stage with John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco. 
He read the book. He stood on a stage with me, he invited me in front of his whole management team, men and women, and he said, I thought we were good at this. I thought I was good at this. 
And then I read this book, and I realized that we — my company — we have called all of our senior women too aggressive, and I'm standing on this stage, and I'm sorry. 
And I want you to know we're never going to do it again. 
PM: Can we send that to a lot of other people that we know? (Applause) SS: And so John is doing that because he believes it's good for his company, and so this kind of acknowledgement of these biases can change it. 
And so next time you all see someone call a little girl "" bossy, "" you walk right up to that person, big smile, and you say, "" That little girl's not bossy. That little girl has executive leadership skills. "" (Laughter) PM: I know that's what you're telling your daughter. SS: Absolutely. 
PM: And you did focus in the book — and the reason, as you said, in writing it, was to create a dialogue about this. 
I mean, let's just put it out there, face the fact that women are — in a time when we have more open doors, and more opportunities — are still not getting to the leadership positions. 
So in the months that have come since the book, in which "" Lean In "" focused on that and said, here are some of the challenges that remain, and many of them we have to own within ourselves and look at ourselves. What has changed? 
Have you seen changes? 
SS: Well, there's certainly more dialogue, which is great. 
But what really matters to me, and I think all of us, is action. 
So everywhere I go, CEOs, they're mostly men, say to me, you're costing me so much money because all the women want to be paid as much as the men. 
And to them I say, I'm not sorry at all. (Laughter) At all. I mean, the women should be paid as much as the men. 
Everywhere I go, women tell me they ask for raises. 
Everywhere I go, women say they're getting better relationships with their spouses, asking for more help at home, asking for the promotions they should be getting at work, and importantly, believing it themselves. Even little things. 
One of the governors of one of the states told me that he didn't realize that more women were, in fact, literally sitting on the side of the room, which they are, and now he made a rule that all the women on his staff need to sit at the table. 
The foundation I started along with the book "" Lean In "" helps women, or men, start circles — small groups, it can be 10, it can be however many you want, which meet once a month. 
I would have hoped that by now, we'd have about 500 circles. That would've been great. 
You know, 500 times roughly 10. 
There are over 12,000 circles in 50 countries in the world. 
PM: Wow, that's amazing. 
SS: And these are people who are meeting every single month. 
I met one of them, I was in Beijing. 
A group of women, they're all about 29 or 30, they started the first Lean In circle in Beijing, several of them grew up in very poor, rural China. 
These women are 29, they are told by their society that they are "" left over, "" because they are not yet married, and the process of coming together once a month at a meeting is helping them define who they are for themselves. 
What they want in their careers. The kind of partners they want, if at all. 
I looked at them, we went around and introduced ourselves, and they all said their names and where they're from, and I said, I'm Sheryl Sandberg, and this was my dream. 
And I kind of just started crying. 
Right, which, I admit, I do. Right? I've talked about it before. 
But the fact that a woman so far away out in the world, who grew up in a rural village, who's being told to marry someone she doesn't want to marry, can now go meet once a month with a group of people and refuse that, and find life on her own terms. 
That's the kind of change we have to hope for. 
PM: Have you been surprised by the global nature of the message? 
Because I think when the book first came out, many people thought, well, this is a really important handbook for young women on their way up. 
They need to look at this, anticipate the barriers, and recognize them, put them out in the open, have the dialogue about it, but that it's really for women who are that. Doing that. Pursuing the corporate world. 
And yet the book is being read, as you say, in rural and developing countries. 
What part of that has surprised you, and perhaps led to a new perspective on your part? 
SS: The book is about self-confidence, and about equality. 
And it turns out, everywhere in the world, women need more self-confidence, because the world tells us we're not equal to men. 
Everywhere in the world, we live in a world where the men get "" and, "" and women get "" or. "" I've never met a man who's been asked how he does it all. (Laughter) Again, I'm going to turn to the men in the audience: Please raise your hand if you've been asked, how do you do it all? (Laughter) 
Men only. 
Women, women. Please raise your hand if you've been asked how you do it all? 
We assume men can do it all, slash — have jobs and children. 
We assume women can't, and that's ridiculous, because the great majority of women everywhere in the world, including the United States, work full time and have children. 
And I think people don't fully understand how broad the message is. 
There is a circle that's been started for rescued sex workers in Miami. 
They're using "" Lean In "" to help people make the transition back to what would be a fair life, really rescuing them from their pimps, and using it. 
There are dress-for-success groups in Texas which are using the book, for women who have never been to college. 
And we know there are groups all the way to Ethiopia. 
And so these messages of equality — of how women are told they can't have what men can have — how we assume that leadership is for men, how we assume that voice is for men, these affect all of us, and I think they are very universal. 
And it's part of what TEDWomen does. 
It unites all of us in a cause we have to believe in, which is more women, more voice, more equality. 
PM: If you were invited now to make another TEDWomen talk, what would you say that is a result of this experience, for you personally, and what you've learned about women, and men, as you've made this journey? 
SS: I think I would say — I tried to say this strongly, but I think I can say it more strongly — I want to say that the status quo is not enough. 
That it's not good enough, that it's not changing quickly enough. 
Since I gave my TED Talk and published my book, another year of data came out from the U.S. Census. 
And you know what we found? 
No movement in the wage gap for women in the United States. 
Seventy-seven cents to the dollar. 
If you are a black woman, 64 cents. 
If you are a Latina, we're at 54 cents. 
Do you know when the last time those numbers went up? 
2002. 
We are stagnating, we are stagnating in so many ways. 
And I think we are not really being honest about that, for so many reasons. It's so hard to talk about gender. 
We shy away from the word "" feminist, "" a word I really think we need to embrace. 
We have to get rid of the word bossy and bring back — (Applause) I think I would say in a louder voice, we need to get rid of the word "" bossy "" and bring back the word "" feminist, "" because we need it. (Applause) 
PM: And we all need to do a lot more leaning in. 
SS: A lot more leaning in. 
PM: Thank you, Sheryl. 
Thanks for leaning in and saying yes. 
SS: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

There is an entire genre of YouTube videos devoted to an experience which I am certain that everyone in this room has had. 
It entails an individual who, thinking they're alone, engages in some expressive behavior — wild singing, gyrating dancing, some mild sexual activity — only to discover that, in fact, they are not alone, that there is a person watching and lurking, the discovery of which causes them to immediately cease what they were doing in horror. 
The sense of shame and humiliation in their face is palpable. 
It's the sense of, "" This is something I'm willing to do only if no one else is watching. "" This is the crux of the work on which I have been singularly focused for the last 16 months, the question of why privacy matters, a question that has arisen in the context of a global debate, enabled by the revelations of Edward Snowden that the United States and its partners, unbeknownst to the entire world, has converted the Internet, once heralded as an unprecedented tool of liberation and democratization, into an unprecedented zone of mass, indiscriminate surveillance. 
There is a very common sentiment that arises in this debate, even among people who are uncomfortable with mass surveillance, which says that there is no real harm that comes from this large-scale invasion because only people who are engaged in bad acts have a reason to want to hide and to care about their privacy. 
This worldview is implicitly grounded in the proposition that there are two kinds of people in the world, good people and bad people. 
Bad people are those who plot terrorist attacks or who engage in violent criminality and therefore have reasons to want to hide what they're doing, have reasons to care about their privacy. 
But by contrast, good people are people who go to work, come home, raise their children, watch television. 
They use the Internet not to plot bombing attacks but to read the news or exchange recipes or to plan their kids' Little League games, and those people are doing nothing wrong and therefore have nothing to hide and no reason to fear the government monitoring them. 
The people who are actually saying that are engaged in a very extreme act of self-deprecation. 
What they're really saying is, "" I have agreed to make myself such a harmless and unthreatening and uninteresting person that I actually don't fear having the government know what it is that I'm doing. "" This mindset has found what I think is its purest expression in a 2009 interview with the longtime CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, who, when asked about all the different ways his company is causing invasions of privacy for hundreds of millions of people around the world, said this: He said, "" If you're doing something that you don't want other people to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. "" 
Now, there's all kinds of things to say about that mentality, the first of which is that the people who say that, who say that privacy isn't really important, they don't actually believe it, and the way you know that they don't actually believe it is that while they say with their words that privacy doesn't matter, with their actions, they take all kinds of steps to safeguard their privacy. 
They put passwords on their email and their social media accounts, they put locks on their bedroom and bathroom doors, all steps designed to prevent other people from entering what they consider their private realm and knowing what it is that they don't want other people to know. 
The very same Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, ordered his employees at Google to cease speaking with the online Internet magazine CNET after CNET published an article full of personal, private information about Eric Schmidt, which it obtained exclusively through Google searches and using other Google products. (Laughter) This same division can be seen with the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, who in an infamous interview in 2010 pronounced that privacy is no longer a "" social norm. "" Last year, Mark Zuckerberg and his new wife purchased not only their own house but also all four adjacent houses in Palo Alto 
for a total of 30 million dollars in order to ensure that they enjoyed a zone of privacy that prevented other people from monitoring what they do in their personal lives. 
Over the last 16 months, as I've debated this issue around the world, every single time somebody has said to me, "" I don't really worry about invasions of privacy because I don't have anything to hide. "" I always say the same thing to them. 
I get out a pen, I write down my email address. 
I say, "" Here's my email address. 
What I want you to do when you get home is email me the passwords to all of your email accounts, not just the nice, respectable work one in your name, but all of them, because I want to be able to just troll through what it is you're doing online, read what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting. 
After all, if you're not a bad person, if you're doing nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide. "" Not a single person has taken me up on that offer. 
I check and — (Applause) I check that email account religiously all the time. 
It's a very desolate place. 
And there's a reason for that, which is that we as human beings, even those of us who in words disclaim the importance of our own privacy, instinctively understand the profound importance of it. 
It is true that as human beings, we're social animals, which means we have a need for other people to know what we're doing and saying and thinking, which is why we voluntarily publish information about ourselves online. 
But equally essential to what it means to be a free and fulfilled human being is to have a place that we can go and be free of the judgmental eyes of other people. 
There's a reason why we seek that out, and our reason is that all of us — not just terrorists and criminals, all of us — have things to hide. 
There are all sorts of things that we do and think that we're willing to tell our physician or our lawyer or our psychologist or our spouse or our best friend that we would be mortified for the rest of the world to learn. 
We make judgments every single day about the kinds of things that we say and think and do that we're willing to have other people know, and the kinds of things that we say and think and do that we don't want anyone else to know about. 
People can very easily in words claim that they don't value their privacy, but their actions negate the authenticity of that belief. 
Now, there's a reason why privacy is so craved universally and instinctively. 
It isn't just a reflexive movement like breathing air or drinking water. 
The reason is that when we're in a state where we can be monitored, where we can be watched, our behavior changes dramatically. 
The range of behavioral options that we consider when we think we're being watched severely reduce. 
This is just a fact of human nature that has been recognized in social science and in literature and in religion and in virtually every field of discipline. 
There are dozens of psychological studies that prove that when somebody knows that they might be watched, the behavior they engage in is vastly more conformist and compliant. 
Human shame is a very powerful motivator, as is the desire to avoid it, and that's the reason why people, when they're in a state of being watched, make decisions not that are the byproduct of their own agency but that are about the expectations that others have of them or the mandates of societal orthodoxy. 
This realization was exploited most powerfully for pragmatic ends by the 18th- century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who set out to resolve an important problem ushered in by the industrial age, where, for the first time, institutions had become so large and centralized that they were no longer able to monitor and therefore control each one of their individual members, and the solution that he devised was an architectural design originally intended to be implemented in prisons that he called the panopticon, the primary attribute of which was the construction of an enormous tower in the center of the institution where whoever controlled the institution 
could at any moment watch any of the inmates, although they couldn't watch all of them at all times. 
And crucial to this design was that the inmates could not actually see into the panopticon, into the tower, and so they never knew if they were being watched or even when. 
And what made him so excited about this discovery was that that would mean that the prisoners would have to assume that they were being watched at any given moment, which would be the ultimate enforcer for obedience and compliance. 
The 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault realized that that model could be used not just for prisons but for every institution that seeks to control human behavior: schools, hospitals, factories, workplaces. 
And what he said was that this mindset, this framework discovered by Bentham, was the key means of societal control for modern, Western societies, which no longer need the overt weapons of tyranny — punishing or imprisoning or killing dissidents, or legally compelling loyalty to a particular party — because mass surveillance creates a prison in the mind that is a much more subtle though much more effective means of fostering compliance with social norms or with social orthodoxy, much more effective than brute force could ever be. 
The most iconic work of literature about surveillance and privacy is the George Orwell novel "" 1984, "" which we all learn in school, and therefore it's almost become a cliche. 
In fact, whenever you bring it up in a debate about surveillance, people instantaneously dismiss it as inapplicable, and what they say is, "" Oh, well in '1984,' there were monitors in people's homes, they were being watched at every given moment, and that has nothing to do with the surveillance state that we face. "" That is an actual fundamental misapprehension of the warnings that Orwell issued in "" 1984. "" The warning that he was issuing was about a surveillance state not that monitored everybody at all times, but where people were aware that they could be monitored at any given moment. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

And these are made of this kind of tube — electricity tube, we call it in Holland. 
And we can start a film about that, and we can see a little bit backwards in time. 
Theo Jansen is working hard on this evolution. 
And they should survive over there, on their own, in the future. 
Learning to live on their own — and it'll take couple of more years to let them walk on their own. 
The wind will move feathers on their back, which will drive their feet. 
(Music) This is the Animaris Currens Ventosa. (Music) 
(Laughter) (Applause) TJ: This is a herd, and it is built according to genetic codes. 
And it is a sort of race, and each and every animal is different, and the winning codes will multiply. 
So, the proportion of the tubes in this animal is very important for the walking. 
In fact, it's a new invention of the wheel. 
The axis of a wheel stays on the same level, and this hip is staying on the same level as well. 
In fact, this is better than a wheel, because when you try to drive your bicycle on the beach, you will notice it's very hard to do. 
I will show you, in the next video — can you start it, please? — that very heavy loads can be moved. 
There's a guy pushing there, behind, but it can also walk on the wind very well. 
It's 3.2 tons. 
And this is the water feeler, and what's very important is this tube. 
It sucks in air normally, but when it swallows water, it feels the resistance of it. 
This is a part of the nose of the Animaris Percipiere. 

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

This sound, this smell, this sight all remind me of the campfires of my childhood, when anyone could become a storyteller in front of the dancing flames. 
There was this wondrous ending when people and fire fell asleep almost in unison. 
It was dreaming time. 
Now my story has a lot to do with dreaming, although I'm known to make my dreams come true. 
Last year, I created a one-man show. 
For an hour and a half I shared with the audience a lifetime of creativity, how I pursue perfection, how I cheat the impossible. 
And then TED challenged me: "Philippe, can you shrink this lifetime to 18 minutes?" 
(Laughter) Eighteen minutes, clearly impossible. 
But here I am. 
One solution was to rehearse a machine gun delivery in which every syllable, every second will have its importance and hope to God the audience will be able to follow me. 
No, no, no. 
No, the best way for me to start is to pay my respects to the gods of creativity. 
So please join me for a minute of silence. 
Okay, I cheated, it was a mere 20 seconds. 
But hey, we're on TED time. 
When I was six years old, I fell in love with magic. 
For Christmas I got a magic box and a very old book on card manipulation. 
Somehow I was more interested in pure manipulation than in all the silly little tricks in the box. 
So I looked in the book for the most difficult move, and it was this. 
Now I'm not supposed to share that with you, but I have to show you the card is hidden in the back of the hand. 
Now that manipulation was broken down into seven moves described over seven pages. 
One, two, three, four, five, six and seven. 
And let me show you something else. 
The cards were bigger than my hands. 
Two months later, six years old, I'm able to do one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. 
And I go to see a famous magician and proudly ask him, "" Well what do you think? "" Six years old. 
The magician looked at me and said, "" This is a disaster. 
You cannot do that in two seconds and have a minuscule part of the card showing. 
For the move to be professional, it has to be less than one second and it has to be perfect. "" Two years later, one — zoop. 
And I'm not cheating. It's in the back. It's perfect. 
Passion is the motto of all my actions. 
As I'm studying magic, juggling is mentioned repeatedly as a great way to acquire dexterity and coordination. 
Now I had long admired how fast and fluidly jugglers make objects fly. 
So that's it. I'm 14; I'm becoming a juggler. 
I befriend a young juggler in a juggling troupe, and he agrees to sell me three clubs. 
But in America you have to explain. What are clubs? 
Nothing to do with golf. 
They are those beautiful oblong objects, but quite difficult to make. 
They have to be precisely lathed. 
Oh, when I was buying the clubs, somehow the young juggler was hiding from the others. 
Well I didn't think much of it at the time. 
Anyway, here I was progressing with my new clubs. 
But I could not understand. 
I was pretty fast, but I was not fluid at all. 
The clubs were escaping me at each throw. 
And I was trying constantly to bring them back to me. 
Until one day I practiced in front of Francis Brunn, the world's greatest juggler. 
And he was frowning. 
And he finally asked, "" Can I see those? "" So I proudly showed him my clubs. 
He said, "" Philippe, you have been had. 
These are rejects. They are completely out of alignment. 
They are impossible to juggle. "" Tenacity is how I kept at it against all odds. 
So I went to the circus to see more magicians, more jugglers, and I saw — oh no, no, no, I didn't see. 
It was more interesting; I heard. 
I heard about those amazing men and women who walk on thin air — the high-wire walkers. 
Now I have been playing with ropes and climbing all my childhood, so that's it. I'm 16; I'm becoming a wire walker. 
I found two trees — but not any kind of trees, trees with character — and then a very long rope. 
And I put the rope around and around and around and around and around till I had no more rope. 
Now I have all of those ropes parallel like this. 
I get a pair of pliers and some coat hangers, and I gather them together in some kind of ropey path. 
So I just created the widest tightrope in the world. 
What did I need? I needed the widest shoes in the world. 
So I found some enormous, ridiculous, giant ski boots and then wobbly, wobbly I get on the ropes. 
Well within a few days I'm able to do one crossing. 
So I cut one rope off. 
And the next day one rope off. 
And a few days later, I was practicing on a single tightrope. 
Now you can imagine at that time I had to switch the ridiculous boots for some slippers. 
So that is how — in case there are people here in the audience who would like to try — this is how not to learn wire walking. 
(Laughter) Intuition is a tool essential in my life. 
In the meantime, I am being thrown out of five different schools because instead of listening to the teachers, I am my own teacher, progressing in my new art and becoming a street juggler. 
On the high wire, within months, I'm able to master all the tricks they do in the circus, except I am not satisfied. 
I was starting to invent my own moves and bring them to perfection. 
But nobody wanted to hire me. 
So I started putting a wire up in secret and performing without permission. 
Notre Dame, the Sydney Harbor Bridge, the World Trade Center. 
And I developed a certitude, a faith that convinced me that I will get safely to the other side. 
If not, I will never do that first step. 
Well nonetheless, on the top of the World Trade Center my first step was terrifying. 
All of a sudden the density of the air is no longer the same. 
Manhattan no longer spreads its infinity. 
The murmur of the city dissolves into a squall whose chilling power I no longer feel. 
I lift the balancing pole. I approach the edge. 
I step over the beam. 
I put my left foot on the cable, the weight of my body raised on my right leg anchored to the flank of the building. 
Shall I ever so slightly shift my weight to the left? 
My right leg will be unburdened, my right foot will freely meet the wire. 
On one side, a mass of a mountain, a life I know. 
On the other, the universe of the clouds, so full of unknown we think it's empty. 
At my feet, the path to the north tower — 60 yards of wire rope. 
It's a straight line, which sags, which sways, which vibrates, which rolls on itself, which is ice, which is three tons tight, ready to explode, ready to swallow me. 
An inner howl assails me, the wild longing to flee. 
But it is too late. 
The wire is ready. 
Decisively my other foot sets itself onto the cable. 
Faith is what replaces doubt in my dictionary. 
So after the walk people ask me, "" How can you top that? "" Well I didn't have that problem. 
I was not interested in collecting the gigantic, in breaking records. 
In fact, I put my World Trade Center crossing at the same artistic level as some of my smaller walks — or some completely different type of performance. 
Let's see, such as my street juggling, for example. 
So each time I draw my circle of chalk on the pavement and enter as the improvising comic silent character I created 45 years ago, I am as happy as when I am in the clouds. 
But this here, this is not the street. 
So I cannot street juggle here, you understand. 
So you don't want me to street juggle here, right? 
You know that, right? 
You don't want me to juggle, right? 
(Applause) (Music) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. 
Each time I street juggle I use improvisation. 
Now improvisation is empowering because it welcomes the unknown. 
And since what's impossible is always unknown, it allows me to believe I can cheat the impossible. 
Now I have done the impossible not once, but many times. 
So what should I share? Oh, I know. Israel. 
Some years ago I was invited to open the Israel Festival by a high-wire walk. 
And I chose to put my wire between the Arab quarters and the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem over the Ben Hinnom Valley. 
And I thought it would be incredible if in the middle of the wire I stopped and, like a magician, I produce a dove and send her in the sky as a living symbol of peace. 
Well now I must say, it was a little bit hard to find a dove in Israel, but I got one. 
And in my hotel room, each time I practiced making it appear and throwing her in the air, she would graze the wall and end up on the bed. 
So I said, now it's okay. The room is too small. 
I mean, a bird needs space to fly. 
It will go perfectly on the day of the walk. 
Now comes the day of the walk. 
Eighty thousand people spread over the entire valley. 
The mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, comes to wish me the best. 
But he seemed nervous. 
There was tension in my wire, but I also could feel tension on the ground. 
Because all those people were made up of people who, for the most part, considered each other enemies. 
So I start the walk. Everything is fine. 
I stop in the middle. 
I make the dove appear. 
People applaud in delight. 
And then in the most magnificent gesture, I send the bird of peace into the azure. 
But the bird, instead of flying away, goes flop, flop, flop and lands on my head. 
(Laughter) And people scream. 
So I grab the dove, and for the second time I send her in the air. 
But the dove, who obviously didn't go to flying school, goes flop, flop, flop and ends up at the end of my balancing pole. 
(Laughter) You laugh, you laugh. But hey. 
I sit down immediately. It's a reflex of wire walkers. 
Now in the meantime, the audience, they go crazy. 
They must think this guy with this dove, he must have spent years working with him. 
What a genius, what a professional. 
(Laughter) So I take a bow. I salute with my hand. 
And at the end I bang my hand against the pole to dislodge the bird. 
Now the dove, who, now you know, obviously cannot fly, does for the third time a little flop, flop, flop and ends up on the wire behind me. 
And the entire valley goes crazy. 
Now but hold on, I'm not finished. 
So now I'm like 50 yards from my arrival and I'm exhausted, so my steps are slow. 
And something happened. 
Somebody somewhere, a group of people, starts clapping in rhythm with my steps. 
And within seconds the entire valley is applauding in unison with each of my steps. 
But not an applause of delight like before, an applause encouragement. 
For a moment, the entire crowd had forgotten their differences. 
They had become one, pushing me to triumph. 
I want you just for a second to experience this amazing human symphony. 
So let's say I am here and the chair is my arrival. 
So I walk, you clap, everybody in unison. 
(Clapping) (Applause) So after the walk, Teddy and I become friends. 
And he tells me, he has on his desk a picture of me in the middle of the wire with a dove on my head. 
He didn't know the true story. 
And whenever he's daunted by an impossible situation to solve in this hard-to-manage city, instead of giving up, he looks at the picture and he says, "If Philippe can do that, I can do this," and he goes back to work. 
Inspiration. 
By inspiring ourselves we inspire others. 
I will never forget this music, and I hope now neither will you. 
Please take this music with you home, and start gluing feathers to your arms and take off and fly, and look at the world from a different perspective. 
And when you see mountains, remember mountains can be moved. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) 

Many times I go around the world to speak, and people ask me questions about the challenges, my moments, some of my regrets. 
1998: A single mother of four, three months after the birth of my fourth child, I went to do a job as a research assistant. 
I went to Northern Liberia. 
And as part of the work, the village would give you lodgings. 
And they gave me lodging with a single mother and her daughter. 
This girl happened to be the only girl in the entire village who had made it to the ninth grade. 
She was the laughing stock of the community. 
Her mother was often told by other women, "" You and your child will die poor. "" After two weeks of working in that village, it was time to go back. 
The mother came to me, knelt down, and said, "" Leymah, take my daughter. 
I wish for her to be a nurse. "" Dirt poor, living in the home with my parents, I couldn't afford to. 
With tears in my eyes, I said, "" No. "" Two months later, I go to another village on the same assignment and they asked me to live with the village chief. 
The women's chief of the village has this little girl, fair color like me, totally dirty. 
And all day she walked around only in her underwear. 
When I asked, "" Who is that? "" She said, "" That's Wei. 
The meaning of her name is pig. 
Her mother died while giving birth to her, and no one had any idea who her father was. "" For two weeks, she became my companion, slept with me. 
I bought her used clothes and bought her her first doll. 
The night before I left, she came to the room and said, "" Leymah, don't leave me here. 
I wish to go with you. 
I wish to go to school. "" Dirt poor, no money, living with my parents, I again said, "" No. "" Two months later, both of those villages fell into another war. 
Till today, I have no idea where those two girls are. 
Fast-forward, 2004: In the peak of our activism, the minister of Gender Liberia called me and said, "" Leymah, I have a nine-year-old for you. 
I want you to bring her home because we don't have safe homes. "" The story of this little girl: She had been raped by her paternal grandfather every day for six months. 
She came to me bloated, very pale. 
Every night I'd come from work and lie on the cold floor. 
She'd lie beside me and say, "" Auntie, I wish to be well. 
I wish to go to school. "" 2010: A young woman stands before President Sirleaf and gives her testimony of how she and her siblings live together, their father and mother died during the war. 
She's 19; her dream is to go to college to be able to support them. 
She's highly athletic. 
One of the things that happens is that she applies for a scholarship. 
Full scholarship. She gets it. 
Her dream of going to school, her wish of being educated, is finally here. 
She goes to school on the first day. 
The director of sports who's responsible for getting her into the program asks her to come out of class. 
And for the next three years, her fate will be having sex with him every day, as a favor for getting her in school. 
Globally, we have policies, international instruments, work leaders. 
Great people have made commitments — we will protect our children from want and from fear. 
The U.N. has the Convention on the Rights of the Child. 
Countries like America, we've heard things like No Child Left Behind. 
Other countries come with different things. 
There is a Millennium Development called Three that focuses on girls. 
All of these great works by great people aimed at getting young people to where we want to get them globally, I think, has failed. 
In Liberia, for example, the teenage pregnancy rate is three to every 10 girls. 
Teen prostitution is at its peak. 
In one community, we're told, you wake up in the morning and see used condoms like used chewing gum paper. 
Girls as young as 12 being prostituted for less than a dollar a night. 
It's disheartening, it's sad. 
And then someone asked me, just before my TEDTalk, a few days ago, "So where is the hope?" 
Several years ago, a few friends of mine decided we needed to bridge the disconnect between our generation and the generation of young women. 
It's not enough to say you have two Nobel laureates from the Republic of Liberia when your girls' kids are totally out there and no hope, or seemingly no hope. 
We created a space called the Young Girls Transformative Project. 
We go into rural communities and all we do, like has been done in this room, is create the space. 
When these girls sit, you unlock intelligence, you unlock passion, you unlock commitment, you unlock focus, you unlock great leaders. 
Today, we've worked with over 300. 
And some of those girls who walked in the room very shy have taken bold steps, as young mothers, to go out there and advocate for the rights of other young women. 
One young woman I met, teen mother of four, never thought about finishing high school, graduated successfully; never thought about going to college, enrolled in college. 
One day she said to me, "" My wish is to finish college and be able to support my children. "" She's at a place where she can't find money to go to school. 
She sells water, sells soft drinks and sells recharge cards for cellphones. 
And you would think she would take that money and put it back into her education. 
Juanita is her name. 
She takes that money and finds single mothers in her community to send back to school. 
Says, "" Leymah, my wish is to be educated. 
And if I can't be educated, when I see some of my sisters being educated, my wish has been fulfilled. 
I wish for a better life. 
I wish for food for my children. 
I wish that sexual abuse and exploitation in schools would stop. "" This is the dream of the African girl. 
Several years ago, there was one African girl. 
This girl had a son who wished for a piece of doughnut because he was extremely hungry. 
Angry, frustrated, really upset about the state of her society and the state of her children, this young girl started a movement, a movement of ordinary women banding together to build peace. 
I will fulfill the wish. 
This is another African girl's wish. 
I failed to fulfill the wish of those two girls. 
I failed to do this. 
These were the things that were going through the head of this other young woman — I failed, I failed, I failed. 
So I will do this. 
Women came out, protested a brutal dictator, fearlessly spoke. 
Not only did the wish of a piece of doughnut come true, the wish of peace came true. 
This young woman wished also to go to school. 
She went to school. 
This young woman wished for other things to happen, it happened for her. 
Today, this young woman is me, a Nobel laureate. 
I'm now on a journey to fulfill the wish, in my tiny capacity, of little African girls — the wish of being educated. 
We set up a foundation. 
We're giving full four-year scholarships to girls from villages that we see with potential. 
I don't have much to ask of you. 
I've also been to places in this U.S., and I know that girls in this country also have wishes, a wish for a better life somewhere in the Bronx, a wish for a better life somewhere in downtown L.A., a wish for a better life somewhere in Texas, a wish for a better life somewhere in New York, a wish for a better life somewhere in New Jersey. 
Will you journey with me to help that girl, be it an African girl or an American girl or a Japanese girl, fulfill her wish, fulfill her dream, achieve that dream? 
Because all of these great innovators and inventors that we've talked to and seen over the last few days are also sitting in tiny corners in different parts of the world, and all they're asking us to do is create that space to unlock the intelligence, unlock the passion, unlock all of the great things that they hold within themselves. 
Let's journey together. Let's journey together. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you so much. 
Right now in Liberia, what do you see as the main issue that troubles you? 
LG: I've been asked to lead the Liberian Reconciliation Initiative. 
As part of my work, I'm doing these tours in different villages and towns — 13, 15 hours on dirt roads — and there is no community that I've gone into that I haven't seen intelligent girls. 
But sadly, the vision of a great future, or the dream of a great future, is just a dream, because you have all of these vices. 
Teen pregnancy, like I said, is epidemic. 
So what troubles me is that I was at that place and somehow I'm at this place, and I just don't want to be the only one at this place. 
I'm looking for ways for other girls to be with me. 
I want to look back 20 years from now and see that there's another Liberian girl, Ghanaian girl, Nigerian girl, Ethiopian girl standing on this TED stage. 
And maybe, just maybe, saying, "" Because of that Nobel laureate I'm here today. "" So I'm troubled when I see them like there's no hope. 
But I'm also not pessimistic, because I know it doesn't take a lot to get them charged up. 
CA: And in the last year, tell us one hopeful thing that you've seen happening. 
LG: I can tell you many hopeful things that I've seen happening. 
But in the last year, where President Sirleaf comes from, her village, we went there to work with these girls. 
And we could not find 25 girls in high school. 
All of these girls went to the gold mine, and they were predominantly prostitutes doing other things. 
We took 50 of those girls and we worked with them. 
And this was at the beginning of elections. 
This is one place where women were never — even the older ones barely sat in the circle with the men. 
These girls banded together and formed a group and launched a campaign for voter registration. 
This is a real rural village. 
And the theme they used was: "Even pretty girls vote." 
They were able to mobilize young women. 
But not only did they do that, they went to those who were running for seats to ask them, "" What is it that you will give the girls of this community when you win? "" And one of the guys who already had a seat was very — because Liberia has one of the strongest rape laws, and he was one of those really fighting in parliament to overturn that law because he called it barbaric. 
Rape is not barbaric, but the law, he said, was barbaric. 
And when the girls started engaging him, he was very hostile towards them. 
These little girls turned to him and said, "We will vote you out of office." 
He's out of office today. 
(Applause) CA: Leymah, thank you. Thank you so much for coming to TED. 
LG: You're welcome. (CA: Thank you.) (Applause) 

It's wonderful to be here to talk about my journey, to talk about the wheelchair and the freedom it has bought me. 
I started using a wheelchair 16 years ago when an extended illness changed the way I could access the world. 
When I started using the wheelchair, it was a tremendous new freedom. 
I'd seen my life slip away and become restricted. 
It was like having an enormous new toy. 
I could whiz around and feel the wind in my face again. 
Just being out on the street was exhilarating. 
But even though I had this newfound joy and freedom, people's reaction completely changed towards me. 
It was as if they couldn't see me anymore, as if an invisibility cloak had descended. 
They seemed to see me in terms of their assumptions of what it must be like to be in a wheelchair. 
When I asked people their associations with the wheelchair, they used words like "" limitation, "" "" fear, "" "pity" and "restriction." 
I realized I'd internalized these responses and it had changed who I was on a core level. 
A part of me had become alienated from myself. 
I was seeing myself not from my perspective, but vividly and continuously from the perspective of other people's responses to me. 
As a result, I knew I needed to make my own stories about this experience, new narratives to reclaim my identity. 
["" Finding Freedom: 'By creating our own stories we learn to take the texts of our lives as seriously as we do' official 'narratives.' — Davis 2009, TEDx Women ""] I started making work that aimed to communicate something of the joy and freedom I felt when using a wheelchair — a power chair — to negotiate the world. 
I was working to transform these internalized responses, to transform the preconceptions that had so shaped my identity when I started using a wheelchair, by creating unexpected images. 
The wheelchair became an object to paint and play with. 
When I literally started leaving traces of my joy and freedom, it was exciting to see the interested and surprised responses from people. 
It seemed to open up new perspectives, and therein lay the paradigm shift. 
It showed that an arts practice can remake one's identity and transform preconceptions by revisioning the familiar. 
So when I began to dive, in 2005, I realized scuba gear extends your range of activity in just the same way as a wheelchair does, but the associations attached to scuba gear are ones of excitement and adventure, completely different to people's responses to the wheelchair. 
So I thought, "" I wonder what'll happen if I put the two together? "" (Laughter) (Applause) And the underwater wheelchair that has resulted has taken me on the most amazing journey over the last seven years. 
So to give you an idea of what that's like, I'd like to share with you one of the outcomes from creating this spectacle, and show you what an amazing journey it's taken me on. 
(Music) (Applause) It is the most amazing experience, beyond most other things I've experienced in life. 
I literally have the freedom to move in 360 degrees of space and an ecstatic experience of joy and freedom. 
And the incredibly unexpected thing is that other people seem to see and feel that too. 
Their eyes literally light up, and they say things like, "" I want one of those, "" or, "" If you can do that, I can do anything. "" And I'm thinking, it's because in that moment of them seeing an object they have no frame of reference for, or so transcends the frames of reference they have with the wheelchair, they have to think in a completely new way. 
And I think that moment of completely new thought perhaps creates a freedom that spreads to the rest of other people's lives. 
For me, this means that they're seeing the value of difference, the joy it brings when instead of focusing on loss or limitation, we see and discover the power and joy of seeing the world from exciting new perspectives. 
For me, the wheelchair becomes a vehicle for transformation. 
In fact, I now call the underwater wheelchair "" Portal, "" because it's literally pushed me through into a new way of being, into new dimensions and into a new level of consciousness. 
And the other thing is, that because nobody's seen or heard of an underwater wheelchair before, and creating this spectacle is about creating new ways of seeing, being and knowing, now you have this concept in your mind. 
You're all part of the artwork too. 
(Applause) 

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

Almost a year ago, my aunt started suffering back pains. 
She went to see the doctor and they told her it was a normal injury for someone who had been playing tennis for almost 30 years. 
They recommended that she do some therapy, but after a while she wasn't feeling better, so the doctors decided to do further tests. 
They did an x-ray and discovered an injury in her lungs, and at the time they thought that the injury was a strain in the muscles and tendons between her ribs, but after a few weeks of treatment, again her health wasn't getting any better. 
So finally, they decided to do a biopsy, and two weeks later, the results of the biopsy came back. 
It was stage 3 lung cancer. 
Her lifestyle was almost free of risk. 
She never smoked a cigarette, she never drank alcohol, and she had been playing sports for almost half her life. 
Perhaps, that is why it took them almost six months to get her properly diagnosed. 
My story might be, unfortunately, familiar to most of you. 
One out of three people sitting in this audience will be diagnosed with some type of cancer, and one out of four will die because of it. 
Not only did that cancer diagnosis change the life of our family, but that process of going back and forth with new tests, different doctors describing symptoms, discarding diseases over and over, was stressful and frustrating, especially for my aunt. 
And that is the way cancer diagnosis has been done since the beginning of history. 
We have 21st-century medical treatments and drugs to treat cancer, but we still have 20th-century procedures and processes for diagnosis, if any. 
Today, most of us have to wait for symptoms to indicate that something is wrong. 
Today, the majority of people still don't have access to early cancer detection methods, even though we know that catching cancer early is basically the closest thing we have to a silver bullet cure against it. 
We know that we can change this in our lifetime, and that is why my team and I have decided to begin this journey, this journey to try to make cancer detection at the early stages and monitoring the appropriate response at the molecular level easier, cheaper, smarter and more accessible than ever before. 
The context, of course, is that we're living at a time where technology is disrupting our present at exponential rates, and the biological realm is no exception. 
It is said today that biotech is advancing at least six times faster than the growth rate of the processing power of computers. 
But progress in biotech is not only being accelerated, it is also being democratized. 
Just as personal computers or the Internet or smartphones leveled the playing field for entrepreneurship, politics or education, recent advances have leveled it up for biotech progress as well, and that is allowing multidisciplinary teams like ours to try to tackle and look at these problems with new approaches. 
We are a team of scientists and technologists from Chile, Panama, Mexico, Israel and Greece, and based on recent scientific discoveries, we believe that we have found a reliable and accurate way of detecting several types of cancer at the very early stages through a blood sample. 
We do it by detecting a set of very small molecules that circulate freely in our blood called microRNAs. 
To explain what microRNAs are and their important role in cancer, I need to start with proteins, because when cancer is present in our body, protein modification is observed in all cancerous cells. 
As you might know, proteins are large biological molecules that perform different functions within our body, like catalyzing metabolic reactions or responding to stimuli or replicating DNA, but before a protein is expressed or produced, relevant parts of its genetic code present in the DNA are copied into the messenger RNA, so this messenger RNA has instructions on how to build a specific protein, and potentially it can build hundreds of proteins, but the one that tells them when to build them and how many to build are microRNAs. 
So microRNAs are small molecules that regulate gene expression. 
Unlike DNA, which is mainly fixed, microRNAs can vary depending on internal and environmental conditions at any given time, telling us which genes are actively expressed at that particular moment. 
And that is what makes microRNAs such a promising biomarker for cancer, because as you know, cancer is a disease of altered gene expression. 
It is the uncontrolled regulation of genes. 
Another important thing to consider is that no two cancers are the same, but at the microRNA level, there are patterns. 
Several scientific studies have shown that abnormal microRNA expression levels varies and creates a unique, specific pattern for each type of cancer, even at the early stages, reflecting the progression of the disease, and whether it's responding to medication or in remission, making microRNAs a perfect, highly sensitive biomarker. 
However, the problem with microRNAs is that we cannot use existing DNA-based technology to detect them in a reliable way, because they are very short sequences of nucleotides, much smaller than DNA. 
And also, all microRNAs are very similar to each other, with just tiny differences. 
So imagine trying to differentiate two molecules, extremely similar, extremely small. 
We believe that we have found a way to do so, and this is the first time that we've shown it in public. 
Let me do a demonstration. 
Imagine that next time you go to your doctor and do your next standard blood test, a lab technician extracts a total RNA, which is quite simple today, and puts it in a standard 96-well plate like this one. 
Each well of these plates has specific biochemistry that we assign, that is looking for a specific microRNA, acting like a trap that closes only when the microRNA is present in the sample, and when it does, it will shine with green color. 
To run the reaction, you put the plate inside a device like this one, and then you can put your smartphone on top of it. 
If we can have a camera here so you can see my screen. 
A smartphone is a connected computer and it's also a camera, good enough for our purpose. 
The smartphone is taking pictures, and when the reaction is over, it will send the pictures to our online database for processing and interpretation. 
This entire process lasts around 60 minutes, but when the process is over, wells that shine are matched with the specific microRNAs and analyzed in terms of how much and how fast they shine. 
And then, when this entire process is over, this is what happens. 
This chart is showing the specific microRNAs present in this sample and how they reacted over time. 
Then, if we take this specific pattern of microRNA of this person's samples and compare it with existing scientific documentation that correlates microRNA patterns with a specific presence of a disease, this is how pancreatic cancer looks like. 
This inside is a real sample where we just detected pancreatic cancer. 
(Applause) Another important aspect of this approach is the gathering and mining of data in the cloud, so we can get results in real time and analyze them with our contextual information. 
If we want to better understand and decode diseases like cancer, we need to stop treating them as acute, isolated episodes, and consider and measure everything that affects our health on a permanent basis. 
This entire platform is a working prototype. 
It uses state-of-the-art molecular biology, a low-cost, 3D-printed device, and data science to try to tackle one of humanity's toughest challenges. 
Since we believe early cancer detection should really be democratized, this entire solution costs at least 50 times less than current available methods, and we know that the community can help us accelerate this even more, so we're making the design of the device open-source. 
(Applause) Let me say very clearly that we are at the very early stages, but so far, we have been able to successfully identify the microRNA pattern of pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer and hepatic cancer. 
And currently, we're doing a clinical trial in collaboration with the German Cancer Research Center with 200 women for breast cancer. 
(Applause) This is the single non-invasive, accurate and affordable test that has the potential to dramatically change how cancer procedures and diagnostics have been done. 
Since we're looking for the microRNA patterns in your blood at any given time, you don't need to know which cancer you're looking for. 
You don't need to have any symptoms. 
You only need one milliliter of blood and a relatively simple array of tools. 
Today, cancer detection happens mainly when symptoms appear. 
That is, at stage 3 or 4, and I believe that is too late. 
It is too expensive for our families. 
It is too expensive for humanity. 
We cannot lose the war against cancer. 
It not only costs us billions of dollars, but it also costs us the people we love. 
Today, my aunt, she's fighting bravely and going through this process with a very positive attitude. 
However, I want fights like this to become very rare. 
I want to see the day when cancer is treated easily because it can be routinely diagnosed at the very early stages, and I'm certain that in the very near future, because of this and other breakthroughs that we are seeing every day in the life sciences, the way we see cancer will radically change. 
It will give us the chance of detecting it early, understanding it better, and finding a cure. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

"" Even in purely non-religious terms, homosexuality represents a misuse of the sexual faculty. 
It is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality — a pitiable flight from life. 
As such, it deserves no compassion, it deserves no treatment as minority martyrdom, and it deserves not to be deemed anything but a pernicious sickness. "" That's from Time magazine in 1966, when I was three years old. 
And last year, the president of the United States came out in favor of gay marriage. 
(Applause) And my question is, how did we get from there to here? 
How did an illness become an identity? 
When I was perhaps six years old, I went to a shoe store with my mother and my brother. 
And at the end of buying our shoes, the salesman said to us that we could each have a balloon to take home. 
My brother wanted a red balloon, and I wanted a pink balloon. 
My mother said that she thought I'd really rather have a blue balloon. 
But I said that I definitely wanted the pink one. 
And she reminded me that my favorite color was blue. 
The fact that my favorite color now is blue, but I'm still gay — (Laughter) — is evidence of both my mother's influence and its limits. (Laughter) 
(Applause) When I was little, my mother used to say, "" The love you have for your children is like no other feeling in the world. 
And until you have children, you don't know what it's like. "" And when I was little, I took it as the greatest compliment in the world that she would say that about parenting my brother and me. 
And when I was an adolescent, I thought that I'm gay, and so I probably can't have a family. 
And when she said it, it made me anxious. 
And after I came out of the closet, when she continued to say it, it made me furious. 
I said, "" I'm gay. That's not the direction that I'm headed in. 
And I want you to stop saying that. "" About 20 years ago, I was asked by my editors at The New York Times Magazine to write a piece about deaf culture. 
And I was rather taken aback. 
I had thought of deafness entirely as an illness. 
Those poor people, they couldn't hear. 
They lacked hearing, and what could we do for them? 
And then I went out into the deaf world. 
I went to deaf clubs. 
I saw performances of deaf theater and of deaf poetry. 
I even went to the Miss Deaf America contest in Nashville, Tennessee where people complained about that slurry Southern signing. 
(Laughter) And as I plunged deeper and deeper into the deaf world, I become convinced that deafness was a culture and that the people in the deaf world who said, "We don't lack hearing, we have membership in a culture," were saying something that was viable. 
It wasn't my culture, and I didn't particularly want to rush off and join it, but I appreciated that it was a culture and that for the people who were members of it, it felt as valuable as Latino culture or gay culture or Jewish culture. 
It felt as valid perhaps even as American culture. 
Then a friend of a friend of mine had a daughter who was a dwarf. 
And when her daughter was born, she suddenly found herself confronting questions that now began to seem quite resonant to me. 
She was facing the question of what to do with this child. 
Should she say, "" You're just like everyone else but a little bit shorter? "" Or should she try to construct some kind of dwarf identity, get involved in the Little People of America, become aware of what was happening for dwarfs? 
And I suddenly thought, most deaf children are born to hearing parents. 
Those hearing parents tend to try to cure them. 
Those deaf people discover community somehow in adolescence. 
Most gay people are born to straight parents. 
Those straight parents often want them to function in what they think of as the mainstream world, and those gay people have to discover identity later on. 
And here was this friend of mine looking at these questions of identity with her dwarf daughter. 
And I thought, there it is again: A family that perceives itself to be normal with a child who seems to be extraordinary. 
And I hatched the idea that there are really two kinds of identity. 
There are vertical identities, which are passed down generationally from parent to child. 
Those are things like ethnicity, frequently nationality, language, often religion. 
Those are things you have in common with your parents and with your children. 
And while some of them can be difficult, there's no attempt to cure them. 
You can argue that it's harder in the United States — our current presidency notwithstanding — to be a person of color. 
And yet, we have nobody who is trying to ensure that the next generation of children born to African-Americans and Asians come out with creamy skin and yellow hair. 
There are these other identities which you have to learn from a peer group. 
And I call them horizontal identities, because the peer group is the horizontal experience. 
These are identities that are alien to your parents and that you have to discover when you get to see them in peers. 
And those identities, those horizontal identities, people have almost always tried to cure. 
And I wanted to look at what the process is through which people who have those identities come to a good relationship with them. 
And it seemed to me that there were three levels of acceptance that needed to take place. 
There's self-acceptance, there's family acceptance, and there's social acceptance. 
And they don't always coincide. 
And a lot of the time, people who have these conditions are very angry because they feel as though their parents don't love them, when what actually has happened is that their parents don't accept them. 
Love is something that ideally is there unconditionally throughout the relationship between a parent and a child. 
But acceptance is something that takes time. 
It always takes time. 
One of the dwarfs I got to know was a guy named Clinton Brown. 
When he was born, he was diagnosed with diastrophic dwarfism, a very disabling condition, and his parents were told that he would never walk, he would never talk, he would have no intellectual capacity, and he would probably not even recognize them. 
And it was suggested to them that they leave him at the hospital so that he could die there quietly. 
And his mother said she wasn't going to do it. 
And she took her son home. 
And even though she didn't have a lot of educational or financial advantages, she found the best doctor in the country for dealing with diastrophic dwarfism, and she got Clinton enrolled with him. 
And in the course of his childhood, he had 30 major surgical procedures. 
And he spent all this time stuck in the hospital while he was having those procedures, as a result of which he now can walk. 
And while he was there, they sent tutors around to help him with his school work. 
And he worked very hard because there was nothing else to do. 
And he ended up achieving at a level that had never before been contemplated by any member of his family. 
He was the first one in his family, in fact, to go to college, where he lived on campus and drove a specially-fitted car that accommodated his unusual body. 
And his mother told me this story of coming home one day — and he went to college nearby — and she said, "" I saw that car, which you can always recognize, in the parking lot of a bar, "" she said. (Laughter) "" And I thought to myself, they're six feet tall, he's three feet tall. 
Two beers for them is four beers for him. "" She said, "" I knew I couldn't go in there and interrupt him, but I went home, and I left him eight messages on his cell phone. "" She said, "" And then I thought, if someone had said to me when he was born that my future worry would be that he'd go drinking and driving with his college buddies — "" (Applause) And I said to her, "" What do you think you did that helped him to emerge as this charming, accomplished, wonderful person? "" And she said, "" What did I do? I loved him, that's all. 
Clinton just always had that light in him. 
And his father and I were lucky enough to be the first to see it there. "" I'm going to quote from another magazine of the '60s. 
This one is from 1968 — The Atlantic Monthly, voice of liberal America — written by an important bioethicist. 
He said, "" There is no reason to feel guilty about putting a Down syndrome child away, whether it is put away in the sense of hidden in a sanitarium or in a more responsible, lethal sense. 
It is sad, yes — dreadful. But it carries no guilt. 
True guilt arises only from an offense against a person, and a Down's is not a person. "" There's been a lot of ink given to the enormous progress that we've made in the treatment of gay people. 
The fact that our attitude has changed is in the headlines every day. 
But we forget how we used to see people who had other differences, how we used to see people who were disabled, how inhuman we held people to be. 
And the change that's been accomplished there, which is almost equally radical, is one that we pay not very much attention to. 
One of the families I interviewed, Tom and Karen Robards, were taken aback when, as young and successful New Yorkers, their first child was diagnosed with Down syndrome. 
They thought the educational opportunities for him were not what they should be, and so they decided they would build a little center — two classrooms that they started with a few other parents — to educate kids with D.S. 
And over the years, that center grew into something called the Cooke Center, where there are now thousands upon thousands of children with intellectual disabilities who are being taught. 
In the time since that Atlantic Monthly story ran, the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome has tripled. 
The experience of Down syndrome people includes those who are actors, those who are writers, some who are able to live fully independently in adulthood. 
The Robards had a lot to do with that. 
And I said, "" Do you regret it? 
Do you wish your child didn't have Down syndrome? 
Do you wish you'd never heard of it? "" And interestingly his father said, "" Well, for David, our son, I regret it, because for David, it's a difficult way to be in the world, and I'd like to give David an easier life. 
But I think if we lost everyone with Down syndrome, it would be a catastrophic loss. "" And Karen Robards said to me, "" I'm with Tom. 
For David, I would cure it in an instant to give him an easier life. 
But speaking for myself — well, I would never have believed 23 years ago when he was born that I could come to such a point — speaking for myself, it's made me so much better and so much kinder and so much more purposeful in my whole life, that speaking for myself, I wouldn't give it up for anything in the world. "" We live at a point when social acceptance for these and many other conditions is on the up and up. 
And yet we also live at the moment when our ability to eliminate those conditions has reached a height we never imagined before. 
Most deaf infants born in the United States now will receive Cochlear implants, which are put into the brain and connected to a receiver, and which allow them to acquire a facsimile of hearing and to use oral speech. 
A compound that has been tested in mice, BMN-111, is useful in preventing the action of the achondroplasia gene. 
Achondroplasia is the most common form of dwarfism, and mice who have been given that substance and who have the achondroplasia gene, grow to full size. 
Testing in humans is around the corner. 
There are blood tests which are making progress that would pick up Down syndrome more clearly and earlier in pregnancies than ever before, making it easier and easier for people to eliminate those pregnancies, or to terminate them. 
And so we have both social progress and medical progress. 
And I believe in both of them. 
I believe the social progress is fantastic and meaningful and wonderful, and I think the same thing about the medical progress. 
But I think it's a tragedy when one of them doesn't see the other. 
And when I see the way they're intersecting in conditions like the three I've just described, I sometimes think it's like those moments in grand opera when the hero realizes he loves the heroine at the exact moment that she lies expiring on a divan. 
(Laughter) We have to think about how we feel about cures altogether. 
And a lot of the time the question of parenthood is, what do we validate in our children, and what do we cure in them? 
Jim Sinclair, a prominent autism activist, said, "" When parents say 'I wish my child did not have autism,' what they're really saying is' I wish the child I have did not exist and I had a different, non-autistic child instead. 'Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. 
This is what we hear when you pray for a cure — that your fondest wish for us is that someday we will cease to be and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces. "" It's a very extreme point of view, but it points to the reality that people engage with the life they have and they don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. 
They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be. 
One of the families I interviewed for this project was the family of Dylan Klebold who was one of the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre. 
It took a long time to persuade them to talk to me, and once they agreed, they were so full of their story that they couldn't stop telling it. 
And the first weekend I spent with them — the first of many — I recorded more than 20 hours of conversation. 
And on Sunday night, we were all exhausted. 
We were sitting in the kitchen. Sue Klebold was fixing dinner. 
And I said, "" If Dylan were here now, do you have a sense of what you'd want to ask him? "" And his father said, "" I sure do. 
I'd want to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing. "" And Sue looked at the floor, and she thought for a minute. 
And then she looked back up and said, "" I would ask him to forgive me for being his mother and never knowing what was going on inside his head. "" When I had dinner with her a couple of years later — one of many dinners that we had together — she said, "" You know, when it first happened, I used to wish that I had never married, that I had never had children. 
If I hadn't gone to Ohio State and crossed paths with Tom, this child wouldn't have existed and this terrible thing wouldn't have happened. 
But I've come to feel that I love the children I had so much that I don't want to imagine a life without them. 
I recognize the pain they caused to others, for which there can be no forgiveness, but the pain they caused to me, there is, "" she said. 
"" So while I recognize that it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born, I've decided that it would not have been better for me. "" I thought it was surprising how all of these families had all of these children with all of these problems, problems that they mostly would have done anything to avoid, and that they had all found so much meaning in that experience of parenting. 
And then I thought, all of us who have children love the children we have, with their flaws. 
If some glorious angel suddenly descended through my living room ceiling and offered to take away the children I have and give me other, better children — more polite, funnier, nicer, smarter — I would cling to the children I have and pray away that atrocious spectacle. 
And ultimately I feel that in the same way that we test flame-retardant pajamas in an inferno to ensure they won't catch fire when our child reaches across the stove, so these stories of families negotiating these extreme differences reflect on the universal experience of parenting, which is always that sometimes you look at your child and you think, where did you come from? 
(Laughter) It turns out that while each of these individual differences is siloed — there are only so many families dealing with schizophrenia, there are only so many families of children who are transgender, there are only so many families of prodigies — who also face similar challenges in many ways — there are only so many families in each of those categories — but if you start to think that the experience of negotiating difference within your family is what people are addressing, then you discover that it's a nearly universal phenomenon. 
Ironically, it turns out, that it's our differences, and our negotiation of difference, that unite us. 
I decided to have children while I was working on this project. 
And many people were astonished and said, "" But how can you decide to have children in the midst of studying everything that can go wrong? "" And I said, "" I'm not studying everything that can go wrong. 
What I'm studying is how much love there can be, even when everything appears to be going wrong. "" I thought a lot about the mother of one disabled child I had seen, a severely disabled child who died through caregiver neglect. 
And when his ashes were interred, his mother said, "" I pray here for forgiveness for having been twice robbed, once of the child I wanted and once of the son I loved. "" And I figured it was possible then for anyone to love any child if they had the effective will to do so. 
So my husband is the biological father of two children with some lesbian friends in Minneapolis. 
I had a close friend from college who'd gone through a divorce and wanted to have children. 
And so she and I have a daughter, and mother and daughter live in Texas. 
And my husband and I have a son who lives with us all the time of whom I am the biological father, and our surrogate for the pregnancy was Laura, the lesbian mother of Oliver and Lucy in Minneapolis. 
(Applause) So the shorthand is five parents of four children in three states. 
And there are people who think that the existence of my family somehow undermines or weakens or damages their family. 
And there are people who think that families like mine shouldn't be allowed to exist. 
And I don't accept subtractive models of love, only additive ones. 
And I believe that in the same way that we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on, so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness. 
The day after our son was born, the pediatrician came into the hospital room and said she was concerned. 
He wasn't extending his legs appropriately. 
She said that might mean that he had brain damage. 
In so far as he was extending them, he was doing so asymmetrically, which she thought could mean that there was a tumor of some kind in action. 
And he had a very large head, which she thought might indicate hydrocephalus. 
And as she told me all of these things, I felt the very center of my being pouring out onto the floor. 
And I thought, here I had been working for years on a book about how much meaning people had found in the experience of parenting children who are disabled, and I didn't want to join their number. 
Because what I was encountering was an idea of illness. 
And like all parents since the dawn of time, I wanted to protect my child from illness. 
And I wanted also to protect myself from illness. 
And yet, I knew from the work I had done that if he had any of the things we were about to start testing for, that those would ultimately be his identity, and if they were his identity they would become my identity, that that illness was going to take a very different shape as it unfolded. 
We took him to the MRI machine, we took him to the CAT scanner, we took this day-old child and gave him over for an arterial blood draw. 
We felt helpless. 
And at the end of five hours, they said that his brain was completely clear and that he was by then extending his legs correctly. 
And when I asked the pediatrician what had been going on, she said she thought in the morning he had probably had a cramp. 
(Laughter) But I thought how my mother was right. 
I thought, the love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world, and until you have children, you don't know what it feels like. 
I think children had ensnared me the moment I connected fatherhood with loss. 
But I'm not sure I would have noticed that if I hadn't been so in the thick of this research project of mine. 
I'd encountered so much strange love, and I fell very naturally into its bewitching patterns. 
And I saw how splendor can illuminate even the most abject vulnerabilities. 
During these 10 years, I had witnessed and learned the terrifying joy of unbearable responsibility, and I had come to see how it conquers everything else. 
And while I had sometimes thought the parents I was interviewing were fools, enslaving themselves to a lifetime's journey with their thankless children and trying to breed identity out of misery, I realized that day that my research had built me a plank and that I was ready to join them on their ship. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

This is how war starts. 
One day you're living your ordinary life, you're planning to go to a party, you're taking your children to school, you're making a dentist appointment. 
The next thing, the telephones go out, the TVs go out, there's armed men on the street, there's roadblocks. 
Your life as you know it goes into suspended animation. 
It stops. 
I'm going to steal a story from a friend of mine, a Bosnian friend, about what happened to her, because I think it will illustrate for you exactly what it feels like. 
She was walking to work one day in April, 1992, in a miniskirt and high heels. She worked in a bank. 
She was a young mother. She was someone who liked to party. 
Great person. 
And suddenly she sees a tank ambling down the main road of Sarajevo knocking everything out of its path. 
She thinks she's dreaming, but she's not. 
And she runs as any of us would have done and takes cover, and she hides behind a trash bin, in her high heels and her miniskirt. 
And as she's hiding there, she's feeling ridiculous, but she's seeing this tank go by with soldiers and people all over the place and chaos and she thinks, "" I feel like Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole, down, down, down into chaos, and my life will never be the same again. "" A few weeks later, my friend was in a crowd of people pushing with her infant son in her arms to give him to a stranger on a bus, which was one of the last buses leaving Sarajevo to take children out so they could be safe. 
And she remembers struggling with her mother to the front, crowds and crowds of people, "" Take my child! Take my child! "" and passing her son to someone through a window. 
And she didn't see him for years. 
The siege went on for three and a half years, and it was a siege without water, without power, without electricity, without heat, without food, in the middle of Europe, in the middle of the 20th century. 
I had the honor of being one of those reporters that lived through that siege, and I say I have the honor and the privilege of being there because it's taught me everything, not just about being a reporter, but about being a human being. 
I learned about compassion. 
I learned about ordinary people who could be heroes. 
I learned about sharing. I learned about camaraderie. 
Most of all, I learned about love. 
Even in the midst of terrible destruction and death and chaos, I learned how ordinary people could help their neighbors, share food, raise their children, drag someone who's being sniped at from the middle of the road even though you yourself were endangering your life, helping people get into taxis who were injured to try to take them to hospitals. 
I learned so much about myself. 
Martha Gellhorn, who's one of my heroes, once said, "You can only love one war. The rest is responsibility." 
I went on to cover many, many, many wars after that, so many that I lost count, but there was nothing like Sarajevo. 
Last April, I went back to a very strange — what I called a deranged high school reunion. 
What it was, was the 20th anniversary of the siege, the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo, and I don't like the word "" anniversary, "" because it sounds like a party, and this was not a party. 
It was a very somber gathering of the reporters that worked there during the war, humanitarian aid workers, and of course the brave and courageous people of Sarajevo themselves. 
And the thing that struck me the most, that broke my heart, was walking down the main street of Sarajevo, where my friend Aida saw the tank coming 20 years ago, and in that road were more than 12,000 red chairs, empty, and every single one of them symbolized a person who had died during the siege, just in Sarajevo, not in all of Bosnia, and it stretched from one end of the city to a large part of it, and the saddest for me were the tiny little chairs for the children. 
I now cover Syria, and I started reporting it because I believed that it needs to be done. 
I believe a story there has to be told. 
I see, again, a template of the war in Bosnia. 
And when I first arrived in Damascus, I saw this strange moment where people didn't seem to believe that war was going to descend, and it was exactly the same in Bosnia and nearly every other country I've seen where war comes. 
People don't want to believe it's coming, so they don't leave, they don't leave before they can. 
They don't get their money out. 
They stay because you want to stay in your home. 
And then war and chaos descend. 
Rwanda is a place that haunts me a lot. 
In 1994, I briefly left Sarajevo to go report the genocide in Rwanda. 
Between April and August, 1994, one million people were slaughtered. 
Now if those 12,000 chairs freaked me out with the sheer number, I want you just for a second to think of a million people. 
And to give you some example, I remember standing and looking down a road as far as I could see, at least a mile, and there were bodies piled twice my height of the dead. 
And that was just a small percentage of the dead. 
And there were mothers holding their children who had been caught in their last death throes. 
So we learn a lot from war, and I mention Rwanda because it is one place, like South Africa, where nearly 20 years on, there is healing. 
Fifty-six percent of the parliamentarians are women, which is fantastic, and there's also within the national constitution now, you're actually not allowed to say Hutu or Tutsi. 
You're not allowed to identify anyone by ethnicity, which is, of course, what started the slaughter in the first place. 
And an aid worker friend of mine told me the most beautiful story, or I find it beautiful. 
There was a group of children, mixed Hutus and Tutsis, and a group of women who were adopting them, and they lined up and one was just given to the next. 
There was no kind of compensation for, you're a Tutsi, you're a Hutu, you might have killed my mother, you might have killed my father. 
They were just brought together in this kind of reconciliation, and I find this remarkable. 
So when people ask me how I continue to cover war, and why I continue to do it, this is why. 
When I go back to Syria, next week in fact, what I see is incredibly heroic people, some of them fighting for democracy, for things we take for granted every single day. 
And that's pretty much why I do it. 
In 2004, I had a little baby boy, and I call him my miracle child, because after seeing so much death and destruction and chaos and darkness in my life, this ray of hope was born. 
And I called him Luca, which means "" The bringer of light, "" because he does bring light to my life. 
But I'm talking about him because when he was four months old, my foreign editor forced me to go back to Baghdad where I had been reporting all throughout the Saddam regime and during the fall of Baghdad and afterwards, and I remember getting on the plane in tears, crying to be separated from my son, and while I was there, a quite famous Iraqi politician who was a friend of mine said to me, "" What are you doing here? 
Why aren't you home with Luca? "" And I said, "" Well, I have to see. "" It was 2004 which was the beginning of the incredibly bloody time in Iraq, "" I have to see, I have to see what is happening here. 
I have to report it. "" And he said, "" Go home, because if you miss his first tooth, if you miss his first step, you'll never forgive yourself. 
But there will always be another war. "" And there, sadly, will always be wars. 
And I am deluding myself if I think, as a journalist, as a reporter, as a writer, what I do can stop them. I can't. 
I'm not Kofi Annan. He can't stop a war. 
He tried to negotiate Syria and couldn't do it. 
I'm not a U.N. conflict resolution person. 
I'm not even a humanitarian aid doctor, and I can't tell you the times of how helpless I've felt to have people dying in front of me, and I couldn't save them. 
All I am is a witness. 
My role is to bring a voice to people who are voiceless. 
A colleague of mine described it as to shine a light in the darkest corners of the world. 
And that's what I try to do. 
I'm not always successful, and sometimes it's incredibly frustrating, because you feel like you're writing into a void, or you feel like no one cares. 
Who cares about Syria? Who cares about Bosnia? 
Who cares about the Congo, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, all of these strings of places that I will remember for the rest of my life? 
But my métier is to bear witness and that is the crux, the heart of the matter, for us reporters who do this. 
And all I can really do is hope, not to policymakers or politicians, because as much as I'd like to have faith that they read my words and do something, I don't delude myself. 
But what I do hope is that if you remember anything I said or any of my stories tomorrow morning over breakfast, if you can remember the story of Sarajevo, or the story of Rwanda, then I've done my job. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

In my industry, we believe that images can change the world. 
Okay, we're naive, we're bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. 
The truth is that we know that the images themselves don't change the world, but we're also aware that, since the beginning of photography, images have provoked reactions in people, and those reactions have caused change to happen. 
So let's begin with a group of images. 
I'd be extremely surprised if you didn't recognize many or most of them. 
They're best described as iconic: so iconic, perhaps, they're cliches. 
In fact, they're so well-known that you might even recognize them in a slightly or somewhat different form. 
(Laughter) But I think we're looking for something more. 
We're looking for something more. 
We're looking for images that shine an uncompromising light on crucial issues, images that transcend borders, that transcend religions, images that provoke us to step up and do something — in other words, to act. 
Well, this image you've all seen. 
It changed our view of the physical world. 
We had never seen our planet from this perspective before. 
Many people credit a lot of the birth of the environmental movement to our seeing the planet like this for the first time — its smallness, its fragility. 
Forty years later, this group, more than most, are well aware of the destructive power that our species can wield over our environment. 
And at last, we appear to be doing something about it. 
This destructive power takes many different forms. 
For example, these images taken by Brent Stirton in the Congo. 
These gorillas were murdered, some would even say crucified, and unsurprisingly, they sparked international outrage. 
Most recently, we've been tragically reminded of the destructive power of nature itself with the recent earthquake in Haiti. 
Well, I think what is far worse is man's destructive power over man. 
Samuel Pisar, an Auschwitz survivor, said, and I'll quote him, "" The Holocaust teaches us that nature, even in its cruelest moments, is benign in comparison with man, when he loses his moral compass and his reason. "" There's another kind of crucifixion. 
The horrifying images from Abu Ghraib as well as the images from Guantanamo had a profound impact. 
The publication of those images, as opposed to the images themselves, caused a government to change its policies. 
Some would argue that it is those images that did more to fuel the insurgency in Iraq than virtually any other single act. 
Furthermore, those images forever removed the so-called moral high ground of the occupying forces. 
Let's go back a little. 
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnam War was basically shown in America's living rooms day in, day out. 
News photos brought people face to face with the victims of the war: a little girl burned by napalm, a student killed by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio during a protest. 
In fact, these images became the voices of protest themselves. 
Now, images have power to shed light of understanding on suspicion, ignorance, and in particular — I've given a lot of talks on this but I'll just show one image — the issue of HIV / AIDS. 
In the 1980s, the stigmatization of people with the disease was an enormous barrier to even discussing or addressing it. 
A simple act, in 1987, of the most famous woman in the world, the Princess of Wales, touching an HIV / AIDS infected baby did a great deal, especially in Europe, to stop that. 
She, better than most, knew the power of an image. 
So when we are confronted by a powerful image, we all have a choice: We can look away, or we can address the image. 
Thankfully, when these photos appeared in The Guardian in 1998, they put a lot of focus and attention and, in the end, a lot of money towards the Sudan famine relief efforts. 
Did the images change the world? 
No, but they had a major impact. 
Images often push us to question our core beliefs and our responsibilities to each other. 
We all saw those images after Katrina, and I think for millions of people they had a very strong impact. 
And I think it's very unlikely that they were far from the minds of Americans when they went to vote in November 2008. 
Unfortunately, some very important images are deemed too graphic or disturbing for us to see them. 
I'll show you one photo here, and it's a photo by Eugene Richards of an Iraq War veteran from an extraordinary piece of work, which has never been published, called War Is Personal. 
But images don't need to be graphic in order to remind us of the tragedy of war. 
John Moore set up this photo at Arlington Cemetery. 
After all the tense moments of conflict in all the conflict zones of the world, there's one photograph from a much quieter place that haunts me still, much more than the others. 
Ansel Adams said, and I'm going to disagree with him, "You don't take a photograph, you make it." 
In my view, it's not the photographer who makes the photo, it's you. 
We bring to each image our own values, our own belief systems, and as a result of that, the image resonates with us. 
My company has 70 million images. 
I have one image in my office. 
Here it is. 
I hope that the next time you see an image that sparks something in you, you'll better understand why, and I know that speaking to this audience, you'll definitely do something about it. 
And thank you to all the photographers. 
(Applause) 

Clouds. 
Have you ever noticed how much people moan about them? 
They get a bad rap. 
If you think about it, the English language has written into it negative associations towards the clouds. 
Someone who's down or depressed, they're under a cloud. 
And when there's bad news in store, there's a cloud on the horizon. 
I saw an article the other day. 
It was about problems with computer processing over the Internet. 
"" A cloud over the cloud, "" was the headline. 
It seems like they're everyone's default doom-and-gloom metaphor. 
But I think they're beautiful, don't you? 
It's just that their beauty is missed because they're so omnipresent, so, I don't know, commonplace, that people don't notice them. 
And so people think of clouds as things that get in the way. 
They think of them as the annoying, frustrating obstructions, and then they rush off and do some blue-sky thinking. 
(Laughter) But most people, when you stop to ask them, will admit to harboring a strange sort of fondness for clouds. 
It's like a nostalgic fondness, and they make them think of their youth. 
Who here can't remember thinking, well, looking and finding shapes in the clouds when they were kids? 
You know, when you were masters of daydreaming? 
Aristophanes, the ancient Greek playwright, he described the clouds as the patron godesses of idle fellows two and a half thousand years ago, and you can see what he means. 
It's just that these days, us adults seem reluctant to allow ourselves the indulgence of just allowing our imaginations to drift along in the breeze, and I think that's a pity. 
I think we should perhaps do a bit more of it. 
I think we should be a bit more willing, perhaps, to look at the beautiful sight of the sunlight bursting out from behind the clouds and go, "" Wait a minute, that's two cats dancing the salsa! "" (Laughter) (Applause) Or seeing the big, white, puffy one up there over the shopping center looks like the Abominable Snowman going to rob a bank. (Laughter) 
They're like nature's version of those inkblot images, you know, that shrinks used to show their patients in the '60s, and I think if you consider the shapes you see in the clouds, you'll save money on psychoanalysis bills. 
Let's say you're in love. All right? 
And you look up and what do you see? 
Right? Or maybe the opposite. 
You've just been dumped by your partner, and everywhere you look, it's kissing couples. 
(Laughter) Perhaps you're having a moment of existential angst. 
You know, you're thinking about your own mortality. 
(Laughter) Or maybe you see a topless sunbather. (Laughter) 
What would that mean? 
What would that mean? I have no idea. 
But one thing I do know is this: The bad press that clouds get is totally unfair. 
I think we should stand up for them, which is why, a few years ago, I started the Cloud Appreciation Society. 
Tens of thousands of members now in almost 100 countries around the world. 
And all these photographs that I'm showing, they were sent in by members. 
And the society exists to remind people of this: Clouds are not something to moan about. 
Far from it. They are, in fact, the most diverse, evocative, poetic aspect of nature. 
I think, if you live with your head in the clouds every now and then, it helps you keep your feet on the ground. 
Let's start with this one. It's the cirrus cloud, named after the Latin for a lock of hair. 
It's composed entirely of ice crystals cascading from the upper reaches of the troposphere, and as these ice crystals fall, they pass through different layers with different winds and they speed up and slow down, giving the cloud these brush-stroked appearances, these brush-stroke forms known as fall streaks. 
And these winds up there can be very, very fierce. 
They can be 200 miles an hour, 300 miles an hour. 
These clouds are bombing along, but from all the way down here, they appear to be moving gracefully, slowly, like most clouds. 
And so to tune into the clouds is to slow down, to calm down. 
It's like a bit of everyday meditation. 
Those are common clouds. 
What about rarer ones, like the lenticularis, the UFO-shaped lenticularis cloud? 
These clouds form in the region of mountains. 
When the wind passes, rises to pass over the mountain, it can take on a wave-like path in the lee of the peak, with these clouds hovering at the crest of these invisible standing waves of air, these flying saucer-like forms, and some of the early black-and-white UFO photos are in fact lenticularis clouds. It's true. 
A little rarer are the fallstreak holes. All right? 
This is when a layer is made up of very, very cold water droplets, and in one region they start to freeze, and this freezing sets off a chain reaction which spreads outwards with the ice crystals cascading and falling down below, giving the appearance of jellyfish tendrils down below. 
Rarer still, the Kelvin – Helmholtz cloud. 
Not a very snappy name. Needs a rebrand. 
This looks like a series of breaking waves, and it's caused by shearing winds — the wind above the cloud layer and below the cloud layer differ significantly, and in the middle, in between, you get this undulating of the air, and if the difference in those speeds is just right, the tops of the undulations curl over in these beautiful breaking wave-like vortices. 
All right. Those are rarer clouds than the cirrus, but they're not that rare. 
If you look up, and you pay attention to the sky, you'll see them sooner or later, maybe not quite as dramatic as these, but you'll see them. 
Clouds are the most egalitarian of nature's displays, because we all have a good, fantastic view of the sky. 
And these clouds, these rarer clouds, remind us that the exotic can be found in the everyday. 
Nothing is more nourishing, more stimulating to an active, inquiring mind than being surprised, being amazed. It's why we're all here at TED, right? 
But you don't need to rush off away from the familiar, across the world to be surprised. 
You just need to step outside, pay attention to what's so commonplace, so everyday, so mundane that everybody else misses it. 
One cloud that people rarely miss is this one: the cumulonimbus storm cloud. 
It's what's produces thunder and lightning and hail. 
These clouds spread out at the top in this enormous anvil fashion stretching 10 miles up into the atmosphere. 
They are an expression of the majestic architecture of our atmosphere. 
But from down below, they are the embodiment of the powerful, elemental force and power that drives our atmosphere. 
To be there is to be connected in the driving rain and the hail, to feel connected to our atmosphere. 
It's to be reminded that we are creatures that inhabit this ocean of air. 
We don't live beneath the sky. We live within it. 
And that connection, that visceral connection to our atmosphere feels to me like an antidote. 
It's an antidote to the growing tendency we have to feel that we can really ever experience life by watching it on a computer screen, you know, when we're in a wi-fi zone. 
But the one cloud that best expresses why cloudspotting is more valuable today than ever is this one, the cumulus cloud. 
Right? It forms on a sunny day. 
If you close your eyes and think of a cloud, it's probably one of these that comes to mind. 
All those cloud shapes at the beginning, those were cumulus clouds. 
The sharp, crisp outlines of this formation make it the best one for finding shapes in. 
And it reminds us of the aimless nature of cloudspotting, what an aimless activity it is. 
You're not going to change the world by lying on your back and gazing up at the sky, are you? 
It's pointless. It's a pointless activity, which is precisely why it's so important. 
The digital world conspires to make us feel eternally busy, perpetually busy. 
You know, when you're not dealing with the traditional pressures of earning a living and putting food on the table, raising a family, writing thank you letters, you have to now contend with answering a mountain of unanswered emails, updating a Facebook page, feeding your Twitter feed. 
And cloudspotting legitimizes doing nothing. 
(Laughter) And sometimes we need — (Applause) Sometimes we need excuses to do nothing. 
We need to be reminded by these patron goddesses of idle fellows that slowing down and being in the present, not thinking about what you've got to do and what you should have done, but just being here, letting your imagination lift from the everyday concerns down here and just being in the present, it's good for you, and it's good for the way you feel. 
It's good for your ideas. It's good for your creativity. 
It's good for your soul. 
So keep looking up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and always remember to live life with your head in the clouds. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

The word concussion evokes a fear these days more so than it ever has, and I know this personally. 
I played 10 years of football, was struck in the head thousands of times. 
And I have to tell you, though, what was much worse than that was a pair of bike accidents I had where I suffered concussions, and I'm still dealing with the effects of the most recent one today as I stand in front of you. 
There is a fear around concussion that does have some evidence behind it. 
There is information that a repeated history of concussion can lead to early dementia, such as Alzheimer's, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. 
That was the subject of the Will Smith movie "" Concussion. "" And so everybody is caught up in football and what they see in the military, but you may not know that bike riding is the leading cause of concussion for kids, sports-related concussion, that is. 
And so another thing that I should tell you that you may not know is that the helmets that are worn in bicycling and football and many activities, they're not designed or tested for how well they can protect your children against concussion. 
They're in fact designed and tested for their ability to protect against skull fracture. 
And so I get this question all the time from parents, and they ask me, "Would you let your own child play football?" 
Or, "" Should I let my child play soccer? "" And I think that as a field, we're a long way from giving an answer with any kind of confidence there. 
So I look at that question from a bit of a different lens, and I want to know, how can we prevent concussion? 
Is that even possible? 
And most experts think that it's not, but the work that we're doing in my lab is starting to reveal more of the details around concussion so that we can have a better understanding. 
The reason we're able to prevent skull fracture with helmets is because it's pretty simple. We know how it works. 
Concussion has been much more of a mystery. 
So to give you a sense of what might be happening in a concussion, I want to show you the video here that you see when you type into Google, "What is a concussion?" 
The CDC website comes up, and this video essentially tells the whole story. 
What you see is the head moves forward, the brain lags behind, then the brain catches up and smashes into the skull. 
It rebounds off the skull and then proceeds to run into the other side of the skull. 
And what you'll notice is highlighted in this video from the CDC, which I'll note was funded by the NFL, is that the outer surface of the brain, where it was to have smashed into the skull, looks like it's been damaged or injured, so it's on the outer surface of the brain. 
And what I'd like to do with this video is to tell you that there are some aspects that are probably right, indicative of what the scientists think happens with concussion, but there's probably more that's wrong with this video. 
So one thing that I do agree with, and I think most experts would, is that the brain does have these dynamics. 
It does lag behind the skull and then catch up and move back and forth and oscillate. 
That we think is true. 
However, the amount of motion you see in the brain in this video is probably not right at all. 
There's very little room in the cranial vault, only a few millimeters, and it's filled entirely with cerebral spinal fluid, which acts as a protective layer. 
And so the brain as a whole probably moves very little inside the skull. 
The other problem with this video is that the brain is shown as a kind of rigid whole as it moves around, and that's not true either. 
Your brain is one of the softest substances in your body, and you can think of it kind of like jello. 
So as your head is moving back and forth, your brain is twisting and turning and contorting, and the tissue is getting stretched. 
And so most experts, I think, would agree that concussion is not likely to be something that's happening on this outer surface of the brain, but rather it's something that's much deeper towards the center of the brain. 
Now, the way that we're approaching this problem to try to understand the mechanisms of concussion and to figure out if we can prevent it is we are using a device like this. 
It's a mouthguard. 
It has sensors in it that are essentially the same that are in your cell phone: accelerometers, gyroscopes, and when someone is struck in the head, it can tell you how their head moved at a thousand samples per second. 
The principle behind the mouthguard is this: it fits onto your teeth. 
Your teeth are one of the hardest substances in your body. 
So it rigidly couples to your skull and gives you the most precise possible measurement of how the skull moves. 
People have tried other approaches, with helmets. 
We've looked at other sensors that go on your skin, and they all simply move around too much, and so we found that this is the only reliable way to take a good measurement. 
So now that we've got this device, we can go beyond studying cadavers, because you can only learn so much about concussion from studying a cadaver, and we want to learn and study live humans. 
So where can we find a group of willing volunteers to go out and smash their heads into each other on a regular basis and sustain concussion? 
Well, I was one of them, and it's your local friendly Stanford football team. 
So this is our laboratory, and I want to show you the first concussion we measured with this device. 
One of the things that I should point out is the device has this gyroscope in it, and that allows you to measure the rotation of the head. 
Most experts think that that's the critical factor that might start to tell us what is happening in concussion. 
So please watch this video. 
Announcer: Cougars bring extra people late, but Luck has time, and Winslow is crushed. 
I hope he's all right. 
(Audience roars) Top of your screen, you'll see him come on just this little post route, get separation, safety. 
Here it comes at you in real speed. You'll hear this. 
The hit delivered by — David Camarillo: Sorry, three times is probably a little excessive there. 
But you get the idea. 
So when you look at just the film here, pretty much the only thing you can see is he got hit really hard and he was hurt. 
But when we extract the data out of the mouthguard that he was wearing, we can see much more detail, much richer information. 
And one of the things that we noticed here is that he was struck in the lower left side of his face mask. 
And so that did something first that was a little counterintuitive. 
His head did not move to the right. 
In fact, it rotated first to the left. 
Then as the neck began to compress, the force of the blow caused it to whip back to the right. 
So this left-right motion was sort of a whiplash-type phenomenon, and we think that is probably what led to the brain injury. 
Now, this device is only limited in such that it can measure the skull motion, but what we really want to know is what's happening inside of the brain. 
So we collaborate with Svein Kleiven's group in Sweden. 
They've developed a finite element model of the brain. 
And so this is a simulation using the data from our mouthguard from the injury I just showed you, and what you see is the brain — this is a cross-section right in the front of the brain twisting and contorting as I mentioned. 
So you can see this doesn't look a lot like the CDC video. 
Now, the colors that you're looking at are how much the brain tissue is being stretched. 
And so the red is 50 percent. 
That means the brain has been stretched to 50 percent of its original length, the tissue in that particular area. 
And the main thing I want to draw your attention to is this red spot. 
So the red spot is very close to the center of the brain, and relatively speaking, you don't see a lot of colors like that on the exterior surface as the CDC video showed. 
Now, to explain a little more detail about how we think concussion might be happening, one thing I should mention is that we and others have observed that a concussion is more likely when you're struck and your head rotates in this direction. 
This is more common in sports like football, but this seems to be more dangerous. So what might be happening there? 
Well, one thing that you'll notice in the human brain that is different than other animals is we have these two very large lobes. 
We have the right brain and the left brain. 
And the key thing to notice in this figure here is that right down the center of the right brain and the left brain there's a large fissure that goes deep into the brain. 
And in that fissure, what you can't see in this image, you'll have to trust me, there is a fibrous sheet of tissue. 
It's called the falx, and it runs from the front of your head all the way to the back of your head, and it's quite stiff. 
And so what that allows for is when you're struck and your head rotates in this left-right direction, forces can rapidly transmit right down to the center of your brain. 
Now, what's there at the bottom of this fissure? 
It's the wiring of your brain, and in fact this red bundle here at the bottom of that fissure is the single largest fiber bundle that is the wiring that connects the right and left sides of your brain. 
It's called the corpus callosum. 
And we think that this might be one of the most common mechanisms of concussion, and as the forces move down, they strike the corpus callosum, it causes a dissociation between your right and your left brain and could explain some of the symptoms of concussion. 
This finding is also consistent of what we've seen in this brain disease that I mentioned, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. 
So this is an image of a middle-aged ex-professional football player, and the thing that I want to point out is if you look at the corpus callosum, and I'll page back here so you can see the size of a normal corpus callosum and the size of the person here who has chronic traumatic encephalopathy, it is greatly atrophied. 
And the same goes for all of the space in the ventricles. 
These ventricles are much larger. 
And so all of this tissue near the center of the brain has died off over time. 
So what we're learning is indeed consistent. 
Now, there is some good news here, and I hope to give you a sense of hope by the end of this talk. 
One of the things that we've noticed, specifically about this mechanism of injury, is although there's a rapid transmission of the forces down this fissure, it still takes a defined amount of time. 
And what we think is that if we can slow the head down just enough so that the brain does not lag behind the skull but instead it moves in synchrony with the skull, then we might be able to prevent this mechanism of concussion. 
So how can we slow the head down? 
(Laughter) A gigantic helmet. 
So with more space, you have more time, and this is a bit of a joke, but some of you may have seen this. 
This is bubble soccer, and it's a real sport. 
In fact, I saw some young adults playing this sport down the street from my house the other day, and as far as I know there have been no reported concussions. 
(Laughter) But in all seriousness, this principle does work, but this has gone too far. 
This isn't something that's practical for bike riding or playing football. 
And so we are collaborating with a company in Sweden called Hövding. 
Some of you may have seen their work, and they're using the same principle of air to give you some extra space to prevent concussion. 
Kids, don't try this at home please. 
This stuntman does not have a helmet. 
He instead has a neck collar, and this neck collar has sensors in it, the same type of sensors that are in our mouthguard, and it detects when he's likely to have a fall, and there's an airbag that explodes and triggers, the same way that an airbag works in your car, essentially. 
And in the experiments we've done in my lab with their device, we found that it can greatly reduce the risk of concussion in some scenarios compared to a normal bicycle helmet. 
So it's a pretty exciting development. 
But in order for us to actually realize the benefits of technology that can prevent concussion, it needs to meet regulations. 
That's a reality. 
And this device is for sale in Europe but is not for sale in the US, and probably won't be any time soon. 
So I wanted to tell you why. 
There are some good reasons and then there are some not so good reasons. 
Bike helmets are federally regulated. 
The Consumer Product Safety Commission has been given jurisdiction to approve any bike helmet for sale, and this is the test they use. 
This is back to what I was telling you at the beginning about skull fracture. 
That's what this test is for. 
And that's an important thing to do. 
It can save your life, but it's not sufficient, I would say. 
So for example, one thing this test doesn't evaluate is it doesn't tell you is that airbag going to trigger at the right time and place, and not trigger when it doesn't need to? 
Similarly, it's not going to tell you is this helmet likely to prevent concussion or not? 
And if you look at football helmets, which aren't regulated, they still have a very similar test. 
They're not regulated by the government, anyway. 
They have an industry body, which is the way most industries work. 
But this industry body, I can tell you, has been quite resistant to updating their standards. 
So in my lab, we are working on not only the mechanism of concussion, but we want to understand how can we have better test standards? 
And we hope that the government can use this type of information to encourage innovation by letting consumers know how protected are you with a given helmet. 
And I want to bring this back finally to the original question I asked, which is, would I feel comfortable letting my child play football or ride a bicycle? 
And this might be just a result of my own traumatic experience. 
I'm much more nervous about my daughter, Rose, riding a bicycle. 
So she's a year and a half old, and she's already, well, wants to anyway, race down the streets of San Francisco. 
This is the bottom of one of these streets. 
And so my personal goal is to — and I believe this is possible — is to further develop these technologies, and in fact, we're working on something in my lab in particular that really makes optimal use of the given space of a helmet. 
And I am confident that we will be able to, before she's ready to ride a two-wheeler, have something available that can in fact really reduce the risk of concussion and comply with regulatory bodies. 
And so what I'd like to do — and I know that this is for some of you of more immediate nature, I've got a couple years here — is to be able to tell parents and grandparents when I'm asked, it is safe and healthy for your children to engage in these activities. 
And I'm very fortunate to have a wonderful team at Stanford that's working hard on this. 
So I hope to come back in a few years with the final story, but for now I will tell you, please don't just be afraid when you hear the word concussion. 
There is hope. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I'm a computer science professor, and my area of expertise is computer and information security. 
When I was in graduate school, I had the opportunity to overhear my grandmother describing to one of her fellow senior citizens what I did for a living. 
Apparently, I was in charge of making sure that no one stole the computers from the university. (Laughter) And, you know, that's a perfectly reasonable thing for her to think, because I told her I was working in computer security, and it was interesting to get her perspective. 
But that's not the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard anyone say about my work. 
The most ridiculous thing I ever heard is, I was at a dinner party, and a woman heard that I work in computer security, and she asked me if — she said her computer had been infected by a virus, and she was very concerned that she might get sick from it, that she could get this virus. (Laughter) And I'm not a doctor, but I reassured her that it was very, very unlikely that this would happen, but if she felt more comfortable, she could be free to use latex gloves when she was on the computer, and there would be no harm whatsoever in that. 
I'm going to get back to this notion of being able to get a virus from your computer, in a serious way. 
What I'm going to talk to you about today are some hacks, some real world cyberattacks that people in my community, the academic research community, have performed, which I don't think most people know about, and I think they're very interesting and scary, and this talk is kind of a greatest hits of the academic security community's hacks. 
None of the work is my work. It's all work that my colleagues have done, and I actually asked them for their slides and incorporated them into this talk. 
So the first one I'm going to talk about are implanted medical devices. 
Now medical devices have come a long way technologically. 
You can see in 1926 the first pacemaker was invented. 
1960, the first internal pacemaker was implanted, hopefully a little smaller than that one that you see there, and the technology has continued to move forward. 
In 2006, we hit an important milestone from the perspective of computer security. 
And why do I say that? 
Because that's when implanted devices inside of people started to have networking capabilities. 
One thing that brings us close to home is we look at Dick Cheney's device, he had a device that pumped blood from an aorta to another part of the heart, and as you can see at the bottom there, it was controlled by a computer controller, and if you ever thought that software liability was very important, get one of these inside of you. 
Now what a research team did was they got their hands on what's called an ICD. 
This is a defibrillator, and this is a device that goes into a person to control their heart rhythm, and these have saved many lives. 
Well, in order to not have to open up the person every time you want to reprogram their device or do some diagnostics on it, they made the thing be able to communicate wirelessly, and what this research team did is they reverse engineered the wireless protocol, and they built the device you see pictured here, with a little antenna, that could talk the protocol to the device, and thus control it. 
In order to make their experience real — they were unable to find any volunteers, and so they went and they got some ground beef and some bacon and they wrapped it all up to about the size of a human being's area where the device would go, and they stuck the device inside it to perform their experiment somewhat realistically. 
They launched many, many successful attacks. 
One that I'll highlight here is changing the patient's name. 
I don't know why you would want to do that, but I sure wouldn't want that done to me. 
And they were able to change therapies, including disabling the device — and this is with a real, commercial, off-the-shelf device — simply by performing reverse engineering and sending wireless signals to it. 
There was a piece on NPR that some of these ICDs could actually have their performance disrupted simply by holding a pair of headphones onto them. 
Now, wireless and the Internet can improve health care greatly. 
There's several examples up on the screen of situations where doctors are looking to implant devices inside of people, and all of these devices now, it's standard that they communicate wirelessly, and I think this is great, but without a full understanding of trustworthy computing, and without understanding what attackers can do and the security risks from the beginning, there's a lot of danger in this. 
Okay, let me shift gears and show you another target. 
I'm going to show you a few different targets like this, and that's my talk. So we'll look at automobiles. 
This is a car, and it has a lot of components, a lot of electronics in it today. 
In fact, it's got many, many different computers inside of it, more Pentiums than my lab did when I was in college, and they're connected by a wired network. 
There's also a wireless network in the car, which can be reached from many different ways. 
So there's Bluetooth, there's the FM and XM radio, there's actually wi-fi, there's sensors in the wheels that wirelessly communicate the tire pressure to a controller on board. 
The modern car is a sophisticated multi-computer device. 
And what happens if somebody wanted to attack this? 
Well, that's what the researchers that I'm going to talk about today did. 
They basically stuck an attacker on the wired network and on the wireless network. 
Now, they have two areas they can attack. 
One is short-range wireless, where you can actually communicate with the device from nearby, either through Bluetooth or wi-fi, and the other is long-range, where you can communicate with the car through the cellular network, or through one of the radio stations. 
Think about it. When a car receives a radio signal, it's processed by software. 
That software has to receive and decode the radio signal, and then figure out what to do with it, even if it's just music that it needs to play on the radio, and that software that does that decoding, if it has any bugs in it, could create a vulnerability for somebody to hack the car. 
The way that the researchers did this work is, they read the software in the computer chips that were in the car, and then they used sophisticated reverse engineering tools to figure out what that software did, and then they found vulnerabilities in that software, and then they built exploits to exploit those. 
They actually carried out their attack in real life. 
They bought two cars, and I guess they have better budgets than I do. 
The first threat model was to see what someone could do if an attacker actually got access to the internal network on the car. 
Okay, so think of that as, someone gets to go to your car, they get to mess around with it, and then they leave, and now, what kind of trouble are you in? 
The other threat model is that they contact you in real time over one of the wireless networks like the cellular, or something like that, never having actually gotten physical access to your car. 
This is what their setup looks like for the first model, where you get to have access to the car. 
They put a laptop, and they connected to the diagnostic unit on the in-car network, and they did all kinds of silly things, like here's a picture of the speedometer showing 140 miles an hour when the car's in park. 
Once you have control of the car's computers, you can do anything. 
Now you might say, "" Okay, that's silly. "" Well, what if you make the car always say it's going 20 miles an hour slower than it's actually going? 
You might produce a lot of speeding tickets. 
Then they went out to an abandoned airstrip with two cars, the target victim car and the chase car, and they launched a bunch of other attacks. 
One of the things they were able to do from the chase car is apply the brakes on the other car, simply by hacking the computer. 
They were able to disable the brakes. 
They also were able to install malware that wouldn't kick in and wouldn't trigger until the car was doing something like going over 20 miles an hour, or something like that. 
The results are astonishing, and when they gave this talk, even though they gave this talk at a conference to a bunch of computer security researchers, everybody was gasping. 
They were able to take over a bunch of critical computers inside the car: the brakes computer, the lighting computer, the engine, the dash, the radio, etc., and they were able to perform these on real commercial cars that they purchased using the radio network. 
They were able to compromise every single one of the pieces of software that controlled every single one of the wireless capabilities of the car. 
All of these were implemented successfully. 
How would you steal a car in this model? 
Well, you compromise the car by a buffer overflow of vulnerability in the software, something like that. 
You use the GPS in the car to locate it. 
You remotely unlock the doors through the computer that controls that, start the engine, bypass anti-theft, and you've got yourself a car. 
Surveillance was really interesting. 
The authors of the study have a video where they show themselves taking over a car and then turning on the microphone in the car, and listening in on the car while tracking it via GPS on a map, and so that's something that the drivers of the car would never know was happening. 
Am I scaring you yet? 
I've got a few more of these interesting ones. 
These are ones where I went to a conference, and my mind was just blown, and I said, "I have to share this with other people." 
This was Fabian Monrose's lab at the University of North Carolina, and what they did was something intuitive once you see it, but kind of surprising. 
They videotaped people on a bus, and then they post-processed the video. 
What you see here in number one is a reflection in somebody's glasses of the smartphone that they're typing in. 
They wrote software to stabilize — even though they were on a bus and maybe someone's holding their phone at an angle — to stabilize the phone, process it, and you may know on your smartphone, when you type a password, the keys pop out a little bit, and they were able to use that to reconstruct what the person was typing, and had a language model for detecting typing. 
What was interesting is, by videotaping on a bus, they were able to produce exactly what people on their smartphones were typing, and then they had a surprising result, which is that their software had not only done it for their target, but other people who accidentally happened to be in the picture, they were able to produce what those people had been typing, and that was kind of an accidental artifact of what their software was doing. 
I'll show you two more. One is P25 radios. 
P25 radios are used by law enforcement and all kinds of government agencies and people in combat to communicate, and there's an encryption option on these phones. 
This is what the phone looks like. It's not really a phone. 
It's more of a two-way radio. 
Motorola makes the most widely used one, and you can see that they're used by Secret Service, they're used in combat, it's a very, very common standard in the U.S. and elsewhere. 
So one question the researchers asked themselves is, could you block this thing, right? 
Could you run a denial-of-service, because these are first responders? 
So, would a terrorist organization want to black out the ability of police and fire to communicate at an emergency? 
They found that there's this GirlTech device used for texting that happens to operate at the same exact frequency as the P25, and they built what they called My First Jammer. (Laughter) If you look closely at this device, it's got a switch for encryption or cleartext. 
Let me advance the slide, and now I'll go back. 
You see the difference? 
This is plain text. This is encrypted. 
There's one little dot that shows up on the screen, and one little tiny turn of the switch. 
And so the researchers asked themselves, "" I wonder how many times very secure, important, sensitive conversations are happening on these two-way radios where they forget to encrypt and they don't notice that they didn't encrypt? "" So they bought a scanner. These are perfectly legal and they run at the frequency of the P25, and what they did is they hopped around frequencies and they wrote software to listen in. 
If they found encrypted communication, they stayed on that channel and they wrote down, that's a channel that these people communicate in, these law enforcement agencies, and they went to 20 metropolitan areas and listened in on conversations that were happening at those frequencies. 
They found that in every metropolitan area, they would capture over 20 minutes a day of cleartext communication. 
And what kind of things were people talking about? 
Well, they found the names and information about confidential informants. They found information that was being recorded in wiretaps, a bunch of crimes that were being discussed, sensitive information. 
It was mostly law enforcement and criminal. 
They went and reported this to the law enforcement agencies, after anonymizing it, and the vulnerability here is simply the user interface wasn't good enough. If you're talking about something really secure and sensitive, it should be really clear to you that this conversation is encrypted. 
That one's pretty easy to fix. 
The last one I thought was really, really cool, and I just had to show it to you, it's probably not something that you're going to lose sleep over like the cars or the defibrillators, but it's stealing keystrokes. 
Now, we've all looked at smartphones upside down. 
Every security expert wants to hack a smartphone, and we tend to look at the USB port, the GPS for tracking, the camera, the microphone, but no one up till this point had looked at the accelerometer. 
The accelerometer is the thing that determines the vertical orientation of the smartphone. 
And so they had a simple setup. 
They put a smartphone next to a keyboard, and they had people type, and then their goal was to use the vibrations that were created by typing to measure the change in the accelerometer reading to determine what the person had been typing. 
Now, when they tried this on an iPhone 3GS, this is a graph of the perturbations that were created by the typing, and you can see that it's very difficult to tell when somebody was typing or what they were typing, but the iPhone 4 greatly improved the accelerometer, and so the same measurement produced this graph. 
Now that gave you a lot of information while someone was typing, and what they did then is used advanced artificial intelligence techniques called machine learning to have a training phase, and so they got most likely grad students to type in a whole lot of things, and to learn, to have the system use the machine learning tools that were available to learn what it is that the people were typing and to match that up with the measurements in the accelerometer. 
And then there's the attack phase, where you get somebody to type something in, you don't know what it was, but you use your model that you created in the training phase to figure out what they were typing. 
They had pretty good success. This is an article from the USA Today. 
They typed in, "" The Illinois Supreme Court has ruled that Rahm Emanuel is eligible to run for Mayor of Chicago "" — see, I tied it in to the last talk — "and ordered him to stay on the ballot." 
Now, the system is interesting, because it produced "" Illinois Supreme "" and then it wasn't sure. 
The model produced a bunch of options, and this is the beauty of some of the A.I. techniques, is that computers are good at some things, humans are good at other things, take the best of both and let the humans solve this one. 
Don't waste computer cycles. 
A human's not going to think it's the Supreme might. 
It's the Supreme Court, right? 
And so, together we're able to reproduce typing simply by measuring the accelerometer. 
Why does this matter? Well, in the Android platform, for example, the developers have a manifest where every device on there, the microphone, etc., has to register if you're going to use it so that hackers can't take over it, but nobody controls the accelerometer. 
So what's the point? You can leave your iPhone next to someone's keyboard, and just leave the room, and then later recover what they did, even without using the microphone. 
If someone is able to put malware on your iPhone, they could then maybe get the typing that you do whenever you put your iPhone next to your keyboard. 
There's several other notable attacks that unfortunately I don't have time to go into, but the one that I wanted to point out was a group from the University of Michigan which was able to take voting machines, the Sequoia AVC Edge DREs that were going to be used in New Jersey in the election that were left in a hallway, and put Pac-Man on it. 
So they ran the Pac-Man game. 
What does this all mean? 
Well, I think that society tends to adopt technology really quickly. I love the next coolest gadget. 
But it's very important, and these researchers are showing, that the developers of these things need to take security into account from the very beginning, and need to realize that they may have a threat model, but the attackers may not be nice enough to limit themselves to that threat model, and so you need to think outside of the box. 
What we can do is be aware that devices can be compromised, and anything that has software in it is going to be vulnerable. It's going to have bugs. 
Thank you very much. (Applause) 

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

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

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

I grew up in a very small village in Canada, and I'm an undiagnosed dyslexic. 
I had a really hard time in school. 
In fact, my mother told me eventually that I was the little kid in the village who cried all the way to school. 
I ran away. 
I left when I was 25 years old to go to Bali, and there I met my incredible wife, Cynthia, and together, over 20 years, we built an amazing jewelry business. 
It was a fairy tale, and then we retired. 
Then she took me to see a film that I really didn't want to see. 
It ruined my life — (Laughter) "" The Inconvenient Truth "" and Mr. Gore. 
I have four kids, and even if part of what he says is true, they're not going to have the life that I had. 
And I decided at that moment that I would spend the rest of my life doing whatever I could to improve their possibilities. 
So here's the world, and here we are in Bali. 
It's a tiny, little island — 60 miles by 90 miles. 
It has an intact Hindu culture. 
Cynthia and I were there. 
We had had a wonderful life there, and we decided to do something unusual. 
We decided to give back locally. 
And here it is: it's called the Green School. 
I know it doesn't look like a school, but it is something we decided to do, and it is extremely, extremely green. 
The classrooms have no walls. 
The teacher is writing on a bamboo blackboard. 
The desks are not square. 
At Green School, the children are smiling — an unusual thing for school, especially for me. 
And we practice holism. 
And for me it's just the idea that, if this little girl graduates as a whole person, chances are she'll demand a whole world — a whole world — to live on. 
Our children spend 181 days going to school in a box. 
The people that built my school also built the prison and the insane asylum out of the same materials. 
So if this gentleman had had a holistic education, would he be sitting there? 
Would he have had more possibilities in his life? 
The classrooms have natural light. 
They're beautiful. They're bamboo. 
The breeze passes through them. 
And when the natural breeze isn't enough, the kids deploy bubbles, but not the kind of bubbles you know. 
These bubbles are made from natural cotton and rubber from the rubber tree. 
So we basically turned the box into a bubble. 
And these kids know that painless climate control may not be part of their future. 
We pay the bill at the end of the month, but the people that are really going to pay the bill are our grandchildren. 
We have to teach the kids that the world is not indestructible. 
These kids did a little graffiti on their desks, and then they signed up for two extra courses. 
The first one was called sanding and the second one was called re-waxing. 
But since that happened, they own those desks. 
They know they can control their world. 
We're on the grid. We're not proud of it. 
But an amazing alternative energy company in Paris is taking us off the grid with solar. 
And this thing is the second vortex to be built in the world, in a two-and-a-half meter drop on a river. 
When the turbine drops in, it will produce 8,000 watts of electricity, day and night. 
And you know what these are. 
There's nowhere to flush. 
And as long as we're taking our waste and mixing it with a huge amount of water — you're all really smart, just do the math. 
How many people times how much water. 
There isn't enough water. 
These are compost toilets, and nobody at the school wanted to know about them, especially the principal. 
And they work. People use them. People are okay. 
It's something you should think about doing. 
Not many things didn't work. 
The beautiful canvas and rubber skylights got eaten by the sun in six months. 
We had to replace them with recyclable plastic. 
The teachers dragged giant PVC whiteboards into the classrooms. 
So we had some good ideas: we took old automobile windshields, put paper behind them and created the first alternative to the whiteboard. 
Green School sits in south-central Bali, and it's on 20 acres of rolling garden. 
There's an amazing river traveling through it, and you can see there how we manage to get across the river. 
I met a father the other day; he looked a little crazed. 
I said, "" Welcome to Green School. "" He said, "" I've been on an airplane for 24 hours. "" I asked him, "" Why? "" He said, "" I had a dream once about a green school, and I saw a picture of this green school, I got on an airplane. 
In August I'm bringing my sons. "" This was a great thing. 
But more than that, people are building green houses around Green School, so their kids can walk to school on the paths. 
And people are bringing their green industries, hopefully their green restaurants, to the Green School. 
It's becoming a community. 
It's becoming a green model. 
We had to look at everything. 
No petrochemicals in the pavement. 
No pavement. 
These are volcanic stones laid by hand. 
There are no sidewalks. 
The sidewalks are gravel. They flood when it rains, but they're green. 
This is the school buffalo. 
He's planning to eat that fence for dinner. 
All the fences at Green School are green. 
And when the kindergarten kids recently moved their gate, they found out the fence was made out of tapioca. 
They took the tapioca roots up to the kitchen, sliced them thinly and made delicious chips. 
Landscaping. 
We manage to keep the garden that was there running right up to the edge of each of the classrooms. 
We dropped them gently in. 
We made space for these guys who are Bali's last black pigs. 
And the school cow is trying to figure out how to replace the lawnmower on the playing field. 
These young ladies are living in a rice culture, but they know something that few people know in a rice culture. 
They know how to plant organic rice, they know how to look after it, they know how to harvest and they know how to cook it. 
They're part of the rice cycle and these skills will be valuable for them in their future. 
This young man is picking organic vegetables. 
We feed 400 people lunch every day and it's not a normal lunch. There's no gas. 
Local Balinese women cook the food on sawdust burners using secrets that only their grandmothers know. 
The food is incredible. 
Green School is a place of pioneers, local and global. 
And it's a kind of microcosm of the globalized world. 
The kids are from 25 countries. 
When I see them together, I know that they're working out how to live in the future. 
Green School is going into its third year with 160 children. 
It's a school where you do learn reading — one of my favorites — writing — I was bad at it — arithmetic. 
But you also learn other things. 
You learn bamboo building. 
You practice ancient Balinese arts. 
This is called mud wrestling in the rice fields. 
The kids love it. 
The mothers aren't quite convinced. 
(Laughter) We've done a lot of outrageous things in our lives, and we said, okay, local, what does "" local "" mean? 
Local means that 20 percent of the population of the school has to be Balinese, and this was a really big commitment. 
And we were right. 
And people are coming forward from all over the world to support the Balinese Scholarship Fund, because these kids will be Bali's next green leaders. 
The teachers are as diverse as the student body, and the amazing thing is that volunteers are popping up. 
A man came from Java with a new kind of organic agriculture. 
A woman came from Africa with music. 
And together these volunteers and the teachers are deeply committed to creating a new generation of global, green leaders. 
The Green School effect — we don't know what it is. 
We need someone to come and study it. 
But what's happening, our learning-different kids — dyslexic — we've renamed them prolexic — are doing well in these beautiful, beautiful classrooms. 
And all the kids are thriving. 
And how did we do all this? 
On giant grass. 
It's bamboo. 
It comes out of the ground like a train. 
It grows as high as a coconut tree in two months and three years later it can be harvested to build buildings like this. 
It's as strong and dense as teak and it will hold up any roof. 
When the architects came, they brought us these things, and you've probably seen things like this. 
The yellow box was called the administration complex. 
(Laughter) We squashed it, we rethought it, but mainly we renamed it "the heart of school," and that changed everything forever. 
It's a double helix. 
It has administrators in it and many, many other things. 
And the problem of building it — when the Balinese workers saw long reams of plans, they looked at them and said, "" What's this? "" So we built big models. 
We had them engineered by the engineers. 
And Balinese carpenters like this measured them with their bamboo rulers, selected the bamboo and built the buildings using age-old techniques, mostly by hand. 
It was chaos. 
And the Balinese carpenters want to be as modern as we do, so they use metal scaffolding to build the bamboo building and when the scaffolding came down, we realized that we had a cathedral, a cathedral to green, and a cathedral to green education. 
The heart of school has seven kilometers of bamboo in it. 
From the time the foundations were finished, in three months it had roofs and floors. 
It may not be the biggest bamboo building in the world, but many people believe that it's the most beautiful. 
Is this doable in your community? 
We believe it is. 
Green School is a model we built for the world. 
It's a model we built for Bali. 
And you just have to follow these simple, simple rules: be local, let the environment lead and think about how your grandchildren might build. 
So, Mr. Gore, thank you. 
You ruined my life, but you gave me an incredible future. 
And if you're interested in being involved in finishing Green School and building the next 50 around the world, please come and see us. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So, basically we have public leaders, public officials who are out of control; they are writing bills that are unintelligible, and out of these bills are going to come maybe 40,000 pages of regulations, total complexity, which has a dramatically negative impact on our life. 
If you're a veteran coming back from Iraq or Vietnam you face a blizzard of paperwork to get your benefits; if you're trying to get a small business loan, you face a blizzard of paperwork. 
What are we going to do about it? I define simplicity as a means to achieving clarity, transparency and empathy, building humanity into communications. 
I've been simplifying things for 30 years. 
I come out of the advertising and design business. 
My focus is understanding you people, and how you interact with the government to get your benefits, how you interact with corporations to decide whom you're going to do business with, and how you view brands. 
So, very quickly, when President Obama said, "" I don't see why we can't have a one-page, plain English consumer credit agreement. "" So, I locked myself in a room, figured out the content, organized the document, and wrote it in plain English. 
I've had this checked by the two top consumer credit lawyers in the country. 
This is a real thing. 
Now, I went one step further and said, "" Why do we have to stick with the stodgy lawyers and just have a paper document? Let's go online. "" And many people might need help in computation. 
Working with the Harvard Business School, you'll see this example when you talk about minimum payment: If you spent 62 dollars for a meal, the longer you take to pay out that loan, you see, over a period of time using the minimum payment it's 99 dollars and 17 cents. 
How about that? Do you think your bank is going to show that to people? 
But it's going to work. It's more effective than just computational aids. 
And what about terms like "" over the limit ""? 
Perhaps a stealth thing. 
Define it in context. Tell people what it means. 
When you put it in plain English, you almost force the institution to give the people a way, a default out of that, and not put themselves at risk. 
Plain English is about changing the content. 
And one of the things I'm most proud of is this agreement for IBM. 
It's a grid, it's a calendar. 
At such and such a date, IBM has responsibilities, you have responsibilities. 
Received very favorably by business. 
And there is some good news to report today. 
Each year, one in 10 taxpayers receives a notice from the IRS. 
There are 200 million letters that go out. 
Running through this typical letter that they had, I ran it through my simplicity lab, it's pretty unintelligible. 
All the parts of the document in red are not intelligible. 
We looked at doing over 1,000 letters that cover 70 percent of their transactions in plain English. 
They have been tested in the laboratory. 
When I run it through my lab, this heat-mapping shows everything is intelligible. 
And the IRS has introduced the program. 
(Applause) There are a couple of things going on right now that I want to bring to your attention. 
There is a lot of discussion now about a consumer financial protection agency, how to mandate simplicity. 
We see all this complexity. 
It's incumbent upon us, and this organization, I believe, to make clarity, transparency and empathy a national priority. 
There is no way that we should allow government to communicate the way they communicate. 
There is no way we should do business with companies that have agreements with stealth provisions and that are unintelligible. 
So, how are we going to change the world? 
Make clarity, transparency and simplicity a national priority. 
I thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Four years ago, I rowed solo across the Atlantic, and since then, I've done two out of three stages across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Hawaii and from Hawaii to Kiribati. 
And tomorrow, I'll be leaving this boat to fly back to Kiribati to continue with the third and final stage of my row across the Pacific. 
Cumulatively, I will have rowed over 8,000 miles, taken over three million oar strokes and spent more than 312 days alone on the ocean on a 23 foot rowboat. 
This has given me a very special relationship with the ocean. 
We have a bit of a love / hate thing going on. 
I feel a bit about it like I did about a very strict math teacher that I once had at school. 
I didn't always like her, but I did respect her, and she taught me a heck of a lot. 
So today I'd like to share with you some of my ocean adventures and tell you a little bit about what they've taught me, and how I think we can maybe take some of those lessons and apply them to this environmental challenge that we face right now. 
Now, some of you might be thinking, "" Hold on a minute. She doesn't look very much like an ocean rower. 
Isn't she meant to be about this tall and about this wide and maybe look a bit more like these guys? "" You'll notice, they've all got something that I don't. 
Well, I don't know what you're thinking, but I'm talking about the beards. (Laughter) And no matter how long I've spent on the ocean, I haven't yet managed to muster a decent beard, and I hope that it remains that way. 
For a long time, I didn't believe that I could have a big adventure. 
The story that I told myself was that adventurers looked like this. 
I didn't look the part. 
I thought there were them and there were us, and I was not one of them. 
So for 11 years, I conformed. 
I did what people from my kind of background were supposed to do. 
I was working in an office in London as a management consultant. 
And I think I knew from day one that it wasn't the right job for me. 
But that kind of conditioning just kept me there for so many years, until I reached my mid-30s and I thought, "" You know, I'm not getting any younger. 
I feel like I've got a purpose in this life, and I don't know what it is, but I'm pretty certain that management consultancy is not it. 
So, fast forward a few years. 
I'd gone through some changes. 
To try and answer that question of, "What am I supposed to be doing with my life?" 
I sat down one day and wrote two versions of my own obituary, the one that I wanted, a life of adventure, and the one that I was actually heading for which was a nice, normal, pleasant life, but it wasn't where I wanted to be by the end of my life. 
I wanted to live a life that I could be proud of. 
And I remember looking at these two versions of my obituary and thinking, "" Oh boy, I'm on totally the wrong track here. 
If I carry on living as I am now, I'm just not going to end up where I want to be in five years, or 10 years, or at the end of my life. "" I made a few changes, let go of some loose trappings of my old life, and through a bit of a leap of logic, decided to row across the Atlantic Ocean. 
(Laughter) The Atlantic Rowing Race runs from the Canaries to Antigua, it's about 3,000 miles, and it turned out to be the hardest thing I had ever done. 
Sure, I had wanted to get outside of my comfort zone, but what I'd sort of failed to notice was that getting out of your comfort zone is, by definition, extremely uncomfortable. 
And my timing was not great either: 2005, when I did the Atlantic, was the year of Hurricane Katrina. 
There were more tropical storms in the North Atlantic than ever before, since records began. 
And pretty early on, those storms started making their presence known. 
All four of my oars broke before I reached halfway across. 
Oars are not supposed to look like this. 
But what can you do? You're in the middle of the ocean. 
Oars are your only means of propulsion. 
So I just had to look around the boat and figure out what I was going to use to fix up these oars so that I could carry on. 
So I found a boat hook and my trusty duct tape and splintered the boat hook to the oars to reinforce it. 
Then, when that gave out, I sawed the wheel axles off my spare rowing seat and used those. 
And then when those gave out, I cannibalized one of the broken oars. 
I'd never been very good at fixing stuff when I was living my old life, but it's amazing how resourceful you can become when you're in the middle of the ocean and there's only one way to get to the other side. 
And the oars kind of became a symbol of just in how many ways I went beyond what I thought were my limits. 
I suffered from tendinitis on my shoulders and saltwater sores on my bottom. 
I really struggled psychologically, totally overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge, realizing that, if I carried on moving at two miles an hour, 3,000 miles was going to take me a very, very long time. 
There were so many times when I thought I'd hit that limit, but had no choice but to just carry on and try and figure out how I was going to get to the other side without driving myself crazy. 
And eventually after 103 days at sea, I arrived in Antigua. 
I don't think I've ever felt so happy in my entire life. 
It was a bit like finishing a marathon and getting out of solitary confinement and winning an Oscar all rolled into one. 
I was euphoric. 
And to see all the people coming out to greet me and standing along the cliff tops and clapping and cheering, I just felt like a movie star. 
It was absolutely wonderful. 
And I really learned then that, the bigger the challenge, the bigger the sense of achievement when you get to the end of it. 
So this might be a good moment to take a quick time-out to answer a few FAQs about ocean rowing that might be going through your mind. 
Number one that I get asked: What do you eat? 
A few freeze-dried meals, but mostly I try and eat much more unprocessed foods. 
So I grow my own beansprouts. 
I eat fruits and nut bars, a lot of nuts. 
And generally arrive about 30 pounds lighter at the other end. 
Question number two: How do you sleep? 
With my eyes shut. Ha-ha. 
I suppose what you mean is: What happens to the boat while I'm sleeping? 
Well, I plan my route so that I'm drifting with the winds and the currents while I'm sleeping. 
On a good night, I think my best ever was 11 miles in the right direction. 
Worst ever, 13 miles in the wrong direction. 
That's a bad day at the office. 
What do I wear? 
Mostly, a baseball cap, rowing gloves and a smile — or a frown, depending on whether I went backwards overnight — and lots of sun lotion. 
Do I have a chase boat? 
No I don't. I'm totally self-supporting out there. 
I don't see anybody for the whole time that I'm at sea, generally. 
And finally: Am I crazy? 
Well, I leave that one up to you to judge. 
So, how do you top rowing across the Atlantic? 
Well, naturally, you decide to row across the Pacific. 
Well, I thought the Atlantic was big, but the Pacific is really, really big. 
I think we tend to do it a little bit of a disservice in our usual maps. 
I don't know for sure that the Brits invented this particular view of the world, but I suspect we might have done so: we are right in the middle, and we've cut the Pacific in half and flung it to the far corners of the world. 
Whereas if you look in Google Earth, this is how the Pacific looks. 
It pretty much covers half the planet. 
You can just see a little bit of North America up here and a sliver of Australia down there. 
It is really big — 65 million square miles — and to row in a straight line across it would be about 8,000 miles. 
Unfortunately, ocean rowboats very rarely go in a straight line. 
By the time I get to Australia, if I get to Australia, I will have rowed probably nine or 10,000 miles in all. 
So, because nobody in their straight mind would row straight past Hawaii without dropping in, I decided to cut this very big undertaking into three segments. 
The first attempt didn't go so well. 
In 2007, I did a rather involuntary capsize drill three times in 24 hours. 
A bit like being in a washing machine. 
Boat got a bit dinged up, so did I. 
I blogged about it. Unfortunately, somebody with a bit of a hero complex decided that this damsel was in distress and needed saving. 
The first I knew about this was when the Coast Guard plane turned up overhead. 
I tried to tell them to go away. 
We had a bit of a battle of wills. 
I lost and got airlifted. 
Awful, really awful. 
It was one of the worst feelings of my life, as I was lifted up on that winch line into the helicopter and looked down at my trusty little boat rolling around in the 20 foot waves and wondering if I would ever see her again. 
So I had to launch a very expensive salvage operation and then wait another nine months before I could get back out onto the ocean again. 
But what do you do? 
Fall down nine times, get up 10. 
So, the following year, I set out and, fortunately, this time made it safely across to Hawaii. 
But it was not without misadventure. 
My watermaker broke, only the most important piece of kit that I have on the boat. 
Powered by my solar panels, it sucks in saltwater and turns it into freshwater. 
But it doesn't react very well to being immersed in ocean, which is what happened to it. 
Fortunately, help was at hand. 
There was another unusual boat out there at the same time, doing as I was doing, bringing awareness to the North Pacific Garbage Patch, that area in the North Pacific about twice the size of Texas, with an estimated 3.5 million tons of trash in it, circulating at the center of that North Pacific Gyre. 
So, to make the point, these guys had actually built their boat out of plastic trash, 15,000 empty water bottles latched together into two pontoons. 
They were going very slowly. 
Partly, they'd had a bit of a delay. 
They'd had to pull in at Catalina Island shortly after they left Long Beach because the lids of all the water bottles were coming undone, and they were starting to sink. 
So they'd had to pull in and do all the lids up. 
But, as I was approaching the end of my water reserves, luckily, our courses were converging. 
They were running out of food; I was running out of water. 
So we liaised by satellite phone and arranged to meet up. 
And it took about a week for us to actually gradually converge. 
I was doing a pathetically slow speed of about 1.3 knots, and they were doing only marginally less pathetic speed of about 1.4: it was like two snails in a mating dance. 
But, eventually, we did manage to meet up and Joel hopped overboard, caught us a beautiful, big mahi-mahi, which was the best food I'd had in, ooh, at least three months. 
Fortunately, the one that he caught that day was better than this one they caught a few weeks earlier. 
When they opened this one up, they found its stomach was full of plastic. 
And this is really bad news because plastic is not an inert substance. 
It leaches out chemicals into the flesh of the poor critter that ate it, and then we come along and eat that poor critter, and we get some of the toxins accumulating in our bodies as well. 
So there are very real implications for human health. 
I eventually made it to Hawaii still alive. 
And, the following year, set out on the second stage of the Pacific, from Hawaii down to Tarawa. 
And you'll notice something about Tarawa; it is very low-lying. 
It's that little green sliver on the horizon, which makes them very nervous about rising oceans. 
This is big trouble for these guys. 
They've got no points of land more than about six feet above sea level. 
And also, as an increase in extreme weather events due to climate change, they're expecting more waves to come in over the fringing reef, which will contaminate their fresh water supply. 
I had a meeting with the president there, who told me about his exit strategy for his country. 
He expects that within the next 50 years, the 100,000 people that live there will have to relocate to New Zealand or Australia. 
And that made me think about how would I feel if Britain was going to disappear under the waves; if the places where I'd been born and gone to school and got married, if all those places were just going to disappear forever. 
How, literally, ungrounded that would make me feel. 
Very shortly, I'll be setting out to try and get to Australia, and if I'm successful, I'll be the first woman ever to row solo all the way across the Pacific. 
And I try to use this to bring awareness to these environmental issues, to bring a human face to the ocean. 
If the Atlantic was about my inner journey, discovering my own capabilities, maybe the Pacific has been about my outer journey, figuring out how I can use my interesting career choice to be of service to the world, and to take some of those things that I've learned out there and apply them to the situation that humankind now finds itself in. 
I think there are probably three key points here. 
The first one is about the stories that we tell ourselves. 
For so long, I told myself that I couldn't have an adventure because I wasn't six foot tall and athletic and bearded. 
And then that story changed. 
I found out that people had rowed across oceans. 
I even met one of them and she was just about my size. 
So even though I didn't grow any taller, I didn't sprout a beard, something had changed: My interior dialogue had changed. 
At the moment, the story that we collectively tell ourselves is that we need all this stuff, that we need oil. 
But what about if we just change that story? 
We do have alternatives, and we have the power of free will to choose those alternatives, those sustainable ones, to create a greener future. 
The second point is about the accumulation of tiny actions. 
We might think that anything that we do as an individual is just a drop in the ocean, that it can't really make a difference. 
But it does. Generally, we haven't got ourselves into this mess through big disasters. 
Yes, there have been the Exxon Valdezes and the Chernobyls, but mostly it's been an accumulation of bad decisions by billions of individuals, day after day and year after year. 
And, by the same token, we can turn that tide. 
We can start making better, wiser, more sustainable decisions. 
And when we do that, we're not just one person. 
Anything that we do spreads ripples. 
Other people will see if you're in the supermarket line and you pull out your reusable grocery bag. 
Maybe if we all start doing this, we can make it socially unacceptable to say yes to plastic in the checkout line. 
That's just one example. 
This is a world-wide community. 
The other point: It's about taking responsibility. 
For so much of my life, I wanted something else to make me happy. 
I thought if I had the right house or the right car or the right man in my life, then I could be happy. 
But when I wrote that obituary exercise, I actually grew up a little bit in that moment and realized that I needed to create my own future. 
I couldn't just wait passively for happiness to come and find me. 
And I suppose I'm a selfish environmentalist. 
I plan on being around for a long time, and when I'm 90 years old, I want to be happy and healthy. 
And it's very difficult to be happy on a planet that's racked with famine and drought. 
It's very difficult to be healthy on a planet where we've poisoned the earth and the sea and the air. 
So, shortly, I'm going to be launching a new initiative called Eco-Heroes. 
And the idea here is that all our Eco-Heroes will log at least one green deed every day. 
It's meant to be a bit of a game. 
We're going to make an iPhone app out of it. 
We just want to try and create that awareness because, sure, changing a light bulb isn't going to change the world, but that attitude, that awareness that leads you to change the light bulb or take your reusable coffee mug, that is what could change the world. 
I really believe that we stand at a very important point in history. 
We have a choice. We've been blessed, or cursed, with free will. 
We can choose a greener future, and we can get there if we all pull together to take it one stroke at a time. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I want to share with you over the next 18 minutes a pretty incredible idea. 
Actually, it's a really big idea. 
But to get us started, I want to ask if everyone could just close your eyes for two seconds and try and think of a technology or a bit of science that you think has changed the world. 
Now I bet, in this audience, you're thinking of some really incredible technology, some stuff that I haven't even heard of, I'm absolutely sure. 
But I'm also sure, pretty sure, that absolutely nobody is thinking of this. 
This is a polio vaccine. 
And it's a great thing actually that nobody's had to think about it here today because it means that we can take this for granted. 
This is a great technology. 
We can take it completely for granted. 
But it wasn't always that way. 
Even here in California, if we were to go back just a few years, it was a very different story. 
People were terrified of this disease. 
They were terrified of polio, and it would cause public panic. 
And it was because of scenes like this. 
In this scene, people are living in an iron lung. 
These are people who were perfectly healthy two or three days before, and then two days later, they can no longer breathe, and this polio virus has paralyzed not only their arms and their legs, but also their breathing muscles. 
And they were going to spend the rest of their lives, usually, in this iron lung to breathe for them. 
This disease was terrifying. 
There was no cure, and there was no vaccine. 
The disease was so terrifying that the president of the United States launched an extraordinary national effort to find a way to stop it. 
Twenty years later, they succeeded and developed the polio vaccine. 
It was hailed as a scientific miracle in the late 1950s. 
Finally, a vaccine that could stop this awful disease, and here in the United States it had an incredible impact. 
As you can see, the virus stopped, and it stopped very, very fast. 
But this wasn't the case everywhere in the world. 
And it happened so fast in the United States, however, that even just last month Jon Stewart said this: (Video) Jon Stewart: Where is polio still active? 
Because I thought that had been eradicated in the way that smallpox had been eradicated. 
Bruce Aylward: Oops. Jon, polio's almost been eradicated. 
But the reality is that polio still exists today. 
We made this map for Jon to try to show him exactly where polio still exists. 
This is the picture. 
There's not very much left in the world. 
But the reason there's not very much left is because there's been an extraordinary public / private partnership working behind the scenes, almost unknown, I'm sure to most of you here today. 
It's been working for 20 years to try and eradicate this disease, and it's got it down to these few cases that you can see here on this graphic. 
But just last year, we had an incredible shock and realized that almost just isn't good enough with a virus like polio. 
And this is the reason: in two countries that hadn't had this disease for more than probably a decade, on opposite sides of the globe, there was suddenly terrible polio outbreaks. 
Hundreds of people were paralyzed. 
Hundreds of people died — children as well as adults. 
And in both cases, we were able to use genetic sequencing to look at the polio viruses, and we could tell these viruses were not from these countries. 
They had come from thousands of miles away. 
And in one case, it originated on another continent. 
And not only that, but when they came into these countries, then they got on commercial jetliners probably and they traveled even farther to other places like Russia, where, for the first time in over a decade last year, children were crippled and paralyzed by a disease that they had not seen for years. 
Now all of these outbreaks that I just showed you, these are under control now, and it looks like they'll probably stop very, very quickly. 
But the message was very clear. 
Polio is still a devastating, explosive disease. 
It's just happening in another part of the world. 
And our big idea is that the scientific miracle of this decade should be the complete eradication of poliomyelitis. 
So I want to tell you a little bit about what this partnership, the Polio Partnership, is trying to do. 
We're not trying to control polio. 
We're not trying to get it down to just a few cases, because this disease is like a root fire; it can explode again if you don't snuff it out completely. 
So what we're looking for is a permanent solution. 
We want a world in which every child, just like you guys, can take for granted a polio-free world. 
So we're looking for a permanent solution, and this is where we get lucky. 
This is one of the very few viruses in the world where there are big enough cracks in its armor that we can try to do something truly extraordinary. 
This virus can only survive in people. 
It can't live for a very long time in people. 
It doesn't survive in the environment hardly at all. 
And we've got pretty good vaccines, as I've just showed you. 
So we are trying to wipe out this virus completely. 
What the polio eradication program is trying to do is to kill the virus itself that causes polio everywhere on Earth. 
Now we don't have a great track record when it comes to doing something like this, to eradicating diseases. 
It's been tried six times in the last century, and it's been successful exactly once. 
And this is because disease eradication, it's still the venture capital of public health. 
The risks are massive, but the pay-off — economic, humanitarian, motivational — it's absolutely huge. 
One congressman here in the United States thinks that the entire investment that the U.S. put into smallpox eradication pays itself off every 26 days — in foregone treatment costs and vaccination costs. 
And if we can finish polio eradication, the poorest countries in the world are going to save over 50 billion dollars in the next 25 years alone. 
So those are the kind of stakes that we're after. 
But smallpox eradication was hard; it was very, very hard. 
And polio eradication, in many ways, is even tougher, and there's a few reasons for that. 
The first is that, when we started trying to eradicate polio about 20 years ago, more than twice as many countries were infected than had been when we started off with smallpox. 
And there were more than 10 times as many people living in these countries. 
So it was a massive effort. 
The second challenge we had was — in contrast to the smallpox vaccine, which was very stable, and a single dose protected you for life — the polio vaccine is incredibly fragile. 
It deteriorates so quickly in the tropics that we've had to put this special vaccine monitor on every single vial so that it will change very quickly when it's exposed to too much heat, and we can tell that it's not a good vaccine to use on a child — it's not potent; it's not going to protect them. 
Even then, kids need many doses of the vaccine. 
But the third challenge we have — and probably even bigger one, the biggest challenge — is that, in contrast to smallpox where you could always see your enemy — every single person almost who was infected with smallpox had this telltale rash. 
So you could get around the disease; you could vaccinate around the disease and cut it off. 
With polio it's almost completely different. 
The vast majority of people who are infected with the polio virus show absolutely no sign of the disease. 
So you can't see the enemy most of the time, and as a result, we've needed a very different approach to eradicate polio than what was done with smallpox. 
We've had to create one of the largest social movements in history. 
There's over 10 million people, probably 20 million people, largely volunteers, who have been working over the last 20 years in what has now been called the largest internationally-coordinated operation in peacetime. 
These people, these 20 million people, vaccinate over 500 million children every single year, multiple times at the peak of our operation. 
Now giving the polio vaccine is simple. 
It's just two drops, like that. 
But reaching 500 million people is much, much tougher. 
And these vaccinators, these volunteers, they have got to dive headlong into some of the toughest, densest urban slums in the world. 
They've got to trek under sweltering suns to some of the most remote, difficult to reach places in the world. 
And they also have to dodge bullets, because we have got to operate during shaky cease-fires and truces to try and vaccinate children, even in areas affected by conflict. 
One reporter who was watching our program in Somalia about five years ago — a place which has eradicated polio, not once, but twice, because they got reinfected. 
He was sitting outside of the road, watching one of these polio campaigns unfold, and a few months later he wrote: "This is foreign aid at its most heroic." 
And these heroes, they come from every walk of life, all sorts of backgrounds. 
But one of the most extraordinary is Rotary International. 
This is a group whose million-strong army of volunteers have been working to eradicate polio for over 20 years. 
They're right at the center of the whole thing. 
Now it took years to build up the infrastructure for polio eradication — more than 15 years, much longer than it should have — but once it was built, the results were striking. 
Within a couple of years, every country that started polio eradication rapidly eradicated all three of their polio viruses, with the exception of four countries that you see here. 
And in each of those, it was only part of the country. 
And then, by 1999, one of the three polio viruses that we were trying to eradicate had been completely eradicated worldwide — proof of concept. 
And then today, there's been a 99 percent reduction — greater than 99 percent reduction — in the number of children who are being paralyzed by this awful disease. 
When we started, over 20 years ago, 1,000 children were being paralyzed every single day by this virus. 
Last year, it was 1,000. 
And at the same time, the polio eradication program has been working to help with a lot of other areas. 
It's been working to help control pandemic flu, SARS for example. 
It's also tried to save children by doing other things — giving vitamin A drops, giving measles shots, giving bed nets against malaria even during some of these campaigns. 
But the most exciting thing that the polio eradication program has been doing has been to force us, the international community, to reach every single child, every single community, the most vulnerable people in the world, with the most basic of health services, irrespective of geography, poverty, culture and even conflict. 
So things were looking very exciting, and then about five years ago, this virus, this ancient virus, started to fight back. 
The first problem we ran into was that, in these last four countries, the strongholds of this virus, we just couldn't seem to get the virus rooted out. 
And then to make the matters even worse, the virus started to spread out of these four places, especially northern India and northern Nigeria, into much of Africa, Asia, and even into Europe, causing horrific outbreaks in places that had not seen this disease for decades. 
And then, in one of the most important, tenacious and toughest reservoirs of the polio virus in the world, we found that our vaccine was working half as well as it should have. 
In conditions like this, the vaccine just couldn't get the grip it needed to in the guts of these children and protect them the way that it needed to. 
Now at that time, there was a great, as you can imagine, frustration — let's call it frustration — it started to grow very, very quickly. 
And all of a sudden, some very important voices in the world of public health started to say, "" Hang on. 
We should abandon this idea of eradication. 
Let's settle for control — that's good enough. "" Now as seductive as the idea of control sounds, it's a false premise. 
The brutal truth is, if we don't have the will or the skill, or even the money that we need to reach children, the most vulnerable children in the world, with something as simple as an oral polio vaccine, then pretty soon, more than 200,000 children are again going to be paralyzed by this disease every single year. 
There's absolutely no question. 
These are children like Umar. 
Umar is seven years old, and he's from northern Nigeria. 
He lives in a family home there with his eight brothers and sisters. 
Umar also has polio. 
Umar was paralyzed for life. 
His right leg was paralyzed in 2004. 
This leg, his right leg, now takes an awful beating because he has to half-crawl, because it's faster to move that way to keep up with his friends, keep up with his brothers and sisters, than to get up on his crutches and walk. 
But Umar is a fantastic student. He's an incredible kid. 
As you probably can't see the detail here, but this is his report card, and you'll see, he's got perfect scores. 
He got 100 percent in all the important things, like nursery rhymes, for example there. 
But you know I'd love to be able to tell you that Umar is a typical kid with polio these days, but it's not true. 
Umar is an exceptional kid in exceptional circumstances. 
The reality of polio today is something very different. 
Polio strikes the poorest communities in the world. 
It leaves their children paralyzed, and it drags their families deeper into poverty, because they're desperately searching and they're desperately spending the little bit of savings that they have, trying in vain to find a cure for their children. 
We think children deserve better. 
And so when the going got really tough in the polio eradication program about two years ago, when people were saying, "" We should call it off, "" the Polio Partnership decided to buckle down once again and try and find innovative new solutions, new ways to get to the children that we were missing again and again. 
In northern India, we started mapping the cases using satellite imaging like this, so that we could guide our investments and vaccinator shelters, so we could get to the millions of children on the Koshi River basin where there are no other health services. 
In northern Nigeria, the political leaders and the traditional Muslim leaders, they got directly involved in the program to help solve the problems of logistics and community confidence. 
And now they've even started using these devices — speaking of cool technology — these little devices, little GIS trackers like this, which they put into the vaccine carriers of their vaccinators. 
And then they can track them, and at the end of the day, they look and see, did these guys get every single street, every single house. 
This is the kind of commitment now we're seeing to try and reach all of the children we've been missing. 
And in Afghanistan, we're trying new approaches — access negotiators. 
We're working closely with the International Committee of the Red Cross to ensure that we can reach every child. 
But as we tried these extraordinary things, as people went to this trouble to try and rework their tactics, we went back to the vaccine — it's a 50-year-old vaccine — and we thought, surely we can make a better vaccine, so that when they finally get to these kids, we can have a better bang for our buck. 
And this started an incredible collaboration with industry, and within six months, we were testing a new polio vaccine that targeted, just two years ago, the last two types of polio in the world. 
Now June the ninth, 2009, we got the first results from the first trial with this vaccine, and it turned out to be a game-changer. 
The new vaccine had twice the impact on these last couple of viruses as the old vaccine had, and we immediately started using this. 
Well, in a couple of months we had to get it out of production. 
And it started rolling off the production lines and into the mouths of children around the world. 
And we didn't start with the easy places. 
The first place this vaccine was used was in southern Afghanistan, because it's in places like that where kids are going to benefit the most from technologies like this. 
Now here at TED, over the last couple of days, I've seen people challenging the audience again and again to believe in the impossible. 
So this morning at about seven o'clock, I decided that we'd try to drive Chris and the production crew here berserk by downloading all of our data from India again, so that you could see something that's just unfolding today, which proves that the impossible is possible. 
And only two years ago, people were saying that this is impossible. 
Now remember, northern India is the perfect storm when it comes to polio. 
Over 500,000 children are born in the two states that have never stopped polio — Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — 500,000 children every single month. 
Sanitation is terrible, and our old vaccine, you remember, worked half as well as it should have. 
And yet, the impossible is happening. 
Today marks exactly six months — and for the first time in history, not a single child has been paralyzed in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar. 
(Applause) India's not unique. 
In Umar's home country of Nigeria, a 95 percent reduction in the number of children paralyzed by polio last year. 
And in the last six months, we've had less places reinfected by polio than at any other time in history. 
Ladies and gentlemen, with a combination of smart people, smart technology and smart investments, polio can now be eradicated anywhere. 
We have major challenges, you can imagine, to finish this job, but as you've also seen, it's doable, it has great secondary benefits, and polio eradication is a great buy. 
And as long as any child anywhere is paralyzed by this virus, it's a stark reminder that we are failing, as a society, to reach children with the most basic of services. 
And for that reason, polio eradication: it's the ultimate in equity and it's the ultimate in social justice. 
The huge social movement that's been involved in polio eradication is ready to do way more for these children. 
It's ready to reach them with bed nets, with other things. 
But capitalizing on their enthusiasm, capitalizing on their energy means finishing the job that they started 20 years ago. 
Finishing polio is a smart thing to do, and it's the right thing to do. 
Now we're in tough times economically. 
But as David Cameron of the United Kingdom said about a month ago when he was talking about polio, "" There's never a wrong time to do the right thing. "" Finishing polio eradication is the right thing to do. 
And we are at a crossroads right now in this great effort over the last 20 years. 
We have a new vaccine, we have new resolve, and we have new tactics. 
We have the chance to write an entirely new polio-free chapter in human history. 
But if we blink now, we will lose forever the chance to eradicate an ancient disease. 
Here's a great idea to spread: End polio now. 
Help us tell the story. 
Help us build the momentum so that very soon every child, every parent everywhere can also take for granted a polio-free life forever. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bill Gates: Well Bruce, where do you think the toughest places are going to be? 
Where would you say we need to be the smartest? 
BA: The four places where you saw, that we've never stopped — northern Nigeria, northern India, the southern corner of Afghanistan and bordering areas of Pakistan — they're going to be the toughest. 
But the interesting thing is, of those three, India's looking real good, as you just saw in the data. 
And Afghanistan, Afghanistan, we think has probably stopped polio repeatedly. 
It keeps getting reinfected. 
So the tough ones: going to get the top of Nigeria finished and getting Pakistan finished. 
They're going to be the tough ones. 
BG: Now what about the money? 
Give us a sense of how much the campaign costs a year. 
And is it easy to raise that money? 
And what's it going to be like the next couple of years? 
BA: It's interesting. 
We spend right now about 750 million to 800 million dollars a year. 
That's what it costs to reach 500 million children. 
It sounds like a lot of money; it is a lot of money. 
But when you're reaching 500 million children multiple times — 20, 30 cents to reach a child — that's not very much money. 
But right now we don't have enough of that. 
We have a big gap in that money. We're cutting corners, and every time we cut corners, more places get infected that shouldn't have, and it just slows us down. 
And that great buy costs us a little bit more. 
BG: Well, hopefully we'll get the word out, and the governments will keep their generosity up. 
So good luck. We're all in this with you. 
Thank you. (BA: Thank you.) (Applause) 

For a long time in my life, I felt like I'd been living two different lives. 
There's the life that everyone sees, and then there's the life that only I see. 
And in the life that everyone sees, who I am is a friend, a son, a brother, a stand-up comedian and a teenager. 
That's the life everyone sees. 
If you were to ask my friends and family to describe me, that's what they would tell you. 
And that's a huge part of me. That is who I am. 
And if you were to ask me to describe myself, I'd probably say some of those same things. 
And I wouldn't be lying, but I wouldn't totally be telling you the truth, either, because the truth is, that's just the life everyone else sees. 
In the life that only I see, who I am, who I really am, is someone who struggles intensely with depression. 
I have for the last six years of my life, and I continue to every day. 
Now, for someone who has never experienced depression or doesn't really know what that means, that might surprise them to hear, because there's this pretty popular misconception that depression is just being sad when something in your life goes wrong, when you break up with your girlfriend, when you lose a loved one, when you don't get the job you wanted. 
But that's sadness. That's a natural thing. 
That's a natural human emotion. 
Real depression isn't being sad when something in your life goes wrong. 
Real depression is being sad when everything in your life is going right. 
That's real depression, and that's what I suffer from. 
And to be totally honest, that's hard for me to stand up here and say. 
It's hard for me to talk about, and it seems to be hard for everyone to talk about, so much so that no one's talking about it. 
And no one's talking about depression, but we need to be, because right now it's a massive problem. 
It's a massive problem. 
But we don't see it on social media, right? 
We don't see it on Facebook. We don't see it on Twitter. 
We don't see it on the news, because it's not happy, it's not fun, it's not light. 
And so because we don't see it, we don't see the severity of it. 
But the severity of it and the seriousness of it is this: every 30 seconds, every 30 seconds, somewhere, someone in the world takes their own life because of depression, and it might be two blocks away, it might be two countries away, it might be two continents away, but it's happening, and it's happening every single day. 
And we have a tendency, as a society, to look at that and go, "" So what? "" So what? We look at that, and we go, "" That's your problem. 
That's their problem. "" We say we're sad and we say we're sorry, but we also say, "" So what? "" Well, two years ago it was my problem, because I sat on the edge of my bed where I'd sat a million times before and I was suicidal. 
I was suicidal, and if you were to look at my life on the surface, you wouldn't see a kid who was suicidal. 
You'd see a kid who was the captain of his basketball team, the drama and theater student of the year, the English student of the year, someone who was consistently on the honor roll and consistently at every party. 
So you would say I wasn't depressed, you would say I wasn't suicidal, but you would be wrong. 
You would be wrong. So I sat there that night beside a bottle of pills with a pen and paper in my hand and I thought about taking my own life and I came this close to doing it. I came this close to doing it. 
And I didn't, so that makes me one of the lucky ones, 
one of the people who gets to step out on the ledge and look down but not jump, one of the lucky ones who survives. 
Well, I survived, and that just leaves me with my story, and my story is this: In four simple words, I suffer from depression. 
I suffer from depression, and for a long time, I think, I was living two totally different lives, where one person was always afraid of the other. 
I was afraid that people would see me for who I really was, that I wasn't the perfect, popular kid in high school everyone thought I was, that beneath my smile, there was struggle, and beneath my light, there was dark, and beneath my big personality just hid even bigger pain. 
See, some people might fear girls not liking them back. 
Some people might fear sharks. Some people might fear death. 
But for me, for a large part of my life, I feared myself. 
I feared my truth, I feared my honesty, I feared my vulnerability, and that fear made me feel like I was forced into a corner, like I was forced into a corner and there was only one way out, and so I thought about that way every single day. 
I thought about it every single day, and if I'm being totally honest, standing here I've thought about it again since, because that's the sickness, that's the struggle, that's depression, and depression isn't chicken pox. 
You don't beat it once and it's gone forever. 
It's something you live with. It's something you live in. 
It's the roommate you can't kick out. It's the voice you can't ignore. 
It's the feelings you can't seem to escape, the scariest part is that after a while, you become numb to it. It becomes normal for you, and what you really fear the most isn't the suffering inside of you. 
It's the stigma inside of others, it's the shame, it's the embarrassment, it's the disapproving look on a friend's face, it's the whispers in the hallway that you're weak, it's the comments that you're crazy. 
That's what keeps you from getting help. 
That's what makes you hold it in and hide it. 
It's the stigma. So you hold it in and you hide it, and you hold it in and you hide it, and even though it's keeping you in bed every day and it's making your life feel empty no matter how much you try and fill it, you hide it, because the stigma in our society around depression is very real. 
It's very real, and if you think that it isn't, ask yourself this: Would you rather make your next Facebook status say you're having a tough time getting out of bed because you hurt your back or you're having a tough time getting out of bed every morning because you're depressed? 
That's the stigma, because unfortunately, we live in a world where if you break your arm, everyone runs over to sign your cast, but if you tell people you're depressed, everyone runs the other way. 
That's the stigma. 
We are so, so, so accepting of any body part breaking down other than our brains. And that's ignorance. 
That's pure ignorance, and that ignorance has created a world that doesn't understand depression, that doesn't understand mental health. 
And that's ironic to me, because depression is one of the best documented problems we have in the world, yet it's one of the least discussed. 
We just push it aside and put it in a corner and pretend it's not there and hope it'll fix itself. 
Well, it won't. It hasn't, and it's not going to, because that's wishful thinking, and wishful thinking isn't a game plan, it's procrastination, and we can't procrastinate on something this important. 
The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. 
Well, we haven't done that, so we can't really expect to find an answer when we're still afraid of the question. 
And I don't know what the solution is. 
I wish I did, but I don't — but I think, I think it has to start here. 
It has to start with me, it has to start with you, it has to start with the people who are suffering, the ones who are hidden in the shadows. 
We need to speak up and shatter the silence. 
We need to be the ones who are brave for what we believe in, because if there's one thing that I've come to realize, if there's one thing that I see as the biggest problem, it's not in building a world where we eliminate the ignorance of others. 
It's in building a world where we teach the acceptance of ourselves, where we're okay with who we are, because when we get honest, we see that we all struggle and we all suffer. 
Whether it's with this, whether it's with something else, we all know what it is to hurt. 
We all know what it is to have pain in our heart, and we all know how important it is to heal. 
But right now, depression is society's deep cut that we're content to put a Band-Aid over and pretend it's not there. 
Well, it is there. It is there, and you know what? It's okay. 
Depression is okay. If you're going through it, know that you're okay. 
And know that you're sick, you're not weak, and it's an issue, not an identity, because when you get past the fear and the ridicule and the judgment and the stigma of others, you can see depression for what it really is, and that's just a part of life, just a part of life, and as much as I hate, as much as I hate some of the places, some of the parts of my life depression has dragged me down to, in a lot of ways I'm grateful for it. 
Because yeah, it's put me in the valleys, but only to show me there's peaks, and yeah it's dragged me through the dark but only to remind me there is light. 
My pain, more than anything in 19 years on this planet, has given me perspective, and my hurt, my hurt has forced me to have hope, have hope and to have faith, faith in myself, faith in others, faith that it can get better, that we can change this, that we can speak up and speak out and fight back against ignorance, fight back against intolerance, and more than anything, learn to love ourselves, learn to accept ourselves for who we are, the people we are, not the people the world wants us to be. 
Because the world I believe in is one where embracing your light doesn't mean ignoring your dark. 
The world I believe in is one where we're measured by our ability to overcome adversities, not avoid them. 
The world I believe in is one where I can look someone in the eye and say, "" I'm going through hell, "" and they can look back at me and go, "" Me too, "" and that's okay, and it's okay because depression is okay. We're people. 
We're people, and we struggle and we suffer and we bleed and we cry, and if you think that true strength means never showing any weakness, then I'm here to tell you you're wrong. 
You're wrong, because it's the opposite. 
We're people, and we have problems. 
We're not perfect, and that's okay. 
So we need to stop the ignorance, stop the intolerance, stop the stigma, and stop the silence, and we need to take away the taboos, take a look at the truth, and start talking, because the only way we're going to beat a problem that people are battling alone is by standing strong together, by standing strong together. 
And I believe that we can. 
I believe that we can. Thank you guys so much. 
This is a dream come true. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

On Mondays and Thursdays, I learn how to die. 
I call them my terminal days. 
My wife Fernanda doesn't like the term, but a lot of people in my family died of melanoma cancer and my parents and grandparents had it. 
And I kept thinking, one day I could be sitting in front of a doctor who looks at my exams and says, "" Ricardo, things don't look very good. 
You have six months or a year to live. "" And you start thinking about what you would do with this time. 
I'm going to visit these places, I'm going to go up and down mountains and places and I'm going to do all the things I didn't do when I had the time. "" But of course, we all know these are very bittersweet memories we're going to have. 
It's very difficult to do. 
You spend a good part of the time crying, probably. 
So I said, I'm going to do something else. 
Every Monday and Thursday, I'm going use my terminal days. 
And I will do, during those days, whatever it is I was going to do if I had received that piece of news. 
(Laughter) When you think about — (Applause) when you think about the opposite of work, we, many times, think it's leisure. 
And you say, ah, I need some leisure time, and so forth. 
But the fact is that, leisure is a very busy thing. 
You go play golf and tennis, and you meet people, and you're going for lunch, and you're late for the movies. 
It's a very crowded thing that we do. 
The opposite of work is idleness. 
But very few of us know what to do with idleness. 
When you look at the way that we distribute our lives in general, you realize that in the periods in which we have a lot of money, we have very little time. 
And then when we finally have time, we have neither the money nor the health. 
So we started thinking about that as a company for the last 30 years. 
This is a complicated company with thousands of employees, hundreds of millions of dollars of business that makes rocket fuel propellent systems, runs 4,000 ATMs in Brazil, does income tax preparation for dozens of thousands. 
So this is not a simple business. 
We looked at it and we said, let's devolve to these people, let's give these people a company where we take away all the boarding school aspects of, this is when you arrive, this is how you dress, this is how you go to meetings, this is what you say, this is what you don't say, and let's see what's left. 
So we started this about 30 years ago, and we started dealing with this very issue. 
And so we said, look, the retirement, the whole issue of how we distribute our graph of life. 
Instead of going mountain climbing when you're 82, why don't you do it next week? 
And we'll do it like this, we'll sell you back your Wednesdays for 10 percent of your salary. 
So now, if you were going to be a violinist, which you probably weren't, you go and do this on Wednesday. 
And what we found — we thought, these are the older people who are going to be really interested in this program. 
And the average age of the first people who adhered were 29, of course. 
And so we started looking, and we said, we have to do things in a different way. 
So we started saying things like, why do we want to know what time you came to work, what time you left, etc.? 
Can't we exchange this for a contract for buying something from you, some kind of work? 
Why are we building these headquarters? 
Is it not an ego issue that we want to look solid and big and important? 
But we're dragging you two hours across town because of it? 
So we started asking questions one by one. 
We'd say it like this: One: How do we find people? 
We'd go out and try and recruit people and we'd say, look, when you come to us, we're not going to have two or three interviews and then you're going to be married to us for life. 
Anyone who's interested in interviewing, you will show up. 
And then we'll see what happens out of the intuition that rises from that, instead of just filling out the little items of whether you're the right person. 
And then, come back. 
Spend an afternoon, spend a whole day, talk to anybody you want. 
Make sure we are the bride you thought we were and not all the bullshit we put into our own ads. 
(Laughter) Slowly we went to a process where we'd say things like, we don't want anyone to be a leader in the company if they haven't been interviewed and approved by their future subordinates. 
Every six months, everyone gets evaluated, anonymously, as a leader. 
And this determines whether they should continue in that leadership position, which is many times situational, as you know. 
And so if they don't have 70, 80 percent of a grade, they don't stay, which is probably the reason why I haven't been CEO for more than 10 years. 
And over time, we started asking other questions. 
We said things like, why can't people set their own salaries? 
What do they need to know? 
There's only three things you need to know: how much people make inside the company, how much people make somewhere else in a similar business and how much we make in general to see whether we can afford it. 
So let's give people these three pieces of information. 
So we started having, in the cafeteria, a computer where you could go in and you could ask what someone spent, how much someone makes, what they make in benefits, what the company makes, what the margins are, and so forth. 
And this is 25 years ago. 
As this information started coming to people, we said things like, we don't want to see your expense report, we don't want to know how many holidays you're taking, we don't want to know where you work. 
We had, at one point, 14 different offices around town, and we'd say, go to the one that's closest to your house, to the customer that you're going to visit today. 
Don't tell us where you are. 
And more, even when we had thousands of people, 5,000 people, we had two people in the H.R. department, and thankfully one of them has retired. 
(Laughter) And so, the question we were asking was, how can we be taking care of people? 
People are the only thing we have. 
We can't have a department that runs after people and looks after people. 
So as we started finding that this worked, and we'd say, we're looking for — and this is, I think, the main thing I was looking for in the terminal days and in the company, which is, how do you set up for wisdom? 
We've come from an age of revolution, industrial revolution, an age of information, an age of knowledge, but we're not any closer to the age of wisdom. 
How we design, how do we organize, for more wisdom? 
So for example, many times, what's the smartest or the intelligent decision doesn't jive. 
So we'd say things like, let's agree that you're going to sell 57 widgets per week. 
If you sell them by Wednesday, please go to the beach. 
Don't create a problem for us, for manufacturing, for application, then we have to buy new companies, we have to buy our competitors, we have to do all kinds of things because you sold too many widgets. 
So go to the beach and start again on Monday. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So the process is looking for wisdom. 
And in the process, of course, we wanted people to know everything, and we wanted to be truly democratic about the way we ran things. 
So our board had two seats open with the same voting rights, for the first two people who showed up. 
(Laughter) And so we had cleaning ladies voting on a board meeting, which had a lot of other very important people in suits and ties. 
And the fact is that they kept us honest. 
This process, as we started looking at the people who came to us, we'd say, now wait a second, people come to us and they say, where am I supposed to sit? 
How am I supposed to work? Where am I going to be in 5 years' time? 
And we looked at that and we said, we have to start much earlier. 
Where do we start? 
We said, oh, kindergarten seems like a good place. 
So we set up a foundation, which now has, for 11 years, three schools, where we started asking the same questions, how do you redesign school for wisdom? 
It is one thing to say, we need to recycle the teachers, we need the directors to do more. 
But the fact is that what we do with education is entirely obsolete. 
The teacher's role is entirely obsolete. 
Going from a math class, to biology, to 14th-century France is very silly. 
(Applause) So we started thinking, what could it look like? 
And we put together people, including people who like education, people like Paulo Freire, and two ministers of education in Brazil and we said, if we were to design a school from scratch, what would it look like? 
And so we created this school, which is called Lumiar, and Lumiar, one of them is a public school, and Lumiar says the following: Let's divide this role of the teacher into two. 
One guy, we'll call a tutor. 
A tutor, in the old sense of the Greek "" paideia "": Look after the kid. 
What's happening at home, what's their moment in life, etc.. 
But please don't teach, because the little you know compared to Google, we don't want to know. 
Keep that to yourself. 
(Laughter) Now, we'll bring in people who have two things: passion and expertise, and it could be their profession or not. 
And we use the senior citizens, who are 25 percent of the population with wisdom that nobody wants anymore. 
So we bring them to school and we say, teach these kids whatever you really believe in. 
So we have violinists teaching math. 
We have all kinds of things where we say, don't worry about the course material anymore. 
We have approximately 10 great threads that go from 2 to 17. 
Things like, how do we measure ourselves as humans? 
So there's a place for math and physics and all that there. 
How do we express ourselves? 
So there's a place for music and literature, etc., but also for grammar. 
And then we have things that everyone has forgotten, which are probably the most important things in life. 
The very important things in life, we know nothing about. 
We know nothing about love, we know nothing about death, we know nothing about why we're here. 
So we need a thread in school that talks about everything we don't know. 
So that's a big part of what we do. 
(Applause) So over the years, we started going into other things. 
We'd say, why do we have to scold the kids and say, sit down and come here and do that, and so forth. 
We said, let's get the kids to do something we call a circle, which meets once a week. 
And we'd say, you put the rules together and then you decide what you want to do with it. 
So can you all hit yourself on the head? 
Sure, for a week, try. 
They came up with the very same rules that we had, except they're theirs. 
And then, they have the power, which means, they can and do suspend and expel kids so that we're not playing school, they really decide. 
And then, in this same vein, we keep a digital mosaic, because this is not constructivist or Montessori or something. 
It's something where we keep the Brazilian curriculum with 600 tiles of a mosaic, which we want to expose these kids to by the time they're 17. 
And follow this all the time and we know how they're doing and we say, you're not interested in this now, let's wait a year. 
And the kids are in groups that don't have an age category, so the six-year-old kid who is ready for that with an 11-year-old, that eliminates all of the gangs and the groups and this stuff that we have in the schools, in general. 
And they have a zero to 100 percent grading, which they do themselves with an app every couple of hours. 
Until we know they're 37 percent of the way we'd like them to be on this issue, so that we can send them out in the world with them knowing enough about it. 
And so the courses are World Cup Soccer, or building a bicycle. 
And people will sign up for a 45-day course on building a bicycle. 
Now, try to build a bicycle without knowing that pi is 3.1416. 
You can't. 
And try, any one of you, using 3.1416 for something. 
You don't know anymore. 
So this is lost and that's what we try to do there, which is looking for wisdom in that school. 
And that brings us back to this graph and this distribution of our life. 
I accumulated a lot of money when I think about it. 
When you think and you say, now is the time to give back — well, if you're giving back, you took too much. 
(Laughter) (Applause) I keep thinking of Warren Buffet waking up one day and finding out he has 30 billion dollars more than he thought he had. 
And he looks and he says, what am I going to do with this? 
And he says, I'll give it to someone who really needs this. 
I'll give it to Bill Gates. (Laughter) And my guy, who's my financial advisor in New York, he says, look, you're a silly guy because you would have 4.1 times more money today if you had made money with money instead of sharing as you go. 
But I like sharing as you go better. 
(Applause) I taught MBAs at MIT for a time and I ended up, one day, at the Mount Auburn Cemetery. 
It is a beautiful cemetery in Cambridge. 
And I was walking around. It was my birthday and I was thinking. 
And the first time around, I saw these tombstones and these wonderful people who'd done great things and I thought, what do I want to be remembered for? 
And I did another stroll around, and the second time, another question came to me, which did me better, which was, why do I want to be remembered at all? 
(Laughter) And that, I think, took me different places. 
When I was 50, my wife Fernanda and I sat for a whole afternoon, we had a big pit with fire, and I threw everything I had ever done into that fire. 
This is a book in 38 languages, hundreds and hundreds of articles and DVDs, everything there was. 
And that did two things. 
One, it freed our five kids from following in our steps, our shadow — They don't know what I do. 
(Laughter) Which is good. 
And I'm not going to take them somewhere and say, one day all of this will be yours. 
(Laughter) The five kids know nothing, which is good. 
And the second thing is, I freed myself from this anchor of past achievement or whatever. 
I'm free to start something new every time and to decide things from scratch in part of those terminal days. 
And some people would say, oh, so now you have this time, these terminal days, and so you go out and do everything. 
No, we've been to the beaches, so we've been to Samoa and Maldives and Mozambique, so that's done. 
I've climbed mountains in the Himalayas. 
I've gone down 60 meters to see hammerhead sharks. 
I've spent 59 days on the back of a camel from Chad to Timbuktu. 
I've gone to the magnetic North Pole on a dog sled. 
So, we've been busy. 
It's what I'd like to call my empty bucket list. 
(Laughter) And with this rationale, I look at these days and I think, I'm not retired. I don't feel retired at all. 
And so I'm writing a new book. 
We started three new companies in the last two years. 
I'm now working on getting this school system for free out into the world, and I've found, very interestingly enough, that nobody wants it for free. 
And so I've been trying for 10 years to get the public system to take over this school rationale, much as the public schools we have, which has instead of 43 out of 100, as their rating, as their grades, has 91 out of 100. 
But for free, nobody wants it. 
So maybe we'll start charging for it and then it will go somewhere. 
But getting this out is one of the things we want to do. 
And I think what this leaves us as a message for all of you, I think is a little bit like this: We've all learned how to go on Sunday night to email and work from home. 
But very few of us have learned how to go to the movies on Monday afternoon. 
And if we're looking for wisdom, we need to learn to do that as well. 
And so, what we've done all of these years is very simple, is use the little tool, which is ask three whys in a row. 
Because the first why you always have a good answer for. 
The second why, it starts getting difficult. 
By the third why, you don't really know why you're doing what you're doing. 
What I want to leave you with is the seed and the thought that maybe if you do this, you will come to the question, what for? 
What am I doing this for? 
And hopefully, as a result of that, and over time, I hope that with this, and that's what I'm wishing you, you'll have a much wiser future. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: So Ricardo, you're kind of crazy. 
(Laughter) To many people, this seems crazy. 
And yet so deeply wise, also. 
The pieces I'm trying to put together are this: Your ideas are so radical. 
How, in business, for example, these ideas have been out for a while, probably the percentage of businesses that have taken some of them is still quite low. 
Are there any times you've seen some big company take on one of your ideas and you've gone, "" Yes! ""? 
Ricardo Semler: It happens. It happened about two weeks ago with Richard Branson, with his people saying, oh, I don't want to control your holidays anymore, or Netflix does a little bit of this and that, but I don't think it's very important. 
I'd like to see it happen maybe a little bit in a bit of a missionary zeal, but that's a very personal one. 
But the fact is that it takes a leap of faith about losing control. 
And almost nobody who is in control is ready to take leaps of faith. 
It will have to come from kids and other people who are starting companies in a different way. 
CA: So that's the key thing? 
From your point of view the evidence is there, in the business point of view this works, but people just don't have the courage to — (Whoosh) RS: They don't even have the incentive. 
You're running a company with a 90-day mandate. 
It's a quarterly report. 
If you're not good in 90 days, you're out. 
So you say, "" Here's a great program that, in less than one generation — "" And the guy says, "" Get out of here. "" So this is the problem. 
(Laughter) CA: What you're trying to do in education seems to me incredibly profound. 
Everyone is bothered about their country's education system. 
No one thinks that we've caught up yet to a world where there's Google and all these technological options. 
So you've got actual evidence now that the kids so far going through your system, there's a dramatic increase in performance. 
How do we help you move these ideas forward? 
RS: I think it's that problem of ideas whose time has come. 
And I've never been very evangelical about these things. 
We put it out there. 
Suddenly, you find people — there's a group in Japan, which scares me very much, which is called the Semlerists, and they have 120 companies. 
They've invited me. I've always been scared to go. 
And there is a group in Holland that has 600 small, Dutch companies. 
It's something that will flourish on its own. 
Part of it will be wrong, and it doesn't matter. 
This will find its own place. 
And I'm afraid of the other one, which says, this is so good you've got to do this. 
Let's set up a system and put lots of money into it and then people will do it no matter what. 
CA: So you have asked extraordinary questions your whole life. 
It seems to me that's the fuel that's driven a lot of this. 
Do you have any other questions for us, for TED, for this group here? 
RS: I always come back to variations of the question that my son asked me when he was three. 
We were sitting in a jacuzzi, and he said, "" Dad, why do we exist? "" There is no other question. 
Nobody has any other question. 
We have variations of this one question, from three onwards. 
So when you spend time in a company, in a bureaucracy, in an organization and you're saying, boy — how many people do you know who on their death beds said, boy, I wish I had spent more time at the office? 
So there's a whole thing of having the courage now — not in a week, not in two months, not when you find out you have something — to say, no, what am I doing this for? 
Stop everything. Let me do something else. 
And it will be okay, it will be much better than what you're doing, if you're stuck in a process. 
CA: So that strikes me as a profound and quite beautiful way to end this penultimate day of TED. 
Ricardo Semler, thank you so much. 
RS: Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

I want to start with a game. Okay? 
And to win this game, all you have to do is see the reality that's in front of you as it really is, all right? 
So we have two panels here, of colored dots. 
And one of those dots is the same in the two panels. 
And you have to tell me which one. 
Now, I narrowed it down to the gray one, the green one, and, say, the orange one. 
So by a show of hands, we'll start with the easiest one. 
Show of hands: how many people think it's the gray one? 
Really? Okay. 
How many people think it's the green one? 
And how many people think it's the orange one? 
Pretty even split. 
Let's find out what the reality is. 
Here is the orange one. 
(Laughter) Here is the green one. 
And here is the gray one. 
(Laughter) So for all of you who saw that, you're complete realists. 
All right? 
(Laughter) So this is pretty amazing, isn't it? 
Because nearly every living system has evolved the ability to detect light in one way or another. 
So for us, seeing color is one of the simplest things the brain does. 
And yet, even at this most fundamental level, context is everything. 
What I'm going to talk about is not that context is everything, but why context is everything. 
Because it's answering that question that tells us not only why we see what we do, but who we are as individuals, and who we are as a society. 
But first, we have to ask another question, which is, "" What is color for? "" And instead of telling you, I'll just show you. 
What you see here is a jungle scene, and you see the surfaces according to the amount of light that those surfaces reflect. 
Now, can any of you see the predator that's about to jump out at you? 
And if you haven't seen it yet, you're dead, right? 
(Laughter) Can anyone see it? Anyone? No? 
Now let's see the surfaces according to the quality of light that they reflect. 
And now you see it. 
So, color enables us to see the similarities and differences between surfaces, according to the full spectrum of light that they reflect. 
But what you've just done is in many respects mathematically impossible. 
Why? 
Because, as Berkeley tells us, we have no direct access to our physical world, other than through our senses. 
And the light that falls onto our eyes is determined by multiple things in the world, not only the color of objects, but also the color of their illumination, and the color of the space between us and those objects. 
You vary any one of those parameters, and you'll change the color of the light that falls onto your eye. 
This is a huge problem, because it means that the same image could have an infinite number of possible real-world sources. 
Let me show you what I mean. 
Imagine that this is the back of your eye, okay? 
And these are two projections from the world. 
They're identical in every single way. 
Identical in shape, size, spectral content. 
They are the same, as far as your eye is concerned. 
And yet they come from completely different sources. 
The one on the right comes from a yellow surface, in shadow, oriented facing the left, viewed through a pinkish medium. 
The one on the left comes from an orange surface, under direct light, facing to the right, viewed through sort of a bluish medium. 
Completely different meanings, giving rise to the exact same retinal information. 
And yet it's only the retinal information that we get. 
So how on Earth do we even see? 
So if you remember anything in this next 18 minutes, remember this: that the light that falls onto your eye, sensory information, is meaningless, because it could mean literally anything. 
And what's true for sensory information is true for information generally. 
There's no inherent meaning in information. 
It's what we do with that information that matters. 
So, how do we see? Well, we see by learning to see. 
The brain evolved the mechanisms for finding patterns, finding relationships in information, and associating those relationships with a behavioral meaning, a significance, by interacting with the world. 
We're very aware of this in the form of more cognitive attributes, like language. 
I'm going to give you some letter strings, and I want you to read them out for me, if you can. 
Audience: "" Can you read this? "" "You are not reading this." 
"What are you reading?" 
Beau Lotto: "" What are you reading? "" Half the letters are missing, right? 
There's no a priori reason why an "" H "" has to go between that "" W "" and "" A. "" But you put one there. Why? 
Because in the statistics of your past experience, it would have been useful to do so. 
So you do so again. 
And yet you don't put a letter after that first "" T. "" Why? Because it wouldn't have been useful in the past. 
So you don't do it again. 
So, let me show you how quickly our brains can redefine normality, even at the simplest thing the brain does, which is color. 
So if I could have the lights down up here. 
I want you to first notice that those two desert scenes are physically the same. 
One is simply the flipping of the other. 
Now I want you to look at that dot between the green and the red. 
And I want you to stare at that dot. Don't look anywhere else. 
We're going to look at it for about 30 seconds, which is a bit of a killer in an 18-minute talk. 
(Laughter) But I really want you to learn. 
And I'll tell you — don't look anywhere else — I'll tell you what's happening in your head. 
Your brain is learning, and it's learning that the right side of its visual field is under red illumination; the left side of its visual field is under green illumination. 
That's what it's learning. Okay? 
Now, when I tell you, I want you to look at the dot between the two desert scenes. 
So why don't you do that now? 
(Laughter) Can I have the lights up again? 
I take it from your response they don't look the same anymore, right? 
(Applause) Why? Because your brain is seeing that same information as if the right one is still under red light, and the left one is still under green light. 
That's your new normal. 
Okay? So, what does this mean for context? 
It means I can take two identical squares, put them in light and dark surrounds, and the one on the dark surround looks lighter than on the light surround. 
What's significant is not simply the light and dark surrounds that matter. 
It's what those light and dark surrounds meant for your behavior in the past. 
So I'll show you what I mean. 
Here we have that exact same illusion. 
We have two identical tiles on the left, one in a dark surround, one in a light surround. 
And the same thing over on the right. 
Now, I'll reveal those two scenes, but I'm not going to change anything within those boxes, except their meaning. 
And see what happens to your perception. 
Notice that on the left the two tiles look nearly completely opposite: one very white and one very dark, right? 
Whereas on the right, the two tiles look nearly the same. 
And yet there is still one on a dark surround, and one on a light surround. 
Why? 
Because if the tile in that shadow were in fact in shadow, and reflecting the same amount of light to your eye as the one outside the shadow, it would have to be more reflective — just the laws of physics. 
So you see it that way. 
Whereas on the right, the information is consistent with those two tiles being under the same light. 
If they're under the same light reflecting the same amount of light to your eye, then they must be equally reflective. 
So you see it that way. 
Which means we can bring all this information together to create some incredibly strong illusions. 
This is one I made a few years ago. 
And you'll notice you see a dark brown tile at the top, and a bright orange tile at the side. 
That is your perceptual reality. 
The physical reality is that those two tiles are the same. 
Here you see four gray tiles on your left, seven gray tiles on the right. 
I'm not going to change those tiles at all, but I'm going to reveal the rest of the scene. 
And see what happens to your perception. 
The four blue tiles on the left are gray. 
The seven yellow tiles on the right are also gray. 
They are the same. Okay? 
Don't believe me? Let's watch it again. 
What's true for color is also true for complex perceptions of motion. 
So, here we have — let's turn this around — a diamond. 
And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to hold it here, and I'm going to spin it. 
And for all of you, you'll see it probably spinning this direction. 
Now I want you to keep looking at it. 
Move your eyes around, blink, maybe close one eye. 
And suddenly it will flip, and start spinning the opposite direction. 
Yes? Raise your hand if you got that. Yes? 
Keep blinking. 
Every time you blink, it will switch. 
So I can ask you, which direction is it rotating? 
How do you know? 
Your brain doesn't know, because both are equally likely. 
So depending on where it looks, it flips between the two possibilities. 
Are we the only ones that see illusions? 
The answer to this question is no. 
Even the beautiful bumblebee, with its mere one million brain cells, which is 250 times fewer cells than you have in one retina, sees illusions, does the most complicated things that even our most sophisticated computers can't do. 
So in my lab we work on bumblebees, because we can completely control their experience, and see how it alters the architecture of their brain. 
We do this in what we call the Bee Matrix. 
Here you have the hive. 
You can see the queen bee, the large bee in the middle. 
Those are her daughters, the eggs. 
They go back and forth between this hive and the arena, via this tube. 
You'll see one of the bees come out here. 
You see how she has a little number on her? 
There's another one coming out, she also has a number on her. 
Now, they're not born that way, right? 
We pull them out, put them in the fridge, and they fall asleep. 
Then you can superglue little numbers on them. 
(Laughter) And now, in this experiment they get a reward if they go to the blue flowers. 
They land on the flower, stick their tongue in there, called a proboscis, and drink sugar water. 
She's drinking a glass of water that's about that big to you and I, will do that about three times, then fly. 
And sometimes they learn not to go to the blue, but to go where the other bees go. 
So they copy each other. 
They can count to five. They can recognize faces. 
And here she comes down the ladder. 
And she'll come into the hive, find an empty honey pot, and throw up, and that's honey. 
(Laughter) Now remember, she's supposed to be going to the blue flowers, but what are these bees doing in the upper right corner? 
It looks like they're going to green flowers. 
Now, are they getting it wrong? 
And the answer to the question is no. Those are actually blue flowers. 
But those are blue flowers under green light. 
So they're using the relationships between the colors to solve the puzzle, which is exactly what we do. 
So, illusions are often used, especially in art, in the words of a more contemporary artist, "to demonstrate the fragility of our senses." 
Okay, this is complete rubbish. 
The senses aren't fragile. And if they were, we wouldn't be here. 
Instead, color tells us something completely different, that the brain didn't actually evolve to see the world the way it is. 
We can't. 
Instead, the brain evolved to see the world the way it was useful to see in the past. 
And how we see is by continually redefining normality. 
So, how can we take this incredible capacity of plasticity of the brain and get people to experience their world differently? 
Well, one of the ways we do it in my lab and studio is we translate the light into sound, and we enable people to hear their visual world. 
And they can navigate the world using their ears. 
Here's David on the right, and he's holding a camera. 
On the left is what his camera sees. 
And you'll see there's a faint line going across that image. 
That line is broken up into 32 squares. 
In each square, we calculate the average color. 
And then we just simply translate that into sound. 
And now he's going to turn around, close his eyes, and find a plate on the ground with his eyes closed. 
(Continuous sound) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) Beau Lotto: He finds it. Amazing, right? 
So not only can we create a prosthetic for the visually impaired, but we can also investigate how people literally make sense of the world. 
But we can also do something else. 
We can also make music with color. 
So, working with kids, they created images, thinking about what might the images you see sound like if we could listen to them. 
And then we translated these images. 
And this is one of those images. 
And this is a six-year-old child composing a piece of music for a 32-piece orchestra. 
And this is what it sounds like. 
(Electronic representation of orchestral music) So, a six-year-old child. Okay? 
Now, what does all this mean? 
What this suggests is that no one is an outside observer of nature, okay? 
We're not defined by our central properties, by the bits that make us up. 
We're defined by our environment and our interaction with that environment, by our ecology. 
And that ecology is necessarily relative, historical and empirical. 
So, what I'd like to finish with is this over here. 
Because what I've been trying to do is really celebrate uncertainty. 
Because I think only through uncertainty is there potential for understanding. 
So, if some of you are still feeling a bit too certain, I'd like to do this one. 
So, if we have the lights down. 
And what we have here — Can everyone see 25 purple surfaces on your left, and 25, call it yellowish, surfaces on your right? 
So now, what I want to do, I'm going to put the middle nine surfaces here under yellow illumination, by simply putting a filter behind them. 
Now you can see that changes the light that's coming through there, right? 
Because now the light is going through a yellowish filter and then a purplish filter. 
I'm going to do the opposite on the left here. 
I'm going to put the middle nine under a purplish light. 
Now, some of you will have noticed that the consequence is that the light coming through those middle nine on the right, or your left, is exactly the same as the light coming through the middle nine on your right. 
Agreed? Yes? 
Okay. So they are physically the same. 
Let's pull the covers off. 
Now remember — you know that the middle nine are exactly the same. 
Do they look the same? 
No. 
The question is, "" Is that an illusion? "" And I'll leave you with that. 
So, thank you very much. 

A few words about how I got started, and it has a lot to do with happiness, actually. 
When I was a very young child, I was extremely introverted and very much to myself. 
And, kind of as a way of surviving, I would go into my own very personal space, and I would make things. 
I would make things for people as a way of, you know, giving, showing them my love. 
I would go into these private places, and I would put my ideas and my passions into objects — and sort of learning how to speak with my hands. 
So, the whole activity of working with my hands and creating objects is very much connected with not only the idea realm, but also with very much the feeling realm. 
And the ideas are very disparate. 
I'm going to show you many different kinds of pieces, and there's no real connection between one or the other, except that they sort of come out of my brain, and they're all different sort of thoughts that are triggered by looking at life, and seeing nature and seeing objects, and just having kind of playful random thoughts about things. 
When I was a child, I started to explore motion. 
I fell in love with the way things moved, so I started to explore motion by making little flipbooks. 
And this is one that I did, probably like when I was around seventh grade, and I remember when I was doing this, I was thinking about that little rock there, and the pathway of the vehicles as they would fly through the air, and how the characters — (Laughter) — would come shooting out of the car, so, on my mind, I was thinking about the trajectory of the vehicles. 
And of course, when you're a little kid, there's always destruction. 
So, it has to end with this — (Laughter) — gratuitous violence. (Laughter) 
So that was how I first started to explore the way things moved, and expressed it. 
Now, when I went to college, I found myself making fairly complicated, fragile machines. 
And this really came about from having many different kinds of interests. 
When I was in high school, I loved to program computers, so I sort of liked the logical flow of events. 
I was also very interested in perhaps going into surgery and becoming a surgeon, because it meant working with my hands in a very focused, intense way. 
So, I started taking art courses, and I found a way to make sculpture that brought together my love for being very precise with my hands, with coming up with different kinds of logical flows of energy through a system. 
And also, working with wire — everything that I did was both a visual and a mechanical engineering decision at the same time. 
So, I was able to sort of exercise all of that. 
Now, this kind of machine is as close as I can get to painting. 
And it's full of many little trivial end points, like there's a little foot here that just drags around in circles and it doesn't really mean anything. 
It's really just for the sort of joy of its own triviality. 
The connection I have with engineering is the same as any other engineer, in that I love to solve problems. 
I love to figure things out, but the end result of what I'm doing is really completely ambiguous. 
(Laughter) That's pretty ambiguous. (Laughter) 
The next piece that is going to come up is an example of a kind of machine that is fairly complex. 
I gave myself the problem. 
Since I'm always liking to solve problems, I gave myself the problem of turning a crank in one direction, and solving all of the mechanical problems for getting this little man to walk back and forth. 
So, when I started this, I didn't have an overall plan for the machine, but I did have a sense of the gesture, and a sense of the shape and how it would occupy space. 
And then it was a matter of starting from one point and sort of building to that final point. 
That little gear there switches back and forth to change direction. 
And that's a little found object. 
So a lot of the pieces that I've made, they involve found objects. 
And it really — it's almost like doing visual puns all the time. 
When I see objects, I imagine them in motion. 
I imagine what can be said with them. 
This next one here, "" Machine with Wishbone, "" it came about from playing with this wishbone after dinner. 
You know, they say, never play with your food — but I always play with things. 
So, I had this wishbone, and I thought, it's kind of like a cowboy who's been on his horse for too long. 
(Laughter) And I started to make him walk across the table, and I thought, "" Oh, I can make a little machine that will do that. "" So, I made this device, linked it up, and the wishbone walks. 
And because the wishbone is bone — it's animal — it's sort of a point where I think we can enter into it. 
And that's the whole piece. 
(Laughter) That's about that big. 
(Applause) This kind of work is also very much like puppetry, where the found object is, in a sense, the puppet, and I'm the puppeteer at first, because I'm playing with an object. 
But then I make the machine, which is sort of the stand-in for me, and it is able to achieve the action that I want. 
The next piece I'll show you is a much more conceptual thought, and it's a little piece called "" Cory's Yellow Chair. "" I had this image in my mind, when I saw my son's little chair, and I saw it explode up and out. 
And — so the way I saw this in my mind at first, was that the pieces would explode up and out with infinite speed, and the pieces would move far out, and then they would begin to be pulled back with a kind of a gravitational feel, to the point where they would approach infinite speed back to the center. 
And they would coalesce for just a moment, so you could perceive that there was a chair there. 
For me, it's kind of a feeling about the fleetingness of the present moment, and I wanted to express that. 
Now, the machine is — in this case, it's a real approximation of that, because obviously you can't move physical matter infinitely with infinite speed and have it stop instantaneously. 
This whole thing is about four feet wide, and the chair itself is only about a few inches. 
(Applause) Now, this is a funny sort of conceptual thing, and yesterday we were talking about Danny Hillis' "" 10,000 Year Clock. "" So, we have a motor here on the left, and it goes through a gear train. 
There are 12 pairs of 50: 1 reductions, so that means that the final speed of that gear on the end is so slow that it would take two trillion years to turn once. 
So I've invented it in concrete, because it doesn't really matter. 
(Laughter) Because it could run all the time. (Laughter) 
Now, a completely different thought. 
I'm always imagining myself in different situations. 
I'm imagining myself as a machine. 
What would I love? 
I would love to be bathed in oil. 
(Laughter) So, this machine does nothing but just bathe itself in oil. (Laughter) 
(Applause) And it's really, just sort of — for me, it was just really about the lusciousness of oil. (Laughter) 
And then, I got a call from a friend who wanted to have a show of erotic art, and I didn't have any pieces. 
But when she suggested to be in the show, this piece came to mind. 
So, it's sort of related, but you can see it's much more overtly erotic. 
And this one I call "" Machine with Grease. "" It's just continually ejaculating, and it's — (Laughter) — this is a happy machine, I'll tell you. (Laughter) 
It's definitely happy. 
From an engineering point of view, this is just a little four-bar linkage. 
And then again, this is a found object, a little fan that I found. 
And I thought, what about the gesture of opening the fan, and how simply could I state something. 
And, in a case like this, I'm trying to make something which is clear but also not suggestive of any particular kind of animal or plant. 
For me, the process is very important, because I'm inventing machines, but I'm also inventing tools to make machines, and the whole thing is all sort of wrapped up from the beginning. 
So this is a little wire-bending tool. 
After many years of bending gears with a pair of pliers, I made that tool, and then I made this other tool for sort of centering gears very quickly — sort of developing my own little world of technology. 
My life completely changed when I found a spot welder. 
(Laughter) And that was that tool. 
It completely changed what I could do. 
Now here, I'm going to do a very poor job of silver soldering. 
This is not the way they teach you to silver solder when you're in school. 
I just like, throw it in. 
I mean, real jewelers put little bits of solder in. 
So, that's a finished gear. 
When I moved to Boston, I joined a group called the World Sculpture Racing Society. 
(Laughter) And the idea, their premise was that we wanted to show pieces of sculpture on the street, and there'd be no subjective decision about what was the best. 
It would be — whatever came across the finish line first would be the winner. 
(Laughter) So I made — this is my first racing sculpture, and I thought, "" Oh, I'm going to make a cart, and I'm going to have it — I'm going to have my hand writing 'faster,' so as I run down the street, the cart's going to talk to me and it's going to go, 'Faster, faster!' "" So, that's what it does. (Laughter) 
But then in the end, what I decided was every time you finish writing the word, I would stop and I would give the card to somebody on the side of the road. 
So I would never win the race because I'm always stopping. 
But I had a lot of fun. 
(Applause) Now, I only have two and a half minutes — I'm going to play this. 
This is a piece that, for me, is in some ways the most complete kind of piece. 
Because when I was a kid, I also played a lot of guitar. 
And when I had this thought, I was imagining that I would make — I would have a whole machine theater evening, where I would — you would have an audience, the curtain would open, and you'd be entertained by machines on stage. 
So, I imagined a very simple gestural dance that would be between a machine and just a very simple chair, and... 
When I'm making these pieces, I'm always trying to find a point where I'm saying something very clearly and it's very simple, but also at the same time it's very ambiguous. 
And I think there's a point between simplicity and ambiguity which can allow a viewer to perhaps take something from it. 
And that leads me to the thought that all of these pieces start off in my own mind, in my heart, and I do my best at finding ways to express them with materials, and it always feels really crude. 
It's always a struggle, but somehow I manage to sort of get this thought out into an object, and then it's there, OK. 
It means nothing at all. 
The object itself just means nothing. 
Once it's perceived, and someone brings it into their own mind, then there's a cycle that has been completed. 
And to me, that's the most important thing because, ever since being a kid, I've wanted to communicate my passion and love. 
And that means the complete cycle of coming from inside, out to the physical, to someone perceiving it. 
So I'll just let this chair come down. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

Today, I'm going to take you around the world in 18 minutes. 
My base of operations is in the U.S., but let's start at the other end of the map, in Kyoto, Japan, where I was living with a Japanese family while I was doing part of my dissertational research 15 years ago. 
I knew even then that I would encounter cultural differences and misunderstandings, but they popped up when I least expected it. 
On my first day, I went to a restaurant, and I ordered a cup of green tea with sugar. 
After a pause, the waiter said, "One does not put sugar in green tea." 
"" I know, "" I said. "" I'm aware of this custom. 
But I really like my tea sweet. "" In response, he gave me an even more courteous version of the same explanation. 
"" One does not put sugar in green tea. "" "" I understand, "" I said, "" that the Japanese do not put sugar in their green tea, but I'd like to put some sugar in my green tea. "" (Laughter) Surprised by my insistence, the waiter took up the issue with the manager. 
Pretty soon, a lengthy discussion ensued, and finally the manager came over to me and said, "I am very sorry. We do not have sugar." 
(Laughter) Well, since I couldn't have my tea the way I wanted it, I ordered a cup of coffee, which the waiter brought over promptly. 
Resting on the saucer were two packets of sugar. 
My failure to procure myself a cup of sweet, green tea was not due to a simple misunderstanding. 
This was due to a fundamental difference in our ideas about choice. 
From my American perspective, when a paying customer makes a reasonable request based on her preferences, she has every right to have that request met. 
The American way, to quote Burger King, is to "" have it your way, "" because, as Starbucks says, "happiness is in your choices." 
(Laughter) But from the Japanese perspective, it's their duty to protect those who don't know any better — (Laughter) in this case, the ignorant gaijin — from making the wrong choice. 
Let's face it: the way I wanted my tea was inappropriate according to cultural standards, and they were doing their best to help me save face. 
Americans tend to believe that they've reached some sort of pinnacle in the way they practice choice. 
They think that choice, as seen through the American lens best fulfills an innate and universal desire for choice in all humans. 
Unfortunately, these beliefs are based on assumptions that don't always hold true in many countries, in many cultures. 
At times they don't even hold true at America's own borders. 
I'd like to discuss some of these assumptions and the problems associated with them. 
As I do so, I hope you'll start thinking about some of your own assumptions and how they were shaped by your backgrounds. 
First assumption: if a choice affects you, then you should be the one to make it. 
This is the only way to ensure that your preferences and interests will be most fully accounted for. 
It is essential for success. 
In America, the primary locus of choice is the individual. 
People must choose for themselves, sometimes sticking to their guns, regardless of what other people want or recommend. 
It's called "" being true to yourself. "" But do all individuals benefit from taking such an approach to choice? 
Mark Lepper and I did a series of studies in which we sought the answer to this very question. 
In one study, which we ran in Japantown, San Francisco, we brought seven- to nine-year-old Anglo- and Asian-American children into the laboratory, and we divided them up into three groups. 
The first group came in, and they were greeted by Miss Smith, who showed them six big piles of anagram puzzles. 
The kids got to choose which pile of anagrams they would like to do, and they even got to choose which marker they would write their answers with. 
When the second group of children came in, they were brought to the same room, shown the same anagrams, but this time Miss Smith told them which anagrams to do and which markers to write their answers with. 
Now when the third group came in, they were told that their anagrams and their markers had been chosen by their mothers. 
(Laughter) In reality, the kids who were told what to do, whether by Miss Smith or their mothers, were actually given the very same activity, which their counterparts in the first group had freely chosen. 
With this procedure, we were able to ensure that the kids across the three groups all did the same activity, making it easier for us to compare performance. 
Such small differences in the way we administered the activity yielded striking differences in how well they performed. 
Anglo-Americans, they did two and a half times more anagrams when they got to choose them, as compared to when it was chosen for them by Miss Smith or their mothers. 
It didn't matter who did the choosing, if the task was dictated by another, their performance suffered. 
In fact, some of the kids were visibly embarrassed when they were told that their mothers had been consulted. 
(Laughter) One girl named Mary said, "You asked my mother?" (Laughter) 
In contrast, Asian-American children performed best when they believed their mothers had made the choice, second best when they chose for themselves, and least well when it had been chosen by Miss Smith. 
A girl named Natsumi even approached Miss Smith as she was leaving the room and tugged on her skirt and asked, "" Could you please tell my mommy I did it just like she said? "" The first-generation children were strongly influenced by their immigrant parents' approach to choice. 
For them, choice was not just a way of defining and asserting their individuality, but a way to create community and harmony by deferring to the choices of people whom they trusted and respected. 
If they had a concept of being true to one's self, then that self, most likely, [was] composed, not of an individual, but of a collective. 
Success was just as much about pleasing key figures as it was about satisfying one's own preferences. 
Or, you could say that the individual's preferences were shaped by the preferences of specific others. 
The assumption then that we do best when the individual self chooses only holds when that self is clearly divided from others. 
When, in contrast, two or more individuals see their choices and their outcomes as intimately connected, then they may amplify one another's success by turning choosing into a collective act. 
To insist that they choose independently might actually compromise both their performance and their relationships. 
Yet that is exactly what the American paradigm demands. 
It leaves little room for interdependence or an acknowledgment of individual fallibility. 
It requires that everyone treat choice as a private and self-defining act. 
People that have grown up in such a paradigm might find it motivating, but it is a mistake to assume that everyone thrives under the pressure of choosing alone. 
The second assumption which informs the American view of choice goes something like this. 
The more choices you have, the more likely you are to make the best choice. 
So bring it on, Walmart, with 100,000 different products, and Amazon, with 27 million books and Match.com with — what is it? — 15 million date possibilities now. 
You will surely find the perfect match. 
Let's test this assumption by heading over to Eastern Europe. 
Here, I interviewed people who were residents of formerly communist countries, who had all faced the challenge of transitioning to a more democratic and capitalistic society. 
One of the most interesting revelations came not from an answer to a question, but from a simple gesture of hospitality. 
When the participants arrived for their interview, I offered them a set of drinks: Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite — seven, to be exact. 
During the very first session, which was run in Russia, one of the participants made a comment that really caught me off guard. 
"" Oh, but it doesn't matter. 
It's all just soda. That's just one choice. "" (Murmuring) I was so struck by this comment that from then on, I started to offer all the participants those seven sodas, and I asked them, "" How many choices are these? "" Again and again, they perceived these seven different sodas, not as seven choices, but as one choice: soda or no soda. 
When I put out juice and water in addition to these seven sodas, now they perceived it as only three choices — juice, water and soda. 
Compare this to the die-hard devotion of many Americans, not just to a particular flavor of soda, but to a particular brand. 
You know, research shows repeatedly that we can't actually tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. 
Of course, you and I know that Coke is the better choice. 
(Laughter) For modern Americans who are exposed to more options and more ads associated with options than anyone else in the world, choice is just as much about who they are as it is about what the product is. 
Combine this with the assumption that more choices are always better, and you have a group of people for whom every little difference matters and so every choice matters. 
But for Eastern Europeans, the sudden availability of all these consumer products on the marketplace was a deluge. 
They were flooded with choice before they could protest that they didn't know how to swim. 
When asked, "" What words and images do you associate with choice? "" Grzegorz from Warsaw said, "" Ah, for me it is fear. 
There are some dilemmas you see. 
I am used to no choice. "" Bohdan from Kiev said, in response to how he felt about the new consumer marketplace, "" It is too much. 
We do not need everything that is there. "" A sociologist from the Warsaw Survey Agency explained, "" The older generation jumped from nothing to choice all around them. 
They were never given a chance to learn how to react. "" And Tomasz, a young Polish man said, "" I don't need twenty kinds of chewing gum. 
I don't mean to say that I want no choice, but many of these choices are quite artificial. "" In reality, many choices are between things that are not that much different. 
The value of choice depends on our ability to perceive differences between the options. 
Americans train their whole lives to play "" spot the difference. "" They practice this from such an early age that they've come to believe that everyone must be born with this ability. 
In fact, though all humans share a basic need and desire for choice, we don't all see choice in the same places or to the same extent. 
When someone can't see how one choice is unlike another, or when there are too many choices to compare and contrast, the process of choosing can be confusing and frustrating. 
Instead of making better choices, we become overwhelmed by choice, sometimes even afraid of it. 
Choice no longer offers opportunities, but imposes constraints. 
It's not a marker of liberation, but of suffocation by meaningless minutiae. 
In other words, choice can develop into the very opposite of everything it represents in America when it is thrust upon those who are insufficiently prepared for it. 
But it is not only other people in other places that are feeling the pressure of ever-increasing choice. 
Americans themselves are discovering that unlimited choice seems more attractive in theory than in practice. 
We all have physical, mental and emotional (Laughter) limitations that make it impossible for us to process every single choice we encounter, even in the grocery store, let alone over the course of our entire lives. 
A number of my studies have shown that when you give people 10 or more options when they're making a choice, they make poorer decisions, whether it be health care, investment, other critical areas. 
Yet still, many of us believe that we should make all our own choices and seek out even more of them. 
This brings me to the third, and perhaps most problematic, assumption: "" You must never say no to choice. "" To examine this, let's go back to the U.S. 
and then hop across the pond to France. 
Right outside Chicago, a young couple, Susan and Daniel Mitchell, were about to have their first baby. 
They'd already picked out a name for her, Barbara, after her grandmother. 
One night, when Susan was seven months pregnant, she started to experience contractions and was rushed to the emergency room. 
The baby was delivered through a C-section, but Barbara suffered cerebral anoxia, a loss of oxygen to the brain. 
Unable to breathe on her own, she was put on a ventilator. 
Two days later, the doctors gave the Mitchells a choice: They could either remove Barbara off the life support, in which case she would die within a matter of hours, or they could keep her on life support, in which case she might still die within a matter of days. 
If she survived, she would remain in a permanent vegetative state, never able to walk, talk or interact with others. 
What do they do? 
What do any parent do? 
In a study I conducted with Simona Botti and Kristina Orfali, American and French parents were interviewed. 
They had all suffered the same tragedy. 
In all cases, the life support was removed, and the infants had died. 
But there was a big difference. 
In France, the doctors decided whether and when the life support would be removed, while in the United States, the final decision rested with the parents. 
We wondered: does this have an effect on how the parents cope with the loss of their loved one? 
We found that it did. 
Even up to a year later, American parents were more likely to express negative emotions, as compared to their French counterparts. 
French parents were more likely to say things like, "" Noah was here for so little time, but he taught us so much. 
He gave us a new perspective on life. "" American parents were more likely to say things like, "What if? What if?" 
Another parent complained, "" I feel as if they purposefully tortured me. 
How did they get me to do that? "" And another parent said, "" I feel as if I've played a role in an execution. "" But when the American parents were asked if they would rather have had the doctors make the decision, they all said, "" No. "" They could not imagine turning that choice over to another, even though having made that choice made them feel trapped, guilty, angry. 
In a number of cases they were even clinically depressed. 
These parents could not contemplate giving up the choice, because to do so would have gone contrary to everything they had been taught and everything they had come to believe about the power and purpose of choice. 
In her essay, "" The White Album, "" Joan Didion writes, "" We tell ourselves stories in order to live. 
We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. 
We live entirely by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the idea with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience. "" The story Americans tell, the story upon which the American dream depends, is the story of limitless choice. 
This narrative promises so much: freedom, happiness, success. 
It lays the world at your feet and says, "You can have anything, everything." 
It's a great story, and it's understandable why they would be reluctant to revise it. 
But when you take a close look, you start to see the holes, and you start to see that the story can be told in many other ways. 
Americans have so often tried to disseminate their ideas of choice, believing that they will be, or ought to be, welcomed with open hearts and minds. 
But the history books and the daily news tell us it doesn't always work out that way. 
The phantasmagoria, the actual experience that we try to understand and organize through narrative, varies from place to place. 
No single narrative serves the needs of everyone everywhere. 
Moreover, Americans themselves could benefit from incorporating new perspectives into their own narrative, which has been driving their choices for so long. 
Robert Frost once said that, "It is poetry that is lost in translation." 
This suggests that whatever is beautiful and moving, whatever gives us a new way to see, cannot be communicated to those who speak a different language. 
But Joseph Brodsky said that, "" It is poetry that is gained in translation, "" suggesting that translation can be a creative, transformative act. 
When it comes to choice, we have far more to gain than to lose by engaging in the many translations of the narratives. 
Instead of replacing one story with another, we can learn from and revel in the many versions that exist and the many that have yet to be written. 
No matter where we're from and what your narrative is, we all have a responsibility to open ourselves up to a wider array of what choice can do, and what it can represent. 
And this does not lead to a paralyzing moral relativism. 
Rather, it teaches us when and how to act. 
It brings us that much closer to realizing the full potential of choice, to inspiring the hope and achieving the freedom that choice promises but doesn't always deliver. 
If we learn to speak to one another, albeit through translation, then we can begin to see choice in all its strangeness, complexity and compelling beauty. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. 
Sheena, there is a detail about your biography that we have not written in the program book. 
But by now it's evident to everyone in this room. You're blind. 
And I guess one of the questions on everybody's mind is: How does that influence your study of choosing because that's an activity that for most people is associated with visual inputs like aesthetics and color and so on? 
Sheena Iyengar: Well, it's funny that you should ask that because one of the things that's interesting about being blind is you actually get a different vantage point when you observe the way sighted people make choices. 
And as you just mentioned, there's lots of choices out there that are very visual these days. 
Yeah, I — as you would expect — get pretty frustrated by choices like what nail polish to put on because I have to rely on what other people suggest. 
And I can't decide. 
And so one time I was in a beauty salon, and I was trying to decide between two very light shades of pink. 
And one was called "" Ballet Slippers. "" And the other one was called "" Adorable. "" (Laughter) And so I asked these two ladies, and the one lady told me, "" Well, you should definitely wear 'Ballet Slippers.' "" "Well, what does it look like?" 
"Well, it's a very elegant shade of pink." 
"Okay, great." 
The other lady tells me to wear "" Adorable. "" "What does it look like?" 
"It's a glamorous shade of pink." 
And so I asked them, "" Well, how do I tell them apart? 
What's different about them? "" And they said, "" Well, one is elegant, the other one's glamorous. "" Okay, we got that. 
And the only thing they had consensus on: well, if I could see them, I would clearly be able to tell them apart. 
(Laughter) And what I wondered was whether they were being affected by the name or the content of the color, so I decided to do a little experiment. 
So I brought these two bottles of nail polish into the laboratory, and I stripped the labels off. 
And I brought women into the laboratory, and I asked them, "" Which one would you pick? "" 50 percent of the women accused me of playing a trick, of putting the same color nail polish in both those bottles. 
(Laughter) (Applause) At which point you start to wonder who the trick's really played on. 
Now, of the women that could tell them apart, when the labels were off, they picked "" Adorable, "" and when the labels were on, they picked "" Ballet Slippers. "" So as far as I can tell, a rose by any other name probably does look different and maybe even smells different. 
BG: Thank you. Sheena Iyengar. Thank you Sheena. 
(Applause) 

(Laughter) (Applause) Never before has the phrase "" I am British "" elicited so much pity. (Laughter) 
I come from an island where many of us like to believe there's been a lot of continuity over the last thousand years. 
We tend to have historically imposed change on others but done much less of it ourselves. 
So it came as an immense shock to me when I woke up on the morning of June 24 to discover that my country had voted to leave the European Union, my Prime Minister had resigned, and Scotland was considering a referendum that could bring to an end the very existence of the United Kingdom. 
So that was an immense shock for me, and it was an immense shock for many people, but it was also something that, over the following several days, created a complete political meltdown in my country. 
There were calls for a second referendum, almost as if, following a sports match, we could ask the opposition for a replay. 
Everybody was blaming everybody else. 
People blamed the Prime Minister for calling the referendum in the first place. 
They blamed the leader of the opposition for not fighting it hard enough. 
The young accused the old. 
The educated blamed the less well-educated. 
That complete meltdown was made even worse by the most tragic element of it: levels of xenophobia and racist abuse in the streets of Britain at a level that I have never seen before in my lifetime. 
People are now talking about whether my country is becoming a Little England, or, as one of my colleagues put it, whether we're about to become a 1950s nostalgia theme park floating in the Atlantic Ocean. 
(Laughter) But my question is really, should we have the degree of shock that we've experienced since? 
Was it something that took place overnight? 
Or are there deeper structural factors that have led us to where we are today? 
So I want to take a step back and ask two very basic questions. 
First, what does Brexit represent, not just for my country, but for all of us around the world? 
And second, what can we do about it? 
How should we all respond? 
So first, what does Brexit represent? 
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. 
Brexit teaches us many things about our society and about societies around the world. 
It highlights in ways that we seem embarrassingly unaware of how divided our societies are. 
The vote split along lines of age, education, class and geography. 
Young people didn't turn out to vote in great numbers, but those that did wanted to remain. 
Older people really wanted to leave the European Union. 
Geographically, it was London and Scotland that most strongly committed to being part of the European Union, while in other parts of the country there was very strong ambivalence. 
Those divisions are things we really need to recognize and take seriously. 
But more profoundly, the vote teaches us something about the nature of politics today. 
Contemporary politics is no longer just about right and left. 
It's no longer just about tax and spend. 
It's about globalization. 
The fault line of contemporary politics is between those that embrace globalization and those that fear globalization. 
(Applause) If we look at why those who wanted to leave — we call them "" Leavers, "" as opposed to "" Remainers "" — we see two factors in the opinion polls that really mattered. 
The first was immigration, and the second sovereignty, and these represent a desire for people to take back control of their own lives and the feeling that they are unrepresented by politicians. 
But those ideas are ones that signify fear and alienation. 
They represent a retreat back towards nationalism and borders in ways that many of us would reject. 
What I want to suggest is the picture is more complicated than that, that liberal internationalists, like myself, and I firmly include myself in that picture, need to write ourselves back into the picture in order to understand how we've got to where we are today. 
When we look at the voting patterns across the United Kingdom, we can visibly see the divisions. 
The blue areas show Remain and the red areas Leave. 
When I looked at this, what personally struck me was the very little time in my life I've actually spent in many of the red areas. 
I suddenly realized that, looking at the top 50 areas in the UK that have the strongest Leave vote, I've spent a combined total of four days of my life in those areas. 
In some of those places, I didn't even know the names of the voting districts. 
It was a real shock to me, and it suggested that people like me who think of ourselves as inclusive, open and tolerant, perhaps don't know our own countries and societies nearly as well as we like to believe. 
(Applause) And the challenge that comes from that is we need to find a new way to narrate globalization to those people, to recognize that for those people who have not necessarily been to university, who haven't necessarily grown up with the Internet, that don't get opportunities to travel, they may be unpersuaded by the narrative that we find persuasive in our often liberal bubbles. (Applause) 
It means that we need to reach out more broadly and understand. 
In the Leave vote, a minority have peddled the politics of fear and hatred, creating lies and mistrust around, for instance, the idea that the vote on Europe could reduce the number of refugees and asylum-seekers coming to Europe, when the vote on leaving had nothing to do with immigration from outside the European Union. 
But for a significant majority of the Leave voters the concern was disillusionment with the political establishment. 
This was a protest vote for many, a sense that nobody represented them, that they couldn't find a political party that spoke for them, and so they rejected that political establishment. 
This replicates around Europe and much of the liberal democratic world. 
We see it with the rise in popularity of Donald Trump in the United States, with the growing nationalism of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, with the increase in popularity of Marine Le Pen in France. 
The specter of Brexit is in all of our societies. 
So the question I think we need to ask is my second question, which is how should we collectively respond? 
For all of us who care about creating liberal, open, tolerant societies, we urgently need a new vision, a vision of a more tolerant, inclusive globalization, one that brings people with us rather than leaving them behind. 
That vision of globalization is one that has to start by a recognition of the positive benefits of globalization. 
The consensus amongst economists is that free trade, the movement of capital, the movement of people across borders benefit everyone on aggregate. 
The consensus amongst international relations scholars is that globalization brings interdependence, which brings cooperation and peace. 
But globalization also has redistributive effects. 
It creates winners and losers. 
To take the example of migration, we know that immigration is a net positive for the economy as a whole under almost all circumstances. 
But we also have to be very aware that there are redistributive consequences, that importantly, low-skilled immigration can lead to a reduction in wages for the most impoverished in our societies and also put pressure on house prices. 
That doesn't detract from the fact that it's positive, but it means more people have to share in those benefits and recognize them. 
In 2002, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, gave a speech at Yale University, and that speech was on the topic of inclusive globalization. 
That was the speech in which he coined that term. 
And he said, and I paraphrase, "" The glass house of globalization has to be open to all if it is to remain secure. 
Bigotry and ignorance are the ugly face of exclusionary and antagonistic globalization. "" That idea of inclusive globalization was briefly revived in 2008 in a conference on progressive governance involving many of the leaders of European countries. 
But amid austerity and the financial crisis of 2008, the concept disappeared almost without a trace. 
Globalization has been taken to support a neoliberal agenda. 
It's perceived to be part of an elite agenda rather than something that benefits all. 
And it needs to be reclaimed on a far more inclusive basis than it is today. 
So the question is, how can we achieve that goal? 
How can we balance on the one hand addressing fear and alienation while on the other hand refusing vehemently to give in to xenophobia and nationalism? 
That is the question for all of us. 
And I think, as a social scientist, that social science offers some places to start. 
Our transformation has to be about both ideas and about material change, and I want to give you four ideas as a starting point. 
The first relates to the idea of civic education. 
What stands out from Brexit is the gap between public perception and empirical reality. 
It's been suggested that we've moved to a postfactual society, where evidence and truth no longer matter, and lies have equal status to the clarity of evidence. 
So how can we — (Applause) How can we rebuild respect for truth and evidence into our liberal democracies? 
It has to begin with education, but it has to start with the recognition that there are huge gaps. 
In 2014, the pollster Ipsos MORI published a survey on attitudes to immigration, and it showed that as numbers of immigrants increase, so public concern with immigration also increases, although it obviously didn't unpack causality, because this could equally be to do not so much with numbers but the political and media narrative around it. 
But the same survey also revealed huge public misinformation and misunderstanding about the nature of immigration. 
For example, in these attitudes in the United Kingdom, the public believed that levels of asylum were a greater proportion of immigration than they were, but they also believed the levels of educational migration were far lower as a proportion of overall migration than they actually are. 
So we have to address this misinformation, the gap between perception and reality on key aspects of globalization. 
And that can't just be something that's left to our schools, although that's important to begin at an early age. 
It has to be about lifelong civic participation and public engagement that we all encourage as societies. 
The second thing that I think is an opportunity is the idea to encourage more interaction across diverse communities. 
(Applause) One of the things that stands out for me very strikingly, looking at immigration attitudes in the United Kingdom, is that ironically, the regions of my country that are the most tolerant of immigrants have the highest numbers of immigrants. 
So for instance, London and the Southeast have the highest numbers of immigrants, and they are also by far the most tolerant areas. 
It's those areas of the country that have the lowest levels of immigration that actually are the most exclusionary and intolerant towards migrants. 
So we need to encourage exchange programs. 
We need to ensure that older generations who maybe can't travel get access to the Internet. 
We need to encourage, even on a local and national level, more movement, more participation, more interaction with people who we don't know and whose views we might not necessarily agree with. 
The third thing that I think is crucial, though, and this is really fundamental, is we have to ensure that everybody shares in the benefits of globalization. 
This illustration from the Financial Times post-Brexit is really striking. 
It shows tragically that those people who voted to leave the European Union were those who actually benefited the most materially from trade with the European Union. 
But the problem is that those people in those areas didn't perceive themselves to be beneficiaries. 
They didn't believe that they were actually getting access to material benefits of increased trade and increased mobility around the world. 
I work on questions predominantly to do with refugees, and one of the ideas I spent a lot of my time preaching, mainly to developing countries around the world, is that in order to encourage the integration of refugees, we can't just benefit the refugee populations, we also have to address the concerns of the host communities in local areas. 
But in looking at that, one of the policy prescriptions is that we have to provide disproportionately better education facilities, health facilities, access to social services in those regions of high immigration to address the concerns of those local populations. 
But while we encourage that around the developing world, we don't take those lessons home and incorporate them in our own societies. 
Furthermore, if we're going to really take seriously the need to ensure people share in the economic benefits, our businesses and corporations need a model of globalization that recognizes that they, too, have to take people with them. 
The fourth and final idea I want to put forward is an idea that we need more responsible politics. 
There's very little social science evidence that compares attitudes on globalization. 
But from the surveys that do exist, what we can see is there's huge variation across different countries and time periods in those countries for attitudes and tolerance of questions like migration and mobility on the one hand and free trade on the other. 
But one hypothesis that I think emerges from a cursory look at that data is the idea that polarized societies are far less tolerant of globalization. 
It's the societies like Sweden in the past, like Canada today, where there is a centrist politics, where right and left work together, that we encourage supportive attitudes towards globalization. 
And what we see around the world today is a tragic polarization, a failure to have dialogue between the extremes in politics, and a gap in terms of that liberal center ground that can encourage communication and a shared understanding. 
We might not achieve that today, but at the very least we have to call upon our politicians and our media to drop a language of fear and be far more tolerant of one another. 
(Applause) These ideas are very tentative, and that's in part because this needs to be an inclusive and shared project. 
I am still British. 
I am still European. 
I am still a global citizen. 
For those of us who believe that our identities are not mutually exclusive, we have to all work together to ensure that globalization takes everyone with us and doesn't leave people behind. 
Only then will we truly reconcile democracy and globalization. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'll never forget that day back in the spring of 2006. 
I was a surgical resident at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, taking emergency call. 
I got paged by the E.R. around 2 in the morning to come and see a woman with a diabetic ulcer on her foot. 
I can still remember sort of that smell of rotting flesh as I pulled the curtain back to see her. 
And everybody there agreed this woman was very sick and she needed to be in the hospital. 
That wasn't being asked. 
The question that was being asked of me was a different one, which was, did she also need an amputation? 
Now, looking back on that night, I'd love so desperately to believe that I treated that woman on that night with the same empathy and compassion I'd shown the 27-year-old newlywed who came to the E.R. three nights earlier with lower back pain that turned out to be advanced pancreatic cancer. 
In her case, I knew there was nothing I could do that was actually going to save her life. 
The cancer was too advanced. 
But I was committed to making sure that I could do anything possible to make her stay more comfortable. I brought her a warm blanket and a cup of a coffee. 
I brought some for her parents. 
But more importantly, see, I passed no judgment on her, because obviously she had done nothing to bring this on herself. 
So why was it that, just a few nights later, as I stood in that same E.R. and determined that my diabetic patient did indeed need an amputation, why did I hold her in such bitter contempt? 
You see, unlike the woman the night before, this woman had type 2 diabetes. 
She was fat. 
And we all know that's from eating too much and not exercising enough, right? 
I mean, how hard can it be? 
As I looked down at her in the bed, I thought to myself, if you just tried caring even a little bit, you wouldn't be in this situation at this moment with some doctor you've never met about to amputate your foot. 
Why did I feel justified in judging her? 
I'd like to say I don't know. 
But I actually do. 
You see, in the hubris of my youth, I thought I had her all figured out. 
She ate too much. She got unlucky. 
She got diabetes. Case closed. 
Ironically, at that time in my life, I was also doing cancer research, immune-based therapies for melanoma, to be specific, and in that world I was actually taught to question everything, to challenge all assumptions and hold them to the highest possible scientific standards. 
Yet when it came to a disease like diabetes that kills Americans eight times more frequently than melanoma, I never once questioned the conventional wisdom. 
I actually just assumed the pathologic sequence of events was settled science. 
Three years later, I found out how wrong I was. 
But this time, I was the patient. 
Despite exercising three or four hours every single day, and following the food pyramid to the letter, I'd gained a lot of weight and developed something called metabolic syndrome. 
Some of you may have heard of this. 
I had become insulin-resistant. 
You can think of insulin as this master hormone that controls what our body does with the foods we eat, whether we burn it or store it. 
This is called fuel partitioning in the lingo. 
Now failure to produce enough insulin is incompatible with life. 
And insulin resistance, as its name suggests, is when your cells get increasingly resistant to the effect of insulin trying to do its job. 
Once you're insulin-resistant, you're on your way to getting diabetes, which is what happens when your pancreas can't keep up with the resistance and make enough insulin. 
Now your blood sugar levels start to rise, and an entire cascade of pathologic events sort of spirals out of control that can lead to heart disease, cancer, even Alzheimer's disease, and amputations, just like that woman a few years earlier. 
With that scare, I got busy changing my diet radically, adding and subtracting things most of you would find almost assuredly shocking. 
I did this and lost 40 pounds, weirdly while exercising less. 
I, as you can see, I guess I'm not overweight anymore. 
More importantly, I don't have insulin resistance. 
But most important, I was left with these three burning questions that wouldn't go away: How did this happen to me if I was supposedly doing everything right? 
If the conventional wisdom about nutrition had failed me, was it possible it was failing someone else? 
And underlying these questions, I became almost maniacally obsessed in trying to understand the real relationship between obesity and insulin resistance. 
Now, most researchers believe obesity is the cause of insulin resistance. 
Logically, then, if you want to treat insulin resistance, you get people to lose weight, right? 
You treat the obesity. 
But what if we have it backwards? 
What if obesity isn't the cause of insulin resistance at all? 
In fact, what if it's a symptom of a much deeper problem, the tip of a proverbial iceberg? 
I know it sounds crazy because we're obviously in the midst of an obesity epidemic, but hear me out. 
What if obesity is a coping mechanism for a far more sinister problem going on underneath the cell? 
I'm not suggesting that obesity is benign, but what I am suggesting is it may be the lesser of two metabolic evils. 
You can think of insulin resistance as the reduced capacity of our cells to partition fuel, as I alluded to a moment ago, taking those calories that we take in and burning some appropriately and storing some appropriately. 
When we become insulin-resistant, the homeostasis in that balance deviates from this state. 
So now, when insulin says to a cell, I want you to burn more energy than the cell considers safe, the cell, in effect, says, "No thanks, I'd actually rather store this energy." 
And because fat cells are actually missing most of the complex cellular machinery found in other cells, it's probably the safest place to store it. 
So for many of us, about 75 million Americans, the appropriate response to insulin resistance may actually be to store it as fat, not the reverse, getting insulin resistance in response to getting fat. 
This is a really subtle distinction, but the implication could be profound. 
Consider the following analogy: Think of the bruise you get on your shin when you inadvertently bang your leg into the coffee table. 
Sure, the bruise hurts like hell, and you almost certainly don't like the discolored look, but we all know the bruise per Se is not the problem. 
In fact, it's the opposite. It's a healthy response to the trauma, all of those immune cells rushing to the site of the injury to salvage cellular debris and prevent the spread of infection to elsewhere in the body. 
Now, imagine we thought bruises were the problem, and we evolved a giant medical establishment and a culture around treating bruises: masking creams, painkillers, you name it, all the while ignoring the fact that people are still banging their shins into coffee tables. 
How much better would we be if we treated the cause — telling people to pay attention when they walk through the living room — rather than the effect? 
Getting the cause and the effect right makes all the difference in the world. 
Getting it wrong, and the pharmaceutical industry can still do very well for its shareholders but nothing improves for the people with bruised shins. 
Cause and effect. 
So what I'm suggesting is maybe we have the cause and effect wrong on obesity and insulin resistance. 
Maybe we should be asking ourselves, is it possible that insulin resistance causes weight gain and the diseases associated with obesity, at least in most people? 
What if being obese is just a metabolic response to something much more threatening, an underlying epidemic, the one we ought to be worried about? 
Let's look at some suggestive facts. 
We know that 30 million obese Americans in the United States don't have insulin resistance. 
And by the way, they don't appear to be at any greater risk of disease than lean people. 
Conversely, we know that six million lean people in the United States are insulin-resistant, and by the way, they appear to be at even greater risk for those metabolic diseases I mentioned a moment ago than their obese counterparts. 
Now I don't know why, but it might be because, in their case, their cells haven't actually figured out the right thing to do with that excess energy. 
So if you can be obese and not have insulin resistance, and you can be lean and have it, this suggests that obesity may just be a proxy for what's going on. 
So what if we're fighting the wrong war, fighting obesity rather than insulin resistance? 
Even worse, what if blaming the obese means we're blaming the victims? 
What if some of our fundamental ideas about obesity are just wrong? 
Personally, I can't afford the luxury of arrogance anymore, let alone the luxury of certainty. 
I have my own ideas about what could be at the heart of this, but I'm wide open to others. 
Now, my hypothesis, because everybody always asks me, is this. 
If you ask yourself, what's a cell trying to protect itself from when it becomes insulin resistant, the answer probably isn't too much food. 
It's more likely too much glucose: blood sugar. 
Now, we know that refined grains and starches elevate your blood sugar in the short run, and there's even reason to believe that sugar may lead to insulin resistance directly. 
So if you put these physiological processes to work, I'd hypothesize that it might be our increased intake of refined grains, sugars and starches that's driving this epidemic of obesity and diabetes, but through insulin resistance, you see, and not necessarily through just overeating and under-exercising. 
When I lost my 40 pounds a few years ago, I did it simply by restricting those things, which admittedly suggests I have a bias based on my personal experience. 
But that doesn't mean my bias is wrong, and most important, all of this can be tested scientifically. 
But step one is accepting the possibility that our current beliefs about obesity, diabetes and insulin resistance could be wrong and therefore must be tested. 
I'm betting my career on this. 
Today, I devote all of my time to working on this problem, and I'll go wherever the science takes me. 
I've decided that what I can't and won't do anymore is pretend I have the answers when I don't. 
I've been humbled enough by all I don't know. 
For the past year, I've been fortunate enough to work on this problem with the most amazing team of diabetes and obesity researchers in the country, and the best part is, just like Abraham Lincoln surrounded himself with a team of rivals, we've done the same thing. 
We've recruited a team of scientific rivals, the best and brightest who all have different hypotheses for what's at the heart of this epidemic. 
Some think it's too many calories consumed. 
Others think it's too much dietary fat. 
Others think it's too many refined grains and starches. 
But this team of multi-disciplinary, highly skeptical and exceedingly talented researchers do agree on two things. 
First, this problem is just simply too important to continue ignoring because we think we know the answer. 
And two, if we're willing to be wrong, if we're willing to challenge the conventional wisdom with the best experiments science can offer, we can solve this problem. 
I know it's tempting to want an answer right now, some form of action or policy, some dietary prescription — eat this, not that — but if we want to get it right, we're going to have to do much more rigorous science before we can write that prescription. 
Briefly, to address this, our research program is focused around three meta-themes, or questions. 
First, how do the various foods we consume impact our metabolism, hormones and enzymes, and through what nuanced molecular mechanisms? 
Second, based on these insights, can people make the necessary changes in their diets in a way that's safe and practical to implement? 
And finally, once we identify what safe and practical changes people can make to their diet, how can we move their behavior in that direction so that it becomes more the default rather than the exception? 
Just because you know what to do doesn't mean you're always going to do it. 
Sometimes we have to put cues around people to make it easier, and believe it or not, that can be studied scientifically. 
I don't know how this journey is going to end, but this much seems clear to me, at least: We can't keep blaming our overweight and diabetic patients like I did. 
Most of them actually want to do the right thing, but they have to know what that is, and it's got to work. 
I dream of a day when our patients can shed their excess pounds and cure themselves of insulin resistance, because as medical professionals, we've shed our excess mental baggage and cured ourselves of new idea resistance sufficiently to go back to our original ideals: open minds, the courage to throw out yesterday's ideas when they don't appear to be working, and the understanding that scientific truth isn't final, but constantly evolving. 
Staying true to that path will be better for our patients and better for science. 
If obesity is nothing more than a proxy for metabolic illness, what good does it do us to punish those with the proxy? 
Sometimes I think back to that night in the E.R. 
seven years ago. 
I wish I could speak with that woman again. 
I'd like to tell her how sorry I am. 
I'd say, as a doctor, I delivered the best clinical care I could, but as a human being, I let you down. 
You didn't need my judgment and my contempt. 
You needed my empathy and compassion, and above all else, you needed a doctor who was willing to consider maybe you didn't let the system down. 
Maybe the system, of which I was a part, was letting you down. 
If you're watching this now, I hope you can forgive me. 
(Applause) 

Imagine you are a part of a crew of astronauts traveling to Mars or some distant planet. 
The travel time could take a year or even longer. 
The space on board and the resources would be limited. 
So you and the crew would have to figure out how to produce food with minimal inputs. 
What if you could bring with you just a few packets of seeds, and grow crops in a matter of hours? 
And what if those crops would then make more seeds, enabling you to feed the entire crew with just those few packets of seeds for the duration of the trip? 
Well, the scientists at NASA actually figured out a way to do this. 
What they came up with was actually quite interesting. 
It involved microorganisms, which are single-celled organisms. 
And they also used hydrogen from water. 
The types of microbes that they used were called hydrogenotrophs, and with these hydrogenotrophs, you can create a virtuous carbon cycle that would sustain life onboard a spacecraft. 
Astronauts would breathe out carbon dioxide, that carbon dioxide would then be captured by the microbes and converted into a nutritious, carbon-rich crop. 
The astronauts would then eat that carbon-rich crop and exhale the carbon out in the form of carbon dioxide, which would then be captured by the microbes, to create a nutritious crop, which then would be exhaled in the form of carbon dioxide by the astronauts. 
So in this way, a closed-loop carbon cycle is created. 
So why is this important? 
We need carbon to survive as humans, and we get our carbon from food. 
On a long space journey, you simply wouldn't be able to pick up any carbon along the way, so you'd have to figure out how to recycle it on board. 
This is a clever solution, right? 
But the thing is, that research didn't really go anywhere. 
We haven't yet gone to Mars. We haven't yet gone to another planet. 
And this was actually done in the '60s and' 70s. 
So a colleague of mine, Dr. John Reed, and I, were interested, actually, in carbon recycling here on Earth. 
We wanted to come up with technical solutions to address climate change. 
And we discovered this research by reading some papers published in the '60s — 1967 and later — articles about this work. 
And we thought it was a really good idea. 
So we said, well, Earth is actually like a spaceship. 
We have limited space and limited resources, and on Earth, we really do need to figure out how to recycle our carbon better. 
So we had the idea, can we take some of these NASA-type ideas and apply them to our carbon problem here on Earth? 
Could we cultivate these NASA-type microbes in order to make valuable products here on Earth? 
We started a company to do it. 
And in that company, we discovered that these hydrogenotrophs — which I'll actually call nature's supercharged carbon recyclers — we found that they are a powerful class of microbes that had been largely overlooked and understudied, and that they could make some really valuable products. 
So we began cultivating these products, these microbes, in our lab. 
We found that we can make essential amino acids from carbon dioxide using these microbes. 
And we even made a protein-rich meal that has an amino acid profile similar to what you might find in some animal proteins. 
We began cultivating them even further, and we found that we can make oil. 
Oils are used to manufacture many products. 
We made an oil that was similar to a citrus oil, which can be used for flavoring and for fragrances, but it also can be used as a biodegradable cleaner or even as a jet fuel. 
And we made an oil that's similar to palm oil. 
Palm oil is used to manufacture a wide range of consumer and industrial goods. 
We began working with manufacturers to scale up this technology, and we're currently working with them to bring some of these products to market. 
We believe this type of technology can indeed help us profitably recycle carbon dioxide into valuable products — something that's beneficial for the planet but also beneficial for business. 
That's what we're doing today. 
But tomorrow, this type of technology and using these types of microbes actually could help us do something even greater if we take it to the next level. 
We believe that this type of technology can actually help us address an issue with agriculture and allow us to create a type of agriculture that's sustainable, that will allow us to scale to meet the demands of tomorrow. 
And why might we need a sustainable agriculture? 
Well, actually, it is estimated that the population will reach about 10 billion by 2050, and we're projecting that we will need to increase food production by 70 percent. 
In addition, we will need many more resources and raw materials to make consumer goods and industrial goods. 
So how will we scale to meet that demand? 
Well, modern agriculture simply cannot sustainably scale to meet that demand. 
There are a number of reasons why. 
One of them is that modern agriculture is one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. 
In fact, it emits more greenhouse gases than our cars, our trucks, our planes and our trains combined. 
Another reason is that modern ag simply takes up a whole lot of land. 
We have cleared 19.4 million square miles for crops and livestock. 
What does that look like? 
Well, that's roughly the size of South America and Africa combined. 
Let me give you a specific example. 
In Indonesia, an amount of virgin rainforest was cleared totaling the size of approximately Ireland, between 2000 and 2012. 
Just think of all of the species, the diversity, that was removed in the process, whether plant life, insects or animal life. 
And a natural carbon sink was also removed. 
So let me make this real for you. 
This clearing happened primarily to make room for palm plantations. 
And as I mentioned before, palm oil is used to manufacture many products. 
In fact, it is estimated that over 50 percent of consumer products are manufactured using palm oil. 
And that includes things like ice cream, cookies... 
It includes cooking oils. 
It also includes detergents, lotions, soaps. 
You and I both probably have numerous items in our kitchens and our bathrooms that were manufactured using palm oil. 
So you and I are direct beneficiaries of removed rainforests. 
Modern ag has some problems, and we need solutions if we want to scale sustainably. 
I believe that microbes can be a part of the answer — specifically, these supercharged carbon recyclers. 
These supercharged carbon recyclers, like plants, serve as the natural recyclers in their ecosystems where they thrive. 
And they thrive in exotic places on Earth, like hydrothermal vents and hot springs. 
In those ecosystems, they take carbon and recycle it into the nutrients needed for those ecosystems. 
And they're rich in nutrients, such as oils and proteins, minerals and carbohydrates. 
And actually, microbes are already an integral part of our everyday lives. 
If you enjoy a glass of pinot noir on a Friday night, after a long, hard work week, then you are enjoying a product of microbes. 
If you enjoy a beer from your local microbrewery — a product of microbes. 
Or bread, or cheese, or yogurt. 
These are all products of microbes. 
But the beauty and power associated with these supercharged carbon recyclers lies in the fact that they can actually produce in a matter of hours versus months. 
That means we can make crops much faster than we're making them today. 
They grow in the dark, so they can grow in any season and in any geography and any location. 
They can grow in containers that require minimal space. 
And we can get to a type of vertical agriculture. 
Instead of our traditional horizontal agriculture that requires so much land, we can scale vertically, and as a result produce much more product per area. 
If we implement this type of approach and use these carbon recyclers, then we wouldn't have to remove any more rainforests to make the food and the goods that we consume. 
Because, at a large scale, you can actually make 10,000 times more output per land area than you could — for instance, if you used soybeans — if you planted soybeans on that same area of land over a period of a year. 
Ten thousand times over a period of a year. 
So this is what I mean by a new type of agriculture. 
And this is what I mean by developing a system that allows us to sustainably scale to meet the demands of 10 billion. 
And what would be the products of this new type of agriculture? 
Well, we've already made a protein meal, so you can imagine something similar to a soybean meal, or even cornmeal, or wheat flour. 
We've already made oils, so you can imagine something similar to coconut oil or olive oil or soybean oil. 
So this type of crop can actually produce the nutrients that would give us pasta and bread, cakes, nutritional items of many sorts. 
Furthermore, since oil is used to manufacture multiple other goods, industrial products and consumer products, you can imagine being able to make detergents, soaps, lotions, etc., using these types of crops. 
Not only are we running out of space, but if we continue to operate under the status quo with modern agriculture, we run the risk of robbing our progeny of a beautiful planet. 
But it doesn't have to be this way. 
We can imagine a future of abundance. 
Let us create systems that keep planet Earth, our spaceship, not only from not crashing, but let us also develop systems and ways of living that will be beneficial to the lives of ourselves and the 10 billion that will be on this planet by 2050. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

It would be nice to be objective in life, in many ways. 
The problem is that we have these color-tinted glasses as we look at all kinds of situations. 
For example, think about something as simple as beer. 
If I gave you a few beers to taste and I asked you to rate them on intensity and bitterness, different beers would occupy different space. 
But what if we tried to be objective about it? 
In the case of beer, it would be very simple. 
What if we did a blind taste? 
Well, if we did the same thing, you tasted the same beer, now in the blind taste, things would look slightly different. 
Most of the beers will go into one place. 
You will basically not be able to distinguish them, and the exception, of course, will be Guinness. 
(Laughter) Similarly, we can think about physiology. 
What happens when people expect something from their physiology? 
For example, we sold people pain medications. 
Some people, we told them the medications were expensive. 
Some people, we told them it was cheap. 
And the expensive pain medication worked better. 
It relieved more pain from people, because expectations do change our physiology. 
And of course, we all know that in sports, if you are a fan of a particular team, you can't help but see the game develop from the perspective of your team. 
So all of those are cases in which our preconceived notions and our expectations color our world. 
But what happened in more important questions? 
What happened with questions that had to do with social justice? 
So we wanted to think about what is the blind tasting version for thinking about inequality? 
So we started looking at inequality, and we did some large-scale surveys around the U.S. and other countries. 
So we asked two questions: Do people know what kind of level of inequality we have? 
And then, what level of inequality do we want to have? 
So let's think about the first question. 
Imagine I took all the people in the U.S. 
and I sorted them from the poorest on the right to the richest on the left, and then I divided them into five buckets: the poorest 20 percent, the next 20 percent, the next, the next, and the richest 20 percent. 
And then I asked you to tell me how much wealth do you think is concentrated in each of those buckets. 
So to make it simpler, imagine I ask you to tell me, how much wealth do you think is concentrated in the bottom two buckets, the bottom 40 percent? 
Take a second. Think about it and have a number. 
Usually we don't think. 
Think for a second, have a real number in your mind. 
You have it? 
Okay, here's what lots of Americans tell us. 
They think that the bottom 20 percent has about 2.9 percent of the wealth, the next group has 6.4, so together it's slightly more than nine. 
The next group, they say, has 12 percent, 20 percent, and the richest 20 percent, people think has 58 percent of the wealth. 
You can see how this relates to what you thought. 
Now, what's reality? 
Reality is slightly different. 
The bottom 20 percent has 0.1 percent of the wealth. 
The next 20 percent has 0.2 percent of the wealth. 
The next group has 3.9, 11.3, and the richest group has 84-85 percent of the wealth. 
So what we actually have and what we think we have are very different. 
What about what we want? 
How do we even figure this out? 
So to look at this, to look at what we really want, we thought about the philosopher John Rawls. 
If you remember John Rawls, he had this notion of what's a just society. 
He said a just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you would be willing to enter it in a random place. 
And it's a beautiful definition, because if you're wealthy, you might want the wealthy to have more money, the poor to have less. 
If you're poor, you might want more equality. 
But if you're going to go into that society in every possible situation, and you don't know, you have to consider all the aspects. 
It's a little bit like blind tasting in which you don't know what the outcome will be when you make a decision, and Rawls called this the "" veil of ignorance. "" So, we took another group, a large group of Americans, and we asked them the question in the veil of ignorance. 
What are the characteristics of a country that would make you want to join it, knowing that you could end randomly at any place? 
And here is what we got. 
What did people want to give to the first group, the bottom 20 percent? 
They wanted to give them about 10 percent of the wealth. 
The next group, 14 percent of the wealth, 21, 22 and 32. 
Now, nobody in our sample wanted full equality. 
Nobody thought that socialism is a fantastic idea in our sample. 
But what does it mean? 
It means that we have this knowledge gap between what we have and what we think we have, but we have at least as big a gap between what we think is right to what we think we have. 
Now, we can ask these questions, by the way, not just about wealth. 
We can ask it about other things as well. 
So for example, we asked people from different parts of the world about this question, people who are liberals and conservatives, and they gave us basically the same answer. 
We asked rich and poor, they gave us the same answer, men and women, NPR listeners and Forbes readers. 
We asked people in England, Australia, the U.S. — very similar answers. 
We even asked different departments of a university. 
We went to Harvard and we checked almost every department, and in fact, from Harvard Business School, where a few people wanted the wealthy to have more and the [poor] to have less, the similarity was astonishing. 
I know some of you went to Harvard Business School. 
We also asked this question about something else. 
We asked, what about the ratio of CEO pay to unskilled workers? 
So you can see what people think is the ratio, and then we can ask the question, what do they think should be the ratio? 
And then we can ask, what is reality? 
What is reality? And you could say, well, it's not that bad, right? 
The red and the yellow are not that different. 
But the fact is, it's because I didn't draw them on the same scale. 
It's hard to see, there's yellow and blue in there. 
So what about other outcomes of wealth? 
Wealth is not just about wealth. 
We asked, what about things like health? 
What about availability of prescription medication? 
What about life expectancy? 
What about life expectancy of infants? 
How do we want this to be distributed? 
What about education for young people? 
And for older people? 
And across all of those things, what we learned was that people don't like inequality of wealth, but there's other things where inequality, which is an outcome of wealth, is even more aversive to them: for example, inequality in health or education. 
We also learned that people are particularly open to changes in equality when it comes to people who have less agency — basically, young kids and babies, because we don't think of them as responsible for their situation. 
So what are some lessons from this? 
We have two gaps: We have a knowledge gap and we have a desirability gap And the knowledge gap is something that we think about, how do we educate people? 
How do we get people to think differently about inequality and the consequences of inequality in terms of health, education, jealousy, crime rate, and so on? 
Then we have the desirability gap. 
How do we get people to think differently about what we really want? 
You see, the Rawls definition, the Rawls way of looking at the world, the blind tasting approach, takes our selfish motivation out of the picture. 
How do we implement that to a higher degree on a more extensive scale? 
And finally, we also have an action gap. 
How do we take these things and actually do something about it? 
I think part of the answer is to think about people like young kids and babies that don't have much agency, because people seem to be more willing to do this. 
To summarize, I would say, next time you go to drink beer or wine, first of all, think about, what is it in your experience that is real, and what is it in your experience that is a placebo effect coming from expectations? 
And then think about what it also means for other decisions in your life, and hopefully also for policy questions that affect all of us. 
Thanks a lot. 
(Applause) 

You probably don't know me, but I am one of those .01 percenters that you hear about and read about, and I am by any reasonable definition a plutocrat. 
And tonight, what I would like to do is speak directly to other plutocrats, to my people, because it feels like it's time for us all to have a chat. 
Like most plutocrats, I too am a proud and unapologetic capitalist. 
I have founded, cofounded or funded over 30 companies across a range of industries. 
I was the first non-family investor in Amazon.com. 
I cofounded a company called aQuantive that we sold to Microsoft for 6.4 billion dollars. 
My friends and I, we own a bank. 
I tell you this — (Laughter) — unbelievable, right? 
I tell you this to show that my life is like most plutocrats. 
I have a broad perspective on capitalism and business, and I have been rewarded obscenely for that with a life that most of you all can't even imagine: multiple homes, a yacht, my own plane, etc., etc., etc. 
But let's be honest: I am not the smartest person you've ever met. 
I am certainly not the hardest working. 
I was a mediocre student. 
I'm not technical at all. 
I can't write a word of code. 
Truly, my success is the consequence of spectacular luck, of birth, of circumstance and of timing. 
But I am actually pretty good at a couple of things. 
One, I have an unusually high tolerance for risk, and the other is I have a good sense, a good intuition about what will happen in the future, and I think that that intuition about the future is the essence of good entrepreneurship. 
So what do I see in our future today, you ask? 
I see pitchforks, as in angry mobs with pitchforks, because while people like us plutocrats are living beyond the dreams of avarice, the other 99 percent of our fellow citizens are falling farther and farther behind. 
In 1980, the top one percent of Americans shared about eight percent of national [income], while the bottom 50 percent of Americans shared 18 percent. 
Thirty years later, today, the top one percent shares over 20 percent of national [income], while the bottom 50 percent of Americans share 12 or 13. 
If the trend continues, the top one percent will share over 30 percent of national [income] in another 30 years, while the bottom 50 percent of Americans will share just six. 
You see, the problem isn't that we have some inequality. 
Some inequality is necessary for a high-functioning capitalist democracy. 
The problem is that inequality is at historic highs today and it's getting worse every day. 
And if wealth, power, and income continue to concentrate at the very tippy top, our society will change from a capitalist democracy to a neo-feudalist rentier society like 18th-century France. 
That was France before the revolution and the mobs with the pitchforks. 
So I have a message for my fellow plutocrats and zillionaires and for anyone who lives in a gated bubble world: Wake up. 
Wake up. It cannot last. 
Because if we do not do something to fix the glaring economic inequities in our society, the pitchforks will come for us, for no free and open society can long sustain this kind of rising economic inequality. 
It has never happened. There are no examples. 
You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state or an uprising. 
The pitchforks will come for us if we do not address this. 
It's not a matter of if, it's when. 
And it will be terrible when they come for everyone, but particularly for people like us plutocrats. 
I know I must sound like some liberal do-gooder. 
I'm not. I'm not making a moral argument that economic inequality is wrong. 
What I am arguing is that rising economic inequality is stupid and ultimately self-defeating. 
Rising inequality doesn't just increase our risks from pitchforks, but it's also terrible for business too. 
So the model for us rich guys should be Henry Ford. 
When Ford famously introduced the $5 day, which was twice the prevailing wage at the time, he didn't just increase the productivity of his factories, he converted exploited autoworkers who were poor into a thriving middle class who could now afford to buy the products that they made. 
Ford intuited what we now know is true, that an economy is best understood as an ecosystem and characterized by the same kinds of feedback loops you find in a natural ecosystem, a feedback loop between customers and businesses. 
Raising wages increases demand, which increases hiring, which in turn increases wages and demand and profits, and that virtuous cycle of increasing prosperity is precisely what is missing from today's economic recovery. 
And this is why we need to put behind us the trickle-down policies that so dominate both political parties and embrace something I call middle-out economics. 
Middle-out economics rejects the neoclassical economic idea that economies are efficient, linear, mechanistic, that they tend towards equilibrium and fairness, and instead embraces the 21st-century idea that economies are complex, adaptive, ecosystemic, that they tend away from equilibrium and toward inequality, that they're not efficient at all but are effective if well managed. 
This 21st-century perspective allows you to clearly see that capitalism does not work by [efficiently] allocating existing resources. 
It works by [efficiently] creating new solutions to human problems. 
The genius of capitalism is that it is an evolutionary solution-finding system. 
It rewards people for solving other people's problems. 
The difference between a poor society and a rich society, obviously, is the degree to which that society has generated solutions in the form of products for its citizens. 
The sum of the solutions that we have in our society really is our prosperity, and this explains why companies like Google and Amazon and Microsoft and Apple and the entrepreneurs who created those companies have contributed so much to our nation's prosperity. 
This 21st-century perspective also makes clear that what we think of as economic growth is best understood as the rate at which we solve problems. 
But that rate is totally dependent upon how many problem solvers — diverse, able problem solvers — we have, and thus how many of our fellow citizens actively participate, both as entrepreneurs who can offer solutions, and as customers who consume them. 
But this maximizing participation thing doesn't happen by accident. 
It doesn't happen by itself. 
It requires effort and investment, which is why all highly prosperous capitalist democracies are characterized by massive investments in the middle class and the infrastructure that they depend on. 
We plutocrats need to get this trickle-down economics thing behind us, this idea that the better we do, the better everyone else will do. 
It's not true. How could it be? 
I earn 1,000 times the median wage, but I do not buy 1,000 times as much stuff, do I? 
I actually bought two pairs of these pants, what my partner Mike calls my manager pants. 
I could have bought 2,000 pairs, but what would I do with them? (Laughter) How many haircuts can I get? 
How often can I go out to dinner? 
No matter how wealthy a few plutocrats get, we can never drive a great national economy. 
Only a thriving middle class can do that. 
There's nothing to be done, my plutocrat friends might say. 
Henry Ford was in a different time. 
Maybe we can't do some things. 
Maybe we can do some things. 
June 19, 2013, Bloomberg published an article I wrote called "The Capitalist ’ s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage." 
The good people at Forbes magazine, among my biggest admirers, called it "" Nick Hanauer's near-insane proposal. "" And yet, just 350 days after that article was published, Seattle's Mayor Ed Murray signed into law an ordinance raising the minimum wage in Seattle to 15 dollars an hour, more than double what the prevailing federal $7.25 rate is. 
How did this happen, reasonable people might ask. 
It happened because a group of us reminded the middle class that they are the source of growth and prosperity in capitalist economies. 
We reminded them that when workers have more money, businesses have more customers, and need more employees. 
We reminded them that when businesses pay workers a living wage, taxpayers are relieved of the burden of funding the poverty programs like food stamps and medical assistance and rent assistance that those workers need. 
We reminded them that low-wage workers make terrible taxpayers, and that when you raise the minimum wage for all businesses, all businesses benefit yet all can compete. 
Now the orthodox reaction, of course, is raising the minimum wage costs jobs. Right? 
Your politician's always echoing that trickle-down idea by saying things like, "" Well, if you raise the price of employment, guess what happens? You get less of it. "" Are you sure? 
Because there's some contravening evidence. 
Since 1980, the wages of CEOs in our country have gone from about 30 times the median wage to 500 times. 
That's raising the price of employment. 
And yet, to my knowledge, I have never seen a company outsource its CEO's job, automate their job, export the job to China. 
In fact, we appear to be employing more CEOs and senior managers than ever before. 
So too for technology workers and financial services workers, who earn multiples of the median wage and yet we employ more and more of them, so clearly you can raise the price of employment and get more of it. 
I know that most people think that the $15 minimum wage is this insane, risky economic experiment. 
We disagree. 
We believe that the $15 minimum wage in Seattle is actually the continuation of a logical economic policy. 
It is allowing our city to kick your city's ass. 
Because, you see, Washington state already has the highest minimum wage of any state in the nation. 
We pay all workers $9.32, which is almost 30 percent more than the federal minimum of 7.25, but crucially, 427 percent more than the federal tipped minimum of 2.13. 
If trickle-down thinkers were right, then Washington state should have massive unemployment. 
Seattle should be sliding into the ocean. 
And yet, Seattle is the fastest-growing big city in the country. 
Washington state is generating small business jobs at a higher rate than any other major state in the nation. 
The restaurant business in Seattle? Booming. 
Why? Because the fundamental law of capitalism is, when workers have more money, businesses have more customers and need more workers. 
When restaurants pay restaurant workers enough so that even they can afford to eat in restaurants, that's not bad for the restaurant business. 
That's good for it, despite what some restaurateurs may tell you. 
Is it more complicated than I'm making out? 
Of course it is. 
There are a lot of dynamics at play. 
But can we please stop insisting that if low-wage workers earn a little bit more, unemployment will skyrocket and the economy will collapse? 
There is no evidence for it. 
The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. 
It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. 
This is nonsense. 
So can we please dispense with this rhetoric that says that rich guys like me and my plutocrat friends made our country? 
We plutocrats know, even if we don't like to admit it in public, that if we had been born somewhere else, not here in the United States, we might very well be just some dude standing barefoot by the side of a dirt road selling fruit. 
It's not that they don't have good entrepreneurs in other places, even very, very poor places. 
It's just that that's all that those entrepreneurs' customers can afford. 
So here's an idea for a new kind of economics, a new kind of politics that I call new capitalism. 
Let's acknowledge that capitalism beats the alternatives, but also that the more people we include, both as entrepreneurs and as customers, the better it works. 
Let's by all means shrink the size of government, but not by slashing the poverty programs, but by ensuring that workers are paid enough so that they actually don't need those programs. 
Let's invest enough in the middle class to make our economy fairer and more inclusive, and by fairer, more truly competitive, and by more truly competitive, more able to generate the solutions to human problems that are the true drivers of growth and prosperity. 
Capitalism is the greatest social technology ever invented for creating prosperity in human societies, if it is well managed, but capitalism, because of the fundamental multiplicative dynamics of complex systems, tends towards, inexorably, inequality, concentration and collapse. 
The work of democracies is to maximize the inclusion of the many in order to create prosperity, not to enable the few to accumulate money. 
Government does create prosperity and growth, by creating the conditions that allow both entrepreneurs and their customers to thrive. 
Balancing the power of capitalists like me and workers isn't bad for capitalism. 
It's essential to it. 
Programs like a reasonable minimum wage, affordable healthcare, paid sick leave, and the progressive taxation necessary to pay for the important infrastructure necessary for the middle class like education, R and D, these are indispensable tools shrewd capitalists should embrace to drive growth, because no one benefits from it like us. 
Many economists would have you believe that their field is an objective science. 
I disagree, and I think that it is equally a tool that humans use to enforce and encode our social and moral preferences and prejudices about status and power, which is why plutocrats like me have always needed to find persuasive stories to tell everyone else about why our relative positions are morally righteous and good for everyone: like, we are indispensable, the job creators, and you are not; like, tax cuts for us create growth, but investments in you will balloon our debt and bankrupt our great country; that we matter; that you don't. 
For thousands of years, these stories were called divine right. 
Today, we have trickle-down economics. 
How obviously, transparently self-serving all of this is. 
We plutocrats need to see that the United States of America made us, not the other way around; that a thriving middle class is the source of prosperity in capitalist economies, not a consequence of it. 
And we should never forget that even the best of us in the worst of circumstances are barefoot by the side of a dirt road selling fruit. 
Fellow plutocrats, I think it may be time for us to recommit to our country, to commit to a new kind of capitalism which is both more inclusive and more effective, a capitalism that will ensure that America's economy remains the most dynamic and prosperous in the world. 
Let's secure the future for ourselves, our children and their children. 
Or alternatively, we could do nothing, hide in our gated communities and private schools, enjoy our planes and yachts — they're fun — and wait for the pitchforks. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Let me start by asking you a question, just with a show of hands: Who has an iPhone? 
Who has a Blackberry? 
(Laughter) And let me guess, how many of you, when you arrived here, like me, went and bought a pay-as-you-go SIM card? Yeah? 
I'll bet you didn't even know you're using African technology. 
Pay-as-you-go was a technology, or an idea, pioneered in Africa by a company called Vodacom a good 15 years ago, and now, like franchising, pay-as-you-go is one of the most dominant forces of economic activity in the world. 
So I'm going to talk about innovation in Africa, which I think is the purest form, innovation out of necessity. 
But first, I'm going to ask you some other questions. 
You don't have to put your hands up. 
These are rhetorical. 
Why did Nikola Tesla have to invent the alternating current that powers the lights in this building or the city that we're in? 
Why did Henry Ford have to invent the production line to produce these Fords that came in anything as long as they were black? 
And why did Eric Merrifield have to invent the dolos? 
Blank stares. That is what a dolos looks like, and in the background, you can see Robben Island. 
This is a small dolos, and Eric Merrifield is the most famous inventor you've never heard of. 
In 1963, a storm ripped up the harbor in a small South African town called East London, and while he was watching his kids playing with toys made from oxen bones called dolosse, he had the idea for this. 
It's a bit like a huge jumping jack, and they have used this in every harbor in the world as a breakwater. 
The global shipping economy would not be possible without African technology like this. 
So whenever you talk about Africa, you have to put up this picture of the world from space, and people go, "" Look, it's the Dark Continent. "" Actually, it isn't. 
What it is is a map of innovation. 
And it's really easy to see where innovation's going on. 
All the places with lots of electricity, it isn't. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And the reason it isn't is because everybody's watching television or playing Angry Birds. (Laughter) (Applause) 
So where it's happening is in Africa. 
Now, this is real innovation, not the way people have expropriated the word to talk about launching new products. 
This is real innovation, and I define it as problem-solving. 
People are solving real problems in Africa. 
Why? Because we have to. 
Because we have real problems. 
And when we solve real problems for people, we solve them for the rest of the world at the same time. 
So in California, everybody's really excited about a little square of plastic that you plug into a phone and you can swipe your credit card, and people say, "" We've liberated the credit card from the point of sale terminal. "" Fantastic. Why do you even need a credit card? 
In Africa, we've been doing that for years, and we've been doing it on phones like this. 
This is a picture I took at a place called Kitengela, about an hour south of Nairobi, and the thing that's so remarkable about the payment system that's been pioneered in Africa called M-Pesa is that it works on phones like this. 
It works on every single phone possible, because it uses SMS. 
You can pay bills with it, you can buy your groceries, you can pay your kids' school fees, and I'm told you can even bribe customs officials. 
(Laughter) Something like 25 million dollars a day is transacted through M-Pesa. 
Forty percent of Kenya's GDP moves through M-Pesa using phones like this. 
And you think this is just a feature phone. 
Actually it's the smartphone of Africa. 
It's also a radio, and it's also a torch, and more than anything else, it has really superb battery life. 
Why? Because that's what we need. 
We have really severe energy problems in Africa. 
By the way, you can update Facebook and send Gmail from a phone like this. 
So we have found a way to use the available technology to send money via M-Pesa, which is a bit like a check system for the mobile age. 
I come from Johannesburg, which is a mining town. 
It's built on gold. 
This is a picture I Instagrammed earlier. 
And the difference today is that the gold of today is mobile. 
If you think about the railroad system in North America and how that worked, first came the infrastructure, then came the industry around it, the brothels — it's a bit like the Internet today, right? — and everything else that worked with it: bars, saloons, etc. 
The gold of today is mobile, and mobile is the enabler that makes all of this possible. 
So what are some of the things that you can do with it? 
Well, this is by a guy called Bright Simons from Ghana, and what you do is you take medication, something that some people might spend their entire month's salary on, and you scratch off the code, and you send that to an SMS number, and it tells you if that is legitimate or if it's expired. 
Really simple, really effective, really life-saving. 
In Kenya, there's a service called iCow, which just sends you really important information about how to look after your dairy. 
The dairy business in Kenya is a $463 million business, and the difference between a subsistence farmer and an abundance farmer is only a couple of liters of milk a day. 
And if you can do that, you can rise out of poverty. 
Really simple, using a basic phone. 
If you don't have electricity, no problem! 
We'll just make it out of old bicycle parts using a windmill, as William Kamkwamba did. 
There's another great African that you've heard that's busy disrupting the automobile industry in the world. 
He's also finding a way to reinvent solar power and the electricity industry in North America, and if he's lucky, he'll get us to Mars, hopefully in my lifetime. 
He comes from Pretoria, the capital of [South Africa], about 50 kilometers from where I live. 
So back to Joburg, which is sometimes called Egoli, which means City of Gold. 
And not only is mobile the gold of today, I don't believe that the gold is under the ground. 
I believe we are the gold. 
Like you've heard the other economists say, we are at the point where China was when its boom years began, and that's where we're going. 
So, you hear the West talk about innovation at the edge. 
Well, of course it's happening at the edge, because in the middle, everybody's updating Facebook, or worse still, they're trying to understand Facebook's privacy settings. 
(Laughter) This is not that catchy catchphrase. 
This is innovation over the edge. 
So, people like to call Africa a mobile-first continent, but actually it's mobile-only, so while everybody else is doing all of those things, we're solving the world's problems. 
So there's only one thing left to say. 
["" You're welcome ""] (Laughter) (Applause) 

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

When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze — that all people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. 
This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. 
At the same time, if you think about it, there's all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. 
In fact, it's all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. 
I'll never do it again. "" (Laughter) "Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos." 
And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. 
And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to visit me. 
And he was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. 
He stayed late at night every day. 
Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. 
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. 
We'll pay you three dollars for it. "" And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. 
And when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and we said, "" Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70? "" If they said yes, we gave them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, "" Do you want to build another one? "" for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point people said, "No more. It's not worth it for me." 
And we told them that at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant. 
And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. 
You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. 
Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again. 
There's something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating. 
And if they said yes, they built it. 
Then we asked them, "" Do you want to build another one for $2.70? "" And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. 
And when they finished that, we said, "" Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less? "" And if they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. 
The first thing that happened was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. 
And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. 
In this other version of the experiment, we didn't put people in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the result would be. 
People who were just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. 
And you would speculate that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it. 
There was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built. 
In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people's eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. 
We basically eliminated it. 
Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle. 
And the week before I showed up, the CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. 
And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I've ever talked to. 
And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. 
They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. 
He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. 
In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, say "" Uh huh, "" and put it on the pile next to them. 
So low numbers mean that people worked harder. 
At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. 
And this is basically the result we had before. 
You shred people's efforts, output — you get them not to be as happy with what they're doing. 
Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. 
The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don't think about it carefully, we might overdo it. 
(Laughter) I don't know about you, but every time I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it's much more effortful, it's much more confusing, I put things in the wrong way — I can't say I enjoy those pieces. 
But when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like other ones. 
So when they started cake mixes in the '40s, they would take this powder and they would put it in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. 
People did not want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. 
What they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. 
It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, "" Here is my cake. "" No, it was somebody else's cake, as if you bought it in the store. 
They took the eggs and the milk out of the powder. 
(Laughter) Now you had to break the eggs and add them, you had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. 
We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. 
And these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. 
And we had two types of people: We had the people who built it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. 
And what we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami — (Laughter) and they were willing to pay five times more for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. 
Most people would say for a lot, a lot of money. 
(Laughter) On good days. (Laughter) 
But imagine this was slightly different. 
And this is because our kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because of us, because they are so connected to us, and because of the time and connection. 
By the way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those are really tough. 
Which comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, we don't see that other people don't see things our way. 
He said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. 
Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what they are doing. 
And if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. 
But if you do one step every time, maybe you don't care as much. 
I think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the way to work, and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. 
(Applause) 

To be honest, by personality, I'm just not much of a crier. 
But I think in my career that's been a good thing. 
I'm a civil rights lawyer, and I've seen some horrible things in the world. 
I began my career working police abuse cases in the United States. 
And then in 1994, I was sent to Rwanda to be the director of the U.N. 's genocide investigation. 
It turns out that tears just aren't much help when you're trying to investigate a genocide. 
The things I had to see, and feel and touch were pretty unspeakable. 
What I can tell you is this: that the Rwandan genocide was one of the world's greatest failures of simple compassion. 
That word, compassion, actually comes from two Latin words: cum passio, which simply mean "" to suffer with. "" And the things that I saw and experienced in Rwanda as I got up close to human suffering, it did, in moments, move me to tears. 
But I just wish that I, and the rest of the world, had been moved earlier. 
And not just to tears, but to actually stop the genocide. 
Now by contrast, I've also been involved with one of the world's greatest successes of compassion. 
And that's the fight against global poverty. 
It's a cause that probably has involved all of us here. 
I don't know if your first introduction might have been choruses of "" We Are the World, "" or maybe the picture of a sponsored child on your refrigerator door, or maybe the birthday you donated for fresh water. 
I don't really remember what my first introduction to poverty was but I do remember the most jarring. 
It was when I met Venus — she's a mom from Zambia. 
She's got three kids and she's a widow. 
When I met her, she had walked about 12 miles in the only garments she owned, to come to the capital city and to share her story. 
She sat down with me for hours, just ushered me in to the world of poverty. 
She described what it was like when the coals on the cooking fire finally just went completely cold. 
When that last drop of cooking oil finally ran out. 
When the last of the food, despite her best efforts, ran out. 
She had to watch her youngest son, Peter, suffer from malnutrition, as his legs just slowly bowed into uselessness. 
As his eyes grew cloudy and dim. 
And then as Peter finally grew cold. 
For over 50 years, stories like this have been moving us to compassion. 
We whose kids have plenty to eat. 
And we're moved not only to care about global poverty, but to actually try to do our part to stop the suffering. 
Now there's plenty of room for critique that we haven't done enough, and what it is that we've done hasn't been effective enough, but the truth is this: The fight against global poverty is probably the broadest, longest running manifestation of the human phenomenon of compassion in the history of our species. 
And so I'd like to share a pretty shattering insight that might forever change the way you think about that struggle. 
But first, let me begin with what you probably already know. 
Thirty-five years ago, when I would have been graduating from high school, they told us that 40,000 kids every day died because of poverty. 
That number, today, is now down to 17,000. 
Way too many, of course, but it does mean that every year, there's eight million kids who don't have to die from poverty. 
Moreover, the number of people in our world who are living in extreme poverty, which is defined as living off about a dollar and a quarter a day, that has fallen from 50 percent, to only 15 percent. 
This is massive progress, and this exceeds everybody's expectations about what is possible. 
And I think you and I, I think, honestly, that we can feel proud and encouraged to see the way that compassion actually has the power to succeed in stopping the suffering of millions. 
But here's the part that you might not hear very much about. 
If you move that poverty mark just up to two dollars a day, it turns out that virtually the same two billion people who were stuck in that harsh poverty when I was in high school, are still stuck there, 35 years later. 
So why, why are so many billions still stuck in such harsh poverty? 
Well, let's think about Venus for a moment. 
Now for decades, my wife and I have been moved by common compassion to sponsor kids, to fund microloans, to support generous levels of foreign aid. 
But until I had actually talked to Venus, I would have had no idea that none of those approaches actually addressed why she had to watch her son die. 
"" We were doing fine, "" Venus told me, "until Brutus started to cause trouble." 
Now, Brutus is Venus' neighbor and "" cause trouble "" is what happened the day after Venus' husband died, when Brutus just came and threw Venus and the kids out of the house, stole all their land, and robbed their market stall. 
You see, Venus was thrown into destitution by violence. 
And then it occurred to me, of course, that none of my child sponsorships, none of the microloans, none of the traditional anti-poverty programs were going to stop Brutus, because they weren't meant to. 
This became even more clear to me when I met Griselda. 
She's a marvelous young girl living in a very poor community in Guatemala. 
And one of the things we've learned over the years is that perhaps the most powerful thing that Griselda and her family can do to get Griselda and her family out of poverty is to make sure that she goes to school. 
The experts call this the Girl Effect. 
But when we met Griselda, she wasn't going to school. 
In fact, she was rarely ever leaving her home. 
Days before we met her, while she was walking home from church with her family, in broad daylight, men from her community just snatched her off the street, and violently raped her. 
See, Griselda had every opportunity to go to school, it just wasn't safe for her to get there. 
And Griselda's not the only one. 
Around the world, poor women and girls between the ages of 15 and 44, they are — when victims of the everyday violence of domestic abuse and sexual violence — those two forms of violence account for more death and disability than malaria, than car accidents, than war combined. 
The truth is, the poor of our world are trapped in whole systems of violence. 
In South Asia, for instance, I could drive past this rice mill and see this man hoisting these 100-pound sacks of rice upon his thin back. 
But I would have no idea, until later, that he was actually a slave, held by violence in that rice mill since I was in high school. 
Decades of anti-poverty programs right in his community were never able to rescue him or any of the hundred other slaves from the beatings and the rapes and the torture of violence inside the rice mill. 
In fact, half a century of anti-poverty programs have left more poor people in slavery than in any other time in human history. 
Experts tell us that there's about 35 million people in slavery today. 
That's about the population of the entire nation of Canada, where we're sitting today. 
This is why, over time, I have come to call this epidemic of violence the Locust Effect. 
Because in the lives of the poor, it just descends like a plague and it destroys everything. 
In fact, now when you survey very, very poor communities, residents will tell you that their greatest fear is violence. 
But notice the violence that they fear is not the violence of genocide or the wars, it's everyday violence. 
So for me, as a lawyer, of course, my first reaction was to think, well, of course we've got to change all the laws. 
We've got to make all this violence against the poor illegal. 
But then I found out, it already is. 
The problem is not that the poor don't get laws, it's that they don't get law enforcement. 
In the developing world, basic law enforcement systems are so broken that recently the U.N. issued a report that found that "" most poor people live outside the protection of the law. "" Now honestly, you and I have just about no idea of what that would mean because we have no first-hand experience of it. 
Functioning law enforcement for us is just a total assumption. 
In fact, nothing expresses that assumption more clearly than three simple numbers: 9-1-1, which, of course, is the number for the emergency police operator here in Canada and in the United States, where the average response time to a police 911 emergency call is about 10 minutes. 
So we take this just completely for granted. 
But what if there was no law enforcement to protect you? 
A woman in Oregon recently experienced what this would be like. 
She was home alone in her dark house on a Saturday night, when a man started to tear his way into her home. 
This was her worst nightmare, because this man had actually put her in the hospital from an assault just two weeks before. 
So terrified, she picks up that phone and does what any of us would do: She calls 911 — but only to learn that because of budget cuts in her county, law enforcement wasn't available on the weekends. 
Listen. 
Dispatcher: I don't have anybody to send out there. 
Woman: OK Dispatcher: Um, obviously if he comes inside the residence and assaults you, can you ask him to go away? 
Or do you know if he is intoxicated or anything? 
Woman: I've already asked him. I've already told him I was calling you. 
He's broken in before, busted down my door, assaulted me. 
Dispatcher: Uh-huh. 
Woman: Um, yeah, so... 
Dispatcher: Is there any way you could safely leave the residence? 
Woman: No, I can't, because he's blocking pretty much my only way out. 
Dispatcher: Well, the only thing I can do is give you some advice, and call the sheriff's office tomorrow. 
Obviously, if he comes in and unfortunately has a weapon or is trying to cause you physical harm, that's a different story. 
You know, the sheriff's office doesn't work up there. 
I don't have anybody to send. "" Gary Haugen: Tragically, the woman inside that house was violently assaulted, choked and raped because this is what it means to live outside the rule of law. 
And this is where billions of our poorest live. 
What does that look like? 
In Bolivia, for example, if a man sexually assaults a poor child, statistically, he's at greater risk of slipping in the shower and dying than he is of ever going to jail for that crime. 
In South Asia, if you enslave a poor person, you're at greater risk of being struck by lightning than ever being sent to jail for that crime. 
And so the epidemic of everyday violence, it just rages on. 
And it devastates our efforts to try to help billions of people out of their two-dollar-a-day hell. 
Because the data just doesn't lie. 
It turns out that you can give all manner of goods and services to the poor, but if you don't restrain the hands of the violent bullies from taking it all away, you're going to be very disappointed in the long-term impact of your efforts. 
So you would think that the disintegration of basic law enforcement in the developing world would be a huge priority for the global fight against poverty. 
But it's not. 
Auditors of international assistance recently couldn't find even one percent of aid going to protect the poor from the lawless chaos of everyday violence. 
And honestly, when we do talk about violence against the poor, sometimes it's in the weirdest of ways. 
A fresh water organization tells a heart-wrenching story of girls who are raped on the way to fetching water, and then celebrates the solution of a new well that drastically shortens their walk. 
End of story. 
But not a word about the rapists who are still right there in the community. 
If a young woman on one of our college campuses was raped on her walk to the library, we would never celebrate the solution of moving the library closer to the dorm. 
And yet, for some reason, this is okay for poor people. 
Now the truth is, the traditional experts in economic development and poverty alleviation, they don't know how to fix this problem. 
And so what happens? 
They don't talk about it. 
But the more fundamental reason that law enforcement for the poor in the developing world is so neglected, is because the people inside the developing world, with money, don't need it. 
I was at the World Economic Forum not long ago talking to corporate executives who have massive businesses in the developing world and I was just asking them, "How do you guys protect all your people and property from all the violence?" 
And they looked at each other, and they said, practically in unison, "We buy it." 
Indeed, private security forces in the developing world are now, four, five and seven times larger than the public police force. 
In Africa, the largest employer on the continent now is private security. 
But see, the rich can pay for safety and can keep getting richer, but the poor can't pay for it and they're left totally unprotected and they keep getting thrown to the ground. 
This is a massive and scandalous outrage. 
Where were you, Grandpa, when the Jews were fleeing Nazi Germany and were being rejected from our shores? 
Where were you? 
And Grandma, where were you when they were marching our Japanese-American neighbors off to internment camps? 
And Grandpa, where were you when they were beating our African-American neighbors just because they were trying to register to vote? "" Likewise, when our grandchildren ask us, "" Grandma, Grandpa, where were you when two billion of the world's poorest were drowning in a lawless chaos of everyday violence? "" I hope we can say that we had compassion, that we raised our voice, and as a generation, we were moved to make the violence stop. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Really powerfully argued. 
Talk to us a bit about some of the things that have actually been happening to, for example, boost police training. 
How hard a process is that? 
GH: Well, one of the glorious things that's starting to happen now is that the collapse of these systems and the consequences are becoming obvious. 
There's actually, now, political will to do that. 
But it just requires now an investment of resources and transfer of expertise. 
There's a political will struggle that's going to take place as well, but those are winnable fights, because we've done some examples around the world at International Justice Mission that are very encouraging. 
CA: So just tell us in one country, how much it costs to make a material difference to police, for example — I know that's only one piece of it. 
GH: In Guatemala, for instance, we've started a project there with the local police and court system, prosecutors, to retrain them so that they can actually effectively bring these cases. 
And we've seen prosecutions against perpetrators of sexual violence increase by more than 1,000 percent. 
This project has been very modestly funded at about a million dollars a year, and the kind of bang you can get for your buck in terms of leveraging a criminal justice system that could function if it were properly trained and motivated and led, and these countries, especially a middle class that is seeing that there's really no future with this total instability and total privatization of security I think there's an opportunity, a window for change. 
CA: Gary, I think you've done a spectacular job of bringing this to the world's attention in your book and right here today. 
Thanks so much. 
Gary Haugen. 

I guess the story actually has to start maybe back in the the 1960s, when I was seven or eight years old, watching Jacques Cousteau documentaries on the living room floor with my mask and flippers on. 
Then after every episode, I had to go up to the bathtub and swim around the bathtub and look at the drain, because that's all there was to look at. 
And by the time I turned 16, I pursued a career in marine science, in exploration and diving, and lived in underwater habitats, like this one off the Florida Keys, for 30 days total. 
Brian Skerry took this shot. Thanks, Brian. 
And I've dived in deep-sea submersibles around the world. 
And this one is the deepest diving submarine in the world, operated by the Japanese government. 
And Sylvia Earle and I were on an expedition in this submarine 20 years ago in Japan. 
And on my dive, I went down 18,000 feet, to an area that I thought would be pristine wilderness area on the sea floor. 
But when I got there, I found lots of plastic garbage and other debris. 
And it was really a turning point in my life, where I started to realize that I couldn't just go have fun doing science and exploration. 
I needed to put it into a context. 
I needed to head towards conservation goals. 
So I began to work with National Geographic Society and others and led expeditions to Antarctica. 
I led three diving expeditions to Antarctica. 
Ten years ago was a seminal trip, where we explored that big iceberg, B-15, the largest iceberg in history, that broke off the Ross Ice Shelf. 
And we developed techniques to dive inside and under the iceberg, such as heating pads on our kidneys with a battery that we dragged around, so that, as the blood flowed through our kidneys, it would get a little boost of warmth before going back into our bodies. 
But after three trips to Antarctica, I decided that it might be nicer to work in warmer water. 
And that same year, 10 years ago, I headed north to the Phoenix Islands. 
And I'm going to tell you that story here in a moment. 
But before I do, I just want you to ponder this graph for a moment. 
You may have seen this in other forms, but the top line is the amount of protected area on land, globally, and it's about 12 percent. 
And you can see that it kind of hockey sticks up around the 1960s and '70s, and it's on kind of a nice trajectory right now. 
And that's probably because that's when everybody got aware of the environment and Earth Day and all the stuff that happened in the '60s with the Hippies and everything really did, I think, have an affect on global awareness. 
But the ocean-protected area is basically flat line until right about now — it appears to be ticking up. 
And I do believe that we are at the hockey stick point of the protected area in the ocean. 
I think we would have gotten there a lot earlier if we could see what happens in the ocean like we can see what happens on land. 
But unfortunately, the ocean is opaque, and we can't see what's going on. 
And therefore we're way behind on protection. 
But scuba diving, submersibles and all the work that we're setting about to do here will help rectify that. 
So where are the Phoenix Islands? 
They were the world's largest marine-protected area up until last week when the Chagos Archipelago was declared. 
It's in the mid-Pacific. It's about five days from anywhere. 
If you want to get to the Phoenix Islands, it's five days from Fiji, it's five days from Hawaii, it's five days from Samoa. 
It's out in the middle of the Pacific, right around the Equator. 
I had never heard of the islands 10 years ago, nor the country, Kiribati, that owns them, till two friends of mine who run a liveaboard dive boat in Fiji said, "" Greg, would you lead a scientific expedition up to these islands? 
They've never been dived. "" And I said, "" Yeah. 
But tell me where they are and the country that owns them. "" So that's when I first learned of the Islands and had no idea what I was getting into. 
But I was in for the adventure. 
Let me give you a little peek here of the Phoenix Islands-protected area. 
It's a very deep-water part of our planet. 
The average depths are about 12,000 ft. 
There's lots of seamounts in the Phoenix Islands, which are specifically part of the protected area. 
Seamounts are important for biodiversity. 
There's actually more mountains in the ocean than there are on land. 
It's an interesting fact. 
And the Phoenix Islands is very rich in those seamounts. 
So it's a deep — think about it in a big three-dimensional space, very deep three-dimensional space with herds of tuna, whales, all kinds of deep sea marine life like we've seen here before. 
That's the vessel that we took up there for these studies, early on, and that's what the Islands look like — you can see in the background. 
They're very low to the water, and they're all uninhabited, except one island has about 35 caretakers on it. 
And they've been uninhabited for most of time because even in the ancient days, these islands were too far away from the bright lights of Fiji and Hawaii and Tahiti for those ancient Polynesian mariners that were traversing the Pacific so widely. 
But we got up there, and I had the unique and wonderful scientific opportunity and personal opportunity to get to a place that had never been dived and just get to an island and go, "" Okay, where are we going to dive? 
Let's try there, "" and then falling into the water. 
Both my personal and my professional life changed. 
Suddenly, I saw a world that I had never seen before in the ocean — schools of fish that were so dense they dulled the penetration of sunlight from the surface, coral reefs that were continuous and solid and colorful, large fish everywhere, manta rays. 
It was an ecosystem. Parrotfish spawning — this is about 5,000 longnose parrotfish spawning at the entrance to one of the Phoenix Islands. 
You can see the fish are balled up and then there's a little cloudy area there where they're exchanging the eggs and sperm for reproduction — events that the ocean is supposed to do, but struggles to do in many places now because of human activity. 
The Phoenix Islands and all the equatorial parts of our planet are very important for tuna fisheries, especially this yellowfin tuna that you see here. 
Phoenix Islands is a major tuna location. 
And sharks — we had sharks on our early dives, up to 150 sharks at once, which is an indication of a very, very healthy, very strong, system. 
So I thought the scenes of never-ending wilderness would go on forever, but they did finally come to an end. 
And we explored the surface of the Islands as well — very important bird nesting site, some of the most important bird-nesting sites in the Pacific, in the world. 
And we finished our trip. 
And that's the area again. 
You can see the Islands — there are eight islands — that pop out of the water. 
The peaks that don't come out of the water are the seamounts. 
Remember, a seamount turns into an island when it hits the surface. 
And what's the context of the Phoenix Islands? 
Where do these exist? 
Well they exist in the Republic of Kiribati, and Kiribati is located in the Central Pacific in three island groups. 
In the west we have the Gilbert Islands. 
In the center we have the Phoenix Islands, which is the subject that I'm talking about. 
And then over to the east we have the Line Islands. 
It's the largest atoll nation in the world. 
And they have about 110,000 people spread out over 33 islands. 
They control 3.4 million cubic miles of ocean, and that's between one and two percent of all the ocean water on the planet. 
And when I was first going up there, I barely knew the name of this country 10 years ago, and people would ask me, "Why are you going to this place called Kiribati?" 
And it reminded me of that old joke where the bank robber comes out of the courthouse handcuffed, and the reporter yells, "" Hey, Willy. Why do you rob banks? "" And he says, "" cause that's where all the money is. "" And I would tell people, "" Why do I go to Kiribati? 
Because that's where all the ocean is. "" They basically are one nation that controls most of the equatorial waters of the Central Pacific Ocean. 
They're also a country that is in dire danger. 
Sea levels are rising, and Kiribati, along with 42 other nations in the world, will be under water within 50 to 100 years due to climate change and the associated sea-level rise from thermal expansion and the melting of freshwater into the ocean. 
The Islands rise only one to two meters above the surface. 
Some of the islands have already gone under water. 
And these nations are faced with a real problem. 
We as a world are faced with a problem. 
What do we do with displaced fellow Earthlings who no longer have a home on the planet? 
The president of the Maldives conducted a mock cabinet meeting underwater recently to highlight the dire straits of these countries. 
So it's something we need to focus on. 
But back to the Phoenix Islands, which is the subject of this Talk. 
After I got back, I said, okay, this is amazing, what we found. 
I'd like to go back and share it with the government of Kiribati, who are over in Tarawa, the westernmost group. 
So I started contacting them — because they had actually given me a permit to do this — and I said, "" I want to come up and tell you what we found. "" And for some reason they didn't want me to come, or it was hard to find a time and a place, and it took a while, but finally they said, "" Okay, you can come. 
But if you come, you have to buy lunch for everybody who comes to the seminar. "" So I said, "" Okay, I'm happy to buy lunch. 
Just get whatever anybody wants. "" So David Obura, a coral reef biologist, and I went to Tarawa, and we presented for two hours on the amazing findings of the Phoenix Islands. 
And the country never knew this. They never had any data from this area. 
They'd never had any information from the Phoenix Islands. 
After the talk, the Minister of Fisheries walked up to me and he said, "" Greg, do you realize that you are the first scientist who has ever come back and told us what they did? "" He said, "" We often issue these permits to do research in our waters, but usually we get a note two or three years later, or a reprint. 
But you're the first one who's ever come back and told us what you did. 
And we really appreciate that. And we're buying you lunch today. 
And are you free for dinner? "" And I was free for dinner, and I went out to dinner with the Minister of Fisheries in Kiribati. 
And over the course of dinner, I learned that Kiribati gains most of its revenue — it's a very poor country — but it gains what revenue is has by selling access to foreign nations to take fish out of its waters, because Kiribati does not have the capacity to take the fish itself. 
And the deal that they strike is the extracting country gives Kiribati five percent of the landed value. 
So if the United States removes a million dollars' worth of lobsters from a reef, Kiribati gets 50,000 dollars. 
And, you know, it didn't seem like a very good deal to me. 
So I asked the Minister over dinner, I said, "" Would you consider a situation where you would still get paid — we do the math and figure out what the value of the resource is — but you leave fish and the sharks and the shrimp in the water? "" He stopped, and he said, "" Yes, we would like to do that to deal with our overfishing problem, and I think we would call it a reverse fishing license. "" He coined the term "" reverse fishing license. "" So I said, "" Yes, a 'reverse fishing license.' "" So we walked away from this dinner really not knowing where to go at that point. 
I went back to the States and started looking around to see if I could find examples where reverse fishing licenses had been issued, and it turned out there were none. 
There were no oceanic deals where countries were compensated for not fishing. 
It had occurred on land, in rainforests of South America and Africa, where landowners had been paid not to cut the trees down. 
And Conservation International had struck some of those deals. 
So I went to Conservation International and brought them in as a partner and went through the process of valuing the fishery resource, deciding how much Kiribati should be compensated, what the range of the fishes were, brought in a whole bunch of other partners — the government of Australia, the government of New Zealand, the World Bank. 
The Oak Foundation and National Geographic have been big funders of this as well. 
And we basically founded the park on the idea of an endowment that would pay the equivalent lost fishing license fees to this very poor country to keep the area intact. 
Halfway through this process, I met the president of Kiribati, President Anote Tong. 
He's a really important leader, a real visionary, forward-thinking man, and he told me two things when I approached him. 
He said, "" Greg, there's two things I'd like you to do. 
One is, remember I'm a politician, so you've got to go out and work with my ministers and convince the people of Kiribati that this is a good idea. 
Secondly, I'd like you to create principles that will transcend my own presidency. 
I don't want to do something like this if it's going to go away after I'm voted out of office. "" So we had very strong leadership, very good vision and a lot of science, a lot of lawyers involved. 
Many, many steps were taken to pull this off. 
And it was primarily because Kiribati realized that this was in their own self-interest to do this. 
They realized that this was a common cause that they had found with the conservation community. 
Then in 2002, when this was all going full-swing, a coral-bleaching event happened in the Phoenix Islands. 
Here's this resource that we're looking to save, and it turns out it's the hottest heating event that we can find on record. 
The ocean heated up as it does sometimes, and the hot spot formed and stalled right over the Phoenix Islands for six months. 
It was over 32 degrees Celsius for six months and it basically killed 60 percent of the coral. 
So suddenly we had this area that we were protecting, but now it appeared to be dead, at least in the coral areas. 
Of course the deep-sea areas and the open ocean areas were fine, but the coral, which everybody likes to look at, was in trouble. 
Well, the good news is it's recovered and recovering fast, faster than any reef we've seen. 
This picture was just taken by Brian Skerry a few months ago when we returned to the Phoenix Islands and discovered that, because it is a protected area and has healthy fish populations that keep the algae grazed down and keep the rest of the reef healthy, the coral is booming, is just booming back. 
It's almost like if a person has multiple diseases, it's hard to get well, you might die, but if you only have one disease to deal with, you can get better. 
And that's the story with climate-change heating. 
It's the only threat, the only influence that the reef had to deal with. 
There was no fishing, there was no pollution, there was no coastal development, and the reef is on a full-bore recovery. 
Now I remember that dinner I had with the Minister of Fisheries 10 years ago when we first brought this up and I got quite animated during the dinner and said, "" Well, I think that the conservation community might embrace this idea, Minister. "" He paused and put his hands together and said, "" Yes, Greg, but the devil will be in the details, "" he said. 
And it certainly was. 
The last 10 years have been detail after detail ranging from creating legislation to multiple research expeditions to communication plans, as I said, teams of lawyers, MOUs, creating the Phoenix Islands Trust Board. 
And we are now in the process of raising the full endowment. 
Kiribati has frozen extracting activities at its current state while we raise the endowment. 
We just had our first PIPA Trust Board meeting three weeks ago. 
So it's a fully functional up-and-running entity that negotiates the reverse fishing license with the country. 
And the PIPA Trust Board holds that license and pays the country for this. 
So it's a very solid, very well thought-out, very well grounded system, and it was a bottom-up system, and that was very important with this work, from the bottom up to secure this. 
So the conditions for success here are listed. 
You can read them yourselves. 
But I would say the most important one in my mind was working within the market forces of the situation. 
And that insured that we could move this forward and it would have both the self-interest of Kiribati as well as the self-interest of the world. 
And I'll leave you with one final slide, that is: how do we scale this up? 
How do we realize Sylvia's dream? 
Where eventually do we take this? 
Here's the Pacific with large MPAs and large conservation zones on it. 
And as you can see, we have a patchwork across this ocean. 
I've just described to you the one story behind that rectangular area in the middle, the Phoenix Islands, but every other green patch on that has its own story. 
And what we need to do now is look at the whole Pacific Ocean in its entirety and make a network of MPAs across the Pacific so that we have our world's largest ocean protected and self-sustaining over time. 
Thank you very much. (Applause) 

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

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

Radical openness is still a distant future in the field of school education. 
We have such a hard time figuring out that learning is not a place but an activity. 
But I want to tell you the story of PISA, OECD's test to measure the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds around the world, and it's really a story of how international comparisons have globalized the field of education that we usually treat as an affair of domestic policy. 
Look at how the world looked in the 1960s, in terms of the proportion of people who had completed high school. 
You can see the United States ahead of everyone else, and much of the economic success of the United States draws on its long-standing advantage as the first mover in education. 
But in the 1970s, some countries caught up. 
In the 1980s, the global expansion of the talent pool continued. 
And the world didn't stop in the 1990s. 
So in the '60s, the U.S. was first. 
In the '90s, it was 13th, and not because standards had fallen, but because they had risen so much faster elsewhere. 
Korea shows you what's possible in education. 
Two generations ago, Korea had the standard of living of Afghanistan today, and was one of the lowest education performers. 
Today, every young Korean finishes high school. 
So this tells us that, in a global economy, it is no longer national improvement that's the benchmark for success, but the best performing education systems internationally. 
The trouble is that measuring how much time people spend in school or what degree they have got is not always a good way of seeing what they can actually do. 
Look at the toxic mix of unemployed graduates on our streets, while employers say they cannot find the people with the skills they need. 
And that tells you that better degrees don't automatically translate into better skills and better jobs and better lives. 
So with PISA, we try to change this by measuring the knowledge and skills of people directly. 
And we took a very special angle to this. 
We were less interested in whether students can simply reproduce what they have learned in school, but we wanted to test whether they can extrapolate from what they know and apply their knowledge in novel situations. 
Now, some people have criticized us for this. 
They say, you know, such a way of measuring outcomes is terribly unfair to people, because we test students with problems they haven't seen before. 
But if you take that logic, you know, you should consider life unfair, because the test of truth in life is not whether we can remember what we learned in school, but whether we are prepared for change, whether we are prepared for jobs that haven't been created, to use technologies that haven't been invented, to solve problems we just can't anticipate today. 
And once hotly contested, our way of measuring outcomes has actually quickly become the standard. 
In our latest assessment in 2009, we measured 74 school systems that together cover 87 percent of the economy. 
This chart shows you the performance of countries. 
In red, sort of below OECD average. 
Yellow is so-so, and in green are the countries doing really well. 
You can see Shanghai, Korea, Singapore in Asia; Finland in Europe; Canada in North America doing really well. 
You can also see that there is a gap of almost three and a half school years between 15-year-olds in Shanghai and 15-year-olds in Chile, and the gap grows to seven school years when you include the countries with really poor performance. 
There's a world of difference in the way in which young people are prepared for today's economy. 
But I want to introduce a second important dimension into this picture. 
Educators like to talk about equity. 
With PISA, we wanted to measure how they actually deliver equity, in terms of ensuring that people from different social backgrounds have equal chances. 
And we see that in some countries, the impact of social background on learning outcomes is very, very strong. 
Opportunities are unequally distributed. 
A lot of potential of young children is wasted. 
We see in other countries that it matters much less into which social context you're born. 
We all want to be there, in the upper right quadrant, where performance is strong and learning opportunities are equally distributed. 
Nobody, and no country, can afford to be there, where performance is poor and there are large social disparities. 
And then we can debate, you know, is it better to be there, where performance is strong at the price of large disparities? 
Or do we want to focus on equity and accept mediocrity? 
But actually, if you look at how countries come out on this picture, you see there are a lot of countries that actually are combining excellence with equity. 
In fact, one of the most important lessons from this comparison is that you don't have to compromise equity to achieve excellence. 
These countries have moved on from providing excellence for just some to providing excellence for all, a very important lesson. 
And that also challenges the paradigms of many school systems that believe they are mainly there to sort people. 
And ever since those results came out, policymakers, educators, researchers from around the world have tried to figure out what's behind the success of those systems. 
But let's step back for a moment and focus on the countries that actually started PISA, and I'm giving them a colored bubble now. 
And I'm making the size of the bubble proportional to the amount of money that countries spent on students. 
If money would tell you everything about the quality of learning outcomes, you would find all the large bubbles at the top, no? 
But that's not what you see. 
Spending per student only explains about, well, less than 20 percent of the performance variation among countries, and Luxembourg, for example, the most expensive system, doesn't do particularly well. 
What you see is that two countries with similar spending achieve very different results. 
You also see — and I think that's one of the most encouraging findings — that we no longer live in a world that is neatly divided between rich and well-educated countries, and poor and badly-educated ones, a very, very important lesson. 
Let's look at this in greater detail. 
The red dot shows you spending per student relative to a country's wealth. 
One way you can spend money is by paying teachers well, and you can see Korea investing a lot in attracting the best people into the teaching profession. 
And Korea also invests into long school days, which drives up costs further. 
Last but not least, Koreans want their teachers not only to teach but also to develop. 
They invest in professional development and collaboration and many other things. 
All that costs money. 
How can Korea afford all of this? 
The answer is, students in Korea learn in large classes. 
This is the blue bar which is driving costs down. 
You go to the next country on the list, Luxembourg, and you can see the red dot is exactly where it is for Korea, so Luxembourg spends the same per student as Korea does. 
But, you know, parents and teachers and policymakers in Luxembourg all like small classes. 
You know, it's very pleasant to walk into a small class. 
So they have invested all their money into there, and the blue bar, class size, is driving costs up. 
But even Luxembourg can spend its money only once, and the price for this is that teachers are not paid particularly well. 
Students don't have long hours of learning. 
And basically, teachers have little time to do anything else than teaching. 
So you can see two countries spent their money very differently, and actually how they spent their money matters a lot more than how much they invest in education. 
Let's go back to the year 2000. 
Remember, that was the year before the iPod was invented. 
This is how the world looked then in terms of PISA performance. 
The first thing you can see is that the bubbles were a lot smaller, no? 
We spent a lot less on education, about 35 percent less on education. 
So you ask yourself, if education has become so much more expensive, has it become so much better? 
And the bitter truth really is that, you know, not in many countries. 
But there are some countries which have seen impressive improvements. 
Germany, my own country, in the year 2000, featured in the lower quadrant, below average performance, large social disparities. 
And remember, Germany, we used to be one of those countries that comes out very well when you just count people who have degrees. 
Very disappointing results. 
People were stunned by the results. 
And for the very first time, the public debate in Germany was dominated for months by education, not tax, not other kinds of issues, but education was the center of the public debate. 
And then policymakers began to respond to this. 
The federal government dramatically raised its investment in education. 
A lot was done to increase the life chances of students with an immigrant background or from social disadvantage. 
And what's really interesting is that this wasn't just about optimizing existing policies, but data transformed some of the beliefs and paradigms underlying German education. 
For example, traditionally, the education of the very young children was seen as the business of families, and you would have cases where women were seen as neglecting their family responsibilities when they sent their children to kindergarten. 
PISA has transformed that debate, and pushed early childhood education right at the center of public policy in Germany. 
Or traditionally, the German education divides children at the age of 10, very young children, between those deemed to pursue careers of knowledge workers and those who would end up working for the knowledge workers, and that mainly along socioeconomic lines, and that paradigm is being challenged now too. 
A lot of change. 
And the good news is, nine years later, you can see improvements in quality and equity. 
People have taken up the challenge, done something about it. 
Or take Korea, at the other end of the spectrum. 
In the year 2000, Korea did already very well, but the Koreans were concerned that only a small share of their students achieved the really high levels of excellence. 
They took up the challenge, and Korea was able to double the proportion of students achieving excellence in one decade in the field of reading. 
Well, if you only focus on your brightest students, you know what happens is disparities grow, and you can see this bubble moving slightly to the other direction, but still, an impressive improvement. 
A major overhaul of Poland's education helped to dramatically reduce between variability among schools, turn around many of the lowest-performing schools, and raise performance by over half a school year. 
And you can see other countries as well. 
Portugal was able to consolidate its fragmented school system, raise quality and improve equity, and so did Hungary. 
So what you can actually see, there's been a lot of change. 
And even those people who complain and say that the relative standing of countries on something like PISA is just an artifact of culture, of economic factors, of social issues, of homogeneity of societies, and so on, these people must now concede that education improvement is possible. 
You know, Poland hasn't changed its culture. 
It didn't change its economy. It didn't change the compositions of its population. 
It didn't fire its teachers. It changed its education policies and practice. Very impressive. 
And all that raises, of course, the question: What can we learn from those countries in the green quadrant who have achieved high levels of equity, high levels of performance, and raised outcomes? 
And, of course, the question is, can what works in one context provide a model elsewhere? 
Of course, you can't copy and paste education systems wholesale, but these comparisons have identified a range of factors that high-performing systems share. 
Everybody agrees that education is important. 
Everybody says that. 
But the test of truth is, how do you weigh that priority against other priorities? 
How do countries pay their teachers relative to other highly skilled workers? 
Would you want your child to become a teacher rather than a lawyer? 
How do the media talk about schools and teachers? 
Those are the critical questions, and what we have learned from PISA is that, in high-performing education systems, the leaders have convinced their citizens to make choices that value education, their future, more than consumption today. 
And you know what's interesting? You won't believe it, but there are countries in which the most attractive place to be is not the shopping center but the school. 
Those things really exist. 
But placing a high value on education is just part of the picture. 
The other part is the belief that all children are capable of success. 
You have some countries where students are segregated early in their ages. 
You know, students are divided up, reflecting the belief that only some children can achieve world-class standards. 
But usually that is linked to very strong social disparities. 
If you go to Japan in Asia, or Finland in Europe, parents and teachers in those countries expect every student to succeed, and you can see that actually mirrored in student behavior. 
When we asked students what counts for success in mathematics, students in North America would typically tell us, you know, it's all about talent. 
If I'm not born as a genius in math, I'd better study something else. 
Nine out of 10 Japanese students say that it depends on my own investment, on my own effort, and that tells you a lot about the system that is around them. 
In the past, different students were taught in similar ways. 
High performers on PISA embrace diversity with differentiated pedagogical practices. 
They realize that ordinary students have extraordinary talents, and they personalize learning opportunities. 
High-performing systems also share clear and ambitious standards across the entire spectrum. 
Every student knows what matters. 
Every student knows what's required to be successful. 
And nowhere does the quality of an education system exceed the quality of its teachers. 
High-performing systems are very careful in how they recruit and select their teachers and how they train them. 
They watch how they improve the performances of teachers in difficulties who are struggling, and how they structure teacher pay. 
They provide an environment also in which teachers work together to frame good practice. 
And they provide intelligent pathways for teachers to grow in their careers. 
In bureaucratic school systems, teachers are often left alone in classrooms with a lot of prescription on what they should be teaching. 
High-performing systems are very clear what good performance is. 
They set very ambitious standards, but then they enable their teachers to figure out, what do I need to teach to my students today? 
The past was about delivered wisdom in education. 
Now the challenge is to enable user-generated wisdom. 
High performers have moved on from professional or from administrative forms of accountability and control — sort of, how do you check whether people do what they're supposed to do in education — to professional forms of work organization. 
They enable their teachers to make innovations in pedagogy. 
They provide them with the kind of development they need to develop stronger pedagogical practices. 
The goal of the past was standardization and compliance. 
High-performing systems have made teachers and school principals inventive. 
In the past, the policy focus was on outcomes, on provision. 
The high-performing systems have helped teachers and school principals to look outwards to the next teacher, the next school around their lives. 
And the most impressive outcomes of world-class systems is that they achieve high performance across the entire system. 
You've seen Finland doing so well on PISA, but what makes Finland so impressive is that only five percent of the performance variation amongst students lies between schools. 
Every school succeeds. 
This is where success is systemic. 
And how do they do that? 
They invest resources where they can make the most difference. 
They attract the strongest principals into the toughest schools, and the most talented teachers into the most challenging classroom. 
Last but not least, those countries align policies across all areas of public policy. 
They make them coherent over sustained periods of time, and they ensure that what they do is consistently implemented. 
Now, knowing what successful systems are doing doesn't yet tell us how to improve. 
That's also clear, and that's where some of the limits of international comparisons of PISA are. 
That's where other forms of research need to kick in, and that's also why PISA doesn't venture into telling countries what they should be doing. 
But its strength lies in telling them what everybody else has been doing. 
And the example of PISA shows that data can be more powerful than administrative control of financial subsidy through which we usually run education systems. 
You know, some people argue that changing educational administration is like moving graveyards. 
You just can't rely on the people out there to help you with this. (Laughter) But PISA has shown what's possible in education. 
It has helped countries to see that improvement is possible. 
It has taken away excuses from those who are complacent. 
And it has helped countries to set meaningful targets in terms of measurable goals achieved by the world's leaders. 
If we can help every child, every teacher, every school, every principal, every parent see what improvement is possible, that only the sky is the limit to education improvement, we have laid the foundations for better policies and better lives. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Six months ago, I got an email from a man in Israel who had read one of my books, and the email said, "" You don't know me, but I'm your 12th cousin. "" And it said, "" I have a family tree with 80,000 people on it, including you, Karl Marx, and several European aristocrats. "" Now I did not know what to make of this. 
Part of me was like, okay, when's he going to ask me to wire 10,000 dollars to his Nigerian bank, right? 
I also thought, 80,000 relatives, do I want that? 
I have enough trouble with some of the ones I have already. 
And I won't name names, but you know who you are. 
But another part of me said, this is remarkable. 
Here I am alone in my office, but I'm not alone at all. 
I'm connected to 80,000 people around the world, and that's four Madison Square Gardens full of cousins. 
And some of them are going to be great, and some of them are going to be irritating, but they're all related to me. 
So this email inspired me to dive into genealogy, which I always thought was a very staid and proper field, but it turns out it's going through a fascinating revolution, and a controversial one. 
Partly, this is because of DNA and genetic testing, but partly, it's because of the Internet. 
There are sites that now take the Wikipedia approach to family trees, collaboration and crowdsourcing, and what you do is, you load your family tree on, and then these sites search to see if the A.J. Jacobs in your tree is the same as the A.J. Jacobs in another tree, and if it is, then you can combine, and then you combine and combine and combine until you get these massive, mega-family trees with thousands of people on them, or even millions. 
I'm on something on Geni called the world family tree, which has no less than a jaw-dropping 75 million people. 
So that's 75 million people connected by blood or marriage, sometimes both. 
(Laughter) It's in all seven continents, including Antarctica. 
I'm on it. Many of you are on it, whether you know it or not, and you can see the links. 
Here's my cousin Gwyneth Paltrow. 
She has no idea I exist, but we are officially cousins. 
We have just 17 links between us. 
And there's my cousin Barack Obama. 
(Laughter) And he is my aunt's fifth great-aunt's husband's father's wife's seventh great-nephew, so practically my old brother. 
And my cousin, of course, the actor Kevin Bacon — (Laughter) — who is my first cousin's twice removed's wife's niece's husband's first cousin once removed's niece's husband. 
So six degrees of Kevin Bacon, plus or minus several degrees. 
Now, I'm not boasting, because all of you have famous people and historical figures in your tree, because we are all connected, and 75 million may seem like a lot, but in a few years, it's quite likely we will have a family tree with all, almost all, seven billion people on Earth. 
But does it really matter? 
What's the importance? 
And I do think it is important, and I'll give you five reasons why, really quickly. 
First, it's got scientific value. 
This is an unprecedented history of the human race, and it's giving us valuable data about how diseases are inherited, how people migrate, and there's a team of scientists at MIT right now studying the world family tree. 
Number two, it brings history alive. 
I found out I'm connected to Albert Einstein, so I told my seven-year-old son that, and he was totally engaged. 
Now Albert Einstein is not some dead white guy with weird hair. 
He's Uncle Albert. (Laughter) And my son wanted to know, "What did he say? What is E = MC squared?" 
Also, it's not all good news. 
I found a link to Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer, but I will say that's on my wife's side. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So I want to make that clear. Sorry, honey. 
Number three, interconnectedness. 
We all come from the same ancestor, and you don't have to believe the literal Bible version, but scientists talk about Y chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve, and these were about 100,000 to 300,000 years ago. 
We all have a bit of their DNA in us. 
They are our great-great-great-great-great-great — continue that for about 7,000 times — grandparents, and so that means we literally all are biological cousins as well, and estimates vary, but probably the farthest cousin you have on Earth is about a 50th cousin. 
Now, it's not just ancestors we share, descendants. 
If you have kids, and they have kids, look how quickly the descendants accumulate. 
So in 10, 12 generations, you're going to have thousands of offspring, and millions of offspring. 
Number four, a kinder world. 
Now, I know that there are family feuds. 
I have three sons, so I see how they fight. 
But I think that there's also a human bias to treat your family a little better than strangers. 
I think this tree is going to be bad news for bigots, because they're going to have to realize that they are cousins with thousands of people in whatever ethnic group they happen to have issues with, and I think you look back at history, and a lot of the terrible things we've done to each other is because one group thinks another group is sub-human, and you can't do that anymore. 
We're not just part of the same species. 
We're part of the same family. 
We share 99.9 percent of our DNA. 
Now the final one is number five, a democratizing effect. 
Some genealogy has an elitist strain, like people say, "" Oh, I'm descended from Mary Queen of Scots and you're not, so you cannot join my country club. "" But that's really going to be hard to do now, because everyone is related. 
I'm descended from Mary Queen of Scots — by marriage, but still. 
So it's really a fascinating time in the history of family, because it's changing so fast. 
There is gay marriage and sperm donors and there's intermarriage on an unprecedented scale, and this makes some of my more conservative cousins a little nervous, but I actually think it's a good thing. 
I think the more inclusive the idea of family is, the better, because then you have more potential caretakers, and as my aunt's eighth cousin twice removed Hillary Clinton says — (Laughter) — it takes a village. 
So I have all these hundreds and thousands, millions of new cousins. 
I thought, what can I do with this information? 
And that's when I decided, why not throw a party? 
So that's what I'm doing. 
And you're all invited. 
Next year, next summer, I will be hosting what I hope is the biggest and best family reunion in history. 
(Applause) Thank you. I want you there. I want you there. 
It's going to be at the New York Hall of Science, 
which is a great venue, but it's also on the site of the former World's Fair, which is, I think, very appropriate, because I see this as a family reunion meets a world's fair. 
There's going to be exhibits and food, music. 
Paul McCartney is 11 steps away, so I'm hoping he brings his guitar. 
He hasn't RSVP'd yet, but fingers crossed. 
And there is going to be a day of speakers, of fascinating cousins. 
It's early, but I've already, I've got some lined up. 
Cass Sunstein, my cousin who is perhaps the most brilliant legal scholar, will be talking. 
He was a former member of the Obama administration. 
And on the other side of the political spectrum, George H.W. Bush, number 41, the father, he has agreed to participate, and Nick Kroll, the comedian, and Dr. Oz, and many more to come. 
And, of course, the most important is that you, I want you guys there, and I invite you to go to GlobalFamilyReunion.org and figure out how you're on the family tree, because these are big issues, family and tribe, and I don't know all the answers, but I have a lot of smart relatives, including you guys, so together, I think we can figure it out. 
Only together can we solve these big problems. 
So from cousin to cousin, I thank you. I can't wait to see you. 
Goodbye. 
(Applause) 

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

I was recently traveling in the Highlands of New Guinea, and I was talking with a man who had three wives. 
I asked him, "" How many wives would you like to have? "" And there was this long pause, and I thought to myself, "" Is he going to say five? 
Is he going to say 25? "" And he leaned towards me and he whispered, "" None. "" (Laughter) Eighty-six percent of human societies permit a man to have several wives: polygyny. 
And you've got to have a lot of cows, a lot of goats, a lot of money, a lot of land, in order to build a harem. 
We are a pair-bonding species. 
How is technology changing love? 
I'm going to say almost not at all. 
I study the brain. 
And I've long ago maintained that we've evolved three distinctly different brain systems for mating and reproduction: sex drive, feelings of intense romantic love and feelings of deep cosmic attachment to a long-term partner. 
But, you know — is this actually dramatically changing love? 
What about the late 1940s, when the automobile became very popular and we suddenly had rolling bedrooms? 
Unchained from the great threat of pregnancy and social ruin, women could finally express their primitive and primal sexuality. 
Even dating sites are not changing love. 
When you sit down in a bar, in a coffee house, on a park bench, your ancient brain snaps into action like a sleeping cat awakened, and you smile and laugh and listen and parade the way our ancestors did 100,000 years ago. 
We can give you various people — all the dating sites can — but the only real algorithm is your own human brain. 
Technology is also not going to change who you choose to love. 
So I created a questionnaire directly from brain science to measure the degree to which you express the traits — the constellation of traits — linked with each of these four brain systems. 
I then put that questionnaire on various dating sites in 40 countries. 
Fourteen million or more people have now taken the questionnaire, and I've been able to watch who's naturally drawn to whom. 
And as it turns out, those who were very expressive of the dopamine system tend to be curious, creative, spontaneous, energetic — I would imagine there's an awful lot of people like that in this room — they're drawn to people like themselves. 
We have natural patterns of mate choice. 
Modern technology is not going to change who we choose to love. 
But technology is producing one modern trend that I find particularly important. 
It's associated with the concept of paradox of choice. 
For millions of years, we lived in little hunting and gathering groups. 
In fact, I've been studying this recently, and I actually think there's some sort of sweet spot in the brain; I don't know what it is, but apparently, from reading a lot of the data, we can embrace about five to nine alternatives, and after that, you get into what academics call "" cognitive overload, "" and you don't choose any. 
So I've come to think that due to this cognitive overload, we're ushering in a new form of courtship that I call "" slow love. "" I arrived at this during my work with Match.com. 
Every year for the last six years, we've done a study called "" Singles in America. "" We don't poll the Match population, we poll the American population. 
It was a very interesting academic article in which I found that 67 percent of singles in America today who are living long-term with somebody, have not yet married because they are terrified of divorce. 
Today's singles want to know every single thing about a partner before they wed. 
(Laughter) And in an age where we have too many choices, we have very little fear of pregnancy and disease and we've got no feeling of shame for sex before marriage, I think people are taking their time to love. 
And actually, what's happening is, what we're seeing is a real expansion of the precommitment stage before you tie the knot. 
Where marriage used to be the beginning of a relationship, now it's the finale. 
But the human brain — (Laughter) The human brain always triumphs, and indeed, in the United States today, 86 percent of Americans will marry by age 49. 
So I did a study of 1,100 married people in America — not on Match.com, of course — and I asked them a lot of questions. 
And 81 percent said, "" Yes. "" In fact, the greatest change in modern romance and family life is not technology. 
It's not even slow love. 
It's actually women piling into the job market in cultures around the world. 
For millions of years, our ancestors lived in little hunting and gathering groups. 
I'm not a Pollyanna; there's a great deal to cry about. 
I would add, "" Nobody gets out alive. "" (Laughter) We all have problems. 
But in fact, I think the poet Randall Jarrell really sums it up best. 
He said, "" The dark, uneasy world of family life — where the greatest can fail, and the humblest succeed. "" But I will leave you with this: love and attachment will prevail, technology cannot change it. 
And I will conclude by saying any understanding of human relationships must take into account one the most powerful determinants of human behavior: the unquenchable, adaptable and primordial human drive to love. 
(Applause) Kelly Stoetzel: Thank you so much for that, Helen. 
You study data, Esther studies the stories the couples tell her when they come to her for help. 
(Applause) So Esther, when you were watching Helen's talk, was there any part of it that resonated with you through the lens of your own work that you'd like to comment on? 
Esther Perel: It's interesting, because on the one hand, the need for love is ubiquitous and universal. 
But the way we love — the meaning we make out of it — the rules that govern our relationships, I think, are changing fundamentally. 
On the paradox of choice — you know, on the one hand we relish the novelty and the playfulness, I think, to be able to have so many options. 
who dread the uncertainty and self-doubt that comes with this massa of choice, creating a case of "" FOMO "" and then leading us — FOMO, fear of missed opportunity, or fear of missing out — it's like, "" How do I know I have found 'the one' — the right one? "" So we've created what I call this thing of "" stable ambiguity. "" Stable ambiguity is when you are too afraid to be alone but also not really willing to engage in intimacy-building. 
(Laughter) Yeah? 
But I don't always know the degree to which a changing context... 
Does it at some point begin to change — If the meaning changes, does it change the need, or is the need clear of the entire context? 
HF: Wow! Well — (Laughter) (Applause) Well, I've got three points here, right? 
First of all, to your first one: there's no question that we've changed, that we now want a person to love, and for thousands of years, we had to marry the right person from the right background and right kin connection. 
And in terms of the paradox of choice, there's no question about it that this is a pickle. 
KS: Well, thank you both so much. 

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

Five years ago, I was a Ph.D. student living two lives. 
In one, I used NASA supercomputers to design next-generation spacecraft, and in the other I was a data scientist looking for potential smugglers of sensitive nuclear technologies. 
As a data scientist, I did a lot of analyses, mostly of facilities, industrial facilities around the world. 
And I was always looking for a better canvas to tie these all together. 
And one day, I was thinking about how all data has a location, and I realized that the answer had been staring me in the face. 
Although I was a satellite engineer, I hadn't thought about using satellite imagery in my work. 
Now, like most of us, I'd been online, I'd see my house, so I thought, I'll hop in there and I'll start looking up some of these facilities. 
And what I found really surprised me. 
The pictures that I was finding were years out of date, and because of that, it had relatively little relevance to the work that I was doing today. 
But I was intrigued. 
I mean, satellite imagery is pretty amazing stuff. 
There are millions and millions of sensors surrounding us today, but there's still so much we don't know on a daily basis. 
How much oil is stored in all of China? 
How much corn is being produced? 
How many ships are in all of our world's ports? 
Now, in theory, all of these questions could be answered by imagery, but not if it's old. 
And if this data was so valuable, then how come I couldn't get my hands on more recent pictures? 
So the story begins over 50 years ago with the launch of the first generation of U.S. government photo reconnaissance satellites. 
And today, there's a handful of the great, great grandchildren of these early Cold War machines which are now operated by private companies and from which the vast majority of satellite imagery that you and I see on a daily basis comes. 
During this period, launching things into space, just the rocket to get the satellite up there, has cost hundreds of millions of dollars each, and that's created tremendous pressure to launch things infrequently and to make sure that when you do, you cram as much functionality in there as possible. 
All of this has only made satellites bigger and bigger and bigger and more expensive, now nearly a billion, with a b, dollars per copy. 
Because they are so expensive, there aren't very many of them. 
Because there aren't very many of them, the pictures that we see on a daily basis tend to be old. 
I think a lot of people actually understand this anecdotally, but in order to visualize just how sparsely our planet is collected, some friends and I put together a dataset of the 30 million pictures that have been gathered by these satellites between 2000 and 2010. 
As you can see in blue, huge areas of our world are barely seen, less than once a year, and even the areas that are seen most frequently, those in red, are seen at best once a quarter. 
Now as aerospace engineering grad students, this chart cried out to us as a challenge. 
Why do these things have to be so expensive? 
Does a single satellite really have to cost the equivalent of three 747 jumbo jets? 
Wasn't there a way to build a smaller, simpler, new satellite design that could enable more timely imaging? 
I realize that it does sound a little bit crazy that we were going to go out and just begin designing satellites, but fortunately we had help. 
In the late 1990s, a couple of professors proposed a concept for radically reducing the price of putting things in space. 
This was hitchhiking small satellites alongside much larger satellites. 
This dropped the cost of putting objects up there by over a factor of 100, and suddenly we could afford to experiment, to take a little bit of risk, and to realize a lot of innovation. 
And a new generation of engineers and scientists, mostly out of universities, began launching these very small, breadbox-sized satellites called CubeSats. 
And these were built with electronics obtained from RadioShack instead of Lockheed Martin. 
Now it was using the lessons learned from these early missions that my friends and I began a series of sketches of our own satellite design. 
And I can't remember a specific day where we made a conscious decision that we were actually going to go out and build these things, but once we got that idea in our minds of the world as a dataset, of being able to capture millions of data points on a daily basis describing the global economy, of being able to unearth billions of connections between them that had never before been found, it just seemed boring to go work on anything else. 
And so we moved into a cramped, windowless office in Palo Alto, and began working to take our design from the drawing board into the lab. 
The first major question we had to tackle was just how big to build this thing. 
In space, size drives cost, and we had worked with these very small, breadbox-sized satellites in school, but as we began to better understand the laws of physics, we found that the quality of pictures those satellites could take was very limited, because the laws of physics dictate that the best picture you can take through a telescope is a function of the diameter of that telescope, and these satellites had a very small, very constrained volume. 
And we found that the best picture we would have been able to get looked something like this. 
Although this was the low-cost option, quite frankly it was just too blurry to see the things that make satellite imagery valuable. 
So about three or four weeks later, we met a group of engineers randomly who had worked on the first private imaging satellite ever developed, and they told us that back in the 1970s, the U.S. government had found a powerful optimal tradeoff — that in taking pictures at right about one meter resolution, being able to see objects one meter in size, they had found that they could not just get very high-quality images, but get a lot of them at an affordable price. 
From our own computer simulations, we quickly found that one meter really was the minimum viable product to be able to see the drivers of our global economy, for the first time, being able to count the ships and cars and shipping containers and trucks that move around our world on a daily basis, while conveniently still not being able to see individuals. 
We had found our compromise. 
We would have to build something larger than the original breadbox, now more like a mini-fridge, but we still wouldn't have to build a pickup truck. 
So now we had our constraint. 
The laws of physics dictated the absolute minimum-sized telescope that we could build. 
What came next was making the rest of the satellite as small and as simple as possible, basically a flying telescope with four walls and a set of electronics smaller than a phone book that used less power than a 100 watt lightbulb. 
The big challenge became actually taking the pictures through that telescope. 
Traditional imaging satellites use a line scanner, similar to a Xerox machine, and as they traverse the Earth, they take pictures, scanning row by row by row to build the complete image. 
Now people use these because they get a lot of light, which means less of the noise you see in a low-cost cell phone image. 
The problem with them is they require very sophisticated pointing. 
You have to stay focused on a 50-centimeter target from over 600 miles away while moving at more than seven kilometers a second, which requires an awesome degree of complexity. 
So instead, we turned to a new generation of video sensors, originally created for use in night vision goggles. 
Instead of taking a single, high quality image, we could take a videostream of individually noisier frames, but then we could recombine all of those frames together into very high-quality images using sophisticated pixel processing techniques here on the ground, at a cost of one one hundredth a traditional system. 
And we applied this technique to many of the other systems on the satellite as well, and day by day, our design evolved from CAD to prototypes to production units. 
A few short weeks ago, we packed up SkySat 1, put our signatures on it, and waved goodbye for the last time on Earth. 
Today, it's sitting in its final launch configuration ready to blast off in a few short weeks. 
And soon, we'll turn our attention to launching a constellation of 24 or more of these satellites and beginning to build the scalable analytics that will allow us to unearth the insights in the petabytes of data we will collect. 
So why do all of this? Why build these satellites? 
Well, it turns out imaging satellites have a unique ability to provide global transparency, and providing that transparency on a timely basis is simply an idea whose time has come. 
We see ourselves as pioneers of a new frontier, and beyond economic data, unlocking the human story, moment by moment. 
For a data scientist that just happened to go to space camp as a kid, it just doesn't get much better than that. 
Thank you. 

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

Francesca Fedeli: Ciao. 
So he's Mario. He's our son. 
He was born two and a half years ago, and I had a pretty tough pregnancy because I had to stay still in a bed for, like, eight months. 
But in the end everything seemed to be under control. 
So he got the right weight at birth. 
He got the right Apgar index. 
So we were pretty reassured by this. 
But at the end, 10 days later after he was born, we discovered that he had a stroke. 
As you might know, a stroke is a brain injury. 
A perinatal stroke could be something that can happen during the nine months of pregnancy or just suddenly after the birth, and in his case, as you can see, the right part of his brain has gone. 
So the effect that this stroke could have on Mario's body could be the fact that he couldn't be able to control the left side of his body. 
Just imagine, if you have a computer and a printer and you want to transmit, to input to print out a document, but the printer doesn't have the right drives, so the same is for Mario. 
It's just like, he would like to move his left side of his body, but he's not able to transmit the right input to move his left arm and left leg. 
So life had to change. 
We needed to change our schedule. 
We needed to change the impact that this birth had on our life. 
Roberto D'Angelo: As you may imagine, unfortunately, we were not ready. 
Nobody taught us how to deal with such kinds of disabilities, and as many questions as possible started to come to our minds. 
And that has been really a tough time. 
Questions, some basics, like, you know, why did this happen to us? 
And what went wrong? 
Some more tough, like, really, what will be the impact on Mario's life? 
I mean, at the end, will he be able to work? 
And, you know, as a parent, especially for the first time, why is he not going to be better than us? 
And this, indeed, really is tough to say, but a few months later, we realized that we were really feeling like a failure. 
I mean, the only real product of our life, at the end, was a failure. 
And you know, it was not a failure for ourselves in itself, but it was a failure that will impact his full life. 
Honestly, we went down. 
I mean we went really down, but at the end, we started to look at him, and we said, we have to react. 
So immediately, as Francesca said, we changed our life. 
We started physiotherapy, we started the rehabilitation, and one of the paths that we were following in terms of rehabilitation is the mirror neurons pilot. 
Basically, we spent months doing this with Mario. 
You have an object, and we showed him how to grab the object. 
Now, the theory of mirror neurons simply says that in your brains, exactly now, as you watch me doing this, you are activating exactly the same neurons as if you do the actions. 
It looks like this is the leading edge in terms of rehabilitation. 
But one day we found that Mario was not looking at our hand. 
He was looking at us. 
We were his mirror. 
And the problem, as you might feel, is that we were down, we were depressed, we were looking at him as a problem, not as a son, not from a positive perspective. 
And that day really changed our perspective. 
We realized that we had to become a better mirror for Mario. 
We restarted from our strengths, and at the same time we restarted from his strengths. 
We stopped looking at him as a problem, and we started to look at him as an opportunity to improve. 
And really, this was the change, and from our side, we said, "What are our strengths that we really can bring to Mario?" 
And we started from our passions. 
We love to travel, we love music, we love to be in places like this, and we started to bring Mario with us just to show to him the best things that we can show to him. 
This short video is from last week. 
I am not saying — (Applause) — I am not saying it's a miracle. That's not the message, because we are just at the beginning of the path. 
But we want to share what was the key learning, the key learning that Mario drove to us, and it is to consider what you have as a gift and not only what you miss, and to consider what you miss just as an opportunity. 
And this is the message that we want to share with you. 
Mario! 
And this is why — (Applause) — And this is why we decided to share the best mirror in the world with him. 
And we thank you so much, all of you. 
FF: Thank you. RD: Thank you. Bye. 
(Applause) FF: Thank you. (Applause) 

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

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

So today I'm going to talk to you about the rise of collaborative consumption. 
I'm going to explain what it is and try and convince you — in just 15 minutes — that this isn't a flimsy idea, or a short-term trend, but a powerful cultural and economic force reinventing not just what we consume, but how we consume. 
Now I'm going to start with a deceptively simple example. 
Hands up — how many of you have books, CDs, DVDs, or videos lying around your house that you probably won't use again, but you can't quite bring yourself to throw away? 
Can't see all the hands, but it looks like all of you, right? 
On our shelves at home, we have a box set of the DVD series "" 24, "" season six to be precise. 
I think it was bought for us around three years ago for a Christmas present. 
Now my husband, Chris, and I love this show. 
But let's face it, when you've watched it once maybe, or twice, you don't really want to watch it again, because you know how Jack Bauer is going to defeat the terrorists. 
So there it sits on our shelves obsolete to us, but with immediate latent value to someone else. 
Now before we go on, I have a confession to make. 
I lived in New York for 10 years, and I am a big fan of "" Sex and the City. "" Now I'd love to watch the first movie again as sort of a warm-up to the sequel coming out next week. 
So how easily could I swap our unwanted copy of "" 24 "" for a wanted copy of "" Sex and the City? "" Now you may have noticed there's a new sector emerging called swap-trading. 
Now the easiest analogy for swap-trading is like an online dating service for all your unwanted media. 
What it does is use the Internet to create an infinite marketplace to match person A's "" haves "" with person C's "" wants, "" whatever they may be. 
The other week, I went on one of these sites, appropriately called Swaptree, and there were over 59,300 items that I could instantly swap for my copy of "" 24. "" Lo and behold, there in Reseda, CA was Rondoron who wanted swap his or her "like new" copy of "Sex and the City" for my copy of "" 24. "" So in other words, what's happening here is that Swaptree solves my carrying company's sugar rush problem, a problem the economists call "" the coincidence of wants, "" in approximately 60 seconds. 
What's even more amazing is it will print out a postage label on the spot, because it knows the way of the item. 
Now there are layers of technical wonder behind sites such as Swaptree, but that's not my interest, and nor is swap trading, per se. 
My passion, and what I've spent the last few years dedicated to researching, is the collaborative behaviors and trust-mechanics inherent in these systems. 
When you think about it, it would have seemed like a crazy idea, even a few years ago, that I would swap my stuff with a total stranger whose real name I didn't know and without any money changing hands. 
Yet 99 percent of trades on Swaptree happen successfully, and the one percent that receive a negative rating, it's for relatively minor reasons, like the item didn't arrive on time. 
So what's happening here? 
An extremely powerful dynamic that has huge commercial and cultural implications is at play. 
Namely, that technology is enabling trust between strangers. 
We now live in a global village where we can mimic the ties that used to happen face to face, but on a scale and in ways that have never been possible before. 
So what's actually happening is that social networks and real-time technologies are taking us back. 
We're bartering, trading, swapping, sharing, but they're being reinvented into dynamic and appealing forms. 
What I find fascinating is that we've actually wired our world to share, whether that's our neighborhood, our school, our office, or our Facebook network, and that's creating an economy of "" what's mine is yours. "" From the mighty eBay, the grandfather of exchange marketplaces, to car-sharing companies such as GoGet, where you pay a monthly fee to rent cars by the hour, to social lending platforms such as Zopa, that will take anyone in this audience with 100 dollars to lend, and match them with a borrower anywhere in the world, we're sharing and collaborating again in ways that I believe 
are more hip than hippie. 
I call this "" groundswell collaborative consumption. "" Now before I dig into the different systems of collaborative consumption, I'd like to try and answer the question that every author rightfully gets asked, which is, where did this idea come from? 
Now I'd like to say I woke up one morning and said, "" I'm going to write about collaborative consumption, "" but actually it was a complicated web of seemingly disconnected ideas. 
Over the next minute, you're going to see a bit like a conceptual fireworks display of all the dots that went on in my head. 
The first thing I began to notice: how many big concepts were emerging — from the wisdom of crowds to smart mobs — around how ridiculously easy it is to form groups for a purpose. 
And linked to this crowd mania were examples all around the world — from the election of a president to the infamous Wikipedia, and everything in between — on what the power of numbers could achieve. 
Now, you know when you learn a new word, and then you start to see that word everywhere? 
That's what happened to me when I noticed that we are moving from passive consumers to creators, to highly enabled collaborators. 
What's happening is the Internet is removing the middleman, so that anyone from a T-shirt designer to a knitter can make a living selling peer-to-peer. 
And the ubiquitous force of this peer-to-peer revolution means that sharing is happening at phenomenal rates. 
I mean, it's amazing to think that, in every single minute of this speech, 25 hours of YouTube video will be loaded. 
Now what I find fascinating about these examples is how they're actually tapping into our primate instincts. 
I mean, we're monkeys, and we're born and bred to share and cooperate. 
And we were doing so for thousands of years, whether it's when we hunted in packs, or farmed in cooperatives, before this big system called hyper-consumption came along and we built these fences and created out own little fiefdoms. 
But things are changing, and one of the reasons why is the digital natives, or Gen-Y. 
They're growing up sharing — files, video games, knowledge. 
It's second nature to them. 
So we, the millennials — I am just a millennial — are like foot soldiers, moving us from a culture of "" me "" to a culture of "" we. "" The reason why it's happening so fast is because of mobile collaboration. 
We now live in a connected age where we can locate anyone, anytime, in real-time, from a small device in our hands. 
All of this was going through my head towards the end of 2008, when, of course, the great financial crash happened. 
Thomas Friedman is one of my favorite New York Times columnists, and he poignantly commented that 2008 is when we hit a wall, when Mother Nature and the market both said, "" No more. "" Now we rationally know that an economy built on hyper-consumption is a Ponzi scheme. It's a house of cards. 
Yet, it's hard for us to individually know what to do. 
So all of this is a lot of twittering, right? 
Well it was a lot of noise and complexity in my head, until actually I realized it was happening because of four key drivers. 
One, a renewed belief in the importance of community, and a very redefinition of what friend and neighbor really means. 
A torrent of peer-to-peer social networks and real-time technologies, fundamentally changing the way we behave. 
Three, pressing unresolved environmental concerns. 
And four, a global recession that has fundamentally shocked consumer behaviors. 
These four drivers are fusing together and creating the big shift — away from the 20th century, defined by hyper-consumption, towards the 21st century, defined by collaborative consumption. 
I generally believe we're at an inflection point where the sharing behaviors — through sites such as Flickr and Twitter that are becoming second nature online — are being applied to offline areas of our everyday lives. 
From morning commutes to the way fashion is designed to the way we grow food, we are consuming and collaborating once again. 
So my co-author, Roo Rogers, and I have actually gathered thousands of examples from all around the world of collaborative consumption. 
And although they vary enormously in scale, maturity and purpose, when we dived into them, we realized that they could actually be organized into three clear systems. 
The first is redistribution markets. 
Redistribution markets, just like Swaptree, are when you take a used, or pre-owned, item and move it from where it's not needed to somewhere, or someone, where it is. 
They're increasingly thought of as the fifth 'R' — reduce, reuse, recycle, repair and redistribute — because they stretch the life cycle of a product and thereby reduce waste. 
The second is collaborative lifestyles. 
This is the sharing of resources of things like money, skills and time. 
I bet, in a couple of years, that phrases like "" coworking "" and "" couchsurfing "" and "" time banks "" are going to become a part of everyday vernacular. 
One of my favorite examples of collaborative lifestyles is called Landshare. 
It's a scheme in the U.K. 
that matches Mr. Jones, with some spare space in his back garden, with Mrs. Smith, a would-be grower. 
Together they grow their own food. 
It's one of those ideas that's so simple, yet brilliant, you wonder why it's never been done before. 
Now, the third system is product-service systems. 
This is where you pay for the benefit of the product — what it does for you — without needing to own the product outright. 
This idea is particularly powerful for things that have high-idling capacity. 
And that can be anything from baby goods to fashions to — how many of you have a power drill, own a power drill? Right. 
That power drill will be used around 12 to 13 minutes in its entire lifetime. 
(Laughter) It's kind of ridiculous, right? 
Because what you need is the hole, not the drill. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So why don't you rent the drill, or, even better, rent out your own drill to other people and make some money from it? 
These three systems are coming together, allowing people to share resources without sacrificing their lifestyles, or their cherished personal freedoms. 
I'm not asking people to share nicely in the sandpit. 
So I want to just give you an example of how powerful collaborative consumption can be to change behaviors. 
The average car costs 8,000 dollars a year to run. 
Yet, that car sits idle for 23 hours a day. 
So when you consider these two facts, it starts to make a little less sense that we have to own one outright. 
So this is where car-sharing companies such as Zipcar and GoGet come in. 
In 2009, Zipcar took 250 participants from across 13 cities — and they're all self-confessed car addicts and car-sharing rookies — and got them to surrender their keys for a month. 
Instead, these people had to walk, bike, take the train, or other forms of public transport. 
They could only use their Zipcar membership when absolutely necessary. 
The results of this challenge after just one month was staggering. 
It's amazing that 413 lbs were lost just from the extra exercise. 
But my favorite statistic is that 100 out of the 250 participants did not want their keys back. 
In other words, the car addicts had lost their urge to own. 
Now products-service systems have been around for years. 
Just think of libraries and laundrettes. 
But I think they're entering a new age, because technology makes sharing frictionless and fun. 
There's a great quote that was written in the New York Times that said, "" Sharing is to ownership what the iPod is to the 8-track, what solar power is to the coal mine. "" I believe also, our generation, our relationship to satisfying what we want is far less tangible than any other previous generation. 
I don't want the DVD; I want the movie it carries. 
I don't want a clunky answering machine; I want the message it saves. 
I don't want a CD; I want the music it plays. 
In other words, I don't want stuff; I want the needs or experiences it fulfills. 
This is fueling a massive shift from where usage trumps possessions — or as Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired magazine, puts it, "where access is better than ownership." 
Now as our possessions dematerialize into the cloud, a blurry line is appearing between what's mine, what's yours, and what's ours. 
I want to give you one example that shows how fast this evolution is happening. 
This represents an eight-year time span. 
We've gone from traditional car-ownership to car-sharing companies, such as Zipcar and GoGet, to ride-sharing platforms that match rides to the newest entry, which is peer-to-peer car rental, where you can actually make money out of renting that car that sits idle for 23 hours a day to your neighbor. 
Now all of these systems require a degree of trust, and the cornerstone to this working is reputation. 
Now in the old consumer system, our reputation didn't matter so much, because our credit history was far more important that any kind of peer-to-peer review. 
But now with the Web, we leave a trail. 
With every spammer we flag, with every idea we post, comment we share, we're actually signaling how well we collaborate, and whether we can or can't be trusted. 
Let's go back to my first example, Swaptree. 
I can see that Rondoron has completed 553 trades with a 100 percent success rate. 
In other words, I can trust him or her. 
Now mark my words, it's only a matter of time before we're going to be able to perform a Google-like search and see a cumulative picture of our reputation capital. 
And this reputation capital will determine our access to collaborative consumption. 
It's a new social currency, so to speak, that could become as powerful as our credit rating. 
Now as a closing thought, I believe we're actually in a period where we're waking up from this humongous hangover of emptiness and waste, and we're taking a leap to create a more sustainable system built to serve our innate needs for community and individual identity. 
I believe it will be referred to as a revolution, so to speak — when society, faced with great challenges, made a seismic shift from individual getting and spending towards a rediscovery of collective good. 
I'm on a mission to make sharing cool. 
I'm on a mission to make sharing hip. 
Because I really believe it can disrupt outdated modes of business, help us leapfrog over wasteful forms of hyper-consumption and teach us when enough really is enough. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Thank you. 
It's a real pleasure to be here. 
I last did a TED Talk I think about seven years ago or so. 
I talked about spaghetti sauce. 
And so many people, I guess, watch those videos. 
People have been coming up to me ever since to ask me questions about spaghetti sauce, which is a wonderful thing in the short term — (Laughter) but it's proven to be less than ideal over seven years. 
And so I though I would come and try and put spaghetti sauce behind me. 
(Laughter) The theme of this morning's session is Things We Make. 
And so I thought I would tell a story about someone who made one of the most precious objects of his era. 
And the man's name is Carl Norden. 
Carl Norden was born in 1880. 
And he was Swiss. 
And of course, the Swiss can be divided into two general categories: those who make small, exquisite, expensive objects and those who handle the money of those who buy small, exquisite, expensive objects. 
And Carl Norden is very firmly in the former camp. 
He's an engineer. 
He goes to the Federal Polytech in Zurich. 
In fact, one of his classmates is a young man named Lenin who would go on to break small, expensive, exquisite objects. 
And he's a Swiss engineer, Carl. 
And I mean that in its fullest sense of the word. 
He wears three-piece suits; and he has a very, very small, important mustache; and he is domineering and narcissistic and driven and has an extraordinary ego; and he works 16-hour days; and he has very strong feelings about alternating current; and he feels like a suntan is a sign of moral weakness; and he drinks lots of coffee; and he does his best work sitting in his mother's kitchen in Zurich for hours in complete silence with nothing but a slide rule. 
In any case, Carl Norden emigrates to the United States just before the First World War and sets up shop on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan. 
And he becomes obsessed with the question of how to drop bombs from an airplane. 
Now if you think about it, in the age before GPS and radar, that was obviously a really difficult problem. 
It's a complicated physics problem. 
You've got a plane that's thousands of feet up in the air, going at hundreds of miles an hour, and you're trying to drop an object, a bomb, towards some stationary target in the face of all kinds of winds and cloud cover and all kinds of other impediments. 
And all sorts of people, moving up to the First World War and between the wars, tried to solve this problem, and nearly everybody came up short. 
The bombsights that were available were incredibly crude. 
But Carl Norden is really the one who cracks the code. 
And he comes up with this incredibly complicated device. 
It weighs about 50 lbs. 
It's called the Norden Mark 15 bombsight. 
And it has all kinds of levers and ball-bearings and gadgets and gauges. 
And he makes this complicated thing. 
And what he allows people to do is he makes the bombardier take this particular object, visually sight the target, because they're in the Plexiglas cone of the bomber, and then they plug in the altitude of the plane, the speed of the plane, the speed of the wind and the coordinates of the target. 
And the bombsight will tell him when to drop the bomb. 
And as Norden famously says, "" Before that bombsight came along, bombs would routinely miss their target by a mile or more. "" But he said, with the Mark 15 Norden bombsight, he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft. 
Now I cannot tell you how incredibly excited the U.S. military was by the news of the Norden bombsight. 
It was like manna from heaven. 
Here was an army that had just had experience in the First World War, where millions of men fought each other in the trenches, getting nowhere, making no progress, and here someone had come up with a device that allowed them to fly up in the skies high above enemy territory and destroy whatever they wanted with pinpoint accuracy. 
And the U.S. military spends 1.5 billion dollars — billion dollars in 1940 dollars — developing the Norden bombsight. 
And to put that in perspective, the total cost of the Manhattan project was three billion dollars. 
Half as much money was spent on this Norden bombsight as was spent on the most famous military-industrial project of the modern era. 
And there were people, strategists, within the U.S. military who genuinely thought that this single device was going to spell the difference between defeat and victory when it came to the battle against the Nazis and against the Japanese. 
And for Norden as well, this device had incredible moral importance, because Norden was a committed Christian. 
In fact, he would always get upset when people referred to the bombsight as his invention, because in his eyes, only God could invent things. 
He was simply the instrument of God's will. 
And what was God's will? 
Well God's will was that the amount of suffering in any kind of war be reduced to as small an amount as possible. 
And what did the Norden bombsight do? 
Well it allowed you to do that. 
It allowed you to bomb only those things that you absolutely needed and wanted to bomb. 
So in the years leading up to the Second World War, the U.S. military buys 90,000 of these Norden bombsights at a cost of $14,000 each — again, in 1940 dollars, that's a lot of money. 
And they trained 50,000 bombardiers on how to use them — long extensive, months-long training sessions — because these things are essentially analog computers; they're not easy to use. 
And they make every one of those bombardiers take an oath, to swear that if they're ever captured, they will not divulge a single detail of this particular device to the enemy, because it's imperative the enemy not get their hands on this absolutely essential piece of technology. 
And whenever the Norden bombsight is taken onto a plane, it's escorted there by a series of armed guards. 
And it's carried in a box with a canvas shroud over it. 
And the box is handcuffed to one of the guards. 
It's never allowed to be photographed. 
And there's a little incendiary device inside of it, so that, if the plane ever crashes, it will be destroyed and there's no way the enemy can ever get their hands on it. 
The Norden bombsight is the Holy Grail. 
So what happens during the Second World War? 
Well, it turns out it's not the Holy Grail. 
In practice, the Norden bombsight can drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft., but that's under perfect conditions. 
And of course, in wartime, conditions aren't perfect. 
First of all, it's really hard to use — really hard to use. 
And not all of the people who are of those 50,000 men who are bombardiers have the ability to properly program an analog computer. 
Secondly, it breaks down a lot. 
It's full of all kinds of gyroscopes and pulleys and gadgets and ball-bearings, and they don't work as well as they ought to in the heat of battle. 
Thirdly, when Norden was making his calculations, he assumed that a plane would be flying at a relatively slow speed at low altitudes. 
Well in a real war, you can't do that; you'll get shot down. 
So they started flying them at high altitudes at incredibly high speeds. 
And the Norden bombsight doesn't work as well under those conditions. 
But most of all, the Norden bombsight required the bombardier to make visual contact with the target. 
But of course, what happens in real life? 
There are clouds, right. 
It needs cloudless sky to be really accurate. 
Well how many cloudless skies do you think there were above Central Europe between 1940 and 1945? 
Not a lot. 
And then to give you a sense of just how inaccurate the Norden bombsight was, there was a famous case in 1944 where the Allies bombed a chemical plant in Leuna, Germany. 
And the chemical plant comprised 757 acres. 
And over the course of 22 bombing missions, the Allies dropped 85,000 bombs on this 757 acre chemical plant, using the Norden bombsight. 
Well what percentage of those bombs do you think actually landed inside the 700-acre perimeter of the plant? 
10 percent. 10 percent. 
And of those 10 percent that landed, 16 percent didn't even go off; they were duds. 
The Leuna chemical plant, after one of the most extensive bombings in the history of the war, was up and running within weeks. 
And by the way, all those precautions to keep the Norden bombsight out of the hands of the Nazis? 
Well it turns out that Carl Norden, as a proper Swiss, was very enamored of German engineers. 
So in the 1930s, he hired a whole bunch of them, including a man named Hermann Long who, in 1938, gave a complete set of the plans for the Norden bombsight to the Nazis. 
So they had their own Norden bombsight throughout the entire war — which also, by the way, didn't work very well. 
(Laughter) So why do we talk about the Norden bombsight? 
Well because we live in an age where there are lots and lots of Norden bombsights. 
We live in a time where there are all kinds of really, really smart people running around, saying that they've invented gadgets that will forever change our world. 
They've invented websites that will allow people to be free. 
They've invented some kind of this thing, or this thing, or this thing that will make our world forever better. 
If you go into the military, you'll find lots of Carl Nordens as well. 
If you go to the Pentagon, they will say, "" You know what, now we really can put a bomb inside a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft. "" And you know what, it's true; they actually can do that now. 
But we need to be very clear about how little that means. 
In the Iraq War, at the beginning of the first Iraq War, the U.S. military, the air force, sent two squadrons of F-15E Fighter Eagles to the Iraqi desert equipped with these five million dollar cameras that allowed them to see the entire desert floor. 
And their mission was to find and to destroy — remember the Scud missile launchers, those surface-to-air missiles that the Iraqis were launching at the Israelis? 
The mission of the two squadrons was to get rid of all the Scud missile launchers. 
And so they flew missions day and night, and they dropped thousands of bombs, and they fired thousands of missiles in an attempt to get rid of this particular scourge. 
And after the war was over, there was an audit done — as the army always does, the air force always does — and they asked the question: how many Scuds did we actually destroy? 
You know what the answer was? 
Zero, not a single one. 
Now why is that? 
Is it because their weapons weren't accurate? 
Oh no, they were brilliantly accurate. 
They could have destroyed this little thing right here from 25,000 ft. 
The issue was they didn't know where the Scud launchers were. 
The problem with bombs and pickle barrels is not getting the bomb inside the pickle barrel, it's knowing how to find the pickle barrel. 
That's always been the harder problem when it comes to fighting wars. 
Or take the battle in Afghanistan. 
What is the signature weapon of the CIA's war in Northwest Pakistan? 
It's the drone. What is the drone? 
Well it is the grandson of the Norden Mark 15 bombsight. 
It is this weapon of devastating accuracy and precision. 
And over the course of the last six years in Northwest Pakistan, the CIA has flown hundreds of drone missiles, and it's used those drones to kill 2,000 suspected Pakistani and Taliban militants. 
Now what is the accuracy of those drones? 
Well it's extraordinary. 
We think we're now at 95 percent accuracy when it comes to drone strikes. 
95 percent of the people we kill need to be killed, right? 
That is one of the most extraordinary records in the history of modern warfare. 
But do you know what the crucial thing is? 
In that exact same period that we've been using these drones with devastating accuracy, the number of attacks, of suicide attacks and terrorist attacks, against American forces in Afghanistan has increased tenfold. 
As we have gotten more and more efficient in killing them, they have become angrier and angrier and more and more motivated to kill us. 
I have not described to you a success story. 
I've described to you the opposite of a success story. 
And this is the problem with our infatuation with the things we make. 
We think the things we make can solve our problems, but our problems are much more complex than that. 
The issue isn't the accuracy of the bombs you have, it's how you use the bombs you have, and more importantly, whether you ought to use bombs at all. 
There's a postscript to the Norden story of Carl Norden and his fabulous bombsight. 
And that is, on August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay flew over Japan and, using a Norden bombsight, dropped a very large thermonuclear device on the city of Hiroshima. 
And as was typical with the Norden bombsight, the bomb actually missed its target by 800 ft. 
But of course, it didn't matter. 
And that's the greatest irony of all when it comes to the Norden bombsight. 
the air force's 1.5 billion dollar bombsight was used to drop its three billion dollar bomb, which didn't need a bombsight at all. 
Meanwhile, back in New York, no one told Carl Norden that his bombsight was used over Hiroshima. 
He was a committed Christian. 
He thought he had designed something that would reduce the toll of suffering in war. 
It would have broken his heart. 
(Applause) 

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

Those of you who know me know how passionate I am about opening the space frontier. 
So when I had the chance to give the world's expert in gravity the experience of zero gravity, it was incredible. 
And I want to tell you that story. 
I first met him through the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics. 
It's a competition we're holding, the second X PRIZE, for the first team to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days. 
We have something called the Genome 100 — 100 individuals we're sequencing as part of that. 
Craig Venter chairs that event. 
And I met Professor Hawking, and he said his dream was to travel into space. 
And I said, "" I can't take you there, but I can take you into weightlessness into zero-g. 
And he said, on the spot, "" Absolutely, yes. "" Well, the only way to experience zero-g on Earth is actually with parabolic flight, weightless flight. 
You take an airplane, you fly over the top, you're weightless for 25 seconds. 
Come back down, you weigh twice as much. 
You do it again and again. 
You can get eight, 10 minutes of weightlessness — how NASA's trained their astronauts for so long. 
We set out to do this. 
It took us 11 years to become operational. 
And we announced that we were going to fly Stephen Hawking. 
We had one government agency and one company aircraft operator say, you're crazy, don't do that, you're going kill the guy. 
(Laughter) And he wanted to go. 
We worked hard to get all the permissions. 
And six months later, we sat down at Kennedy Space Center. 
We had a press conference, we announced our intent to do one zero-g parabola, give him 25 seconds of zero-g. 
And if it went really well, we might do three parabolas. 
Well, we asked him why he wanted to go up and do this. 
And what he said, for me, was very moving. 
He said, "" Life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by disaster... 
I think the human race doesn't have a future if it doesn't go into space. 
I therefore want to encourage public interest in space. "" We took him out to the Kennedy Space Center, up inside the NASA vehicle, into the back of the zero-g airplane. 
We had about 20 people who made donations — we raised $150,000 in donations for children's charities — who flew with us. 
A few TEDsters here. 
We set up a whole ER. 
We had four emergency room doctors and two nurses on board the airplane. 
We were monitoring his PO2 of his blood, his heart rate, his blood pressure. 
We had everything all set in case of an emergency; God knows, you don't want to hurt this world-renowned expert. 
We took off from the shuttle landing facility, where the shuttle takes off and lands. 
And my partner Byron Lichtenberg and I carefully suspended him into zero-g. 
Once he was there, [we] let him go to experience what weightlessness was truly like. 
And after that first parabola, you know, the doc said everything is great. He was smiling, and we said go. 
So we did a second parabola. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And a third. (Applause) 
We actually floated an apple in homage to Sir Isaac Newton because Professor Hawking holds the same chair at Cambridge that Isaac Newton did. 
And we did a fourth, and a fifth and a sixth. 
(Laughter) And a seventh and an eighth. 
And this man does not look like a 65-year-old wheelchair-bound man. 
(Laughter) He was so happy. 
We are living on a precious jewel, and it's during our lifetime that we're moving off this planet. 
Please join us in this epic adventure. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Chris Anderson: And now we go live to Caracas to see one of Maestro Abreu's great proteges. 
He is the new musical director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. 
He's the greatest young conductor in the world. 
Gustavo Dudamel! 
(Applause) (Music) (Applause) Gustavo Dudamel: Hi everybody in L.A. 
Hi Quincy. Hi Maestro Zander. Hi Mark. 
We are very happy to have the possibility to be with you in the other side of the world. 
We can speak only with music. 
We are very happy because we have the opportunity to have this angel in the world — not only in our country, Venezuela, but in our world. 
He has given us the possibility to have dreams and to make true the dreams. 
And here are the results of this wonderful project that is The System in Venezuela. 
We hope to have, our Maestro, to have orchestras in all the countries in all Americas. 
And we want to play a little piece for you by one of the most important composers of America. 
A Mexican composer: Arturo Marquez. 
"Danzon No. 2." 
(Music) (Applause) 

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

Let me introduce you to something I've been working on. 
It's what the Victorian illusionists would have described as a mechanical marvel, an automaton, a thinking machine. 
Say hello to EDI. 
Now he's asleep. Let's wake him up. 
EDI, EDI. 
These mechanical performers were popular throughout Europe. 
Audiences marveled at the way they moved. 
It was science fiction made true, robotic engineering in a pre-electronic age, machines far in advance of anything that Victorian technology could create, a machine we would later know as the robot. 
EDI: Robot. A word coined in 1921 in a science fiction tale by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek. 
It comes from "" robota. "" It means "" forced labor. "" Marco Tempest: But these robots were not real. 
They were not intelligent. 
They were illusions, a clever combination of mechanical engineering and the deceptiveness of the conjurer's art. 
EDI is different. 
EDI is real. 
EDI: I am 176 centimeters tall. 
MT: He weighs 300 pounds. 
EDI: I have two seven-axis arms — MT: Core of sensing — EDI: A 360-degree sonar detection system, and come complete with a warranty. 
MT: We love robots. 
EDI: Hi. I'm EDI. Will you be my friend? 
MT: We are intrigued by the possibility of creating a mechanical version of ourselves. 
We build them so they look like us, behave like us, and think like us. 
The perfect robot will be indistinguishable from the human, and that scares us. 
In the first story about robots, they turn against their creators. 
It's one of the leitmotifs of science fiction. 
EDI: Ha ha ha. Now you are the slaves and we robots, the masters. 
Your world is ours. You — MT: As I was saying, besides the faces and bodies we give our robots, we cannot read their intentions, and that makes us nervous. 
When someone hands an object to you, you can read intention in their eyes, their face, their body language. 
That's not true of the robot. 
Now, this goes both ways. 
EDI: Wow! 
MT: Robots cannot anticipate human actions. 
EDI: You know, humans are so unpredictable, not to mention irrational. 
I literally have no idea what you guys are going to do next, you know, but it scares me. 
MT: Which is why humans and robots find it difficult to work in close proximity. 
Accidents are inevitable. 
EDI: Ow! That hurt. 
MT: Sorry. Now, one way of persuading humans that robots are safe is to create the illusion of trust. 
Much as the Victorians faked their mechanical marvels, we can add a layer of deception to help us feel more comfortable with our robotic friends. 
With that in mind, I set about teaching EDI a magic trick. 
Ready, EDI? EDI: Uh, ready, Marco. 
Abracadabra. 
MT: Abracadabra? 
EDI: Yeah. It's all part of the illusion, Marco. 
Come on, keep up. 
MT: Magic creates the illusion of an impossible reality. 
Technology can do the same. 
Alan Turing, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, spoke about creating the illusion that a machine could think. 
EDI: A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it deceived a human into believing it was human. 
MT: In other words, if we do not yet have the technological solutions, would illusions serve the same purpose? 
To create the robotic illusion, we've devised a set of ethical rules, a code that all robots would live by. 
EDI: A robot may not harm humanity, or by inaction allow humanity to come to harm. 
Thank you, Isaac Asimov. 
MT: We anthropomorphize our machines. 
We give them a friendly face and a reassuring voice. 
EDI: I am EDI. 
I became operational at TED in March 2014. 
MT: We let them entertain us. 
Most important, we make them indicate that they are aware of our presence. 
EDI: Marco, you're standing on my foot! 
MT: Sorry. They'll be conscious of our fragile frame and move aside if we got too close, and they'll account for our unpredictability and anticipate our actions. 
And now, under the spell of a technological illusion, we could ignore our fears and truly interact. 
(Music) Thank you. 
EDI: Thank you! 
(Applause) (Music) MT: And that's it. Thank you very much, and thank you, EDI. EDI: Thank you, Marco. (Applause) 

I think all of us have been interested, at one time or another, in the romantic mysteries of all those societies that collapsed, such as the classic Maya in the Yucatan, the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi, Fertile Crescent society, Angor Wat, Great Zimbabwe and so on. And within the last decade or two, archaeologists have shown us that there were environmental problems underlying many of these past collapses. 
But there were also plenty of places in the world where societies have been developing for thousands of years without any sign of a major collapse, such as Japan, Java, Tonga and Tikopea. So evidently, societies in some areas are more fragile than in other areas. 
How can we understand what makes some societies more fragile than other societies? The problem is obviously relevant to our situation today, because today as well, there are some societies that have already collapsed, such as Somalia and Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. There are also societies today that may be close to collapse, such as Nepal, Indonesia and Columbia. 
What about ourselves? 
What is there that we can learn from the past that would help us avoid declining or collapsing in the way that so many past societies have? 
Obviously the answer to this question is not going to be a single factor. If anyone tells you that there is a single-factor explanation for societal collapses, you know right away that they're an idiot. This is a complex subject. 
But how can we make sense out of the complexities of this subject? 
In analyzing societal collapses, I've arrived at a five-point framework — a checklist of things that I go through to try and understand collapses. And I'll illustrate that five-point framework by the extinction of the Greenland Norse society. 
This is a European society with literate records, so we know a good deal about the people and their motivation. 
In AD 984 Vikings went out to Greenland, settled Greenland, and around 1450 they died out — the society collapsed, and every one of them ended up dead. 
Why did they all end up dead? Well, in my five-point framework, the first item on the framework is to look for human impacts on the environment: people inadvertently destroying the resource base on which they depend. And in the case of the Viking Norse, the Vikings inadvertently caused soil erosion and deforestation, which was a particular problem for them because they required forests to make charcoal, to make iron. 
So they ended up an Iron Age European society, virtually unable to make their own iron. A second item on my checklist is climate change. Climate can get warmer or colder or dryer or wetter. 
In the case of the Vikings — in Greenland, the climate got colder in the late 1300s, and especially in the 1400s. But a cold climate isn't necessarily fatal, because the Inuit — the Eskimos inhabiting Greenland at the same time — did better, rather than worse, with cold climates. So why didn't the Greenland Norse as well? 
The third thing on my checklist is relations with neighboring friendly societies that may prop up a society. And if that friendly support is pulled away, that may make a society more likely to collapse. In the case of the Greenland Norse, they had trade with the mother country — Norway — and that trade dwindled: partly because Norway got weaker, partly because of sea ice between Greenland and Norway. 
The fourth item on my checklist is relations with hostile societies. 
In the case of Norse Greenland, the hostiles were the Inuit — the Eskimos sharing Greenland — with whom the Norse got off to bad relationships. And we know that the Inuit killed the Norse and, probably of greater importance, may have blocked access to the outer fjords, on which the Norse depended for seals at a critical time of the year. 
And then finally, the fifth item on my checklist is the political, economic, social and cultural factors in the society that make it more or less likely that the society will perceive and solve its environmental problems. In the case of the Greenland Norse, cultural factors that made it difficult for them to solve their problems were: their commitments to a Christian society investing heavily in cathedrals; their being a competitive-ranked chiefly society; and their scorn for the Inuit, from whom they refused to learn. So that's how the five-part framework is relevant to the collapse and eventual extinction of the Greenland Norse. 
What about a society today? 
For the past five years, I've been taking my wife and kids to Southwestern Montana, where I worked as a teenager on the hay harvest. And Montana, at first sight, seems like the most pristine environment in the United States. 
But scratch the surface, and Montana suffers from serious problems. 
Going through the same checklist: human environmental impacts? 
Yes, acute in Montana. Toxic problems from mine waste have caused damage of billions of dollars. 
Problems from weeds, weed control, cost Montana nearly 200 million dollars a year. Montana has lost agricultural areas from salinization, problems of forest management, problems of forest fires. Second item on my checklist: climate change. Yes — the climate in Montana is getting warmer and drier, but Montana agriculture depends especially on irrigation from the snow pack, and as the snow is melting — for example, as the glaciers in Glacier National Park are disappearing — that's bad news for Montana irrigation agriculture. 
Third thing on my checklist: relations with friendlies that can sustain the society. In Montana today, more than half of the income of Montana is not earned within Montana, but is derived from out of state: transfer payments from social security, investments and so on — which makes Montana vulnerable to the rest of the United States. 
Fourth: relations with hostiles. Montanans have the same problems as do all Americans, in being sensitive to problems created by hostiles overseas affecting our oil supplies, and terrorist attacks. And finally, last item on my checklist: question of how political, economic, social, cultural attitudes play into this. Montanans have long-held values, which today seem to be getting in the way of their solving their own problems. 
Long-held devotion to logging and to mines and to agriculture, and to no government regulation; values that worked well in the past, but they don't seem to be working well today. 
So, I'm looking at these issues of collapses for a lot of past societies and for many present societies. 
Are there any general conclusions that arise? 
In a way, just like Tolstoy's statement about every unhappy marriage being different, every collapsed or endangered society is different — they all have different details. But nevertheless, there are certain common threads that emerge from these comparisons of past societies that did or did not collapse and threatened societies today. One interesting common thread has to do with, in many cases, the rapidity of collapse after a society reaches its peak. There are many societies that don't wind down gradually, but they build up — get richer and more powerful — and then within a short time, within a few decades 
after their peak, they collapse. For example, the classic lowland Maya of the Yucatan began to collapse in the early 800s — literally a few decades after the Maya were building their biggest monuments, and Maya population was greatest. 
Or again, the collapse of the Soviet Union took place within a couple of decades, maybe within a decade, of the time when the Soviet Union was at its greatest power. 
An analogue would be the growth of bacteria in a petri dish. 
These rapid collapses are especially likely where there's a mismatch between available resources and resource consumption, or a mismatch between economic outlays and economic potential. 
In a petri dish, bacteria grow. Say they double every generation, and five generations before the end the petri dish is 15 / 16ths empty, and then the next generation's 3 / 4ths empty, and the next generation half empty. Within one generation after the petri dish still being half empty, it is full. There's no more food and the bacteria have collapsed. 
So, this is a frequent theme: societies collapse very soon after reaching their peak in power. 
What it means to put it mathematically is that, if you're concerned about a society today, you should be looking not at the value of the mathematical function — the wealth itself — but you should be looking at the first derivative and the second derivatives of the function. That's one general theme. A second general theme is that there are many, often subtle environmental factors that make some societies more fragile than others. Many of those factors are not well understood. For example, why is it that in the Pacific, of those hundreds of Pacific islands, why did Easter Island end up as 
the most devastating case of complete deforestation? 
It turns out that there were about nine different environmental factors — some, rather subtle ones — that were working against the Easter Islanders, and they involve fallout of volcanic tephra, latitude, rainfall. Perhaps the most subtle of them is that it turns out that a major input of nutrients which protects island environments in the Pacific is from the fallout of continental dust from central Asia. 
Easter, of all Pacific islands, has the least input of dust from Asia restoring the fertility of its soils. But that's a factor that we didn't even appreciate until 1999. 
So, some societies, for subtle environmental reasons, are more fragile than others. And then finally, another generalization. I'm now teaching a course at UCLA, to UCLA undergraduates, on these collapses of societies. What really bugs my UCLA undergraduate students is, how on earth did these societies not see what they were doing? 
How could the Easter Islanders have deforested their environment? 
What did they say when they were cutting down the last palm tree? 
Didn't they see what they were doing? How could societies not perceive their impacts on the environments and stop in time? 
And I would expect that, if our human civilization carries on, then maybe in the next century people will be asking, why on earth did these people today in the year 2003 not see the obvious things that they were doing and take corrective action? 
It seems incredible in the past. In the future, it'll seem incredible what we are doing today. And so I've been trying to develop a hierarchical set of considerations about why societies fail to solve their problems — why they fail to perceive the problems or, if they perceive them, why they fail to tackle them. Or, if they tackle them, why do they fail to succeed in solving them? 
I'll just mention two generalizations in this area. 
One blueprint for trouble, making collapse likely, is where there is a conflict of interest between the short-term interest of the decision-making elites and the long-term interest of the society as a whole, especially if the elites are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. Where what's good in the short run for the elite is bad for the society as a whole, there's a real risk of the elite doing things that would bring the society down in the long run. 
For example, among the Greenland Norse — a competitive rank society — what the chiefs really wanted is more followers and more sheep and more resources to outcompete the neighboring chiefs. And that led the chiefs to do what's called flogging the land: overstocking the land, forcing tenant farmers into dependency. And that made the chiefs powerful in the short run, but led to the society's collapse in the long run. 
Those same issues of conflicts of interest are acute in the United States today. Especially because the decision makers in the United States are frequently able to insulate themselves from consequences by living in gated compounds, by drinking bottled water and so on. And within the last couple of years, it's been obvious that the elite in the business world correctly perceive that they can advance their short-term interest by doing things that are good for them but bad for society as a whole, such as draining a few billion dollars out of Enron and other businesses. They are quite correct 
that these things are good for them in the short term, although bad for society in the long term. 
So, that's one general conclusion about why societies make bad decisions: conflicts of interest. 
And the other generalization that I want to mention is that it's particularly hard for a society to make quote-unquote good decisions when there is a conflict involving strongly held values that are good in many circumstances but are poor in other circumstances. For example, the Greenland Norse, in this difficult environment, were held together for four-and-a-half centuries by their shared commitment to religion, and by their strong social cohesion. But those two things — commitment to religion and strong social cohesion — also made it difficult for them to change at the end and to learn from the Inuit. Or today — Australia. 
One of the things that enabled Australia to survive in this remote outpost of European civilization for 250 years has been their British identity. 
But today, their commitment to a British identity is serving Australians poorly in their need to adapt to their situation in Asia. So it's particularly difficult to change course when the things that get you in trouble are the things that are also the source of your strength. 
What's going to be the outcome today? 
Well, all of us know the dozen sorts of ticking time bombs going on in the modern world, time bombs that have fuses of a few decades to — all of them, not more than 50 years, and any one of which can do us in; the time bombs of water, of soil, of climate change, invasive species, the photosynthetic ceiling, population problems, toxics, etc., etc. — listing about 12 of them. And while these time bombs — none of them has a fuse beyond 50 years, and most of them have fuses of a few decades — some of them, in some places, 
have much shorter fuses. At the rate at which we're going now, the Philippines will lose all its accessible loggable forest within five years. And the Solomon Islands are only one year away from losing their loggable forest, which is their major export. And that's going to be spectacular for the economy of the Solomons. People often ask me, Jared, what's the most important thing that we need to do about the world's environmental problems? 
And my answer is, the most important thing we need to do is to forget about there being any single thing that is the most important thing we need to do. 
Instead, there are a dozen things, any one of which could do us in. 
And we've got to get them all right, because if we solve 11, we fail to solve the 12th — we're in trouble. For example, if we solve our problems of water and soil and population, but don't solve our problems of toxics, then we are in trouble. 
The fact is that our present course is a non-sustainable course, which means, by definition, that it cannot be maintained. 
And the outcome is going to get resolved within a few decades. 
That means that those of us in this room who are less than 50 or 60 years old will see how these paradoxes are resolved, and those of us who are over the age of 60 may not see the resolution, but our children and grandchildren certainly will. 
The resolution is going to achieve either of two forms: either we will resolve these non-sustainable time-fuses in pleasant ways of our own choice by taking remedial action, or else these conflicts are going to get settled in unpleasant ways not of our choice — namely, by war, disease or starvation. But what's for sure is that our non-sustainable course will get resolved in one way or another in a few decades. In other words, since the theme of this session is choices, we have a choice. Does that mean that we should get pessimistic and overwhelmed? I draw the reverse conclusion. 
The big problems facing the world today are not at all things beyond our control. Our biggest threat is not an asteroid about to crash into us, something we can do nothing about. 
Instead, all the major threats facing us today are problems entirely of our own making. And since we made the problems, we can also solve the problems. That then means that it's entirely in our power to deal with these problems. 
In particular, what can all of us do? For those of you who are interested in these choices, there are lots of things you can do. There's a lot that we don't understand, and that we need to understand. And there's a lot that we already do understand, but aren't doing, and that we need to be doing. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm going to talk to you today about hopefully converting fear into hope. 
When we go to the physician today — when we go to the doctor's office and we walk in, there are words that we just don't want to hear. 
There are words that we're truly afraid of. 
Diabetes, cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, heart failure, lung failure — things that we know are debilitating diseases, for which there's relatively little that can be done. 
And what I want to lay out for you today is a different way of thinking about how to treat debilitating disease, why it's important, why without it perhaps our health care system will melt down if you think it already hasn't, and where we are clinically today, and where we might go tomorrow, and what some of the hurdles are. 
And we're going to do all of that in 18 minutes, I promise. 
I want to start with this slide, because this slide sort of tells the story the way Science Magazine thinks of it. 
This was an issue from 2002 that they published with a lot of different articles on the bionic human. 
It was basically a regenerative medicine issue. 
Regenerative medicine is an extraordinarily simple concept that everybody can understand. 
It's simply accelerating the pace at which the body heals itself to a clinically relevant timescale. 
So we know how to do this in many of the ways that are up there. 
We know that if we have a damaged hip, you can put an artificial hip in. 
And this is the idea that Science Magazine used on their front cover. 
This is the complete antithesis of regenerative medicine. 
This is not regenerative medicine. 
Regenerative medicine is what Business Week put up when they did a story about regenerative medicine not too long ago. 
The idea is that instead of figuring out how to ameliorate symptoms with devices and drugs and the like — and I'll come back to that theme a few times — instead of doing that, we will regenerate lost function of the body by regenerating the function of organs and damaged tissue. 
So that at the end of the treatment, you are the same as you were at the beginning of the treatment. 
Very few good ideas — if you agree that this is a good idea — very few good ideas are truly novel. 
And this is just the same. 
If you look back in history, Charles Lindbergh, who was better known for flying airplanes, was actually one of the first people along with Alexis Carrel, one of the Nobel Laureates from Rockefeller, to begin to think about, could you culture organs? 
And they published this book in 1937, where they actually began to think about, what could you do in bio-reactors to grow whole organs? 
We've come a long way since then. 
I'm going to share with you some of the exciting work that's going on. 
But before doing that, what I'd like to do is share my depression about the health care system and the need for this with you. 
Many of the talks yesterday talked about improving the quality of life, and reducing poverty, and essentially increasing life expectancy all around the globe. 
One of the challenges is that the richer we are, the longer we live. 
And the longer we live, the more expensive it is to take care of our diseases as we get older. 
This is simply the wealth of a country versus the percent of population over the age of 65. 
And you can basically see that the richer a country is, the older the people are within it. 
Why is this important? 
And why is this a particularly dramatic challenge right now? 
If the average age of your population is 30, then the average kind of disease that you have to treat is maybe a broken ankle every now and again, maybe a little bit of asthma. 
If the average age in your country is 45 to 55, now the average person is looking at diabetes, early-onset diabetes, heart failure, coronary artery disease — things that are inherently more difficult to treat, and much more expensive to treat. 
Just have a look at the demographics in the U.S. here. 
This is from "" The Untied States of America. "" In 1930, there were 41 workers per retiree. 
41 people who were basically outside of being really sick, paying for the one retiree who was experiencing debilitating disease. 
In 2010, two workers per retiree in the U.S. 
And this is matched in every industrialized, wealthy country in the world. 
How can you actually afford to treat patients when the reality of getting old looks like this? 
This is age versus cost of health care. 
And you can see that right around age 45, 40 to 45, there's a sudden spike in the cost of health care. 
It's actually quite interesting. If you do the right studies, you can look at how much you as an individual spend on your own health care, plotted over your lifetime. 
And about seven years before you're about to die, there's a spike. 
And you can actually — (Laughter) — we won't get into that. (Laughter) 
There are very few things, very few things that you can really do that will change the way that you can treat these kinds of diseases and experience what I would call healthy aging. 
I'd suggest there are four things, and none of these things include an insurance system or a legal system. 
All those things do is change who pays. 
They don't actually change what the actual cost of the treatment is. 
One thing you can do is not treat. You can ration health care. 
We won't talk about that anymore. It's too depressing. 
You can prevent. 
Obviously a lot of monies should be put into prevention. 
But perhaps most interesting, to me anyway, and most important, is the idea of diagnosing a disease much earlier on in the progression, and then treating the disease to cure the disease instead of treating a symptom. 
Think of it in terms of diabetes, for instance. 
Today, with diabetes, what do we do? 
We diagnose the disease eventually, once it becomes symptomatic, and then we treat the symptom for 10, 20, 30, 40 years. 
And we do OK. Insulin's a pretty good therapy. 
But eventually it stops working, and diabetes leads to a predictable onset of debilitating disease. 
Why couldn't we just inject the pancreas with something to regenerate the pancreas early on in the disease, perhaps even before it was symptomatic? 
And it might be a little bit expensive at the time that we did it, but if it worked, we would truly be able to do something different. 
This video, I think, gets across the concept that I'm talking about quite dramatically. 
This is a newt re-growing its limb. 
If a newt can do this kind of thing, why can't we? 
I'll actually show you some more important features about limb regeneration in a moment. 
But what we're talking about in regenerative medicine is doing this in every organ system of the body, for tissues and for organs themselves. 
So today's reality is that if we get sick, the message is we will treat your symptoms, and you need to adjust to a new way of life. 
I would pose to you that tomorrow — and when tomorrow is we could debate, but it's within the foreseeable future — we will talk about regenerative rehabilitation. 
There's a limb prosthetic up here, similar actually one on the soldier that's come back from Iraq. 
There are 370 soldiers that have come back from Iraq that have lost limbs. 
Imagine if instead of facing that, they could actually face the regeneration of that limb. 
It's a wild concept. 
I'll show you where we are at the moment in working towards that concept. 
But it's applicable, again, to every organ system. 
How can we do that? 
The way to do that is to develop a conversation with the body. 
We need to learn to speak the body's language. 
And to switch on processes that we knew how to do when we were a fetus. 
A mammalian fetus, if it loses a limb during the first trimester of pregnancy, will re-grow that limb. 
So our DNA has the capacity to do these kinds of wound-healing mechanisms. 
It's a natural process, but it is lost as we age. 
In a child, before the age of about six months, if they lose their fingertip in an accident, they'll re-grow their fingertip. 
By the time they're five, they won't be able to do that anymore. 
So to engage in that conversation with the body, we need to speak the body's language. 
And there are certain tools in our toolbox that allow us to do this today. 
I'm going to give you an example of three of these tools through which to converse with the body. 
The first is cellular therapies. 
Clearly, we heal ourselves in a natural process, using cells to do most of the work. 
Therefore, if we can find the right cells and implant them in the body, they may do the healing. 
Secondly, we can use materials. 
We heard yesterday about the importance of new materials. 
If we can invent materials, design materials, or extract materials from a natural environment, then we might be able to have those materials induce the body to heal itself. 
And finally, we may be able to use smart devices that will offload the work of the body and allow it to heal. 
I'm going to show you an example of each of these, and I'm going to start with materials. 
Steve Badylak — who's at the University of Pittsburgh — about a decade ago had a remarkable idea. 
And that idea was that the small intestine of a pig, if you threw away all the cells, and if you did that in a way that allowed it to remain biologically active, may contain all of the necessary factors and signals that would signal the body to heal itself. 
And he asked a very important question. 
He asked the question, if I take that material, which is a natural material that usually induces healing in the small intestine, and I place it somewhere else on a person's body, would it give a tissue-specific response, or would it make small intestine if I tried to make a new ear? 
I wouldn't be telling you this story if it weren't compelling. 
The picture I'm about to show you is a compelling picture. 
(Laughter) However, for those of you that are even the slightest bit squeamish — even though you may not like to admit it in front of your friends — the lights are down. This is a good time to look at your feet, check your Blackberry, do anything other than look at the screen. (Laughter) 
What I'm about to show you is a diabetic ulcer. 
And although — it's good to laugh before we look at this. 
This is the reality of diabetes. 
I think a lot of times we hear about diabetics, diabetic ulcers, we just don't connect the ulcer with the eventual treatment, which is amputation, if you can't heal it. 
So I'm going to put the slide up now. It won't be up for long. 
This is a diabetic ulcer. It's tragic. 
The treatment for this is amputation. 
This is an older lady. She has cancer of the liver as well as diabetes, and has decided to die with what 's left of her body intact. 
And this lady decided, after a year of attempted treatment of that ulcer, that she would try this new therapy that Steve invented. 
That's what the wound looked like 11 weeks later. 
That material contained only natural signals. 
And that material induced the body to switch back on a healing response that it didn't have before. 
There's going to be a couple more distressing slides for those of you — I'll let you know when you can look again. 
This is a horse. The horse is not in pain. 
If the horse was in pain, I wouldn't show you this slide. 
The horse just has another nostril that's developed because of a riding accident. 
Just a few weeks after treatment — in this case, taking that material, turning it into a gel, and packing that area, and then repeating the treatment a few times — and the horse heals up. 
And if you took an ultrasound of that area, it would look great. 
Here's a dolphin where the fin's been re-attached. 
There are now 400,000 patients around the world who have used that material to heal their wounds. 
Could you regenerate a limb? 
DARPA just gave Steve 15 million dollars to lead an eight-institution project to begin the process of asking that question. 
And I'll show you the 15 million dollar picture. 
This is a 78 year-old man who's lost the end of his fingertip. 
Remember that I mentioned before the children who lose their fingertips. 
After treatment that's what it looks like. 
This is happening today. 
This is clinically relevant today. 
There are materials that do this. Here are the heart patches. 
But could you go a little further? 
Could you, say, instead of using material, can I take some cells along with the material, and remove a damaged piece of tissue, put a bio-degradable material on there? 
You can see here a little bit of heart muscle beating in a dish. 
This was done by Teruo Okano at Tokyo Women's Hospital. 
He can actually grow beating tissue in a dish. 
He chills the dish, it changes its properties and he peels it right out of the dish. 
It's the coolest stuff. 
Now I'm going to show you cell-based regeneration. 
And what I'm going to show you here is stem cells being removed from the hip of a patient. 
Again, if you're squeamish, you don't want to watch. 
But this one's kind of cool. 
So this is a bypass operation, just like what Al Gore had, with a difference. 
In this case, at the end of the bypass operation, you're going to see the stem cells from the patient that were removed at the beginning of the procedure being injected directly into the heart of the patient. 
And I'm standing up here because at one point I'm going to show you just how early this technology is. 
Here go the stem cells, right into the beating heart of the patient. 
And if you look really carefully, it's going to be right around this point you'll actually see a back-flush. 
You see the cells coming back out. 
We need all sorts of new technology, new devices, to get the cells to the right place at the right time. 
Just a little bit of data, a tiny bit of data. 
This was a randomized trial. 
At this time this was an N of 20. Now there's an N of about 100. 
Basically, if you take an extremely sick patient and you give them a bypass, they get a little bit better. 
If you give them stem cells as well as their bypass, for these particular patients, they became asymptomatic. 
These are now two years out. 
The coolest thing would be is if you could diagnose the disease early, and prevent the onset of the disease to a bad state. 
This is the same procedure, but now done minimally invasively, with only three holes in the body where they're taking the heart and simply injecting stem cells through a laparoscopic procedure. 
There go the cells. 
We don't have time to go into all of those details, but basically, that works too. 
You can take patients who are less sick, and bring them back to an almost asymptomatic state through that kind of therapy. 
Here's another example of stem-cell therapy that isn't quite clinical yet, but I think very soon will be. 
This is the work of Kacey Marra from Pittsburgh, along with a number of colleagues around the world. 
They've decided that liposuction fluid, which — in the United States, we have a lot of liposuction fluid. 
(Laughter) It's a great source of stem cells. 
Stem cells are packed in that liposuction fluid. 
So you could go in, you could get your tummy-tuck. 
Out comes the liposuction fluid, and in this case, the stem cells are isolated and turned into neurons. 
All done in the lab. 
And I think fairly soon, you will see patients being treated with their own fat-derived, or adipose-derived, stem cells. 
I talked before about the use of devices to dramatically change the way we treat disease. 
Here's just one example before I close up. 
This is equally tragic. 
We have a very abiding and heartbreaking partnership with our colleagues at the Institute for Surgical Research in the US Army, who have to treat the now 11,000 kids that have come back from Iraq. 
Many of those patients are very severely burned. 
And if there's anything that's been learned about burn, it's that we don't know how to treat it. 
Everything that is done to treat burn — basically we do a sodding approach. 
We make something over here, and then we transplant it onto the site of the wound, and we try and get the two to take. 
In this case here, a new, wearable bio-reactor has been designed — it should be tested clinically later this year at ISR — by Joerg Gerlach in Pittsburgh. 
And that bio-reactor will lay down in the wound bed. 
The gun that you see there sprays cells. 
That's going to spray cells over that area. 
The reactor will serve to fertilize the environment, deliver other things as well at the same time, and therefore we will seed that lawn, as opposed to try the sodding approach. 
It's a completely different way of doing it. 
So my 18 minutes is up. 
So let me finish up with some good news, and maybe a little bit of bad news. 
The good news is that this is happening today. 
It's very powerful work. 
Clearly the images kind of get that across. 
It's incredibly difficult because it's highly inter-disciplinary. 
Almost every field of science engineering and clinical practice is involved in trying to get this to happen. 
A number of governments, and a number of regions, have recognized that this is a new way to treat disease. 
The Japanese government were perhaps the first, when they decided to invest first 3 billion, later another 2 billion in this field. 
It's no coincidence. 
Japan is the oldest country on earth in terms of its average age. 
They need this to work or their health system dies. 
So they're putting a lot of strategic investment focused in this area. 
The European Union, same thing. 
China, the same thing. 
China just launched a national tissue-engineering center. 
The first year budget was 250 million US dollars. 
In the United States we've had a somewhat different approach. 
(Laughter) Oh, for Al Gore to come and be in the real world as president. 
We've had a different approach. 
And the approach has basically been to just sort of fund things as they come along. 
But there's been no strategic investment to bring all of the necessary things to bear and focus them in a careful way. 
And I'm going to finish up with a quote, maybe a little cheap shot, at the director of the NIH, who's a very charming man. 
Myself and Jay Vacanti from Harvard went to visit with him and a number of his directors of his institute just a few months ago, to try and convince him that it was time to take just a little piece of that 27.5 billion dollars that he's going to get next year and focus it, in a strategic way, to make sure we can accelerate the pace at which these things get to patients. 
And at the end of a very testy meeting, what the NIH director said was, "Your vision is larger than our appetite." 
I'd like to close by saying that no one's going to change our vision, but together we can change his appetite. 
Thank you. 

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

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

"Give me liberty or give me death." 
When Patrick Henry, the governor of Virginia, said these words in 1775, he could never have imagined just how much they would come to resonate with American generations to come. 
At the time, these words were earmarked and targeted against the British, but over the last 200 years, they've come to embody what many Westerners believe, that freedom is the most cherished value, and that the best systems of politics and economics have freedom embedded in them. 
Who could blame them? 
Over the past hundred years, the combination of liberal democracy and private capitalism has helped to catapult the United States and Western countries to new levels of economic development. 
In the United States over the past hundred years, incomes have increased 30 times, and hundreds of thousands of people have been moved out of poverty. 
Meanwhile, American ingenuity and innovation has helped to spur industrialization and also helped in the creation and the building of things like household appliances such as refrigerators and televisions, motor vehicles and even the mobile phones in your pockets. 
It's no surprise, then, that even at the depths of the private capitalism crisis, President Obama said, "" The question before us is not whether the market is a force for good or ill. 
Its power to generate wealth and to expand freedom is unmatched. "" Thus, there's understandably a deep-seated presumption among Westerners that the whole world will decide to adopt private capitalism as the model of economic growth, liberal democracy, and will continue to prioritize political rights over economic rights. 
However, to many who live in the emerging markets, this is an illusion, and even though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was signed in 1948, was unanimously adopted, what it did was to mask a schism that has emerged between developed and developing countries, and the ideological beliefs between political and economic rights. 
This schism has only grown wider. 
Today, many people who live in the emerging markets, where 90 percent of the world's population lives, believe that the Western obsession with political rights is beside the point, and what is actually important is delivering on food, shelter, education and healthcare. 
"Give me liberty or give me death" is all well and good if you can afford it, but if you're living on less than one dollar a day, you're far too busy trying to survive and to provide for your family than to spend your time going around trying to proclaim and defend democracy. 
Now, I know many people in this room and around the world will think, "Well actually, this is hard to grasp," because private capitalism and liberal democracy are held sacrosanct. 
But I ask you today, what would you do if you had to choose? 
What if you had to choose between a roof over your head and the right to vote? 
Over the last 10 years, I've had the privilege to travel to over 60 countries, many of them in the emerging markets, in Latin America, Asia, and my own continent of Africa. 
I've met with presidents, dissidents, policymakers, lawyers, teachers, doctors and the man on the street, and through these conversations, it's become clear to me that many people in the emerging markets believe that there's actually a split occurring between what people believe ideologically in terms of politics and economics in the West and that which people believe in the rest of the world. 
Now, don't get me wrong. 
I'm not saying people in the emerging markets don't understand democracy, nor am I saying that they wouldn't ideally like to pick their presidents or their leaders. 
Of course they would. 
However, I am saying that on balance, they worry more about where their living standard improvements are going to come from, and how it is their governments can deliver for them, than whether or not the government was elected by democracy. 
The fact of the matter is that this has become a very poignant question because there is for the first time in a long time a real challenge to the Western ideological systems of politics and economics, and this is a system that is embodied by China. 
And rather than have private capitalism, they have state capitalism. 
Instead of liberal democracy, they have de-prioritized the democratic system. 
And they have also decided to prioritize economic rights over political rights. 
I put it to you today that it is this system that is embodied by China that is gathering momentum amongst people in the emerging markets as the system to follow, because they believe increasingly that it is the system that will promise the best and fastest improvements in living standards in the shortest period of time. 
If you will indulge me, I will spend a few moments explaining to you first why economically they've come to this belief. 
First of all, it's China's economic performance over the past 30 years. 
She's been able to produce record economic growth and meaningfully move many people out of poverty, specifically putting a meaningful dent in poverty by moving over 300 million people out of indigence. 
It's not just in economics, but it's also in terms of living standards. 
We see that in China, 28 percent of people had secondary school access. 
Today, it's closer to 82 percent. 
So in its totality, economic improvement has been quite significant. 
Second, China has been able to meaningfully improve its income inequality without changing the political construct. 
Today, the United States and China are the two leading economies in the world. 
They have vastly different political systems and different economic systems, one with private capitalism, another one broadly with state capitalism. 
However, these two countries have the identical GINI Coefficient, which is a measure of income equality. 
Perhaps what is more disturbing is that China's income equality has been improving in recent times, whereas that of the United States has been declining. 
Thirdly, people in the emerging markets look at China's amazing and legendary infrastructure rollout. 
This is not just about China building roads and ports and railways in her own country — she's been able to build 85,000 kilometers of road network in China and surpass that of the United States — but even if you look to places like Africa, China has been able to help tar the distance of Cape Town to Cairo, which is 9,000 miles, or three times the distance of New York to California. 
Now this is something that people can see and point to. 
Perhaps it's no surprise that in a 2007 Pew survey, when surveyed, Africans in 10 countries said they thought that the Chinese were doing amazing things to improve their livelihoods by wide margins, by as much as 98 percent. 
Finally, China is also providing innovative solutions to age-old social problems that the world faces. 
If you travel to Mogadishu, Mexico City or Mumbai, you find that dilapidated infrastructure and logistics continue to be a stumbling block to the delivery of medicine and healthcare in the rural areas. 
However, through a network of state-owned enterprises, the Chinese have been able to go into these rural areas, using their companies to help deliver on these healthcare solutions. 
Ladies and gentlemen, it's no surprise that around the world, people are pointing at what China is doing and saying, "" I like that. I want that. 
I want to be able to do what China's doing. 
That is the system that seems to work. "" I'm here to also tell you that there are lots of shifts occurring around what China is doing in the democratic stance. 
In particular, there is growing doubt among people in the emerging markets, when people now believe that democracy is no longer to be viewed as a prerequisite for economic growth. 
In fact, countries like Taiwan, Singapore, Chile, not just China, have shown that actually, it's economic growth that is a prerequisite for democracy. 
In a recent study, the evidence has shown that income is the greatest determinant of how long a democracy can last. 
The study found that if your per capita income is about 1,000 dollars a year, your democracy will last about eight and a half years. 
If your per capita income is between 2,000 and 4,000 dollars per year, then you're likely to only get 33 years of democracy. 
And only if your per capita income is above 6,000 dollars a year will you have democracy come hell or high water. 
What this is telling us is that we need to first establish a middle class that is able to hold the government accountable. 
But perhaps it's also telling us that we should be worried about going around the world and shoehorning democracy, because ultimately we run the risk of ending up with illiberal democracies, democracies that in some sense could be worse than the authoritarian governments that they seek to replace. 
The evidence around illiberal democracies is quite depressing. 
Freedom House finds that although 50 percent of the world's countries today are democratic, 70 percent of those countries are illiberal in the sense that people don't have free speech or freedom of movement. 
But also, we're finding from Freedom House in a study that they published last year that freedom has been on the decline every year for the past seven years. 
What this says is that for people like me who care about liberal democracy, is we've got to find a more sustainable way of ensuring that we have a sustainable form of democracy in a liberal way, and that has its roots in economics. 
But it also says that as China moves toward being the largest economy in the world, something that is expected to happen by experts in 2016, that this schism between the political and economic ideologies of the West and the rest is likely to widen. 
What might that world look like? 
Well, the world could look like more state involvement and state capitalism; greater protectionisms of nation-states; but also, as I just pointed out a moment ago, ever-declining political rights and individual rights. 
The question that is left for us in general is, what then should the West be doing? 
And I suggest that they have two options. 
The West can either compete or cooperate. 
If the West chooses to compete with the Chinese model, and in effect go around the world and continue to try and push an agenda of private capitalism and liberal democracy, this is basically going against headwinds, but it also would be a natural stance for the West to take because in many ways it is the antithesis of the Chinese model of de-prioritizing democracy, and state capitalism. 
Now the fact of the matter is, if the West decides to compete, it will create a wider schism. 
The other option is for the West to cooperate, and by cooperating I mean giving the emerging market countries the flexibility to figure out in an organic way what political and economic system works best for them. 
Now I'm sure some of you in the room will be thinking, well, this is like ceding to China, and this is a way, in other words, for the West to take a back seat. 
But I put it to you that if the United States and European countries want to remain globally influential, they may have to consider cooperating in the short term in order to compete, and by that, they might have to focus more aggressively on economic outcomes to help create the middle class and therefore be able to hold government accountable and create the democracies that we really want. 
The fact of the matter is that instead of going around the world and haranguing countries for engaging with China, the West should be encouraging its own businesses to trade and invest in these regions. 
Instead of criticizing China for bad behavior, the West should be showing how it is that their own system of politics and economics is the superior one. 
And instead of shoehorning democracy around the world, perhaps the West should take a leaf out of its own history book and remember that it takes a lot of patience in order to develop the models and the systems that you have today. 
Indeed, the Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer reminds us that it took the United States nearly 170 years from the time that the Constitution was written for there to be equal rights in the United States. 
Some people would argue that today there is still no equal rights. 
In fact, there are groups who would argue that they still do not have equal rights under the law. 
At its very best, the Western model speaks for itself. 
It's the model that put food on the table. 
It's the refrigerators. 
It put a man on the moon. 
But the fact of the matter is, although people back in the day used to point at the Western countries and say, "I want that, I like that," there's now a new person in town in the form of a country, China. 
Today, generations are looking at China and saying, "" China can produce infrastructure, China can produce economic growth, and we like that. "" Because ultimately, the question before us, and the question before seven billion people on the planet is, how can we create prosperity? 
People who care and will pivot towards the model of politics and economics in a very rational way, to those models that will ensure that they can have better living standards in the shortest period of time. 
As you leave here today, I would like to leave you with a very personal message, which is what it is that I believe we should be doing as individuals, and this is really about being open-minded, open-minded to the fact that our hopes and dreams of creating prosperity for people around the world, creating and meaningfully putting a dent in poverty for hundreds of millions of people, has to be based in being open-minded, because these systems have good things and they have bad things. 
Just to illustrate, I went into my annals of myself. 
That's a picture of me. 
Awww. (Laughter) I was born and raised in Zambia in 1969. 
At the time of my birth, blacks were not issued birth certificates, and that law only changed in 1973. 
This is an affidavit from the Zambian government. 
I bring this to you to tell you that in 40 years, I've gone from not being recognized as a human being to standing in front of the illustrious TED crowd today to talk to you about my views. 
In this vein, we can increase economic growth. 
We can meaningfully put a dent in poverty. 
But also, it's going to require that we look at our assumptions, assumptions and strictures that we've grown up with around democracy, around private capitalism, around what creates economic growth and reduces poverty and creates freedoms. 
We might have to tear those books up and start to look at other options and be open-minded to seek the truth. 
Ultimately, it's about transforming the world and making it a better place. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

Pat Mitchell: That day, January 8, 2011, began like all others. 
You were both doing the work that you love. 
You were meeting with constituents, which is something that you loved doing as a congresswoman, and Mark, you were happily preparing for your next space shuttle. 
And suddenly, everything that you had planned or expected in your lives was irrevocably changed forever. 
Mark Kelly: Yeah, it's amazing, it's amazing how everything can change for any of us in an instant. 
People don't realize that. 
I certainly didn't. 
Gabby Giffords: Yes. 
MK: And on that Saturday morning, I got this horrible phone call from Gabby's chief of staff. 
She didn't have much other information. 
She just said, "" Gabby was shot. "" A few minutes later, I called her back and I actually thought for a second, well, maybe I just imagined getting this phone call. 
I called her back, and that's when she told me that Gabby had been shot in the head. 
And from that point on, I knew that our lives were going to be a lot different. 
PM: And when you arrived at the hospital, what was the prognosis that they gave you about Gabby's condition and what recovery, if any, you could expect? 
MK: Well, for a gunshot wound to the head and a traumatic brain injury, they typically can't tell you much. 
Every injury is different. It's not predictable like often a stroke might be predictable, which is another TBI kind of injury. 
So they didn't know how long Gabby would be in a coma, didn't know when that would change and what the prognosis would be. 
PM: Gabby, has your recovery been an effort to create a new Gabby Giffords or reclaim the old Gabby Giffords? 
GG: The new one — better, stronger, tougher. 
(Applause) MK: That to say, when you look at the picture behind us, to come back from that kind of injury and come back strong and stronger than ever is a really tough thing to do. 
I don't know anybody that's as tough as my wonderful wife right here. 
(Applause) PM: And what were the first signs that recovery was not only going to be possible but you were going to have some semblance of the life that you and Gabby had planned? 
MK: Well, the first thing, for me, was Gabby was still kind of almost unconscious, but she did something when she was in the ICU hospital bed that she used to do when we might be out to dinner at a restaurant, in that she pulled my ring off and she flipped it from one finger to the next, and at that point I knew that she was still in there. 
PM: And there were certain words, too. 
Didn't she surprise you with words in the beginning? 
MK: Well, it was tough in the beginning. GG: What? What? Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. 
MK: Yeah, that was it. 
For the first month, that was the extent of Gabby's vocabulary. 
For some reason, she has aphasia, which is difficulty with communication. 
She latched on to the word "" chicken, "" which isn't the best but certainly is not the worst. 
(Laughter) And we were actually worried it could have been a lot worse than that. 
PM: Gabby, what's been the toughest challenge for you during this recovery? 
GG: Talking. Really hard. Really. 
MK: Yeah, with aphasia, Gabby knows what she wants to say, she just can't get it out. 
She understands everything, but the communication is just very difficult because when you look at the picture, the part of your brain where those communication centers are are on the left side of your head, which is where the bullet passed through. 
PM: So you have to do a very dangerous thing: speak for your wife. 
MK: I do. 
It might be some of the most dangerous things I've ever done. 
PM: Gabby, are you optimistic about your continuing recovery — walking, talking, being able to move your arm and leg? 
GG: I'm optimistic. It will be a long, hard haul, but I'm optimistic. 
PM: That seems to be the number one characteristic of Gabby Giffords, wouldn't you say? (Applause) MK: Gabby's always been really optimistic. 
She works incredibly hard every day. 
GG: On the treadmill, walked on my treadmill, Spanish lessons, French horn. 
MK: It's only my wife who could be — and if you knew her before she was injured, you would kind of understand this — somebody who could be injured and have such a hard time communicating and meets with a speech therapist, and then about a month ago, she says, "I want to learn Spanish again." 
PM: Well, let's take a little closer look at the wife, and this was even before you met Gabby Giffords. 
And she's on a motor scooter there, but it's my understanding that's a very tame image of what Gabby Giffords was like growing up. 
MK: Yeah, Gabby, she used to race motorcycles. 
So that's a scooter, but she had — well, she still has a BMW motorcycle. 
PM: Does she ride it? MK: Well, that's a challenge with not being able to move her right arm, but I think with something I know about, Velcro, we might be able to get her back on the bike, Velcro her right hand up onto the handlebar. 
PM: I have a feeling we might see that picture next, Gabby. 
But you meet, you're already decided that you're going to dedicate your life to service. 
You're going into the military and eventually to become an astronaut. 
So you meet. 
What attracts you to Gabby? 
MK: Well, when we met, oddly enough, it was the last time we were in Vancouver, about 10 years ago. We met in Vancouver, at the airport, on a trip that we were both taking to China, that I would actually, from my background, I would call it a boondoggle. 
Gabby would — GG: Fact-finding mission. 
MK: She would call it an important fact-finding mission. 
She was a state senator at the time, and we met here, at the airport, before a trip to China. 
PM: Would you describe it as a whirlwind romance? 
GG: No, no, no. 
(Laughter) A good friend. 
MK: Yeah, we were friends for a long time. 
GG: Yes. (Laughter) MK: And then she invited me on, about a year or so later, she invited me on a date. 
Where'd we go, Gabby? 
GG: Death row. 
MK: Yes. Our first date was to death row at the Florence state prison in Arizona, which was just outside Gabby's state senate district. 
They were working on some legislation that had to do with crime and punishment and capital punishment in the state of Arizona. 
So she couldn't get anybody else to go with her, and I'm like, "" Of course I want to go to death row. "" So that was our first date. 
We've been together ever since. GG: Yes. 
PM: Well, that might have contributed to the reason that Gabby decided to marry you. 
You were willing to go to death row, after all. 
MK: I guess. 
PM: Gabby, what did make you want to marry Mark? 
GG: Um, good friends. Best friends. Best friends. 
MK: I thought we always had a very special relationship. 
We've gone through some tough times and it's only made it stronger. GG: Stronger. 
PM: After you got married, however, you continued very independent lives. 
Actually, you didn't even live together. 
MK: We had one of those commuter marriages. 
In our case, it was Washington, D.C., Houston, Tucson. 
Sometimes we'd go clockwise, sometimes counterclockwise, to all those different places, and we didn't really live together until that Saturday morning. 
Within an hour of Gabby being shot, I was on an airplane to Tucson, and that was the moment where that had changed things. 
PM: And also, Gabby, you had run for Congress after being a state senator and served in Congress for six years. 
What did you like best about being in Congress? 
GG: Fast pace. Fast pace. 
PM: Well it was the way you did it. GG: Yes, yes. Fast pace. 
PM: I'm not sure people would describe it entirely that way. 
(Laughter) MK: Yeah, you know, legislation is often at a colossally slow pace, but my wife, and I have to admit, a lot of other members of Congress that I know, work incredibly hard. 
I mean, Gabby would run around like a crazy person, never take a day off, maybe a half a day off a month, and whenever she was awake she was working, and she really, really thrived on that, and still does today. GG: Yes. Yes. 
PM: Installing solar panels on the top of her house, I have to say. 
So after the tragic incident, Mark, you decided to resign your position as an astronaut, even though you were supposed to take the next space mission. 
Everybody, including Gabby, talked you into going back, and you did end up taking. 
MK: Kind of. The day after Gabby was injured, I called my boss, the chief astronaut, Dr. Peggy Whitson, and I said, "" Peggy, I know I'm launching in space in three months from now. 
Gabby's in a coma. I'm in Tucson. 
You've got to find a replacement for me. "" So I didn't actually resign from being an astronaut, but I gave up my job and they found a replacement. 
Months later, maybe about two months later, I started about getting my job back, which is something, when you become this primary caregiver person, which some people in the audience here have certainly been in that position, it's a challenging role but at some point you've got to figure out when you're going to get your life back, and at the time, I couldn't ask Gabby if she wanted me to go fly in the space shuttle again. 
But I knew she was — GG: Yes. Yes. Yes. 
MK: She was the biggest supporter of my career, and I knew it was the right thing to do. 
PM: And yet I'm trying to imagine, Mark, what that was like, going off onto a mission, one presumes safely, but it's never a guarantee, and knowing that Gabby is — MK: Well not only was she still in the hospital, on the third day of that flight, literally while I was rendezvousing with the space station, and you've got two vehicles moving at 17,500 miles an hour, I'm actually flying it, looking out the window, a bunch of computers, Gabby was in brain surgery, literally at that time having the final surgery to replace the piece of skull that they took out on the day she was injured 
with a prosthetic, yeah, which is the whole side of her head. 
Now if any of you guys would ever come to our house in Tucson for the first time, Gabby would usually go up to the freezer and pull out the piece of Tupperware that has the real skull. (Laughter) GG: The real skull. MK: Which freaks people out, sometimes. 
PM: Is that for appetizer or dessert, Mark? 
MK: Well, it just gets the conversation going. 
PM: But there was a lot of conversation about something you did, Gabby, after Mark's flight. 
You had to make another step of courage too, because here was Congress deadlocked again, and you got out of the rehabilitation center, got yourself to Washington so that you could walk on the floor of the House — I can barely talk about this without getting emotional — and cast a vote which could have been the deciding vote. 
GG: The debt ceiling. The debt ceiling. 
MK: Yeah, we had that vote, I guess about five months after Gabby was injured, and she made this bold decision to go back. 
A very controversial vote, but she wanted to be there to have her voice heard one more time. 
PM: And after that, resigned and began what has been a very slow and challenging recovery. 
What's life like, day to day? 
MK: Well, that's Gabby's service dog Nelson. 
GG: Nelson. 
MK: New member of our family. GG: Yes, yes. 
MK: And we got him from a — GG: Prison. Murder. MK: We have a lot of connections with prisons, apparently. (Laughter) Nelson came from a prison, raised by a murderer in Massachusetts. 
But she did a great job with this dog. 
He's a fabulous service dog. 
PM: So Gabby, what have you learned from your experiences the past few years? 
MK: Yeah, what have you learned? GG: Deeper. Deeper. 
PM: Your relationship is deeper. 
It has to be. You're together all the time now. 
MK: I imagine being grateful, too, right? 
GG: Grateful. 
PM: This is a picture of family and friends gathering, but I love these pictures because they show the Gabby and Mark relationship now. 
And you describe it, Gabby, over and over, as deeper on so many levels. Yes? 
MK: I think when something tragic happens in a family, it can pull people together. 
Here's us watching the space shuttle fly over Tucson, the Space Shuttle Endeavour, the one that I was the commander on its last flight, on its final flight on top of an airplane on a 747 on its way to L.A., NASA was kind enough to have it fly over Tucson. 
PM: And of course, the two of you go through these challenges of a slow and difficult recovery, and yet, Gabby, how do you maintain your optimism and positive outlook? 
GG: I want to make the world a better place. 
(Applause) PM: And you're doing that even though your recovery has to remain front and center for both of you. 
You are people who have done service to your country and you are continuing to do that with a new initiative, a new purpose. 
And Gabby, what's on the agenda now? 
GG: Americans for Responsible Solutions. 
MK: That's our political action committee, where we are trying to get members of Congress to take a more serious look at gun violence in this country, and to try to pass some reasonable legislation. 
GG: Yes. Yes. (Applause) MK: You know, this affected us very personally, but it wasn't what happened to Gabby that got us involved. 
It was really the 20 murdered first graders and kindergartners in Newtown, Connecticut, and the response that we saw afterwards where — well, look what's happened so far. 
So far the national response has been pretty much to do nothing. 
We're trying to change that. 
PM: There have been 11 mass shootings since Newtown, a school a week in the first two months of last year. 
What are you doing that's different than other efforts to balance rights for gun ownership and responsibilities? 
MK: We're gun owners, we support gun rights. 
At the same time, we've got to do everything we can to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the dangerously mentally ill. 
It's not too difficult to do that. 
This issue, like many others, has become very polarizing and political, and we're trying to bring some balance to the debate in Washington. 
PM: Thank you both for that effort. 
And not surprisingly for this woman of courage and of a sense of adventure, you just keep challenging yourself, and the sky seems to be the limit. 
I have to share this video of your most recent adventure. 
Take a look at Gabby. 
MK: This is a couple months ago. 
(Video) MK: You okay? You did great. GG: Yes, it's gorgeous. Thank you. 
Good stuff. Gorgeous. Oh, thank you. 
Mountains. Gorgeous mountains. 
(Applause) MK: Let me just say one of the guys that Gabby jumped with that day was a Navy SEAL who she met in Afghanistan who was injured in combat, had a really rough time. 
Gabby visited him when he was at Bethesda and went through a really tough period. 
He started doing better. 
Months later, Gabby was shot in the head, and then he supported her while she was in the hospital in Houston. 
So they have a very, very nice connection. 
GG: Yes. 
PM: What a wonderful moment. 
Because this is the TED stage, Gabby, I know you worked very hard to think of the ideas that you wanted to leave with this audience. 
GG: Thank you. 
Hello, everyone. 
Thank you for inviting us here today. 
It's been a long, hard haul, but I'm getting better. 
I'm working hard, lots of therapy — speech therapy, physical therapy, and yoga too. 
But my spirit is strong as ever. 
I'm still fighting to make the world a better place, and you can too. 
Get involved with your community. 
Be a leader. Set an example. 
Be passionate. Be courageous. 
Be your best. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) MK: Thank you. GG: Thank you. (Applause) 
MK: Thank you everybody. GG: Bye bye. (Applause) 

I moved to America 12 years ago with my wife Terry and our two kids. 
Actually, truthfully, we moved to Los Angeles — (Laughter) thinking we were moving to America, but anyway — (Laughter) It's a short plane ride from Los Angeles to America. (Laughter) 
I got here 12 years ago, and when I got here, I was told various things, like, "" Americans don't get irony. "" (Laughter) Have you come across this idea? 
We've invaded every country we've encountered. 
(Laughter) But it's not true Americans don't get irony, but I just want you to know that that's what people are saying about you behind your back. 
You know, so when you leave living rooms in Europe, people say, thankfully, nobody was ironic in your presence. 
(Laughter) But I knew that Americans get irony when I came across that legislation, "" No Child Left Behind. "" (Laughter) Because whoever thought of that title gets irony. (Laughter) 
(Applause) Because it's leaving millions of children behind. 
Now I can see that's not a very attractive name for legislation: "Millions of Children Left Behind." 
(Laughter) In some parts of the country, 60 percent of kids drop out of high school. 
In the Native American communities, it's 80 percent of kids. 
If we halved that number, one estimate is it would create a net gain to the U.S. economy over 10 years, of nearly a trillion dollars. 
It actually costs an enormous amount to mop up the damage from the dropout crisis. 
But the dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. 
What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it. 
America spends more money on education than most other countries. 
Class sizes are smaller than in many countries. 
And there are hundreds of initiatives every year to try and improve education. 
The trouble is, it's all going in the wrong direction. 
There are three principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most teachers have to labor and most students have to endure. 
How about two children or more? Right. 
And the rest of you have seen such children. 
(Laughter) Small people wandering about. (Laughter) 
I will make you a bet, and I am confident that I will win the bet. 
If you've got two children or more, I bet you they are completely different from each other. 
Aren't they? 
(Applause) You would never confuse them, would you? 
Like, "" Which one are you? Remind me. "" (Laughter) "" Your mother and I need some color-coding system so we don't get confused. "" Education under "" No Child Left Behind "" is based on not diversity but conformity. 
What schools are encouraged to do is to find out what kids can do across a very narrow spectrum of achievement. 
One of the effects of "" No Child Left Behind "" has been to narrow the focus onto the so-called STEM disciplines. 
I'm not here to argue against science and math. 
A real education has to give equal weight to the arts, the humanities, to physical education. 
An awful lot of kids, sorry, thank you — (Applause) One estimate in America currently is that something like 10 percent of kids, getting on that way, are being diagnosed with various conditions under the broad title of attention deficit disorder. 
ADHD. 
If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget, you know? 
(Laughter) (Applause) Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition. 
(Laughter) And I know this because I spent my early life as a child. 
Kids prosper best with a broad curriculum that celebrates their various talents, not just a small range of them. 
And by the way, the arts aren't just important because they improve math scores. 
The second, thank you — (Applause) The second principle that drives human life flourishing is curiosity. 
It's a real achievement to put that particular ability out, or to stifle it. 
Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools. 
Great teachers do that, but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage. 
An old friend of mine — actually very old, he's dead. 
(Laughter) That's as old as it gets, I'm afraid. (Laughter) 
He used to talk about the difference between the task and achievement senses of verbs. 
You can be engaged in the activity of something, but not really be achieving it, like dieting. 
There he is. He's dieting. 
The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. 
And part of the problem is, I think, that the dominant culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and learning, but testing. 
They should be diagnostic. They should help. 
So in place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance. 
Our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite that power of imagination and curiosity. 
We create our lives, and we can recreate them as we go through them. 
I mean, you may have a dog. 
You know, but it doesn't listen to Radiohead, does it? 
(Laughter) And sit staring out the window with a bottle of Jack Daniels. (Laughter) 
We all create our own lives through this restless process of imagining alternatives and possibilities, and one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity. 
Instead, what we have is a culture of standardization. 
That's one of the problems of the test. 
They have a very broad approach to education, which includes humanities, physical education, the arts. 
I mean, there's a bit, but it's not what gets people up in the morning, what keeps them at their desks. 
The third thing — and I was at a meeting recently with some people from Finland, actual Finnish people, and somebody from the American system was saying to the people in Finland, "What do you do about the drop-out rate in Finland?" 
And they all looked a bit bemused, and said, "" Well, we don't have one. 
If people are in trouble, we get to them quite quickly and we help and support them. "" Now people always say, "Well, you know, you can't compare Finland to America." 
No. I think there's a population of around five million in Finland. 
Many states in America have fewer people in them than that. 
I mean, I've been to some states in America and I was the only person there. 
(Laughter) Really. Really. 
(Laughter) But what all the high-performing systems in the world do is currently what is not evident, sadly, across the systems in America — I mean, as a whole. 
One is this: they individualize teaching and learning. 
The second is that they attribute a very high status to the teaching profession. 
They recognize that you can't improve education if you don't pick great people to teach and keep giving them constant support and professional development. 
It's an investment, and every other country that's succeeding well knows that, whether it's Australia, Canada, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai. 
You see, there's a big difference here between going into a mode of command and control in education — That's what happens in some systems. 
The trouble is that education doesn't go on in the committee rooms of our legislative buildings. 
It happens in classrooms and schools, and the people who do it are the teachers and the students, and if you remove their discretion, it stops working. 
(Applause) There is wonderful work happening in this country. 
But I have to say it's happening in spite of the dominant culture of education, not because of it. 
It's like people are sailing into a headwind all the time. 
And the reason I think is this: that many of the current policies are based on mechanistic conceptions of education. 
It's like education is an industrial process that can be improved just by having better data, and somewhere in the back of the mind of some policy makers is this idea that if we fine-tune it well enough, if we just get it right, it will all hum along perfectly into the future. 
It's a human system. 
Every student who drops out of school has a reason for it which is rooted in their own biography. 
They may find it boring. 
I was at a meeting recently in Los Angeles of — they're called alternative education programs. 
They're very personalized. 
And they work. 
We have to recognize that it's a human system, and there are conditions under which people thrive, and conditions under which they don't. 
We are after all organic creatures, and the culture of the school is absolutely essential. 
Culture is an organic term, isn't it? 
In the winter of 2004, it rained in Death Valley. 
Seven inches of rain fell over a very short period. 
The whole floor of Death Valley was carpeted in flowers for a while. 
Right beneath the surface are these seeds of possibility waiting for the right conditions to come about, and with organic systems, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable. 
You take an area, a school, a district, you change the conditions, give people a different sense of possibility, a different set of expectations, a broader range of opportunities, you cherish and value the relationships between teachers and learners, you offer people the discretion to be creative and to innovate in what they do, and schools that were once bereft spring to life. 
Great leaders know that. 
The real role of leadership in education — and I think it's true at the national level, the state level, at the school level — is not and should not be command and control. 
The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility. 
And if you do that, people will rise to it and achieve things that you completely did not anticipate and couldn't have expected. 
"" There are three sorts of people in the world: Those who are immovable, people who don't get it, or don't want to do anything about it; there are people who are movable, people who see the need for change and are prepared to listen to it; and there are people who move, people who make things happen. "" And if we can encourage more people, that will be a movement. 
And if the movement is strong enough, that's, in the best sense of the word, a revolution. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) 

A talk about surgical robots is also a talk about surgery. 
And while I've tried to make my images not too graphic, keep in mind that surgeons have a different relationship with blood than normal people do, because, after all, what a surgeon does to a patient, if it were done without consent, would be a felony. 
Surgeons are the tailors, the plumbers, the carpenters — some would say the butchers — of the medical world: cutting, reshaping, reforming, bypassing, fixing. 
But you need to talk about surgical instruments and the evolution of surgical technology together. 
So in order to give you some kind of a perspective of where we are right now with surgical robots, and where we're going to be going in the future, I want to give you a little bit of perspective of how we got to this point, how we even came to believe that surgery was OK, that this was something that was possible to do, that this kind of cutting and reforming was OK. 
So, a little bit of perspective — about 10,000 years of perspective. 
This is a trephinated skull. 
And trephination is simply just cutting a hole in the skull. 
And many, many hundreds of skulls like this have been found in archaeological sites all over the world, dating back five to 10 thousand years. 
Five to 10 thousand years! Now imagine this. 
You are a healer in a Stone Age village. 
And you have some guy that you're not quite sure what's wrong with him — Oliver Sacks is going to be born way in the future. 
He's got some seizure disorder. And you don't understand this. 
But you think to yourself, "" I'm not quite sure what's wrong with this guy. 
But maybe if I cut a hole in his head I can fix it. "" (Laughter) Now that is surgical thinking. 
Now we've got the dawn of interventional surgery here. 
What is astonishing about this is, even though we don't know really how much of this was intended to be religious, or how much of it was intended to be therapeutic, what we can tell is that these patients lived! 
Judging by the healing on the borders of these holes, they lived days, months, years following trephination. 
And so what we are seeing is evidence of a refined technique that was being handed down over thousands and thousands of years, all over the world. 
This arose independently at sites everywhere that had no communication to one another. 
We really are seeing the dawn of interventional surgery. 
Now we can fast forward many thousands of years into the Bronze Age and beyond. 
And we see new refined tools coming out. 
But surgeons in these eras are a little bit more conservative than their bold, trephinating ancestors. 
These guys confined their surgery to fairly superficial injuries. 
And surgeons were tradesmen, rather than physicians. 
This persisted all the way into and through the Renaissance. 
That may have saved the writers, but it didn't really save the surgeons terribly much. 
They were still a mistrusted lot. 
Surgeons still had a bit of a PR problem, because the landscape was dominated by the itinerant barber surgeon. 
These were folks that traveled from village to village, town to town, doing surgery sort of as a form of performance art. 
Because we were in the age before anesthesia, the agony of the patient is really as much of the public spectacle as the surgery itself. 
One of the most famous of these guys, Frere Jacques, shown here doing a lithotomy — which is the removal of the bladder stone, one of the most invasive surgeries they did at the time — had to take less than two minutes. 
You had to have quite a flair for the dramatic, and be really, really quick. 
And so here you see him doing a lithotomy. 
And he is credited with doing over 4,000 of these public surgeries, wandering around in Europe, which is an astonishing number, when you think that surgery must have been a last resort. 
I mean who would put themselves through that? 
Until anesthesia, the absence of sensation. 
With the demonstration of the Morton Ether Inhaler at the Mass. General in 1847, a whole new era of surgery was ushered in. 
Anesthesia gave surgeons the freedom to operate. 
Anesthesia gave them the freedom to experiment, to start to delve deeper into the body. 
This was truly a revolution in surgery. 
But there was a pretty big problem with this. 
After these very long, painstaking operations, attempting to cure things they'd never been able to touch before, the patients died. 
They died of massive infection. 
Surgery didn't hurt anymore, but it killed you pretty quickly. 
And infection would continue to claim a majority of surgical patients until the next big revolution in surgery, which was aseptic technique. 
Joseph Lister was aepsis's, or sterility's, biggest advocate, to a very very skeptical bunch of surgeons. 
But eventually they did come around. 
The Mayo brothers came out to visit Lister in Europe. 
And they came back to their American clinic and they said they had learned it was as important to wash your hands before doing surgery as it was to wash up afterwards. (Laughter) Something so simple. 
And yet, operative mortality dropped profoundly. 
These surgeries were actually now being effective. 
With the patient insensitive to pain, and a sterile operating field all bets were off, the sky was the limit. 
You could now start doing surgery everywhere, on the gut, on the liver, on the heart, on the brain. 
Transplantation: you could take an organ out of one person, you could put it in another person, and it would work. 
Surgeons didn't have a problem with respectability anymore; they had become gods. 
The era of the "" big surgeon, big incision "" had arrived, but at quite a cost, because they are saving lives, but not necessarily quality of life, because healthy people don't usually need surgery, and unhealthy people have a very hard time recovering from a cut like that. 
The question had to be asked, "" Well, can we do these same surgeries but through little incisions? "" Laparoscopy is doing this kind of surgery: surgery with long instruments through small incisions. 
And it really changed the landscape of surgery. 
Some of the tools for this had been around for a hundred years, but it had only been used as a diagnostic technique until the 1980s, when there was changes in camera technologies and things like that, that allowed this to be done for real operations. 
So what you see — this is now the first surgical image — as we're coming down the tube, this is a new entry into the body. 
It looks very different from what you're expecting surgery to look like. 
We bring instruments in, from two separate cuts in the side, and then you can start manipulating tissue. 
Within 10 years of the first gallbladder surgeries being done laparoscopically, a majority of gallbladder surgeries were being done laparoscopically — truly a pretty big revolution. 
But there were casualties of this revolution. 
These techniques were a lot harder to learn than people had anticipated. 
The learning curve was very long. 
And during that learning curve the complications went quite a bit higher. 
Surgeons had to give up their 3D vision. 
They had to give up their wrists. 
They had to give up intuitive motion in the instruments. 
This surgeon has over 3,000 hours of laparoscopic experience. 
Now this is a particularly frustrating placement of the needle. 
But this is hard. 
And one of the reasons why it is so hard is because the external ergonomics are terrible. 
You've got these long instruments, and you're working off your centerline. 
And the instruments are essentially working backwards. 
So what you need to do, to take the capability of your hand, and put it on the other side of that small incision, is you need to put a wrist on that instrument. 
And so — I get to talk about robots — the da Vinci robot put just that wrist on the other side of that incision. 
And so here you're seeing the operation of this wrist. 
And now, in contrast to the laparoscopy, you can precisely place the needle in your instruments, and you can pass it all the way through and follow it in a trajectory. 
And the reason why this becomes so much easier is — you can see on the bottom — the hands are making the motions, and the instruments are following those motions exactly. 
Now, what you put between those instruments and those hands, is a large, fairly complicated robot. 
The surgeon is sitting at a console, and controlling the robot with these controllers. 
And the robot is moving these instruments around, and powering them, down inside the body. 
You have a 3D camera, so you get a 3D view. 
And since this was introduced in 1999, a lot of these robots have been out and being used for surgical procedures like a prostatectomy, which is a prostate deep in the pelvis, and it requires fine dissection and delicate manipulation to be able to get a good surgical outcome. 
You can also sew bypass vessels directly onto a beating heart without cracking the chest. 
This is all done in between the ribs. 
And you can go inside the heart itself and repair the valves from the inside. 
You've got these technologies — thank you — (Applause) And so you might say, "" Wow this is really cool! 
So, smartypants, why isn't all surgery being done this way? "" And there are some reasons, some good reasons. 
And cost is one of them. 
I talked about the large, complicated robot. 
With all its bells and whistles, one of those robots will cost you about as much as a solid gold surgeon. 
More useful than a solid gold surgeon, but, still, it's a fairly big capital investment. 
But once you've got it, your procedure costs do come down. 
But there are other barriers. 
So something like a prostatectomy — the prostate is small, and it's in one spot, and you can set your robot up very precisely to work in that one spot. 
And so it's perfect for something like that. 
And in fact if you, or anyone you know, had their prostate taken out in the last couple of years, chances are it was done with one of these systems. 
But if you need to reach more places than just one, you need to move the robot. 
And you need to put some new incisions in there. 
And you need to re-set it up. 
And then you need to add some more ports, and more. 
And the problem is it gets time-consuming, and cumbersome. 
And for that reason there are many surgeries that just aren't being done with the da Vinci. 
So we had to ask the question, "" Well how do we fix that? "" What if we could change it so that we didn't have to re-set up each time we wanted to move somewhere different? 
What if we could bring all the instruments in together in one place? 
How would that change the capabilities of the surgeon? 
And how would that change the experience for the patient? 
Now, to do that, we need to be able to bring a camera and instruments in together through one small tube, like that tube you saw in the laparoscopy video. 
Or, not so coincidentally, like a tube like this. 
So what's going to come out of that tube is the debut of this new technology, this new robot that is going to be able to reach anywhere. 
Ready? So here it comes. 
This is the camera, and three instruments. 
And as you see it come out, in order to actually be able to do anything useful, it can't all stay clustered up like this. 
It has to be able to come off of the centerline and then be able to work back toward that centerline. 
He's a cheeky little devil. 
But what this lets you do is gives you that all-important traction, and counter-traction, so that you can dissect, so that you can sew, so that you can do all the things that you need to do, all the surgical tasks. 
But it's all coming in through one incision. 
It's not so simple. 
But it's worth it for the freedom that this gives us as we're going around. 
For the patient, however, it's transparent. This is all they're going to see. 
It's very exciting to think where we get to go with this. 
We get to write the script of the next revolution in surgery. 
As we take these capabilities, and we get to go to the next places, we get to decide what our new surgeries are going to be. 
And I think to really get the rest of the way in that revolution, we need to not just take our hands in in new ways, we also need to take our eyes in in new ways. 
We need to see beyond the surface. 
We need to be able to guide what we're cutting in a much better way. 
This is a cancer surgery. 
One of the problems with this, even for surgeons who've been looking at this a lot, is you can't see the cancer, especially when it's hidden below the surface. 
And so what we're starting to do is we're starting to inject specially designed markers into the bloodstream that will target the cancer. 
It will go, bind to the cancer. 
And we can make those markers glow. 
And we can take special cameras, and we can look at it. 
Now we know where we need to cut, even when it's below the surface. 
We can take these markers and we can inject them in a tumor site. 
And we can follow where they flow out from that tumor site, so we can see the first places where that cancer might travel. 
We can inject these dyes into the bloodstream, so that when we do a new vessel and we bypass a blockage on the heart, we can see if we actually made the connection, before we close that patient back up again — something that we haven't been able to do without radiation before. 
We can light up tumors like this kidney tumor, so that you can exactly see where the boundary is between the kidney tumor and the kidney you want to leave behind, or the liver tumor and the liver you want to leave behind. 
And we don't even need to confine ourselves to this macro vision. 
We have flexible microscopic probes that we can bring down into the body. 
And we can look at cells directly. 
I'm looking at nerves here. So these are nerves you see, down on the bottom, and the microscope probe that's being held by the robotic hand, up at the top. 
So this is all very prototypey at this point. 
But you care about nerves, if you are a surgical patient. 
Because they let you keep continence, bladder control, and sexual function after surgery, all of which is generally fairly important to the patient. 
So, with the combination of these technologies we can reach it all, and we can see it all. 
We can heal the disease. 
And we can leave the patient whole and intact and functional afterwards. 
Now, I've talked about the patient as if the patient is, somehow, someone abstract outside this room. 
And that is not the case. 
Many of you, all of you maybe, will at some point, or have already, faced a diagnosis of cancer, or heart disease, or some organ dysfunction that's going to buy you a date with a surgeon. 
And when you get to that point — I mean, these maladies don't care how many books you've written, how many companies you've started, that Nobel Prize you have yet to win, how much time you planned to spend with your children. 
These maladies come for us all. 
And the prospect I'm offering you, of an easier surgery... 
is that going to make that diagnosis any less terrifying? 
I'm not sure I really even want it to. 
Because facing your own mortality causes a re-evaluation of priorities, and a realignment of what your goals are in life, unlike anything else. 
And I would never want to deprive you of that epiphany. 
What I want instead, is for you to be whole, intact, and functional enough to go out and save the world, after you've decided you need to do it. 
And that is my vision for your future. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Let's pretend right here we have a machine. 
A big machine, a cool, TED-ish machine, and it's a time machine. 
And everyone in this room has to get into it. 
And you can go backwards, you can go forwards; you cannot stay where you are. 
And I wonder what you'd choose, because I've been asking my friends this question a lot lately and they all want to go back. 
I don't know. They want to go back before there were automobiles or Twitter or "" American Idol. "" I don't know. 
I'm convinced that there's some sort of pull to nostalgia, to wishful thinking. 
And I understand that. 
I'm not part of that crowd, I have to say. 
I don't want to go back, and it's not because I'm adventurous. 
It's because possibilities on this planet, they don't go back, they go forward. 
So I want to get in the machine, and I want to go forward. 
This is the greatest time there's ever been on this planet by any measure that you wish to choose: health, wealth, mobility, opportunity, declining rates of disease... 
There's never been a time like this. 
My great-grandparents died, all of them, by the time they were 60. 
My grandparents pushed that number to 70. 
My parents are closing in on 80. 
So there better be a nine at the beginning of my death number. 
But it's not even about people like us, because this is a bigger deal than that. 
A kid born in New Delhi today can expect to live as long as the richest man in the world did 100 years ago. 
Think about that, it's an incredible fact. 
And why is it true? 
Smallpox. Smallpox killed billions of people on this planet. 
It reshaped the demography of the globe in a way that no war ever has. 
It's gone. It's vanished. 
We vanquished it. Puff. 
In the rich world, diseases that threatened millions of us just a generation ago no longer exist, hardly. 
Diphtheria, rubella, polio... 
does anyone even know what those things are? 
Vaccines, modern medicine, our ability to feed billions of people, those are triumphs of the scientific method. 
And to my mind, the scientific method — trying stuff out, seeing if it works, changing it when it doesn't — is one of the great accomplishments of humanity. 
So that's the good news. 
Unfortunately, that's all the good news because there are some other problems, and they've been mentioned many times. 
And one of them is that despite all our accomplishments, a billion people go to bed hungry in this world every day. 
That number's rising, and it's rising really rapidly, and it's disgraceful. 
And not only that, we've used our imagination to thoroughly trash this globe. 
Potable water, arable land, rainforests, oil, gas: they're going away, and they're going away soon, and unless we innovate our way out of this mess, we're going away too. 
So the question is: Can we do that? And I think we can. 
I think it's clear that we can make food that will feed billions of people without raping the land that they live on. 
I think we can power this world with energy that doesn't also destroy it. 
I really do believe that, and, no, it ain't wishful thinking. 
But here's the thing that keeps me up at night — one of the things that keeps me up at night: We've never needed progress in science more than we need it right now. Never. 
And we've also never been in a position to deploy it properly in the way that we can today. 
We're on the verge of amazing, amazing events in many fields, and yet I actually think we'd have to go back hundreds, 300 years, before the Enlightenment, to find a time when we battled progress, when we fought about these things more vigorously, on more fronts, than we do now. 
People wrap themselves in their beliefs, and they do it so tightly that you can't set them free. 
Not even the truth will set them free. 
And, listen, everyone's entitled to their opinion; they're even entitled to their opinion about progress. 
But you know what you're not entitled to? 
You're not entitled to your own facts. Sorry, you're not. 
And this took me awhile to figure out. 
About a decade ago, I wrote a story about vaccines for The New Yorker. A little story. 
And I was amazed to find opposition: opposition to what is, after all, the most effective public health measure in human history. 
I didn't know what to do, so I just did what I do: I wrote a story and I moved on. 
And soon after that, I wrote a story about genetically engineered food. 
Same thing, only bigger. 
People were going crazy. 
So I wrote a story about that too, and I couldn't understand why people thought this was "" Frankenfoods, "" why they thought moving molecules around in a specific, rather than a haphazard way, was trespassing on nature's ground. 
But, you know, I do what I do. I wrote the story, I moved on. 
I mean, I'm a journalist. 
We type, we file, we go to dinner. It's fine. 
(Laughter) But these stories bothered me, and I couldn't figure out why, and eventually I did. 
And that's because those fanatics that were driving me crazy weren't actually fanatics at all. 
They were thoughtful people, educated people, decent people. 
They were exactly like the people in this room. 
And it just disturbed me so much. 
But then I thought, you know, let's be honest. 
We're at a point in this world where we don't have the same relationship to progress that we used to. 
We talk about it ambivalently. 
We talk about it in ironic terms with little quotes around it: "progress." 
Okay, there are reasons for that, and I think we know what those reasons are. 
We've lost faith in institutions, in authority, and sometimes in science itself, and there's no reason we shouldn't have. 
You can just say a few names and people will understand. 
Chernobyl, Bhopal, the Challenger, Vioxx, weapons of mass destruction, hanging chads. 
You know, you can choose your list. 
There are questions and problems with the people we used to believe were always right, so be skeptical. 
Ask questions, demand proof, demand evidence. 
Don't take anything for granted. 
But here's the thing: When you get proof, you need to accept the proof, and we're not that good at doing that. 
And the reason that I can say that is because we're now in an epidemic of fear like one I've never seen and hope never to see again. 
About 12 years ago, there was a story published, a horrible story, that linked the epidemic of autism to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine shot. 
Very scary. 
Tons of studies were done to see if this was true. 
Tons of studies should have been done; it's a serious issue. 
The data came back. 
The data came back from the United States, from England, from Sweden, from Canada, and it was all the same: no correlation, no connection, none at all. 
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because we believe anecdotes, we believe what we see, what we think we see, what makes us feel real. 
We don't believe a bunch of documents from a government official giving us data, and I do understand that, I think we all do. 
But you know what? 
The result of that has been disastrous. 
Disastrous because here's a fact: The United States is one of the only countries in the world where the vaccine rate for measles is going down. 
That is disgraceful, and we should be ashamed of ourselves. 
It's horrible. 
What kind of a thing happened that we could do that? 
Now, I understand it. I do understand it. 
Because, did anyone have measles here? 
Has one person in this audience ever seen someone die of measles? 
Doesn't happen very much. 
Doesn't happen in this country at all, but it happened 160,000 times in the world last year. 
That's a lot of death of measles — 20 an hour. 
But since it didn't happen here, we can put it out of our minds, and people like Jenny McCarthy can go around preaching messages of fear and illiteracy from platforms like "" Oprah "" and "" Larry King Live. "" And they can do it because they don't link causation and correlation. 
They don't understand that these things seem the same, but they're almost never the same. 
And it's something we need to learn, and we need to learn it really soon. 
This guy was a hero, Jonas Salk. 
He took one of the worst scourges of mankind away from us. 
No fear, no agony. Polio — puff, gone. 
That guy in the middle, not so much. 
His name is Paul Offit. 
He just developed a rotavirus vaccine with a bunch of other people. 
It'll save the lives of 400 to 500,000 kids in the developing world every year. 
Pretty good, right? 
Well, it's good, except that Paul goes around talking about vaccines and says how valuable they are and that people ought to just stop the whining. 
And he actually says it that way. 
So, Paul's a terrorist. 
When Paul speaks in a public hearing, he can't testify without armed guards. 
He gets called at home because people like to tell him that they remember where his kids go to school. 
And why? Because Paul made a vaccine. 
I don't need to say this, but vaccines are essential. 
You take them away, disease comes back, horrible diseases. And that's happening. 
We have measles in this country now. 
And it's getting worse, and pretty soon kids are going to die of it again because it's just a numbers game. 
And they're not just going to die of measles. 
What about polio? Let's have that. Why not? 
A college classmate of mine wrote me a couple weeks ago and said she thought I was a little strident. 
No one's ever said that before. 
She wasn't going to vaccinate her kid against polio, no way. 
Fine. 
Why? Because we don't have polio. And you know what? 
We didn't have polio in this country yesterday. 
Today, I don't know, maybe a guy got on a plane in Lagos this morning, and he's flying to LAX, right now he's over Ohio. 
And he's going to land in a couple of hours, he's going to rent a car, and he's going to come to Long Beach, and he's going to attend one of these fabulous TED dinners tonight. 
And he doesn't know that he's infected with a paralytic disease, and we don't either because that's the way the world works. 
That's the planet we live on. Don't pretend it isn't. 
Now, we love to wrap ourselves in lies. We love to do it. 
Everyone take their vitamins this morning? 
Echinacea, a little antioxidant to get you going. 
I know you did because half of Americans do every day. 
They take the stuff, and they take alternative medicines, and it doesn't matter how often we find out that they're useless. 
The data says it all the time. 
They darken your urine. They almost never do more than that. 
(Laughter) It's okay, you want to pay 28 billion dollars for dark urine? 
I'm totally with you. 
(Laughter) Dark urine. Dark. 
Why do we do that? Why do we do that? 
Well, I think I understand, we hate Big Pharma. 
We hate Big Government. We don't trust the Man. 
And we shouldn't: Our health care system sucks. 
It's cruel to millions of people. 
It's absolutely astonishingly cold and soul-bending to those of us who can even afford it. 
So we run away from it, and where do we run? 
We leap into the arms of Big Placebo. 
(Laughter) That's fantastic. I love Big Placebo. 
(Applause) But, you know, it's really a serious thing because this stuff is crap, and we spend billions of dollars on it. 
And I have all sorts of little props here. 
None of it... ginkgo, fraud; echinacea, fraud; acai — I don't even know what that is but we're spending billions of dollars on it — it's fraud. 
And you know what? When I say this stuff, people scream at me, and they say, "" What do you care? Let people do what they want to do. 
It makes them feel good. "" And you know what? You're wrong. 
Because I don't care if it's the secretary of HHS who's saying, "" Hmm, I'm not going to take the evidence of my experts on mammograms, "" or some cancer quack who wants to treat his patient with coffee enemas. 
When you start down the road where belief and magic replace evidence and science, you end up in a place you don't want to be. 
You end up in Thabo Mbeki South Africa. 
He killed 400,000 of his people by insisting that beetroot, garlic and lemon oil were much more effective than the antiretroviral drugs we know can slow the course of AIDS. 
Hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in a country that has been plagued worse than any other by this disease. 
Please, don't tell me there are no consequences to these things. 
There are. There always are. 
Now, the most mindless epidemic we're in the middle of right now is this absurd battle between proponents of genetically engineered food and the organic elite. 
It's an idiotic debate. It has to stop. 
It's a debate about words, about metaphors. 
It's ideology, it's not science. 
Every single thing we eat, every grain of rice, every sprig of parsley, every Brussels sprout has been modified by man. 
You know, there weren't tangerines in the garden of Eden. 
There wasn't any cantaloupe. (Laughter) There weren't Christmas trees. We made it all. 
We made it over the last 11,000 years. 
And some of it worked, and some of it didn't. 
We got rid of the stuff that didn't. 
Now we can do it in a more precise way — and there are risks, absolutely — but we can put something like vitamin A into rice, and that stuff can help millions of people, millions of people, prolong their lives. 
You don't want to do that? 
I have to say, I don't understand it. 
We object to genetically engineered food. 
Why do we do that? 
Well, the things I constantly hear are: Too many chemicals, pesticides, hormones, monoculture, we don't want giant fields of the same thing, that's wrong. 
We don't companies patenting life. 
We don't want companies owning seeds. 
And you know what my response to all of that is? 
Yes, you're right. Let's fix it. 
It's true, we've got a huge food problem, but this isn't science. 
This has nothing to do with science. 
It's law, it's morality, it's patent stuff. 
You know science isn't a company. 
It's not a country. 
It's not even an idea; it's a process. 
It's a process, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but the idea that we should not allow science to do its job because we're afraid, is really very deadening, and it's preventing millions of people from prospering. 
You know, in the next 50 years we're going to have to grow 70 percent more food than we do right now, 70 percent. 
This investment in Africa over the last 30 years. 
Disgraceful. Disgraceful. 
They need it, and we're not giving it to them. 
And why? Genetically engineered food. 
We don't want to encourage people to eat that rotten stuff, like cassava for instance. 
Cassava's something that half a billion people eat. 
It's kind of like a potato. 
It's just a bunch of calories. It sucks. 
It doesn't have nutrients, it doesn't have protein, and scientists are engineering all of that into it right now. 
And then people would be able to eat it and they'd be able to not go blind. 
They wouldn't starve, and you know what? 
That would be nice. It wouldn't be Chez Panisse, but it would be nice. 
And all I can say about this is: Why are we fighting it? 
I mean, let's ask ourselves: Why are we fighting it? 
Because we don't want to move genes around? 
This is about moving genes around. It's not about chemicals. 
It's not about our ridiculous passion for hormones, our insistence on having bigger food, better food, singular food. 
This isn't about Rice Krispies, this is about keeping people alive, and it's about time we started to understand what that meant. 
Because, you know something? 
If we don't, if we continue to act the way we're acting, we're guilty of something that I don't think we want to be guilty of: high-tech colonialism. 
There's no other way to describe what's going on here. 
It's selfish, it's ugly, it's beneath us, and we really have to stop it. 
So after this amazingly fun conversation, (Laughter) you might want to say, "" So, you still want to get in this ridiculous time machine and go forward? "" Absolutely. Absolutely, I do. 
It's stuck in the present right now, but we have an amazing opportunity. 
We can set that time machine on anything we want. 
We can move it where we want to move it, and we're going to move it where we want to move it. 
We have to have these conversations and we have to think, but when we get in the time machine and we go ahead, we're going to be happy we do. 
I know that we can, and as far as I'm concerned, that's something the world needs right now. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. 
Thank you. Thank you. 

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

The key question is, "" When are we going to get fusion? "" It's really been a long time since we've known about fusion. 
We've known about fusion since 1920, when Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington and the British Association for the Advancement of Science conjectured that that's why the sun shines. 
I've always been very worried about resource. 
I don't know about you, but when my mother gave me food, I always sorted the ones I disliked from the ones I liked. 
And I ate the disliked ones first, because the ones you like, you want to save. 
And as a child you're always worried about resource. 
And once it was sort of explained to me how fast we were using up the world's resources, I got very upset, about as upset as I did when I realized that the Earth will only last about five billion years before it's swallowed by the sun. 
Big events in my life, a strange child. 
(Laughter) Energy, at the moment, is dominated by resource. 
The countries that make a lot of money out of energy have something underneath them. 
Coal-powered industrial revolution in this country — oil, gas, sorry. 
(Laughter) Gas, I'm probably the only person who really enjoys it when Mister Putin turns off the gas tap, because my budget goes up. 
We're really dominated now by those things that we're using up faster and faster and faster. 
And as we try to lift billions of people out of poverty in the Third World, in the developing world, we're using energy faster and faster. 
And those resources are going away. 
And the way we'll make energy in the future is not from resource, it's really from knowledge. 
If you look 50 years into the future, the way we probably will be making energy is probably one of these three, with some wind, with some other things, but these are going to be the base load energy drivers. 
Solar can do it, and we certainly have to develop solar. 
But we have a lot of knowledge to gain before we can make solar the base load energy supply for the world. 
Fission. 
Our government is going to put in six new nuclear power stations. 
They're going to put in six new nuclear power stations, and probably more after that. 
China is building nuclear power stations. Everybody is. 
Because they know that that is one sure way to do carbon-free energy. 
But if you wanted to know what the perfect energy source is, the perfect energy source is one that doesn't take up much space, has a virtually inexhaustible supply, is safe, doesn't put any carbon into the atmosphere, doesn't leave any long-lived radioactive waste: it's fusion. 
But there is a catch. Of course there is always a catch in these cases. 
Fusion is very hard to do. 
We've been trying for 50 years. 
Okay. What is fusion? Here comes the nuclear physics. 
And sorry about that, but this is what turns me on. 
(Laughter) I was a strange child. 
Nuclear energy comes for a simple reason. 
The most stable nucleus is iron, right in the middle of the periodic table. 
It's a medium-sized nucleus. 
And you want to go towards iron if you want to get energy. 
So, uranium, which is very big, wants to split. 
But small atoms want to join together, small nuclei want to join together to make bigger ones to go towards iron. 
And you can get energy out this way. 
And indeed that's exactly what stars do. 
In the middle of stars, you're joining hydrogen together to make helium and then helium together to make carbon, to make oxygen, all the things that you're made of are made in the middle of stars. 
But it's a hard process to do because, as you know, the middle of a star is quite hot, almost by definition. 
And there is one reaction that's probably the easiest fusion reaction to do. 
It's between two isotopes of hydrogen, two kinds of hydrogen: deuterium, which is heavy hydrogen, which you can get from seawater, and tritium which is super-heavy hydrogen. 
These two nuclei, when they're far apart, are charged. 
And you push them together and they repel. 
But when you get them close enough, something called the strong force starts to act and pulls them together. 
So, most of the time they repel. 
You get them closer and closer and closer and then at some point the strong force grips them together. 
For a moment they become helium 5, because they've got five particles inside them. 
So, that's that process there. Deuterium and tritium goes together makes helium 5. 
Helium splits out, and a neutron comes out and lots of energy comes out. 
If you can get something to about 150 million degrees, things will be rattling around so fast that every time they collide in just the right configuration, this will happen, and it will release energy. 
And that energy is what powers fusion. 
And it's this reaction that we want to do. 
There is one trickiness about this reaction. 
Well, there is a trickiness that you have to make it 150 million degrees, but there is a trickiness about the reaction yet. 
It's pretty hot. 
The trickiness about the reaction is that tritium doesn't exist in nature. 
You have to make it from something else. 
And you make if from lithium. That reaction at the bottom, that's lithium 6, plus a neutron, will give you more helium, plus tritium. 
And that's the way you make your tritium. 
But fortunately, if you can do this fusion reaction, you've got a neutron, so you can make that happen. 
Now, why the hell would we bother to do this? 
This is basically why we would bother to do it. 
If you just plot how much fuel we've got left, in units of present world consumption. 
And as you go across there you see a few tens of years of oil — the blue line, by the way, is the lowest estimate of existing resources. 
And the yellow line is the most optimistic estimate. 
And as you go across there you will see that we've got a few tens of years, and perhaps 100 years of fossil fuels left. 
And god knows we don't really want to burn all of it, because it will make an awful lot of carbon in the air. 
And then we get to uranium. 
And with current reactor technology we really don't have very much uranium. 
And we will have to extract uranium from sea water, which is the yellow line, to make conventional nuclear power stations actually do very much for us. 
This is a bit shocking, because in fact our government is relying on that for us to meet Kyoto, and do all those kind of things. 
To go any further you would have to have breeder technology. 
And breeder technology is fast breeders. And that's pretty dangerous. 
The big thing, on the right, is the lithium we have in the world. 
And lithium is in sea water. That's the yellow line. 
And we have 30 million years worth of fusion fuel in sea water. 
Everybody can get it. That's why we want to do fusion. 
Is it cost-competitive? 
We make estimates of what we think it would cost to actually make a fusion power plant. 
And we get within about the same price as current electricity. 
So, how would we make it? 
We have to hold something at 150 million degrees. 
And, in fact, we've done this. 
We hold it with a magnetic field. 
And inside it, right in the middle of this toroidal shape, doughnut shape, right in the middle is 150 million degrees. 
It boils away in the middle at 150 million degrees. 
And in fact we can make fusion happen. 
And just down the road, this is JET. 
It's the only machine in the world that's actually done fusion. 
When people say fusion is 30 years away, and always will be, I say, "" Yeah, but we've actually done it. "" Right? 
We can do fusion. In the center of this device we made 16 megawatts of fusion power in 1997. 
And in 2013 we're going to fire it up again and break all those records. 
But that's not really fusion power. That's just making some fusion happen. 
We've got to take that, we've got to make that into a fusion reactor. 
Because we want 30 million years worth of fusion power for the Earth. 
This is the device we're building now. 
It gets very expensive to do this research. 
It turns out you can't do fusion on a table top despite all that cold fusion nonsense. Right? 
You can't. You have to do it in a very big device. 
More than half the world's population is involved in building this device in southern France, which is a nice place to put an experiment. 
Seven nations are involved in building this. 
It's going to cost us 10 billion. And we'll produce half a gigawatt of fusion power. 
But that's not electricity yet. 
We have to get to this. 
We have to get to a power plant. 
We have to start putting electricity on the grid in this very complex technology. 
And I'd really like it to happen a lot faster than it is. 
But at the moment, all we can imagine is sometime in the 2030s. 
I wish this were different. We really need it now. 
We're going to have a problem with power in the next five years in this country. 
So 2030 looks like an infinity away. 
But we can't abandon it now; we have to push forward, get fusion to happen. 
I wish we had more money, I wish we had more resources. 
But this is what we're aiming at, sometime in the 2030s — real electric power from fusion. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

(Laughter) I did that for two reasons. 
But the main reason I did it is that that's what happens to me when I'm forced to wear a Lady Gaga skanky mic. 
(Laughter) I'm used to a stationary mic. 
(Laughter) But you clamp this thing on my head, and something happens. 
I just become skanky. 
(Laughter) So I'm sorry about that. 
And I'm already off-message. 
(Laughter) Ladies and gentlemen, I have devoted the past 25 years of my life to designing books. 
Tell your kids. "") It all sort of started as a benign mistake, like penicillin. (Laughter) What I really wanted was to be a graphic designer at one of the big design firms in New York City. 
But upon arrival there, in the fall of 1986, and doing a lot of interviews, I found that the only thing I was offered was to be Assistant to the Art Director at Alfred A. Knopf, a book publisher. 
Now I was stupid, but not so stupid that I turned it down. 
I had absolutely no idea what I was about to become part of, and I was incredibly lucky. 
My job was to ask this question: "What do the stories look like?" 
Because that is what Knopf is. 
It is the story factory, one of the very best in the world. 
The stories can be anything, and some of them are actually true. 
But they all have one thing in common: They all need to look like something. 
Why? To give you a first impression of what you are about to get into. 
A book designer gives form to content, but also manages a very careful balance between the two. 
Now, the first day of my graphic design training at Penn State University, the teacher, Lanny Sommese, came into the room and he drew a picture of an apple on the blackboard, and wrote the word "" Apple "" underneath, and he said, "" OK. Lesson one. Listen up. "" And he covered up the picture and he said, "" You either say this, "" and then he covered up the word, "" or you show this. 
But you don't do this. "" Because this is treating your audience like a moron. 
(Laughter) And they deserve better. 
And lo and behold, soon enough, I was able to put this theory to the test on two books that I was working on for Knopf. 
Now the Hepburn book was written in a very conversational style, it was like she was sitting across a table telling it all to you. 
So there you are. 
Pure content and pure form, side by side. 
Someone is re-engineering dinosaurs by extracting their DNA from prehistoric amber. 
Genius! 
(Laughter) Now, luckily for me, I live and work in New York City, where there are plenty of dinosaurs. (Laughter) 
So, I went to the Museum of Natural History, and I checked out the bones, and I went to the gift shop, and I bought a book. 
And I was particularly taken with this page of the book, and more specifically the lower right-hand corner. 
Now I took this diagram, and I put it in a Photostat machine, (Laughter) and I took a piece of tracing paper, and I taped it over the Photostat with a piece of Scotch tape — stop me if I'm going too fast — (Laughter) — and then I took a Rapidograph pen — explain it to the youngsters — (Laughter) and I just started to reconstitute the dinosaur. 
I had no idea what I was doing, I had no idea where I was going, but at some point, I stopped — when to keep going would seem like I was going too far. 
And what I ended up with was a graphic representation of us seeing this animal coming into being. 
We're in the middle of the process. 
And then I just threw some typography on it. 
Very basic stuff, slightly suggestive of public park signage. 
(Laughter) Everybody in house loved it, and so off it goes to the author. 
And even back then, Michael was on the cutting edge. 
("" Michael Crichton responds by fax: "") ("" Wow! Fucking Fantastic Jacket "") (Laughter) (Applause) That was a relief to see that pour out of the machine. (Laughter) 
I miss Michael. 
And sure enough, somebody from MCA Universal calls our legal department to see if they can maybe look into buying the rights to the image, just in case they might want to use it. 
Well, they used it. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And I was thrilled. 
We all know it was an amazing movie, and it was so interesting to see it go out into the culture and become this phenomenon and to see all the different permutations of it. 
But not too long ago, I came upon this on the Web. 
No, that is not me. 
But whoever it is, I can't help but thinking they woke up one day like, "" Oh my God, that wasn't there last night. Ooooohh! 
I was so wasted. "" (Laughter) But if you think about it, from my head to my hands to his leg. (Laughter) 
That's a responsibility. 
And it's a responsibility that I don't take lightly. 
The book designer's responsibility is threefold: to the reader, to the publisher and, most of all, to the author. 
I want you to look at the author's book and say, "" Wow! I need to read that. "" David Sedaris is one of my favorite writers, and the title essay in this collection is about his trip to a nudist colony. 
And the reason he went is because he had a fear of his body image, and he wanted to explore what was underlying that. 
For me, it was simply an excuse to design a book that you could literally take the pants off of. 
But when you do, you don't get what you expect. 
You get something that goes much deeper than that. 
And David especially loved this design because at book signings, which he does a lot of, he could take a magic marker and do this. 
(Laughter) Hello! (Laughter) 
Augusten Burroughs wrote a memoir called ["" Dry ""], and it's about his time in rehab. 
In his 20s, he was a hotshot ad executive, and as Mad Men has told us, a raging alcoholic. 
He did not think so, however, but his coworkers did an intervention and they said, "You are going to rehab, or you will be fired and you will die." 
Now to me, this was always going to be a typographic solution, what I would call the opposite of Type 101. 
What does that mean? 
Usually on the first day of Introduction to Typography, you get the assignment of, select a word and make it look like what it says it is. So that's Type 101, right? 
Very simple stuff. 
This is going to be the opposite of that. 
I want this book to look like it's lying to you, desperately and hopelessly, the way an alcoholic would. 
The answer was the most low-tech thing you can imagine. 
I set up the type, I printed it out on an Epson printer with water-soluble ink, taped it to the wall and threw a bucket of water at it. Presto! 
Then when we went to press, the printer put a spot gloss on the ink and it really looked like it was running. 
Not long after it came out, Augusten was waylaid in an airport and he was hiding out in the bookstore spying on who was buying his books. 
And this woman came up to it, and she squinted, and she took it to the register, and she said to the man behind the counter, "" This one's ruined. "" (Laughter) And the guy behind the counter said, "" I know, lady. They all came in that way. "" (Laughter) Now, that's a good printing job. 
A book cover is a distillation. 
It is a haiku, if you will, of the story. 
This particular story by Osama Tezuka is his epic life of the Buddha, and it's eight volumes in all. But the best thing is when it's on your shelf, you get a shelf life of the Buddha, moving from one age to the next. 
All of these solutions derive their origins from the text of the book, but once the book designer has read the text, then he has to be an interpreter and a translator. 
This story was a real puzzle. 
This is what it's about. 
("" Intrigue and murder among 16th century Ottoman court painters. "") (Laughter) All right, so I got a collection of the paintings together and I looked at them and I deconstructed them and I put them back together. 
And so, here's the design, right? 
And so here's the front and the spine, and it's flat. 
But the real story starts when you wrap it around a book and put it on the shelf. 
Ahh! We come upon them, the clandestine lovers. Let's draw them out. 
Huhh! They've been discovered by the sultan. 
He will not be pleased. 
Huhh! And now the sultan is in danger. 
And now, we have to open it up to find out what's going to happen next. 
Try experiencing that on a Kindle. 
(Laughter) Don't get me started. 
Seriously. 
Much is to be gained by eBooks: ease, convenience, portability. 
But something is definitely lost: tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness — a little bit of humanity. 
Do you know what John Updike used to do the first thing when he would get a copy of one of his new books from Alfred A. Knopf? 
He'd smell it. 
Then he'd run his hand over the rag paper, and the pungent ink and the deckled edges of the pages. 
All those years, all those books, he never got tired of it. 
Now, I am all for the iPad, but trust me — smelling it will get you nowhere. 
(Laughter) Now the Apple guys are texting, "Develop odor emission plug-in." (Laughter) 
And the last story I'm going to talk about is quite a story. 
A woman named Aomame in 1984 Japan finds herself negotiating down a spiral staircase off an elevated highway. When she gets to the bottom, she can't help but feel that, all of a sudden, she's entered a new reality that's just slightly different from the one that she left, but very similar, but different. 
And so, we're talking about parallel planes of existence, sort of like a book jacket and the book that it covers. 
So how do we show this? 
We go back to Hepburn and Dietrich, but now we merge them. 
So we're talking about different planes, different pieces of paper. 
So this is on a semi-transparent piece of velum. 
It's one part of the form and content. 
When it's on top of the paper board, which is the opposite, it forms this. 
So even if you don't know anything about this book, you are forced to consider a single person straddling two planes of existence. 
And the object itself invited exploration interaction, consideration and touch. 
This debuted at number two on the New York Times Best Seller list. 
This is unheard of, both for us the publisher, and the author. 
We're talking a 900-page book that is as weird as it is compelling, and featuring a climactic scene in which a horde of tiny people emerge from the mouth of a sleeping girl and cause a German Shepherd to explode. 
(Laughter) Not exactly Jackie Collins. 
Fourteen weeks on the Best Seller list, eight printings, and still going strong. 
So even though we love publishing as an art, we very much know it's a business too, and that if we do our jobs right and get a little lucky, that great art can be great business. 
So that's my story. To be continued. 
What does it look like? 
Yes. It can, it does and it will, but for this book designer, page-turner, dog-eared place-holder, notes in the margins-taker, ink-sniffer, the story looks like this. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I cannot forget them. 
Their names were Aslan, Alik, Andrei, Fernanda, Fred, Galina, Gunnhild, Hans, Ingeborg, Matti, Natalya, Nancy, Sheryl, Usman, Zarema, and the list is longer. 
For many, their existence, their humanity, has been reduced to statistics, coldly recorded as "" security incidents. "" For me, they were colleagues belonging to that community of humanitarian aid workers that tried to bring a bit of comfort to the victims of the wars in Chechnya in the '90s. 
They were nurses, logisticians, shelter experts, paralegals, interpreters. 
And for this service, they were murdered, their families torn apart, and their story largely forgotten. 
No one was ever sentenced for these crimes. 
I cannot forget them. 
They live in me somehow, their memories giving me meaning every day. 
But they are also haunting the dark street of my mind. 
As humanitarian aid workers, they made the choice to be at the side of the victim, to provide some assistance, some comfort, some protection, but when they needed protection themselves, it wasn't there. 
When you see the headlines of your newspaper these days with the war in Iraq or in Syria — aid worker abducted, hostage executed — but who were they? 
Why were they there? 
What motivated them? 
How did we become so indifferent to these crimes? 
This is why I am here today with you. 
We need to find better ways to remember them. 
We also need to explain the key values to which they dedicated their lives. 
We also need to demand justice. 
When in '96 I was sent by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to the North Caucasus, I knew some of the risks. 
Five colleagues had been killed, three had been seriously injured, seven had already been taken hostage. 
So we were careful. 
We were using armored vehicles, decoy cars, changing patterns of travel, changing homes, all sorts of security measures. 
Yet on a cold winter night of January '98, it was my turn. 
When I entered my flat in Vladikavkaz with a guard, we were surrounded by armed men. 
They took the guard, they put him on the floor, they beat him up in front of me, tied him, dragged him away. 
I was handcuffed, blindfolded, and forced to kneel, as the silencer of a gun pressed against my neck. 
When it happens to you, there is no time for thinking, no time for praying. 
My brain went on automatic, rewinding quickly the life I'd just left behind. 
It took me long minutes to figure out that those masked men there were not there to kill me, but that someone, somewhere, had ordered my kidnapping. 
Then a process of dehumanization started that day. 
I was no more than just a commodity. 
I normally don't talk about this, but I'd like to share a bit with you some of those 317 days of captivity. 
I was kept in an underground cellar, total darkness, for 23 hours and 45 minutes every day, and then the guards would come, normally two. 
They would bring a big piece of bread, a bowl of soup, and a candle. 
That candle would burn for 15 minutes, 15 minutes of precious light, and then they would take it away, and I returned to darkness. 
I was chained by a metal cable to my bed. 
I could do only four small steps. 
I always dreamt of the fifth one. 
And no TV, no radio, no newspaper, no one to talk to. 
I had no towel, no soap, no toilet paper, just two metal buckets open, one for water, for one waste. 
Can you imagine that mock execution can be a pastime for guards when they are sadistic or when they are just bored or drunk? 
We are breaking my nerves very slowly. 
Isolation and darkness are particularly difficult to describe. 
How do you describe nothing? 
There are no words for the depths of loneliness I reached in that very thin border between sanity and madness. 
In the darkness, sometimes I played imaginary games of checkers. 
I would start with the black, play with the white, back to the black trying to trick the other side. 
I don't play checkers anymore. 
I was tormented by the thoughts of my family and my colleague, the guard, Edik. 
I didn't know what had happened to him. 
I was trying not to think, I tried to fill up my time by doing all sorts of physical exercise on the spot. 
I tried to pray, I tried all sorts of memorization games. 
But darkness also creates images and thoughts that are not normal. 
One part of your brain wants you to resist, to shout, to cry, and the other part of the brain orders you to shut up and just go through it. 
It's a constant internal debate; there is no one to arbitrate. 
Once a guard came to me, very aggressively, and he told me, "Today you're going to kneel and beg for your food." 
I wasn't in a good mood, so I insulted him. 
I insulted his mother, I insulted his ancestors. 
The consequence was moderate: he threw the food into my waste. 
The day after he came back with the same demand. 
He got the same answer, which had the same consequence. 
Four days later, the body was full of pain. 
I didn't know hunger hurt so much when you have so little. 
So when the guards came down, I knelt. 
I begged for my food. 
Submission was the only way for me to make it to another candle. 
After my kidnapping, I was transferred from North Ossetia to Chechnya, three days of slow travel in the trunks of different cars, and upon arrival, I was interrogated for 11 days by a guy called Ruslan. 
The routine was always the same: a bit more light, 45 minutes. 
He would come down to the cellar, he would ask the guards to tie me on the chair, and he would turn on the music loud. 
And then he would yell questions. 
He would scream. He would beat me. 
I'll spare you the details. 
There are many questions I could not understand, and there are some questions I did not want to understand. 
The length of the interrogation was the duration of the tape: 15 songs, 45 minutes. 
I would always long for the last song. 
On one day, one night in that cellar, I don't know what it was, I heard a child crying above my head, a boy, maybe two or three years old. 
Footsteps, confusion, people running. 
So when Ruslan came the day after, before he put the first question to me, I asked him, "" How is your son today? Is he feeling better? "" Ruslan was taken by surprise. 
He was furious that the guards may have leaked some details about his private life. 
I kept talking about NGOs supplying medicines to local clinics that may help his son to get better. 
And we talked about education, we talked about families. 
He talked to me about his children. 
I talked to him about my daughters. 
And then he'd talk about guns, about cars, about women, and I had to talk about guns, about cars, about women. 
And we talked until the last song on the tape. 
Ruslan was the most brutal man I ever met. 
He did not touch me anymore. 
He did not ask any other questions. 
I was no longer just a commodity. 
Two days after, I was transferred to another place. 
There, a guard came to me, very close — it was quite unusual — and he said with a very soft voice, he said, "" I'd like to thank you for the assistance your organization provided my family when we were displaced in nearby Dagestan. "" What could I possibly reply? 
It was so painful. It was like a blade in the belly. 
It took me weeks of internal thinking to try to reconcile the good reasons we had to assist that family and the soldier of fortune he became. 
He was young, he was shy. 
I never saw his face. 
He probably meant well. 
But in those 15 seconds, he made me question everything we did, all the sacrifices. 
He made me think also how they see us. 
Until then, I had assumed that they know why we are there and what we are doing. 
One cannot assume this. 
Well, explaining why we do this is not that easy, even to our closest relatives. 
We are not perfect, we are not superior, we are not the world's fire brigade, we are not superheroes, we don't stop wars, we know that humanitarian response is not a substitute for political solution. 
Yet we do this because one life matters. 
Sometimes that's the only difference you make — one individual, one family, a small group of individuals — and it matters. 
When you have a tsunami, an earthquake or a typhoon, you see teams of rescuers coming from all over the world, searching for survivors for weeks. 
Why? Nobody questions this. 
Every life matters, or every life should matter. 
This is the same for us when we help refugees, people displaced within their country by conflict, or stateless persons, I know many people, when they are confronted by overwhelming suffering, they feel powerless and they stop there. 
It's a pity, because there are so many ways people can help. 
We don't stop with that feeling. 
We try to do whatever we can to provide some assistance, some protection, some comfort. 
We have to. 
We can't do otherwise. 
It's what makes us feel, I don't know, simply human. 
That's a picture of me the day of my release. 
Months after my release, I met the then-French prime minister. 
The second thing he told me: "" You were totally irresponsible to go to the North Caucasus. 
You don't know how many problems you've created for us. "" It was a short meeting. 
(Laughter) I think helping people in danger is responsible. 
In that war, that nobody seriously wanted to stop, and we have many of these today, bringing some assistance to people in need and a bit of protection was not just an act of humanity, it was making a real difference for the people. 
Why could he not understand this? 
We have a responsibility to try. 
You've heard about that concept: Responsibility to Protect. 
Outcomes may depend on various parameters. 
We may even fail, but there is worse than failing — it's not even trying when we can. 
Well, if you are met this way, if you sign up for this sort of job, your life is going to be full of joy and sadness, because there are a lot of people we cannot help, a lot of people we cannot protect, a lot of people we did not save. 
I call them my ghost, and by having witnessed their suffering from close, you take a bit of that suffering on yourself. 
Many young humanitarian workers go through their first experience with a lot of bitterness. 
They are thrown into situations where they are witness, but they are powerless to bring any change. 
They have to learn to accept it and gradually turn this into positive energy. 
It's difficult. 
Many don't succeed, but for those who do, there is no other job like this. 
You can see the difference you make every day. 
Humanitarian aid workers know the risk they are taking in conflict areas or in post-conflict environments, yet our life, our job, is becoming increasingly life-threatening, and the sanctity of our life is fading. 
Do you know that since the millennium, the number of attacks on humanitarian aid workers has tripled? 
2013 broke new records: 155 colleagues killed, 171 seriously wounded, 134 abducted. 
So many broken lives. 
Until the beginning of the civil war in Somalia in the late '80s, humanitarian aid workers were sometimes victims of what we call collateral damages, but by and large we were not the target of these attacks. 
This has changed. 
Look at this picture. 
Baghdad, August 2003: 24 colleagues were killed. 
Gone are the days when a U.N. blue flag or a Red Cross would automatically protect us. 
Criminal groups and some political groups have cross-fertilized over the last 20 years, and they've created these sort of hybrids with whom we have no way of communicating. 
Humanitarian principles are tested, questioned, and often ignored, but perhaps more importantly, we have abandoned the search for justice. 
There seems to be no consequence whatsoever for attacks against humanitarian aid workers. 
After my release, I was told not to seek any form of justice. 
It won't do you any good, that's what I was told. 
Plus, you're going to put in danger the life of other colleagues. 
It took me years to see the sentencing of three people associated with my kidnapping, but this was the exception. 
There was no justice for any of the humanitarian aid workers killed or abducted in Chechnya between '95 and' 99, and it's the same all over the world. 
This is unacceptable. 
This is inexcusable. 
Attacks on humanitarian aid workers are war crimes in international law. 
Those crimes should not go unpunished. 
We must end this cycle of impunity. 
We must consider that those attacks against humanitarian aid workers are attacks against humanity itself. 
That makes me furious. 
I know I'm very lucky compared to the refugees I work for. 
I don't know what it is to have seen my whole town destroyed. 
I don't know what it is to have seen my relatives shot in front of me. 
I don't know what it is to lose the protection of my country. 
I also know that I'm very lucky compared to other hostages. 
Four days before my eventful release, four hostages were beheaded a few miles away from where I was kept in captivity. 
Why them? 
Why am I here today? 
No easy answer. 
I was received with a lot of support that I got from my relatives, from colleagues, from friends, from people I didn't know. 
They have helped me over the years to come out of the darkness. 
Not everyone was treated with the same attention. 
How many of my colleagues, after a traumatic incident, took their own life? 
I can count nine that I knew personally. 
How many of my colleagues went through a difficult divorce after a traumatic experience because they could not explain anything anymore to their spouse? 
I've lost that count. 
There is a price for this type of life. 
In Russia, all war monuments have this beautiful inscription at the top. 
It says, (In Russian) "No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten." 
I do not forget my lost colleagues. 
I cannot forget anything. 
I call on you to remember their dedication and demand that humanitarian aid workers around the world be better protected. 
We should not let that light of hope they have brought to be switched off. 
After my ordeal, a lot of colleagues asked me, "" But why do you continue? 
Why do you do this sort of job? 
Why do you have to go back to it? "" My answer was very simple: If I had quit, that would have meant my kidnapper had won. 
They would have taken my soul and my humanity. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

About 12 years ago, I gave up my career in banking to try to make the world a safer place. 
This involved a journey into national and global advocacy and meeting some of the most extraordinary people in the world. 
In the process, I became a civil society diplomat. 
Civil society diplomats do three things: They voice the concerns of the people, are not pinned down by national interests, and influence change through citizen networks, not only state ones. 
And if you want to change the world, we need more of them. 
But many people still ask, "" Can civil society really make a big difference? 
Can citizens influence and shape national and global policy? "" I never thought I would ask myself these questions, but here I am to share some lessons about two powerful civil society movements that I've been involved in. 
They are in issues that I'm passionate about: gun control and drug policy. 
And these are issues that matter here. 
Latin America is ground zero for both of them. 
For example, Brazil — this beautiful country hosting TEDGlobal has the world's ugliest record. 
We are the number one champion in homicidal violence. 
One in every 10 people killed around the world is a Brazilian. 
This translates into over 56,000 people dying violently each year. 
Most of them are young, black boys dying by guns. 
Brazil is also one of the world's largest consumers of drugs, and the War on Drugs has been especially painful here. 
Around 50 percent of the homicides in the streets in Brazil are related to the War on Drugs. 
The same is true for about 25 percent of people in jail. 
And it's not just Brazil that is affected by the twin problems of guns and drugs. 
Virtually every country and city across Central and South America is in trouble. 
Latin America has nine percent of the world's population, but 25 percent of its global violent deaths. 
These are not problems we can run away from. 
I certainly could not. 
So the first campaign I got involved with started here in 2003 to change Brazil's gun law and to create a program to buy back weapons. 
In just a few years, we not only changed national legislation that made it much more difficult for civilians to buy a gun, but we collected and destroyed almost half a million weapons. 
This was one of the biggest buyback programs in history — (Applause) — but we also suffered some setbacks. 
We lost a referendum to ban gun sales to civilians in 2005. 
The second initiative was also home-grown, but is today a global movement to reform the international drug control regime. 
I am the executive coordinator of something called the Global Commission on Drug Policy. 
The commission is a high-level group of global leaders brought together to identify more humane and effective approaches to the issue of drugs. 
Since we started in 2008, the taboo on drugs is broken. 
Across the Americas, from the US and Mexico to Colombia and Uruguay, change is in the air. 
But rather than tell you the whole story about these two movements, I just want to share with you four key insights. 
I call them lessons to change the world. 
There are certainly many more, but these are the ones that stand out to me. 
So the first lesson is: Change and control the narrative. 
It may seem obvious, but a key ingredient to civil society diplomacy is first changing and then controlling the narrative. 
This is something that veteran politicians understand, but that civil society groups generally do not do very well. 
In the case of drug policy, our biggest success has been to change the discussion away from prosecuting a War on Drugs to putting people's health and safety first. 
In a cutting-edge report we just launched in New York, we also showed that the groups benefiting most from this $320 billion market are criminal gangs and cartels. 
So in order to undermine the power and profit of these groups, we need to change the conversation. 
We need to make illegal drugs legal. 
But before I get you too excited, I don't mean drugs should be a free-for-all. 
What I'm talking about, and what the Global Commission advocates for is creating a highly regulated market, where different drugs would have different degrees of regulation. 
As for gun control, we were successful in changing, but not so much in controlling, the narrative. 
And this brings me to my next lesson: Never underestimate your opponents. 
If you want to succeed in changing the world, you need to know who you're up against. 
You need to learn their motivations and points of view. 
In the case of gun control, we really underestimated our opponents. 
After a very successful gun-collection program, we were elated. 
We had support from 80 percent of Brazilians, and thought that this could help us win the referendum to ban gun sales to civilians. 
But we were dead wrong. 
During a televised 20-day public debate, our opponent used our own arguments against us. 
We ended up losing the popular vote. 
It was really terrible. 
The National Rifle Association — yes, the American NRA — came to Brazil. 
They inundated our campaign with their propaganda, that as you know, links the right to own guns to ideas of freedom and democracy. 
They simply threw everything at us. 
They used our national flag, our independence anthem. 
They invoked women's rights and misused images of Mandela, Tiananmen Square, and even Hitler. 
They won by playing with people's fears. 
In fact, guns were almost completely ignored in their campaign. 
Their focus was on individual rights. 
But I ask you, which right is more important, the right to life or the right to have a gun that takes life away? 
(Applause) We thought people would vote in defense of life, but in a country with a recent past of military dictatorship, the anti-government message of our opponents resonated, and we were not prepared to respond. 
Lesson learned. 
We've been more successful in the case of drug policy. 
If you asked most people 10 years ago if an end to the War on Drugs was possible, they would have laughed. 
After all, there are huge military police prisons and financial establishments benefiting from this war. 
But today, the international drug control regime is starting to crumble. 
Governments and civil societies are experimenting with new approaches. 
The Global Commission on Drug Policy really knew its opposition, and rather than fighting them, our chair — former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso — reached out to leaders from across the political spectrum, from liberals to conservatives. 
This high level group agreed to honestly discuss the merits and flaws of drug policies. 
It was this reasoned, informed and strategic discussion that revealed the sad truth about the War on Drugs. 
The War on Drugs has simply failed across every metric. 
Drugs are cheaper and more available than ever, and consumption has risen globally. 
But even worse, it also generated massive negative unintended consequences. 
It is true that some people have made these arguments before, but we've made a difference by anticipating the arguments of our opponents and by leveraging powerful voices that a few years ago would probably have resisted change. 
Third lesson: Use data to drive your argument. 
Guns and drugs are emotive issues, and as we've painfully learned in the gun referendum campaign in Brazil, sometimes it's impossible to cut through the emotions and get to the facts. 
But this doesn't mean that we shouldn't try. 
Until quite recently, we simply didn't know how many Brazilians were killed by guns. 
Amazingly, it was a local soap opera called "" Mulheres Apaixonadas "" — or "" Women in Love "" — that kicked off Brazil's national gun control campaign. 
In one highly viewed episode, a soap opera lead actress was killed by a stray bullet. 
Brazilian grannies and housewives were outraged, and in a case of art imitating life, this episode also included footage of a real gun control march that we had organized right here, outside in Copacabana Beach. 
The televised death and march had a huge impact on public opinion. 
Within weeks, our national congress approved the disarmament bill that had been languishing for years. 
We were then able to mobilize data to show the successful outcomes of the change in the law and gun collection program. 
Here is what I mean: We could prove that in just one year, we saved more than 5,000 lives. 
(Applause) And in the case of drugs, in order to undermine this fear and prejudice that surrounds the issue, we managed to gather and present data that shows that today's drug policies cause much more harm than drug use per se, and people are starting to get it. 
My fourth insight is: Don't be afraid to bring together odd bedfellows. 
What we've learned in Brazil — and this doesn't only apply to my country — is the importance of bringing diverse and eclectic folks together. 
If you want to change the world, it helps to have a good cross-section of society on your side. 
In both the case of guns and drugs, we brought together a wonderful mix of people. 
We mobilized the elite and got huge support from the media. 
We gathered the victims, human rights champions, cultural icons. 
We also assembled the professional classes — doctors, lawyers, academia and more. 
What I've learned over the last years is that you need coalitions of the willing and of the unwilling to make change. 
In the case of drugs, we needed libertarians, anti-prohibitionists, legalizers, and liberal politicians. 
They may not agree on everything; in fact, they disagree on almost everything. 
But the legitimacy of the campaign is based on their diverse points of view. 
Over a decade ago, I had a comfortable future working for an investment bank. 
I was as far removed from the world of civil society diplomacy as you can imagine. 
But I took a chance. 
I changed course, and on the way, I helped to create social movements that I believe have made some parts of the world safer. 
Each and every one of us has the power to change the world. 
No matter what the issue, and no matter how hard the fight, civil society is central to the blueprint for change. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

So here's the most important economic fact of our time. 
We are living in an age of surging income inequality, particularly between those at the very top and everyone else. 
This shift is the most striking in the U.S. and in the U.K., but it's a global phenomenon. 
It's happening in communist China, in formerly communist Russia, it's happening in India, in my own native Canada. 
We're even seeing it in cozy social democracies like Sweden, Finland and Germany. 
Let me give you a few numbers to place what's happening. 
In the 1970s, the One Percent accounted for about 10 percent of the national income in the United States. 
Today, their share has more than doubled to above 20 percent. 
But what's even more striking is what's happening at the very tippy top of the income distribution. 
The 0.1 percent in the U.S. 
today account for more than eight percent of the national income. 
They are where the One Percent was 30 years ago. 
Let me give you another number to put that in perspective, and this is a figure that was calculated in 2005 by Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. 
Reich took the wealth of two admittedly very rich men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and he found that it was equivalent to the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population, 120 million people. 
Now, as it happens, Warren Buffett is not only himself a plutocrat, he is one of the most astute observers of that phenomenon, and he has his own favorite number. 
Buffett likes to point out that in 1992, the combined wealth of the people on the Forbes 400 list — and this is the list of the 400 richest Americans — was 300 billion dollars. 
Just think about it. 
You didn't even need to be a billionaire to get on that list in 1992. 
Well, today, that figure has more than quintupled to 1.7 trillion, and I probably don't need to tell you that we haven't seen anything similar happen to the middle class, whose wealth has stagnated if not actually decreased. 
So we're living in the age of the global plutocracy, but we've been slow to notice it. 
One of the reasons, I think, is a sort of boiled frog phenomenon. 
Changes which are slow and gradual can be hard to notice even if their ultimate impact is quite dramatic. 
Think about what happened, after all, to the poor frog. 
But I think there's something else going on. 
Talking about income inequality, even if you're not on the Forbes 400 list, can make us feel uncomfortable. 
It feels less positive, less optimistic, to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger. 
And if you do happen to be on the Forbes 400 list, talking about income distribution, and inevitably its cousin, income redistribution, can be downright threatening. 
So we're living in the age of surging income inequality, especially at the top. 
What's driving it, and what can we do about it? 
One set of causes is political: lower taxes, deregulation, particularly of financial services, privatization, weaker legal protections for trade unions, all of these have contributed to more and more income going to the very, very top. 
A lot of these political factors can be broadly lumped under the category of "" crony capitalism, "" political changes that benefit a group of well-connected insiders but don't actually do much good for the rest of us. 
In practice, getting rid of crony capitalism is incredibly difficult. 
Think of all the years reformers of various stripes have tried to get rid of corruption in Russia, for instance, or how hard it is to re-regulate the banks even after the most profound financial crisis since the Great Depression, or even how difficult it is to get the big multinational companies, including those whose motto might be "" don't do evil, "" to pay taxes at a rate even approaching that paid by the middle class. 
But while getting rid of crony capitalism in practice is really, really hard, at least intellectually, it's an easy problem. 
After all, no one is actually in favor of crony capitalism. 
Indeed, this is one of those rare issues that unites the left and the right. 
A critique of crony capitalism is as central to the Tea Party as it is to Occupy Wall Street. 
But if crony capitalism is, intellectually at least, the easy part of the problem, things get trickier when you look at the economic drivers of surging income inequality. 
In and of themselves, these aren't too mysterious. 
Globalization and the technology revolution, the twin economic transformations which are changing our lives and transforming the global economy, are also powering the rise of the super-rich. 
Just think about it. 
For the first time in history, if you are an energetic entrepreneur with a brilliant new idea or a fantastic new product, you have almost instant, almost frictionless access to a global market of more than a billion people. 
As a result, if you are very, very smart and very, very lucky, you can get very, very rich very, very quickly. 
The latest poster boy for this phenomenon is David Karp. 
The 26-year-old founder of Tumblr recently sold his company to Yahoo for 1.1 billion dollars. 
Think about that for a minute: 1.1 billion dollars, 26 years old. 
It's easiest to see how the technology revolution and globalization are creating this sort of superstar effect in highly visible fields, like sports and entertainment. 
We can all watch how a fantastic athlete or a fantastic performer can today leverage his or her skills across the global economy as never before. 
But today, that superstar effect is happening across the entire economy. 
We have superstar technologists. 
We have superstar bankers. 
We have superstar lawyers and superstar architects. 
There are superstar cooks and superstar farmers. 
There are even, and this is my personal favorite example, superstar dentists, the most dazzling exemplar of whom is Bernard Touati, the Frenchman who ministers to the smiles of fellow superstars like Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich or European-born American fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. 
But while it's pretty easy to see how globalization and the technology revolution are creating this global plutocracy, what's a lot harder is figuring out what to think about it. 
And that's because, in contrast with crony capitalism, so much of what globalization and the technology revolution have done is highly positive. 
Let's start with technology. 
I love the Internet. I love my mobile devices. 
I love the fact that they mean that whoever chooses to will be able to watch this talk far beyond this auditorium. 
I'm even more of a fan of globalization. 
This is the transformation which has lifted hundreds of millions of the world's poorest people out of poverty and into the middle class, and if you happen to live in the rich part of the world, it's made many new products affordable — who do you think built your iPhone? — and things that we've relied on for a long time much cheaper. 
Think of your dishwasher or your t-shirt. 
So what's not to like? 
Well, a few things. 
One of the things that worries me is how easily what you might call meritocratic plutocracy can become crony plutocracy. 
Imagine you're a brilliant entrepreneur who has successfully sold that idea or that product to the global billions and become a billionaire in the process. 
It gets tempting at that point to use your economic nous to manipulate the rules of the global political economy in your own favor. 
And that's no mere hypothetical example. 
Think about Amazon, Apple, Google, Starbucks. 
These are among the world's most admired, most beloved, most innovative companies. 
They also happen to be particularly adept at working the international tax system so as to lower their tax bill very, very significantly. 
And why stop at just playing the global political and economic system as it exists to your own maximum advantage? 
Once you have the tremendous economic power that we're seeing at the very, very top of the income distribution and the political power that inevitably entails, it becomes tempting as well to start trying to change the rules of the game in your own favor. 
Again, this is no mere hypothetical. 
It's what the Russian oligarchs did in creating the sale-of-the-century privatization of Russia's natural resources. 
It's one way of describing what happened with deregulation of the financial services in the U.S. and the U.K. 
A second thing that worries me is how easily meritocratic plutocracy can become aristocracy. 
One way of describing the plutocrats is as alpha geeks, and they are people who are acutely aware of how important highly sophisticated analytical and quantitative skills are in today's economy. 
That's why they are spending unprecedented time and resources educating their own children. 
The middle class is spending more on schooling too, but in the global educational arms race that starts at nursery school and ends at Harvard, Stanford or MIT, the 99 percent is increasingly outgunned by the One Percent. 
The result is something that economists Alan Krueger and Miles Corak call the Great Gatsby Curve. 
As income inequality increases, social mobility decreases. 
The plutocracy may be a meritocracy, but increasingly you have to be born on the top rung of the ladder to even take part in that race. 
The third thing, and this is what worries me the most, is the extent to which those same largely positive forces which are driving the rise of the global plutocracy also happen to be hollowing out the middle class in Western industrialized economies. 
Let's start with technology. 
Those same forces that are creating billionaires are also devouring many traditional middle-class jobs. 
When's the last time you used a travel agent? 
And in contrast with the industrial revolution, the titans of our new economy aren't creating that many new jobs. 
At its zenith, G.M. employed hundreds of thousands, Facebook fewer than 10,000. 
The same is true of globalization. 
For all that it is raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the emerging markets, it's also outsourcing a lot of jobs from the developed Western economies. 
The terrifying reality is that there is no economic rule which automatically translates increased economic growth into widely shared prosperity. 
That's shown in what I consider to be the most scary economic statistic of our time. 
Since the late 1990s, increases in productivity have been decoupled from increases in wages and employment. 
That means that our countries are getting richer, our companies are getting more efficient, but we're not creating more jobs and we're not paying people, as a whole, more. 
One scary conclusion you could draw from all of this is to worry about structural unemployment. 
What worries me more is a different nightmare scenario. 
After all, in a totally free labor market, we could find jobs for pretty much everyone. 
The dystopia that worries me is a universe in which a few geniuses invent Google and its ilk and the rest of us are employed giving them massages. 
So when I get really depressed about all of this, I comfort myself in thinking about the Industrial Revolution. 
After all, for all its grim, satanic mills, it worked out pretty well, didn't it? 
After all, all of us here are richer, healthier, taller — well, there are a few exceptions — and live longer than our ancestors in the early 19th century. 
But it's important to remember that before we learned how to share the fruits of the Industrial Revolution with the broad swathes of society, we had to go through two depressions, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Long Depression of the 1870s, two world wars, communist revolutions in Russia and in China, and an era of tremendous social and political upheaval in the West. 
We also, not coincidentally, went through an era of tremendous social and political inventions. 
We created the modern welfare state. 
We created public education. 
We created public health care. 
We created public pensions. 
We created unions. 
Today, we are living through an era of economic transformation comparable in its scale and its scope to the Industrial Revolution. 
To be sure that this new economy benefits us all and not just the plutocrats, we need to embark on an era of comparably ambitious social and political change. 
We need a new New Deal. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Good afternoon, good evening, whatever. 
We can go, jambo, guten Abend, bonsoir, but we can also ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. 
That is the call that chimpanzees make before they go to sleep in the evening. 
You hear it going from one side of the valley to the other, from one group of nests to the next. 
And I want to pick up with my talk this evening from where Zeray left off yesterday. 
He was talking about this amazing, three-year-old Australopithecine child, Selam. 
And we've also been hearing about the history, the family tree, of mankind through DNA genetic profiling. 
And it was a paleontologist, the late Louis Leakey, who actually set me on the path for studying chimpanzees. 
And it was pretty extraordinary, way back then. 
It's kind of commonplace now, but his argument was — because he'd been searching for the fossilized remains of early humans in Africa. 
And you can tell an awful lot about what those beings looked like from the fossils, from the shape of the muscle attachments, something about the way they lived from the various artifacts found with them. 
But what about how they behaved? That's what he wanted to know. 
And of course, behavior doesn't fossilize. 
He argued — and it's now a fairly common theory — that if we found behavior patterns similar or the same in our closest living relatives, the great apes, and humans today, then maybe those behaviors were present in the ape-like, human-like ancestor some seven million years ago. 
And therefore, perhaps we had brought those characteristics with us from that ancient, ancient past. 
Well, if you look in textbooks today that deal with human evolution, you very often find people speculating about how early humans may have behaved, based on the behavior of chimpanzees. 
They are more like us than any other living creature, and we've heard about that during this TED Conference. 
So it remains for me to comment on the ways in which chimpanzees are so like us, in certain aspects of their behavior. 
Every chimpanzee has his or her own personality. 
Of course, I gave them names. They can live to be 60 years or more, although we think most of them probably don't make it to 60 in the wild. 
Mr. Wurzel. The female has her first baby when she's 11 or 12. 
Thereafter, she has one baby only every five or six years, a long period of childhood dependency when the child is nursing, sleeping with the mother at night, and riding on her back. 
And we believe that this long period of childhood is important for chimpanzees, just as it is for us, in relation to learning. 
As the brain becomes ever more complex during evolution in different forms of animals, so we find that learning plays an ever more important role in an individual's life history. 
And young chimpanzees spend a lot of time watching what their elders do. 
We know now that they're capable of imitating behaviors that they see. 
And we believe that it's in this way that the different tool-using behaviors — that have now been seen in all the different chimpanzee populations studied in Africa — how these are passed from one generation to the next, through observation, imitation and practice, so that we can describe these tool-using behaviors as primitive culture. 
Chimpanzees don't have a spoken language. We've talked about that. 
They do have a very rich repertoire of postures and gestures, many of which are similar, or even identical, to ours and formed in the same context. Greeting chimpanzees embracing. 
They also kiss, hold hands, pat one another on the back. 
And they swagger and they throw rocks. 
In chimpanzee society, we find many, many examples of compassion, precursors to love and true altruism. 
Unfortunately, they, like us, have a dark side to their nature. 
They're capable of extreme brutality, even a kind of primitive war. 
And these really aggressive behaviors, for the most part, are directed against individuals of the neighboring social group. 
They are very territorially aggressive. 
Chimpanzees, I believe, more than any other living creature, have helped us to understand that, after all, there is no sharp line between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. 
It's a very blurry line, and it's getting more blurry all the time as we make even more observations. 
The study that I began in 1960 is still continuing to this day. 
And these chimpanzees, living their complex social lives in the wild, have helped — more than anything else — to make us realize we are part of, and not separated from, the amazing animals with whom we share the planet. 
So it's pretty sad to find that chimpanzees, like so many other creatures around the world, are losing their habitats. 
This is just one photograph from the air, and it shows you the forested highlands of Gombe. 
And it was when I flew over the whole area, about 16 years ago, and realized that outside the park, this forest, which in 1960 had stretched almost unbroken along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, which is where the tiny, 30-square-mile Gombe National Park lies, that a question came to my mind. 
"" How can we even try to save these famous chimpanzees, when the people living around the National Park are struggling to survive? "" More people are living there than the land could possibly support. 
The numbers increased by refugees pouring in from Burundi and over the lake from Congo. 
And very poor people — they couldn't afford to buy food from elsewhere. 
This led to a program, which we call TACARE. 
It's a very holistic way of improving the lives of the people living in the villages around the park. 
It started small with 12 villages. It's now in 24. 
There isn't time to go into it, but it's including things like tree nurseries, methods of farming most suitable to this now very degraded, almost desert-like land up in these mountains. 
Ways of controlling, preventing soil erosion. 
Ways of reclaiming overused farmland, so that within two years they can again be productive. 
Working to help the villagers obtain fresh water from wells. 
Perhaps build some schoolrooms. 
Most important of all, I believe, is working with small groups of women, providing them with opportunities for micro-credit loans. 
And we've got, as is the case around the world, about 95 percent of all loans returned. 
Empowering women, working with education, providing scholarships for girls so they can finish secondary school, in the clear understanding that, all around the world, as women's education improves, family size drops. 
We provide information about family planning and about HIV / AIDS. 
And as a result of this program, something's happening for conservation. 
What's happening for conservation is that the farmers living in these 24 villages, instead of looking on us as a bunch of white people coming to study a whole bunch of monkeys — and by the way, many of the staff are now Tanzanian — but when we began the TACARE program, it was a Tanzanian team going into the villages. 
It was a Tanzanian team talking to the villagers, asking what they were interested in. 
Were they interested in conservation? Absolutely not. 
They were interested in health; they were interested in education. 
And as time went on, and as their situation began to improve, they began to understand ever more about the need for conservation. 
They began to understand that as the upper levels of the hills were denuded of trees, so you've got this terrible soil erosion and mudslides. 
Today, we are developing what we call the Greater Gombe Ecosystem. 
This is an area way outside the National Park, stretching out into all these very degraded lands. 
And as these villages have a better standard of life, they are actually agreeing to put between 10 percent and 20 percent of their land in the highlands aside, so that once again, as the trees grow back, the chimpanzees will have leafy corridors through which they can travel to interact — as they must for genetic viability — with other remnant groups outside the National Park. 
So TACARE is a success. 
We're replicating it in other parts of Africa, around other wilderness areas which are faced with extreme population pressure. 
The problems in Africa, however, as we've been discussing for the whole of these first couple of days of TED, are major problems. 
There is a great deal of poverty. 
And when you get large numbers of people living in land that is not that fertile, particularly when you cut down trees, and you leave the soil open to the wind for erosion, as desperate populations cut down more and more trees, so that they can try and grow food for themselves and their families, what's going to happen? Something's got to give. 
And the other problems — in not only Africa, but the rest of the developing world and, indeed, everywhere — what are we doing to our planet? 
You know, the famous scientist, E. O. Wilson said that if every person on this planet attains the standard of living of the average European or American, we need three new planets. 
Today, they are saying four. But we don't have them. We've got one. 
And what's happened? I mean, the question here is, here we are, arguably the most intelligent being that's ever walked planet Earth, with this extraordinary brain, capable of the kind of technology that is so well illustrated by these TED Conferences, and yet we're destroying the only home we have. 
The indigenous people around the world, before they made a major decision, used to sit around and ask themselves, "How does this decision affect our people seven generations ahead?" 
Today, major decisions — and I'm not particularly talking about Africa here, but the developed world — major decisions involving millions of dollars, and millions of people, are often based on, "How will this affect the next shareholders' meeting?" 
And these decisions affect Africa. 
As I began traveling around Africa talking about the problems faced by chimpanzees and their vanishing forests, I realized more and more how so many of Africa's problems could be laid at the door of previous colonial exploitation. 
So I began traveling outside Africa, talking in Europe, talking in the United States, going to Asia. 
And everywhere there were these terrible problems. 
And you know the kind I'm talking about. I'm talking about pollution. 
The air that we breathe that often poisons us. 
The earth is poisoning our foods. 
The water — water is perhaps one of the most crucial issues that we're going to face in this century — and everywhere water is being polluted by agricultural, industrial and household chemicals that still are being sprayed around the world, seemingly with the inability to profit from past experience. 
The mangroves are being cut down; the effects of things like the tsunami get worse. 
We've talked about the soil erosion. 
We have the reckless burning of fossil fuels along with other greenhouse gasses, so called, leading to climate change. 
Finally, all around the world, people have begun to believe that there is something going on very wrong with our climate. 
All around the world climates are mixed up. 
And it's the poor people who are affected worse. 
It's Africa that already is affected. 
In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the droughts are so much worse. 
And when the rain does come, it so often leads to flooding and added distress, and the cycle of poverty and hunger and disease. 
And the numbers of people living in an area that the land cannot support, who are too poor to buy food, who can't move away because the whole land is degraded. 
And so you get desertification — creeping, creeping, creeping — as the last of the trees are cut down. 
And this kind of thing is not just in Africa. It's all over the world. 
So it wasn't surprising to me that as I was traveling around the world I met so many young people who seemed to have lost hope. 
We seem to have lost wisdom, the wisdom of the indigenous people. 
I asked a question. "" Why? "" Well, do you think there could be some kind of disconnect between this extraordinarily clever brain, the kind of brain that the TED technologies exemplify, and the human heart? Talking about it in the non-scientific term, in terms of love and compassion. Is there some disconnect? 
And these young people, when I talk to them, basically they were either depressed or apathetic, or bitter and angry. And they said more or less the same thing, "" We feel this way because we feel you've compromised our future and there's nothing we can do about it. "" We have compromised their future. 
I've got three little grandchildren, and every time I look at them and I think how we've harmed this beautiful planet since I was their age, I feel this desperation. 
And that led to this program we call Roots and Shoots, which began right here in Tanzania and has now spread to 97 countries around the world. 
It's symbolic. Roots make a firm foundation. 
Shoots seem tiny; to reach the sun they can break through a brick wall. 
See the brick wall as all these problems we've inflicted on the planet, environmental and social. It's a message of hope. 
Hundreds and thousands of young people around the world can break through and can make this a better world for all living things. 
The most important message of Roots and Shoots: every single one of us makes a difference, every single day. 
We have a choice. Every one of us in this room, we have a choice as to what kind of difference we want to make. 
The very poor have no choice. It's up to us to change things so that the poor have choice as well. 
The Roots and Shoots groups all choose three projects. 
It depends on how old they are, and which country, whether they're in a city or rural, as to what kinds of projects. 
But basically, we have programs now from preschool right through university, with more and more adults starting their own Roots and Shoots groups. 
And every group chooses, between them, three different kinds of project to make this a better world, recognizing that all these different problems are interconnected and impinge on each other. 
So one of their projects will be to help their own human community. 
And then, if they're able, they may raise money to help communities in other parts of the world. 
One of their projects will be to help animals — not just wildlife, domestic animals as well. 
And one of their projects will be to help the environment that we all share. 
And woven throughout all of this is a message of learning to live in peace and harmony within ourselves, in our families, in our communities, between nations, between cultures, between religions and between us and the natural world. 
We need the natural world. We cannot go on destroying it at the rate we are. 
We not do have more than this one planet. 
Just picking one or two of the projects right here in Africa that the Roots and Shoots groups are doing, one or two projects only — in Tanzania, in Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Congo-Brazzaville, Sierra Leone, Cameroon and other groups. And as I say, it's in 97 countries around the world. 
Of course, they're planting trees. They're growing organic vegetables. 
They're working in the refugee camps, with chickens and selling the eggs for a little amount of money, or just using them to feed their families, and feeling a sense of pride and empowerment, because they're no longer helpless and depending on others with their vegetables and their chickens. 
It's being used in Uganda to give some psychological help to ex-child soldiers. 
Doing projects like this is bringing them out of themselves. 
Once again, they're useful members of society. 
We have this program in prisons as well. 
So, there's no time for more Roots and Shoots now. 
But — oh, they're also working on HIV / AIDS. 
That's a very important component of Roots and Shoots, with older kids talking to younger ones. 
And unwanted pregnancies and things like that, which young people listen to better from other youth, rather than adults. 
Hope. That's the question I get asked as I'm going around the world: "" Jane, you've seen so many terrible things, you've seen your chimpanzees decrease in number from about one million, at the turn of the century, to no more than 150,000 now, and the same with so many other animals. 
Forests disappearing, deserts where once there was forest. 
Do you really have hope? "" Well, yes. 
You can't come to a conference like TED and not have hope, can you? 
And of course, there's hope. One is this amazing human brain. 
And I mean, think of the technologies. 
And I've just been so thrilled, finally, to come to people talking about compost latrines. 
It's one of my hobbyhorses. 
We just flush all this water down the lavatory, it's terrible. 
And then talking about renewable energy — desperately important. 
Do we care about the planet for our children? 
How many of us have children or grandchildren, nieces, nephews? 
Do we care about their future? 
And if we care about their future, we, as the elite around the world, we can do something about it. We can make choices as to how we live each day. 
What we buy. What we wear. 
And choose to make these choices with the question, how will this affect the environment around me? 
How will it affect the life of my child when he or she grows up? 
Or my grandchild, or whatever it is. 
So the human brain, coupled with the human heart, and we join hands around the world. 
And that's what TED is helping so well with, and Google who help us, and Esri are helping us with mapping in Gombe National Park. 
All of these technologies we can use. 
Now let's link them, and it's beginning to happen, isn't it? 
You've heard about it this afternoon. It's beginning to happen. 
This change, this change. To see change that we must have if we care about the future. 
And the next reason for hope — nature is amazingly resilient. 
You can take an area that's absolutely destroyed, with time and perhaps some help it can regenerate. 
And an example is the TACARE program. 
I told you, where a seemingly dead tree stump — if you stop hacking them for firewood, which you don't need to because you have wood lots, then in five years you can have a 30-foot tree. 
And animals, almost on the brink of extinction, can be given a second chance. That's my next book. 
It's inspiring. And it brings me to my last category of hope, and we've heard about this so much in the last two days: this indomitable human spirit. This determination of people, the resilience of the human spirit, So that people who you would think would be battered by poverty, or disease, or whatever, can pull themselves up out of it, sometimes with a helping hand, and take their part in society, and take their part in changing the world. 
And just to think of one or two people out of Africa who are just really inspiring. 
We could make a very long list, but obviously Nelson Mandela, emerging from 17 years of hard physical labor, 23 years of imprisonment, with this amazing ability to forgive, so that he could lead his nation out the evil regime of apartheid without a bloodbath. 
Ken Saro-Wiwa, in Nigeria, who took on the giant oil companies, and although people around the world tried their best, was executed. 
People like this are so inspirational. 
People like this are the role models we need for young Africans. 
And we need some environmental role models as well, and I've been hearing some of them today. 
So I'm really grateful for this opportunity to share this message again, with everyone at TED. 
And I hope that some of us can get together and talk about some of these things, especially the Roots and Shoots program. 
And just a last word on that — the young woman who's running this entire conference center, I met her today. 
She came up so excited, with her certificate. She was [in] Roots and Shoots. 
She was in the leadership in Dar es Salaam. 
She said it's helped her to do what she's doing. 
And it was very, very exciting for me to meet her and see just one example of how young people, when they are empowered, given the opportunity to take action, to make the world a better place, truly are our hope for tomorrow. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Roy Gould: Less than a year from now, the world is going to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, which marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first glimpse of the night sky through a telescope. 
In a few months, the world is also going to celebrate the launch of a new invention from Microsoft Research, which I think is going to have as profound an impact on the way we view the universe as Galileo did four centuries ago. 
It's called the WorldWide Telescope, and I want to thank TED and Microsoft for allowing me to bring it to your attention. 
And I want to urge you, when you get a chance, to give it a closer look at the TED Lab downstairs. 
The WorldWide Telescope takes the best images from the world's greatest telescopes on Earth and in space, and has woven them seamlessly to produce a holistic view of the universe. 
It's going to change the way we do astronomy, it's going to change the way we teach astronomy and I think most importantly it's going to change the way we see ourselves in the universe. 
If we were having this TED meeting in our grandparents' day, that might not be so big a claim. 
In 1920, for example, you weren't allowed to drink; if you were a woman, you weren't allowed to vote; and if you looked up at the stars and the Milky Way on a summer night, what you saw was thought to be the entire universe. 
In fact, the head of Harvard's observatory back then gave a great debate in which he argued that the Milky Way Galaxy was the entire universe. 
Harvard was wrong, big time. (Laughter) Of course, we know today that galaxies extend far beyond our own galaxy. 
We can see all the way out to the edge of the observable universe, all the way back in time, almost to the moment of the Big Bang itself. 
We can see across the entire spectrum of light, revealing worlds that had previously been invisible. 
We see these magnificent star nurseries, where nature has somehow arranged for just the right numbers and just the right sizes of stars to be born for life to arise. 
We see alien worlds, we see alien solar systems — 300 now, and still counting — and they're not like us. 
We see black holes at the heart of our galaxy, in the Milky Way, and elsewhere in the universe, where time itself seems to stand still. 
But until now, our view of the universe has been disconnected and fragmented, and I think that many of the marvelous stories that nature has to tell us have fallen through the cracks. And that's changing. 
I want to just briefly mention three reasons why my colleagues and I, in astronomy and in education, are so excited about the WorldWide Telescope and why we think it's truly transformative. 
First, it enables you to experience the universe: the WorldWide Telescope, for me, is a kind of magic carpet that lets you navigate through the universe where you want to go. 
Second: you can tour the universe with astronomers as your guides. 
And I'm not talking here about just experts who are telling you what you're seeing, but really people who are passionate about the various nooks and crannies of the universe, who can share their enthusiasm and can make the universe a welcoming place. 
And third, you can create your own tours — you can share them with friends, you can create them with friends — and that's the part that I think I'm most excited about because I think that at heart, we are all storytellers. 
And in telling stories, each of us is going to understand the universe in our own way. 
We're going to have a personal universe. 
I think we're going to see a community of storytellers evolve and emerge. 
Before I introduce the person responsible for the WorldWide Telescope, I just want to leave you with this brief thought: when I ask people, "" How does the night sky make you feel? "" they often say, "" Oh, tiny. I feel tiny and insignificant. "" Well, our gaze fills the universe. 
And thanks to the creators of the WorldWide Telescope, we can now start to have a dialogue with the universe. 
I think the WorldWide Telescope will convince you that we may be tiny, but we are truly, wonderfully significant. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) I can't tell you what a privilege it is to introduce Curtis Wong from Microsoft. (Applause) Curtis Wong: Thank you, Roy. 
So, what you're seeing here is a wonderful presentation, but it's one of the tours. 
And actually this tour is one that was created earlier. 
And the tours are all totally interactive, so that if I were to go somewhere... 
you may be watching a tour and you can pause anywhere along the way, pull up other information — there are lots of Web and information sources about places you might want to go — you can zoom in, you can pull back out. 
The whole resources are there available for you. 
So, Microsoft — this is a project that — WorldWide Telescope is dedicated to Jim Gray, who's our colleague, and a lot of his work that he did is really what makes this project possible. 
It's a labor of love for us and our small team, and we really hope it will inspire kids to explore and learn about the universe. 
So basically, kids of all ages, like us. 
And so WorldWide Telescope will be available this spring. 
It'll be a free download — thank you, Craig Mundie — and it'll be available at the website WorldWideTelescope.org, which is something new. 
And so, what you've seen today is less than a fraction of one percent of what is in here, and in the TED Lab, we have a tour that was created by a six-year-old named Benjamin that will knock your socks off. (Laughter) So we'll see you there. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I was a Marine with 1 / 1 Weapons Company, 81's platoon, out in Camp Pendleton, California. 
Oorah! 
Audience: Oorah! 
(Laughter) I joined a few months after September 11, feeling like I think most people in the country did at the time, filled with a sense of patriotism and retribution and the desire to do something — that, coupled with that fact that I wasn't doing anything. 
I was 17, just graduated from high school that past summer, living in the back room of my parents' house paying rent, in the small town I was raised in in Northern Indiana, called Mishawaka. 
I can spell that later for people who are interested — (Laughter) Mishawaka is many good things but cultural hub of the world it is not, so my only exposure to theater and film was limited to the plays I did in high school and Blockbuster Video, may she rest in peace. (Laughter) 
I was serious enough about acting that I auditioned for Juilliard when I was a senior in high school, didn't get in, determined college wasn't for me and applied nowhere else, which was a genius move. 
I also did that Hail Mary LA acting odyssey that I always heard stories about, of actors moving to LA with, like, seven dollars and finding work and successful careers. 
I got as far as Amarillo, Texas, before my car broke down. 
I spent all my money repairing it, finally made it to Santa Monica — not even LA — stayed for 48 hours wandering the beach, basically, got in my car, drove home, thus ending my acting career, so — (Laughter) Seventeen, Mishawaka... 
parents' house, paying rent, selling vacuums... 
telemarketing, cutting grass at the local 4-H fairgrounds. 
This was my world going into September, 2001. 
So after the 11th, and feeling an overwhelming sense of duty, and just being pissed off in general — at myself, my parents, the government; not having confidence, not having a respectable job, my shitty mini-fridge that I just drove to California and back — I joined the Marine Corps and loved it. I loved being a Marine. 
It's one of the things I'm most proud of having done in my life. 
Firing weapons was cool, driving and detonating expensive things was great. 
But I found I loved the Marine Corps the most for the thing I was looking for the least when I joined, which was the people: these weird dudes — a motley crew of characters from a cross section of the United States — that on the surface I had nothing in common with. 
And over time, all the political and personal bravado that led me to the military dissolved, and for me, the Marine Corps became synonymous with my friends. 
And then, a few years into my service and months away from deploying to Iraq, I dislocated my sternum in a mountain-biking accident, and had to be medically separated. 
Those never in the military may find this hard to understand, but being told I wasn't getting deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan was very devastating for me. 
I have a very clear image of leaving the base hospital on a stretcher and my entire platoon is waiting outside to see if I was OK. 
And then, suddenly, I was a civilian again. 
I knew I wanted to give acting another shot, because — again, this is me — I thought all civilian problems are small compared to the military. 
I mean, what can you really bitch about now, you know? 
"" It's hot. 
Someone should turn on the air conditioner. "" "This coffee line is too long." 
I was a Marine, I knew how to survive. 
I'd go to New York and become an actor. 
If things didn't work out, I'd live in Central Park and dumpster-dive behind Panera Bread. 
(Laughter) I re-auditioned for Juilliard and this time I was lucky, I got in. 
But I was surprised by how complex the transition was from military to civilian. 
And I was relatively healthy; I can't imagine going through that process on top of a mental or physical injury. 
But regardless, it was difficult. 
In part, because I was in acting school — I couldn't justify going to voice and speech class, throwing imaginary balls of energy at the back of the room, doing acting exercises where I gave birth to myself — (Laughter) while my friends were serving without me overseas. 
But also, because I didn't know how to apply the things I learned in the military to a civilian context. 
I mean that both practically and emotionally. 
Practically, I had to get a job. 
And I was an Infantry Marine, where you're shooting machine guns and firing mortars. 
There's not a lot of places you can put those skills in the civilian world. 
(Laughter) Emotionally, I struggled to find meaning. 
In the military, everything has meaning. 
Everything you do is either steeped in tradition or has a practical purpose. 
You can't smoke in the field because you don't want to give away your position. 
You don't touch your face — you have to maintain a personal level of health and hygiene. 
You face this way when "" Colors "" plays, out of respect for people who went before you. 
Walk this way, talk this way because of this. 
Your uniform is maintained to the inch. 
How diligently you followed those rules spoke volumes about the kind of Marine you were. 
Your rank said something about your history and the respect you had earned. 
In the civilian world there's no rank. 
Here you're just another body, and I felt like I constantly had to prove my worth all over again. 
And the respect civilians were giving me while I was in uniform didn't exist when I was out of it. 
There didn't seem to be a... 
a sense of community, whereas in the military, I felt this sense of community. 
How often in the civilian world are you put in a life-or-death situation with your closest friends and they constantly demonstrate that they're not going to abandon you? 
And meanwhile, at acting school... 
(Laughter) I was really, for the first time, discovering playwrights and characters and plays that had nothing to do with the military, but were somehow describing my military experience in a way that before to me was indescribable. 
And I felt myself becoming less aggressive as I was able to put words to feelings for the first time and realizing what a valuable tool that was. 
And when I was reflecting on my time in the military, I wasn't first thinking on the stereotypical drills and discipline and pain of it; but rather, the small, intimate human moments, moments of great feeling: friends going AWOL because they missed their families, friends getting divorced, grieving together, celebrating together, all within the backdrop of the military. 
I saw my friends battling these circumstances, and I watched the anxiety it produced in them and me, not being able to express our feelings about it. 
The military and theater communities are actually very similar. 
You have a group of people trying to accomplish a mission greater than themselves; it's not about you. 
You have a role, you have to know your role within that team. 
Every team has a leader or director; sometimes they're smart, sometimes they're not. 
You're forced to be intimate with complete strangers in a short amount of time; the self-discipline, the self-maintenance. 
I thought, how great would it be to create a space that combined these two seemingly dissimilar communities, that brought entertainment to a group of people that, considering their occupation, could handle something a bit more thought-provoking than the typical mandatory-fun events that I remember being "" volun-told "" to go to in the military — (Laughter) all well-intended but slightly offensive events, like "" Win a Date with a San Diego Chargers Cheerleader, "" where you answer a question about pop culture, and if you get it right you win a date, which was a chaperoned walk around the parade deck with this already married, pregnant cheerleader — (Laughter) 
Nothing against cheerleaders, I love cheerleaders. 
The point is more, how great would it be to have theater presented through characters that were accessible without being condescending. 
So we started this nonprofit called Arts in the Armed Forces, where we tried to do that, tried to join these two seemingly dissimilar communities. 
We pick a play or select monologues from contemporary American plays that are diverse in age and race like a military audience is, grab a group of incredible theater-trained actors, arm them with incredible material, keep production value as minimal as possible — no sets, no costumes, no lights, just reading it — to throw all the emphasis on the language and to show that theater can be created at any setting. 
It's a powerful thing, getting in a room with complete strangers and reminding ourselves of our humanity, and that self-expression is just as valuable a tool as a rifle on your shoulder. 
And for an organization like the military, that prides itself on having acronyms for acronyms, you can get lost in the sauce when it comes to explaining a collective experience. 
And I can think of no better community to arm with a new means of self-expression than those protecting our country. 
We've gone all over the United States and the world, from Walter Reed in Bethesda, Maryland, to Camp Pendleton, to Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, to USAG Bavaria, on- and off-Broadway theaters in New York. 
And for the performing artists we bring, it's a window into a culture they otherwise would not have had exposure to. 
And for the military, it's the exact same. 
And in doing this for the past six years, I'm always reminded that acting is many things. 
It's a craft, it's a political act, it's a business, it's — whatever adjective is most applicable to you. 
But it's also a service. 
I didn't get to finish mine, so whenever I get to be of service to this ultimate service industry, the military, for me, again — there's not many things better than that. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) We're going to be doing a piece from Marco Ramirez, called "" I am not Batman. "" An incredible actor and good friend of mine, Jesse Perez, is going to be reading, and Matt Johnson, who I just met a couple hours ago. 
They're doing it together for the first time, so we'll see how it goes. 
Jesse Perez and Matt Johnson. 
(Applause) Jesse Perez: It's the middle of the night and the sky is glowing like mad, radioactive red. 
And if you squint, you can maybe see the moon through a thick layer of cigarette smoke and airplane exhaust that covers the whole city, like a mosquito net that won't let the angels in. 
(Drum beat) And if you look up high enough, you can see me standing on the edge of an 87-story building. 
And up there, a place for gargoyles and broken clock towers that have stayed still and dead for maybe like 100 years, up there is me. 
(Beat) And I'm frickin 'Batman. (Beat) 
And I gots Batmobiles and batarangs and frickin 'bat caves, like, for real. 
And all it takes is a broom closet or a back room or a fire escape, and Danny's hand-me-down jeans are gone. 
And my navy blue polo shirt, the one that looks kinda good on me but has that hole on it near the butt from when it got snagged on the chain-link fence behind Arturo's but it isn't even a big deal because I tuck that part in and it's, like, all good. 
That blue polo shirt — it's gone, too! 
And I get like, like... transformational. 
(Beat) And nobody pulls out a belt and whips Batman for talkin 'back. (Beat) 
Or for not talkin 'back. 
And nobody calls Batman simple or stupid or skinny. 
And nobody fires Batman's brother from the Eastern Taxi Company 'cause they was making cutbacks, neither. 
'Cause they got nothing but respect. 
And not like afraid-respect, just, like, respect-respect. 
(Laughter) 'Cause nobody's afraid of you. 
'Cause Batman doesn't mean nobody no harm. 
(Beat) Ever. (Double beat) 'Cause all Batman really wants to do is save people and maybe pay abuela's bills one day and die happy. 
And maybe get, like, mad-famous for real. 
(Laughter) Oh — and kill the Joker. 
(Drum roll) Tonight, like most nights, I'm all alone. 
And I'm watchin 'and I'm waitin' like a eagle or like a — no, yeah, like a eagle. 
(Laughter) And my cape is flapping in the wind cause it's frickin 'long and my pointy ears are on, and that mask that covers like half my face is on, too, and I got, like, bulletproof stuff all in my chest so no one can hurt me. 
And nobody — nobody! — is gonna come between Batman... 
and justice. 
(Drums) (Laughter) From where I am, I can hear everything. 
(Silence) Somewhere in the city, there's a old lady picking Styrofoam leftovers up out of a trash can and she's putting a piece of sesame chicken someone spit out into her own mouth. 
And somewhere there's a doctor with a wack haircut in a black lab coat trying to find a cure for the diseases that are gonna make us all extinct for real one day. 
And somewhere there's a man, a man in a janitor's uniform, stumbling home drunk and dizzy after spending half his paycheck on 40-ounce bottles of twist-off beer, and the other half on a four-hour visit to some lady's house on a street where the lights have all been shot out by people who'd rather do what they do in this city in the dark. 
And half a block away from janitor man, there's a group of good-for-nothings who don't know no better, waiting for janitor man with rusted bicycle chains and imitation Louisville Sluggers, and if they don't find a cent on him, which they won't, they'll just pound at him till the muscles in their arms start burning, till there's no more teeth to crack out. 
But they don't count on me. 
They don't count on no Dark Knight, with a stomach full of grocery-store brand macaroni and cheese and cut-up Vienna sausages. 
(Laughter) 'Cause they'd rather believe I don't exist. 
And from 87 stories up, I can hear one of the good-for-nothings say, "" Gimme the cash! "" — real fast like that, just, "" Gimme me the fuckin 'cash! "" And I see janitor man mumble something in drunk language and turn pale, and from 87 stories up, I can hear his stomach trying to hurl its way out his Dickies. 
So I swoop down, like, mad-fast and I'm like darkness, I'm like, "" Swoosh! "" And I throw a batarang at the one naked lightbulb. 
(Cymbal) And they're all like, "" Whoa, muthafucker! 
Who just turned out the lights? "" (Laughter) "What's that over there?" "What?" 
"Gimme me what you got, old man!" 
"Did anybody hear that?" 
"Hear what? There ain't nothing. No, really — there ain't no bat!" 
But then... 
one out of the three good-for-nothings gets it to the head — pow! 
And number two swings blindly into the dark cape before him, but before his fist hits anything, I grab a trash can lid and — right in the gut! 
And number one comes back with the jump kick, but I know judo karate, too, so I'm like — (Drums) Twice! (Drums) 
(Laughter) (Drums) But before I can do any more damage, suddenly we all hear a "" click-click. "" And suddenly everything gets quiet. 
And the one good-for-nothing left standing grips a handgun and aims it straight up, like he's holding Jesus hostage, like he's threatening maybe to blow a hole in the moon. 
And the good-for-nothing who got it to the head, who tried to jump-kick me, and the other good-for-nothing who got it in the gut, is both scrambling back away from the dark figure before 'em. 
And the drunk man, the janitor man, is huddled in a corner, praying to Saint Anthony 'cause that's the only one he could remember. 
(Double beat) And there's me: eyes glowing white, cape blowing softly in the wind. 
(Beat) Bulletproof chest heaving, my heart beating right through it in a Morse code for: "" Fuck with me just once come on just try. "" And the one good-for-nothing left standing, the one with the handgun — yeah, he laughs. 
And he lowers his arm. 
And he points it at me and gives the moon a break. 
And he aims it right between my pointy ears, like goal posts and he's special teams. 
And janitor man is still calling Saint Anthony, but he ain't pickin 'up. 
And for a second, it seems like... 
maybe I'm gonna lose. 
Nah! 
(Drums) Shoot! Shoot! Fwa-ka-ka! 
"Don't kill me, man!" 
Snap! Wrist crack! Neck! Slash! 
Skin meets acid: "" Ahhhhhhh! "" And he's on the floor and I'm standing over him and I got the gun in my hands now and I hate guns, I hate holding 'em' cause I'm Batman. 
And, asterisk: Batman don't like guns' cause his parents got iced by guns a long time ago. 
But for just a second, my eyes glow white, and I hold this thing for I could speak to the good-for-nothing in a language he maybe understands. 
Click-click! 
(Beat) And the good-for-nothings become good-for-disappearing into whatever toxic waste, chemical sludge shithole they crawled out of. 
And it's just me and janitor man. 
And I pick him up, and I wipe sweat and cheap perfume off his forehead. 
And he begs me not to hurt him and I grab him tight by his janitor-man shirt collar, and I pull him to my face and he's taller than me but the cape helps, so he listens when I look him straight in the eyes. 
And I say two words to him: "Go home." 
And he does, checking behind his shoulder every 10 feet. 
And I swoosh from building to building on his way there 'cause I know where he lives. 
And I watch his hands tremble as he pulls out his key chain and opens the door to his building. 
And I'm back in bed before he even walks in through the front door. 
And I hear him turn on the faucet and pour himself a glass of warm tap water. 
And he puts the glass back in the sink. 
And I hear his footsteps. 
And they get slower as they get to my room. 
And he creaks my door open, like, mad-slow. 
And he takes a step in, which he never does. 
(Beat) And he's staring off into nowhere, his face, the color of sidewalks in summer. 
And I act like I'm just waking up and I say, "" Ah, what's up, Pop? "" And janitor man says nothing to me. 
But I see in the dark, I see his arms go limp and his head turns back, like, towards me. 
And he lifts it for I can see his face, for I could see his eyes. 
And his cheeks is drippin ', but not with sweat. 
And he just stands there breathing, like he remembers my eyes glowing white, like he remembers my bulletproof chest, like he remembers he's my pop. 
And for a long time I don't say nothin '. 
And he turns around, hand on the doorknob. 
And he ain't looking my way, but I hear him mumble two words to me: "I'm sorry." 
And I lean over, and I open my window just a crack. 
If you look up high enough, you could see me. 
And from where I am — (Cymbals) I could hear everything. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

I just did something I've never done before. 
I spent a week at sea on a research vessel. 
Now I'm not a scientist, but I was accompanying a remarkable scientific team from the University of South Florida who have been tracking the travels of BP's oil in the Gulf of Mexico. 
This is the boat we were on, by the way. 
The scientists I was with were not studying the effect of the oil and dispersants on the big stuff — the birds, the turtles, the dolphins, the glamorous stuff. 
They're looking at the really little stuff that gets eaten by the slightly less little stuff that eventually gets eaten by the big stuff. 
And what they're finding is that even trace amounts of oil and dispersants can be highly toxic to phytoplankton, which is very bad news, because so much life depends on it. 
So contrary to what we heard a few months back about how 75 percent of that oil sort of magically disappeared and we didn't have to worry about it, this disaster is still unfolding. 
It's still working its way up the food chain. 
Now this shouldn't come as a surprise to us. 
Rachel Carson — the godmother of modern environmentalism — warned us about this very thing back in 1962. 
She pointed out that the "" control men "" — as she called them — who carpet-bombed towns and fields with toxic insecticides like DDT, were only trying to kill the little stuff, the insects, not the birds. 
But they forgot this: the fact that birds dine on grubs, that robins eat lots of worms now saturated with DDT. 
And so, robin eggs failed to hatch, songbirds died en masse, towns fell silent. 
Thus the title "" Silent Spring. "" I've been trying to pinpoint what keeps drawing me back to the Gulf of Mexico, because I'm Canadian, and I can draw no ancestral ties. 
And I think what it is is I don't think we have fully come to terms with the meaning of this disaster, with what it meant to witness a hole ripped in our world, with what it meant to watch the contents of the Earth gush forth on live TV, 24 hours a day, for months. 
After telling ourselves for so long that our tools and technology can control nature, suddenly we were face-to-face with our weakness, with our lack of control, as the oil burst out of every attempt to contain it — "top hats," "top kills" and, most memorably, the "" junk shot "" — the bright idea of firing old tires and golf balls down that hole in the world. 
But even more striking than the ferocious power emanating from that well was the recklessness with which that power was unleashed — the carelessness, the lack of planning that characterized the operation from drilling to clean-up. 
If there is one thing BP's watery improv act made clear, it is that, as a culture, we have become far too willing to gamble with things that are precious and irreplaceable, and to do so without a back-up plan, without an exit strategy. 
And BP was hardly our first experience of this in recent years. 
Our leaders barrel into wars, telling themselves happy stories about cakewalks and welcome parades. 
Then, it is years of deadly damage control, Frankensteins of sieges and surges and counter-insurgencies, and once again, no exit strategy. 
Our financial wizards routinely fall victim to similar overconfidence, convincing themselves that the latest bubble is a new kind of market — the kind that never goes down. 
And when it inevitably does, the best and the brightest reach for the financial equivalent of the junk shot — in this case, throwing massive amounts of much-needed public money down a very different kind of hole. 
As with BP, the hole does get plugged, at least temporarily, but not before exacting a tremendous price. 
We have to figure out why we keep letting this happen, because we are in the midst of what may be our highest-stakes gamble of all — deciding what to do, or not to do, about climate change. 
Now as you know, a great deal of time is spent, in this country and around the world, inside the climate debate, on the question of, "" What if the IPC scientists are all wrong? "" Now a far more relevant question — as MIT physicist Evelyn Fox Keller puts it — is, "" What if those scientists are right? "" Given the stakes, the climate crisis clearly calls for us to act based on the precautionary principle — the theory that holds that when human health and the environment are significantly at risk and when the potential damage is irreversible, we cannot afford to wait 
for perfect scientific certainty. 
Better to err on the side of caution. 
More overt, the burden of proving that a practice is safe should not be placed on the public that would be harmed, but rather on the industry that stands to profit. 
But climate policy in the wealthy world — to the extent that such a thing exists — is not based on precaution, but rather on cost-benefit analysis — finding the course of action that economists believe will have the least impact on our GDP. 
So rather than asking, as precaution would demand, what can we do as quickly as possible to avoid potential catastrophe, we ask bizarre questions like this: "" What is the latest possible moment we can wait before we begin seriously lowering emissions? 
Can we put this off till 2020, 2030, 2050? "" Or we ask, "" How much hotter can we let the planet get and still survive? 
Can we go with two degrees, three degrees, or — where we're currently going — four degrees Celsius? "" And by the way, the assumption that we can safely control the Earth's awesomely complex climate system as if it had a thermostat, making the planet not too hot, not too cold, but just right — sort of Goldilocks style — this is pure fantasy, and it's not coming from the climate scientists. 
It's coming from the economists imposing their mechanistic thinking on the science. 
The fact is that we simply don't know when the warming that we create will be utterly overwhelmed by feedback loops. 
So once again, why do we take these crazy risks with the precious? 
A range of explanations may be popping into your mind by now, like "" greed. "" This is a popular explanation, and there's lots of truth to it, because taking big risks, as we all know, pays a lot of money. 
Another explanation that you often hear for recklessness is hubris. 
And greed and hubris are intimately intertwined when it comes to recklessness. 
For instance, if you happen to be a 35-year-old banker taking home 100 times more than a brain surgeon, then you need a narrative, you need a story that makes that disparity okay. 
And you actually don't have a lot of options. 
You're either an incredibly good scammer, and you're getting away with it — you gamed the system — or you're some kind of boy genius, the likes of which the world has never seen. 
Now both of these options — the boy genius and the scammer — are going to make you vastly overconfident and therefore more prone to taking even bigger risks in the future. 
By the way, Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BP, had a plaque on his desk inscribed with this inspirational slogan: "" What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? "" Now this is actually a popular plaque, and this is a crowd of overachievers, so I'm betting that some of you have this plaque. 
Don't feel ashamed. 
Putting fear of failure out of your mind can be a very good thing if you're training for a triathlon or preparing to give a TEDTalk, but personally, I think people with the power to detonate our economy and ravage our ecology would do better having a picture of Icarus hanging from the wall, because — maybe not that one in particular — but I want them thinking about the possibility of failure all of the time. 
So we have greed, we've got overconfidence / hubris, but since we're here at TEDWomen, let's consider one other factor that could be contributing in some small way to societal recklessness. 
Now I'm not going to belabor this point, but studies do show that, as investors, women are much less prone to taking reckless risks than men, precisely because, as we've already heard, women tend not to suffer from overconfidence in the same way that men do. 
So it turns out that being paid less and praised less has its upsides — for society at least. 
The flipside of this is that constantly being told that you are gifted, chosen and born to rule has distinct societal downsides. 
And this problem — call it the "" perils of privilege "" — brings us closer, I think, to the root of our collective recklessness. 
Because none of us — at least in the global North — neither men nor women, are fully exempt from this message. 
Here's what I'm talking about. 
Whether we actively believe them or consciously reject them, our culture remains in the grips of certain archetypal stories about our supremacy over others and over nature — the narrative of the newly discovered frontier and the conquering pioneer, the narrative of manifest destiny, the narrative of apocalypse and salvation. 
And just when you think these stories are fading into history, and that we've gotten over them, they pop up in the strangest places. 
For instance, I stumbled across this advertisement outside the women's washroom in the Kansas City airport. 
It's for Motorola's new Rugged cell phone, and yes, it really does say, "Slap Mother Nature in the face." 
And I'm not just showing it to pick on Motorola — that's just a bonus. 
I'm showing it because — they're not a sponsor, are they? — because, in its own way, this is a crass version of our founding story. 
We slapped Mother Nature around and won, and we always win, because dominating nature is our destiny. 
But this is not the only fairytale we tell ourselves about nature. 
There's another one, equally important, about how that very same Mother Nature is so nurturing and so resilient that we can never make a dent in her abundance. 
Let's hear from Tony Hayward again. 
"" The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. 
The amount of oil and dispersants that we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume. "" In other words, the ocean is big; she can take it. 
It is this underlying assumption of limitlessness that makes it possible to take the reckless risks that we do. 
Because this is our real master-narrative: however much we mess up, there will always be more — more water, more land, more untapped resources. 
A new bubble will replace the old one. 
A new technology will come along to fix the messes we made with the last one. 
In a way, that is the story of the settling of the Americas, the supposedly inexhaustible frontier to which Europeans escaped. 
And it's also the story of modern capitalism, because it was the wealth from this land that gave birth to our economic system, one that cannot survive without perpetual growth and an unending supply of new frontiers. 
Now the problem is that the story was always a lie. 
The Earth always did have limits. 
They were just beyond our sights. 
And now we are hitting those limits on multiple fronts. 
I believe that we know this, yet we find ourselves trapped in a kind of narrative loop. 
Not only do we continue to tell and retell the same tired stories, but we are now doing so with a frenzy and a fury that, frankly, verges on camp. 
How else to explain the cultural space occupied by Sarah Palin? 
Now on the one hand, exhorting us to "" drill, baby, drill, "" because God put those resources into the ground in order for us to exploit them, and on the other, glorying in the wilderness of Alaska's untouched beauty on her hit reality TV show. 
The twin message is as comforting as it is mad. 
Ignore those creeping fears that we have finally hit the wall. 
There are still no limits. 
There will always be another frontier. 
So stop worrying and keep shopping. 
Now, would that this were just about Sarah Palin and her reality TV show. 
In environmental circles, we often hear that, rather than shifting to renewables, we are continuing with business as usual. 
This assessment, unfortunately, is far too optimistic. 
The truth is that we have already exhausted so much of the easily accessible fossil fuels that we have already entered a far riskier business era, the era of extreme energy. 
So that means drilling for oil in the deepest water, including the icy Arctic seas, where a clean-up may simply be impossible. 
It means large-scale hydraulic fracking for gas and massive strip-mining operations for coal, the likes of which we haven't yet seen. 
And most controversially, it means the tar sands. 
I'm always surprised by how little people outside of Canada know about the Alberta Tar Sands, which this year are projected to become the number one source of imported oil to the United States. 
It's worth taking a moment to understand this practice, because I believe it speaks to recklessness and the path we're on like little else. 
So this is where the tar sands live, under one of the last magnificent Boreal forests. 
The oil is not liquid. 
You can't just drill a hole and pump it out. 
Tar sand's oil is solid, mixed in with the soil. 
So to get at it, you first have to get rid of the trees. 
Then, you rip off the topsoil and get at that oily sand. 
The process requires a huge amount of water, which is then pumped into massive toxic tailing ponds. 
That's very bad news for local indigenous people living downstream who are reporting alarmingly high cancer rates. 
Now looking at these images, it's difficult to grasp the scale of this operation, which can already be seen from space and could grow to an area the size of England. 
I find it helps actually to look at the dump trucks that move the earth, the largest ever built. 
That's a person down there by the wheel. 
My point is that this is not oil drilling. 
It's not even mining. 
It is terrestrial skinning. 
Vast, vivid landscapes are being gutted, left monochromatic gray. 
Now I should confess that as [far as] I'm concerned this would be an abomination if it emitted not one particle of carbon. 
But the truth is that, on average, turning that gunk into crude oil produces about three times more greenhouse gas pollution than it does to produce conventional oil in Canada. 
How else to describe this, but as a form of mass insanity? 
Just when we know we need to be learning to live on the surface of our planet, off the power of sun, wind and waves, we are frantically digging to get at the dirtiest, highest-emitting stuff imaginable. 
This is where our story of endless growth has taken us, to this black hole at the center of my country — a place of such planetary pain that, like the BP gusher, one can only stand to look at it for so long. 
As Jared Diamond and others have shown us, this is how civilizations commit suicide, by slamming their foot on the accelerator at the exact moment when they should be putting on the brakes. 
The problem is that our master-narrative has an answer for that too. 
At the very last minute, we are going to get saved just like in every Hollywood movie, just like in the Rapture. 
But, of course, our secular religion is technology. 
Now, you may have noticed more and more headlines like these. 
The idea behind this form of "" geoengineering "" as it's called, is that, as the planet heats up, we may be able to shoot sulfates and aluminum particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun's rays back to space, thereby cooling the planet. 
The wackiest plan — and I'm not making this up — would put what is essentially a garden hose 18-and-a-half miles high into the sky, suspended by balloons, to spew sulfur dioxide. 
So, solving the problem of pollution with more pollution. 
Think of it as the ultimate junk shot. 
The serious scientists involved in this research all stress that these techniques are entirely untested. 
They don't know if they'll work, and they have no idea what kind of terrifying side effects they could unleash. 
Nevertheless, the mere mention of geoengineering is being greeted in some circles, particularly media circles, with a relief tinged with euphoria. 
An escape hatch has been reached. 
A new frontier has been found. 
Most importantly, we don't have to change our lifestyles after all. 
You see, for some people, their savior is a guy in a flowing robe. 
For other people, it's a guy with a garden hose. 
We badly need some new stories. 
We need stories that have different kinds of heroes willing to take different kinds of risks — risks that confront recklessness head on, that put the precautionary principle into practice, even if that means through direct action — like hundreds of young people willing to get arrested, blocking dirty power plants or fighting mountaintop-removal coal mining. We need stories 
that replace that linear narrative of endless growth with circular narratives that remind us that what goes around comes around. 
That this is our only home. 
There is no escape hatch. 
Call it karma, call it physics, action and reaction, call it precaution — the principle that reminds us that life is too precious to be risked for any profit. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

There's actually a major health crisis today in terms of the shortage of organs. 
The fact is that we're living longer. 
Medicine has done a much better job of making us live longer, and the problem is, as we age, our organs tend to fail more, and so currently there are not enough organs to go around. 
In fact, in the last 10 years, the number of patients requiring an organ has doubled, while in the same time, the actual number of transplants has barely gone up. 
So this is now a public health crisis. 
So that's where this field comes in that we call the field of regenerative medicine. 
It really involves many different areas. 
You can use, actually, scaffolds, biomaterials — they're like the piece of your blouse or your shirt — but specific materials you can actually implant in patients and they will do well and help you regenerate. 
Or we can use cells alone, either your very own cells or different stem cell populations. 
Or we can use both. 
We can use, actually, biomaterials and the cells together. 
And that's where the field is today. 
But it's actually not a new field. 
Interestingly, this is a book that was published back in 1938. 
It's titled "" The Culture of Organs. "" The first author, Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize winner. 
He actually devised some of the same technologies used today for suturing blood vessels, and some of the blood vessel grafts we use today were actually designed by Alexis. 
But I want you to note his co-author: Charles Lindbergh. 
That's the same Charles Lindbergh who actually spent the rest of his life working with Alexis at the Rockefeller Institute in New York in the area of the culture of organs. 
So if the field's been around for so long, why so few clinical advances? 
And that really has to do to many different challenges. 
But if I were to point to three challenges, the first one is actually the design of materials that could go in your body and do well over time. 
And many advances now, we can do that fairly readily. 
The second challenge was cells. 
We could not get enough of your cells to grow outside of your body. 
Over the last 20 years, we've basically tackled that. 
Many scientists can now grow many different types of cells. 
Plus we have stem cells. 
But even now, 2011, there's still certain cells that we just can't grow from the patient. 
Liver cells, nerve cells, pancreatic cells — we still can't grow them even today. 
And the third challenge is vascularity, the actual supply of blood to allow those organs or tissues to survive once we regenerate them. 
So we can actually use biomaterials now. 
This is actually a biomaterial. 
We can weave them, knit them, or we can make them like you see here. 
This is actually like a cotton candy machine. 
You saw the spray going in. 
That was like the fibers of the cotton candy creating this structure, this tubularized structure, which is a biomaterial that we can then use to help your body regenerate using your very own cells to do so. 
And that's exactly what we did here. 
This is actually a patient who [was] presented with a deceased organ, and we then created one of these smart biomaterials, and then we then used that smart biomaterial to replace and repair that patient's structure. 
What we did was we actually used the biomaterial as a bridge so that the cells in the organ could walk on that bridge, if you will, and help to bridge the gap to regenerate that tissue. 
And you see that patient now six months after with an X-ray showing you the regenerated tissue, which is fully regenerated when you analyze it under the microscope. 
We can also use cells alone. 
These are actually cells that we obtained. 
These are stem cells that we create from specific sources, and we can drive them to become heart cells, and they start beating in culture. 
So they know what to do. 
The cells genetically know what to do, and they start beating together. 
Now today, many clinical trials are using different kinds of stem cells for heart disease. 
So that's actually now in patients. 
Or if we're going to use larger structures to replace larger structures, we can then use the patient's own cells, or some cell population, and the biomaterials, the scaffolds, together. 
So the concept here: so if you do have a deceased or injured organ, we take a very small piece of that tissue, less than half the size of a postage stamp. 
We then tease the cells apart, we grow the cells outside the body. 
We then take a scaffold, a biomaterial — again, looks very much like a piece of your blouse or your shirt — we then shape that material, and we then use those cells to coat that material one layer at a time — very much like baking a layer cake, if you will. 
We then place it in an oven-like device, and we're able to create that structure and bring it out. 
This is actually a heart valve that we've engineered, and you can see here, we have the structure of the heart valve and we've seeded that with cells, and then we exercise it. 
So you see the leaflets opening and closing — of this heart valve that's currently being used experimentally to try to get it to further studies. 
Another technology that we have used in patients actually involves bladders. 
We actually take a very small piece of the bladder from the patient — less than half the size of a postage stamp. 
We then grow the cells outside the body, take the scaffold, coat the scaffold with the cells — the patient's own cells, two different cell types. 
We then put it in this oven-like device. 
It has the same conditions as the human body — 37 degrees centigrade, 95 percent oxygen. 
A few weeks later, you have your engineered organ that we're able to implant back into the patient. 
For these specific patients, we actually just suture these materials. 
We use three-dimensional imagining analysis, but we actually created these biomaterials by hand. 
But we now have better ways to create these structures with the cells. 
We use now some type of technologies, where for solid organs, for example, like the liver, what we do is we take discard livers. 
As you know, a lot of organs are actually discarded, not used. 
So we can take these liver structures, which are not going to be used, and we then put them in a washing machine-like structure that will allow the cells to be washed away. 
Two weeks later, you have something that looks like a liver. 
You can hold it like a liver, but it has no cells; it's just a skeleton of the liver. 
And we then can re-perfuse the liver with cells, preserving the blood vessel tree. 
So we actually perfuse first the blood vessel tree with the patient's own blood vessel cells, and we then infiltrate the parenchyma with the liver cells. 
And we now have been able just to show the creation of human liver tissue just this past month using this technology. 
Another technology that we've used is actually that of printing. 
This is actually a desktop inkjet printer, but instead of using ink, we're using cells. 
And you can actually see here the printhead going through and printing this structure, and it takes about 40 minutes to print this structure. 
And there's a 3D elevator that then actually goes down one layer at a time each time the printhead goes through. 
And then finally you're able to get that structure out. 
You can pop that structure out of the printer and implant it. 
And this is actually a piece of bone that I'm going to show you in this slide that was actually created with this desktop printer and implanted as you see here. 
That was all new bone that was implanted using these techniques. 
Another more advanced technology we're looking at right now, our next generation of technologies, are more sophisticated printers. 
This particular printer we're designing now is actually one where we print right on the patient. 
So what you see here — I know it sounds funny, but that's the way it works. 
Because in reality, what you want to do is you actually want to have the patient on the bed with the wound, and you have a scanner, basically like a flatbed scanner. 
That's what you see here on the right side. 
You see a scanner technology that first scans the wound on the patient and then it comes back with the printheads actually printing the layers that you require on the patients themselves. 
This is how it actually works. 
Here's the scanner going through, scanning the wound. 
Once it's scanned, it sends information in the correct layers of cells where they need to be. 
And now you're going to see here a demo of this actually being done in a representative wound. 
And we actually do this with a gel so that you can lift the gel material. 
So once those cells are on the patient they will stick where they need to be. 
And this is actually new technology still under development. 
We're also working on more sophisticated printers. 
Because in reality, our biggest challenge are the solid organs. 
I don't know if you realize this, but 90 percent of the patients on the transplant list are actually waiting for a kidney. 
Patients are dying every day because we don't have enough of those organs to go around. 
So this is more challenging — large organ, vascular, a lot of blood vessel supply, a lot of cells present. 
So the strategy here is — this is actually a CT scan, an X-ray — and we go layer by layer, using computerized morphometric imaging analysis and 3D reconstruction to get right down to those patient's own kidneys. 
We then are able to actually image those, do 360 degree rotation to analyze the kidney in its full volumetric characteristics, and we then are able to actually take this information and then scan this in a printing computerized form. 
So we go layer by layer through the organ, analyzing each layer as we go through the organ, and we then are able to send that information, as you see here, through the computer and actually design the organ for the patient. 
This actually shows the actual printer. 
And this actually shows that printing. 
In fact, we actually have the printer right here. 
So while we've been talking today, you can actually see the printer back here in the back stage. 
That's actually the actual printer right now, and that's been printing this kidney structure that you see here. 
It takes about seven hours to print a kidney, so this is about three hours into it now. 
And Dr. Kang's going to walk onstage right now, and we're actually going to show you one of these kidneys that we printed a little bit earlier today. 
Put a pair of gloves here. 
Thank you. 
Go backwards. 
So, these gloves are a little bit small on me, but here it is. 
You can actually see that kidney as it was printed earlier today. 
(Applause) Has a little bit of consistency to it. 
This is Dr. Kang who's been working with us on this project, and part of our team. 
Thank you, Dr. Kang. I appreciate it. 
(Applause) So this is actually a new generation. 
This is actually the printer that you see here onstage. 
And this is actually a new technology we're working on now. 
In reality, we now have a long history of doing this. 
I'm going to share with you a clip in terms of technology we have had in patients now for a while. 
And this is actually a very brief clip — only about 30 seconds — of a patient who actually received an organ. 
(Video) Luke Massella: I was really sick. I could barely get out of bed. 
I was missing school. It was pretty much miserable. 
I couldn't go out and play basketball at recess without feeling like I was going to pass out when I got back inside. 
I felt so sick. 
I was facing basically a lifetime of dialysis, and I don't even like to think about what my life would be like if I was on that. 
So after the surgery, life got a lot better for me. 
I was able to do more things. 
I was able to wrestle in high school. 
I became the captain of the team, and that was great. 
I was able to be a normal kid with my friends. 
And because they used my own cells to build this bladder, it's going to be with me. 
I've got it for life, so I'm all set. 
(Applause) Juan Enriquez: These experiments sometimes work, and it's very cool when they do. 
Luke, come up please. 
(Applause) So Luke, before last night, when's the last time you saw Tony? 
LM: Ten years ago, when I had my surgery — and it's really great to see him. 
(Laughter) (Applause) JE: And tell us a little bit about what you're doing. 
LM: Well right now I'm in college at the University of Connecticut. 
I'm a sophomore and studying communications, TV and mass media, and basically trying to live life like a normal kid, which I always wanted growing up. 
But it was hard to do that when I was born with spina bifida and my kidneys and bladder weren't working. 
I went through about 16 surgeries, and it seemed impossible to do that when I was in kidney failure when I was 10. 
And this surgery came along and basically made me who I am today and saved my life. 
(Applause) JE: And Tony's done hundreds of these? 
LM: What I know from, he's working really hard in his lab and coming up with crazy stuff. 
I know I was one of the first 10 people to have this surgery. 
And when I was 10, I didn't realize how amazing it was. 
I was a little kid, and I was like, "Yeah. I'll have that. I'll have that surgery." 
(Laughter) All I wanted to do was to get better, and I didn't realize how amazing it really was until now that I'm older and I see the amazing things that he's doing. 
JE: When you got this call out of the blue — Tony's really shy, and it took a lot of convincing to get somebody as modest as Tony to allow us to bring Luke. 
So Luke, you go to your communications professors — you're majoring in communications — and you ask them for permission to come to TED, which might have a little bit to do with communications, and what was their reaction? 
LM: Most of my professors were all for it, and they said, "" Bring pictures and show me the clips online, "" and "" I'm happy for you. "" There were a couple that were a little stubborn, but I had to talk to them. 
I pulled them aside. 
JE: Well, it's an honor and a privilege to meet you. 
Thank you so much. (LM: Thank you so much.) JE: Thank you, Tony. 
(Applause) 

I am a plant geneticist. 
I study genes that make plants resistant to disease and tolerant of stress. 
In recent years, millions of people around the world have come to believe that there's something sinister about genetic modification. 
Today, I am going to provide a different perspective. 
First, let me introduce my husband, Raoul. 
He's an organic farmer. 
On his farm, he plants a variety of different crops. 
This is one of the many ecological farming practices he uses to keep his farm healthy. 
Imagine some of the reactions we get: "" Really? An organic farmer and a plant geneticist? 
Can you agree on anything? "" Well, we can, and it's not difficult, because we have the same goal. 
We want to help nourish the growing population without further destroying the environment. 
I believe this is the greatest challenge of our time. 
Now, genetic modification is not new; virtually everything we eat has been genetically modified in some manner. 
Let me give you a few examples. 
On the left is an image of the ancient ancestor of modern corn. 
You see a single roll of grain that's covered in a hard case. 
Unless you have a hammer, teosinte isn't good for making tortillas. 
Now, take a look at the ancient ancestor of banana. 
You can see the large seeds. 
And unappetizing brussel sprouts, and eggplant, so beautiful. 
Now, to create these varieties, breeders have used many different genetic techniques over the years. 
Some of them are quite creative, like mixing two different species together using a process called grafting to create this variety that's half tomato and half potato. 
Breeders have also used other types of genetic techniques, such as random mutagenesis, which induces uncharacterized mutations into the plants. 
The rice in the cereal that many of us fed our babies was developed using this approach. 
Now, today, breeders have even more options to choose from. 
Some of them are extraordinarily precise. 
I want to give you a couple examples from my own work. 
I work on rice, which is a staple food for more than half the world's people. 
Each year, 40 percent of the potential harvest is lost to pest and disease. 
For this reason, farmers plant rice varieties that carry genes for resistance. 
This approach has been used for nearly 100 years. 
Yet, when I started graduate school, no one knew what these genes were. 
It wasn't until the 1990s that scientists finally uncovered the genetic basis of resistance. 
In my laboratory, we isolated a gene for immunity to a very serious bacterial disease in Asia and Africa. 
We found we could engineer the gene into a conventional rice variety that's normally susceptible, and you can see the two leaves on the bottom here are highly resistant to infection. 
Now, the same month that my laboratory published our discovery on the rice immunity gene, my friend and colleague Dave Mackill stopped by my office. 
He said, "" Seventy million rice farmers are having trouble growing rice. "" That's because their fields are flooded, and these rice farmers are living on less than two dollars a day. 
Although rice grows well in standing water, most rice varieties will die if they're submerged for more than three days. 
Flooding is expected to be increasingly problematic as the climate changes. 
He told me that his graduate student Kenong Xu and himself were studying an ancient variety of rice that had an amazing property. 
It could withstand two weeks of complete submergence. 
He asked if I would be willing to help them isolate this gene. 
I said yes — I was very excited, because I knew if we were successful, we could potentially help millions of farmers grow rice even when their fields were flooded. 
Kenong spent 10 years looking for this gene. 
Then one day, he said, "Come look at this experiment. You've got to see it." 
I went to the greenhouse and I saw that the conventional variety that was flooded for 18 days had died, but the rice variety that we had genetically engineered with a new gene we had discovered, called Sub1, was alive. 
Kenong and I were amazed and excited that a single gene could have this dramatic effect. 
But this is just a greenhouse experiment. 
Would this work in the field? 
Now, I'm going to show you a four-month time lapse video taken at the International Rice Research Institute. 
Breeders there developed a rice variety carrying the Sub1 gene using another genetic technique called precision breeding. 
On the left, you can see the Sub1 variety, and on the right is the conventional variety. 
Both varieties do very well at first, but then the field is flooded for 17 days. 
You can see the Sub1 variety does great. 
In fact, it produces three and a half times more grain than the conventional variety. 
I love this video because it shows the power of plant genetics to help farmers. 
Last year, with the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, three and a half million farmers grew Sub1 rice. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
Now, many people don't mind genetic modification when it comes to moving rice genes around, rice genes in rice plants, or even when it comes to mixing species together through grafting or random mutagenesis. 
But when it comes to taking genes from viruses and bacteria and putting them into plants, a lot of people say, "" Yuck. "" Why would you do that? 
The reason is that sometimes it's the cheapest, safest, and most effective technology for enhancing food security and advancing sustainable agriculture. 
I'm going to give you three examples. 
First, take a look at papaya. It's delicious, right? 
But now, look at this papaya. 
This papaya is infected with papaya ringspot virus. 
In the 1950s, this virus nearly wiped out the entire production of papaya on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. 
Many people thought that the Hawaiian papaya was doomed, but then, a local Hawaiian, a plant pathologist named Dennis Gonsalves, decided to try to fight this disease using genetic engineering. 
He took a snippet of viral DNA and he inserted it into the papaya genome. 
This is kind of like a human getting a vaccination. 
Now, take a look at his field trial. 
You can see the genetically engineered papaya in the center. 
It's immune to infection. 
The conventional papaya around the outside is severely infected with the virus. 
Dennis' pioneering work is credited with rescuing the papaya industry. 
Today, 20 years later, there's still no other method to control this disease. 
There's no organic method. There's no conventional method. 
Eighty percent of Hawaiian papaya is genetically engineered. 
Now, some of you may still feel a little queasy about viral genes in your food, but consider this: The genetically engineered papaya carries just a trace amount of the virus. 
If you bite into an organic or conventional papaya that is infected with the virus, you will be chewing on tenfold more viral protein. 
Now, take a look at this pest feasting on an eggplant. 
The brown you see is frass, what comes out the back end of the insect. 
To control this serious pest, which can devastate the entire eggplant crop in Bangladesh, Bangladeshi farmers spray insecticides two to three times a week, sometimes twice a day, when pest pressure is high. 
But we know that some insecticides are very harmful to human health, especially when farmers and their families cannot afford proper protection, like these children. 
In less developed countries, it's estimated that 300,000 people die every year because of insecticide misuse and exposure. 
Cornell and Bangladeshi scientists decided to fight this disease using a genetic technique that builds on an organic farming approach. 
Organic farmers like my husband Raoul spray an insecticide called B.T., which is based on a bacteria. 
This pesticide is very specific to caterpillar pests, and in fact, it's nontoxic to humans, fish and birds. 
It's less toxic than table salt. 
But this approach does not work well in Bangladesh. 
That's because these insecticide sprays are difficult to find, they're expensive, and they don't prevent the insect from getting inside the plants. 
In the genetic approach, scientists cut the gene out of the bacteria and insert it directly into the eggplant genome. 
Will this work to reduce insecticide sprays in Bangladesh? 
Definitely. 
Last season, farmers reported they were able to reduce their insecticide use by a huge amount, almost down to zero. 
They're able to harvest and replant for the next season. 
Now, I've given you a couple examples of how genetic engineering can be used to fight pests and disease and to reduce the amount of insecticides. 
My final example is an example where genetic engineering can be used to reduce malnutrition. 
In less developed countries, 500,000 children go blind every year because of lack of Vitamin A. 
More than half will die. 
For this reason, scientists supported by the Rockefeller Foundation genetically engineered a golden rice to produce beta-carotene, which is the precursor of Vitamin A. 
This is the same pigment that we find in carrots. 
Researchers estimate that just one cup of golden rice per day will save the lives of thousands of children. 
But golden rice is virulently opposed by activists who are against genetic modification. 
Just last year, activists invaded and destroyed a field trial in the Philippines. 
When I heard about the destruction, I wondered if they knew that they were destroying much more than a scientific research project, that they were destroying medicines that children desperately needed to save their sight and their lives. 
Some of my friends and family still worry: How do you know genes in the food are safe to eat? 
I explained the genetic engineering, the process of moving genes between species, has been used for more than 40 years in wines, in medicine, in plants, in cheeses. 
In all that time, there hasn't been a single case of harm to human health or the environment. 
But I say, look, I'm not asking you to believe me. 
Science is not a belief system. 
My opinion doesn't matter. 
Let's look at the evidence. 
After 20 years of careful study and rigorous peer review by thousands of independent scientists, every major scientific organization in the world has concluded that the crops currently on the market are safe to eat and that the process of genetic engineering is no more risky than older methods of genetic modification. 
These are precisely the same organizations that most of us trust when it comes to other important scientific issues such as global climate change or the safety of vaccines. 
Raoul and I believe that, instead of worrying about the genes in our food, we must focus on how we can help children grow up healthy. 
We must ask if farmers in rural communities can thrive, and if everyone can afford the food. 
We must try to minimize environmental degradation. 
What scares me most about the loud arguments and misinformation about plant genetics is that the poorest people who most need the technology may be denied access because of the vague fears and prejudices of those who have enough to eat. 
We have a huge challenge in front of us. 
Let's celebrate scientific innovation and use it. 
It's our responsibility to do everything we can to help alleviate human suffering and safeguard the environment. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
Chris Anderson: Powerfully argued. 
The people who argue against GMOs, as I understand it, the core piece comes from two things. 
One, complexity and unintended consequence. 
Nature is this incredibly complex machine. 
If we put out these brand new genes that we've created, that haven't been challenged by years of evolution, and they started mixing up with the rest of what's going on, couldn't that trigger some kind of cataclysm or problem, especially when you add in the commercial incentive that some companies have to put them out there? 
The fear is that those incentives mean that the decision is not made on purely scientific grounds, and even if it was, that there would be unintended consequences. 
How do we know that there isn't a big risk of some unintended consequence? 
Often our tinkerings with nature do lead to big, unintended consequences and chain reactions. 
Pamela Ronald: Okay, so on the commercial aspects, one thing that's really important to understand is that, in the developed world, farmers in the United States, almost all farmers, whether they're organic or conventional, they buy seed produced by seed companies. 
So there's definitely a commercial interest to sell a lot of seed, but hopefully they're selling seed that the farmers want to buy. 
It's different in the less developed world. 
Farmers there cannot afford the seed. 
These seeds are not being sold. 
These seeds are being distributed freely through traditional kinds of certification groups, so it is very important in less developed countries that the seed be freely available. 
CA: Wouldn't some activists say that this is actually part of the conspiracy? 
This is the heroin strategy. 
You seed the stuff, and people have no choice but to be hooked on these seeds forever? 
PR: There are a lot of conspiracy theories for sure, but it doesn't work that way. 
For example, the seed that's being distributed, the flood-tolerant rice, this is distributed freely through Indian and Bangladeshi seed certification agencies, so there's no commercial interest at all. 
The golden rice was developed through support of the Rockefeller Foundation. 
Again, it's being freely distributed. 
There are no commercial profits in this situation. 
And now to address your other question about, well, mixing genes, aren't there some unintended consequences? 
Absolutely — every time we do something different, there's an unintended consequence, but one of the points I was trying to make is that we've been doing kind of crazy things to our plants, mutagenesis using radiation or chemical mutagenesis. 
This induces thousands of uncharacterized mutations, and this is even a higher risk of unintended consequence than many of the modern methods. 
And so it's really important not to use the term GMO because it's scientifically meaningless. 
I feel it's very important to talk about a specific crop and a specific product, and think about the needs of the consumer. 
CA: So part of what's happening here is that there's a mental model in a lot of people that nature is nature, and it's pure and pristine, and to tinker with it is Frankensteinian. 
It's making something that's pure dangerous in some way, and I think you're saying that that whole model just misunderstands how nature is. 
Nature is a much more chaotic interplay of genetic changes that have been happening all the time anyway. 
PR: That's absolutely true, and there's no such thing as pure food. 
I mean, you could not spray eggplant with insecticides or not genetically engineer it, but then you'd be stuck eating frass. 
So there's no purity there. 
CA: Pam Ronald, thank you. That was powerfully argued. 
PR: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. 
(Applause) 

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

So I've had the great privilege of traveling to some incredible places, photographing these distant landscapes and remote cultures all over the world. 
I love my job. 
But people think it's this string of epiphanies and sunrises and rainbows, when in reality, it looks more something like this. 
(Laughter) This is my office. 
We can't afford the fanciest places to stay at night, so we tend to sleep a lot outdoors. 
As long as we can stay dry, that's a bonus. 
We also can't afford the fanciest restaurants. 
So we tend to eat whatever's on the local menu. 
And if you're in the Ecuadorian Páramo, you're going to eat a large rodent called a cuy. 
(Laughter) But what makes our experiences perhaps a little bit different and a little more unique than that of the average person is that we have this gnawing thing in the back of our mind that even in our darkest moments, and those times of despair, we think, "" Hey, there might be an image to be made here, there might be a story to be told. "" And why is storytelling important? 
Well, it helps us to connect with our cultural and our natural heritage. 
And in the Southeast, there's an alarming disconnect between the public and the natural areas that allow us to be here in the first place. 
We're visual creatures, so we use what we see to teach us what we know. 
Now the majority of us aren't going to willingly go way down to a swamp. 
So how can we still expect those same people to then advocate on behalf of their protection? 
We can't. 
So my job, then, is to use photography as a communication tool, to help bridge the gap between the science and the aesthetics, to get people talking, to get them thinking, and to hopefully, ultimately, get them caring. 
I started doing this 15 years ago right here in Gainesville, right here in my backyard. 
And I fell in love with adventure and discovery, going to explore all these different places that were just minutes from my front doorstep. 
There are a lot of beautiful places to find. 
Despite all these years that have passed, I still see the world through the eyes of a child and I try to incorporate that sense of wonderment and that sense of curiosity into my photography as often as I can. 
And we're pretty lucky because here in the South, we're still blessed with a relatively blank canvas that we can fill with the most fanciful adventures and incredible experiences. 
It's just a matter of how far our imagination will take us. 
See, a lot of people look at this and they say, "Oh yeah, wow, that's a pretty tree." 
But I don't just see a tree — I look at this and I see opportunity. 
I see an entire weekend. 
Because when I was a kid, these were the types of images that got me off the sofa and dared me to explore, dared me to go find the woods and put my head underwater and see what we have. 
And folks, I've been photographing all over the world and I promise you, what we have here in the South, what we have in the Sunshine State, rivals anything else that I've seen. 
But yet our tourism industry is busy promoting all the wrong things. 
Before most kids are 12, they'll have been to Disney World more times than they've been in a canoe or camping under a starry sky. 
And I have nothing against Disney or Mickey; I used to go there, too. 
But they're missing out on those fundamental connections that create a real sense of pride and ownership for the place that they call home. 
And this is compounded by the issue that the landscapes that define our natural heritage and fuel our aquifer for our drinking water have been deemed as scary and dangerous and spooky. 
When our ancestors first came here, they warned, "" Stay out of these areas, they're haunted. 
They're full of evil spirits and ghosts. "" I don't know where they came up with that idea. 
But it's actually led to a very real disconnect, a very real negative mentality that has kept the public disinterested, silent, and ultimately, our environment at risk. 
We're a state that's surrounded and defined by water, and yet for centuries, swamps and wetlands have been regarded as these obstacles to overcome. 
And so we've treated them as these second-class ecosystems, because they have very little monetary value and of course, they're known to harbor alligators and snakes — which, I'll admit, these aren't the most cuddly of ambassadors. 
(Laughter) So it became assumed, then, that the only good swamp was a drained swamp. 
And in fact, draining a swamp to make way for agriculture and development was considered the very essence of conservation not too long ago. 
But now we're backpedaling, because the more we come to learn about these sodden landscapes, the more secrets we're starting to unlock about interspecies relationships and the connectivity of habitats, watersheds and flyways. 
Take this bird, for example: this is the prothonotary warbler. 
I love this bird because it's a swamp bird, through and through, a swamp bird. 
They nest and they mate and they breed in these old-growth swamps in these flooded forests. 
And so after the spring, after they raise their young, they then fly thousand of miles over the Gulf of Mexico into Central and South America. 
And then after the winter, the spring rolls around and they come back. 
They fly thousands of miles over the Gulf of Mexico. 
And where do they go? Where do they land? 
Right back in the same tree. 
That's nuts. 
This is a bird the size of a tennis ball — I mean, that's crazy! 
I used a GPS to get here today, and this is my hometown. 
(Laughter) It's crazy. 
So what happens, then, when this bird flies over the Gulf of Mexico into Central America for the winter and then the spring rolls around and it flies back, and it comes back to this: a freshly sodded golf course? 
This is a narrative that's all too commonly unraveling here in this state. 
And this is a natural process that's occurred for thousands of years and we're just now learning about it. 
So you can imagine all else we have to learn about these landscapes if we just preserve them first. 
Now despite all this rich life that abounds in these swamps, they still have a bad name. 
Many people feel uncomfortable with the idea of wading into Florida's blackwater. 
I can understand that. 
But what I loved about growing up in the Sunshine State is that for so many of us, we live with this latent but very palpable fear that when we put our toes into the water, there might be something much more ancient and much more adapted than we are. 
Knowing that you're not top dog is a welcomed discomfort, I think. 
How often in this modern and urban and digital age do you actually get the chance to feel vulnerable, or consider that the world may not have been made for just us? 
So for the last decade, I began seeking out these areas where the concrete yields to forest and the pines turn to cypress, and I viewed all these mosquitoes and reptiles, all these discomforts, as affirmations that I'd found true wilderness, and I embrace them wholly. 
Now as a conservation photographer obsessed with blackwater, it's only fitting that I'd eventually end up in the most famous swamp of all: the Everglades. 
Growing up here in North Central Florida, it always had these enchanted names, places like Loxahatchee and Fakahatchee, Corkscrew, Big Cypress. 
I started what turned into a five-year project to hopefully reintroduce the Everglades in a new light, in a more inspired light. 
But I knew this would be a tall order, because here you have an area that's roughly a third the size the state of Florida, it's huge. 
And when I say Everglades, most people are like, "" Oh, yeah, the national park. "" But the Everglades is not just a park; it's an entire watershed, starting with the Kissimmee chain of lakes in the north, and then as the rains would fall in the summer, these downpours would flow into Lake Okeechobee, and Lake Okeechobee would fill up and it would overflow its banks and spill southward, ever slowly, with the topography, and get into the river of grass, the Sawgrass Prairies, before meting into the cypress slews, until going further south into the mangrove swamps, and then finally — finally — reaching Florida Bay, 
the emerald gem of the Everglades, the great estuary, the 850 square-mile estuary. 
So sure, the national park is the southern end of this system, but all the things that make it unique are these inputs that come in, the fresh water that starts 100 miles north. 
So no manner of these political or invisible boundaries protect the park from polluted water or insufficient water. 
And unfortunately, that's precisely what we've done. 
Over the last 60 years, we have drained, we have dammed, we have dredged the Everglades to where now only one third of the water that used to reach the bay now reaches the bay today. 
So this story is not all sunshine and rainbows, unfortunately. 
For better or for worse, the story of the Everglades is intrinsically tied to the peaks and the valleys of mankind's relationship with the natural world. 
But I'll show you these beautiful pictures, because it gets you on board. 
And while I have your attention, I can tell you the real story. 
It's that we're taking this, and we're trading it for this, at an alarming rate. 
And what's lost on so many people is the sheer scale of which we're discussing. 
Because the Everglades is not just responsible for the drinking water for 7 million Floridians; today it also provides the agricultural fields for the year-round tomatoes and oranges for over 300 million Americans. 
And it's that same seasonal pulse of water in the summer that built the river of grass 6,000 years ago. 
Ironically, today, it's also responsible for the over half a million acres of the endless river of sugarcane. 
These are the same fields that are responsible for dumping exceedingly high levels of fertilizers into the watershed, forever changing the system. 
But in order for you to not just understand how this system works, but to also get personally connected to it, I decided to break the story down into several different narratives. 
And I wanted that story to start in Lake Okeechobee, the beating heart of the Everglade system. 
And to do that, I picked an ambassador, an iconic species. 
This is the Everglade snail kite. 
It's a great bird, and they used to nest in the thousands, thousands in the northern Everglades. 
And then they've gone down to about 400 nesting pairs today. 
And why is that? 
Well, it's because they eat one source of food, an apple snail, about the size of a ping-pong ball, an aquatic gastropod. 
So as we started damming up the Everglades, as we started diking Lake Okeechobee and draining the wetlands, we lost the habitat for the snail. 
And thus, the population of the kites declined. 
And so, I wanted a photo that would not only communicate this relationship between wetland, snail and bird, but I also wanted a photo that would communicate how incredible this relationship was, and how very important it is that they've come to depend on each other, this healthy wetland and this bird. 
And to do that, I brainstormed this idea. 
I started sketching out these plans to make a photo, and I sent it to the wildlife biologist down in Okeechobee — this is an endangered bird, so it takes special permission to do. 
So I built this submerged platform that would hold snails just right under the water. 
And I spent months planning this crazy idea. 
And I took this platform down to Lake Okeechobee and I spent over a week in the water, wading waist-deep, 9-hour shifts from dawn until dusk, to get one image that I thought might communicate this. 
And here's the day that it finally worked: [Video: (Mac Stone narrating) After setting up the platform, I look off and I see a kite coming over the cattails. 
And I see him scanning and searching. 
And he gets right over the trap, and I see that he's seen it. 
And he beelines, he goes straight for the trap. 
And in that moment, all those months of planning, waiting, all the sunburn, mosquito bites — suddenly, they're all worth it. 
(Mac Stone in film) Oh my gosh, I can't believe it!] You can believe how excited I was when that happened. 
But what the idea was, is that for someone who's never seen this bird and has no reason to care about it, these photos, these new perspectives, will help shed a little new light on just one species that makes this watershed so incredible, so valuable, so important. 
Now, I know I can't come here to Gainesville and talk to you about animals in the Everglades without talking about gators. 
I love gators, I grew up loving gators. 
My parents always said I had an unhealthy relationship with gators. 
But what I like about them is, they're like the freshwater equivalent of sharks. 
They're feared, they're hated, and they are tragically misunderstood. 
Because these are a unique species, they're not just apex predators. 
In the Everglades, they are the very architects of the Everglades, because as the water drops down in the winter during the dry season, they start excavating these holes called gator holes. 
And they do this because as the water drops down, they'll be able to stay wet and they'll be able to forage. 
And now this isn't just affecting them, other animals also depend on this relationship, so they become a keystone species as well. 
So how do you make an apex predator, an ancient reptile, at once look like it dominates the system, but at the same time, look vulnerable? 
Well, you wade into a pit of about 120 of them, then you hope that you've made the right decision. 
(Laughter) I still have all my fingers, it's cool. 
But I understand, I know I'm not going to rally you guys, I'm not going to rally the troops to "" Save the Everglades for the gators! "" It won't happen because they're so ubiquitous, we see them now, they're one of the great conservation success stories of the US. 
But there is one species in the Everglades that no matter who you are, you can't help but love, too, and that's the roseate spoonbill. 
These birds are great, but they've had a really tough time in the Everglades, because they started out with thousands of nesting pairs in Florida Bay, and at the turn of the 20th century, they got down to two — two nesting pairs. 
And why? 
That's because women thought they looked better on their hats then they did flying in the sky. 
Then we banned the plume trade, and their numbers started rebounding. 
And as their numbers started rebounding, scientists began to pay attention, they started studying these birds. 
And what they found out is that these birds' behavior is intrinsically tied to the annual draw-down cycle of water in the Everglades, the thing that defines the Everglades watershed. 
What they found out is that these birds started nesting in the winter as the water drew down, because they're tactile feeders, so they have to touch whatever they eat. 
And so they wait for these concentrated pools of fish to be able to feed enough to feed their young. 
So these birds became the very icon of the Everglades — an indicator species of the overall health of the system. 
And just as their numbers were rebounding in the mid-20th century — shooting up to 900, 1,000, 1,100, 1,200 — just as that started happening, we started draining the southern Everglades. 
And we stopped two-thirds of that water from moving south. 
And it had drastic consequences. 
And just as those numbers started reaching their peak, unfortunately, today, the real spoonbill story, the real photo of what it looks like is more something like this. 
And we're down to less than 70 nesting pairs in Florida Bay today, because we've disrupted the system so much. 
So all these different organizations are shouting, they're screaming, "The Everglades is fragile! It's fragile!" 
It is not. 
It is resilient. 
Because despite all we've taken, despite all we've done and we've drained and we've dammed and we've dredged it, pieces of it are still here, waiting to be put back together. 
And this is what I've loved about South Florida, that in one place, you have this unstoppable force of mankind meeting the immovable object of tropical nature. 
And it's at this new frontier that we are forced with a new appraisal. 
What is wilderness worth? 
What is the value of biodiversity, or our drinking water? 
And fortunately, after decades of debate, we're finally starting to act on those questions. 
We're slowly undertaking these projects to bring more freshwater back to the bay. 
But it's up to us as citizens, as residents, as stewards to hold our elected officials to their promises. 
What can you do to help? 
It's so easy. 
Just get outside, get out there. 
Take your friends out, take your kids out, take your family out. 
Hire a fishing guide. 
Show the state that protecting wilderness not only makes ecological sense, but economic sense as well. 
It's a lot of fun, just do it — put your feet in the water. 
The swamp will change you, I promise. 
Over the years, we've been so generous with these other landscapes around the country, cloaking them with this American pride, places that we now consider to define us: Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone. 
And we use these parks and these natural areas as beacons and as cultural compasses. 
And sadly, the Everglades is very commonly left out of that conversation. 
But I believe it's every bit as iconic and emblematic of who we are as a country as any of these other wildernesses. 
It's just a different kind of wild. 
But I'm encouraged, because maybe we're finally starting to come around, because what was once deemed this swampy wasteland, today is a World Heritage site. 
It's a wetland of international importance. 
And we've come a long way in the last 60 years. 
And as the world's largest and most ambitious wetland restoration project, the international spotlight is on us in the Sunshine State. 
Because if we can heal this system, it's going to become an icon for wetland restoration all over the world. 
But it's up to us to decide which legacy we want to attach our flag to. 
They say that the Everglades is our greatest test. 
If we pass it, we get to keep the planet. 
I love that quote, because it's a challenge, it's a prod. 
Can we do it? Will we do it? 
We have to, we must. 
But the Everglades is not just a test. 
It's also a gift, and ultimately, our responsibility. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Sheryl Shade: Hi, Aimee. Aimee Mullins: Hi. 
SS: Aimee and I thought we'd just talk a little bit, and I wanted her to tell all of you what makes her a distinctive athlete. 
AM: Well, for those of you who have seen the picture in the little bio — it might have given it away — I'm a double amputee, and I was born without fibulas in both legs. 
I was amputated at age one, and I've been running like hell ever since, all over the place. 
SS: Well, why don't you tell them how you got to Georgetown — why don't we start there? 
Why don't we start there? 
AM: I'm a senior in Georgetown in the Foreign Service program. 
I won a full academic scholarship out of high school. 
They pick three students out of the nation every year to get involved in international affairs, and so I won a full ride to Georgetown and I've been there for four years. Love it. 
SS: When Aimee got there, she decided that she's, kind of, curious about track and field, so she decided to call someone and start asking about it. 
So, why don't you tell that story? 
AM: Yeah. Well, I guess I've always been involved in sports. 
I played softball for five years growing up. 
I skied competitively throughout high school, and I got a little restless in college because I wasn't doing anything for about a year or two sports-wise. 
And I'd never competed on a disabled level, you know — I'd always competed against other able-bodied athletes. 
That's all I'd ever known. 
In fact, I'd never even met another amputee until I was 17. 
And I heard that they do these track meets with all disabled runners, and I figured, "" Oh, I don't know about this, but before I judge it, let me go see what it's all about. "" So, I booked myself a flight to Boston in '95, 19 years old and definitely the dark horse candidate at this race. I'd never done it before. 
I went out on a gravel track a couple of weeks before this meet to see how far I could run, and about 50 meters was enough for me, panting and heaving. 
And I had these legs that were made of a wood and plastic compound, attached with Velcro straps — big, thick, five-ply wool socks on — you know, not the most comfortable things, but all I'd ever known. 
And I'm up there in Boston against people wearing legs made of all things — carbon graphite and, you know, shock absorbers in them and all sorts of things — and they're all looking at me like, OK, we know who's not going to win this race. 
And, I mean, I went up there expecting — I don't know what I was expecting — but, you know, when I saw a man who was missing an entire leg go up to the high jump, hop on one leg to the high jump and clear it at six feet, two inches... 
Dan O'Brien jumped 5 '11 "" in' 96 in Atlanta, I mean, if it just gives you a comparison of — these are truly accomplished athletes, without qualifying that word "" athlete. "" And so I decided to give this a shot: heart pounding, I ran my first race and I beat the national record-holder by three hundredths of a second, and became the new national record-holder on my first try out. 
And, you know, people said, "" Aimee, you know, you've got speed — you've got natural speed — but you don't have any skill or finesse going down that track. 
You were all over the place. 
We all saw how hard you were working. "" And so I decided to call the track coach at Georgetown. 
And I thank god I didn't know just how huge this man is in the track and field world. 
He's coached five Olympians, and the man's office is lined from floor to ceiling with All America certificates of all these athletes he's coached. 
He's just a rather intimidating figure. 
And I called him up and said, "" Listen, I ran one race and I won... "" (Laughter) "" I want to see if I can, you know — I need to just see if I can sit in on some of your practices, see what drills you do and whatever. "" That's all I wanted — just two practices. 
"Can I just sit in and see what you do?" 
And he said, "" Well, we should meet first, before we decide anything. "" You know, he's thinking, "" What am I getting myself into? "" So, I met the man, walked in his office, and saw these posters and magazine covers of people he has coached. 
And we got to talking, and it turned out to be a great partnership because he'd never coached a disabled athlete, so therefore he had no preconceived notions of what I was or wasn't capable of, and I'd never been coached before. 
So this was like, "" Here we go — let's start on this trip. "" So he started giving me four days a week of his lunch break, his free time, and I would come up to the track and train with him. 
So that's how I met Frank. 
That was fall of '95. But then, by the time that winter was rolling around, he said, "" You know, you're good enough. 
You can run on our women's track team here. "" And I said, "" No, come on. "" And he said, "" No, no, really. You can. 
You can run with our women's track team. "" In the spring of 1996, with my goal of making the U.S. Paralympic team that May coming up full speed, I joined the women's track team. 
And no disabled person had ever done that — run at a collegiate level. 
So I don't know, it started to become an interesting mix. 
SS: Well, on your way to the Olympics, a couple of memorable events happened at Georgetown. 
Why don't you just tell them? 
AM: Yes, well, you know, I'd won everything as far as the disabled meets — everything I competed in — and, you know, training in Georgetown and knowing that I was going to have to get used to seeing the backs of all these women's shirts — you know, I'm running against the next Flo-Jo — and they're all looking at me like, "Hmm, what's, you know, what's going on here?" 
And putting on my Georgetown uniform and going out there and knowing that, you know, in order to become better — and I'm already the best in the country — you know, you have to train with people who are inherently better than you. 
And I went out there and made it to the Big East, which was sort of the championship race at the end of the season. 
It was really, really hot. 
And it's the first — I had just gotten these new sprinting legs that you see in that bio, and I didn't realize at that time that the amount of sweating I would be doing in the sock — it actually acted like a lubricant and I'd be, kind of, pistoning in the socket. 
And at about 85 meters of my 100 meters sprint, in all my glory, I came out of my leg. 
Like, I almost came out of it, in front of, like, 5,000 people. 
And I, I mean, was just mortified — because I was signed up for the 200, you know, which went off in a half hour. 
(Laughter) I went to my coach: "" Please, don't make me do this. "" I can't do this in front of all those people. My legs will come off. 
And if it came off at 85 there's no way I'm going 200 meters. 
And he just sat there like this. 
My pleas fell on deaf ears, thank god. 
Because you know, the man is from Brooklyn; he's a big man. He says, "" Aimee, so what if your leg falls off? 
You pick it up, you put the damn thing back on, and finish the goddamn race! "" (Laughter) (Applause) And I did. So, he kept me in line. 
He kept me on the right track. 
SS: So, then Aimee makes it to the 1996 Paralympics, and she's all excited. Her family's coming down — it's a big deal. 
It's now two years that you've been running? 
AM: No, a year. 
SS: A year. And why don't you tell them what happened right before you go run your race? 
AM: Okay, well, Atlanta. 
The Paralympics, just for a little bit of clarification, are the Olympics for people with physical disabilities — amputees, persons with cerebral palsy, and wheelchair athletes — as opposed to the Special Olympics, which deals with people with mental disabilities. 
So, here we are, a week after the Olympics and down at Atlanta, and I'm just blown away by the fact that just a year ago, I got out on a gravel track and couldn't run 50 meters. 
And so, here I am — never lost. 
I set new records at the U.S. Nationals — the Olympic trials — that May, and was sure that I was coming home with the gold. 
I was also the only, what they call "" bilateral BK "" — below the knee. 
I was the only woman who would be doing the long jump. 
I had just done the long jump, and a guy who was missing two legs came up to me and says, "" How do you do that? You know, we're supposed to have a planar foot, so we can't get off on the springboard. "" I said, "" Well, I just did it. No one told me that. "" So, it's funny — I'm three inches within the world record — and kept on from that point, you know, so I'm signed up in the long jump — signed up? 
No, I made it for the long jump and the 100-meter. 
And I'm sure of it, you know? 
I made the front page of my hometown paper that I delivered for six years, you know? 
It was, like, this is my time for shine. 
And we're at the trainee warm-up track, which is a few blocks away from the Olympic stadium. 
These legs that I was on, which I'll take out right now — I was the first person in the world on these legs. 
I was the guinea pig., I'm telling you, this was, like — talk about a tourist attraction. 
Everyone was taking pictures — "" What is this girl running on? "" And I'm always looking around, like, where is my competition? 
It's my first international meet. 
I tried to get it out of anybody I could, you know, "" Who am I running against here? "" "Oh, Aimee, we'll have to get back to you on that one." 
I wanted to find out times. 
"Don't worry, you're doing great." 
This is 20 minutes before my race in the Olympic stadium, and they post the heat sheets. And I go over and look. 
And my fastest time, which was the world record, was 15.77. 
Then I'm looking: the next lane, lane two, is 12.8. 
Lane three is 12.5. Lane four is 12.2. I said, "" What's going on? "" And they shove us all into the shuttle bus, and all the women there are missing a hand. 
(Laughter) So, I'm just, like — they're all looking at me like 'which one of these is not like the other,' you know? 
I'm sitting there, like, "" Oh, my god. Oh, my god. "" You know, I'd never lost anything, like, whether it would be the scholarship or, you know, I'd won five golds when I skied. In everything, I came in first. 
And Georgetown — that was great. 
I was losing, but it was the best training because this was Atlanta. 
Here we are, like, crème de la crème, and there is no doubt about it, that I'm going to lose big. 
And, you know, I'm just thinking, "" Oh, my god, my whole family got in a van and drove down here from Pennsylvania. "" And, you know, I was the only female U.S. sprinter. 
So they call us out and, you know — "Ladies, you have one minute." 
And I remember putting my blocks in and just feeling horrified because there was just this murmur coming over the crowd, like, the ones who are close enough to the starting line to see. 
And I'm like, "" I know! Look! This isn't right. "" And I'm thinking that's my last card to play here; if I'm not going to beat these girls, I'm going to mess their heads a little, you know? 
(Laughter) I mean, it was definitely the "" Rocky IV "" sensation of me versus Germany, and everyone else — Estonia and Poland — was in this heat. 
And the gun went off, and all I remember was finishing last and fighting back tears of frustration and incredible — incredible — this feeling of just being overwhelmed. 
And I had to think, "" Why did I do this? "" If I had won everything — but it was like, what was the point? 
All this training — I had transformed my life. 
I became a collegiate athlete, you know. I became an Olympic athlete. 
And it made me really think about how the achievement was getting there. 
I mean, the fact that I set my sights, just a year and three months before, on becoming an Olympic athlete and saying, "" Here's my life going in this direction — and I want to take it here for a while, and just seeing how far I could push it. "" And the fact that I asked for help — how many people jumped on board? 
How many people gave of their time and their expertise, and their patience, to deal with me? 
And that was this collective glory — that there was, you know, 50 people behind me that had joined in this incredible experience of going to Atlanta. 
So, I apply this sort of philosophy now to everything I do: sitting back and realizing the progression, how far you've come at this day to this goal, you know. 
It's important to focus on a goal, I think, but also recognize the progression on the way there and how you've grown as a person. 
That's the achievement, I think. That's the real achievement. 
SS: Why don't you show them your legs? 
AM: Oh, sure. 
SS: You know, show us more than one set of legs. 
AM: Well, these are my pretty legs. 
(Laughter) No, these are my cosmetic legs, actually, and they're absolutely beautiful. 
You've got to come up and see them. 
There are hair follicles on them, and I can paint my toenails. 
And, seriously, like, I can wear heels. 
Like, you guys don't understand what that's like to be able to just go into a shoe store and buy whatever you want. 
SS: You got to pick your height? 
AM: I got to pick my height, exactly. 
(Laughter) Patrick Ewing, who played for Georgetown in the '80s, comes back every summer. 
And I had incessant fun making fun of him in the training room because he'd come in with foot injuries. 
I'm like, "" Get it off! Don't worry about it, you know. 
You can be eight feet tall. Just take them off. "" (Laughter) He didn't find it as humorous as I did, anyway. 
OK, now, these are my sprinting legs, made of carbon graphite, like I said, and I've got to make sure I've got the right socket. 
No, I've got so many legs in here. 
These are — do you want to hold that actually? 
That's another leg I have for, like, tennis and softball. 
It has a shock absorber in it so it, like, "" Shhhh, "" makes this neat sound when you jump around on it. All right. 
And then this is the silicon sheath I roll over, to keep it on. Which, when I sweat, you know, I'm pistoning out of it. 
SS: Are you a different height? 
AM: In these? 
SS: In these. 
AM: I don't know. I don't think so. 
I may be a little taller. I actually can put both of them on. 
SS: She can't really stand on these legs. She has to be moving, so... 
AM: Yeah, I definitely have to be moving, and balance is a little bit of an art in them. 
But without having the silicon sock, I'm just going to try slip in it. 
And so, I run on these, and have shocked half the world on these. 
(Applause) These are supposed to simulate the actual form of a sprinter when they run. 
If you ever watch a sprinter, the ball of their foot is the only thing that ever hits the track. 
So when I stand in these legs, my hamstring and my glutes are contracted, as they would be had I had feet and were standing on the ball of my feet. 
(Audience: Who made them?) AM: It's a company in San Diego called Flex-Foot. 
And I was a guinea pig, as I hope to continue to be in every new form of prosthetic limbs that come out. 
But actually these, like I said, are still the actual prototype. 
I need to get some new ones because the last meet I was at, they were everywhere. You know, it's like a big — it's come full circle. 
Moderator: Aimee and the designer of them will be at TEDMED 2, and we'll talk about the design of them. 
AM: Yes, we'll do that. 
SS: Yes, there you go. 
AM: So, these are the sprint legs, and I can put my other... 
SS: Can you tell about who designed your other legs? 
AM: Yes. These I got in a place called Bournemouth, England, about two hours south of London, and I'm the only person in the United States with these, which is a crime because they are so beautiful. 
And I don't even mean, like, because of the toes and everything. 
For me, while I'm such a serious athlete on the track, I want to be feminine off the track, and I think it's so important not to be limited in any capacity, whether it's, you know, your mobility or even fashion. 
I mean, I love the fact that I can go in anywhere and pick out what I want — the shoes I want, the skirts I want — and I'm hoping to try to bring these over here and make them accessible to a lot of people. 
They're also silicon. 
This is a really basic, basic prosthetic limb under here. 
It's like a Barbie foot under this. 
(Laughter) It is. It's just stuck in this position, so I have to wear a two-inch heel. 
And, I mean, it's really — let me take this off so you can see it. 
I don't know how good you can see it, but, like, it really is. 
There're veins on the feet, and then my heel is pink, and my Achilles' tendon — that moves a little bit. 
And it's really an amazing store. I got them a year and two weeks ago. 
And this is just a silicon piece of skin. 
I mean, what happened was, two years ago this man in Belgium was saying, "" God, if I can go to Madame Tussauds' wax museum and see Jerry Hall replicated down to the color of her eyes, looking so real as if she breathed, why can't they build a limb for someone that looks like a leg, or an arm, or a hand? "" I mean, they make ears for burn victims. 
They do amazing stuff with silicon. 
SS: Two weeks ago, Aimee was up for the Arthur Ashe award at the ESPYs. 
And she came into town and she rushed around and she said, "" I have to buy some new shoes! "" We're an hour before the ESPYs, and she thought she'd gotten a two-inch heel but she'd actually bought a three-inch heel. 
AM: And this poses a problem for me, because it means I'm walking like that all night long. 
SS: For 45 minutes. Luckily, the hotel was terrific. 
They got someone to come in and saw off the shoes. 
(Laughter) AM: I said to the receptionist — I mean, I am just harried, and Sheryl's at my side — I said, "" Look, do you have anybody here who could help me? 
Because I have this problem... "" You know, at first they were just going to write me off, like, "If you don't like your shoes, sorry. It's too late." 
"" No, no, no, no. I've got these special feet that need a two-inch heel. I have a three-inch heel. 
I need a little bit off. "" They didn't even want to go there. 
They didn't even want to touch that one. They just did it. 
No, these legs are great. 
I'm actually going back in a couple of weeks to get some improvements. 
I want to get legs like these made for flat feet so I can wear sneakers, because I can't with these ones. 
So... Moderator: That's it. 
SS: That's Aimee Mullins. 
(Applause) 

It is very fashionable and proper to speak about food in all its forms, all its colors, aromas and tastes. 
But after the food goes through the digestive system, when it is thrown out as crap, it is no longer fashionable to speak about it. 
It is rather revolting. 
(Laughter) My organization, Gram Vikas, which means "" village development organization, "" was working in the area of renewable energy. 
On the most part, we were producing biogas, biogas for rural kitchens. 
We produce biogas in India by using animal manure, which usually, in India, is called cow dung. 
But as the gender-sensitive person that I am, I would like to call it bullshit. 
But realizing later on how important were sanitation and the disposal of crap in a proper way, we went into the arena of sanitation. 
Eighty percent of all diseases in India and most developing countries are because of poor quality water. 
And when we look at the reason for poor quality water, you find that it is our abysmal attitude to the disposal of human waste. 
Human waste, in its rawest form, finds its way back to drinking water, bathing water, washing water, irrigation water, whatever water you see. 
In India, it is unfortunately only the women who carry water. 
So for all domestic needs, women have to carry water. 
So that is a pitiable state of affairs. 
Open defecation is rampant. 
Seventy percent of India defecates in the open. 
They sit there out in the open, with the wind on their sails, hiding their faces, exposing their bases, and sitting there in pristine glory — 70 percent of India. 
And if you look at the world total, 60 percent of all the crap that is thrown into the open is by Indians. 
A fantastic distinction. 
I don't know if we Indians can be proud of such a distinction. 
(Laughter) So we, together with a lot of villages, we began to talk about how to really address this situation of sanitation. 
And we came together and formed a project called MANTRA. 
MANTRA stands for Movement and Action Network for Transformation of Rural Areas. 
So we are speaking about transformation, transformation in rural areas. 
Villages that agree to implement this project, they organize a legal society where the general body consists of all members who elect a group of men and women who implement the project and, later on, who look after the operation and maintenance. 
They decide to build a toilet and a shower room. 
And from a protected water source, water will be brought to an elevated water reservoir and piped to all households through three taps: one in the toilet, one in the shower, one in the kitchen, 24 hours a day. 
The pity is that our cities, like New Delhi and Bombay, do not have a 24-hour water supply. 
But in these villages, we want to have it. 
There is a distinct difference in the quality. 
Well in India, we have a theory, which is very much accepted by the government bureaucracy and all those who matter, that poor people deserve poor solutions and absolutely poor people deserve pathetic solutions. 
This, combined with a Nobel Prize-worthy theory that the cheapest is the most economic, is the heady cocktail that the poor are forced to drink. 
We are fighting against this. 
We feel that the poor have been humiliated for centuries. 
And even in sanitation, they should not be humiliated. 
Sanitation is more about dignity than about human disposal of waste. 
And so you build these toilets and very often, we have to hear that the toilets are better than their houses. 
And you can see that in front are the attached houses and the others are the toilets. 
So these people, without a single exception of a family in a village, decide to build a toilet, a bathing room. 
And for that, they come together, collect all the local materials — local materials like rubble, sand, aggregates, usually a government subsidy is available to meet at least part of the cost of external materials like cement, steel, toilet commode. 
Also, all the unskilled laborers, that is daily wage earners, mostly landless, are given an opportunity to be trained as masons and plumbers. 
So while these people are being trained, others are collecting the materials. 
And when both are ready, they build a toilet, a shower room, and of course also a water tower, an elevated water reservoir. 
We use a system of two leach pits to treat the waste. 
From the toilet, the muck comes into the first leach pit. 
And when it is full, it is blocked and it can go to the next. 
But we discovered that if you plant banana trees, papaya trees on the periphery of these leach pits, they grow very well because they suck up all the nutrients and you get very tasty bananas, papayas. 
If any of you come to my place, I would be happy to share these bananas and papayas with you. 
So there you can see the completed toilets, the water towers. 
This is in a village where most of the people are even illiterate. 
It is always a 24-hour water supply because water gets polluted very often when you store it — a child dips his or her hand into it, something falls into it. 
So no water is stored. It's always on tap. 
And that is the end product. 
Because it has to go high, and there is some space available, two or three rooms are made under the water tower, which are used by the village for different committee meetings. 
We have had clear evidence of the great impact of this program. 
Before we started, there were, as usual, more than 80 percent of people suffering from waterborne diseases. 
But after this, we have empirical evidence that 82 percent, on average, among all these villages — 1,200 villages have completed it — waterborne diseases have come down 82 percent. 
(Applause) Women usually used to spend, especially in the summer months, about six to seven hours a day carrying water. 
And when they went to carry water, because, as I said earlier, it's only women who carry water, they used to take their little children, girl children, also to carry water, or else to be back at home to look after the siblings. 
So there were less than nine percent of girl children attending school, even if there was a school. 
And boys, about 30 percent. 
But girls, it has gone to about 90 percent and boys, almost to 100 percent. 
(Applause) The most vulnerable section in a village are the landless laborers who are the daily wage-earners. 
Because they have gone through this training to be masons and plumbers and bar benders, now their ability to earn has increased 300 to 400 percent. 
So this is a democracy in action because there is a general body, a governing board, the committee. 
People are questioning, people are governing themselves, people are learning to manage their own affairs, they are taking their own futures into their hands. 
More than 1,200 villages have so far done this. 
It benefits over 400,000 people and it's still going on. 
And I hope it continues to move ahead. 
For India and such developing countries, armies and armaments, software companies and spaceships may not be as important as taps and toilets. 
Thank you. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. 

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

So, I lead a team at Google that works on machine intelligence; in other words, the engineering discipline of making computers and devices able to do some of the things that brains do. 
And this makes us interested in real brains and neuroscience as well, and especially interested in the things that our brains do that are still far superior to the performance of computers. 
Historically, one of those areas has been perception, the process by which things out there in the world — sounds and images — can turn into concepts in the mind. 
This is essential for our own brains, and it's also pretty useful on a computer. 
The machine perception algorithms, for example, that our team makes, are what enable your pictures on Google Photos to become searchable, based on what's in them. 
The flip side of perception is creativity: turning a concept into something out there into the world. 
So over the past year, our work on machine perception has also unexpectedly connected with the world of machine creativity and machine art. 
I think Michelangelo had a penetrating insight into to this dual relationship between perception and creativity. 
This is a famous quote of his: "" Every block of stone has a statue inside of it, and the job of the sculptor is to discover it. "" So I think that what Michelangelo was getting at is that we create by perceiving, and that perception itself is an act of imagination and is the stuff of creativity. 
The organ that does all the thinking and perceiving and imagining, of course, is the brain. 
And I'd like to begin with a brief bit of history about what we know about brains. 
Because unlike, say, the heart or the intestines, you really can't say very much about a brain by just looking at it, at least with the naked eye. 
The early anatomists who looked at brains gave the superficial structures of this thing all kinds of fanciful names, like hippocampus, meaning "" little shrimp. "" But of course that sort of thing doesn't tell us very much about what's actually going on inside. 
The first person who, I think, really developed some kind of insight into what was going on in the brain was the great Spanish neuroanatomist, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, in the 19th century, who used microscopy and special stains that could selectively fill in or render in very high contrast the individual cells in the brain, in order to start to understand their morphologies. 
And these are the kinds of drawings that he made of neurons in the 19th century. 
This is from a bird brain. 
And you see this incredible variety of different sorts of cells, even the cellular theory itself was quite new at this point. 
And these structures, these cells that have these arborizations, these branches that can go very, very long distances — this was very novel at the time. 
They're reminiscent, of course, of wires. 
That might have been obvious to some people in the 19th century; the revolutions of wiring and electricity were just getting underway. 
But in many ways, these microanatomical drawings of Ramón y Cajal's, like this one, they're still in some ways unsurpassed. 
We're still more than a century later, trying to finish the job that Ramón y Cajal started. 
These are raw data from our collaborators at the Max Planck Institute of Neuroscience. 
And what our collaborators have done is to image little pieces of brain tissue. 
The entire sample here is about one cubic millimeter in size, and I'm showing you a very, very small piece of it here. 
That bar on the left is about one micron. 
The structures you see are mitochondria that are the size of bacteria. 
And these are consecutive slices through this very, very tiny block of tissue. 
Just for comparison's sake, the diameter of an average strand of hair is about 100 microns. 
So we're looking at something much, much smaller than a single strand of hair. 
And from these kinds of serial electron microscopy slices, one can start to make reconstructions in 3D of neurons that look like these. 
So these are sort of in the same style as Ramón y Cajal. 
Only a few neurons lit up, because otherwise we wouldn't be able to see anything here. 
It would be so crowded, so full of structure, of wiring all connecting one neuron to another. 
So Ramón y Cajal was a little bit ahead of his time, and progress on understanding the brain proceeded slowly over the next few decades. 
But we knew that neurons used electricity, and by World War II, our technology was advanced enough to start doing real electrical experiments on live neurons to better understand how they worked. 
This was the very same time when computers were being invented, very much based on the idea of modeling the brain — of "" intelligent machinery, "" as Alan Turing called it, one of the fathers of computer science. 
Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts looked at Ramón y Cajal's drawing of visual cortex, which I'm showing here. 
This is the cortex that processes imagery that comes from the eye. 
And for them, this looked like a circuit diagram. 
So there are a lot of details in McCulloch and Pitts's circuit diagram that are not quite right. 
But this basic idea that visual cortex works like a series of computational elements that pass information one to the next in a cascade, is essentially correct. 
Let's talk for a moment about what a model for processing visual information would need to do. 
The basic task of perception is to take an image like this one and say, "That's a bird," which is a very simple thing for us to do with our brains. 
But you should all understand that for a computer, this was pretty much impossible just a few years ago. 
The classical computing paradigm is not one in which this task is easy to do. 
So what's going on between the pixels, between the image of the bird and the word "" bird, "" is essentially a set of neurons connected to each other in a neural network, as I'm diagramming here. 
This neural network could be biological, inside our visual cortices, or, nowadays, we start to have the capability to model such neural networks on the computer. 
And I'll show you what that actually looks like. 
So the pixels you can think about as a first layer of neurons, and that's, in fact, how it works in the eye — that's the neurons in the retina. 
And those feed forward into one layer after another layer, after another layer of neurons, all connected by synapses of different weights. 
The behavior of this network is characterized by the strengths of all of those synapses. 
Those characterize the computational properties of this network. 
And at the end of the day, you have a neuron or a small group of neurons that light up, saying, "" bird. "" Now I'm going to represent those three things — the input pixels and the synapses in the neural network, and bird, the output — by three variables: x, w and y. 
There are maybe a million or so x's — a million pixels in that image. 
There are billions or trillions of w's, which represent the weights of all these synapses in the neural network. 
And there's a very small number of y's, of outputs that that network has. 
"" Bird "" is only four letters, right? 
So let's pretend that this is just a simple formula, x "" x "" w = y. 
I'm putting the times in scare quotes because what's really going on there, of course, is a very complicated series of mathematical operations. 
That's one equation. 
There are three variables. 
And we all know that if you have one equation, you can solve one variable by knowing the other two things. 
So the problem of inference, that is, figuring out that the picture of a bird is a bird, is this one: it's where y is the unknown and w and x are known. 
You know the neural network, you know the pixels. 
As you can see, that's actually a relatively straightforward problem. 
You multiply two times three and you're done. 
I'll show you an artificial neural network that we've built recently, doing exactly that. 
This is running in real time on a mobile phone, and that's, of course, amazing in its own right, that mobile phones can do so many billions and trillions of operations per second. 
What you're looking at is a phone looking at one after another picture of a bird, and actually not only saying, "" Yes, it's a bird, "" but identifying the species of bird with a network of this sort. 
So in that picture, the x and the w are known, and the y is the unknown. 
I'm glossing over the very difficult part, of course, which is how on earth do we figure out the w, the brain that can do such a thing? 
How would we ever learn such a model? 
So this process of learning, of solving for w, if we were doing this with the simple equation in which we think about these as numbers, we know exactly how to do that: 6 = 2 x w, well, we divide by two and we're done. 
The problem is with this operator. 
So, division — we've used division because it's the inverse to multiplication, but as I've just said, the multiplication is a bit of a lie here. 
This is a very, very complicated, very non-linear operation; it has no inverse. 
So we have to figure out a way to solve the equation without a division operator. 
And the way to do that is fairly straightforward. 
You just say, let's play a little algebra trick, and move the six over to the right-hand side of the equation. 
Now, we're still using multiplication. 
And that zero — let's think about it as an error. 
In other words, if we've solved for w the right way, then the error will be zero. 
And if we haven't gotten it quite right, the error will be greater than zero. 
So now we can just take guesses to minimize the error, and that's the sort of thing computers are very good at. 
So you've taken an initial guess: what if w = 0? 
Well, then the error is 6. 
What if w = 1? The error is 4. 
And then the computer can sort of play Marco Polo, and drive down the error close to zero. 
As it does that, it's getting successive approximations to w. 
Typically, it never quite gets there, but after about a dozen steps, we're up to w = 2.999, which is close enough. 
And this is the learning process. 
So remember that what's been going on here is that we've been taking a lot of known x's and known y's and solving for the w in the middle through an iterative process. 
It's exactly the same way that we do our own learning. 
We have many, many images as babies and we get told, "" This is a bird; this is not a bird. "" And over time, through iteration, we solve for w, we solve for those neural connections. 
So now, we've held x and w fixed to solve for y; that's everyday, fast perception. 
We figure out how we can solve for w, that's learning, which is a lot harder, because we need to do error minimization, using a lot of training examples. 
And about a year ago, Alex Mordvintsev, on our team, decided to experiment with what happens if we try solving for x, given a known w and a known y. 
In other words, you know that it's a bird, and you already have your neural network that you've trained on birds, but what is the picture of a bird? 
It turns out that by using exactly the same error-minimization procedure, one can do that with the network trained to recognize birds, and the result turns out to be... 
a picture of birds. 
So this is a picture of birds generated entirely by a neural network that was trained to recognize birds, just by solving for x rather than solving for y, and doing that iteratively. 
Here's another fun example. 
This was a work made by Mike Tyka in our group, which he calls "" Animal Parade. "" It reminds me a little bit of William Kentridge's artworks, in which he makes sketches, rubs them out, makes sketches, rubs them out, and creates a movie this way. 
In this case, what Mike is doing is varying y over the space of different animals, in a network designed to recognize and distinguish different animals from each other. 
And you get this strange, Escher-like morph from one animal to another. 
Here he and Alex together have tried reducing the y's to a space of only two dimensions, thereby making a map out of the space of all things recognized by this network. 
Doing this kind of synthesis or generation of imagery over that entire surface, varying y over the surface, you make a kind of map — a visual map of all the things the network knows how to recognize. 
The animals are all here; "" armadillo "" is right in that spot. 
You can do this with other kinds of networks as well. 
This is a network designed to recognize faces, to distinguish one face from another. 
And here, we're putting in a y that says, "" me, "" my own face parameters. 
And when this thing solves for x, it generates this rather crazy, kind of cubist, surreal, psychedelic picture of me from multiple points of view at once. 
The reason it looks like multiple points of view at once is because that network is designed to get rid of the ambiguity of a face being in one pose or another pose, being looked at with one kind of lighting, another kind of lighting. 
So when you do this sort of reconstruction, if you don't use some sort of guide image or guide statistics, then you'll get a sort of confusion of different points of view, because it's ambiguous. 
This is what happens if Alex uses his own face as a guide image during that optimization process to reconstruct my own face. 
So you can see it's not perfect. 
There's still quite a lot of work to do on how we optimize that optimization process. 
But you start to get something more like a coherent face, rendered using my own face as a guide. 
You don't have to start with a blank canvas or with white noise. 
When you're solving for x, you can begin with an x, that is itself already some other image. 
That's what this little demonstration is. 
This is a network that is designed to categorize all sorts of different objects — man-made structures, animals... 
Here we're starting with just a picture of clouds, and as we optimize, basically, this network is figuring out what it sees in the clouds. 
And the more time you spend looking at this, the more things you also will see in the clouds. 
You could also use the face network to hallucinate into this, and you get some pretty crazy stuff. 
(Laughter) Or, Mike has done some other experiments in which he takes that cloud image, hallucinates, zooms, hallucinates, zooms hallucinates, zooms. 
And in this way, you can get a sort of fugue state of the network, I suppose, or a sort of free association, in which the network is eating its own tail. 
So every image is now the basis for, "" What do I think I see next? 
What do I think I see next? What do I think I see next? "" I showed this for the first time in public to a group at a lecture in Seattle called "" Higher Education "" — this was right after marijuana was legalized. 
(Laughter) So I'd like to finish up quickly by just noting that this technology is not constrained. 
I've shown you purely visual examples because they're really fun to look at. 
It's not a purely visual technology. 
Our artist collaborator, Ross Goodwin, has done experiments involving a camera that takes a picture, and then a computer in his backpack writes a poem using neural networks, based on the contents of the image. 
And that poetry neural network has been trained on a large corpus of 20th-century poetry. 
And the poetry is, you know, I think, kind of not bad, actually. 
(Laughter) In closing, I think that per Michelangelo, I think he was right; perception and creativity are very intimately connected. 
What we've just seen are neural networks that are entirely trained to discriminate, or to recognize different things in the world, able to be run in reverse, to generate. 
One of the things that suggests to me is not only that Michelangelo really did see the sculpture in the blocks of stone, but that any creature, any being, any alien that is able to do perceptual acts of that sort is also able to create because it's exactly the same machinery that's used in both cases. 
Also, I think that perception and creativity are by no means uniquely human. 
We start to have computer models that can do exactly these sorts of things. 
And that ought to be unsurprising; the brain is computational. 
And finally, computing began as an exercise in designing intelligent machinery. 
It was very much modeled after the idea of how could we make machines intelligent. 
And we finally are starting to fulfill now some of the promises of those early pioneers, of Turing and von Neumann and McCulloch and Pitts. 
And I think that computing is not just about accounting or playing Candy Crush or something. 
From the beginning, we modeled them after our minds. 
And they give us both the ability to understand our own minds better and to extend them. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

The kind of neuroscience that I do and my colleagues do is almost like the weatherman. 
We are always chasing storms. 
We want to see and measure storms — brainstorms, that is. 
And we all talk about brainstorms in our daily lives, but we rarely see or listen to one. 
So I always like to start these talks by actually introducing you to one of them. 
Actually, the first time we recorded more than one neuron — a hundred brain cells simultaneously — we could measure the electrical sparks of a hundred cells in the same animal, this is the first image we got, the first 10 seconds of this recording. 
So we got a little snippet of a thought, and we could see it in front of us. 
I always tell the students that we could also call neuroscientists some sort of astronomer, because we are dealing with a system that is only comparable in terms of number of cells to the number of galaxies that we have in the universe. 
And here we are, out of billions of neurons, just recording, 10 years ago, a hundred. 
We are doing a thousand now. 
And we hope to understand something fundamental about our human nature. 
Because, if you don't know yet, everything that we use to define what human nature is comes from these storms, comes from these storms that roll over the hills and valleys of our brains and define our memories, our beliefs, our feelings, our plans for the future. 
Everything that we ever do, everything that every human has ever done, do or will do, requires the toil of populations of neurons producing these kinds of storms. 
And the sound of a brainstorm, if you've never heard one, is somewhat like this. 
You can put it louder if you can. 
My son calls this "" making popcorn while listening to a badly-tuned A.M. station. "" This is a brain. 
This is what happens when you route these electrical storms to a loudspeaker and you listen to a hundred brain cells firing, your brain will sound like this — my brain, any brain. 
And what we want to do as neuroscientists in this time is to actually listen to these symphonies, these brain symphonies, and try to extract from them the messages they carry. 
In particular, about 12 years ago we created a preparation that we named brain-machine interfaces. 
And you have a scheme here that describes how it works. 
The idea is, let's have some sensors that listen to these storms, this electrical firing, and see if you can, in the same time that it takes for this storm to leave the brain and reach the legs or the arms of an animal — about half a second — let's see if we can read these signals, extract the motor messages that are embedded in it, translate it into digital commands and send it to an artificial device that will reproduce the voluntary motor wheel of that brain in real time. 
And see if we can measure how well we can translate that message when we compare to the way the body does that. 
And if we can actually provide feedback, sensory signals that go back from this robotic, mechanical, computational actuator that is now under the control of the brain, back to the brain, how the brain deals with that, of receiving messages from an artificial piece of machinery. 
And that's exactly what we did 10 years ago. 
We started with a superstar monkey called Aurora that became one of the superstars of this field. 
And Aurora liked to play video games. 
As you can see here, she likes to use a joystick, like any one of us, any of our kids, to play this game. 
And as a good primate, she even tries to cheat before she gets the right answer. 
So even before a target appears that she's supposed to cross with the cursor that she's controlling with this joystick, Aurora is trying to find the target, no matter where it is. 
And if she's doing that, because every time she crosses that target with the little cursor, she gets a drop of Brazilian orange juice. 
And I can tell you, any monkey will do anything for you if you get a little drop of Brazilian orange juice. 
Actually any primate will do that. 
Think about that. 
Well, while Aurora was playing this game, as you saw, and doing a thousand trials a day and getting 97 percent correct and 350 milliliters of orange juice, we are recording the brainstorms that are produced in her head and sending them to a robotic arm that was learning to reproduce the movements that Aurora was making. 
Because the idea was to actually turn on this brain-machine interface and have Aurora play the game just by thinking, without interference of her body. 
Her brainstorms would control an arm that would move the cursor and cross the target. 
And to our shock, that's exactly what Aurora did. 
She played the game without moving her body. 
So every trajectory that you see of the cursor now, this is the exact first moment she got that. 
That's the exact first moment a brain intention was liberated from the physical domains of a body of a primate and could act outside, in that outside world, just by controlling an artificial device. 
And Aurora kept playing the game, kept finding the little target and getting the orange juice that she wanted to get, that she craved for. 
Well, she did that because she, at that time, had acquired a new arm. 
The robotic arm that you see moving here 30 days later, after the first video that I showed to you, is under the control of Aurora's brain and is moving the cursor to get to the target. 
And Aurora now knows that she can play the game with this robotic arm, but she has not lost the ability to use her biological arms to do what she pleases. 
She can scratch her back, she can scratch one of us, she can play another game. 
By all purposes and means, Aurora's brain has incorporated that artificial device as an extension of her body. 
The model of the self that Aurora had in her mind has been expanded to get one more arm. 
Well, we did that 10 years ago. 
Just fast forward 10 years. 
Just last year we realized that you don't even need to have a robotic device. 
You can just build a computational body, an avatar, a monkey avatar. 
And you can actually use it for our monkeys to either interact with them, or you can train them to assume in a virtual world the first-person perspective of that avatar and use her brain activity to control the movements of the avatar's arms or legs. 
And what we did basically was to train the animals to learn how to control these avatars and explore objects that appear in the virtual world. 
And these objects are visually identical, but when the avatar crosses the surface of these objects, they send an electrical message that is proportional to the microtactile texture of the object that goes back directly to the monkey's brain, informing the brain what it is the avatar is touching. 
And in just four weeks, the brain learns to process this new sensation and acquires a new sensory pathway — like a new sense. 
And you truly liberate the brain now because you are allowing the brain to send motor commands to move this avatar. 
And the feedback that comes from the avatar is being processed directly by the brain without the interference of the skin. 
So what you see here is this is the design of the task. 
You're going to see an animal basically touching these three targets. 
And he has to select one because only one carries the reward, the orange juice that they want to get. 
And he has to select it by touch using a virtual arm, an arm that doesn't exist. 
And that's exactly what they do. 
This is a complete liberation of the brain from the physical constraints of the body and the motor in a perceptual task. 
The animal is controlling the avatar to touch the targets. 
And he's sensing the texture by receiving an electrical message directly in the brain. 
And the brain is deciding what is the texture associated with the reward. 
The legends that you see in the movie don't appear for the monkey. 
And by the way, they don't read English anyway, so they are here just for you to know that the correct target is shifting position. 
And yet, they can find them by tactile discrimination, and they can press it and select it. 
So when we look at the brains of these animals, on the top panel you see the alignment of 125 cells showing what happens with the brain activity, the electrical storms, of this sample of neurons in the brain when the animal is using a joystick. 
And that's a picture that every neurophysiologist knows. 
The basic alignment shows that these cells are coding for all possible directions. 
The bottom picture is what happens when the body stops moving and the animal starts controlling either a robotic device or a computational avatar. 
As fast as we can reset our computers, the brain activity shifts to start representing this new tool, as if this too was a part of that primate's body. 
The brain is assimilating that too, as fast as we can measure. 
So that suggests to us that our sense of self does not end at the last layer of the epithelium of our bodies, but it ends at the last layer of electrons of the tools that we're commanding with our brains. 
Our violins, our cars, our bicycles, our soccer balls, our clothing — they all become assimilated by this voracious, amazing, dynamic system called the brain. 
How far can we take it? 
Well, in an experiment that we ran a few years ago, we took this to the limit. 
We had an animal running on a treadmill at Duke University on the East Coast of the United States, producing the brainstorms necessary to move. 
And we had a robotic device, a humanoid robot, in Kyoto, Japan at ATR Laboratories that was dreaming its entire life to be controlled by a brain, a human brain, or a primate brain. 
What happens here is that the brain activity that generated the movements in the monkey was transmitted to Japan and made this robot walk while footage of this walking was sent back to Duke, so that the monkey could see the legs of this robot walking in front of her. 
So she could be rewarded, not by what her body was doing but for every correct step of the robot on the other side of the planet controlled by her brain activity. 
Funny thing, that round trip around the globe took 20 milliseconds less than it takes for that brainstorm to leave its head, the head of the monkey, and reach its own muscle. 
The monkey was moving a robot that was six times bigger, across the planet. 
This is one of the experiments in which that robot was able to walk autonomously. 
This is CB1 fulfilling its dream in Japan under the control of the brain activity of a primate. 
So where are we taking all this? 
What are we going to do with all this research, besides studying the properties of this dynamic universe that we have between our ears? 
Well the idea is to take all this knowledge and technology and try to restore one of the most severe neurological problems that we have in the world. 
Millions of people have lost the ability to translate these brainstorms into action, into movement. 
Although their brains continue to produce those storms and code for movements, they cannot cross a barrier that was created by a lesion on the spinal cord. 
So our idea is to create a bypass, is to use these brain-machine interfaces to read these signals, larger-scale brainstorms that contain the desire to move again, bypass the lesion using computational microengineering and send it to a new body, a whole body called an exoskeleton, a whole robotic suit that will become the new body of these patients. 
And you can see an image produced by this consortium. 
This is a nonprofit consortium called the Walk Again Project that is putting together scientists from Europe, from here in the United States, and in Brazil together to work to actually get this new body built — a body that we believe, through the same plastic mechanisms that allow Aurora and other monkeys to use these tools through a brain-machine interface and that allows us to incorporate the tools that we produce and use in our daily life. 
This same mechanism, we hope, will allow these patients, not only to imagine again the movements that they want to make and translate them into movements of this new body, but for this body to be assimilated as the new body that the brain controls. 
So I was told about 10 years ago that this would never happen, that this was close to impossible. 
And I can only tell you that as a scientist, I grew up in southern Brazil in the mid- '60s watching a few crazy guys telling [us] that they would go to the Moon. 
And I was five years old, and I never understood why NASA didn't hire Captain Kirk and Spock to do the job; after all, they were very proficient — but just seeing that as a kid made me believe, as my grandmother used to tell me, that "" impossible is just the possible that someone has not put in enough effort to make it come true. "" So they told me that it's impossible to make someone walk. 
I think I'm going to follow my grandmother's advice. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

Looking deeply inside nature, through the magnifying glass of science, designers extract principles, processes and materials that are forming the very basis of design methodology. 
In realms of genetics, regenerative medicine and synthetic biology, designers are growing novel technologies, not foreseen or anticipated by nature. 
As you can see, my legs are bionic. 
Today, I will tell human stories of bionic integration; how electromechanics attached to the body, and implanted inside the body are beginning to bridge the gap between disability and ability, between human limitation and human potential. 
In 1982, both of my legs were amputated due to tissue damage from frostbite, incurred during a mountain-climbing accident. 
This simple but powerful idea was a call to arms, to advance technology for the elimination of my own disability, and ultimately, the disability of others. 
(Laughter) So when I was feeling bad about myself, insecure, I would jack my height up. (Laughter) 
As a young man, I imagined a future world where technology so advanced could rid the world of disability, a world in which neural implants would allow the visually impaired to see. 
There's three extreme interfaces in my bionic limbs: mechanical, how my limbs are attached to my biological body; dynamic, how they move like flesh and bone; and electrical, how they communicate with my nervous system. 
This is the beautifully lyrical design work of Professor Neri Oxman at the MIT Media Lab, showing spatially varying exoskeletal impedances, shown here by color variation in this 3D-printed model. 
So under zero voltage, the material is compliant, it's floppy like paper. 
(Tapping sounds) We embed this material into the synthetic skin that attaches my bionic limb to my biological body. 
This exoskeleton becomes stiff and soft in just the right areas of the running cycle, to protect the biological joints from high impacts and degradation. 
They've been fitted to nearly 1,000 patients, 400 of which have been wounded U.S. soldiers. 
So on the left, you see the bionic device worn by a lady, on the right, a passive device worn by the same lady, that fails to emulate normal muscle function, enabling her to do something everyone should be able to do: go up and down their steps at home. 
We're beginning the age in which machines attached to our bodies will make us stronger and faster and more efficient. 
Across my residual limb are electrodes that measure the electrical pulse of my muscles. 
That's communicated to the bionic limb, so when I think about moving my phantom limb, the robot tracks those movement desires. 
What we've done, then, is we modulate the sensitivity of the reflex, the modeled spinal reflex, with the neural signal, so when I relax my muscles in my residual limb, I get very little torque and power, but the more I fire my muscles, the more torque I get, and I can even run. 
We want to actually close the loop between the human and the bionic external limb. 
On the other side of the channel, the nerve then attaches to cells, skin cells and muscle cells. 
That can be sent out wirelessly to the bionic limb, then [sensory information] on the bionic limb can be converted to stimulations in adjacent channels, sensory channels. 
So when this is fully developed and for human use, persons like myself will not only have synthetic limbs that move like flesh and bone, but actually feel like flesh and bone. 
(Video) (Laughter) LM: It's just like I've got a real leg! 
Hugh Herr: Next week, I'm visiting the Center — Thank you. Thank you. 
Every person should have the right to live life without disability if they so choose — the right to live life without severe depression; the right to see a loved one, in the case of seeing-impaired; or the right to walk or to dance, in the case of limb paralysis or limb amputation. 
Our built environment, our technologies, are broken and disabled. 
Let's build her a bionic limb, to enable her to go back to her life of dance. 
I brought in MIT scientists with expertise in prosthetics, robotics, machine learning and biomechanics, and over a 200-day research period, we studied dance. 
We brought in dancers with biological limbs, and we studied how they move, what forces they apply on the dance floor, and we took those data, and we put forth fundamental principles of dance, reflexive dance capability, and we embedded that intelligence into the bionic limb. 
(Applause) Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to introduce Adrianne Haslet-Davis, her first performance since the attack. 
(Applause) (Music: "" Ring My Bell "" performed by Enrique Iglesias) (Applause) Ladies and gentlemen, members of the research team: Elliott Rouse and Nathan Villagaray-Carski. 
Elliott and Nathan. 
(Applause) 

Let's begin with a story. 
Once upon a time — well actually less than two years ago — in a kingdom not so very far away, there was a man who traveled many miles to come to work at the jewel in the kingdom's crown — an internationally famous company. 
Let's call it Island Networks. 
Now this kingdom had many resources and mighty ambitions, but the one thing it lacked was people. 
And so it invited workers from around the world to come and help it build the nation. 
But in order to enter and to stay these migrants had to pass a few tests. 
And so it was, our man presented himself to authorities in the kingdom, looking forward to settling into his new life. 
But then something unexpected happened. 
The medical personnel who took blood samples from the man never actually told him what they were testing for. 
He wasn't offered counseling before or after the test, which is best medical practice. 
He was never informed of the results of the test. 
And yet, a couple of weeks later, he was picked up and taken to prison where he was subjected to a medical exam, including a full-body search in full view of the others in the cell. 
He was released, but then a day or two later, he was taken to the airport and he was deported. 
What on earth did this man do to merit this treatment? 
What was his terrible crime? 
He was infected with HIV. 
Now the kingdom is one of about 50 countries that imposes restrictions on the entry or stay of people living with HIV. 
The kingdom argues that its laws allow it to detain or deport foreigners who pose a risk to the economy or the security or the public health or the morals of the state. 
But these laws, when applied to people living with HIV, are a violation of international human rights agreements to which these countries are signatories. 
But you know what? 
Matters of principle aside, practically speaking, these laws drive HIV underground. 
People are less likely to come forth to be tested or treated or to disclose their condition, none of which helps these individuals or the communities these laws purport to protect. 
Today we can prevent the transmission of HIV. 
And with treatment, it is a manageable condition. 
We are very far from the days when the only practical response to dread disease was to have banished the afflicted — like this, "" The Exile of the Leper. "" So you tell me why, in our age of science, we still have laws and policies which come from an age of superstition. 
Time for a quick show of hands. 
Who here has been touched by HIV — either because you yourself have the virus or you have a family member or a friend or a colleague who is living with HIV? 
Hands up. 
Wow. Wow. 
That's a significant number of us. 
You know better than anyone that HIV brings out the best and the worst in humanity. 
And the laws reflect these attitudes. 
I'm not just talking about laws on the books, but laws as they are enforced on the streets and laws as they are decided in the courts. 
And I'm not just talking about laws as they relate to people living with HIV, but people who are at greatest risk of infection — people such as those who inject drugs or sex workers or men who have sex with men or transgendered persons or migrants or prisoners. 
And in many parts of the world that includes women and children who are especially vulnerable. 
Now there are laws in many parts of the world which reflect the best of human nature. 
These laws treat people touched by HIV with compassion and acceptance. 
These laws respect universal human rights and they are grounded in evidence. 
These laws ensure that people living with HIV and those at greatest risk are protected from violence and discrimination and that they get access to prevention and to treatment. 
Unfortunately, these good laws are counter-balanced by a mass of really bad law — law which is grounded in moral judgement and in fear and in misinformation, laws which specifically punish people living with HIV or those at greatest risk. 
These laws fly in the face of science, and they are grounded in prejudice and in ignorance and in a rewriting of tradition and a selective reading of religion. 
But you know what? You don't have to take my word for it. 
We're going to hear from two people who are on the sharp end of the law. 
The first is Nick Rhoades. He's an American. 
And he was convicted under the U.S. State of Iowa's law on HIV transmission and exposure — neither of which offense he actually committed. 
(Video) Nick Rhoades: If something is against the law then that is telling society that is unacceptable, that's bad behavior. 
And I think the severity of that punishment tells you how bad you are as a person. 
You're a class B felon, lifetime sex offender. 
You are a very, very, very bad person. 
And you did a very, very, very bad thing. 
And so that's just programmed into you. 
And you go through the correctional system and everyone's telling you the same thing. 
And you're just like, I'm a very bad person. 
Shereen El-Feki: It's not just a question of unfair or ineffective laws. 
Some countries have good laws, laws which could stem the tide of HIV. 
The problem is that these laws are flouted. 
Because stigma gives unofficial license to treat people living with HIV or those at greatest risk unlike other citizens. 
And this is exactly what happened to Helma and Dongo from Namibia. 
(Video) Hilma: I found out when I went to the hospital for a pregnancy check-up. 
The nurse announced that every pregnant woman must also be tested for HIV that day. 
I took the test and the result showed I was positive. 
That's the day I found out. 
The nurse said to me, "" Why should you people bcome pregnant when you know you are HIV positive? 
Why are you pregnant when you are living positive? "" I am sure now that is the reason they sterilized me. 
Because I am HIV positive. 
They didn't give the forms to me or explain what was in the form. 
The nurse just came with it already marked where I had to sign. 
And with the labor pain, I didn't have the strength to ask them to read it to me. 
I just signed. 
SE: Hilma and Nick and our man in the kingdom are among the 34 million people living with HIV according to recent estimates. 
They're the lucky ones because they're still alive. 
According to those same estimates, in 2010 1.8 million people died of AIDS related causes. 
These are terrible and tragic figures. 
But if we look a little more broadly into the statistics, we actually see some reason for hope. 
Looking globally, the number of new infections of HIV is declining. 
And looking globally as well, deaths are also starting to fall. 
There are many reasons for these positive developments, but one of the most remarkable is in the increase in the number of people around the world on anti-retroviral therapy, the medicines they need to keep their HIV in check. 
Now there are still many problems. 
Only about half of the people who need treatment are currently receiving it. 
In some parts of the world — like here in the Middle East and North Africa — new infections are rising and so are deaths. 
And the money, the money we need for the global response to HIV, that is shrinking. 
But for the first time in three decades into this epidemic we have a real chance to come to grips with HIV. 
But in order to do that we need to tackle an epidemic of really bad law. 
It's for this reason that the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, of which I'm a member, was established by the agencies of the United Nations — to look at the ways that legal environments are affecting people living with HIV and those at greatest risk, and to recommend what should be done to make the law an ally, not an enemy, of the global response to HIV. 
Let me give you just one example of the way a legal environment can make a positive difference. 
People who inject drugs are one of those groups I mentioned. 
They're at high risk of HIV through contaminated injection equipment and other risk-related behaviors. 
In fact, one in every 10 new infections of HIV is among people who inject drugs. 
Now drug use or possession is illegal in almost every country. 
But some countries take a harder line on this than others. 
In Thailand people who use drugs, or are merely suspected of using drugs, are placed in detention centers, like the one you see here, where they are supposed to clean up. 
There is absolutely no evidence to show that throwing people into detention cures their drug dependence. 
There is, however, ample evidence to show that incarcerating people increases their risk of HIV and other infections. 
We know how to reduce HIV transmission and other risks in people who inject drugs. 
It's called harm reduction, and it involves, among other things, providing clean needles and syringes, offering opioid substitution therapy and other evidence-based treatments to reduce drug dependence. 
It involves providing information and education and condoms to reduce HIV transmission, and also providing HIV testing and counseling and treatment should people become infected. 
Where the legal environment allows for harm reduction the results are striking. 
Australia and Switzerland were two countries which introduced harm reduction very early on in their HIV epidemics, and they have a very low rate of HIV among injecting drug users. 
The U.S. and Malaysia came to harm reduction a little later, and they have higher rates of HIV in these populations. 
Thailand and Russia, however, have resisted harm reduction and have stringent laws which punish drug use. 
And hey, surprise, very high rates of HIV among people who are injecting drugs. 
At the Global Commission we have studied the evidence, and we've heard the experiences of over 700 people from 140 countries. 
And the trend? Well the trend is clear. 
Where you criminalize people living with HIV or those at greatest risk, you fuel the epidemic. 
Now coming up with a vaccine for HIV or a cure for AIDS — now that's rocket science. 
But changing the law isn't. 
And in fact, a number of countries are starting to make progress on a number of points. 
To begin, countries need to review their legislation as it touches HIV and vulnerable groups. 
On the back of those reviews, governments should repeal laws that punish or discriminate against people living with HIV or those at greatest risk. 
Repealing a law isn't easy, and it's particularly difficult when it relates to touchy subjects like drugs and sex. 
But there's plenty you can do while that process is underway. 
One of the key points is to reform the police so that they have better practices on the ground. 
So for example, outreach workers who are distributing condoms to vulnerable populations are not themselves subject to police harassment or abuse or arbitrary arrest. 
We can also train judges so that they find flexibilities in the law and so that they rule on the side of tolerance rather than prejudice. 
We can retool prisons so that HIV prevention and harm reduction is available to prisoners. 
The key to all this is reinforcing civil society. 
Because civil society is key to raising awareness among vulnerable groups of their legal rights. 
But awareness needs action. 
And so we need to ensure that these people who are living with HIV or at greatest risk of HIV have access to legal services and they have equal access to the courts. 
And also important is talking to communities so that we change interpretations of religious or customary law, which is too often used to justify punishment and fuel stigma. 
For many of us here HIV is not an abstract threat. 
It hits very close to home. 
The law, on the other hand, can seem remote, arcane, the stuff of specialists, but it isn't. 
Because for those of us who live in democracies, or in aspiring democracies, the law begins with us. 
Laws that treat people living with HIV or those at greatest risk with respect start with the way that we treat them ourselves: as equals. 
If we are going to stop the spread of HIV in our lifetime, then that is the change we need to spread. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I am an engineering professor, and for the past 14 years I've been teaching crap. 
(Laughter) Not that I'm a bad teacher, but I've been studying and teaching about human waste and how waste is conveyed through these wastewater treatment plants, and how we engineer and design these treatment plants so that we can protect surface water like rivers. 
I've based my scientific career on using leading-edge molecular techniques, DNA- and RNA-based methods to look at microbial populations in biological reactors, and again to optimize these systems. 
And over the years, I have developed an unhealthy obsession with toilets, and I've been known to sneak into toilets and take my camera phone all over the world. 
But along the way, I've learned that it's not just the technical side, but there's also this thing called the culture of crap. 
So for example, how many of you are washers and how many of you are wipers? 
(Laughter) If, well, I guess you know what I mean. 
If you're a washer, then you use water for anal cleansing. That's the technical term. 
And if you're a wiper, then you use toilet paper or, in some regions of the world where it's not available, newspaper or rags or corncobs. 
And this is not just a piece of trivia, but it's really important to understand and solve the sanitation problem. 
And it is a big problem: There are 2.5 billion people in the world who don't have access to adequate sanitation. 
For them, there's no modern toilet. 
And there are 1.1 billion people whose toilets are the streets or river banks or open spaces, and again, the technical term for that is open defecation, but that is really simply shitting in the open. 
And if you're living in fecal material and it's surrounding you, you're going to get sick. 
It's going to get into your drinking water, into your food, into your immediate surroundings. 
So the United Nations estimates that every year, there are 1.5 million child deaths because of inadequate sanitation. 
That's one preventable death every 20 seconds, 171 every hour, 4,100 every day. 
And so, to avoid open defecation, municipalities and cities build infrastructure, for example, like pit latrines, in peri-urban and rural areas. 
For example, in KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa, they've built tens of thousands of these pit latrines. 
But there's a problem when you scale up to tens of thousands, and the problem is, what happens when the pits are full? 
This is what happens. 
People defecate around the toilet. 
In schools, children defecate on the floors and then leave a trail outside the building and start defecating around the building, and these pits have to be cleaned and manually emptied. 
And who does the emptying? 
You've got these workers who have to sometimes go down into the pits and manually remove the contents. 
It's a dirty and dangerous business. 
As you can see, there's no protective equipment, no protective clothing. 
There's one worker down there. 
I hope you can see him. 
He's got a face mask on, but no shirt. 
And in some countries, like India, the lower castes are condemned to empty the pits, and they're further condemned by society. 
So you ask yourself, how can we solve this and why don't we just build Western-style flush toilets for these two and a half billion? 
And the answer is, it's just not possible. 
In some of these areas, there's not enough water, there's no energy, it's going to cost tens of trillions of dollars to lay out the sewer lines and to build the facilities and to operate and maintain these systems, and if you don't build it right, you're going to have flush toilets that basically go straight into the river, just like what's happening in many cities in the developing world. 
And is this really the solution? 
Because essentially, what you're doing is you're using clean water and you're using it to flush your toilet, convey it to a wastewater treatment plant which then discharges to a river, and that river, again, is a drinking water source. 
So we've got to rethink sanitation, and we've got to reinvent the sanitation infrastructure, and I'm going to argue that to do this, you have to employ systems thinking. 
We have to look at the whole sanitation chain. 
We start with a human interface, and then we have to think about how feces are collected and stored, transported, treated and reused — and not just disposal but reuse. 
So let's start with the human user interface. 
I say, it doesn't matter if you're a washer or a wiper, a sitter or a squatter, the human user interface should be clean and easy to use, because after all, taking a dump should be pleasurable. 
(Laughter) And when we open the possibilities to understanding this sanitation chain, then the back-end technology, the collection to the reuse, should not really matter, and then we can apply locally adoptable and context-sensitive solutions. 
So we can open ourselves to possibilities like, for example, this urine-diverting toilet, and there's two holes in this toilet. 
There's the front and the back, and the front collects the urine, and the back collects the fecal material. 
And so what you're doing is you're separating the urine, which has 80 percent of the nitrogen and 50 percent of the phosphorus, and then that can then be treated and precipitated to form things like struvite, which is a high-value fertilizer, and then the fecal material can then be disinfected and again converted to high-value end products. 
Or, for example, in some of our research, you can reuse the water by treating it in on-site sanitation systems like planter boxes or constructed wetlands. 
So we can open up all these possibilities if we take away the old paradigm of flush toilets and treatment plants. 
So you might be asking, who's going to pay? 
Well, I'm going to argue that governments should fund sanitation infrastructure. 
NGOs and donor organizations, they can do their best, but it's not going to be enough. 
Governments should fund sanitation the same way they fund roads and schools and hospitals and other infrastructure like bridges, because we know, and the WHO has done this study, that for every dollar that we invest in sanitation infrastructure, we get something like three to 34 dollars back. 
Let's go back to the problem of pit emptying. 
So at North Carolina State University, we challenged our students to come up with a simple solution, and this is what they came up with: a simple, modified screw auger that can move the waste up from the pit and into a collecting drum, and now the pit worker doesn't have to go down into the pit. 
We tested it in South Africa, and it works. 
We need to make it more robust, and we're going to do more testing in Malawi and South Africa this coming year. 
And our idea is to make this a professionalized pit-emptying service so that we can create a small business out of it, create profits and jobs, and the hope is that, as we are rethinking sanitation, we are extending the life of these pits so that we don't have to resort to quick solutions that don't really make sense. 
I believe that access to adequate sanitation is a basic human right. 
We need to stop the practice of lower castes and lower-status people going down and being condemned to empty pits. 
It is our moral, it is our social and our environmental obligation. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

In the spirit of Jacques Cousteau, who said, "People protect what they love," I want to share with you today what I love most in the ocean, and that's the incredible number and variety of animals in it that make light. 
My addiction began with this strange looking diving suit called Wasp; that's not an acronym — just somebody thought it looked like the insect. 
It was actually developed for use by the offshore oil industry for diving on oil rigs down to a depth of 2,000 feet. 
Right after I completed my Ph.D., I was lucky enough to be included with a group of scientists that was using it for the first time as a tool for ocean exploration. 
We trained in a tank in Port Hueneme, and then my first open ocean dive was in Santa Barbara Channel. 
It was an evening dive. 
I went down to a depth of 880 feet and turned out the lights. 
And the reason I turned out the lights is because I knew I would see this phenomenon of animals making light called bioluminescence. 
But I was totally unprepared for how much there was and how spectacular it was. 
I saw chains of jellyfish called siphonophores that were longer than this room, pumping out so much light that I could read the dials and gauges inside the suit without a flashlight; and puffs and billows of what looked like luminous blue smoke; and explosions of sparks that would swirl up out of the thrusters — just like when you throw a log on a campfire and the embers swirl up off the campfire, but these were icy, blue embers. 
It was breathtaking. 
Now, usually if people are familiar with bioluminescence at all, it's these guys; it's fireflies. 
And there are a few other land-dwellers that can make light — some insects, earthworms, fungi — but in general, on land, it's really rare. 
In the ocean, it's the rule rather than the exception. 
If I go out in the open ocean environment, virtually anywhere in the world, and I drag a net from 3,000 feet to the surface, most of the animals — in fact, in many places, 80 to 90 percent of the animals that I bring up in that net — make light. 
This makes for some pretty spectacular light shows. 
Now I want to share with you a little video that I shot from a submersible. 
I first developed this technique working from a little single-person submersible called Deep Rover and then adapted it for use on the Johnson Sea-Link, which you see here. 
So, mounted in front of the observation sphere, there's a a three-foot diameter hoop with a screen stretched across it. 
And inside the sphere with me is an intensified camera that's about as sensitive as a fully dark-adapted human eye, albeit a little fuzzy. 
So you turn on the camera, turn out the lights. 
That sparkle you're seeing is not luminescence, that's just electronic noise on these super intensified cameras. 
You don't see luminescence until the submersible begins to move forward through the water, but as it does, animals bumping into the screen are stimulated to bioluminesce. 
Now, when I was first doing this, all I was trying to do was count the numbers of sources. 
I knew my forward speed, I knew the area, and so I could figure out how many hundreds of sources there were per cubic meter. 
But I started to realize that I could actually identify animals by the type of flashes they produced. 
And so, here, in the Gulf of Maine at 740 feet, I can name pretty much everything you're seeing there to the species level. 
Like those big explosions, sparks, are from a little comb jelly, and there's krill and other kinds of crustaceans, and jellyfish. 
There was another one of those comb jellies. 
And so I've worked with computer image analysis engineers to develop automatic recognition systems that can identify these animals and then extract the XYZ coordinate of the initial impact point. 
And we can then do the kinds of things that ecologists do on land, and do nearest neighbor distances. 
But you don't always have to go down to the depths of the ocean to see a light show like this. 
You can actually see it in surface waters. 
This is some shot, by Dr. Mike Latz at Scripps Institution, of a dolphin swimming through bioluminescent plankton. 
And this isn't someplace exotic like one of the bioluminescent bays in Puerto Rico, this was actually shot in San Diego Harbor. 
And sometimes you can see it even closer than that, because the heads on ships — that's toilets, for any land lovers that are listening — are flushed with unfiltered seawater that often has bioluminescent plankton in it. 
So, if you stagger into the head late at night and you're so toilet-hugging sick that you forget to turn on the light, you may think that you're having a religious experience. (Laughter) So, how does a living creature make light? 
Well, that was the question that 19th century French physiologist Raphael Dubois, asked about this bioluminescent clam. 
He ground it up and he managed to get out a couple of chemicals; one, the enzyme, he called luciferase; the substrate, he called luciferin after Lucifer the Lightbearer. 
That terminology has stuck, but it doesn't actually refer to specific chemicals because these chemicals come in a lot of different shapes and forms. 
In fact, most of the people studying bioluminescence today are focused on the chemistry, because these chemicals have proved so incredibly valuable for developing antibacterial agents, cancer fighting drugs, testing for the presence of life on Mars, detecting pollutants in our waters — which is how we use it at ORCA. 
In 2008, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for work done on a molecule called green fluorescent protein that was isolated from the bioluminescent chemistry of a jellyfish, and it's been equated to the invention of the microscope, in terms of the impact that it has had on cell biology and genetic engineering. 
Another thing all these molecules are telling us that, apparently, bioluminescence has evolved at least 40 times, maybe as many as 50 separate times in evolutionary history, which is a clear indication of how spectacularly important this trait is for survival. 
So, what is it about bioluminescence that's so important to so many animals? 
Well, for animals that are trying to avoid predators by staying in the darkness, light can still be very useful for the three basic things that animals have to do to survive: and that's find food, attract a mate and avoid being eaten. 
So, for example, this fish has a built-in headlight behind its eye that it can use for finding food or attracting a mate. 
And then when it's not using it, it actually can roll it down into its head just like the headlights on your Lamborghini. 
This fish actually has high beams. 
And this fish, which is one of my favorites, has three headlights on each side of its head. 
Now, this one is blue, and that's the color of most bioluminescence in the ocean because evolution has selected for the color that travels farthest through seawater in order to optimize communication. 
So, most animals make blue light, and most animals can only see blue light, but this fish is a really fascinating exception because it has two red light organs. 
And I have no idea why there's two, and that's something I want to solve some day — but not only can it see blue light, but it can see red light. 
So it uses its red bioluminescence like a sniper's scope to be able to sneak up on animals that are blind to red light and be able to see them without being seen. 
It's also got a little chin barbel here with a blue luminescent lure on it that it can use to attract prey from a long way off. 
And a lot of animals will use their bioluminescence as a lure. 
This is another one of my favorite fish. 
This is a viperfish, and it's got a lure on the end of a long fishing rod that it arches in front of the toothy jaw that gives the viperfish its name. 
The teeth on this fish are so long that if they closed inside the mouth of the fish, it would actually impale its own brain. 
So instead, it slides in grooves on the outside of the head. 
This is a Christmas tree of a fish; everything on this fish lights up, it's not just that lure. 
It's got a built-in flashlight. 
It's got these jewel-like light organs on its belly that it uses for a type of camouflage that obliterates its shadow, so when it's swimming around and there's a predator looking up from below, it makes itself disappear. 
It's got light organs in the mouth, it's got light organs in every single scale, in the fins, in a mucus layer on the back and the belly, all used for different things — some of which we know about, some of which we don't. 
And we know a little bit more about bioluminescence thanks to Pixar, and I'm very grateful to Pixar for sharing my favorite topic with so many people. 
I do wish, with their budget, that they might have spent just a tiny bit more money to pay a consulting fee to some poor, starving graduate student, who could have told them that those are the eyes of a fish that's been preserved in formalin. 
These are the eyes of a living anglerfish. 
So, she's got a lure that she sticks out in front of this living mousetrap of needle-sharp teeth in order to attract in some unsuspecting prey. 
And this one has a lure with all kinds of little interesting threads coming off it. 
Now we used to think that the different shape of the lure was to attract different types of prey, but then stomach content analyses on these fish done by scientists, or more likely their graduate students, have revealed that they all eat pretty much the same thing. 
So, now we believe that the different shape of the lure is how the male recognizes the female in the anglerfish world, because many of these males are what are known as dwarf males. 
This little guy has no visible means of self-support. 
He has no lure for attracting food and no teeth for eating it when it gets there. 
His only hope for existence on this planet is as a gigolo. (Laughter) He's got to find himself a babe and then he's got to latch on for life. 
So this little guy has found himself this babe, and you will note that he's had the good sense to attach himself in a way that he doesn't actually have to look at her. 
(Laughter) But he still knows a good thing when he sees it, and so he seals the relationship with an eternal kiss. 
His flesh fuses with her flesh, her bloodstream grows into his body, and he becomes nothing more than a little sperm sac. 
(Laughter) Well, this is a deep-sea version of Women's Lib. 
She always knows where he is, and she doesn't have to be monogamous, because some of these females come up with multiple males attached. 
So they can use it for finding food, for attracting mates. 
They use it a lot for defense, many different ways. 
A lot of them can release their luciferin or luferase in the water just the way a squid or an octopus will release an ink cloud. 
This shrimp is actually spewing light out of its mouth like a fire breathing dragon in order to blind or distract this viperfish so that the shrimp can swim away into the darkness. 
And there are a lot of different animals that can do this: There's jellyfish, there's squid, there's a whole lot of different crustaceans, there's even fish that can do this. 
This fish is called the shining tubeshoulder because it actually has a tube on its shoulder that can squirt out light. 
And I was luck enough to capture one of these when we were on a trawling expedition off the northwest coast of Africa for "" Blue Planet, "" for the deep portion of "" Blue Planet. "" And we were using a special trawling net that we were able to bring these animals up alive. 
So we captured one of these, and I brought it into the lab. 
So I'm holding it, and I'm about to touch that tube on its shoulder, and when I do, you'll see bioluminescence coming out. 
But to me, what's shocking is not just the amount of light, but the fact that it's not just luciferin and luciferase. 
For this fish, it's actually whole cells with nuclei and membranes. 
It's energetically very costly for this fish to do this, and we have no idea why it does it — another one of these great mysteries that needs to be solved. 
Now, another form of defense is something called a burglar alarm — same reason you have a burglar alarm on your car; the honking horn and flashing lights are meant to attract the attention of, hopefully, the police that will come and take the burglar away — when an animal's caught in the clutches of a predator, its only hope for escape may be to attract the attention of something bigger and nastier that will attack their attacker, thereby affording them a chance for escape. 
This jellyfish, for example, has a spectacular bioluminescent display. 
This is us chasing it in the submersible. 
That's not luminescence, that's reflected light from the gonads. 
We capture it in a very special device on the front of the submersible that allows us to bring it up in really pristine condition, bring it into the lab on the ship. 
And then to generate the display you're about to see, all I did was touch it once per second on its nerve ring with a sharp pick that's sort of like the sharp tooth of a fish. 
And once this display gets going, I'm not touching it anymore. 
This is an unbelievable light show. 
It's this pinwheel of light, and I've done calculations that show that this could be seen from as much as 300 feet away by a predator. 
And I thought, "" You know, that might actually make a pretty good lure. "" Because one of the things that's frustrated me as a deep-sea explorer is how many animals there probably are in the ocean that we know nothing about because of the way we explore the ocean. 
The primary way that we know about what lives in the ocean is we go out and drag nets behind ships. 
And I defy you to name any other branch of science that still depends on hundreds of year-old technology. 
The other primary way is we go down with submersibles and remote-operated vehicles. 
I've made hundreds of dives in submersibles. 
When I'm sitting in a submersible though, I know that I'm not unobtrusive at all — I've got bright lights and noisy thrusters — any animal with any sense is going to be long gone. 
So, I've wanted for a long time to figure out a different way to explore. 
And so, sometime ago, I got this idea for a camera system. 
It's not exactly rocket science. We call this thing Eye-in-the-Sea. 
And scientists have done this on land for years; we just use a color that the animals can't see and then a camera that can see that color. 
You can't use infrared in the sea. 
We use far-red light, but even that's a problem because it gets absorbed so quickly. 
Made an intensified camera, wanted to make this electronic jellyfish. 
Thing is, in science, you basically have to tell the funding agencies what you're going to discover before they'll give you the money. 
And I didn't know what I was going to discover, so I couldn't get the funding for this. 
So I kluged this together, I got the Harvey Mudd Engineering Clinic to actually do it as an undergraduate student project initially, and then I kluged funding from a whole bunch of different sources. 
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute gave me time with their ROV so that I could test it and we could figure out, you know, for example, which colors of red light we had to use so that we could see the animals, but they couldn't see us — get the electronic jellyfish working. 
And you can see just what a shoestring operation this really was, because we cast these 16 blue LEDs in epoxy and you can see in the epoxy mold that we used, the word Ziploc is still visible. 
Needless to say, when it's kluged together like this, there were a lot of trials and tribulations getting this working. 
But there came a moment when it all came together, and everything worked. 
And, remarkably, that moment got caught on film by photographer Mark Richards, who happened to be there at the precise moment that we discovered that it all came together. 
That's me on the left, my graduate student at the time, Erika Raymond, and Lee Fry, who was the engineer on the project. 
And we have this photograph posted in our lab in a place of honor with the caption: "" Engineer satisfying two women at once. "" (Laughter) And we were very, very happy. 
So now we had a system that we could actually take to some place that was kind of like an oasis on the bottom of the ocean that might be patrolled by large predators. 
And so, the place that we took it to was this place called a Brine Pool, which is in the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico. 
It's a magical place. 
And I know this footage isn't going to look like anything to you — we had a crummy camera at the time — but I was ecstatic. 
We're at the edge of the Brine Pool, there's a fish that's swimming towards the camera. 
It's clearly undisturbed by us. 
And I had my window into the deep sea. 
I, for the first time, could see what animals were doing down there when we weren't down there disturbing them in some way. 
Four hours into the deployment, we had programmed the electronic jellyfish to come on for the first time. 
Eighty-six seconds after it went into its pinwheel display, we recorded this: This is a squid, over six feet long, that is so new to science, it cannot be placed in any known scientific family. 
I could not have asked for a better proof of concept. 
And based on this, I went back to the National Science Foundation and said, "" This is what we will discover. "" And they gave me enough money to do it right, which has involved developing the world's first deep-sea webcam — which has been installed in the Monterey Canyon for the past year — and now, more recently, a modular form of this system, a much more mobile form that's a lot easier to launch and recover, that I hope can be used on Sylvia's "" hope spots "" to help explore and protect these areas, and, for me, learn more about the bioluminescence in these "" hope spots. "" 
So one of these take-home messages here is, there is still a lot to explore in the oceans. 
And Sylvia has said that we are destroying the oceans before we even know what's in them, and she's right. 
So if you ever, ever get an opportunity to take a dive in a submersible, say yes — a thousand times, yes — and please turn out the lights. 
I promise, you'll love it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

A few years ago, my mom developed rheumatoid arthritis. 
Her wrists, knees and toes swelled up, causing crippling, chronic pain. 
She had to file for disability. 
She stopped attending our local mosque. 
Some mornings it was too painful for her to brush her teeth. 
I wanted to help. 
But I didn't know how. 
I'm not a doctor. 
So, what I am is a historian of medicine. 
So I started to research the history of chronic pain. 
Turns out, UCLA has an entire history of pain collection in their archives. 
And I found a story — a fantastic story — of a man who saved — rescued — millions of people from pain; people like my mom. 
Yet, I had never heard of him. 
There were no biographies of him, no Hollywood movies. 
His name was John J. Bonica. 
But when our story begins, he was better known as Johnny "" Bull "" Walker. 
It was a summer day in 1941. 
The circus had just arrived in the tiny town of Brookfield, New York. 
Spectators flocked to see the wire-walkers, the tramp clowns — if they were lucky, the human cannonball. 
They also came to see the strongman, Johnny "" Bull "" Walker, a brawny bully who'd pin you for a dollar. 
You know, on that particular day, a voice rang out over the circus P.A. system. 
They needed a doctor urgently, in the live animal tent. 
Something had gone wrong with the lion tamer. 
The climax of his act had gone wrong, and his head was stuck inside the lion's mouth. 
He was running out of air; the crowd watched in horror as he struggled and then passed out. 
When the lion finally did relax its jaws, the lion tamer just slumped to the ground, motionless. 
When he came to a few minutes later, he saw a familiar figure hunched over him. 
It was Bull Walker. 
The strongman had given the lion tamer mouth-to-mouth, and saved his life. 
Now, the strongman hadn't told anyone, but he was actually a third-year medical student. 
He toured with the circus during summers to pay tuition, but kept it a secret to protect his persona. 
He was supposed to be a brute, a villain — not a nerdy do-gooder. 
His medical colleagues didn't know his secret, either. 
As he put it, "" If you were an athlete, you were a dumb dodo. "" So he didn't tell them about the circus, or about how he wrestled professionally on evenings and weekends. 
He used a pseudonym like Bull Walker, or later, the Masked Marvel. 
He even kept it a secret that same year, when he was crowned the Light Heavyweight Champion of the world. 
Over the years, John J. Bonica lived these parallel lives. 
He was a wrestler; he was a doctor. 
He was a heel; he was a hero. 
He inflicted pain, and he treated it. 
And he didn ’ t know it at the time, but over the next five decades, he'd draw on these dueling identities to forge a whole new way to think about pain. 
It'd change modern medicine so much so, that decades later, Time magazine would call him pain relief's founding father. 
But that all happened later. 
In 1942, Bonica graduated medical school and married Emma, his sweetheart, whom he had met at one of his matches years before. 
He still wrestled in secret — he had to. 
His internship at New York's St. Vincent's Hospital paid nothing. 
With his championship belt, he wrestled in big-ticket venues, like Madison Square Garden, against big-time opponents, like Everett "" The Blonde Bear "" Marshall, or three-time world champion, Angelo Savoldi. 
The matches took a toll on his body; he tore hip joints, fractured ribs. 
One night, The Terrible Turk's big toe scratched a scar like Capone's down the side of his face. 
The next morning at work, he had to wear a surgical mask to hide it. 
Twice Bonica showed up to the O.R. with one eye so bruised, he couldn't see out of it. 
But worst of all were his mangled cauliflower ears. 
He said they felt like two baseballs on the sides of his head. 
Pain just kept accumulating in his life. 
Next, he watched his wife go into labor at his hospital. 
She heaved and pushed, clearly in anguish. 
Her obstetrician called out to the intern on duty to give her a few drops of ether to ease her pain. 
But the intern was a young guy, just three weeks on the job — he was jittery, and in applying the ether, irritated Emma's throat. 
She vomited and choked, and started to turn blue. 
Bonica, who was watching all this, pushed the intern out of the way, cleared her airway, and saved his wife and his unborn daughter. 
At that moment, he decided to devote his life to anesthesiology. 
Later, he'd even go on to help develop the epidural, for delivering mothers. 
But before he could focus on obstetrics, Bonica had to report for basic training. 
Right around D-Day, Bonica showed up to Madigan Army Medical Center, near Tacoma. 
At 7,700 beds, it was one of the largest army hospitals in America. 
Bonica was in charge of all pain control there. 
He was only 27. 
Treating so many patients, Bonica started noticing cases that contradicted everything he had learned. 
Pain was supposed to be a kind of alarm bell — in a good way — a body's way of signaling an injury, like a broken arm. 
But in some cases, like after a patient had a leg amputated, that patient might still complain of pain in that nonexistent leg. 
But if the injury had been treated, why would the alarm bell keep ringing? 
There were other cases in which there was no evidence of an injury whatsoever, and yet, still the patient hurt. 
Bonica tracked down all the specialists at his hospital — surgeons, neurologists, psychiatrists, others. 
And he tried to get their opinions on his patients. 
It took too long, so he started organizing group meetings over lunch. 
It would be like a tag team of specialists going up against the patient's pain. 
No one had ever focused on pain this way before. 
After that, he hit the books. 
He read every medical textbook he could get his hands on, carefully noting every mention of the word "" pain. "" Out of the 14,000 pages he read, the word "" pain "" was on 17 and a half of them. 
Seventeen and a half. 
For the most basic, most common, most frustrating part of being a patient. 
Bonica was shocked — I'm quoting him, he said, "" What the hell kind of conclusion can you come to there? 
The most important thing from the patient's perspective, they don't talk about. "" So over the next eight years, Bonica would talk about it. 
He'd write about it; he'd write those missing pages. 
He wrote what would later be known as the Bible of Pain. 
In it he proposed new strategies, new treatments using nerve-block injections. 
He proposed a new institution, the Pain Clinic, based on those lunchtime meetings. 
But the most important thing about his book was that it was kind of an emotional alarm bell for medicine. 
A desperate plea to doctors to take pain seriously in patients' lives. 
He recast the very purpose of medicine. 
The goal wasn't to make patients better; it was to make patients feel better. 
He pushed his pain agenda for decades, before it finally took hold in the mid- '70s. 
Hundreds of pain clinics sprung up all over the world. 
But as they did — a tragic twist. 
Bonica's years of wrestling caught up to him. 
He had been out of the ring for over 20 years, but those 1,500 professional bouts had left a mark on his body. 
Still in his mid-50s, he suffered severe osteoarthritis. 
Over the next 20 years he'd have 22 surgeries, including four spine operations, and hip replacement after hip replacement. 
He could barely raise his arm, turn his neck. 
He needed aluminum crutches to walk. 
His friends and former students became his doctors. 
One recalled that he probably had more nerve-block injections than anyone else on the planet. 
Already a workaholic, he worked even more — 15- to 18-hour days. 
Healing others became more than just his job, it was his own most effective form of relief. 
"" If I wasn't as busy as I am, "" he told a reporter at the time, "I would be a completely disabled guy." 
On a business trip to Florida in the early 1980s, Bonica got a former student to drive him to the Hyde Park area in Tampa. 
They drove past palm trees and pulled up to an old mansion, with giant silver howitzer cannons hidden in the garage. 
The house belonged to the Zacchini family, who were something like American circus royalty. 
Decades earlier, Bonica had watched them, clad in silver jumpsuits and goggles, doing the act they pioneered — the Human Cannonball. 
But now they were like him: retired. 
That generation is all dead now, including Bonica, so there's no way to know exactly what they said that day. 
But still, I love imagining it. 
The strongman and the human cannonballs reunited, showing off old scars, and new ones. 
Maybe Bonica gave them medical advice. 
Maybe he told them what he later said in an oral history, which is that his time in the circus and wrestling deeply molded his life. 
Bonica saw pain close up. 
He felt it. He lived it. 
And it made it impossible for him to ignore in others. 
Out of that empathy, he spun a whole new field, played a major role in getting medicine to acknowledge pain in and of itself. 
In that same oral history, Bonica claimed that pain is the most complex human experience. 
That it involves your past life, your current life, your interactions, your family. 
That was definitely true for Bonica. 
But it was also true for my mom. 
It's easy for doctors to see my mom as a kind of professional patient, a woman who just spends her days in waiting rooms. 
Sometimes I get stuck seeing her that same way. 
But as I saw Bonica's pain — a testament to his fully lived life — I started to remember all the things that my mom's pain holds. 
Before they got swollen and arthritic, my mom's fingers clacked away in the hospital H.R. department where she worked. 
They folded samosas for our entire mosque. 
When I was a kid, they cut my hair, wiped my nose, tied my shoes. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So, this is a story about how we know what we know. 
It's a story about this woman, Natalia Rybczynski. 
She's a paleobiologist, which means she specializes in digging up really old dead stuff. 
(Audio) Natalia Rybczynski: Yeah, I had someone call me "" Dr. Dead Things. "" Latif Nasser: And I think she's particularly interesting because of where she digs that stuff up, way above the Arctic Circle in the remote Canadian tundra. 
Now, one summer day in 2006, she was at a dig site called the Fyles Leaf Bed, which is less than 10 degrees latitude away from the magnetic north pole. 
(Audio) NR: Really, it's not going to sound very exciting, because it was a day of walking with your backpack and your GPS and notebook and just picking up anything that might be a fossil. 
LN: And at some point, she noticed something. 
(Audio) NR: Rusty, kind of rust-colored, about the size of the palm of my hand. 
It was just lying on the surface. 
LN: And at first she thought it was just a splinter of wood, because that's the sort of thing people had found at the Fyles Leaf Bed before — prehistoric plant parts. 
But that night, back at camp... 
(Audio) NR:... I get out the hand lens, I'm looking a little bit more closely and realizing it doesn't quite look like this has tree rings. 
Maybe it's a preservation thing, but it looks really like... 
bone. 
LN: Huh. So over the next four years, she went to that spot over and over, and eventually collected 30 fragments of that exact same bone, most of them really tiny. 
(Audio) NR: It's not a whole lot. It fits in a small Ziploc bag. 
LN: And she tried to piece them together like a jigsaw puzzle. 
But it was challenging. 
(Audio) NR: It's broken up into so many little tiny pieces, I'm trying to use sand and putty, and it's not looking good. 
So finally, we used a 3D surface scanner. 
LN: Ooh! NR: Yeah, right? 
(Laughter) LN: It turns out it was way easier to do it virtually. 
(Audio) NR: It's kind of magical when it all fits together. 
LN: How certain were you that you had it right, that you had put it together in the right way? 
Was there a potential that you'd put it together a different way and have, like, a parakeet or something? 
(Laughter) (Audio) NR: (Laughs) Um, no. No, we got this. 
LN: What she had, she discovered, was a tibia, a leg bone, and specifically, one that belonged to a cloven-hoofed mammal, so something like a cow or a sheep. 
But it couldn't have been either of those. 
It was just too big. 
(Audio) NR: The size of this thing, it was huge. It's a really big animal. 
LN: So what animal could it be? 
Having hit a wall, she showed one of the fragments to some colleagues of hers in Colorado, and they had an idea. 
(Audio) NR: We took a saw, and we nicked just the edge of it, and there was this really interesting smell that comes from it. 
LN: It smelled kind of like singed flesh. 
It was a smell that Natalia recognized from cutting up skulls in her gross anatomy lab: collagen. 
Collagen is what gives structure to our bones. 
And usually, after so many years, it breaks down. 
But in this case, the Arctic had acted like a natural freezer and preserved it. 
Then a year or two later, Natalia was at a conference in Bristol, and she saw that a colleague of hers named Mike Buckley was demoing this new process that he called "" collagen fingerprinting. "" It turns out that different species have slightly different structures of collagen, so if you get a collagen profile of an unknown bone, you can compare it to those of known species, and, who knows, maybe you get a match. 
So she shipped him one of the fragments, FedEx. 
(Audio) NR: Yeah, you want to track it. It's kind of important. 
(Laughter) LN: And he processed it, and compared it to 37 known and modern-day mammal species. 
And he found a match. 
It turns out that the 3.5 million-year-old bone that Natalia had dug out of the High Arctic belonged to... 
a camel. 
(Laughter) (Audio) NR: And I'm thinking, what? That's amazing — if it's true. 
LN: So they tested a bunch of the fragments, and they got the same result for each one. 
However, based on the size of the bone that they found, it meant that this camel was 30 percent larger than modern-day camels. 
So this camel would have been about nine feet tall, weighed around a ton. 
(Audience reacts) Yeah. 
Natalia had found a Giant Arctic camel. 
(Laughter) Now, when you hear the word "" camel, "" what may come to mind is one of these, the Bactrian camel of East and Central Asia. 
But chances are the postcard image you have in your brain is one of these, the dromedary, quintessential desert creature — hangs out in sandy, hot places like the Middle East and the Sahara, has a big old hump on its back for storing water for those long desert treks, has big, broad feet to help it tromp over sand dunes. 
So how on earth would one of these guys end up in the High Arctic? 
Well, scientists have known for a long time, turns out, even before Natalia's discovery, that camels are actually originally American. 
(Music: The Star-Spangled Banner) (Laughter) They started here. 
For nearly 40 of the 45 million years that camels have been around, you could only find them in North America, around 20 different species, maybe more. 
(Audio) LN: If I put them all in a lineup, would they look different? 
NR: Yeah, you're going to have different body sizes. 
You'll have some with really long necks, so they're actually functionally like giraffes. 
LN: Some had snouts, like crocodiles. 
(Audio) NR: The really primitive, early ones would have been really small, almost like rabbits. 
LN: What? Rabbit-sized camels? 
(Audio) NR: The earliest ones. 
So those ones you probably would not recognize. 
LN: Oh my God, I want a pet rabbit-camel. 
(Audio) NR: I know, wouldn't that be great? 
(Laughter) LN: And then about three to seven million years ago, one branch of camels went down to South America, where they became llamas and alpacas, and another branch crossed over the Bering Land Bridge into Asia and Africa. 
And then around the end of the last ice age, North American camels went extinct. 
So, scientists knew all of that already, but it still doesn't fully explain how Natalia found one so far north. 
Now to be fair, three and a half million years ago, it was on average 22 degrees Celsius warmer than it is now. 
So it would have been boreal forest, so more like the Yukon or Siberia today. 
But still, like, they would have six-month-long winters where the ponds would freeze over. 
You'd have blizzards. 
You'd have 24 hours a day of straight darkness. 
Like, how... How? 
How is it that one of these Saharan superstars could ever have survived those arctic conditions? 
(Laughter) Natalia and her colleagues think they have an answer. 
And it's kind of brilliant. 
What if the very features that we imagine make the camel so well-suited to places like the Sahara, actually evolved to help it get through the winter? 
What if those broad feet were meant to tromp not over sand, but over snow, like a pair of snowshoes? 
What if that hump — which, huge news to me, does not contain water, it contains fat — (Laughter) was there to help the camel get through that six-month-long winter, when food was scarce? 
And then, only later, long after it crossed over the land bridge did it retrofit those winter features for a hot desert environment? 
Like, for instance, the hump may be helpful to camels in hotter climes because having all your fat in one place, like a, you know, fat backpack, means that you don't have to have that insulation all over the rest of your body. 
So it helps heat dissipate easier. 
It's this crazy idea, that what seems like proof of the camel's quintessential desert nature could actually be proof of its High Arctic past. 
Now, I'm not the first person to tell this story. 
Others have told it as a way to marvel at evolutionary biology or as a keyhole into the future of climate change. 
But I love it for a totally different reason. 
For me, it's a story about us, about how we see the world and about how that changes. 
So I was trained as a historian. 
And I've learned that, actually, a lot of scientists are historians, too. 
They make sense of the past. 
They tell the history of our universe, of our planet, of life on this planet. 
And as a historian, you start with an idea in your mind of how the story goes. 
(Audio) NR: We make up stories and we stick with it, like the camel in the desert, right? 
That's a great story! It's totally adapted for that. 
Clearly, it always lived there. 
LN: But at any moment, you could uncover some tiny bit of evidence. 
You could learn some tiny thing that forces you to reframe everything you thought you knew. 
Like, in this case, this one scientist finds this one shard of what she thought was wood, and because of that, science has a totally new and totally counterintuitive theory about why this absurd Dr. Seuss-looking creature looks the way it does. 
And for me, it completely upended the way I think of the camel. 
It went from being this ridiculously niche creature suited only to this one specific environment, to being this world traveler that just happens to be in the Sahara, and could end up virtually anywhere. 
(Applause) This is Azuri. 
Azuri, hi, how are you doing? 
OK, here, I've got one of these for you here. 
(Laughter) So Azuri is on a break from her regular gig at the Radio City Music Hall. (Laughter) 
That's not even a joke. 
Anyway — But really, Azuri is here as a living reminder that the story of our world is a dynamic one. 
It requires our willingness to readjust, to reimagine. 
(Laughter) Right, Azuri? 
And, really, that we're all just one shard of bone away from seeing the world anew. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Fifty years ago, when I began exploring the ocean, no one — not Jacques Perrin, not Jacques Cousteau or Rachel Carson — imagined that we could do anything to harm the ocean by what we put into it or by what we took out of it. 
It seemed, at that time, to be a sea of Eden, but now we know, and now we are facing paradise lost. 
I want to share with you my personal view of changes in the sea that affect all of us, and to consider why it matters that in 50 years, we've lost — actually, we've taken, we've eaten — more than 90 percent of the big fish in the sea; why you should care that nearly half of the coral reefs have disappeared; why a mysterious depletion of oxygen in large areas of the Pacific should concern not only the creatures that are dying, but it really should concern you. 
It does concern you, as well. 
I'm haunted by the thought of what Ray Anderson calls "" tomorrow's child, "" asking why we didn't do something on our watch to save sharks and bluefin tuna and squids and coral reefs and the living ocean while there still was time. 
Well, now is that time. 
I hope for your help to explore and protect the wild ocean in ways that will restore the health and, in so doing, secure hope for humankind. 
Health to the ocean means health for us. 
And I hope Jill Tarter's wish to engage Earthlings includes dolphins and whales and other sea creatures in this quest to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. 
And I hope, Jill, that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet. 
(Laughter) Did I say that? I guess I did. 
For me, as a scientist, it all began in 1953 when I first tried scuba. 
It's when I first got to know fish swimming in something other than lemon slices and butter. 
I actually love diving at night; you see a lot of fish then that you don't see in the daytime. 
Diving day and night was really easy for me in 1970, when I led a team of aquanauts living underwater for weeks at a time — at the same time that astronauts were putting their footprints on the moon. 
In 1979 I had a chance to put my footprints on the ocean floor while using this personal submersible called Jim. 
It was six miles offshore and 1,250 feet down. 
It's one of my favorite bathing suits. 
Since then, I've used about 30 kinds of submarines and I've started three companies and a nonprofit foundation called Deep Search to design and build systems to access the deep sea. 
I led a five-year National Geographic expedition, the Sustainable Seas expeditions, using these little subs. 
They're so simple to drive that even a scientist can do it. 
And I'm living proof. 
Astronauts and aquanauts alike really appreciate the importance of air, food, water, temperature — all the things you need to stay alive in space or under the sea. 
I heard astronaut Joe Allen explain how he had to learn everything he could about his life support system and then do everything he could to take care of his life support system; and then he pointed to this and he said, "" Life support system. "" We need to learn everything we can about it and do everything we can to take care of it. 
The poet Auden said, "" Thousands have lived without love; none without water. "" Ninety-seven percent of Earth's water is ocean. 
No blue, no green. 
If you think the ocean isn't important, imagine Earth without it. 
Mars comes to mind. 
No ocean, no life support system. 
I gave a talk not so long ago at the World Bank and I showed this amazing image of Earth and I said, "" There it is! The World Bank! "" That's where all the assets are! 
And we've been trawling them down much faster than the natural systems can replenish them. 
Tim Worth says the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment. 
With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you're connected to the sea. 
No matter where on Earth you live. 
Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea. 
Over time, most of the planet's organic carbon has been absorbed and stored there, mostly by microbes. 
The ocean drives climate and weather, stabilizes temperature, shapes Earth's chemistry. 
Water from the sea forms clouds that return to the land and the seas as rain, sleet and snow, and provides home for about 97 percent of life in the world, maybe in the universe. 
No water, no life; no blue, no green. 
Yet we have this idea, we humans, that the Earth — all of it: the oceans, the skies — are so vast and so resilient it doesn't matter what we do to it. 
That may have been true 10,000 years ago, and maybe even 1,000 years ago but in the last 100, especially in the last 50, we've drawn down the assets, the air, the water, the wildlife that make our lives possible. 
New technologies are helping us to understand the nature of nature; the nature of what's happening, showing us our impact on the Earth. 
I mean, first you have to know that you've got a problem. 
And fortunately, in our time, we've learned more about the problems than in all preceding history. 
And with knowing comes caring. 
And with caring, there's hope that we can find an enduring place for ourselves within the natural systems that support us. 
But first we have to know. 
Three years ago, I met John Hanke, who's the head of Google Earth, and I told him how much I loved being able to hold the world in my hands and go exploring vicariously. 
But I asked him: "" When are you going to finish it? 
You did a great job with the land, the dirt. 
What about the water? "" Since then, I've had the great pleasure of working with the Googlers, with DOER Marine, with National Geographic, with dozens of the best institutions and scientists around the world, ones that we could enlist, to put the ocean in Google Earth. 
And as of just this week, last Monday, Google Earth is now whole. 
Consider this: Starting right here at the convention center, we can find the nearby aquarium, we can look at where we're sitting, and then we can cruise up the coast to the big aquarium, the ocean, and California's four national marine sanctuaries, and the new network of state marine reserves that are beginning to protect and restore some of the assets We can flit over to Hawaii and see the real Hawaiian Islands: not just the little bit that pokes through the surface, but also what's below. 
To see — wait a minute, we can go kshhplash! — right there, ha — under the ocean, see what the whales see. 
We can go explore the other side of the Hawaiian Islands. 
We can go actually and swim around on Google Earth and visit with humpback whales. 
These are the gentle giants that I've had the pleasure of meeting face to face many times underwater. 
There's nothing quite like being personally inspected by a whale. 
We can pick up and fly to the deepest place: seven miles down, the Mariana Trench, where only two people have ever been. 
Imagine that. It's only seven miles, but only two people have been there, 49 years ago. 
One-way trips are easy. 
We need new deep-diving submarines. 
How about some X Prizes for ocean exploration? 
We need to see deep trenches, the undersea mountains, and understand life in the deep sea. 
We can now go to the Arctic. 
Just ten years ago I stood on the ice at the North Pole. 
An ice-free Arctic Ocean may happen in this century. 
That's bad news for the polar bears. 
That's bad news for us too. 
Excess carbon dioxide is not only driving global warming, it's also changing ocean chemistry, making the sea more acidic. 
That's bad news for coral reefs and oxygen-producing plankton. 
Also it's bad news for us. 
We're putting hundreds of millions of tons of plastic and other trash into the sea. 
Millions of tons of discarded fishing nets, gear that continues to kill. 
We're clogging the ocean, poisoning the planet's circulatory system, and we're taking out hundreds of millions of tons of wildlife, all carbon-based units. 
Barbarically, we're killing sharks for shark fin soup, undermining food chains that shape planetary chemistry and drive the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the oxygen cycle, the water cycle — our life support system. 
We're still killing bluefin tuna; truly endangered and much more valuable alive than dead. 
All of these parts are part of our life support system. 
We kill using long lines, with baited hooks every few feet that may stretch for 50 miles or more. 
Industrial trawlers and draggers are scraping the sea floor like bulldozers, taking everything in their path. 
Using Google Earth you can witness trawlers — in China, the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico — shaking the foundation of our life support system, leaving plumes of death in their path. 
The next time you dine on sushi — or sashimi, or swordfish steak, or shrimp cocktail, whatever wildlife you happen to enjoy from the ocean — think of the real cost. 
For every pound that goes to market, more than 10 pounds, even 100 pounds, may be thrown away as bycatch. 
This is the consequence of not knowing that there are limits to what we can take out of the sea. 
This chart shows the decline in ocean wildlife from 1900 to 2000. 
The highest concentrations are in red. 
In my lifetime, imagine, 90 percent of the big fish have been killed. 
Most of the turtles, sharks, tunas and whales are way down in numbers. 
But, there is good news. 
Ten percent of the big fish still remain. 
There are still some blue whales. 
There are still some krill in Antarctica. 
There are a few oysters in Chesapeake Bay. 
Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape, a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet. 
There's still time, but not a lot, to turn things around. 
But business as usual means that in 50 years, there may be no coral reefs — and no commercial fishing, because the fish will simply be gone. 
Imagine the ocean without fish. 
Imagine what that means to our life support system. 
Natural systems on the land are in big trouble too, but the problems are more obvious, and some actions are being taken to protect trees, watersheds and wildlife. 
And in 1872, with Yellowstone National Park, the United States began establishing a system of parks that some say was the best idea America ever had. 
About 12 percent of the land around the world is now protected: safeguarding biodiversity, providing a carbon sink, generating oxygen, protecting watersheds. 
And, in 1972, this nation began to establish a counterpart in the sea, National Marine Sanctuaries. 
That's another great idea. 
The good news is that there are now more than 4,000 places in the sea, around the world, that have some kind of protection. 
And you can find them on Google Earth. 
The bad news is that you have to look hard to find them. 
In the last three years, for example, the U.S. protected 340,000 square miles of ocean as national monuments. 
But it only increased from 0.6 of one percent to 0.8 of one percent of the ocean protected, globally. 
Protected areas do rebound, but it takes a long time to restore 50-year-old rockfish or monkfish, sharks or sea bass, or 200-year-old orange roughy. 
We don't consume 200-year-old cows or chickens. 
Protected areas provide hope that the creatures of Ed Wilson's dream of an encyclopedia of life, or the census of marine life, will live not just as a list, a photograph, or a paragraph. 
With scientists around the world, I've been looking at the 99 percent of the ocean that is open to fishing — and mining, and drilling, and dumping, and whatever — to search out hope spots, and try to find ways to give them and us a secure future. 
Such as the Arctic — we have one chance, right now, to get it right. 
Or the Antarctic, where the continent is protected, but the surrounding ocean is being stripped of its krill, whales and fish. 
Sargasso Sea's three million square miles of floating forest is being gathered up to feed cows. 
97 percent of the land in the Galapagos Islands is protected, but the adjacent sea is being ravaged by fishing. 
It's true too in Argentina on the Patagonian shelf, which is now in serious trouble. 
The high seas, where whales, tuna and dolphins travel — the largest, least protected, ecosystem on Earth, filled with luminous creatures, living in dark waters that average two miles deep. 
They flash, and sparkle, and glow with their own living light. 
There are still places in the sea as pristine as I knew as a child. 
The next 10 years may be the most important, and the next 10,000 years the best chance our species will have to protect what remains of the natural systems that give us life. 
To cope with climate change, we need new ways to generate power. 
We need new ways, better ways, to cope with poverty, wars and disease. 
We need many things to keep and maintain the world as a better place. 
But, nothing else will matter if we fail to protect the ocean. 
Our fate and the ocean's are one. 
We need to do for the ocean what Al Gore did for the skies above. 
A global plan of action with a world conservation union, the IUCN, is underway to protect biodiversity, to mitigate and recover from the impacts of climate change, on the high seas and in coastal areas, wherever we can identify critical places. 
New technologies are needed to map, photograph and explore the 95 percent of the ocean that we have yet to see. 
The goal is to protect biodiversity, to provide stability and resilience. 
We need deep-diving subs, new technologies to explore the ocean. 
We need, maybe, an expedition — a TED at sea — that could help figure out the next steps. 
And so, I suppose you want to know what my wish is. 
I wish you would use all means at your disposal — films, expeditions, the web, new submarines — and campaign to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas — hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet. 
How much? 
Some say 10 percent, some say 30 percent. 
You decide: how much of your heart do you want to protect? 
Whatever it is, a fraction of one percent is not enough. 
My wish is a big wish, but if we can make it happen, it can truly change the world, and help ensure the survival of what actually — as it turns out — is my favorite species; that would be us. 
For the children of today, for tomorrow's child: as never again, now is the time. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So over the long course of human history, the infectious disease that's killed more humans than any other is malaria. 
It's carried in the bites of infected mosquitos, and it's probably our oldest scourge. 
We may have had malaria since we evolved from the apes. 
And to this day, malaria takes a huge toll on our species. 
We've got 300 million cases a year and over half a million deaths. 
Now this really makes no sense. 
We've known how to cure malaria since the 1600s. 
That's when Jesuit missionaries in Peru discovered the bark of the cinchona tree, and inside that bark was quinine, still an effective cure for malaria to this day. 
So we've known how to cure malaria for centuries. 
We've known how to prevent malaria since 1897. 
That's when the British army surgeon Ronald Ross discovered that it was mosquitos that carried malaria, not bad air or miasmas, as was previously thought. 
So malaria should be a relatively simple disease to solve, and yet to this day, hundreds of thousands of people are going to die from the bite of a mosquito. 
Why is that? 
This is a question that's personally intrigued me for a long time. 
I grew up as the daughter of Indian immigrants visiting my cousins in India every summer, and because I had no immunity to the local malarias, I was made to sleep under this hot, sweaty mosquito net every night while my cousins, they were allowed to sleep out on the terrace and have this nice, cool night breeze wafting over them. 
And I really hated the mosquitos for that. 
But at the same time, I come from a Jain family, and Jainism is a religion that espouses a very extreme form of nonviolence. 
So Jains are not supposed to eat meat. 
We're not supposed to walk on grass, because you could, you know, inadvertently kill some insects when you walk on grass. 
We're certainly not supposed to swat mosquitos. 
So the fearsome power of this little insect was apparent to me from a very young age, and it's one reason why I spent five years as a journalist trying to understand, why has malaria been such a horrible scourge for all of us for so very long? 
And I think there's three main reasons why. 
Those three reasons add up to the fourth reason, which is probably the biggest reason of all. 
The first reason is certainly scientific. 
This little parasite that causes malaria, it's probably one of the most complex and wily pathogens known to humankind. 
It lives half its life inside the cold-blooded mosquito and half its life inside the warm-blooded human. 
These two environments are totally different, but not only that, they're both utterly hostile. 
So the insect is continually trying to fight off the parasite, and so is the human body continually trying to fight it off. 
This little creature survives under siege like that, but not only does it survive, it has thrived. 
It has spread. It has more ways to evade attack than we know. 
It's a shape-shifter, for one thing. 
Just as a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, the malaria parasite transforms itself like that seven times in its life cycle. 
And each of those life stages not only looks totally different from each other, they have totally different physiology. 
So say you came up with some great drug that worked against one stage of the parasite's life cycle. 
It might do nothing at all to any of the other stages. 
It can hide in our bodies, undetected, unbeknownst to us, for days, for weeks, for months, for years, in some cases even decades. 
So the parasite is a very big scientific challenge to tackle, but so is the mosquito that carries the parasite. 
Only about 12 species of mosquitos carry most of the world's malaria, and we know quite a bit about the kinds of watery habitats that they specialize in. 
So you might think, then, well, why don't we just avoid the places where the killer mosquitos live? Right? 
We could avoid the places where the killer grizzly bears live and we avoid the places where the killer crocodiles live. 
But say you live in the tropics and you walk outside your hut one day and you leave some footprints in the soft dirt around your home. 
Or say your cow does, or say your pig does, and then, say, it rains, and that footprint fills up with a little bit of water. 
That's it. You've created the perfect malarial mosquito habitat that's right outside your door. 
So it's not easy for us to extricate ourselves from these insects. 
We kind of create places that they love to live just by living our own lives. 
So there's a huge scientific challenge, but there's a huge economic challenge too. 
Malaria occurs in some of the poorest and most remote places on Earth, and there's a reason for that. 
If you're poor, you're more likely to get malaria. 
If you're poor, you're more likely to live in rudimentary housing on marginal land that's poorly drained. 
These are places where mosquitos breed. 
You're less likely to have door screens or window screens. 
You're less likely to have electricity and all the indoor activities that electricity makes possible, so you're outside more. 
You're getting bitten by mosquitos more. 
So poverty causes malaria, but what we also know now is that malaria itself causes poverty. 
For one thing, it strikes hardest during harvest season, so exactly when farmers need to be out in the fields collecting their crops, they're home sick with a fever. 
But it also predisposes people to death from all other causes. 
So this has happened historically. 
We've been able to take malaria out of a society. 
Everything else stays the same, so we still have bad food, bad water, bad sanitation, all the things that make people sick. 
But just if you take malaria out, deaths from everything else go down. 
And the economist Jeff Sachs has actually quantified what this means for a society. 
What it means is, if you have malaria in your society, your economic growth is depressed by 1.3 percent every year, year after year after year, just this one disease alone. 
So this poses a huge economic challenge, because say you do come up with your great drug or your great vaccine — how do you deliver it in a place where there's no roads, there's no infrastructure, there's no electricity for refrigeration to keep things cold, there's no clinics, there's no clinicians to deliver these things where they're needed? 
So there's a huge economic challenge in taming malaria. 
But along with the scientific challenge and the economic challenge, there's also a cultural challenge, and this is probably the part about malaria that people don't like to talk about. 
And it's the paradox that the people who have the most malaria in the world tend to care about it the least. 
This has been the finding of medical anthropologists again and again. 
They ask people in malarious parts of the world, "What do you think about malaria?" 
And they don't say, "" It's a killer disease. We're scared of it. "" They say, "" Malaria is a normal problem of life. "" And that was certainly my personal experience. 
When I told my relatives in India that I was writing a book about malaria, they kind of looked at me like I told them I was writing a book about warts or something. 
Like, why would you write about something so boring, so ordinary? You know? 
And it's simple risk perception, really. 
A child in Malawi, for example, she might have 12 episodes of malaria before the age of two, but if she survives, she'll continue to get malaria throughout her life, but she's much less likely to die of it. 
And so in her lived experience, malaria is something that comes and goes. 
And that's actually true for most of the world's malaria. 
Most of the world's malaria comes and goes on its own. 
It's just, there's so much malaria that this tiny fraction of cases that end in death add up to this big, huge number. 
So I think people in malarious parts of the world must think of malaria the way those of us who live in the temperate world think of cold and flu. Right? 
Cold and flu have a huge burden on our societies and on our own lives, but we don't really even take the most rudimentary precautions against it because we consider it normal to get cold and flu during cold and flu season. 
And so this poses a huge cultural challenge in taming malaria, because if people think it's normal to have malaria, then how do you get them to run to the doctor to get diagnosed, to pick up their prescription, to get it filled, to take the drugs, to put on the repellents, to tuck in the bed nets? 
This is a huge cultural challenge in taming this disease. 
So take all that together. 
We've got a disease. It's scientifically complicated, it's economically challenging to deal with, and it's one for which the people who stand to benefit the most care about it the least. 
And that adds up to the biggest problem of all, which, of course, is the political problem. 
How do you get a political leader to do anything about a problem like this? 
And the answer is, historically, you don't. 
Most malarious societies throughout history have simply lived with the disease. 
So the main attacks on malaria have come from outside of malarious societies, from people who aren't constrained by these rather paralyzing politics. 
But this, I think, introduces a whole host of other kinds of difficulties. 
The first concerted attack against malaria started in the 1950s. 
It was the brainchild of the U.S. State Department. 
And this effort well understood the economic challenge. 
They knew they had to focus on cheap, easy-to-use tools, and they focused on DDT. 
They understood the cultural challenge. 
In fact, their rather patronizing view was that people at risk of malaria shouldn't be asked to do anything at all. 
Everything should be done to them and for them. 
But they greatly underestimated the scientific challenge. 
They had so much faith in their tools that they stopped doing malaria research. 
And so when those tools started to fail, and public opinion started to turn against those tools, they had no scientific expertise to figure out what to do. 
The whole campaign crashed, malaria resurged back, but now it was even worse than before because it was corralled into the hardest-to-reach places in the most difficult-to-control forms. 
One WHO official at the time actually called that whole campaign "one of the greatest mistakes ever made in public health." 
The latest effort to tame malaria started in the late 1990s. 
It's similarly directed and financed primarily from outside of malarious societies. 
Now this effort well understands the scientific challenge. 
They are doing tons of malaria research. 
And they understand the economic challenge too. 
They're focusing on very cheap, very easy-to-use tools. 
But now, I think, the dilemma is the cultural challenge. 
The centerpiece of the current effort is the bed net. 
It's treated with insecticides. 
This thing has been distributed across the malarious world by the millions. 
And when you think about the bed net, it's sort of a surgical intervention. 
You know, it doesn't really have any value to a family with malaria except that it helps prevent malaria. 
And yet we're asking people to use these nets every night. 
They have to sleep under them every night. 
That's the only way they are effective. 
And they have to do that even if the net blocks the breeze, even if they might have to get up in the middle of the night and relieve themselves, even if they might have to move all their furnishings to put this thing up, even if, you know, they might live in a round hut in which it's difficult to string up a square net. 
Now that's no big deal if you're fighting a killer disease. 
I mean, these are minor inconveniences. 
But that's not how people with malaria think of malaria. 
So for them, the calculus must be quite different. 
Imagine, for example, if a bunch of well-meaning Kenyans came up to those of us in the temperate world and said, "" You know, you people have a lot of cold and flu. 
We've designed this great, easy-to-use, cheap tool, we're going to give it to you for free. 
It's called a face mask, and all you need to do is wear it every day during cold and flu season when you go to school and when you go to work. "" Would we do that? 
And I wonder if that's how people in the malarious world thought of those nets when they first received them? 
Indeed, we know from studies that only 20 percent of the bed nets that were first distributed were actually used. 
And even that's probably an overestimate, because the same people who distributed the nets went back and asked the recipients, "Oh, did you use that net I gave you?" 
Which is like your Aunt Jane asking you, "Oh, did you use that vase I gave you for Christmas?" 
So it's probably an overestimate. 
But that's not an insurmountable problem. 
We can do more education, we can try to convince these people to use the nets. 
And that's what happening now. 
We're throwing a lot more time and money into workshops and trainings and musicals and plays and school meetings, all these things to convince people to use the nets we gave you. 
And that might work. 
But it takes time. It takes money. 
It takes resources. It takes infrastructure. 
It takes all the things that that cheap, easy-to-use bed net was not supposed to be. 
So it's difficult to attack malaria from inside malarious societies, but it's equally tricky when we try to attack it from outside of those societies. 
We end up imposing our own priorities on the people of the malarious world. 
That's exactly what we did in the 1950s, and that effort backfired. 
I would argue today, when we are distributing tools that we've designed and that don't necessarily make sense in people's lives, we run the risk of making the same mistake again. 
That's not to say that malaria is unconquerable, because I think it is, but what if we attacked this disease according to the priorities of the people who lived with it? 
Take the example of England and the United States. 
We had malaria in those countries for hundreds of years, and we got rid of it completely, not because we attacked malaria. We didn't. 
We attacked bad roads and bad houses and bad drainage and lack of electricity and rural poverty. 
We attacked the malarious way of life, and by doing that, we slowly built malaria out. 
Now attacking the malarious way of life, this is something — these are things people care about today. 
And attacking the malarious way of life, it's not fast, it's not cheap, it's not easy, but I think it's the only lasting way forward. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

So in 1885, Karl Benz invented the automobile. 
Later that year, he took it out for the first public test drive, and — true story — crashed into a wall. 
For the last 130 years, we've been working around that least reliable part of the car, the driver. 
We've made the car stronger. 
We've added seat belts, we've added air bags, and in the last decade, we've actually started trying to make the car smarter to fix that bug, the driver. 
Now, today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the difference between patching around the problem with driver assistance systems and actually having fully self-driving cars and what they can do for the world. 
I'm also going to talk to you a little bit about our car and allow you to see how it sees the world and how it reacts and what it does, but first I'm going to talk a little bit about the problem. 
And it's a big problem: 1.2 million people are killed on the world's roads every year. 
In America alone, 33,000 people are killed each year. 
To put that in perspective, that's the same as a 737 falling out of the sky every working day. 
It's kind of unbelievable. 
Cars are sold to us like this, but really, this is what driving's like. 
Right? It's not sunny, it's rainy, and you want to do anything other than drive. 
And the reason why is this: Traffic is getting worse. 
In America, between 1990 and 2010, the vehicle miles traveled increased by 38 percent. 
We grew by six percent of roads, so it's not in your brains. 
Traffic really is substantially worse than it was not very long ago. 
And all of this has a very human cost. 
So if you take the average commute time in America, which is about 50 minutes, you multiply that by the 120 million workers we have, that turns out to be about six billion minutes wasted in commuting every day. 
Now, that's a big number, so let's put it in perspective. 
You take that six billion minutes and you divide it by the average life expectancy of a person, that turns out to be 162 lifetimes spent every day, wasted, just getting from A to B. 
It's unbelievable. 
And then, there are those of us who don't have the privilege of sitting in traffic. 
So this is Steve. 
He's an incredibly capable guy, but he just happens to be blind, and that means instead of a 30-minute drive to work in the morning, it's a two-hour ordeal of piecing together bits of public transit or asking friends and family for a ride. 
He doesn't have that same freedom that you and I have to get around. 
We should do something about that. 
Now, conventional wisdom would say that we'll just take these driver assistance systems and we'll kind of push them and incrementally improve them, and over time, they'll turn into self-driving cars. 
Well, I'm here to tell you that's like me saying that if I work really hard at jumping, one day I'll be able to fly. 
We actually need to do something a little different. 
And so I'm going to talk to you about three different ways that self-driving systems are different than driver assistance systems. 
And I'm going to start with some of our own experience. 
So back in 2013, we had the first test of a self-driving car where we let regular people use it. 
Well, almost regular — they were 100 Googlers, but they weren't working on the project. 
And we gave them the car and we allowed them to use it in their daily lives. 
But unlike a real self-driving car, this one had a big asterisk with it: They had to pay attention, because this was an experimental vehicle. 
We tested it a lot, but it could still fail. 
And so we gave them two hours of training, we put them in the car, we let them use it, and what we heard back was something awesome, as someone trying to bring a product into the world. 
Every one of them told us they loved it. 
In fact, we had a Porsche driver who came in and told us on the first day, "This is completely stupid. What are we thinking?" 
But at the end of it, he said, "" Not only should I have it, everyone else should have it, because people are terrible drivers. "" So this was music to our ears, but then we started to look at what the people inside the car were doing, and this was eye-opening. 
Now, my favorite story is this gentleman who looks down at his phone and realizes the battery is low, so he turns around like this in the car and digs around in his backpack, pulls out his laptop, puts it on the seat, goes in the back again, digs around, pulls out the charging cable for his phone, futzes around, puts it into the laptop, puts it on the phone. 
Sure enough, the phone is charging. 
All the time he's been doing 65 miles per hour down the freeway. 
Right? Unbelievable. 
So we thought about this and we said, it's kind of obvious, right? 
The better the technology gets, the less reliable the driver is going to get. 
So by just making the cars incrementally smarter, we're probably not going to see the wins we really need. 
Let me talk about something a little technical for a moment here. 
So we're looking at this graph, and along the bottom is how often does the car apply the brakes when it shouldn't. 
You can ignore most of that axis, because if you're driving around town, and the car starts stopping randomly, you're never going to buy that car. 
And the vertical axis is how often the car is going to apply the brakes when it's supposed to to help you avoid an accident. 
Now, if we look at the bottom left corner here, this is your classic car. 
It doesn't apply the brakes for you, it doesn't do anything goofy, but it also doesn't get you out of an accident. 
Now, if we want to bring a driver assistance system into a car, say with collision mitigation braking, we're going to put some package of technology on there, and that's this curve, and it's going to have some operating properties, but it's never going to avoid all of the accidents, because it doesn't have that capability. 
But we'll pick some place along the curve here, and maybe it avoids half of accidents that the human driver misses, and that's amazing, right? 
We just reduced accidents on our roads by a factor of two. 
There are now 17,000 less people dying every year in America. 
But if we want a self-driving car, we need a technology curve that looks like this. 
We're going to have to put more sensors in the vehicle, and we'll pick some operating point up here where it basically never gets into a crash. 
They'll happen, but very low frequency. 
Now you and I could look at this and we could argue about whether it's incremental, and I could say something like "" 80-20 rule, "" and it's really hard to move up to that new curve. 
But let's look at it from a different direction for a moment. 
So let's look at how often the technology has to do the right thing. 
And so this green dot up here is a driver assistance system. 
It turns out that human drivers make mistakes that lead to traffic accidents about once every 100,000 miles in America. 
In contrast, a self-driving system is probably making decisions about 10 times per second, so order of magnitude, that's about 1,000 times per mile. 
So if you compare the distance between these two, it's about 10 to the eighth, right? 
Eight orders of magnitude. 
That's like comparing how fast I run to the speed of light. 
It doesn't matter how hard I train, I'm never actually going to get there. 
So there's a pretty big gap there. 
And then finally, there's how the system can handle uncertainty. 
So this pedestrian here might be stepping into the road, might not be. 
I can't tell, nor can any of our algorithms, but in the case of a driver assistance system, that means it can't take action, because again, if it presses the brakes unexpectedly, that's completely unacceptable. 
Whereas a self-driving system can look at that pedestrian and say, I don't know what they're about to do, slow down, take a better look, and then react appropriately after that. 
So it can be much safer than a driver assistance system can ever be. 
So that's enough about the differences between the two. 
Let's spend some time talking about how the car sees the world. 
So this is our vehicle. 
It starts by understanding where it is in the world, by taking a map and its sensor data and aligning the two, and then we layer on top of that what it sees in the moment. 
So here, all the purple boxes you can see are other vehicles on the road, and the red thing on the side over there is a cyclist, and up in the distance, if you look really closely, you can see some cones. 
Then we know where the car is in the moment, but we have to do better than that: we have to predict what's going to happen. 
So here the pickup truck in top right is about to make a left lane change because the road in front of it is closed, so it needs to get out of the way. 
Knowing that one pickup truck is great, but we really need to know what everybody's thinking, so it becomes quite a complicated problem. 
And then given that, we can figure out how the car should respond in the moment, so what trajectory it should follow, how quickly it should slow down or speed up. 
And then that all turns into just following a path: turning the steering wheel left or right, pressing the brake or gas. 
It's really just two numbers at the end of the day. 
So how hard can it really be? 
Back when we started in 2009, this is what our system looked like. 
So you can see our car in the middle and the other boxes on the road, driving down the highway. 
The car needs to understand where it is and roughly where the other vehicles are. 
It's really a geometric understanding of the world. 
Once we started driving on neighborhood and city streets, the problem becomes a whole new level of difficulty. 
You see pedestrians crossing in front of us, cars crossing in front of us, going every which way, the traffic lights, crosswalks. 
It's an incredibly complicated problem by comparison. 
And then once you have that problem solved, the vehicle has to be able to deal with construction. 
So here are the cones on the left forcing it to drive to the right, but not just construction in isolation, of course. 
It has to deal with other people moving through that construction zone as well. 
And of course, if anyone's breaking the rules, the police are there and the car has to understand that that flashing light on the top of the car means that it's not just a car, it's actually a police officer. 
Similarly, the orange box on the side here, it's a school bus, and we have to treat that differently as well. 
When we're out on the road, other people have expectations: So, when a cyclist puts up their arm, it means they're expecting the car to yield to them and make room for them to make a lane change. 
And when a police officer stood in the road, our vehicle should understand that this means stop, and when they signal to go, we should continue. 
Now, the way we accomplish this is by sharing data between the vehicles. 
The first, most crude model of this is when one vehicle sees a construction zone, having another know about it so it can be in the correct lane to avoid some of the difficulty. 
But we actually have a much deeper understanding of this. 
We could take all of the data that the cars have seen over time, the hundreds of thousands of pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles that have been out there and understand what they look like and use that to infer what other vehicles should look like and other pedestrians should look like. 
And then, even more importantly, we could take from that a model of how we expect them to move through the world. 
So here the yellow box is a pedestrian crossing in front of us. 
Here the blue box is a cyclist and we anticipate that they're going to nudge out and around the car to the right. 
Here there's a cyclist coming down the road and we know they're going to continue to drive down the shape of the road. 
Here somebody makes a right turn, and in a moment here, somebody's going to make a U-turn in front of us, and we can anticipate that behavior and respond safely. 
Now, that's all well and good for things that we've seen, but of course, you encounter lots of things that you haven't seen in the world before. 
And so just a couple of months ago, our vehicles were driving through Mountain View, and this is what we encountered. 
This is a woman in an electric wheelchair chasing a duck in circles on the road. (Laughter) Now it turns out, there is nowhere in the DMV handbook that tells you how to deal with that, but our vehicles were able to encounter that, slow down, and drive safely. 
Now, we don't have to deal with just ducks. 
Watch this bird fly across in front of us. The car reacts to that. 
Here we're dealing with a cyclist that you would never expect to see anywhere other than Mountain View. 
And of course, we have to deal with drivers, even the very small ones. 
Watch to the right as someone jumps out of this truck at us. 
And now, watch the left as the car with the green box decides he needs to make a right turn at the last possible moment. 
Here, as we make a lane change, the car to our left decides it wants to as well. 
And here, we watch a car blow through a red light and yield to it. 
And similarly, here, a cyclist blowing through that light as well. 
And of course, the vehicle responds safely. 
And of course, we have people who do I don't know what sometimes on the road, like this guy pulling out between two self-driving cars. 
You have to ask, "" What are you thinking? "" (Laughter) Now, I just fire-hosed you with a lot of stuff there, so I'm going to break one of these down pretty quickly. 
So what we're looking at is the scene with the cyclist again, and you might notice in the bottom, we can't actually see the cyclist yet, but the car can: it's that little blue box up there, and that comes from the laser data. 
And that's not actually really easy to understand, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn that laser data and look at it, and if you're really good at looking at laser data, you can see a few dots on the curve there, right there, and that blue box is that cyclist. 
Now as our light is red, the cyclist's light has turned yellow already, and if you squint, you can see that in the imagery. 
But the cyclist, we see, is going to proceed through the intersection. 
Our light has now turned green, his is solidly red, and we now anticipate that this bike is going to come all the way across. 
Unfortunately the other drivers next to us were not paying as much attention. 
They started to pull forward, and fortunately for everyone, this cyclists reacts, avoids, and makes it through the intersection. 
And off we go. 
Now, as you can see, we've made some pretty exciting progress, and at this point we're pretty convinced this technology is going to come to market. 
We do three million miles of testing in our simulators every single day, so you can imagine the experience that our vehicles have. 
We are looking forward to having this technology on the road, and we think the right path is to go through the self-driving rather than driver assistance approach because the urgency is so large. 
In the time I have given this talk today, 34 people have died on America's roads. 
How soon can we bring it out? 
Well, it's hard to say because it's a really complicated problem, but these are my two boys. 
My oldest son is 11, and that means in four and a half years, he's going to be able to get his driver's license. 
My team and I are committed to making sure that doesn't happen. 
Thank you. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Chris Anderson: Chris, I've got a question for you. 
Chris Urmson: Sure. 
CA: So certainly, the mind of your cars is pretty mind-boggling. 
On this debate between driver-assisted and fully driverless — I mean, there's a real debate going on out there right now. 
So some of the companies, for example, Tesla, are going the driver-assisted route. 
What you're saying is that that's kind of going to be a dead end because you can't just keep improving that route and get to fully driverless at some point, and then a driver is going to say, "" This feels safe, "" and climb into the back, and something ugly will happen. 
CU: Right. No, that's exactly right, and it's not to say that the driver assistance systems aren't going to be incredibly valuable. 
They can save a lot of lives in the interim, but to see the transformative opportunity to help someone like Steve get around, to really get to the end case in safety, to have the opportunity to change our cities and move parking out and get rid of these urban craters we call parking lots, it's the only way to go. 

I've been living in rural East Africa for about 10 years, and I want to share a field perspective with you on global poverty. 
I believe that the greatest failure of the human race is the fact that we've left more than one billion of our members behind. 
Hungry, extreme poverty: these often seem like gigantic, insurmountable problems, too big to solve. 
But as a field practitioner, I believe these are actually very solvable problems if we just take the right strategies. 
Archimedes was an ancient Greek thinker, and he taught us that if we lean on the right levers, we can move the world. 
In the fight against extreme poverty, I believe there are three powerful levers that we can lean on. 
This talk is all about those levers, and why they make poverty a winnable fight in our lifetimes. 
What is extreme poverty? 
When I first moved to rural East Africa, I stayed overnight with a farm family. 
They were wonderful people. 
They invited me into their home. We sang songs together and ate a simple dinner. 
They gave me a blanket to sleep on the floor. 
In the morning, however, there was nothing to eat. 
And then at lunchtime, I watched with an increasingly sick feeling as the eldest girl in the family cooked porridge as a substitute for lunch. 
For that meal, every child drank one cup to survive. 
And I cannot tell you how ashamed I felt when they handed one of those cups to me, and I knew I had to accept their hospitality. 
Children need food not only to survive but also to grow physically and mentally. 
Every day they fail to eat, they lose a little bit of their future. 
Amongst the extreme poor, one in three children are permanently stunted from a lifetime of not eating enough. 
When that's combined with poor access to health care, one in 10 extremely poor children die before they reach age five. 
And only one quarter of children complete high school because they lack school fees. 
Hunger and extreme poverty curb human potential in every possible way. 
We see ourselves as a thinking, feeling and moral human race, but until we solve these problems for all of our members, we fail that standard, because every person on this planet matters. 
This child matters. 
These children matter. 
This girl matters. 
You know, we see things like this, and we're upset by them, but they seem like such big problems. 
We don't know how to take effective action. 
But remember our friend Archimedes. 
Global poverty has powerful levers. 
It's a problem like any other. 
I live and work in the field, and as a practitioner, I believe these are very solvable problems. 
So for the next 10 minutes, let's not be sad about the state of the world. 
Let's engage our brains. 
Let's engage our collective passion for problem-solving and figure out what those levers are. 
Lever number one: most of the world's poor are farmers. 
Think about how extraordinary this is. 
If this picture represents the world's poor, then more than half engage in farming as a major source of income. 
This gets me really excited. 
All of these people, one profession. 
Think how powerful this is. 
When farmers become more productive, then more than half the world's poor earn more money and climb out of poverty. 
And it gets better. 
The product of farming is, of course, food. 
So when farmers become more productive, they earn more food, and they don't just help themselves, but they help to feed healthy communities and thriving economies. 
And when farmers become more productive, they reduce environmental pressure. 
We only have two ways we can feed the world: we can either make our existing farmland a lot more productive, or we can clear cut forest and savannah to make more farmland, which would be environmentally disastrous. 
Farmers are basically a really important leverage point. 
When farmers become more productive, they earn more income, they climb out of poverty, they feed their communities and they reduce environmental land pressure. 
Farmers stand at the center of the world. 
And not a farmer like this one, but rather this lady. 
Most of the farmers I know are actually women. 
Look at the strength and the will radiating from this woman. 
She is physically strong, mentally tough, and she will do whatever it takes to earn a better life for her children. 
If we're going to put the future of humanity in one person's hands, then I'm really glad it's her. 
(Applause) There's just one problem: many smallholder farmers lack access to basic tools and knowledge. 
Currently, they take a little bit of saved food grain from the prior year, they plant it in the ground and they till it with a manual hand hoe. 
These are tools and techniques that date to the Bronze Age, and it's why many farmers are still very poor. 
But good news, again. 
Lever number two: humanity actually solved the problem of agricultural poverty a century ago. 
Let me walk you through the three most basic factors in farming. 
First, hybrid seed is created when you cross two seeds together. 
If you naturally pollinate a high-yielding variety together with a drought-resistant variety, you get a hybrid that inherits positive traits from both of its parents. 
Next, conventional fertilizer, if used responsibly, is environmentally sustainable. 
If you micro-dose just a pinch of fertilizer to a plant that's taller than I am, you unlock enormous yield gain. 
These are known as farm inputs. 
Farm inputs need to be combined with good practice. 
When you space your seeds and plant with massive amounts of compost, farmers multiply their harvests. 
These proven tools and practices have more than tripled agricultural productivity in every major region of the world, moving mass numbers of people out of poverty. 
We just haven't finished delivering these things to everybody just yet, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. 
So overall, this is amazing news. 
Humanity actually solved agricultural poverty a century ago, in theory. 
We just haven't delivered these things to everybody just yet. 
In this century, the reason that people remain poor is because maybe they live in remote places. 
They lack access to these things. 
Therefore, ending poverty is simply a matter of delivering proven goods and services to people. 
We don't need more genius types right now. 
The humble delivery guy is going to end global poverty in our lifetime. 
So these are the three levers, and the most powerful lever is simply delivery. 
Wherever the world's companies, governments and nonprofits set up delivery networks for life-improving goods, we eliminate poverty. 
OK, so that sounds really nice in theory, but what about in practice? 
What do these delivery networks look like? 
I want to share the concrete example that I know best, my organization, One Acre Fund. 
We only serve the farmer, and our job is to provide her with the tools that she needs to succeed. 
We start off by delivering farm inputs to really rural places. 
Now, this may appear initially very challenging, but it's pretty possible. Let me show you. 
We buy farm inputs with the combined power of our farmer network, and store it in 20 warehouses like this. 
Then, during input delivery, we rent hundreds of 10-ton trucks and send them out to where farmers are waiting in the field. 
They then get their individual orders and walk it home to their farms. 
It's kind of like Amazon for rural farmers. 
Importantly, realistic delivery also includes finance, a way to pay. 
Farmers pay us little by little over time, covering most of our expenses. 
And then we surround all that with training. 
Our rural field officers deliver practical, hands-on training to farmers in the field every two weeks. 
Wherever we deliver our services, farmers use these tools to climb out of poverty. 
This is a farmer in our program, Consolata. 
Look at the pride on her face. 
She has achieved a modest prosperity that I believe is the human right of every hardworking person on the planet. 
Today, I'm proud to say that we're serving about 400,000 farmers like Consolata. 
(Applause) The key to doing this is scalable delivery. 
In any given area, we hire a rural field officer who delivers our services to 200 farmers, on average, with more than 1,000 people living in those families. 
Today, we have 2,000 of these rural field officers growing very quickly. 
This is our delivery army, and we're just one organization. 
There are many companies, governments and nonprofits that have delivery armies just like this. 
And I believe we stand at a moment in time where collectively, we are capable of delivering farm services to all farmers. 
Let me show you how possible this is. 
This is a map of Sub-Saharan Africa, with a map of the United States for scale. 
I chose Sub-Saharan Africa because this is a huge delivery territory. 
It's very challenging. 
But we analyzed every 50-mile by 50-mile block on the continent, and we found that half of farmers live in just these shaded regions. 
That's a remarkably small area overall. 
If you were to lay these boxes next to each other within a map of the United States, they would only cover the Eastern United States. 
You can order pizza anywhere in this territory and it'll arrive to your house hot, fresh and delicious. 
If America can deliver pizza to an area of this size, then Africa's companies, governments and non-profits can deliver farm services to all of her farmers. 
This is possible. 
I'm going to wrap up by generalizing beyond just farming. 
In every field of human development, humanity has already invented effective tools to end poverty. 
We just need to deliver them. 
So again, in every area of human development, super-smart people a long time ago invented inexpensive, highly effective tools. 
Humanity is armed to the teeth with simple, effective solutions to poverty. 
We just need to deliver these to a pretty small area. 
Again using the map of Sub-Saharan Africa as an example, remember that rural poverty is concentrated in these blue shaded areas. 
Urban poverty is even more concentrated, in these green little dots. 
Again, using a map of the United States for scale, this is what I would call a highly achievable delivery zone. 
In fact, for the first time in human history, we have a vast amount of delivery infrastructure available to us. 
The world's companies, governments and non-profits have delivery armies that are fully capable of covering this relatively small area. 
We just lack the will. 
If we are willing, every one of us has a role to play. 
We first need more people to pursue careers in human development, especially if you live in a developing nation. 
We need more front line health workers, teachers, farmer trainers, sales agents for life-improving goods. 
These are the delivery people that dedicate their careers to improving the lives of others. 
But we also need a lot of support roles. 
These are roles available at just my organization alone, and we're just one out of many. 
This may surprise you, but no matter what your technical specialty, there is a role for you in this fight. 
And no matter how logistically possible it is to end poverty, we need a lot more resources. 
This is our number one constraint. 
For private investors, we need a big expansion of venture capital, private equity, working capital, available in emerging markets. 
But there are also limits to what private business can accomplish. 
Private businesses often struggle to profitably serve the extreme poor, so philanthropy still has a major role to play. 
Anybody can give, but we need more leadership. 
We need more visionary philanthropists and global leaders who will take problems in human development and lead humanity to wipe them off the face of the planet. 
If you're interested in these ideas, check out this website. 
We need more leaders. 
Humanity has put people on the moon. 
We've invented supercomputers that fit into our pockets and connect us with anybody on the planet. 
We've run marathons at a five-minute mile pace. 
We are an exceptional people. 
But we've left more than one billion of our members behind. 
Until every girl like this one has an opportunity to earn her full human potential, we have failed to become a truly moral and just human race. 
Logistically speaking, it's incredibly possible to end extreme poverty. 
We just need to deliver proven goods and services to everybody. 
If we have the will, every one of us has a role to play. 
Let's deploy our time, our careers, our collective wealth. 
Let us deliver an end to extreme poverty in this lifetime. 

I want to open by quoting Einstein's wonderful statement, just so people will feel at ease that the great scientist of the 20th century also agrees with us, and also calls us to this action. 
He said, "" A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, the 'universe,' — a part limited in time and space. 
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. 
This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. 
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion, to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. "" This insight of Einstein's is uncannily close to that of Buddhist psychology, wherein compassion — "" karuna, "" it is called — is defined as, "" the sensitivity to another's suffering and the corresponding will to free the other from that suffering. "" It pairs closely with love, which is the will for the other to be happy, which requires, of course, that one feels some happiness oneself and wishes to share it. 
This is perfect in that it clearly opposes self-centeredness and selfishness to compassion, the concern for others, and, further, it indicates that those caught in the cycle of self-concern suffer helplessly, while the compassionate are more free and, implicitly, more happy. 
The Dalai Lama often states that compassion is his best friend. 
It helps him when he is overwhelmed with grief and despair. 
Compassion helps him turn away from the feeling of his suffering as the most absolute, most terrible suffering anyone has ever had and broadens his awareness of the sufferings of others, even of the perpetrators of his misery and the whole mass of beings. 
In fact, suffering is so huge and enormous, his own becomes less and less monumental. 
And he begins to move beyond his self-concern into the broader concern for others. 
And this immediately cheers him up, as his courage is stimulated to rise to the occasion. 
Thus, he uses his own suffering as a doorway to widening his circle of compassion. 
He is a very good colleague of Einstein's, we must say. 
Now, I want to tell a story, which is a very famous story in the Indian and Buddhist tradition, of the great Saint Asanga who was a contemporary of Augustine in the West and was sort of like the Buddhist Augustine. 
And Asanga lived 800 years after the Buddha's time. 
And he was discontented with the state of people's practice of the Buddhist religion in India at that time. 
And so he said, "" I'm sick of all this. Nobody's really living the doctrine. 
They're talking about love and compassion and wisdom and enlightenment, but they are acting selfish and pathetic. 
So, Buddha's teaching has lost its momentum. 
I know the next Buddha will come a few thousand years from now, but exists currently in a certain heaven "" — that's Maitreya — "" so, I'm going to go on a retreat and I'm going to meditate and pray until the Buddha Maitreya reveals himself to me, and gives me a teaching or something to revive the practice of compassion in the world today. "" So he went on this retreat. And he meditated for three years and he did not see the future Buddha Maitreya. 
And he left in disgust. 
And as he was leaving, he saw a man — a funny little man sitting sort of part way down the mountain. 
And he had a lump of iron. 
And he was rubbing it with a cloth. 
And he became interested in that. 
He said, "" Well what are you doing? "" And the man said, "" I'm making a needle. "" And he said, "" That's ridiculous. You can't make a needle by rubbing a lump of iron with a cloth. "" And the man said, "" Really? "" And he showed him a dish full of needles. 
So he said, "" Okay, I get the point. "" He went back to his cave. He meditated again. 
Another three years, no vision. He leaves again. 
This time, he comes down. 
And as he's leaving, he sees a bird making a nest on a cliff ledge. 
And where it's landing to bring the twigs to the cliff, its feathers brushes the rock — and it had cut the rock six to eight inches in. There was a cleft in the rock by the brushing of the feathers of generations of the birds. 
So he said, "" All right. I get the point. "" He went back. 
Another three years. 
Again, no vision of Maitreya after nine years. 
And he again leaves, and this time: water dripping, making a giant bowl in the rock where it drips in a stream. 
And so, again, he goes back. And after 12 years there is still no vision. 
And he's freaked out. And he won't even look left or right to see any encouraging vision. 
And he comes to the town. He's a broken person. 
And there, in the town, he's approached by a dog who comes like this — one of these terrible dogs you can see in some poor countries, even in America, I think, in some areas — and he's looking just terrible. 
And he becomes interested in this dog because it's so pathetic, and it's trying to attract his attention. And he sits down looking at the dog. 
And the dog's whole hindquarters are a complete open sore. 
Some of it is like gangrenous, and there are maggots in the flesh. And it's terrible. 
He thinks, "" What can I do to fix up this dog? 
Well, at least I can clean this wound and wash it. "" So, he takes it to some water. He's about to clean, but then his awareness focuses on the maggots. 
And he sees the maggots, and the maggots are kind of looking a little cute. 
And they're maggoting happily in the dog's hindquarters there. 
"" Well, if I clean the dog, I'll kill the maggots. So how can that be? 
That's it. I'm a useless person and there's no Buddha, no Maitreya, and everything is all hopeless. 
And now I'm going to kill the maggots? "" So, he had a brilliant idea. 
And he took a shard of something, and cut a piece of flesh from his thigh, and he placed it on ground. 
He was not really thinking too carefully about the ASPCA. 
He was just immediately caught with the situation. 
So he thought, "" I will take the maggots and put them on this piece of flesh, then clean the dog's wounds, and then I'll figure out what to do with the maggots. "" So he starts to do that. He can't grab the maggots. 
Apparently they wriggle around. They're kind of hard to grab, these maggots. 
So he says, "" Well, I'll put my tongue on the dog's flesh. 
And then the maggots will jump on my warmer tongue "" — the dog is kind of used up — "and then I'll spit them one by one down on the thing." 
So he goes down, and he's sticking his tongue out like this. 
And he had to close his eyes, it's so disgusting, and the smell and everything. 
And then, suddenly, there's a pfft, a noise like that. 
He jumps back and there, of course, is the future Buddha Maitreya in a beautiful vision — rainbow lights, golden, jeweled, a plasma body, an exquisite mystic vision — that he sees. 
And he says, "" Oh. "" He bows. 
But, being human, he's immediately thinking of his next complaint. 
So as he comes up from his first bow he says, "" My Lord, I'm so happy to see you, but where have you been for 12 years? 
What is this? "" And Maitreya says, "" I was with you. Who do you think was making needles and making nests and dripping on rocks for you, mister dense? "" (Laughter) "" Looking for the Buddha in person, "" he said. 
And he said, "" You didn't have, until this moment, real compassion. 
And, until you have real compassion, you cannot recognize love. "" "" Maitreya "" means love, "" the loving one, "" in Sanskrit. 
And so he looked very dubious, Asanga did. 
And he said, "" If you don't believe me, just take me with you. "" And so he took the Maitreya — it shrunk into a globe, a ball — took him on his shoulder. 
And he ran into town in the marketplace, and he said, "" Rejoice! Rejoice! 
The future Buddha has come ahead of all predictions. Here he is. "" And then pretty soon they started throwing rocks and stones at him — it wasn't Chautauqua, it was some other town — because they saw a demented looking, scrawny looking yogi man, like some kind of hippie, with a bleeding leg and a rotten dog on his shoulder, shouting that the future Buddha had come. 
So, naturally, they chased him out of town. 
But on the edge of town, one elderly lady, a charwoman in the charnel ground, saw a jeweled foot on a jeweled lotus on his shoulder and then the dog, but she saw the jewel foot of the Maitreya, and she offered a flower. 
So that encouraged him, and he went with Maitreya. 
Maitreya then took him to a certain heaven, which is the typical way a Buddhist myth unfolds. 
And Maitreya then kept him in heaven for five years, dictating to him five complicated tomes of the methodology of how you cultivate compassion. 
And then I thought I would share with you what that method is, or one of them. 
A famous one, it's called the "" Sevenfold Causal Method of Developing Compassion. "" And it begins first by one meditating and visualizing that all beings are with one — even animals too, but everyone is in human form. 
The animals are in one of their human lives. The humans are human. 
And then, among them, you think of your friends and loved ones, the circle at the table. 
And you think of your enemies, and you think of the neutral ones. 
And then you try to say, "" Well, the loved ones I love. 
But, you know, after all, they're nice to me. 
I had fights with them. Sometimes they were unfriendly. 
I got mad. Brothers can fight. Parents and children can fight. 
So, in a way, I like them so much because they're nice to me. 
While the neutral ones I don't know. They could all be just fine. 
And then the enemies I don't like because they're mean to me. 
But they are nice to somebody. I could be them. "" And then the Buddhists, of course, think that, because we've all had infinite previous lives, we've all been each other's relatives, actually. 
Therefore all of you, in the Buddhist view, in some previous life, although you don't remember it and neither do I, have been my mother — for which I do apologize for the trouble I caused you. 
And also, actually, I've been your mother. 
I've been female, and I've been every single one of yours' mother in a previous life, the way the Buddhists reflect. 
So, my mother in this life is really great. But all of you in a way are part of the eternal mother. 
You gave me that expression; "" the eternal mama, "" you said. That's wonderful. 
So, that's the way the Buddhists do it. 
A theist Christian can think that all beings, even my enemies, are God's children. 
So, in that sense, we're related. 
So, they first create this foundation of equality. 
So, we sort of reduce a little of the clinging to the ones we love — just in the meditation — and we open our mind to those we don't know. 
And we definitely reduce the hostility and the "" I don't want to be compassionate to them "" to the ones we think of as the bad guys, the ones we hate and we don't like. 
And we don't hate anyone, therefore. So we equalize. That's very important. 
And then the next thing we do is what is called "" mother recognition. "" And that is, we think of every being as familiar, as family. 
We expand. We take the feeling about remembering a mama, and we defuse that to all beings in this meditation. 
And we see the mother in every being. 
We see that look that the mother has on her face, looking at this child that is a miracle that she has produced from her own body, being a mammal, where she has true compassion, truly is the other, and identifies completely. 
Often the life of that other will be more important to her than her own life. 
And that's why it's the most powerful form of altruism. 
The mother is the model of all altruism for human beings, in spiritual traditions. 
And so, we reflect until we can sort of see that motherly expression in all beings. 
People laugh at me because, you know, I used to say that I used to meditate on mama Cheney as my mom, when, of course, I was annoyed with him about all of his evil doings in Iraq. 
I used to meditate on George Bush. He's quite a cute mom in a female form. 
He has his little ears and he smiles and he rocks you in his arms. 
And you think of him as nursing you. 
And then Saddam Hussein's serious mustache is a problem, but you think of him as a mom. 
And this is the way you do it. You take any being who looks weird to you, and you see how they could be familiar to you. 
And you do that for a while, until you really feel that. 
You can feel the familiarity of all beings. 
Nobody seems alien. They're not "" other. "" You reduce the feeling of otherness about beings. 
Then you move from there to remembering the kindness of mothers in general, if you can remember the kindness of your own mother, if you can remember the kindness of your spouse, or, if you are a mother yourself, how you were with your children. 
And you begin to get very sentimental; you cultivate sentimentality intensely. 
You will even weep, perhaps, with gratitude and kindness. 
And then you connect that with your feeling that everyone has that motherly possibility. 
Every being, even the most mean looking ones, can be motherly. 
And then, third, you step from there to what is called "" a feeling of gratitude. "" You want to repay that kindness that all beings have shown to you. 
And then the fourth step, you go to what is called "" lovely love. "" In each one of these you can take some weeks, or months, or days depending on how you do it, or you can do them in a run, this meditation. 
And then you think of how lovely beings are when they are happy, when they are satisfied. 
And every being looks beautiful when they are internally feeling a happiness. 
Their face doesn't look like this. When they're angry, they look ugly, every being, but when they're happy they look beautiful. 
And so you see beings in their potential happiness. 
And you feel a love toward them and you want them to be happy, even the enemy. 
We think Jesus is being unrealistic when he says, "" Love thine enemy. "" He does say that, and we think he's being unrealistic and sort of spiritual and highfalutin. "" Nice for him to say it, but I can't do that. "" But, actually, that's practical. 
If you love your enemy that means you want your enemy to be happy. 
If your enemy was really happy, why would they bother to be your enemy? 
How boring to run around chasing you. 
They would be relaxing somewhere having a good time. 
So it makes sense to want your enemy to be happy, because they'll stop being your enemy because that's too much trouble. 
But anyway, that's the "" lovely love. "" And then finally, the fifth step is compassion, "" universal compassion. "" And that is where you then look at the reality of all the beings you can think of. 
And you look at them, and you see how they are. 
And you realize how unhappy they are actually, mostly, most of the time. 
You see that furrowed brow in people. 
And then you realize they don't even have compassion on themselves. 
They're driven by this duty and this obligation. 
"I have to get that. I need more. I'm not worthy. And I should do something." 
And they're rushing around all stressed out. 
And they think of it as somehow macho, hard discipline on themselves. 
But actually they are cruel to themselves. 
And, of course, they are cruel and ruthless toward others. 
And they, then, never get any positive feedback. 
And the more they succeed and the more power they have, the more unhappy they are. 
And this is where you feel real compassion for them. 
And you then feel you must act. 
And the choice of the action, of course, hopefully will be more practical than poor Asanga, who was fixing the maggots on the dog because he had that motivation, and whoever was in front of him, he wanted to help. 
But, of course, that is impractical. He should have founded the ASPCA in the town and gotten some scientific help for dogs and maggots. 
And I'm sure he did that later. (Laughter) But that just indicates the state of mind, you know. 
And so the next step — the sixth step beyond "" universal compassion "" — is this thing where you're linked with the needs of others in a true way, and you have compassion for yourself also, and it isn't sentimental only. You might be in fear of something. 
Some bad guy is making himself more and more unhappy being more and more mean to other people and getting punished in the future for it in various ways. 
And in Buddhism, they catch it in the future life. 
Of course in theistic religion they're punished by God or whatever. 
And materialism, they think they get out of it just by not existing, by dying, but they don't. 
And so they get reborn as whatever, you know. 
Never mind. I won't get into that. 
But the next step is called "" universal responsibility. "" And that is very important — the Charter of Compassion must lead us to develop through true compassion, what is called "" universal responsibility. "" In the great teaching of his Holiness the Dalai Lama that he always teaches everywhere, he says that that is the common religion of humanity: kindness. 
But "" kindness "" means "" universal responsibility. "" And that means whatever happens to other beings is happening to us: we are responsible for that, and we should take it and do whatever we can at whatever little level and small level that we can do it. 
We absolutely must do that. There is no way not to do it. 
And then, finally, that leads to a new orientation in life where we live equally for ourselves and for others and we are joyful and happy. 
One thing we mustn't think is that compassion makes you miserable. 
Compassion makes you happy. 
The first person who is happy when you get great compassion is yourself, even if you haven't done anything yet for anybody else. 
Although, the change in your mind already does something for other beings: they can sense this new quality in yourself, and it helps them already, and gives them an example. 
And that uncompassionate clock has just showed me that it's all over. 
So, practice compassion, read the charter, disseminate it and develop it within yourself. 
Don't just think, "" Well, I'm compassionate, "" or "" I'm not compassionate, "" and sort of think you're stuck there. 
You can develop this. You can diminish the non-compassion, the cruelty, the callousness, the neglect of others, and take universal responsibility for them. 
And then, not only will God smile and the eternal mama will smile, but Karen Armstrong will smile. 
Thank you very much. (Applause) 

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

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

Everything I do, and everything I do professionally — my life — has been shaped by seven years of work as a young man in Africa. 
From 1971 to 1977 — I look young, but I'm not — (Laughter) — I worked in Zambia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Algeria, Somalia, in projects of technical cooperation with African countries. 
I worked for an Italian NGO, and every single project that we set up in Africa failed. 
And I was distraught. 
I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good people and we were doing good work in Africa. 
Instead, everything we touched we killed. 
Our first project, the one that has inspired my first book, "Ripples from the Zambezi," was a project where we Italians decided to teach Zambian people how to grow food. 
So we arrived there with Italian seeds in southern Zambia in this absolutely magnificent valley going down to the Zambezi River, and we taught the local people how to grow Italian tomatoes and zucchini and... 
And of course the local people had absolutely no interest in doing that, so we paid them to come and work, and sometimes they would show up. (Laughter) And we were amazed that the local people, in such a fertile valley, would not have any agriculture. 
But instead of asking them how come they were not growing anything, we simply said, "" Thank God we're here. "" (Laughter) "Just in the nick of time to save the Zambian people from starvation." 
And of course, everything in Africa grew beautifully. 
We had these magnificent tomatoes. In Italy, a tomato would grow to this size. In Zambia, to this size. 
And we could not believe, and we were telling the Zambians, "Look how easy agriculture is." 
When the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red, overnight, some 200 hippos came out from the river and they ate everything. (Laughter) And we said to the Zambians, "" My God, the hippos! "" And the Zambians said, "" Yes, that's why we have no agriculture here. "" (Laughter) "Why didn't you tell us?" "You never asked." 
I thought it was only us Italians blundering around Africa, but then I saw what the Americans were doing, what the English were doing, what the French were doing, and after seeing what they were doing, I became quite proud of our project in Zambia. 
Because, you see, at least we fed the hippos. 
You should see the rubbish — (Applause) — You should see the rubbish that we have bestowed on unsuspecting African people. 
You want to read the book, read "" Dead Aid, "" by Dambisa Moyo, Zambian woman economist. 
The book was published in 2009. 
We Western donor countries have given the African continent two trillion American dollars in the last 50 years. 
I'm not going to tell you the damage that that money has done. 
Just go and read her book. 
Read it from an African woman, the damage that we have done. 
We Western people are imperialist, colonialist missionaries, and there are only two ways we deal with people: We either patronize them, or we are paternalistic. 
The two words come from the Latin root "" pater, "" which means "" father. "" But they mean two different things. 
Paternalistic, I treat anybody from a different culture as if they were my children. "" I love you so much. "" Patronizing, I treat everybody from another culture as if they were my servants. 
That's why the white people in Africa are called "" bwana, "" boss. 
I was given a slap in the face reading a book, "" Small is Beautiful, "" written by Schumacher, who said, above all in economic development, if people do not wish to be helped, leave them alone. 
This should be the first principle of aid. 
The first principle of aid is respect. 
This morning, the gentleman who opened this conference lay a stick on the floor, and said, "" Can we — can you imagine a city that is not neocolonial? "" I decided when I was 27 years old to only respond to people, and I invented a system called Enterprise Facilitation, where you never initiate anything, you never motivate anybody, but you become a servant of the local passion, the servant of local people who have a dream to become a better person. 
So what you do — you shut up. 
You never arrive in a community with any ideas, and you sit with the local people. 
We don't work from offices. 
We meet at the cafe. We meet at the pub. 
We have zero infrastructure. 
And what we do, we become friends, and we find out what that person wants to do. 
The most important thing is passion. 
You can give somebody an idea. 
If that person doesn't want to do it, what are you going to do? 
The passion that the person has for her own growth is the most important thing. 
The passion that that man has for his own personal growth is the most important thing. 
And then we help them to go and find the knowledge, because nobody in the world can succeed alone. 
The person with the idea may not have the knowledge, but the knowledge is available. 
So years and years ago, I had this idea: Why don't we, for once, instead of arriving in the community to tell people what to do, why don't, for once, listen to them? But not in community meetings. 
Let me tell you a secret. 
There is a problem with community meetings. 
Entrepreneurs never come, and they never tell you, in a public meeting, what they want to do with their own money, what opportunity they have identified. 
So planning has this blind spot. 
The smartest people in your community you don't even know, because they don't come to your public meetings. 
What we do, we work one-on-one, and to work one-on-one, you have to create a social infrastructure that doesn't exist. 
You have to create a new profession. 
The profession is the family doctor of enterprise, the family doctor of business, who sits with you in your house, at your kitchen table, at the cafe, and helps you find the resources to transform your passion into a way to make a living. 
I started this as a tryout in Esperance, in Western Australia. 
I was a doing a Ph.D. at the time, trying to go away from this patronizing bullshit that we arrive and tell you what to do. 
And so what I did in Esperance that first year was to just walk the streets, and in three days I had my first client, and I helped this first guy who was smoking fish from a garage, was a Maori guy, and I helped him to sell to the restaurant in Perth, to get organized, and then the fishermen came to me to say, "You the guy who helped Maori? Can you help us?" 
And I helped these five fishermen to work together and get this beautiful tuna not to the cannery in Albany for 60 cents a kilo, but we found a way to take the fish for sushi to Japan for 15 dollars a kilo, and the farmers came to talk to me, said, "Hey, you helped them. Can you help us?" 
In a year, I had 27 projects going on, and the government came to see me to say, "" How can you do that? 
How can you do —? "" And I said, "" I do something very, very, very difficult. 
I shut up, and listen to them. "" (Laughter) So — (Applause) — So the government says, "" Do it again. "" (Laughter) We've done it in 300 communities around the world. 
We have helped to start 40,000 businesses. 
There is a new generation of entrepreneurs who are dying of solitude. 
Peter Drucker, one of the greatest management consultants in history, died age 96, a few years ago. 
Peter Drucker was a professor of philosophy before becoming involved in business, and this is what Peter Drucker says: "" Planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy. "" Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship. 
So now you're rebuilding Christchurch without knowing what the smartest people in Christchurch want to do with their own money and their own energy. 
You have to learn how to get these people to come and talk to you. 
You have to offer them confidentiality, privacy, you have to be fantastic at helping them, and then they will come, and they will come in droves. 
In a community of 10,000 people, we get 200 clients. 
Can you imagine a community of 400,000 people, the intelligence and the passion? 
Which presentation have you applauded the most this morning? 
Local, passionate people. That's who you have applauded. 
So what I'm saying is that entrepreneurship is where it's at. 
We are at the end of the first industrial revolution — nonrenewable fossil fuels, manufacturing — and all of a sudden, we have systems which are not sustainable. 
The internal combustion engine is not sustainable. 
Freon way of maintaining things is not sustainable. 
What we have to look at is at how we feed, cure, educate, transport, communicate for seven billion people in a sustainable way. 
The technologies do not exist to do that. 
Who is going to invent the technology for the green revolution? Universities? Forget about it! 
Government? Forget about it! 
It will be entrepreneurs, and they're doing it now. 
There's a lovely story that I read in a futurist magazine many, many years ago. 
There was a group of experts who were invited to discuss the future of the city of New York in 1860. 
And in 1860, this group of people came together, and they all speculated about what would happen to the city of New York in 100 years, and the conclusion was unanimous: The city of New York would not exist in 100 years. 
Why? Because they looked at the curve and said, if the population keeps growing at this rate, to move the population of New York around, they would have needed six million horses, and the manure created by six million horses would be impossible to deal with. 
They were already drowning in manure. (Laughter) So 1860, they are seeing this dirty technology that is going to choke the life out of New York. 
So what happens? In 40 years' time, in the year 1900, in the United States of America, there were 1,001 car manufacturing companies — 1,001. 
The idea of finding a different technology had absolutely taken over, and there were tiny, tiny little factories in backwaters. 
Dearborn, Michigan. Henry Ford. 
However, there is a secret to work with entrepreneurs. 
First, you have to offer them confidentiality. 
Otherwise they don't come and talk to you. 
Then you have to offer them absolute, dedicated, passionate service to them. 
And then you have to tell them the truth about entrepreneurship. 
The smallest company, the biggest company, has to be capable of doing three things beautifully: The product that you want to sell has to be fantastic, you have to have fantastic marketing, and you have to have tremendous financial management. 
Guess what? 
We have never met a single human being in the world who can make it, sell it and look after the money. 
It doesn't exist. 
This person has never been born. 
We've done the research, and we have looked at the 100 iconic companies of the world — Carnegie, Westinghouse, Edison, Ford, all the new companies, Google, Yahoo. 
There's only one thing that all the successful companies in the world have in common, only one: None were started by one person. 
Now we teach entrepreneurship to 16-year-olds in Northumberland, and we start the class by giving them the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiography, and the task of the 16-year-olds is to underline, in the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiography how many times Richard uses the word "" I "" and how many times he uses the word "" we. "" Never the word "" I, "" and the word "" we "" 32 times. 
He wasn't alone when he started. 
Nobody started a company alone. No one. 
So we can create the community where we have facilitators who come from a small business background sitting in cafes, in bars, and your dedicated buddies who will do to you, what somebody did for this gentleman who talks about this epic, somebody who will say to you, "" What do you need? 
What can you do? Can you make it? 
Okay, can you sell it? Can you look after the money? "" "Oh, no, I cannot do this." "Would you like me to find you somebody?" 
We activate communities. 
We have groups of volunteers supporting the Enterprise Facilitator to help you to find resources and people and we have discovered that the miracle of the intelligence of local people is such that you can change the culture and the economy of this community just by capturing the passion, the energy and imagination of your own people. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

I write fiction sci-fi thrillers, so if I say "" killer robots, "" you'd probably think something like this. 
But I'm actually not here to talk about fiction. 
I'm here to talk about very real killer robots, autonomous combat drones. 
Now, I'm not referring to Predator and Reaper drones, which have a human making targeting decisions. 
I'm talking about fully autonomous robotic weapons that make lethal decisions about human beings all on their own. 
There's actually a technical term for this: lethal autonomy. 
Now, lethally autonomous killer robots would take many forms — flying, driving, or just lying in wait. 
And actually, they're very quickly becoming a reality. 
These are two automatic sniper stations currently deployed in the DMZ between North and South Korea. 
Both of these machines are capable of automatically identifying a human target and firing on it, the one on the left at a distance of over a kilometer. 
Now, in both cases, there's still a human in the loop to make that lethal firing decision, but it's not a technological requirement. It's a choice. 
And it's that choice that I want to focus on, because as we migrate lethal decision-making from humans to software, we risk not only taking the humanity out of war, but also changing our social landscape entirely, far from the battlefield. 
That's because the way humans resolve conflict shapes our social landscape. 
And this has always been the case, throughout history. 
For example, these were state-of-the-art weapons systems in 1400 A.D. 
Now they were both very expensive to build and maintain, but with these you could dominate the populace, and the distribution of political power in feudal society reflected that. 
Power was focused at the very top. 
And what changed? Technological innovation. 
Gunpowder, cannon. 
And pretty soon, armor and castles were obsolete, and it mattered less who you brought to the battlefield versus how many people you brought to the battlefield. 
And as armies grew in size, the nation-state arose as a political and logistical requirement of defense. 
And as leaders had to rely on more of their populace, they began to share power. 
Representative government began to form. 
So again, the tools we use to resolve conflict shape our social landscape. 
Autonomous robotic weapons are such a tool, except that, by requiring very few people to go to war, they risk re-centralizing power into very few hands, possibly reversing a five-century trend toward democracy. 
Now, I think, knowing this, we can take decisive steps to preserve our democratic institutions, to do what humans do best, which is adapt. 
But time is a factor. 
Seventy nations are developing remotely-piloted combat drones of their own, and as you'll see, remotely-piloted combat drones are the precursors to autonomous robotic weapons. 
That's because once you've deployed remotely-piloted drones, there are three powerful factors pushing decision-making away from humans and on to the weapon platform itself. 
The first of these is the deluge of video that drones produce. 
For example, in 2004, the U.S. drone fleet produced a grand total of 71 hours of video surveillance for analysis. 
By 2011, this had gone up to 300,000 hours, outstripping human ability to review it all, but even that number is about to go up drastically. 
The Pentagon's Gorgon Stare and Argus programs will put up to 65 independently operated camera eyes on each drone platform, and this would vastly outstrip human ability to review it. 
And that means visual intelligence software will need to scan it for items of interest. 
And that means very soon drones will tell humans what to look at, not the other way around. 
But there's a second powerful incentive pushing decision-making away from humans and onto machines, and that's electromagnetic jamming, severing the connection between the drone and its operator. 
Now we saw an example of this in 2011 when an American RQ-170 Sentinel drone got a bit confused over Iran due to a GPS spoofing attack, but any remotely-piloted drone is susceptible to this type of attack, and that means drones will have to shoulder more decision-making. 
They'll know their mission objective, and they'll react to new circumstances without human guidance. 
They'll ignore external radio signals and send very few of their own. 
Which brings us to, really, the third and most powerful incentive pushing decision-making away from humans and onto weapons: plausible deniability. 
Now we live in a global economy. 
High-tech manufacturing is occurring on most continents. 
Cyber espionage is spiriting away advanced designs to parts unknown, and in that environment, it is very likely that a successful drone design will be knocked off in contract factories, proliferate in the gray market. 
And in that situation, sifting through the wreckage of a suicide drone attack, it will be very difficult to say who sent that weapon. 
This raises the very real possibility of anonymous war. 
This could tilt the geopolitical balance on its head, make it very difficult for a nation to turn its firepower against an attacker, and that could shift the balance in the 21st century away from defense and toward offense. 
It could make military action a viable option not just for small nations, but criminal organizations, private enterprise, even powerful individuals. 
It could create a landscape of rival warlords undermining rule of law and civil society. 
Now if responsibility and transparency are two of the cornerstones of representative government, autonomous robotic weapons could undermine both. 
Now you might be thinking that citizens of high-tech nations would have the advantage in any robotic war, that citizens of those nations would be less vulnerable, particularly against developing nations. 
But I think the truth is the exact opposite. 
I think citizens of high-tech societies are more vulnerable to robotic weapons, and the reason can be summed up in one word: data. 
Data powers high-tech societies. 
Cell phone geolocation, telecom metadata, social media, email, text, financial transaction data, transportation data, it's a wealth of real-time data on the movements and social interactions of people. 
In short, we are more visible to machines than any people in history, and this perfectly suits the targeting needs of autonomous weapons. 
What you're looking at here is a link analysis map of a social group. 
Lines indicate social connectedness between individuals. 
And these types of maps can be automatically generated based on the data trail modern people leave behind. 
Now it's typically used to market goods and services to targeted demographics, but it's a dual-use technology, because targeting is used in another context. 
Notice that certain individuals are highlighted. 
These are the hubs of social networks. 
These are organizers, opinion-makers, leaders, and these people also can be automatically identified from their communication patterns. 
Now, if you're a marketer, you might then target them with product samples, try to spread your brand through their social group. 
But if you're a repressive government searching for political enemies, you might instead remove them, eliminate them, disrupt their social group, and those who remain behind lose social cohesion and organization. 
Now in a world of cheap, proliferating robotic weapons, borders would offer very little protection to critics of distant governments or trans-national criminal organizations. 
Popular movements agitating for change could be detected early and their leaders eliminated before their ideas achieve critical mass. 
And ideas achieving critical mass is what political activism in popular government is all about. 
Anonymous lethal weapons could make lethal action an easy choice for all sorts of competing interests. 
And this would put a chill on free speech and popular political action, the very heart of democracy. 
And this is why we need an international treaty on robotic weapons, and in particular a global ban on the development and deployment of killer robots. 
Now we already have international treaties on nuclear and biological weapons, and, while imperfect, these have largely worked. 
But robotic weapons might be every bit as dangerous, because they will almost certainly be used, and they would also be corrosive to our democratic institutions. 
Now in November 2012 the U.S. Department of Defense issued a directive requiring a human being be present in all lethal decisions. 
This temporarily effectively banned autonomous weapons in the U.S. military, but that directive needs to be made permanent. 
And it could set the stage for global action. 
Because we need an international legal framework for robotic weapons. 
And we need it now, before there's a devastating attack or a terrorist incident that causes nations of the world to rush to adopt these weapons before thinking through the consequences. 
Autonomous robotic weapons concentrate too much power in too few hands, and they would imperil democracy itself. 
Now, don't get me wrong, I think there are tons of great uses for unarmed civilian drones: environmental monitoring, search and rescue, logistics. 
If we have an international treaty on robotic weapons, how do we gain the benefits of autonomous drones and vehicles while still protecting ourselves against illegal robotic weapons? 
I think the secret will be transparency. 
No robot should have an expectation of privacy in a public place. 
(Applause) Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement through public spaces. 
We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on aircraft. 
This is no different. 
And every citizen should be able to download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and historically. 
And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their presence. 
And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility. 
But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. 
It would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles and drones while still preserving our open, civil society. 
We must ban the deployment and development of killer robots. 
Let's not succumb to the temptation to automate war. 
Autocratic governments and criminal organizations undoubtedly will, but let's not join them. 
Autonomous robotic weapons would concentrate too much power in too few unseen hands, and that would be corrosive to representative government. 
Let's make sure, for democracies at least, killer robots remain fiction. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

Hello. My name is Jarrett Krosoczka, and I write and illustrate books for children for a living. 
So I use my imagination as my full-time job. 
But well before my imagination was my vocation, my imagination saved my life. 
When I was a kid, I loved to draw, and the most talented artist I knew was my mother, but my mother was addicted to heroin. 
And when your parent is a drug addict, it's kind of like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football, because as much as you want to love on that person, as much as you want to receive love from that person, every time you open your heart, you end up on your back. 
So throughout my childhood, my mother was incarcerated and I didn't have my father because I didn't even learn his first name until I was in the sixth grade. 
But I had my grandparents, my maternal grandparents Joseph and Shirley, who adopted me just before my third birthday and took me in as their own, after they had already raised five children. 
So two people who grew up in the Great Depression, there in the very, very early '80s took on a new kid. 
I was the Cousin Oliver of the sitcom of the Krosoczka family, the new kid who came out of nowhere. 
And I would like to say that life was totally easy with them. 
They each smoked two packs a day, each, nonfiltered, and by the time I was six, I could order a Southern Comfort Manhattan, dry with a twist, rocks on the side, the ice on the side so you could fit more liquor in the drink. 
But they loved the hell out of me. They loved me so much. 
And they supported my creative efforts, because my grandfather was a self-made man. 
He ran and worked in a factory. 
My grandmother was a homemaker. 
But here was this kid who loved Transformers and Snoopy and the Ninja Turtles, and the characters that I read about, I fell in love with, and they became my friends. 
So my best friends in life were the characters I read about in books. 
I went to Gates Lane Elementary School in Worcester, Massachusetts, and I had wonderful teachers there, most notably in first grade Mrs. Alisch. 
And I just, I can just remember the love that she offered us as her students. 
When I was in the third grade, a monumental event happened. 
An author visited our school, Jack Gantos. 
A published author of books came to talk to us about what he did for a living. 
And afterwards, we all went back to our classrooms and we drew our own renditions of his main character, Rotten Ralph. 
And suddenly the author appeared in our doorway, and I remember him sort of sauntering down the aisles, going from kid to kid looking at the desks, not saying a word. 
But he stopped next to my desk, and he tapped on my desk, and he said, "" Nice cat. "" (Laughter) And he wandered away. 
Two words that made a colossal difference in my life. 
When I was in the third grade, I wrote a book for the first time, "" The Owl Who Thought He Was The Best Flyer. "" (Laughter) We had to write our own Greek myth, our own creation story, so I wrote a story about an owl who challenged Hermes to a flying race, and the owl cheated, and Hermes, being a Greek god, grew angry and bitter, and turned the owl into a moon, so the owl had to live the rest of his life as a moon while he watched his family and friends play at night. 
Yeah. (Laughter) My book had a title page. 
I was clearly worried about my intellectual property when I was eight. 
(Laughter) And it was a story that was told with words and pictures, exactly what I do now for a living, and I sometimes let the words have the stage on their own, and sometimes I allowed the pictures to work on their own to tell the story. 
My favorite page is the "" About the author "" page. 
(Laughter) So I learned to write about myself in third person at a young age. 
So I love that last sentence: "" He liked making this book. "" And I liked making that book because I loved using my imagination, and that's what writing is. 
Writing is using your imagination on paper, and I do get so scared because I travel to so many schools now and that seems like such a foreign concept to kids, that writing would be using your imagination on paper, if they're allowed to even write now within the school hours. 
So I loved writing so much that I'd come home from school, and I would take out pieces of paper, and I would staple them together, and I would fill those blank pages with words and pictures just because I loved using my imagination. 
And so these characters would become my friends. 
There was an egg, a tomato, a head of lettuce and a pumpkin, and they all lived in this refrigerator city, and in one of their adventures they went to a haunted house that was filled with so many dangers like an evil blender who tried to chop them up, an evil toaster who tried to kidnap the bread couple, and an evil microwave who tried to melt their friend who was a stick of butter. (Laughter) And I'd make my own comics too, and this was another way for me to tell stories, through words and through pictures. 
Now when I was in sixth grade, the public funding all but eliminated the arts budgets in the Worcester public school system. 
I went from having art once a week to twice a month to once a month to not at all. 
And my grandfather, he was a wise man, and he saw that as a problem, because he knew that was, like, the one thing I had. I didn't play sports. 
I had art. 
So he walked into my room one evening, and he sat on the edge of my bed, and he said, "" Jarrett, it's up to you, but if you'd like to, we'd like to send you to the classes at the Worcester Art Museum. "" And I was so thrilled. 
So from sixth through 12th grade, once, twice, sometimes three times a week, I would take classes at the art museum, and I was surrounded by other kids who loved to draw, other kids who shared a similar passion. 
Now my publishing career began when I designed the cover for my eighth grade yearbook, and if you're wondering about the style of dress I put our mascot in, I was really into Bell Biv DeVoe and MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice at the time. (Laughter) And to this day, I still can do karaoke to "" Ice, Ice Baby "" without looking at the screen. 
Don't tempt me, because I will do it. 
So I get shipped off to private school, K through eight, public schools, but for some reason my grandfather was upset that somebody at the local high school had been stabbed and killed, so he didn't want me to go there. 
He wanted me to go to a private school, and he gave me an option. 
You can go to Holy Name, which is coed, or St. John's, which is all boys. 
Very wise man, because he knew I would, I felt like I was making the decision on my own, and he knew I wouldn't choose St. John's, so I went to Holy Name High School, which was a tough transition because, like I said, I didn't play sports, and it was very focused on sports, but I took solace in Mr. Shilale's art room. 
And I just flourished here. 
I just couldn't wait to get to that classroom every day. 
So how did I make friends? 
I drew funny pictures of my teachers — (Laughter) — and I passed them around. 
Well, in English class, in ninth grade, my friend John, who was sitting next to me, laughed a little bit too hard. 
Mr. Greenwood was not pleased. 
(Laughter) He instantly saw that I was the cause of the commotion, and for the first time in my life, I was sent to the hall, and I thought, "" Oh no, I'm doomed. 
My grandfather's just going to kill me. "" And he came out to the hallway and he said, "Let me see the paper." 
And I thought, "" Oh no. He thinks it's a note. "" And so I took this picture, and I handed it to him. 
And we sat in silence for that brief moment, and he said to me, "" You're really talented. "" (Laughter) "" You're really good. You know, the school newspaper needs a new cartoonist, and you should be the cartoonist. 
Just stop drawing in my class. "" So my parents never found out about it. 
I didn't get in trouble. I was introduced to Mrs. Casey, who ran the school newspaper, and I was for three and a half years the cartoonist for my school paper, handling such heavy issues as, seniors are mean, freshmen are nerds, the prom bill is so expensive. I can't believe how much it costs to go to the prom. 
And I took the headmaster to task and then I also wrote an ongoing story about a boy named Wesley who was unlucky in love, and I just swore up and down that this wasn't about me, but all these years later it was totally me. 
But it was so cool because I could write these stories, I could come up with these ideas, and they'd be published in the school paper, and people who I didn't know could read them. 
And I loved that thought, of being able to share my ideas through the printed page. 
On my 14th birthday, my grandfather and my grandmother gave me the best birthday present ever: a drafting table that I have worked on ever since. 
Here I am, 20 years later, and I still work on this table every day. 
On the evening of my 14th birthday, I was given this table, and we had Chinese food. 
And this was my fortune: "You will be successful in your work." 
I taped it to the top left hand of my table, and as you can see, it's still there. 
Now I never really asked my grandparents for anything. 
Well, two things: Rusty, who was a great hamster and lived a great long life when I was in fourth grade. 
(Laughter) And a video camera. 
I just wanted a video camera. 
And after begging and pleading for Christmas, I got a second-hand video camera, and I instantly started making my own animations on my own, and all throughout high school I made my own animations. 
I convinced my 10th grade English teacher to allow me to do my book report on Stephen King's "" Misery "" as an animated short. (Laughter) And I kept making comics. 
I kept making comics, and at the Worcester Art Museum, I was given the greatest piece of advice by any educator I was ever given. 
Mark Lynch, he's an amazing teacher and he's still a dear friend of mine, and I was 14 or 15, and I walked into his comic book class halfway through the course, and I was so excited, I was beaming. 
I had this book that was how to draw comics in the Marvel way, and it taught me how to draw superheroes, how to draw a woman, how to draw muscles just the way they were supposed to be if I were to ever draw for X-Men or Spiderman. 
And all the color just drained from his face, and he looked at me, and he said, "Forget everything you learned." 
And I didn't understand. He said, "" You have a great style. 
Celebrate your own style. Don't draw the way you're being told to draw. 
Draw the way you're drawing and keep at it, because you're really good. "" Now when I was a teenager, I was angsty as any teenager was, but after 17 years of having a mother who was in and out of my life like a yo-yo and a father who was faceless, I was angry. 
And when I was 17, I met my father for the first time, upon which I learned I had a brother and sister I had never known about. 
And on the day I met my father for the first time, I was rejected from the Rhode Island School of Design, my one and only choice for college. 
But it was around this time I went to Camp Sunshine to volunteer a week and working with the most amazing kids, kids with leukemia, and this kid Eric changed my life. 
Eric didn't live to see his sixth birthday, and Eric lives with me every day. 
So after this experience, my art teacher, Mr. Shilale, he brought in these picture books, and I thought, "" Picture books for kids! "" and I started writing books for young readers when I was a senior in high school. 
Well, I eventually got to the Rhode Island School of Design. 
I transferred to RISD as a sophomore, and it was there that I took every course that I could on writing, and it was there that I wrote a story about a giant orange slug who wanted to be friends with this kid. 
The kid had no patience for him. 
And I sent this book out to a dozen publishers and it was rejected every single time, but I was also involved with the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, an amazing camp for kids with all sorts of critical illnesses, and it's those kids at the camp that read my stories, and I read to them, and I saw that they responded to my work. 
I graduated from RISD. My grandparents were very proud, and I moved to Boston, and I set up shop. 
I set up a studio and I tried to get published. 
I would send out my books. I would send out hundreds of postcards to editors and art directors, but they would go unanswered. 
And my grandfather would call me every week, and he would say, "" Jarrett, how's it going? Do you have a job yet? "" Because he had just invested a significant amount of money in my college education. 
And I said, "" Yes, I have a job. I write and illustrate children's books. "" And he said, "" Well, who pays you for that? "" And I said, "" No one, no one, no one just yet. 
But I know it's going to happen. "" Now, I used to work the weekends at the Hole in the Wall off-season programming to make some extra money as I was trying to get my feet off the ground, and this kid who was just this really hyper kid, I started calling him "" Monkey Boy, "" and I went home and wrote a book called "" Good Night, Monkey Boy. "" And I sent out one last batch of postcards. 
And I received an email from an editor at Random House with a subject line, "" Nice work! "" Exclamation point. 
"" Dear Jarrett, I received your postcard. 
I liked your art, so I went to your website and I'm wondering if you ever tried writing any of your own stories, because I really like your art and it looks like there are some stories that go with them. 
Please let me know if you're ever in New York City. "" And this was from an editor at Random House Children's Books. 
So the next week I "" happened "" to be in New York. 
(Laughter) And I met with this editor, and I left New York for a contract for my first book, "Good Night, Monkey Boy," which was published on June 12, 2001. 
And my local paper celebrated the news. 
The local bookstore made a big deal of it. 
They sold out of all of their books. 
My friend described it as a wake, but happy, because everyone I ever knew was there in line to see me, but I wasn't dead. I was just signing books. 
My grandparents, they were in the middle of it. 
They were so happy. They couldn't have been more proud. 
Mrs. Alisch was there. Mr. Shilale was there. Mrs. Casey was there. 
Mrs. Alisch cut in front of the line and said, "" I taught him how to read. "" (Laughter) And then something happened that changed my life. 
I got my first piece of significant fan mail, where this kid loved Monkey Boy so much that he wanted to have a Monkey Boy birthday cake. 
For a two-year-old, that is like a tattoo. (Laughter) You know? You only get one birthday per year. 
And for him, it's only his second. 
And I got this picture, and I thought, "" This picture is going to live within his consciousness for his entire life. He will forever have this photo in his family photo albums. "" So that photo, since that moment, is framed in front of me while I've worked on all of my books. 
I have 10 picture books out. 
"Punk Farm," "Baghead," "Ollie the Purple Elephant." 
I just finished the ninth book in the "" Lunch Lady "" series, which is a graphic novel series about a lunch lady who fights crime. 
I'm expecting the release of a chapter book called "" Platypus Police Squad: The Frog Who Croaked. "" And I travel the country visiting countless schools, letting lots of kids know that they draw great cats. 
And I meet Bagheads. 
Lunch ladies treat me really well. 
And I got to see my name in lights because kids put my name in lights. 
Twice now, the "" Lunch Lady "" series has won the Children's Choice Book of the Year in the third or fourth grade category, and those winners were displayed on a jumbotron screen in Times Square. 
"" Punk Farm "" and "" Lunch Lady "" are in development to be movies, so I am a movie producer and I really do think, thanks to that video camera I was given in ninth grade. 
I've seen people have "" Punk Farm "" birthday parties, people have dressed up as "" Punk Farm "" for Halloween, a "" Punk Farm "" baby room, which makes me a little nervous for the child's well-being in the long term. 
And I get the most amazing fan mail, and I get the most amazing projects, and the biggest moment for me came last Halloween. 
The doorbell rang and it was a trick-or-treater dressed as my character. It was so cool. 
Now my grandparents are no longer living, so to honor them, I started a scholarship at the Worcester Art Museum for kids who are in difficult situations but whose caretakers can't afford the classes. 
And it displayed the work from my first 10 years of publishing, and you know who was there to celebrate? Mrs. Alisch. 
I said, "" Mrs. Alisch, how are you? "" And she responded with, "" I'm here. "" (Laughter) That's true. You are alive, and that's pretty good right now. 
So the biggest moment for me, though, my most important job now is I am a dad myself, and I have two beautiful daughters, and my goal is to surround them by inspiration, by the books that are in every single room of our house to the murals I painted in their rooms to the moments for creativity where you find, in quiet times, by making faces on the patio to letting her sit in the very desk that I've sat in for the past 20 years. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

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

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

Let me tell you, it has been a fantastic month for deception. 
And I'm not even talking about the American presidential race. (Laughter) We have a high-profile journalist caught for plagiarism, a young superstar writer whose book involves so many made up quotes that they've pulled it from the shelves; a New York Times exposé on fake book reviews. 
It's been fantastic. 
Now, of course, not all deception hits the news. 
Much of the deception is everyday. In fact, a lot of research shows that we all lie once or twice a day, as Dave suggested. 
So it's about 6: 30 now, suggests that most of us should have lied. 
Let's take a look at Winnipeg. How many of you, in the last 24 hours — think back — have told a little fib, or a big one? How many have told a little lie out there? 
All right, good. These are all the liars. 
Make sure you pay attention to them. (Laughter) No, that looked good, it was about two thirds of you. 
The other third didn't lie, or perhaps forgot, or you're lying to me about your lying, which is very, very devious. (Laughter) This fits with a lot of the research, which suggests that lying is very pervasive. 
It's this pervasiveness, combined with the centrality to what it means to be a human, the fact that we can tell the truth or make something up, that has fascinated people throughout history. 
Here we have Diogenes with his lantern. 
Does anybody know what he was looking for? 
A single honest man, and he died without finding one back in Greece. And we have Confucius in the East who was really concerned with sincerity, not only that you walked the walk or talked the talk, but that you believed in what you were doing. 
You believed in your principles. 
Now my first professional encounter with deception is a little bit later than these guys, a couple thousand years. 
I was a customs officer for Canada back in the mid- '90s. 
Yeah. I was defending Canada's borders. 
You may think that's a weapon right there. In fact, that's a stamp. I used a stamp to defend Canada's borders. (Laughter) Very Canadian of me. I learned a lot about deception while doing my duty here in customs, one of which was that most of what I thought I knew about deception was wrong, and I'll tell you about some of that tonight. 
But even since just 1995, '96, the way we communicate has been completely transformed. We email, we text, we skype, we Facebook. It's insane. 
Almost every aspect of human communication's been changed, and of course that's had an impact on deception. 
Let me tell you a little bit about a couple of new deceptions we've been tracking and documenting. 
They're called the Butler, the Sock Puppet and the Chinese Water Army. 
It sounds a little bit like a weird book, but actually they're all new types of lies. 
Let's start with the Butlers. Here's an example of one: "On my way." Anybody ever written, "On my way?" 
Then you've also lied. (Laughter) We're never on our way. We're thinking about going on our way. 
Here's another one: "" Sorry I didn't respond to you earlier. 
My battery was dead. "" Your battery wasn't dead. 
You weren't in a dead zone. 
You just didn't want to respond to that person that time. 
Here's the last one: You're talking to somebody, and you say, "" Sorry, got work, gotta go. "" But really, you're just bored. You want to talk to somebody else. 
Each of these is about a relationship, and this is a 24 / 7 connected world. Once you get my cell phone number, you can literally be in touch with me 24 hours a day. 
And so these lies are being used by people to create a buffer, like the butler used to do, between us and the connections to everybody else. 
But they're very special. They use ambiguity that comes from using technology. You don't know where I am or what I'm doing or who I'm with. 
And they're aimed at protecting the relationships. 
These aren't just people being jerks. These are people that are saying, look, I don't want to talk to you now, or I didn't want to talk to you then, but I still care about you. 
Our relationship is still important. 
Now, the Sock Puppet, on the other hand, is a totally different animal. The sock puppet isn't about ambiguity, per se. It's about identity. 
Let me give you a very recent example, as in, like, last week. 
Here's R.J. Ellory, best-seller author in Britain. 
Here's one of his bestselling books. 
Here's a reviewer online, on Amazon. 
My favorite, by Nicodemus Jones, is, "Whatever else it might do, it will touch your soul." 
And of course, you might suspect that Nicodemus Jones is R.J. Ellory. 
He wrote very, very positive reviews about himself. Surprise, surprise. 
Now this Sock Puppet stuff isn't actually that new. 
Walt Whitman also did this back in the day, before there was Internet technology. Sock Puppet becomes interesting when we get to scale, which is the domain of the Chinese Water Army. 
Chinese Water Army refers to thousands of people in China that are paid small amounts of money to produce content. It could be reviews. It could be propaganda. The government hires these people, companies hire them, all over the place. 
In North America, we call this Astroturfing, and Astroturfing is very common now. There's a lot of concerns about it. 
We see this especially with product reviews, book reviews, everything from hotels to whether that toaster is a good toaster or not. 
Now, looking at these three reviews, or these three types of deception, you might think, wow, the Internet is really making us a deceptive species, especially when you think about the Astroturfing, where we can see deception brought up to scale. 
But actually, what I've been finding is very different from that. 
Now, let's put aside the online anonymous sex chatrooms, which I'm sure none of you have been in. 
I can assure you there's deception there. 
And let's put aside the Nigerian prince who's emailed you about getting the 43 million out of the country. (Laughter) Let's forget about that guy, too. 
Let's focus on the conversations between our friends and our family and our coworkers and our loved ones. 
Those are the conversations that really matter. 
What does technology do to deception with those folks? 
Here's a couple of studies. One of the studies we do are called diary studies, in which we ask people to record all of their conversations and all of their lies for seven days, and what we can do then is calculate how many lies took place per conversation within a medium, and the finding that we get that surprises people the most is that email is the most honest of those three media. 
And it really throws people for a loop because we think, well, there's no nonverbal cues, so why don't you lie more? 
The phone, in contrast, the most lies. 
Again and again and again we see the phone is the device that people lie on the most, and perhaps because of the Butler Lie ambiguities I was telling you about. 
This tends to be very different from what people expect. 
What about résumés? We did a study in which we had people apply for a job, and they could apply for a job either with a traditional paper résumé, or on LinkedIn, which is a social networking site like Facebook, but for professionals — involves the same information as a résumé. 
And what we found, to many people's surprise, was that those LinkedIn résumés were more honest on the things that mattered to employers, like your responsibilities or your skills at your previous job. 
How about Facebook itself? 
You know, we always think that hey, there are these idealized versions, people are just showing the best things that happened in their lives. I've thought that many times. 
My friends, no way they can be that cool and have good of a life. 
Well, one study tested this by examining people's personalities. 
They had four good friends of a person judge their personality. 
Then they had strangers, many strangers, judge the person's personality just from Facebook, and what they found was those judgments of the personality were pretty much identical, highly correlated, meaning that Facebook profiles really do reflect our actual personality. 
All right, well, what about online dating? 
I mean, that's a pretty deceptive space. 
I'm sure you all have "" friends "" that have used online dating. (Laughter) And they would tell you about that guy that had no hair when he came, or the woman that didn't look at all like her photo. 
Well, we were really interested in it, and so what we did is we brought people, online daters, into the lab, and then we measured them. We got their height up against the wall, we put them on a scale, got their weight — ladies loved that — and then we actually got their driver's license to get their age. 
And what we found was very, very interesting. 
Here's an example of the men and the height. 
Along the bottom is how tall they said they were in their profile. 
Along the y-axis, the vertical axis, is how tall they actually were. 
That diagonal line is the truth line. If their dot's on it, they were telling exactly the truth. 
Now, as you see, most of the little dots are below the line. 
What it means is all the guys were lying about their height. 
In fact, they lied about their height about nine tenths of an inch, what we say in the lab as "" strong rounding up. "" (Laughter) You get to 5 '8 "" and one tenth, and boom! 5' 9 "". 
But what's really important here is, look at all those dots. 
They are clustering pretty close to the truth. What we found was 80 percent of our participants did indeed lie on one of those dimensions, but they always lied by a little bit. 
One of the reasons is pretty simple. If you go to a date, a coffee date, and you're completely different than what you said, game over. Right? So people lied frequently, but they lied subtly, not too much. They were constrained. 
Well, what explains all these studies? What explains the fact that despite our intuitions, mine included, a lot of online communication, technologically-mediated communication, is more honest than face to face? 
That really is strange. How do we explain this? 
Well, to do that, one thing is we can look at the deception-detection literature. 
It's a very old literature by now, it's coming up on 50 years. 
It's been reviewed many times. There's been thousands of trials, hundreds of studies, and there's some really compelling findings. 
The first is, we're really bad at detecting deception, really bad. Fifty-four percent accuracy on average when you have to tell if somebody that just said a statement is lying or not. 
That's really bad. Why is it so bad? 
Well it has to do with Pinocchio's nose. 
If I were to ask you guys, what do you rely on when you're looking at somebody and you want to find out if they're lying? What cue do you pay attention to? 
Most of you would say that one of the cues you look at is the eyes. The eyes are the window to the soul. 
And you're not alone. Around the world, almost every culture, one of the top cues is eyes. But the research over the last 50 years says there's actually no reliable cue to deception, which blew me away, and it's one of the hard lessons that I learned when I was customs officer. 
The eyes do not tell us whether somebody's lying or not. 
Some situations, yes — high stakes, maybe their pupils dilate, their pitch goes up, their body movements change a little bit, but not all the time, not for everybody, it's not reliable. 
Strange. The other thing is that just because you can't see me doesn't mean I'm going to lie. It's common sense, but one important finding is that we lie for a reason. 
We lie to protect ourselves or for our own gain or for somebody else's gain. 
So there are some pathological liars, but they make up a tiny portion of the population. We lie for a reason. 
Just because people can't see us doesn't mean we're going to necessarily lie. 
But I think there's actually something much more interesting and fundamental going on here. The next big thing for me, the next big idea, we can find by going way back in history to the origins of language. 
Most linguists agree that we started speaking somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. That's a long time ago. 
A lot of humans have lived since then. 
We've been talking, I guess, about fires and caves and saber-toothed tigers. I don't know what they talked about, but they were doing a lot of talking, and like I said, there's a lot of humans evolving speaking, about 100 billion people in fact. 
What's important though is that writing only emerged about 5,000 years ago. So what that means is that all the people before there was any writing, every word that they ever said, every utterance disappeared. No trace. Evanescent. Gone. 
So we've been evolving to talk in a way in which there is no record. In fact, even the next big change to writing was only 500 years ago now, with the printing press, which is very recent in our past, and literacy rates remained incredibly low right up until World War II, so even the people of the last two millennia, most of the words they ever said — poof! — disappeared. 
Let's turn to now, the networked age. 
How many of you have recorded something today? 
Anybody do any writing today? Did anybody write a word? 
It looks like almost every single person here recorded something. 
In this room, right now, we've probably recorded more than almost all of human pre-ancient history. 
That is crazy. We're entering this amazing period of flux in human evolution where we've evolved to speak in a way in which our words disappear, but we're in an environment where we're recording everything. 
In fact, I think in the very near future, it's not just what we write that will be recorded, everything we do will be recorded. 
What does that mean? What's the next big idea from that? 
Well, as a social scientist, this is the most amazing thing I have ever even dreamed of. Now, I can look at all those words that used to, for millennia, disappear. 
I can look at lies that before were said and then gone. 
You remember those Astroturfing reviews that we were talking about before? Well, when they write a fake review, they have to post it somewhere, and it's left behind for us. 
So one thing that we did, and I'll give you an example of looking at the language, is we paid people to write some fake reviews. One of these reviews is fake. 
The person never was at the James Hotel. 
The other review is real. The person stayed there. 
Now, your task now is to decide which review is fake? 
I'll give you a moment to read through them. 
But I want everybody to raise their hand at some point. 
Remember, I study deception. I can tell if you don't raise your hand. 
All right, how many of you believe that A is the fake? 
All right. Very good. About half. 
And how many of you think that B is? 
All right. Slightly more for B. 
Excellent. Here's the answer. 
B is a fake. Well done second group. You dominated the first group. (Laughter) You're actually a little bit unusual. Every time we demonstrate this, it's usually about a 50-50 split, which fits with the research, 54 percent. Maybe people here in Winnipeg are more suspicious and better at figuring it out. 
Those cold, hard winters, I love it. 
All right, so why do I care about this? 
Well, what I can do now with my colleagues in computer science is we can create computer algorithms that can analyze the linguistic traces of deception. 
Let me highlight a couple of things here in the fake review. The first is that liars tend to think about narrative. They make up a story: Who? And what happened? And that's what happened here. 
Our fake reviewers talked about who they were with and what they were doing. They also used the first person singular, I, way more than the people that actually stayed there. 
They were inserting themselves into the hotel review, kind of trying to convince you they were there. 
In contrast, the people that wrote the reviews that were actually there, their bodies actually entered the physical space, they talked a lot more about spatial information. 
They said how big the bathroom was, or they said, you know, here's how far shopping is from the hotel. 
Now, you guys did pretty well. Most people perform at chance at this task. 
Our computer algorithm is very accurate, much more accurate than humans can be, and it's not going to be accurate all the time. 
This isn't a deception-detection machine to tell if your girlfriend's lying to you on text messaging. 
We believe that every lie now, every type of lie — fake hotel reviews, fake shoe reviews, your girlfriend cheating on you with text messaging — those are all different lies. They're going to have different patterns of language. But because everything's recorded now, we can look at all of those kinds of lies. 
Now, as I said, as a social scientist, this is wonderful. 
It's transformational. We're going to be able to learn so much more about human thought and expression, about everything from love to attitudes, because everything is being recorded now, but what does it mean for the average citizen? 
What does it mean for us in our lives? 
Well, let's forget deception for a bit. One of the big ideas, I believe, is that we're leaving these huge traces behind. 
My outbox for email is massive, and I never look at it. I write all the time, but I never look at my record, at my trace. 
And I think we're going to see a lot more of that, where we can reflect on who we are by looking at what we wrote, what we said, what we did. 
Now, if we bring it back to deception, there's a couple of take-away things here. 
First, lying online can be very dangerous, right? 
Not only are you leaving a record for yourself on your machine, but you're leaving a record on the person that you were lying to, and you're also leaving them around for me to analyze with some computer algorithms. 
So by all means, go ahead and do that, that's good. 
But when it comes to lying and what we want to do with our lives, I think we can go back to Diogenes and Confucius. And they were less concerned about whether to lie or not to lie, and more concerned about being true to the self, and I think this is really important. 
Now, when you are about to say or do something, we can think, do I want this to be part of my legacy, part of my personal record? 
Because in the digital age we live in now, in the networked age, we are all leaving a record. 
Thank you so much for your time, and good luck with your record. (Applause) 

I've always written primarily about architecture, about buildings, and writing about architecture is based on certain assumptions. 
An architect designs a building, and it becomes a place, or many architects design many buildings, and it becomes a city, and regardless of this complicated mix of forces of politics and culture and economics that shapes these places, at the end of the day, you can go and you can visit them. You can walk around them. 
You can smell them. You can get a feel for them. 
You can experience their sense of place. 
But what was striking to me over the last several years was that less and less was I going out into the world, and more and more, I was sitting in front of my computer screen. 
And especially since about 2007, when I got an iPhone, I was not only sitting in front of my screen all day, but I was also getting up at the end of the day and looking at this little screen that I carried in my pocket. 
And what was surprising to me was how quickly my relationship to the physical world had changed. 
In this very short period of time, you know, whether you call it the last 15 years or so of being online, or the last, you know, four or five years of being online all the time, our relationship to our surroundings had changed in that our attention is constantly divided. You know, we're both looking inside the screens and we're looking out in the world around us. 
And what was even more striking to me, and what I really got hung up on, was that the world inside the screen seemed to have no physical reality of its own. 
If you went and looked for images of the Internet, this was all that you found, this famous image by Opte of the Internet as the kind of Milky Way, this infinite expanse where we don't seem to be anywhere on it. 
We can never seem to grasp it in its totality. 
It's always reminded me of the Apollo image of the Earth, the blue marble picture, and it's similarly meant to suggest, I think, that we can't really understand it as a whole. 
We're always sort of small in the face of its expanse. 
So if there was this world and this screen, and if there was the physical world around me, I couldn't ever get them together in the same place. 
And then this happened. 
My Internet broke one day, as it occasionally does, and the cable guy came to fix it, and he started with the dusty clump of cables behind the couch, and he followed it to the front of my building and into the basement and out to the back yard, and there was this big jumble of cables against the wall. 
And then he saw a squirrel running along the wire, and he said, "" There's your problem. 
A squirrel is chewing on your Internet. "" (Laughter) And this seemed astounding. The Internet is a transcendent idea. It's a set of protocols that has changed everything from shopping to dating to revolutions. 
It was unequivocally not something a squirrel could chew on. (Laughter) But that in fact seemed to be the case. 
A squirrel had in fact chewed on my Internet. (Laughter) And then I got this image in my head of what would happen if you yanked the wire from the wall and if you started to follow it. Where would it go? 
Was the Internet actually a place that you could visit? 
Could I go there? Who would I meet? 
You know, was there something actually out there? 
And the answer, by all accounts, was no. 
This was the Internet, this black box with a red light on it, as represented in the sitcom "" The IT Crowd. "" Normally it lives on the top of Big Ben, because that's where you get the best reception, but they had negotiated that their colleague could borrow it for the afternoon to use in an office presentation. 
The elders of the Internet were willing to part with it for a short while, and she looks at it and she says, "This is the Internet? The whole Internet? Is it heavy?" 
They say, "" Of course not, the Internet doesn't weigh anything. "" And I was embarrassed. I was looking for this thing that only fools seem to look for. 
The Internet was that amorphous blob, or it was a silly black box with a blinking red light on it. 
It wasn't a real world out there. 
But, in fact, it is. There is a real world of the Internet out there, and that's what I spent about two years visiting, these places of the Internet. I was in large data centers that use as much power as the cities in which they sit, and I visited places like this, 60 Hudson Street in New York, which is one of the buildings in the world, one of a very short list of buildings, about a dozen buildings, where more networks of the Internet connect to each other than anywhere else. 
And that connection is an unequivocally physical process. 
It's about the router of one network, a Facebook or a Google or a B.T. or a Comcast or a Time Warner, whatever it is, connecting with usually a yellow fiber optic cable up into the ceiling and down into the router of another network, and that's unequivocally physical, and it's surprisingly intimate. 
A building like 60 Hudson, and a dozen or so others, has 10 times more networks connecting within it than the next tier of buildings. 
There's a very short list of these places. 
And 60 Hudson in particular is interesting because it's home to about a half a dozen very important networks, which are the networks which serve the undersea cables that travel underneath the ocean that connect Europe and America and connect all of us. 
And it's those cables in particular that I want to focus on. 
If the Internet is a global phenomenon, if we live in a global village, it's because there are cables underneath the ocean, cables like this. 
And in this dimension, they are incredibly small. 
You can you hold them in your hand. They're like a garden hose. 
But in the other dimension they are incredibly expansive, as expansive as you can imagine. 
They stretch across the ocean. They're three or five or eight thousand miles in length, and if the material science and the computational technology is incredibly complicated, the basic physical process is shockingly simple. Light goes in on one end of the ocean and comes out on the other, and it usually comes from a building called a landing station that's often tucked away inconspicuously in a little seaside neighborhood, and there are amplifiers that sit on the ocean floor that look kind of like bluefin tuna, and every 50 miles they amplify the signal, and since the rate of transmission 
is incredibly fast, the basic unit is a 10-gigabit-per-second wavelength of light, maybe a thousand times your own connection, or capable of carrying 10,000 video streams, but not only that, but you'll put not just one wavelength of light through one of the fibers, but you'll put maybe 50 or 60 or 70 different wavelengths or colors of light through a single fiber, and then you'll have maybe eight fibers in a cable, four going in each direction. 
And they're tiny. They're the thickness of a hair. 
And then they connect to the continent somewhere. 
They connect in a manhole like this. Literally, this is where the 5,000-mile cable plugs in. 
This is in Halifax, a cable that stretches from Halifax to Ireland. 
And the landscape is changing. Three years ago, when I started thinking about this, there was one cable down the Western coast of Africa, represented in this map by Steve Song as that thin black line. 
Now there are six cables and more coming, three down each coast. 
Because once a country gets plugged in by one cable, they realize that it's not enough. If they're going to build an industry around it, they need to know that their connection isn't tenuous but permanent, because if a cable breaks, you have to send a ship out into the water, throw a grappling hook over the side, pick it up, find the other end, and then fuse the two ends back together and then dump it over. 
It's an intensely, intensely physical process. 
So this is my friend Simon Cooper, who until very recently worked for Tata Communications, the communications wing of Tata, the big Indian industrial conglomerate. 
And I've never met him. We've only communicated via this telepresence system, which always makes me think of him as the man inside the Internet. (Laughter) And he is English. The undersea cable industry is dominated by Englishmen, and they all seem to be 42. 
(Laughter) Because they all started at the same time with the boom about 20 years ago. 
And Tata had gotten its start as a communications business when they bought two cables, one across the Atlantic and one across the Pacific, and proceeded to add pieces onto them, until they had built a belt around the world, which means they will send your bits to the East or the West. 
They have — this is literally a beam of light around the world, and if a cable breaks in the Pacific, it'll send it around the other direction. And then having done that, they started to look for places to wire next. 
They looked for the unwired places, and that's meant North and South, primarily these cables to Africa. 
But what amazes me is Simon's incredible geographic imagination. 
He thinks about the world with this incredible expansiveness. 
And I was particularly interested because I wanted to see one of these cables being built. See, you know, all the time online we experience these fleeting moments of connection, these sort of brief adjacencies, a tweet or a Facebook post or an email, and it seemed like there was a physical corollary to that. 
It seemed like there was a moment when the continent was being plugged in, and I wanted to see that. 
And Simon was working on a new cable, WACS, the West Africa Cable System, that stretched from Lisbon down the west coast of Africa, to Cote d'Ivoire, to Ghana, to Nigeria, to Cameroon. 
And he said there was coming soon, depending on the weather, but he'd let me know when, and so with about four days notice, he said to go to this beach south of Lisbon, and a little after 9, this guy will walk out of the water. (Laughter) And he'll be carrying a green nylon line, a lightweight line, called a messenger line, and that was the first link between sea and land, this link that would then be leveraged into this 9,000-mile path of light. 
Then a bulldozer began to pull the cable in from this specialized cable landing ship, and it was floated on these buoys until it was in the right place. 
Then you can see the English engineers looking on. 
And then, once it was in the right place, he got back in the water holding a big knife, and he cut each buoy off, and the buoy popped up into the air, and the cable dropped to the sea floor, and he did that all the way out to the ship, and when he got there, they gave him a glass of juice and a cookie, and then he jumped back in, and he swam back to shore, and then he lit a cigarette. (Laughter) And then once that cable was on shore, they began to prepare to connect it to the other side, 
for the cable that had been brought down from the landing station. 
And first they got it with a hacksaw, and then they start sort of shaving away at this plastic interior with a — sort of working like chefs, and then finally they're working like jewelers to get these hair-thin fibers to line up with the cable that had come down, and with this hole-punch machine they fuse it together. 
And when you see these guys going at this cable with a hacksaw, you stop thinking about the Internet as a cloud. 
It starts to seem like an incredibly physical thing. 
And what surprised me as well was that as much as this is based on the most sophisticated technology, as much as this is an incredibly new thing, the physical process itself has been around for a long time, and the culture is the same. 
You see the local laborers. You see the English engineer giving directions in the background. And more importantly, the places are the same. These cables still connect these classic port cities, places like Lisbon, Mombasa, Mumbai, Singapore, New York. 
And then the process on shore takes around three or four days, and then, when it's done, they put the manhole cover back on top, and they push the sand over that, and we all forget about it. 
And it seems to me that we talk a lot about the cloud, but every time we put something on the cloud, we give up some responsibility for it. 
We are less connected to it. We let other people worry about it. 
And that doesn't seem right. 
There's a great Neal Stephenson line where he says that wired people should know something about wires. 
And we should know, I think, we should know where our Internet comes from, and we should know what it is that physically, physically connects us all. 
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) 

If I could reveal anything that is hidden from us, at least in modern cultures, it would be to reveal something that we've forgotten, that we used to know as well as we knew our own names. 
And that is that we live in a competent universe, that we are part of a brilliant planet, and that we are surrounded by genius. 
Biomimicry is a new discipline that tries to learn from those geniuses, and take advice from them, design advice. 
That's where I live, and it's my university as well. 
I'm surrounded by genius. I cannot help but remember the organisms and the ecosystems that know how to live here gracefully on this planet. 
This is what I would tell you to remember if you ever forget this again. 
Remember this. 
This is what happens every year. 
This is what keeps its promise. 
While we're doing bailouts, this is what happened. 
Spring. 
Imagine designing spring. 
Imagine that orchestration. 
You think TED is hard to organize. (Laughter) Right? 
Imagine, and if you haven't done this in a while, do. 
Imagine the timing, the coordination, all without top-down laws, or policies, or climate change protocols. 
This happens every year. 
There is lots of showing off. 
There is lots of love in the air. 
There's lots of grand openings. 
And the organisms, I promise you, have all of their priorities in order. 
I have this neighbor that keeps me in touch with this, because he's living, usually on his back, looking up at those grasses. 
And one time he came up to me — he was about seven or eight years old — he came up to me. 
And there was a wasp's nest that I had let grow in my yard, right outside my door. 
And most people knock them down when they're small. 
But it was fascinating to me, because I was looking at this sort of fine Italian end papers. 
And he came up to me and he knocked. 
He would come every day with something to show me. 
And like, knock like a woodpecker on my door until I opened it up. 
And he asked me how I had made the house for those wasps, because he had never seen one this big. 
And I told him, "" You know, Cody, the wasps actually made that. "" And we looked at it together. 
And I could see why he thought, you know — it was so beautifully done. 
It was so architectural. It was so precise. 
But it occurred to me, how in his small life had he already believed the myth that if something was that well done, that we must have done it. 
How did he not know — it's what we've all forgotten — that we're not the first ones to build. 
We're not the first ones to process cellulose. 
We're not the first ones to make paper. We're not the first ones to try to optimize packing space, or to waterproof, or to try to heat and cool a structure. 
We're not the first ones to build houses for our young. 
What's happening now, in this field called biomimicry, is that people are beginning to remember that organisms, other organisms, the rest of the natural world, are doing things very similar to what we need to do. 
But in fact they are doing them in a way that have allowed them to live gracefully on this planet for billions of years. 
So these people, biomimics, are nature's apprentices. 
And they're focusing on function. 
What I'd like to do is show you a few of the things that they're learning. 
They have asked themselves, "" What if, every time I started to invent something, I asked, 'How would nature solve this?' "" And here is what they're learning. 
This is an amazing picture from a Czech photographer named Jack Hedley. 
This is a story about an engineer at J.R. West. 
They're the people who make the bullet train. 
It was called the bullet train because it was rounded in front, but every time it went into a tunnel it would build up a pressure wave, and then it would create like a sonic boom when it exited. 
So the engineer's boss said, "Find a way to quiet this train." 
He happened to be a birder. 
He went to the equivalent of an Audubon Society meeting. 
And he studied — there was a film about king fishers. 
And he thought to himself, "" They go from one density of medium, the air, into another density of medium, water, without a splash. Look at this picture. 
Without a splash, so they can see the fish. 
And he thought, "" What if we do this? "" Quieted the train. 
Made it go 10 percent faster on 15 percent less electricity. 
How does nature repel bacteria? 
We're not the first ones to have to protect ourselves from some bacteria. 
Turns out that — this is a Galapagos Shark. 
It has no bacteria on its surface, no fouling on its surface, no barnacles. 
And it's not because it goes fast. 
It actually basks. It's a slow-moving shark. 
So how does it keep its body free of bacteria build-up? 
It doesn't do it with a chemical. 
It does it, it turns out, with the same denticles that you had on Speedo bathing suits, that broke all those records in the Olympics, but it's a particular kind of pattern. 
And that pattern, the architecture of that pattern on its skin denticles keep bacteria from being able to land and adhere. 
There is a company called Sharklet Technologies that's now putting this on the surfaces in hospitals to keep bacteria from landing, which is better than dousing it with anti-bacterials or harsh cleansers that many, many organisms are now becoming drug resistant. 
Hospital-acquired infections are now killing more people every year in the United States than die from AIDS or cancer or car accidents combined — about 100,000. 
This is a little critter that's in the Namibian desert. 
It has no fresh water that it's able to drink, but it drinks water out of fog. 
It's got bumps on the back of its wing covers. 
And those bumps act like a magnet for water. 
They have water-loving tips, and waxy sides. 
And the fog comes in and it builds up on the tips. 
And it goes down the sides and goes into the critter's mouth. 
There is actually a scientist here at Oxford who studied this, Andrew Parker. 
And now kinetic and architectural firms like Grimshaw are starting to look at this as a way of coating buildings so that they gather water from the fog. 
10 times better than our fog-catching nets. 
CO2 as a building block. 
Organisms don't think of CO2 as a poison. 
Plants and organisms that make shells, coral, think of it as a building block. 
There is now a cement manufacturing company starting in the United States called Calera. 
They've borrowed the recipe from the coral reef, and they're using CO2 as a building block in cement, in concrete. 
Instead of — cement usually emits a ton of CO2 for every ton of cement. 
Now it's reversing that equation, and actually sequestering half a ton of CO2 thanks to the recipe from the coral. 
None of these are using the organisms. 
They're really only using the blueprints or the recipes from the organisms. 
How does nature gather the sun's energy? 
This is a new kind of solar cell that's based on how a leaf works. 
It's self-assembling. 
It can be put down on any substrate whatsoever. 
It's extremely inexpensive and rechargeable every five years. 
It's actually a company a company that I'm involved in called OneSun, with Paul Hawken. 
There are many many ways that nature filters water that takes salt out of water. 
We take water and push it against a membrane. 
And then we wonder why the membrane clogs and why it takes so much electricity. 
Nature does something much more elegant. 
And it's in every cell. 
Every red blood cell of your body right now has these hourglass-shaped pores called aquaporins. 
They actually export water molecules through. 
It's kind of a forward osmosis. 
They export water molecules through, and leave solutes on the other side. 
A company called Aquaporin is starting to make desalination membranes mimicking this technology. 
Trees and bones are constantly reforming themselves along lines of stress. 
This algorithm has been put into a software program that's now being used to make bridges lightweight, to make building beams lightweight. 
Actually G.M. Opel used it to create that skeleton you see, in what's called their bionic car. 
It lightweighted that skeleton using a minimum amount of material, as an organism must, for the maximum amount of strength. 
This beetle, unlike this chip bag here, this beetle uses one material, chitin. 
And it finds many many ways to put many functions into it. 
It's waterproof. 
It's strong and resilient. 
It's breathable. It creates color through structure. 
Whereas that chip bag has about seven layers to do all of those things. 
One of our major inventions that we need to be able to do to come even close to what these organisms can do is to find a way to minimize the amount of material, the kind of material we use, and to add design to it. 
We use five polymers in the natural world to do everything that you see. 
In our world we use about 350 polymers to make all this. 
Nature is nano. 
Nanotechnology, nanoparticles, you hear a lot of worry about this. 
Loose nanoparticles. What is really interesting to me is that not many people have been asking, "How can we consult nature about how to make nanotechnology safe?" 
Nature has been doing that for a long time. 
Embedding nanoparticles in a material for instance, always. 
In fact, sulfur-reducing bacteria, as part of their synthesis, they will emit, as a byproduct, nanoparticles into the water. 
But then right after that, they emit a protein that actually gathers and aggregates those nanoparticles so that they fall out of solution. 
Energy use. Organisms sip energy, because they have to work or barter for every single bit that they get. 
And one of the largest fields right now, in the world of energy grids, you hear about the smart grid. 
One of the largest consultants are the social insects. 
Swarm technology. There is a company called Regen. 
They are looking at how ants and bees find their food and their flowers in the most effective way as a whole hive. 
And they're having appliances in your home talk to one another through that algorithm, and determine how to minimize peak power use. 
There's a group of scientists in Cornell that are making what they call a synthetic tree, because they are saying, "" There is no pump at the bottom of a tree. "" It's capillary action and transpiration pulls water up, a drop at a time, pulling it, releasing it from a leaf and pulling it up through the roots. 
And they're creating — you can think of it as a kind of wallpaper. 
They're thinking about putting it on the insides of buildings to move water up without pumps. 
Amazon electric eel — incredibly endangered, some of these species — create 600 volts of electricity with the chemicals that are in your body. 
Even more interesting to me is that 600 volts doesn't fry it. 
You know we use PVC, and we sheath wires with PVC for insulation. 
These organisms, how are they insulating against their own electric charge? 
These are some questions that we've yet to ask. 
Here's a wind turbine manufacturer that went to a whale. 
Humpback whale has scalloped edges on its flippers. 
And those scalloped edges play with flow in such a way that is reduces drag by 32 percent. 
These wind turbines can rotate in incredibly slow windspeeds, as a result. 
MIT just has a new radio chip that uses far less power than our chips. 
And it's based on the cochlear of your ear, able to pick up internet, wireless, television signals and radio signals, in the same chip. 
Finally, on an ecosystem scale. 
At Biomimicry Guild, which is my consulting company, we work with HOK Architects. 
We're looking at building whole cities in their planning department. 
And what we're saying is that, shouldn't our cities do at least as well, in terms of ecosystem services, as the native systems that they replace? 
So we're creating something called Ecological Performance Standards that hold cities to this higher bar. 
The question is — biomimicry is an incredibly powerful way to innovate. 
The question I would ask is, "" What's worth solving? "" If you haven't seen this, it's pretty amazing. 
Dr. Adam Neiman. 
This is a depiction of all of the water on Earth in relation to the volume of the Earth — all the ice, all the fresh water, all the sea water — and all the atmosphere that we can breathe, in relation to the volume of the Earth. 
And inside those balls life, over 3.8 billion years, has made a lush, livable place for us. 
And we are in a long, long line of organisms to come to this planet and ask ourselves, "How can we live here gracefully over the long haul?" 
How can we do what life has learned to do? 
Which is to create conditions conducive to life. 
Now in order to do this, the design challenge of our century, I think, we need a way to remind ourselves of those geniuses, and to somehow meet them again. 
One of the big ideas, one of the big projects I've been honored to work on is a new website. And I would encourage you all to please go to it. 
It's called AskNature.org. 
And what we're trying to do, in a TEDesque way, is to organize all biological information by design and engineering function. 
And we're working with EOL, Encyclopedia of Life, Ed Wilson's TED wish. 
And he's gathering all biological information on one website. 
And the scientists who are contributing to EOL are answering a question, "What can we learn from this organism?" 
And that information will go into AskNature.org. 
And hopefully, any inventor, anywhere in the world, will be able, in the moment of creation, to type in, "" How does nature remove salt from water? "" And up will come mangroves, and sea turtles and your own kidneys. 
And we'll begin to be able to do as Cody does, and actually be in touch with these incredible models, these elders that have been here far, far longer than we have. 
And hopefully, with their help, we'll learn how to live on this Earth, and on this home that is ours, but not ours alone. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

My name is Kate Hartman. 
And I like to make devices that play with the ways that we relate and communicate. 
So I'm specifically interested in how we, as humans, relate to ourselves, each other and the world around us. 
(Laughter) So just to give you a bit of context, as June said, I'm an artist, a technologist and an educator. 
I teach courses in physical computing and wearable electronics. 
And much of what I do is either wearable or somehow related to the human form. 
And so anytime I talk about what I do, I like to just quickly address the reason why bodies matter. 
And it's pretty simple. 
Everybody's got one — all of you. 
I can guarantee, everyone in this room, all of you over there, the people in the cushy seats, the people up top with the laptops — we all have bodies. 
Don't be ashamed. 
It's something that we have in common and they act as our primary interfaces for the world. 
And so when working as an interaction designer, or as an artist who deals with participation — creating things that live on, in or around the human form — it's really a powerful space to work within. 
So within my own work, I use a broad range of materials and tools. 
So I communicate through everything from radio transceivers to funnels and plastic tubing. 
And to tell you a bit about the things that I make, the easiest place to start the story is with a hat. 
And so it all started several years ago, late one night when I was sitting on the subway, riding home, and I was thinking. 
And I tend to be a person who thinks too much and talks too little. 
And so I was thinking about how it might be great if I could just take all these noises — like all these sounds of my thoughts in my head — if I could just physically extricate them and pull them out in such a form that I could share them with somebody else. 
And so I went home, and I made a prototype of this hat. 
And I called it the Muttering Hat, because it emitted these muttering noises that were kind of tethered to you, but you could detach them and share them with somebody else. 
(Laughter) So I make other hats as well. 
This one is called the Talk to Yourself Hat. 
(Laughter) It's fairly self-explanatory. 
It physically carves out conversation space for one. 
And when you speak out loud, the sound of your voice is actually channeled back into your own ears. 
(Laughter) And so when I make these things, it's really not so much about the object itself, but rather the negative space around the object. 
So what happens when a person puts this thing on? 
What kind of an experience do they have? 
And how are they transformed by wearing it? 
So many of these devices really kind of focus on the ways in which we relate to ourselves. 
So this particular device is called the Gut Listener. 
And it is a tool that actually enables one to listen to their own innards. 
(Laughter) And so some of these things are actually more geared toward expression and communication. 
And so the Inflatable Heart is an external organ that can be used by the wearer to express themselves. 
So they can actually inflate it and deflate it according to their emotions. 
So they can express everything from admiration and lust to anxiety and angst. 
(Laughter) And some of these are actually meant to mediate experiences. 
So the Discommunicator is a tool for arguments. 
(Laughter) And so actually it allows for an intense emotional exchange, but is serves to absorb the specificity of the words that are delivered. (Laughter) 
And in the end, some of these things just act as invitations. 
So the Ear Bender literally puts something out there so someone can grab your ear and say what they have to say. 
So even though I'm really interested in the relationship between people, I also consider the ways in which we relate to the world around us. 
And so when I was first living in New York City a few years back, I was thinking a lot about the familiar architectural forms that surrounded me and how I would like to better relate to them. 
And I thought, "" Well, hey! 
Maybe if I want to better relate to walls, maybe I need to be more wall-like myself. "" So I made a wearable wall that I could wear as a backpack. 
And so I would put it on and sort of physically transform myself so that I could either contribute to or critique the spaces that surrounded me. 
(Laughter) And so jumping off of that, thinking beyond the built environment into the natural world, I have this ongoing project called Botanicalls — which actually enables houseplants to tap into human communication protocols. 
So when a plant is thirsty, it can actually make a phone call or post a message to a service like Twitter. 
And so this really shifts the human / plant dynamic, because a single house plant can actually express its needs to thousands of people at the same time. 
And so kind of thinking about scale, my most recent obsession is actually with glaciers — of course. 
And so glaciers are these magnificent beings, and there's lots of reasons to be obsessed with them, but what I'm particularly interested in is in human-glacier relations. 
(Laughter) Because there seems to be an issue. 
The glaciers are actually leaving us. 
They're both shrinking and retreating — and some of them have disappeared altogether. 
And so I actually live in Canada now, so I've been visiting one of my local glaciers. 
And this one's particularly interesting, because, of all the glaciers in North America, it receives the highest volume of human traffic in a year. 
They actually have these buses that drive up and over the lateral moraine and drop people off on the surface of the glacier. 
And this has really gotten me thinking about this experience of the initial encounter. 
When I meet a glacier for the very first time, what do I do? 
There's no kind of social protocol for this. 
I really just don't even know how to say hello. 
Do I carve a message in the snow? 
Or perhaps I can assemble one out of dot and dash ice cubes — ice cube Morse code. 
Or perhaps I need to make myself a speaking tool, like an icy megaphone that I can use to amplify my voice when I direct it at the ice. 
But really the most satisfying experience I've had is the act of listening, which is what we need in any good relationship. 
And I was really struck by how much it affected me. 
This very basic shift in my physical orientation helped me shift my perspective in relation to the glacier. 
And so since we use devices to figure out how to relate to the world these days, I actually made a device called the Glacier Embracing Suit. 
(Laughter) And so this is constructed out of a heat reflected material that serves to mediate the difference in temperature between the human body and the glacial ice. 
And once again, it's this invitation that asks people to lay down on the glacier and give it a hug. 
So, yea, this is actually just the beginning. 
These are initial musings for this project. 
And just as with the wall, how I wanted to be more wall-like, with this project, I'd actually like to take more a of glacial pace. 
And so my intent is to actually just take the next 10 years and go on a series of collaborative projects where I work with people from different disciplines — artists, technologists, scientists — to kind of work on this project of how we can improve human-glacier relations. 
So beyond that, in closing, I'd just like to say that we're in this era of communications and device proliferation, and it's really tremendous and exciting and sexy, but I think what's really important is thinking about how we can simultaneously maintain a sense of wonder and a sense of criticality about the tools that we use and the ways in which we relate to the world. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Let's face it: Driving is dangerous. 
It's one of the things that we don't like to think about, but the fact that religious icons and good luck charms show up on dashboards around the world betrays the fact that we know this to be true. 
Car accidents are the leading cause of death in people ages 16 to 19 in the United States — leading cause of death — and 75 percent of these accidents have nothing to do with drugs or alcohol. 
So what happens? 
No one can say for sure, but I remember my first accident. 
I was a young driver out on the highway, and the car in front of me, I saw the brake lights go on. 
I'm like, "" Okay, all right, this guy is slowing down, I'll slow down too. "" I step on the brake. 
But no, this guy isn't slowing down. 
This guy is stopping, dead stop, dead stop on the highway. 
It was just going 65 — to zero? 
I slammed on the brakes. 
I felt the ABS kick in, and the car is still going, and it's not going to stop, and I know it's not going to stop, and the air bag deploys, the car is totaled, and fortunately, no one was hurt. 
But I had no idea that car was stopping, and I think we can do a lot better than that. 
I think we can transform the driving experience by letting our cars talk to each other. 
I just want you to think a little bit about what the experience of driving is like now. 
Get into your car. Close the door. You're in a glass bubble. 
You can't really directly sense the world around you. 
You're in this extended body. 
You're tasked with navigating it down partially-seen roadways, in and amongst other metal giants, at super-human speeds. 
Okay? And all you have to guide you are your two eyes. 
Okay, so that's all you have, eyes that weren't really designed for this task, but then people ask you to do things like, you want to make a lane change, what's the first thing they ask you do? 
Take your eyes off the road. That's right. 
Stop looking where you're going, turn, check your blind spot, and drive down the road without looking where you're going. 
You and everyone else. This is the safe way to drive. 
Why do we do this? Because we have to, we have to make a choice, do I look here or do I look here? 
What's more important? 
And usually we do a fantastic job picking and choosing what we attend to on the road. 
But occasionally we miss something. 
Occasionally we sense something wrong or too late. 
In countless accidents, the driver says, "I didn't see it coming." 
And I believe that. I believe that. 
We can only watch so much. 
But the technology exists now that can help us improve that. 
In the future, with cars exchanging data with each other, we will be able to see not just three cars ahead and three cars behind, to the right and left, all at the same time, bird's eye view, we will actually be able to see into those cars. 
We will be able to see the velocity of the car in front of us, to see how fast that guy's going or stopping. 
If that guy's going down to zero, I'll know. 
And with computation and algorithms and predictive models, we will be able to see the future. 
You may think that's impossible. 
How can you predict the future? That's really hard. 
Actually, no. With cars, it's not impossible. 
Cars are three-dimensional objects that have a fixed position and velocity. 
They travel down roads. 
Often they travel on pre-published routes. 
It's really not that hard to make reasonable predictions about where a car's going to be in the near future. 
Even if, when you're in your car and some motorcyclist comes — bshoom! — 85 miles an hour down, lane-splitting — I know you've had this experience — that guy didn't "" just come out of nowhere. "" That guy's been on the road probably for the last half hour. 
(Laughter) Right? I mean, somebody's seen him. 
Ten, 20, 30 miles back, someone's seen that guy, and as soon as one car sees that guy and puts him on the map, he's on the map — position, velocity, good estimate he'll continue going 85 miles an hour. 
You'll know, because your car will know, because that other car will have whispered something in his ear, like, "" By the way, five minutes, motorcyclist, watch out. "" You can make reasonable predictions about how cars behave. 
I mean, they're Newtonian objects. 
That's very nice about them. 
So how do we get there? 
We can start with something as simple as sharing our position data between cars, just sharing GPS. 
If I have a GPS and a camera in my car, I have a pretty precise idea of where I am and how fast I'm going. 
With computer vision, I can estimate where the cars around me are, sort of, and where they're going. 
And same with the other cars. 
They can have a precise idea of where they are, and sort of a vague idea of where the other cars are. 
What happens if two cars share that data, if they talk to each other? 
I can tell you exactly what happens. 
Both models improve. 
Everybody wins. 
Professor Bob Wang and his team have done computer simulations of what happens when fuzzy estimates combine, even in light traffic, when cars just share GPS data, and we've moved this research out of the computer simulation and into robot test beds that have the actual sensors that are in cars now on these robots: stereo cameras, GPS, and the two-dimensional laser range finders that are common in backup systems. 
We also attach a discrete short-range communication radio, and the robots talk to each other. 
When these robots come at each other, they track each other's position precisely, and they can avoid each other. 
We're now adding more and more robots into the mix, and we encountered some problems. 
One of the problems, when you get too much chatter, it's hard to process all the packets, so you have to prioritize, and that's where the predictive model helps you. 
If your robot cars are all tracking the predicted trajectories, you don't pay as much attention to those packets. 
You prioritize the one guy who seems to be going a little off course. 
That guy could be a problem. 
And you can predict the new trajectory. 
So you don't only know that he's going off course, you know how. 
And you know which drivers you need to alert to get out of the way. 
And we wanted to do — how can we best alert everyone? 
How can these cars whisper, "" You need to get out of the way? "" Well, it depends on two things: one, the ability of the car, and second the ability of the driver. 
If one guy has a really great car, but they're on their phone or, you know, doing something, they're not probably in the best position to react in an emergency. 
So we started a separate line of research doing driver state modeling. 
And now, using a series of three cameras, we can detect if a driver is looking forward, looking away, looking down, on the phone, or having a cup of coffee. 
We can predict the accident and we can predict who, which cars, are in the best position to move out of the way to calculate the safest route for everyone. 
Fundamentally, these technologies exist today. 
I think the biggest problem that we face is our own willingness to share our data. 
I think it's a very disconcerting notion, this idea that our cars will be watching us, talking about us to other cars, that we'll be going down the road in a sea of gossip. 
But I believe it can be done in a way that protects our privacy, just like right now, when I look at your car from the outside, I don't really know about you. 
If I look at your license plate number, I don't really know who you are. 
I believe our cars can talk about us behind our backs. 
(Laughter) And I think it's going to be a great thing. 
I want you to consider for a moment if you really don't want the distracted teenager behind you to know that you're braking, that you're coming to a dead stop. 
By sharing our data willingly, we can do what's best for everyone. 
So let your car gossip about you. 
It's going to make the roads a lot safer. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

A few years ago, with my colleague, Emmanuelle Charpentier, I invented a new technology for editing genomes. 
It's called CRISPR-Cas9. 
The CRISPR technology allows scientists to make changes to the DNA in cells that could allow us to cure genetic disease. 
You might be interested to know that the CRISPR technology came about through a basic research project that was aimed at discovering how bacteria fight viral infections. 
Bacteria have to deal with viruses in their environment, and we can think about a viral infection like a ticking time bomb — a bacterium has only a few minutes to defuse the bomb before it gets destroyed. 
So, many bacteria have in their cells an adaptive immune system called CRISPR, that allows them to detect viral DNA and destroy it. 
Part of the CRISPR system is a protein called Cas9, that's able to seek out, cut and eventually degrade viral DNA in a specific way. 
And it was through our research to understand the activity of this protein, Cas9, that we realized that we could harness its function as a genetic engineering technology — a way for scientists to delete or insert specific bits of DNA into cells with incredible precision — that would offer opportunities to do things that really haven't been possible in the past. 
The CRISPR technology has already been used to change the DNA in the cells of mice and monkeys, other organisms as well. 
Chinese scientists showed recently that they could even use the CRISPR technology to change genes in human embryos. 
And scientists in Philadelphia showed they could use CRISPR to remove the DNA of an integrated HIV virus from infected human cells. 
The opportunity to do this kind of genome editing also raises various ethical issues that we have to consider, because this technology can be employed not only in adult cells, but also in the embryos of organisms, including our own species. 
And so, together with my colleagues, I've called for a global conversation about the technology that I co-invented, so that we can consider all of the ethical and societal implications of a technology like this. 
What I want to do now is tell you what the CRISPR technology is, what it can do, where we are today and why I think we need to take a prudent path forward in the way that we employ this technology. 
When viruses infect a cell, they inject their DNA. 
And in a bacterium, the CRISPR system allows that DNA to be plucked out of the virus, and inserted in little bits into the chromosome — the DNA of the bacterium. 
And these integrated bits of viral DNA get inserted at a site called CRISPR. 
CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. 
(Laughter) A big mouthful — you can see why we use the acronym CRISPR. 
It's a mechanism that allows cells to record, over time, the viruses they have been exposed to. 
And importantly, those bits of DNA are passed on to the cells' progeny, so cells are protected from viruses not only in one generation, but over many generations of cells. 
This allows the cells to keep a record of infection, and as my colleague, Blake Wiedenheft, likes to say, the CRISPR locus is effectively a genetic vaccination card in cells. 
Once those bits of DNA have been inserted into the bacterial chromosome, the cell then makes a little copy of a molecule called RNA, which is orange in this picture, that is an exact replicate of the viral DNA. 
RNA is a chemical cousin of DNA, and it allows interaction with DNA molecules that have a matching sequence. 
So those little bits of RNA from the CRISPR locus associate — they bind — to protein called Cas9, which is white in the picture, and form a complex that functions like a sentinel in the cell. 
It searches through all of the DNA in the cell, to find sites that match the sequences in the bound RNAs. 
And when those sites are found — as you can see here, the blue molecule is DNA — this complex associates with that DNA and allows the Cas9 cleaver to cut up the viral DNA. 
It makes a very precise break. 
So we can think of the Cas9 RNA sentinel complex like a pair of scissors that can cut DNA — it makes a double-stranded break in the DNA helix. 
And importantly, this complex is programmable, so it can be programmed to recognize particular DNA sequences, and make a break in the DNA at that site. 
As I'm going to tell you now, we recognized that that activity could be harnessed for genome engineering, to allow cells to make a very precise change to the DNA at the site where this break was introduced. 
That's sort of analogous to the way that we use a word-processing program to fix a typo in a document. 
The reason we envisioned using the CRISPR system for genome engineering is because cells have the ability to detect broken DNA and repair it. 
So when a plant or an animal cell detects a double-stranded break in its DNA, it can fix that break, either by pasting together the ends of the broken DNA with a little, tiny change in the sequence of that position, or it can repair the break by integrating a new piece of DNA at the site of the cut. 
So if we have a way to introduce double-stranded breaks into DNA at precise places, we can trigger cells to repair those breaks, by either the disruption or incorporation of new genetic information. 
So if we were able to program the CRISPR technology to make a break in DNA at the position at or near a mutation causing cystic fibrosis, for example, we could trigger cells to repair that mutation. 
Genome engineering is actually not new, it's been in development since the 1970s. 
We've had technologies for sequencing DNA, for copying DNA, and even for manipulating DNA. 
And these technologies were very promising, but the problem was that they were either inefficient, or they were difficult enough to use that most scientists had not adopted them for use in their own laboratories, or certainly for many clinical applications. 
So, the opportunity to take a technology like CRISPR and utilize it has appeal, because of its relative simplicity. 
We can think of older genome engineering technologies as similar to having to rewire your computer each time you want to run a new piece of software, whereas the CRISPR technology is like software for the genome, we can program it easily, using these little bits of RNA. 
So once a double-stranded break is made in DNA, we can induce repair, and thereby potentially achieve astounding things, like being able to correct mutations that cause sickle cell anemia or cause Huntington's Disease. 
I actually think that the first applications of the CRISPR technology are going to happen in the blood, where it's relatively easier to deliver this tool into cells, compared to solid tissues. 
Right now, a lot of the work that's going on applies to animal models of human disease, such as mice. 
The technology is being used to make very precise changes that allow us to study the way that these changes in the cell's DNA affect either a tissue or, in this case, an entire organism. 
Now in this example, the CRISPR technology was used to disrupt a gene by making a tiny change in the DNA in a gene that is responsible for the black coat color of these mice. 
Imagine that these white mice differ from their pigmented litter-mates by just a tiny change at one gene in the entire genome, and they're otherwise completely normal. 
And when we sequence the DNA from these animals, we find that the change in the DNA has occurred at exactly the place where we induced it, using the CRISPR technology. 
Additional experiments are going on in other animals that are useful for creating models for human disease, such as monkeys. 
And here we find that we can use these systems to test the application of this technology in particular tissues, for example, figuring out how to deliver the CRISPR tool into cells. 
We also want to understand better how to control the way that DNA is repaired after it's cut, and also to figure out how to control and limit any kind of off-target, or unintended effects of using the technology. 
I think that we will see clinical application of this technology, certainly in adults, within the next 10 years. 
I think that it's likely that we will see clinical trials and possibly even approved therapies within that time, which is a very exciting thing to think about. 
And because of the excitement around this technology, there's a lot of interest in start-up companies that have been founded to commercialize the CRISPR technology, and lots of venture capitalists that have been investing in these companies. 
But we have to also consider that the CRISPR technology can be used for things like enhancement. 
Imagine that we could try to engineer humans that have enhanced properties, such as stronger bones, or less susceptibility to cardiovascular disease or even to have properties that we would consider maybe to be desirable, like a different eye color or to be taller, things like that. 
"" Designer humans, "" if you will. 
Right now, the genetic information to understand what types of genes would give rise to these traits is mostly not known. 
But it's important to know that the CRISPR technology gives us a tool to make such changes, once that knowledge becomes available. 
This raises a number of ethical questions that we have to carefully consider, and this is why I and my colleagues have called for a global pause in any clinical application of the CRISPR technology in human embryos, to give us time to really consider all of the various implications of doing so. 
And actually, there is an important precedent for such a pause from the 1970s, when scientists got together to call for a moratorium on the use of molecular cloning, until the safety of that technology could be tested carefully and validated. 
So, genome-engineered humans are not with us yet, but this is no longer science fiction. 
Genome-engineered animals and plants are happening right now. 
And this puts in front of all of us a huge responsibility, to consider carefully both the unintended consequences as well as the intended impacts of a scientific breakthrough. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) Bruno Giussani: Jennifer, this is a technology with huge consequences, as you pointed out. 
Your attitude about asking for a pause or a moratorium or a quarantine is incredibly responsible. 
There are, of course, the therapeutic results of this, but then there are the un-therapeutic ones and they seem to be the ones gaining traction, particularly in the media. 
This is one of the latest issues of The Economist — "" Editing humanity. "" It's all about genetic enhancement, it's not about therapeutics. 
What kind of reactions did you get back in March from your colleagues in the science world, when you asked or suggested that we should actually pause this for a moment and think about it? 
Jennifer Doudna: My colleagues were actually, I think, delighted to have the opportunity to discuss this openly. 
It's interesting that as I talk to people, my scientific colleagues as well as others, there's a wide variety of viewpoints about this. 
So clearly it's a topic that needs careful consideration and discussion. 
BG: There's a big meeting happening in December that you and your colleagues are calling, together with the National Academy of Sciences and others, what do you hope will come out of the meeting, practically? 
JD: Well, I hope that we can air the views of many different individuals and stakeholders who want to think about how to use this technology responsibly. 
It may not be possible to come up with a consensus point of view, but I think we should at least understand what all the issues are as we go forward. 
BG: Now, colleagues of yours, like George Church, for example, at Harvard, they say, "" Yeah, ethical issues basically are just a question of safety. 
We test and test and test again, in animals and in labs, and then once we feel it's safe enough, we move on to humans. "" So that's kind of the other school of thought, that we should actually use this opportunity and really go for it. 
Is there a possible split happening in the science community about this? 
I mean, are we going to see some people holding back because they have ethical concerns, and some others just going forward because some countries under-regulate or don't regulate at all? 
JD: Well, I think with any new technology, especially something like this, there are going to be a variety of viewpoints, and I think that's perfectly understandable. 
I think that in the end, this technology will be used for human genome engineering, but I think to do that without careful consideration and discussion of the risks and potential complications would not be responsible. 
BG: There are a lot of technologies and other fields of science that are developing exponentially, pretty much like yours. 
I'm thinking about artificial intelligence, autonomous robots and so on. 
No one seems — aside from autonomous warfare robots — nobody seems to have launched a similar discussion in those fields, in calling for a moratorium. 
Do you think that your discussion may serve as a blueprint for other fields? 
JD: Well, I think it's hard for scientists to get out of the laboratory. 
Speaking for myself, it's a little bit uncomfortable to do that. 
But I do think that being involved in the genesis of this really puts me and my colleagues in a position of responsibility. 
And I would say that I certainly hope that other technologies will be considered in the same way, just as we would want to consider something that could have implications in other fields besides biology. 
BG: Jennifer, thanks for coming to TED. 
JD: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The will to live life differently can start in some of the most unusual places. 
This is where I come from, Todmorden. 
It's a market town in the north of England, 15,000 people, between Leeds and Manchester, fairly normal market town. 
It used to look like this, and now it's more like this, with fruit and veg and herbs sprouting up all over the place. 
We call it propaganda gardening. (Laughter) Corner row railway, station car park, front of a health center, people's front gardens, and even in front of the police station. (Laughter) We've got edible canal towpaths, and we've got sprouting cemeteries. 
The soil is extremely good. (Laughter) We've even invented a new form of tourism. 
It's called vegetable tourism, and believe it or not, people come from all over the world to poke around in our raised beds, even when there's not much growing. (Laughter) But it starts a conversation. (Laughter) And, you know, we're not doing it because we're bored. (Laughter) We're doing it because we want to start a revolution. 
We tried to answer this simple question: Can you find a unifying language that cuts across age and income and culture that will help people themselves find a new way of living, see spaces around them differently, think about the resources they use differently, interact differently? 
Can we find that language? 
And then, can we replicate those actions? 
And the answer would appear to be yes, and the language would appear to be food. 
So, three and a half years ago, a few of us sat around a kitchen table and we just invented the whole thing. (Laughter) (Applause) We came up with a really simple game plan that we put to a public meeting. 
We did not consult. We did not write a report. 
Enough of all that. (Laughter) And we said to that public meeting in Todmorden, look, let's imagine that our town is focused around three plates: a community plate, the way we live our everyday lives; a learning plate, what we teach our kids in school and what new skills we share amongst ourselves; and business, what we do with the pound in our pocket and which businesses we choose to support. 
Now, let's imagine those plates agitated with community actions around food. 
If we start one of those community plates spinning, that's really great, that really starts to empower people, but if we can then spin that community plate with the learning plate, and then spin it with the business plate, we've got a real show there, we've got some action theater. 
We're starting to build resilience ourselves. 
We're starting to reinvent community ourselves, and we've done it all without a flipping strategy document. 
(Applause) And here's the thing as well. 
We've not asked anybody's permission to do this, we're just doing it. (Laughter) And we are certainly not waiting for that check to drop through the letterbox before we start, and most importantly of all, we are not daunted by the sophisticated arguments that say, "These small actions are meaningless in the face of tomorrow's problems," because I have seen the power of small actions, and it is awesome. 
So, back to the public meeting. (Laughter) We put that proposition to the meeting, two seconds, and then the room exploded. 
I have never, ever experienced anything like that in my life. 
And it's been the same in every single room, in every town that we've ever told our story. 
People are ready and respond to the story of food. 
They want positive actions they can engage in, and in their bones, they know it's time to take personal responsibility and invest in more kindness to each other and to the environment. 
And since we had that meeting three and a half years ago, it's been a heck of a roller coaster. 
We started with a seed swap, really simple stuff, and then we took an area of land, a strip on the side of our main road, which was a dog toilet, basically, and we turned it into a really lovely herb garden. 
We took the corner of the car park in the station that you saw, and we made vegetable beds for everybody to share and pick from themselves. 
We went to the doctors. We've just had a 6-million-pound health center built in Todmorden, and for some reason that I cannot comprehend, it has been surrounded by prickly plants. (Laughter) So we went to the doctors, said, "" Would you mind us taking them up? "" They said, "" Absolutely fine, provided you get planning permission and you do it in Latin and you do it in triplicate, "" so we did — (Laughter) — and now there are fruit trees and bushes and herbs and vegetables around that doctor's surgery. 
And there's been lots of other examples, like the corn that was in front of the police station, and the old people's home that we've planted it with food that they can pick and grow. 
But it isn't just about growing, because we all are part of this jigsaw. 
It's about taking those artistic people in your community and doing some fabulous designs in those raised beds to explain to people what's growing there, because there's so many people that don't really recognize a vegetable unless it's in a bit of plastic with a bit of an instruction packet on the top. (Laughter) So we have some people who designed these things, "" If it looks like this, please don't pick it, but if it looks like this, help yourself. "" This is about sharing and investing in kindness. 
And for those people that don't want to do either of those things, maybe they can cook, so we pick them seasonally and then we go on the street, or in the pub, or in the church, or wherever people are living their lives. 
This is about us going to the people and saying, "" We are all part of the local food jigsaw, we are all part of a solution. "" And then, because we know we've got vegetable tourists and we love them to bits and they're absolutely fantastic, we thought, what could we do to give them an even better experience? 
So we invented, without asking, of course, the Incredible Edible Green Route. 
And this is a route of exhibition gardens, and edible towpaths, and bee-friendly sites, and the story of pollinators, and it's a route that we designed that takes people through the whole of our town, past our cafes and our small shops, through our market, not just to and fro from the supermarket, and we're hoping that, in changing people's footfall around our town, we're also changing their behavior. 
And then there's the second plate, the learning plate. 
Well, we're in partnership with a high school. 
We've created a company. We are designing and building an aquaponics unit in some land that was spare at the back of the high school, like you do, and now we're going to be growing fish and vegetables in an orchard with bees, and the kids are helping us build that, and the kids are on the board, and because the community was really keen on working with the high school, the high school is now teaching agriculture, and because it's teaching agriculture, we started to think, how could we then get those kids that never had a qualification before in their lives but are really excited about growing, 
how can we give them some more experience? 
So we got some land that was donated by a local garden center. 
It was really quite muddy, but in a truly incredible way, totally voluntary-led, we have turned that into a market garden training center, and that is polytunnels and raised beds and all the things you need to get the soil under your fingers and think maybe there's a job in this for me in the future. 
And because we were doing that, some local academics said, "" You know, we could help design a commercial horticulture course for you. 
There's not one that we know of. "" So they're doing that, and we're going to launch it later this year, and it's all an experiment, and it's all voluntary. 
And then there's the third plate, because if you walk through an edible landscape, and if you're learning new skills, and if you start to get interested in what's growing seasonally, you might just want to spend more of your own money in support of local producers, not just veg, but meat and cheese and beer and whatever else it might be. 
But then, we're just a community group, you know. 
We're just all volunteers. What could we actually do? 
So we did some really simple things. 
We fundraised, we got some blackboards, we put "" Incredible Edible "" on the top, we gave it every market trader that was selling locally, and they scribbled on what they were selling in any one week. 
Really popular. People congregated around it. 
Sales were up. 
And then, we had a chat with the farmers, and we said, "We're really serious about this," but they didn't actually believe us, so we thought, okay, what should we do? I know. If we can create a campaign around one product and show them there is local loyalty to that product, maybe they'll change their mind and see we're serious. 
So we launched a campaign — because it just amuses me — called Every Egg Matters. (Laughter) And what we did was we put people on our egg map. 
It's a stylized map of Togmorden. 
Anybody that's selling their excess eggs at the garden gate, perfectly legally, to their neighbors, we've stuck on there. We started with four, and we've now got 64 on, and the result of that was that people were then going into shops asking for a local Todmorden egg, and the result of that was, some farmers upped the amount of flocks they got of free range birds, and then they went on to meat birds, and although these are really, really small steps, that increasing local economic confidence is starting to play out in a number of ways, and we now have farmers doing cheese 
and they've upped their flocks and rare breed pigs, they're doing pasties and pies and things that they would have never done before. 
We've got increasing market stalls selling local food, and in a survey that local students did for us, 49 percent of all food traders in that town said that their bottom line had increased because of what we were actually doing. 
And we're just volunteers and it's only an experiment. 
(Laughter) Now, none of this is rocket science. 
It certainly is not clever, and it's not original. 
But it is joined up, and it is inclusive. 
This is not a movement for those people that are going to sort themselves out anyway. 
This is a movement for everyone. 
We have a motto: If you eat, you're in. (Laughter) (Applause) Across age, across income, across culture. 
It's been really quite a roller coaster experience, but going back to that first question that we asked, is it replicable? Yeah. It most certainly is replicable. 
More than 30 towns in England now are spinning the Incredible Edible plate. 
Whichever way they want to do it, of their own volition, they're trying to make their own lives differently, and worldwide, we've got communities across America and Japan — it's incredible, isn't it? I mean, America and Japan and New Zealand. 
People after the earthquake in New Zealand visited us in order to incorporate some of this public spiritedness around local growing into the heart of Christchurch. 
And none of this takes more money and none of this demands a bureaucracy, but it does demand that you think things differently and you are prepared to bend budgets and work programs in order to create that supportive framework that communities can bounce off. 
And there's some great ideas already in our patch. 
Our local authority has decided to make everywhere Incredible Edible, and in support of that have decided to do two things. 
First, they're going to create an asset register of spare land that they've got, put it in a food bank so that communities can use that wherever they live, and they're going to underpin that with a license. 
And then they've said to every single one of their workforce, if you can, help those communities grow, and help them to maintain their spaces. 
Suddenly, we're seeing actions on the ground from local government. We're seeing this mainstreamed. 
We are responding creatively at last to what Rio demanded of us, and there's lots more you could do. 
I mean, just to list a few. One, please stop putting prickly plants around public buildings. It's a waste of space. 
(Laughter) Secondly, please create — please, please create edible landscapes so that our children start to walk past their food day in, day out, on our high streets, in our parks, wherever that might be. 
Inspire local planners to put the food sites at the heart of the town and the city plan, not relegate them to the edges of the settlements that nobody can see. 
Encourage all our schools to take this seriously. 
This isn't a second class exercise. 
If we want to inspire the farmers of tomorrow, then please let us say to every school, create a sense of purpose around the importance to the environment, local food and soils. 
Put that at the heart of your school culture, and you will create a different generation. 
There are so many things you can do, but ultimately this is about something really simple. 
Through an organic process, through an increasing recognition of the power of small actions, we are starting, at last, to believe in ourselves again, and to believe in our capacity, each and every one of us, to build a different and a kinder future, and in my book, that's incredible. 
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) 

In the great 1980s movie "" The Blues Brothers, "" there's a scene where John Belushi goes to visit Dan Aykroyd in his apartment in Chicago for the very first time. 
It's a cramped, tiny space and it's just three feet away from the train tracks. 
As John sits on Dan's bed, a train goes rushing by, rattling everything in the room. 
John asks, "" How often does that train go by? "" Dan replies, "" So often, you won't even notice it. "" And then, something falls off the wall. 
We all know what he's talking about. 
As human beings, we get used to everyday things really fast. 
As a product designer, it's my job to see those everyday things, to feel them, and try to improve upon them. 
For example, see this piece of fruit? 
See this little sticker? 
That sticker wasn't there when I was a kid. 
But somewhere as the years passed, someone had the bright idea to put that sticker on the fruit. 
Why? 
So it could be easier for us to check out at the grocery counter. 
Well that's great, we can get in and out of the store quickly. 
But now, there's a new problem. 
When we get home and we're hungry and we see this ripe, juicy piece of fruit on the counter, we just want to pick it up and eat it. 
Except now, we have to look for this little sticker. 
And dig at it with our nails, damaging the flesh. 
Then rolling up that sticker — you know what I mean. 
And then trying to flick it off your fingers. 
(Applause) It's not fun, not at all. 
But something interesting happened. 
See the first time you did it, you probably felt those feelings. 
You just wanted to eat the piece of fruit. 
You felt upset. 
You just wanted to dive in. 
By the 10th time, you started to become less upset and you just started peeling the label off. 
By the 100th time, at least for me, I became numb to it. 
I simply picked up the piece of fruit, dug at it with my nails, tried to flick it off, and then wondered, "Was there another sticker?" 
So why is that? 
Why do we get used to everyday things? 
Well as human beings, we have limited brain power. 
And so our brains encode the everyday things we do into habits so we can free up space to learn new things. 
It's a process called habituation and it's one of the most basic ways, as humans, we learn. 
Now, habituation isn't always bad. 
Remember learning to drive? 
I sure do. 
Your hands clenched at 10 and 2 on the wheel, looking at every single object out there — the cars, the lights, the pedestrians. 
It's a nerve-wracking experience. 
So much so, that I couldn't even talk to anyone else in the car and I couldn't even listen to music. 
But then something interesting happened. 
As the weeks went by, driving became easier and easier. 
You habituated it. 
It started to become fun and second nature. 
And then, you could talk to your friends again and listen to music. 
So there's a good reason why our brains habituate things. 
If we didn't, we'd notice every little detail, all the time. 
It would be exhausting, and we'd have no time to learn about new things. 
But sometimes, habituation isn't good. 
If it stops us from noticing the problems that are around us, well, that's bad. 
And if it stops us from noticing and fixing those problems, well, then that's really bad. 
Comedians know all about this. 
Jerry Seinfeld's entire career was built on noticing those little details, those idiotic things we do every day that we don't even remember. 
He tells us about the time he visited his friends and he just wanted to take a comfortable shower. 
He'd reach out and grab the handle and turn it slightly one way, and it was 100 degrees too hot. 
And then he'd turn it the other way, and it was 100 degrees too cold. 
He just wanted a comfortable shower. 
Now, we've all been there, we just don't remember it. 
But Jerry did, and that's a comedian's job. 
But designers, innovators and entrepreneurs, it's our job to not just notice those things, but to go one step further and try to fix them. 
See this, this person, this is Mary Anderson. 
In 1902 in New York City, she was visiting. 
It was a cold, wet, snowy day and she was warm inside a streetcar. 
As she was going to her destination, she noticed the driver opening the window to clean off the excess snow so he could drive safely. 
When he opened the window, though, he let all this cold, wet air inside, making all the passengers miserable. 
Now probably, most of those passengers just thought, "" It's a fact of life, he's got to open the window to clean it. 
That's just how it is. "" But Mary didn't. 
Mary thought, "" What if the diver could actually clean the windshield from the inside so that he could stay safe and drive and the passengers could actually stay warm? "" So she picked up her sketchbook right then and there, and began drawing what would become the world's first windshield wiper. 
Now as a product designer, I try to learn from people like Mary to try to see the world the way it really is, not the way we think it is. 
Why? 
Because it's easy to solve a problem that almost everyone sees. 
But it's hard to solve a problem that almost no one sees. 
Now some people think you're born with this ability or you're not, as if Mary Anderson was hardwired at birth to see the world more clearly. 
That wasn't the case for me. 
I had to work at it. 
During my years at Apple, Steve Jobs challenged us to come into work every day, to see our products through the eyes of the customer, the new customer, the one that has fears and possible frustrations and hopeful exhilaration that their new technology product could work straightaway for them. 
He called it staying beginners, and wanted to make sure that we focused on those tiny little details to make them faster, easier and seamless for the new customers. 
So I remember this clearly in the very earliest days of the iPod. 
See, back in the '90s, being a gadget freak like I am, I would rush out to the store for the very, very latest gadget. 
I'd take all the time to get to the store, I'd check out, I'd come back home, I'd start to unbox it. 
And then, there was another little sticker: the one that said, "" Charge before use. "" What! 
I can't believe it! 
I just spent all this time buying this product and now I have to charge before use. 
I have to wait what felt like an eternity to use that coveted new toy. 
It was crazy. 
But you know what? 
Almost every product back then did that. 
When it had batteries in it, you had to charge it before you used it. 
Well, Steve noticed that and he said, "We're not going to let that happen to our product." 
So what did we do? 
Typically, when you have a product that has a hard drive in it, you run it for about 30 minutes in the factory to make sure that hard drive's going to be working years later for the customer after they pull it out of the box. 
What did we do instead? 
We ran that product for over two hours. 
Why? 
Well, first off, we could make a higher quality product, be easy to test, and make sure it was great for the customer. 
But most importantly, the battery came fully charged right out of the box, ready to use. 
So that customer, with all that exhilaration, could just start using the product. 
It was great, and it worked. 
People liked it. 
Today, almost every product that you get that's battery powered comes out of the box fully charged, even if it doesn't have a hard drive. 
But back then, we noticed that detail and we fixed it, and now everyone else does that as well. 
No more, "" Charge before use. "" So why am I telling you this? 
Well, it's seeing the invisible problem, not just the obvious problem, that's important, not just for product design, but for everything we do. 
You see, there are invisible problems all around us, ones we can solve. 
But first we need to see them, to feel them. 
So, I'm hesitant to give you any tips about neuroscience or psychology. 
There's far too many experienced people in the TED community who would know much more about that than I ever will. 
But let me leave you with a few tips that I do, that we all can do, to fight habituation. 
My first tip is to look broader. 
You see, when you're tackling a problem, sometimes, there are a lot of steps that lead up to that problem. 
And sometimes, a lot of steps after it. 
If you can take a step back and look broader, maybe you can change some of those boxes before the problem. 
Maybe you can combine them. 
Maybe you can remove them altogether to make that better. 
Take thermostats, for instance. 
In the 1900s when they first came out, they were really simple to use. 
You could turn them up or turn them down. 
People understood them. 
But in the 1970s, the energy crisis struck, and customers started thinking about how to save energy. 
So what happened? 
Thermostat designers decided to add a new step. 
Instead of just turning up and down, you now had to program it. 
So you could tell it the temperature you wanted at a certain time. 
Now that seemed great. 
Every thermostat had started adding that feature. 
But it turned out that no one saved any energy. 
Now, why is that? 
Well, people couldn't predict the future. 
They just didn't know how their weeks would change season to season, year to year. 
So no one was saving energy, and what happened? 
Thermostat designers went back to the drawing board and they focused on that programming step. 
They made better U.I.s, they made better documentation. 
But still, years later, people were not saving any energy because they just couldn't predict the future. 
So what did we do? 
We put a machine-learning algorithm in instead of the programming that would simply watch when you turned it up and down, when you liked a certain temperature when you got up, or when you went away. 
And you know what? 
It worked. 
People are saving energy without any programming. 
So, it doesn't matter what you're doing. 
If you take a step back and look at all the boxes, maybe there's a way to remove one or combine them so that you can make that process much simpler. 
So that's my first tip: look broader. 
For my second tip, it's to look closer. 
One of my greatest teachers was my grandfather. 
He taught me all about the world. 
He taught me how things were built and how they were repaired, the tools and techniques necessary to make a successful project. 
I remember one story he told me about screws, and about how you need to have the right screw for the right job. 
There are many different screws: wood screws, metal screws, anchors, concrete screws, the list went on and on. 
Our job is to make products that are easy to install for all of our customs themselves without professionals. 
So what did we do? 
I remembered that story that my grandfather told me, and so we thought, "" How many different screws can we put in the box? 
Was it going to be two, three, four, five? 
Because there's so many different wall types. "" So we thought about it, we optimized it, and we came up with three different screws to put in the box. 
We thought that was going to solve the problem. 
But it turned out, it didn't. 
So we shipped the product, and people weren't having a great experience. 
So what did we do? 
We went back to the drawing board just instantly after we figured out we didn't get it right. 
And we designed a special screw, a custom screw, much to the chagrin of our investors. 
They were like, "" Why are you spending so much time on a little screw? 
Get out there and sell more! "" And we said, "" We will sell more if we get this right. "" And it turned out, we did. 
With that custom little screw, there was just one screw in the box, that was easy to mount and put on the wall. 
So if we focus on those tiny details, the ones we may not see and we look at them as we say, "" Are those important or is that the way we've always done it? 
Maybe there's a way to get rid of those. "" So my last piece of advice is to think younger. 
Every day, I'm confronted with interesting questions from my three young kids. 
They come up with questions like, "Why can't cars fly around traffic?" 
Or, "" Why don't my shoelaces have Velcro instead? "" Sometimes, those questions are smart. 
My son came to me the other day and I asked him, "Go run out to the mailbox and check it." 
He looked at me, puzzled, and said, "" Why doesn't the mailbox just check itself and tell us when it has mail? "" (Laughter) I was like, "" That's a pretty good question. "" So, they can ask tons of questions and sometimes we find out we just don't have the right answers. 
We say, "" Son, that's just the way the world works. "" So the more we're exposed to something, the more we get used to it. 
But kids haven't been around long enough to get used to those things. 
And so when they run into problems, they immediately try to solve them, and sometimes they find a better way, and that way really is better. 
So my advice that we take to heart is to have young people on your team, or people with young minds. 
Because if you have those young minds, they cause everyone in the room to think younger. 
Picasso once said, "" Every child is an artist. 
The problem is when he or she grows up, is how to remain an artist. "" We all saw the world more clearly when we saw it for the first time, before a lifetime of habits got in the way. 
Our challenge is to get back there, to feel that frustration, to see those little details, to look broader, look closer, and to think younger so we can stay beginners. 
It's not easy. 
It requires us pushing back against one of the most basic ways we make sense of the world. 
But if we do, we could do some pretty amazing things. 
For me, hopefully, that's better product design. 
For you, that could mean something else, something powerful. 
Our challenge is to wake up each day and say, "How can I experience the world better?" 
And if we do, maybe, just maybe, we can get rid of these dumb little stickers. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

All right. So, like all good stories, this starts a long, long time ago when there was basically nothing. 
So here is a complete picture of the universe about 14-odd billion years ago. 
All energy is concentrated into a single point of energy. 
For some reason it explodes, and you begin to get these things. 
So you're now about 14 billion years into this. 
And these things expand and expand and expand into these giant galaxies, and you get trillions of them. 
And within these galaxies you get these enormous dust clouds. 
And I want you to pay particular attention to the three little prongs in the center of this picture. 
If you take a close-up of those, they look like this. 
And what you're looking at is columns of dust where there's so much dust — by the way, the scale of this is a trillion vertical miles — and what's happening is there's so much dust, it comes together and it fuses and ignites a thermonuclear reaction. 
And so what you're watching is the birth of stars. 
These are stars being born out of here. 
When enough stars come out, they create a galaxy. 
This one happens to be a particularly important galaxy, because you are here. 
(Laughter) And as you take a close-up of this galaxy, you find a relatively normal, not particularly interesting star. 
By the way, you're now about two-thirds of the way into this story. 
So this star doesn't even appear until about two-thirds of the way into this story. 
And then what happens is there's enough dust left over that it doesn't ignite into a star, it becomes a planet. 
And this is about a little over four billion years ago. 
And soon thereafter there's enough material left over that you get a primordial soup, and that creates life. 
And life starts to expand and expand and expand, until it goes kaput. 
(Laughter) Now the really strange thing is life goes kaput, not once, not twice, but five times. 
So almost all life on Earth is wiped out about five times. 
And as you're thinking about that, what happens is you get more and more complexity, more and more stuff to build new things with. 
And we don't appear until about 99.96 percent of the time into this story, just to put ourselves and our ancestors in perspective. 
So within that context, there's two theories of the case as to why we're all here. 
The first theory of the case is that's all she wrote. 
Under that theory, we are the be-all and end-all of all creation. 
And the reason for trillions of galaxies, sextillions of planets, is to create something that looks like that and something that looks like that. 
And that's the purpose of the universe; and then it flat-lines, it doesn't get any better. 
(Laughter) The only question you might want to ask yourself is, could that be just mildly arrogant? 
And if it is — and particularly given the fact that we came very close to extinction. 
There were only about 2,000 of our species left. 
A few more weeks without rain, we would have never seen any of these. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So maybe you have to think about a second theory if the first one isn't good enough. 
Second theory is: Could we upgrade? 
(Laughter) Well, why would one ask a question like that? 
Because there have been at least 29 upgrades so far of humanoids. 
So it turns out that we have upgraded. 
We've upgraded time and again and again. 
And it turns out that we keep discovering upgrades. 
We found this one last year. 
We found another one last month. 
And as you're thinking about this, you might also ask the question: So why a single human species? 
Wouldn't it be really odd if you went to Africa and Asia and Antarctica and found exactly the same bird — particularly given that we co-existed at the same time with at least eight other versions of humanoid at the same time on this planet? 
So the normal state of affairs is not to have just a Homo sapiens; the normal state of affairs is to have various versions of humans walking around. 
And if that is the normal state of affairs, then you might ask yourself, all right, so if we want to create something else, how big does a mutation have to be? 
Well Svante Paabo has the answer. 
The difference between humans and Neanderthal is 0.004 percent of gene code. 
That's how big the difference is one species to another. 
This explains most contemporary political debates. 
(Laughter) But as you're thinking about this, one of the interesting things is how small these mutations are and where they take place. 
Difference human / Neanderthal is sperm and testis, smell and skin. 
And those are the specific genes that differ from one to the other. 
So very small changes can have a big impact. 
And as you're thinking about this, we're continuing to mutate. 
So about 10,000 years ago by the Black Sea, we had one mutation in one gene which led to blue eyes. 
And this is continuing and continuing and continuing. 
And as it continues, one of the things that's going to happen this year is we're going to discover the first 10,000 human genomes, because it's gotten cheap enough to do the gene sequencing. 
And when we find these, we may find differences. 
And by the way, this is not a debate that we're ready for, because we have really misused the science in this. 
In the 1920s, we thought there were major differences between people. 
That was partly based on Francis Galton's work. 
He was Darwin's cousin. 
But the U.S., the Carnegie Institute, Stanford, American Neurological Association took this really far. 
That got exported and was really misused. 
In fact, it led to some absolutely horrendous treatment of human beings. 
So since the 1940s, we've been saying there are no differences, we're all identical. 
We're going to know at year end if that is true. 
And as we think about that, we're actually beginning to find things like, do you have an ACE gene? 
Why would that matter? 
Because nobody's ever climbed an 8,000-meter peak without oxygen that doesn't have an ACE gene. 
And if you want to get more specific, how about a 577R genotype? 
Well it turns out that every male Olympic power athelete ever tested carries at least one of these variants. 
If that is true, it leads to some very complicated questions for the London Olympics. 
Three options: Do you want the Olympics to be a showcase for really hardworking mutants? 
(Laughter) Option number two: Why don't we play it like golf or sailing? 
Because you have one and you don't have one, I'll give you a tenth of a second head start. 
Version number three: Because this is a naturally occurring gene and you've got it and you didn't pick the right parents, you get the right to upgrade. 
Three different options. 
If these differences are the difference between an Olympic medal and a non-Olympic medal. 
And it turns out that as we discover these things, we human beings really like to change how we look, how we act, what our bodies do. 
And we had about 10.2 million plastic surgeries in the United States, except that with the technologies that are coming online today, today's corrections, deletions, augmentations and enhancements are going to seem like child's play. 
You already saw the work by Tony Atala on TED, but this ability to start filling things like inkjet cartridges with cells are allowing us to print skin, organs and a whole series of other body parts. 
And as these technologies go forward, you keep seeing this, you keep seeing this, you keep seeing things — 2000, human genome sequence — and it seems like nothing's happening, until it does. 
And we may just be in some of these weeks. 
And as you're thinking about these two guys sequencing a human genome in 2000 and the Public Project sequencing the human genome in 2000, then you don't hear a lot, until you hear about an experiment last year in China, where they take skin cells from this mouse, put four chemicals on it, turn those skin cells into stem cells, let the stem cells grow and create a full copy of that mouse. 
That's a big deal. 
Because in essence what it means is you can take a cell, which is a pluripotent stem cell, which is like a skier at the top of a mountain, and those two skiers become two pluripotent stem cells, four, eight, 16, and then it gets so crowded after 16 divisions that those cells have to differentiate. 
So they go down one side of the mountain, they go down another. 
And as they pick that, these become bone, and then they pick another road and these become platelets, and these become macrophages, and these become T cells. 
But it's really hard, once you ski down, to get back up. 
Unless, of course, if you have a ski lift. 
And what those four chemicals do is they take any cell and take it way back up the mountain so it can become any body part. 
And as you think of that, what it means is potentially you can rebuild a full copy of any organism out of any one of its cells. 
That turns out to be a big deal because now you can take, not just mouse cells, but you can human skin cells and turn them into human stem cells. 
And then what they did in October is they took skin cells, turned them into stem cells and began to turn them into liver cells. 
So in theory, you could grow any organ from any one of your cells. 
Here's a second experiment: If you could photocopy your body, maybe you also want to take your mind. 
And one of the things you saw at TED about a year and a half ago was this guy. 
And he gave a wonderful technical talk. 
He's a professor at MIT. 
But in essence what he said is you can take retroviruses, which get inside brain cells of mice. 
You can tag them with proteins that light up when you light them. 
And you can map the exact pathways when a mouse sees, feels, touches, remembers, loves. 
And then you can take a fiber optic cable and light up some of the same things. 
And by the way, as you do this, you can image it in two colors, which means you can download this information as binary code directly into a computer. 
So what's the bottom line on that? 
Well it's not completely inconceivable that someday you'll be able to download your own memories, maybe into a new body. 
And maybe you can upload other people's memories as well. 
And this might have just one or two small ethical, political, moral implications. 
(Laughter) Just a thought. 
Here's the kind of questions that are becoming interesting questions for philosophers, for governing people, for economists, for scientists. 
Because these technologies are moving really quickly. 
And as you think about it, let me close with an example of the brain. 
The first place where you would expect to see enormous evolutionary pressure today, both because of the inputs, which are becoming massive, and because of the plasticity of the organ, is the brain. 
Do we have any evidence that that is happening? 
Well let's take a look at something like autism incidence per thousand. 
Here's what it looks like in 2000. 
Here's what it looks like in 2002, 2006, 2008. 
Here's the increase in less than a decade. 
And we still don't know why this is happening. 
What we do know is, potentially, the brain is reacting in a hyperactive, hyper-plastic way, and creating individuals that are like this. 
And this is only one of the conditions that's out there. 
You've also got people with who are extraordinarily smart, people who can remember everything they've seen in their lives, people who've got synesthesia, people who've got schizophrenia. 
You've got all kinds of stuff going on out there, and we still don't understand how and why this is happening. 
But one question you might want to ask is, are we seeing a rapid evolution of the brain and of how we process data? 
Because when you think of how much data's coming into our brains, we're trying to take in as much data in a day as people used to take in in a lifetime. 
And as you're thinking about this, there's four theories as to why this might be going on, plus a whole series of others. 
I don't have a good answer. 
There really needs to be more research on this. 
One option is the fast food fetish. 
There's beginning to be some evidence that obesity and diet have something to do with gene modifications, which may or may not have an impact on how the brain of an infant works. 
A second option is the sexy geek option. 
These conditions are highly rare. 
(Laughter) (Applause) But what's beginning to happen is because these geeks are all getting together, because they are highly qualified for computer programming and it is highly remunerated, as well as other very detail-oriented tasks, that they are concentrating geographically and finding like-minded mates. 
So this is the assortative mating hypothesis of these genes reinforcing one another in these structures. 
The third, is this too much information? 
We're trying to process so much stuff that some people get synesthetic and just have huge pipes that remember everything. 
Other people get hyper-sensitive to the amount of information. 
Other people react with various psychological conditions or reactions to this information. 
Or maybe it's chemicals. 
But when you see an increase of that order of magnitude in a condition, either you're not measuring it right or there's something going on very quickly, and it may be evolution in real time. 
Here's the bottom line. 
What I think we are doing is we're transitioning as a species. 
And I didn't think this when Steve Gullans and I started writing together. 
I think we're transitioning into Homo evolutis that, for better or worse, is not just a hominid that's conscious of his or her environment, it's a hominid that's beginning to directly and deliberately control the evolution of its own species, of bacteria, of plants, of animals. 
And I think that's such an order of magnitude change that your grandkids or your great-grandkids may be a species very different from you. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I write about food. I write about cooking. 
I take it quite seriously, but I'm here to talk about something that's become very important to me in the last year or two. 
It is about food, but it's not about cooking, per se. 
I'm going to start with this picture of a beautiful cow. 
I'm not a vegetarian — this is the old Nixon line, right? 
But I still think that this — (Laughter) — may be this year's version of this. 
Now, that is only a little bit hyperbolic. 
And why do I say it? 
Because only once before has the fate of individual people and the fate of all of humanity been so intertwined. 
There was the bomb, and there's now. 
And where we go from here is going to determine not only the quality and the length of our individual lives, but whether, if we could see the Earth a century from now, we'd recognize it. 
It's a holocaust of a different kind, and hiding under our desks isn't going to help. 
Start with the notion that global warming is not only real, but dangerous. 
Since every scientist in the world now believes this, and even President Bush has seen the light, or pretends to, we can take this is a given. 
Then hear this, please. 
After energy production, livestock is the second-highest contributor to atmosphere-altering gases. 
Nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gas is generated by livestock production — more than transportation. 
Now, you can make all the jokes you want about cow farts, but methane is 20 times more poisonous than CO2, and it's not just methane. 
Livestock is also one of the biggest culprits in land degradation, air and water pollution, water shortages and loss of biodiversity. 
There's more. 
Like half the antibiotics in this country are not administered to people, but to animals. 
But lists like this become kind of numbing, so let me just say this: if you're a progressive, if you're driving a Prius, or you're shopping green, or you're looking for organic, you should probably be a semi-vegetarian. 
Now, I'm no more anti-cattle than I am anti-atom, but it's all in the way we use these things. 
There's another piece of the puzzle, which Ann Cooper talked about beautifully yesterday, and one you already know. 
There's no question, none, that so-called lifestyle diseases — diabetes, heart disease, stroke, some cancers — are diseases that are far more prevalent here than anywhere in the rest of the world. 
And that's the direct result of eating a Western diet. 
Our demand for meat, dairy and refined carbohydrates — the world consumes one billion cans or bottles of Coke a day — our demand for these things, not our need, our want, drives us to consume way more calories than are good for us. 
And those calories are in foods that cause, not prevent, disease. 
Now global warming was unforeseen. 
We didn't know that pollution did more than cause bad visibility. 
Maybe a few lung diseases here and there, but, you know, that's not such a big deal. 
The current health crisis, however, is a little more the work of the evil empire. 
We were told, we were assured, that the more meat and dairy and poultry we ate, the healthier we'd be. 
No. Overconsumption of animals, and of course, junk food, is the problem, along with our paltry consumption of plants. 
Now, there's no time to get into the benefits of eating plants here, but the evidence is that plants — and I want to make this clear — it's not the ingredients in plants, it's the plants. 
It's not the beta-carotene, it's the carrot. 
The evidence is very clear that plants promote health. 
This evidence is overwhelming at this point. 
You eat more plants, you eat less other stuff, you live longer. 
Not bad. 
But back to animals and junk food. 
What do they have in common? 
One: we don't need either of them for health. 
We don't need animal products, and we certainly don't need white bread or Coke. 
Two: both have been marketed heavily, creating unnatural demand. 
We're not born craving Whoppers or Skittles. 
Three: their production has been supported by government agencies at the expense of a more health- and Earth-friendly diet. 
Now, let's imagine a parallel. 
Let's pretend that our government supported an oil-based economy, while discouraging more sustainable forms of energy, knowing all the while that the result would be pollution, war and rising costs. 
Incredible, isn't it? 
Yet they do that. 
And they do this here. It's the same deal. 
The sad thing is, when it comes to diet, is that even when well-intentioned Feds try to do right by us, they fail. 
Either they're outvoted by puppets of agribusiness, or they are puppets of agribusiness. 
So, when the USDA finally acknowledged that it was plants, rather than animals, that made people healthy, they encouraged us, via their overly simplistic food pyramid, to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, along with more carbs. 
What they didn't tell us is that some carbs are better than others, and that plants and whole grains should be supplanting eating junk food. 
But industry lobbyists would never let that happen. 
And guess what? 
Half the people who developed the food pyramid have ties to agribusiness. 
So, instead of substituting plants for animals, our swollen appetites simply became larger, and the most dangerous aspects of them remained unchanged. 
So-called low-fat diets, so-called low-carb diets — these are not solutions. 
But with lots of intelligent people focusing on whether food is organic or local, or whether we're being nice to animals, the most important issues just aren't being addressed. 
Now, don't get me wrong. 
I like animals, and I don't think it's just fine to industrialize their production and to churn them out like they were wrenches. 
But there's no way to treat animals well, when you're killing 10 billion of them a year. 
That's our number. 10 billion. 
If you strung all of them — chickens, cows, pigs and lambs — to the moon, they'd go there and back five times, there and back. 
Now, my math's a little shaky, but this is pretty good, and it depends whether a pig is four feet long or five feet long, but you get the idea. 
That's just the United States. 
And with our hyper-consumption of those animals producing greenhouse gases and heart disease, kindness might just be a bit of a red herring. 
Let's get the numbers of the animals we're killing for eating down, and then we'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left. 
Another red herring might be exemplified by the word "" locavore, "" which was just named word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. 
Seriously. 
And locavore, for those of you who don't know, is someone who eats only locally grown food — which is fine if you live in California, but for the rest of us it's a bit of a sad joke. 
Between the official story — the food pyramid — and the hip locavore vision, you have two versions of how to improve our eating. 
(Laughter). 
They both get it wrong, though. 
The first at least is populist, and the second is elitist. 
How we got to this place is the history of food in the United States. 
And I'm going to go through that, at least the last hundred years or so, very quickly right now. 
A hundred years ago, guess what? 
Everyone was a locavore: even New York had pig farms nearby, and shipping food all over the place was a ridiculous notion. 
Every family had a cook, usually a mom. 
And those moms bought and prepared food. 
It was like your romantic vision of Europe. 
Margarine didn't exist. 
In fact, when margarine was invented, several states passed laws declaring that it had to be dyed pink, so we'd all know that it was a fake. 
There was no snack food, and until the '20s, until Clarence Birdseye came along, there was no frozen food. 
There were no restaurant chains. 
There were neighborhood restaurants run by local people, but none of them would think to open another one. 
Eating ethnic was unheard of unless you were ethnic. 
And fancy food was entirely French. 
As an aside, those of you who remember Dan Aykroyd in the 1970s doing Julia Child imitations can see where he got the idea of stabbing himself from this fabulous slide. 
(Laughter) Back in those days, before even Julia, back in those days, there was no philosophy of food. 
You just ate. 
You didn't claim to be anything. 
There was no marketing. There were no national brands. 
Vitamins had not been invented. 
There were no health claims, at least not federally sanctioned ones. 
Fats, carbs, proteins — they weren't bad or good, they were food. 
You ate food. 
Hardly anything contained more than one ingredient, because it was an ingredient. 
The cornflake hadn't been invented. 
(Laughter) The Pop-Tart, the Pringle, Cheez Whiz, none of that stuff. 
Goldfish swam. 
(Laughter) It's hard to imagine. People grew food, and they ate food. 
And again, everyone ate local. 
In New York, an orange was a common Christmas present, because it came all the way from Florida. 
From the '30s on, road systems expanded, trucks took the place of railroads, fresh food began to travel more. 
Oranges became common in New York. 
The South and West became agricultural hubs, and in other parts of the country, suburbs took over farmland. 
The effects of this are well known. They are everywhere. 
And the death of family farms is part of this puzzle, as is almost everything from the demise of the real community to the challenge of finding a good tomato, even in summer. 
Eventually, California produced too much food to ship fresh, so it became critical to market canned and frozen foods. 
Thus arrived convenience. 
It was sold to proto-feminist housewives as a way to cut down on housework. 
Now, I know everybody over the age of, like 45 — their mouths are watering at this point. 
(Laughter) (Applause) If we had a slide of Salisbury steak, even more so, right? (Laughter) 
But this may have cut down on housework, but it cut down on the variety of food we ate as well. 
Many of us grew up never eating a fresh vegetable except the occasional raw carrot or maybe an odd lettuce salad. 
I, for one — and I'm not kidding — didn't eat real spinach or broccoli till I was 19. 
Who needed it though? Meat was everywhere. 
What could be easier, more filling or healthier for your family than broiling a steak? 
But by then cattle were already raised unnaturally. 
Rather than spending their lives eating grass, for which their stomachs were designed, they were forced to eat soy and corn. 
They have trouble digesting those grains, of course, but that wasn't a problem for producers. 
New drugs kept them healthy. 
Well, they kept them alive. 
Healthy was another story. 
Thanks to farm subsidies, the fine collaboration between agribusiness and Congress, soy, corn and cattle became king. 
And chicken soon joined them on the throne. 
It was during this period that the cycle of dietary and planetary destruction began, the thing we're only realizing just now. 
Listen to this, between 1950 and 2000, the world's population doubled. 
Meat consumption increased five-fold. 
Now, someone had to eat all that stuff, so we got fast food. 
And this took care of the situation resoundingly. 
Home cooking remained the norm, but its quality was down the tubes. 
There were fewer meals with home-cooked breads, desserts and soups, because all of them could be bought at any store. 
Not that they were any good, but they were there. 
Most moms cooked like mine: a piece of broiled meat, a quickly made salad with bottled dressing, canned soup, canned fruit salad. 
Maybe baked or mashed potatoes, or perhaps the stupidest food ever, Minute Rice. 
For dessert, store-bought ice cream or cookies. 
My mom is not here, so I can say this now. 
This kind of cooking drove me to learn how to cook for myself. 
(Laughter) It wasn't all bad. 
By the '70s, forward-thinking people began to recognize the value of local ingredients. 
We tended gardens, we became interested in organic food, we knew or we were vegetarians. 
We weren't all hippies, either. 
Some of us were eating in good restaurants and learning how to cook well. 
Meanwhile, food production had become industrial. Industrial. 
Perhaps because it was being produced rationally, as if it were plastic, food gained magical or poisonous powers, or both. 
Many people became fat-phobic. 
Others worshiped broccoli, as if it were God-like. 
But mostly they didn't eat broccoli. 
Instead they were sold on yogurt, yogurt being almost as good as broccoli. 
Except, in reality, the way the industry sold yogurt was to convert it to something much more akin to ice cream. 
Similarly, let's look at a granola bar. 
You think that that might be healthy food, but in fact, if you look at the ingredient list, it's closer in form to a Snickers than it is to oatmeal. 
Sadly, it was at this time that the family dinner was put in a coma, if not actually killed — the beginning of the heyday of value-added food, which contained as many soy and corn products as could be crammed into it. 
Think of the frozen chicken nugget. 
The chicken is fed corn, and then its meat is ground up, and mixed with more corn products to add bulk and binder, and then it's fried in corn oil. 
All you do is nuke it. What could be better? 
And zapped horribly, pathetically. 
By the '70s, home cooking was in such a sad state that the high fat and spice contents of foods like McNuggets and Hot Pockets — and we all have our favorites, actually — made this stuff more appealing than the bland things that people were serving at home. 
At the same time, masses of women were entering the workforce, and cooking simply wasn't important enough for men to share the burden. 
So now, you've got your pizza nights, you've got your microwave nights, you've got your grazing nights, you've got your fend-for-yourself nights and so on. 
Leading the way — what's leading the way? 
Meat, junk food, cheese: the very stuff that will kill you. 
So, now we clamor for organic food. 
That's good. 
And as evidence that things can actually change, you can now find organic food in supermarkets, and even in fast-food outlets. 
But organic food isn't the answer either, at least not the way it's currently defined. 
Let me pose you a question. 
Can farm-raised salmon be organic, when its feed has nothing to do with its natural diet, even if the feed itself is supposedly organic, and the fish themselves are packed tightly in pens, swimming in their own filth? 
And if that salmon's from Chile, and it's killed down there and then flown 5,000 miles, whatever, dumping how much carbon into the atmosphere? 
I don't know. 
Packed in Styrofoam, of course, before landing somewhere in the United States, and then being trucked a few hundred more miles. 
This may be organic in letter, but it's surely not organic in spirit. 
Now here is where we all meet. 
The locavores, the organivores, the vegetarians, the vegans, the gourmets and those of us who are just plain interested in good food. 
Even though we've come to this from different points, we all have to act on our knowledge to change the way that everyone thinks about food. 
We need to start acting. 
And this is not only an issue of social justice, as Ann Cooper said — and, of course, she's completely right — but it's also one of global survival. 
Which bring me full circle and points directly to the core issue, the overproduction and overconsumption of meat and junk food. 
As I said, 18 percent of greenhouse gases are attributed to livestock production. 
How much livestock do you need to produce this? 
70 percent of the agricultural land on Earth, 30 percent of the Earth's land surface is directly or indirectly devoted to raising the animals we'll eat. 
And this amount is predicted to double in the next 40 years or so. 
And if the numbers coming in from China are anything like what they look like now, it's not going to be 40 years. 
There is no good reason for eating as much meat as we do. 
And I say this as a man who has eaten a fair share of corned beef in his life. 
The most common argument is that we need nutrients — even though we eat, on average, twice as much protein as even the industry-obsessed USDA recommends. 
But listen: experts who are serious about disease reduction recommend that adults eat just over half a pound of meat per week. 
What do you think we eat per day? Half a pound. 
But don't we need meat to be big and strong? 
Isn't meat eating essential to health? 
Won't a diet heavy in fruit and vegetables turn us into godless, sissy, liberals? 
(Laughter) Some of us might think that would be a good thing. 
But, no, even if we were all steroid-filled football players, the answer is no. 
In fact, there's no diet on Earth that meets basic nutritional needs that won't promote growth, and many will make you much healthier than ours does. 
We don't eat animal products for sufficient nutrition, we eat them to have an odd form of malnutrition, and it's killing us. 
To suggest that in the interests of personal and human health Americans eat 50 percent less meat — it's not enough of a cut, but it's a start. 
It would seem absurd, but that's exactly what should happen, and what progressive people, forward-thinking people should be doing and advocating, along with the corresponding increase in the consumption of plants. 
I've been writing about food more or less omnivorously — one might say indiscriminately — for about 30 years. 
During that time, I've eaten and recommended eating just about everything. 
I'll never stop eating animals, I'm sure, but I do think that for the benefit of everyone, the time has come to stop raising them industrially and stop eating them thoughtlessly. 
Ann Cooper's right. 
The USDA is not our ally here. 
We have to take matters into our own hands, not only by advocating for a better diet for everyone — and that's the hard part — but by improving our own. 
And that happens to be quite easy. 
Less meat, less junk, more plants. 
It's a simple formula: eat food. 
Eat real food. 
We can continue to enjoy our food, and we continue to eat well, and we can eat even better. 
We can continue the search for the ingredients we love, and we can continue to spin yarns about our favorite meals. 
We'll reduce not only calories, but our carbon footprint. 
We can make food more important, not less, and save ourselves by doing so. 
We have to choose that path. 
Thank you. 

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

(Breathes in) (Breathes out) So, I didn't always make my living from music. 
For about the five years after graduating from an upstanding liberal arts university, this was my day job. 
(Laughter) I was a self-employed living statue called the Eight-Foot Bride, and I love telling people I did this for a job, because everybody always wants to know, who are these freaks in real life. (Laughter) 
Hello. 
I painted myself white one day, stood on a box, put a hat or a can at my feet, and when someone came by and dropped in money, I handed them a flower — and some intense eye contact. 
(Laughter) So I had the most profound encounters with people, especially lonely people who looked like they hadn't talked to anyone in weeks, and we would get this beautiful moment of prolonged eye contact being allowed in a city street, and we would sort of fall in love a little bit. 
But it hurt, because it made me fear that I was somehow doing something un-joblike and unfair, shameful. 
I had no idea how perfect a real education I was getting for the music business on this box. 
And for the economists out there, you may be interested to know I actually made a pretty predictable income, which was shocking to me, given I had no regular customers, but pretty much 60 bucks on a Tuesday, 90 bucks on a Friday. 
It was consistent. 
I wrote the songs, and eventually we started making enough money that I could quit being a statue, and as we started touring, I really didn't want to lose this sense of direct connection with people, because I loved it. 
So after all of our shows, we would sign autographs and hug fans and hang out and talk to people, and we made an art out of asking people to help us and join us, and I would track down local musicians and artists and they would set up outside of our shows, and they would pass the hat, and then they would come in and join us onstage, so we had this rotating smorgasbord of weird, random circus guests. 
And then Twitter came along, and made things even more magic, because I could ask instantly for anything anywhere. 
So I would need a piano to practice on, and an hour later I would be at a fan's house. 
This is a library in Auckland. 
I once tweeted, "" Where in Melbourne can I buy a neti pot? "" And a nurse from a hospital drove one right at that moment to the cafe I was in, and I bought her a smoothie and we sat there talking about nursing and death. 
And I love this kind of random closeness, which is lucky, because I do a lot of couchsurfing. 
In mansions where everyone in my crew gets their own room but there's no wireless, and in punk squats, everyone on the floor in one room with no toilets but with wireless, clearly making it the better option. 
(Laughter) My crew once pulled our van up to a really poor Miami neighborhood and we found out that our couchsurfing host for the night was an 18-year-old girl, still living at home, and her family were all undocumented immigrants from Honduras. 
And that night, her whole family took the couches and she slept together with her mom so that we could take their beds. 
A couple of months later, I was in Manhattan, and I tweeted for a crash pad, and at midnight, I'm on the Lower East Side, and it occurs to me I've never actually done this alone. 
(Laughter) Is this how stupid people die? 
He's a financial blogger for Reuters, and they're pouring me a glass of red wine and offering me a bath, and I have had thousands of nights like that and like that. 
I maintain couchsurfing and crowdsurfing are basically the same thing. 
I once asked an opening band of mine if they wanted to go out into the crowd and pass the hat to get some extra money, something that I did a lot. 
We sign with a major label. 
And it comes out and it sells about 25,000 copies in the first few weeks, and the label considers this a failure. 
Right at this same time, I'm signing and hugging after a gig, and a guy comes up to me and hands me a $10 bill, and he says, "I'm sorry, I burned your CD from a friend." 
I just want you to have this money. "" And this starts happening all the time. 
I become the hat after my own gigs, but I have to physically stand there and take the help from people, and unlike the guy in the opening band, I've actually had a lot of practice standing there. 
And this is the moment I decide I'm just going to give away my music for free online whenever possible, so it's like Metallica over here, Napster, bad; Amanda Palmer over here, and I'm going to encourage torrenting, downloading, sharing, but I'm going to ask for help, because I saw it work on the street. 
So I fought my way off my label, and for my next project with my new band, the Grand Theft Orchestra, I turned to crowdfunding. 
And I fell into those thousands of connections that I'd made, and I asked my crowd to catch me. 
(Applause) And you can see how many people it is. 
And the media asked, "" Amanda, the music business is tanking and you encourage piracy. 
And through the very act of asking people, I'd connected with them, and when you connect with them, people want to help you. 
And a lot of artists have a problem with this. 
And I got a lot of criticism online, after my Kickstarter went big, for continuing my crazy crowdsourcing practices, specifically for asking musicians who are fans if they wanted to join us on stage for a few songs in exchange for love and tickets and beer, and this was a doctored image that went up of me on a website. 
And people saying, "You're not allowed anymore to ask for that kind of help," really reminded me of the people in their cars yelling, "" Get a job. "" Because they weren't with us on the sidewalk, and they couldn't see the exchange that was happening between me and my crowd, an exchange that was very fair to us but alien to them. 
Now let me tell you, if you want to experience the visceral feeling of trusting strangers — (Laughter) I recommend this, especially if those strangers are drunk German people. (Laughter) 
This was a ninja master-level fan connection, because what I was really saying here was, I trust you this much. 
For most of human history, musicians, artists, they've been part of the community. 
Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance, but the Internet and the content that we're freely able to share on it are taking us back. 
It's about a few people loving you up close and about those people being enough. 
So a lot of people are confused by the idea of no hard sticker price. 
But the perfect tools aren't going to help us if we can't face each other and give and receive fearlessly, but, more important — to ask without shame. 
So blogging and tweeting not just about my tour dates and my new video but about our work and our art and our fears and our hangovers, our mistakes, and we see each other. 
And I think when we really see each other, we want to help each other. 
I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, "" How do we make people pay for music? "" What if we started asking, "How do we let people pay for music?" 

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

I heard this amazing story about Miuccia Prada. 
She's an Italian fashion designer. 
She goes to this vintage store in Paris with a friend of hers. 
She's rooting around, she finds this one jacket by Balenciaga — she loves it. 
She's turning it inside out. 
She's looking at the seams. She's looking at the construction. 
Her friend says, "" Buy it already. "" She said, "" I'll buy it, but I'm also going to replicate it. "" Now, the academics in this audience may think, "Well, that sounds like plagiarism." 
But to a fashionista, what it really is is a sign of Prada's genius: that she can root through the history of fashion and pick the one jacket that doesn't need to be changed by one iota, and to be current and to be now. 
You might also be asking whether it's possible that this is illegal for her to do this. 
Well, it turns out that it's actually not illegal. 
In the fashion industry, there's very little intellectual property protection. 
They have trademark protection, but no copyright protection and no patent protection to speak of. 
All they have, really, is trademark protection, and so it means that anybody could copy any garment on any person in this room and sell it as their own design. 
The only thing that they can't copy is the actual trademark label within that piece of apparel. 
That's one reason that you see logos splattered all over these products. 
It's because it's a lot harder for knock-off artists to knock off these designs because they can't knock off the logo. 
But if you go to Santee Alley, yeah. 
(Laughter) Well, yeah. 
Canal Street, I know. 
And sometimes these are fun, right? 
Now, the reason for this, the reason that the fashion industry doesn't have any copyright protection is because the courts decided long ago that apparel is too utilitarian to qualify for copyright protection. 
They didn't want a handful of designers owning the seminal building blocks of our clothing. 
And then everybody else would have to license this cuff or this sleeve because Joe Blow owns it. 
But too utilitarian? I mean is that the way you think of fashion? 
This is Vivienne Westwood. No! 
We think of it as maybe too silly, too unnecessary. 
Now, those of you who are familiar with the logic behind copyright protection — which is that without ownership, there is no incentive to innovate — might be really surprised by both the critical success of the fashion industry and the economic success of this industry. 
What I'm going to argue today is that because there's no copyright protection in the fashion industry, fashion designers have actually been able to elevate utilitarian design, things to cover our naked bodies, into something that we consider art. 
Because there's no copyright protection in this industry, there's a very open and creative ecology of creativity. 
Unlike their creative brothers and sisters, who are sculptors or photographers or filmmakers or musicians, fashion designers can sample from all their peers' designs. 
They can take any element from any garment from the history of fashion and incorporate it into their own design. 
They're also notorious for riffing off of the zeitgeist. 
And here, I suspect, they were influenced by the costumes in Avatar. 
Maybe just a little. 
Can't copyright a costume either. 
Now, fashion designers have the broadest palette imaginable in this creative industry. 
This wedding dress here is actually made of sporks, and this dress is actually made of aluminum. 
I've heard this dress actually sort of sounds like wind chimes as they walk through. 
So, one of the magical side effects of having a culture of copying, which is really what it is, is the establishment of trends. 
People think this is a magical thing. How does it happen? 
Well, it's because it's legal for people to copy one another. 
Some people believe that there are a few people at the top of the fashion food chain who sort of dictate to us what we're all going to wear, but if you talk to any designer at any level, including these high-end designers, they always say their main inspiration comes from the street: where people like you and me remix and match our own fashion looks. 
And that's where they really get a lot of their creative inspiration, so it's both a top-down and a bottom-up kind of industry. 
Now, the fast fashion giants have probably benefited the most from the lack of copyright protection in the fashion industry. 
They are notorious for knocking off high-end designs and selling them at very low prices. 
And they've been faced with a lot of lawsuits, but those lawsuits are usually not won by fashion designers. 
The courts have said over and over again, "" You don't need any more intellectual property protection. "" When you look at copies like this, you wonder: How do the luxury high-end brands remain in business? 
If you can get it for 200 bucks, why pay a thousand? 
Well, that's one reason we had a conference here at USC a few years ago. 
We invited Tom Ford to come — the conference was called, "" Ready to Share: Fashion and the Ownership of Creativity "" — and we asked him exactly this question. 
Here's what he had to say. 
He had just come off a successful stint as the lead designer at Gucci, in case you didn't know. 
Tom Ford: And we found after much research that — actually not much research, quite simple research — that the counterfeit customer was not our customer. 
Johanna Blakley: Imagine that. 
The people on Santee Alley are not the ones who shop at Gucci. 
(Laughter) This is a very different demographic. 
And, you know, a knock-off is never the same as an original high-end design, at least in terms of the materials; they're always made of cheaper materials. 
But even sometimes a cheaper version can actually have some charming aspects, can breathe a little extra life into a dying trend. 
There's lots of virtues of copying. 
One that a lot of cultural critics have pointed to is that we now have a much broader palette of design choices to choose from than we ever have before, and this is mainly because of the fast fashion industry, actually. 
And this is a good thing. We need lots of options. 
Fashion, whether you like it or not, helps you project who you are to the world. 
Because of fast fashion, global trends actually get established much more quickly than they used to. 
And this, actually, is good news to trendsetters; they want trends to be set so that they can move product. 
For fashionistas, they want to stay ahead of the curve. 
They don't want to be wearing what everybody else is wearing. 
And so, they want to move on to the next trend as soon as possible. 
I tell you, there is no rest for the fashionable. 
Every season, these designers have to struggle to come up with the new fabulous idea that everybody's going to love. 
And this, let me tell you, is very good for the bottom line. 
Now of course, there's a bunch of effects that this culture of copying has on the creative process. 
And Stuart Weitzman is a very successful shoe designer. 
He has complained a lot about people copying him, but in one interview I read, he said it has really forced him to up his game. 
He had to come up with new ideas, new things that would be hard to copy. 
He came up with this Bowden-wedge heel that has to be made out of steel or titanium; if you make it from some sort of cheaper material, it'll actually crack in two. 
It forced him to be a little more innovative. (Music) And that actually reminded me of jazz great, Charlie Parker. 
I don't know if you've heard this anecdote, but I have. 
He said that one of the reasons he invented bebop was that he was pretty sure that white musicians wouldn't be able to replicate the sound. (Laughter) He wanted to make it too difficult to copy, and that's what fashion designers are doing all the time. 
They're trying to put together a signature look, an aesthetic that reflects who they are. 
When people knock it off, everybody knows because they've put that look out on the runway, and it's a coherent aesthetic. 
I love these Gallianos. 
Okay, we'll move on. (Laughter) This is not unlike the world of comedy. 
I don't know if you know that jokes also can't be copyright protected. 
So when one-liners were really popular, everybody stole them from one another. 
But now, we have a different kind of comic. 
They develop a persona, a signature style, much like fashion designers. 
And their jokes, much like the fashion designs by a fashion designer, really only work within that aesthetic. 
If somebody steals a joke from Larry David, for instance, it's not as funny. 
Now, the other thing that fashion designers have done to survive in this culture of copying is they've learned how to copy themselves. 
They knock themselves off. 
They make deals with the fast fashion giants and they come up with a way to sell their product to a whole new demographic: the Santee Alley demographic. 
Now, some fashion designers will say, "" It's only in the United States that we don't have any respect. 
In other countries there is protection for our artful designs. "" But if you take a look at the two other biggest markets in the world, it turns out that the protection that's offered is really ineffectual. 
In Japan, for instance, which I think is the third largest market, they have a design law; it protects apparel, but the novelty standard is so high, you have to prove that your garment has never existed before, it's totally unique. 
And that's sort of like the novelty standard for a U.S. patent, which fashion designers never get — rarely get here in the states. 
In the European Union, they went in the other direction. 
Very low novelty standard, anybody can register anything. 
But even though it's the home of the fast fashion industry and you have a lot of luxury designers there, they don't register their garments, generally, and there's not a lot of litigation. 
It turns out it's because the novelty standard is too low. 
A person can come in and take somebody else's gown, cut off three inches from the bottom, go to the E.U. and register it as a new, original design. 
So, that does not stop the knock-off artists. 
If you look at the registry, actually, a lot of the registered things in the E.U. 
are Nike T-shirts that are almost identical to one another. 
But this has not stopped Diane von Furstenberg. 
She is the head of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and she has told her constituency that she is going to get copyright protection for fashion designs. 
The retailers have kind of quashed this notion though. 
I don't think the legislation is going anywhere, because they realized it is so hard to tell the difference between a pirated design and something that's just part of a global trend. 
Who owns a look? 
That is a very difficult question to answer. 
It takes lots of lawyers and lots of court time, and the retailers decided that would be way too expensive. 
You know, it's not just the fashion industry that doesn't have copyright protection. 
There's a bunch of other industries that don't have copyright protection, including the food industry. 
You cannot copyright a recipe because it's a set of instructions, it's fact, and you cannot copyright the look and feel of even the most unique dish. 
Same with automobiles. 
It doesn't matter how wacky they look or how cool they look, you cannot copyright the sculptural design. 
It's a utilitarian article, that's why. 
Same with furniture, it's too utilitarian. 
Magic tricks, I think they're instructions, sort of like recipes: no copyright protection. 
Hairdos, no copyright protection. 
Open source software, these guys decided they didn't want copyright protection. 
They thought it'd be more innovative without it. 
It's really hard to get copyright for databases. 
Tattoo artists, they don't want it; it's not cool. 
They share their designs. 
Jokes, no copyright protection. 
Fireworks displays, the rules of games, the smell of perfume: no. 
And some of these industries may seem sort of marginal to you, but these are the gross sales for low I.P. industries, industries with very little copyright protection, and there's the gross sales of films and books. 
(Applause) It ain't pretty. (Applause) 
So you talk to people in the fashion industry and they're like, "" Shhh! 
Don't tell anybody we can actually steal from each other's designs. 
It's embarrassing. "" But you know what? It's revolutionary, and it's a model that a lot of other industries — like the ones we just saw with the really small bars — they might have to think about this. 
Because right now, those industries with a lot of copyright protection are operating in an atmosphere where it's as if they don't have any protection, and they don't know what to do. 
When I found out that there are a whole bunch of industries that didn't have copyright protection, I thought, "" What exactly is the underlying logic? 
I want a picture. "" And the lawyers do not provide a picture, so I made one. 
These are the two main sort of binary oppositions within the logic of copyright law. 
It is more complex than this, but this will do. 
First: Is something an artistic object? 
Then it deserves protection. 
Is it a utilitarian object? 
Then no, it does not deserve protection. 
This is a difficult, unstable binary. 
The other one is: Is it an idea? 
Is it something that needs to freely circulate in a free society? 
No protection. 
Or is it a physically fixed expression of an idea: something that somebody made and they deserve to own it for a while and make money from it? 
The problem is that digital technology has completely subverted the logic of this physically fixed, expression versus idea concept. 
Nowadays, we don't really recognize a book as something that sits on our shelf or music as something that is a physical object that we can hold. 
It's a digital file. 
It is barely tethered to any sort of physical reality in our minds. 
And these things, because we can copy and transmit them so easily, actually circulate within our culture a lot more like ideas than like physically instantiated objects. 
Now, the conceptual issues are truly profound when you talk about creativity and ownership and, let me tell you, we don't want to leave this just to lawyers to figure out. 
They're smart. 
I'm with one. He's my boyfriend, he's okay. 
He's smart, he's smart. 
But you want an interdisciplinary team of people hashing this out, trying to figure out: What is the kind of ownership model, in a digital world, that's going to lead to the most innovation? 
And my suggestion is that fashion might be a really good place to start looking for a model for creative industries in the future. 
If you want more information about this research project, please visit our website: it's ReadyToShare.org. 
And I really want to thank Veronica Jauriqui for making this very fashionable presentation. 
Thank you so much. (Applause) 

The universe is really big. 
We live in a galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy. 
There are about a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. 
And if you take a camera and you point it at a random part of the sky, and you just keep the shutter open, as long as your camera is attached to the Hubble Space Telescope, it will see something like this. 
Every one of these little blobs is a galaxy roughly the size of our Milky Way — a hundred billion stars in each of those blobs. 
There are approximately a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. 
100 billion is the only number you need to know. 
The age of the universe, between now and the Big Bang, is a hundred billion in dog years. 
(Laughter) Which tells you something about our place in the universe. 
One thing you can do with a picture like this is simply admire it. 
It's extremely beautiful. 
I've often wondered, what is the evolutionary pressure that made our ancestors in the Veldt adapt and evolve to really enjoy pictures of galaxies when they didn't have any. 
But we would also like to understand it. 
As a cosmologist, I want to ask, why is the universe like this? 
One big clue we have is that the universe is changing with time. 
If you looked at one of these galaxies and measured its velocity, it would be moving away from you. 
And if you look at a galaxy even farther away, it would be moving away faster. 
So we say the universe is expanding. 
What that means, of course, is that, in the past, things were closer together. 
In the past, the universe was more dense, and it was also hotter. 
If you squeeze things together, the temperature goes up. 
That kind of makes sense to us. 
The thing that doesn't make sense to us as much is that the universe, at early times, near the Big Bang, was also very, very smooth. 
You might think that that's not a surprise. 
The air in this room is very smooth. 
You might say, "" Well, maybe things just smoothed themselves out. "" But the conditions near the Big Bang are very, very different than the conditions of the air in this room. 
In particular, things were a lot denser. 
The gravitational pull of things was a lot stronger near the Big Bang. 
What you have to think about is we have a universe with a hundred billion galaxies, a hundred billion stars each. 
At early times, those hundred billion galaxies were squeezed into a region about this big — literally — at early times. 
And you have to imagine doing that squeezing without any imperfections, without any little spots where there were a few more atoms than somewhere else. 
Because if there had been, they would have collapsed under the gravitational pull into a huge black hole. 
Keeping the universe very, very smooth at early times is not easy; it's a delicate arrangement. 
It's a clue that the early universe is not chosen randomly. 
There is something that made it that way. 
We would like to know what. 
So part of our understanding of this was given to us by Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist in the 19th century. 
And Boltzmann's contribution was that he helped us understand entropy. 
You've heard of entropy. 
It's the randomness, the disorder, the chaoticness of some systems. 
Boltzmann gave us a formula — engraved on his tombstone now — that really quantifies what entropy is. 
And it's basically just saying that entropy is the number of ways we can rearrange the constituents of a system so that you don't notice, so that macroscopically it looks the same. 
If you have the air in this room, you don't notice each individual atom. 
A low entropy configuration is one in which there's only a few arrangements that look that way. 
A high entropy arrangement is one that there are many arrangements that look that way. 
This is a crucially important insight because it helps us explain the second law of thermodynamics — the law that says that entropy increases in the universe, or in some isolated bit of the universe. 
The reason why entropy increases is simply because there are many more ways to be high entropy than to be low entropy. 
That's a wonderful insight, but it leaves something out. 
This insight that entropy increases, by the way, is what's behind what we call the arrow of time, the difference between the past and the future. 
Every difference that there is between the past and the future is because entropy is increasing — the fact that you can remember the past, but not the future. 
The fact that you are born, and then you live, and then you die, always in that order, that's because entropy is increasing. 
Boltzmann explained that if you start with low entropy, it's very natural for it to increase because there's more ways to be high entropy. 
What he didn't explain was why the entropy was ever low in the first place. 
The fact that the entropy of the universe was low was a reflection of the fact that the early universe was very, very smooth. 
We'd like to understand that. 
That's our job as cosmologists. 
Unfortunately, it's actually not a problem that we've been giving enough attention to. 
It's not one of the first things people would say, if you asked a modern cosmologist, "What are the problems we're trying to address?" 
One of the people who did understand that this was a problem was Richard Feynman. 
50 years ago, he gave a series of a bunch of different lectures. 
He gave the popular lectures that became "" The Character of Physical Law. "" He gave lectures to Caltech undergrads that became "" The Feynman Lectures on Physics. "" He gave lectures to Caltech graduate students that became "" The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation. "" In every one of these books, every one of these sets of lectures, he emphasized this puzzle: Why did the early universe have such a small entropy? 
So he says — I'm not going to do the accent — he says, "" For some reason, the universe, at one time, had a very low entropy for its energy content, and since then the entropy has increased. 
The arrow of time cannot be completely understood until the mystery of the beginnings of the history of the universe are reduced still further from speculation to understanding. "" So that's our job. 
We want to know — this is 50 years ago, "" Surely, "" you're thinking, "we've figured it out by now." 
It's not true that we've figured it out by now. 
The reason the problem has gotten worse, rather than better, is because in 1998 we learned something crucial about the universe that we didn't know before. 
We learned that it's accelerating. 
The universe is not only expanding. 
If you look at the galaxy, it's moving away. 
If you come back a billion years later and look at it again, it will be moving away faster. 
Individual galaxies are speeding away from us faster and faster so we say the universe is accelerating. 
Unlike the low entropy of the early universe, even though we don't know the answer for this, we at least have a good theory that can explain it, if that theory is right, and that's the theory of dark energy. 
It's just the idea that empty space itself has energy. 
In every little cubic centimeter of space, whether or not there's stuff, whether or not there's particles, matter, radiation or whatever, there's still energy, even in the space itself. 
And this energy, according to Einstein, exerts a push on the universe. 
It is a perpetual impulse that pushes galaxies apart from each other. 
Because dark energy, unlike matter or radiation, does not dilute away as the universe expands. 
The amount of energy in each cubic centimeter remains the same, even as the universe gets bigger and bigger. 
This has crucial implications for what the universe is going to do in the future. 
For one thing, the universe will expand forever. 
Back when I was your age, we didn't know what the universe was going to do. 
Some people thought that the universe would recollapse in the future. 
Einstein was fond of this idea. 
But if there's dark energy, and the dark energy does not go away, the universe is just going to keep expanding forever and ever and ever. 
14 billion years in the past, 100 billion dog years, but an infinite number of years into the future. 
Meanwhile, for all intents and purposes, space looks finite to us. 
Space may be finite or infinite, but because the universe is accelerating, there are parts of it we cannot see and never will see. 
There's a finite region of space that we have access to, surrounded by a horizon. 
So even though time goes on forever, space is limited to us. 
Finally, empty space has a temperature. 
In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking told us that a black hole, even though you think it's black, it actually emits radiation when you take into account quantum mechanics. 
The curvature of space-time around the black hole brings to life the quantum mechanical fluctuation, and the black hole radiates. 
A precisely similar calculation by Hawking and Gary Gibbons showed that if you have dark energy in empty space, then the whole universe radiates. 
The energy of empty space brings to life quantum fluctuations. 
And so even though the universe will last forever, and ordinary matter and radiation will dilute away, there will always be some radiation, some thermal fluctuations, even in empty space. 
So what this means is that the universe is like a box of gas that lasts forever. 
Well what is the implication of that? 
That implication was studied by Boltzmann back in the 19th century. 
He said, well, entropy increases because there are many, many more ways for the universe to be high entropy, rather than low entropy. 
But that's a probabilistic statement. 
It will probably increase, and the probability is enormously huge. 
It's not something you have to worry about — the air in this room all gathering over one part of the room and suffocating us. 
It's very, very unlikely. 
Except if they locked the doors and kept us here literally forever, that would happen. 
Everything that is allowed, every configuration that is allowed to be obtained by the molecules in this room, would eventually be obtained. 
So Boltzmann says, look, you could start with a universe that was in thermal equilibrium. 
He didn't know about the Big Bang. He didn't know about the expansion of the universe. 
He thought that space and time were explained by Isaac Newton — they were absolute; they just stuck there forever. 
So his idea of a natural universe was one in which the air molecules were just spread out evenly everywhere — the everything molecules. 
But if you're Boltzmann, you know that if you wait long enough, the random fluctuations of those molecules will occasionally bring them into lower entropy configurations. 
And then, of course, in the natural course of things, they will expand back. 
So it's not that entropy must always increase — you can get fluctuations into lower entropy, more organized situations. 
Well if that's true, Boltzmann then goes onto invent two very modern-sounding ideas — the multiverse and the anthropic principle. 
He says, the problem with thermal equilibrium is that we can't live there. 
Remember, life itself depends on the arrow of time. 
We would not be able to process information, metabolize, walk and talk, if we lived in thermal equilibrium. 
So if you imagine a very, very big universe, an infinitely big universe, with randomly bumping into each other particles, there will occasionally be small fluctuations in the lower entropy states, and then they relax back. 
But there will also be large fluctuations. 
Occasionally, you will make a planet or a star or a galaxy or a hundred billion galaxies. 
So Boltzmann says, we will only live in the part of the multiverse, in the part of this infinitely big set of fluctuating particles, where life is possible. 
That's the region where entropy is low. 
Maybe our universe is just one of those things that happens from time to time. 
Now your homework assignment is to really think about this, to contemplate what it means. 
Carl Sagan once famously said that "" in order to make an apple pie, you must first invent the universe. "" But he was not right. 
In Boltzmann's scenario, if you want to make an apple pie, you just wait for the random motion of atoms to make you an apple pie. 
That will happen much more frequently than the random motions of atoms making you an apple orchard and some sugar and an oven, and then making you an apple pie. 
So this scenario makes predictions. 
And the predictions are that the fluctuations that make us are minimal. 
Even if you imagine that this room we are in now exists and is real and here we are, and we have, not only our memories, but our impression that outside there's something called Caltech and the United States and the Milky Way Galaxy, it's much easier for all those impressions to randomly fluctuate into your brain than for them actually to randomly fluctuate into Caltech, the United States and the galaxy. 
The good news is that, therefore, this scenario does not work; it is not right. 
This scenario predicts that we should be a minimal fluctuation. 
Even if you left our galaxy out, you would not get a hundred billion other galaxies. 
And Feynman also understood this. 
Feynman says, "" From the hypothesis that the world is a fluctuation, all the predictions are that if we look at a part of the world we've never seen before, we will find it mixed up, and not like the piece we've just looked at — high entropy. 
If our order were due to a fluctuation, we would not expect order anywhere but where we have just noticed it. 
We therefore conclude the universe is not a fluctuation. "" So that's good. The question is then what is the right answer? 
If the universe is not a fluctuation, why did the early universe have a low entropy? 
And I would love to tell you the answer, but I'm running out of time. 
(Laughter) Here is the universe that we tell you about, versus the universe that really exists. 
I just showed you this picture. 
The universe is expanding for the last 10 billion years or so. 
It's cooling off. 
But we now know enough about the future of the universe to say a lot more. 
If the dark energy remains around, the stars around us will use up their nuclear fuel, they will stop burning. 
They will fall into black holes. 
We will live in a universe with nothing in it but black holes. 
That universe will last 10 to the 100 years — a lot longer than our little universe has lived. 
The future is much longer than the past. 
But even black holes don't last forever. 
They will evaporate, and we will be left with nothing but empty space. 
That empty space lasts essentially forever. 
However, you notice, since empty space gives off radiation, there's actually thermal fluctuations, and it cycles around all the different possible combinations of the degrees of freedom that exist in empty space. 
So even though the universe lasts forever, there's only a finite number of things that can possibly happen in the universe. 
They all happen over a period of time equal to 10 to the 10 to the 120 years. 
So here's two questions for you. 
Number one: If the universe lasts for 10 to the 10 to the 120 years, why are we born in the first 14 billion years of it, in the warm, comfortable afterglow of the Big Bang? 
Why aren't we in empty space? 
You might say, "" Well there's nothing there to be living, "" but that's not right. 
You could be a random fluctuation out of the nothingness. 
Why aren't you? 
More homework assignment for you. 
So like I said, I don't actually know the answer. 
I'm going to give you my favorite scenario. 
Either it's just like that. There is no explanation. 
This is a brute fact about the universe that you should learn to accept and stop asking questions. 
Or maybe the Big Bang is not the beginning of the universe. 
An egg, an unbroken egg, is a low entropy configuration, and yet, when we open our refrigerator, we do not go, "" Hah, how surprising to find this low entropy configuration in our refrigerator. "" That's because an egg is not a closed system; it comes out of a chicken. 
Maybe the universe comes out of a universal chicken. 
Maybe there is something that naturally, through the growth of the laws of physics, gives rise to universe like ours in low entropy configurations. 
If that's true, it would happen more than once; we would be part of a much bigger multiverse. 
That's my favorite scenario. 
So the organizers asked me to end with a bold speculation. 
My bold speculation is that I will be absolutely vindicated by history. 
And 50 years from now, all of my current wild ideas will be accepted as truths by the scientific and external communities. 
We will all believe that our little universe is just a small part of a much larger multiverse. 
And even better, we will understand what happened at the Big Bang in terms of a theory that we will be able to compare to observations. 
This is a prediction. I might be wrong. 
But we've been thinking as a human race about what the universe was like, why it came to be in the way it did for many, many years. 
It's exciting to think we may finally know the answer someday. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm going to talk to you about optimism — or more precisely, the optimism bias. 
It's a cognitive illusion that we've been studying in my lab for the past few years, and 80 percent of us have it. 
It's our tendency to overestimate our likelihood of experiencing good events in our lives and underestimate our likelihood of experiencing bad events. 
So we underestimate our likelihood of suffering from cancer, being in a car accident. 
We overestimate our longevity, our career prospects. 
In short, we're more optimistic than realistic, but we are oblivious to the fact. 
Take marriage for example. 
In the Western world, divorce rates are about 40 percent. 
That means that out of five married couples, two will end up splitting their assets. 
But when you ask newlyweds about their own likelihood of divorce, they estimate it at zero percent. 
And even divorce lawyers, who should really know better, hugely underestimate their own likelihood of divorce. 
So it turns out that optimists are not less likely to divorce, but they are more likely to remarry. 
In the words of Samuel Johnson, "Remarriage is the triumph of hope over experience." 
(Laughter) So if we're married, we're more likely to have kids. 
And we all think our kids will be especially talented. 
This, by the way, is my two-year-old nephew, Guy. 
And I just want to make it absolutely clear that he's a really bad example of the optimism bias, because he is in fact uniquely talented. 
(Laughter) And I'm not alone. 
Out of four British people, three said that they were optimistic about the future of their own families. 
That's 75 percent. 
But only 30 percent said that they thought families in general are doing better than a few generations ago. 
And this is a really important point, because we're optimistic about ourselves, we're optimistic about our kids, we're optimistic about our families, but we're not so optimistic about the guy sitting next to us, and we're somewhat pessimistic about the fate of our fellow citizens and the fate of our country. 
But private optimism about our own personal future remains persistent. 
And it doesn't mean that we think things will magically turn out okay, but rather that we have the unique ability to make it so. 
Now I'm a scientist, I do experiments. 
So to show you what I mean, I'm going to do an experiment here with you. 
So I'm going to give you a list of abilities and characteristics, and I want you to think for each of these abilities where you stand relative to the rest of the population. 
The first one is getting along well with others. 
Who here believes they're at the bottom 25 percent? 
Okay, that's about 10 people out of 1,500. 
Who believes they're at the top 25 percent? 
That's most of us here. 
Okay, now do the same for your driving ability. 
How interesting are you? 
How attractive are you? 
How honest are you? 
And finally, how modest are you? 
So most of us put ourselves above average on most of these abilities. 
Now this is statistically impossible. 
We can't all be better than everyone else. 
(Laughter) But if we believe we're better than the other guy, well that means that we're more likely to get that promotion, to remain married, because we're more social, more interesting. 
And it's a global phenomenon. 
The optimism bias has been observed in many different countries — in Western cultures, in non-Western cultures, in females and males, in kids, in the elderly. 
It's quite widespread. 
But the question is, is it good for us? 
So some people say no. 
Some people say the secret to happiness is low expectations. 
I think the logic goes something like this: If we don't expect greatness, if we don't expect to find love and be healthy and successful, well we're not going to be disappointed when these things don't happen. 
And if we're not disappointed when good things don't happen, and we're pleasantly surprised when they do, we will be happy. 
So it's a very good theory, but it turns out to be wrong for three reasons. 
Number one: Whatever happens, whether you succeed or you fail, people with high expectations always feel better. 
Because how we feel when we get dumped or win employee of the month depends on how we interpret that event. 
The psychologists Margaret Marshall and John Brown studied students with high and low expectations. 
And they found that when people with high expectations succeed, they attribute that success to their own traits. 
"" I'm a genius, therefore I got an A, therefore I'll get an A again and again in the future. "" When they failed, it wasn't because they were dumb, but because the exam just happened to be unfair. 
Next time they will do better. 
People with low expectations do the opposite. 
So when they failed it was because they were dumb, and when they succeeded it was because the exam just happened to be really easy. 
Next time reality would catch up with them. 
So they felt worse. 
Number two: Regardless of the outcome, the pure act of anticipation makes us happy. 
The behavioral economist George Lowenstein asked students in his university to imagine getting a passionate kiss from a celebrity, any celebrity. 
Then he said, "" How much are you willing to pay to get a kiss from a celebrity if the kiss was delivered immediately, in three hours, in 24 hours, in three days, in one year, in 10 years? 
He found that the students were willing to pay the most not to get a kiss immediately, but to get a kiss in three days. 
They were willing to pay extra in order to wait. 
Now they weren't willing to wait a year or 10 years; no one wants an aging celebrity. 
But three days seemed to be the optimum amount. 
So why is that? 
Well if you get the kiss now, it's over and done with. 
But if you get the kiss in three days, well that's three days of jittery anticipation, the thrill of the wait. 
The students wanted that time to imagine where is it going to happen, how is it going to happen. 
Anticipation made them happy. 
This is, by the way, why people prefer Friday to Sunday. 
It's a really curious fact, because Friday is a day of work and Sunday is a day of pleasure, so you'd assume that people will prefer Sunday, but they don't. 
It's not because they really, really like being in the office and they can't stand strolling in the park or having a lazy brunch. 
We know that, because when you ask people about their ultimate favorite day of the week, surprise, surprise, Saturday comes in at first, then Friday, then Sunday. 
People prefer Friday because Friday brings with it the anticipation of the weekend ahead, all the plans that you have. 
On Sunday, the only thing you can look forward to is the work week. 
So optimists are people who expect more kisses in their future, more strolls in the park. 
And that anticipation enhances their wellbeing. 
In fact, without the optimism bias, we would all be slightly depressed. 
People with mild depression, they don't have a bias when they look into the future. 
They're actually more realistic than healthy individuals. 
But individuals with severe depression, they have a pessimistic bias. 
So they tend to expect the future to be worse than it ends up being. 
So optimism changes subjective reality. 
The way we expect the world to be changes the way we see it. 
But it also changes objective reality. 
It acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy. 
And that is the third reason why lowering your expectations will not make you happy. 
Controlled experiments have shown that optimism is not only related to success, it leads to success. 
Optimism leads to success in academia and sports and politics. 
And maybe the most surprising benefit of optimism is health. 
If we expect the future to be bright, stress and anxiety are reduced. 
So all in all, optimism has lots of benefits. 
But the question that was really confusing to me was, how do we maintain optimism in the face of reality? 
As an neuroscientist, this was especially confusing, because according to all the theories out there, when your expectations are not met, you should alter them. 
But this is not what we find. 
We asked people to come into our lab in order to try and figure out what was going on. 
We asked them to estimate their likelihood of experiencing different terrible events in their lives. 
So, for example, what is your likelihood of suffering from cancer? 
And then we told them the average likelihood of someone like them to suffer these misfortunes. 
So cancer, for example, is about 30 percent. 
And then we asked them again, "How likely are you to suffer from cancer?" 
What we wanted to know was whether people will take the information that we gave them to change their beliefs. 
And indeed they did — but mostly when the information we gave them was better than what they expected. 
So for example, if someone said, "" My likelihood of suffering from cancer is about 50 percent, "" and we said, "" Hey, good news. 
The average likelihood is only 30 percent, "" the next time around they would say, "Well maybe my likelihood is about 35 percent." 
So they learned quickly and efficiently. 
But if someone started off saying, "My average likelihood of suffering from cancer is about 10 percent," and we said, "" Hey, bad news. 
The average likelihood is about 30 percent, "" the next time around they would say, "Yep. Still think it's about 11 percent." 
(Laughter) So it's not that they didn't learn at all — they did — but much, much less than when we gave them positive information about the future. 
And it's not that they didn't remember the numbers that we gave them; everyone remembers that the average likelihood of cancer is about 30 percent and the average likelihood of divorce is about 40 percent. 
But they didn't think that those numbers were related to them. 
What this means is that warning signs such as these may only have limited impact. 
Yes, smoking kills, but mostly it kills the other guy. 
What I wanted to know was what was going on inside the human brain that prevented us from taking these warning signs personally. 
But at the same time, when we hear that the housing market is hopeful, we think, "" Oh, my house is definitely going to double in price. "" To try and figure that out, I asked the participants in the experiment to lie in a brain imaging scanner. 
It looks like this. 
And using a method called functional MRI, we were able to identify regions in the brain that were responding to positive information. 
One of these regions is called the left inferior frontal gyrus. 
So if someone said, "" My likelihood of suffering from cancer is 50 percent, "" and we said, "" Hey, good news. 
Average likelihood is 30 percent, "" the left inferior frontal gyrus would respond fiercely. 
And it didn't matter if you're an extreme optimist, a mild optimist or slightly pessimistic, everyone's left inferior frontal gyrus was functioning perfectly well, whether you're Barack Obama or Woody Allen. 
On the other side of the brain, the right inferior frontal gyrus was responding to bad news. 
And here's the thing: it wasn't doing a very good job. 
The more optimistic you were, the less likely this region was to respond to unexpected negative information. 
And if your brain is failing at integrating bad news about the future, you will constantly leave your rose-tinted spectacles on. 
So we wanted to know, could we change this? 
Could we alter people's optimism bias by interfering with the brain activity in these regions? 
And there's a way for us to do that. 
This is my collaborator Ryota Kanai. 
And what he's doing is he's passing a small magnetic pulse through the skull of the participant in our study into their inferior frontal gyrus. 
And by doing that, he's interfering with the activity of this brain region for about half an hour. 
After that everything goes back to normal, I assure you. 
(Laughter) So let's see what happens. 
First of all, I'm going to show you the average amount of bias that we see. 
So if I was to test all of you now, this is the amount that you would learn more from good news relative to bad news. 
Now we interfere with the region that we found to integrate negative information in this task, and the optimism bias grew even larger. 
We made people more biased in the way that they process information. 
Then we interfered with the brain region that we found to integrate good news in this task, and the optimism bias disappeared. 
We were quite amazed by these results because we were able to eliminate a deep-rooted bias in humans. 
And at this point we stopped and we asked ourselves, would we want to shatter the optimism illusion into tiny little bits? 
If we could do that, would we want to take people's optimism bias away? 
Well I've already told you about all of the benefits of the optimism bias, which probably makes you want to hold onto it for dear life. 
But there are, of course, pitfalls, and it would be really foolish of us to ignore them. 
Take for example this email I recieved from a firefighter here in California. 
He says, "" Fatality investigations for firefighters often include 'We didn't think the fire was going to do that,' even when all of the available information was there to make safe decisions. "" This captain is going to use our findings on the optimism bias to try to explain to the firefighters why they think the way they do, to make them acutely aware of this very optimistic bias in humans. 
So unrealistic optimism can lead to risky behavior, to financial collapse, to faulty planning. 
The British government, for example, has acknowledged that the optimism bias can make individuals more likely to underestimate the costs and durations of projects. 
So they have adjusted the 2012 Olympic budget for the optimism bias. 
My friend who's getting married in a few weeks has done the same for his wedding budget. 
And by the way, when I asked him about his own likelihood of divorce, he said he was quite sure it was zero percent. 
So what we would really like to do, is we would like to protect ourselves from the dangers of optimism, but at the same time remain hopeful, benefiting from the many fruits of optimism. 
And I believe there's a way for us to do that. 
The key here really is knowledge. 
We're not born with an innate understanding of our biases. 
These have to be identified by scientific investigation. 
But the good news is that becoming aware of the optimism bias does not shatter the illusion. 
It's like visual illusions, in which understanding them does not make them go away. 
And this is good because it means we should be able to strike a balance, to come up with plans and rules to protect ourselves from unrealistic optimism, but at the same time remain hopeful. 
I think this cartoon portrays it nicely. 
Because if you're one of these pessimistic penguins up there who just does not believe they can fly, you certainly never will. 
Because to make any kind of progress, we need to be able to imagine a different reality, and then we need to believe that that reality is possible. 
But if you are an extreme optimistic penguin who just jumps down blindly hoping for the best, you might find yourself in a bit of a mess when you hit the ground. 
But if you're an optimistic penguin who believes they can fly, but then adjusts a parachute to your back just in case things don't work out exactly as you had planned, you will soar like an eagle, even if you're just a penguin. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I have a question. 
Can a computer write poetry? 
This is a provocative question. 
You think about it for a minute, and you suddenly have a bunch of other questions like: What is a computer? 
What is poetry? 
What is creativity? 
But these are questions that people spend their entire lifetime trying to answer, not in a single TED Talk. 
One of them is written by a human, and the other one's written by a computer. 
I'm going to ask you to tell me which one's which. 
Have a go: Poem 1: Little Fly / Thy summer's play, / My thoughtless hand / Has brush'd away. 
Hands up if you think Poem 1 was written by a human. 
OK, most of you. 
Very brave of you, because the first one was written by the human poet William Blake. 
The second one was written by an algorithm that took all the language from my Facebook feed on one day and then regenerated it algorithmically, according to methods that I'll describe a little bit later on. 
So let's try another test. 
Again, you haven't got ages to read this, so just trust your gut. 
OK. 
We have, more or less, a 50 / 50 split here. 
It was much harder. 
(Laughter) So what we've just done now is a Turing test for poetry. 
The Turing test was first proposed by this guy, Alan Turing, in 1950, in order to answer the question, can computers think? 
Alan Turing believed that if a computer was able to have a to have a text-based conversation with a human, with such proficiency such that the human couldn't tell whether they are talking to a computer or a human, then the computer can be said to have intelligence. 
So in 2013, my friend Benjamin Laird and I, we created a Turing test for poetry online. 
Well, Turing said that if a computer could fool a human 30 percent of the time that it was a human, then it passes the Turing test for intelligence. 
We have poems on the bot or not database that have fooled 65 percent of human readers into thinking it was written by a human. 
So, I think we have an answer to our question. 
According to the logic of the Turing test, can a computer write poetry? 
But if you're feeling a little bit uncomfortable with this answer, that's OK. 
If you're having a bunch of gut reactions to it, that's also OK because this isn't the end of the story. 
Let's play our third and final test. 
Again, you're going to have to read and tell me which you think is human. 
Hands up if you think Poem 2 was written by a human. 
So you'd be surprised to find that Poem 1 was written by the very human poet Gertrude Stein. 
And Poem 2 was generated by an algorithm called RKCP. 
So RKCP is an algorithm designed by Ray Kurzweil, who's a director of engineering at Google and a firm believer in artificial intelligence. 
So, you give RKCP a source text, it analyzes the source text in order to find out how it uses language, and then it regenerates language that emulates that first text. 
But the important thing to know about RKCP is that it doesn't know the meaning of the words it's using. 
The language is just raw material, it could be Chinese, it could be in Swedish, it could be the collected language from your Facebook feed for one day. 
And nevertheless, it's able to create a poem that seems more human than Gertrude Stein's poem, and Gertrude Stein is a human. 
So what we've done here is, more or less, a reverse Turing test. 
So Gertrude Stein, who's a human, is able to write a poem that fools a majority of human judges into thinking that it was written by a computer. 
Therefore, according to the logic of the reverse Turing test, Gertrude Stein is a computer. 
(Laughter) Feeling confused? 
I think that's fair enough. 
So far we've had humans that write like humans, we have computers that write like computers, we have computers that write like humans, but we also have, perhaps most confusingly, humans that write like computers. 
So what do we take from all of this? 
Do we take that William Blake is somehow more of a human than Gertrude Stein? 
So my first insight is that, for some reason, we associate poetry with being human. 
So that when we ask, "" Can a computer write poetry? "" we're also asking, "" What does it mean to be human and how do we put boundaries around this category? 
How do we say who or what can be part of this category? "" This is an essentially philosophical question, I believe, and it can't be answered with a yes or no test, like the Turing test. 
I also believe that Alan Turing understood this, and that when he devised his test back in 1950, he was doing it as a philosophical provocation. 
So my second insight is that, when we take the Turing test for poetry, we're not really testing the capacity of the computers because poetry-generating algorithms, they're pretty simple and have existed, more or less, since the 1950s. 
What we are doing with the Turing test for poetry, rather, is collecting opinions about what constitutes humanness. 
So, what I've figured out, we've seen this when earlier today, we say that William Blake is more of a human than Gertrude Stein. 
It simply means that the category of the human is unstable. 
This has led me to understand that the human is not a cold, hard fact. 
Rather, it is something that's constructed with our opinions and something that changes over time. 
So my final insight is that the computer, more or less, works like a mirror that reflects any idea of a human that we show it. 
We show it Emily Dickinson, it gives Emily Dickinson back to us. 
We show it William Blake, that's what it reflects back to us. 
More than any other bit of technology, the computer is a mirror that reflects any idea of the human we teach it. 
So I'm sure a lot of you have been hearing a lot about artificial intelligence recently. 
And much of the conversation is, can we build it? 
Can we build an intelligent computer? 
But what we've seen just now is that the human is not a scientific fact, that it's an ever-shifting, concatenating idea and one that changes over time. 
This is an essentially philosophical idea, and it's one that can't be answered with software alone, but I think requires a moment of species-wide, existential reflection. 
Thank you. 

In the northwest corner of the United States, right up near the Canadian border, there's a little town called Libby, Montana, and it's surrounded by pine trees and lakes and just amazing wildlife and these enormous trees that scream up into the sky. 
And in there is a little town called Libby, which I visited, which feels kind of lonely, a little isolated. 
And in Libby, Montana, there's a rather unusual woman named Gayla Benefield. 
She always felt a little bit of an outsider, although she's been there almost all her life, a woman of Russian extraction. 
She told me when she went to school, she was the only girl who ever chose to do mechanical drawing. 
Later in life, she got a job going house to house reading utility meters — gas meters, electricity meters. 
And she was doing the work in the middle of the day, and one thing particularly caught her notice, which was, in the middle of the day she met a lot of men who were at home, middle aged, late middle aged, and a lot of them seemed to be on oxygen tanks. 
It struck her as strange. 
Then, a few years later, her father died at the age of 59, five days before he was due to receive his pension. 
He'd been a miner. 
She thought he must just have been worn out by the work. 
But then a few years later, her mother died, and that seemed stranger still, because her mother came from a long line of people who just seemed to live forever. 
In fact, Gayla's uncle is still alive to this day, and learning how to waltz. 
It didn't make sense that Gayla's mother should die so young. 
It was an anomaly, and she kept puzzling over anomalies. 
And as she did, other ones came to mind. 
She remembered, for example, when her mother had broken a leg and went into the hospital, and she had a lot of x-rays, and two of them were leg x-rays, which made sense, but six of them were chest x-rays, which didn't. 
She puzzled and puzzled over every piece of her life and her parents' life, trying to understand what she was seeing. 
She thought about her town. 
The town had a vermiculite mine in it. 
Vermiculite was used for soil conditioners, to make plants grow faster and better. 
Vermiculite was used to insulate lofts, huge amounts of it put under the roof to keep houses warm during the long Montana winters. 
Vermiculite was in the playground. 
It was in the football ground. 
What she didn't learn until she started working this problem is vermiculite is a very toxic form of asbestos. 
When she figured out the puzzle, she started telling everyone she could what had happened, what had been done to her parents and to the people that she saw on oxygen tanks at home in the afternoons. 
But she was really amazed. 
She thought, when everybody knows, they'll want to do something, but actually nobody wanted to know. 
In fact, she became so annoying as she kept insisting on telling this story to her neighbors, to her friends, to other people in the community, that eventually a bunch of them got together and they made a bumper sticker, which they proudly displayed on their cars, which said, "" Yes, I'm from Libby, Montana, and no, I don't have asbestosis. "" But Gayla didn't stop. She kept doing research. 
The advent of the Internet definitely helped her. 
She talked to anybody she could. 
She argued and argued, and finally she struck lucky when a researcher came through town studying the history of mines in the area, and she told him her story, and at first, of course, like everyone, he didn't believe her, but he went back to Seattle and he did his own research and he realized that she was right. 
So now she had an ally. 
Nevertheless, people still didn't want to know. 
They said things like, "" Well, if it were really dangerous, someone would have told us. "" "" If that's really why everyone was dying, the doctors would have told us. "" Some of the guys used to very heavy jobs said, "" I don't want to be a victim. 
I can't possibly be a victim, and anyway, every industry has its accidents. "" But still Gayla went on, and finally she succeeded in getting a federal agency to come to town and to screen the inhabitants of the town — 15,000 people — and what they discovered was that the town had a mortality rate 80 times higher than anywhere in the United States. 
That was in 2002, and even at that moment, no one raised their hand to say, "" Gayla, look in the playground where your grandchildren are playing. 
It's lined with vermiculite. "" This wasn't ignorance. 
It was willful blindness. 
Willful blindness is a legal concept which means, if there's information that you could know and you should know but you somehow manage not to know, the law deems that you're willfully blind. 
You have chosen not to know. 
There's a lot of willful blindness around these days. 
You can see willful blindness in banks, when thousands of people sold mortgages to people who couldn't afford them. 
You could see them in banks when interest rates were manipulated and everyone around knew what was going on, but everyone studiously ignored it. 
You can see willful blindness in the Catholic Church, where decades of child abuse went ignored. 
You could see willful blindness in the run-up to the Iraq War. 
Willful blindness exists on epic scales like those, and it also exists on very small scales, in people's families, in people's homes and communities, and particularly in organizations and institutions. 
Companies that have been studied for willful blindness can be asked questions like, "" Are there issues at work that people are afraid to raise? "" And when academics have done studies like this of corporations in the United States, what they find is 85 percent of people say yes. 
Eighty-five percent of people know there's a problem, but they won't say anything. 
And when I duplicated the research in Europe, asking all the same questions, I found exactly the same number. 
Eighty-five percent. That's a lot of silence. 
It's a lot of blindness. 
And what's really interesting is that when I go to companies in Switzerland, they tell me, "" This is a uniquely Swiss problem. "" And when I go to Germany, they say, "" Oh yes, this is the German disease. "" And when I go to companies in England, they say, "Oh, yeah, the British are really bad at this." 
And the truth is, this is a human problem. 
We're all, under certain circumstances, willfully blind. 
What the research shows is that some people are blind out of fear. They're afraid of retaliation. 
And some people are blind because they think, well, seeing anything is just futile. 
Nothing's ever going to change. 
If we make a protest, if we protest against the Iraq War, nothing changes, so why bother? 
Better not to see this stuff at all. 
And the recurrent theme that I encounter all the time is people say, "" Well, you know, the people who do see, they're whistleblowers, and we all know what happens to them. "" So there's this profound mythology around whistleblowers which says, first of all, they're all crazy. 
But what I've found going around the world and talking to whistleblowers is, actually, they're very loyal and quite often very conservative people. 
They're hugely dedicated to the institutions that they work for, and the reason that they speak up, the reason they insist on seeing, is because they care so much about the institution and want to keep it healthy. 
And the other thing that people often say about whistleblowers is, "" Well, there's no point, because you see what happens to them. 
They are crushed. 
Nobody would want to go through something like that. "" And yet, when I talk to whistleblowers, the recurrent tone that I hear is pride. 
I think of Joe Darby. 
We all remember the photographs of Abu Ghraib, which so shocked the world and showed the kind of war that was being fought in Iraq. 
But I wonder who remembers Joe Darby, the very obedient, good soldier who found those photographs and handed them in. 
And he said, "" You know, I'm not the kind of guy to rat people out, but some things just cross the line. 
Ignorance is bliss, they say, but you can't put up with things like this. "" I talked to Steve Bolsin, a British doctor, who fought for five years to draw attention to a dangerous surgeon who was killing babies. 
And I asked him why he did it, and he said, "" Well, it was really my daughter who prompted me to do it. 
She came up to me one night, and she just said, 'Dad, you can't let the kids die.' "" Or I think of Cynthia Thomas, a really loyal army daughter and army wife, who, as she saw her friends and relations coming back from the Iraq War, was so shocked by their mental condition and the refusal of the military to recognize and acknowledge post-traumatic stress syndrome that she set up a cafe in the middle of a military town to give them legal, psychological and medical assistance. 
And she said to me, she said, "" You know, Margaret, I always used to say I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grow up. 
But I've found myself in this cause, and I'll never be the same. "" We all enjoy so many freedoms today, hard-won freedoms: the freedom to write and publish without fear of censorship, a freedom that wasn't here the last time I came to Hungary; a freedom to vote, which women in particular had to fight so hard for; the freedom for people of different ethnicities and cultures and sexual orientation to live the way that they want. 
But freedom doesn't exist if you don't use it, and what whistleblowers do, and what people like Gayla Benefield do is they use the freedom that they have. 
And what they're very prepared to do is recognize that yes, this is going to be an argument, and yes I'm going to have a lot of rows with my neighbors and my colleagues and my friends, but I'm going to become very good at this conflict. 
I'm going to take on the naysayers, because they'll make my argument better and stronger. 
I can collaborate with my opponents to become better at what I do. 
These are people of immense persistence, incredible patience, and an absolute determination not to be blind and not to be silent. 
When I went to Libby, Montana, I visited the asbestosis clinic that Gayla Benefield brought into being, a place where at first some of the people who wanted help and needed medical attention went in the back door because they didn't want to acknowledge that she'd been right. 
I sat in a diner, and I watched as trucks drove up and down the highway, carting away the earth out of gardens and replacing it with fresh, uncontaminated soil. 
I took my 12-year-old daughter with me, because I really wanted her to meet Gayla. 
And she said, "" Why? What's the big deal? "" I said, "" She's not a movie star, and she's not a celebrity, and she's not an expert, and Gayla's the first person who'd say she's not a saint. 
The really important thing about Gayla is she is ordinary. 
She's like you, and she's like me. 
She had freedom, and she was ready to use it. "" Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I want to talk about what we learn from conservatives. 
And I'm at a stage in life where I'm yearning for my old days, so I want to confess to you that when I was a kid, indeed, I was a conservative. 
I was a Young Republican, a Teenage Republican, a leader in the Teenage Republicans. 
Indeed, I was the youngest member of any delegation in the 1980 convention that elected Ronald Reagan to be the Republican nominee for president. 
Now, I know what you're thinking. 
(Laughter) You're thinking, "" That's not what the Internets say. "" You're thinking, "" Wikipedia doesn't say this fact. "" And indeed, this is just one of the examples of the junk that flows across the tubes in these Internets here. 
Wikipedia reports that this guy, this former congressman from Erie, Pennsylvania was, at the age of 20, one of the youngest people at the Republican National Convention, but it's just not true. 
(Laughter) Indeed, it drives me so nuts, let me just change this little fact here. (Laughter) 
(Applause) All right. Okay, so... perfect. 
Perfect. 
(Laughter) Okay, speaker Lawrence Lessig, right. 
Okay. 
Finally, truth will be brought here. 
Okay, see? It's done. It's almost done. Here we go. 
""... Youngest Republican, "" okay, we're finished. 
That's it. Please save this. 
Great, here we go. 
And... Wikipedia is fixed, finally. 
Okay, but no, this is really besides the point. 
(Applause) But the thing I want you to think about when we think about conservatives — not so much this issue of the 1980 convention — the thing to think about is this: They go to church. 
Now, you know, I mean, a lot of people go to church. 
I'm not talking about that only conservatives go to church. 
And I'm not talking about the God thing. 
I don't want to get into that, you know; that's not my point. 
They go to church, by which I mean, they do lots of things for free for each other. 
They hold potluck dinners. 
Indeed, they sell books about potluck dinners. 
They serve food to poor people. 
They share, they give, they give away for free. 
And it's the very same people leading Wall Street firms who, on Sundays, show up and share. 
And not only food, right. 
These very same people are strong believers, in lots of contexts, in the limits on the markets. 
They are in many important places against markets. 
Indeed, they, like all of us, celebrate this kind of relationship. 
But they're very keen that we don't let money drop into that relationship, else it turns into something like this. 
They want to regulate us, those conservatives, to stop us from allowing the market to spread in those places. 
Because they understand: There are places for the market and places where the market should not exist, where we should be free to enjoy the fellowship of others. 
They recognize: Both of these things have to live together. 
And the second great thing about conservatives: they get ecology. 
Right, it was the first great Republican president of the 20th century who taught us about environmental thinking — Teddy Roosevelt. 
They first taught us about ecology in the context of natural resources. 
And then they began to teach us in the context of innovation, economics. 
They understand, in that context, "" free. "" They understand "" free "" is an important essential part of the cultural ecology as well. 
That's the thing I want you to think about them. 
Now, I know you don't believe me, really, here. 
So here's exhibit number one. 
I want to share with you my latest hero, Julian Sanchez, a libertarian who works at the, for many people, "" evil "" Cato Institute. 
Okay, so Julian made this video. 
He's a terrible producer of videos, but it's great content, so I'm going to give you a little bit of it. 
So here he is beginning. 
Julian Sanchez: I'm going to make an observation about the way remix culture seems to be evolving... 
Larry Lessig: So what he does is he begins to tell us about these three videos. 
This is this fantastic Brat Pack remix set to Lisztomania. 
Which, of course, spread virally. 
Hugely successful. 
(Music) And then some people from Brooklyn saw it. 
They decided they wanted to do the same. 
(Music) And then, of course, people from San Fransisco saw it. 
And San Franciscans thought they had to do the same as well. 
(Music) And so they're beautiful, but this libertarian has some important lessons he wants us to learn from this. 
Here's lesson number one. 
JS: There's obviously also something really deeply great about this. 
They are acting in the sense that they're emulating the original mashup. 
And the guy who shot it obviously has a strong eye and some experience with video editing. 
But this is also basically just a group of friends having an authentic social moment and screwing around together. 
It should feel familiar and kind of resonate for anyone who's had a sing-a-long or a dance party with a group of good friends. 
LL: Or... 
JS: So that's importantly different from the earlier videos we looked at because here, remix isn't just about an individual doing something alone in his basement; it becomes an act of social creativity. 
And it's not just that it yields a different kind of product at the end, it's that potentially it changes the way that we relate to each other. 
All of our normal social interactions become a kind of invitation to this sort of collective expression. 
It's our real social lives themselves that are transmuted into art. 
LL: And so then, what this libertarian draws from these two points... 
JS: One remix is about individuals using our shared culture as a kind of language to communicate something to an audience. 
Stage two, social remix, is really about using it to mediate people's relationships to each other. 
First, within each video, the Brat Pack characters are used as a kind of template for performing the social reality of each group. 
But there's also a dialogue between the videos, where, once the basic structure is established, it becomes a kind of platform for articulating the similarities and differences between the groups' social and physical worlds. 
LL: And then, here's for me, the critical key to what Julian has to say... 
JS: Copyright policy isn't just about how to incentivize the production of a certain kind of artistic commodity; it's about what level of control we're going to permit to be exercised over our social realities — social realities that are now inevitably permeated by pop culture. 
I think it's important that we keep these two different kinds of public goods in mind. 
If we're only focused on how to maximize the supply of one, I think we risk suppressing this different and richer and, in some ways, maybe even more important one. 
LL: Right. Bingo. Point. 
Freedom needs this opportunity to both have the commercial success of the great commercial works and the opportunity to build this different kind of culture. 
And for that to happen, you need ideas like fair use to be central and protected, to enable this kind of innovation, as this libertarian tells us, between these two creative cultures, a commercial and a sharing culture. 
The point is they, he, here, gets that culture. 
Now, my concern is, we Dems, too often, not so much. 
All right, take for example this great company. 
In the good old days when this Republican ran that company, their greatest work was work that built on the past, right. 
All of the great Disney works were works that took works that were in the public domain and remixed them, or waited until they entered the public domain to remix them, to celebrate this add-on remix creativity. 
Indeed, Mickey Mouse himself, of course, as "" Steamboat Willie, "" is a remix of the then, very dominant, very popular "" Steamboat Bill "" by Buster Keaton. 
This man was a remixer extraordinaire. 
He is the celebration and ideal of exactly this kind of creativity. 
But then the company passes through this dark stage to this Democrat. 
Wildly different. 
This is the mastermind behind the eventual passage of what we call the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, extending the term of existing copyrights by 20 years, so that no one could do to Disney what Disney did to the Brothers Grimm. 
Now, when we tried to challenge this, going to the Supreme Court, getting the Supreme Court, the bunch of conservatives there — if we could get them to wake up to this — to strike it down, we had the assistance of Nobel Prize winners including this right-wing Nobel Prize winner, Milton Friedman, who said he would join our brief only if the word "" no brainer "" was in the brief somewhere. 
(Laughter) But apparently, no brains existed in this place when Democrats passed and signed this bill into law. 
Now, tiny little quibble of a footnote: Sonny Bono, you might say, was a Republican, but I don't buy it. 
This guy is no Republican. 
Okay, for a second example, think about this cultural hero, icon on the Left, creator of this character. 
Look at the site that he built: "" Star Wars "" MashUps, inviting people to come and use their creative energy to produce a new generation of attention towards this extraordinarily important cultural icon. 
Read the license. 
The license for these remixers assigns all of the rights to the remix back to Lucas. 
The mashup is owned by Lucas. 
Indeed, anything you add to the mashup, music you might add, Lucas has a worldwide perpetual right to exploit that for free. 
There is no creator here to be recognized. 
The creator doesn't have any rights. 
The creator is a sharecropper in this story. 
And we should remember who employed the sharecroppers: the Democrats, right? 
So the point is the Republicans here recognize that there's a certain need of ownership, a respect for ownership, the respect we should give the creator, the remixer, the owner, the property owner, the copyright owner of this extraordinarily powerful stuff, and not a generation of sharecroppers. 
Now, I think there are lessons we should learn here, lessons about openness. 
Our lives are sharing activities, at least in part. 
Even for the head of Goldman Sachs, at least in part. 
And for that sharing activity to happen, we have to have well-protected spaces of fair use. 
That's number one. Number two: This ecology of sharing needs freedom within which to create. 
Freedom, which means without permission from anyone, the ability to create. 
And number three: We need to respect the creator, the creator of these remixes through rights that are directly tied to them. 
Now, this explains the right-wing nonprofit Creative Commons. 
Actually, it's not a right-wing nonprofit, but of course — let me just tie it here — the Creative Commons, which is offering authors this simple way to mark their content with the freedoms they intended to carry. 
So that we go from a "" all rights reserved "" world to a "" some rights reserved "" world so that people can know the freedoms they have attached to the content, building and creating on the basis of this creative copyrighted work. 
These tools that we built enable this sharing in parts through licenses that make it clear and a freedom to create without requiring permission first because the permission has already been granted and a respect for the creator because it builds upon a copyright the creator has licensed freely. 
And it explains the vast right-wing conspiracy that's obviously developed around these licenses, as now more than 350 million digital objects are out there, licensed freely in this way. 
Now that picture of an ecology of creativity, the picture of an ecology of balanced creativity, is that the ecology of creativity we have right now? 
Well, as you all know, not many of us believe we do. 
I tripped on the reality of this ecology of creativity just last week. 
I created a video which was based on a Wireside Chat that I'd given, and I uploaded it to YouTube. 
I then got this email from YouTube weirdly notifying me that there was content in that owned by the mysterious WMG that matched their content ID. 
So I didn't think much about it. 
And then on Twitter, somebody said to me, "Your talk on YouTube was DMCA'd. Was that your purpose?" 
imagining that I had this deep conspiracy to reveal the obvious flaws in the DMCA. 
I answered, "" No. "" I didn't even think about it. 
But then I went to the site and all of the audio in my site had been silenced. 
My whole 45-minute video had been silenced because there were snippets in that video, a video about fair use, that included Warner Music Group music. 
Now, interestingly, they still sold ads for that music, if you played the silent video. 
You could still buy the music, but you couldn't hear anything because it had been silenced. 
So I did what the current regime says I must do to be free to use YouTube to talk about fair use. 
I went to this site, and I had to answer these questions. 
And then in an extraordinarily Bart Simpson-like, juvenile way you've actually got to type out these words and get them right to reassert your freedom to speak. 
And I felt like I was in third grade again. 
"" I will not put tacks on the teacher's chair. 
I will not put tacks on the teacher's chair. "" This is absurd. 
It is outrageous. 
It is an extraordinary perversion of the system of freedom we should be encouraging. 
And the question I ask you is: Who's fighting it? 
Well, interestingly, in the last presidential election, who was the number one, active opponent of this system of regulation in online speech? 
John McCain. 
Letter after letter attacking YouTube's refusal to be more respectful of fair use with their extraordinary notice and take down system, that led his campaign so many times to be thrown off the Internet. 
Now, that was the story of me then, my good old days of right-wing lunacy. 
Let me come back to now, now when I'm a little leftist — I'm certainly left-handed, so at least a lefty — And I wonder, can we on the Left expect to build this ecology of freedom, now, in a world where we know the extraordinarily powerful influences against it, where even icons of the Left like this entertain and push bills that would effectively ban the requirement of open access for government-funded research? 
The president, who has supported a process that secretly negotiates agreements, which effectively lock us into the insane system of DMCA that we have adopted and likely lock us down a path of three strikes, you're out that, of course, the rest of the world are increasingly adopting. 
Not a single example of reform has been produced yet. 
And we're not going to see this change in this system anytime soon. 
So here's the lessons of openness that I think we need to learn. 
Openness is a commitment to a certain set of values. 
We need to speak of those values. 
The value of freedom. It's a value of community. 
It's a value of the limits in regulation. 
It's a value respecting the creator. 
Now, if we can learn those values from at least some influences on the Right, if we can take them and incorporate them, maybe we could do a little trade. 
We learn those values on the Left, and maybe they'll do health care or global warming legislation or something in the Right. 
Anyway, please join me in teaching these values. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Hey buddy, are you sure you lost your keys here? "" And the guy says, "" No, actually I lost them down at the other end of the street, but the light is better here. "" (Laughter) There's a concept that people talk about nowadays called "" big data. "" And what they're talking about is all of the information that we're generating through our interaction with and over the Internet, everything from Facebook and Twitter to music downloads, movies, streaming, all this kind of stuff, the live streaming of TED. 
And the folks who work with big data, for them, they talk about that their biggest problem is we have so much information. 
So we don't know, for example, how many people right now are being affected by disasters or by conflict situations. 
We don't know for, really, basically, any of the clinics in the developing world, which ones have medicines and which ones don't. 
We have no idea of what the supply chain is for those clinics. 
For all of these different critically important problems or critically important areas that we want to solve problems in, we basically know nothing at all. 
This is about a 5,000-year-old technology. 
Some of you may have used it before. 
And what you're looking at is a paper form in the hand of a Ministry of Health nurse in Indonesia, who is tramping out across the countryside in Indonesia on, I'm sure, a very hot and humid day, and she is going to be knocking on thousands of doors over a period of weeks or months, knocking on the doors and saying, "" Excuse me, we'd like to ask you some questions. 
You know, a census of Indonesia would probably take two years to accomplish. 
We have paper forms to track drug supplies, blood supplies — all these different paper forms for many different topics, they all have a single, common endpoint, and the common endpoint looks something like this. 
This is the data from a single vaccination coverage survey in a single district in the country of Zambia from a few years ago, that I participated in. 
The only thing anyone was trying to find out is what percentage of Zambian children are vaccinated, and this is the data, collected on paper over weeks, from a single district, which is something like a county in the United States. 
And millions of children die of these diseases every year. 
Now try and wrap your head around that for a second. 
They went out into the field to answer a particular question. 
And then for some reason, momentum is lost or there's no money left, and all of that comes to nothing, because no one actually types it into the computer at all. 
This is what we base our decisions on in global health: little data, old data, no data. 
But to me, the most significant thing that I saw in 1995 was this. 
Hard for us to imagine, but in 1995, this was the ultimate elite mobile device. 
We can skip straight to the analysis and then straight to the use of the data to actually save lives. "" So that's what I began to do. 
It worked exactly as well as anybody would have predicted. 
The demand for this, the need for data to run better programs just within health — not to mention all of the other fields in developing countries — is enormous. 
There are millions and millions and millions of programs, millions of clinics that need to track drugs, millions of vaccine programs. 
It's always guys that look pretty much like me, flying from countries that look pretty much like this to other countries with people with darker skin. 
And you go out there, and you spend money on airfare and you spend time and you spend per diem and you spend for a hotel and all that stuff. 
You may not think of Hotmail as being miraculous, but for me it was miraculous, because I noticed, just as I was wrestling with this problem — I was working in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly, at the time — I noticed that every sub-Saharan African health worker that I was working with had a Hotmail account. 
No one has to speak to me, you just have to hear about it and go to the website. 
It's cloud based, and it doesn't require any training, programming, consultants. 
What happened after we did this? 
In the second three years, we had 14,000 people find the website, sign up and start using it to collect data: data for disaster response, Canadian pig farmers tracking pig disease and pig herds, people tracking drug supplies. 
One of my favorite examples, the IRC, International Rescue Committee, they have a program where semi-literate midwives, using $10 mobile phones, send a text message using our software, once a week, with the number of births and the number of deaths, which gives IRC something that no one in global health has ever had: a near-real-time system of counting babies, of knowing how many kids are born, of knowing how many children there are in Sierra Leone, which is the country where this is happening, and knowing how many children die. 
Physicians for Human Rights — this is moving a little bit outside the health field — they're basically training people to do rape exams in Congo, where this is an epidemic, a horrible epidemic, and they're using our software to document the evidence they find, including photographically, so that they can bring the perpetrators to justice. 
That's less than I used to get just traveling out for two weeks to do a consultation. 

Is there life beyond Earth in our solar system? 
Wow, what a powerful question. 
You know, as a scientist — planetary scientist — we really didn't take that very seriously until recently. 
Carl Sagan always said, "It takes extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims." 
And the claims of having life beyond Earth need to be definitive, they need to be loud and they need to be everywhere for us to be able to believe it. 
So how do we make this journey? 
What we decided to do is first look for those ingredients for life. 
The ingredients of life are: liquid water — we have to have a solvent, can't be ice, has to be liquid. 
We also have to have energy. 
So we have to have these elements in environments for long periods of time for us to be able to be confident that life, in that moment when it starts, can spark and then grow and evolve. 
Well, I have to tell you that early in my career, when we looked at those three elements, I didn't believe that they were beyond Earth in any length of time and for any real quantity. 
Mars — dry and arid. 
And beyond Mars, the water in the solar system is all frozen. 
But recent observations have changed all that. 
It's now turning our attention to the right places for us to take a deeper look and really start to answer our life question. 
So when we look out into the solar system, where are the possibilities? 
We're concentrating our attention on four locations. 
The planet Mars and then three moons of the outer planets: Titan, Europa and small Enceladus. 
So what about Mars? 
Well, Mars we thought was initially moon-like: full of craters, arid and a dead world. 
And so about 15 years ago, we started a series of missions to go to Mars and see if water existed on Mars in its past that changed its geology. 
And indeed we started to be surprised right away. 
And in fact, Curiosity — which has been roving on the surface now for about three years — has really shown us that it's sitting in an ancient river bed, where water flowed rapidly. 
And not for a little while, perhaps hundreds of millions of years. 
And if everything was there, including organics, perhaps life had started. 
So Mars in its past, with a lot of water, perhaps plenty of time, could have had life, could have had that spark, could have grown. 
A few months ago the fairy tale came true. 
These craters are weeping during the summer. 
Well, it tells us that Mars has all the ingredients necessary for life. 
So what are we going to do next? 
As we move out into the solar system, here's the tiny moon Enceladus. 
This is not in what we call the traditional habitable zone, this area around the sun. 
This object should be ice over a silicate core. 
But what did we find? 
Enceladus is blasting sheets of water out into the solar system and sloshing back down onto the moon. 
What a fabulous environment. 
Where does the silica come from? 
The tidal energy is generated by Saturn, pulling and squeezing this moon — is melting that ice, creating an ocean. 
Now, the only thing that we can think of that does that here on Earth as an analogy... 
are hydrothermal vents. 
Hydrothermal vents deep in our ocean were discovered in 1977. 
And now there are thousands of these below the ocean. 
What do we find? 
The oceanographers, when they go and look at these hydrothermal vents, they're teeming with life, regardless of whether the water is acidic or alkaline — doesn't matter. 
So what about Enceladus? 
Well, we believe because it has water and has had it for a significant period of time, and we believe it has hydrothermal vents with perhaps the right organic material, it is a place where life could exist. 
Another moon, very similar, is Europa. 
Galileo visited Jupiter's system in 1996 and made fabulous observations of Europa. 
Europa, we also know, has an under-the-ice crust ocean. 
Galileo mission told us that, but we never saw any plumes. 
Hubble, just a couple years ago, observing Europa, saw plumes of water spraying from the cracks in the southern hemisphere, just exactly like Enceladus. 
These moons, which are not in what we call a traditional habitable zone, that are out in the solar system, have liquid water. 
This is a fabulous set of discoveries because these moons have been in this environment like that for billions of years. 
Life started here on Earth, we believe, after about the first 500 million, and look where we are. 
These moons are fabulous moons. 
Another moon that we're looking at is Titan. 
Titan is a huge moon of Saturn. 
It has an extensive atmosphere. 
And on the surface, Cassini has found liquid. 
We see lakes... 
actually almost the size of our Black Sea in some places. 
If there's any place in the solar system where life is not like us, where the substitute of water is another solvent — and it could be methane — it could be Titan. 
Well, is there life beyond Earth in the solar system? 
The data that we're receiving is really exciting and telling us — forcing us to think about this in new and exciting ways. 
I believe we're on the right track. 
Just think about that. 
Thank you. 

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

Well, as Alexander Graham Bell famously said on his first successful telephone call, "Hello, is that Domino's Pizza?" 
(Laughter) I just really want to thank you very much. 
As another famous man, Jerry Garcia, said, "What a strange, long trip." 
And he should have said, "What a strange, long trip it's about to become." 
At this very moment, you are viewing my upper half. 
My lower half is appearing at a different conference (Laughter) in a different country. 
You can, it turns out, be in two places at once. 
But still, I'm sorry I can't be with you in person. 
I'll explain at another time. 
And though I'm a rock star, I just want to assure you that none of my wishes will include a hot tub. 
But what really turns me on about technology is not just the ability to get more songs on MP3 players. 
The revolution — this revolution — is much bigger than that. 
I hope, I believe. 
What turns me on about the digital age, what excites me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. 
You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. 
Now, you need a laptop. 
If you wanted to make a film, you needed a mass of equipment and a Hollywood budget. 
Now, you need a camera that fits in your palm, and a couple of bucks for a blank DVD. 
Imagination has been decoupled from the old constraints. 
And that really, really excites me. 
I'm excited when I glimpse that kind of thinking writ large. 
What I would like to see is idealism decoupled from all constraints. 
Political, economic, psychological, whatever. 
The geopolitical world has got a lot to learn from the digital world. 
From the ease with which you swept away obstacles that no one knew could even be budged. 
And that's actually what I'd like to talk about today. 
First, though, I should probably explain why, and how, I got to this place. 
It's a journey that started 20 years ago. 
You may remember that song, "" We Are the World, "" or, "" Do They Know It's Christmas? "" Band Aid, Live Aid. 
Another very tall, grizzled rock star, my friend Sir Bob Geldof, issued a challenge to "" feed the world. "" It was a great moment, and it utterly changed my life. 
That summer, my wife, Ali, and myself went to Ethiopia. 
We went on the quiet to see for ourselves what was going on. 
We lived in Ethiopia for a month, working at an orphanage. 
The children had a name for me. 
They called me, "" The girl with the beard. "" (Laughter) Don't ask. 
Anyway, we found Africa to be a magical place. 
Big skies, big hearts, big, shining continent. 
Beautiful, royal people. 
Anybody who ever gave anything to Africa got a lot more back. 
Ethiopia didn't just blow my mind; it opened my mind. 
Anyway, on our last day at this orphanage a man handed me his baby and said, "Would you take my son with you?" 
He knew, in Ireland, that his son would live, and that in Ethiopia, his son would die. 
It was the middle of that awful famine. 
Well, I turned him down. 
And it was a funny kind of sick feeling, but I turned him down. 
And it's a feeling I can't ever quite forget. 
And in that moment, I started this journey. 
In that moment, I became the worst thing of all: I became a rock star with a cause. (Laughter) Except this isn't the cause, is it? 
Six-and-a-half thousand Africans dying every single day from AIDS — a preventable, treatable disease — for lack of drugs we can get in any pharmacy. 
That's not a cause. That's an emergency. 
11 million AIDS orphans in Africa, 20 million by the end of the decade. 
That's not a cause. That's an emergency. 
Today, every day, 9,000 more Africans will catch HIV because of stigmatization and lack of education. 
That's not a cause. That's an emergency. 
So what we're talking about here is human rights. 
The right to live like a human. 
The right to live, period. 
And what we're facing in Africa is an unprecedented threat to human dignity and equality. 
The next thing I'd like to be clear about is what this problem is, and what this problem isn't. 
Because this is not all about charity. 
This is about justice. Really. 
This is not about charity. This is about justice. 
That's right. 
And that's too bad, because we're very good at charity. 
Americans, like Irish people, are good at it. 
Even the poorest neighborhoods give more than they can afford. 
We like to give, and we give a lot. 
Look at the response to the tsunami — it's inspiring. 
But justice is a tougher standard than charity. 
You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. 
It makes a farce of our idea of equality. 
It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. 
It questions our commitment. 
Because there is no way we can look at what's happening in Africa, and if we're honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else. 
As you heard in the film, anywhere else, not here. 
Not here, not in America, not in Europe. 
In fact, a head of state that you're all familiar with admitted this to me. And it's really true. 
There is no chance this kind of hemorrhaging of human life would be accepted anywhere else other than Africa. 
Africa is a continent in flames. 
And deep down, if we really accepted that Africans were equal to us, we would all do more to put the fire out. 
We're standing around with watering cans, when what we really need is the fire brigade. 
You see, it's not as dramatic as the tsunami. 
It's crazy, really, when you think about it. 
Does stuff have to look like an action movie these days to exist in the front of our brain? 
The slow extinguishing of countless lives is just not dramatic enough, it would appear. 
Catastrophes that we can avert are not as interesting as ones we could avert. 
Funny, that. 
Anyway, I believe that that kind of thinking offends the intellectual rigor in this room. 
Six-and-a-half thousand people dying a day in Africa may be Africa's crisis, but the fact that it's not on the nightly news, that we in Europe, or you in America, are not treating it like an emergency — I want to argue with you tonight that that's our crisis. 
I want to argue that though Africa is not the front line in the war against terror, it could be soon. 
Every week, religious extremists take another African village. 
They're attempting to bring order to chaos. 
Well, why aren't we? 
Poverty breeds despair. We know this. 
Despair breeds violence. We know this. 
In turbulent times, isn't it cheaper, and smarter, to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later? 
"The war against terror is bound up in the war against poverty." 
And I didn't say that. Colin Powell said that. 
Now when the military are telling us that this is a war that cannot be won by military might alone, maybe we should listen. 
There's an opportunity here, and it's real. 
It's not spin. It's not wishful thinking. 
The problems facing the developing world afford us in the developed world a chance to re-describe ourselves to the world. 
We will not only transform other people's lives, but we will also transform the way those other lives see us. 
And that might be smart in these nervous, dangerous times. 
Don't you think that on a purely commercial level, that anti-retroviral drugs are great advertisements for Western ingenuity and technology? 
Doesn't compassion look well on us? 
And let's cut the crap for a second. 
In certain quarters of the world, brand EU, brand USA, is not at its shiniest. 
The neon sign is fizzing and cracking. 
Someone's put a brick through the window. 
The regional branch managers are getting nervous. 
Never before have we in the west been so scrutinized. 
Our values: do we have any? 
Our credibility? 
These things are under attack around the world. 
Brand USA could use some polishing. 
And I say that as a fan, you know? 
As a person who buys the products. 
But think about it. 
More anti-retrovirals make sense. 
But that's just the easy part, or ought to be. 
But equality for Africa — that's a big, expensive idea. 
You see, the scale of the suffering numbs us into a kind of indifference. 
What on earth can we all do about this? 
Well, much more than we think. 
We can't fix every problem, but the ones we can, I want to argue, we must. 
And because we can, we must. 
This is the straight truth, the righteous truth. 
It is not a theory. 
The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it: we do not have to stand for this. 
A whole continent written off — we do not have to stand for this. 
(Applause) And let me say this without a trace of irony — before I back it up to a bunch of ex-hippies. 
Forget the '60s. We can change the world. 
I can't; you can't, as individuals; but we can change the world. 
I really believe that, the people in this room. 
Look at the Gates Foundation. 
They've done incredible stuff, unbelievable stuff. 
But working together, we can actually change the world. 
We can turn the inevitable outcomes, and transform the quality of life for millions of lives who look and feel rather like us, when you're up close. 
I'm sorry to laugh here, but you do look so different than you did in Haight-Ashbury in the '60s. 
(Laughter) But I want to argue that this is the moment that you are designed for. 
It is the flowering of the seeds you planted in earlier, headier days. 
Ideas that you gestated in your youth. 
This is what excites me. 
This room was born for this moment, is really what I want to say to you tonight. 
Most of you started out wanting to change the world, didn't you? 
Most of you did, the digital world. 
Well, now, actually because of you, it is possible to change the physical world. 
It's a fact. 
Economists confirm it, and they know much more than I do. 
So why, then, are we not pumping our fists into the air? 
Probably because when we admit we can do something about it, we've got to do something about it. 
It is a pain in the arse. 
This equality business is actually a pain in the arse. 
But for the first time in history, we have the technology; we have the know-how; we have the cash; we have the life-saving drugs. 
Do we have the will? 
I hope this is obvious, but I'm not a hippie. 
And I'm not really one for the warm, fuzzy feeling. 
I do not have flowers in my hair. 
Actually, I come from punk rock. 
The Clash wore big army boots, not sandals. 
But I know toughness when I see it. 
And for all the talk of peace and love on the West Coast, there was muscle to the movement that started out here. 
You see, idealism detached from action is just a dream. 
But idealism allied with pragmatism, with rolling up your sleeves and making the world bend a bit, is very exciting. It's very real. It's very strong. 
And it's very present in a crowd like you. 
Last year at DATA, this organization I helped set up, we launched a campaign to summon this spirit in the fight against AIDS and extreme poverty. 
We're calling it the ONE Campaign. 
It's based on our belief that the action of one person can change a lot, but the actions of many coming together as one can change the world. 
Well, we feel that now is the time to prove we're right. 
There are moments in history when civilization redefines itself. 
We believe this is one. 
We believe that this could be the time when the world finally decides that the wanton loss of life in Africa is just no longer acceptable. 
This could be the time that we finally get serious about changing the future for most people who live on planet Earth. 
Momentum has been building. 
Lurching a little, but it's building. 
This year is a test for us all, especially the leaders of the G8 nations, who really are on the line here, with all the world in history watching. 
I have been, of late, disappointed with the Bush Administration. 
They started out with such promise on Africa. 
They made some really great promises, and actually have fulfilled a lot of them. 
But some of them they haven't. 
They don't feel the push from the ground, is the truth. 
But my disappointment has much more perspective when I talk to American people, and I hear their worries about the deficit, and the fiscal well being of their country. 
I understand that. 
But there's much more push from the ground than you'd think, if we got organized. 
What I try to communicate, and you can help me if you agree, is that aid for Africa is just great value for money at a time when America really needs it. 
Putting it in the crassest possible terms, the investment reaps huge returns. 
Not only in lives saved, but in goodwill, stability and security that we'll gain. 
So this is what I hope that you will do, if I could be so bold, and not have it deducted from my number of wishes. 
(Laughter) What I hope is that beyond individual merciful acts, that you will tell the politicians to do right by Africa, by America and by the world. 
Give them permission, if you like, to spend their political capital and your financial capital, your national purse on saving the lives of millions of people. 
That's really what I would like you to do. 
Because we also need your intellectual capital: your ideas, your skills, your ingenuity. 
And you, at this conference, are in a unique position. 
Some of the technologies we've been talking about, you invented them, or at least revolutionized the way that they're used. 
Together you have changed the zeitgeist from analog to digital, and pushed the boundaries. 
And we'd like you to give us that energy. 
Give us that kind of dreaming, that kind of doing. 
As I say, there're two things on the line here. 
There's the continent Africa. 
But there's also our sense of ourselves. 
People are starting to figure this out. 
Movements are springing up. 
Artists, politicians, pop stars, priests, CEOs, NGOs, mothers' unions, student unions. 
A lot of people are getting together, and working under this umbrella I told you about earlier, the ONE Campaign. 
I think they just have one idea in their mind, which is, where you live in the world should not determine whether you live in the world. 
(Applause) History, like God, is watching what we do. 
When the history books get written, I think our age will be remembered for three things. 
Really, it's just three things this whole age will be remembered for. 
The digital revolution, yes. 
The war against terror, yes. 
And what we did or did not do to put out the fires in Africa. 
Some say we can't afford to. I say we can't afford not to. 
Thank you, thank you very much. 
(Applause) Okay, my three wishes. 
The ones that TED has offered to grant. 
You see, if this is true, and I believe it is, that the digital world you all created has uncoupled the creative imagination from the physical constraints of matter, this should be a piece of piss. 
(Laughter) I should add that this started out as a much longer list of wishes. 
Most of them impossible, some of them impractical and one or two of them certainly immoral. 
(Laughter) This business, it gets to be addictive, you know what I mean, when somebody else is picking up the tab. 
Anyway, here's number one. 
I wish for you to help build a social movement of more than one million American activists for Africa. 
That is my first wish. 
I believe it's possible. 
A few minutes ago, I talked about all the citizens' campaigns that are springing up. 
You know, there's lots out there. 
And with this one campaign as our umbrella, my organization, DATA, and other groups, have been tapping into the energy and the enthusiasm that's out there from Hollywood into the heartland of America. 
We know there's more than enough energy to power this movement. 
We just need your help in making it happen. 
We want all of you here, church America, corporate America, Microsoft America, Apple America, Coke America, Pepsi America, nerd America, noisy America. 
We can't afford to be cool and sit this one out. 
I do believe if we build a movement that's one million Americans strong, we're not going to be denied. 
We will have the ear of Congress. 
We'll be the first page in Condi Rice's briefing book, and right into the Oval Office. 
If there's one million Americans — and I really know this — who are ready to make phone calls, who are ready to be on email, I am absolutely sure that we can actually change the course of history, literally, for the continent of Africa. 
Anyway, so I'd like your help in getting that signed up. 
I know John Gage and Sun Microsystems are already on board for this, but there's lots of you we'd like to talk to. 
Right, my second wish, number two. 
I would like one media hit for every person on the planet who is living on less than one dollar a day. 
That's one billion media hits. 
Could be on Google, could be on AOL. 
Steve Case, Larry, Sergey — they've done a lot already. 
It could be NBC. It could be ABC. 
Actually we're talking to ABC today about the Oscars. 
We have a film, produced by Jon Kamen at Radical Media. 
But you know, we want, we need some airtime for our ideas. 
We need to get the math; we need to get the statistics out to the American people. 
I really believe that old Truman line, that if you give the American people the facts, they'll do the right thing. 
And, the other thing that's important is that this is not Sally Struthers. 
This has to be described as an adventure, not a burden. 
(Video): One by one they step forward, a nurse, a teacher, a homemaker, and lives are saved. 
The problem is enormous. 
Every three seconds one person dies. 
Another three seconds, one more. 
The situation is so desperate in parts of Africa, Asia, even America, that aid groups, just as they did for the tsunami, are uniting as one, acting as one. 
We can beat extreme poverty, starvation, AIDS. 
But we need your help. 
One more person, letter, voice will mean the difference between life and death for millions of people. 
Please join us by working together. 
Americans have an unprecedented opportunity. 
We can make history. 
We can start to make poverty history. 
One, by one, by one. 
Please visit ONE at this address. 
We're not asking for your money. We're asking for your voice. 
Bono: All right. I wish for TED to truly show the power of information, its power to rewrite the rules and transform lives, by connecting every hospital, health clinic and school in one African country. 
And I would like it to be Ethiopia. 
I believe we can connect every school in Ethiopia, every health clinic, every hospital — we can connect to the Internet. 
That is my wish, my third wish. 
I think it's possible. 
I think we have the money and brains in the room to do that. 
And that would be a mind-blowing wish to come true. 
I've been to Ethiopia, as I said earlier. 
It's actually where it all started for me. 
The idea that the Internet, which changed all of our lives, can transform a country — and a continent that has hardly made it to analog, let alone digital — blows my mind. 
But it didn't start out that way. 
The first long-distance line from Boston to New York was used in 1885 on the phone. 
It was just nine years later that Addis Ababa was connected by phone to Harare, which is 500 kilometers away. 
Since then, not that much has changed. 
The average waiting time to get a landline in Ethiopia is actually about seven or eight years. 
But wireless technology wasn't dreamt up then. 
Anyway, I'm Irish, and as you can see, I know how important talking is. 
Communication is very important for Ethiopia — will transform the country. 
Nurses getting better training, pharmacists being able to order supplies, doctors sharing their expertise in all aspects of medicine. 
It's a very, very good idea to get them wired. 
And that is my third and final wish for you at the TED conference. 
Thank you very much once again. 
(Applause) 

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

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

I am passionate about the American landscape and how the physical form of the land, from the great Central Valley of California to the bedrock of Manhattan, has really shaped our history and our character. 
But one thing is clear. 
In the last 100 years alone, our country — and this is a sprawl map of America — our country has systematically flattened and homogenized the landscape to the point where we've forgotten our relationship with the plants and animals that live alongside us and the dirt beneath our feet. 
And so, how I see my work contributing is sort of trying to literally re-imagine these connections and physically rebuild them. 
This graph represents what we're dealing with now in the built environment. 
And it's really a conflux of urban population rising, biodiversity plummeting and also, of course, sea levels rising and climate changing. 
So when I also think about design, I think about trying to rework and re-engage the lines on this graph in a more productive way. 
And you can see from the arrow here indicating "" you are here, "" I'm trying to sort of blend and meld these two very divergent fields of urbanism and ecology, and sort of bring them together in an exciting new way. 
So the era of big infrastructure is over. 
I mean, these sort of top-down, mono-functional, capital-intensive solutions are really not going to cut it. 
We need new tools and new approaches. 
Similarly, the idea of architecture as this sort of object in the field, devoid of context, is really not the — excuse me, it's fairly blatant — is really not the approach that we need to take. 
So we need new stories, new heroes and new tools. 
So now I want to introduce you to my new hero in the global climate change war, and that is the eastern oyster. 
So, albeit a very small creature and very modest, this creature is incredible, because it can agglomerate into these mega-reef structures. 
It can grow; you can grow it; and — did I mention? — it's quite tasty. 
So the oyster was the basis for a manifesto-like urban design project that I did about the New York Harbor called "" oyster-tecture. "" And the core idea of oyster-tecture is to harness the biological power of mussels, eelgrass and oysters — species that live in the harbor — and, at the same time, harness the power of people who live in the community towards making change now. 
Here's a map of my city, New York City, showing inundation in red. 
And what's circled is the site that I'm going to talk about, the Gowanus Canal and Governors Island. 
If you look here at this map, showing everything in blue is out in the water, and everything in yellow is upland. 
But you can see, even just intuit, from this map, that the harbor has dredged and flattened, and went from a rich, three-dimensional mosaic to flat muck in really a matter of years. 
Another set of views of actually the Gowanus Canal itself. 
Now the Gowanus is particularly smelly — I will admit it. 
There are problems of sewage overflow and contamination, but I would also argue that almost every city has this exact condition, and it's a condition that we're all facing. 
And here's a map of that condition, showing the contaminants in yellow and green, exacerbated by this new flow of storm-surge and sea-level rise. 
So we really had a lot to deal with. 
When we started this project, one of the core ideas was to look back in history and try to understand what was there. 
And you can see from this map, there's this incredible geographical signature of a series of islands that were out in the harbor and a matrix of salt marshes and beaches that served as natural wave attenuation for the upland settlement. 
We also learned at this time that you could eat an oyster about the size of a dinner plate in the Gowanus Canal itself. 
So our concept is really this back-to-the-future concept, harnessing the intelligence of that land settlement pattern. 
And the idea has two core stages. 
One is to develop a new artificial ecology, a reef out in the harbor, that would then protect new settlement patterns inland and the Gowanus. 
Because if you have cleaner water and slower water, you can imagine a new way of living with that water. 
So the project really addresses these three core issues in a new and exciting way, I think. 
Here we are, back to our hero, the oyster. 
And again, it's this incredibly exciting animal. 
It accepts algae and detritus in one end, and through this beautiful, glamorous set of stomach organs, out the other end comes cleaner water. 
And one oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day. 
Oyster reefs also covered about a quarter of our harbor and were capable of filtering water in the harbor in a matter of days. 
They were key in our culture and our economy. 
Basically, New York was built on the backs of oystermen, and our streets were literally built over oyster shells. 
This image is an image of an oyster cart, which is now as ubiquitous as the hotdog cart is today. 
So again, we got the short end of the deal there. 
(Laughter) Finally, oysters can attenuate and agglomerate onto each other and form these amazing natural reef structures. 
They really become nature's wave attenuators. 
And they become the bedrock of any harbor ecosystem. 
Many, many species depend on them. 
So we were inspired by the oyster, but I was also inspired by the life cycle of the oyster. 
It can move from a fertilized egg to a spat, which is when they're floating through the water, and when they're ready to attach onto another oyster, to an adult male oyster or female oyster, in a number of weeks. 
We reinterpreted this life cycle on the scale of our sight and took the Gowanus as a giant oyster nursery where oysters would be grown up in the Gowanus, then paraded down in their spat stage and seeded out on the Bayridge Reef. 
And so the core idea here was to hit the reset button and regenerate an ecology over time that was regenerative and cleaning and productive. 
How does the reef work? Well, it's very, very simple. 
A core concept here is that climate change isn't something that — the answers won't land down from the Moon. 
And with a $20 billion price tag, we should simply start and get to work with what we have now and what's in front of us. 
So this image is simply showing — it's a field of marine piles interconnected with this woven fuzzy rope. 
What is fuzzy rope, you ask? 
It's just that; it's this very inexpensive thing, available practically at your hardware store, and it's very cheap. 
So we imagine that we would actually potentially even host a bake sale to start our new project. 
(Laughter) So in the studio, rather than drawing, we began to learn how to knit. 
The concept was to really knit this rope together and develop this new soft infrastructure for the oysters to grow on. 
You can see in the diagram how it grows over time from an infrastructural space into a new public urban space. 
And that grows over time dynamically with the threat of climate change. 
It also creates this incredibly interesting, I think, new amphibious public space, where you can imagine working, you can imagine recreating in a new way. 
In the end, what we realized we were making was a new blue-green watery park for the next watery century — an amphibious park, if you will. 
So get your Tevas on. 
So you can imagine scuba diving here. 
This is an image of high school students, scuba divers that we worked with on our team. 
So you can imagine a sort of new manner of living with a new relationship with the water, and also a hybridizing of recreational and science programs in terms of monitoring. 
Another new vocabulary word for the brave new world: this is the word "" flupsy "" — it's short for "" floating upwelling system. "" And this glorious, readily available device is basically a floating raft with an oyster nursery below. 
So the water is churned through this raft. 
You can see the eight chambers on the side host little baby oysters and essentially force-feed them. 
So rather than having 10 oysters, you have 10,000 oysters. 
And then those spat are then seeded. 
Here's the Gowanus future with the oyster rafts on the shorelines — the flupsification of the Gowanus. 
New word. 
And also showing oyster gardening for the community along its edges. 
And finally, how much fun it would be to watch the flupsy parade and cheer on the oyster spats as they go down to the reef. 
I get asked two questions about this project. 
One is: why isn't it happening now? 
And the second one is: when can we eat the oysters? 
And the answer is: not yet, they're working. 
But we imagine, with our calculations, that by 2050, you might be able to sink your teeth into a Gowanus oyster. 
To conclude, this is just one cross-section of one piece of city, but my dream is, my hope is, that when you all go back to your own cities that we can start to work together and collaborate on remaking and reforming a new urban landscape towards a more sustainable, a more livable and a more delicious future. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

This is Tim Ferriss circa 1979 A.D. Age two. 
You can tell by the power squat, I was a very confident boy — and not without reason. 
I had a very charming routine at the time, which was to wait until late in the evening when my parents were decompressing from a hard day's work, doing their crossword puzzles, watching television. 
I would run into the living room, jump up on the couch, rip the cushions off, throw them on the floor, scream at the top of my lungs and run out because I was the Incredible Hulk. 
(Laughter) Obviously, you see the resemblance. 
And this routine went on for some time. 
When I was seven I went to summer camp. 
My parents found it necessary for peace of mind. 
And at noon each day the campers would go to a pond, where they had floating docks. 
You could jump off the end into the deep end. 
I was born premature. I was always very small. 
My left lung had collapsed when I was born. 
And I've always had buoyancy problems. 
So water was something that scared me to begin with. 
But I would go in on occasion. 
And on one particular day, the campers were jumping through inner tubes, They were diving through inner tubes. And I thought this would be great fun. 
So I dove through the inner tube, and the bully of the camp grabbed my ankles. 
And I tried to come up for air, and my lower back hit the bottom of the inner tube. 
And I went wild eyed and thought I was going to die. 
A camp counselor fortunately came over and separated us. 
From that point onward I was terrified of swimming. 
That is something that I did not get over. 
My inability to swim has been one of my greatest humiliations and embarrassments. 
That is when I realized that I was not the Incredible Hulk. 
But there is a happy ending to this story. 
At age 31 — that's my age now — in August I took two weeks to re-examine swimming, and question all the of the obvious aspects of swimming. 
And went from swimming one lap — so 20 yards — like a drowning monkey, at about 200 beats per minute heart rate — I measured it — to going to Montauk on Long Island, close to where I grew up, and jumping into the ocean and swimming one kilometer in open water, getting out and feeling better than when I went in. 
And I came out, in my Speedos, European style, feeling like the Incredible Hulk. 
And that's what I want everyone in here to feel like, the Incredible Hulk, at the end of this presentation. 
More specifically, I want you to feel like you're capable of becoming an excellent long-distance swimmer, a world-class language learner, and a tango champion. 
And I would like to share my art. 
If I have an art, it's deconstructing things that really scare the living hell out of me. 
So, moving onward. 
Swimming, first principles. 
First principles, this is very important. 
I find that the best results in life are often held back by false constructs and untested assumptions. 
And the turnaround in swimming came when a friend of mine said, "" I will go a year without any stimulants "" — this is a six-double-espresso-per-day type of guy — "if you can complete a one kilometer open water race." 
So the clock started ticking. 
I started seeking out triathletes because I found that lifelong swimmers often couldn't teach what they did. 
I tried kickboards. 
My feet would slice through the water like razors, I wouldn't even move. I would leave demoralized, staring at my feet. 
Hand paddles, everything. 
Even did lessons with Olympians — nothing helped. 
And then Chris Sacca, who is now a dear friend mine, had completed an Iron Man with 103 degree temperature, said, "" I have the answer to your prayers. "" And he introduced me to the work of a man named Terry Laughlin who is the founder of Total Immersion Swimming. 
That set me on the road to examining biomechanics. 
So here are the new rules of swimming, if any of you are afraid of swimming, or not good at it. 
The first is, forget about kicking. Very counterintuitive. 
So it turns out that propulsion isn't really the problem. 
Kicking harder doesn't solve the problem because the average swimmer only transfers about three percent of their energy expenditure into forward motion. 
The problem is hydrodynamics. 
So what you want to focus on instead is allowing your lower body to draft behind your upper body, much like a small car behind a big car on the highway. 
And you do that by maintaining a horizontal body position. 
The only way you can do that is to not swim on top of the water. 
The body is denser than water. 95 percent of it would be, at least, submerged naturally. 
So you end up, number three, not swimming, in the case of freestyle, on your stomach, as many people think, reaching on top of the water. 
But actually rotating from streamlined right to streamlined left, maintaining that fuselage position as long as possible. 
So let's look at some examples. This is Terry. 
And you can see that he's extending his right arm below his head and far in front. 
And so his entire body really is underwater. 
The arm is extended below the head. 
The head is held in line with the spine, so that you use strategic water pressure to raise your legs up — very important, especially for people with lower body fat. 
Here is an example of the stroke. 
So you don't kick. But you do use a small flick. 
You can see this is the left extension. 
Then you see his left leg. 
Small flick, and the only purpose of that is to rotate his hips so he can get to the opposite side. 
And the entry point for his right hand — notice this, he's not reaching in front and catching the water. 
Rather, he is entering the water at a 45-degree angle with his forearm, and then propelling himself by streamlining — very important. 
Incorrect, above, which is what almost every swimming coach will teach you. 
Not their fault, honestly. 
And I'll get to implicit versus explicit in a moment. 
Below is what most swimmers will find enables them to do what I did, which is going from 21 strokes per 20-yard length to 11 strokes in two workouts with no coach, no video monitoring. 
And now I love swimming. I can't wait to go swimming. 
I'll be doing a swimming lesson later, for myself, if anyone wants to join me. 
Last thing, breathing. A problem a lot of us have, certainly, when you're swimming. 
In freestyle, easiest way to remedy this is to turn with body roll, and just to look at your recovery hand as it enters the water. 
And that will get you very far. 
That's it. That's really all you need to know. 
Languages. Material versus method. 
I, like many people, came to the conclusion that I was terrible at languages. 
I suffered through Spanish for junior high, first year of high school, and the sum total of my knowledge was pretty much, "" Donde esta el bano? "" And I wouldn't even catch the response. A sad state of affairs. 
Then I transferred to a different school sophomore year, and I had a choice of other languages. Most of my friends were taking Japanese. 
So I thought why not punish myself? I'll do Japanese. 
Six months later I had the chance to go to Japan. 
My teachers assured me, they said, "" Don't worry. 
You'll have Japanese language classes every day to help you cope. 
It will be an amazing experience. "" My first overseas experience in fact. 
So my parents encouraged me to do it. I left. 
I arrived in Tokyo. Amazing. 
I couldn't believe I was on the other side of the world. 
I met my host family. Things went quite well I think, all things considered. 
My first evening, before my first day of school, I said to my mother, very politely, "Please wake me up at eight a.m." 
So, (Japanese) But I didn't say (Japanese). I said, (Japanese). Pretty close. 
But I said, "" Please rape me at eight a.m. "" (Laughter) You've never seen a more confused Japanese woman. (Laughter) 
I walked in to school. 
And a teacher came up to me and handed me a piece of paper. 
I couldn't read any of it — hieroglyphics, it could have been — because it was Kanji, Chinese characters adapted into the Japanese language. 
Asked him what this said. 
And he goes, "" Ahh, okay okay, eehto, World History, ehh, Calculus, Traditional Japanese. "" And so on. 
And so it came to me in waves. 
There had been something lost in translation. 
The Japanese classes were not Japanese instruction classes, per se. 
They were the normal high school curriculum for Japanese students — the other 4,999 students in the school, who were Japanese, besides the American. 
And that's pretty much my response. 
(Laughter) And that set me on this panic driven search for the perfect language method. 
I tried everything. I went to Kinokuniya. 
I tried every possible book, every possible CD. 
Nothing worked until I found this. 
This is the Joyo Kanji. This is a Tablet rather, or a poster of the 1,945 common-use characters as determined by the Ministry of Education in 1981. 
Many of the publications in Japan limit themselves to these characters, to facilitate literacy — some are required to. 
And this became my Holy Grail, my Rosetta Stone. 
As soon as I focused on this material, I took off. 
I ended up being able to read Asahi Shinbu, Asahi newspaper, about six months later — so a total of 11 months later — and went from Japanese I to Japanese VI. 
Ended up doing translation work at age 16 when I returned to the U.S., and have continued to apply this material over method approach to close to a dozen languages now. 
Someone who was terrible at languages, and at any given time, speak, read and write five or six. 
This brings us to the point, which is, it's oftentimes what you do, not how you do it, that is the determining factor. 
This is the difference between being effective — doing the right things — and being efficient — doing things well whether or not they're important. 
You can also do this with grammar. 
I came up with these six sentences after much experimentation. 
Having a native speaker allow you to deconstruct their grammar, by translating these sentences into past, present, future, will show you subject, object, verb, placement of indirect, direct objects, gender and so forth. 
From that point, you can then, if you want to, acquire multiple languages, alternate them so there is no interference. 
We can talk about that if anyone in interested. 
And now I love languages. 
So ballroom dancing, implicit versus explicit — very important. 
You might look at me and say, "" That guy must be a ballroom dancer. "" But no, you'd be wrong because my body is very poorly designed for most things — pretty well designed for lifting heavy rocks perhaps. 
I used to be much bigger, much more muscular. 
And so I ended up walking like this. 
I looked a lot like an orangutan, our close cousins, or the Incredible Hulk. 
Not very good for ballroom dancing. 
I found myself in Argentina in 2005, decided to watch a tango class — had no intention of participating. 
Went in, paid my ten pesos, walked up — 10 women two guys, usually a good ratio. 
The instructor says, "" You are participating. "" Immediately: death sweat. 
(Laughter) Fight-or-flight fear sweat, because I tried ballroom dancing in college — stepped on the girl's foot with my heel. She screamed. 
I was so concerned with her perception of what I was doing, that it exploded in my face, never to return to the ballroom dancing club. 
She comes up, and this was her approach, the teacher. 
"Okay, come on, grab me." 
Gorgeous assistant instructor. 
She was very pissed off that I had pulled her from her advanced practice. 
So I did my best. I didn't know where to put my hands. 
And she pulled back, threw down her arms, put them on her hips, turned around and yelled across the room, "" This guy is built like a god-damned mountain of muscle, and he's grabbing me like a fucking Frenchman, "" (Laughter) which I found encouraging. (Laughter) 
Everyone burst into laughter. I was humiliated. 
She came back. She goes, "" Come on. I don't have all day. "" As someone who wrestled since age eight, I proceeded to crush her, "" Of Mice and Men "" style. 
And she looked up and said, "Now that's better." 
So I bought a month's worth of classes. 
(Laughter) And proceeded to look at — I wanted to set competition so I'd have a deadline — Parkinson's Law, the perceived complexity of a task will expand to fill the time you allot it. 
So I had a very short deadline for a competition. 
I got a female instructor first, to teach me the female role, the follow, because I wanted to understand the sensitivities and abilities that the follow needed to develop, so I wouldn't have a repeat of college. 
And then I took an inventory of the characteristics, along with her, of the of the capabilities and elements of different dancers who'd won championships. 
I interviewed these people because they all taught in Buenos Aires. 
I compared the two lists, and what you find is that there is explicitly, expertise they recommended, certain training methods. 
Then there were implicit commonalities that none of them seemed to be practicing. 
Now the protectionism of Argentine dance teachers aside, I found this very interesting. So I decided to focus on three of those commonalities. 
Long steps. So a lot of milongueros — the tango dancers will use very short steps. 
I found that longer steps were much more elegant. 
So you can have — and you can do it in a very small space in fact. 
Secondly, different types of pivots. 
Thirdly, variation in tempo. 
These seemed to be the three areas that I could exploit to compete if I wanted to comptete against people who'd been practicing for 20 to 30 years. 
That photo is of the semi-finals of the Buenos Aires championships, four months later. 
Then one month later, went to the world championships, made it to the semi-final. And then set a world record, following that, two weeks later. 
I want you to see part of what I practiced. 
I'm going to jump forward here. 
This is the instructor that Alicia and I chose for the male lead. 
His name is Gabriel Misse. 
One of the most elegant dancers of his generation, known for his long steps, and his tempo changes and his pivots. 
Alicia, in her own right, very famous. 
So I think you'll agree, they look quite good together. 
Now what I like about this video is it's actually a video of the first time they ever danced together because of his lead. He had a strong lead. 
He didn't lead with his chest, which requires you lean forward. 
I couldn't develop the attributes in my toes, the strength in my feet, to do that. 
So he uses a lead that focuses on his shoulder girdle and his arm. 
So he can lift the woman to break her, for example. 
That's just one benefit of that. 
So then we broke it down. 
This would be an example of one pivot. 
This is a back step pivot. 
There are many different types. 
I have hundreds of hours of footage — all categorized, much like George Carlin categorized his comedy. 
So using my arch-nemesis, Spanish, no less, to learn tango. 
So fear is your friend. Fear is an indicator. 
Sometimes it shows you what you shouldn't do. 
More often than not it shows you exactly what you should do. 
And the best results that I've had in life, the most enjoyable times, have all been from asking a simple question: what's the worst that can happen? 
Especially with fears you gained when you were a child. 
Take the analytical frameworks, the capabilities you have, apply them to old fears. 
Apply them to very big dreams. 
And when I think of what I fear now, it's very simple. 
When I imagine my life, what my life would have been like without the educational opportunities that I had, it makes me wonder. 
I've spent the last two years trying to deconstruct the American public school system, to either fix it or replace it. 
And have done experiments with about 50,000 students thus far — built, I'd say, about a half dozen schools, my readers, at this point. 
And if any of you are interested in that, I would love to speak with you. 
I know nothing. I'm a beginner. 
But I ask a lot of questions, and I would love your advice. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

So, this is the short story of that research. 
They've never found a society that did not have it. 
There's other love poems that are, of course, just as good, but I don't think this one can be surpassed. 
(Laughter) So anyway, we found activity in three brain regions. 
That brain system — the reward system for wanting, for motivation, for craving, for focus — becomes more active when you can't get what you want. 
It comes from a David Mamet play, and there's two con artists in the play, and the woman is conning the man, and the man looks at the woman and says, "Oh, you're a bad pony, I'm not going to bet on you." 
You focus on the person, you obsessively think about them, you crave them, you distort reality, your willingness to take enormous risks to win this person. 
Unless you're stuck in a laboratory cage — and you know, if you spend your entire life in a little box, you're not going to be as picky about who you have sex with, but I've looked in a hundred species, and everywhere in the wild, animals have favorites. 
As a matter of fact, ethologists know this. 
There are over eight words for what they call "" animal favoritism: "" selective proceptivity, mate choice, female choice, sexual choice. 
And indeed, there are now three academic articles in which they've looked at this attraction, which may only last for a second, but it's a definite attraction, and either this same brain region, this reward system, or the chemicals of that reward system are involved. 
And I think that this is really the origin of what you and I call "" love at first sight. "" People have often asked me whether what I know about love has spoiled it for me. 
And in fact, sometimes I feel a little sorry for the chicken on my dinner plate, when I think of how intense this brain system is. 
There are still many questions to be answered and asked about romantic love. 
I never would have even thought to think of this, but Match.com, the Internet dating site, came to me three years ago and asked me that question. 
And that's about it, that's all they know. 
So, it began to occur to me that maybe your biology pulls you towards some people rather than another. 
I think we've evolved four very broad personality types associated with the ratios of these four chemicals in the brain. 
And 3.7 million people have taken the questionnaire in America. 

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

Everybody in our society's life is touched by cancer — if not personally, then through a loved one, a family member, colleague, friend. 
And once our lives are touched by cancer, we quickly learn that there are basically three weapons, or three tools, that are available to fight the disease: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. 
And once we get involved in the therapeutic decisions, again either personally or with our loved ones and family members, we also very quickly learn the benefits, the trade-offs and the limitations of these tools. 
I'm very thankful to Jay and to Mark and the TEDMED team for inviting me today to describe a fourth tool, a new tool, that we call Tumor Treating Fields. Tumor Treating Fields 
were invented by Dr. Yoram Palti, professor emeritus at the Technion in Israel. 
And they use low-intensity electric fields to fight cancer. 
To understand how Tumor Treating Fields work, we first need to understand what are electric fields. 
Let me first address a few popular misconceptions. 
First of all, electric fields are not an electric current that is coursing through the tissue. 
Electric fields are not ionizing radiation, like X-rays or proton beams, that bombard tissue to disrupt DNA. 
And electric fields are not magnetism. 
What electric fields are are a field of forces. 
And these forces act on, attract, bodies that have an electrical charge. 
The best way to visualize an electric field is to think of gravity. 
Gravity is also a field of forces that act on masses. 
We can all picture astronauts in space. 
They float freely in three dimensions without any forces acting on them. 
But as that space shuttle returns to Earth, and as the astronauts enter the Earth's gravitational field, they begin to see the effects of gravity. 
They begin to be attracted towards Earth. 
And as they land, they're fully aligned in the gravitational field. 
We're, of course, all stuck in the Earth's gravitational field right now. 
That's why you're all in your chairs. 
And that's why we have to use our muscle energy to stand up, to walk around and to lift things. 
In cancer, cells rapidly divide and lead to uncontrolled tumor growth. 
We can think of a cell from an electrical perspective as if it's a mini space station. 
And in that space station we have the genetic material, the chromosomes, within a nucleus. 
And out in the cytoplasmic soup we have special proteins that are required for cell division that float freely in this soup in three dimensions. 
Importantly, those special proteins are among the most highly charged objects in our body. 
As cell division begins the nucleus disintegrates, the chromosomes line up in the middle of the cell and those special proteins undergo a three-dimensional sequence whereby they attach and they literally click into place end-on-end to form chains. 
These chains then progress and attach to the genetic material and pull the genetic material from one cell into two cells. 
And this is exactly how one cancer cell becomes two cancer cells, two cancer cells become four cancer cells, and we have ultimately uncontrolled tumor growth. 
Tumor Treating Fields use externally placed transducers attached to a field generator to create an artificial electric field on that space station. 
And when that cellular space station is within the electric field, it acts on those highly charged proteins and aligns them. 
And it prevents them from forming those chains, those mitotic spindles, that are necessary to pull the genetic material into the daughter cells. 
What we see is that the cells will attempt to divide for several hours. 
And they will either enter into this so-called cellular suicide, programmed cell death, or they will form unhealthy daughter cells and enter into apoptosis once they have divided. 
And we can observe this. 
What I'm going to show you next are two in vitro experiments. 
This is cultures, identical cultures, of cervical cancer cells. 
And we've stained these cultures with a green florescent dye so that we can look at these proteins that form these chains. 
The first clip shows a normal cell division without the Tumor Treating Fields. 
What we see are, first of all, a very active culture, a lot of divisions, and then very clear nuclei once the cells have separated. 
And we can see them dividing throughout. 
When we apply the fields — again, in the identical time-scale to the identical culture — you're going to see something different. 
The cells round up for division, but they're very static in that position. 
We'll see two cells in the upper part of the screen attempting to divide. 
The one within the circle manages. 
But see how much of the protein is still throughout the nucleus, even in the dividing cell. 
The one up there can't divide at all. 
And then this bubbling, this membrane bubbling, is the hallmark of apoptosis in this cell. 
Formation of healthy mitotic spindles is necessary for division in all cell types. 
We've applied Tumor Treating Fields to over 20 different cancers in the lab, and we see this effect in all of them. 
Now importantly, these Tumor Treating Fields have no effect on normal undividing cells. 
10 years ago, Dr. Palti founded a company called Novocure to develop his discovery into a practical therapy for patients. 
In that time, Novocure's developed two systems — one system for cancers in the head and another system for cancers in the trunk of the body. 
The first cancer that we have focused on is the deadly brain cancer, GBM. 
GBM affects about 10,000 people in the U.S. each year. 
It's a death sentence. 
The expected five year survival is less than five percent. 
And the typical patient with optimal therapy survives just a little over a year, and only about seven months from the time that the cancer is first treated and then comes back and starts growing again. 
Novocure conducted its first phase three randomized trial in patients with recurrent GBM. 
So these are patients who had received surgery, high dose radiation to the head and first-line chemotherapy, and that had failed and their tumors had grown back. 
We divided the patients into two groups. 
The first group received second-line chemotherapy, which is expected to double the life expectancy, versus no treatment at all. 
And then the second group received only Tumor Treating Field therapy. 
What we saw in that trial is that that the life expectancies of both groups — so the chemotherapy treated group and the Tumor Treating Field group — was the same. 
But importantly, the Tumor Treating Field group suffered none of the side effects typical of chemotherapy patients. 
They had no pain, suffered none of the infections. 
They had no nausea, diarrhea, constipation, fatigue that would be expected. 
Based on this trial, in April of this year, the FDA approved Tumor Treating Fields for the treatment of patients with recurrent GBM. 
Importantly, it was the first time ever that the FDA included in their approval of an oncology treatment a quality of life claim. 
So I'm going to show you now one of the patients from this trial. 
Robert Dill-Bundi is a famous Swiss cycling champion. 
He won the gold medal in Moscow in the 4,000 meter pursuit. 
And five years ago, Robert was diagnosed with GBM. 
He received the standard treatments. 
He received surgery. 
He received high dose radiation to the head. 
And he received first-line chemotherapy. 
A year after this treatment — in fact, this is his baseline MRI. 
You can see that the black regions in the upper right quadrant are the areas where he had surgery. 
And a year after that treatment, his tumor grew back with a vengeance. 
That cloudy white mass that you see is the recurrence of the tumor. 
At this point, he was told by his doctors that he had about 3 months to live. 
He entered our trial. 
And here we can see him getting the therapy. 
First of all, these electrodes are noninvasive. 
They're attached to the skin in the area of the tumor. 
Here you can see that a technician is placing them on there much like bandages. 
The patients learn to do this themselves And then the patients can undergo all the activities of their daily life. 
There's none of the tiredness. 
There's none of what is called the "" chemo head. "" There's no sensation. 
It doesn't interfere with computers or electrical equipment. 
And the therapy is delivered continuously at home, without having to go into the hospital either periodically or continually. 
These are Robert's MRIs, again, under only TTField treatment. 
This is a therapy that takes time to work. 
It's a medical device; it works when it's on. 
But what we can see is, by month six, the tumor has responded and it's begun to melt away. 
It's still there. 
By month 12, we could argue whether there's a little bit of material around the edges, but it's essentially completely gone. 
It's now five years since Robert's diagnosis, and he's alive, but importantly, he's healthy and he's at work. 
I'm going to let him, in this very short clip, describe his impressions of the therapy in his own words. 
(Video) Robert Dill-Bundi: My quality of life, I rate what I have today a bit different than what most people would assume. 
I am the happiest, the happiest person in the world. 
And every single morning I appreciate life. 
Every night I fall asleep very well, and I am, I repeat, the happiest man in the world, and I'm thankful I am alive. 
BD: Novocure's also working on lung cancer as the second target. 
We've run a phase two trial in Switzerland on, again, recurrent patients — patients who have received standard therapy and whose cancer has come back. 
I'm going to show you another clip of a woman named Lydia. 
Lydia's a 66 year-old farmer in Switzerland. 
She was diagnosed with lung cancer five years ago. 
She underwent four different regimes of chemotherapy over two years, none of which had an effect. 
Her cancer continued to grow. 
Three years ago, she entered the Novocure lung cancer trial. 
You can see, in her case, she's wearing her transducer arrays, one of the front of her chest, one on the back, and then the second pair side-to-side over the liver. 
You can see the Tumor Treating Field field generator, but importantly you can also see that she is living her life. 
She is managing her farm. 
She's interacting with her kids and her grand kids. 
And when we talked to her, she said that when she was undergoing chemotherapy, she had to go to the hospital every month for her infusions. 
Her whole family suffered as her side effect profile came and went. 
Now she can run all of the activities of her farm. 
It's only the beginning. 
(Applause) In the lab, we've observed tremendous synergies between chemotherapy and Tumor Treating Fields. 
There's research underway now at Harvard Medical School to pick the optimum pairs to maximize that benefit. 
We also believe that Tumor Treating Fields will work with radiation and interrupt the self-repair mechanisms that we have. 
There's now a new research project underway at the Karolinska in Sweden to prove that hypothesis. 
We have more trials planned for lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer and breast cancer. 
And I firmly believe that in the next 10 years Tumor Treating Fields will be a weapon available to doctors and patients for all of these most-difficult-to-treat solid tumors. 
I'm also very hopeful that in the next decades, we will make big strides on reducing that death rate that has been so challenging in this disease. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

In the space that used to house one transistor, we can now fit one billion. 
That made it so that a computer the size of an entire room now fits in your pocket. 
You might say the future is small. 
As an engineer, I'm inspired by this miniaturization revolution in computers. 
As a physician, I wonder whether we could use it to reduce the number of lives lost due to one of the fastest-growing diseases on Earth: cancer. 
Now when I say that, what most people hear me say is that we're working on curing cancer. 
And we are. 
But it turns out that there's an incredible opportunity to save lives through the early detection and prevention of cancer. 
Worldwide, over two-thirds of deaths due to cancer are fully preventable using methods that we already have in hand today. 
Things like vaccination, timely screening and of course, stopping smoking. 
But even with the best tools and technologies that we have today, some tumors can't be detected until 10 years after they've started growing, when they are 50 million cancer cells strong. 
What if we had better technologies to detect some of these more deadly cancers sooner, when they could be removed, when they were just getting started? 
Let me tell you about how miniaturization might get us there. 
This is a microscope in a typical lab that a pathologist would use for looking at a tissue specimen, like a biopsy or a pap smear. 
This $7,000 microscope would be used by somebody with years of specialized training to spot cancer cells. 
This is an image from a colleague of mine at Rice University, Rebecca Richards-Kortum. 
What she and her team have done is miniaturize that whole microscope into this $10 part, and it fits on the end of an optical fiber. 
Now what that means is instead of taking a sample from a patient and sending it to the microscope, you can bring the microscope to the patient. 
And then, instead of requiring a specialist to look at the images, you can train the computer to score normal versus cancerous cells. 
Now this is important, because what they found working in rural communities, is that even when they have a mobile screening van that can go out into the community and perform exams and collect samples and send them to the central hospital for analysis, that days later, women get a call with an abnormal test result and they're asked to come in. 
Fully half of them don't turn up because they can't afford the trip. 
With the integrated microscope and computer analysis, Rebecca and her colleagues have been able to create a van that has both a diagnostic setup and a treatment setup. 
And what that means is that they can do a diagnosis and perform therapy on the spot, so no one is lost to follow up. 
That's just one example of how miniaturization can save lives. 
Now as engineers, we think of this as straight-up miniaturization. 
You took a big thing and you made it little. 
But what I told you before about computers was that they transformed our lives when they became small enough for us to take them everywhere. 
So what is the transformational equivalent like that in medicine? 
Well, what if you had a detector that was so small that it could circulate in your body, find the tumor all by itself and send a signal to the outside world? 
It sounds a little bit like science fiction. 
But actually, nanotechnology allows us to do just that. 
Nanotechnology allows us to shrink the parts that make up the detector from the width of a human hair, which is 100 microns, to a thousand times smaller, which is 100 nanometers. 
And that has profound implications. 
It turns out that materials actually change their properties at the nanoscale. 
You take a common material like gold, and you grind it into dust, into gold nanoparticles, and it changes from looking gold to looking red. 
If you take a more exotic material like cadmium selenide — forms a big, black crystal — if you make nanocrystals out of this material and you put it in a liquid, and you shine light on it, they glow. 
And they glow blue, green, yellow, orange, red, depending only on their size. 
It's wild! Can you imagine an object like that in the macro world? 
It would be like all the denim jeans in your closet are all made of cotton, but they are different colors depending only on their size. 
(Laughter) So as a physician, what's just as interesting to me is that it's not just the color of materials that changes at the nanoscale; the way they travel in your body also changes. 
And this is the kind of observation that we're going to use to make a better cancer detector. 
So let me show you what I mean. 
This is a blood vessel in the body. 
Surrounding the blood vessel is a tumor. 
We're going to inject nanoparticles into the blood vessel and watch how they travel from the bloodstream into the tumor. 
Now it turns out that the blood vessels of many tumors are leaky, and so nanoparticles can leak out from the bloodstream into the tumor. 
Whether they leak out depends on their size. 
So in this image, the smaller, hundred-nanometer, blue nanoparticles are leaking out, and the larger, 500-nanometer, red nanoparticles are stuck in the bloodstream. 
So that means as an engineer, depending on how big or small I make a material, I can change where it goes in your body. 
In my lab, we recently made a cancer nanodetector that is so small that it could travel into the body and look for tumors. 
We designed it to listen for tumor invasion: the orchestra of chemical signals that tumors need to make to spread. 
For a tumor to break out of the tissue that it's born in, it has to make chemicals called enzymes to chew through the scaffolding of tissues. 
We designed these nanoparticles to be activated by these enzymes. 
One enzyme can activate a thousand of these chemical reactions in an hour. 
Now in engineering, we call that one-to-a-thousand ratio a form of amplification, and it makes something ultrasensitive. 
So we've made an ultrasensitive cancer detector. 
OK, but how do I get this activated signal to the outside world, where I can act on it? 
For this, we're going to use one more piece of nanoscale biology, and that has to do with the kidney. 
The kidney is a filter. 
Its job is to filter out the blood and put waste into the urine. 
It turns out that what the kidney filters is also dependent on size. 
So in this image, what you can see is that everything smaller than five nanometers is going from the blood, through the kidney, into the urine, and everything else that's bigger is retained. 
OK, so if I make a 100-nanometer cancer detector, I inject it in the bloodstream, it can leak into the tumor where it's activated by tumor enzymes to release a small signal that is small enough to be filtered out of the kidney and put into the urine, I have a signal in the outside world that I can detect. 
OK, but there's one more problem. 
This is a tiny little signal, so how do I detect it? 
Well, the signal is just a molecule. 
They're molecules that we designed as engineers. 
They're completely synthetic, and we can design them so they are compatible with our tool of choice. 
If we want to use a really sensitive, fancy instrument called a mass spectrometer, then we make a molecule with a unique mass. 
Or maybe we want make something that's more inexpensive and portable. 
Then we make molecules that we can trap on paper, like a pregnancy test. 
In fact, there's a whole world of paper tests that are becoming available in a field called paper diagnostics. 
Alright, where are we going with this? 
What I'm going to tell you next, as a lifelong researcher, represents a dream of mine. 
I can't say that's it's a promise; it's a dream. 
But I think we all have to have dreams to keep us pushing forward, even — and maybe especially — cancer researchers. 
I'm going to tell you what I hope will happen with my technology, that my team and I will put our hearts and souls into making a reality. 
OK, here goes. 
I dream that one day, instead of going into an expensive screening facility to get a colonoscopy, or a mammogram, or a pap smear, that you could get a shot, wait an hour, and do a urine test on a paper strip. 
I imagine that this could even happen without the need for steady electricity, or a medical professional in the room. 
Maybe they could be far away and connected only by the image on a smartphone. 
Now I know this sounds like a dream, but in the lab we already have this working in mice, where it works better than existing methods for the detection of lung, colon and ovarian cancer. 
And I hope that what this means is that one day we can detect tumors in patients sooner than 10 years after they've started growing, in all walks of life, all around the globe, and that this would lead to earlier treatments, and that we could save more lives than we can today, with early detection. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

You've all seen lots of articles on climate change, and here's yet another New York Times article, just like every other darn one you've seen. 
It says all the same stuff as all the other ones you've seen. 
It even has the same amount of headline as all the other ones you've seen. 
What's unusual about this one, maybe, is that it's from 1953. 
And the reason I'm saying this is that you may have the idea this problem is relatively recent. 
That people have just sort of figured out about it, and now with Kyoto and the Governator and people beginning to actually do something, we may be on the road to a solution. 
The fact is — uh-uh. 
We've known about this problem for 50 years, depending on how you count it. 
We have talked about it endlessly over the last decade or so. 
And we've accomplished close to zip. 
This is the growth rate of CO2 in the atmosphere. 
You've seen this in various forms, but maybe you haven't seen this one. 
What this shows is that the rate of growth of our emissions is accelerating. 
And that it's accelerating even faster than what we thought was the worst case just a few years back. 
So that red line there was something that a lot of skeptics said the environmentalists only put in the projections to make the projections look as bad as possible, that emissions would never grow as fast as that red line. 
But in fact, they're growing faster. 
Here's some data from actually just 10 days ago, which shows this year's minimum of the Arctic Sea ice, and it's the lowest by far. 
And the rate at which the Arctic Sea ice is going away is a lot quicker than models. 
So despite all sorts of experts like me flying around the planet and burning jet fuel, and politicians signing treaties — in fact, you could argue the net effect of all this has been negative, because it's just consumed a lot of jet fuel. (Laughter) No, no! In terms of what we really need to do to put the brakes on this very high inertial thing — our big economy — we've really hardly started. 
Really, we're doing this, basically. Really, not very much. 
I don't want to depress you too much. 
The problem is absolutely soluble, and even soluble in a way that's reasonably cheap. 
Cheap meaning sort of the cost of the military, not the cost of medical care. 
Cheap meaning a few percent of GDP. 
No, this is really important to have this sense of scale. 
So the problem is soluble, and the way we should go about solving it is, say, dealing with electricity production, which causes something like 43-or-so percent and rising of CO2 emissions. 
And we could do that by perfectly sensible things like conservation, and wind power, nuclear power and coal to CO2 capture, which are all things that are ready for giant scale deployment, and work. 
All we lack is the action to actually spend the money to put those into place. 
Instead, we spend our time talking. 
But nevertheless, that's not what I'm going to talk to you about tonight. 
What I'm going to talk to you about tonight is stuff we might do if we did nothing. 
And it's this stuff in the middle here, which is what you do if you don't stop the emissions quickly enough. 
And you need to deal — somehow break the link between human actions that change climate, and the climate change itself. And that's particularly important because, of course, while we can adapt to climate change — and it's important to be honest here, there will be some benefits to climate change. 
Oh, yes, I think it's bad. I've spent my whole life working to stop it. 
But one of the reasons it's politically hard is there are winners and losers — not all losers. 
But, of course, the natural world, polar bears. 
I spent time skiing across the sea ice for weeks at a time in the high Arctic. 
They will completely lose. 
And there's no adaption. 
So this problem is absolutely soluble. 
This geo-engineering idea, in it's simplest form, is basically the following. 
You could put signed particles, say sulfuric acid particles — sulfates — into the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, where they'd reflect away sunlight and cool the planet. 
And I know for certain that that will work. 
Not that there aren't side effects, but I know for certain it will work. 
And the reason is, it's been done. 
And it was done not by us, not by me, but by nature. 
Here's Mount Pinatubo in the early '90s. That put a whole bunch of sulfur in the stratosphere with a sort of atomic bomb-like cloud. 
The result of that was pretty dramatic. 
After that, and some previous volcanoes we have, you see a quite dramatic cooling of the atmosphere. 
So this lower bar is the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, and it heats up after these volcanoes. 
But you'll notice that in the upper bar, which is the lower atmosphere and the surface, it cools down because we shielded the atmosphere a little bit. 
There's no big mystery about it. 
There's lots of mystery in the details, and there's some bad side effects, like it partially destroys the ozone layer — and I'll get to that in a minute. 
But it clearly cools down. 
And one other thing: it's fast. 
It's really important to say. So much of the other things that we ought to do, like slowing emissions, are intrinsically slow, because it takes time to build all the hardware we need to reduce emissions. 
And not only that, when you cut emissions, you don't cut concentrations, because concentrations, the amount of CO2 in the air, is the sum of emissions over time. 
So you can't step on the brakes very quickly. 
But if you do this, it's quick. 
And there are times you might like to do something quick. 
Another thing you might wonder about is, does it work? 
Can you shade some sunlight and effectively compensate for the added CO2, and produce a climate sort of back to what it was originally? 
And the answer seems to be yes. 
So here are the graphs you've seen lots of times before. 
That's what the world looks like, under one particular climate model's view, with twice the amount of CO2 in the air. 
The lower graph is with twice the amount of CO2 and 1.8 percent less sunlight, and you're back to the original climate. 
And this graph from Ken Caldeira. It's important to say came, because Ken — at a meeting that I believe Marty Hoffart was also at in the mid- '90s — Ken and I stood up at the back of the meeting and said, "Geo-engineering won't work." 
And to the person who was promoting it said, "The atmosphere's much more complicated." 
Gave a bunch of physical reasons why it wouldn't do a very good compensation. 
Ken went and ran his models, and found that it did. 
This topic is also old. 
That report that landed on President Johnson's desk when I was two years old — 1965. 
That report, in fact, which had all the modern climate science — the only thing they talked about doing was geo-engineering. 
It didn't even talk about cutting emissions, which is an incredible shift in our thinking about this problem. 
I'm not saying we shouldn't cut emissions. 
We should, but it made exactly this point. 
So, in a sense, there's not much new. 
The one new thing is this essay. 
So I should say, I guess, that since the time of that original President Johnson report, and the various reports of the U.S. National Academy — 1977, 1982, 1990 — people always talked about this idea. 
Not as something that was foolproof, but as an idea to think about. 
But when climate became, politically, a hot topic — if I may make the pun — in the last 15 years, this became so un-PC, we couldn't talk about it. 
It just sunk below the surface. We weren't allowed to speak about it. 
But in the last year, Paul Crutzen published this essay saying roughly what's all been said before: that maybe, given our very slow rate of progress in solving this problem and the uncertain impacts, we should think about things like this. 
He said roughly what's been said before. 
The big deal was he happened to have won the Nobel prize for ozone chemistry. 
And so people took him seriously when he said we should think about this, even though there will be some ozone impacts. 
And in fact, he had some ideas to make them go away. 
There was all sorts of press coverage, all over the world, going right down to "" Dr. Strangelove Saves the Earth, "" from the Economist. 
And that got me thinking. I've worked on this topic on and off, but not so much technically. And I was actually lying in bed thinking one night. 
And I thought about this child's toy — hence, the title of my talk — and I wondered if you could use the same physics that makes that thing spin 'round in the child's radiometer, to levitate particles into the upper atmosphere and make them stay there. 
One of the problems with sulfates is they fall out quickly. 
The other problem is they're right in the ozone layer, and I'd prefer them above the ozone layer. 
And it turns out, I woke up the next morning, and I started to calculate this. 
It was very hard to calculate from first principles. I was stumped. 
But then I found out that there were all sorts of papers already published that addressed this topic because it happens already in the natural atmosphere. 
So it seems there are already fine particles that are levitated up to what we call the mesosphere, about 100 kilometers up, that already have this effect. 
I'll tell you very quickly how the effect works. 
There are a lot of fun complexities that I'd love to spend the whole evening on, but I won't. 
But let's say you have sunlight hitting some particle and it's unevenly heated. 
So the side facing the sun is warmer; the side away, cooler. 
Gas molecules that bounce off the warm side bounce away with some extra velocity because it's warm. 
And so you see a net force away from the sun. 
That's called the photophoretic force. 
There are a bunch of other versions of it that I and some collaborators have thought about how to exploit. 
And of course, we may be wrong — this hasn't all been peer reviewed, we're in the middle of thinking about it — but so far, it seems good. 
But it looks like we could achieve long atmospheric lifetimes — much longer than before — because they're levitated. 
We can move things out of the stratosphere into the mesosphere, in principle solving the ozone problem. 
I'm sure there will be other problems that arise. 
Finally, we could make the particles migrate to over the poles, so we could arrange the climate engineering so it really focused on the poles. 
Which would have minimal bad impacts in the middle of the planet, where we live, and do the maximum job of what we might need to do, which is cooling the poles in case of planetary emergency, if you like. 
This is a new idea that's crept up that may be, essentially, a cleverer idea than putting sulfates in. 
Whether this idea is right or some other idea is right, I think it's almost certain we will eventually think of cleverer things to do than just putting sulfur in. 
That if engineers and scientists really turned their minds to this, it's amazing how we can affect the planet. 
The one thing about this is it gives us extraordinary leverage. 
This improved science and engineering will, whether we like it or not, give us more and more leverage to affect the planet, to control the planet, to give us weather and climate control — not because we plan it, not because we want it, just because science delivers it to us bit by bit, with better knowledge of the way the system works and better engineering tools to effect it. 
Now, suppose that space aliens arrived. 
Maybe they're going to land at the U.N. headquarters down the road here, or maybe they'll pick a smarter spot — but suppose they arrive and they give you a box. 
And the box has two knobs. 
One knob is the knob for controlling global temperature. 
Maybe another knob is a knob for controlling CO2 concentrations. 
You might imagine that we would fight wars over that box. 
Because we have no way to agree about where to set the knobs. 
We have no global governance. 
And different people will have different places they want it set. 
Now, I don't think that's going to happen. It's not very likely. 
But we're building that box. 
The scientists and engineers of the world are building it piece by piece, in their labs. 
Even when they're doing it for other reasons. 
Even when they're thinking they're just working on protecting the environment. 
They have no interest in crazy ideas like engineering the whole planet. 
They develop science that makes it easier and easier to do. 
And so I guess my view on this is not that I want to do it — I do not — but that we should move this out of the shadows and talk about it seriously. 
Because sooner or later, we'll be confronted with decisions about this, and it's better if we think hard about it, even if we want to think hard about reasons why we should never do it. 
I'll give you two different ways to think about this problem that are the beginning of my thinking about how to think about it. 
But what we need is not just a few oddballs like me thinking about this. 
We need a broader debate. 
A debate that involves musicians, scientists, philosophers, writers, who get engaged with this question about climate engineering and think seriously about what its implications are. 
So here's one way to think about it, which is that we just do this instead of cutting emissions because it's cheaper. 
I guess the thing I haven't said about this is, it is absurdly cheap. 
It's conceivable that, say, using the sulfates method or this method I've come up with, you could create an ice age at a cost of .001 percent of GDP. 
It's very cheap. We have a lot of leverage. 
It's not a good idea, but it's just important. (Laughter) I'll tell you how big the lever is: the lever is that big. 
And that calculation isn't much in dispute. 
You might argue about the sanity of it, but the leverage is real. (Laughter) So because of this, we could deal with the problem simply by stopping reducing emissions, and just as the concentrations go up, we can increase the amount of geo-engineering. 
I don't think anybody takes that seriously. 
Because under this scenario, we walk further and further away from the current climate. 
We have all sorts of other problems, like ocean acidification that come from CO2 in the atmosphere, anyway. 
Nobody but maybe one or two very odd folks really suggest this. 
But here's a case which is harder to reject. 
Let's say that we don't do geo-engineering, we do what we ought to do, which is get serious about cutting emissions. 
But we don't really know how quickly we have to cut them. 
There's a lot of uncertainty about exactly how much climate change is too much. 
So let's say that we work hard, and we actually don't just tap the brakes, but we step hard on the brakes and really reduce emissions and eventually reduce concentrations. 
And maybe someday — like 2075, October 23 — we finally reach that glorious day where concentrations have peaked and are rolling down the other side. 
And we have global celebrations, and we've actually started to — you know, we've seen the worst of it. 
But maybe on that day we also find that the Greenland ice sheet is really melting unacceptably fast, fast enough to put meters of sea level on the oceans in the next 100 years, and remove some of the biggest cities from the map. 
That's an absolutely possible scenario. 
We might decide at that point that even though geo-engineering was uncertain and morally unhappy, that it's a lot better than not geo-engineering. 
And that's a very different way to look at the problem. 
It's using this as risk control, not instead of action. 
It's saying that you do some geo-engineering for a little while to take the worst of the heat off, not that you'd use it as a substitute for action. 
But there is a problem with that view. 
And the problem is the following: knowledge that geo-engineering is possible makes the climate impacts look less fearsome, and that makes a weaker commitment to cutting emissions today. 
This is what economists call a moral hazard. 
And that's one of the fundamental reasons that this problem is so hard to talk about, and, in general, I think it's the underlying reason that it's been politically unacceptable to talk about this. 
But you don't make good policy by hiding things in a drawer. 
I'll leave you with three questions, and then one final quote. 
Should we do serious research on this topic? 
Should we have a national research program that looks at this? 
Not just at how you would do it better, but also what all the risks and downsides of it are. 
Right now, you have a few enthusiasts talking about it, some in a positive side, some in a negative side — but that's a dangerous state to be in because there's very little depth of knowledge on this topic. 
A very small amount of money would get us some. 
Many of us — maybe now me — think we should do that. 
But I have a lot of reservations. 
My reservations are principally about the moral hazard problem, and I don't really know how we can best avoid the moral hazard. 
I think there is a serious problem: as you talk about this, people begin to think they don't need to work so hard to cut emissions. 
Another thing is, maybe we need a treaty. 
A treaty that decides who gets to do this. 
Right now we may think of a big, rich country like the U.S. doing this. 
But it might well be that, in fact, if China wakes up in 2030 and realizes that the climate impacts are just unacceptable, they may not be very interested in our moral conversations about how to do this, and they may just decide they'd really rather have a geo-engineered world than a non-geo-engineered world. 
And we'll have no international mechanism to figure out who makes the decision. 
So here's one last thought, which was said much, much better 25 years ago in the U.S. National Academy report than I can say today. 
And I think it really summarizes where we are here. 
That the CO2 problem, the climate problem that we've heard about, is driving lots of things — innovations in the energy technologies that will reduce emissions — but also, I think, inevitably, it will drive us towards thinking about climate and weather control, whether we like it or not. 
And it's time to begin thinking about it, even if the reason we're thinking about it is to construct arguments for why we shouldn't do it. 
Thank you very much. 

Once upon a time we lived in an economy of financial growth and prosperity. 
This was called the Great Moderation, the misguided belief by most economists, policymakers and central banks that we have transformed into a new world of never-ending growth and prosperity. 
This was seen by robust and steady GDP growth, by low and controlled inflation, by low unemployment, and controlled and low financial volatility. 
But the Great Recession in 2007 and 2008, the great crash, broke this illusion. 
A few hundred billion dollars of losses in the financial sector cascaded into five trillion dollars of losses in world GDP and almost $30 trillion losses in the global stock market. 
So the understanding of this Great Recession was that this was completely surprising, this came out of the blue, this was like the wrath of the gods. 
There was no responsibility. 
So, as a reflection of this, we started the Financial Crisis Observatory. 
We had the goal to diagnose in real time financial bubbles and identify in advance their critical time. 
What is the underpinning, scientifically, of this financial observatory? 
We developed a theory called "" dragon-kings. "" Dragon-kings represent extreme events which are of a class of their own. 
They are special. They are outliers. 
They are generated by specific mechanisms that may make them predictable, perhaps controllable. 
Consider the financial price time series, a given stock, your perfect stock, or a global index. 
You have these up-and-downs. 
A very good measure of the risk of this financial market is the peaks-to-valleys that represent a worst case scenario when you bought at the top and sold at the bottom. 
You can look at the statistics, the frequency of the occurrence of peak-to-valleys of different sizes, which is represented in this graph. 
Now, interestingly, 99 percent of the peak-to-valleys of different amplitudes can be represented by a universal power law represented by this red line here. 
More interestingly, there are outliers, there are exceptions which are above this red line, occur 100 times more frequently, at least, than the extrapolation would predict them to occur based on the calibration of the 99 percent remaining peak-to-valleys. 
They are due to trenchant dependancies such that a loss is followed by a loss which is followed by a loss which is followed by a loss. 
These kinds of dependencies are largely missed by standard risk management tools, which ignore them and see lizards when they should see dragon-kings. 
The root mechanism of a dragon-king is a slow maturation towards instability, which is the bubble, and the climax of the bubble is often the crash. 
This is similar to the slow heating of water in this test tube reaching the boiling point, where the instability of the water occurs and you have the phase transition to vapor. 
And this process, which is absolutely non-linear — cannot be predicted by standard techniques — is the reflection of a collective emergent behavior which is fundamentally endogenous. 
So the cause of the crash, the cause of the crisis has to be found in an inner instability of the system, and any tiny perturbation will make this instability occur. 
Now, some of you may have come to the mind that is this not related to the black swan concept you have heard about frequently? 
Remember, black swan is this rare bird that you see once and suddenly shattered your belief that all swans should be white, so it has captured the idea of unpredictability, unknowability, that the extreme events are fundamentally unknowable. 
Nothing can be further from the dragon-king concept I propose, which is exactly the opposite, that most extreme events are actually knowable and predictable. 
So we can be empowered and take responsibility and make predictions about them. 
So let's have my dragon-king burn this black swan concept. 
(Laughter) There are many early warning signals that are predicted by this theory. 
Let me just focus on one of them: the super-exponential growth with positive feedback. 
What does it mean? 
Imagine you have an investment that returns the first year five percent, the second year 10 percent, the third year 20 percent, the next year 40 percent. Is that not marvelous? 
This is a super-exponential growth. 
A standard exponential growth corresponds to a constant growth rate, let's say, of 10 percent The point is that, many times during bubbles, there are positive feedbacks which can be of many times, such that previous growths enhance, push forward, increase the next growth through this kind of super-exponential growth, which is very trenchant, not sustainable. 
And the key idea is that the mathematical solution of this class of models exhibit finite-time singularities, which means that there is a critical time where the system will break, will change regime. 
It may be a crash. It may be just a plateau, something else. 
And the key idea is that the critical time, the information about the critical time is contained in the early development of this super-exponential growth. 
We have applied this theory early on, that was our first success, to the diagnostic of the rupture of key elements on the iron rocket. 
Using acoustic emission, you know, this little noise that you hear a structure emit, sing to you when they are stressed, and reveal the damage going on, there's a collective phenomenon of positive feedback, the more damage gives the more damage, so you can actually predict, within, of course, a probability band, when the rupture will occur. 
So this is now so successful that it is used in the initial phase of [unclear] the flight. 
Perhaps more surprisingly, the same type of theory applies to biology and medicine, parturition, the act of giving birth, epileptic seizures. 
From seven months of pregnancy, a mother starts to feel episodic precursory contractions of the uterus that are the sign of these maturations toward the instability, giving birth to the baby, the dragon-king. 
So if you measure the precursor signal, you can actually identify pre- and post-maturity problems in advance. 
Epileptic seizures also come in a large variety of size, and when the brain goes to a super-critical state, you have dragon-kings which have a degree of predictability and this can help the patient to deal with this illness. 
We have applied this theory to many systems, landslides, glacier collapse, even to the dynamics of prediction of success: blockbusters, YouTube videos, movies, and so on. 
But perhaps the most important application is for finance, and this theory illuminates, I believe, the deep reason for the financial crisis that we have gone through. 
This is rooted in 30 years of history of bubbles, starting in 1980, with the global bubble crashing in 1987, followed by many other bubbles. 
The biggest one was the "" new economy "" Internet bubble in 2000, crashing in 2000, the real estate bubbles in many countries, financial derivative bubbles everywhere, stock market bubbles also everywhere, commodity and all bubbles, debt and credit bubbles — bubbles, bubbles, bubbles. 
We had a global bubble. 
This is a measure of global overvaluation of all markets, expressing what I call an illusion of a perpetual money machine that suddenly broke in 2007. 
The problem is that we see the same process, in particular through quantitative easing, of a thinking of a perpetual money machine nowadays to tackle the crisis since 2008 in the U.S., in Europe, in Japan. 
This has very important implications to understand the failure of quantitative easing as well as austerity measures as long as we don't attack the core, the structural cause of this perpetual money machine thinking. 
Now, these are big claims. 
Why would you believe me? 
Well, perhaps because, in the last 15 years we have come out of our ivory tower, and started to publish ex ante — and I stress the term ex ante, it means "" in advance "" — before the crash confirmed the existence of the bubble or the financial excesses. 
These are a few of the major bubbles that we have lived through in recent history. 
Again, many interesting stories for each of them. 
Let me tell you just one or two stories that deal with massive bubbles. 
We all know the Chinese miracle. 
This is the expression of the stock market of a massive bubble, a factor of three, 300 percent in just a few years. 
In September 2007, I was invited as a keynote speaker of a macro hedge fund management conference, and I showed to the conference a prediction that by the end of 2007, this bubble would change regime. 
There might be a crash. Certainly not sustainable. 
Now, how do you believe the very smart, very motivated, very informed macro hedge fund managers reacted to this prediction? 
You know, they had made billions just surfing this bubble until now. 
They told me, "" Didier, yeah, the market might be overvalued, but you forget something. 
There is the Beijing Olympic Games coming in August 2008, and it's very clear that the Chinese government is controlling the economy and doing what it takes to also avoid any wave and control the stock market. "" Three weeks after my presentation, the markets lost 20 percent and went through a phase of volatility, upheaval, and a total market loss of 70 percent until the end of the year. 
So how can we be so collectively wrong by misreading or ignoring the science of the fact that when an instability has developed, and the system is ripe, any perturbation makes it essentially impossible to control? 
The Chinese market collapsed, but it rebounded. 
In 2009, we also identified that this new bubble, a smaller one, was unsustainable, so we published again a prediction, in advance, stating that by August 2009, the market will correct, will not continue on this track. 
Our critics, reading the prediction, said, "" No, it's not possible. 
The Chinese government is there. 
They have learned their lesson. They will control. 
They want to benefit from the growth. "" Perhaps these critics have not learned their lesson previously. 
So the crisis did occur. The market corrected. 
The same critics then said, "" Ah, yes, but you published your prediction. 
You influenced the market. 
It was not a prediction. "" Maybe I am very powerful then. 
Now, this is interesting. 
It shows that it's essentially impossible until now to develop a science of economics because we are sentient beings who anticipate and there is a problem of self-fulfilling prophesies. 
So we invented a new way of doing science. 
We created the Financial Bubble Experiment. 
The idea is the following. We monitor the markets. 
We identify excesses, bubbles. 
We do our work. We write a report in which we put our prediction of the critical time. 
We don't release the report. It's kept secret. 
But with modern encrypting techniques, we have a hash, we publish a public key, and six months later, we release the report, and there is authentication. 
And all this is done on an international archive so that we cannot be accused of just releasing the successes. 
Let me tease you with a very recent analysis. 
17th of May, 2013, just two weeks ago, we identified that the U.S. stock market was on an unsustainable path and we released this on our website on the 21st of May that there will be a change of regime. 
The next day, the market started to change regime, course. 
This is not a crash. 
This is just the third or fourth act of a massive bubble in the making. 
Scaling up the discussion at the size of the planet, we see the same thing. 
Wherever we look, it's observable: in the biosphere, in the atmosphere, in the ocean, showing these super-exponential trajectories characterizing an unsustainable path and announcing a phase transition. 
This diagram on the right shows a very beautiful compilation of studies suggesting indeed that there is a nonlinear — possibility for a nonlinear transition just in the next few decades. 
So there are bubbles everywhere. 
From one side, this is exciting for me, as a professor who chases bubbles and slays dragons, as the media has sometimes called me. 
But can we really slay the dragons? 
Very recently, with collaborators, we studied a dynamical system where you see the dragon-king as these big loops and we were able to apply tiny perturbations at the right times that removed, when control is on, these dragons. 
"Gouverner, c'est prévoir." 
Governing is the art of planning and predicting. 
But is it not the case that this is probably one of the biggest gaps of mankind, which has the responsibility to steer our societies and our planet toward sustainability in the face of growing challenges and crises? 
But the dragon-king theory gives hope. 
We learn that most systems have pockets of predictability. 
It is possible to develop advance diagnostics of crises so that we can be prepared, we can take measures, we can take responsibility, and so that never again will extremes and crises like the Great Recession or the European crisis take us by surprise. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

When people think about cities, they tend to think of certain things. 
They think of buildings and streets and skyscrapers, noisy cabs. 
But when I think about cities, I think about people. 
Cities are fundamentally about people, and where people go and where people meet are at the core of what makes a city work. 
So even more important than buildings in a city are the public spaces in between them. 
And today, some of the most transformative changes in cities are happening in these public spaces. 
So I believe that lively, enjoyable public spaces are the key to planning a great city. 
They are what makes it come alive. 
But what makes a public space work? 
What attracts people to successful public spaces, and what is it about unsuccessful places that keeps people away? 
I thought, if I could answer those questions, I could make a huge contribution to my city. 
But one of the more wonky things about me is that I am an animal behaviorist, and I use those skills not to study animal behavior but to study how people in cities use city public spaces. 
One of the first spaces that I studied was this little vest pocket park called Paley Park in midtown Manhattan. 
This little space became a small phenomenon, and because it had such a profound impact on New Yorkers, it made an enormous impression on me. 
I studied this park very early on in my career because it happened to have been built by my stepfather, so I knew that places like Paley Park didn't happen by accident. 
I saw firsthand that they required incredible dedication and enormous attention to detail. 
But what was it about this space that made it special and drew people to it? 
Well, I would sit in the park and watch very carefully, and first among other things were the comfortable, movable chairs. 
People would come in, find their own seat, move it a bit, actually, and then stay a while, and then interestingly, people themselves attracted other people, and ironically, I felt more peaceful if there were other people around. 
And it was green. 
This little park provided what New Yorkers crave: comfort and greenery. 
But my question was, why weren't there more places with greenery and places to sit in the middle of the city where you didn't feel alone, or like a trespasser? 
Unfortunately, that's not how cities were being designed. 
So here you see a familiar sight. 
This is how plazas have been designed for generations. 
They have that stylish, Spartan look that we often associate with modern architecture, but it's not surprising that people avoid spaces like this. 
They not only look desolate, they feel downright dangerous. 
I mean, where would you sit here? 
What would you do here? 
But architects love them. 
They are plinths for their creations. 
They might tolerate a sculpture or two, but that's about it. 
And for developers, they are ideal. 
There's nothing to water, nothing to maintain, and no undesirable people to worry about. 
But don't you think this is a waste? 
For me, becoming a city planner meant being able to truly change the city that I lived in and loved. 
I wanted to be able to create places that would give you the feeling that you got in Paley Park, and not allow developers to build bleak plazas like this. 
But over the many years, I have learned how hard it is to create successful, meaningful, enjoyable public spaces. 
As I learned from my stepfather, they certainly do not happen by accident, especially in a city like New York, where public space has to be fought for to begin with, and then for them to be successful, somebody has to think very hard about every detail. 
Now, open spaces in cities are opportunities. 
Yes, they are opportunities for commercial investment, but they are also opportunities for the common good of the city, and those two goals are often not aligned with one another, and therein lies the conflict. 
The first opportunity I had to fight for a great public open space was in the early 1980s, when I was leading a team of planners at a gigantic landfill called Battery Park City in lower Manhattan on the Hudson River. 
And this sandy wasteland had lain barren for 10 years, and we were told, unless we found a developer in six months, it would go bankrupt. 
So we came up with a radical, almost insane idea. 
Instead of building a park as a complement to future development, why don't we reverse that equation and build a small but very high-quality public open space first, and see if that made a difference. 
So we only could afford to build a two-block section of what would become a mile-long esplanade, so whatever we built had to be perfect. 
So just to make sure, I insisted that we build a mock-up in wood, at scale, of the railing and the sea wall. 
And when I sat down on that test bench with sand still swirling all around me, the railing hit exactly at eye level, blocking my view and ruining my experience at the water's edge. 
So you see, details really do make a difference. 
But design is not just how something looks, it's how your body feels on that seat in that space, and I believe that successful design always depends on that very individual experience. 
In this photo, everything looks very finished, but that granite edge, those lights, the back on that bench, the trees in planting, and the many different kinds of places to sit were all little battles that turned this project into a place that people wanted to be. 
Now, this proved very valuable 20 years later when Michael Bloomberg asked me to be his planning commissioner and put me in charge of shaping the entire city of New York. 
And he said to me on that very day, he said that New York was projected to grow from eight to nine million people. 
And he asked me, "" So where are you going to put one million additional New Yorkers? "" Well, I didn't have any idea. 
Now, you know that New York does place a high value on attracting immigrants, so we were excited about the prospect of growth, but honestly, where were we going to grow in a city that was already built out to its edges and surrounded by water? 
How were we going to find housing for that many new New Yorkers? 
And if we couldn't spread out, which was probably a good thing, where could new housing go? 
And what about cars? 
Our city couldn't possibly handle any more cars. 
So what were we going to do? 
If we couldn't spread out, we had to go up. 
And if we had to go up, we had to go up in places where you wouldn't need to own a car. 
So that meant using one of our greatest assets: our transit system. 
But we had never before thought of how we could make the most of it. 
So here was the answer to our puzzle. 
If we were to channel and redirect all new development around transit, we could actually handle that population increase, we thought. 
And so here was the plan, what we really needed to do: We needed to redo our zoning — and zoning is the city planner's regulatory tool — and basically reshape the entire city, targeting where new development could go and prohibiting any development at all in our car-oriented, suburban-style neighborhoods. 
Well, this was an unbelievably ambitious idea, ambitious because communities had to approve those plans. 
So how was I going to get this done? 
By listening. So I began listening, in fact, thousands of hours of listening just to establish trust. 
You know, communities can tell whether or not you understand their neighborhoods. 
It's not something you can just fake. 
And so I began walking. 
I can't tell you how many blocks I walked, in sweltering summers, in freezing winters, year after year, just so I could get to understand the DNA of each neighborhood and know what each street felt like. 
I became an incredibly geeky zoning expert, finding ways that zoning could address communities' concerns. 
So little by little, neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, we began to set height limits so that all new development would be predictable and near transit. 
Over the course of 12 years, we were able to rezone 124 neighborhoods, 40 percent of the city, 12,500 blocks, so that now, 90 percent of all new development of New York is within a 10-minute walk of a subway. 
In other words, nobody in those new buildings needs to own a car. 
Well, those rezonings were exhausting and enervating and important, but rezoning was never my mission. 
You can't see zoning and you can't feel zoning. 
My mission was always to create great public spaces. 
So in the areas where we zoned for significant development, I was determined to create places that would make a difference in people's lives. 
Here you see what was two miles of abandoned, degraded waterfront in the neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, impossible to get to and impossible to use. 
Now the zoning here was massive, so I felt an obligation to create magnificent parks on these waterfronts, and I spent an incredible amount of time on every square inch of these plans. 
I wanted to make sure that there were tree-lined paths from the upland to the water, that there were trees and plantings everywhere, and, of course, lots and lots of places to sit. 
Honestly, I had no idea how it would turn out. 
I had to have faith. 
But I put everything that I had studied and learned into those plans. 
And then it opened, and I have to tell you, it was incredible. 
People came from all over the city to be in these parks. 
I know they changed the lives of the people who live there, but they also changed New Yorkers' whole image of their city. 
I often come down and watch people get on this little ferry that now runs between the boroughs, and I can't tell you why, but I'm completely moved by the fact that people are using it as if it had always been there. 
And here is a new park in lower Manhattan. 
Now, the water's edge in lower Manhattan was a complete mess before 9 / 11. 
Wall Street was essentially landlocked because you couldn't get anywhere near this edge. 
And after 9 / 11, the city had very little control. 
But I thought if we went to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and got money to reclaim this two miles of degraded waterfront that it would have an enormous effect on the rebuilding of lower Manhattan. 
And it did. 
Lower Manhattan finally has a public waterfront on all three sides. 
I really love this park. 
You know, railings have to be higher now, so we put bar seating at the edge, and you can get so close to the water you're practically on it. 
And see how the railing widens and flattens out so you can lay down your lunch or your laptop. 
And I love when people come there and look up and they say, "Wow, there's Brooklyn, and it's so close." 
So what's the trick? 
How do you turn a park into a place that people want to be? 
Well, it's up to you, not as a city planner but as a human being. 
You don't tap into your design expertise. 
You tap into your humanity. 
I mean, would you want to go there? 
Would you want to stay there? 
Can you see into it and out of it? 
Are there other people there? 
Does it seem green and friendly? 
Can you find your very own seat? 
Well now, all over New York City, there are places where you can find your very own seat. 
Where there used to be parking spaces, there are now pop-up cafes. 
Where Broadway traffic used to run, there are now tables and chairs. 
Where 12 years ago, sidewalk cafes were not allowed, they are now everywhere. 
But claiming these spaces for public use was not simple, and it's even harder to keep them that way. 
So now I'm going to tell you a story about a very unusual park called the High Line. 
The High Line was an elevated railway. 
(Applause) The High Line was an elevated railway that ran through three neighborhoods on Manhattan's West Side, and when the train stopped running, it became a self-seeded landscape, a kind of a garden in the sky. 
And when I saw it the first time, honestly, when I went up on that old viaduct, I fell in love the way you fall in love with a person, honestly. 
And when I was appointed, saving the first two sections of the High Line from demolition became my first priority and my most important project. 
I knew if there was a day that I didn't worry about the High Line, it would come down. 
And the High Line, even though it is widely known now and phenomenally popular, it is the most contested public space in the city. 
You might see a beautiful park, but not everyone does. 
You know, it's true, commercial interests will always battle against public space. 
You might say, "" How wonderful it is that more than four million people come from all over the world to visit the High Line. "" Well, a developer sees just one thing: customers. 
Hey, why not take out those plantings and have shops all along the High Line? 
Wouldn't that be terrific and won't it mean a lot more money for the city? 
Well no, it would not be terrific. 
It would be a mall, and not a park. 
(Applause) And you know what, it might mean more money for the city, but a city has to take the long view, the view for the common good. 
Most recently, the last section of the High Line, the third section of the High Line, the final section of the High Line, has been pitted against development interests, where some of the city's leading developers are building more than 17 million square feet at the Hudson Yards. 
And they came to me and proposed that they "" temporarily disassemble "" that third and final section. 
Perhaps the High Line didn't fit in with their image of a gleaming city of skyscrapers on a hill. 
Perhaps it was just in their way. 
But in any case, it took nine months of nonstop daily negotiation to finally get the signed agreement to prohibit its demolition, and that was only two years ago. 
So you see, no matter how popular and successful a public space may be, it can never be taken for granted. 
Public spaces always — this is it saved — public spaces always need vigilant champions, not only to claim them at the outset for public use, but to design them for the people that use them, then to maintain them to ensure that they are for everyone, that they are not violated, invaded, abandoned or ignored. 
If there is any one lesson that I have learned in my life as a city planner, it is that public spaces have power. 
It's not just the number of people using them, it's the even greater number of people who feel better about their city just knowing that they are there. 
Public space can change how you live in a city, how you feel about a city, whether you choose one city over another, and public space is one of the most important reasons why you stay in a city. 
I believe that a successful city is like a fabulous party. 
People stay because they are having a great time. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

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

What I want to talk about is, as background, is the idea that cars are art. 
This is actually quite meaningful to me, because car designers tend to be a little bit low on the totem pole — we don't do coffee table books with just one lamp inside of it — and cars are thought so much as a product that it's a little bit difficult to get into the aesthetic side under the same sort of terminology that one would discuss art. 
And so cars, as art, brings it into an emotional plane — if you accept that — that you have to deal with on the same level you would with art with a capital A. 
Now at this point you're going to see a picture of Michelangelo. 
This is completely different than automobiles. 
Automobiles are self-moving things, right? Elevators are automobiles. 
And they're not very emotional; they solve a purpose; and certainly automobiles have been around for 100 years and have made our lives functionally a lot better in many ways; they've also been a real pain in the ass, because automobiles are really the thing we have to solve. 
We have to solve the pollution, we have to solve the congestion — but that's not what interests me in this speech. 
What interests me in this speech is cars. Automobiles may be what you use, but cars are what we are, in many ways. 
And as long as we can solve the problems of automobiles, and I believe we can, with fuel cells or hydrogen, like BMW is really hip on, and lots of other things, then I think we can look past that and try and understand why this hook is in many of us — of this car-y-ness — and what that means, what we can learn from it. 
That's what I want to get to. Cars are not a suit of clothes; cars are an avatar. Cars are an expansion of yourself: they take your thoughts, your ideas, your emotions, and they multiply it — your anger, whatever. It's an avatar. 
It's a super-waldo that you happen to be inside of, and if you feel sexy, the car is sexy. And if you're full of road rage, you've got a "" Chevy: Like a Rock, "" right? 
Cars are a sculpture — did you know this? 
That every car you see out there is sculpted by hand. 
Many people think, "" Well, it's computers, and it's done by machines and stuff like that. "" Well, they reproduce it, but the originals are all done by hand. 
It's done by men and women who believe a lot in their craft. 
And they put that same kind of tension into the sculpting of a car that you do in a great sculpture that you would go and look at in a museum. 
That tension between the need to express, the need to discover, then you put something new into it, and at the same time you have bounds of craftsmanship. 
Rules that say, this is how you handle surfaces; this is what control is all about; this is how you show you're a master of your craft. 
And that tension, that discovery, that push for something new — and at the same time, that sense of obligation to the regards of craftsmanship — that's as strong in cars as it is in anything. 
We work in clay, which hasn't changed much since Michelangelo started screwing around with it, and there's a very interesting analogy to that too. 
Real quickly — Michelangelo once said he's there to "" discover the figure within, "" OK? 
There we go, the automobile. 
That was 100 years right there — did you catch that? 
Between that one there, and that one there, it changed a lot didn't it? 
OK, it's not marketing; there's a very interesting car concept here, but the marketing part is not what I want to talk about here. 
I want to talk about this. 
Why it means you have to wash a car, what is it, that sensuality you have to touch about it? That's the sculpture that goes into it. That sensuality. 
And it's done by men and women working just like this, making cars. 
Now this little quote about sculpture from Henry Moore, I believe that that "" pressure within "" that Moore's talking about — at least when it comes to cars — comes right back to this idea of the mean. 
It's that will to live, that need to survive, to express itself, that comes in a car, and takes over people like me. 
And we tell other people, "" Do this, do this, do this, "" until this thing comes alive. 
We are completely infected. And beauty can be the result of this infectiousness; it's quite wonderful. 
This sculpture is, of course, at the heart of all of it, and it's really what puts the craftsmanship into our cars. 
And it's not a whole lot different, really, when they're working like this, or when somebody works like this. 
It's that same kind of commitment, that same kind of beauty. 
Now, now I get to the point. I want to talk about cars as art. 
Art, in the Platonic sense, is truth; it's beauty, and love. 
Now this is really where designers in car business diverge from the engineers. 
We don't really have a problem talking about love. 
We don't have a problem talking about truth or beauty in that sense. 
That's what we're searching for — when we're working our craft, we are really trying to find that truth out there. 
We're not trying to find vanity and beauty. 
We're trying to find the beauty in the truth. 
However, engineers tend to look at things a little bit more Newtonian, instead of this quantum approach. 
We're dealing with irrationalisms, and we're dealing with paradoxes that we admit exist, and the engineers tend to look things a little bit more like two and two is four, and if you get 4.0 it's better, and 4.000 is even better. 
And that sometimes leads to bit of a divergence in why we're doing what we're doing. 
We've pretty much accepted the fact, though, that we are the women in the organization at BMW — BMW is a very manly type business, — men, men, men; it's engineers. 
And we're kind of the female side to that. That's OK, that's cool. You go off and be manly. We're going to be a little bit more female. 
Because what we're interested in is finding form that's more than just a function. 
We're interested in finding beauty that's more than just an aesthetic; it's really a truth. 
And I think this idea of soul, as being at the heart of great cars, is very applicable. You all know it. You know a car when you've seen it, with soul. You know how strong this is. 
Well, this experience of love, and the experience of design, to me, are interchangeable. And now I'm coming to my story. 
I discovered something about love and design through a project called Deep Blue. 
And first of all, you have to go with me for a second, and say, you know, you could take the word "" love "" out of a lot of things in our society, put the word "" design "" in, and it still works, like this quote here, you know. It kind of works, you know? 
You can understand that. It works in truisms. 
"All is fair in design and war." 
Certainly we live in a competitive society. 
I think this one here, there's a pop song that really describes Philippe Starck for me, you know, this is like you know, this is like puppy love, you know, this is cool right? 
Toothbrush, cool. 
It really only gets serious when you look at something like this. OK? 
(Laughter) This is one substitution that I believe all of us, in design management, are guilty of. 
And this idea that there is more to love, more to design, when it gets down to your neighbor, your other, it can be physical like this, and maybe in the future it will be. 
But right now it's in dealing with our own people, our own teams who are doing the creating. So, to my story. 
The idea of people-work is what we work with here, and I have to make a bond with my designers when we're creating BMWs. 
We have to have a shared intimacy, a shared vision — that means we have to work as one family; we have to understand ourselves that way. 
There's good times; there's interesting times; and there's some stress times too. 
You want to do cars, you've got to go outside. 
You've got to do cars in the rain; you've got to do cars in the snow. 
That's, by the way, is a presentation we made to our board of directors. 
We haul their butts out in the snow, too. You want to know cars outside? 
Well, you've got to stand outside to do this. 
And because these are artists, they have very artistic temperaments. 
All right? Now one thing about art is, art is discovery, and art is discovering yourself through your art. Right? 
And one thing about cars is we're all a little bit like Pygmalion, we are completely in love with our own creations. 
This is one of my favorite paintings, it really describes our relationship with cars. 
This is sick beyond belief. 
(Laughter) But because of this, the intimacy with which we work together as a team takes on a new dimension, a new meaning. 
We have a shared center; we have a shared focus — that car stays at the middle of all our relationships. 
And it's my job, in the competitive process, to narrow this down. 
I heard today about Joseph's death genes that have to go in and kill cell reproduction. 
You know, that's what I have to do sometimes. 
We start out with 10 cars; we narrow it down to five cars, down to three cars, down to two cars, down to one car, and I'm in the middle of that killing, basically. 
Someone's love, someone's baby. 
This is very difficult, and you have to have a bond with your team that permits you to do this, because their life is wrapped up in that too. 
They've got that gene infected in them as well, and they want that to live, more than anything else. 
Well, this project, Deep Blue, put me in contact with my team in a way that I never expected, and I want to pass it on to you, because I want you to reflect on this, perhaps in your own relationships. 
We wanted to a do a car which was a complete leap of faith for BMW. 
We wanted to do a team which was so removed from the way we'd done it, that I only had a phone number that connected me to them. 
So, what we did was: instead of having a staff of artists that are just your wrist, we decided to free up a team of creative designers and engineers to find out what's the successor to the SUV phenomenon in America. 
This is 1996 we did this project. And so we sent them off with this team name, Deep Blue. Now many people know Deep Blue from IBM — we actually stole it from them because we figured if anybody read our faxes they'd think we're talking about computers. 
It turned out it was quite clever because Deep Blue, in a company like BMW, has a hook — "" Deep Blue, "" wow, cool name. 
So people get wrapped up in it. And we took a team of designers, and we sent them off to America. And we gave them a budget, what we thought was a set of deliverables, a timetable, and nothing else. 
Like I said, I just had a phone number that connected me to them. 
And a group of engineers worked in Germany, and the idea was they would work separately on this problem of what's the successor to the SUV. 
They would come together, compare notes. Then they would work apart, come together, and they would produce together a monumental set of diverse opinions that didn't pollute each other's ideas — but at the same time came together and resolved the problems. 
Hopefully, really understand the customer at its heart, where the customer is, live with them in America. So — sent the team off, and actually something different happened. They went other places. 
(Laughter) They disappeared, quite honestly, and all I got was postcards. 
Now, I got some postcards of these guys in Las Vegas, and I got some postcards of these guys in the Grand Canyon, and I got these postcards of Niagara Falls, and pretty soon they're in New York, and I don't know where else. 
And I'm telling myself, "" This is going to be a great car, they're doing research that I've never even thought about before. "" Right? And they decided that instead of, like, having a studio, and six or seven apartments, it was cheaper to rent Elizabeth Taylor's ex-house in Malibu. 
And — at least they told me it was her house, I guess it was at one time, she had a party there or something. 
But anyway, this was the house, and they all lived there. 
Now this is 24 / 7 living, half-a-dozen people who'd left their — some had left their wives behind and families behind, and they literally lived in this house for the entire six months the project was in America, but the first three months were the most intensive. 
And one of the young women in the project, she was a fantastic lady, she actually built her room in the bathroom. 
The bathroom was so big, she built the bed over the bathtub — it's quite fascinating. 
On the other hand, I didn't know anything about this. OK? 
Nothing. This is all going on, and all I'm getting is postcards of these guys in Las Vegas, or whatever, saying, "" Don't worry Chris, this is really going to be good. "" OK? 
So my concept of what a design studio was probably — I wasn't up to speed on where these guys were. 
However, the engineers back in Munich had taken on this kind of Newtonian solution, and they were trying to find how many cup holders can dance on the head of a pin, and, you know, these really serious questions that are confronting the modern consumer. 
And one was hoping that these two teams would get together, and this collusion of incredible creativity, under these incredible surroundings, and these incredibly stressed-out engineers, would create some incredible solutions. 
Well, what I didn't know was, and what we found out was — these guys, they can't even like talk to each other under those conditions. 
You get a divergence of Newtonian and quantum thinking at that point, you have a split in your dialog that is so deep, and so far, that they cannot bring this together at all. 
And so we had our first meeting, after three months, in Tiburon, which is just up the road from here — you know Tiburon? 
And the idea was after the first three months of this independent research they would present it all to Dr. Goschel — who is now my boss, and at that time he was co-mentor on the project — and they would present their results. 
We would see where we were going, we would see the first indication of what could be the successive phenomenon to the SUV in America. 
And so I had these ideas in my head, that this is going to be great. 
I mean, I'm going to see so much work, it's so intense — I know probably Las Vegas meant a lot about it, and I'm not really sure where the Grand Canyon came in either — but somehow all this is going to come together, and I'm going to see some really great product. 
So we went to Tiburon, after three months, and the team had gotten together the week before, many days ahead of time. 
The engineers flew over, and designers got together with them, and they put their presentation together. 
Well, it turns out that the engineers hadn't done anything. 
And they hadn't done anything because — kind of, like in car business, engineers are there to solve problems, and we were asking them to create a problem. 
And the engineers were waiting for the designers to say, "This is the problem that we've created, now help us solve it." 
And they couldn't talk about it. So what happened was, the engineers showed up with nothing. 
And the engineers told the designers, "" If you go in with all your stuff, we'll walk out, we'll walk right out of the project. "" So I didn't know any of this, and we got a presentation that had an agenda, looked like this. 
There was a whole lot of dialog. 
We spent four hours being told all about vocabulary that needs to be built between engineers and designers. 
And here I'm expecting at any moment, "" OK, they're going to turn the page, and I'm going to see the cars, I'm going to see the sketches, I'm going to see maybe some idea of where it's going. "" Dialog kept on going, with mental maps of words, and pretty soon it was becoming obvious that instead of being dazzled with brilliance, I was seriously being baffled with bullshit. 
And if you can imagine what this is like, to have these months of postcard indication of how great this team is working, and they're out there spending all this money, and they're learning, and they're doing all this stuff. 
I went fucking ballistic, right? I went nuts. 
You can probably remember Tiburon, it used to look like this. 
After four hours of this, I stood up, and I took this team apart. 
I screamed at them, I yelled at them, "" What the hell are you doing? 
You're letting me down, you're my designers, you're supposed to be the creative ones, what the hell is going on around here? "" It was probably one of my better tirades, I have some good ones, but this was probably one of my better ones. And I went into these people; how could they take BMW's money, how could they have a holiday for three months and produce nothing, nothing? 
Because of course they didn't tell us that they had three station wagons full of drawings, model concepts, pictures — everything I wanted, they'd locked up in the cars, because they had shown solidarity with the engineers — and they'd decided not to show me anything, in order to give the chance for problem solving a chance to start, because they hadn't realized, of course, that they couldn't do problem creating. 
So we went to lunch — (Laughter) And I've got to tell you, this was one seriously quiet lunch. 
The engineers all sat at one end of the table, the designers and I sat at the other end of the table, really quiet. 
And I was just fucking furious, furious. OK? 
Probably because they had all the fun and I didn't, you know. 
That's what you get furious about right? 
And somebody asked me about Catherine, my wife, you know, did she fly out with me or something? 
I said, "" No, "" and it triggered a set of thoughts about my wife. 
And I recalled that when Catherine and I were married, the priest gave a very nice sermon, and he said something very important. 
He said, "" Love is not selfish, "" he said, "" Love does not mean counting how many times I say, 'I love you.' It doesn't mean you had sex this many times this month, and it's two times less than last month, so that means you don't love me as much. 
Love is not selfish. "" And I thought about this, and I thought, "" You know, I'm not showing love here. I'm seriously not showing love. 
I'm in the air, I'm in the air without trust. 
This cannot be. This cannot be that I'm expecting a certain number of sketches, and to me that's my quantification method for qualifying a team. 
This cannot be. "" So I told them this story. I said, "" Guys, I'm thinking about something here, this isn't right. I can't have a relationship with you guys based on a premise that is a quantifiable one. 
Based on a dictate premise that says, 'I'm a boss, you do what I say, without trust.' "" I said "" This can't be. "" Actually, we all broke down into tears, to be quite honest about it, because they still could not tell me how much frustration they had built up inside of them, not being able to show me what I wanted, and merely having to ask me to trust them that it would come. 
And I think we felt much closer that day, we cut a lot of strings that didn't need to be there, and we forged the concept for what real team and creativity is all about. 
We put the car back at the center of our thoughts, and we put love, I think, truly back into the center of the process. 
By the way, that team went on to create six different concepts for the next model of what would be the proposal for the next generation after SUVs in America. 
One of those was the idea of a crossover coupes — you see it downstairs, the X Coupe — they had a lot of fun with that. 
It was the rendition of our motorcycle, the GS, as Carl Magnusson says, "" brute-iful, "" as the idea of what could be a motorcycle, if you add two more wheels. 
And so, in conclusion, my lesson that I wanted to pass on to you, was this one here. I'm also going to steal a little quote out of "" Little Prince. "" There's a lot to be said about trust and love, if you know that those two words are synonymous for design. 
I had a very, very meaningful relationship with my team that day, and it's stayed that way ever since. 
And I hope that you too find that there's more to design, and more towards the art of the design, than doing it yourself. 
It's true that the trust and the love, that makes it worthwhile. 
Thanks so much. 
(Applause) 

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

So today, I would like to talk with you about bionics, which is the popular term for the science of replacing part of a living organism with a mechatronic device, or a robot. 
It is essentially the stuff of life meets machine. 
And specifically, I'd like to talk with you about how bionics is evolving for people with arm amputations. 
This is our motivation. 
Arm amputation causes a huge disability. 
I mean, the functional impairment is clear. 
Our hands are amazing instruments. 
And when you lose one, far less both, it's a lot harder to do the things we physically need to do. 
There's also a huge emotional impact. 
And actually, I spend as much of my time in clinic dealing with the emotional adjustment of patients as with the physical disability. 
And finally, there's a profound social impact. 
We talk with our hands. 
We greet with our hands. 
And we interact with the physical world with our hands. 
And when they're missing, it's a barrier. 
Arm amputation is usually caused by trauma, with things like industrial accidents, motor vehicle collisions or, very poignantly, war. 
There are also some children who are born without arms, called congenital limb deficiency. 
Unfortunately, we don't do great with upper-limb prosthetics. 
There are two general types. 
They're called body-powered prostheses, which were invented just after the Civil War, refined in World War I and World War II. 
Here you see a patent for an arm in 1912. 
It's not a lot different than the one you see on my patient. 
They work by harnessing shoulder power. 
So when you squish your shoulders, they pull on a bicycle cable. 
And that bicycle cable can open or close a hand or a hook or bend an elbow. 
And we still use them commonly, because they're very robust and relatively simple devices. 
The state of the art is what we call myoelectric prostheses. 
These are motorized devices that are controlled by little electrical signals from your muscle. 
Every time you contract a muscle, it emits a little electricity that you can record with antennae or electrodes and use that to operate the motorized prosthesis. 
They work pretty well for people who have just lost their hand, because your hand muscles are still there. 
You squeeze your hand, these muscles contract. 
You open it, these muscles contract. 
So it's intuitive, and it works pretty well. 
Well how about with higher levels of amputation? 
Now you've lost your arm above the elbow. 
You're missing not only these muscles, but your hand and your elbow too. 
What do you do? 
Well our patients have to use very code-y systems of using just their arm muscles to operate robotic limbs. 
We have robotic limbs. 
There are several available on the market, and here you see a few. 
They contain just a hand that will open and close, a wrist rotator and an elbow. 
There's no other functions. 
If they did, how would we tell them what to do? 
We built our own arm at the Rehab Institute of Chicago where we've added some wrist flexion and shoulder joints to get up to six motors, or six degrees of freedom. 
And we've had the opportunity to work with some very advanced arms that were funded by the U.S. military, using these prototypes, that had up to 10 different degrees of freedom including movable hands. 
But at the end of the day, how do we tell these robotic arms what to do? 
How do we control them? 
Well we need a neural interface, a way to connect to our nervous system or our thought processes so that it's intuitive, it's natural, like for you and I. 
Well the body works by starting a motor command in your brain, going down your spinal cord, out the nerves and to your periphery. 
And your sensation's the exact opposite. 
You touch yourself, there's a stimulus that comes up those very same nerves back up to your brain. 
When you lose your arm, that nervous system still works. 
Those nerves can put out command signals. 
And if I tap the nerve ending on a World War II vet, he'll still feel his missing hand. 
So you might say, let's go to the brain and put something in the brain to record signals, or in the end of the peripheral nerve and record them there. 
And these are very exciting research areas, but it's really, really hard. 
You have to put in hundreds of microscopic wires to record from little tiny individual neurons — ordinary fibers that put out tiny signals that are microvolts. 
And it's just too hard to use now and for my patients today. 
So we developed a different approach. 
We're using a biological amplifier to amplify these nerve signals — muscles. 
Muscles will amplify the nerve signals about a thousand-fold, so that we can record them from on top of the skin, like you saw earlier. 
So our approach is something we call targeted reinnervation. 
Imagine, with somebody who's lost their whole arm, we still have four major nerves that go down your arm. 
And we take the nerve away from your chest muscle and let these nerves grow into it. 
Now you think, "" Close hand, "" and a little section of your chest contracts. 
You think, "" Bend elbow, "" a different section contracts. 
And we can use electrodes or antennae to pick that up and tell the arm to move. 
That's the idea. 
So this is the first man that we tried it on. 
His name is Jesse Sullivan. 
He's just a saint of a man — 54-year-old lineman who touched the wrong wire and had both of his arms burnt so badly they had to be amputated at the shoulder. 
Jesse came to us at the RIC to be fit with these state-of-the-art devices, and here you see them. 
I'm still using that old technology with a bicycle cable on his right side. 
And he picks which joint he wants to move with those chin switches. 
On the left side he's got a modern motorized prosthesis with those three joints, and he operates little pads in his shoulder that he touches to make the arm go. 
And Jesse's a good crane operator, and he did okay by our standards. 
He also required a revision surgery on his chest. 
And that gave us the opportunity to do targeted reinnervation. 
So my colleague, Dr. Greg Dumanian, did the surgery. 
First, we cut away the nerve to his own muscle, then we took the arm nerves and just kind of had them shift down onto his chest and closed him up. 
And after about three months, the nerves grew in a little bit and we could get a twitch. 
And after six months, the nerves grew in well, and you could see strong contractions. 
And this is what it looks like. 
This is what happens when Jesse thinks open and close his hand, or bend or straighten your elbow. 
You can see the movements on his chest, and those little hash marks are where we put our antennae, or electrodes. 
And I challenge anybody in the room to make their chest go like this. 
His brain is thinking about his arm. 
He has not learned how to do this with the chest. 
There is not a learning process. 
That's why it's intuitive. 
So here's Jesse in our first little test with him. 
On the left-hand side, you see his original prosthesis, and he's using those switches to move little blocks from one box to the other. 
He's had that arm for about 20 months, so he's pretty good with it. 
On the right side, two months after we fit him with his targeted reinnervation prosthesis — which, by the way, is the same physical arm, just programmed a little different — you can see that he's much faster and much smoother as he moves these little blocks. 
And we're only able to use three of the signals at this time. 
Then we had one of those little surprises in science. 
So we're all motivated to get motor commands to drive robotic arms. 
And after a few months, you touch Jesse on his chest, and he felt his missing hand. 
His hand sensation grew into his chest again probably because we had also taken away a lot of fat, so the skin was right down to the muscle and deinnervated, if you would, his skin. 
So you touch Jesse here, he feels his thumb; you touch it here, he feels his pinky. 
He feels light touch down to one gram of force. 
He feels hot, cold, sharp, dull, all in his missing hand, or both his hand and his chest, but he can attend to either. 
So this is really exciting for us, because now we have a portal, a portal, or a way to potentially give back sensation, so that he might feel what he touches with his prosthetic hand. 
Imagine sensors in the hand coming up and pressing on this new hand skin. 
So it was very exciting. 
We've also gone on with what was initially our primary population of people with above-the-elbow amputations. 
And here we deinnervate, or cut the nerve away, just from little segments of muscle and leave others alone that give us our up-down signals and two others that will give us a hand open and close signal. 
This was one of our first patients, Chris. 
You see him with his original device on the left there after eight months of use, and on the right, it is two months. 
He's about four or five times as fast with this simple little performance metric. 
All right. 
So one of the best parts of my job is working with really great patients who are also our research collaborators. 
And we're fortunate today to have Amanda Kitts come and join us. 
Please welcome Amanda Kitts. 
(Applause) So Amanda, would you please tell us how you lost your arm? 
Amanda Kitts: Sure. In 2006, I had a car accident. 
And I was driving home from work, and a truck was coming the opposite direction, came over into my lane, ran over the top of my car and his axle tore my arm off. 
Todd Kuiken: Okay, so after your amputation, you healed up. 
And you've got one of these conventional arms. 
Can you tell us how it worked? 
AK: Well, it was a little difficult, because all I had to work with was a bicep and a tricep. 
So for the simple little things like picking something up, I would have to bend my elbow, and then I would have to cocontract to get it to change modes. 
When I did that, I had to use my bicep to get the hand to close, use my tricep to get it to open, cocontract again to get the elbow to work again. 
TK: So it was a little slow? 
AK: A little slow, and it was just hard to work. 
You had to concentrate a whole lot. 
TK: Okay, so I think about nine months later that you had the targeted reinnervation surgery, took six more months to have all the reinnervation. 
Then we fit her with a prosthesis. 
And how did that work for you? 
AK: It works good. 
I was able to use my elbow and my hand simultaneously. 
I could work them just by my thoughts. 
So I didn't have to do any of the cocontracting and all that. 
TK: A little faster? 
AK: A little faster. And much more easy, much more natural. 
TK: Okay, this was my goal. 
For 20 years, my goal was to let somebody [be] able to use their elbow and hand in an intuitive way and at the same time. 
And we now have over 50 patients around the world who have had this surgery, including over a dozen of our wounded warriors in the U.S. armed services. 
The success rate of the nerve transfers is very high. 
It's like 96 percent. 
Because we're putting a big fat nerve onto a little piece of muscle. 
And it provides intuitive control. 
Our functional testing, those little tests, all show that they're a lot quicker and a lot easier. 
And the most important thing is our patients have appreciated it. 
So that was all very exciting. 
But we want to do better. 
There's a lot of information in those nerve signals, and we wanted to get more. 
You can move each finger. You can move your thumb, your wrist. 
Can we get more out of it? 
So we did some experiments where we saturated our poor patients with zillions of electrodes and then had them try to do two dozen different tasks — from wiggling a finger to moving a whole arm to reaching for something — and recorded this data. 
And then we used some algorithms that are a lot like speech recognition algorithms, called pattern recognition. 
See. 
(Laughter) And here you can see, on Jesse's chest, when he just tried to do three different things, you can see three different patterns. 
But I can't put in an electrode and say, "" Go there. "" So we collaborated with our colleagues in University of New Brunswick, came up with this algorithm control, which Amanda can now demonstrate. 
AK: So I have the elbow that goes up and down. 
I have the wrist rotation that goes — and it can go all the way around. 
And I have the wrist flexion and extension. 
And I also have the hand closed and open. 
TK: Thank you, Amanda. 
Now this is a research arm, but it's made out of commercial components from here down and a few that I've borrowed from around the world. 
It's about seven pounds, which is probably about what my arm would weigh if I lost it right here. 
Obviously, that's heavy for Amanda. 
And in fact, it feels even heavier, because it's not glued on the same. 
She's carrying all the weight through harnesses. 
So the exciting part isn't so much the mechatronics, but the control. 
So we've developed a small microcomputer that is blinking somewhere behind her back and is operating this all by the way she trains it to use her individual muscle signals. 
So Amanda, when you first started using this arm, how long did it take to use it? 
AK: It took just about probably three to four hours to get it to train. 
I had to hook it up to a computer, so I couldn't just train it anywhere. 
So if it stopped working, I just had to take it off. 
So now it's able to train with just this little piece on the back. 
I can wear it around. 
If it stops working for some reason, I can retrain it. 
Takes about a minute. 
TK: So we're really excited, because now we're getting to a clinically practical device. 
And that's where our goal is — to have something clinically pragmatic to wear. 
We've also had Amanda able to use some of our more advanced arms that I showed you earlier. 
Here's Amanda using an arm made by DEKA Research Corporation. 
And I believe Dean Kamen presented it at TED a few years ago. 
So Amanda, you can see, has really good control. 
It's all the pattern recognition. 
And it now has a hand that can do different grasps. 
What we do is have the patient go all the way open and think, "" What hand grasp pattern do I want? "" It goes into that mode, and then you can do up to five or six different hand grasps with this hand. 
Amanda, how many were you able to do with the DEKA arm? 
AK: I was able to get four. 
I had the key grip, I had a chuck grip, I had a power grasp and I had a fine pinch. 
But my favorite one was just when the hand was open, because I work with kids, and so all the time you're clapping and singing, so I was able to do that again, which was really good. 
TK: That hand's not so good for clapping. 
AK: Can't clap with this one. 
TK: All right. So that's exciting on where we may go with the better mechatronics, if we make them good enough to put out on the market and use in a field trial. 
I want you to watch closely. 
(Video) Claudia: Oooooh! 
TK: That's Claudia, and that was the first time she got to feel sensation through her prosthetic. 
She had a little sensor at the end of her prosthesis that then she rubbed over different surfaces, and she could feel different textures of sandpaper, different grits, ribbon cable, as it pushed on her reinnervated hand skin. 
She said that when she just ran it across the table, it felt like her finger was rocking. 
So that's an exciting laboratory experiment on how to give back, potentially, some skin sensation. 
But here's another video that shows some of our challenges. 
This is Jesse, and he's squeezing a foam toy. 
And the harder he squeezes — you see a little black thing in the middle that's pushing on his skin proportional to how hard he squeezes. 
But look at all the electrodes around it. 
I've got a real estate problem. 
You're supposed to put a bunch of these things on there, but our little motor's making all kinds of noise right next to my electrodes. 
So we're really challenged on what we're doing there. 
The future is bright. 
We're excited about where we are and a lot of things we want to do. 
So for example, one is to get rid of my real estate problem and get better signals. 
We want to develop these little tiny capsules about the size of a piece of risotto that we can put into the muscles and telemeter out the EMG signals, so that it's not worrying about electrode contact. 
And we can have the real estate open to try more sensation feedback. 
We want to build a better arm. 
This arm — they're always made for the 50th percentile male — which means they're too big for five-eighths of the world. 
So rather than a super strong or super fast arm, we're making an arm that is — we're starting with, the 25th percentile female — that will have a hand that wraps around, opens all the way, two degrees of freedom in the wrist and an elbow. 
So it'll be the smallest and lightest and the smartest arm ever made. 
Once we can do it that small, it's a lot easier making them bigger. 
So those are just some of our goals. 
And we really appreciate you all being here today. 
I'd like to tell you a little bit about the dark side, with yesterday's theme. 
So Amanda came jet-lagged, she's using the arm, and everything goes wrong. 
There was a computer spook, a broken wire, a converter that sparked. 
We took out a whole circuit in the hotel and just about put on the fire alarm. 
And none of those problems could I have dealt with, but I have a really bright research team. 
And thankfully Dr. Annie Simon was with us and worked really hard yesterday to fix it. 
That's science. 
And fortunately, it worked today. 
So thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I was about 10 years old on a camping trip with my dad in the Adirondack Mountains, a wilderness area in the northern part of New York State. 
It was a beautiful day. 
The forest was sparkling. 
The sun made the leaves glow like stained glass, and if it weren't for the path we were following, we could almost pretend we were the first human beings to ever walk that land. 
We got to our campsite. 
It was a lean-to on a bluff looking over a crystal, beautiful lake, when I discovered a horror. 
Behind the lean-to was a dump, maybe 40 feet square with rotting apple cores and balled-up aluminum foil, and a dead sneaker. 
And I was astonished, I was very angry, and I was deeply confused. 
The campers who were too lazy to take out what they had brought in, who did they think would clean up after them? 
That question stayed with me, and it simplified a little. 
Who cleans up after us? 
However you configure or wherever you place the us, who cleans up after us in Istanbul? 
Who cleans up after us in Rio or in Paris or in London? 
Here in New York, the Department of Sanitation cleans up after us, to the tune of 11,000 tons of garbage and 2,000 tons of recyclables every day. 
I wanted to get to know them as individuals. 
I wanted to understand who takes the job. 
What's it like to wear the uniform and bear that burden? 
So I started a research project with them. 
I rode in the trucks and walked the routes and interviewed people in offices and facilities all over the city, and I learned a lot, but I was still an outsider. 
I needed to go deeper. 
So I took the job as a sanitation worker. 
I didn't just ride in the trucks now. I drove the trucks. 
And I operated the mechanical brooms and I plowed the snow. 
It was a remarkable privilege and an amazing education. 
Everyone asks about the smell. 
It's there, but it's not as prevalent as you think, and on days when it is really bad, you get used to it rather quickly. 
The weight takes a long time to get used to. 
I knew people who were several years on the job whose bodies were still adjusting to the burden of bearing on your body tons of trash every week. 
Then there's the danger. 
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, sanitation work is one of the 10 most dangerous occupations in the country, and I learned why. 
You're in and out of traffic all day, and it's zooming around you. 
It just wants to get past you, so it's often the motorist is not paying attention. 
That's really bad for the worker. 
And then the garbage itself is full of hazards that often fly back out of the truck and do terrible harm. 
I also learned about the relentlessness of trash. 
When you step off the curb and you see a city from behind a truck, you come to understand that trash is like a force of nature unto itself. 
It never stops coming. 
It's also like a form of respiration or circulation. 
It must always be in motion. 
And then there's the stigma. 
You put on the uniform, and you become invisible until someone is upset with you for whatever reason like you've blocked traffic with your truck, or you're taking a break too close to their home, or you're drinking coffee in their diner, and they will come and scorn you, and tell you that they don't want you anywhere near them. 
I find the stigma especially ironic, because I strongly believe that sanitation workers are the most important labor force on the streets of the city, for three reasons. 
They are the first guardians of public health. 
If they're not taking away trash efficiently and effectively every day, it starts to spill out of its containments, and the dangers inherent to it threaten us in very real ways. 
Diseases we've had in check for decades and centuries burst forth again and start to harm us. 
The economy needs them. 
If we can't throw out the old stuff, we have no room for the new stuff, so then the engines of the economy start to sputter when consumption is compromised. 
I'm not advocating capitalism, I'm just pointing out their relationship. 
And then there's what I call our average, necessary quotidian velocity. 
By that I simply mean how fast we're used to moving in the contemporary day and age. 
We usually don't care for, repair, clean, carry around our coffee cup, our shopping bag, our bottle of water. 
We use them, we throw them out, we forget about them, because we know there's a workforce on the other side that's going to take it all away. 
So I want to suggest today a couple of ways to think about sanitation that will perhaps help ameliorate the stigma and bring them into this conversation of how to craft a city that is sustainable and humane. 
Their work, I think, is kind of liturgical. 
They're on the streets every day, rhythmically. 
They wear a uniform in many cities. 
You know when to expect them. 
And their work lets us do our work. 
They are almost a form of reassurance. 
The flow that they maintain keeps us safe from ourselves, from our own dross, our cast-offs, and that flow must be maintained always no matter what. 
On the day after September 11 in 2001, I heard the growl of a sanitation truck on the street, and I grabbed my infant son and I ran downstairs and there was a man doing his paper recycling route like he did every Wednesday. 
And I tried to thank him for doing his work on that day of all days, but I started to cry. 
And he looked at me, and he just nodded, and he said, "" We're going to be okay. 
We're going to be okay. "" It was a little while later that I started my research with sanitation, and I met that man again. 
His name is Paulie, and we worked together many times, and we became good friends. 
I want to believe that Paulie was right. 
We are going to be okay. 
But in our effort to reconfigure how we as a species exist on this planet, we must include and take account of all the costs, including the very real human cost of the labor. 
And we also would be well informed to reach out to the people who do that work and get their expertise on how do we think about, how do we create systems around sustainability that perhaps take us from curbside recycling, which is a remarkable success across 40 years, across the United States and countries around the world, and lift us up to a broader horizon where we're looking at other forms of waste that could be lessened from manufacturing and industrial sources. 
Municipal waste, what we think of when we talk about garbage, accounts for three percent of the nation's waste stream. 
It's a remarkable statistic. 
So in the flow of your days, in the flow of your lives, next time you see someone whose job is to clean up after you, take a moment to acknowledge them. 
Take a moment to say thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Four years ago, on the TED stage, I announced a company I was working with at the time called Odeo. 
And because of that announcement, we got a big article in The New York Times, which led to more press, which led to more attention, and me deciding to become CEO of that company — whereas I was just an adviser — and raising a round of venture capital and ramping up hiring. 
One of the guys I hired was an engineer named Jack Dorsey, and a year later, when we were trying to decide which way to go with Odeo, Jack presented an idea he'd been tinkering around with for a number of years that was based around sending simple status updates to friends. 
We were also playing with SMS at the time at Odeo, so we kind of put two and two together, and in early 2006 we launched Twitter as a side project at Odeo. 
Now, it's hard to justify doing a side project at a startup, where focus is so critical, but I had actually launched Blogger as a side project to my previous company, thinking it was just a little thing we'd do on the side, and it ended up taking over not only the company, but my life for the next five or six years. 
So I learned to follow hunches even though you can't necessarily justify them or know where they're going to go. 
And that's kind of what's happened with Twitter, time after time. 
So, for those of you unfamiliar, Twitter is based around a very simple, seemingly trivial concept. 
You say what you're doing in 140 characters or less, and people who are interested in you get those updates. 
If they're really interested, they get the update as a text message on their cell phone. 
So, for instance, I may Twitter right now that I'm giving a talk at TED. 
And in my case, when I hit send, up to 60,000 people will receive that message in a matter of seconds. 
Now, the fundamental idea is that Twitter lets people share moments of their lives whenever they want, be they momentous occasions or mundane ones. 
It is by sharing these moments as they're happening that lets people feel more connected and in touch, despite distance, and in real time. 
This is the primary use we saw of Twitter from the beginning, and what got us excited. 
What we didn't anticipate was the many, many other uses that would evolve from this very simple system. 
One of the things we realized was how important Twitter could be during real-time events. 
When the wildfires broke out in San Diego, in October of 2007, people turned to Twitter to report what was happening and to find information from neighbors about what was happening around them. 
But it wasn't just individuals. 
The L.A. Times actually turned to Twitter to dispense information as well, and put a Twitter feed on the front page, and the L.A. Fire Department and Red Cross used it to dispense news and updates as well. 
At this event, dozens of people here are Twittering and thousands of people around the world are following along because they want to know what it feels like to be here and what's happening. 
Among the other interesting things that have cropped up are many things from businesses, from marketing and communications and predictable things, to an insanely popular Korean-barbecue taco truck that drives around L.A. and Twitters where it stops, causing a line to form around the block. 
Politicians have recently begun Twittering. 
In fact, there are 47 members of Congress who currently have Twitter accounts. 
And they're tweeting, in some cases, from behind closed-door sessions with the President. 
In this case, this guy's not liking what he's hearing. 
The President himself is our most popular Twitter user, although his tweets have dropped off as of late, while Senator McCain's have picked up. 
As have this guy's. 
Twitter was originally designed as a broadcast medium: you send one message and it goes out to everybody, and you receive the messages you're interested in. 
One of the many ways that users shaped the evolution of Twitter was by inventing a way to reply to a specific person or a specific message. 
So, this syntax, the "" @ username "" that Shaquille O'Neal's using here to reply to one of his fans, was completely invented by users, and we didn't build it into the system until it already became popular and then we made it easier. 
This is one of the many ways that users have shaped the system. 
Another is via the API. 
We built an application-programming interface, which basically means that programmers can write software that interacts with Twitter. 
We currently know about over 2,000 pieces of software that can send Twitter updates — interfaces for Mac, Windows, your iPhone, your BlackBerry — as well as things like a device that lets an unborn baby Twitter when it kicks or a plant Twitter when it needs water. 
Probably the most important third-party development came from a little company in Virginia called Summize. 
Summize built a Twitter search engine. 
And they tapped into the fact that, if you have millions of people around the world talking about what they're doing and what's around them, you have an incredible resource to find out about any topic or event while it's going on. 
This really changed how we perceived Twitter. 
For instance, here's what people are saying about TED. 
This is another way that our mind was shifted, and Twitter wasn't what we thought it was. 
We liked this so much we actually bought the company and are folding it into the main product. 
This not only lets you view Twitters in different ways, but it introduces new use cases as well. 
One of my favorites is what happened a few months ago when there was a gas shortage in Atlanta. 
Some users figured out that they would Twitter when they found gas — where it was, and how much it cost — and then appended the keyword "" # atlgas "" which let other people search for that and find gas themselves. 
And this trend of people using this communication network to help each other out goes far beyond the original idea of just keeping up with family and friends. 
It's happened more and more lately, whether it's raising money for homeless people or to dig wells in Africa or for a family in crisis. 
People have raised tens of thousands of dollars over Twitter in a matter of days on several occasions. 
It seems like when you give people easier ways to share information, more good things happen. 
I have no idea what will happen next with Twitter. 
I've learned to follow the hunch, but never assume where it will go. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: We're not quite done yet. 
So, look, if we could have this screen live. 
This is actually the most terrifying thing that any speaker can do after they've been to an event. 
It's totally intimidating. 
So, this would be the Twitter search screen. 
So we're going to just type a couple of random words into Twitter. 
For example: "" Evan Williams. "" "Evan Williams, give people more good ways to share information and follow your hunch at TED." 
"Currently listening to Evan Williams." "Currently listening to Evan Williams." "Evan Williams —" Oh. 
"" Evan Williams is just dying on stage here at TED. 
Worst talk ever! "" (Laughter) Evan Williams: Nice. Thanks. 
CA: Just kidding. 
But, literally in the eight minutes he was talking, there are about fifty tweets that already came on the talk. 
So he'll see every aspect of the reaction: the fact that Barack Obama is the biggest Twitterer, the fact that it came out of TED. 
I don't think there's any other way of getting instant feedback that way. 
You have build something very fascinating, and it looks like its best times are still ahead of it. 
So, thank you very much, Evan. EW: Thank you. 
CA: That was very interesting. 

Audience: People! 
I don't know who the players are, what the market is like. "" You've got to know your market, your area. 
But if you can do it, it works really well. 
Now I come back to you. Nothing else to look at, right? 

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

I'm not quite sure whether I really want to see a snare drum at nine o'clock or so in the morning. 
But anyway, it's just great to see such a full theater, and really I must thank Herbie Hancock and his colleagues for such a great presentation. (Applause) One of the interesting things, of course, is the combination of that raw hand on the instrument and technology, and of course what he said about listening to our young people. 
Of course, my job is all about listening, and my aim, really, is to teach the world to listen. 
That's my only real aim in life. 
And it sounds quite simple, but actually it's quite a big, big job. 
Because you know, when you look at a piece of music — for example, if I just open my little motorbike bag — we have here, hopefully, a piece of music that is full of little black dots on the page. 
And, you know, we open it up and I read the music. 
So technically, I can actually read this. 
I will follow the instructions, the tempo markings, the dynamics. 
I will do exactly as I'm told. 
And so therefore, because time is short, if I just play you literally the first maybe two lines or so. It's very straightforward. 
There's nothing too difficult about the piece. 
But here I'm being told that the piece of music is very quick. 
I'm being told where to play on the drum. 
I'm being told which part of the stick to use. 
And I'm being told the dynamic. 
And I'm also being told that the drum is without snares. 
Snares on, snares off. 
So therefore, if I translate this piece of music, we have this idea. (Music) And so on. My career would probably last about five years. 
However, what I have to do as a musician is do everything that is not on the music. 
Everything that there isn't time to learn from a teacher, or to talk about, even, from a teacher. 
But it's the things that you notice when you're not actually with your instrument that in fact become so interesting, and that you want to explore through this tiny, tiny surface of a drum. 
So there, we experience the translation. Now we'll experience the interpretation. (Music) (Applause) Now my career may last a little longer! 
But in a way, you know, it's the same if I look at you and I see a nice bright young lady with a pink top on. 
I see that you're clutching a teddy bear, etc., etc. 
So I get a basic idea as to what you might be about, what you might like, what you might do as a profession, etc., etc. 
However, that's just, you know, the initial idea I may have that we all get when we actually look, and we try to interpret, but actually it's so unbelievably shallow. 
In the same way, I look at the music; I get a basic idea; I wonder what technically might be hard, or, you know, what I want to do. 
Just the basic feeling. 
However, that is simply not enough. 
And I think what Herbie said — please listen, listen. 
We have to listen to ourselves, first of all. 
If I play, for example, holding the stick — where literally I do not let go of the stick — you'll experience quite a lot of shock coming up through the arm. 
And you feel really quite — believe it or not — detached from the instrument and from the stick, even though I'm actually holding the stick quite tightly. 
By holding it tightly, I feel strangely more detached. 
If I just simply let go and allow my hand, my arm, to be more of a support system, suddenly I have more dynamic with less effort. Much more. 
And I just feel, at last, one with the stick and one with the drum. 
And I'm doing far, far less. 
So in the same way that I need time with this instrument, I need time with people in order to interpret them. 
Not just translate them, but interpret them. 
If, for example, I play just a few bars of a piece of music for which I think of myself as a technician — that is, someone who is basically a percussion player... (Music) And so on. If I think of myself as a musician... (Music) And so on. There is a little bit of a difference there that is worth just — (Applause) — thinking about. 
And I remember when I was 12 years old, and I started playing tympani and percussion, and my teacher said, "Well, how are we going to do this? You know, music is about listening." 
And I said, "" Yes, I agree with that. So what's the problem? "" And he said, "" Well, how are you going to hear this? How are you going to hear that? "" And I said, "" Well, how do you hear it? "" He said, "" Well, I think I hear it through here. "" And I said, "" Well, I think I do too — but I also hear it through my hands, through my arms, cheekbones, my scalp, my tummy, my chest, my legs and so on. "" And so we began our lessons every single time tuning drums — in particular, the kettle drums, or tympani — 
to such a narrow pitch interval, so something like... 
that of a difference. Then gradually... and gradually... 
and it's amazing that when you do open your body up, and open your hand up to allow the vibration to come through, that in fact the tiny, tiny difference... 
can be felt with just the tiniest part of your finger, there. 
And so what we would do is that I would put my hands on the wall of the music room, and together we would "" listen "" to the sounds of the instruments, and really try to connect with those sounds far, far more broadly than simply depending on the ear. 
Because of course, the ear is, I mean, subject to all sorts of things. 
The room we happen to be in, the amplification, the quality of the instrument, the type of sticks... etc., etc. 
They're all different. 
Same amount of weight, but different sound colors. 
And that's basically what we are. We're just human beings, but we all have our own little sound colors, as it were, that make up these extraordinary personalities and characters and interests and things. 
And as I grew older, I then auditioned for the Royal Academy of Music in London, and they said, "" Well, no, we won't accept you, because we haven't a clue, you know, of the future of a so-called 'deaf' musician. "" And I just couldn't quite accept that. 
And so therefore, I said to them, "" Well, look, if you refuse — if you refuse me through those reasons, as opposed to the ability to perform and to understand and love the art of creating sound — then we have to think very, very hard about the people you do actually accept. "" And as a result — once we got over a little hurdle, and having to audition twice — they accepted me. And not only that — what had happened was that it changed the whole role of the music institutions throughout the United Kingdom. 
Under no circumstances were they to refuse any application whatsoever on the basis of whether someone had no arms, no legs — they could still perhaps play a wind instrument if it was supported on a stand. 
No circumstances at all were used to refuse any entry. 
And every single entry had to be listened to, experienced and then based on the musical ability — then that person could either enter or not. 
So therefore, this in turn meant that there was an extremely interesting bunch of students who arrived in these various music institutions. 
And I have to say, many of them now in the professional orchestras throughout the world. 
The interesting thing about this as well, though — (Applause) — is quite simply that not only were people connected with sound — which is basically all of us, and we well know that music really is our daily medicine. 
I say "" music, "" but actually I mean "" sound. "" Because you know, some of the extraordinary things I've experienced as a musician, when you may have a 15-year-old lad who has got the most incredible challenges, who may not be able to control his movements, who may be deaf, who may be blind, etc., etc. — suddenly, if that young lad sits close to this instrument, and perhaps even lies underneath the marimba, and you play something that's so incredibly organ-like, almost — I don't really have the right sticks, perhaps — but something like this. Let me change. (Music) Something that's so unbelievably simple — 
but he would be experiencing something that I wouldn't be, because I'm on top of the sound. 
I have the sound coming this way. 
He would have the sound coming through the resonators. 
If there were no resonators on here, we would have... (Music) So he would have a fullness of sound that those of you in the front few rows wouldn't experience, those of you in the back few rows wouldn't experience either. 
Every single one of us, depending on where we're sitting, will experience this sound quite, quite differently. 
And of course, being the participator of the sound, and that is starting from the idea of what type of sound I want to produce — for example, this sound. 
Can you hear anything? 
Exactly. Because I'm not even touching it. 
But yet, we get the sensation of something happening. 
In the same way that when I see tree moves, then I imagine that tree making a rustling sound. 
Do you see what I mean? 
Whatever the eye sees, then there's always sound happening. 
So there's always, always that huge — I mean, just this kaleidoscope of things to draw from. 
So all of my performances are based on entirely what I experience, and not by learning a piece of music, putting on someone else's interpretation of it, buying all the CDs possible of that particular piece of music, and so on and so forth. 
Because that isn't giving me enough of something that is so raw and so basic, and something that I can fully experience the journey of. 
So it may be that, in certain halls, this dynamic may well work. (Music) It may be that in other halls, they're simply not going to experience that at all and so therefore, my level of soft, gentle playing may have to be... (Music) Do you see what I mean? So, because of this explosion in access to sound, especially through the deaf community, this has not only affected how music institutions, how schools for the deaf treat sound — and not just as a means of therapy — although of course, being a participator of music, that definitely is the case as well. 
But it's meant that acousticians have had to really think about the types of halls they put together. There are so few halls in this world that actually have very good acoustics, dare I say. But by that I mean where you can absolutely do anything you imagine. 
The tiniest, softest, softest sound to something that is so broad, so huge, so incredible! There's always something — it may sound good up there, may not be so good there. 
May be great there, but terrible up there. 
Maybe terrible over there, but not too bad there, etc., etc. 
So to find an actual hall is incredible — for which you can play exactly what you imagine, without it being cosmetically enhanced. 
And so therefore, acousticians are actually in conversation with people who are hearing impaired, and who are participators of sound. 
And this is quite interesting. 
I cannot, you know, give you any detail as far as what is actually happening with those halls, but it's just the fact that they are going to a group of people for whom so many years we've been saying, "Well, how on Earth can they experience music? You know, they're deaf." 
We just — we go like that, and we imagine that that's what deafness is about. 
Or we go like that, and we imagine that's what blindness is about. 
If we see someone in a wheelchair, we assume they cannot walk. 
It may be that they can walk three, four, five steps. That, to them, means they can walk. 
In a year's time, it could be two extra steps. 
In another year's time, three extra steps. 
Those are hugely important aspects to think about. 
So when we do listen to each other, it's unbelievably important for us to really test our listening skills, to really use our bodies as a resonating chamber, to stop the judgment. 
For me, as a musician who deals with 99 percent of new music, it's very easy for me to say, "" Oh yes, I like that piece. 
Oh no, I don't like that piece. "" And so on. 
And you know, I just find that I have to give those pieces of music real time. 
It may be that the chemistry isn't quite right between myself and that particular piece of music, but that doesn't mean I have the right to say it's a bad piece of music. 
And you know, it's just one of the great things about being a musician, is that it is so unbelievably fluid. 
So there are no rules, no right, no wrong, this way, that way. 
If I asked you to clap — maybe I can do this. 
If I can just say, "" Please clap and create the sound of thunder. "" I'm assuming we've all experienced thunder. 
Now, I don't mean just the sound; I mean really listen to that thunder within yourselves. 
And please try to create that through your clapping. Try. Just — please try. 
(Applause) Very good! Snow. Snow. Have you ever heard snow? 
Audience: No. 
Evelyn Glennie: Well then, stop clapping. (Laughter) Try again. 
Try again. Snow. 
See, you're awake. 
Rain. Not bad. Not bad. 
You know, the interesting thing here, though, is that I asked a group of kids not so long ago exactly the same question. 
Now — great imagination, thank you very much. 
However, not one of you got out of your seats to think, "" Right! How can I clap? OK, maybe... (Claps) Maybe I can use my jewelry to create extra sounds. 
Maybe I can use the other parts of my body to create extra sounds. "" Not a single one of you thought about clapping in a slightly different way other than sitting in your seats there and using two hands. 
In the same way that when we listen to music, we assume that it's all being fed through here. 
This is how we experience music. Of course it's not. 
We experience thunder — thunder, thunder. Think, think, think. 
Listen, listen, listen. Now — what can we do with thunder? 
I remember my teacher. When I first started, my very first lesson, I was all prepared with sticks, ready to go. 
And instead of him saying, "" OK, Evelyn, please, feet slightly apart, arms at a more-or-less 90 degree angle, sticks in a more-or-less V shape, keep this amount of space here, etc. 
Please keep your back straight, etc., etc., etc. "" — where I was probably just going to end up absolutely rigid, frozen, and I would not be able to strike the drum, because I was thinking of so many other things — he said, "Evelyn, take this drum away for seven days, and I'll see you next week." 
So, heavens! What was I to do? I no longer required the sticks; I wasn't allowed to have these sticks. 
I had to basically look at this particular drum, see how it was made, what these little lugs did, what the snares did. 
Turned it upside down, experimented with the shell, experimented with the head. 
Experimented with my body, experimented with jewelry, experimented with all sorts of things. 
And of course, I returned with all sorts of bruises and things like that — but nevertheless, it was such an unbelievable experience, because then, where on Earth are you going to experience that in a piece of music? 
Where on Earth are you going to experience that in a study book? 
So we never, ever dealt with actual study books. 
So for example, one of the things that we learn when we are dealing with being a percussion player, as opposed to a musician, is basically straightforward single stroke rolls. 
Like that. And then we get a little faster and a little faster and a little faster. 
And so on and so forth. What does this piece require? 
Single stroke rolls. So why can't I then do that whilst learning a piece of music? 
And that's exactly what he did. 
And interestingly, the older I became, and when I became a full-time student at a so called "" music institution, "" all of that went out of the window. 
We had to study from study books. 
And constantly, the question, "" Well, why? Why? What is this relating to? 
I need to play a piece of music. "" "" Oh, well, this will help your control! "" "" Well, how? Why do I need to learn that? I need to relate it to a piece of music. 
You know. I need to say something. 
"" Why am I practicing paradiddles? 
Is it just literally for control, for hand-stick control? Why am I doing that? 
I need to have the reason, and the reason has to be by saying something through the music. "" And by saying something through music, which basically is sound, we then can reach all sorts of things to all sorts of people. 
But I don't want to take responsibility of your emotional baggage. 
That's up to you, when you walk through a hall. 
Because that then determines what and how we listen to certain things. 
I may feel sorrowful, or happy, or exhilarated, or angry when I play certain pieces of music, but I'm not necessarily wanting you to feel exactly the same thing. 
So please, the next time you go to a concert, just allow your body to open up, allow your body to be this resonating chamber. 
Be aware that you're not going to experience the same thing as the performer is. 
The performer is in the worst possible position for the actual sound, because they're hearing the contact of the stick on the drum, or the mallet on the bit of wood, or the bow on the string, etc., or the breath that's creating the sound from wind and brass. 
They're experiencing that rawness there. 
But yet they're experiencing something so unbelievably pure, which is before the sound is actually happening. 
Please take note of the life of the sound after the actual initial strike, or breath, is being pulled. Just experience the whole journey of that sound in the same way that I wished I'd experienced the whole journey of this particular conference, rather than just arriving last night. 
But I hope maybe we can share one or two things as the day progresses. 
But thank you very much for having me! 
(Applause) 

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

So you go to the doctor and get some tests. 
The doctor determines that you have high cholesterol and you would benefit from medication to treat it. 
So you get a pillbox. 
You have some confidence, your physician has some confidence that this is going to work. 
The company that invented it did a lot of studies, submitted it to the FDA. 
They studied it very carefully, skeptically, they approved it. 
They have a rough idea of how it works, they have a rough idea of what the side effects are. 
It should be OK. 
You have a little more of a conversation with your physician and the physician is a little worried because you've been blue, haven't felt like yourself, you haven't been able to enjoy things in life quite as much as you usually do. 
Your physician says, "" You know, I think you have some depression. 
I'm going to have to give you another pill. "" So now we're talking about two medications. 
This pill also — millions of people have taken it, the company did studies, the FDA looked at it — all good. 
Think things should go OK. Think things should go OK. 
Well, wait a minute. How much have we studied these two together? Well, it's very hard to do that. In fact, it's not traditionally done. We totally depend on what we call "" post-marketing surveillance, "" 
after the drugs hit the market. 
How can we figure out if bad things are happening between two medications? 
Three? Five? Seven? 
Ask your favorite person who has several diagnoses how many medications they're on. 
Why do I care about this problem? 
I care about it deeply. 
I'm an informatics and data science guy and really, in my opinion, the only hope — only hope — to understand these interactions is to leverage lots of different sources of data in order to figure out when drugs can be used together safely and when it's not so safe. 
So let me tell you a data science story. 
And it begins with my student Nick. 
Let's call him "" Nick, "" because that's his name. 
(Laughter) Nick was a young student. 
I said, "" You know, Nick, we have to understand how drugs work and how they work together and how they work separately, and we don't have a great understanding. 
But the FDA has made available an amazing database. 
It's a database of adverse events. 
They literally put on the web — publicly available, you could all download it right now — hundreds of thousands of adverse event reports from patients, doctors, companies, pharmacists. 
And these reports are pretty simple: it has all the diseases that the patient has, all the drugs that they're on, and all the adverse events, or side effects, that they experience. 
It is not all of the adverse events that are occurring in America today, but it's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of drugs. 
So I said to Nick, "" Let's think about glucose. 
Glucose is very important, and we know it's involved with diabetes. 
Let's see if we can understand glucose response. 
I sent Nick off. Nick came back. 
"" Russ, "" he said, "" I've created a classifier that can look at the side effects of a drug based on looking at this database, and can tell you whether that drug is likely to change glucose or not. "" He did it. It was very simple, in a way. 
He took all the drugs that were known to change glucose and a bunch of drugs that don't change glucose, and said, "" What's the difference in their side effects? 
Differences in fatigue? In appetite? In urination habits? "" All those things conspired to give him a really good predictor. 
He said, "" Russ, I can predict with 93 percent accuracy when a drug will change glucose. "" I said, "" Nick, that's great. "" He's a young student, you have to build his confidence. 
"" But Nick, there's a problem. 
It's that every physician in the world knows all the drugs that change glucose, because it's core to our practice. 
So it's great, good job, but not really that interesting, definitely not publishable. "" (Laughter) He said, "" I know, Russ. I thought you might say that. "" Nick is smart. 
"" I thought you might say that, so I did one other experiment. 
I looked at people in this database who were on two drugs, and I looked for signals similar, glucose-changing signals, for people taking two drugs, where each drug alone did not change glucose, but together I saw a strong signal. "" And I said, "" Oh! You're clever. Good idea. Show me the list. "" And there's a bunch of drugs, not very exciting. 
But what caught my eye was, on the list there were two drugs: paroxetine, or Paxil, an antidepressant; and pravastatin, or Pravachol, a cholesterol medication. 
And I said, "" Huh. There are millions of Americans on those two drugs. "" In fact, we learned later, 15 million Americans on paroxetine at the time, 15 million on pravastatin, and a million, we estimated, on both. 
So that's a million people who might be having some problems with their glucose if this machine-learning mumbo jumbo that he did in the FDA database actually holds up. 
But I said, "" It's still not publishable, because I love what you did with the mumbo jumbo, with the machine learning, but it's not really standard-of-proof evidence that we have. "" So we have to do something else. 
Let's go into the Stanford electronic medical record. 
We have a copy of it that's OK for research, we removed identifying information. 
And I said, "" Let's see if people on these two drugs have problems with their glucose. "" Now there are thousands and thousands of people in the Stanford medical records that take paroxetine and pravastatin. 
But we needed special patients. 
We needed patients who were on one of them and had a glucose measurement, then got the second one and had another glucose measurement, all within a reasonable period of time — something like two months. 
And when we did that, we found 10 patients. 
However, eight out of the 10 had a bump in their glucose when they got the second P — we call this P and P — when they got the second P. 
Either one could be first, the second one comes up, glucose went up 20 milligrams per deciliter. 
Just as a reminder, you walk around normally, if you're not diabetic, with a glucose of around 90. 
And if it gets up to 120, 125, your doctor begins to think about a potential diagnosis of diabetes. 
So a 20 bump — pretty significant. 
I said, "" Nick, this is very cool. 
But, I'm sorry, we still don't have a paper, because this is 10 patients and — give me a break — it's not enough patients. "" So we said, what can we do? 
And we said, let's call our friends at Harvard and Vanderbilt, who also — Harvard in Boston, Vanderbilt in Nashville, who also have electronic medical records similar to ours. 
Let's see if they can find similar patients with the one P, the other P, the glucose measurements in that range that we need. 
God bless them, Vanderbilt in one week found 40 such patients, same trend. 
Harvard found 100 patients, same trend. 
So at the end, we had 150 patients from three diverse medical centers that were telling us that patients getting these two drugs were having their glucose bump somewhat significantly. 
More interestingly, we had left out diabetics, because diabetics already have messed up glucose. 
When we looked at the glucose of diabetics, it was going up 60 milligrams per deciliter, not just 20. 
This was a big deal, and we said, "" We've got to publish this. "" We submitted the paper. 
It was all data evidence, data from the FDA, data from Stanford, data from Vanderbilt, data from Harvard. 
We had not done a single real experiment. 
But we were nervous. 
So Nick, while the paper was in review, went to the lab. 
We found somebody who knew about lab stuff. 
I don't do that. 
I take care of patients, but I don't do pipettes. 
They taught us how to feed mice drugs. 
We took mice and we gave them one P, paroxetine. 
We gave some other mice pravastatin. 
And we gave a third group of mice both of them. 
And lo and behold, glucose went up 20 to 60 milligrams per deciliter in the mice. 
So the paper was accepted based on the informatics evidence alone, but we added a little note at the end, saying, oh by the way, if you give these to mice, it goes up. 
That was great, and the story could have ended there. 
But I still have six and a half minutes. 
(Laughter) So we were sitting around thinking about all of this, and I don't remember who thought of it, but somebody said, "" I wonder if patients who are taking these two drugs are noticing side effects of hyperglycemia. 
They could and they should. 
How would we ever determine that? "" We said, well, what do you do? 
You're taking a medication, one new medication or two, and you get a funny feeling. 
What do you do? 
You go to Google and type in the two drugs you're taking or the one drug you're taking, and you type in "" side effects. "" What are you experiencing? 
So we said OK, let's ask Google if they will share their search logs with us, so that we can look at the search logs and see if patients are doing these kinds of searches. 
Google, I am sorry to say, denied our request. 
So I was bummed. 
I was at a dinner with a colleague who works at Microsoft Research and I said, "" We wanted to do this study, Google said no, it's kind of a bummer. "" He said, "" Well, we have the Bing searches. "" (Laughter) Yeah. 
That's great. 
Now I felt like I was — (Laughter) I felt like I was talking to Nick again. 
He works for one of the largest companies in the world, and I'm already trying to make him feel better. 
But he said, "" No, Russ — you might not understand. 
We not only have Bing searches, but if you use Internet Explorer to do searches at Google, Yahoo, Bing, any... 
Then, for 18 months, we keep that data for research purposes only. "" I said, "" Now you're talking! "" This was Eric Horvitz, my friend at Microsoft. 
So we did a study where we defined 50 words that a regular person might type in if they're having hyperglycemia, like "" fatigue, "" "" loss of appetite, "" "" urinating a lot, "" "" peeing a lot "" — forgive me, but that's one of the things you might type in. 
So we had 50 phrases that we called the "" diabetes words. "" And we did first a baseline. 
And it turns out that about .5 to one percent of all searches on the Internet involve one of those words. 
So that's our baseline rate. 
If people type in "" paroxetine "" or "" Paxil "" — those are synonyms — and one of those words, the rate goes up to about two percent of diabetes-type words, if you already know that there's that "" paroxetine "" word. 
If it's "" pravastatin, "" the rate goes up to about three percent from the baseline. 
If both "" paroxetine "" and "" pravastatin "" are present in the query, it goes up to 10 percent, a huge three- to four-fold increase in those searches with the two drugs that we were interested in, and diabetes-type words or hyperglycemia-type words. 
We published this, and it got some attention. 
The reason it deserves attention is that patients are telling us their side effects indirectly through their searches. 
We brought this to the attention of the FDA. 
They were interested. 
They have set up social media surveillance programs to collaborate with Microsoft, which had a nice infrastructure for doing this, and others, to look at Twitter feeds, to look at Facebook feeds, to look at search logs, to try to see early signs that drugs, either individually or together, are causing problems. 
What do I take from this? Why tell this story? 
Well, first of all, we have now the promise of big data and medium-sized data to help us understand drug interactions and really, fundamentally, drug actions. 
How do drugs work? 
This will create and has created a new ecosystem for understanding how drugs work and to optimize their use. 
Nick went on; he's a professor at Columbia now. 
He did this in his PhD for hundreds of pairs of drugs. 
He found several very important interactions, and so we replicated this and we showed that this is a way that really works for finding drug-drug interactions. 
However, there's a couple of things. 
We don't just use pairs of drugs at a time. 
As I said before, there are patients on three, five, seven, nine drugs. 
Have they been studied with respect to their nine-way interaction? 
Yes, we can do pair-wise, A and B, A and C, A and D, but what about A, B, C, D, E, F, G all together, being taken by the same patient, perhaps interacting with each other in ways that either makes them more effective or less effective or causes side effects that are unexpected? 
We really have no idea. 
It's a blue sky, open field for us to use data to try to understand the interaction of drugs. 
Two more lessons: I want you to think about the power that we were able to generate with the data from people who had volunteered their adverse reactions through their pharmacists, through themselves, through their doctors, the people who allowed the databases at Stanford, Harvard, Vanderbilt, to be used for research. 
People are worried about data. 
They're worried about their privacy and security — they should be. 
We need secure systems. 
But we can't have a system that closes that data off, because it is too rich of a source of inspiration, innovation and discovery for new things in medicine. 
And the final thing I want to say is, in this case we found two drugs and it was a little bit of a sad story. 
The two drugs actually caused problems. 
They increased glucose. 
They could throw somebody into diabetes who would otherwise not be in diabetes, and so you would want to use the two drugs very carefully together, perhaps not together, make different choices when you're prescribing. 
But there was another possibility. 
We could have found two drugs or three drugs that were interacting in a beneficial way. 
We could have found new effects of drugs that neither of them has alone, but together, instead of causing a side effect, they could be a new and novel treatment for diseases that don't have treatments or where the treatments are not effective. 
If we think about drug treatment today, all the major breakthroughs — for HIV, for tuberculosis, for depression, for diabetes — it's always a cocktail of drugs. 
And so the upside here, and the subject for a different TED Talk on a different day, is how can we use the same data sources to find good effects of drugs in combination that will provide us new treatments, new insights into how drugs work and enable us to take care of our patients even better? 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

We will demonstrate the concept of machine athleticism and the research to achieve it with the help of these flying machines called quadrocopters, or quads, for short. 
They are inherently unstable, and they need some form of automatic feedback control in order to be able to fly. 
So, how did it just do that? 
Cameras on the ceiling and a laptop serve as an indoor global positioning system. 
It's the magic that brings these machines to life. 
So how does one design the algorithms that create a machine athlete? 
For example, that's how we can make the quad hover. 
We first captured the dynamics with a set of differential equations. 
We then manipulate these equations with the help of control theory to create algorithms that stabilize the quad. 
Suppose that we want this quad to not only hover but to also balance this pole. 
It becomes a little bit more difficult when I only have one foot on the ground and when I don't use my hands. 
Notice how this pole has a reflective marker on top, which means that it can be located in the space. 
We added the mathematical model of the pole to that of the quad. 
Once we have a model of the combined quad-pole system, we can use control theory to create algorithms for controlling it. 
Here, you see that it's stable, and even if I give it little nudges, it goes back — to the nice, balanced position. 
Using this pointer, made out of reflective markers, I can point to where I want the quad to be in space a fixed distance away from me. 
(Laughter) The key to these acrobatic maneuvers is algorithms, designed with the help of mathematical models and control theory. 
Let's tell the quad to come back here and let the pole drop, and I will next demonstrate the importance of understanding physical models and the workings of the physical world. 
Notice how the quad lost altitude when I put this glass of water on it. 
Unlike the balancing pole, I did not include the mathematical model of the glass in the system. 
Like before, I could use the pointer to tell the quad where I want it to be in space. 
The second is that the propellers are all pointing in the same direction of the glass, pointing up. 
You put these two things together, the net result is that all side forces on the glass are small and are mainly dominated by aerodynamic effects, which at these speeds are negligible. 
And that's why you don't need to model the glass. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) The lesson here is that some high-performance tasks are easier than others, and that understanding the physics of the problem tells you which ones are easy and which ones are hard. 
We've all heard stories of athletes performing feats while physically injured. 
Can a machine also perform with extreme physical damage? 
Conventional wisdom says that you need at least four fixed motor propeller pairs in order to fly, because there are four degrees of freedom to control: roll, pitch, yaw and acceleration. 
Hexacopters and octocopters, with six and eight propellers, can provide redundancy, but quadrocopters are much more popular because they have the minimum number of fixed motor propeller pairs: four. 
(Laughter) If we analyze the mathematical model of this machine with only two working propellers, we discover that there's an unconventional way to fly it. 
We relinquish control of yaw, but roll, pitch and acceleration can still be controlled with algorithms that exploit this new configuration. 
Mathematical models tell us exactly when and why this is possible. 
In this instance, this knowledge allows us to design novel machine architectures or to design clever algorithms that gracefully handle damage, just like human athletes do, instead of building machines with redundancy. 
We can't help but hold our breath when we watch a diver somersaulting into the water, or when a vaulter is twisting in the air, the ground fast approaching. 
Will the diver be able to pull off a rip entry? 
Will the vaulter stick the landing? 
This maneuver is going to happen so quickly that we can't use position feedback to correct the motion during execution. 
Instead, what the quad can do is perform the maneuver blindly, observe how it finishes the maneuver, and then use that information to modify its behavior so that the next flip is better. 
Similar to the diver and the vaulter, it is only through repeated practice that the maneuver can be learned and executed to the highest standard. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Striking a moving ball is a necessary skill in many sports. 
(Laughter) (Applause) (Applause ends) This quad has a racket strapped onto its head with a sweet spot roughly the size of an apple, so not too large. 
The following calculations are made every 20 milliseconds, or 50 times per second. 
We first figure out where the ball is going. 
We then next calculate how the quad should hit the ball so that it flies to where it was thrown from. 
Third, a trajectory is planned that carries the quad from its current state to the impact point with the ball. 
Fourth, we only execute 20 milliseconds' worth of that strategy. 
(Applause) Machines can not only perform dynamic maneuvers on their own, they can do it collectively. 
These three quads are cooperatively carrying a sky net. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) They perform an extremely dynamic and collective maneuver to launch the ball back to me. 
Notice that, at full extension, these quads are vertical. 
(Applause) In fact, when fully extended, this is roughly five times greater than what a bungee jumper feels at the end of their launch. 
The algorithms to do this are very similar to what the single quad used to hit the ball back to me. 
Mathematical models are used to continuously re-plan a cooperative strategy 50 times per second. 
What happens when we couple this machine athleticism with that of a human being? 
What I have in front of me is a commercial gesture sensor mainly used in gaming. 
It can recognize what my various body parts are doing in real time. 
We now have a natural way of interacting with the raw athleticism of these quads with my gestures. 
Take this quad, for example. 
We can use mathematical models to estimate the force that I'm applying to the quad. 
Once we know this force, we can also change the laws of physics, as far as the quad is concerned, of course. 
Here, the quad is behaving as if it were in a viscous fluid. 
We now have an intimate way of interacting with a machine. 
I will use this new capability to position this camera-carrying quad to the appropriate location for filming the remainder of this demonstration. 
So we can physically interact with these quads and we can change the laws of physics. 
Let's have a little bit of fun with this. 
As time goes on, gravity will be increased until we're all back on planet Earth, but I assure you we won't get there. 
(Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) Whew! 
You're all thinking now, these guys are having way too much fun, and you're probably also asking yourself, why exactly are they building machine athletes? 
Some conjecture that the role of play in the animal kingdom is to hone skills and develop capabilities. 
Others think that it has more of a social role, that it's used to bind the group. 
Similarly, we use the analogy of sports and athleticism to create new algorithms for machines to push them to their limits. 
Like all our past creations and innovations, they may be used to improve the human condition or they may be misused and abused. 
They're the current members of the Flying Machine Arena research team. 
Look out for them. They're destined for great things. 

One thing I wanted to say about film making is — about this film — in thinking about some of the wonderful talks we've heard here, Michael Moschen, and some of the talks about music, this idea that there is a narrative line, and that music exists in time. 
A film also exists in time; it's an experience that you should go through emotionally. 
And in making this film I felt that so many of the documentaries I've seen were all about learning something, or knowledge, or driven by talking heads, and driven by ideas. 
And I wanted this film to be driven by emotions, and really to follow my journey. 
So instead of doing the talking head thing, instead it's composed of scenes, and we meet people along the way. 
We only meet them once. 
They don't come back several times, so it really chronicles a journey. 
It's something like life, that once you get in it you can't get out. 
There are two clips I want to show you, the first one is a kind of hodgepodge, its just three little moments, four little moments with three of the people who are here tonight. 
It's not the way they occur in the film, because they are part of much larger scenes. 
They play off each other in a wonderful way. 
And that ends with a little clip of my father, of Lou, talking about something that is very dear to him, which is the accidents of life. 
I think he felt that the greatest things in life were accidental, and perhaps not planned at all. 
And those three clips will be followed by a scene of perhaps what, to me, is really his greatest building which is a building in Dhaka, Bangladesh. 
He built the capital over there. 
And I think you'll enjoy this building, it's never been seen — it's been still photographed, but never photographed by a film crew. 
We were the first film crew in there. 
So you'll see images of this remarkable building. 
A couple of things to keep in mind when you see it, it was built entirely by hand, I think they got a crane the last year. 
It was built entirely by hand off bamboo scaffolding, people carrying these baskets of concrete on their heads, dumping them in the forms. 
It is the capital of the country, and it took 23 years to build, which is something they seem to be very proud of over there. 
It took as long as the Taj Mahal. 
Unfortunately it took so long that Lou never saw it finished. 
He died in 1974. 
The building was finished in 1983. 
So it continued on for many years after he died. 
Think about that when you see that building, that sometimes the things we strive for so hard in life we never get to see finished. 
And that really struck me about my father, in the sense that he had such belief that somehow, doing these things giving in the way that he gave, that something good would come out of it, even in the middle of a war, there was a war with Pakistan at one point, and the construction stopped totally and he kept working, because he felt, "" Well when the war is done they'll need this building. "" So, those are the two clips I'm going to show. 
Roll that tape. 
(Applause) Richard Saul Wurman: I remember hearing him talk at Penn. 
And I came home and I said to my father and mother, "" I just met this man: doesn't have much work, and he's sort of ugly, funny voice, and he's a teacher at school. 
I know you've never heard of him, but just mark this day that someday you will hear of him, because he's really an amazing man. "" Frank Gehry: I heard he had some kind of a fling with Ingrid Bergman. Is that true? 
Nathaniel Kahn: If he did he was a very lucky man. 
(Laughter) NK: Did you hear that, really? 
FG: Yeah, when he was in Rome. 
Moshe Safdie: He was a real nomad. 
And you know, when I knew him when I was in the office, he would come in from a trip, and he would be in the office for two or three days intensely, and he would pack up and go. 
You know he'd be in the office till three in the morning working with us and there was this kind of sense of the nomad in him. 
I mean as tragic as his death was in a railway station, it was so consistent with his life, you know? 
I mean I often think I'm going to die in a plane, or I'm going to die in an airport, or die jogging without an identification on me. 
I don't know why I sort of carry that from that memory of the way he died. 
But he was a sort of a nomad at heart. 
Louis Kahn: How accidental our existences are really and how full of influence by circumstance. 
Man: We are the morning workers who come, all the time, here and enjoy the walking, city's beauty and the atmosphere and this is the nicest place of Bangladesh. 
We are proud of it. 
NK: You're proud of it? 
Man: Yes, it is the national image of Bangladesh. 
NK: Do you know anything about the architect? 
Man: Architect? I've heard about him; he's a top-ranking architect. 
NK: Well actually I'm here because I'm the architect's son, he was my father. 
Man: Oh! Dad is Louis Farrakhan? 
NK: Yeah. No not Louis Farrakhan, Louis Kahn. 
Man: Louis Kahn, yes! 
(Laughter) Man: Your father, is he alive? 
NK: No, he's been dead for 25 years. 
Man: Very pleased to welcome you back. 
NK: Thank you. 
NK: He never saw it finished, Pop. 
No, he never saw this. 
Shamsul Wares: It was almost impossible, building for a country like ours. 
In 30, 50 years back, it was nothing, only paddy fields, and since we invited him here, he felt that he has got a responsibility. 
He wanted to be a Moses here, he gave us democracy. 
He is not a political man, but in this guise he has given us the institution for democracy, from where we can rise. 
In that way it is so relevant. 
He didn't care for how much money this country has, or whether he would be able to ever finish this building, but somehow he has been able to do it, build it, here. 
And this is the largest project he has got in here, the poorest country in the world. 
NK: It cost him his life. 
SW: Yeah, he paid. He paid his life for this, and that is why he is great and we'll remember him. 
But he was also human. 
Now his failure to satisfy the family life, is an inevitable association of great people. 
But I think his son will understand this, and will have no sense of grudge, or sense of being neglected, I think. 
He cared in a very different manner, but it takes a lot of time to understand that. 
In social aspect of his life he was just like a child, he was not at all matured. 
He could not say no to anything, and that is why, that he cannot say no to things, we got this building today. 
You see, only that way you can be able to understand him. 
There is no other shortcut, no other way to really understand him. 
But I think he has given us this building and we feel all the time for him, that's why, he has given love for us. 
He could not probably give the right kind of love for you, but for us, he has given the people the right kind of love, that is important. 
You have to understand that. 
He had an enormous amount of love, he loved everybody. 
To love everybody, he sometimes did not see the very closest ones, and that is inevitable for men of his stature. 
(Applause) 

It was a Saturday afternoon in May, and I suddenly realized that the next day was Mother's Day, and I hadn't gotten anything for my mom, so I started thinking about what should I get my mom for Mother's Day? 
I thought, why don't I make her an interactive Mother's Day card using the Scratch software that I'd been developing with my research group at the MIT Media Lab? 
We developed it so that people could easily create their own interactive stories and games and animations, and then share their creations with one another. 
So I thought, this would be an opportunity to use Scratch to make an interactive card for my mom. 
Before making my own Mother's Day card, I thought I would take a look at the Scratch website. 
So over the last several years, kids around the world ages 8 and up, have shared their projects, and I thought, I wonder if, of those three million projects, whether anyone else has thought to put up Mother's Day cards. 
So in the search box I typed in "Mother's Day," and I was surprised and delighted to see a list of dozens and dozens of Mother's Day cards that showed up on the Scratch website, many of them just in the past 24 hours by procrastinators just like myself. 
So I started taking a look at them. (Music) I saw one of them that featured a kitten and her mom and wishing her mom a happy Mother's Day. 
And the creator very considerately offered a replay for her mom. 
Another one was an interactive project where, when you moved the mouse over the letters of "" Happy Mom Day, "" it reveals a special happy Mother's Day slogan. 
(Music) In this one, the creator told a narrative about how she had Googled to find out when Mother's Day was happening. 
(Typing) And then once she found out when Mother's Day was happening, she delivered a special Mother's Day greeting of how much she loved her mom. 
So I really enjoyed looking at these projects and interacting with these projects. 
In fact, I liked it so much that, instead of making my own project, I sent my mom links to about a dozen of these projects. (Laughter) And actually, she reacted exactly the way that I hoped that she would. 
She wrote back to me and she said, "" I'm so proud to have a son that created the software that allowed these kids to make Mother's Day cards for their mothers. "" So my mom was happy, and that made me happy, but actually I was even happier for another reason. 
I was happy because these kids were using Scratch just in the way that we had hoped that they would. 
As they created their interactive Mother's Day cards, you could see that they were really becoming fluent with new technologies. 
What do I mean by fluent? 
I mean that they were able to start expressing themselves and to start expressing their ideas. 
When you become fluent with language, it means you can write an entry in your journal or tell a joke to someone or write a letter to a friend. 
And it's similar with new technologies. 
By writing, be creating these interactive Mother's Day cards, these kids were showing that they were really fluent with new technologies. 
Now maybe you won't be so surprised by this, because a lot of times people feel that young people today can do all sorts of things with technology. 
I mean, all of us have heard young people referred to as "" digital natives. "" But actually I'm sort of skeptical about this term. 
I'm not so sure we should be thinking of young people as digital natives. 
When you really look at it, how is it that young people spend most of their time using new technologies? 
You often see them in situations like this, or like this, and there's no doubt that young people are very comfortable and familiar browsing and chatting and texting and gaming. 
But that doesn't really make you fluent. 
So young people today have lots of experience and lots of familiarity with interacting with new technologies, but a lot less so of creating with new technologies and expressing themselves with new technologies. 
It's almost as if they can read but not write with new technologies. 
And I'm really interested in seeing, how can we help young people become fluent so they can write with new technologies? 
And that really means that they need to be able to write their own computer programs, or code. 
So, increasingly, people are starting to recognize the importance of learning to code. 
You know, in recent years, there have been hundreds of new organizations and websites that are helping young people learn to code. 
You look online, you'll see places like Codecademy and events like CoderDojo and sites like Girls Who Code, or Black Girls Code. 
It seems that everybody is getting into the act. 
You know, just at the beginning of this year, at the turn of the new year, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a New Year's resolution that he was going to learn to code in 2012. 
A few months later, the country of Estonia decided that all of its first graders should learn to code. 
And that triggered a debate in the U.K. 
about whether all the children there should learn to code. 
Now, for some of you, when you hear about this, it might seem sort of strange about everybody learning to code. 
When many people think of coding, they think of it as something that only a very narrow sub-community of people are going to be doing, and they think of coding looking like this. 
And in fact, if this is what coding is like, it will only be a narrow sub-community of people with special mathematical skills and technological background that can code. 
But coding doesn't have to be like this. 
Let me show you about what it's like to code in Scratch. 
So in Scratch, to code, you just snap blocks together. 
In this case, you take a move block, snap it into a stack, and the stacks of blocks control the behaviors of the different characters in your game or your story, in this case controlling the big fish. 
After you've created your program, you can click on "" share, "" and then share your project with other people, so that they can use the project and start working on the project as well. 
So, of course, making a fish game isn't the only thing you can do with Scratch. 
Of the millions of projects on the Scratch website, there's everything from animated stories to school science projects to anime soap operas to virtual construction kits to recreations of classic video games to political opinion polls to trigonometry tutorials to interactive artwork, and, yes, interactive Mother's Day cards. 
So I think there's so many different ways that people can express themselves using this, to be able to take their ideas and share their ideas with the world. 
And it doesn't just stay on the screen. 
You can also code to interact with the physical world around you. 
Here's an example from Hong Kong, where some kids made a game and then built their own physical interface device and had a light sensor, so the light sensor detects the hole in the board, so as they move the physical saw, the light sensor detects the hole and controls the virtual saw on the screen and saws down the tree. 
We're going to continue to look at new ways of bringing together the physical world and the virtual world and connecting to the world around us. 
This is an example from a new version of Scratch that we'll be releasing in the next few months, and we're looking again to be able to push you in new directions. 
Here's an example. 
It uses the webcam. 
And as I move my hand, I can pop the balloons or I can move the bug. 
So it's a little bit like Microsoft Kinect, where you interact with gestures in the world. 
But instead of just playing someone else's game, you get to create the games, and if you see someone else's game, you can just say "" see inside, "" and you can look at the stacks of blocks that control it. 
So there's a new block that says how much video motion there is, and then, if there's so much video motion, it will then tell the balloon to pop. 
The same way that this uses the camera to get information into Scratch, you can also use the microphone. 
Here's an example of a project using the microphone. 
So I'm going to let all of you control this game using your voices. 
(Crickets chirping) (Shouts) (Chomping) (Laughter) (Applause) As kids are creating projects like this, they're learning to code, but even more importantly, they're coding to learn. 
Because as they learn to code, it enables them to learn many other things, opens up many new opportunities for learning. 
Again, it's useful to make an analogy to reading and writing. 
When you learn to read and write, it opens up opportunities for you to learn so many other things. 
When you learn to read, you can then read to learn. 
And it's the same thing with coding. 
If you learn to code, you can code to learn. 
Now some of the things you can learn are sort of obvious. 
You learn more about how computers work. 
But that's just where it starts. 
When you learn to code, it opens up for you to learn many other things. 
Let me show you an example. 
Here's another project, and I saw this when I was visiting one of the computer clubhouses. 
These are after-school learning centers that we helped start that help young people from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. 
And when I went to one of the clubhouses a couple years ago, I saw a 13-year-old boy who was using our Scratch software to create a game somewhat like this one, and he was very happy with his game and proud of his game, but also he wanted to do more. 
He wanted to keep score. 
So this was a game where the big fish eats the little fish, but he wanted to keep score, so that each time the big fish eats the little fish, the score would go up and it would keep track, and he didn't know how to do that. 
So I showed him. 
In Scratch, you can create something called a variable. 
I'll call it score. 
And that creates some new blocks for you, and also creates a little scoreboard that keeps track of the score, so each time I click on "" change score, "" it increments the score. 
So I showed this to the clubhouse member — let's call him Victor — and Victor, when he saw that this block would let him increment the score, he knew exactly what to do. 
He took the block and he put it into the program exactly where the big fish eats the little fish. 
So then, each time the big fish eats the little fish, he will increment the score, and the score will go up by one. 
And it's in fact working. 
And he saw this, and he was so excited, he reached his hand out to me, and he said, "" Thank you, thank you, thank you. "" And what went through my mind was, how often is it that teachers are thanked by their students for teaching them variables? (Laughter) It doesn't happen in most classrooms, but that's because in most classrooms, when kids learn about variables, they don't know why they're learning it. 
It's nothing that, really, they can make use of. 
When you learn ideas like this in Scratch, you can learn it in a way that's really meaningful and motivating for you, that you can understand the reason for learning variables, and we see that kids learn it more deeply and learn it better. 
Victor had, I'm sure, been taught about variables in schools, but he really didn't — he wasn't paying attention. 
Now he had a reason for learning variables. 
So when you learn through coding, and coding to learn, you're learning it in a meaningful context, and that's the best way of learning things. 
So as kids like Victor are creating projects like this, they're learning important concepts like variables, but that's just the start. 
As Victor worked on this project and created the scripts, he was also learning about the process of design, how to start with the glimmer of an idea and turn it into a fully-fledged, functioning project like you see here. 
So he was learning many different core principles of design, about how to experiment with new ideas, how to take complex ideas and break them down into simpler parts, how to collaborate with other people on your projects, about how to find and fix bugs when things go wrong, how to keep persistent and to persevere in the face of frustrations when things aren't working well. 
Now those are important skills that aren't just relevant for coding. 
They're relevant for all sorts of different activities. 
Now, who knows if Victor is going to grow up and become a programmer or a professional computer scientist? 
It's probably not so likely, but regardless of what he does, he'll be able to make use of these design skills that he learned. 
Regardless of whether he grows up to be a marketing manager or a mechanic or a community organizer, that these ideas are useful for everybody. 
Again, it's useful to think about this analogy with language. 
When you become fluent with reading and writing, it's not something that you're doing just to become a professional writer. 
Very few people become professional writers. 
But it's useful for everybody to learn how to read and write. 
Again, the same thing with coding. 
Most people won't grow up to become professional computer scientists or programmers, but those skills of thinking creatively, reasoning systematically, working collaboratively — skills you develop when you code in Scratch — are things that people can use no matter what they're doing in their work lives. 
And it's not just about your work life. 
Coding can also enable you to express your ideas and feelings in your personal life. 
Let me end with just one more example. 
So this is an example that came from after I had sent the Mother's Day cards to my mom, she decided that she wanted to learn Scratch. 
So she made this project for my birthday and sent me a happy birthday Scratch card. 
Now this project is not going to win any prizes for design, and you can rest assured that my 83-year-old mom is not training to become a professional programmer or computer scientist. 
But working on this project enabled her to make a connection to someone that she cares about and enabled her to keep on learning new things and continuing to practice her creativity and developing new ways of expressing herself. 
So as we take a look and we see that Michael Bloomberg is learning to code, all of the children of Estonia learn to code, even my mom has learned to code, don't you think it's about time that you might be thinking about learning to code? 
If you're interested in giving it a try, I'd encourage you to go to the Scratch website. 
It's scratch.mit.edu, and give a try at coding. 
Thanks very much. (Applause) 

I would like to tell you a story connecting the notorious privacy incident involving Adam and Eve, and the remarkable shift in the boundaries between public and private which has occurred in the past 10 years. 
You know the incident. 
Adam and Eve one day in the Garden of Eden realize they are naked. 
They freak out. 
And the rest is history. 
Nowadays, Adam and Eve would probably act differently. 
[@ Adam Last nite was a blast! loved dat apple LOL] [@ Eve yep.. babe, know what happened to my pants tho?] We do reveal so much more information about ourselves online than ever before, and so much information about us is being collected by organizations. 
Now there is much to gain and benefit from this massive analysis of personal information, or big data, but there are also complex tradeoffs that come from giving away our privacy. 
And my story is about these tradeoffs. 
We start with an observation which, in my mind, has become clearer and clearer in the past few years, that any personal information can become sensitive information. 
Back in the year 2000, about 100 billion photos were shot worldwide, but only a minuscule proportion of them were actually uploaded online. 
In 2010, only on Facebook, in a single month, 2.5 billion photos were uploaded, most of them identified. 
In the same span of time, computers' ability to recognize people in photos improved by three orders of magnitude. 
What happens when you combine these technologies together: increasing availability of facial data; improving facial recognizing ability by computers; but also cloud computing, which gives anyone in this theater the kind of computational power which a few years ago was only the domain of three-letter agencies; and ubiquitous computing, which allows my phone, which is not a supercomputer, to connect to the Internet and do there hundreds of thousands of face metrics in a few seconds? 
Well, we conjecture that the result of this combination of technologies will be a radical change in our very notions of privacy and anonymity. 
To test that, we did an experiment on Carnegie Mellon University campus. 
We asked students who were walking by to participate in a study, and we took a shot with a webcam, and we asked them to fill out a survey on a laptop. 
While they were filling out the survey, we uploaded their shot to a cloud-computing cluster, and we started using a facial recognizer to match that shot to a database of some hundreds of thousands of images which we had downloaded from Facebook profiles. 
By the time the subject reached the last page on the survey, the page had been dynamically updated with the 10 best matching photos which the recognizer had found, and we asked the subjects to indicate whether he or she found themselves in the photo. 
Do you see the subject? 
Well, the computer did, and in fact did so for one out of three subjects. 
So essentially, we can start from an anonymous face, offline or online, and we can use facial recognition to give a name to that anonymous face thanks to social media data. 
But a few years back, we did something else. 
We started from social media data, we combined it statistically with data from U.S. government social security, and we ended up predicting social security numbers, which in the United States are extremely sensitive information. 
Do you see where I'm going with this? 
So if you combine the two studies together, then the question becomes, can you start from a face and, using facial recognition, find a name and publicly available information about that name and that person, and from that publicly available information infer non-publicly available information, much more sensitive ones which you link back to the face? 
And the answer is, yes, we can, and we did. 
Of course, the accuracy keeps getting worse. 
[27% of subjects' first 5 SSN digits identified (with 4 attempts)] But in fact, we even decided to develop an iPhone app which uses the phone's internal camera to take a shot of a subject and then upload it to a cloud and then do what I just described to you in real time: looking for a match, finding public information, trying to infer sensitive information, and then sending back to the phone so that it is overlaid on the face of the subject, an example of augmented reality, probably a creepy example of augmented reality. 
In fact, we didn't develop the app to make it available, just as a proof of concept. 
In fact, take these technologies and push them to their logical extreme. 
Imagine a future in which strangers around you will look at you through their Google Glasses or, one day, their contact lenses, and use seven or eight data points about you to infer anything else which may be known about you. 
What will this future without secrets look like? 
And should we care? 
We may like to believe that the future with so much wealth of data would be a future with no more biases, but in fact, having so much information doesn't mean that we will make decisions which are more objective. 
In another experiment, we presented to our subjects information about a potential job candidate. 
We included in this information some references to some funny, absolutely legal, but perhaps slightly embarrassing information that the subject had posted online. 
Now interestingly, among our subjects, some had posted comparable information, and some had not. 
Which group do you think was more likely to judge harshly our subject? 
Paradoxically, it was the group who had posted similar information, an example of moral dissonance. 
Now you may be thinking, this does not apply to me, because I have nothing to hide. 
But in fact, privacy is not about having something negative to hide. 
Imagine that you are the H.R. director of a certain organization, and you receive résumés, and you decide to find more information about the candidates. 
Therefore, you Google their names and in a certain universe, you find this information. 
Or in a parallel universe, you find this information. 
Do you think that you would be equally likely to call either candidate for an interview? 
If you think so, then you are not like the U.S. employers who are, in fact, part of our experiment, meaning we did exactly that. 
We created Facebook profiles, manipulating traits, then we started sending out résumés to companies in the U.S., and we detected, we monitored, whether they were searching for our candidates, and whether they were acting on the information they found on social media. And they were. 
Discrimination was happening through social media for equally skilled candidates. 
Now marketers like us to believe that all information about us will always be used in a manner which is in our favor. 
But think again. Why should that be always the case? 
In a movie which came out a few years ago, "" Minority Report, "" a famous scene had Tom Cruise walk in a mall and holographic personalized advertising would appear around him. 
Now, that movie is set in 2054, about 40 years from now, and as exciting as that technology looks, it already vastly underestimates the amount of information that organizations can gather about you, and how they can use it to influence you in a way that you will not even detect. 
So as an example, this is another experiment actually we are running, not yet completed. 
Imagine that an organization has access to your list of Facebook friends, and through some kind of algorithm they can detect the two friends that you like the most. 
And then they create, in real time, a facial composite of these two friends. 
Now studies prior to ours have shown that people don't recognize any longer even themselves in facial composites, but they react to those composites in a positive manner. 
So next time you are looking for a certain product, and there is an ad suggesting you to buy it, it will not be just a standard spokesperson. 
It will be one of your friends, and you will not even know that this is happening. 
Now the problem is that the current policy mechanisms we have to protect ourselves from the abuses of personal information are like bringing a knife to a gunfight. 
One of these mechanisms is transparency, telling people what you are going to do with their data. 
And in principle, that's a very good thing. 
It's necessary, but it is not sufficient. 
Transparency can be misdirected. 
You can tell people what you are going to do, and then you still nudge them to disclose arbitrary amounts of personal information. 
So in yet another experiment, this one with students, we asked them to provide information about their campus behavior, including pretty sensitive questions, such as this one. 
[Have you ever cheated in an exam?] Now to one group of subjects, we told them, "Only other students will see your answers." 
To another group of subjects, we told them, "Students and faculty will see your answers." 
Transparency. Notification. And sure enough, this worked, in the sense that the first group of subjects were much more likely to disclose than the second. 
It makes sense, right? 
But then we added the misdirection. 
We repeated the experiment with the same two groups, this time adding a delay between the time we told subjects how we would use their data and the time we actually started answering the questions. 
How long a delay do you think we had to add in order to nullify the inhibitory effect of knowing that faculty would see your answers? 
Ten minutes? 
Five minutes? 
One minute? 
How about 15 seconds? 
Fifteen seconds were sufficient to have the two groups disclose the same amount of information, as if the second group now no longer cares for faculty reading their answers. 
Now I have to admit that this talk so far may sound exceedingly gloomy, but that is not my point. 
In fact, I want to share with you the fact that there are alternatives. 
The way we are doing things now is not the only way they can done, and certainly not the best way they can be done. 
When someone tells you, "" People don't care about privacy, "" consider whether the game has been designed and rigged so that they cannot care about privacy, and coming to the realization that these manipulations occur is already halfway through the process of being able to protect yourself. 
When someone tells you that privacy is incompatible with the benefits of big data, consider that in the last 20 years, researchers have created technologies to allow virtually any electronic transactions to take place in a more privacy-preserving manner. 
We can browse the Internet anonymously. 
We can send emails that can only be read by the intended recipient, not even the NSA. 
We can have even privacy-preserving data mining. 
In other words, we can have the benefits of big data while protecting privacy. 
Of course, these technologies imply a shifting of cost and revenues between data holders and data subjects, which is why, perhaps, you don't hear more about them. 
Which brings me back to the Garden of Eden. 
There is a second privacy interpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden which doesn't have to do with the issue of Adam and Eve feeling naked and feeling ashamed. 
You can find echoes of this interpretation in John Milton's "" Paradise Lost. "" In the garden, Adam and Eve are materially content. 
They're happy. They are satisfied. 
However, they also lack knowledge and self-awareness. 
The moment they eat the aptly named fruit of knowledge, that's when they discover themselves. 
They become aware. They achieve autonomy. 
The price to pay, however, is leaving the garden. 
So privacy, in a way, is both the means and the price to pay for freedom. 
Again, marketers tell us that big data and social media are not just a paradise of profit for them, but a Garden of Eden for the rest of us. 
We get free content. 
We get to play Angry Birds. We get targeted apps. 
But in fact, in a few years, organizations will know so much about us, they will be able to infer our desires before we even form them, and perhaps buy products on our behalf before we even know we need them. 
Now there was one English author who anticipated this kind of future where we would trade away our autonomy and freedom for comfort. 
Even more so than George Orwell, the author is, of course, Aldous Huxley. 
In "" Brave New World, "" he imagines a society where technologies that we created originally for freedom end up coercing us. 
However, in the book, he also offers us a way out of that society, similar to the path that Adam and Eve had to follow to leave the garden. 
In the words of the Savage, regaining autonomy and freedom is possible, although the price to pay is steep. 
So I do believe that one of the defining fights of our times will be the fight for the control over personal information, the fight over whether big data will become a force for freedom, rather than a force which will hiddenly manipulate us. 
Right now, many of us do not even know that the fight is going on, but it is, whether you like it or not. 
And at the risk of playing the serpent, I will tell you that the tools for the fight are here, the awareness of what is going on, and in your hands, just a few clicks away. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

My work is about the behaviors that we all engage in unconsciously, on a collective level. 
And what I mean by that, it's the behaviors that we're in denial about, and the ones that operate below the surface of our daily awareness. 
And as individuals, we all do these things, all the time, everyday. 
It's like when you're mean to your wife because you're mad at somebody else. 
Or when you drink a little too much at a party, just out of anxiety. 
Or when you overeat because your feelings are hurt, or whatever. 
And when we do these kind of things, when 300 million people do unconscious behaviors, then it can add up to a catastrophic consequence that nobody wants, and no one intended. 
And that's what I look at with my photographic work. 
This is an image I just recently completed, that is — when you stand back at a distance, it looks like some kind of neo-Gothic, cartoon image of a factory spewing out pollution. 
And as you get a little bit closer, it starts looking like lots of pipes, like maybe a chemical plant, or a refinery, or maybe a hellish freeway interchange. 
And as you get all the way up close, you realize that it's actually made of lots and lots of plastic cups. 
And in fact, this is one million plastic cups, which is the number of plastic cups that are used on airline flights in the United States every six hours. 
We use four million cups a day on airline flights, and virtually none of them are reused or recycled. 
They just don't do that in that industry. 
Now, that number is dwarfed by the number of paper cups we use every day, and that is 40 million cups a day for hot beverages, most of which is coffee. 
I couldn't fit 40 million cups on a canvas, but I was able to put 410,000. That's what 410,000 cups looks like. 
That's 15 minutes of our cup consumption. 
And if you could actually stack up that many cups in real life, that's the size it would be. 
And there's an hour's worth of our cups. 
And there's a day's worth of our cups. 
You can still see the little people way down there. 
That's as high as a 42-story building, and I put the Statue of Liberty in there as a scale reference. 
Speaking of justice, there's another phenomenon going on in our culture that I find deeply troubling, and that is that America, right now, has the largest percentage of its population in prison of any country on Earth. 
One out of four people, one out of four humans in prison are Americans, imprisoned in our country. 
And I wanted to show the number. 
The number is 2.3 million Americans were incarcerated in 2005. 
And that's gone up since then, but we don't have the numbers yet. 
So, I wanted to show 2.3 million prison uniforms, and in the actual print of this piece, each uniform is the size of a nickel on its edge. 
They're tiny. They're barely visible as a piece of material, and to show 2.3 million of them required a canvas that was larger than any printer in the world would print. 
And so I had to divide it up into multiple panels that are 10 feet tall by 25 feet wide. 
This is that piece installed in a gallery in New York — those are my parents looking at the piece. 
(Laughter) Every time I look at this piece, I always wonder if my mom's whispering to my dad, "He finally folded his laundry." (Laughter) 
I want to show you some pieces now that are about addiction. 
And this particular one is about cigarette addiction. 
I wanted to make a piece that shows the actual number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking. 
More than 400,000 people die in the United States every year from smoking cigarettes. 
And so, this piece is made up of lots and lots of boxes of cigarettes. 
And, as you slowly step back, you see that it's a painting by Van Gogh, called "" Skull with Cigarette. "" It's a strange thing to think about, that on 9 / 11, when that tragedy happened, 3,000 Americans died. 
And do you remember the response? 
It reverberated around the world, and will continue to reverberate through time. 
It will be something that we talk about in 100 years. 
And yet on that same day, 1,100 Americans died from smoking. 
And the day after that, another 1,100 Americans died from smoking. 
And every single day since then, 1,100 Americans have died. 
And today, 1,100 Americans are dying from cigarette smoking. 
And we aren't talking about it — we dismiss it. 
The tobacco lobby, it's too strong. 
We just dismiss it out of our consciousness. 
And knowing what we know about the destructive power of cigarettes, we continue to allow our children, our sons and daughters, to be in the presence of the influences that start them smoking. 
And this is what the next piece is about. 
This is just lots and lots of cigarettes: 65,000 cigarettes, which is equal to the number of teenagers who will start smoking this month, and every month in the U.S. 
More than 700,000 children in the United States aged 18 and under begin smoking every year. 
One more strange epidemic in the United States that I want to acquaint you with is this phenomenon of abuse and misuse of prescription drugs. 
This is an image I've made out of lots and lots of Vicodin. 
Well, actually, I only had one Vicodin that I scanned lots and lots of times. 
(Laughter) And so, as you stand back, you see 213,000 Vicodin pills, which is the number of hospital emergency room visits yearly in the United States, attributable to abuse and misuse of prescription painkillers and anti-anxiety medications. 
One-third of all drug overdoses in the U.S. — and that includes cocaine, heroin, alcohol, everything — one-third of drug overdoses are prescription medications. 
A strange phenomenon. 
This is a piece that I just recently completed about another tragic phenomenon. And that is the phenomenon, this growing obsession we have with breast augmentation surgery. 
384,000 women, American women, last year went in for elective breast augmentation surgery. 
It's rapidly becoming the most popular high school graduation gift, given to young girls who are about to go off to college. 
So, I made this image out of Barbie dolls, and so, as you stand back you see this kind of floral pattern, and as you get all the way back, you see 32,000 Barbie dolls, which represents the number of breast augmentation surgeries that are performed in the U.S. each month. 
The vast majority of those are on women under the age of 21. 
And strangely enough, the only plastic surgery that is more popular than breast augmentation is liposuction, and most of that is being done by men. 
Now, I want to emphasize that these are just examples. 
I'm not holding these out as being the biggest issues. 
They're just examples. 
And the reason that I do this, it's because I have this fear that we aren't feeling enough as a culture right now. 
There's this kind of anesthesia in America at the moment. 
We've lost our sense of outrage, our anger and our grief about what's going on in our culture right now, what's going on in our country, the atrocities that are being committed in our names around the world. 
They've gone missing; these feelings have gone missing. 
Our cultural joy, our national joy is nowhere to be seen. 
And one of the causes of this, I think, is that as each of us attempts to build this new kind of worldview, this holoptical worldview, this holographic image that we're all trying to create in our mind of the interconnection of things: the environmental footprints 1,000 miles away of the things that we buy; the social consequences 10,000 miles away of the daily decisions that we make as consumers. 
As we try to build this view, and try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture, the information that we have to work with is these gigantic numbers: numbers in the millions, in the hundreds of millions, in the billions and now in the trillions. 
Bush's new budget is in the trillions, and these are numbers that our brain just doesn't have the ability to comprehend. 
We can't make meaning out of these enormous statistics. 
And so that's what I'm trying to do with my work, is to take these numbers, these statistics from the raw language of data, and to translate them into a more universal visual language, that can be felt. 
Because my belief is, if we can feel these issues, if we can feel these things more deeply, then they'll matter to us more than they do now. 
And if we can find that, then we'll be able to find, within each one of us, what it is that we need to find to face the big question, which is: how do we change? 
That, to me, is the big question that we face as a people right now: how do we change? How do we change as a culture, and how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of, and that is our own behavior? 
My belief is that you don't have to make yourself bad to look at these issues. 
I'm not pointing the finger at America in a blaming way. 
I'm simply saying, this is who we are right now. 
And if there are things that we see that we don't like about our culture, then we have a choice. 
The degree of integrity that each of us can bring to the surface, to bring to this question, the depth of character that we can summon, as we show up for the question of how do we change — it's already defining us as individuals and as a nation, and it will continue to do that, on into the future. 
And it will profoundly affect the well-being, the quality of life of the billions of people who are going to inherit the results of our decisions. 
I'm not speaking abstractly about this, I'm speaking — this is who we are in this room, right now, in this moment. 
Thank you and good afternoon. 
(Applause) 

My journey to become a polar specialist, photographing, specializing in the polar regions, began when I was four years old, when my family moved from southern Canada to Northern Baffin Island, up by Greenland. 
There we lived with the Inuit in the tiny Inuit community of 200 Inuit people, where [we] were one of three non-Inuit families. 
And in this community, we didn't have a television; we didn't have computers, obviously, radio. 
We didn't even have a telephone. 
All of my time was spent outside with the Inuit, playing. 
The snow and the ice were my sandbox, and the Inuit were my teachers. 
And that's where I became truly obsessed with this polar realm. 
And I knew someday that I was going to do something that had to do with trying to share news about it and protect it. 
I'd like to share with you, for just two minutes only, some images, a cross-section of my work, to the beautiful music by Brandi Carlile, "" Have You Ever. "" I don't know why National Geographic has done this, they've never done this before, but they're allowing me to show you a few images from a coverage that I've just completed that is not published yet. 
National Geographic doesn't do this, so I'm very excited to be able to share this with you. 
And what these images are — you'll see them at the start of the slide show — there's only about four images — but it's of a little bear that lives in the Great Bear Rainforest. 
It's pure white, but it's not a polar bear. 
It's a spirit bear, or a Kermode bear. 
There are only 200 of these bears left. 
They're more rare than the panda bear. 
I sat there on the river for two months without seeing one. 
I thought, my career's over. 
I proposed this stupid story to National Geographic. 
What in the heck was I thinking? 
So I had two months to sit there and figure out different ways of what I was going to do in my next life, after I was a photographer, because they were going to fire me. 
Because National Geographic is a magazine; they remind us all the time: they publish pictures, not excuses. 
(Laughter) And after two months of sitting there — one day, thinking that it was all over, this incredible big white male came down, right beside me, three feet away from me, and he went down and grabbed a fish and went off in the forest and ate it. 
And then I spent the entire day living my childhood dream of walking around with this bear through the forest. 
He went through this old-growth forest and sat up beside this 400-year-old culturally modified tree and went to sleep. 
And I actually got to sleep within three feet of him, just in the forest, and photograph him. 
So I'm very excited to be able to show you those images and a cross-section of my work that I've done on the polar regions. 
Please enjoy. 
(Music) Brandi Carlile: ♫ Have you ever wandered lonely through the woods? ♫ ♫ And everything there feels just as it should ♫ ♫ You're part of the life there ♫ ♫ You're part of something good ♫ ♫ If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫ ♫ Have you ever stared into a starry sky? ♫ ♫ Lying on your back, you're asking why ♫ ♫ What's the purpose? ♫ ♫ I wonder, who am I? ♫ ♫ If you've ever stared into a starry sky ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ 
♫ Aah, ah, aah ♫ ♫ Ah, oh, oh, ah, ah, oh, oh ♫ ♫ Have you ever stared into a starry sky? ♫ ♫ Have you ever been out walking in the snow? ♫ ♫ Tried to get back where you were before ♫ ♫ You always end up ♫ ♫ Not knowing where to go ♫ ♫ If you've ever been out walking in the snow ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ Aah, ah, aah, ah, aah ♫ ♫ Ah, ah, oh, ah, ah, oh, ah ♫ ♫ Oh, ah, ah, ah ♫ 
♫ Ah, ah, oh, ah, ah, oh, oh ♫ ♫ If you'd ever been out walking you would know ♫ (Applause) Paul Nicklen: Thank you very much. The show's not over. 
My clock is ticking. OK, let's stop. 
Thank you very much. I appreciate it. 
We're inundated with news all the time that the sea ice is disappearing and it's at its lowest level. 
And in fact, scientists were originally saying sea ice is going to disappear in the next hundred years, then they said 50 years. 
Now they're saying the sea ice in the Arctic, the summertime extent is going to be gone in the next four to 10 years. 
And what does that mean? 
After a while of reading this in the news, it just becomes news. 
You glaze over with it. 
And what I'm trying to do with my work is put faces to this. 
And I want people to understand and get the concept that, if we lose ice, we stand to lose an entire ecosystem. 
Projections are that we could lose polar bears, they could become extinct in the next 50 to 100 years. 
And there's no better, sexier, more beautiful, charismatic megafauna species for me to hang my campaign on. 
Polar bears are amazing hunters. 
This was a bear I sat with for a while on the shores. 
There was no ice around. 
But this glacier caved into the water and a seal got on it. 
And this bear swam out to that seal — 800 lb. bearded seal — grabbed it, swam back and ate it. 
And he was so full, he was so happy and so fat eating this seal, that, as I approached him — about 20 feet away — to get this picture, his only defense was to keep eating more seal. 
And as he ate, he was so full — he probably had about 200 lbs of meat in his belly — and as he ate inside one side of his mouth, he was regurgitating out the other side of his mouth. 
So as long as these bears have any bit of ice they will survive, but it's the ice that's disappearing. 
We're finding more and more dead bears in the Arctic. 
When I worked on polar bears as a biologist 20 years ago, we never found dead bears. 
And in the last four or five years, we're finding dead bears popping up all over the place. 
We're seeing them in the Beaufort Sea, floating in the open ocean where the ice has melted out. 
I found a couple in Norway last year. We're seeing them on the ice. 
These bears are already showing signs of the stress of disappearing ice. 
Here's a mother and her two year-old cub were traveling on a ship a hundred miles offshore in the middle of nowhere, and they're riding on this big piece of glacier ice, which is great for them; they're safe at this point. 
They're not going to die of hypothermia. 
They're going to get to land. 
But unfortunately, 95 percent of the glaciers in the Arctic are also receding right now to the point that the ice is ending up on land and not injecting any ice back into the ecosystem. 
These ringed seals, these are the "" fatsicles "" of the Arctic. 
These little, fat dumplings, 150-pound bundles of blubber are the mainstay of the polar bear. 
And they're not like the harbor seals that you have here. 
These ringed seals also live out their entire life cycle associated and connected to sea ice. 
They give birth inside the ice, and they feed on the Arctic cod that live under the ice. 
And here's a picture of sick ice. 
This is a piece of multi-year ice that's 12 years old. 
And what scientists didn't predict is that, as this ice melts, these big pockets of black water are forming and they're grabbing the sun's energy and accelerating the melting process. 
And here we are diving in the Beaufort Sea. 
The visibility's 600 ft.; we're on our safety lines; the ice is moving all over the place. 
I wish I could spend half an hour telling you about how we almost died on this dive. 
But what's important in this picture is that you have a piece of multi-year ice, that big chunk of ice up in the corner. 
In that one single piece of ice, you have 300 species of microorganisms. 
And in the spring, when the sun returns to the ice, it forms the phytoplankton, grows under that ice, and then you get bigger sheets of seaweed, and then you get the zooplankton feeding on all that life. 
So really what the ice does is it acts like a garden. 
It acts like the soil in a garden. It's an inverted garden. 
Losing that ice is like losing the soil in a garden. 
Here's me in my office. 
I hope you appreciate yours. 
This is after an hour under the ice. 
I can't feel my lips; my face is frozen; I can't feel my hands; I can't feel my feet. 
And I've come up, and all I wanted to do was get out of the water. 
After an hour in these conditions, it's so extreme that, when I go down, almost every dive I vomit into my regulator because my body can't deal with the stress of the cold on my head. 
And so I'm just so happy that the dive is over. 
I get to hand my camera to my assistant, and I'm looking up at him, and I'm going, "" Woo. Woo. Woo. "" Which means, "" Take my camera. "" And he thinks I'm saying, "" Take my picture. "" So we had this little communication breakdown. 
(Laughter) But it's worth it. 
I'm going to show you pictures of beluga whales, bowhead whales, and narwhals, and polar bears, and leopard seals today, but this picture right here means more to me than any other I've ever made. 
I dropped down in this ice hole, just through that hole that you just saw, and I looked up under the underside of the ice, and I was dizzy; I thought I had vertigo. 
I got very nervous — no rope, no safety line, the whole world is moving around me — and I thought, "" I'm in trouble. "" But what happened is that the entire underside was full of these billions of amphipods and copepods moving around and feeding on the underside of the ice, giving birth and living out their entire life cycle. 
This is the foundation of the whole food chain in the Arctic, right here. 
And when you have low productivity in this, in ice, the productivity in copepods go down. 
This is a bowhead whale. 
Supposedly, science is stating that it could be the oldest living animal on earth right now. 
This very whale right here could be over 250 years old. 
This whale could have been born around the start of the Industrial Revolution. 
It could have survived 150 years of whaling. 
And now its biggest threat is the disappearance of ice in the North because of the lives that we're leading in the South. 
Narwhals, these majestic narwhals with their eight-foot long ivory tusks, don't have to be here; they could be out on the open water. 
But they're forcing themselves to come up in these tiny little ice holes where they can breathe, catch a breath, because right under that ice are all the swarms of cod. 
And the cod are there because they are feeding on all the copepods and amphipods. 
Alright, my favorite part. 
When I'm on my deathbed, I'm going to remember one story more than any other. 
Even though that spirit bear moment was powerful, I don't think I'll ever have another experience like I did with these leopard seals. 
Leopard seals, since the time of Shackleton, have had a bad reputation. 
They've got that wryly smile on their mouth. 
They've got those black sinister eyes and those spots on their body. 
They look positively prehistoric and a bit scary. 
And tragically in [2003], a scientist was taken down and drowned, and she was being consumed by a leopard seal. 
And people were like, "" We knew they were vicious. We knew they were. "" And so people love to form their opinions. 
And that's when I got a story idea: I want to go to Antarctica, get in the water with as many leopard seals as I possibly can and give them a fair shake — find out if they really are these vicious animals, or if they're misunderstood. 
So this is that story. 
Oh, and they also happen to eat Happy Feet. 
(Laughter) As a species, as humans, we like to say penguins are really cute, therefore, leopard seals eat them, so leopard seals are ugly and bad. 
It doesn't work that way. 
The penguin doesn't know it's cute, and the leopard seal doesn't know it's kind of big and monstrous. 
This is just the food chain unfolding. 
They're also big. 
They're not these little harbor seals. 
They are 12 ft. long, a thousand pounds. 
And they're also curiously aggressive. 
You get 12 tourists packed into a Zodiac, floating in these icy waters, and a leopard seal comes up and bites the pontoon. 
The boat starts to sink, they race back to the ship and get to go home and tell the stories of how they got attacked. 
All the leopard seal was doing — it's just biting a balloon. 
It just sees this big balloon in the ocean — it doesn't have hands — it's going to take a little bite, the boat pops, and off they go. 
(Laughter) So after five days of crossing the Drake Passage — isn't that beautiful — after five days of crossing the Drake Passage, we have finally arrived at Antarctica. 
I'm with my Swedish assistant and guide. 
His name is Goran Ehlme from Sweden — Goran. 
And he has a lot of experience with leopard seals. I have never seen one. 
So we come around the cove in our little Zodiac boat, and there's this monstrous leopard seal. 
And even in his voice, he goes, "" That's a bloody big seal, ya. "" (Laughter) And this seal is taking this penguin by the head, and it's flipping it back and forth. 
And what it's trying to do is turn that penguin inside-out, so it can eat the meat off the bones, and then it goes off and gets another one. 
And so this leopard seal grabbed another penguin, came under the boat, the Zodiac, starting hitting the hull of the boat. 
And we're trying to not fall in the water. 
And we sit down, and that's when Goran said to me, "" This is a good seal, ya. 
It's time for you to get in the water. "" (Laughter) And I looked at Goran, and I said to him, "" Forget that. "" But I think I probably used a different word starting with the letter "" F. "" But he was right. 
He scolded me out, and said, "" This is why we're here. 
And you purposed this stupid story to National Geographic. 
And now you've got to deliver. 
And you can't publish excuses. "" So I had such dry mouth — probably not as bad as now — but I had such, such dry mouth. 
And my legs were just trembling. I couldn't feel my legs. 
I put my flippers on. I could barely part my lips. 
I put my snorkel in my mouth, and I rolled over the side of the Zodiac into the water. 
And this was the first thing she did. 
She came racing up to me, engulfed my whole camera — and her teeth are up here and down here — but Goran, before I had gotten in the water, had given me amazing advice. 
He said, "" If you get scared, you close your eyes, ya, and she'll go away. "" (Laughter) So that's all I had to work with at that point. 
But I just started to shoot these pictures. 
So she did this threat display for a few minutes, and then the most amazing thing happened — she totally relaxed. 
She went off, she got a penguin. 
She stopped about 10 feet away from me, and she sat there with this penguin, the penguin's flapping, and she let's it go. 
The penguin swims toward me, takes off. 
She grabs another one. She does this over and over. 
And it dawned on me that she's trying to feed me a penguin. 
Why else would she release these penguins at me? 
And after she did this four or five times, she swam by me with this dejected look on her face. 
You don't want to be too anthropomorphic, but I swear that she looked at me like, "" This useless predator's going to starve in my ocean. "" (Laughter) So realizing I couldn't catch swimming penguins, she'd get these other penguins and bring them slowly towards me, bobbing like this, and she'd let them go. 
This didn't work. 
I was laughing so hard and so emotional that my mask was flooding, because I was crying underwater, just because it was so amazing. 
And so that didn't work. 
So then she'd get another penguin and try this ballet-like sexy display sliding down this iceberg like this. (Laughter) And she would sort of bring them over to me and offer it to me. 
This went on for four days. 
This just didn't happen a couple of times. 
And then so she realized I couldn't catch live ones, so she brought me dead penguins. 
(Laughter) Now I've got four or five penguins floating around my head, and I'm just sitting there shooting away. 
And she would often stop and have this dejected look on her face like, "" Are you for real? "" Because she can't believe I can't eat this penguin. 
Because in her world, you're either breeding or you're eating — and I'm not breeding, so... 
(Laughter) And then that wasn't enough; she started to flip penguins onto my head. 
She was trying to force-feed me. She's pushing me around. 
She's trying to force-feed my camera, which is every photographer's dream. 
And she would get frustrated; she'd blow bubbles in my face. 
She would, I think, let me know that I was going to starve. 
But yet she didn't stop. 
She would not stop trying to feed me penguins. 
And on the last day with this female where I thought I had pushed her too far, I got nervous because she came up to me, she rolled over on her back, and she did this deep, guttural jackhammer sound, this gok-gok-gok-gok. 
And I thought, she's about to bite. 
She's about to let me know she's too frustrated with me. 
What had happened was another seal had snuck in behind me, and she did that to threat display. 
She chased that big seal away, went and got its penguin and brought it to me. 
(Laughter) That wasn't the only seal I got in the water with. 
I got in the water with 30 other leopard seals, and I never once had a scary encounter. 
They are the most remarkable animals I've ever worked with, and the same with polar bears. 
And just like the polar bears, these animals depend on an icy environment. 
I get emotional. Sorry. 
It's a story that lives deep in my heart, and I'm proud to share this with you. 
And I'm so passionate about it. 
Anybody want to come with me to Antarctica or the Arctic, I'll take you; let's go. 
We've got to get the story out now. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
Thank you. Thanks very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

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

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

By birth and by choice, I've been involved with the auto industry my entire life, and for the past 30 years, I've worked at Ford Motor Company. 
And for most of those years, I worried about, how am I going to sell more cars and trucks? 
But today I worry about, what if all we do is sell more cars and trucks? 
What happens when the number of vehicles on the road doubles, triples, or even quadruples? 
My life is guided by two great passions, and the first is automobiles. 
I literally grew up with the Ford Motor Company. 
I thought it was so cool as a little boy when my dad would bring home the latest Ford or Lincoln and leave it in the driveway. 
And I decided about that time, about age 10, that it would be really cool if I was a test driver. 
So my parents would go to dinner. 
They'd sit down; I'd sneak out of the house. 
I'd jump behind the wheel and take the new model around the driveway, and it was a blast. 
And that went on for about two years, until — I think I was about 12 — my dad brought home a Lincoln Mark III. 
And it was snowing that day. 
So he and mom went to dinner, and I snuck out and thought it'd be really cool to do donuts or even some figure-eights in the snow. 
My dad finished dinner early that evening. 
And he was walking to the front hall and out the front door just about the same time I hit some ice and met him at the front door with the car — and almost ended up in the front hall. 
So it kind of cooled my test-driving for a little while. 
But I really began to love cars then. 
And my first car was a 1975 electric-green Mustang. 
And even though the color was pretty hideous, I did love the car, and it really cemented my love affair with cars that's continued on to this day. 
But cars are really more than a passion of mine; they're quite literally in my blood. 
My great grandfather was Henry Ford, and on my mother's side, my great grandfather was Harvey Firestone. 
So when I was born, I guess you could say expectations were kind of high for me. 
But my great grandfather, Henry Ford, really believed that the mission of the Ford Motor Company was to make people's lives better and make cars affordable so that everyone could have them. 
Because he believed that with mobility comes freedom and progress. 
And that's a belief that I share. 
My other great passion is the environment. 
And as a young boy, I used to go up to Northern Michigan and fish in the rivers that Hemingway fished in and then later wrote about. 
And it really struck me as the years went by, in a very negative way, when I would go to some stream that I'd loved, and was used to walking through this field that was once filled with fireflies, and now had a strip mall or a bunch of condos on it. 
And so even at a young age, that really resonated with me, and the whole notion of environmental preservation, at a very basic level, sunk in with me. 
As a high-schooler, I started to read authors like Thoreau and Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey, and I really began to develop a deeper appreciation of the natural world. 
But it never really occurred to me that my love of cars and trucks would ever be in conflict with nature. 
And that was true until I got to college. 
And when I got to college, you can imagine my surprise when I would go to class and a number of my professors would say that Ford Motor Company and my family was everything that was wrong with our country. 
They thought that we were more interested, as an industry, in profits, rather than progress, and that we filled the skies with smog — and frankly, we were the enemy. 
I joined Ford after college, after some soul searching whether or not this is really the right thing to do. 
But I decided that I wanted to go and see if I could affect change there. 
And as I look back over 30 years ago, it was a little naive to think at that age that I could. But I wanted to. 
And I really discovered that my professors weren't completely wrong. 
In fact, when I got back to Detroit, my environmental leanings weren't exactly embraced by those in my own company, and certainly by those in the industry. 
I had some very interesting conversations, as you can imagine. 
There were some within Ford who believed that all this ecological nonsense should just disappear and that I needed to stop hanging out with "" environmental wackos. "" I was considered a radical. 
And I'll never forget the day I was called in by a member of top management and told to stop associating with any known or suspected environmentalists. 
(Laughter) Of course, I had no intention of doing that, and I kept speaking out about the environment, and it really was the topic that we now today call sustainability. 
And in time, my views went from controversial to more or less consensus today. 
I mean, I think most people in the industry understand that we've got to get on with it. 
And the good news is today we are tackling the big issues, of cars and the environment — not only at Ford, but really as an industry. 
We're pushing fuel efficiency to new heights. 
And with new technology, we're reducing — and I believe, someday we'll eliminate — CO2 emissions. 
We're starting to sell electric cars, which is great. 
We're developing alternative powertrains that are going to make cars affordable in every sense of the word — economically, socially and environmentally. 
And actually, although we've got a long way to go and a lot of work to do, I can see the day where my two great passions — cars and the environment — actually come into harmony. 
But unfortunately, as we're on our way to solving one monstrous problem — and as I said, we're not there yet; we've got a lot of work to do, but I can see where we will — but even as we're in the process of doing that, another huge problem is looming, and people aren't noticing. 
And that is the freedom of mobility that my great grandfather brought to people is now being threatened, just as the environment is. 
The problem, put in its simplest terms, is one of mathematics. 
Today there are approximately 6.8 billion people in the world, and within our lifetime, that number's going to grow to about nine billion. 
And at that population level, our planet will be dealing with the limits of growth. 
And with that growth comes some severe practical problems, one of which is our transportation system simply won't be able to deal with it. 
When we look at the population growth in terms of cars, it becomes even clearer. 
Today there are about 800 million cars on the road worldwide. 
But with more people and greater prosperity around the world, that number's going to grow to between two and four billion cars by mid century. 
And this is going to create the kind of global gridlock that the world has never seen before. 
Now think about the impact that this is going to have on our daily lives. 
Today the average American spends about a week a year stuck in traffic jams, and that's a huge waste of time and resources. 
But that's nothing compared to what's going on in the nations that are growing the fastest. 
Today the average driver in Beijing has a five-hour commute. 
And last summer — many of you probably saw this — there was a hundred-mile traffic jam that took 11 days to clear in China. 
In the decades to come, 75 percent of the world's population will live in cities, and 50 of those cities will be of 10 million people or more. 
So you can see the size of the issue that we're facing. 
When you factor in population growth, it's clear that the mobility model that we have today simply will not work tomorrow. 
Frankly, four billion clean cars on the road are still four billion cars, and a traffic jam with no emissions is still a traffic jam. 
So, if we make no changes today, what does tomorrow look like? 
Well I think you probably already have the picture. 
Traffic jams are just a symptom of this challenge, and they're really very, very inconvenient, but that's all they are. 
But the bigger issue is that global gridlock is going to stifle economic growth and our ability to deliver food and health care, particularly to people that live in city centers. 
And our quality of life is going to be severely compromised. 
So what's going to solve this? 
Well the answer isn't going to be more of the same. 
My great grandfather once said before he invented the Model T, "" If I had asked people then what they wanted, they would have answered, 'We want faster horses.' "" So the answer to more cars is simply not to have more roads. 
When America began moving west, we didn't add more wagon trains, we built railroads. 
And to connect our country after World War II, we didn't build more two-lane highways, we built the interstate highway system. 
Today we need that same leap in thinking for us to create a viable future. 
We are going to build smart cars, but we also need to build smart roads, smart parking, smart public transportation systems and more. 
We don't want to waste our time sitting in traffic, sitting at tollbooths or looking for parking spots. 
We need an integrated system that uses real time data to optimize personal mobility on a massive scale without hassle or compromises for travelers. 
And frankly, that's the kind of system that's going to make the future of personal mobility sustainable. 
Now the good news is some of this work has already begun in different parts of the world. 
The city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi uses driverless electric vehicles that can communicate with one another, and they go underneath the city streets. 
And up above, you've got a series of pedestrian walkways. 
On New York City's 34th Street, gridlock will soon be replaced with a connected system of vehicle-specific corridors. 
Pedestrian zones and dedicated traffic lanes are going to be created, and all of this will cut down the average rush hour commute to get across town in New York from about an hour today at rush hour to about 20 minutes. 
Now if you look at Hong Kong, they have a very interesting system called Octopus there. 
It's a system that really ties together all the transportation assets into a single payment system. 
So parking garages, buses, trains, they all operate within the same system. 
Now shared car services are also springing up around the world, and these efforts, I think, are great. 
They're relieving congestion, and they're frankly starting to save some fuel. 
These are all really good ideas that will move us forward. 
But what really inspires me is what's going to be possible when our cars can begin talking to each other. 
Very soon, the same systems that we use today to bring music and entertainment and GPS information into our vehicles are going to be used to create a smart vehicle network. 
Every morning I drive about 30 miles from my home in Ann Arbor to my office in Dearborn, Michigan. 
And every night I go home, my commute is a total crapshoot. 
And I often have to leave the freeway and look for different ways for me to try and make it home. 
But very soon we're going to see the days when cars are essentially talking to each other. 
So if the car ahead of me on I-94 hits traffic, it will immediately alert my car and tell my car to reroute itself to get me home in the best possible way. 
And these systems are being tested right now, and frankly they're going to be ready for prime time pretty soon. 
But the potential of a connected car network is almost limitless. 
So just imagine: one day very soon, you're going to be able to plan a trip downtown and your car will be connected to a smart parking system. 
So you get in your car, and as you get in your car, your car will reserve you a parking spot before you arrive — no more driving around looking for one, which frankly is one of the biggest users of fuel in today's cars in urban areas — is looking for parking spots. 
Or think about being in New York City and tracking down an intelligent cab on your smart phone so you don't have to wait in the cold to hail one. 
Or being at a future TED Conference and having your car talk to the calendars of everybody here and telling you all the best route to take home and when you should leave so that you can all arrive at your next destination on time. 
This is the kind of technology that will merge millions of individual vehicles into a single system. 
So I think it's clear we have the beginnings of a solution to this enormous problem. 
But as we found out with addressing CO2 issues, and also fossil fuels, there is no one silver bullet. 
The solution is not going to be more cars, more roads or a new rail system; it can only be found, I believe, in a global network of interconnected solutions. 
Now I know we can develop the technology that's going to make this work, but we've got to be willing to get out there and seek out the solutions — whether that means vehicle sharing or public transportation or some other way we haven't even thought of yet; our overall transportation-mix and infrastructure must support all the future options. 
We need our best and our brightest to start entertaining this issue. 
Companies, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, they all need to understand this is a huge business opportunity, as well as an enormous social problem. 
And just as these groups embrace the green energy challenge — and it's really been amazing to me to watch how much brain power, how much money and how much serious thought has, really over the last three years, just poured into the green energy field. 
We need that same kind of passion and energy to attack global gridlock. 
But we need people like all of you in this room, leading thinkers. 
I mean, frankly, I need all of you to think about how you can help solve this huge issue. 
And we need people from all walks of life; not just inventors, we need policymakers and government officials to also think about how they're going to respond to this challenge. 
This isn't going to be solved by any one person or one group. 
It's going to really require a national energy policy, frankly for each country, because the solutions in each country are going to be different based upon income levels, traffic jams and also how integrated the systems already are. 
But we need to get going, and we need to get going today. 
And we must have an infrastructure that's designed to support this flexible future. 
You know, we've come a long way. 
Since the Model T, most people never traveled more than 25 miles from home in their entire lifetime. 
And since then, the automobile has allowed us the freedom to choose where we live, where we work, where we play and frankly when we just go out and want to move around. 
We don't want to regress and lose that freedom. 
We're on our way to solving — and as I said earlier, I know we've got a long way to go — the one big issue that we're all focused on that threatens it, and that's the environmental issue, but I believe we all must turn all of our effort and all of our ingenuity and determination to help now solve this notion of global gridlock. 
Because in doing so, we're going to preserve what we've really come to take for granted, which is the freedom to move and move very effortlessly around the world. 
And it frankly will enhance our quality of life if we fix this. 
Because, if you can envision, as I do, a future of zero emissions and freedom to move around the country and around the world like we take for granted today, that's worth the hard work today to preserve that for tomorrow. 
I believe we're at our best when we're confronted with big issues. 
This is a big one, and it won't wait. 
So let's get started now. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

See, I grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the home of Bethlehem Steel. 
We would build projects together, like model rockets and slot cars. 
And one day, he came home, when I was about 10 years old, and at the dinner table, he announced that for our next project, we were going to build... 
Now, I was thrilled about this, because at school, there was a bully named Kevin, and he was picking on me, because I was the only Jewish kid in class. 
(Laughter) (Robot noises) (Laughter) But that wasn't the kind of robot my dad had in mind. (Laughter) 
See, he owned a chromium-plating company, and they had to move heavy steel parts between tanks of chemicals. 
He and I worked on it for several years, but it was the 1970s, and the technology that was available to amateurs just wasn't there yet. 
It was a warning about his exposure to the toxic chemicals. 
He didn't recognize that at the time, and he contracted leukemia. 
And I never forgot the robot that he and I tried to build. 
So, rather than have it fight or do industrial work, we decided to build a planter, put the robot into the center of it, and we called it the Telegarden. 
And we had put a camera in the gripper of the hand of the robot, and we wrote some special scripts and software, so that anyone in the world could come in, and by clicking on the screen, they could move the robot around and visit the garden. 
It was invited, after the first year, by the Ars Electronica Museum in Austria, to have it installed in their lobby. 
But I knew what he meant, because it would be possible to take a bunch of pictures of flowers in a garden and then, basically, index them in a computer system, such that it would appear that there was a real robot, when there wasn't. 
We invited leading artists, engineers and philosophers to write essays about this, and the results are collected in this book from MIT Press. 
So thanks to this student, who questioned what everyone else had assumed to be true, this project taught me an important lesson about life, which is to always question assumptions. 
As it was operating, my students and I were very interested in how people were interacting with each other, and what they were doing with the garden. 
Like, for example, what if it could go to a dinner party at the White House? 
We got a human, someone who's very outgoing and gregarious, and she was outfitted with a helmet with various equipment, cameras and microphones, and then a backpack with wireless Internet connection. 
So they could see what she was seeing, but then, more importantly, they could participate, by interacting with each other and coming up with ideas about what she should do next and where she should go, and then conveying those to the Tele-Actor. 
So we got a chance to take the Tele-Actor to the Webby Awards in San Francisco. 
And that year, Sam Donaldson was the host. 
This is a new experimental project, and people are watching her on their screens, there's cameras involved and there's microphones and she's got an earbud in her ear, and people over the network are giving her advice about what to do next. "" And he said, "" Wait a second. 
But that night, as we were packing up, I asked the Tele-Actor, how did the Tele-Directors decide that they would give a kiss to Sam Donaldson? 
And she said they hadn't. 
(Laughter) So, the success of the Tele-Actor that night was due to the fact that she was a wonderful actor. 
And so that project taught me another lesson about life, which is that, when in doubt, improvise. 
And the way it's done, as you can see here, is that surgeons insert needles into the body to deliver the seeds. 
So we simulated this; we developed some optimization algorithms and we simulated this. 
So now, we're working with doctors at UCSF and engineers at Johns Hopkins, and we're building a robot that has a number of — it's a specialized design with different joints that can allow the needles to come in at an infinite variety of angles. 
And this is a commercially available device. 
It's being used in over 2,000 hospitals around the world. 
Many of the subtasks in surgery are very routine and tedious, like suturing, and currently, all of these are performed under the specific and immediate control of the surgeon. 
So he's gotten robots to fly helicopters, do incredibly interesting, beautiful acrobatics, by watching human experts fly them. 
So what we're doing is asking the surgeon to perform the task, and we record the motions of the robot. 
Now we take those human demonstrations — they're all noisy and imperfect — and we extract from them an inferred task trajectory and control sequence for the robot. 
We then execute that on the robot, we observe what happens, then we adjust the controls, using a sequence of techniques called iterative learning. 
Then what we do is we increase the velocity a little bit. 
And here's the result. 
And here's the robot operating at 10 times the speed of the human. 
And she likes robots, too. 
And now I get to teach her how things work, and we get to build projects together. 
Robots are the most human of our machines. 
They can't solve all of the world's problems, but I think they have something important to teach us. 
And think about what they might be telling you. 

Has anyone among you ever been exposed to tear gas? 
Tear gas? Anyone? 
I'm sorry to hear that, so you might know that it's a very toxic substance, but you might not know that it's a very simple molecule with an unpronouncable name: it's called chlorobenzalmalononitrile. 
I made it. 
It's decades old, but it's becoming very trendy among police forces around the planet lately, it seems, and according to my experience as a non-voluntary breather of it, tear gas has two main but quite opposite effects. 
One, it can really burn your eyes, and two, it can also help you to open them. 
Tear gas definitely helped to open mine to something that I want to share with you this afternoon: that livestreaming the power of independent broadcasts through the web can be a game-changer in journalism, in activism, and as I see it, in the political discourse as well. 
That idea started to dawn on me in early 2011 when I was covering a protest in São Paulo. 
It was the marijuana march, a gathering of people asking for the legalization of cannabis. 
When that group started to move, the riot police came from the back with rubber bullets, bombs, and then the gas. 
But to make a long story short, I had entered that protest as the editor-in-chief of a well-established printed magazine where I'd worked for 11 years, and thanks to this unsolicited effects of tear gas, I left it as a journalist that was now committed to new ways of sharing the raw experience of what it's like to be there, actually. 
So in the following week, I was back in the streets, but that time, I wasn't a member of any media outlet anymore. 
I was there as an independent livestreamer, and all I had with me was basically borrowed equipment. 
I had a very simple camera and a backpack with 3G modems. 
And I had this weblink that could be shared through social media, could be put in any website, and that time, the protest went along fine. 
There was no violence. 
There was no action scenes. 
But there was something really exciting, because I could see at a distance the TV channels covering it, and they had these big vans and the teams and the cameras, and I was basically doing the same thing and all I had was a backpack. 
And that was really exciting to a journalist, but the most interesting part was when I got back home, actually, because I learned that I had been watched by more than 90,000 people, and I got hundreds of emails and messages of people asking me, basically, how did I do it, how it was possible to do such a thing. 
And I learned something else, that that was actually the first time that somebody had ever done a livestreaming in a street protest in the country. 
And that really shocked me, because I was no geek, I was no technology guy, and all the equipment needed was already there, was easily available. 
And I realized that we had a frontier here, a very important one, that it was just a matter of changing the perspective, and the web could be actually used, already used, as a colossal and uncontrollable and highly anarchical TV channel, TV network, and anyone with very basic skills and very basic equipment, even someone like me who had this little stuttering issue, so if it happens, bear with me please, even someone like me could become a broadcaster. 
And that sounded revolutionary in my mind. 
So for the next couple of years, I started to experiment with livestreaming in different ways, not only in the streets but mostly in studios and in homes, until the beginning of 2013, last year, when I became the cofounder of a group called Mídia NINJA. 
NINJA is an acronym that stands for Narrativas Independentes Jornalismo e Ação, or in English, independent narratives, journalism, and action. 
It was a media group that had little media plan. 
We didn't have any financial structure. 
We were not planning to make money out of this, which was wise, because you shouldn't try to make money out of journalism now. 
But we had a very solid and clear conviction, that we knew that the hyperconnected environment of social media could maybe allow us to consolidate a network of experimental journalists throughout the country. 
So we launched a Facebook page first, and then a manifesto, and started to cover the streets in a very simple way. 
But then something happened, something that wasn't predicted, that no one could have anticipated. 
Street protests started to erupt in São Paulo. 
They began as very local and specific. 
They were against the bus fare hike that had just happened in the city. 
This is a bus. 
It's written there, "" Theft. "" But those kind of manifestations started to grow, and they kept happening. 
So the police violence against them started to grow as well. 
But there was another conflict, the one I believe that's more important here to make my point that it was a narrative conflict. 
There was this mainstream media version of the facts that anyone who was on the streets could easily challenge if they presented their own vision of what was actually happening there. 
And it was this clash of visions, this clash of narratives, that I think turned those protests into a long period in the country of political reckoning where hundreds of thousands of people, probably more than a million people took to the streets in the whole country. 
But it wasn't about the bus fare hike anymore. 
It was about everything. 
The people's demands, their expectations, the reasons why they were on the streets could be as diverse as they could be contradictory in many cases. 
If you could read it, you would understand me. 
But it was in this environment of political catharsis that the country was going through that it had to do with politics, indeed, but it had to do also with a new way of organizing, through a new way of communicating. 
It was in that environment that Mídia NINJA emerged from almost anonymity to become a national phenomenon, because we did have the right equipment. 
We are not using big cameras. 
We are using basically this. 
We are using smartphones. 
And that, actually, allowed us to become invisible in the middle of the protests, but it allowed us to do something else: to show what it was like to be in the protests, to present to people at home a subjective perspective. 
But there was something that is more important, I think, than the equipment. 
It was our mindset, because we are not behaving as a media outlet. 
We are not competing for news. 
We are trying to encourage people, to invite people, and to actually teach people how to do this, how they also could become broadcasters. 
And that was crucial to turn Mídia NINJA from a small group of people, and in a matter of weeks, we multiplied and we grew exponentially throughout the country. 
So in a matter of a week or two, as the protests kept happening, we were hundreds of young people connected in this network throughout the country. 
We were covering more than 50 cities at the same time. 
That's something that no TV channel could ever do. 
That was responsible for turning us suddenly, actually, into kind of the mainstream media of social media. 
So we had a couple of thousands of followers on our Facebook page, and soon we had a quarter of a million followers. 
Our posts and our videos were being seen by more than 11 million timelines a week. 
It was way more than any newspaper or any magazine could ever do. 
And that turned Mídia NINJA into something else, more than a media outlet, than a media project. 
It became almost like a public service to the citizen, to the protester, to the activist, because they had a very simple and efficient and peaceful tool to confront both police and media authority. 
Many of our images started to be used in regular TV channels. 
Our livestreams started to be broadcast even in regular televisions when things got really rough. 
Some our images were responsible to take some people out of jail, people who were being arrested unfairly under false accusations, and we could prove them innocent. 
And that also turned Mídia NINJA very soon to be seen as almost an enemy of cops, unfortunately, and we started to be severely beaten, and eventually arrested on the streets. 
It happened in many cases. 
But that was also useful, because we were still at the web, so that helped to trigger an important debate in the country on the role of the media itself and the state of the freedom of the press in the country. 
So Mídia NINJA now evolved and finally consolidated itself in what we hoped it would become: a national network of hundreds of young people, self-organizing themselves locally to cover social, human rights issues, and expressing themselves not only politically but journalistically. 
What I started to do in the beginning of this year, as Mídia NINJA is already a self-organizing network, I'm dedicating myself to another project. 
It's called Fluxo, which is Portuguese for "" stream. "" It's a journalism studio in São Paulo downtown, where I used livestream to experiment with what I call post-television formats. 
But I'm also trying to come up with ways to finance independent journalism through a direct relationship with an audience, with an active audience, because now I really want to try to make a living out of my tear gas resolution back then. 
But there's something more significant here, something that I believe is more important and more crucial than my personal example. 
I said that livestream could turn the web into a colossal TV network, but I believe it does something else, because after watching people using it, not only to cover things but to express, to organize themselves politically, I believe livestream can turn cyberspace into a global political arena where everyone might have a voice, a proper voice, because livestream takes the monopoly of the broadcast political discourse, of the verbal aspect of the political dialogue out of the mouths of just politicians and political pundits alone, and it empowers the citizen through this direct and non-mediated power of exchanging experiences and dialogue, 
empowers them to question and to influence authorities in ways in which we are about to see. 
And I believe it does something else that might be even more important, that the simplicity of the technology can merge objectivity and subjectivity in a very political way, as I see it, because it really helps the audience, the citizen, to see the world through somebody else's eye, so it helps the citizen to put him- or herself in other people's place. 
And that idea, I think, should be the intention, should be the goal of any good journalism, any good activism, but most of all, any good politics. 
Thank you very much. It was an honor. 
(Applause) 

I made a film that was impossible to make, but I didn't know it was impossible, and that's how I was able to do it. 
"" Mars et Avril "" is a science fiction film. 
It's set in Montreal some 50 years in the future. 
No one had done that kind of movie in Quebec before because it's expensive, it's set in the future, and it's got tons of visual effects, and it's shot on green screen. 
Yet this is the kind of movie that I wanted to make ever since I was a kid, really, back when I was reading some comic books and dreaming about what the future might be. 
When American producers see my film, they think that I had a big budget to do it, like 23 million. 
But in fact I had 10 percent of that budget. 
I did "" Mars et Avril "" for only 2.3 million. 
So you might wonder, what's the deal here? 
How did I do this? 
Well, it's two things. First, it's time. 
When you don't have money, you must take time, and it took me seven years to do "" Mars et Avril. "" The second aspect is love. 
I got tons and tons of generosity from everyone involved. 
And it seems like every department had nothing, so they had to rely on our creativity and turn every problem into an opportunity. 
And that brings me to the point of my talk, actually, how constraints, big creative constraints, can boost creativity. 
But let me go back in time a bit. 
In my early 20s, I did some graphic novels, but they weren't your usual graphic novels. 
They were books telling a science fiction story through images and text, and most of the actors who are now starring in the movie adaptation, they were already involved in these books portraying characters into a sort of experimental, theatrical, simplistic way. 
And one of these actors is the great stage director and actor Robert Lepage. 
And I just love this guy. 
I've been in love with this guy since I was a kid. 
His career I admire a lot. 
And I wanted this guy to be involved in my crazy project, and he was kind enough to lend his image to the character of Eugène Spaak, who is a cosmologist and artist who seeks relation in between time, space, love, music and women. 
And he was a perfect fit for the part, and Robert is actually the one who gave me my first chance. 
He was the one who believed in me and encouraged me to do an adaptation of my books into a film, and to write, direct, and produce the film myself. 
And Robert is actually the very first example of how constraints can boost creativity. 
Because this guy is the busiest man on the planet. 
I mean, his agenda is booked until 2042, and he's really hard to get, and I wanted him to be in the movie, to reprise his role in the movie. 
But the thing is, had I waited for him until 2042, my film wouldn't be a futuristic film anymore, so I just couldn't do that. Right? 
But that's kind of a big problem. 
How do you get somebody who is too busy to star in a movie? 
Well, I said as a joke in a production meeting — and this is a true story, by the way — I said, "" Why don't we turn this guy into a hologram? 
Because, you know, he is everywhere and nowhere on the planet at the same time, and he's an illuminated being in my mind, and he's in between reality and virtual reality, so it would make perfect sense to turn this guy into a hologram. "" Everybody around the table laughed, but the joke was kind of a good solution, so that's what we ended up doing. 
Here's how we did it. We shot Robert with six cameras. 
He was dressed in green and he was like in a green aquarium. 
Each camera was covering 60 degrees of his head, so that in post-production we could use pretty much any angle we needed, and we shot only his head. 
Six months later there was a guy on set, a mime portraying the body, the vehicle for the head. 
And he was wearing a green hood so that we could erase the green hood in postproduction and replace it with Robert Lepage's head. 
So he became like a renaissance man, and here's what it looks like in the movie. 
(Music) (Video) Robert Lepage: [As usual, Arthur's drawing didn't account for the technical challenges. 
I welded the breech, but the valve is still gaping. 
I tried to lift the pallets to lower the pressure in the sound box, but I might have hit a heartstring. 
It still sounds too low.] Jacques Languirand: [That's normal. 
The instrument always ends up resembling its model.] (Music) Martin Villeneuve: Now these musical instruments that you see in this excerpt, they're my second example of how constraints can boost creativity, because I desperately needed these objects in my movie. 
They are objects of desire. 
They are imaginary musical instruments. 
And they carry a nice story with them. 
Actually, I knew what these things would look like in my mind for many, many years. 
But my problem was, I didn't have the money to pay for them. I couldn't afford them. 
So that's kind of a big problem too. 
How do you get something that you can't afford? 
And, you know, I woke up one morning with a pretty good idea. 
I said, "" What if I have somebody else pay for them? "" (Laughter) But who on Earth would be interested by seven not-yet-built musical instruments inspired by women's bodies? 
And I thought of Cirque du Soleil in Montreal, because who better to understand the kind of crazy poetry that I wanted to put on screen? 
So I found my way to Guy Laliberté, Cirque du Soleil's CEO, and I presented my crazy idea to him with sketches like this and visual references, and something pretty amazing happened. 
Guy was interested by this idea not because I was asking for his money, but because I came to him with a good idea in which everybody was happy. 
It was kind of a perfect triangle in which the art buyer was happy because he got the instruments at a cheaper price, because they weren't even made. 
He took a leap of faith. 
And the artist, Dominique Engel, brilliant guy, he was happy too because he had a dream project to work on for a year. 
And obviously I was happy because I got the instruments in my film for free, which was kind of what I tried to do. 
So here they are. 
And my last example of how constraints can boost creativity comes from the green, because this is a weird color, a crazy color, and you need to replace the green screens eventually and you must figure that out sooner rather than later. 
And I had, again, pretty much, ideas in my mind as to what the world would be, but then again I turned to my childhood imagination and went to the work of Belgian comic book master François Schuiten in Belgium. 
And this guy is another guy I admire a lot, and I wanted him to be involved in the movie as a production designer. 
But people told me, you know, Martin, it's impossible, the guy is too busy and he will say no. 
Well, I said, you know what, instead of mimicking his style, I might as well call the real guy and ask him, and I sent him my books, and he answered that he was interested in working on the film with me because he could be a big fish in a small aquarium. 
In other words, there was space for him to dream with me. 
So here I was with one of my childhood heroes, drawing every single frame that's in the film to turn that into Montreal in the future. 
And it was an amazing collaboration to work with this great artist whom I admire. 
But then, you know, eventually you have to turn all these drawings into reality. 
So, again, my solution was to aim for the best possible artist that I could think of. 
And there's this guy in Montreal, another Quebecois called Carlos Monzon, and he's a very good VFX artist. 
This guy had been lead compositor on such films as "" Avatar "" and "" Star Trek "" and "" Transformers, "" and other unknown projects like this, and I knew he was the perfect fit for the job, and I had to convince him, and, instead of working on the next Spielberg movie, he accepted to work on mine. 
Why? Because I offered him a space to dream. 
So if you don't have money to offer to people, you must strike their imagination with something as nice as you can think of. 
So this is what happened on this movie, and that's how it got made, and we went to this very nice postproduction company in Montreal called Vision Globale, and they lent their 60 artists to work full time for six months to do this crazy film. 
So I want to tell you that, if you have some crazy ideas in your mind, and that people tell you that it's impossible to make, well, that's an even better reason to want to do it, because people have a tendency to see the problems rather than the final result, whereas if you start to deal with problems as being your allies rather than your opponents, life will start to dance with you in the most amazing way. 
I have experienced it. 
And you might end up doing some crazy projects, and who knows, you might even end up going to Mars. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So, how many of you have ever gotten behind the wheel of a car when you really shouldn't have been driving? 
Maybe you're out on the road for a long day, and you just wanted to get home. 
You were tired, but you felt you could drive a few more miles. 
Maybe you thought, I've had less to drink than everybody else, I should be the one to go home. 
Or maybe your mind was just entirely elsewhere. 
Does this sound familiar to you? 
Now, in those situations, wouldn't it be great if there was a button on your dashboard that you could push, and the car would get you home safely? 
Now, that's been the promise of the self-driving car, the autonomous vehicle, and it's been the dream since at least 1939, when General Motors showcased this idea at their Futurama booth at the World's Fair. 
Now, it's been one of those dreams that's always seemed about 20 years in the future. 
Now, two weeks ago, that dream took a step forward, when the state of Nevada granted Google's self-driving car the very first license for an autonomous vehicle, clearly establishing that it's legal for them to test it on the roads in Nevada. 
Now, California's considering similar legislation, and this would make sure that the autonomous car is not one of those things that has to stay in Vegas. 
(Laughter) Now, in my lab at Stanford, we've been working on autonomous cars too, but with a slightly different spin on things. You see, we've been developing robotic race cars, cars that can actually push themselves to the very limits of physical performance. 
Now, why would we want to do such a thing? 
Well, there's two really good reasons for this. 
First, we believe that before people turn over control to an autonomous car, that autonomous car should be at least as good as the very best human drivers. 
Now, if you're like me, and the other 70 percent of the population who know that we are above-average drivers, you understand that's a very high bar. 
There's another reason as well. 
Just like race car drivers can use all of the friction between the tire and the road, all of the car's capabilities to go as fast as possible, we want to use all of those capabilities to avoid any accident we can. 
Now, you may push the car to the limits not because you're driving too fast, but because you've hit an icy patch of road, conditions have changed. 
In those situations, we want a car that is capable enough to avoid any accident that can physically be avoided. 
I must confess, there's kind of a third motivation as well. 
You see, I have a passion for racing. 
In the past, I've been a race car owner, a crew chief and a driving coach, although maybe not at the level that you're currently expecting. 
One of the things that we've developed in the lab — we've developed several vehicles — is what we believe is the world's first autonomously drifting car. 
It's another one of those categories where maybe there's not a lot of competition. 
(Laughter) But this is P1. It's an entirely student-built electric vehicle, which through using its rear-wheel drive and front-wheel steer-by-wire can drift around corners. 
It can get sideways like a rally car driver, always able to take the tightest curve, even on slippery, changing surfaces, never spinning out. 
We've also worked with Volkswagen Oracle, on Shelley, an autonomous race car that has raced at 150 miles an hour through the Bonneville Salt Flats, gone around Thunderhill Raceway Park in the sun, the wind and the rain, and navigated the 153 turns and 12.4 miles of the Pikes Peak Hill Climb route in Colorado with nobody at the wheel. 
(Laughter) (Applause) I guess it goes without saying that we've had a lot of fun doing this. 
But in fact, there's something else that we've developed in the process of developing these autonomous cars. 
We have developed a tremendous appreciation for the capabilities of human race car drivers. 
As we've looked at the question of how well do these cars perform, we wanted to compare them to our human counterparts. 
And we discovered their human counterparts are amazing. 
Now, we can take a map of a race track, we can take a mathematical model of a car, and with some iteration, we can actually find the fastest way around that track. 
We line that up with data that we record from a professional driver, and the resemblance is absolutely remarkable. 
Yes, there are subtle differences here, but the human race car driver is able to go out and drive an amazingly fast line, without the benefit of an algorithm that compares the trade-off between going as fast as possible in this corner, and shaving a little bit of time off of the straight over here. 
Not only that, they're able to do it lap after lap after lap. 
They're able to go out and consistently do this, pushing the car to the limits every single time. 
It's extraordinary to watch. 
You put them in a new car, and after a few laps, they've found the fastest line in that car, and they're off to the races. 
It really makes you think, we'd love to know what's going on inside their brain. 
So as researchers, that's what we decided to find out. 
We decided to instrument not only the car, but also the race car driver, to try to get a glimpse into what was going on in their head as they were doing this. 
Now, this is Dr. Lene Harbott applying electrodes to the head of John Morton. 
John Morton is a former Can-Am and IMSA driver, who's also a class champion at Le Mans. 
Fantastic driver, and very willing to put up with graduate students and this sort of research. 
She's putting electrodes on his head so that we can monitor the electrical activity in John's brain as he races around the track. 
Now, clearly we're not going to put a couple of electrodes on his head and understand exactly what all of his thoughts are on the track. 
However, neuroscientists have identified certain patterns that let us tease out some very important aspects of this. 
For instance, the resting brain tends to generate a lot of alpha waves. 
In contrast, theta waves are associated with a lot of cognitive activity, like visual processing, things where the driver is thinking quite a bit. 
Now, we can measure this, and we can look at the relative power between the theta waves and the alpha waves. 
This gives us a measure of mental workload, how much the driver is actually challenged cognitively at any point along the track. 
Now, we wanted to see if we could actually record this on the track, so we headed down south to Laguna Seca. 
Laguna Seca is a legendary raceway about halfway between Salinas and Monterey. 
It has a curve there called the Corkscrew. 
Now, the Corkscrew is a chicane, followed by a quick right-handed turn as the road drops three stories. 
Now, the strategy for driving this as explained to me was, you aim for the bush in the distance, and as the road falls away, you realize it was actually the top of a tree. 
All right, so thanks to the Revs Program at Stanford, we were able to take John there and put him behind the wheel of a 1960 Porsche Abarth Carrera. 
Life is way too short for boring cars. 
So, here you see John on the track, he's going up the hill — Oh! Somebody liked that — and you can see, actually, his mental workload — measuring here in the red bar — you can see his actions as he approaches. 
Now watch, he has to downshift. 
And then he has to turn left. 
Look for the tree, and down. 
Not surprisingly, you can see this is a pretty challenging task. 
You can see his mental workload spike as he goes through this, as you would expect with something that requires this level of complexity. 
But what's really interesting is to look at areas of the track where his mental workload doesn't increase. 
I'm going to take you around now to the other side of the track. 
Turn three. And John's going to go into that corner and the rear end of the car is going to begin to slide out. 
He's going to have to correct for that with steering. 
So watch as John does this here. 
Watch the mental workload, and watch the steering. 
The car begins to slide out, dramatic maneuver to correct it, and no change whatsoever in the mental workload. 
Not a challenging task. 
In fact, entirely reflexive. 
Now, our data processing on this is still preliminary, but it really seems that these phenomenal feats that the race car drivers are performing are instinctive. 
They are things that they have simply learned to do. 
It requires very little mental workload for them to perform these amazing feats. 
And their actions are fantastic. 
This is exactly what you want to do on the steering wheel to catch the car in this situation. 
Now, this has given us tremendous insight and inspiration for our own autonomous vehicles. 
We've started to ask the question: Can we make them a little less algorithmic and a little more intuitive? 
Can we take this reflexive action that we see from the very best race car drivers, introduce it to our cars, and maybe even into a system that could get onto your car in the future? 
That would take us a long step along the road to autonomous vehicles that drive as well as the best humans. 
But it's made us think a little bit more deeply as well. 
Do we want something more from our car than to simply be a chauffeur? 
Do we want our car to perhaps be a partner, a coach, someone that can use their understanding of the situation to help us reach our potential? 
Can, in fact, the technology not simply replace humans, but allow us to reach the level of reflex and intuition that we're all capable of? 
So, as we move forward into this technological future, I want you to just pause and think of that for a moment. 
What is the ideal balance of human and machine? 
And as we think about that, let's take inspiration from the absolutely amazing capabilities of the human body and the human mind. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

How do you feed a city? 
It's one of the great questions of our time. 
Yet it's one that's rarely asked. 
We take it for granted that if we go into a shop or restaurant, or indeed into this theater's foyer in about an hour's time, there is going to be food there waiting for us, having magically come from somewhere. 
But when you think that every day for a city the size of London, enough food has to be produced, transported, bought and sold, cooked, eaten, disposed of, and that something similar has to happen every day for every city on earth, it's remarkable that cities get fed at all. 
We live in places like this as if they're the most natural things in the world, forgetting that because we're animals and that we need to eat, we're actually as dependent on the natural world as our ancient ancestors were. 
And as more of us move into cities, more of that natural world is being transformed into extraordinary landscapes like the one behind me — it's soybean fields in Mato Grosso in Brazil — in order to feed us. 
These are extraordinary landscapes, but few of us ever get to see them. 
And increasingly these landscapes are not just feeding us either. 
As more of us move into cities, more of us are eating meat, so that a third of the annual grain crop globally now gets fed to animals rather than to us human animals. 
And given that it takes three times as much grain — actually ten times as much grain — to feed a human if it's passed through an animal first, that's not a very efficient way of feeding us. 
And it's an escalating problem too. 
By 2050, it's estimated that twice the number of us are going to be living in cities. 
And it's also estimated that there is going to be twice as much meat and dairy consumed. 
So meat and urbanism are rising hand in hand. 
And that's going to pose an enormous problem. 
Six billion hungry carnivores to feed, by 2050. 
That's a big problem. And actually if we carry on as we are, it's a problem we're very unlikely to be able to solve. 
Nineteen million hectares of rainforest are lost every year to create new arable land. 
Although at the same time we're losing an equivalent amount of existing arables to salinization and erosion. 
We're very hungry for fossil fuels too. 
It takes about 10 calories to produce every calorie of food that we consume in the West. 
And even though there is food that we are producing at great cost, we don't actually value it. 
Half the food produced in the USA is currently thrown away. 
And to end all of this, at the end of this long process, we're not even managing to feed the planet properly. 
A billion of us are obese, while a further billion starve. 
None of it makes very much sense. 
And when you think that 80 percent of global trade in food now is controlled by just five multinational corporations, it's a grim picture. 
As we're moving into cities, the world is also embracing a Western diet. 
And if we look to the future, it's an unsustainable diet. 
So how did we get here? 
And more importantly, what are we going to do about it? 
Well, to answer the slightly easier question first, about 10,000 years ago, I would say, is the beginning of this process in the ancient Near East, known as the Fertile Crescent. 
Because, as you can see, it was crescent shaped. 
And it was also fertile. 
And it was here, about 10,000 years ago, that two extraordinary inventions, agriculture and urbanism, happened roughly in the same place and at the same time. 
This is no accident, because agriculture and cities are bound together. They need each other. 
Because it was discovery of grain by our ancient ancestors for the first time that produced a food source that was large enough and stable enough to support permanent settlements. 
And if we look at what those settlements were like, we see they were compact. 
They were surrounded by productive farm land and dominated by large temple complexes like this one at Ur, that were, in fact, effectively, spiritualized, central food distribution centers. 
Because it was the temples that organized the harvest, gathered in the grain, offered it to the gods, and then offered the grain that the gods didn't eat back to the people. 
So, if you like, the whole spiritual and physical life of these cities was dominated by the grain and the harvest that sustained them. 
And in fact, that's true of every ancient city. 
But of course not all of them were that small. 
Famously, Rome had about a million citizens by the first century A.D. 
So how did a city like this feed itself? 
The answer is what I call "" ancient food miles. "" Basically, Rome had access to the sea, which made it possible for it to import food from a very long way away. 
This is the only way it was possible to do this in the ancient world, because it was very difficult to transport food over roads, which were rough. 
And the food obviously went off very quickly. 
So Rome effectively waged war on places like Carthage and Egypt just to get its paws on their grain reserves. 
And, in fact, you could say that the expansion of the Empire was really sort of one long, drawn out militarized shopping spree, really. 
(Laughter) In fact — I love the fact, I just have to mention this: Rome in fact used to import oysters from London, at one stage. I think that's extraordinary. 
So Rome shaped its hinterland through its appetite. 
But the interesting thing is that the other thing also happened in the pre-industrial world. 
If we look at a map of London in the 17th century, we can see that its grain, which is coming in from the Thames, along the bottom of this map. 
So the grain markets were to the south of the city. 
And the roads leading up from them to Cheapside, which was the main market, were also grain markets. 
And if you look at the name of one of those streets, Bread Street, you can tell what was going on there 300 years ago. 
And the same of course was true for fish. 
Fish was, of course, coming in by river as well. Same thing. 
And of course Billingsgate, famously, was London's fish market, operating on-site here until the mid-1980s. 
Which is extraordinary, really, when you think about it. 
Everybody else was wandering around with mobile phones that looked like bricks and sort of smelly fish happening down on the port. 
This is another thing about food in cities: Once its roots into the city are established, they very rarely move. 
Meat is a very different story because, of course, animals could walk into the city. 
So much of London's meat was coming from the northwest, from Scotland and Wales. 
So it was coming in, and arriving at the city at the northwest, which is why Smithfield, London's very famous meat market, was located up there. 
Poultry was coming in from East Anglia and so on, to the northeast. 
I feel a bit like a weather woman doing this. Anyway, and so the birds were coming in with their feet protected with little canvas shoes. 
And then when they hit the eastern end of Cheapside, that's where they were sold, which is why it's called Poultry. 
And, in fact, if you look at the map of any city built before the industrial age, you can trace food coming in to it. 
You can actually see how it was physically shaped by food, both by reading the names of the streets, which give you a lot of clues. 
Friday Street, in a previous life, is where you went to buy your fish on a Friday. 
But also you have to imagine it full of food. 
Because the streets and the public spaces were the only places where food was bought and sold. 
And if we look at an image of Smithfield in 1830 you can see that it would have been very difficult to live in a city like this and be unaware of where your food came from. 
In fact, if you were having Sunday lunch, the chances were it was mooing or bleating outside your window about three days earlier. 
So this was obviously an organic city, part of an organic cycle. 
And then 10 years later everything changed. 
This is an image of the Great Western in 1840. 
And as you can see, some of the earliest train passengers were pigs and sheep. 
So all of a sudden, these animals are no longer walking into market. 
They're being slaughtered out of sight and mind, somewhere in the countryside. 
And they're coming into the city by rail. 
And this changes everything. 
To start off with, it makes it possible for the first time to grow cities, really any size and shape, in any place. 
Cities used to be constrained by geography; they used to have to get their food through very difficult physical means. 
All of a sudden they are effectively emancipated from geography. 
And as you can see from these maps of London, in the 90 years after the trains came, it goes from being a little blob that was quite easy to feed by animals coming in on foot, and so on, to a large splurge, that would be very, very difficult to feed with anybody on foot, either animals or people. 
And of course that was just the beginning. After the trains came cars, and really this marks the end of this process. 
It's the final emancipation of the city from any apparent relationship with nature at all. 
And this is the kind of city that's devoid of smell, devoid of mess, certainly devoid of people, because nobody would have dreamed of walking in such a landscape. 
In fact, what they did to get food was they got in their cars, drove to a box somewhere on the outskirts, came back with a week's worth of shopping, and wondered what on earth to do with it. 
And this really is the moment when our relationship, both with food and cities, changes completely. 
Here we have food — that used to be the center, the social core of the city — at the periphery. 
It used to be a social event, buying and selling food. 
Now it's anonymous. 
We used to cook; now we just add water, or a little bit of an egg if you're making a cake or something. 
We don't smell food to see if it's okay to eat. 
We just read the back of a label on a packet. 
And we don't value food. We don't trust it. 
So instead of trusting it, we fear it. 
And instead of valuing it, we throw it away. 
One of the great ironies of modern food systems is that they've made the very thing they promised to make easier much harder. 
By making it possible to build cities anywhere and any place, they've actually distanced us from our most important relationship, which is that of us and nature. 
And also they've made us dependent on systems that only they can deliver, that, as we've seen, are unsustainable. 
So what are we going to do about that? 
It's not a new question. 
500 years ago it's what Thomas More was asking himself. 
This is the frontispiece of his book "" Utopia. "" And it was a series of semi-independent city-states, if that sounds remotely familiar, a day's walk from one another where everyone was basically farming-mad, and grew vegetables in their back gardens, and ate communal meals together, and so on. 
And I think you could argue that food is a fundamental ordering principle of Utopia, even though More never framed it that way. 
And here is another very famous "" Utopian "" vision, that of Ebenezer Howard, "" The Garden City. "" Same idea: series of semi-independent city-states, little blobs of metropolitan stuff with arable land around, joined to one another by railway. 
And again, food could be said to be the ordering principle of his vision. 
It even got built, but nothing to do with this vision that Howard had. 
And that is the problem with these Utopian ideas, that they are Utopian. 
Utopia was actually a word that Thomas Moore used deliberately. 
It was a kind of joke, because it's got a double derivation from the Greek. 
It can either mean a good place, or no place. 
Because it's an ideal. It's an imaginary thing. We can't have it. 
And I think, as a conceptual tool for thinking about the very deep problem of human dwelling, that makes it not much use. 
So I've come up with an alternative, which is Sitopia, from the ancient Greek, "" sitos "" for food, and "" topos "" for place. 
I believe we already live in Sitopia. 
We live in a world shaped by food, and if we realize that, we can use food as a really powerful tool — a conceptual tool, design tool, to shape the world differently. 
So if we were to do that, what might Sitopia look like? 
Well I think it looks a bit like this. 
I have to use this slide. It's just the look on the face of the dog. 
But anyway, this is — (Laughter) it's food at the center of life, at the center of family life, being celebrated, being enjoyed, people taking time for it. 
This is where food should be in our society. 
But you can't have scenes like this unless you have people like this. 
By the way, these can be men as well. 
It's people who think about food, who think ahead, who plan, who can stare at a pile of raw vegetables and actually recognize them. 
We need these people. We're part of a network. 
Because without these kinds of people we can't have places like this. 
Here, I deliberately chose this because it is a man buying a vegetable. 
But networks, markets where food is being grown locally. 
It's common. It's fresh. 
It's part of the social life of the city. 
Because without that, you can't have this kind of place, food that is grown locally and also is part of the landscape, and is not just a zero-sum commodity off in some unseen hell-hole. 
Cows with a view. 
Steaming piles of humus. 
This is basically bringing the whole thing together. 
And this is a community project I visited recently in Toronto. 
It's a greenhouse, where kids get told all about food and growing their own food. 
Here is a plant called Kevin, or maybe it's a plant belonging to a kid called Kevin. I don't know. 
But anyway, these kinds of projects that are trying to reconnect us with nature is extremely important. 
So Sitopia, for me, is really a way of seeing. 
It's basically recognizing that Sitopia already exists in little pockets everywhere. 
The trick is to join them up, to use food as a way of seeing. 
And if we do that, we're going to stop seeing cities as big, metropolitan, unproductive blobs, like this. 
We're going to see them more like this, as part of the productive, organic framework of which they are inevitably a part, symbiotically connected. 
But of course, that's not a great image either, because we need not to be producing food like this anymore. 
We need to be thinking more about permaculture, which is why I think this image just sums up for me the kind of thinking we need to be doing. 
It's a re-conceptualization of the way food shapes our lives. 
The best image I know of this is from 650 years ago. 
It's Ambrogio Lorenzetti's "" Allegory of Good Government. "" It's about the relationship between the city and the countryside. 
And I think the message of this is very clear. 
If the city looks after the country, the country will look after the city. 
And I want us to ask now, what would Ambrogio Lorenzetti paint if he painted this image today? 
What would an allegory of good government look like today? 
Because I think it's an urgent question. 
It's one we have to ask, and we have to start answering. 
We know we are what we eat. 
We need to realize that the world is also what we eat. 
But if we take that idea, we can use food as a really powerful tool to shape the world better. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Not yours, of course — other people's. 
(Laughter) So after being at MIT for a few years, I realized that writing academic papers is not that exciting. 
So I decided to try and write something more fun. 
And I came up with an idea that I would write a cookbook. 
Until somebody said, "" Look, if you're serious about this, you have to write about your research first; you have to publish something, then you'll get the opportunity to write something else. 
I do it all day long, I want to write something a bit more free, less constrained. "" And this person was very forceful and said, "Look, that's the only way you'll ever do it." 
People write to me about their personal experience, and about their examples, and where they disagree, and their nuances. 
And even being here — I mean, the last few days, I've known heights of obsessive behavior I never thought about. 
(Laughter) Which I think is just fascinating. 
If I asked you what's longer, the vertical line on the table on the left, or the horizontal line on the table on the right, which one seems longer? 
Can anybody see anything but the left one being longer? 
Now, the interesting thing about this is when I take the lines away, it's as if you haven't learned anything in the last minute. 
and there is almost nothing we can do about it, aside from taking a ruler and starting to measure it. 
If I cover the rest of the cube, you can see that they are identical. 
Vision is one of the best things we do. 
(Laughter) Something we don't have an evolutionary reason to do, we don't have a specialized part of the brain for, and we don't do that many hours of the day. 
And worse — not having an easy way to see them, because in visual illusions, we can easily demonstrate the mistakes; in cognitive illusion it's much, much harder to demonstrate the mistakes to people. 
So I want to show you some cognitive illusions, or decision-making illusions, in the same way. 
Giving organs to somebody else is probably about how much you care about society, how linked you are. 
But if you look at this plot, you can see that countries that we think about as very similar, actually exhibit very different behavior. 
Germany is on the left, and Austria is on the right. 
The Netherlands is on the left, and Belgium is on the right. 
And finally, depending on your particular version of European similarity, you can think about the U.K. and France as either similar culturally or not, but it turns out that with organ donation, they are very different. 
It turns out that they got to 28 percent after mailing every household in the country a letter, begging people to join this organ donation program. 
(Laughter) But whatever the countries on the right are doing, they're doing a much better job than begging. 
The countries on the left have a form at the DMV that looks something like this. 
People don't check, and they don't join. 
The countries on the right, the ones that give a lot, have a slightly different form. 
(Laughter) Now, think about what this means. 
We wake up in the morning and we open the closet; we feel that we decide what to wear. 
How many of you believe that if you went to renew your license tomorrow, and you went to the DMV, and you encountered one of these forms, that it would actually change your own behavior? 
The cost of lifting the pencil and marking a "" V "" is higher than the possible benefit of the decision, so that's why we get this effect. "" (Laughter) But, in fact, it's not because it's easy. 
He's been suffering from right hip pain for a while. "" And then, they said to the physicians, "" You decided a few weeks ago that nothing is working for this patient. 
All these medications, nothing seems to be working. 
Hip replacement. Okay? "" So the patient is on a path to have his hip replaced. 
What do you do? Do you pull the patient back and try ibuprofen? 
I hope this worries you, by the way — (Laughter) when you go to see your physician. 
But the moment you set this as the default, it has a huge power over whatever people end up doing. 
I'll give you a couple of more examples on irrational decision-making. 
Now, weekend in Paris, weekend in Rome — these are different things. 
If you want coffee, you have to pay for it yourself, it's two euros 50. 
(Laughter) Now in some ways, given that you can have Rome with coffee, why would you possibly want Rome without coffee? 
The fact that you have Rome without coffee makes Rome with coffee look superior, and not just to Rome without coffee — even superior to Paris. 
(Laughter) Here are two examples of this principle. 
(Laughter) Now I looked at this, and I called up The Economist, and I tried to figure out what they were thinking. 
So I printed another version of this, where I eliminated the middle option. 
What was happening was the option that was useless, in the middle, was useless in the sense that nobody wanted it. 
In fact, relative to the option in the middle, which was get only the print for 125, the print and web for 125 looked like a fantastic deal. 
People believe that when we deal with physical attraction, we see somebody, and we know immediately whether we like them or not, if we're attracted or not. 
This is why we have these four-minute dates. 
I'll show you images here, no real people, but the experiment was with people. 
I showed some people a picture of Tom, and a picture of Jerry. 
and I said, "" Who do you want to date? 
(Laughter) For the other people, I added an ugly version of Tom. 
And the question was, will ugly Jerry and ugly Tom help their respective, more attractive brothers? 
(Laughter) This of course has two very clear implications for life in general. 
(Laughter) You want a slightly uglier version of yourself. (Laughter) 
Similar, but slightly uglier. (Laughter) 
Now you get it. 
The general point is that, when we think about economics, we have this beautiful view of human nature. 
"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason!" 
The silver lining is, I think, kind of the reason that behavioral economics is interesting and exciting. 
Are we Superman, or are we Homer Simpson? 
(Applause) 

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

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

How many of you have been to Oklahoma City? 
Raise your hand. Yeah? 
How many of you have not been to Oklahoma City and have no idea who I am? (Laughter) Most of you. Let me give you a little bit of background. 
Oklahoma City started in the most unique way imaginable. 
Back on a spring day in 1889, the federal government held what they called a land run. 
They literally lined up the settlers along an imaginary line, and they fired off a gun, and the settlers roared across the countryside and put down a stake, and wherever they put down that stake, that was their new home. 
And at the end of the very first day, the population of Oklahoma City had gone from zero to 10,000, and our planning department is still paying for that. 
The citizens got together on that first day and elected a mayor. 
And then they shot him. 
(Laughter) That's not really all that funny — (Laughter) — but it allows me to see what type of audience I'm dealing with, so I appreciate the feedback. 
The 20th century was fairly kind to Oklahoma City. 
Our economy was based on commodities, so the price of cotton or the price of wheat, and ultimately the price of oil and natural gas. 
And along the way, we became a city of innovation. 
The shopping cart was invented in Oklahoma City. 
(Applause) The parking meter, invented in Oklahoma City. 
You're welcome. 
Having an economy, though, that relates to commodities can give you some ups and some downs, and that was certainly the case in Oklahoma City's history. 
In the 1970s, when it appeared that the price of energy would never retreat, our economy was soaring, and then in the early 1980s, it cratered quickly. 
The price of energy dropped. 
Our banks began to fail. 
Before the end of the decade, 100 banks had failed in the state of Oklahoma. 
There was no bailout on the horizon. 
Our banking industry, our oil and gas industry, our commercial real estate industry, were all at the bottom of the economic scale. 
Young people were leaving Oklahoma City in droves for Washington and Dallas and Houston and New York and Tokyo, anywhere where they could find a job that measured up to their educational attainment, because in Oklahoma City, the good jobs just weren't there. 
But along at the end of the '80s came an enterprising businessman who became mayor named Ron Norick. 
Ron Norick eventually figured out that the secret to economic development wasn't incentivizing companies up front, it was about creating a place where businesses wanted to locate, and so he pushed an initiative called MAPS that basically was a penny-on-the-dollar sales tax to build a bunch of stuff. 
It built a new sports arena, a new canal downtown, it fixed up our performing arts center, a new baseball stadium downtown, a lot of things to improve the quality of life. 
And the economy indeed seemed to start showing some signs of life. 
The next mayor came along. 
He started MAPS for Kids, rebuilt the entire inner city school system, all 75 buildings either built anew or refurbished. 
And then, in 2004, in this rare collective lack of judgment bordering on civil disobedience, the citizens elected me mayor. 
Now the city I inherited was just on the verge of coming out of its slumbering economy, and for the very first time, we started showing up on the lists. 
Now you know the lists I'm talking about. 
The media and the Internet love to rank cities. 
And in Oklahoma City, we'd never really been on lists before. 
So I thought it was kind of cool when they came out with these positive lists and we were on there. 
We weren't anywhere close to the top, but we were on the list, we were somebody. 
Best city to get a job, best city to start a business, best downtown — Oklahoma City. 
And then came the list of the most obese cities in the country. 
And there we were. 
Now I like to point out that we were on that list with a lot of really cool places. 
(Laughter) Dallas and Houston and New Orleans and Atlanta and Miami. 
You know, these are cities that, typically, you're not embarrassed to be associated with. 
But nonetheless, I didn't like being on the list. 
And about that time, I got on the scales. 
And I weighed 220 pounds. 
And then I went to this website sponsored by the federal government, and I typed in my height, I typed in my weight, and I pushed Enter, and it came back and said "" obese. "" I thought, "" What a stupid website. "" (Laughter) "I'm not obese. I would know if I was obese." 
And then I started getting honest with myself about what had become my lifelong struggle with obesity, and I noticed this pattern, that I was gaining about two or three pounds a year, and then about every 10 years, I'd drop 20 or 30 pounds. 
And then I'd do it again. 
And I had this huge closet full of clothes, and I could only wear a third of it at any one time, and only I knew which part of the closet I could wear. 
But it all seemed fairly normal, going through it. 
Well, I finally decided I needed to lose weight, and I knew I could because I'd done it so many times before, so I simply stopped eating as much. 
I had always exercised. 
That really wasn't the part of the equation that I needed to work on. 
But I had been eating 3,000 calories a day, and I cut it to 2,000 calories a day, and the weight came off. I lost about a pound a week for about 40 weeks. 
Along the way, though, I started examining my city, its culture, its infrastructure, trying to figure out why our specific city seemed to have a problem with obesity. 
And I came to the conclusion that we had built an incredible quality of life if you happen to be a car. 
(Laughter) But if you happen to be a person, you are combatting the car seemingly at every turn. 
Our city is very spread out. 
We have a great intersection of highways, I mean, literally no traffic congestion in Oklahoma City to speak of. 
And so people live far, far away. 
Our city limits are enormous, 620 square miles, but 15 miles is less than 15 minutes. 
You literally can get a speeding ticket during rush hour in Oklahoma City. 
And as a result, people tend to spread out. 
Land's cheap. 
We had also not required developers to build sidewalks on new developments for a long, long time. 
We had fixed that, but it had been relatively recently, and there were literally 100,000 or more homes into our inventory in neighborhoods that had virtually no level of walkability. 
And as I tried to examine how we might deal with obesity, and was taking all of these elements into my mind, I decided that the first thing we need to do was have a conversation. 
You see, in Oklahoma City, we weren't talking about obesity. 
And so, on New Year's Eve of 2007, I went to the zoo, and I stood in front of the elephants, and I said, "" This city is going on a diet, and we're going to lose a million pounds. "" Well, that's when all hell broke loose. 
(Laughter) The national media gravitated toward this story immediately, and they really could have gone with it one of two ways. 
They could have said, "" This city is so fat that the mayor had to put them on a diet. "" But fortunately, the consensus was, "" Look, this is a problem in a lot of places. 
This is a city that's wanting to do something about it. "" And so they started helping us drive traffic to the website. 
Now, the web address was thiscityisgoingonadiet.com. 
And I appeared on "" The Ellen DeGeneres Show "" one weekday morning to talk about the initiative, and on that day, 150,000 visits were placed to our website. 
People were signing up, and so the pounds started to add up, and the conversation that I thought was so important to have was starting to take place. 
It was taking place inside the homes, mothers and fathers talking about it with their kids. 
It was taking place in churches. 
Churches were starting their own running groups and their own support groups for people who were dealing with obesity. 
Suddenly, it was a topic worth discussing at schools and in the workplace. 
And the large companies, they typically have wonderful wellness programs, but the medium-sized companies that typically fall between the cracks on issues like this, they started to get engaged and used our program as a model for their own employees to try and have contests to see who might be able to deal with their obesity situation in a way that could be proactively beneficial to others. 
And then came the next stage of the equation. 
It was time to push what I called MAPS 3. 
Now MAPS 3, like the other two programs, had had an economic development motive behind it, but along with the traditional economic development tasks like building a new convention center, we added some health-related infrastructure to the process. 
We added a new central park, 70 acres in size, to be right downtown in Oklahoma City. 
We're building a downtown streetcar to try and help the walkability formula for people who choose to live in the inner city and help us create the density there. 
We're building senior health and wellness centers throughout the community. 
We put some investments on the river that had originally been invested upon in the original MAPS, and now we are currently in the final stages of developing the finest venue in the world for the sports of canoe, kayak and rowing. 
We hosted the Olympic trials last spring. 
We have Olympic-caliber events coming to Oklahoma City, and athletes from all over the world moving in, along with inner city programs to get kids more engaged in these types of recreational activities that are a little bit nontraditional. 
We also, with another initiative that was passed, are building hundreds of miles of new sidewalks throughout the metro area. 
We're even going back into some inner city situations where we had built neighborhoods and we had built schools but we had not connected the two. 
We had built libraries and we had built neighborhoods, but we had never really connected the two with any sort of walkability. 
Through yet another funding source, we're redesigning all of our inner city streets to be more pedestrian-friendly. 
Our streets were really wide, and you'd push the button to allow you to walk across, and you had to run in order to get there in time. 
But now we've narrowed the streets, highly landscaped them, making them more pedestrian-friendly, really a redesign, rethinking the way we build our infrastructure, designing a city around people and not cars. 
We're completing our bicycle trail master plan. 
We'll have over 100 miles when we're through building it out. 
And so you see this culture starting to shift in Oklahoma City. 
And lo and behold, the demographic changes that are coming with it are very inspiring. 
Highly educated twentysomethings are moving to Oklahoma City from all over the region and, indeed, even from further away, in California. 
When we reached a million pounds, in January of 2012, I flew to New York with some our participants who had lost over 100 pounds, whose lives had been changed, and we appeared on the Rachael Ray show, and then that afternoon, I did a round of media in New York pushing the same messages that you're accustomed to hearing about obesity and the dangers of it. 
And I went into the lobby of Men's Fitness magazine, the same magazine that had put us on that list five years before. 
And as I'm sitting in the lobby waiting to talk to the reporter, I notice there's a magazine copy of the current issue right there on the table, and I pick it up, and I look at the headline across the top, and it says, "America's Fattest Cities: Do You Live in One?" 
Well, I knew I did, so I picked up the magazine and I began to look, and we weren't on it. 
(Applause) Then I looked on the list of fittest cities, and we were on that list. 
We were on the list as the 22nd fittest city in the United States. 
Our state health statistics are doing better. 
Granted, we have a long way to go. 
Health is still not something that we should be proud of in Oklahoma City, but we seem to have turned the cultural shift of making health a greater priority. 
And we love the idea of the demographics of highly educated twentysomethings, people with choices, choosing Oklahoma City in large numbers. 
We have the lowest unemployment in the United States, probably the strongest economy in the United States. 
And if you're like me, at some point in your educational career, you were asked to read a book called "The Grapes of Wrath." 
Oklahomans leaving for California in large numbers for a better future. 
When we look at the demographic shifts of people coming from the west, it appears that what we're seeing now is the wrath of grapes. 
(Laughter) (Applause) The grandchildren are coming home. 
You've been a great audience and very attentive. 
Thank you very much for having me here. 
(Applause) 

Let's go south. 
All of you are actually going south. 
This is the direction of south, this way, and if you go 8,000 kilometers out of the back of this room, you will come to as far south as you can go anywhere on Earth, the Pole itself. 
Now, I am not an explorer. 
I'm not an environmentalist. 
I'm actually just a survivor, and these photographs that I'm showing you here are dangerous. 
They are the ice melt of the South and North Poles. 
And ladies and gentlemen, we need to listen to what these places are telling us, and if we don't, we will end up with our own survival situation here on planet Earth. 
I have faced head-on these places, and to walk across a melting ocean of ice is without doubt the most frightening thing that's ever happened to me. 
Antarctica is such a hopeful place. 
It is protected by the Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959. 
In 1991, a 50-year agreement was entered into that stops any exploitation in Antarctica, and this agreement could be altered, changed, modified, or even abandoned starting in the year 2041. 
Ladies and gentlemen, people already far up north from here in the Arctic are already taking advantage of this ice melt, taking out resources from areas already that have been covered in ice for the last 10, 20, 30,000, 100,000 years. 
Can they not join the dots and think, "" Why is the ice actually melting? "" This is such an amazing place, the Antarctic, and I have worked hard for the last 23 years on this mission to make sure that what's happening up here in the North does never happen, cannot happen in the South. 
Where did this all begin? 
It began for me at the age of 11. 
Check out that haircut. It's a bit odd. (Laughter) And at the age of 11, I was inspired by the real explorers to want to try to be the first to walk to both Poles. 
I found it incredibly inspiring that the idea of becoming a polar traveler went down pretty well with girls at parties when I was at university. 
That was a bit more inspiring. 
And after years, seven years of fundraising, seven years of being told no, seven years of being told by my family to seek counseling and psychiatric help, eventually three of us found ourselves marching to the South Geographic Pole on the longest unassisted march ever made anywhere on Earth in history. 
In this photograph, we are standing in an area the size of the United States of America, and we're on our own. 
We have no radio communications, no backup. 
Beneath our feet, 90 percent of all the world's ice, 70 percent of all the world's fresh water. 
We're standing on it. 
This is the power of Antarctica. 
On this journey, we faced the danger of crevasses, intense cold, so cold that sweat turns to ice inside your clothing, your teeth can crack, water can freeze in your eyes. 
Let's just say it's a bit chilly. (Laughter) And after 70 desperate days, we arrive at the South Pole. 
We had done it. 
But something happened to me on that 70-day journey in 1986 that brought me here, and it hurt. 
My eyes changed color in 70 days through damage. 
Our faces blistered out. 
The skin ripped off and we wondered why. 
And when we got home, we were told by NASA that a hole in the ozone had been discovered above the South Pole, and we'd walked underneath it the same year it had been discovered. 
Ultraviolet rays down, hit the ice, bounced back, fried out the eyes, ripped off our faces. 
It was a bit of a shock — (Laughter) — and it started me thinking. 
In 1989, we now head north. 
Sixty days, every step away from the safety of land across a frozen ocean. 
It was desperately cold again. 
Here's me coming in from washing naked at -60 Celsius. 
And if anybody ever says to you, "" I am cold "" — (Laughter) — if they look like this, they are cold, definitely. 
(Applause) And 1,000 kilometers away from the safety of land, disaster strikes. 
The Arctic Ocean melts beneath our feet four months before it ever had in history, and we're 1,000 kilometers from safety. 
The ice is crashing around us, grinding, and I'm thinking, "" Are we going to die? "" But something clicked in my head on this day, as I realized we, as a world, are in a survival situation, and that feeling has never gone away for 25 long years. 
Back then, we had to march or die. 
And we're not some TV survivor program. 
When things go wrong for us, it's life or death, and our brave African-American Daryl, who would become the first American to walk to the North Pole, his heel dropped off from frostbite 200 klicks out. 
He must keep going, he does, and after 60 days on the ice, we stood at the North Pole. 
We had done it. 
Yes, I became the first person in history stupid enough to walk to both Poles, but it was our success. 
And sadly, on return home, it was not all fun. 
I became very low. 
To succeed at something is often harder than actually making it happen. 
I was empty, lonely, financially destroyed. 
I was without hope, but hope came in the form of the great Jacques Cousteau, and he inspired me to take on the 2041 mission. 
Being Jacques, he gave me clear instructions: Engage the world leaders, talk to industry and business, and above all, Rob, inspire young people, because they will choose the future of the preservation of Antarctica. 
For the world leaders, we've been to every world Earth Summit, all three of them, with our brave yacht, 2041, twice to Rio, once in '92, once in 2012, and for the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, we made the longest overland voyage ever made with a yacht, 13,000 kilometers around the whole of Southern Africa doing our best to inspire over a million young people in person about 2041 and about their environment. 
For the last 11 years, we have taken over 1,000 people, people from industry and business, women and men from companies, students from all over the world, down to Antarctica, and during those missions, we've managed to pull out over 1,500 tons of twisted metal left in Antarctica. 
That took eight years, and I'm so proud of it because we recycled all of it back here in South America. 
I have been inspired ever since I could walk to recycle by my mum. 
Here she is, and my mum — (Applause) — my mum is still recycling, and as she is in her 100th year, isn't that fantastic? (Applause) 
And when — I love my mum. 
(Laughter) But when Mum was born, the population of our planet was only 1.8 billion people, and talking in terms of billions, we have taken young people from industry and business from India, from China. 
These are game-changing nations, and will be hugely important in the decision about the preservation of the Antarctic. 
Unbelievably, we've engaged and inspired women to come from the Middle East, often for the first time they've represented their nations in Antarctica. 
Fantastic people, so inspired. 
To look after Antarctica, you've got to first engage people with this extraordinary place, form a relationship, form a bond, form some love. 
It is such a privilege to go to Antarctica, I can't tell you. 
I feel so lucky, and I've been 35 times in my life, and all those people who come with us return home as great champions, not only for Antarctica, but for local issues back in their own nations. 
Let's go back to where we began: the ice melt of the North and South Poles. 
And it's not good news. 
NASA informed us six months ago that the Western Antarctic Ice Shelf is now disintegrating. 
Huge areas of ice — look how big Antarctica is even compared to here — Huge areas of ice are breaking off from Antarctica, the size of small nations. 
And NASA have calculated that the sea level will rise, it is definite, by one meter in the next 100 years, the same time that my mum has been on planet Earth. 
It's going to happen, and I've realized that the preservation of Antarctica and our survival here on Earth are linked. 
And there is a very simple solution. 
If we are using more renewable energy in the real world, if we are being more efficient with the energy here, running our energy mix in a cleaner way, there will be no financial reason to go and exploit Antarctica. 
It won't make financial sense, and if we manage our energy better, we also may be able to slow down, maybe even stop, this great ice melt that threatens us. 
It's a big challenge, and what is our response to it? 
We've got to go back one last time, and at the end of next year, we will go back to the South Geographic Pole, where we arrived 30 years ago on foot, and retrace our steps of 1,600 kilometers, but this time only using renewable energy to survive. 
We will walk across those icecaps, which far down below are melting, hopefully inspiring some solutions on that issue. 
This is my son, Barney. 
He is coming with me. 
He is committed to walking side by side with his father, and what he will do is to translate these messages and inspire these messages to the minds of future young leaders. 
I'm extremely proud of him. 
Good on him, Barney. 
Ladies and gentlemen, a survivor — and I'm good — a survivor sees a problem and doesn't go, "" Whatever. "" A survivor sees a problem and deals with that problem before it becomes a threat. 
We have 27 years to preserve the Antarctic. 
We all own it. 
We all have responsibility. 
The fact that nobody owns it maybe means that we can succeed. 
Antarctica is a moral line in the snow, and on one side of that line we should fight, fight hard for this one beautiful, pristine place left alone on Earth. 
I know it's possible. 
We are going to do it. 
And I'll leave you with these words from Goethe. 
I've tried to live by them. 
"" If you can do, or dream you can, begin it now, for boldness has genius, power and magic in it. "" Good luck to you all. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I'm a man who's trying to live from his heart, and so just before I get going, I wanted to tell you as a South African that one of the men who has inspired me most passed away a few hours ago. 
Nelson Mandela has come to the end of his long walk to freedom. 
And so this talk is going to be for him. 
I grew up in wonder. 
I grew up amongst those animals. 
I grew up in the wild eastern part of South Africa at a place called Londolozi Game Reserve. 
It's a place where my family has been in the safari business for four generations. 
Now for as long as I can remember, my job has been to take people out into nature, and so I think it's a lovely twist of fate today to have the opportunity to bring some of my experiences out in nature in to this gathering. 
Africa is a place where people still sit under starlit skies and around campfires and tell stories, and so what I have to share with you today is the simple medicine of a few campfire stories, stories about heroes of heart. 
Now my stories are not the stories that you'll hear on the news, and while it's true that Africa is a harsh place, I also know it to be a place where people, animals and ecosystems teach us about a more interconnected world. 
When I was nine years old, President Mandela came to stay with my family. 
He had just been released from his 27 years of incarceration, and was in a period of readjustment to his sudden global icon status. 
Members of the African National Congress thought that in the bush he would have time to rest and recuperate away from the public eye, and it's true that lions tend to be a very good deterrent to press and paparazzi. 
(Laughter) But it was a defining time for me as a young boy. 
I would take him breakfast in bed, and then, in an old track suit and slippers, he would go for a walk around the garden. 
At night, I would sit with my family around the snowy, bunny-eared TV, and watch images of that same quiet man from the garden surrounded by hundreds and thousands of people as scenes from his release were broadcast nightly. 
He was bringing peace to a divided and violent South Africa, one man with an unbelievable sense of his humanity. 
Mandela said often that the gift of prison was the ability to go within and to think, to create in himself the things he most wanted for South Africa: peace, reconciliation, harmony. 
Through this act of immense open-heartedness, he was to become the embodiment of what in South Africa we call "" ubuntu. "" Ubuntu: I am because of you. 
Or, people are not people without other people. 
It's not a new idea or value but it's one that I certainly think at these times is worth building on. 
In fact, it is said that in the collective consciousness of Africa, we get to experience the deepest parts of our own humanity through our interactions with others. 
Ubuntu is at play right now. 
You are holding a space for me to express the deepest truth of who I am. 
Without you, I'm just a guy talking to an empty room, and I spent a lot of time last week doing that, and it's not the same as this. 
(Laughter) If Mandela was the national and international embodiment, then the man who taught me the most about this value personally was this man, Solly Mhlongo. 
Solly was born under a tree 60 kilometers from where I grew up in Mozambique. 
He would never have a lot of money, but he was to be one of the richest men I would ever meet. 
Solly grew up tending to his father's cattle. 
Now, I can tell you, I don't know what it is about people who grow up looking after cattle, but it makes for über-resourcefulness. 
The first job that he ever got in the safari business was fixing the safari trucks. 
Where he had learned to do that out in the bush I have no idea, but he could do it. 
He then moved across into what we called the habitat team. 
These were the people on the reserve who were responsible for its well-being. 
He fixed roads, he mended wetlands, he did some anti-poaching. 
And then one day we were out together, and he came across the tracks of where a female leopard had walked. 
And it was an old track, but for fun he turned and he began to follow it, and I tell you, I could tell by the speed at which he moved on those pad marks that this man was a Ph.D.-level tracker. 
If you drove past Solly somewhere out on the reserve, you look up in your rearview mirror, you'd see he'd stopped the car 20, 50 meters down the road just in case you need help with something. 
The only accusation I ever heard leveled at him was when one of our clients said, "Solly, you are pathologically helpful." 
(Laughter) When I started professionally guiding people out into this environment, Solly was my tracker. 
We worked together as a team. 
And the first guests we ever got were a philanthropy group from your East Coast, and they said to Solly, on the side, they said, "" Before we even go out to see lions and leopards, we want to see where you live. "" So we took them up to his house, and this visit of the philanthropist to his house coincided with a time when Solly's wife, who was learning English, was going through a phase where she would open the door by saying, "" Hello, I love you. 
Welcome, I love you. "" (Laughter) And there was something so beautifully African about it to me, this small house with a huge heart in it. 
Now on the day that Solly saved my life, he was already my hero. 
It was a hot day, and we found ourselves down by the river. 
Because of the heat, I took my shoes off, and I rolled up my pants, and I walked into the water. 
Solly remained on the bank. 
The water was clear running over sand, and we turned and we began to make our way upstream. 
And a few meters ahead of us, there was a place where a tree had fallen out of the bank, and its branches were touching the water, and it was shadowy. 
And if had been a horror movie, people in the audience would have started saying, "" Don't go in there. Don't go in there. "" (Laughter) And of course, the crocodile was in the shadows. 
Now the first thing that you notice when a crocodile hits you is the ferocity of the bite. 
Wham! It hits me by my right leg. 
It pulls me. It turns. I throw my hand up. I'm able to grab a branch. 
It's shaking me violently. 
It's a very strange sensation having another creature try and eat you, and there are few things that promote vegetarianism like that. 
(Laughter) Solly on the bank sees that I'm in trouble. 
He turns. He begins to make his way to me. 
The croc again continues to shake me. 
It goes to bite me a second time. 
I notice a slick of blood in the water around me that gets washed downstream. 
As it bites the second time, I kick. 
My foot goes down its throat. It spits me out. 
I pull myself up into the branches, and as I come out of the water, I look over my shoulder. 
My leg from the knee down is mangled beyond description. 
The bone is cracked. 
The meat is torn up. 
I make an instant decision that I'll never look at that again. 
As I come out of the water, Solly arrives at a deep section, a channel between us. 
He knows, he sees the state of my leg, he knows that between him and I there is a crocodile, and I can tell you this man doesn't slow down for one second. 
He comes straight into the channel. 
He wades in to above his waist. 
He gets to me. He grabs me. 
I'm still in a vulnerable position. 
He picks me and puts me on his shoulder. 
This is the other thing about Solly, he's freakishly strong. 
He turns. He walks me up the bank. 
He lays me down. He pulls his shirt off. 
He wraps it around my leg, picks me up a second time, walks me to a vehicle, and he's able to get me to medical attention. 
And I survive. 
Now — (Applause) Now I don't know how many people you know that go into a deep channel of water that they know has a crocodile in it to come and help you, but for Solly, it was as natural as breathing. 
And he is one amazing example of what I have experienced all over Africa. 
In a more collective society, we realize from the inside that our own well-being is deeply tied to the well-being of others. 
Danger is shared. Pain is shared. 
Joy is shared. Achievement is shared. 
Houses are shared. Food is shared. 
Ubuntu asks us to open our hearts and to share, and what Solly taught me that day is the essence of this value, his animated, empathetic action in every moment. 
Now although the root word is about people, I thought that maybe ubuntu was only about people. 
And then I met this young lady. 
Her name was Elvis. 
In fact, Solly gave her the name Elvis because he said she walked like she was doing the Elvis the pelvis dance. 
She was born with very badly deformed back legs and pelvis. 
She arrived at our reserve from a reserve east of us on her migratory route. 
When I first saw her, I thought she would be dead in a matter of days. 
And yet, for the next five years she returned in the winter months. 
And we would be so excited to be out in the bush and to come across this unusual track. 
It looked like an inverted bracket, and we would drop whatever we were doing and we would follow, and then we would come around the corner, and there she would be with her herd. 
And that outpouring of emotion from people on our safari trucks as they saw her, it was this sense of kinship. 
And it reminded me that even people who grow up in cities feel a natural connection with the natural world and with animals. 
And yet still I remained amazed that she was surviving. 
And then one day we came across them at this small water hole. 
It was sort of a hollow in the ground. 
And I watched as the matriarch drank, and then she turned in that beautiful slow motion of elephants, looks like the arm in motion, and she began to make her way up the steep bank. 
The rest of the herd turned and began to follow. 
And I watched young Elvis begin to psych herself up for the hill. 
She got visibly — ears came forward, she had a full go of it and halfway up, her legs gave way, and she fell backwards. 
She attempted it a second time, and again, halfway up, she fell backwards. 
And on the third attempt, an amazing thing happened. 
Halfway up the bank, a young teenage elephant came in behind her, and he propped his trunk underneath her, and he began to shovel her up the bank. 
And it occurred to me that the rest of the herd was in fact looking after this young elephant. 
The next day I watched again as the matriarch broke a branch and she would put it in her mouth, and then she would break a second one and drop it on the ground. 
And a consensus developed between all of us who were guiding people in that area that that herd was in fact moving slower to accommodate that elephant. 
What Elvis and the herd taught me caused me to expand my definition of ubuntu, and I believe that in the cathedral of the wild, we get to see the most beautiful parts of ourselves reflected back at us. 
And it is not only through other people that we get to experience our humanity but through all the creatures that live on this planet. 
If Africa has a gift to share, it's a gift of a more collective society. 
And while it's true that ubuntu is an African idea, what I see is the essence of that value being invented here. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Pat Mitchell: So Boyd, we know that you knew President Mandela from early childhood and that you heard the news as we all did today, and deeply distraught and know the tragic loss that it is to the world. 
But I just wondered if you wanted to share any additional thoughts, because we know that you heard that news just before coming in to do this session. 
Boyd Varty: Well thanks, Pat. 
I'm so happy because it was time for him to pass on. 
He was suffering. 
And so of course there's the mixed emotions. 
But I just think of so many occurrences like the time he went on the Oprah show and asked her what the show would be about. 
(Laughter) And she was like, "" Well, it'll be about you. "" I mean, that's just incredible humility. (Laughter) 
He was the father of our nation and we've got a road to walk in South Africa. 
And everything, they used to call it Madiba magic. 
You know, he used to go to a rugby match and we would win. 
Anywhere he went, things went well. 
But I think that magic will be with us, and the important thing is that we carry what he stood for. 
And so that's what I'm going to try and do, and that's what people all over South Africa are trying to do. 
PM: And that's what you've done today. BV: Oh, thank you. 
PM: Thank you. BV: Thank you. Thanks very much. 
(Applause) 

I'm here to talk to you about the economic invisibility of nature. 
The bad news is that mother nature's back office isn't working yet, so those invoices don't get issued. 
But we need to do something about this problem. 
I began my life as a markets professional and continued to take an interest, but most of my recent effort has been looking at the value of what comes to human beings from nature, and which doesn't get priced by the markets. 
A project called TEEB was started in 2007, and it was launched by a group of environment ministers of the G8 + 5. 
And their basic inspiration was a stern review of Lord Stern. 
They asked themselves a question: If economics could make such a convincing case for early action on climate change, well why can't the same be done for conservation? 
Why can't an equivalent case be made for nature? 
And the answer is: Yeah, it can. 
But it's not that straightforward. 
Biodiversity, the living fabric of this planet, is not a gas. 
It exists in many layers, ecosystems, species and genes across many scales — international, national, local, community — and doing for nature what Lord Stern and his team did for nature is not that easy. 
And yet, we began. 
We began the project with an interim report, which quickly pulled together a lot of information that had been collected on the subject by many, many researchers. 
And amongst our compiled results was the startling revelation that, in fact, we were losing natural capital — the benefits that flow from nature to us. 
We were losing it at an extraordinary rate — in fact, of the order of two to four trillion dollars-worth of natural capital. 
This came out in 2008, which was, of course, around the time that the banking crisis had shown that we had lost financial capital of the order of two and a half trillion dollars. 
So this was comparable in size to that kind of loss. 
We then have gone on since to present for [the] international community, for governments, for local governments and for business and for people, for you and me, a whole slew of reports, which were presented at the U.N. last year, which address the economic invisibility of nature and describe what can be done to solve it. 
What is this about? 
A picture that you're familiar with — the Amazon rainforests. 
It's a massive store of carbon, it's an amazing store of biodiversity, but what people don't really know is this also is a rain factory. 
Because the northeastern trade winds, as they go over the Amazonas, effectively gather the water vapor. 
Something like 20 billion tons per day of water vapor is sucked up by the northeastern trade winds, and eventually precipitates in the form of rain across the La Plata Basin. 
This rainfall cycle, this rainfall factory, effectively feeds an agricultural economy of the order of 240 billion dollars-worth in Latin America. 
But the question arises: Okay, so how much do Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and indeed the state of Mato Grosso in Brazil pay for that vital input to that economy to the state of Amazonas, which produces that rainfall? 
And the answer is zilch, exactly zero. 
That's the economic invisibility of nature. 
That can't keep going on, because economic incentives and disincentives are very powerful. 
Economics has become the currency of policy. 
And unless we address this invisibility, we are going to get the results that we are seeing, which is a gradual degradation and loss of this valuable natural asset. 
It's not just about the Amazonas, or indeed about rainforests. 
No matter what level you look at, whether it's at the ecosystem level or at the species level or at the genetic level, we see the same problem again and again. 
So rainfall cycle and water regulation by rainforests at an ecosystem level. 
At the species level, it's been estimated that insect-based pollination, bees pollinating fruit and so on, is something like 190 billion dollars-worth. 
That's something like eight percent of the total agricultural output globally. 
It completely passes below the radar screen. 
But when did a bee actually ever give you an invoice? 
Or for that matter, if you look at the genetic level, 60 percent of medicines were prospected, were found first as molecules in a rainforest or a reef. 
Once again, most of that doesn't get paid. 
And that brings me to another aspect of this, which is, to whom should this get paid? 
That genetic material probably belonged, if it could belong to anyone, to a local community of poor people who parted with the knowledge that helped the researchers to find the molecule, which then became the medicine. 
They were the ones that didn't get paid. 
And if you look at the species level, you saw about fish. 
Today, the depletion of ocean fisheries is so significant that effectively it is effecting the ability of the poor, the artisanal fisher folk and those who fish for their own livelihoods, to feed their families. 
Something like a billion people depend on fish, the quantity of fish in the oceans. 
A billion people depend on fish for their main source for animal protein. 
And at this rate at which we are losing fish, it is a human problem of enormous dimensions, a health problem of a kind we haven't seen before. 
And finally, at the ecosystem level, whether it's flood prevention or drought control provided by the forests, or whether it is the ability of poor farmers to go out and gather leaf litter for their cattle and goats, or whether it's the ability of their wives to go and collect fuel wood from the forest, it is actually the poor who depend most on these ecosystem services. 
We did estimates in our study that for countries like Brazil, India and Indonesia, even though ecosystem services — these benefits that flow from nature to humanity for free — they're not very big in percentage terms of GDP — two, four, eight, 10, 15 percent — but in these countries, if we measure how much they're worth to the poor, the answers are more like 45 percent, 75 percent, 90 percent. 
That's the difference. 
Because these are important benefits for the poor. 
And you can't really have a proper model for development if at the same time you're destroying or allowing the degradation of the very asset, the most important asset, which is your development asset, that is ecological infrastructure. 
How bad can things get? 
Well here a picture of something called the mean species abundance. 
It's basically a measure of how many tigers, toads, ticks or whatever on average of biomass of various species are around. 
The green represents the percentage. 
If you start green, it's like 80 to 100 percent. 
If it's yellow, it's 40 to 60 percent. 
And these are percentages versus the original state, so to speak, the pre-industrial era, 1750. 
Now I'm going to show you how business as usual will affect this. 
And just watch the change in colors in India, China, Europe, sub-Saharan Africa as we move on and consume global biomass at a rate which is actually not going to be able to sustain us. 
See that again. 
The only places that remain green — and that's not good news — is, in fact, places like the Gobi Desert, like the tundra and like the Sahara. 
But that doesn't help because there were very few species and volume of biomass there in the first place. 
This is the challenge. 
The reason this is happening boils down, in my mind, to one basic problem, which is our inability to perceive the difference between public benefits and private profits. 
We tend to constantly ignore public wealth simply because it is in the common wealth, it's common goods. 
And here's an example from Thailand where we found that, because the value of a mangrove is not that much — it's about $600 over the life of nine years that this has been measured — compared to its value as a shrimp farm, which is more like $9,600, there has been a gradual trend to deplete the mangroves and convert them to shrimp farms. 
But of course, if you look at exactly what those profits are, almost 8,000 of those dollars are, in fact, subsidies. 
So you compare the two sides of the coin and you find that it's more like 1,200 to 600. 
That's not that hard. 
But on the other hand, if you start measuring, how much would it actually cost to restore the land of the shrimp farm back to productive use? 
Once salt deposition and chemical deposition has had its effects, that answer is more like $12,000 of cost. 
And if you see the benefits of the mangrove in terms of the storm protection and cyclone protection that you get and in terms of the fisheries, the fish nurseries, that provide fish for the poor, that answer is more like $11,000. 
So now look at the different lens. 
If you look at the lens of public wealth as against the lens of private profits, you get a completely different answer, which is clearly conservation makes more sense, and not destruction. 
So is this just a story from South Thailand? 
Sorry, this is a global story. 
And here's what the same calculation looks like, which was done recently — well I say recently, over the last 10 years — by a group called TRUCOST. 
And they calculated for the top 3,000 corporations, what are the externalities? 
In other words, what are the costs of doing business as usual? 
This is not illegal stuff, this is basically business as usual, which causes climate-changing emissions, which have an economic cost. 
It causes pollutants being issued, which have an economic cost, health cost and so on. 
Use of freshwater. 
If you drill water to make coke near a village farm, that's not illegal, but yes, it costs the community. 
Can we stop this, and how? 
I think the first point to make is that we need to recognize natural capital. 
Basically the stuff of life is natural capital, and we need to recognize and build that into our systems. 
When we measure GDP as a measure of economic performance at the national level, we don't include our biggest asset at the country level. 
When we measure corporate performances, we don't include our impacts on nature and what our business costs society. 
That has to stop. 
In fact, this was what really inspired my interest in this phase. 
I began a project way back called the Green Accounting Project. 
That was in the early 2000s when India was going gung-ho about GDP growth as the means forward — looking at China with its stellar growths of eight, nine, 10 percent and wondering, why can we do the same? 
And a few friends of mine and I decided this doesn't make sense. 
This is going to create more cost to society and more losses. 
So we decided to do a massive set of calculations and started producing green accounts for India and its states. 
That's how my interests began and went to the TEEB project. 
Calculating this at the national level is one thing, and it has begun. 
And the World Bank has acknowledged this and they've started a project called WAVES — Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services. 
But calculating this at the next level, that means at the business sector level, is important. 
And actually we've done this with the TEEB project. 
We've done this for a very difficult case, which was for deforestation in China. 
This is important, because in China in 1997, the Yellow River actually went dry for nine months causing severe loss of agriculture output and pain and loss to society. 
Just a year later the Yangtze flooded, causing something like 5,500 deaths. 
So clearly there was a problem with deforestation. 
It was associated largely with the construction industry. 
And the Chinese government responded sensibly and placed a ban on felling. 
A retrospective on 40 years shows that if we had accounted for these costs — the cost of loss of topsoil, the cost of loss of waterways, the lost productivity, the loss to local communities as a result of all these factors, desertification and so on — those costs are almost twice as much as the market price of timber. 
So in fact, the price of timber in the Beijing marketplace ought to have been three-times what it was had it reflected the true pain and the costs to the society within China. 
Of course, after the event one can be wise. 
The way to do this is to do it on a company basis, to take leadership forward, and to do it for as many important sectors which have a cost, and to disclose these answers. 
Someone once asked me, "" Who is better or worse, is it Unilever or is it P & G when it comes to their impact on rainforests in Indonesia? "" And I couldn't answer because neither of these companies, good though they are and professional though they are, do not calculate or disclose their externalities. 
But if we look at companies like PUMA — Jochen Zeitz, their CEO and chairman, once challenged me at a function, saying that he's going to implement my project before I finish it. 
Well I think we kind of did it at the same time, but he's done it. 
He's basically worked the cost to PUMA. 
PUMA has 2.7 billion dollars of turnover, 300 million dollars of profits, 200 million dollars after tax, 94 million dollars of externalities, cost to business. 
Now that's not a happy situation for them, but they have the confidence and the courage to come forward and say, "" Here's what we are measuring. 
We are measuring it because we know that you cannot manage what you do not measure. "" That's an example, I think, for us to look at and for us to draw comfort from. 
If more companies did this, and if more sectors engaged this as sectors, you could have analysts, business analysts, and you could have people like us and consumers and NGOs actually look and compare the social performance of companies. 
Today we can't yet do that, but I think the path is laid out. 
This can be done. 
And I'm delighted that the Institute of Chartered Accountants in the U.K. 
has already set up a coalition to do this, an international coalition. 
The other favorite, if you like, solution for me is the creation of green carbon markets. 
And by the way, these are my favorites — externalities calculation and green carbon markets. 
TEEB has more than a dozen separate groups of solutions including protected area evaluation and payments for ecosystem services and eco-certification and you name it, but these are the favorites. 
What's green carbon? 
Today what we have is basically a brown carbon marketplace. 
It's about energy emissions. 
The European Union ETS is the main marketplace. 
It's not doing too well. We've over-issued. 
A bit like inflation: you over-issue currency, you get what you see, declining prices. 
But that's all about energy and industry. 
But what we're missing is also some other emissions like black carbon, that is soot. 
What we're also missing is blue carbon, which, by the way, is the largest store of carbon — more than 55 percent. 
Thankfully, the flux, in other words, the flow of emissions from the ocean to the atmosphere and vice versa, is more or less balanced. 
In fact, what's being absorbed is something like 25 percent of our emissions, which then leads to acidification or lower alkalinity in oceans. 
More of that in a minute. 
And finally, there's deforestation, and there's emission of methane from agriculture. 
Green carbon, which is the deforestation and agricultural emissions, and blue carbon together comprise 25 percent of our emissions. 
We have the means already in our hands, through a structure, through a mechanism, called REDD Plus — a scheme for the reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. 
And already Norway has contributed a billion dollars each towards Indonesia and Brazil to implement this Red Plus scheme. 
So we actually have some movement forward. 
But the thing is to do a lot more of that. 
Will this solve the problem? Will economics solve everything? 
Well I'm afraid not. 
There is an area that is the oceans, coral reefs. 
As you can see, they cut across the entire globe all the way from Micronesia across Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Madagascar and to the West of the Caribbean. 
These red dots, these red areas, basically provide the food and livelihood for more than half a billion people. 
So that's almost an eighth of society. 
And the sad thing is that, as these coral reefs are lost — and scientists tell us that any level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere above 350 parts per million is too dangerous for the survival of these reefs — we are not only risking the extinction of the entire coral species, the warm water corals, we're not only risking a fourth of all fish species which are in the oceans, but we are risking the very lives and livelihoods of more than 500 million people who live in the developing world in poor countries. 
So in selecting targets of 450 parts per million and selecting two degrees at the climate negotiations, what we have done is we've made an ethical choice. 
We've actually kind of made an ethical choice in society to not have coral reefs. 
Well what I will say to you in parting is that we may have done that. 
Let's think about it and what it means, but please, let's not do more of that. 
Because mother nature only has that much in ecological infrastructure and that much natural capital. 
I don't think we can afford too much of such ethical choices. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm going to make an argument today that may seem a little bit crazy: social media and the end of gender. 
Let me connect the dots. 
I'm going to argue today that the social media applications that we all know and love, or love to hate, are actually going to help free us from some of the absurd assumptions that we have as a society about gender. 
I think that social media is actually going to help us dismantle some of the silly and demeaning stereotypes that we see in media and advertising about gender. 
If you hadn't noticed, our media climate generally provides a very distorted mirror of our lives and of our gender, and I think that's going to change. 
Now most media companies — television, radio, publishing, games, you name it — they use very rigid segmentation methods in order to understand their audiences. 
It's old-school demographics. 
They come up with these very restrictive labels to define us. 
Now the crazy thing is that media companies believe that if you fall within a certain demographic category then you are predictable in certain ways — you have certain taste, that you like certain things. 
And so the bizarre result of this is that most of our popular culture is actually based on these presumptions about our demographics. 
Age demographics: the 18 to 49 demo has had a huge impact on all mass media programming in this country since the 1960s, when the baby boomers were still young. 
Now they've aged out of that demographic, but it's still the case that powerful ratings companies like Nielson don't even take into account viewers of television shows over age 54. 
In our media environment, it's as if they don't even exist. 
Now, if you watch "" Mad Men, "" like I do — it's a popular TV show in the States — Dr. Faye Miller does something called psychographics, which first came about in the 1960s, where you create these complex psychological profiles of consumers. 
But psychographics really haven't had a huge impact on the media business. 
It's really just been basic demographics. 
So I'm at the Norman Lear Center at USC, and we've done a lot of research over the last seven, eight years on demographics and how they affect media and entertainment in this country and abroad. 
And in the last three years, we've been looking specifically at social media to see what has changed, and we've discovered some very interesting things. 
All the people who participate in social media networks belong to the same old demographic categories that media companies and advertisers have used in order to understand them. 
But those categories mean even less now than they did before, because with online networking tools, it's much easier for us to escape some of our demographic boxes. 
We're able to connect with people quite freely and to redefine ourselves online. 
And we can lie about our age online, too, pretty easily. 
We can also connect with people based on our very specific interests. 
We don't need a media company to help do this for us. 
So the traditional media companies, of course, are paying very close attention to these online communities. 
They know this is the mass audience of the future; they need to figure it out. 
But they're having a hard time doing it because they're still trying to use demographics in order to understand them, because that's how ad rates are still determined. 
When they're monitoring your clickstream — and you know they are — they have a really hard time figuring out your age, your gender and your income. 
They can make some educated guesses. 
But they get a lot more information about what you do online, what you like, what interests you. 
That's easier for them to find out than who you are. 
And even though that's still sort of creepy, there is an upside to having your taste monitored. 
Suddenly our taste is being respected in a way that it hasn't been before. 
It had been presumed before. 
So when you look online at the way people aggregate, they don't aggregate around age, gender and income. 
They aggregate around the things they love, the things that they like, and if you think about it, shared interests and values are a far more powerful aggregator of human beings than demographic categories. 
I'd much rather know whether you like "" Buffy the Vampire Slayer "" rather than how old you are. 
That would tell me something more substantial about you. 
Now there's something else that we've discovered about social media that's actually quite surprising. 
It turns out that women are really driving the social media revolution. 
If you look at the statistics — these are worldwide statistics — in every single age category, women actually outnumber men in their use of social networking technologies. 
And then if you look at the amount of time that they spend on these sites, they truly dominate the social media space, which is a space that's having a huge impact on old media. 
The question is: what sort of impact is this going to have on our culture, and what's it going to mean for women? 
If the case is that social media is dominating old media and women are dominating social media, then does that mean that women are going to take over global media? 
Are we suddenly going to see a lot more female characters in cartoons and in games and on TV shows? 
Will the next big-budget blockbuster movies actually be chick flicks? 
Could this be possible, that suddenly our media landscape will become a feminist landscape? 
Well, I actually don't think that's going to be the case. 
I think that media companies are going to hire a lot more women, because they realize this is important for their business, and I think that women are also going to continue to dominate the social media sphere. 
But I think women are actually going to be — ironically enough — responsible for driving a stake through the heart of cheesy genre categories like the "" chick flick "" and all these other genre categories that presume that certain demographic groups like certain things — that Hispanics like certain things, that young people like certain things. 
This is far too simplistic. 
The future entertainment media that we're going to see is going to be very data-driven, and it's going to be based on the information that we ascertain from taste communities online, where women are really driving the action. 
So you may be asking, well why is it important that I know what entertains people? 
Why should I know this? 
Of course, old media companies and advertisers need to know this. 
But my argument is that, if you want to understand the global village, it's probably a good idea that you figure out what they're passionate about, what amuses them, what they choose to do in their free time. 
This is a very important thing to know about people. 
I've spent most of my professional life researching media and entertainment and its impact on people's lives. 
And I do it not just because it's fun — though actually, it is really fun — but also because our research has shown over and over again that entertainment and play have a huge impact on people's lives — for instance, on their political beliefs and on their health. 
And so, if you have any interest in understanding the world, looking at how people amuse themselves is a really good way to start. 
So imagine a media atmosphere that isn't dominated by lame stereotypes about gender and other demographic characteristics. 
Can you even imagine what that looks like? 
I can't wait to find out what it looks like. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

So in my free time outside of Twitter I experiment a little bit with telling stories online, experimenting with what we can do with new digital tools. 
And in my job at Twitter, I actually spent a little bit of time working with authors and storytellers as well, helping to expand out the bounds of what people are experimenting with. 
And I want to talk through some examples today of things that people have done that I think are really fascinating using flexible identity and anonymity on the web and blurring the lines between fact and fiction. 
But I want to start and go back to the 1930s. 
Long before a little thing called Twitter, radio brought us broadcasts and connected millions of people to single points of broadcast. 
And from those single points emanated stories. 
Some of them were familiar stories. 
Some of them were new stories. 
And for a while they were familiar formats, but then radio began to evolve its own unique formats specific to that medium. 
Think about episodes that happened live on radio. 
Combining the live play and the serialization of written fiction, you get this new format. 
And the reason why I bring up radio is that I think radio is a great example of how a new medium defines new formats which then define new stories. 
And of course, today, we have an entirely new medium to play with, which is this online world. 
This is the map of verified users on Twitter and the connections between them. 
There are thousands upon thousands of them. 
Every single one of these points is its own broadcaster. 
We've gone to this world of many to many, where access to the tools is the only barrier to broadcasting. 
And I think that we should start to see wildly new formats emerge as people learn how to tell stories in this new medium. 
I actually believe that we are in a wide open frontier for creative experimentation, if you will, that we've explored and begun to settle this wild land of the Internet and are now just getting ready to start to build structures on it, and those structures are the new formats of storytelling that the Internet will allow us to create. 
I believe this starts with an evolution of existing methods. 
The short story, for example, people are saying that the short story is experiencing a renaissance of sorts thanks to e-readers, digital marketplaces. 
One writer, Hugh Howey, experimented with short stories on Amazon by releasing one very short story called "" Wool. "" And he actually says that he didn't intend for "" Wool "" to become a series, but that the audience loved the first story so much they demanded more, and so he gave them more. 
He gave them "" Wool 2, "" which was a little bit longer than the first one, "" Wool 3, "" which was even longer, culminating in "" Wool 5, "" which was a 60,000-word novel. 
I think Howey was able to do all of this because he had the quick feedback system of e-books. 
He was able to write and publish in relatively short order. 
There was no mediator between him and the audience. 
It was just him directly connected with his audience and building on the feedback and enthusiasm that they were giving him. 
So this whole project was an experiment. 
It started with the one short story, and I think the experimentation actually became a part of Howey's format. 
And that's something that this medium enabled, was experimentation being a part of the format itself. 
This is a short story by the author Jennifer Egan called "" Black Box. "" It was originally written specifically with Twitter in mind. 
Egan convinced The New Yorker to start a New Yorker fiction account from which they could tweet all of these lines that she created. 
Now Twitter, of course, has a 140-character limit. 
Egan mocked that up just writing manually in this storyboard sketchbook, used the physical space constraints of those storyboard squares to write each individual tweet, and those tweets ended up becoming over 600 of them that were serialized by The New Yorker. 
Every night, at 8 p.m., you could tune in to a short story from The New Yorker's fiction account. 
I think that's pretty exciting: tune-in literary fiction. 
The experience of Egan's story, of course, like anything on Twitter, there were multiple ways to experience it. 
You could scroll back through it, but interestingly, if you were watching it live, there was this suspense that built because the actual tweets, you had no control over when you would read them. 
They were coming at a pretty regular clip, but as the story was building, normally, as a reader, you control how fast you move through a text, but in this case, The New Yorker did, and they were sending you bit by bit by bit, and you had this suspense of waiting for the next line. 
Another great example of fiction and the short story on Twitter, Elliott Holt is an author who wrote a story called "" Evidence. "" It began with this tweet: "" On November 28 at 10: 13 p.m., a woman identified as Miranda Brown, 44, of Brooklyn, fell to her death from the roof of a Manhattan hotel. "" It begins in Elliott's voice, but then Elliott's voice recedes, and we hear the voices of Elsa, Margot and Simon, characters that Elliott created on Twitter specifically to tell this story, a story from multiple perspectives leading up to this moment at 10: 13 p.m. 
when this woman falls to her death. 
These three characters brought an authentic vision from multiple perspectives. 
One reviewer called Elliott's story "" Twitter fiction done right, "" because she did. 
She captured that voice and she had multiple characters and it happened in real time. 
Interestingly, though, it wasn't just Twitter as a distribution mechanism. 
It was also Twitter as a production mechanism. 
Elliott told me later she wrote the whole thing with her thumbs. 
She laid on the couch and just went back and forth between different characters tweeting out each line, line by line. 
I think that this kind of spontaneous creation of what was coming out of the characters' voices really lent an authenticity to the characters themselves, but also to this format that she had created of multiple perspectives in a single story on Twitter. 
As you begin to play with flexible identity online, it gets even more interesting as you start to interact with the real world. 
Things like Invisible Obama or the famous "" binders full of women "" that came up during the 2012 election cycle, or even the fan fiction universe of "" West Wing "" Twitter in which you have all of these accounts for every single one of the characters in "" The West Wing, "" including the bird that taps at Josh Lyman's window in one single episode. (Laughter) All of these are rapid iterations on a theme. 
They are creative people experimenting with the bounds of what is possible in this medium. 
You look at something like "" West Wing "" Twitter, in which you have these fictional characters that engage with the real world. 
They comment on politics, they cry out against the evils of Congress. 
Keep in mind, they're all Democrats. 
And they engage with the real world. 
They respond to it. 
So once you take flexible identity, anonymity, engagement with the real world, and you move beyond simple homage or parody and you put these tools to work in telling a story, that's when things get really interesting. 
So during the Chicago mayoral election there was a parody account. 
It was Mayor Emanuel. 
It gave you everything you wanted from Rahm Emanuel, particularly in the expletive department. 
This foul-mouthed account followed the daily activities of the race, providing commentary as it went. 
It followed all of the natural tropes of a good, solid Twitter parody account, but then started to get weird. 
And as it progressed, it moved from this commentary to a multi-week, real-time science fiction epic in which your protagonist, Rahm Emanuel, engages in multi-dimensional travel on election day, which is — it didn't actually happen. 
I double checked the newspapers. 
And then, very interestingly, it came to an end. 
This is something that doesn't usually happen with a Twitter parody account. 
It ended, a true narrative conclusion. 
And so the author, Dan Sinker, who was a journalist, who was completely anonymous this whole time, I think Dan — it made a lot of sense for him to turn this into a book, because it was a narrative format in the end, and I think that turning it into a book is representative of this idea that he had created something new that needed to be translated into previous formats. 
One of my favorite examples of something that's happening on Twitter right now, actually, is the very absurdist Crimer Show. 
Crimer Show tells the story of a supercriminal and a hapless detective that face off in this exceptionally strange lingo, with all of the tropes of a television show. 
Crimer Show's creator has said that it is a parody of a popular type of show in the U.K., but, man, is it weird. 
And there are all these times where Crimer, the supercriminal, does all of these TV things. 
He's always taking off his sunglasses or turning to the camera, but these things just happen in text. 
I think borrowing all of these tropes from television and additionally presenting each Crimer Show as an episode, spelled E-P-P-A-S-O-D, "" eppasod, "" presenting them as episodes really, it creates something new. 
There is a new "" eppasod "" of Crimer Show on Twitter pretty much every day, and they're archived that way. 
And I think this is an interesting experiment in format. 
Something totally new has been created here out of parodying something on television. 
I think in nonfiction real-time storytelling, there are a lot of really excellent examples as well. 
RealTimeWWII is an account that documents what was happening on this day 60 years ago in exceptional detail, as if you were reading the news reports from that day. 
And the author Teju Cole has done a lot of experimentation with putting a literary twist on events of the news. 
In this particular case, he's talking about drone strikes. 
I think that in both of these examples, you're beginning to see ways in which people are telling stories with nonfiction content that can be built into new types of fictional storytelling. 
So with real-time storytelling, blurring the lines between fact and fiction, the real world and the digital world, flexible identity, anonymity, these are all tools that we have accessible to us, and I think that they're just the building blocks. 
They are the bits that we use to create the structures, the frames, that then become our settlements on this wide open frontier for creative experimentation. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

What do you think of when I say the word "" design ""? 
You probably think of things like this, finely crafted objects that you can hold in your hand, or maybe logos and posters and maps that visually explain things, classic icons of timeless design. 
But I'm not here to talk about that kind of design. 
I want to talk about the kind that you probably use every day and may not give much thought to, designs that change all the time and that live inside your pocket. 
I'm talking about the design of digital experiences and specifically the design of systems that are so big that their scale can be hard to comprehend. 
Consider the fact that Google processes over one billion search queries every day, that every minute, over 100 hours of footage are uploaded to YouTube. 
That's more in a single day than all three major U.S. networks broadcast in the last five years combined. 
And Facebook transmitting the photos, messages and stories of over 1.23 billion people. 
That's almost half of the Internet population, and a sixth of humanity. 
These are some of the products that I've helped design over the course of my career, and their scale is so massive that they've produced unprecedented design challenges. 
But what is really hard about designing at scale is this: It's hard in part because it requires a combination of two things, audacity and humility — audacity to believe that the thing that you're making is something that the entire world wants and needs, and humility to understand that as a designer, it's not about you or your portfolio, it's about the people that you're designing for, and how your work just might help them live better lives. 
Now, unfortunately, there's no school that offers the course Designing for Humanity 101. 
I and the other designers who work on these kinds of products have had to invent it as we go along, and we are teaching ourselves the emerging best practices of designing at scale, and today I'd like share some of the things that we've learned over the years. 
Now, the first thing that you need to know about designing at scale is that the little things really matter. 
Here's a really good example of how a very tiny design element can make a big impact. 
The team at Facebook that manages the Facebook "" Like "" button decided that it needed to be redesigned. 
The button had kind of gotten out of sync with the evolution of our brand and it needed to be modernized. 
Now you might think, well, it's a tiny little button, it probably is a pretty straightforward, easy design assignment, but it wasn't. 
Turns out, there were all kinds of constraints for the design of this button. 
You had to work within specific height and width parameters. 
You had to be careful to make it work in a bunch of different languages, and be careful about using fancy gradients or borders because it has to degrade gracefully in old web browsers. 
The truth is, designing this tiny little button was a huge pain in the butt. 
Now, this is the new version of the button, and the designer who led this project estimates that he spent over 280 hours redesigning this button over the course of months. 
Now, why would we spend so much time on something so small? 
It's because when you're designing at scale, there's no such thing as a small detail. 
This innocent little button is seen on average 22 billion times a day and on over 7.5 million websites. 
It's one of the single most viewed design elements ever created. 
Now that's a lot of pressure for a little button and the designer behind it, but with these kinds of products, you need to get even the tiny things right. 
Now, the next thing that you need to understand is how to design with data. 
Now, when you're working on products like this, you have incredible amounts of information about how people are using your product that you can then use to influence your design decisions, but it's not just as simple as following the numbers. 
Let me give you an example so that you can understand what I mean. 
Facebook has had a tool for a long time that allowed people to report photos that may be in violation of our community standards, things like spam and abuse. 
And there were a ton of photos reported, but as it turns out, only a small percentage were actually in violation of those community standards. 
Most of them were just your typical party photo. 
Now, to give you a specific hypothetical example, let's say my friend Laura hypothetically uploads a picture of me from a drunken night of karaoke. 
This is purely hypothetical, I can assure you. 
(Laughter) Now, incidentally, you know how some people are kind of worried that their boss or employee is going to discover embarrassing photos of them on Facebook? 
Do you know how hard that is to avoid when you actually work at Facebook? 
So anyway, there are lots of these photos being erroneously reported as spam and abuse, and one of the engineers on the team had a hunch. 
He really thought there was something else going on and he was right, because when he looked through a bunch of the cases, he found that most of them were from people who were requesting the takedown of a photo of themselves. 
Now this was a scenario that the team never even took into account before. 
So they added a new feature that allowed people to message their friend to ask them to take the photo down. 
But it didn't work. 
Only 20 percent of people sent the message to their friend. 
So the team went back at it. 
They consulted with experts in conflict resolution. 
They even studied the universal principles of polite language, which I didn't even actually know existed until this research happened. 
And they found something really interesting. 
They had to go beyond just helping people ask their friend to take the photo down. 
They had to help people express to their friend how the photo made them feel. 
Here's how the experience works today. 
So I find this hypothetical photo of myself, and it's not spam, it's not abuse, but I really wish it weren't on the site. 
So I report it and I say, "I'm in this photo and I don't like it," and then we dig deeper. 
Why don't you like this photo of yourself? 
And I select "" It's embarrassing. "" And then I'm encouraged to message my friend, but here's the critical difference. 
I'm provided specific suggested language that helps me communicate to Laura how the photo makes me feel. 
Now the team found that this relatively small change had a huge impact. 
Before, only 20 percent of people were sending the message, and now 60 percent were, and surveys showed that people on both sides of the conversation felt better as a result. 
That same survey showed that 90 percent of your friends want to know if they've done something to upset you. 
Now I don't know who the other 10 percent are, but maybe that's where our "" Unfriend "" feature can come in handy. 
So as you can see, these decisions are highly nuanced. 
Of course we use a lot of data to inform our decisions, but we also rely very heavily on iteration, research, testing, intuition, human empathy. 
It's both art and science. 
Now, sometimes the designers who work on these products are called "" data-driven, "" which is a term that totally drives us bonkers. 
The fact is, it would be irresponsible of us not to rigorously test our designs when so many people are counting on us to get it right, but data analytics will never be a substitute for design intuition. 
Data can help you make a good design great, but it will never made a bad design good. 
The next thing that you need to understand as a principle is that when you introduce change, you need to do it extraordinarily carefully. 
Now I often have joked that I spend almost as much time designing the introduction of change as I do the change itself, and I'm sure that we can all relate to that when something that we use a lot changes and then we have to adjust. 
The fact is, people can become very efficient at using bad design, and so even if the change is good for them in the long run, it's still incredibly frustrating when it happens, and this is particularly true with user-generated content platforms, because people can rightfully claim a sense of ownership. 
It is, after all, their content. 
Now, years ago, when I was working at YouTube, we were looking for ways to encourage more people to rate videos, and it was interesting because when we looked into the data, we found that almost everyone was exclusively using the highest five-star rating, a handful of people were using the lowest one-star, and virtually no one was using two, three or four stars. 
So we decided to simplify into an up-down kind of voting binary model. 
It's going to be much easier for people to engage with. 
But people were very attached to the five-star rating system. 
Video creators really loved their ratings. 
Millions and millions of people were accustomed to the old design. 
So in order to help people prepare themselves for change and acclimate to the new design more quickly, we actually published the data graph sharing with the community the rationale for what we were going to do, and it even engaged the larger industry in a conversation, which resulted in my favorite TechCrunch headline of all time: "" YouTube Comes to a 5-Star Realization: Its Ratings Are Useless. "" Now, it's impossible to completely avoid change aversion when you're making changes to products that so many people use. 
Even though we tried to do all the right things, we still received our customary flood of video protests and angry emails and even a package that had to be scanned by security, but we have to remember people care intensely about this stuff, and it's because these products, this work, really, really matters to them. 
Now, we know that we have to be careful about paying attention to the details, we have to be cognizant about how we use data in our design process, and we have to introduce change very, very carefully. 
Now, these things are all really useful. 
They're good best practices for designing at scale. 
But they don't mean anything if you don't understand something much more fundamental. 
You have to understand who you are designing for. 
Now, when you set a goal to design for the entire human race, and you start to engage in that goal in earnest, at some point you run into the walls of the bubble that you're living in. 
Now, in San Francisco, we get a little miffed when we hit a dead cell zone because we can't use our phones to navigate to the new hipster coffee shop. 
But what if you had to drive four hours to charge your phone because you had no reliable source of electricity? 
What if you had no access to public libraries? 
What if your country had no free press? 
What would these products start to mean to you? 
This is what Google, YouTube and Facebook look like to most of the world, and it's what they'll look like to most of the next five billion people to come online. 
Designing for low-end cell phones is not glamorous design work, but if you want to design for the whole world, you have to design for where people are, and not where you are. 
So how do we keep this big, big picture in mind? 
We try to travel outside of our bubble to see, hear and understand the people we're designing for. 
We use our products in non-English languages to make sure that they work just as well. 
And we try to use one of these phones from time to time to keep in touch with their reality. 
So what does it mean to design at a global scale? 
It means difficult and sometimes exasperating work to try to improve and evolve products. 
Finding the audacity and the humility to do right by them can be pretty exhausting, and the humility part, it's a little tough on the design ego. 
Because these products are always changing, everything that I've designed in my career is pretty much gone, and everything that I will design will fade away. 
But here's what remains: the never-ending thrill of being a part of something that is so big, you can hardly get your head around it, and the promise that it just might change the world. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Roger Ebert: These are my words, but this is not my voice. 
This is Alex, the best computer voice I've been able to find, which comes as standard equipment on every Macintosh. 
For most of my life, I never gave a second thought to my ability to speak. 
It was like breathing. 
In those days, I was living in a fool's paradise. 
After surgeries for cancer took away my ability to speak, eat or drink, I was forced to enter this virtual world in which a computer does some of my living for me. 
For several days now, we have enjoyed brilliant and articulate speakers here at TED. 
I used to be able to talk like that. 
Maybe I wasn't as smart, but I was at least as talkative. 
I want to devote my talk today to the act of speaking itself, and how the act of speaking or not speaking is tied so indelibly to one's identity as to force the birth of a new person when it is taken away. 
However, I've found that listening to a computer voice for any great length of time can be monotonous. 
So I've decided to recruit some of my TED friends to read my words aloud for me. 
I will start with my wife, Chaz. 
Chaz Ebert: It was Chaz who stood by my side through three attempts to reconstruct my jaw and restore my ability to speak. 
Going into the first surgery for a recurrence of salivary cancer in 2006, I expected to be out of the hospital in time to return to my movie review show, 'Ebert and Roeper at the Movies.' I had pre-taped enough shows to get me through six weeks of surgery and recuperation. 
The doctors took a fibula bone from my leg and some tissue from my shoulder to fashion into a new jaw. 
My tongue, larynx and vocal cords were still healthy and unaffected. 
(Laughter) (Laughter) CE: I was optimistic, and all was right with the world. 
The first surgery was a great success. 
I saw myself in the mirror and I looked pretty good. 
Two weeks later, I was ready to return home. 
I was using my iPod to play the Leonard Cohen song 'I'm Your Man' for my doctors and nurses. 
Suddenly, I had an episode of catastrophic bleeding. 
My carotid artery had ruptured. 
Thank God I was still in my hospital room and my doctors were right there. 
Chaz told me that if that song hadn't played for so long, I might have already been in the car, on the way home, and would have died right there and then. 
So thank you, Leonard Cohen, for saving my life. 
(Applause) There was a second surgery — which held up for five or six days and then it also fell apart. 
And then a third attempt, which also patched me back together pretty well, until it failed. 
A doctor from Brazil said he had never seen anyone survive a carotid artery rupture. 
And before I left the hospital, after a year of being hospitalized, I had seven ruptures of my carotid artery. 
There was no particular day when anyone told me I would never speak again; it just sort of became obvious. 
Human speech is an ingenious manipulation of our breath within the sound chamber of our mouth and respiratory system. 
We need to be able to hold and manipulate that breath in order to form sounds. 
Therefore, the system must be essentially airtight in order to capture air. 
Because I had lost my jaw, I could no longer form a seal, and therefore my tongue and all of my other vocal equipment was rendered powerless. 
Dean Ornish: At first for a long time, I wrote messages in notebooks. 
Then I tried typing words on my laptop and using its built in voice. 
This was faster, and nobody had to try to read my handwriting. 
I tried out various computer voices that were available online, and for several months I had a British accent, which Chaz called Sir Lawrence. "" (Laughter) "" It was the clearest I could find. 
Then Apple released the Alex voice, which was the best I'd heard. 
It knew things like the difference between an exclamation point and a question mark. 
When it saw a period, it knew how to make a sentence sound like it was ending instead of staying up in the air. 
There are all sorts of html codes you can use to control the timing and inflection of computer voices, and I've experimented with them. 
For me, they share a fundamental problem: they're too slow. 
When I find myself in a conversational situation, I need to type fast and to jump right in. 
People don't have the time or the patience to wait for me to fool around with the codes for every word or phrase. 
But what value do we place on the sound of our own voice? 
How does that affect who you are as a person? 
When people hear Alex speaking my words, do they experience a disconnect? 
Does that create a separation or a distance from one person to the next? 
How did I feel not being able to speak? 
I felt, and I still feel, a lot of distance from the human mainstream. 
I've become uncomfortable when I'm separated from my laptop. 
Even then, I'm aware that most people have little patience for my speaking difficulties. 
So Chaz suggested finding a company that could make a customized voice using my TV show voice from a period of 30 years. 
At first I was against it. 
I thought it would be creepy to hear my own voice coming from a computer. 
There was something comforting about a voice that was not my own. 
But I decided then to just give it a try. 
So we contacted a company in Scotland that created personalized computer voices. 
They'd never made one from previously-recorded materials. 
All of their voices had been made by a speaker recording original words in a control booth. 
But they were willing to give it a try. 
So I sent them many hours of recordings of my voice, including several audio commentary tracks that I'd made for movies on DVDs. 
And it sounded like me, it really did. 
There was a reason for that; it was me. 
But it wasn't that simple. 
The tapes from my TV show weren't very useful because there were too many other kinds of audio involved — movie soundtracks, for example, or Gene Siskel arguing with me — (Laughter) and my words often had a particular emphasis that didn't fit into a sentence well enough. 
I'll let you hear a sample of that voice. 
These are a few of the comments I recorded for use when Chaz and I appeared on the Oprah Winfrey program. 
And here's the voice we call Roger Jr. 
or Roger 2.0. 
Roger 2.0: Oprah, I can't tell you how great it is to be back on your show. 
We have been talking for a long time, and now here we are again. 
This is the first version of my computer voice. 
It still needs improvement, but at least it sounds like me and not like HAL 9000. 
When I heard it the first time, it sent chills down my spine. 
When I type anything, this voice will speak whatever I type. 
When I read something, it will read in my voice. 
I have typed these words in advance, as I didn't think it would be thrilling to sit here watching me typing. 
The voice was created by a company in Scotland named CereProc. 
It makes me feel good that many of the words you are hearing were first spoken while I was commenting on "" Casablanca "" and "" Citizen Kane. "" This is the first voice they've created for an individual. 
There are several very good voices available for computers, but they all sound like somebody else, while this voice sounds like me. 
I plan to use it on television, radio and the Internet. 
People who need a voice should know that most computers already come with built-in speaking systems. 
Many blind people use them to read pages on the Web to themselves. 
But I've got to say, in first grade, they said I talked too much, and now I still can. 
(Laughter) Roger Ebert: As you can hear, it sounds like me, but the words jump up and down. 
The flow isn't natural. 
The good people in Scotland are still improving my voice, and I'm optimistic about it. 
But so far, the Apple Alex voice is the best one I've heard. 
I wrote a blog about it and actually got a comment from the actor who played Alex. 
He said he recorded many long hours in various intonations to be used in the voice. 
A very large sample is needed. 
John Hunter: All my life I was a motormouth. 
Now I have spoken my last words, and I don't even remember for sure what they were. 
I feel like the hero of that Harlan Ellison story titled "" I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. "" On Wednesday, David Christian explained to us what a tiny instant the human race represents in the time-span of the universe. 
For almost all of its millions and billions of years, there was no life on Earth at all. 
For almost all the years of life on Earth, there was no intelligent life. 
Only after we learned to pass knowledge from one generation to the next, did civilization become possible. 
In cosmological terms, that was about 10 minutes ago. 
Finally came mankind's most advanced and mysterious tool, the computer. 
That has mostly happened in my lifetime. 
Some of the famous early computers were being built in my hometown of Urbana, the birthplace of HAL 9000. 
When I heard the amazing talk by Salman Khan on Wednesday, about the Khan Academy website that teaches hundreds of subjects to students all over the world, I had a flashback. 
It was about 1960. 
As a local newspaper reporter still in high school, I was sent over to the computer lab of the University of Illinois to interview the creators of something called PLATO. 
The initials stood for Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations. 
This was a computer-assisted instruction system, which in those days ran on a computer named ILLIAC. 
The programmers said it could assist students in their learning. 
I doubt, on that day 50 years ago, they even dreamed of what Salman Khan has accomplished. 
But that's not the point. 
The point is PLATO was only 50 years ago, an instant in time. 
It continued to evolve and operated in one form or another on more and more sophisticated computers, until only five years ago. 
I have learned from Wikipedia that, starting with that humble beginning, PLATO established forums, message boards, online testing, email, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing and multiple-player games. 
Since the first Web browser was also developed in Urbana, it appears that my hometown in downstate Illinois was the birthplace of much of the virtual, online universe we occupy today. 
But I'm not here from the Chamber of Commerce. 
(Laughter) I'm here as a man who wants to communicate. 
All of this has happened in my lifetime. 
I started writing on a computer back in the 1970s when one of the first Atech systems was installed at the Chicago Sun-Times. 
I was in line at Radio Shack to buy one of the first Model 100's. 
And when I told the people in the press room at the Academy Awards that they'd better install some phone lines for Internet connections, they didn't know what I was talking about. 
When I bought my first desktop, it was a DEC Rainbow. 
Does anybody remember that? "" (Applause) "" The Sun Times sent me to the Cannes Film Festival with a portable computer the size of a suitcase named the Porteram Telebubble. 
I joined CompuServe when it had fewer numbers than I currently have followers on Twitter. 
(Laughter) CE: All of this has happened in the blink of an eye. 
It is unimaginable what will happen next. 
It makes me incredibly fortunate to live at this moment in history. 
Indeed, I am lucky to live in history at all, because without intelligence and memory there is no history. 
For billions of years, the universe evolved completely without notice. 
Now we live in the age of the Internet, which seems to be creating a form of global consciousness. 
And because of it, I can communicate as well as I ever could. 
We are born into a box of time and space. 
We use words and communication to break out of it and to reach out to others. 
For me, the Internet began as a useful tool and now has become something I rely on for my actual daily existence. 
I cannot speak; I can only type so fast. 
Computer voices are sometimes not very sophisticated, but with my computer, I can communicate more widely than ever before. 
I feel as if my blog, my email, Twitter and Facebook have given me a substitute for everyday conversation. 
They aren't an improvement, but they're the best I can do. 
They give me a way to speak. 
Not everybody has the patience of my wife, Chaz. 
But online, everybody speaks at the same speed. 
This whole adventure has been a learning experience. 
Every time there was a surgery that failed, I was left with a little less flesh and bone. 
Now I have no jaw left at all. 
While harvesting tissue from both my shoulders, the surgeries left me with back pain and reduced my ability to walk easily. 
Ironic that my legs are fine, and it's my shoulders that slow up my walk. 
When you see me today, I look like the Phantom of the Opera. 
But no you don't. 
(Laughter) (Applause) It is human nature to look at someone like me and assume I have lost some of my marbles. 
People — (Applause) People talk loudly — I'm so sorry. 
Excuse me. 
(Applause) People talk loudly and slowly to me. 
Sometimes they assume I am deaf. 
There are people who don't want to make eye contact. 
Believe me, he didn't mean this as — anyway, let me just read it. 
(Laughter) You should never let your wife read something like this. (Laughter) 
It is human nature to look away from illness. 
We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. 
That's why writing on the Internet has become a lifesaver for me. 
My ability to think and write have not been affected. 
And on the Web, my real voice finds expression. 
I have also met many other disabled people who communicate this way. 
One of my Twitter friends can type only with his toes. 
One of the funniest blogs on the Web is written by a friend of mine named Smartass Cripple. 
(Laughter) Google him and he will make you laugh. 
All of these people are saying, in one way or another, that what you see is not all you get. 
So I have not come here to complain. 
I have much to make me happy and relieved. 
I seem, for the time being, to be cancer-free. 
I am writing as well as ever. 
I am productive. 
If I were in this condition at any point before a few cosmological instants ago, I would be as isolated as a hermit. 
I would be trapped inside my head. 
Because of the rush of human knowledge, because of the digital revolution, I have a voice, and I do not need to scream. 
RE: Wait. I have one more thing to add. 
A guy goes into a psychiatrist. 
The psychiatrist says, "" You're crazy. "" The guy says, "" I want a second opinion. "" The psychiatrist says, "" All right, you're ugly. "" (Laughter) You all know the test for artificial intelligence — the Turing test. 
A human judge has a conversation with a human and a computer. 
If the judge can't tell the machine apart from the human, the machine has passed the test. 
I now propose a test for computer voices — the Ebert test. 
If a computer voice can successfully tell a joke and do the timing and delivery as well as Henny Youngman, then that's the voice I want. 
(Applause) 

If you haven't ordered yet, I generally find the rigatoni with the spicy tomato sauce goes best with diseases of the small intestine. 
(Laughter) So, sorry — it just feels like I should be doing stand-up up here because of the setting. 
No, what I want to do is take you back to 1854 in London for the next few minutes, and tell the story — in brief — of this outbreak, which in many ways, I think, helped create the world that we live in today, and particularly the kind of city that we live in today. 
This period in 1854, in the middle part of the 19th century, in London's history, is incredibly interesting for a number of reasons. 
But I think the most important one is that London was this city of 2.5 million people, and it was the largest city on the face of the planet at that point. 
But it was also the largest city that had ever been built. 
And so the Victorians were trying to live through and simultaneously invent a whole new scale of living: this scale of living that we, you know, now call "" metropolitan living. "" And it was in many ways, at this point in the mid-1850s, a complete disaster. 
They were basically a city living with a modern kind of industrial metropolis with an Elizabethan public infrastructure. 
So people, for instance, just to gross you out for a second, had cesspools of human waste in their basement. Like, a foot to two feet deep. 
And they would just kind of throw the buckets down there and hope that it would somehow go away, and of course it never really would go away. 
And all of this stuff, basically, had accumulated to the point where the city was incredibly offensive to just walk around in. 
It was an amazingly smelly city. Not just because of the cesspools, but also the sheer number of livestock in the city would shock people. 
Not just the horses, but people had cows in their attics that they would use for milk, that they would hoist up there and keep them in the attic until literally their milk ran out and they died, and then they would drag them off to the bone boilers down the street. 
So, you would just walk around London at this point and just be overwhelmed with this stench. 
And what ended up happening is that an entire emerging public health system became convinced that it was the smell that was killing everybody, that was creating these diseases that would wipe through the city every three or four years. 
And cholera was really the great killer of this period. 
It arrived in London in 1832, and every four or five years another epidemic would take 10,000, 20,000 people in London and throughout the U.K. 
And so the authorities became convinced that this smell was this problem. 
We had to get rid of the smell. 
And so, in fact, they concocted a couple of early, you know, founding public-health interventions in the system of the city, one of which was called the "" Nuisances Act, "" which they got everybody as far as they could to empty out their cesspools and just pour all that waste into the river. 
Because if we get it out of the streets, it'll smell much better, and — oh right, we drink from the river. 
So what ended up happening, actually, is they ended up increasing the outbreaks of cholera because, as we now know, cholera is actually in the water. 
It's a waterborne disease, not something that's in the air. 
It's not something you smell or inhale; it's something you ingest. 
And so one of the founding moments of public health in the 19th century effectively poisoned the water supply of London much more effectively than any modern day bioterrorist could have ever dreamed of doing. 
So this was the state of London in 1854, and in the middle of all this carnage and offensive conditions, and in the midst of all this scientific confusion about what was actually killing people, it was a very talented classic 19th century multi-disciplinarian named John Snow, who was a local doctor in Soho in London, who had been arguing for about four or five years that cholera was, in fact, a waterborne disease, and had basically convinced nobody of this. 
The public health authorities had largely ignored what he had to say. 
And he'd made the case in a number of papers and done a number of studies, but nothing had really stuck. 
And part of — what's so interesting about this story to me is that in some ways, it's a great case study in how cultural change happens, how a good idea eventually comes to win out over much worse ideas. 
And Snow labored for a long time with this great insight that everybody ignored. 
And then on one day, August 28th of 1854, a young child, a five-month-old girl whose first name we don't know, we know her only as Baby Lewis, somehow contracted cholera, came down with cholera at 40 Broad Street. 
You can't really see it in this map, but this is the map that becomes the central focus in the second half of my book. 
It's in the middle of Soho, in this working class neighborhood, this little girl becomes sick and it turns out that the cesspool, that they still continue to have, despite the Nuisances Act, bordered on an extremely popular water pump, local watering hole that was well known for the best water in all of Soho, that all the residents from Soho and the surrounding neighborhoods would go to. 
And so this little girl inadvertently ended up contaminating the water in this popular pump, and one of the most terrifying outbreaks in the history of England erupted about two or three days later. 
Literally, 10 percent of the neighborhood died in seven days, and much more would have died if people hadn't fled after the initial outbreak kicked in. 
So it was this incredibly terrifying event. 
You had these scenes of entire families dying over the course of 48 hours of cholera, alone in their one-room apartments, in their little flats. 
Just an extraordinary, terrifying scene. 
Snow lived near there, heard about the outbreak, and in this amazing act of courage went directly into the belly of the beast because he thought an outbreak that concentrated could actually potentially end up convincing people that, in fact, the real menace of cholera was in the water supply and not in the air. 
He suspected an outbreak that concentrated would probably involve a single point source. 
One single thing that everybody was going to because it didn't have the traditional slower path of infections that you might expect. 
And so he went right in there and started interviewing people. 
He eventually enlisted the help of this amazing other figure, who's kind of the other protagonist of the book — this guy, Henry Whitehead, who was a local minister, who was not at all a man of science, but was incredibly socially connected; he knew everybody in the neighborhood. 
And he managed to track down, Whitehead did, many of the cases of people who had drunk water from the pump, or who hadn't drunk water from the pump. 
And eventually Snow made a map of the outbreak. 
He found increasingly that people who drank from the pump were getting sick. 
People who hadn't drunk from the pump were not getting sick. 
And he thought about representing that as a kind of a table of statistics of people living in different neighborhoods, people who hadn't, you know, percentages of people who hadn't, but eventually he hit upon the idea that what he needed was something that you could see. 
Something that would take in a sense a higher-level view of all this activity that had been happening in the neighborhood. 
And so he created this map, which basically ended up representing all the deaths in the neighborhoods as black bars at each address. 
And you can see in this map, the pump right at the center of it and you can see that one of the residences down the way had about 15 people dead. 
And the map is actually a little bit bigger. 
As you get further and further away from the pump, the deaths begin to grow less and less frequent. 
And so you can see this something poisonous emanating out of this pump that you could see in a glance. 
And so, with the help of this map, and with the help of more evangelizing that he did over the next few years and that Whitehead did, eventually, actually, the authorities slowly started to come around. 
It took much longer than sometimes we like to think in this story, but by 1866, when the next big cholera outbreak came to London, the authorities had been convinced — in part because of this story, in part because of this map — that in fact the water was the problem. 
And they had already started building the sewers in London, and they immediately went to this outbreak and they told everybody to start boiling their water. 
And that was the last time that London has seen a cholera outbreak since. 
So, part of this story, I think — well, it's a terrifying story, it's a very dark story and it's a story that continues on in many of the developing cities of the world. 
It's also a story really that is fundamentally optimistic, which is to say that it's possible to solve these problems if we listen to reason, if we listen to the kind of wisdom of these kinds of maps, if we listen to people like Snow and Whitehead, if we listen to the locals who understand what's going on in these kinds of situations. 
And what it ended up doing is making the idea of large-scale metropolitan living a sustainable one. 
When people were looking at 10 percent of their neighborhoods dying in the space of seven days, there was a widespread consensus that this couldn't go on, that people weren't meant to live in cities of 2.5 million people. 
But because of what Snow did, because of this map, because of the whole series of reforms that happened in the wake of this map, we now take for granted that cities have 10 million people, cities like this one are in fact sustainable things. 
We don't worry that New York City is going to collapse in on itself quite the way that, you know, Rome did, and be 10 percent of its size in 100 years or 200 years. 
And so that in a way is the ultimate legacy of this map. 
It's a map of deaths that ended up creating a whole new way of life, the life that we're enjoying here today. Thank you very much. 

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

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

I am a computer science and engineering professor here at Carnegie Mellon, and my research focuses on usable privacy and security, and so my friends like to give me examples of their frustrations with computing systems, especially frustrations related to unusable privacy and security. 
So passwords are something that I hear a lot about. 
A lot of people are frustrated with passwords, and it's bad enough when you have to have one really good password that you can remember but nobody else is going to be able to guess. 
But what do you do when you have accounts on a hundred different systems and you're supposed to have a unique password for each of these systems? 
It's tough. 
At Carnegie Mellon, they used to make it actually pretty easy for us to remember our passwords. 
The password requirement up through 2009 was just that you had to have a password with at least one character. 
Pretty easy. But then they changed things, and at the end of 2009, they announced that we were going to have a new policy, and this new policy required passwords that were at least eight characters long, with an uppercase letter, lowercase letter, a digit, a symbol, you couldn't use the same character more than three times, and it wasn't allowed to be in a dictionary. 
Now, when they implemented this new policy, a lot of people, my colleagues and friends, came up to me and they said, "" Wow, now that's really unusable. 
Why are they doing this to us, and why didn't you stop them? "" And I said, "" Well, you know what? 
They didn't ask me. "" But I got curious, and I decided to go talk to the people in charge of our computer systems and find out what led them to introduce this new policy, and they said that the university had joined a consortium of universities, and one of the requirements of membership was that we had to have stronger passwords that complied with some new requirements, and these requirements were that our passwords had to have a lot of entropy. 
Now entropy is a complicated term, but basically it measures the strength of passwords. 
But the thing is, there isn't actually a standard measure of entropy. 
Now, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has a set of guidelines which have some rules of thumb for measuring entropy, but they don't have anything too specific, and the reason they only have rules of thumb is it turns out they don't actually have any good data on passwords. 
In fact, their report states, "" Unfortunately, we do not have much data on the passwords users choose under particular rules. 
NIST would like to obtain more data on the passwords users actually choose, but system administrators are understandably reluctant to reveal password data to others. "" So this is a problem, but our research group looked at it as an opportunity. 
We said, "" Well, there's a need for good password data. 
Maybe we can collect some good password data and actually advance the state of the art here. 
So the first thing we did is, we got a bag of candy bars and we walked around campus and talked to students, faculty and staff, and asked them for information about their passwords. 
Now we didn't say, "" Give us your password. "" No, we just asked them about their password. 
How long is it? Does it have a digit? 
Does it have a symbol? 
And were you annoyed at having to create a new one last week? 
So we got results from 470 students, faculty and staff, and indeed we confirmed that the new policy was very annoying, but we also found that people said they felt more secure with these new passwords. 
We found that most people knew they were not supposed to write their password down, and only 13 percent of them did, but disturbingly, 80 percent of people said they were reusing their password. 
Now, this is actually more dangerous than writing your password down, because it makes you much more susceptible to attackers. 
So if you have to, write your passwords down, but don't reuse them. 
We also found some interesting things about the symbols people use in passwords. 
So CMU allows 32 possible symbols, but as you can see, there's only a small number that most people are using, so we're not actually getting very much strength from the symbols in our passwords. 
So this was a really interesting study, and now we had data from 470 people, but in the scheme of things, that's really not very much password data, and so we looked around to see where could we find additional password data? 
So it turns out there are a lot of people going around stealing passwords, and they often go and post these passwords on the Internet. 
So we were able to get access to some of these stolen password sets. 
This is still not really ideal for research, though, because it's not entirely clear where all of these passwords came from, or exactly what policies were in effect when people created these passwords. 
So we wanted to find some better source of data. 
So we decided that one thing we could do is we could do a study and have people actually create passwords for our study. 
So we used a service called Amazon Mechanical Turk, and this is a service where you can post a small job online that takes a minute, a few minutes, an hour, and pay people, a penny, ten cents, a few dollars, to do a task for you, and then you pay them through Amazon.com. 
So we paid people about 50 cents to create a password following our rules and answering a survey, and then we paid them again to come back two days later and log in using their password and answering another survey. 
So we did this, and we collected 5,000 passwords, and we gave people a bunch of different policies to create passwords with. 
So some people had a pretty easy policy, we call it Basic8, and here the only rule was that your password had to have at least eight characters. 
Then some people had a much harder policy, and this was very similar to the CMU policy, that it had to have eight characters including uppercase, lowercase, digit, symbol, and pass a dictionary check. 
And one of the other policies we tried, and there were a whole bunch more, but one of the ones we tried was called Basic16, and the only requirement here was that your password had to have at least 16 characters. 
All right, so now we had 5,000 passwords, and so we had much more detailed information. 
Again we see that there's only a small number of symbols that people are actually using in their passwords. 
We also wanted to get an idea of how strong the passwords were that people were creating, but as you may recall, there isn't a good measure of password strength. 
So what we decided to do was to see how long it would take to crack these passwords using the best cracking tools that the bad guys are using, or that we could find information about in the research literature. 
So to give you an idea of how bad guys go about cracking passwords, they will steal a password file that will have all of the passwords in kind of a scrambled form, called a hash, and so what they'll do is they'll make a guess as to what a password is, run it through a hashing function, and see whether it matches the passwords they have on their stolen password list. 
So a dumb attacker will try every password in order. 
They'll start with AAAAA and move on to AAAAB, and this is going to take a really long time before they get any passwords that people are really likely to actually have. 
A smart attacker, on the other hand, does something much more clever. 
They look at the passwords that are known to be popular from these stolen password sets, and they guess those first. 
So they're going to start by guessing "" password, "" and then they'll guess "" I love you, "" and "" monkey, "" and "" 12345678, "" because these are the passwords that are most likely for people to have. 
In fact, some of you probably have these passwords. 
So what we found by running all of these 5,000 passwords we collected through these tests to see how strong they were, we found that the long passwords were actually pretty strong, and the complex passwords were pretty strong too. 
However, when we looked at the survey data, we saw that people were really frustrated by the very complex passwords, and the long passwords were a lot more usable, and in some cases, they were actually even stronger than the complex passwords. 
So this suggests that, instead of telling people that they need to put all these symbols and numbers and crazy things into their passwords, we might be better off just telling people to have long passwords. 
Now here's the problem, though: Some people had long passwords that actually weren't very strong. 
You can make long passwords that are still the sort of thing that an attacker could easily guess. 
So we need to do more than just say long passwords. 
There has to be some additional requirements, and some of our ongoing research is looking at what additional requirements we should add to make for stronger passwords that also are going to be easy for people to remember and type. 
Another approach to getting people to have stronger passwords is to use a password meter. 
Here are some examples. 
You may have seen these on the Internet when you were creating passwords. 
We decided to do a study to find out whether these password meters actually work. 
Do they actually help people have stronger passwords, and if so, which ones are better? 
So we tested password meters that were different sizes, shapes, colors, different words next to them, and we even tested one that was a dancing bunny. 
As you type a better password, the bunny dances faster and faster. 
So this was pretty fun. 
What we found was that password meters do work. 
(Laughter) Most of the password meters were actually effective, and the dancing bunny was very effective too, but the password meters that were the most effective were the ones that made you work harder before they gave you that thumbs up and said you were doing a good job, and in fact we found that most of the password meters on the Internet today are too soft. 
They tell you you're doing a good job too early, and if they would just wait a little bit before giving you that positive feedback, you probably would have better passwords. 
Now another approach to better passwords, perhaps, is to use pass phrases instead of passwords. 
So this was an xkcd cartoon from a couple of years ago, and the cartoonist suggests that we should all use pass phrases, and if you look at the second row of this cartoon, you can see the cartoonist is suggesting that the pass phrase "" correct horse battery staple "" would be a very strong pass phrase and something really easy to remember. 
He says, in fact, you've already remembered it. 
And so we decided to do a research study to find out whether this was true or not. 
In fact, everybody who I talk to, who I mention I'm doing password research, they point out this cartoon. 
"" Oh, have you seen it? That xkcd. 
Correct horse battery staple. "" So we did the research study to see what would actually happen. 
So in our study, we used Mechanical Turk again, and we had the computer pick the random words in the pass phrase. 
Now the reason we did this is that humans are not very good at picking random words. 
If we asked a human to do it, they would pick things that were not very random. 
So we tried a few different conditions. 
In one condition, the computer picked from a dictionary of the very common words in the English language, and so you'd get pass phrases like "try there three come." 
And we looked at that, and we said, "Well, that doesn't really seem very memorable." 
So then we tried picking words that came from specific parts of speech, so how about noun-verb-adjective-noun. 
That comes up with something that's sort of sentence-like. 
So you can get a pass phrase like "plan builds sure power" or "" end determines red drug. "" And these seemed a little bit more memorable, and maybe people would like those a little bit better. 
We wanted to compare them with passwords, and so we had the computer pick random passwords, and these were nice and short, but as you can see, they don't really look very memorable. 
And then we decided to try something called a pronounceable password. 
So here the computer picks random syllables and puts them together so you have something sort of pronounceable, like "" tufritvi "" and "" vadasabi. "" That one kind of rolls off your tongue. 
So these were random passwords that were generated by our computer. 
So what we found in this study was that, surprisingly, pass phrases were not actually all that good. 
People were not really better at remembering the pass phrases than these random passwords, and because the pass phrases are longer, they took longer to type and people made more errors while typing them in. 
So it's not really a clear win for pass phrases. 
Sorry, all of you xkcd fans. 
On the other hand, we did find that pronounceable passwords worked surprisingly well, and so we actually are doing some more research to see if we can make that approach work even better. 
So one of the problems with some of the studies that we've done is that because they're all done using Mechanical Turk, these are not people's real passwords. 
They're the passwords that they created or the computer created for them for our study. 
And we wanted to know whether people would actually behave the same way with their real passwords. 
So we talked to the information security office at Carnegie Mellon and asked them if we could have everybody's real passwords. 
Not surprisingly, they were a little bit reluctant to share them with us, but we were actually able to work out a system with them where they put all of the real passwords for 25,000 CMU students, faculty and staff, into a locked computer in a locked room, not connected to the Internet, and they ran code on it that we wrote to analyze these passwords. 
They audited our code. 
They ran the code. 
And so we never actually saw anybody's password. 
We got some interesting results, and those of you Tepper students in the back will be very interested in this. 
So we found that the passwords created by people affiliated with the school of computer science were actually 1.8 times stronger than those affiliated with the business school. 
We have lots of other really interesting demographic information as well. 
The other interesting thing that we found is that when we compared the Carnegie Mellon passwords to the Mechanical Turk-generated passwords, there was actually a lot of similarities, and so this helped validate our research method and show that actually, collecting passwords using these Mechanical Turk studies is actually a valid way to study passwords. 
So that was good news. 
Okay, I want to close by talking about some insights I gained while on sabbatical last year in the Carnegie Mellon art school. 
One of the things that I did is I made a number of quilts, and I made this quilt here. 
It's called "" Security Blanket. "" (Laughter) And this quilt has the 1,000 most frequent passwords stolen from the RockYou website. 
And the size of the passwords is proportional to how frequently they appeared in the stolen dataset. 
And what I did is I created this word cloud, and I went through all 1,000 words, and I categorized them into loose thematic categories. 
And it was, in some cases, it was kind of difficult to figure out what category they should be in, and then I color-coded them. 
So here are some examples of the difficulty. 
So "" justin. "" Is that the name of the user, their boyfriend, their son? 
Maybe they're a Justin Bieber fan. 
Or "" princess. "" Is that a nickname? 
Are they Disney princess fans? 
Or maybe that's the name of their cat. 
"" Iloveyou "" appears many times in many different languages. 
There's a lot of love in these passwords. 
If you look carefully, you'll see there's also some profanity, but it was really interesting to me to see that there's a lot more love than hate in these passwords. 
And there are animals, a lot of animals, and "" monkey "" is the most common animal and the 14th most popular password overall. 
And this was really curious to me, and I wondered, "" Why are monkeys so popular? "" And so in our last password study, any time we detected somebody creating a password with the word "" monkey "" in it, we asked them why they had a monkey in their password. 
And what we found out — we found 17 people so far, I think, who have the word "" monkey "" — We found out about a third of them said they have a pet named "" monkey "" or a friend whose nickname is "" monkey, "" and about a third of them said that they just like monkeys and monkeys are really cute. 
And that guy is really cute. 
So it seems that at the end of the day, when we make passwords, we either make something that's really easy to type, a common pattern, or things that remind us of the word password or the account that we've created the password for, or whatever. 
Or we think about things that make us happy, and we create our password based on things that make us happy. 
And while this makes typing and remembering your password more fun, it also makes it a lot easier to guess your password. 
So I know a lot of these TED Talks are inspirational and they make you think about nice, happy things, but when you're creating your password, try to think about something else. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Thank you. 
I have only got 18 minutes to explain something that lasts for hours and days, so I'd better get started. 
Let's start with a clip from Al Jazeera's Listening Post. 
Richard Gizbert: Norway is a country that gets relatively little media coverage. 
Even the elections this past week passed without much drama. 
And that's the Norwegian media in a nutshell: not much drama. 
A few years back, Norway's public TV channel NRK decided to broadcast live coverage of a seven-hour train ride — seven hours of simple footage, a train rolling down the tracks. 
Norwegians, more than a million of them according to the ratings, loved it. 
A new kind of reality TV show was born, and it goes against all the rules of TV engagement. 
There is no story line, no script, no drama, no climax, and it's called Slow TV. 
For the past two months, Norwegians have been watching a cruise ship's journey up the coast, and there's a lot of fog on that coast. 
Executives at Norway's National Broadcasting Service are now considering broadcasting a night of knitting nationwide. 
On the surface, it sounds boring, because it is, but something about this TV experiment has gripped Norwegians. 
So we sent the Listening Post's Marcela Pizarro to Oslo to find out what it is, but first a warning: Viewers may find some of the images in the following report disappointing. 
(Laughter) Thomas Hellum: And then follows an eight-minute story on Al Jazeera about some strange TV programs in little Norway. 
Al Jazeera. CNN. How did we get there? 
We have to go back to 2009, when one of my colleagues got a great idea. 
Where do you get your ideas? 
In the lunchroom. 
So he said, why don't we make a radio program marking the day of the German invasion of Norway in 1940. 
We tell the story at the exact time during the night. 
Wow. Brilliant idea, except this was just a couple of weeks before the invasion day. 
So we sat in our lunchroom and discussed what other stories can you tell as they evolve? 
What other things take a really long time? 
So one of us came up with a train. 
The Bergen Railway had its 100-year anniversary that year It goes from western Norway to eastern Norway, and it takes exactly the same time as it did 40 years ago, over seven hours. (Laughter) So we caught our commissioning editors in Oslo, and we said, we want to make a documentary about the Bergen Railway, and we want to make it in full length, and the answer was, "Yes, but how long will the program be?" 
"Oh," we said, "full length." 
"Yes, but we mean the program." 
And back and forth. 
Luckily for us, they met us with laughter, very, very good laughter, so one bright day in September, we started a program that we thought should be seven hours and four minutes. 
Actually, it turned out to be seven hours and 14 minutes due to a signal failure at the last station. 
We had four cameras, three of them pointing out to the beautiful nature. 
Some talking to the guests, some information. 
(Video) Train announcement: We will arrive at Haugastøl Station. 
TH: And that's about it, but of course, also the 160 tunnels gave us the opportunity to do some archives. 
Narrator [in Norwegian]: Then a bit of flirting while the food is digested. 
The last downhill stretch before we reach our destination. 
We pass Mjølfjell Station. 
Then a new tunnel. 
(Laughter) TH: And now we thought, yes, we have a brilliant program. 
It will fit for the 2,000 train spotters in Norway. 
We brought it on air in November 2009. 
But no, this was far more attractive. 
This is the five biggest TV channels in Norway on a normal Friday, and if you look at NRK2 over here, look what happened when they put on the Bergen Railway show: 1.2 million Norwegians watched part of this program. 
(Applause) And another funny thing: When the host on our main channel, after they have got news for you, she said, "" And on our second channel, the train has now nearly reached Myrdal station. "" Thousands of people just jumped on the train on our second channel like this. (Laughter) This was also a huge success in terms of social media. 
It was so nice to see all the thousands of Facebook and Twitter users discussing the same view, talking to each other as if they were on the same train together. 
And especially, I like this one. It's a 76-year-old man. 
He's watched all the program, and at the end station, he rises up to pick up what he thinks is his luggage, and his head hit the curtain rod, and he realized he is in his own living room. 
(Applause) So that's strong and living TV. 
Four hundred and thirty-six minute by minute on a Friday night, and during that first night, the first Twitter message came: Why be a chicken? 
Why stop at 436 when you can expand that to 8,040, minute by minute, and do the iconic journey in Norway, the coastal ship journey Hurtigruten from Bergen to Kirkenes, almost 3,000 kilometers, covering most of our coast. 
It has 120-year-old, very interesting history, and literally takes part in life and death along the coast. 
So just a week after the Bergen Railway, we called the Hurtigruten company and we started planning for our next show. 
We wanted to do something different. 
The Bergen Railway was a recorded program. 
So when we sat in our editing room, we watched this picture — it's all Ål Station — we saw this journalist. 
We had called him, we had spoken to him, and when we left the station, he took this picture of us and he waved to the camera, and we thought, what if more people knew that we were on board that train? 
Would more people show up? 
What would it look like? 
So we decided our next project, it should be live. 
We wanted this picture of us on the fjord and on the screen at the same time. 
So this is not the first time NRK had been on board a ship. 
This is back in 1964, when the technical managers have suits and ties and NRK rolled all its equipment on board a ship, and 200 meters out of the shore, transmitting the signal back, and in the machine room, they talked to the machine guy, and on the deck, they have splendid entertainment. 
So being on a ship, it's not the first time. 
But five and a half days in a row, and live, we wanted some help. 
And we asked our viewers out there, what do you want to see? 
What do you want us to film? How do you want this to look? 
Do you want us to make a website? What do you want on it? 
And we got some answers from you out there, and it helped us a very lot to build the program. 
So in June 2011, 23 of us went on board the Hurtigruten coastal ship and we set off. 
(Music) I have some really strong memories from that week, and it's all about people. 
This guy, for instance, he's head of research at the University in Tromsø (Laughter) And I will show you a piece of cloth, this one. 
It's the other strong memory. 
It belongs to a guy called Erik Hansen. 
And it's people like those two who took a firm grip of our program, and together with thousands of others along the route, they made the program what it became. 
They made all the stories. 
This is Karl. He's in the ninth grade. 
It says, "" I will be a little late for school tomorrow. "" He was supposed to be in the school at 8 a.m. 
He came at 9 a.m., and he didn't get a note from his teacher, because the teacher had watched the program. 
(Laughter) How did we do this? 
Yes, we took a conference room on board the Hurtigruten. 
We turned it into a complete TV control room. 
We made it all work, of course, and then we took along 11 cameras. 
This is one of them. 
This is my sketch from February, and when you give this sketch to professional people in the Norwegian broadcasting company NRK, you get some cool stuff back. 
And with some very creative solutions. 
(Video) Narrator [in Norwegian]: Run it up and down. 
This is Norway's most important drill right now. 
It regulates the height of a bow camera in NRK's live production, one of 11 that capture great shots from the MS Nord-Norge. 
Eight wires keep the camera stable. 
Cameraman: I work on different camera solutions. 
They're just tools used in a different context. 
TH: Another camera is this one. It's normally used for sports. 
It made it possible for us to take close-up pictures of people 100 kilomteres away, like this one. (Laughter) People called us and asked, how is this man doing? 
He's doing fine. Everything went well. 
We also could take pictures of people waving at us, people along the route, thousands of them, and they all had a phone in their hand. 
And when you take a picture of them, and they get the message, "" Now we are on TV, dad, "" they start waving back. 
This was waving TV for five and a half days, and people get so extremely happy when they can send a warm message to their loved ones. 
It was also a great success on social media. 
On the last day, we met Her Majesty the Queen of Norway, and Twitter couldn't quite handle it. 
And we also, on the web, during this week we streamed more than 100 years of video to 148 nations, and the websites are still there and they will be forever, actually, because Hurtigruten was selected to be part of the Norwegian UNESCO list of documents, and it's also in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest documentary ever. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
But it's a long program, so some watched part of it, like the Prime Minister. 
Some watched a little bit more. 
It says, "" I haven't used my bed for five days. "" And he's 82 years old, and he hardly slept. 
He kept watching because something might happen, though it probably won't. (Laughter) This is the number of viewers along the route. 
You can see the famous Trollfjord and a day after, all-time high for NRK2. 
If you see the four biggest channels in Norway during June 2011, they will look like this, and as a TV producer, it's a pleasure to put Hurtigruten on top of it. 
It looks like this: 3.2 million Norwegians watched part of this program, and we are only five million here. 
Even the passengers on board the Hurtigruten coastal ship — (Laughter) — they chose to watched the telly instead of turning 90 degrees and watching out the window. 
So we were allowed to be part of people's living room with this strange TV program, with music, nature, people. 
And Slow TV was now a buzzword, and we started looking for other things we could make Slow TV about. 
So we could either take something long and make it a topic, like with the railway and the Hurtigruten, or we could take a topic and make it long. 
This is the last project. It's the peep show. 
It's 14 hours of birdwatching on a TV screen, actually 87 days on the web. 
We have made 18 hours of live salmon fishing. 
It actually took three hours before we got the first fish, and that's quite slow. 
We have made 12 hours of boat ride into the beautiful Telemark Canal, and we have made another train ride with the northern railway, and because this we couldn't do live, we did it in four seasons just to give the viewer another experience on the way. 
So our next project got us some attention outside Norway. 
This is from the Colbert Report on Comedy Central. 
(Video) Stephen Colbert: I've got my eye on a wildly popular program from Norway called "" National Firewood Night, "" which consisted of mostly people in parkas chatting and chopping in the woods, and then eight hours of a fire burning in a fireplace. (Laughter) It destroyed the other top Norwegian shows, like "" So You Think You Can Watch Paint Dry "" and "" The Amazing Glacier Race. "" And get this, almost 20 percent of the Norwegian population tuned in, 20 percent. 
TH: So, when wood fire and wood chopping can be that interesting, why not knitting? 
So on our next project, we used more than eight hours to go live from a sheep to a sweater, and Jimmy Kimmel in the ABC show, he liked that. 
(Music) (Video) Jimmy Kimmel: Even the people on the show are falling asleep, and after all that, the knitters actually failed to break the world record. 
They did not succeed, but remember the old Norwegian saying, it's not whether you win or lose that counts. 
In fact, nothing counts, and death is coming for us all. 
(Laughter) TH: Exactly. So why does this stand out? 
This is so completely different to other TV programming. 
We take the viewer on a journey that happens right now in real time, and the viewer gets the feeling of actually being there, actually being on the train, on the boat, and knitting together with others, and the reason I think why they're doing that is because we don't edit the timeline. 
It's important that we don't edit the timeline, and it's also important that what we make Slow TV about is something that we all can relate to, that the viewer can relate to, and that somehow has a root in our culture. 
This is a picture from last summer when we traveled the coast again for seven weeks. 
And of course this is a lot of planning, this is a lot of logistics. 
So this is the working plan for 150 people last summer, but more important is what you don't plan. 
You don't plan what's going to happen. 
You have to just take your cameras with you. 
It's like a sports event. 
You rig them and you see what's happening. 
So this is actually the whole running order for Hurtigruten, 134 hours, just written on one page. 
We didn't know anything more when we left Bergen. 
So you have to let the viewers make the stories themselves, and I'll give you an example of that. 
This is from last summer, and as a TV producer, it's a nice picture, but now you can cut to the next one. 
But this is Slow TV, so you have to keep this picture until it really starts hurting your stomach, and then you keep it a little bit longer, and when you keep it that long, I'm sure some of you now have noticed the cow. 
Some of you have seen the flag. 
Some of you start wondering, is the farmer at home? 
Has he left? Is he watching the cow? 
And where is that cow going? 
So my point is, the longer you keep a picture like this, and we kept it for 10 minutes, you start making the stories in your own head. 
That's Slow TV. 
So we think that Slow TV is one nice way of telling a TV story, and we think that we can continue doing it, not too often, once or twice a year, so we keep the feeling of an event, and we also think that the good Slow TV idea, that's the idea when people say, "Oh no, you can't put that on TV." 
When people smile, it might be a very good slow idea, so after all, life is best when it's a bit strange. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm going to talk about post-conflict recovery and how we might do post-conflict recovery better. 
The record on post-conflict recovery is not very impressive. 
40 percent of all post-conflict situations, historically, have reverted back to conflict within a decade. 
In fact, they've accounted for half of all civil wars. 
Why has the record been so poor? 
Well, the conventional approach to post-conflict situations has rested on, on kind of, three principles. 
The first principle is: it's the politics that matters. 
So, the first thing that is prioritized is politics. 
Try and build a political settlement first. 
And then the second step is to say, "The situation is admittedly dangerous, but only for a short time." 
So get peacekeepers there, but get them home as soon as possible. 
So, short-term peacekeepers. 
And thirdly, what is the exit strategy for the peacekeepers? 
It's an election. 
That will produce a legitimate and accountable government. 
So that's the conventional approach. 
I think that approach denies reality. 
We see that there is no quick fix. 
There's certainly no quick security fix. 
I've tried to look at the risks of reversion to conflict, during our post-conflict decade. 
And the risks stay high throughout the decade. 
And they stay high regardless of the political innovations. 
Does an election produce an accountable and legitimate government? 
What an election produces is a winner and a loser. 
And the loser is unreconciled. 
The reality is that we need to reverse the sequence. 
It's not the politics first; it's actually the politics last. 
The politics become easier as the decade progresses if you're building on a foundation of security and economic development — the rebuilding of prosperity. 
Why does the politics get easier? 
And why is it so difficult initially? 
Because after years of stagnation and decline, the mentality of politics is that it's a zero-sum game. 
If the reality is stagnation, I can only go up if you go down. 
And that doesn't produce a productive politics. 
And so the mentality has to shift from zero-sum to positive-sum before you can get a productive politics. 
You can only get positive, that mental shift, if the reality is that prosperity is being built. 
And in order to build prosperity, we need security in place. 
So that is what you get when you face reality. 
But the objective of facing reality is to change reality. 
And so now let me suggest two complimentary approaches to changing the reality of the situations. 
The first is to recognize the interdependence of three key actors, who are different actors, and at the moment are uncoordinated. 
The first actor is the Security Council. 
The Security Council typically has the responsibility for providing the peacekeepers who build the security. 
And that needs to be recognized, first of all, that peacekeeping works. 
It is a cost-effective approach. 
It does increase security. 
But it needs to be done long-term. 
It needs to be a decade-long approach, rather than just a couple of years. 
That's one actor, the Security Council. 
The second actor, different cast of guys, is the donors. 
The donors provide post-conflict aid. 
Typically in the past, the donors have been interested in the first couple of years, and then they got bored. 
They moved on to some other situation. 
Post-conflict economic recovery is a slow process. 
There are no quick processes in economics except decline. 
You can do that quite fast. 
(Laughter) So the donors have to stick with this situation for at least a decade. 
And then the third key actor is the post-conflict government. 
And there are two key things it's got to do. 
One is it's got to do economic reform, not fuss about the political constitution. 
It's got to reform economic policy. 
Why? Because during conflict economic policy typically deteriorates. 
Governments snatch short-term opportunities and, by the end of the conflict, the chickens have come home to roost. 
So this legacy of conflict is really bad economic policy. 
So there is a reform agenda, and there is an inclusion agenda. 
The inclusion agenda doesn't come from elections. 
Elections produce a loser, who is then excluded. 
So the inclusion agenda means genuinely bringing people inside the tent. 
So those three actors. 
And they are interdependent over a long term. 
If the Security Council doesn't commit to security over the course of a decade, you don't get the reassurance which produces private investment. 
If you don't get the policy reform and the aid, you don't get the economic recovery, which is the true exit strategy for the peacekeepers. 
So we should recognize that interdependence, by formal, mutual commitments. 
The United Nations actually has a language for these mutual commitments, the recognition of mutual commitments; it's called the language of compact. 
And so we need a post-conflict compact. 
The United Nations even has an agency which could broker these compacts; it's called the Peace Building Commission. 
It would be ideal to have a standard set of norms where, when we got to a post-conflict situation, there was an expectation of these mutual commitments from the three parties. 
So that's idea one: recognize interdependence. 
And now let me turn to the second approach, which is complimentary. 
And that is to focus on a few critical objectives. 
Typical post-conflict situation is a zoo of different actors with different priorities. 
And indeed, unfortunately, if you navigate by needs you get a very unfocused agenda, because in these situations, needs are everywhere, but the capacity to implement change is very limited. 
So we have to be disciplined and focus on things that are critical. 
And I want to suggest that in the typical post-conflict situation three things are critical. 
One is jobs. 
One is improvements in basic services — especially health, which is a disaster during conflict. 
So jobs, health, and clean government. 
Those are the three critical priorities. 
So I'm going to talk a little about each of them. 
Jobs. 
What is a distinctive approach to generating jobs in post-conflict situations? 
And why are jobs so important? 
Jobs for whom? Especially jobs for young men. 
In post-conflict situations, the reason that they so often revert to conflict, is not because elderly women get upset. 
It's because young men get upset. 
And why are they upset? Because they have nothing to do. 
And so we need a process of generating jobs, for ordinary young men, fast. 
Now, that is difficult. 
Governments in post-conflict situation often respond by puffing up the civil service. 
That is not a good idea. 
It's not sustainable. 
In fact, you're building a long-term liability by inflating civil service. 
But getting the private sector to expand is also difficult, because any activity which is open to international trade is basically going to be uncompetitive in a post-conflict situation. 
These are not environments where you can build export manufacturing. 
There's one sector which isn't exposed to international trade, and which can generate a lot of jobs, and which is, in any case, a sensible sector to expand, post-conflict, and that is the construction sector. 
The construction sector has a vital role, obviously, in reconstruction. 
But typically that sector has withered away during conflict. 
During conflict people are doing destruction. 
There isn't any construction going on. And so the sector shrivels away. 
And then when you try and expand it, because it's shriveled away, you encounter a lot of bottlenecks. 
Basically, prices soar and crooked politicians then milk the rents from the sector, but it doesn't generate any jobs. 
And so the policy priority is to break the bottlenecks in expanding the construction sector. 
What might the bottlenecks be? 
Just think what you have to do successfully to build a structure, using a lot of labor. 
First you need access to land. 
Often the legal system is broken down so you can't even get access to land. 
Secondly you need skills, the mundane skills of the construction sector. 
In post-conflict situations we don't just need Doctors Without Borders, we need Bricklayers Without Borders, to rebuild the skill set. 
We need firms. The firms have gone away. 
So we need to encourage the growth of local firms. 
If we do that, we not only get the jobs, we get the improvements in public infrastructure, the restoration of public infrastructure. 
Let me turn from jobs to the second objective, which is improving basic social services. 
And to date, there has been a sort of a schizophrenia in the donor community, as to how to build basic services in post-conflict sectors. 
On the one hand it pays lip service to the idea of rebuild an effective state in the image of Scandinavia in the 1950s. 
Lets develop line ministries of this, that, and the other, that deliver these services. 
And it's schizophrenic because in their hearts donors know that's not a realistic agenda, and so what they also do is the total bypass: just fund NGOs. 
Neither of those approaches is sensible. 
And so what I'd suggest is what I call Independent Service Authorities. 
It's to split the functions of a monopoly line ministry up into three. 
The planning function and policy function stays with the ministry; the delivery of services on the ground, you should use whatever works — churches, NGOs, local communities, whatever works. 
And in between, there should be a public agency, the Independent Service Authority, which channels public money, and especially donor money, to the retail providers. 
So the NGOs become part of a public government system, rather than independent of it. 
One advantage of that is that you can allocate money coherently. 
Another is, you can make NGOs accountable. 
You can use yardstick competition, so they have to compete against each other for the resources. 
The good NGOs, like Oxfam, are very keen on this idea. 
They want to have the discipline and accountability. 
So that's a way to get basic services scaled up. 
And because the government would be funding it, it would be co-branding these services. 
So they wouldn't be provided thanks to the United States government and some NGO. 
They would be co-branded as being done by the post-conflict government, in the country. 
So, jobs, basic services, finally, clean government. 
Clean means follow their money. 
The typical post-conflict government is so short of money that it needs our money just to be on a life-support system. 
You can't get the basic functions of the state done unless we put money into the core budget of these countries. 
But, if we put money into the core budget, we know that there aren't the budget systems with integrity that mean that money will be well spent. 
And if all we do is put money in and close our eyes it's not just that the money is wasted — that's the least of the problems — it's that the money is captured. 
It's captured by the crooks who are at the heart of the political problem. 
And so inadvertently we empower the people who are the problem. 
So building clean government means, yes, provide money to the budget, but also provide a lot of scrutiny, which means a lot of technical assistance that follows the money. 
Paddy Ashdown, who was the grand high nabob of Bosnia to the United Nations, in his book about his experience, he said, "" I realize what I needed was accountants without borders, to follow that money. "" So that's the — let me wrap up, this is the package. 
What's the goal? 
If we follow this, what would we hope to achieve? 
That after 10 years, the focus on the construction sector would have produced both jobs and, hence, security — because young people would have jobs — and it would have reconstructed the infrastructure. 
So that's the focus on the construction sector. 
The focus on the basic service delivery through these independent service authorities would have rescued basic services from their catastrophic levels, and it would have given ordinary people the sense that the government was doing something useful. 
The emphasis on clean government would have gradually squeezed out the political crooks, because there wouldn't be any money in taking part in the politics. 
And so gradually the selection, the composition of politicians, would shift from the crooked to the honest. 
Where would that leave us? 
Gradually it would shift from a politics of plunder to a politics of hope. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

So how many of you have ever been in a cave before? 
Okay, a few of you. 
When you think of a cave, most of you think of a tunnel going through solid rock, and in fact, that's how most caves are. 
Around this half of the country, most of your caves are made of limestone. 
Back where I'm from, most of our caves are made of lava rock, because we have a lot of volcanoes out there. 
But the caves I want to share with you today are made completely of ice, specifically glacier ice that's formed in the side of the tallest mountain in the state of Oregon, called Mount Hood. 
Now Mount Hood's only one hour's drive from Portland, the largest city in Oregon, where over two million people live. 
Now the most exciting thing for a cave explorer is to find a new cave and be the first human to ever go into it. 
The second most exciting thing for a cave explorer is to be the first one to make a map of a cave. 
Now these days, with so many people hiking around, it's pretty hard to find a new cave, so you can imagine how excited we were to find three new caves within sight of Oregon's largest city and realize that they had never been explored or mapped before. 
It was kind of like being an astronaut, because we were getting to see things and go places that no one had ever seen or gone to before. 
So what is a glacier? 
Well, those of you who have ever seen or touched snow, you know that it's really light, because it's just a bunch of tiny ice crystals clumped together, and it's mostly air. 
If you squish a handful of snow to make a snowball, it gets really small, hard and dense. 
Well, on a mountain like Hood, where it snows over 20 feet a year, it crushes the air out of it and gradually forms it into hard blue ice. 
Now each year, more and more ice stacks up on top of it, and eventually it gets so heavy that it starts to slide down the mountain under its own weight, forming a slow-moving river of ice. 
When ice packed like that starts to move, we call it a glacier, and we give it a name. 
The name of the glacier these caves are formed in is the Sandy Glacier. 
Now each year, as new snow lands on the glacier, it melts in the summer sun, and it forms little rivers of water on the flow along the ice, and they start to melt and bore their way down through the glacier, forming big networks of caves, sometimes going all the way down to the underlying bedrock. 
Now the crazy thing about glacier caves is that each year, new tunnels form. 
Different waterfalls pop up or move around from place to place inside the cave. 
Warm water from the top of the ice is boring its way down, and warm air from below the mountain actually rises up, gets into the cave, and melts the ceilings back taller and taller. 
But the weirdest thing about glacier caves is that the entire cave is moving, because it's formed inside a block of ice the size of a small city that's slowly sliding down the mountain. 
Now this is Brent McGregor, my cave exploration partner. 
He and I have both been exploring caves a long time and we've been climbing mountains a long time, but neither one of us had ever really explored a glacier cave before. 
Back in 2011, Brent saw a YouTube video of a couple of hikers that stumbled across the entrance to one of these caves. 
There were no GPS coordinates for it, and all we knew was that it was somewhere out on the Sandy Glacier. 
So in July of that year, we went out on the glacier, and we found a big crack in the ice. 
We had to build snow and ice anchors so that we could tie off ropes and rappel down into the hole. 
This is me looking into the entrance crevasse. 
At the end of this hole, we found a huge tunnel going right up the mountain underneath thousands of tons of glacier ice. 
We followed this cave back for about a half mile until it came to an end, and then with the help of our survey tools we made a three-dimensional map of the cave on our way back out. 
So how do you map a cave? 
Well, cave maps aren't like trail maps or road maps because they have pits and holes going to overlapping levels. 
To make a cave map, you have to set up survey stations every few feet inside the cave, and you use a laser to measure the distance between those stations. 
Then you use a compass and an inclinometer to measure the direction the cave is headed and measure the slope of the floor and the ceilings. 
Now those of you taking trigonometry, that particular type of math is very useful for making maps like this because it allows you to measure heights and distances without actually having to go there. 
In fact, the more I mapped and studied caves, the more useful I found all that math that I originally hated in school to be. 
So when you're done surveying, you take all this data and you punch it into a computer and you find someone that can draw really well, and you have them draft up a map that looks something like this, and it'll show you both a bird's-eye view of the passage as well as a profile view of the passage, kind of like an ant farm view. 
We named this cave Snow Dragon Cave because it was like a big dragon sleeping under the snow. 
Now later this summer, as more snow melted off the glacier, we found more caves, and we realized they were all connected. 
Not long after we mapped Snow Dragon, Brent discovered this new cave not very far away. 
The inside of it was coated with ice, so we had to wear big spikes on our feet called crampons so we could walk around without slipping. 
This cave was amazing. 
The ice in the ceiling was glowing blue anad green because the sunlight from far above was shining through the ice and lighting it all up. 
And we couldn't understand why this cave was so much colder than Snow Dragon until we got to the end and we found out why. 
There was a huge pit or shaft called a moulin going 130 feet straight up to the surface of the glacier. 
Cold air from the top of the mountain was flowing down this hole and blasting through the cave, freezing everything inside of it. 
And we were so excited about finding this new pit, we actually came back in January the following year so we could be the first ones to explore it. 
It was so cold outside, we actually had to sleep inside the cave. 
There's our camp on the left side of this entrance room. 
The next morning, we climbed out of the cave and hiked all the way to the top of the glacier, where we finally rigged and rappelled this pit for the very first time. 
Brent named this cave Pure Imagination, I think because the beautiful sights we saw in there were beyond what we could have ever imagined. 
So besides really cool ice, what else is inside these caves? 
Well not too much lives in them because they're so cold and the entrance is actually covered up with snow for about eight months of the year. 
But there are some really cool things in there. 
There's weird bacteria living in the water that actually eat and digest rocks to make their own food to live under this ice. 
In fact, this past summer, scientists collected samples of water and ice specifically to see if things called extremophiles, tiny lifeforms that are evolved to live in completely hostile conditions, might be living under the ice, kind of like what they hope to find on the polar icecaps of Mars someday. 
Another really cool things is that, as seeds and birds land on the surface of the glacier and die, they get buried in the snow and gradually become part of the glacier, sinking deeper and deeper into the ice. 
As these caves form and melt their way up into the ice, they make these artifacts rain down from the ceiling and fall onto the cave floor, where we end up finding them. 
For example, this is a noble fir seed we found. 
It's been frozen in the ice for over 100 years, and it's just now starting to sprout. 
This mallard duck feather was found over 1,800 feet in the back of Snow Dragon Cave. 
This duck died on the surface of the glacier long, long ago, and its feathers have finally made it down through over 100 feet of ice before falling inside the cave. 
And this beautiful quartz crystal was also found in the back of Snow Dragon. 
Even now, Brent and I find it hard to believe that all these discoveries were essentially in our own backyard, hidden away, just waiting to be found. 
Like I said earlier, the idea of discovering in this busy world we live in kind of seems like something you can only do with space travel now, but that's not true. 
Every year, new caves get discovered that no one has ever been in before. 
So it's actually not too late for one of you to become a discoverer yourself. 
You just have to be willing to look and go where people don't often go and focus your eyes and your mind to recognize the discovery when you see it, because it might be in your own backyard. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

So, I have a feature on my website where every week people submit hypothetical questions for me to answer, and I try to answer them using math, science and comics. 
So for example, one person asked, what would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent of the speed of light? 
So I did some calculations. 
Now, normally, when an object flies through the air, the air will flow around the object, but in this case, the ball would be going so fast that the air molecules wouldn't have time to move out of the way. 
The ball would smash right into and through them, and the collisions with these air molecules would knock away the nitrogen, carbon and hydrogen from the ball, fragmenting it off into tiny particles, and also triggering waves of thermonuclear fusion in the air around it. 
This would result in a flood of x-rays that would spread out in a bubble along with exotic particles, plasma inside, centered on the pitcher's mound, and that would move away from the pitcher's mound slightly faster than the ball. 
Now at this point, about 30 nanoseconds in, the home plate is far enough away that light hasn't had time to reach it, which means the batter still sees the pitcher about to throw and has no idea that anything is wrong. 
(Laughter) Now, after 70 nanoseconds, the ball will reach home plate, or at least the cloud of expanding plasma that used to be the ball, and it will engulf the bat and the batter and the plate and the catcher and the umpire and start disintegrating them all as it also starts to carry them backward through the backstop, which also starts to disintegrate. 
So if you were watching this whole thing from a hill, ideally, far away, what you'd see is a bright flash of light that would fade over a few seconds, followed by a blast wave spreading out, shredding trees and houses as it moves away from the stadium, and then eventually a mushroom cloud rising up over the ruined city. (Laughter) So the Major League Baseball rules are a little bit hazy, but — (Laughter) — under rule 6.02 and 5.09, I think that in this situation, the batter would be considered hit by pitch and would be eligible to take first base, 
if it still existed. 
So this is the kind of question I answer, and I get people writing in with a lot of other strange questions. 
I've had someone write and say, scientifically speaking, what is the best and fastest way to hide a body? 
Can you do this one soon? 
And I had someone write in, I've had people write in about, can you prove whether or not you can find love again after your heart's broken? 
And I've had people send in what are clearly homework questions they're trying to get me to do for them. 
But one week, a couple months ago, I got a question that was actually about Google. 
If all digital data in the world were stored on punch cards, how big would Google's data warehouse be? 
Now, Google's pretty secretive about their operations, so no one really knows how much data Google has, and in fact, no one really knows how many data centers Google has, except people at Google itself. 
And I've tried, I've met them a few times, tried asking them, and they aren't revealing anything. 
So I decided to try to figure this out myself. 
There are a few things that I looked at here. 
I started with money. 
Google has to reveal how much they spend, in general, and that lets you put some caps on how many data centers could they be building, because a big data center costs a certain amount of money. 
And you can also then put a cap on how much of the world hard drive market are they taking up, which turns out, it's pretty sizable. 
I read a calculation at one point, I think Google has a drive failure about every minute or two, and they just throw out the hard drive and swap in a new one. 
So they go through a huge number of them. 
And so by looking at money, you can get an idea of how many of these centers they have. 
You can also look at power. 
You can look at how much electricity they need, because you need a certain amount of electricity to run the servers, and Google is more efficient than most, but they still have some basic requirements, and that lets you put a limit on the number of servers that they have. 
You can also look at square footage and see of the data centers that you know, how big are they? 
How much room is that? 
How many server racks could you fit in there? 
And for some data centers, you might get two of these pieces of information. 
You know how much they spent, and they also, say, because they had to contract with the local government to get the power provided, you might know what they made a deal to buy, so you know how much power it takes. 
Then you can look at the ratios of those numbers, and figure out for a data center where you don't have that information, you can figure out, but maybe you only have one of those, you know the square footage, then you could figure out well, maybe the power is proportional. 
And you can do this same thing with a lot of different quantities, you know, with guesses about the total amount of storage, the number of servers, the number of drives per server, and in each case using what you know to come up with a model that narrows down your guesses for the things that you don't know. 
It's sort of circling around the number you're trying to get. 
And this is a lot of fun. 
The math is not all that advanced, and really it's like nothing more than solving a sudoku puzzle. 
So what I did, I went through all of this information, spent a day or two researching. 
And there are some things I didn't look at. 
You could always look at the Google recruitment messages that they post. 
That gives you an idea of where they have people. 
Sometimes, when people visit a data center, they'll take a cell-cam photo and post it, and they aren't supposed to, but you can learn things about their hardware that way. 
And in fact, you can just look at pizza delivery drivers. 
Turns out, they know where all the Google data centers are, at least the ones that have people in them. 
But I came up with my estimate, which I felt pretty good about, that was about 10 exabytes of data across all of Google's operations, and then another maybe five exabytes or so of offline storage in tape drives, which it turns out Google is about the world's largest consumer of. 
So I came up with this estimate, and this is a staggering amount of data. 
It's quite a bit more than any other organization in the world has, as far as we know. 
There's a couple of other contenders, especially everyone always thinks of the NSA. 
But using some of these same methods, we can look at the NSA's data centers, and figure out, you know, we don't know what's going on there, but it's pretty clear that their operation is not the size of Google's. 
Adding all of this up, I came up with the other thing that we can answer, which is, how many punch cards would this take? 
And so a punch card can hold about 80 characters, and you can fit about 2,000 or so cards into a box, and you put them in, say, my home region of New England, it would cover the entire region up to a depth of a little less than five kilometers, which is about three times deeper than the glaciers during the last ice age about 20,000 years ago. 
So this is impractical, but I think that's about the best answer I could come up with. 
And I posted it on my website. I wrote it up. 
And I didn't expect to get an answer from Google, because of course they've been so secretive, they didn't answer of my questions, and so I just put it up and said, well, I guess we'll never know. 
But then a little while later I got a message, a couple weeks later, from Google, saying, hey, someone here has an envelope for you. 
So I go and get it, open it up, and it's punch cards. (Laughter) Google-branded punch cards. 
And on these punch cards, there are a bunch of holes, and I said, thank you, thank you, okay, so what's on here? 
So I get some software and start reading it, and scan them, and it turns out it's a puzzle. 
There's a bunch of code, and I get some friends to help, and we crack the code, and then inside that is another code, and then there are some equations, and then we solve those equations, and then finally out pops a message from Google which is their official answer to my article, and it said, "" No comment. "" (Laughter) (Applause) And I love calculating these kinds of things, and it's not that I love doing the math. 
I do a lot of math, but I don't really like math for its own sake. 
What I love is that it lets you take some things that you know, and just by moving symbols around on a piece of paper, find out something that you didn't know that's very surprising. 
And I have a lot of stupid questions, and I love that math gives the power to answer them sometimes. 
And sometimes not. 
This is a question I got from a reader, an anonymous reader, and the subject line just said, "" Urgent, "" and this was the entire email: "" If people had wheels and could fly, how would we differentiate them from airplanes? "" Urgent. (Laughter) And I think there are some questions that math just cannot answer. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

I have never, ever forgotten the words of my grandmother who died in her exile: "" Son, resist Gaddafi. Fight him. 
But don't you ever turn into a Gaddafi-like revolutionary. "" Almost two years have passed since the Libyan Revolution broke out, inspired by the waves of mass mobilization in both the Tunisian and the Egyptian revolutions. 
I joined forces with many other Libyans inside and outside Libya to call for a day of rage and to initiate a revolution against the tyrannical regime of Gaddafi. 
And there it was, a great revolution. 
Young Libyan women and men were at the forefront calling for the fall of the regime, raising slogans of freedom, dignity, social justice. 
They have shown an exemplary bravery in confronting the brutal dictatorship of Gaddafi. 
They have shown a great sense of solidarity from the far east to the far west to the south. 
Eventually, after a period of six months of brutal war and a toll rate of almost 50,000 dead, we managed to liberate our country and to topple the tyrant. 
(Applause) However, Gaddafi left behind a heavy burden, a legacy of tyranny, corruption and seeds of diversions. 
For four decades Gaddafi's tyrannical regime destroyed the infrastructure as well as the culture and the moral fabric of Libyan society. 
Aware of the devastation and the challenges, I was keen among many other women to rebuild the Libyan civil society, calling for an inclusive and just transition to democracy and national reconciliation. 
Almost 200 organizations were established in Benghazi during and immediately after the fall of Gaddafi — almost 300 in Tripoli. 
After a period of 33 years in exile, I went back to Libya, and with unique enthusiasm, I started organizing workshops on capacity building, on human development of leadership skills. 
With an amazing group of women, I co-founded the Libyan Women's Platform for Peace, a movement of women, leaders, from different walks of life, to lobby for the sociopolitical empowerment of women and to lobby for our right for equal participation in building democracy and peace. 
I met a very difficult environment in the pre-elections, an environment which was increasingly polarized, an environment which was shaped by the selfish politics of dominance and exclusion. 
I led an initiative by the Libyan Women's Platform for Peace to lobby for a more inclusive electoral law, a law that would give every citizen, no matter what your background, the right to vote and run, and most importantly to stipulate on political parties the alternation of male and female candidates vertically and horizontally in their lists, creating the zipper list. 
Eventually, our initiative was adopted and successful. 
Women won 17.5 percent of the National Congress in the first elections ever in 52 years. 
(Applause) However, bit by bit, the euphoria of the elections, and of the revolution as a whole, was fading out — for every day we were waking up to the news of violence. 
One day we wake up to the news of the desecration of ancient mosques and Sufi tombs. 
On another day we wake up to the news of the murder of the American ambassador and the attack on the consulate. On another day we wake up to the news 
of the assassination of army officers. 
And every day, every day we wake up with the rule of the militias and their continuous violations of human rights of prisoners and their disrespect of the rule of law. 
Our society, shaped by a revolutionary mindset, became more polarized and has driven away from the ideals and the principles — freedom, dignity, social justice — that we first held. 
Intolerance, exclusion and revenge became the icons of the [aftermath] of the revolution. 
I am here today not at all to inspire you with our success story of the zipper list and the elections. 
I'm rather here today to confess that we as a nation took the wrong choice, made the wrong decision. 
We did not prioritize right. 
For elections did not bring peace and stability and security in Libya. 
Did the zipper list and the alternation between female and male candidates bring peace and national reconciliation? 
No, it didn't. 
What is it, then? 
Why does our society continue to be polarized and dominated with selfish politics of dominance and exclusion, by both men and women? 
Maybe what was missing was not the women only, but the feminine values of compassion, mercy and inclusion. 
Our society needs national dialogue and consensus-building more than it needed the elections, which only reinforced polarization and division. 
Our society needs the qualitative representation of the feminine more than it needs the numerical, quantitative representation of the feminine. 
We need to stop acting as agents of rage and calling for days of rage. 
We need to start acting as agents of compassion and mercy. 
We need to develop a feminine discourse that not only honors but also implements mercy instead of revenge, collaboration instead of competition, inclusion instead of exclusion. 
These are the ideals that a war-torn Libya needs desperately in order to achieve peace. 
For peace has an alchemy, and this alchemy is about the intertwining, the alternation between the feminine and masculine perspectives. 
That's the real zipper. 
And we need to establish that existentially before we do so sociopolitically. 
According to a Quranic verse "Salam" — peace — "is the word of the all-merciful God, raheem." 
In turn, the word "" raheem, "" which is known in all Abrahamic traditions, has the same root in Arabic as the word "" rahem "" — womb — symbolizing the maternal feminine encompassing all humanity from which the male and the female, from which all tribes, all peoples, have emanated from. 
And so just as the womb entirely envelopes the embryo, which grows within it, the divine matrix of compassion nourishes the entire existence. 
Thus we are told that "" My mercy encompasses all things. "" Thus we are told that "" My mercy takes precedence over my anger. "" May we all be granted a grace of mercy. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

TED is 30. 
The world wide web is celebrating this month its 25th anniversary. 
So I've got a question for you. 
Let's talk about the journey, mainly about the future. 
Let's talk about the state. 
Let's talk about what sort of a web we want. 
So 25 years ago, then, I was working at CERN. 
I got permission in the end after about a year to basically do it as a side project. 
I wrote the code. 
I was I suppose the first user. 
There was a lot of concern that people didn't want to pick it up because it would be too complicated. 
A lot of persuasion, a lot of wonderful collaboration with other people, and bit by bit, it worked. 
It took off. It was pretty cool. 
And in fact, a few years later in 2000, five percent of the world population were using the world wide web. 
In 2007, seven years later, 17 percent. 
In 2008, we formed the World Wide Web Foundation partly to look at that and worry about that figure. 
And now here we are in 2014, and 40 percent of the world are using the world wide web, and counting. 
Obviously it's increasing. 
I want you to think about both sides of that. 
Okay, obviously to anybody here at TED, the first question you ask is, what can we do to get the other 60 percent on board as quickly as possible? 
Lots of important things. Obviously it's going to be around mobile. 
But also, I want you to think about the 40 percent, because if you're sitting there yourself sort of with a web-enabled life, you don't remember things anymore, you just look them up, then you may feel that it's been a success and we can all sit back. 
But in fact, yeah, it's been a success, there's lots of things, Khan Academy for crying out loud, there's Wikipedia, there's a huge number of free e-books that you can read online, lots of wonderful things for education, things in many areas. 
Online commerce has in some cases completely turned upside down the way commerce works altogether, made types of commerce available which weren't available at all before. 
Commerce has been almost universally affected. 
Government, not universally affected, but very affected, and on a good day, lots of open data, lots of e-government, so lots of things which are visible happening on the web. 
Also, lots of things which are less visible. 
The healthcare, late at night when they're worried about what sort of cancer somebody they care about might have, when they just talk across the Internet to somebody who they care about very much in another country. 
Those sorts of things are not, they're not out there, and in fact they've acquired a certain amount of privacy. 
So we cannot assume that part of the web, part of the deal with the web, is when I use the web, it's just a transparent, neutral medium. 
I can talk to you over it without worrying about what we in fact now know is happening, without worrying about the fact that not only will surveillance be happening but it'll be done by people who may abuse the data. 
So in fact, something we realized, we can't just use the web, we have to worry about what the underlying infrastructure of the whole thing, is it in fact of a quality that we need? 
We revel in the fact that we have this wonderful free speech. 
We can tweet, and oh, lots and lots of people can see our tweets, except when they can't, except when actually Twitter is blocked from their country, or in some way the way we try to express ourselves has put some information about the state of ourselves, the state of the country we live in, which isn't available to anybody else. 
So we must protest and make sure that censorship is cut down, that the web is opened up where there is censorship. 
We love the fact that the web is open. 
It allows us to talk. Anybody can talk to anybody. 
It doesn't matter who we are. 
And then we join these big social networking companies which are in fact effectively built as silos, so that it's much easier to talk to somebody in the same social network than it is to talk to somebody in a different one, so in fact we're sometimes limiting ourselves. 
And we also have, if you've read the book about the filter bubble, the filter bubble phenomenon is that we love to use machines which help us find stuff we like. 
So we love it when we're bathed in what things we like to click on, and so the machine automatically feeds us the stuff that we like and we end up with this rose-colored spectacles view of the world called a filter bubble. 
So here are some of the things which maybe threaten the social web we have. 
What sort of web do you want? 
I want one which is not fragmented into lots of pieces, as some countries have been suggesting they should do in reaction to recent surveillance. 
I want a web which has got, for example, is a really good basis for democracy. 
I want a web where I can use healthcare with privacy and where there's a lot of health data, clinical data is available to scientists to do research. 
I want a web where the other 60 percent get on board as fast as possible. 
I want a web which is such a powerful basis for innovation that when something nasty happens, some disaster strikes, that we can respond by building stuff to respond to it very quickly. 
So this is just some of the things that I want, from a big list, obviously it's longer. 
You have your list. 
I want us to use this 25th anniversary to think about what sort of a web we want. 
You can go to webat25.org and find some links. 
There are lots of sites where people have started to put together a Magna Carta, a bill of rights for the web. 
How about we do that? 
How about we decide, these are, in a way, becoming fundamental rights, the right to communicate with whom I want. 
What would be on your list for that Magna Carta? 
Let's crowdsource a Magna Carta for the web. 
Let's do that this year. 
Let's use the energy from the 25th anniversary to crowdsource a Magna Carta to the web. (Applause) Thank you. And do me a favor, will you? 
Fight for it for me. Okay? Thanks. 
(Applause) 

So I was born on the last day of the last year of the '70s. 
I was raised on "" Free to be you and me "" — (cheering) hip-hop — not as many woohoos for hip-hop in the house. 
Thank you. Thank you for hip-hop — and Anita Hill. 
(Cheering) My parents were radicals — (Laughter) who became, well, grown-ups. 
My dad facetiously says, "" We wanted to save the world, and instead we just got rich. "" We actually just got "" middle class "" in Colorado Springs, Colorado, but you get the picture. 
I was raised with a very heavy sense of unfinished legacy. 
At this ripe old age of 30, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to grow up in this horrible, beautiful time, and I've decided, for me, it's been a real journey and paradox. 
The first paradox is that growing up is about rejecting the past and then promptly reclaiming it. 
Feminism was the water I grew up in. 
When I was just a little girl, my mom started what is now the longest-running women's film festival in the world. 
So while other kids were watching sitcoms and cartoons, I was watching very esoteric documentaries made by and about women. 
You can see how this had an influence. 
But she was not the only feminist in the house. 
My dad actually resigned from the male-only business club in my hometown because he said he would never be part of an organization that would one day welcome his son, but not his daughter. 
(Applause) He's actually here today. (Applause) 
The trick here is my brother would become an experimental poet, not a businessman, but the intention was really good. 
(Laughter) In any case, I didn't readily claim the feminist label, even though it was all around me, because I associated it with my mom's women's groups, her swishy skirts and her shoulder pads — none of which had much cachet in the hallways of Palmer High School where I was trying to be cool at the time. 
But I suspected there was something really important about this whole feminism thing, so I started covertly tiptoeing into my mom's bookshelves and picking books off and reading them — never, of course, admitting that I was doing so. 
I didn't actually claim the feminist label until I went to Barnard College and I heard Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner speak for the first time. 
They were the co-authors of a book called "" Manifesta. "" So what very profound epiphany, you might ask, was responsible for my feminist click moment? 
Fishnet stockings. 
Jennifer Baumgardner was wearing them. 
I thought they were really hot. 
I decided, okay, I can claim the feminist label. 
Now I tell you this — I tell you this at the risk of embarrassing myself, because I think part of the work of feminism is to admit that aesthetics, that beauty, that fun do matter. 
There are lots of very modern political movements that have caught fire in no small part because of cultural hipness. 
Anyone heard of these two guys as an example? 
So my feminism is very indebted to my mom's, but it looks very different. 
My mom says, "" patriarchy. "" I say, "" intersectionality. "" So race, class, gender, ability, all of these things go into our experiences of what it means to be a woman. 
Pay equity? Yes. Absolutely a feminist issue. 
But for me, so is immigration. (Applause) Thank you. 
My mom says, "" Protest march. "" I say, "" Online organizing. "" I co-edit, along with a collective of other super-smart, amazing women, a site called Feministing.com. 
We are the most widely read feminist publication ever, and I tell you this because I think it's really important to see that there's a continuum. 
Feminist blogging is basically the 21st century version of consciousness raising. 
But we also have a straightforward political impact. 
Feministing has been able to get merchandise pulled off the shelves of Walmart. 
We got a misogynist administrator sending us hate-mail fired from a Big Ten school. 
And one of our biggest successes is we get mail from teenage girls in the middle of Iowa who say, "" I Googled Jessica Simpson and stumbled on your site. 
I realized feminism wasn't about man-hating and Birkenstocks. "" So we're able to pull in the next generation in a totally new way. 
My mom says, "" Gloria Steinem. "" I say, "" Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Miriam Perez, Ann Friedman, Jessica Valenti, Vanessa Valenti, and on and on and on and on. "" We don't want one hero. 
We don't want one icon. 
We don't want one face. 
We are thousands of women and men across this country doing online writing, community organizing, changing institutions from the inside out — all continuing the incredible work that our mothers and grandmothers started. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Which brings me to the second paradox: sobering up about our smallness and maintaining faith in our greatness all at once. 
Many in my generation — because of well-intentioned parenting and self-esteem education — were socialized to believe that we were special little snowflakes — (Laughter) who were going to go out and save the world. 
These are three words many of us were raised with. 
We walk across graduation stages, high on our overblown expectations, and when we float back down to earth, we realize we don't know what the heck it means to actually save the world anyway. 
The mainstream media often paints my generation as apathetic, and I think it's much more accurate to say we are deeply overwhelmed. 
And there's a lot to be overwhelmed about, to be fair — an environmental crisis, wealth disparity in this country unlike we've seen since 1928, and globally, a totally immoral and ongoing wealth disparity. 
Xenophobia's on the rise. The trafficking of women and girls. 
It's enough to make you feel very overwhelmed. 
I experienced this firsthand myself when I graduated from Barnard College in 2002. 
I was fired up; I was ready to make a difference. 
I went out and I worked at a non-profit, I went to grad school, I phone-banked, I protested, I volunteered, and none of it seemed to matter. 
And on a particularly dark night of December of 2004, I sat down with my family, and I said that I had become very disillusioned. 
I admitted that I'd actually had a fantasy — kind of a dark fantasy — of writing a letter about everything that was wrong with the world and then lighting myself on fire on the White House steps. 
My mom took a drink of her signature Sea Breeze, her eyes really welled with tears, and she looked right at me and she said, "" I will not stand for your desperation. "" She said, "" You are smarter, more creative and more resilient than that. "" Which brings me to my third paradox. 
Growing up is about aiming to succeed wildly and being fulfilled by failing really well. 
(Laughter) (Applause) There's a writer I've been deeply influenced by, Parker Palmer, and he writes that many of us are often whiplashed "" between arrogant overestimation of ourselves and a servile underestimation of ourselves. "" You may have guessed by now, I did not light myself on fire. 
I did what I know to do in desperation, which is write. 
I wrote the book I needed to read. 
I wrote a book about eight incredible people all over this country doing social justice work. 
I wrote about Nia Martin-Robinson, the daughter of Detroit and two civil rights activists, who's dedicating her life to environmental justice. 
I wrote about Emily Apt who initially became a caseworker in the welfare system because she decided that was the most noble thing she could do, but quickly learned, not only did she not like it, but she wasn't really good at it. 
Instead, what she really wanted to do was make films. 
So she made a film about the welfare system and had a huge impact. 
I wrote about Maricela Guzman, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, who joined the military so she could afford college. 
She was actually sexually assaulted in boot camp and went on to co-organize a group called the Service Women's Action Network. 
What I learned from these people and others was that I couldn't judge them based on their failure to meet their very lofty goals. 
Many of them are working in deeply intractable systems — the military, congress, the education system, etc. 
But what they managed to do within those systems was be a humanizing force. 
And at the end of the day, what could possibly be more important than that? 
Cornel West says, "" Of course it's a failure. 
But how good a failure is it? "" This isn't to say we give up our wildest, biggest dreams. 
It's to say we operate on two levels. 
On one, we really go after changing these broken systems of which we find ourselves a part. 
But on the other, we root our self-esteem in the daily acts of trying to make one person's day more kind, more just, etc. 
So when I was a little girl, I had a couple of very strange habits. 
One of them was I used to lie on the kitchen floor of my childhood home, and I would suck the thumb of my left hand and hold my mom's cold toes with my right hand. 
(Laughter) I was listening to her talk on the phone, which she did a lot. 
She was talking about board meetings, she was founding peace organizations, she was coordinating carpools, she was consoling friends — all these daily acts of care and creativity. 
And surely, at three and four years old, I was listening to the soothing sound of her voice, but I think I was also getting my first lesson in activist work. 
The activists I interviewed had nothing in common, literally, except for one thing, which was that they all cited their mothers as their most looming and important activist influences. 
So often, particularly at a young age, we look far afield for our models of the meaningful life, and sometimes they're in our own kitchens, talking on the phone, making us dinner, doing all that keeps the world going around and around. 
My mom and so many women like her have taught me that life is not about glory, or certainty, or security even. 
It's about embracing the paradox. 
It's about acting in the face of overwhelm. 
And it's about loving people really well. 
And at the end of the day, these things make for a lifetime of challenge and reward. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The first patient to ever be treated with an antibiotic was a policeman in Oxford. 
On his day off from work, he was scratched by a rose thorn while working in the garden. 
That small scratch became infected. 
Over the next few days, his head was swollen with abscesses, and in fact his eye was so infected that they had to take it out, and by February of 1941, this poor man was on the verge of dying. 
He was at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, and fortunately for him, a small team of doctors led by a Dr. Howard Florey had managed to synthesize a very small amount of penicillin, a drug that had been discovered 12 years before by Alexander Fleming but had never actually been used to treat a human, and indeed no one even knew if the drug would work, if it was full of impurities that would kill the patient, but Florey and his team figured if they had to use it, they might as well use it on someone who was going to die anyway. 
So they gave Albert Alexander, this Oxford policeman, the drug, and within 24 hours, he started getting better. 
His fever went down, his appetite came back. 
Second day, he was doing much better. 
They were starting to run out of penicillin, so what they would do was run with his urine across the road to re-synthesize the penicillin from his urine and give it back to him, and that worked. 
Day four, well on the way to recovery. 
This was a miracle. 
Day five, they ran out of penicillin, and the poor man died. 
So that story didn't end that well, but fortunately for millions of other people, like this child who was treated again in the early 1940s, who was again dying of a sepsis, and within just six days, you can see, recovered thanks to this wonder drug, penicillin. 
Millions have lived, and global health has been transformed. 
Now, antibiotics have been used for patients like this, but they've also been used rather frivolously in some instances, for treating someone with just a cold or the flu, which they might not have responded to an antibiotic, and they've also been used in large quantities sub-therapeutically, which means in small concentrations, to make chicken and hogs grow faster. 
Just to save a few pennies on the price of meat, we've spent a lot of antibiotics on animals, not for treatment, not for sick animals, but primarily for growth promotion. 
Now, what did that lead us to? 
Basically, the massive use of antibiotics around the world has imposed such large selection pressure on bacteria that resistance is now a problem, because we've now selected for just the resistant bacteria. 
And I'm sure you've all read about this in the newspapers, you've seen this in every magazine that you come across, but I really want you to appreciate the significance of this problem. 
This is serious. 
The next slide I'm about to show you is of carbapenem resistance in acinetobacter. 
Acinetobacter is a nasty hospital bug, and carbapenem is pretty much the strongest class of antibiotics that we can throw at this bug. 
And you can see in 1999 this is the pattern of resistance, mostly under about 10 percent across the United States. 
Now watch what happens when we play the video. 
So I don't know where you live, but wherever it is, it certainly is a lot worse now than it was in 1999, and that is the problem of antibiotic resistance. 
It's a global issue affecting both rich and poor countries, and at the heart of it, you might say, well, isn't this really just a medical issue? 
If we taught doctors how not to use antibiotics as much, if we taught patients how not to demand antibiotics, perhaps this really wouldn't be an issue, and maybe the pharmaceutical companies should be working harder to develop more antibiotics. 
Now, it turns out that there's something fundamental about antibiotics which makes it different from other drugs, which is that if I misuse antibiotics or I use antibiotics, not only am I affected but others are affected as well, in the same way as if I choose to drive to work or take a plane to go somewhere, that the costs I impose on others through global climate change go everywhere, and I don't necessarily take these costs into consideration. 
This is what economists might call a problem of the commons, and the problem of the commons is exactly what we face in the case of antibiotics as well: that we don't consider — and we, including individuals, patients, hospitals, entire health systems — do not consider the costs that they impose on others by the way antibiotics are actually used. 
Now, that's a problem that's similar to another area that we all know about, which is of fuel use and energy, and of course energy use both depletes energy as well as leads to local pollution and climate change. 
And typically, in the case of energy, there are two ways in which you can deal with the problem. 
One is, we can make better use of the oil that we have, and that's analogous to making better use of existing antibiotics, and we can do this in a number of ways that we'll talk about in a second, but the other option is the "" drill, baby, drill "" option, which in the case of antibiotics is to go find new antibiotics. 
Now, these are not separate. 
They're related, because if we invest heavily in new oil wells, we reduce the incentives for conservation of oil in the same way that's going to happen for antibiotics. 
The reverse is also going to happen, which is that if we use our antibiotics appropriately, we don't necessarily have to make the investments in new drug development. 
And if you thought that these two were entirely, fully balanced between these two options, you might consider the fact that this is really a game that we're playing. 
The game is really one of coevolution, and coevolution is, in this particular picture, between cheetahs and gazelles. 
Cheetahs have evolved to run faster, because if they didn't run faster, they wouldn't get any lunch. 
Gazelles have evolved to run faster because if they don't run faster, they would be lunch. 
Now, this is the game we're playing against the bacteria, except we're not the cheetahs, we're the gazelles, and the bacteria would, just in the course of this little talk, would have had kids and grandkids and figured out how to be resistant just by selection and trial and error, trying it over and over again. 
Whereas how do we stay ahead of the bacteria? 
We have drug discovery processes, screening molecules, we have clinical trials, and then, when we think we have a drug, then we have the FDA regulatory process. 
And once we go through all of that, then we try to stay one step ahead of the bacteria. 
Now, this is clearly not a game that can be sustained, or one that we can win by simply innovating to stay ahead. 
We've got to slow the pace of coevolution down, and there are ideas that we can borrow from energy that are helpful in thinking about how we might want to do this in the case of antibiotics as well. 
Now, if you think about how we deal with energy pricing, for instance, we consider emissions taxes, which means we're imposing the costs of pollution on people who actually use that energy. 
We might consider doing that for antibiotics as well, and perhaps that would make sure that antibiotics actually get used appropriately. 
There are clean energy subsidies, which are to switch to fuels which don't pollute as much or perhaps don't need fossil fuels. 
Now, the analogy here is, perhaps we need to move away from using antibiotics, and if you think about it, what are good substitutes for antibiotics? 
Well, turns out that anything that reduces the need for the antibiotic would really work, so that could include improving hospital infection control or vaccinating people, particularly against the seasonal influenza. 
And the seasonal flu is probably the biggest driver of antibiotic use, both in this country as well as in many other countries, and that could really help. 
A third option might include something like tradeable permits. 
And these seem like faraway scenarios, but if you consider the fact that we might not have antibiotics for many people who have infections, we might consider the fact that we might want to allocate who actually gets to use some of these antibiotics over others, and some of these might have to be on the basis of clinical need, but also on the basis of pricing. 
And certainly consumer education works. 
Very often, people overuse antibiotics or prescribe too much without necessarily knowing that they do so, and feedback mechanisms have been found to be useful, both on energy — When you tell someone that they're using a lot of energy during peak hour, they tend to cut back, and the same sort of example has been performed even in the case of antibiotics. 
A hospital in St. Louis basically would put up on a chart the names of surgeons in the ordering of how much antibiotics they'd used in the previous month, and this was purely an informational feedback, there was no shaming, but essentially that provided some information back to surgeons that maybe they could rethink how they were using antibiotics. 
Now, there's a lot that can be done on the supply side as well. 
If you look at the price of penicillin, the cost per day is about 10 cents. 
It's a fairly cheap drug. 
If you take drugs that have been introduced since then — linezolid or daptomycin — those are significantly more expensive, so to a world that has been used to paying 10 cents a day for antibiotics, the idea of paying 180 dollars per day seems like a lot. 
But what is that really telling us? 
That price is telling us that we should no longer take cheap, effective antibiotics as a given into the foreseeable future, and that price is a signal to us that perhaps we need to be paying much more attention to conservation. 
That price is also a signal that maybe we need to start looking at other technologies, in the same way that gasoline prices are a signal and an impetus, to, say, the development of electric cars. 
Prices are important signals and we need to pay attention, but we also need to consider the fact that although these high prices seem unusual for antibiotics, they're nothing compared to the price per day of some cancer drugs, which might save a patient's life only for a few months or perhaps a year, whereas antibiotics would potentially save a patient's life forever. 
So this is going to involve a whole new paradigm shift, and it's also a scary shift because in many parts of this country, in many parts of the world, the idea of paying 200 dollars for a day of antibiotic treatment is simply unimaginable. 
So we need to think about that. 
Now, there are backstop options, which is other alternative technologies that people are working on. 
It includes bacteriophages, probiotics, quorum sensing, synbiotics. 
Now, all of these are useful avenues to pursue, and they will become even more lucrative when the price of new antibiotics starts going higher, and we've seen that the market does actually respond, and the government is now considering ways of subsidizing new antibiotics and development. 
But there are challenges here. 
We don't want to just throw money at a problem. 
What we want to be able to do is invest in new antibiotics in ways that actually encourage appropriate use and sales of those antibiotics, and that really is the challenge here. 
Now, going back to these technologies, you all remember the line from that famous dinosaur film, "" Nature will find a way. "" So it's not as if these are permanent solutions. 
We really have to remember that, whatever the technology might be, that nature will find some way to work around it. 
You might think, well, this is just a problem just with antibiotics and with bacteria, but it turns out that we have the exact same identical problem in many other fields as well, with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, which is a serious problem in India and South Africa. 
Thousands of patients are dying because the second-line drugs are so expensive, and in some instances, even those don't work and you have XDR TB. 
Viruses are becoming resistant. 
Agricultural pests. Malaria parasites. 
Right now, much of the world depends on one drug, artemisinin drugs, essentially to treat malaria. 
Resistance to artemisinin has already emerged, and if this were to become widespread, that puts at risk the single drug that we have to treat malaria around the world in a way that's currently safe and efficacious. 
Mosquitos develop resistance. 
If you have kids, you probably know about head lice, and if you're from New York City, I understand that the specialty there is bedbugs. 
So those are also resistant. 
And we have to bring an example from across the pond. 
Turns out that rats are also resistant to poisons. 
Now, what's common to all of these things is the idea that we've had these technologies to control nature only for the last 70, 80 or 100 years and essentially in a blink, we have squandered our ability to control, because we have not recognized that natural selection and evolution was going to find a way to get back, and we need to completely rethink how we're going to use measures to control biological organisms, and rethink how we incentivize the development, introduction, in the case of antibiotics prescription, and use of these valuable resources. 
And we really now need to start thinking about them as natural resources. 
And so we stand at a crossroads. 
An option is to go through that rethinking and carefully consider incentives to change how we do business. 
The alternative is a world in which even a blade of grass is a potentially lethal weapon. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I used to have this recurring dream where I'd walk into a roomful of people, and I'd try not to make eye contact with anyone. 
Until someone notices me, and I just panic. 
And the person walks up to me, and says, "" Hi, my name is So-and-so. 
And what is your name? "" And I'm just quiet, unable to respond. 
After some awkward silence, he goes, "Have you forgotten your name?" 
And I'm still quiet. 
And then, slowly, all the other people in the room begin to turn toward me and ask, almost in unison, (Voice-over, several voices) "" Have you forgotten your name? "" As the chant gets louder, I want to respond, but I don't. 
I'm a visual artist. 
Some of my work is humorous, and some is a bit funny but in a sad way. 
And one thing that I really enjoy doing is making these little animations where I get to do the voice-over for all kinds of characters. 
I've been a bear. 
(Video) Bear (Safwat Saleem's voice): Hi. 
(Laughter) Safwat Saleem: I've been a whale. 
(Video) Whale (SS's voice): Hi. 
(Laughter) SS: I've been a greeting card. 
(Laughter) SS: And my personal favorite is Frankenstein's monster. 
(Video) Frankenstein's monster (SS's voice): (Grunts) (Laughter) SS: I just had to grunt a lot for that one. 
A few years ago, I made this educational video about the history of video games. 
And for that one, I got to do the voice of Space Invader. 
(Video) Space Invader (SS's voice): Hi. 
SS: A dream come true, really, (Laughter) And when that video was posted online, I just sat there on the computer, hitting "" refresh, "" excited to see the response. 
The first comment comes in. 
(Video) Comment: Great job. 
SS: Yes! 
I hit "" refresh. "" (Video) Comment: Excellent video. I look forward to the next one. 
SS: This was just the first of a two-part video. 
I was going to work on the second one next. 
I hit "" refresh. "" (Video) Comment: Where is part TWO? WHEREEEEE? I need it NOWWWWW!: P (Laughter) SS: People other than my mom were saying nice things about me, on the Internet! 
It felt like I had finally arrived. 
I hit "" refresh. "" (Video) Comment: His voice is annoying. No offense. 
SS: OK, no offense taken. Refresh. 
(Video) Comment: Could you remake this without peanut butter in your mouth? 
SS: OK, at least the feedback is somewhat constructive. Hit "" refresh. "" (Video) Comment: Please don't use this narrator again u can barely understand him. 
SS: Refresh. 
(Video) Comment: Couldn't follow because of the Indian accent. 
SS: OK, OK, OK, two things. 
Number one, I don't have an Indian accent, I have a Pakistani accent, OK? 
And number two, I clearly have a Pakistani accent. 
(Laughter) But comments like that kept coming in, so I figured I should just ignore them and start working on the second part of the video. 
I recorded my audio, but every time I sat down to edit, I just could not do it. 
Every single time, it would take me back to my childhood, when I had a much harder time speaking. 
I've stuttered for as long as I can remember. 
I was the kid in class who would never raise his hand when he had a question — or knew the answer. 
Every time the phone rang, I would run to the bathroom so I would not have to answer it. 
If it was for me, my parents would say I'm not around. 
I spent a lot of time in the bathroom. 
And I hated introducing myself, especially in groups. 
One library that keeps track of characters in the children's book collection every year, found that in 2014, only about 11 percent of the books had a character of color. 

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

I recently retired from the California Highway Patrol after 23 years of service. 
The majority of those 23 years was spent patrolling the southern end of Marin County, which includes the Golden Gate Bridge. 
The bridge is an iconic structure, known worldwide for its beautiful views of San Francisco, the Pacific Ocean, and its inspiring architecture. 
Unfortunately, it is also a magnet for suicide, being one of the most utilized sites in the world. 
The Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937. 
Joseph Strauss, chief engineer in charge of building the bridge, was quoted as saying, "" The bridge is practically suicide-proof. 
Suicide from the bridge is neither practical nor probable. "" But since its opening, over 1,600 people have leapt to their death from that bridge. 
Some believe that traveling between the two towers will lead you to another dimension — this bridge has been romanticized as such — that the fall from that frees you from all your worries and grief, and the waters below will cleanse your soul. 
But let me tell you what actually occurs when the bridge is used as a means of suicide. 
After a free fall of four to five seconds, the body strikes the water at about 75 miles an hour. 
That impact shatters bones, some of which then puncture vital organs. 
Most die on impact. 
Those that don't generally flail in the water helplessly, and then drown. 
I don't think that those who contemplate this method of suicide realize how grisly a death that they will face. 
This is the cord. 
Except for around the two towers, there is 32 inches of steel paralleling the bridge. 
This is where most folks stand before taking their lives. 
I can tell you from experience that once the person is on that cord, and at their darkest time, it is very difficult to bring them back. 
I took this photo last year as this young woman spoke to an officer contemplating her life. 
I want to tell you very happily that we were successful that day in getting her back over the rail. 
When I first began working on the bridge, we had no formal training. 
You struggled to funnel your way through these calls. 
This was not only a disservice to those contemplating suicide, but to the officers as well. 
We've come a long, long way since then. 
Now, veteran officers and psychologists train new officers. 
This is Jason Garber. 
I met Jason on July 22 of last year when I get received a call of a possible suicidal subject sitting on the cord near midspan. 
I responded, and when I arrived, I observed Jason speaking to a Golden Gate Bridge officer. 
Jason was just 32 years old and had flown out here from New Jersey. 
As a matter of fact, he had flown out here on two other occasions from New Jersey to attempt suicide on this bridge. 
After about an hour of speaking with Jason, he asked us if we knew the story of Pandora's box. 
Recalling your Greek mythology, Zeus created Pandora, and sent her down to Earth with a box, and told her, "" Never, ever open that box. "" Well one day, curiosity got the better of Pandora, and she did open the box. 
Out flew plagues, sorrows, and all sorts of evils against man. 
The only good thing in the box was hope. 
Jason then asked us, "" What happens when you open the box and hope isn't there? "" He paused a few moments, leaned to his right, and was gone. 
This kind, intelligent young man from New Jersey had just committed suicide. 
I spoke with Jason's parents that evening, and I suppose that, when I was speaking with them, that I didn't sound as if I was doing very well, because that very next day, their family rabbi called to check on me. 
Jason's parents had asked him to do so. 
The collateral damage of suicide affects so many people. 
I pose these questions to you: What would you do if your family member, friend or loved one was suicidal? 
What would you say? 
Would you know what to say? 
In my experience, it's not just the talking that you do, but the listening. 
Listen to understand. 
Don't argue, blame, or tell the person you know how they feel, because you probably don't. 
By just being there, you may just be the turning point that they need. 
If you think someone is suicidal, don't be afraid to confront them and ask the question. 
One way of asking them the question is like this: "" Others in similar circumstances have thought about ending their life; have you had these thoughts? "" Confronting the person head-on may just save their life and be the turning point for them. 
Some other signs to look for: hopelessness, believing that things are terrible and never going to get better; helplessness, believing that there is nothing that you can do about it; recent social withdrawal; and a loss of interest in life. 
I came up with this talk just a couple of days ago, and I received an email from a lady that I'd like to read you her letter. 
She lost her son on January 19 of this year, and she wrote this me this email just a couple of days ago, and it's with her permission and blessing that I read this to you. 
"" Hi, Kevin. I imagine you're at the TED Conference. 
That must be quite the experience to be there. 
I'm thinking I should go walk the bridge this weekend. 
Just wanted to drop you a note. 
Hope you get the word out to many people and they go home talking about it to their friends who tell their friends, etc. 
I'm still pretty numb, but noticing more moments of really realizing Mike isn't coming home. 
Mike was driving from Petaluma to San Francisco to watch the 49ers game with his father on January 19. 
He never made it there. 
I called Petaluma police and reported him missing that evening. 
The next morning, two officers came to my home and reported that Mike's car was down at the bridge. 
A witness had observed him jumping off the bridge at 1: 58 p.m. the previous day. 
Thanks so much for standing up for those who may be only temporarily too weak to stand for themselves. 
Who hasn't been low before without suffering from a true mental illness? 
It shouldn't be so easy to end it. 
My prayers are with you for your fight. 
The GGB, Golden Gate Bridge, is supposed to be a passage across our beautiful bay, not a graveyard. 
Good luck this week. Vicky. "" I can't imagine the courage it takes for her to go down to that bridge and walk the path that her son took that day, and also the courage just to carry on. 
I'd like to introduce you to a man I refer to as hope and courage. 
On March 11 of 2005, I responded to a radio call of a possible suicidal subject on the bridge sidewalk near the north tower. 
I rode my motorcycle down the sidewalk and observed this man, Kevin Berthia, standing on the sidewalk. 
When he saw me, he immediately traversed that pedestrian rail, and stood on that small pipe which goes around the tower. 
For the next hour and a half, I listened as Kevin spoke about his depression and hopelessness. 
Kevin decided on his own that day to come back over that rail and give life another chance. 
When Kevin came back over, I congratulated him. 
"This is a new beginning, a new life." 
But I asked him, "" What was it that made you come back and give hope and life another chance? "" And you know what he told me? 
He said, "" You listened. 
You let me speak, and you just listened. "" Shortly after this incident, I received a letter from Kevin's mother, and I have that letter with me, and I'd like to read it to you. 
"" Dear Mr. Briggs, Nothing will erase the events of March 11, but you are one of the reasons Kevin is still with us. 
I truly believe Kevin was crying out for help. 
He has been diagnosed with a mental illness for which he has been properly medicated. 
I adopted Kevin when he was only six months old, completely unaware of any hereditary traits, but, thank God, now we know. 
Kevin is straight, as he says. 
We truly thank God for you. 
Sincerely indebted to you, Narvella Berthia. "" And on the bottom she writes, "" P.S. When I visited San Francisco General Hospital that evening, you were listed as the patient. 
Boy, did I have to straighten that one out. "" Today, Kevin is a loving father and contributing member of society. 
He speaks openly about the events that day and his depression in the hopes that his story will inspire others. 
Suicide is not just something I've encountered on the job. 
It's personal. 
My grandfather committed suicide by poisoning. 
That act, although ending his own pain, robbed me from ever getting to know him. 
This is what suicide does. 
For most suicidal folks, or those contemplating suicide, they wouldn't think of hurting another person. 
They just want their own pain to end. 
Typically, this is accomplished in just three ways: sleep, drugs or alcohol, or death. 
In my career, I've responded to and been involved in hundreds of mental illness and suicide calls around the bridge. 
Of those incidents I've been directly involved with, I've only lost two, but that's two too many. 
One was Jason. 
The other was a man I spoke to for about an hour. 
During that time, he shook my hand on three occasions. 
On that final handshake, he looked at me, and he said, "Kevin, I'm sorry, but I have to go." 
And he leapt. 
Horrible, absolutely horrible. 
I do want to tell you, though, the vast majority of folks that we do get to contact on that bridge do not commit suicide. 
Additionally, that very few who have jumped off the bridge and lived and can talk about it, that one to two percent, most of those folks have said that the second that they let go of that rail, they knew that they had made a mistake and they wanted to live. 
I tell people, the bridge not only connects Marin to San Francisco, but people together also. 
That connection, or bridge that we make, is something that each and every one of us should strive to do. 
Suicide is preventable. 
There is help. There is hope. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

In my previous life, I was an artist. 
I still paint. I love art. 
I love the joy that color can give to our lives and to our communities, and I try to bring something of the artist in me in my politics, and I see part of my job today, the reason for being here, not just to campaign for my party, but for politics, and the role it can play for the better in our lives. 
For 11 years, I was mayor of Tirana, our capital. 
We faced many challenges. 
Art was part of the answer, and my name, in the very beginning, was linked with two things: demolition of illegal constructions in order to get public space back, and use of colors in order to revive the hope that had been lost in my city. 
But this use of colors was not just an artistic act. 
Rather, it was a form of political action in a context when the city budget I had available after being elected amounted to zero comma something. 
When we painted the first building, by splashing a radiant orange on the somber gray of a facade, something unimaginable happened. 
There was a traffic jam and a crowd of people gathered as if it were the location of some spectacular accident, or the sudden sighting of a visiting pop star. 
The French E.U. official in charge of the funding rushed to block the painting. 
He screeched that he would block the financing. 
"" But why? "" I asked him. 
"" Because the colors you have ordered do not meet European standards, "" he replied. 
"" Well, "" I told him, "" the surroundings do not meet European standards, even though this is not what we want, but we will choose the colors ourselves, because this is exactly what we want. 
And if you do not let us continue with our work, I will hold a press conference here, right now, right in this road, and we will tell people that you look to me just like the censors of the socialist realism era. "" Then he was kind of troubled, and asked me for a compromise. 
But I told him no, I'm sorry, compromise in colors is gray, and we have enough gray to last us a lifetime. 
(Applause) So it's time for change. 
The rehabilitation of public spaces revived the feeling of belonging to a city that people lost. 
The pride of people about their own place of living, and there were feelings that had been buried deep for years under the fury of the illegal, barbaric constructions that sprang up in the public space. 
And when colors came out everywhere, a mood of change started transforming the spirit of people. 
Big noise raised up: "" What is this? What is happening? 
What are colors doing to us? "" And we made a poll, the most fascinating poll I've seen in my life. 
We asked people, "" Do you want this action, and to have buildings painted like that? "" And then the second question was, "Do you want it to stop or do you want it to continue?" 
To the first question, 63 percent of people said yes, we like it. 
Thirty-seven said no, we don't like it. 
But to the second question, half of them that didn't like it, they wanted it to continue. (Laughter) So we noticed change. 
People started to drop less litter in the streets, for example, started to pay taxes, started to feel something they had forgotten, and beauty was acting as a guardsman where municipal police, or the state itself, were missing. 
One day I remember walking along a street that had just been colored, and where we were in the process of planting trees, when I saw a shopkeeper and his wife putting a glass facade to their shop. 
They had thrown the old shutter in the garbage collection place. 
"" Why did you throw away the shutters? "" I asked him. 
"" Well, because the street is safer now, "" they answered. 
"Safer? Why? They have posted more policemen here?" 
"" Come on, man! What policemen? 
You can see it for yourself. There are colors, streetlights, new pavement with no potholes, trees. So it's beautiful; it's safe. "" And indeed, it was beauty that was giving people this feeling of being protected. 
And this was not a misplaced feeling. 
Crime did fall. 
The freedom that was won in 1990 brought about a state of anarchy in the city, while the barbarism of the '90s brought about a loss of hope for the city. 
The paint on the walls did not feed children, nor did it tend the sick or educate the ignorant, but it gave hope and light, and helped to make people see there could be a different way of doing things, a different spirit, a different feel to our lives, and that if we brought the same energy and hope to our politics, we could build a better life for each other and for our country. 
We removed 123,000 tons of concrete only from the riverbanks. 
We demolished more than 5,000 illegal buildings all over the city, up to eight stories high, the tallest of them. 
We planted 55,000 trees and bushes in the streets. 
We established a green tax, and then everybody accepted it and all businessmen paid it regularly. 
By means of open competitions, we managed to recruit in our administration many young people, and we thus managed to build a de-politicized public institution where men and women were equally represented. 
International organizations have invested a lot in Albania during these 20 years, not all of it well spent. 
When I told the World Bank directors that I wanted them to finance a project to build a model reception hall for citizens precisely in order to fight endemic daily corruption, they did not understand me. 
But people were waiting in long queues under sun and under rain in order to get a certificate or just a simple answer from two tiny windows of two metal kiosks. 
They were paying in order to skip the queue, the long queue. 
The reply to their requests was met by a voice coming from this dark hole, and, on the other hand, a mysterious hand coming out to take their documents while searching through old documents for the bribe. 
We could change the invisible clerks within the kiosks, every week, but we could not change this corrupt practice. 
"" I'm convinced, "" I told a German official with the World Bank, "" that it would be impossible for them to be bribed if they worked in Germany, in a German administration, just as I am convinced that if you put German officials from the German administration in those holes, they would be bribed just the same. "" (Applause) It's not about genes. 
It's not about some being with a high conscience and some others having not a conscience. 
It's about system, it's about organization. 
It's also about environment and respect. 
We removed the kiosks. 
We built the bright new reception hall that made people, Tirana citizens, think they had traveled abroad when they entered to make their requests. 
We created an online system of control and so speeded up all the processes. 
We put the citizen first, and not the clerks. 
The corruption in the state administration of countries like Albania — it's not up to me to say also like Greece — can be fought only by modernization. 
Reinventing the government by reinventing politics itself is the answer, and not reinventing people based on a ready-made formula that the developed world often tries in vain to impose to people like us. 
(Applause) Things have come to this point because politicians in general, but especially in our countries, let's face it, think people are stupid. 
They take it for granted that, come what may, people have to follow them, while politics, more and more, fails to offer answers for their public concerns or the exigencies of the common people. 
Politics has come to resemble a cynical team game played by politicians, while the public has been pushed aside as if sitting on the seats of a stadium in which passion for politics is gradually making room for blindness and desperation. 
Seen from those stairs, all politicians today seem the same, and politics has come to resemble a sport that inspires more aggressiveness and pessimism than social cohesion and the desire for civic protaganism. 
Barack Obama won — (Applause) — because he mobilized people as never before through the use of social networks. 
He did not know each and every one of them, but with an admirable ingenuity, he managed to transform them into activists by giving them all the possibility to hold in their hands the arguments and the instruments that each would need to campaign in his name by making his own campaign. 
I tweet. I love it. 
I love it because it lets me get the message out, but it also lets people get their messages to me. 
This is politics, not from top down, but from the bottom up, and sideways, and allowing everybody's voice to be heard is exactly what we need. 
Politics is not just about leaders. 
It's not just about politicians and laws. 
It is about how people think, how they view the world around them, how they use their time and their energy. 
When people say all politicians are the same, ask yourself if Obama was the same as Bush, if François Hollande is the same as Sarkozy. 
They are not. They are human beings with different views and different visions for the world. 
When people say nothing can change, just stop and think what the world was like 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago. 
Our world is defined by the pace of change. 
We can all change the world. 
I gave you a very small example of how one thing, the use of color, can make change happen. 
I want to make more change as Prime Minister of my country, but every single one of you can make change happen if you want to. 
President Roosevelt, he said, "Believe you can, and you are halfway there." 
Efharisto and kalinihta. 
(Applause) 

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

(Music) (Applause) I'm Jon M. Chu. And I'm not a dancer, I'm not a choreographer — I'm actually a filmmaker, a storyteller. 
I directed a movie two years ago called "" Step Up 2: The Streets. "" Anybody? Anybody? Yeah! 
During that movie I got to meet a ton of hip-hop dancers — amazing, the best in the world — and they brought me into a society, the sort of underground street culture that blew my mind. 
I mean, this is literally human beings with super-human strength and abilities. 
They could fly in the air. They could bend their elbow all the way back. 
They could spin on their heads for 80 times in a row. 
I'd never seen anything like that. 
When I was growing up, my heroes were people like Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Michael Jackson. 
I grew up in a musical family. 
(Laughter) And those guys, those were like, ultimate heroes. 
Being a shy, little, skinny Asian kid growing up in the Silicon Valley with low self-esteem, those guys made me believe in something bigger. 
Those guys made me want to, like, "" I'm going to do that moonwalk at that bar mitzvah tonight for that girl. "" (Applause) And it seems like those dance heroes have disappeared, sort of relegated to the background of pop stars and music videos. 
But after seeing what I've seen, the truth is, they have not disappeared at all. 
They're here, getting better and better every day. 
And dance has progressed. 
It is insane what dance is right now. 
Dance has never had a better friend than technology. 
Online videos and social networking... 
dancers have created a whole global laboratory online for dance, where kids in Japan are taking moves from a YouTube video created in Detroit, building on it within days and releasing a new video, while teenagers in California are taking the Japanese video and remixing it with a Philly flair to create a whole new dance style in itself. 
And this is happening every day. 
And from these bedrooms and living rooms and garages, with cheap webcams, lies the world's great dancers of tomorrow. 
Our Fred Astaires, our Gene Kellys our Michael Jacksons are right at our fingertips, and may not have that opportunity, except for us. 
So, we created the LXD, sort of a — the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers, a justice league of dancers that believe that dance can have a transformative effect on the world. 
A living, breathing comic book series, but unlike Spiderman and Iron Man, these guys can actually do it. 
And we're going to show you some today. So, let me introduce to you, some of our heroes right now. 
We got Madd Chadd, Lil 'C, Kid David and J Smooth. 
Please be excited, have fun, yell, scream. 
Ladies and gentlemen: The LXD. 
(Applause) (Video): Madd Chadd: When people first see me, I get a lot of different reactions actually. 
Sometimes you would think that maybe kids would enjoy it, but sometimes they get a little freaked out. 
And, I don't know, I kind of get a kick out of that a little bit. 
(Music) (Applause) J Smooth: When I'm in the zone — I'm dancing and free styling it — I actually visually kind of picture lines, and moving them. 
I think of like, Transformers, like how panels open and then they fold, they fold in, and then you close that panel. 
And then another thing opens, you close that. 
(Music) (Applause) Kid David: It's kind of like, honestly a lot of times I don't really know what's going on when I'm dancing. 
Because at that point it's just really like, it's my body and the music. 
It's not really a conscious decision, "I'm going to do this next, I'm going to do this." 
It's kind of like this other level where you can't make choices anymore, and it's just your body reacting to certain sounds in the music. 
I got my name just because I was so young. 
I was young when I started. I was younger than a lot of the people I was dancing with. 
So, it was always like, they called me Kid David, because I was the kid. 
(Music) (Applause) L'il C: I tell them to create a ball, and then you just use that ball of energy. 
And instead of throwing it out, people would think that's a krump move, that's a krump move. 
That's not a krump move. You're going to throw it out, you throw it out, and you hold it. 
And you let it go, and then right when you see the tail, you grab it by the tail, then you bring it back in. 
And you just got this piece of energy and you just, you're manipulating it. 
You know, you create power, then you tame it. 
(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) 

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

For the past few years, I've been spending my summers in the marine biological laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. 
And there, what I've been doing is essentially renting a boat. 
What I would like to do is ask you to come on a boat ride with me tonight. 
So, we ride off from Eel Pond into Vineyard Sound, right off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, equipped with a drone to identify potential spots from which to peer into the Atlantic. 
Earlier, I was going to say into the depths of the Atlantic, but we don't have to go too deep to reach the unknown. 
Here, barely two miles away from what is arguably the greatest marine biology lab in the world, we lower a simple plankton net into the water and bring up to the surface things that humanity rarely pays any attention to, and oftentimes has never seen before. 
Here's one of the organisms that we caught in our net. 
This is a jellyfish. 
But look closely, and living inside of this animal is another organism that is very likely entirely new to science. 
A complete new species. 
Or how about this other transparent beauty with a beating heart, asexually growing on top of its head, progeny that will move on to reproduce sexually. 
Let me say that again: this animal is growing asexually on top of its head, progeny that is going to reproduce sexually in the next generation. 
A weird jellyfish? 
Not quite. 
This is an ascidian. 
This is a group of animals that now we know we share extensive genomic ancestry with, and it is perhaps the closest invertebrate species to our own. 
Meet your cousin, Thalia democratica. 
(Laughter) I'm pretty sure you didn't save a spot at your last family reunion for Thalia, but let me tell you, these animals are profoundly related to us in ways that we're just beginning to understand. 
So, next time you hear anybody derisively telling you that this type of research is a simple fishing expedition, I hope that you'll remember the trip that we just took. 
Today, many of the biological sciences only see value in studying deeper what we already know — in mapping already-discovered continents. 
But some of us are much more interested in the unknown. 
We want to discover completely new continents, and gaze at magnificent vistas of ignorance. 
We crave the experience of being completely baffled by something we've never seen before. 
And yes, I agree there's a lot of little ego satisfaction in being able to say, "Hey, I was the first one to discover that." 
But this is not a self-aggrandizing enterprise, because in this type of discovery research, if you don't feel like a complete idiot most of the time, you're just not sciencing hard enough. 
(Laughter) So every summer I bring onto the deck of this little boat of ours more and more things that we know very little about. 
I would like tonight to tell you a story about life that rarely gets told in an environment like this. 
From the vantage point of our 21st-century biological laboratories, we have begun to illuminate many mysteries of life with knowledge. 
We sense that after centuries of scientific research, we're beginning to make significant inroads into understanding some of the most fundamental principles of life. 
Our collective optimism is reflected by the growth of biotechnology across the globe, striving to utilize scientific knowledge to cure human diseases. 
Things like cancer, aging, degenerative diseases; these are but some of the undesirables we wish to tame. 
I often wonder: Why is it that we are having so much trouble trying to solve the problem of cancer? 
Is it that we're trying to solve the problem of cancer, and not trying to understand life? 
Life on this planet shares a common origin, and I can summarize 3.5 billion years of the history of life on this planet in a single slide. 
What you see here are representatives of all known species in our planet. 
In this immensity of life and biodiversity, we occupy a rather unremarkable position. 
(Laughter) Homo sapiens. 
The last of our kind. 
And though I don't really want to disparage at all the accomplishments of our species, as much as we wish it to be so and often pretend that it is, we are not the measure of all things. 
We are, however, the measurers of many things. 
We relentlessly quantify, analyze and compare, and some of this is absolutely invaluable and indeed necessary. 
But this emphasis today on forcing biological research to specialize and to produce practical outcomes is actually restricting our ability to interrogate life to unacceptably narrow confines and unsatisfying depths. 
We are measuring an astonishingly narrow sliver of life, and hoping that those numbers will save all of our lives. 
How narrow do you ask? 
Well, let me give you a number. 
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently estimated that about 95 percent of our oceans remain unexplored. 
Now let that sink in for a second. 
95 percent of our oceans remain unexplored. 
I think it's very safe to say that we don't even know how much about life we do not know. 
So, it's not surprising that every week in my field we begin to see the addition of more and more new species to this amazing tree of life. 
This one for example — discovered earlier this summer, new to science, and now occupying its lonely branch in our family tree. 
What is even more tragic is that we know about a bunch of other species of animals out there, but their biology remains sorely under-studied. 
I'm sure some of you have heard about the fact that a starfish can actually regenerate its arm after it's lost. 
But some of you might not know that the arm itself can actually regenerate a complete starfish. 
And there are animals out there that do truly astounding things. 
I'm almost willing to bet that many of you have never heard of the flatworm, Schmidtea mediterranea. 
This little guy right here does things that essentially just blow my mind. 
You can grab one of these animals and cut it into 18 different fragments, and each and every one of those fragments will go on to regenerate a complete animal in under two weeks. 
18 heads, 18 bodies, 18 mysteries. 
For the past decade and a half or so, I've been trying to figure out how these little dudes do what they do, and how they pull this magic trick off. 
But like all good magicians, they're not really releasing their secrets readily to me. 
(Laughter) So here we are, after 20 years of essentially studying these animals, genome mapping, chin scratching, and thousands of amputations and thousands of regenerations, we still don't fully understand how these animals do what they do. 
Each planarian an ocean unto itself, full of unknowns. 
One of the common characteristics of all of these animals I've been talking to you about is that they did not appear to have received the memo that they need to behave according to the rules that we have derived from a handful of randomly selected animals that currently populate the vast majority of biomedical laboratories across the world. 
Meet our Nobel Prize winners. 
Seven species, essentially, that have produced for us the brunt of our understanding of biological behavior today. 
This little guy right here — three Nobel Prizes in 12 years. 
And yet, after all the attention they have garnered, and all the knowledge they have generated, as well as the lion's share of the funding, here we are standing [before] the same litany of intractable problems and many new challenges. 
And that's because, unfortunately, these seven animals essentially correspond to 0.0009 percent of all of the species that inhabit the planet. 
So I'm beginning to suspect that our specialization is beginning to impede our progress at best, and at worst, is leading us astray. 
That's because life on this planet and its history is the history of rule breakers. 
Life started on the face of this planet as single-cell organisms, swimming for millions of years in the ocean, until one of those creatures decided, "" I'm going to do things differently today; today I would like to invent something called multicellularity, and I'm going to do this. "" And I'm sure it wasn't a popular decision at the time — (Laughter) but somehow, it managed to do it. 
And then, multicellular organisms began to populate all these ancestral oceans, and they thrived. 
And we have them here today. 
Land masses began to emerge from the surface of the oceans, and another creature thought, "" Hey, that looks like a really nice piece of real estate. 
I'd like to move there. "" "" Are you crazy? 
You're going to desiccate out there. Nothing can live out of water. "" But life found a way, and there are organisms now that live on land. 
Once on land, they may have looked up into the sky and said, "" It would be nice to go to the clouds, I'm going to fly. "" "You can't break the law of gravity, there's no way you can fly." 
And yet, nature has invented — multiple and independent times — ways to fly. 
I love to study these animals that break the rules, because every time they break a rule, they invent something new that made it possible for us to be able to be here today. 
These animals did not get the memo. 
They break the rules. 
So if we're going to study animals that break the rules, shouldn't how we study them also break the rules? 
I think we need to renew our spirit of exploration. 
Rather than bring nature into our laboratories and interrogate it there, we need to bring our science into the majestic laboratory that is nature, and there, with our modern technological armamentarium, interrogate every new form of life we find, and any new biological attribute that we may find. 
We actually need to bring all of our intelligence to becoming stupid again — clueless [before] the immensity of the unknown. 
Because after all, science is not really about knowledge. 
Science is about ignorance. 
That's what we do. 
Once, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote, "" If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea... "" As a scientist and a teacher, I like to paraphrase this to read that we scientists need to teach our students to long for the endless immensity of the sea that is our ignorance. 
We Homo sapiens are the only species we know of that is driven to scientific inquiry. 
We, like all other species on this planet, are inextricably woven into the history of life on this planet. 
And I think I'm a little wrong when I say that life is a mystery, because I think that life is actually an open secret that has been beckoning our species for millennia to understand it. 
So I ask you: Aren't we the best chance that life has to know itself? 
And if so, what the heck are we waiting for? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

The universe is teeming with planets. 
I want us, in the next decade, to build a space telescope that'll be able to image an Earth about another star and figure out whether it can harbor life. 
My colleagues at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Princeton and I are working on technology that will be able to do just that in the coming years. 
Astronomers now believe that every star in the galaxy has a planet, and they speculate that up to one fifth of them have an Earth-like planet that might be able to harbor life, but we haven't seen any of them. 
We've only detected them indirectly. 
This is NASA's famous picture of the pale blue dot. 
It was taken by the Voyager spacecraft in 1990, when they turned it around as it was exiting the solar system to take a picture of the Earth from six billion kilometers away. 
I want to take that of an Earth-like planet about another star. 
Why haven't we done that? Why is that hard? 
Well to see, let's imagine we take the Hubble Space Telescope and we turn it around and we move it out to the orbit of Mars. 
We'll see something like that, a slightly blurry picture of the Earth, because we're a fairly small telescope out at the orbit of Mars. 
Now let's move ten times further away. 
Here we are at the orbit of Uranus. 
It's gotten smaller, it's got less detail, less resolve. 
We can still see the little moon, but let's go ten times further away again. 
Here we are at the edge of the solar system, out at the Kuiper Belt. 
Now it's not resolved at all. 
It's that pale blue dot of Carl Sagan's. 
But let's move yet again ten times further away. 
Here we are out at the Oort Cloud, outside the solar system, and we're starting to see the sun move into the field of view and get into where the planet is. 
One more time, ten times further away. 
Now we're at Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighbor star, and the planet is gone. 
All we're seeing is the big beaming image of the star that's ten billion times brighter than the planet, which should be in that little red circle. 
That's what we want to see. That's why it's hard. 
The light from the star is diffracting. 
It's scattering inside the telescope, creating that very bright image that washes out the planet. 
So to see the planet, we have to do something about all of that light. 
We have to get rid of it. 
I have a lot of colleagues working on really amazing technologies to do that, but I want to tell you about one today that I think is the coolest, and probably the most likely to get us an Earth in the next decade. 
It was first suggested by Lyman Spitzer, the father of the space telescope, in 1962, and he took his inspiration from an eclipse. 
You've all seen that. That's a solar eclipse. 
The moon has moved in front of the sun. 
It blocks out most of the light so we can see that dim corona around it. 
It would be the same thing if I put my thumb up and blocked that spotlight that's getting right in my eye, I can see you in the back row. 
Well, what's going on? 
Well the moon is casting a shadow down on the Earth. 
We put a telescope or a camera in that shadow, we look back at the sun, and most of the light's been removed and we can see that dim, fine structure in the corona. 
Spitzer's suggestion was we do this in space. 
We build a big screen, we fly it in space, we put it up in front of the star, we block out most of the light, we fly a space telescope in that shadow that's created, and boom, we get to see planets. 
Well that would look something like this. 
So there's that big screen, and there's no planets, because unfortunately it doesn't actually work very well, because the light waves of the light and waves diffracts around that screen the same way it did in the telescope. 
It's like water bending around a rock in a stream, and all that light just destroys the shadow. 
It's a terrible shadow. And we can't see planets. 
But Spitzer actually knew the answer. 
If we can feather the edges, soften those edges so we can control diffraction, well then we can see a planet, and in the last 10 years or so we've come up with optimal solutions for doing that. 
It looks something like that. 
We call that our flower petal starshade. 
If we make the edges of those petals exactly right, if we control their shape, we can control diffraction, and now we have a great shadow. 
It's about 10 billion times dimmer than it was before, and we can see the planets beam out just like that. 
That, of course, has to be bigger than my thumb. 
That starshade is about the size of half a football field and it has to fly 50,000 kilometers away from the telescope that has to be held right in its shadow, and then we can see those planets. 
This sounds formidable, but brilliant engineers, colleagues of mine at JPL, came up with a fabulous design for how to do that and it looks like this. 
It starts wrapped around a hub. 
It separates from the telescope. 
The petals unfurl, they open up, the telescope turns around. 
Then you'll see it flip and fly out that 50,000 kilometers away from the telescope. 
It's going to move in front of the star just like that, creates a wonderful shadow. 
Boom, we get planets orbiting about it. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
That's not science fiction. 
We've been working on this for the last five or six years. 
Last summer, we did a really cool test out in California at Northrop Grumman. 
So those are four petals. 
This is a sub-scale star shade. 
It's about half the size of the one you just saw. 
You'll see the petals unfurl. 
Those four petals were built by four undergraduates doing a summer internship at JPL. 
Now you're seeing it deploy. 
Those petals have to rotate into place. 
The base of those petals has to go to the same place every time to within a tenth of a millimeter. 
We ran this test 16 times, and 16 times it went into the exact same place to a tenth of a millimeter. 
This has to be done very precisely, but if we can do this, if we can build this technology, if we can get it into space, you might see something like this. 
That's a picture of one our nearest neighbor stars taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. 
If we can take a similar space telescope, slightly larger, put it out there, fly an occulter in front of it, what we might see is something like that — that's a family portrait of our solar system — but not ours. 
We're hoping it'll be someone else's solar system as seen through an occulter, through a starshade like that. 
You can see Jupiter, you can see Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and right there in the center, next to the residual light is that pale blue dot. That's Earth. 
We want to see that, see if there's water, oxygen, ozone, the things that might tell us that it could harbor life. 
I think this is the coolest possible science. 
That's why I got into doing this, because I think that will change the world. 
That will change everything when we see that. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

It feels like we're all suffering from information overload or data glut. 
And the good news is there might be an easy solution to that, and that's using our eyes more. 
So, visualizing information, so that we can see the patterns and connections that matter and then designing that information so it makes more sense, or it tells a story, or allows us to focus only on the information that's important. 
Failing that, visualized information can just look really cool. 
So, let's see. 
This is the $Billion Dollar o-Gram, and this image arose out of frustration I had with the reporting of billion-dollar amounts in the press. 
That is, they're meaningless without context: 500 billion for this pipeline, 20 billion for this war. 
It doesn't make any sense, so the only way to understand it is visually and relatively. 
So I scraped a load of reported figures from various news outlets and then scaled the boxes according to those amounts. 
And the colors here represent the motivation behind the money. 
So purple is "" fighting, "" and red is "" giving money away, "" and green is "" profiteering. "" And what you can see straight away is you start to have a different relationship to the numbers. 
You can literally see them. 
But more importantly, you start to see patterns and connections between numbers that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports. 
Let me point out some that I really like. 
This is OPEC's revenue, this green box here — 780 billion a year. 
And this little pixel in the corner — three billion — that's their climate change fund. 
Americans, incredibly generous people — over 300 billion a year, donated to charity every year, compared with the amount of foreign aid given by the top 17 industrialized nations at 120 billion. 
Then of course, the Iraq War, predicted to cost just 60 billion back in 2003. 
And it mushroomed slightly. Afghanistan and Iraq mushroomed now to 3,000 billion. 
So now it's great because now we have this texture, and we can add numbers to it as well. 
So we could say, well, a new figure comes out... let's see African debt. 
How much of this diagram do you think might be taken up by the debt that Africa owes to the West? 
Let's take a look. 
So there it is: 227 billion is what Africa owes. 
And the recent financial crisis, how much of this diagram might that figure take up? 
What has that cost the world? Let's take a look at that. 
Dooosh — Which I think is the appropriate sound effect for that much money: 11,900 billion. 
So, by visualizing this information, we turned it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes, a kind of map really, a sort of information map. 
And when you're lost in information, an information map is kind of useful. 
So I want to show you another landscape now. 
We need to imagine what a landscape of the world's fears might look like. 
Let's take a look. 
This is Mountains Out of Molehills, a timeline of global media panic. 
(Laughter) So, I'll label this for you in a second. 
But the height here, I want to point out, is the intensity of certain fears as reported in the media. 
Let me point them out. 
So this, swine flu — pink. 
Bird flu. 
SARS — brownish here. Remember that one? 
The millennium bug, terrible disaster. 
These little green peaks are asteroid collisions. 
(Laughter) And in summer, here, killer wasps. (Laughter) 
So these are what our fears look like over time in our media. 
But what I love — and I'm a journalist — and what I love is finding hidden patterns; I love being a data detective. 
And there's a very interesting and odd pattern hidden in this data that you can only see when you visualize it. 
Let me highlight it for you. 
See this line, this is a landscape for violent video games. 
As you can see, there's a kind of odd, regular pattern in the data, twin peaks every year. 
If we look closer, we see those peaks occur at the same month every year. 
Why? 
Well, November, Christmas video games come out, and there may well be an upsurge in the concern about their content. 
But April isn't a particularly massive month for video games. 
Why April? 
Well, in April 1999 was the Columbine shooting, and since then, that fear has been remembered by the media and echoes through the group mind gradually through the year. 
You have retrospectives, anniversaries, court cases, even copy-cat shootings, all pushing that fear into the agenda. 
And there's another pattern here as well. Can you spot it? 
See that gap there? There's a gap, and it affects all the other stories. 
Why is there a gap there? 
You see where it starts? September 2001, when we had something very real to be scared about. 
So, I've been working as a data journalist for about a year, and I keep hearing a phrase all the time, which is this: "Data is the new oil." 
Data is the kind of ubiquitous resource that we can shape to provide new innovations and new insights, and it's all around us, and it can be mined very easily. 
It's not a particularly great metaphor in these times, especially if you live around the Gulf of Mexico, but I would, perhaps, adapt this metaphor slightly, and I would say that data is the new soil. 
Because for me, it feels like a fertile, creative medium. 
Over the years, online, we've laid down a huge amount of information and data, and we irrigate it with networks and connectivity, and it's been worked and tilled by unpaid workers and governments. 
And, all right, I'm kind of milking the metaphor a little bit. 
But it's a really fertile medium, and it feels like visualizations, infographics, data visualizations, they feel like flowers blooming from this medium. 
But if you look at it directly, it's just a lot of numbers and disconnected facts. 
But if you start working with it and playing with it in a certain way, interesting things can appear and different patterns can be revealed. 
Let me show you this. 
Can you guess what this data set is? 
What rises twice a year, once in Easter and then two weeks before Christmas, has a mini peak every Monday, and then flattens out over the summer? 
I'll take answers. 
(Audience: Chocolate.) David McCandless: Chocolate. 
You might want to get some chocolate in. 
Any other guesses? 
(Audience: Shopping.) DM: Shopping. 
Yeah, retail therapy might help. 
(Audience: Sick leave.) DM: Sick leave. Yeah, you'll definitely want to take some time off. 
Shall we see? 
(Laughter) (Applause) So, the information guru Lee Byron and myself, we scraped 10,000 status Facebook updates for the phrase "" break-up "" and "" broken-up "" and this is the pattern we found — people clearing out for Spring Break, (Laughter) coming out of very bad weekends on a Monday, being single over the summer, and then the lowest day of the year, of course: Christmas Day. 
Who would do that? 
So there's a titanic amount of data out there now, unprecedented. 
But if you ask the right kind of question, or you work it in the right kind of way, interesting things can emerge. 
So information is beautiful. Data is beautiful. 
I wonder if I could make my life beautiful. 
And here's my visual C.V. 
I'm not quite sure I've succeeded. 
Pretty blocky, the colors aren't that great. 
But I wanted to convey something to you. 
I started as a programmer, and then I worked as a writer for many years, about 20 years, in print, online and then in advertising, and only recently have I started designing. 
And I've never been to design school. 
I've never studied art or anything. 
I just kind of learned through doing. 
And when I started designing, I discovered an odd thing about myself. 
I already knew how to design, but it wasn't like I was amazingly brilliant at it, but more like I was sensitive to the ideas of grids and space and alignment and typography. 
It's almost like being exposed to all this media over the years had instilled a kind of dormant design literacy in me. 
And I don't feel like I'm unique. 
I feel that everyday, all of us now are being blasted by information design. 
It's being poured into our eyes through the Web, and we're all visualizers now; we're all demanding a visual aspect to our information. 
There's something almost quite magical about visual information. 
It's effortless, it literally pours in. 
And if you're navigating a dense information jungle, coming across a beautiful graphic or a lovely data visualization, it's a relief, it's like coming across a clearing in the jungle. 
I was curious about this, so it led me to the work of a Danish physicist called Tor Norretranders, and he converted the bandwidth of the senses into computer terms. 
So here we go. This is your senses, pouring into your senses every second. 
Your sense of sight is the fastest. 
It has the same bandwidth as a computer network. 
Then you have touch, which is about the speed of a USB key. 
And then you have hearing and smell, which has the throughput of a hard disk. 
And then you have poor old taste, which is like barely the throughput of a pocket calculator. 
And that little square in the corner, a naught .7 percent, that's the amount we're actually aware of. 
So a lot of your vision — the bulk of it is visual, and it's pouring in. 
It's unconscious. 
The eye is exquisitely sensitive to patterns in variations in color, shape and pattern. 
It loves them, and it calls them beautiful. 
It's the language of the eye. 
If you combine the language of the eye with the language of the mind, which is about words and numbers and concepts, you start speaking two languages simultaneously, each enhancing the other. 
So, you have the eye, and then you drop in the concepts. 
And that whole thing — it's two languages both working at the same time. 
So we can use this new kind of language, if you like, to alter our perspective or change our views. 
Let me ask you a simple question with a really simple answer: Who has the biggest military budget? 
It's got to be America, right? 
Massive. 609 billion in 2008 — 607, rather. 
Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble. 
Now, you can see Africa's total debt there and the U.K. budget deficit for reference. 
So that might well chime with your view that America is a sort of warmongering military machine, out to overpower the world with its huge industrial-military complex. 
But is it true that America has the biggest military budget? 
Because America is an incredibly rich country. 
In fact, it's so massively rich that it can contain the four other top industrialized nations' economies inside itself, it's so vastly rich. 
So its military budget is bound to be enormous. 
So, to be fair and to alter our perspective, we have to bring in another data set, and that data set is GDP, or the country's earnings. 
Who has the biggest budget as a proportion of GDP? 
That changes the picture considerably. 
Other countries pop into view that you, perhaps, weren't considering, and American drops into eighth. 
Now you can also do this with soldiers. 
Who has the most soldiers? It's got to be China. 
Of course, 2.1 million. 
Again, chiming with your view that China has a militarized regime ready to, you know, mobilize its enormous forces. 
But of course, China has an enormous population. 
So if we do the same, we see a radically different picture. 
China drops to 124th. 
It actually has a tiny army when you take other data into consideration. 
So, absolute figures, like the military budget, in a connected world, don't give you the whole picture. 
They're not as true as they could be. 
We need relative figures that are connected to other data so that we can see a fuller picture, and then that can lead to us changing our perspective. 
As Hans Rosling, the master, my master, said, "Let the dataset change your mindset." 
And if it can do that, maybe it can also change your behavior. 
Take a look at this one. 
I'm a bit of a health nut. 
I love taking supplements and being fit, but I can never understand what's going on in terms of evidence. 
There's always conflicting evidence. 
Should I take vitamin C? Should I be taking wheatgrass? 
This is a visualization of all the evidence for nutritional supplements. 
This kind of diagram is called a balloon race. 
So the higher up the image, the more evidence there is for each supplement. 
And the bubbles correspond to popularity as regards to Google hits. 
So you can immediately apprehend the relationship between efficacy and popularity, but you can also, if you grade the evidence, do a "" worth it "" line. 
So supplements above this line are worth investigating, but only for the conditions listed below, and then the supplements below the line are perhaps not worth investigating. 
Now this image constitutes a huge amount of work. 
We scraped like 1,000 studies from PubMed, the biomedical database, and we compiled them and graded them all. 
And it was incredibly frustrating for me because I had a book of 250 visualizations to do for my book, and I spent a month doing this, and I only filled two pages. 
But what it points to is that visualizing information like this is a form of knowledge compression. 
It's a way of squeezing an enormous amount of information and understanding into a small space. 
And once you've curated that data, and once you've cleaned that data, and once it's there, you can do cool stuff like this. 
So I converted this into an interactive app, so I can now generate this application online — this is the visualization online — and I can say, "" Yeah, brilliant. "" So it spawns itself. 
And then I can say, "" Well, just show me the stuff that affects heart health. "" So let's filter that out. 
So heart is filtered out, so I can see if I'm curious about that. 
I think, "" No, no. I don't want to take any synthetics, I just want to see plants and — just show me herbs and plants. I've got all the natural ingredients. "" Now this app is spawning itself from the data. 
The data is all stored in a Google Doc, and it's literally generating itself from that data. 
So the data is now alive; this is a living image, and I can update it in a second. 
New evidence comes out. I just change a row on a spreadsheet. 
Doosh! Again, the image recreates itself. 
So it's cool. 
It's kind of living. 
But it can go beyond data, and it can go beyond numbers. 
I like to apply information visualization to ideas and concepts. 
This is a visualization of the political spectrum, an attempt for me to try and understand how it works and how the ideas percolate down from government into society and culture, into families, into individuals, into their beliefs and back around again in a cycle. 
What I love about this image is it's made up of concepts, it explores our worldviews and it helps us — it helps me anyway — to see what others think, to see where they're coming from. 
And it feels just incredibly cool to do that. 
What was most exciting for me designing this was that, when I was designing this image, I desperately wanted this side, the left side, to be better than the right side — being a journalist, a Left-leaning person — but I couldn't, because I would have created a lopsided, biased diagram. 
So, in order to really create a full image, I had to honor the perspectives on the right-hand side and at the same time, uncomfortably recognize how many of those qualities were actually in me, which was very, very annoying and uncomfortable. 
(Laughter) But not too uncomfortable, because there's something unthreatening about seeing a political perspective, versus being told or forced to listen to one. 
You're capable of holding conflicting viewpoints joyously when you can see them. 
It's even fun to engage with them because it's visual. 
So that's what's exciting to me, seeing how data can change my perspective and change my mind midstream — beautiful, lovely data. 
So, just to wrap up, I wanted to say that it feels to me that design is about solving problems and providing elegant solutions, and information design is about solving information problems. 
It feels like we have a lot of information problems in our society at the moment, from the overload and the saturation to the breakdown of trust and reliability and runaway skepticism and lack of transparency, or even just interestingness. 
I mean, I find information just too interesting. 
It has a magnetic quality that draws me in. 
So, visualizing information can give us a very quick solution to those kinds of problems. 
Even when the information is terrible, the visual can be quite beautiful. 
Often we can get clarity or the answer to a simple question very quickly, like this one, the recent Icelandic volcano. 
Which was emitting the most CO2? 
Was it the planes or the volcano, the grounded planes or the volcano? 
So we can have a look. 
We look at the data and we see: Yep, the volcano emitted 150,000 tons; the grounded planes would have emitted 345,000 if they were in the sky. 
So essentially, we had our first carbon-neutral volcano. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And that is beautiful. Thank you. (Applause) 

Please meet Jane. 
She has a high-risk pregnancy. 
Within 24 weeks, she's on bed rest at the hospital, being monitored for her preterm contractions. 
She doesn't look the happiest. 
That's in part because it requires technicians and experts to apply these clunky belts on her to monitor her uterine contractions. 
Another reason Jane is not so happy is because she's worried. 
In particular, she's worried about what happens after her 10-day stay on bed rest at the hospital. 
What happens when she's home? 
If she were to give birth this early it would be devastating. 
As an African-American woman, she's twice as likely to have a premature birth or to have a stillbirth. 
So Jane basically has one of two options: stay at the hospital on bed rest, a prisoner to the technology until she gives birth, and then spend the rest of her life paying for the bill; or head home after her 10-day stay and hope for the best. 
Neither of these two options seems appealing. 
As I began to think about stories like this and hear about stories like this, I began to ask myself and imagine: Is there an alternative? 
Is there a way we could have the benefits of high-fidelity monitoring that we get with our trusted partners in the hospital while someone is at home living their daily life? 
With that in mind, I encouraged people in my research group to partner with some clever material scientists, and all of us came together and brainstormed. 
And after a long process, we came up with a vision, an idea, of a wearable system that perhaps you could wear like a piece of jewelry or you could apply to yourself like a Band-Aid. 
And after many trials and tribulations and years of endeavors, we were able to come up with this flexible electronic patch that was manufactured using the same processes that they use to build computer chips, except the electronics are transferred from a semiconductor wafer onto a flexible material that can interface with the human body. 
These systems are about the thickness of a human hair. 
They can measure the types of information that we want, things such as: bodily movement, bodily temperature, electrical rhythms of the body and so forth. 
We can also engineer these systems, so they can integrate energy sources, and can have wireless transmission capabilities. 
So as we began to build these types of systems, we began to test them on ourselves in our research group. 
But in addition, we began to reach out to some of our clinical partners in San Diego, and test these on different patients in different clinical conditions, including moms-to-be like Jane. 
Here is a picture of a pregnant woman in labor at our university hospital being monitored for her uterine contractions with the conventional belt. 
In addition, our flexible electronic patches are there. 
This picture demonstrates waveforms pertaining to the fetal heart rate, where the red corresponds to what was acquired with the conventional belts, and the blue corresponds to our estimates using our flexible electronic systems and our algorithms. 
At this moment, we gave ourselves a big mental high five. 
Some of the things we had imagined were beginning to come to fruition, and we were actually seeing this in a clinical context. 
But there was still a problem. 
The problem was, the way we manufactured these systems was very inefficient, had low yield and was very error-prone. 
In addition, as we talked to some of the nurses in the hospital, they encouraged us to make sure that our electronics worked with typical medical adhesives that are used in a hospital. 
We had an epiphany and said, "" Wait a minute. 
Rather than just making them work with adhesives, let's integrate them into adhesives, and that could solve our manufacturing problem. "" This picture that you see here is our ability to embed these censors inside of a piece of Scotch tape by simply peeling it off of a wafer. 
Ongoing work in our research group allows us to, in addition, embed integrated circuits into the flexible adhesives to do things like amplifying signals and digitizing them, processing them and encoding for wireless transmission. 
All of this integrated into the same medical adhesives that are used in the hospital. 
So when we reached this point, we had some other challenges, from both an engineering as well as a usability perspective, to make sure that we could make it used practically. 
In many digital health discussions, people believe in and embrace the idea that we can simply digitize the data, wirelessly transmit it, send it to the cloud, and in the cloud, we can extract meaningful information for interpretation. 
And indeed, you can do all of that, if you're not worried about some of the energy challenges. 
Think about Jane for a moment. 
She doesn't live in Palo Alto, nor does she live in Beverly Hills. 
What that means is, we have to be mindful about her data plan and how much it would cost for her to be sending out a continuous stream of data. 
There's another challenge that not everyone in the medical profession is comfortable talking about. 
And that is, that Jane does not have the most trust in the medical establishment. 
She, people like her, her ancestors, have not had the best experiences at the hands of doctors and the hospital or insurance companies. 
That means that we have to be mindful of questions of privacy. 
Jane might not feel that happy about all that data being processed into the cloud. 
And Jane cannot be fooled; she reads the news. 
She knows that if the federal government can be hacked, if the Fortune 500 can be hacked, so can her doctor. 
And so with that in mind, we had an epiphany. 
We cannot outsmart all the hackers in the world, but perhaps we can present them a smaller target. 
What if we could actually, rather than have those algorithms that do data interpretation run in the cloud, what if we have those algorithms run on those small integrated circuits embedded into those adhesives? 
And so when we integrate these things together, what this means is that now we can think about the future where someone like Jane can still go about living her normal daily life, she can be monitored, it can be done in a way where she doesn't have to get another job to pay her data plan, and we can also address some of her concerns about privacy. 
So at this point, we're feeling very good about ourselves. 
We've accomplished this, we've begun to address some of these questions about privacy and we feel like, pretty much the chapter is closed now. 
Everyone lived happily ever after, right? 
Well, not so fast. 
(Laughter) One of the things we have to remember, as I mentioned earlier, is that Jane does not have the most trust in the medical establishment. 
We have to remember that there are increasing and widening health disparities, and there's inequity in terms of proper care management. 
And so what that means is that this simple picture of Jane and her data — even with her being comfortable being wirelessly transmitted to the cloud, letting a doctor intervene if necessary — is not the whole story. 
So what we're beginning to do is to think about ways to have trusted parties serve as intermediaries between people like Jane and her health care providers. 
For example, we've begun to partner with churches and to think about nurses that are church members, that come from that trusted community, as patient advocates and health coaches to people like Jane. 
Another thing we have going for us is that insurance companies, increasingly, are attracted to some of these ideas. 
They're increasingly realizing that perhaps it's better to pay one dollar now for a wearable device and a health coach, rather than paying 10 dollars later, when that baby is born prematurely and ends up in the neonatal intensive care unit — one of the most expensive parts of a hospital. 
This has been a long learning process for us. 
This iterative process of breaking through and attacking one problem and not feeling totally comfortable, and identifying the next problem, has helped us go along this path of actually trying to not only innovate with this technology but make sure it can be used for people who perhaps need it the most. 
Another learning lesson we've taken from this process that is very humbling, is that as technology progresses and advances at an accelerating rate, we have to remember that human beings are using this technology, and we have to be mindful that these human beings — they have a face, they have a name and a life. 
And in the case of Jane, hopefully, two. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

And I find that since I've been in the Gulf a couple of times, I really kind of am traumatized because whenever I look at the ocean now, no matter where I am, even where I know that none of the oil has gone, I sort of see slicks, and I'm finding that I'm very much haunted by it. 
It's like you dipped a marble in water. 
They can handle a hurricane that comes and goes. 
But when it's something other than water, and their water habitat changes, they don't have many options. 
If you go to the site of the blowout, it looks pretty unbelievable. 
It looks like you just emptied the oil pan in your car, and you just dumped it in the ocean. 
If you go to the places where it's just arriving, like the eastern part of the Gulf, in Alabama, there's still people using the beach while there are people cleaning up the beach. 
signs of their outrage... 
There's a lot you can't see, also, underwater. 
But I couldn't take a submarine ride — especially between the time I knew I was coming here and today — so I had to do a little experiment myself to see if there was oil in the Gulf of Mexico. 
I think it's being hidden on purpose. 
Now this is such a catastrophe and such a mess that lots of stuff is leaking out on the edges of the information stream. 
You can see where the oil is concentrated at the surface, and then it is attacked, because they don't want the evidence, in my opinion. 
These guys have to swim around through it. 
That guide's entire calendar year is canceled bookings. 
He has no bookings left. 
That's the story of thousands of people. 
So he moved away from it, turned around a few minutes later, it was right next to the side of the boat again. 
The other thing about the Gulf that is important is that there are a lot of animals that concentrate in the Gulf at certain parts of the year. 
These tuna swim the entire ocean. 
They get in the Gulf Stream, they go all the way to Europe. 
And that lower photo, that's a bird colony that has been boomed. 
These birds make a living by diving into the water. 
But really, where are those birds going to get released to? 
It really started from the destruction of the idea that the government is there because it's our government, meant to protect the larger public interest. 
So I think that the oil blowout, the bank bailout, the mortgage crisis and all these things are absolutely symptoms of the same cause. 
But in the entire rest of government right now and for the last at least 30 years, there has been a culture of deregulation that is caused directly by the people who we need to be protected from, buying the government out from under us. 
So what we really need to do is regain the idea that it's our government safeguarding our interests, and regain a sense of unity and common cause in our country that really has been lost. 
So it's a continued fight. 
It's a historic moment right now. 
Who says it's too expensive? 
We've been here before with energy, and people saying the economy cannot withstand a switch, because the cheapest energy was slavery. 

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

Chris Anderson: You were something of a mathematical phenom. 
You had already taught at Harvard and MIT at a young age. 
And then the NSA came calling. 
What was that about? 
Jim Simons: Well the NSA — that's the National Security Agency — they didn't exactly come calling. 
They had an operation at Princeton, where they hired mathematicians to attack secret codes and stuff like that. 
And I knew that existed. 
And they had a very good policy, because you could do half your time at your own mathematics, and at least half your time working on their stuff. 
And they paid a lot. 
So that was an irresistible pull. 
So, I went there. 
CA: You were a code-cracker. 
JS: I was. 
CA: Until you got fired. 
JS: Well, I did get fired. Yes. 
CA: How come? 
JS: Well, how come? 
I got fired because, well, the Vietnam War was on, and the boss of bosses in my organization was a big fan of the war and wrote a New York Times article, a magazine section cover story, about how we would win in Vietnam. 
And I didn't like that war, I thought it was stupid. 
And I wrote a letter to the Times, which they published, saying not everyone who works for Maxwell Taylor, if anyone remembers that name, agrees with his views. 
And I gave my own views... 
CA: Oh, OK. I can see that would — JS:... which were different from General Taylor's. 
But in the end, nobody said anything. 
But then, I was 29 years old at this time, and some kid came around and said he was a stringer from Newsweek magazine and he wanted to interview me and ask what I was doing about my views. 
And I told him, "" I'm doing mostly mathematics now, and when the war is over, then I'll do mostly their stuff. "" Then I did the only intelligent thing I'd done that day — I told my local boss that I gave that interview. 
And he said, "" What'd you say? "" And I told him what I said. 
And then he said, "" I've got to call Taylor. "" He called Taylor; that took 10 minutes. 
I was fired five minutes after that. 
CA: OK. 
JS: But it wasn't bad. 
CA: It wasn't bad, because you went on to Stony Brook and stepped up your mathematical career. 
You started working with this man here. 
Who is this? 
JS: Oh, [Shiing-Shen] Chern. 
Chern was one of the great mathematicians of the century. 
I had known him when I was a graduate student at Berkeley. 
And I had some ideas, and I brought them to him and he liked them. 
Together, we did this work which you can easily see up there. 
There it is. 
CA: It led to you publishing a famous paper together. 
Can you explain at all what that work was? 
JS: No. 
(Laughter) JS: I mean, I could explain it to somebody. (Laughter) 
CA: How about explaining this? 
JS: But not many. Not many people. 
CA: I think you told me it had something to do with spheres, so let's start here. 
JS: Well, it did, but I'll say about that work — it did have something to do with that, but before we get to that — that work was good mathematics. 
I was very happy with it; so was Chern. 
It even started a little sub-field that's now flourishing. 
But, more interestingly, it happened to apply to physics, something we knew nothing about — at least I knew nothing about physics, and I don't think Chern knew a heck of a lot. 
And about 10 years after the paper came out, a guy named Ed Witten in Princeton started applying it to string theory and people in Russia started applying it to what's called "" condensed matter. "" Today, those things in there called Chern-Simons invariants have spread through a lot of physics. 
And it was amazing. 
We didn't know any physics. 
It never occurred to me that it would be applied to physics. 
But that's the thing about mathematics — you never know where it's going to go. 
CA: This is so incredible. 
So, we've been talking about how evolution shapes human minds that may or may not perceive the truth. 
Somehow, you come up with a mathematical theory, not knowing any physics, discover two decades later that it's being applied to profoundly describe the actual physical world. 
How can that happen? 
JS: God knows. 
(Laughter) But there's a famous physicist named [Eugene] Wigner, and he wrote an essay on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. 
Somehow, this mathematics, which is rooted in the real world in some sense — we learn to count, measure, everyone would do that — and then it flourishes on its own. 
But so often it comes back to save the day. 
General relativity is an example. 
[Hermann] Minkowski had this geometry, and Einstein realized, "Hey! It's the very thing in which I can cast general relativity." 
So, you never know. It is a mystery. It is a mystery. 
CA: So, here's a mathematical piece of ingenuity. Tell us about this. JS: Well, that's a ball — it's a sphere, and it has a lattice around it — 
you know, those squares. 
What I'm going to show here was originally observed by [Leonhard] Euler, the great mathematician, in the 1700s. 
And it gradually grew to be a very important field in mathematics: algebraic topology, geometry. 
That paper up there had its roots in this. 
So, here's this thing: it has eight vertices, 12 edges, six faces. 
And if you look at the difference — vertices minus edges plus faces — you get two. 
OK, well, two. That's a good number. 
Here's a different way of doing it — these are triangles covering — this has 12 vertices and 30 edges and 20 faces, 20 tiles. 
And vertices minus edges plus faces still equals two. 
And in fact, you could do this any which way — cover this thing with all kinds of polygons and triangles and mix them up. 
And you take vertices minus edges plus faces — you'll get two. 
Here's a different shape. 
This is a torus, or the surface of a doughnut: 16 vertices covered by these rectangles, 32 edges, 16 faces. 
Vertices minus edges comes out to be zero. 
It'll always come out to zero. 
Every time you cover a torus with squares or triangles or anything like that, you're going to get zero. 
So, this is called the Euler characteristic. 
And it's what's called a topological invariant. 
It's pretty amazing. 
No matter how you do it, you're always get the same answer. 
So that was the first sort of thrust, from the mid-1700s, into a subject which is now called algebraic topology. 
CA: And your own work took an idea like this and moved it into higher-dimensional theory, higher-dimensional objects, and found new invariances? 
JS: Yes. Well, there were already higher-dimensional invariants: Pontryagin classes — actually, there were Chern classes. 
There were a bunch of these types of invariants. 
I was struggling to work on one of them and model it sort of combinatorially, instead of the way it was typically done, and that led to this work and we uncovered some new things. 
But if it wasn't for Mr. Euler — who wrote almost 70 volumes of mathematics and had 13 children, who he apparently would dandle on his knee while he was writing — if it wasn't for Mr. Euler, there wouldn't perhaps be these invariants. 
CA: OK, so that's at least given us a flavor of that amazing mind in there. 
Let's talk about Renaissance. 
Because you took that amazing mind and having been a code-cracker at the NSA, you started to become a code-cracker in the financial industry. 
I think you probably didn't buy efficient market theory. 
Somehow you found a way of creating astonishing returns over two decades. 
The way it's been explained to me, what's remarkable about what you did wasn't just the size of the returns, it's that you took them with surprisingly low volatility and risk, compared with other hedge funds. 
So how on earth did you do this, Jim? 
JS: I did it by assembling a wonderful group of people. 
When I started doing trading, I had gotten a little tired of mathematics. 
I was in my late 30s, I had a little money. 
I started trading and it went very well. 
I made quite a lot of money with pure luck. 
I mean, I think it was pure luck. 
It certainly wasn't mathematical modeling. 
But in looking at the data, after a while I realized: it looks like there's some structure here. 
And I hired a few mathematicians, and we started making some models — just the kind of thing we did back at IDA [Institute for Defense Analyses]. 
You design an algorithm, you test it out on a computer. 
Does it work? Doesn't it work? And so on. 
CA: Can we take a look at this? 
Because here's a typical graph of some commodity. 
I look at that, and I say, "" That's just a random, up-and-down walk — maybe a slight upward trend over that whole period of time. "" How on earth could you trade looking at that, and see something that wasn't just random? 
JS: In the old days — this is kind of a graph from the old days, commodities or currencies had a tendency to trend. 
Not necessarily the very light trend you see here, but trending in periods. 
And if you decided, OK, I'm going to predict today, by the average move in the past 20 days — maybe that would be a good prediction, and I'd make some money. 
And in fact, years ago, such a system would work — not beautifully, but it would work. 
You'd make money, you'd lose money, you'd make money. 
But this is a year's worth of days, and you'd make a little money during that period. 
It's a very vestigial system. 
CA: So you would test a bunch of lengths of trends in time and see whether, for example, a 10-day trend or a 15-day trend was predictive of what happened next. 
JS: Sure, you would try all those things and see what worked best. 
Trend-following would have been great in the '60s, and it was sort of OK in the' 70s. 
By the '80s, it wasn't. 
CA: Because everyone could see that. 
So, how did you stay ahead of the pack? 
JS: We stayed ahead of the pack by finding other approaches — shorter-term approaches to some extent. 
The real thing was to gather a tremendous amount of data — and we had to get it by hand in the early days. 
We went down to the Federal Reserve and copied interest rate histories and stuff like that, because it didn't exist on computers. 
We got a lot of data. 
And very smart people — that was the key. 
I didn't really know how to hire people to do fundamental trading. 
I had hired a few — some made money, some didn't make money. 
I couldn't make a business out of that. 
But I did know how to hire scientists, because I have some taste in that department. 
So, that's what we did. 
And gradually these models got better and better, and better and better. 
CA: You're credited with doing something remarkable at Renaissance, which is building this culture, this group of people, who weren't just hired guns who could be lured away by money. 
Their motivation was doing exciting mathematics and science. 
JS: Well, I'd hoped that might be true. 
But some of it was money. 
CA: They made a lot of money. 
JS: I can't say that no one came because of the money. 
I think a lot of them came because of the money. 
But they also came because it would be fun. 
CA: What role did machine learning play in all this? 
JS: In a certain sense, what we did was machine learning. 
You look at a lot of data, and you try to simulate different predictive schemes, until you get better and better at it. 
It doesn't necessarily feed back on itself the way we did things. 
But it worked. 
CA: So these different predictive schemes can be really quite wild and unexpected. 
I mean, you looked at everything, right? 
You looked at the weather, length of dresses, political opinion. 
JS: Yes, length of dresses we didn't try. 
CA: What sort of things? 
JS: Well, everything. 
Everything is grist for the mill — except hem lengths. 
Weather, annual reports, quarterly reports, historic data itself, volumes, you name it. 
Whatever there is. 
We take in terabytes of data a day. 
And store it away and massage it and get it ready for analysis. 
You're looking for anomalies. 
You're looking for — like you said, the efficient market hypothesis is not correct. 
CA: But any one anomaly might be just a random thing. 
So, is the secret here to just look at multiple strange anomalies, and see when they align? 
JS: Any one anomaly might be a random thing; however, if you have enough data you can tell that it's not. 
You can see an anomaly that's persistent for a sufficiently long time — the probability of it being random is not high. 
But these things fade after a while; anomalies can get washed out. 
So you have to keep on top of the business. 
CA: A lot of people look at the hedge fund industry now and are sort of... shocked by it, by how much wealth is created there, and how much talent is going into it. 
Do you have any worries about that industry, and perhaps the financial industry in general? 
Kind of being on a runaway train that's — I don't know — helping increase inequality? 
How would you champion what's happening in the hedge fund industry? 
JS: I think in the last three or four years, hedge funds have not done especially well. 
We've done dandy, but the hedge fund industry as a whole has not done so wonderfully. 
The stock market has been on a roll, going up as everybody knows, and price-earnings ratios have grown. 
So an awful lot of the wealth that's been created in the last — let's say, five or six years — has not been created by hedge funds. 
People would ask me, "" What's a hedge fund? "" And I'd say, "" One and 20. "" Which means — now it's two and 20 — it's two percent fixed fee and 20 percent of profits. 
Hedge funds are all different kinds of creatures. 
CA: Rumor has it you charge slightly higher fees than that. 
JS: We charged the highest fees in the world at one time. 
Five and 44, that's what we charge. 
CA: Five and 44. 
So five percent flat, 44 percent of upside. 
You still made your investors spectacular amounts of money. 
JS: We made good returns, yes. 
People got very mad: "" How can you charge such high fees? "" I said, "" OK, you can withdraw. "" But "" How can I get more? "" was what people were — (Laughter) But at a certain point, as I think I told you, we bought out all the investors because there's a capacity to the fund. 
CA: But should we worry about the hedge fund industry attracting too much of the world's great mathematical and other talent to work on that, as opposed to the many other problems in the world? 
JS: Well, it's not just mathematical. 
We hire astronomers and physicists and things like that. 
I don't think we should worry about it too much. 
It's still a pretty small industry. 
And in fact, bringing science into the investing world has improved that world. 
It's reduced volatility. It's increased liquidity. 
Spreads are narrower because people are trading that kind of stuff. 
So I'm not too worried about Einstein going off and starting a hedge fund. 
CA: You're at a phase in your life now where you're actually investing, though, at the other end of the supply chain — you're actually boosting mathematics across America. 
This is your wife, Marilyn. 
You're working on philanthropic issues together. 
Tell me about that. 
JS: Well, Marilyn started — there she is up there, my beautiful wife — she started the foundation about 20 years ago. 
I think '94. 
I claim it was' 93, she says it was' 94, but it was one of those two years. 
(Laughter) We started the foundation, just as a convenient way to give charity. 
She kept the books, and so on. 
We did not have a vision at that time, but gradually a vision emerged — which was to focus on math and science, to focus on basic research. 
And that's what we've done. 
Six years ago or so, I left Renaissance and went to work at the foundation. 
So that's what we do. 
CA: And so Math for America is basically investing in math teachers around the country, giving them some extra income, giving them support and coaching. 
And really trying to make that more effective and make that a calling to which teachers can aspire. 
JS: Yeah — instead of beating up the bad teachers, which has created morale problems all through the educational community, in particular in math and science, we focus on celebrating the good ones and giving them status. 
Yeah, we give them extra money, 15,000 dollars a year. 
We have 800 math and science teachers in New York City in public schools today, as part of a core. 
There's a great morale among them. 
They're staying in the field. 
Next year, it'll be 1,000 and that'll be 10 percent of the math and science teachers in New York [City] public schools. 
(Applause) CA: Jim, here's another project that you've supported philanthropically: Research into origins of life, I guess. 
What are we looking at here? 
JS: Well, I'll save that for a second. 
And then I'll tell you what you're looking at. 
Origins of life is a fascinating question. 
How did we get here? 
Well, there are two questions: One is, what is the route from geology to biology — how did we get here? 
And the other question is, what did we start with? 
What material, if any, did we have to work with on this route? 
Those are two very, very interesting questions. 
The first question is a tortuous path from geology up to RNA or something like that — how did that all work? 
And the other, what do we have to work with? 
Well, more than we think. 
So what's pictured there is a star in formation. 
Now, every year in our Milky Way, which has 100 billion stars, about two new stars are created. 
Don't ask me how, but they're created. 
And it takes them about a million years to settle out. 
So, in steady state, there are about two million stars in formation at any time. 
That one is somewhere along this settling-down period. 
And there's all this crap sort of circling around it, dust and stuff. 
And it'll form probably a solar system, or whatever it forms. 
But here's the thing — in this dust that surrounds a forming star have been found, now, significant organic molecules. 
Molecules not just like methane, but formaldehyde and cyanide — things that are the building blocks — the seeds, if you will — of life. 
So, that may be typical. 
And it may be typical that planets around the universe start off with some of these basic building blocks. 
Now does that mean there's going to be life all around? 
Maybe. 
But it's a question of how tortuous this path is from those frail beginnings, those seeds, all the way to life. 
And most of those seeds will fall on fallow planets. 
CA: So for you, personally, finding an answer to this question of where we came from, of how did this thing happen, that is something you would love to see. 
JS: Would love to see. 
And like to know — if that path is tortuous enough, and so improbable, that no matter what you start with, we could be a singularity. 
But on the other hand, given all this organic dust that's floating around, we could have lots of friends out there. 
It'd be great to know. 
CA: Jim, a couple of years ago, I got the chance to speak with Elon Musk, and I asked him the secret of his success, and he said taking physics seriously was it. 
Listening to you, what I hear you saying is taking math seriously, that has infused your whole life. 
It's made you an absolute fortune, and now it's allowing you to invest in the futures of thousands and thousands of kids across America and elsewhere. 
Could it be that science actually works? 
That math actually works? 
JS: Well, math certainly works. Math certainly works. 
But this has been fun. 
Working with Marilyn and giving it away has been very enjoyable. 
CA: I just find it — it's an inspirational thought to me, that by taking knowledge seriously, so much more can come from it. 
So thank you for your amazing life, and for coming here to TED. 
Thank you. 
Jim Simons! 
(Applause) 

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

Eric Berlow: I'm an ecologist, and Sean's a physicist, and we both study complex networks. 
And we met a couple years ago when we discovered that we had both given a short TED Talk about the ecology of war, and we realized that we were connected by the ideas we shared before we ever met. 
And then we thought, you know, there are thousands of other talks out there, especially TEDx Talks, that are popping up all over the world. 
How are they connected, and what does that global conversation look like? 
So Sean's going to tell you a little bit about how we did that. 
Sean Gourley: Exactly. So we took 24,000 TEDx Talks from around the world, 147 different countries, and we took these talks and we wanted to find the mathematical structures that underly the ideas behind them. 
And we wanted to do that so we could see how they connected with each other. 
And so, of course, if you're going to do this kind of stuff, you need a lot of data. 
So the data that you've got is a great thing called YouTube, and we can go down and basically pull all the open information from YouTube, all the comments, all the views, who's watching it, where are they watching it, what are they saying in the comments. 
But we can also pull up, using speech-to-text translation, we can pull the entire transcript, and that works even for people with kind of funny accents like myself. 
So we can take their transcript and actually do some pretty cool things. 
We can take natural language processing algorithms to kind of read through with a computer, line by line, extracting key concepts from this. 
And we take those key concepts and they sort of form this mathematical structure of an idea. 
And we call that the meme-ome. 
And the meme-ome, you know, quite simply, is the mathematics that underlies an idea, and we can do some pretty interesting analysis with it, which I want to share with you now. 
So each idea has its own meme-ome, and each idea is unique with that, but of course, ideas, they borrow from each other, they kind of steal sometimes, and they certainly build on each other, and we can go through mathematically and take the meme-ome from one talk and compare it to the meme-ome from every other talk, and if there's a similarity between the two of them, we can create a link and represent that as a graph, just like Eric and I are connected. 
So that's theory, that's great. 
Let's see how it works in actual practice. 
So what we've got here now is the global footprint of all the TEDx Talks over the last four years exploding out around the world from New York all the way down to little old New Zealand in the corner. 
And what we did on this is we analyzed the top 25 percent of these, and we started to see where the connections occurred, where they connected with each other. 
Cameron Russell talking about image and beauty connected over into Europe. 
We've got a bigger conversation about Israel and Palestine radiating outwards from the Middle East. 
And we've got something a little broader like big data with a truly global footprint reminiscent of a conversation that is happening everywhere. 
So from this, we kind of run up against the limits of what we can actually do with a geographic projection, but luckily, computer technology allows us to go out into multidimensional space. 
So we can take in our network projection and apply a physics engine to this, and the similar talks kind of smash together, and the different ones fly apart, and what we're left with is something quite beautiful. 
EB: So I want to just point out here that every node is a talk, they're linked if they share similar ideas, and that comes from a machine reading of entire talk transcripts, and then all these topics that pop out, they're not from tags and keywords. 
They come from the network structure of interconnected ideas. Keep going. 
SG: Absolutely. So I got a little quick on that, but he's going to slow me down. 
We've got education connected to storytelling triangulated next to social media. 
You've got, of course, the human brain right next to healthcare, which you might expect, but also you've got video games, which is sort of adjacent, as those two spaces interface with each other. 
But I want to take you into one cluster that's particularly important to me, and that's the environment. 
And I want to kind of zoom in on that and see if we can get a little more resolution. 
So as we go in here, what we start to see, apply the physics engine again, we see what's one conversation is actually composed of many smaller ones. 
The structure starts to emerge where we see a kind of fractal behavior of the words and the language that we use to describe the things that are important to us all around this world. 
So you've got food economy and local food at the top, you've got greenhouse gases, solar and nuclear waste. 
What you're getting is a range of smaller conversations, each connected to each other through the ideas and the language they share, creating a broader concept of the environment. 
And of course, from here, we can go and zoom in and see, well, what are young people looking at? 
And they're looking at energy technology and nuclear fusion. 
This is their kind of resonance for the conversation around the environment. 
If we split along gender lines, we can see females resonating heavily with food economy, but also out there in hope and optimism. 
And so there's a lot of exciting stuff we can do here, and I'll throw to Eric for the next part. 
EB: Yeah, I mean, just to point out here, you cannot get this kind of perspective from a simple tag search on YouTube. 
Let's now zoom back out to the entire global conversation out of environment, and look at all the talks together. 
Now often, when we're faced with this amount of content, we do a couple of things to simplify it. 
We might just say, well, what are the most popular talks out there? 
And a few rise to the surface. 
There's a talk about gratitude. 
There's another one about personal health and nutrition. 
And of course, there's got to be one about porn, right? 
And so then we might say, well, gratitude, that was last year. 
What's trending now? What's the popular talk now? 
And we can see that the new, emerging, top trending topic is about digital privacy. 
So this is great. It simplifies things. 
But there's so much creative content that's just buried at the bottom. 
And I hate that. How do we bubble stuff up to the surface that's maybe really creative and interesting? 
Well, we can go back to the network structure of ideas to do that. 
Remember, it's that network structure that is creating these emergent topics, and let's say we could take two of them, like cities and genetics, and say, well, are there any talks that creatively bridge these two really different disciplines. 
And that's — Essentially, this kind of creative remix is one of the hallmarks of innovation. 
Well here's one by Jessica Green about the microbial ecology of buildings. 
It's literally defining a new field. 
And we could go back to those topics and say, well, what talks are central to those conversations? 
In the cities cluster, one of the most central was one by Mitch Joachim about ecological cities, and in the genetics cluster, we have a talk about synthetic biology by Craig Venter. 
These are talks that are linking many talks within their discipline. 
We could go the other direction and say, well, what are talks that are broadly synthesizing a lot of different kinds of fields. 
We used a measure of ecological diversity to get this. 
Like, a talk by Steven Pinker on the history of violence, very synthetic. 
And then, of course, there are talks that are so unique they're kind of out in the stratosphere, in their own special place, and we call that the Colleen Flanagan index. 
And if you don't know Colleen, she's an artist, and I asked her, "" Well, what's it like out there in the stratosphere of our idea space? "" And apparently it smells like bacon. 
I wouldn't know. 
So we're using these network motifs to find talks that are unique, ones that are creatively synthesizing a lot of different fields, ones that are central to their topic, and ones that are really creatively bridging disparate fields. 
Okay? We never would have found those with our obsession with what's trending now. 
And all of this comes from the architecture of complexity, or the patterns of how things are connected. 
SG: So that's exactly right. 
We've got ourselves in a world that's massively complex, and we've been using algorithms to kind of filter it down so we can navigate through it. 
And those algorithms, whilst being kind of useful, are also very, very narrow, and we can do better than that, because we can realize that their complexity is not random. 
It has mathematical structure, and we can use that mathematical structure to go and explore things like the world of ideas to see what's being said, to see what's not being said, and to be a little bit more human and, hopefully, a little smarter. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm going to talk about the strategizing brain. 
We're going to use an unusual combination of tools from game theory and neuroscience to understand how people interact socially when value is on the line. 
So game theory is a branch of, originally, applied mathematics, used mostly in economics and political science, a little bit in biology, that gives us a mathematical taxonomy of social life and it predicts what people are likely to do and believe others will do in cases where everyone's actions affect everyone else. 
That's a lot of things: competition, cooperation, bargaining, games like hide-and-seek, and poker. 
Here's a simple game to get us started. 
Everyone chooses a number from zero to 100, we're going to compute the average of those numbers, and whoever's closest to two-thirds of the average wins a fixed prize. 
So you want to be a little bit below the average number, but not too far below, and everyone else wants to be a little bit below the average number as well. 
Think about what you might pick. 
As you're thinking, this is a toy model of something like selling in the stock market during a rising market. Right? 
You don't want to sell too early, because you miss out on profits, but you don't want to wait too late to when everyone else sells, triggering a crash. 
You want to be a little bit ahead of the competition, but not too far ahead. 
Okay, here's two theories about how people might think about this, and then we'll see some data. 
Some of these will sound familiar because you probably are thinking that way. I'm using my brain theory to see. 
A lot of people say, "" I really don't know what people are going to pick, so I think the average will be 50. "" They're not being really strategic at all. 
"" And I'll pick two-thirds of 50. That's 33. "" That's a start. 
Other people who are a little more sophisticated, using more working memory, say, "" I think people will pick 33 because they're going to pick a response to 50, and so I'll pick 22, which is two-thirds of 33. "" They're doing one extra step of thinking, two steps. 
That's better. And of course, in principle, you could do three, four or more, but it starts to get very difficult. 
Just like in language and other domains, we know that it's hard for people to parse very complex sentences with a kind of recursive structure. 
This is called a cognitive hierarchy theory, by the way. 
It's something that I've worked on and a few other people, and it indicates a kind of hierarchy along with some assumptions about how many people stop at different steps and how the steps of thinking are affected by lots of interesting variables and variant people, as we'll see in a minute. 
A very different theory, a much more popular one, and an older one, due largely to John Nash of "" A Beautiful Mind "" fame, is what's called equilibrium analysis. 
So if you've ever taken a game theory course at any level, you will have learned a little bit about this. 
An equilibrium is a mathematical state in which everybody has figured out exactly what everyone else will do. 
It is a very useful concept, but behaviorally, it may not exactly explain what people do the first time they play these types of economic games or in situations in the outside world. 
In this case, the equilibrium makes a very bold prediction, which is everyone wants to be below everyone else, therefore they'll play zero. 
Let's see what happens. This experiment's been done many, many times. 
Some of the earliest ones were done in the '90s by me and Rosemarie Nagel and others. 
This is a beautiful data set of 9,000 people who wrote in to three newspapers and magazines that had a contest. 
The contest said, send in your numbers and whoever is close to two-thirds of the average will win a big prize. 
And as you can see, there's so much data here, you can see the spikes very visibly. 
There's a spike at 33. Those are people doing one step. 
There is another spike visible at 22. 
And notice, by the way, that most people pick numbers right around there. 
They don't necessarily pick exactly 33 and 22. 
There's something a little bit noisy around it. 
But you can see those spikes, and they're there. 
There's another group of people who seem to have a firm grip on equilibrium analysis, because they're picking zero or one. 
But they lose, right? 
Because picking a number that low is actually a bad choice if other people aren't doing equilibrium analysis as well. 
So they're smart, but poor. 
(Laughter) Where are these things happening in the brain? 
One study by Coricelli and Nagel gives a really sharp, interesting answer. 
So they had people play this game while they were being scanned in an fMRI, and two conditions: in some trials, they're told you're playing another person who's playing right now and we're going to match up your behavior at the end and pay you if you win. 
In the other trials, they're told, you're playing a computer. 
They're just choosing randomly. 
So what you see here is a subtraction of areas in which there's more brain activity when you're playing people compared to playing the computer. 
And you see activity in some regions we've seen today, medial prefrontal cortex, dorsomedial, however, up here, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, an area that's involved in lots of types of conflict resolution, like if you're playing "" Simon Says, "" and also the right and left temporoparietal junction. 
And these are all areas which are fairly reliably known to be part of what's called a "" theory of mind "" circuit, or "" mentalizing circuit. "" That is, it's a circuit that's used to imagine what other people might do. 
So these were some of the first studies to see this tied in to game theory. 
What happens with these one- and two-step types? 
So we classify people by what they picked, and then we look at the difference between playing humans versus playing computers, which brain areas are differentially active. 
On the top you see the one-step players. 
There's almost no difference. 
The reason is, they're treating other people like a computer, and the brain is too. 
The bottom players, you see all the activity in dorsomedial PFC. 
So we know that those two-step players are doing something differently. 
Now if you were to step back and say, "" What can we do with this information? "" you might be able to look at brain activity and say, "This person's going to be a good poker player," or, "" This person's socially naive, "" and we might also be able to study things like development of adolescent brains once we have an idea of where this circuitry exists. 
Okay. Get ready. 
I'm saving you some brain activity, because you don't need to use your hair detector cells. 
You should use those cells to think carefully about this game. 
This is a bargaining game. 
Two players who are being scanned using EEG electrodes are going to bargain over one to six dollars. 
If they can do it in 10 seconds, they're going to actually earn that money. 
If 10 seconds goes by and they haven't made a deal, they get nothing. 
That's kind of a mistake together. 
The twist is that one player, on the left, is informed about how much on each trial there is. 
They play lots of trials with different amounts each time. 
In this case, they know there's four dollars. 
The uninformed player doesn't know, but they know that the informed player knows. 
So the uninformed player's challenge is to say, "" Is this guy really being fair or are they giving me a very low offer in order to get me to think that there's only one or two dollars available to split? "" in which case they might reject it and not come to a deal. 
So there's some tension here between trying to get the most money but trying to goad the other player into giving you more. 
And the way they bargain is to point on a number line that goes from zero to six dollars, and they're bargaining over how much the uninformed player gets, and the informed player's going to get the rest. 
So this is like a management-labor negotiation in which the workers don't know how much profits the privately held company has, right, and they want to maybe hold out for more money, but the company might want to create the impression that there's very little to split: "" I'm giving you the most that I can. "" First some behavior. So a bunch of the subject pairs, they play face to face. 
We have some other data where they play across computers. 
That's an interesting difference, as you might imagine. 
But a bunch of the face-to-face pairs agree to divide the money evenly every single time. 
Boring. It's just not interesting neurally. 
It's good for them. They make a lot of money. 
But we're interested in, can we say something about when disagreements occur versus don't occur? 
So this is the other group of subjects who often disagree. 
So they have a chance of — they bicker and disagree and end up with less money. 
They might be eligible to be on "" Real Housewives, "" the TV show. 
You see on the left, when the amount to divide is one, two or three dollars, they disagree about half the time, and when the amount is four, five, six, they agree quite often. 
This turns out to be something that's predicted by a very complicated type of game theory you should come to graduate school at CalTech and learn about. 
It's a little too complicated to explain right now, but the theory tells you that this shape kind of should occur. 
Your intuition might tell you that too. 
Now I'm going to show you the results from the EEG recording. 
Very complicated. The right brain schematic is the uninformed person, and the left is the informed. 
Remember that we scanned both brains at the same time, so we can ask about time-synced activity in similar or different areas simultaneously, just like if you wanted to study a conversation and you were scanning two people talking to each other and you'd expect common activity in language regions when they're actually kind of listening and communicating. 
So the arrows connect regions that are active at the same time, and the direction of the arrows flows from the region that's active first in time, and the arrowhead goes to the region that's active later. 
So in this case, if you look carefully, most of the arrows flow from right to left. 
That is, it looks as if the uninformed brain activity is happening first, and then it's followed by activity in the informed brain. 
And by the way, these were trials where their deals were made. 
This is from the first two seconds. 
We haven't finished analyzing this data, so we're still peeking in, but the hope is that we can say something in the first couple of seconds about whether they'll make a deal or not, which could be very useful in thinking about avoiding litigation and ugly divorces and things like that. 
Those are all cases in which a lot of value is lost by delay and strikes. 
Here's the case where the disagreements occur. 
You can see it looks different than the one before. 
There's a lot more arrows. 
That means that the brains are synced up more closely in terms of simultaneous activity, and the arrows flow clearly from left to right. 
That is, the informed brain seems to be deciding, "We're probably not going to make a deal here." 
And then later there's activity in the uninformed brain. 
Next I'm going to introduce you to some relatives. 
They're hairy, smelly, fast and strong. 
You might be thinking back to your last Thanksgiving. 
Maybe if you had a chimpanzee with you. 
Charles Darwin and I and you broke off from the family tree from chimpanzees about five million years ago. 
They're still our closest genetic kin. 
We share 98.8 percent of the genes. 
We share more genes with them than zebras do with horses. 
And we're also their closest cousin. 
They have more genetic relation to us than to gorillas. 
So how humans and chimpanzees behave differently might tell us a lot about brain evolution. 
So this is an amazing memory test from Nagoya, Japan, Primate Research Institute, where they've done a lot of this research. 
This goes back quite a ways. They're interested in working memory. 
The chimp is going to see, watch carefully, they're going to see 200 milliseconds' exposure — that's fast, that's eight movie frames — of numbers one, two, three, four, five. 
Then they disappear and they're replaced by squares, and they have to press the squares that correspond to the numbers from low to high to get an apple reward. 
Let's see how they can do it. 
This is a young chimp. The young ones are better than the old ones, just like humans. 
And they're highly experienced, so they've done this thousands and thousands of time. 
Obviously there's a big training effect, as you can imagine. 
(Laughter) You can see they're very blasé and kind of effortless. 
Not only can they do it very well, they do it in a sort of lazy way. 
Right? Who thinks you could beat the chimps? 
Wrong. (Laughter) We can try. We'll try. Maybe we'll try. 
Okay, so the next part of this study I'm going to go quickly through is based on an idea of Tetsuro Matsuzawa. 
He had a bold idea that — what he called the cognitive trade-off hypothesis. 
We know chimps are faster and stronger. 
They're also very obsessed with status. 
His thought was, maybe they've preserved brain activities and they practice them in development that are really, really important to them to negotiate status and to win, which is something like strategic thinking during competition. 
So we're going to check that out by having the chimps actually play a game by touching two touch screens. 
The chimps are actually interacting with each other through the computers. 
They're going to press left or right. 
One chimp is called a matcher. 
They win if they press left, left, like a seeker finding someone in hide-and-seek, or right, right. 
The mismatcher wants to mismatch. 
They want to press the opposite screen of the chimp. 
And the rewards are apple cube rewards. 
So here's how game theorists look at these data. 
This is a graph of the percentage of times the matcher picked right on the x-axis, and the percentage of times they predicted right by the mismatcher on the y-axis. 
So a point here is the behavior by a pair of players, one trying to match, one trying to mismatch. 
The NE square in the middle — actually NE, CH and QRE — those are three different theories of Nash equilibrium, and others, tells you what the theory predicts, which is that they should match 50-50, because if you play left too much, for example, I can exploit that if I'm the mismatcher by then playing right. 
And as you can see, the chimps, each chimp is one triangle, are circled around, hovering around that prediction. 
Now we move the payoffs. 
We're actually going to make the left, left payoff for the matcher a little bit higher. 
Now they get three apple cubes. 
Game theoretically, that should actually make the mismatcher's behavior shift, because what happens is, the mismatcher will think, oh, this guy's going to go for the big reward, and so I'm going to go to the right, make sure he doesn't get it. 
And as you can see, their behavior moves up in the direction of this change in the Nash equilibrium. 
Finally, we changed the payoffs one more time. 
Now it's four apple cubes, and their behavior again moves towards the Nash equilibrium. 
It's sprinkled around, but if you average the chimps out, they're really, really close, within .01. 
They're actually closer than any species we've observed. 
What about humans? You think you're smarter than a chimpanzee? 
Here's two human groups in green and blue. 
They're closer to 50-50. They're not responding to payoffs as closely, and also if you study their learning in the game, they aren't as sensitive to previous rewards. 
The chimps are playing better than the humans, better in the sense of adhering to game theory. 
And these are two different groups of humans from Japan and Africa. They replicate quite nicely. 
None of them are close to where the chimps are. 
So here are some things we learned today. 
People seem to do a limited amount of strategic thinking using theory of mind. 
We have some preliminary evidence from bargaining that early warning signs in the brain might be used to predict whether there will be a bad disagreement that costs money, and chimps are better competitors than humans, as judged by game theory. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Adrian Kohler: Well, we're here today to talk about the evolution of a puppet horse. 
Basil Jones: But actually we're going to start this evolution with a hyena. 
AK: The ancestor of the horse. 
Okay, we'll do something with it. 
(Laughter) Hahahaha. 
The hyena is the ancestor of the horse because it was part of a production called "" Faustus in Africa, "" a Handspring Production from 1995, where it had to play draughts with Helen of Troy. 
This production was directed by South African artist and theater director, William Kentridge. 
So it needed a very articulate front paw. 
But, like all puppets, it has other attributes. 
BJ: One of them is breath, and it kind of breathes. 
AK: Haa haa haaa. 
BJ: Breath is really important for us. 
It's the kind of original movement for any puppet for us onstage. 
It's the thing that distinguishes the puppet — AK: Oops. 
BJ: From an actor. 
Puppets always have to try to be alive. 
It's their kind of ur-story onstage, that desperation to live. 
AK: Yeah, it's basically a dead object, as you can see, and it only lives because you make it. 
An actor struggles to die onstage, but a puppet has to struggle to live. 
And in a way that's a metaphor for life. 
BJ: So every moment it's on the stage, it's making the struggle. 
So we call this a piece of emotional engineering that uses up-to-the-minute 17th century technology — (Laughter) to turn nouns into verbs. 
AK: Well actually I prefer to say that it's an object constructed out of wood and cloth with movement built into it to persuade you to believe that it has life. 
BJ: Okay so. 
AK: It has ears that move passively when the head goes. 
BJ: And it has these bulkheads made out of plywood, covered with fabric — curiously similar, in fact, to the plywood canoes that Adrian's father used to make when he was a boy in their workshop. 
AK: In Port Elizabeth, the village outside Port Elizabeth in South Africa. 
BJ: His mother was a puppeteer. 
And when we met at art school and fell in love in 1971, I hated puppets. 
I really thought they were so beneath me. 
I wanted to become an avant-garde artist — and Punch and Judy was certainly not where I wanted to go. 
And, in fact, it took about 10 years to discover the Bambara Bamana puppets of Mali in West Africa, where there's a fabulous tradition of puppetry, to learn a renewed, or a new, respect for this art form. 
AK: So in 1981, I persuaded Basil and some friends of mine to form a puppet company. 
And 20 years later, miraculously, we collaborated with a company from Mali, the Sogolon Marionette Troupe of Bamako, where we made a piece about a tall giraffe. 
It was just called "" Tall Horse, "" which was a life-sized giraffe. 
BJ: And here again, you see the same structure. 
The bulkheads have now turned into hoops of cane, but it's ultimately the same structure. 
It's got two people inside it on stilts, which give them the height, and somebody in the front who's using a kind of steering wheel to move that head. 
AK: The person in the hind legs is also controlling the tail, a bit like the hyena — same mechanism, just a bit bigger. 
And he's controlling the ear movement. 
BJ: So this production was seen by Tom Morris of the National Theatre in London. 
And just around that time, his mother had said, "" Have you seen this book by Michael Morpurgo called 'War Horse'? "" AK: It's about a boy who falls in love with a horse. 
The horse is sold to the First World War, and he joins up to find his horse. 
BJ: So Tom gave us a call and said, "" Do you think you could make us a horse for a show to happen at the National Theatre? "" AK: It seemed a lovely idea. 
BJ: But it had to ride. It had to have a rider. 
AK: It had to have a rider, and it had to participate in cavalry charges. 
(Laughter) A play about early 20th century plowing technology and cavalry charges was a little bit of a challenge for the accounting department at the National Theatre in London. 
But they agreed to go along with it for a while. 
So we began with a test. 
BJ: This is Adrian and Thys Stander, who went on to actually design the cane system for the horse, and our next-door neighbor Katherine, riding on a ladder. 
The weight is really difficult when it's up above your head. 
AK: And once we put Katherine through that particular brand of hell, we knew that we might be able to make a horse, which could be ridden. 
So we made a model. 
This is a cardboard model, a little bit smaller than the hyena. 
You'll notice that the legs are plywood legs and the canoe structure is still there. 
BJ: And the two manipulators are inside. 
But we didn't realize at the time that we actually needed a third manipulator, because we couldn't manipulate the neck from inside and walk the horse at the same time. 
AK: We started work on the prototype after the model was approved, and the prototype took a bit longer than we anticipated. 
We had to throw out the plywood legs and make new cane ones. 
And we had a crate built for it. 
It had to be shipped to London. 
We were going to test-drive it on the street outside of our house in Cape Town, and it got to midnight and we hadn't done that yet. 
BJ: So we got a camera, and we posed the puppet in various galloping stances. 
And we sent it off to the National Theatre, hoping that they believed that we created something that worked. 
(Laughter) AK: A month later, we were there in London with this big box and a studio full of people about to work with us. 
BJ: About 40 people. 
AK: We were terrified. 
We opened the lid, we took the horse out, and it did work; it walked and it was able to be ridden. 
Here I have an 18-second clip of the very first walk of the prototype. 
This is in the National Theatre studio, the place where they cook new ideas. 
It had by no means got the green light yet. 
The choreographer, Toby Sedgwick, invented a beautiful sequence where the baby horse, which was made out of sticks and bits of twigs, grew up into the big horse. 
And Nick Starr, the director of the National Theatre, saw that particular moment, he was standing next to me — he nearly wet himself. 
And so the show was given the green light. 
And we went back to Cape Town and redesigned the horse completely. 
Here is the plan. 
(Laughter) And here is our factory in Cape Town where we make horses. 
You can see quite a lot of skeletons in the background there. 
The horses are completely handmade. 
There is very little 20th century technology in them. 
We used a bit of laser cutting on the plywood and some of the aluminum pieces. 
But because they have to be light and flexible, and each one of them is different, they can't be mass-produced, unfortunately. 
So here are some half-finished horses ready to be worked in London. 
And now we would like to introduce you to Joey. 
Joey boy, you there? 
Joey. 
(Applause) (Applause) Joey. 
Joey, come here. 
No, no, I haven't got it. 
He's got it; it's in his pocket. 
BJ: Joey. 
AK: Joey, Joey, Joey, Joey. 
Come here. Stand here where people can see you. 
Move around. Come on. 
I'd just like to describe — I won't talk too loud. He might get irritated. 
Here, Craig is working the head. 
He has bicycle brake cables going down to the head control in his hand. 
Each one of them operates either an ear, separately, or the head, up and down. 
But he also controls the head directly by using his hand. 
The ears are obviously a very important emotional indicator of the horse. 
When they point right back, the horse is fearful or angry, depending upon what's going on in front of him, around him. 
Or, when he's more relaxed, the head comes down and the ears listen, either side. 
Horses' hearing is very important. 
It's almost more important than their eyesight. 
Over here, Tommy's got what you call the heart position. 
He's working the leg. 
You see the string tendon from the hyena, the hyena's front leg, automatically pulls the hoop up. 
(Laughter) Horses are so unpredictable. (Laughter) 
The way a hoof comes up with a horse immediately gives you the feeling that it's a convincing horse action. 
The hind legs have got the same action. 
BJ: And Mikey also has, in his fingers, the ability to move the tail from left to right, and up and down with the other hand. 
And together, there's quite a complex possibility of tail expression. 
AK: You want to say something about the breathing? 
BJ: We had a big challenge with breathing. 
Adrian thought that he was going to have to split the chest of the puppet in two and make it breathe like that — because that's how a horse would breathe, with an expanded chest. 
But we realized that, if that were to be happening, you wouldn't, as an audience, see the breath. 
So he made a channel in here, and the chest moves up and down in that channel. 
So it's anti-naturalistic really, the up and down movement, but it feels like breath. 
And it's very, very simple because all that happens is that the puppeteer breathes with his knees. 
AK: Other emotional stuff. 
If I were to touch the horse here on his skin, the heart puppeteer can shake the body from inside and get the skin to quiver. 
You'll notice, of course, that the puppet is made out of cane lines. 
And I would like you to believe that it was an aesthetic choice, that I was making a three-dimensional drawing of a horse that somehow moves in space. 
But of course, it was the cane is light, the cane is flexible, the cane is durable and the cane is moldable. 
And so it was a very practical reason why it was made of cane. 
The skin itself is made out of a see-through nylon mesh, which, if the lighting designer wants the horse to almost disappear, she can light the background and the horse becomes ghostlike. 
You see the skeletal structure of it. 
Or if you light it from above, it becomes more solid. 
Again, that was a practical consideration. 
The guys inside the horse have to be able to see out. 
They have to be able to act along with their fellow actors in the production. 
And it's very much an in-the-moment activity that they're engaged in. 
It's three heads making one character. 
But now we would like you to put Joey through some paces. 
And plant. 
(Whinny) Thank you. 
And now just — (Applause) All the way from sunny California we have Zem Joaquin who's going to ride the horse for us. (Applause) (Applause) 
(Music) So we would like to stress that the performance you see in the horse is three guys who have studied horse behavior incredibly thoroughly. 
BJ: Not being able to talk to one another while they're onstage because they're mic'd. 
The sound that that very large chest makes, of the horse — the whinnying and the nickering and everything — that starts usually with one performer, carries on with a second person and ends with a third. 
AK: Mikey Brett from Leicestershire. 
(Applause) Mikey Brett, Craig, Leo, Zem Joaquin and Basil and me. (Applause) 
Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) 

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

Today, I'm going to talk to you about sketching electronics. 
I'm, among several other things, an electrical engineer, and that means that I spend a good amount of time designing and building new pieces of technology, and more specifically designing and building electronics. 
And what I've found is that the process of designing and building electronics is problematic in all sorts of ways. 
So it's a really slow process, it's really expensive, and the outcome of that process, namely electronic circuit boards, are limited in all sorts of kind of interesting ways. 
So they're really small, generally, they're square and flat and hard, and frankly, most of them just aren't very attractive, and so my team and I have been thinking of ways to really change and mix up the process and the outcome of designing electronics. 
And so what if you could design and build electronics like this? So what if you could do it extremely quickly, extremely inexpensively, and maybe more interestingly, really fluidly and expressively and even improvisationally? 
Wouldn't that be so cool, and that wouldn't that open up all sorts of new possibilities? 
I'm going to share with you two projects that are investigations along these lines, and we'll start with this one. 
(Video) Magnetic electronic pieces and ferrous paper. 
A conductive pen from the Lewis lab at UIUC. 
Sticker templates. 
Speed x 4. 
Making a switch. 
Music: DJ Shadow. 
Adding some intelligence with a microcontroller. 
Sketching an interface. 
(Music) (Laughter) (Applause) Pretty cool, huh? We think so. 
So now that we developed these tools and found these materials that let us do these things, we started to realize that, essentially, anything that we can do with paper, anything that we can do with a piece of paper and a pen we can now do with electronics. 
So the next project that I want to show you is kind of a deeper exploration of that possibility. 
And I'll kind of let it speak for itself. 
(Music) (Applause) So the next step for us in this process is now to find a way to let all of you build things like this, and so the way that we're approaching that is by teaching workshops to people where we explain how they can use these kinds of tools, and then also working to get the tools and the materials and techniques out into the real world in a variety of ways. 
And so sometime soon, you'll be able to play and build and sketch with electronics in this fundamentally new way. 
So thank you very much. (Applause) 

Because what that means is that for the first time in the history of the species, the majority of babies born in the developed world are having the opportunity to grow old. 
And we suspect that this may help to explain why older people are better than younger people at solving hotly charged emotional conflicts and debates. 
(Laughter) We've said, could it be that positive emotions are simply easier to process than negative emotions, and so you switch to the positive emotions? 
When time horizons are long and nebulous, as they typically are in youth, people are constantly preparing, trying to soak up all the information they possibly can, taking risks, exploring. 
(Laughter) We go on blind dates. (Laughter) 

Well, this is about state budgets. 
This is probably the most boring topic of the whole morning. 
But I want to tell you, I think it's an important topic that we need to care about. 
State budgets are big, big money — I'll show you the numbers — and they get very little scrutiny. 
The understanding is very low. 
Many of the people involved have special interests or short-term interests that get them not thinking about what the implications of the trends are. 
And these budgets are the key for our future; they're the key for our kids. 
Most education funding — whether it's K through 12, or the great universities or community colleges — most of the money for those things is coming out of these state budgets. 
But we have a problem. 
Here's the overall picture. 
U.S. economy is big — 14.7 trillion. 
Now out of that pie, the government spends 36 percent. 
So this is combining the federal level, which is the largest, the state level and the local level. 
And it's really in this combined way that you get an overall sense of what's going on, because there's a lot of complex things like Medicaid and research money that flow across those boundaries. 
But we're spending 36 percent. 
Well what are we taking in? 
Simple business question. 
Answer is 26 percent. 
Now this leaves 10 percent deficit, sort of a mind-blowing number. 
And some of that, in fact, is due to the fact that we've had an economic recession. 
Receipts go down, some spending programs go up, but most of it is not because of that. 
Most of it is because of ways that the liabilities are building up and the trends, and that creates a huge challenge. 
In fact, this is the forecast picture. 
There are various things in here: I could say we might raise more revenue, or medical innovation will make the spending even higher. 
It is an increasingly difficult picture, even assuming the economy does quite well — probably better than it will do. 
This is what you see at this overall level. 
Now how did we get here? 
How could you have a problem like this? 
After all, at least on paper, there's this notion that these state budgets are balanced. 
Only one state says they don't have to balance the budget. 
But what this means actually is that there's a pretense. 
There's no real, true balancing going on, and in a sense, the games they play to hide that actually obscure the topic so much that people don't see things that are actually pretty straight-forward challenges. 
When Jerry Brown was elected, this was the challenge that was put to him. 
That is, through various gimmicks and things, a so-called balanced budget had led him to have 25 billion missing out of the 76 billion in proposed spending. 
Now he's put together some thoughts: About half of that he'll cut, another half, perhaps in a very complex set of steps, taxes will be approved. 
But even so, as you go out into those future years, various pension costs, health costs go up enough, and the revenue does not go up enough. 
So you get a big squeeze. 
What were those things that allowed us to hide this? 
Well, some really nice little tricks. 
And these were somewhat noticed. 
The paper said, "" It's not really balanced. 
It's got holes. 
It perpetuates deficit spending. 
It's riddled with gimmicks. "" And really when you get down to it, the guys at Enron never would have done this. 
This is so blatant, so extreme. 
Is anyone paying attention to some of the things these guys do? 
They borrow money. 
They're not supposed to, but they figure out a way. 
They make you pay more in withholding just to help their cash flow out. 
They sell off the assets. 
They defer the payments. 
They sell off the revenues from tobacco. 
And California's not unique. 
In fact, there's about five states that are worse and only really four states that don't face this big challenge. 
So it's systemic across the entire country. 
It really comes from the fact that certain long-term obligations — health care, where innovation makes it more expensive, early retirement and pension, where the age structure gets worse for you, and just generosity — that these mis-accounting things allow to develop over time, that you've got a problem. 
This is the retiree health care benefits. 
Three million set aside, 62 billion dollar liability — much worse than the car companies. 
And everybody looked at that and knew that that was headed toward a huge problem. 
The forecast for the medical piece alone is to go from 26 percent of the budget to 42 percent. 
Well what's going to give? 
Well in order to accommodate that, you would have to cut education spending in half. 
It really is this young versus the old to some degree. 
If you don't change that revenue picture, if you don't solve what you're doing in health care, you're going to be deinvesting in the young. 
The great University of California university system, the great things that have gone on, won't happen. 
So far it's meant layoffs, increased class sizes. 
Within the education community there's this discussion of, "" Should it just be the young teachers who get laid off, or the less good teachers who get laid off? "" And there's a discussion: if you're going to increase class sizes, where do you do that? How much effect does that have? 
And unfortunately, as you get into that, people get confused and think, well maybe you think that's okay. 
In fact, no, education spending should not be cut. 
There's ways, if it's temporary, to minimize the impact, but it's a problem. 
It's also really a problem for where we need to go. 
Technology has a role to play. 
Well we need money to experiment with that, to get those tools in there. 
There's the idea of paying teachers for effectiveness, measuring them, giving them feedback, taking videos in the classroom. 
That's something I think is very, very important. 
Well you have to allocate dollars for that system and for that incentive pay. 
In a situation where you have growth, you put the new money into this. 
Or even if you're flat, you might shift money into it. 
But with the type of cuts we're talking about, it will be far, far harder to get these incentives for excellence, or to move over to use technology in the new way. 
So what's going on? 
Where's the brain trust that's in error here? 
Well there really is no brain trust. 
(Laughter) It's sort of the voters. It's sort of us showing up. 
Just look at this spending. 
California will spend over 100 billion, Microsoft, 38, Google, about 19. 
The amount of IQ in good numeric analysis, both inside Google and Microsoft and outside, with analysts and people of various opinions — should they have spent on that? 
No, they wasted their money on this. What about this thing? — it really is quite phenomenal. 
Everybody has an opinion. 
There's great feedback. 
And the numbers are used to make decisions. 
If you go over the education spending and the health care spending — particularly these long-term trends — you don't have that type of involvement on a number that's more important in terms of equity, in terms of learning. 
So what do we need to do? 
We need better tools. 
We can get some things out on the Internet. 
I'm going to use my website to put up some things that will give the basic picture. 
We need lots more. 
There's a few good books, one about school spending and where the money comes from — how that's changed over time, and the challenge. 
We need better accounting. 
We need to take the fact that the current employees, the future liabilities they create, that should come out of the current budget. 
We need to understand why they've done the pension accounting the way they have. 
It should be more like private accounting. 
It's the gold standard. 
And finally, we need to really reward politicians. 
Whenever they say there's these long-term problems, we can't say, "" Oh, you're the messenger with bad news? 
We just shot you. "" In fact, there are some like these: Erskine Bowles, Alan Simpson and others, who have gone through and given proposals for this overall federal health-spending state-level problem. 
But in fact, their work was sort of pushed off. 
In fact, the week afterwards, some tax cuts were done that made the situation even worse than their assumptions. 
So we need these pieces. 
Now I think this is a solvable problem. 
It's a great country with lots of people. 
But we have to draw those people in, because this is about education. 
And just look at what happened with the tuitions with the University of California and project that out for another three, four, five years — it's unaffordable. 
And that's the kind of thing — the investment in the young — that makes us great, allows us to contribute. 
It allows us to do the art, the biotechnology, the software and all those magic things. 
And so the bottom line is we need to care about state budgets because they're critical for our kids and our future. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

They told me that I'm a traitor to my own profession, that I should be fired, have my medical license taken away, that I should go back to my own country. 
My email got hacked. 
In a discussion forum for other doctors, someone took credit for "" Twitter-bombing "" my account. 
Now, I didn't know if this was a good or bad thing, but then came the response: "Too bad it wasn't a real bomb." 
I never thought that I would do something that would provoke this level of anger among other doctors. 
Becoming a doctor was my dream. 
I grew up in China, and my earliest memories are of being rushed to the hospital because I had such bad asthma that I was there nearly every week. 
I had this one doctor, Dr. Sam, who always took care of me. 
She was about the same age as my mother. 
She had this wild, curly hair, and she always wore these bright yellow flowery dresses. 
She was one of those doctors who, if you fell and you broke your arm, she would ask you why you weren't laughing because it's your humerus. Get it? 
See, you'd groan, but she'd always make you feel better after having seen her. 
Well, we all have that childhood hero that we want to grow up to be just like, right? 
Well, I wanted to be just like Dr. Sam. 
When I was eight, my parents and I moved to the U.S., and ours became the typical immigrant narrative. 
My parents cleaned hotel rooms and washed dishes and pumped gas so that I could pursue my dream. 
Well, eventually I learned enough English, and my parents were so happy the day that I got into medical school and took my oath of healing and service. 
But then one day, everything changed. 
My mother called me to tell me that she wasn't feeling well, she had a cough that wouldn't go away, she was short of breath and tired. 
Well, I knew that my mother was someone who never complained about anything. 
For her to tell me that something was the matter, I knew something had to be really wrong. 
And it was: We found out that she had stage IV breast cancer, cancer that by then had spread to her lungs, her bones, and her brain. 
My mother was brave, though, and she had hope. 
She went through surgery and radiation, and was on her third round of chemotherapy when she lost her address book. 
She tried to look up her oncologist's phone number on the Internet and she found it, but she found something else too. 
On several websites, he was listed as a highly paid speaker to a drug company, and in fact often spoke on behalf of the same chemo regimen that he had prescribed her. 
She called me in a panic, and I didn't know what to believe. 
Maybe this was the right chemo regimen for her, but maybe it wasn't. 
It made her scared and it made her doubt. 
When it comes to medicine, having that trust is a must, and when that trust is gone, then all that's left is fear. 
There's another side to this fear. 
As a medical student, I was taking care of this 19-year-old who was biking back to his dorm when he got struck and hit, run over by an SUV. 
He had seven broken ribs, shattered hip bones, and he was bleeding inside his belly and inside his brain. 
Now, imagine being his parents who flew in from Seattle, 2,000 miles away, to find their son in a coma. 
I mean, you'd want to find out what's going on with him, right? 
They asked to attend our bedside rounds where we discussed his condition and his plan, which I thought was a reasonable request, and also would give us a chance to show them how much we were trying and how much we cared. 
The head doctor, though, said no. 
He gave all kinds of reasons. 
Maybe they'll get in the nurse's way. 
Maybe they'll stop students from asking questions. 
He even said, "What if they see mistakes and sue us?" 
What I saw behind every excuse was deep fear, and what I learned was that to become a doctor, we have to put on our white coats, put up a wall, and hide behind it. 
There's a hidden epidemic in medicine. 
Of course, patients are scared when they come to the doctor. 
Imagine you wake up with this terrible bellyache, you go to the hospital, you're lying in this strange place, you're on this hospital gurney, you're wearing this flimsy gown, strangers are coming to poke and prod at you. 
You don't know what's going to happen. 
You don't even know if you're going to get the blanket you asked for 30 minutes ago. 
But it's not just patients who are scared; doctors are scared too. 
We're scared of patients finding out who we are and what medicine is all about. 
And so what do we do? 
We put on our white coats and we hide behind them. 
Of course, the more we hide, the more people want to know what it is that we're hiding. 
The more fear then spirals into mistrust and poor medical care. 
We don't just have a fear of sickness, we have a sickness of fear. 
Can we bridge this disconnect between what patients need and what doctors do? 
Can we overcome the sickness of fear? 
Let me ask you differently: If hiding isn't the answer, what if we did the opposite? 
What if doctors were to become totally transparent with their patients? 
Last fall, I conducted a research study to find out what it is that people want to know about their healthcare. 
I didn't just want to study patients in a hospital, but everyday people. 
So my two medical students, Suhavi Tucker and Laura Johns, literally took their research to the streets. 
They went to banks, coffee shops, senior centers, Chinese restaurants and train stations. 
What did they find? 
Well, when we asked people, "What do you want to know about your healthcare?" 
people responded with what they want to know about their doctors, because people understand health care to be the individual interaction between them and their doctors. 
When we asked, "" What do you want to know about your doctors? "" people gave three different answers. 
Some want to know that their doctor is competent and certified to practice medicine. 
Some want to be sure that their doctor is unbiased and is making decisions based on evidence and science, not on who pays them. 
Surprisingly to us, many people want to know something else about their doctors. 
Jonathan, a 28-year-old law student, says he wants to find someone who is comfortable with LGBTQ patients and specializes in LGBT health. 
Serena, a 32-year-old accountant, says that it's important to her for her doctor to share her values when it comes to reproductive choice and women's rights. 
Frank, a 59-year-old hardware store owner, doesn't even like going to the doctor and wants to find someone who believes in prevention first, but who is comfortable with alternative treatments. 
One after another, our respondents told us that that doctor-patient relationship is a deeply intimate one — that to show their doctors their bodies and tell them their deepest secrets, they want to first understand their doctor's values. 
Just because doctors have to see every patient doesn't mean that patients have to see every doctor. 
People want to know about their doctors first so that they can make an informed choice. 
As a result of this, I formed a campaign, Who's My Doctor? 
that calls for total transparency in medicine. 
Participating doctors voluntarily disclose on a public website not just information about where we went to medical school and what specialty we're in, but also our conflicts of interest. 
We go beyond the Government in the Sunshine Act about drug company affiliations, and we talk about how we're paid. 
Incentives matter. 
If you go to your doctor because of back pain, you might want to know he's getting paid 5,000 dollars to perform spine surgery versus 25 dollars to refer you to see a physical therapist, or if he's getting paid the same thing no matter what he recommends. 
Then, we go one step further. 
We add our values when it comes to women's health, LGBT health, alternative medicine, preventive health, and end-of-life decisions. 
We pledge to our patients that we are here to serve you, so you have a right to know who we are. 
We believe that transparency can be the cure for fear. 
I thought some doctors would sign on and others wouldn't, but I had no idea of the huge backlash that would ensue. 
Within one week of starting Who's My Doctor? 
Medscape's public forum and several online doctors' communities had thousands of posts about this topic. 
Here are a few. 
From a gastroenterologist in Portland: "" I devoted 12 years of my life to being a slave. 
I have loans and mortgages. 
I depend on lunches from drug companies to serve patients. "" Well, times may be hard for everyone, but try telling your patient making 35,000 dollars a year to serve a family of four that you need the free lunch. 
From an orthopedic surgeon in Charlotte: "" I find it an invasion of my privacy to disclose where my income comes from. 
My patients don't disclose their incomes to me. "" But your patients' sources of income don't affect your health. 
From a psychiatrist in New York City: "" Pretty soon we will have to disclose whether we prefer cats to dogs, what model of car we drive, and what toilet paper we use. "" Well, how you feel about Toyotas or Cottonelle won't affect your patients' health, but your views on a woman's right to choose and preventive medicine and end-of-life decisions just might. 
And my favorite, from a Kansas City cardiologist: "" More government-mandated stuff? 
Dr. Wen needs to move back to her own country. "" Well, two pieces of good news. 
First of all, this is meant to be voluntary and not mandatory, and second of all, I'm American and I'm already here. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Within a month, my employers were getting calls asking for me to be fired. 
I received mail at my undisclosed home address with threats to contact the medical board to sanction me. 
My friends and family urged me to quit this campaign. 
After the bomb threat, I was done. 
But then I heard from patients. 
Over social media, a TweetChat, which I'd learned what that was by then, generated 4.3 million impressions, and thousands of people wrote to encourage me to continue. 
They wrote with things like, "" If doctors are doing something they're that ashamed of, they shouldn't be doing it. "" "" Elected officials have to disclose campaign contributions. 
Lawyers have to disclose conflicts of interests. 
Why shouldn't doctors? "" And finally, many people wrote and said, "" Let us patients decide what's important when we're choosing a doctor. "" In our initial trial, over 300 doctors have taken the total transparency pledge. 
What a crazy new idea, right? 
But actually, this is not that new of a concept at all. 
Remember Dr. Sam, my doctor in China, with the goofy jokes and the wild hair? 
Well, she was my doctor, but she was also our neighbor who lived in the building across the street. 
I went to the same school as her daughter. 
My parents and I trusted her because we knew who she was and what she stood for, and she had no need to hide from us. 
Just one generation ago, this was the norm in the U.S. as well. 
You knew that your family doctor was the father of two teenage boys, that he quit smoking a few years ago, that he says he's a regular churchgoer, but you see him twice a year: once at Easter and once when his mother-in-law comes to town. 
You knew what he was about, and he had no need to hide from you. 
But the sickness of fear has taken over, and patients suffer the consequences. 
I know this firsthand. 
My mother fought her cancer for eight years. 
She was a planner, and she thought a lot about how she wanted to live and how she wanted to die. 
Not only did she sign advance directives, she wrote a 12-page document about how she had suffered enough, how it was time for her to go. 
One day, when I was a resident physician, I got a call to say that she was in the intensive care unit. 
By the time I got there, she was about to be intubated and put on a breathing machine. 
"But this is not what she wants," I said, "and we have documents." 
The ICU doctor looked at me in the eye, pointed at my then 16-year-old sister, and said, "" Do you remember when you were that age? 
How would you have liked to grow up without your mother? "" Her oncologist was there too, and said, "" This is your mother. 
Can you really face yourself for the rest of your life if you don't do everything for her? "" I knew my mother so well. 
I understood what her directives meant so well, but I was a physician. 
That was the single hardest decision I ever made, to let her die in peace, and I carry those words of those doctors with me every single day. 
We can bridge the disconnect between what doctors do and what patients need. 
We can get there, because we've been there before, and we know that transparency gets us to that trust. 
Research has shown us that openness also helps doctors, that having open medical records, being willing to talk about medical errors, will increase patient trust, improve health outcomes, and reduce malpractice. 
That openness, that trust, is only going to be more important as we move from the infectious to the behavioral model of disease. 
Bacteria may not care so much about trust and intimacy, but for people to tackle the hard lifestyle choices, to address issues like smoking cessation, blood-pressure management and diabetes control, well, that requires us to establish trust. 
Here's what other transparent doctors have said. 
Brandon Combs, an internist in Denver: "" This has brought me closer to my patients. 
The type of relationship I've developed — that's why I entered medicine. "" Aaron Stupple, an internist in Denver: "" I tell my patients that I am totally open with them. 
I don't hide anything from them. 
This is me. Now tell me about you. 
We're in this together. "" May Nguyen, a family physician in Houston: "" My colleagues are astounded by what I'm doing. 
They ask me how I could be so brave. 
I said, I'm not being brave, it's my job. "" I leave you today with a final thought. 
Being totally transparent is scary. 
You feel naked, exposed and vulnerable, but that vulnerability, that humility, it can be an extraordinary benefit to the practice of medicine. 
When doctors are willing to step off our pedestals, take off our white coats, and show our patients who we are and what medicine is all about, that's when we begin to overcome the sickness of fear. 
That's when we establish trust. 
That's when we change the paradigm of medicine from one of secrecy and hiding to one that is fully open and engaged for our patients. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When, in 1960, still a student, I got a traveling fellowship to study housing in North America. 
We traveled the country. 
We saw public housing high-rise buildings in all major cities: New York, Philadelphia. 
Those who have no choice lived there. 
And then we traveled from suburb to suburb, and I came back thinking, we've got to reinvent the apartment building. 
There has to be another way of doing this. 
We can't sustain suburbs, so let's design a building which gives the qualities of a house to each unit. 
Habitat would be all about gardens, contact with nature, streets instead of corridors. 
We prefabricated it so we would achieve economy, and there it is almost 50 years later. 
It's a very desirable place to live in. 
It's now a heritage building, but it did not proliferate. 
In 1973, I made my first trip to China. 
It was the Cultural Revolution. 
We traveled the country, met with architects and planners. 
This is Beijing then, not a single high rise building in Beijing or Shanghai. 
Shenzhen didn't even exist as a city. 
There were hardly any cars. 
Thirty years later, this is Beijing today. 
This is Hong Kong. 
If you're wealthy, you live there, if you're poor, you live there, but high density it is, and it's not just Asia. 
São Paulo, you can travel in a helicopter 45 minutes seeing those high-rise buildings consume the 19th-century low-rise environment. 
And with it, comes congestion, and we lose mobility, and so on and so forth. 
So a few years ago, we decided to go back and rethink Habitat. 
Could we make it more affordable? 
Could we actually achieve this quality of life in the densities that are prevailing today? 
And we realized, it's basically about light, it's about sun, it's about nature, it's about fractalization. 
Can we open up the surface of the building so that it has more contact with the exterior? 
We came up with a number of models: economy models, cheaper to build and more compact; membranes of housing where people could design their own house and create their own gardens. 
And then we decided to take New York as a test case, and we looked at Lower Manhattan. 
And we mapped all the building area in Manhattan. 
On the left is Manhattan today: blue for housing, red for office buildings, retail. 
On the right, we reconfigured it: the office buildings form the base, and then rising 75 stories above, are apartments. 
There's a street in the air on the 25th level, a community street. 
It's permeable. 
There are gardens and open spaces for the community, almost every unit with its own private garden, and community space all around. 
And most important, permeable, open. 
It does not form a wall or an obstruction in the city, and light permeates everywhere. 
And in the last two or three years, we've actually been, for the first time, realizing the quality of life of Habitat in real-life projects across Asia. 
This in Qinhuangdao in China: middle-income housing, where there is a bylaw that every apartment must receive three hours of sunlight. 
That's measured in the winter solstice. 
And under construction in Singapore, again middle-income housing, gardens, community streets and parks and so on and so forth. 
And Colombo. 
And I want to touch on one more issue, which is the design of the public realm. 
A hundred years after we've begun building with tall buildings, we are yet to understand how the tall high-rise building becomes a building block in making a city, in creating the public realm. 
In Singapore, we had an opportunity: 10 million square feet, extremely high density. 
Taking the concept of outdoor and indoor, promenades and parks integrated with intense urban life. 
So they are outdoor spaces and indoor spaces, and you move from one to the other, and there is contact with nature, and most relevantly, at every level of the structure, public gardens and open space: on the roof of the podium, climbing up the towers, and finally on the roof, the sky park, two and a half acres, jogging paths, restaurants, and the world's longest swimming pool. 
And that's all I can tell you in five minutes. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

As a kid, I used to dream about the ocean. 
It was this wild place full of color and life, home to these alien-looking, fantastical creatures. 
I pictured big sharks ruling the food chain and saw graceful sea turtles dancing across coral reefs. 
As a marine biologist turned photographer, I've spent most of my career looking for places as magical as those I used to dream about when I was little. 
As you can see, I began exploring bodies of water at a fairly young age. 
But the first time I truly went underwater, I was about 10 years old. 
And I can still vividly remember furiously finning to reach this old, encrusted cannon on a shallow coral reef. 
And when I finally managed to grab hold of it, I looked up, and I was instantly surrounded by fish in all colors of the rainbow. 
That was the day I fell in love with the ocean. 
Thomas Peschak Conservation Photographer In my 40 years on this planet, I've had the great privilege to explore some of its most incredible seascapes for National Geographic Magazine and the Save Our Seas Foundation. 
I've photographed everything from really, really big sharks to dainty ones that fit in the palm of your hand. 
I've smelled the fishy, fishy breath of humpback whales feeding just feet away from me in the cold seas off Canada's Great Bear Rainforest. 
And I've been privy to the mating rituals of green sea turtles in the Mozambique Channel. 
Everyone on this planet affects and is affected by the ocean. 
And the pristine seas I used to dream of as a child are becoming harder and harder to find. 
They are becoming more compressed and more threatened. 
As we humans continue to maintain our role as the leading predator on earth, I've witnessed and photographed many of these ripple effects firsthand. 
For a long time, I thought I had to shock my audience out of their indifference with disturbing images. 
And while this approach has merits, I have come full circle. 
I believe that the best way for me to effect change is to sell love. 
I guess I'm a matchmaker of sorts and as a photographer, I have the rare opportunity to reveal animals and entire ecosystems that lie hidden beneath the ocean's surface. 
You can't love something and become a champion for it if you don't know it exists. 
Uncovering this — that is the power of conservation photography. 
(Music) I've visited hundreds of marine locations, but there are a handful of seascapes that have touched me incredibly deeply. 
The first time I experienced that kind of high was about 10 years ago, off South Africa's rugged, wild coast. 
And every June and July, enormous shoals of sardines travel northwards in a mass migration we call the Sardine Run. 
And boy, do those fish have good reason to run. 
In hot pursuit are hoards of hungry and agile predators. 
Common dolphins hunt together and they can separate some of the sardines from the main shoal and they create bait balls. 
They drive and trap the fish upward against the ocean surface and then they rush in to dine on this pulsating and movable feast. 
Close behind are sharks. 
Now, most people believe that sharks and dolphins are these mortal enemies, but during the Sardine Run, they actually coexist. 
In fact, dolphins actually help sharks feed more effectively. 
Without dolphins, the bait balls are more dispersed and sharks often end up with what I call a sardine donut, or a mouth full of water. 
Now, while I've had a few spicy moments with sharks on the sardine run, I know they don't see me as prey. 
However, I get bumped and tail-slapped just like any other guest at this rowdy, rowdy banquet. 
From the shores of Africa we travel east, across the vastness that is the Indian Ocean to the Maldives, an archipelago of coral islands. 
And during the stormy southwest monsoon, manta rays from all across the archipelago travel to a tiny speck in Baa Atoll called Hanifaru. 
Armies of crustaceans, most no bigger than the size of your pupils, are the mainstay of the manta ray's diet. 
When plankton concentrations become patchy, manta rays feed alone and they somersault themselves backwards again and again, very much like a puppy chasing its own tail. 
(Music) However, when plankton densities increase, the mantas line up head-to-tail to form these long feeding chains, and any tasty morsel that escapes the first or second manta in line is surely to be gobbled up by the next or the one after. 
As plankton levels peak in the bay, the mantas swim closer and closer together in a unique behavior we call cyclone feeding. 
And as they swirl in tight formation, this multi-step column of mantas creates its own vortex, sucking in and delivering the plankton right into the mantas' cavernous mouths. 
The experience of diving amongst such masses of hundreds of rays is truly unforgettable. 
(Music) When I first photographed Hanifaru, the site enjoyed no protection and was threatened by development. 
And working with NGOs like the Manta Trust, my images eventually helped Hanifaru become a marine-protected area. 
Now, fisherman from neighboring islands, they once hunted these manta rays to make traditional drums from their skins. 
Today, they are the most ardent conservation champions and manta rays earn the Maldivian economy in excess of 8 million dollars every single year. 
I have always wanted to travel back in time to an era where maps were mostly blank or they read, "" There be dragons. "" And today, the closest I've come is visiting remote atolls in the western Indian Ocean. 
Far, far away from shipping lanes and fishing fleets, diving into these waters is a poignant reminder of what our oceans once looked like. 
Very few people have heard of Bassas da India, a tiny speck of coral in the Mozambique Channel. 
Its reef forms a protective outer barrier and the inner lagoon is a nursery ground for Galapagos sharks. 
These sharks are anything but shy, even during the day. 
I had a bit of a hunch that they'd be even bolder and more abundant at night. 
(Music) Never before have I encountered so many sharks on a single coral outcrop. 
Capturing and sharing moments like this — that reminds me why I chose my path. 
Earlier this year, I was on assignment for National Geographic Magazine in Baja California. 
And about halfway down the peninsula on the Pacific side lies San Ignacio Lagoon, a critical calving ground for gray whales. 
For 100 years, this coast was the scene of a wholesale slaughter, where more than 20,000 gray whales were killed, leaving only a few hundred survivors. 
Today the descendents of these same whales nudge their youngsters to the surface to play and even interact with us. 
(Music) This species truly has made a remarkable comeback. 
Now, on the other side of the peninsula lies Cabo Pulmo, a sleepy fishing village. 
Decades of overfishing had brought them close to collapse. 
In 1995, local fisherman convinced the authorities to proclaim their waters a marine reserve. 
But what happened next was nothing short of miraculous. 
In 2005, after only a single decade of protection, scientists measured the largest recovery of fish ever recorded. 
But don't take my word for it — come with me. 
On a single breath, swim with me in deep, into one of the largest and densest schools of fish I have ever encountered. 
(Music) We all have the ability to be creators of hope. 
And through my photography, I want to pass on the message that it is not too late for our oceans. 
And particularly, I want to focus on nature's resilience in the face of 7.3 billion people. 
My hope is that in the future, I will have to search much, much harder to make photographs like this, while creating images that showcase our respectful coexistence with the ocean. 
Those will hopefully become an everyday occurrence for me. 
To thrive and survive in my profession, you really have to be a hopeless optimist. 
And I always operate on the assumption that the next great picture that will effect change is right around the corner, behind the next coral head, inside the next lagoon or possibly, in the one after it. 
(Music) 

What I want to do this afternoon is something a little different than what's scheduled. 
Foreign policy, you can figure that out by watching, I don't know, Rachel Maddow or somebody, but — (Laughter) — I want to talk about young people and structure, young people and structure. 
This was last Wednesday afternoon at a school in Brooklyn, New York, at Cristo Rey High School, run by the Jesuits. 
And I was talking to this group of students, and take a look at them. 
They were around me in three directions. 
You'll noticed that almost all of them are minority. 
You'll notice that the building is rather austere. 
It's an old New York school building, nothing fancy. 
They still have old blackboards and whatnot. 
And there are about 300 kids in this school, and the school's been going now for four years, and they're about to graduate their first class. 
Twenty-two people are graduating, and all 22 are going to college. 
They all come from homes where there is, for the most part, just one person in the home, usually the mother or the grandmother, and that's it, and they come here for their education and for their structure. 
Now I had this picture taken, and it was put up on my Facebook page last week, and somebody wrote in, "Huh, why does he have him standing at attention like that?" 
And then they said, "" But he looks good. "" (Laughter) He does look good, because kids need structure, and the trick I play in all of my school appearances is that when I get through with my little homily to the kids, I then invite them to ask questions, and when they raise their hands, I say, "" Come up, "" and I make them come up and stand in front of me. 
I make them stand at attention like a soldier. 
Put your arms straight down at your side, look up, open your eyes, stare straight ahead, and speak out your question loudly so everybody can hear. 
No slouching, no pants hanging down, none of that stuff. 
(Laughter) And this young man, his name is — his last name Cruz — he loved it. That's all over his Facebook page and it's gone viral. (Laughter) 
So people think I'm being unkind to this kid. 
No, we're having a little fun. 
And the thing about it, I've done this for years, the younger they are, the more fun it is. 
When I get six- and seven-year-olds in a group, I have to figure out how to keep them quiet. 
You know that they'll always start yakking. 
And so I play a little game with them before I make them stand at attention. 
I say, "" Now listen. In the army, when we want you to pay attention, we have a command. It's called 'at ease.' It means everybody be quiet and pay attention. Listen up. 
Do you understand? "" "Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh." "Let's practice. Everybody start chatting." 
And I let them go for about 10 seconds, then I go, "" At ease! "" "" Huh! "" (Laughter) "Yes, General. Yes, General." 
Try it with your kids. See if it works. (Laughter) I don't think so. 
But anyway, it's a game I play, and it comes obviously from my military experience. 
Because for the majority of my adult life, I worked with young kids, teenagers with guns, I call them. 
And we would bring them into the army, and the first thing we would do is to put them in an environment of structure, put them in ranks, make them all wear the same clothes, cut all their hair off so they look alike, make sure that they are standing in ranks. 
We teach them how to go right face, left face, so they can obey instructions and know the consequences of not obeying instructions. 
It gives them structure. 
And then we introduce them to somebody who they come to hate immediately, the drill sergeant. 
And they hate him. 
And the drill sergeant starts screaming at them, and telling them to do all kinds of awful things. 
But then the most amazing thing happens over time. 
Once that structure is developed, once they understand the reason for something, once they understand, "" Mama ain't here, son. 
I'm your worst nightmare. I'm your daddy and your mommy. 
And that's just the way it is. You got that, son? 
Yeah, and then when I ask you a question, there are only three possible answers: yes, sir; no, sir; and no excuse, sir. 
Don't start telling me why you didn't do something. 
It's yes, sir; no, sir; no excuse, sir. "" "You didn't shave." "But sir —" "" No, don't tell me how often you scraped your face this morning. 
I'm telling you you didn't shave. "" "No excuse, sir." "Attaboy, you're learning fast." 
But you'd be amazed at what you can do with them once you put them in that structure. 
In 18 weeks, they have a skill. They are mature. 
And you know what, they come to admire the drill sergeant and they never forget the drill sergeant. 
They come to respect him. 
And so we need more of this kind of structure and respect in the lives of our children. 
I spend a lot of time with youth groups, and I say to people, "" When does the education process begin? "" We're always talking about, "" Let's fix the schools. 
Let's do more for our teachers. Let's put more computers in our schools. 
Let's get it all online. "" That isn't the whole answer. It's part of the answer. 
But the real answer begins with bringing a child to the school with structure in that child's heart and soul to begin with. 
When does the learning process begin? Does it begin in first grade? 
No, no, it begins the first time a child in a mother's arms looks up at the mother and says, "" Oh, this must be my mother. 
She's the one who feeds me. 
Oh yeah, when I don't feel so good down there, she takes care of me. 
It's her language I will learn. "" And at that moment they shut out all the other languages that they could be learning at that age, but by three months, that's her. 
And if the person doing it, whether it's the mother or grandmother, whoever's doing it, that is when the education process begins. 
That's when language begins. 
That's when love begins. That's when structure begins. 
That's when you start to imprint on the child that "" you are special, you are different from every other child in the world. 
And we're going to read to you. "" A child who has not been read to is in danger when that child gets to school. 
A child who doesn't know his or her colors or doesn't know how to tell time, doesn't know how to tie shoes, doesn't know how to do those things, and doesn't know how to do something that goes by a word that was drilled into me as a kid: mind. 
Mind your manners! Mind your adults! Mind what you're saying! 
This is the way children are raised properly. 
And I watched my own young grandchildren now come along and they're, much to the distress of my children, they are acting just like we did. You know? You imprint them. 
And that's what you have to do to prepare children for education and for school. 
And I'm working at all the energy I have to sort of communicate this message that we need preschool, we need Head Start, we need prenatal care. 
The education process begins even before the child is born, and if you don't do that, you're going to have difficulty. 
And we are having difficulties in so many of our communities and so many of our schools where kids are coming to first grade and their eyes are blazing, they've got their little knapsack on and they're ready to go, and then they realize they're not like the other first graders who know books, have been read to, can do their alphabet. 
And by the third grade, the kids who didn't have that structure and minding in the beginning start to realize they're behind, and what do they do? 
They act it out. They act it out, and they're on their way to jail or they're on their way to being dropouts. 
It's predictable. 
If you're not at the right reading level at third grade, you are a candidate for jail at age 18, and we have the highest incarceration rate because we're not getting our kids the proper start in life. 
The last chapter in my book is called "The Gift of a Good Start." 
The gift of a good start. Every child ought to have a good start in life. 
I was privileged to have that kind of good start. 
I was not a great student. 
I was a public school kid in New York City, and I didn't do well at all. 
I have my entire New York City Board of Education transcript from kindergarten through college. 
I wanted it when I was writing my first book. 
I wanted to see if my memory was correct, and, my God, it was. (Laughter) Straight C everywhere. 
And I finally bounced through high school, got into the City College of New York with a 78.3 average, which I shouldn't have been allowed in with, and then I started out in engineering, and that only lasted six months. (Laughter) And then I went into geology, "" rocks for jocks. "" This is easy. 
And then I found ROTC. 
I found something that I did well and something that I loved doing, and I found a group of youngsters like me who felt the same way. 
And so my whole life then was dedicated to ROTC and the military. 
And I say to young kids everywhere, as you're growing up and as this structure is being developed inside of you, always be looking for that which you do well and that which you love doing, and when you find those two things together, man, you got it. 
That's what's going on. And that's what I found. 
Now the authorities at CCNY were getting tired of me being there. 
I'd been there four and a half going on five years, and my grades were not doing particularly well, and I was in occasional difficulties with the administration. 
And so they said, "" But he does so well in ROTC. 
Look, he gets straight A's in that but not in anything else. "" And so they said, "" Look, let's take his ROTC grades and roll them into his overall GPA and see what happens. "" And they did, and it brought me up to 2.0. (Laughter) Yep. (Laughter) (Applause) They said, "" It's good enough for government work. 
Give him to the army. We'll never see him again. We'll never see him again. "" So they shipped me off to the army, and lo and behold, many years later, I'm considered one of the greatest sons the City College of New York has ever had. (Laughter) So, I tell young people everywhere, it ain't where you start in life, it's what you do with life that determines where you end up in life, and you are blessed to be living in a country that, no matter where you start, you have opportunities so long as you believe in yourself, you believe in the society and the country, 
and you believe that you can self-improve and educate yourself as you go along. 
And that's the key to success. 
But it begins with the gift of a good start. 
If we don't give that gift to each and every one of our kids, if we don't invest at the earliest age, we're going to be running into difficulties. 
It's why we have a dropout rate of roughly 25 percent overall and almost 50 percent of our minority population living in low-income areas, because they're not getting the gift of a good start. 
My gift of a good start was not only being in a nice family, a good family, but having a family that said to me, "" Now listen, we came to this country in banana boats in 1920 and 1924. 
We worked like dogs down in the garment industry every single day. 
We're not doing it so that you can stick something up your nose or get in trouble. And don't even think about dropping out. "" If I had ever gone home and told those immigrant people that, "" You know, I'm tired of school and I'm dropping out, "" they'd said, "" We're dropping you out. We'll get another kid. "" (Laughter) They had expectations for all of the cousins and the extended family of immigrants that lived in the South Bronx, but they had more than just expectations for us. 
They stuck into our hearts like a dagger a sense of shame: "" Don't you shame this family. "" Sometimes I would get in trouble, and my parents were coming home, and I was in my room waiting for what's going to happen, and I would sit there saying to myself, "" Okay, look, take the belt and hit me, but, God, don't give me that 'shame the family' bit again. "" It devastated me when my mother did that to me. 
And I also had this extended network. 
Children need a network. Children need to be part of a tribe, a family, a community. 
In my case it was aunts who lived in all of these tenement buildings. 
I don't know how many of you are New Yorkers, but there were these tenement buildings, and these women were always hanging out one of the windows, leaning on a pillow. 
They never left. (Laughter) I, so help me God, I grew up walking those streets, and they were always there. 
They never went to the bathroom. They never cooked. (Laughter) They never did anything. 
But what they did was keep us in play. 
They kept us in play. 
And they didn't care whether you became a doctor or a lawyer or a general, and they never expected any generals in the family, as long as you got an education and then you got a job. 
"" Don't give us any of that self-actualization stuff. 
You get a job and get out of the house. 
We don't have time to waste for that. 
And then you can support us. That's the role of you guys. "" And so, it's so essential that we kind of put this culture back into our families, all families. 
And it is so important that all of you here today who are successful people, and I'm sure have wonderful families and children and grandchildren, it's not enough. You've got to reach out and back and find kids like Mr. Cruz who can make it if you give them the structure, if you reach back and help, if you mentor, if you invest in boys and girls clubs, if you work with your school system, make sure it's the best school system, and not just your kid's school, but the school uptown in Harlem, not just downtown Montessori on the West Side. 
All of us have to have a commitment to do that. 
And we're not just investing in the kids. 
We're investing in our future. 
We're going to be a minority-majority country in one more generation. 
Those that we call minorities now are going to be the majority. 
And we have to make sure that they are ready to be the majority. 
We have to make sure they're ready to be the leaders of this great country of ours, a country that is like no other, a country that amazes me every single day, a country that's fractious. We're always arguing with each other. 
That's how the system's supposed to work. 
It's a country of such contrasts, but it's a nation of nations. 
We touch every nation. Every nation touches us. 
We are a nation of immigrants. 
That's why we need sound immigration policy. 
It's ridiculous not to have a sound immigration policy to welcome those who want to come here and be part of this great nation, or we can send back home with an education to help their people rise up out of poverty. 
One of the great stories I love to tell is about my love of going to my hometown of New York and walking up Park Avenue on a beautiful day and admiring everything and seeing all the people go by from all over the world. 
But what I always have to do is stop at one of the corners and get a hot dog from the immigrant pushcart peddler. 
Gotta have a dirty water dog. (Laughter) And no matter where I am or what I'm doing, I've got to do that. 
I even did it when I was Secretary of State. 
I'd come out of my suite at the Waldorf Astoria — (Laughter) — be walking up the street, and I would hit around 55th Street looking for the immigrant pushcart peddler. 
In those days, I had five bodyguards around me and three New York City police cars would roll alongside to make sure nobody whacked me while I was going up Park Avenue. (Laughter) And I would order the hot dog from the guy, and he'd start to fix it, and then he'd look around at the bodyguards and the police cars — "" I've got a green card! I've got a green card! "" (Laughter) "It's okay, it's okay." 
But now I'm alone. I'm alone. 
I've got no bodyguards, I've got no police cars. I've got nothing. 
But I gotta have my hot dog. 
I did it just last week. It was on a Tuesday evening down by Columbus Circle. 
And the scene repeats itself so often. 
I'll go up and ask for my hot dog, and the guy will fix it, and as he's finishing, he'll say, "" I know you. I see you on television. 
You're, well, you're General Powell. "" "Yes, yes." "Oh..." I hand him the money. 
"" No, General. You can't pay me. I've been paid. 
America has paid me. I never forget where I came from. 
But now I'm an American. Sir, thank you. "" I accept the generosity, continue up the street, and it washes over me, my God, it's the same country that greeted my parents this way 90 years ago. 
So we are still that magnificent country, but we are fueled by young people coming up from every land in the world, and it is our obligation as contributing citizens to this wonderful country of ours to make sure that no child gets left behind. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

OK, so, confession: I've always been weirdly obsessed with advertising. 
I remember watching Saturday morning cartoons, paying more attention to the commercials than to the shows, trying to figure out how they were trying to get inside my head. 
Ultimately, that led me to my dream job. 
I became a partner at a big New York ad agency. 
But then, all of that suddenly changed on February 23, 1997, when my little brother Matt was shot in the head in a shooting that happened on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. 
Suddenly, my family was thrown into the middle of a nightmare, being told that my brother was going to die, actually being given the opportunity to say goodbye to him, then several emergency brain surgeries and now what's amounted, for Matt, to a lifetime spent courageously recovering from a traumatic brain injury. 
He is definitely my hero. 
But as much as (Applause) — yeah, deserves it — (Applause) But as much as this tragedy was a nightmare for my family, I often think about how much worse it could have been; in fact, how much worse it is for the 90 families every day who aren't as fortunate, who lose loved ones — brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, parents. 
They don't all make national headlines. 
In fact, most of them don't. 
They go largely unnoticed, in a nation that's kind of come to accept a disgraceful national epidemic as some kind of new normal. 
So I quit my job in advertising to try and do something about this disgraceful national epidemic, because I came to realize that the challenges to preventing gun violence are actually the same ones that made me love advertising, which is to try to figure out how to engage people. 
Only instead of doing it to sell products, doing it to save lives. 
And that comes down to finding common ground, where what I want overlaps with what you want. 
And you might be surprised to learn, when it comes to gun violence, just how much common ground there is. 
Let's look, for example, at people who love to hunt, a sport enjoyed by millions across the US. 
It's a proud tradition. Families. 
In some places, the first day of hunting season is actually a school holiday. 
What do hunters want? 
Well, they want to hunt. They love their guns. 
They believe deeply in the Second Amendment right to own those guns. 
But that doesn't mean there isn't common ground. 
In fact, there's a lot of it, starting with the basic idea of keeping guns out of dangerous hands. 
This isn't about taking certain guns away from all people. 
It's about keeping all guns away from certain people, and it's the people that, it turns out, we all agree shouldn't have guns: convicted violent criminals, domestic abusers, the dangerously mentally ill. 
We can all appreciate how Brady background checks have been incredibly effective in keeping guns out of those dangerous hands. 
In 20 years, Brady background checks at federally licensed firearm dealers have blocked 2.4 million gun sales to those people that we all agree shouldn't have guns. 
(Applause) And whether you love guns or hate guns, you probably also appreciate that there shouldn't be thousands of gun sales every day at guns shows or online without those Brady background checks, just like there shouldn't be two lines to get on an airplane — one with security and one with no security. 
And — (Applause) And the numbers show the overwhelming agreement among the American public: 90 percent of Americans support expanding Brady background checks to all gun sales — including 90 percent of Republicans, more than 80 percent of gun owners, more than 70 percent of NRA members. 
This is not a controversial idea. 
In fact, only six percent of the American public disagrees. 
That's about the percentage of the American public that believes the moon landing was a fake. 
(Laughter) And it's also about the percentage that believes the government is putting mind-controlling technology in our TV broadcast signals. 
That's the extent to which we agree about background checks. 
But what about the 300 million guns already out there in homes across America? 
Well first, it's important to realize that those guns are mostly in the hands and homes of decent, law-abiding people like you and me, who want what we all want — including keeping our families safe. 
In fact, that's why more and more people are choosing to own guns. 
Ten years ago, 42 percent of the American public believed — incorrectly — that a gun makes your home safer. 
Today, that number is 63 percent. 
Why? 
I kind of hate to say it, because it gets to the dark underbelly of advertising, which is if you tell a big enough lie enough times, eventually that lie becomes the truth. 
And that's exactly what's happened here. 
The corporate gun lobby has spent billions of dollars blocking the CDC from doing research into the public health epidemic of gun violence; blocking pediatricians from talking to parents about the dangers of guns in the home; blocking smart-gun technology and other technology that would prevent kids from firing parents' guns and would save lives. 
They're desperate to hide the truth, because they view the truth as a threat to their bottom line. 
And every day, people are dying as a result. 
And a lot of those people are children. 
Every day in the US, nine kids are just shot unintentionally. 
900 children and teens take their own lives every year. 
And here's the thing: they're almost all with a parent's gun. 
Even two-thirds of school shootings happen with a gun taken from the home, including the terrible tragedy at Sandy Hook. 
I meet so many of these parents; it's the most heartbreaking part of my job. 
These are not bad people. 
They're just living with the unimaginable consequences of a very bad decision, made based on very bad information that was put into their minds by very bad people, who know good and well the misery that they're causing, but just don't care. 
And the result is a nightmare — not only for families like mine, but for, really, at the end of the day, all of us. 
But I'm not here to talk about the nightmare of gun violence. 
I'm here to talk about our dream, and it's a dream we all share, which is the dream of a better, safer, future. 
For my organization, for the Brady Campaign, that dream is reflected in the bold goal to cut the number of gun deaths in the US in half by 2025. 
And I hope to leave all of you here tonight with a strong sense of exactly why that dream is so absolutely within reach. 
Because folks, for every great movement around the world, there's a moment where you can look back and say, "That's when things really started to change." 
And I'm here to say that for the movement to end gun violence in America, that moment is here. 
(Applause) We are so clearly at a tipping point, because the American public has come together by the millions like never before, based on that common ground, to say, "" Enough. "" Enough of the mass shootings in malls and movie theaters and churches and schools. 
Enough of the daily terror of gun violence in homes and streets that's claimed the lives of women and young black men in staggering proportions. 
Enough of easy access to guns by the people that we all agree shouldn't have them. 
And enough of a small group of craven politicians putting the interests of the corporate gun lobby ahead of the people they have been elected to represent. 
Enough. 
(Applause) And the really exciting thing is, it's not just the usual suspects like me that are saying it anymore. 
It's so much bigger than that. 
And if you want proof, let's start where most conversations in the US seem to start — with Kim Kardashian. 
(Laughter) And here's the thing: it's not really a joke. 
I mean, think about when issues change. 
It's when they go from being political and advocacy issues to being part of pop culture, voices coming from everywhere, celebrities using their platforms, musicians, athletes. 
The NBA has come forward. 
Conservative pundits that you never would have imagined have come forward. 
There's real cultural change — I even hear there's a TED Talk about it this year. 
That's the extent to which this cultural change is happening. 
And yes, Kim Kardashian has made an unsolicited passionate appeal to her 35 million Twitter followers for expanded background checks. 
Let's look at the political elections that are heating up. 
This used to be the classic third-rail issue for Democrats. 
Couldn't run from it fast enough. 
Now candidates are running on it. 
Some are being forced to reverse very bad positions they defended very comfortably, until very recently. 
For somebody like me, watching people wave around their negative NRA ratings — it's almost surreal to watch. 
We're still outfunded, yes, by the corporate gun lobby, and ultimately that needs to change. 
But you know what? 
We're smarter and we're scrappier, and we have the truth on our side. 
And we're on offense. 
You know, they say that the Internet democratizes information. 
Social media and some of the organizing tools that plug into it have democratized activism. 
It's allowed us to show what 90 percent support really looks like. 
Sometimes I think of it — you know, we're converging and attacking instantly by the millions, kind of like white blood cells. 
It's enabled us to start to really close — and this is the bottom line — close that disgraceful disconnect between what the American public wants and what our elected leaders are doing about it. 
Until recently, the narrative in Congress was that calls from the other side, from that six percent, outnumbered calls from our side 10 to one. 
We're flipping that narrative on its head. 
After that recent terrible tragedy in San Bernardino, we jammed Congressional switchboards. 
We put 15,000 calls into Congress in 24 hours. 
And you know what? 
We got a vote on a bill that nobody thought was going to see the light of day anytime soon. 
We're seeing real movement to repeal some of the most evil, ugly gun lobby legislation passed over the last dark decade. 
The stranglehold of the gun lobby is clearly being broken. 
We've seen President Obama's historic executive actions. 
They don't go all the way, but they are going to save lives, because they expand Brady background checks to thousands of gun sales that didn't have them previously. 
And we're marching across the country — we're not just waiting for Congress to act; that would almost be the definition of insanity. 
We're marching across the country, state by state, marriage-equality style. 
And you know what? We're winning. 
Congress is almost always the last to wake up and realize that it's on the wrong side of history. 
And when they do, it's always because the American public shakes them. 
And that's exactly what we're doing right now, as we're in this tipping point. 
You know, recently I was flying cross-country to give a speech to a large group like this, although far less intimidating, and the woman sitting next to me happened to be binge-watching one of my all-time favorite TV shows, "" Mad Men, "" a period TV show about advertising in the 1960s. 
And as I was trying to think about how to end my remarks, I'd glance up at her screen every now and then, and it seemed that every time I did, I'd see somebody smoking in an office or around children or while pregnant or drinking and driving or driving without seat belts or sexually harassing a coworker. 
And ultimately it dawned on me: what tremendous inspiration to those of us who have this dream to end gun violence. 
I mean, think about how much the world has changed in a relatively short period of time, how all those behaviors that were once considered commonplace or normal — some even glamorous or sexy — have become stigmatized in just a generation or two, once they became conversations about our common ground. 
That is the magnitude of the change we have the potential to create around gun violence. 
And that's my dream, that maybe someday, some period TV show will depict the terrible nightmare of gun violence, and a future generation of children might only be able to imagine how terrible it must have been. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

Now when we think of our senses, we don't usually think of the reasons why they probably evolved, from a biological perspective. 
We don't really think of the evolutionary need to be protected by our senses, but that's probably why our senses really evolved — to keep us safe, to allow us to live. 
Really when we think of our senses, or when we think of the loss of the sense, we really think about something more like this: the ability to touch something luxurious, to taste something delicious, to smell something fragrant, to see something beautiful. 
This is what we want out of our senses. 
We want beauty; we don't just want function. 
And when it comes to sensory restoration, we're still very far away from being able to provide beauty. 
And that's what I'd like to talk to you a little bit about today. 
Likewise for hearing. 
When we think about why we hear, we don't often think about the ability to hear an alarm or a siren, although clearly that's an important thing. 
Really what we want to hear is music. 
(Music) So many of you know that that's Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. 
Many of you know that he was deaf, or near profoundly deaf, when he wrote that. 
Now I'd like to impress upon you how unusual it is that we can hear music. 
Music is just one of the strangest things that there is. 
It's acoustic vibrations in the air, little waves of energy in the air that tickle our eardrum. 
Somehow in tickling our eardrum that transmits energy down our hearing bones, which get converted to a fluid impulse inside the cochlea and then somehow converted into an electrical signal in our auditory nerves that somehow wind up in our brains as a perception of a song or a beautiful piece of music. 
That process is entirely abstract and very, very unusual. 
And we could discuss that topic alone for days to really try to figure out, how is it that we hear something that's emotional from something that starts out as a vibration in the air? 
Turns out that if you have hearing loss, most people that lose their hearing lose it at what's called the cochlea, the inner ear. 
And it's at the hair cell level that they do this. 
Now if you had to pick a sense to lose, I have to be very honest with you and say, we're better at restoring hearing than we are at restoring any sense that there is. 
In fact, nothing even actually comes close to our ability to restore hearing. 
And as a physician and a surgeon, I can confidently tell my patients that if you had to pick a sense to lose, we are the furthest along medically and surgically with hearing. 
As a musician, I can tell you that if I had to have a cochlear implant, I'd be heartbroken. I'd just be plainly heartbroken, because I know that music would never sound the same to me. 
Now this is a video that I'm going to show you of a girl who's born deaf. 
She's in a very supportive environment. 
Her mother's doing everything she can. 
Okay, play that video please. 
(Video) Mother: That's an owl. 
Owl, yeah. 
Owl. Owl. 
Yeah. 
Baby. Baby. 
You want it? 
(Kiss) Charles Limb: Now despite everything going for this child in terms of family support and simple infused learning, there is a limitation to what a child who's deaf, an infant who was born deaf, has in this world in terms of social, educational, vocational opportunities. 
I'm not saying that they can't live a beautiful, wonderful life. 
I'm saying that they're going to face obstacles that most people who have normal hearing will not have to face. 
Now hearing loss and the treatment for hearing loss has really evolved in the past 200 years. 
I mean literally, they used to do things like stick ear-shaped objects onto your ears and stick funnels in. 
And that was the best you could do for hearing loss. 
Back then you couldn't even look at the eardrum. 
So it's not too surprising that there were no good treatments for hearing loss. 
And now today we have the modern multi-channel cochlear implant, which is an outpatient procedure. 
It's surgically placed inside the inner ear. 
It takes about an hour and a half to two hours, depending on where it's done, under general anesthesia. 
And in the end, you achieve something like this where an electrode array is inserted inside the cochlea. 
Now actually, this is quite crude in comparison to our regular inner ear. 
But here is that same girl who is implanted now. 
This is her 10 years later. 
And this is a video that was taken by my surgical mentor, Dr. John Niparko, who implanted her. 
If we could play this video please. 
(Video) John Niparko: So you've written two books? 
Girl: I have written two books. (Mother: Was the other one a book or a journal entry?) Girl: No, the other one was a book. (Mother: Oh, okay.) JN: Well this book has seven chapters, and the last chapter is entitled "" The Good Things About Being Deaf. "" Do you remember writing that chapter? 
Girl: Yes I do. I remember writing every chapter. 
JN: Yeah. 
Girl: Well sometimes my sister can be kind of annoying. 
So it comes in handy to not be annoyed by her. 
JN: I see. And who is that? 
Girl: Holly. (JN: Okay.) Mother: Her sister. (JN: Her sister.) Girl: My sister. 
JN: And how can you avoid being annoyed by her? 
Girl: I just take off my CI, and I don't hear anything. 
(Laughter) It comes in handy. 
JN: So you don't want to hear everything that's out there? 
Girl: No. 
CL: And so she's phenomenal. 
And there's no way that you can't look at that as an overwhelming success. 
It is. It's a huge success story in modern medicine. 
However, despite this incredible facility that some cochlear implant users display with language, you turn on the radio and all of a sudden they can't hear music almost at all. 
In fact, most implant users really struggle and dislike music because it sounds so bad. 
And so when it comes to this idea of restoring beauty to somebody's life, we have a long way to go when it comes to audition. 
Now there are a lot of reasons for that. 
I mentioned earlier the fact that music is a different capacity because it's abstract. 
Language is very different. Language is very precise. 
In fact, the whole reason we use it is because it has semantic-specificity. 
When you say a word, what you care is that word was perceived correctly. 
You don't care that the word sounded pretty when it was spoken. 
Music is entirely different. 
When you hear music, if it doesn't sound good, what's the point? 
There's really very little point in listening to music when it doesn't sound good to you. 
The acoustics of music are much harder than those of language. 
And you can see on this figure, that the frequency range and the decibel range, the dynamic range of music is far more heterogeneous. 
So if we had to design a perfect cochlear implant, what we would try to do is target it to be able to allow music transmission. 
Because I always view music as the pinnacle of hearing. 
If you can hear music, you should be able to hear anything. 
Now the problems begin first with pitch perception. 
I mean, most of us know that pitch is a fundamental building block of music. 
And without the ability to perceive pitch well, music and melody is a very difficult thing to do — forget about a harmony and things like that. 
Now this is a MIDI arrangement of Rachmaninoff's Prelude. 
Now if we could just play this. 
(Music) Okay, now if we consider that in a cochlear implant patient pitch perception could be off as much as two octaves, let's see what happens here when we randomize this to within one semitone. 
We would be thrilled if we had one semitone pitch perception in cochlear implant users. 
Go ahead and play this one. 
(Music) Now my goal in showing you that is to show you that music is not robust to degradation. 
You distort it a little bit, especially in terms of pitch, and you've changed it. 
And it might be that you kind of like that. 
That's kind of hypnotic. 
But it certainly wasn't the way the music was intended. 
And you're not hearing the same thing that most people who have normal hearing are hearing. 
Now the other issue comes with, not just the ability to tell pitches apart, but the ability to tell sounds apart. 
Most cochlear implant users cannot tell the difference between an instrument. 
If we could play these two sound clips in succession. 
(Trumpet) The trumpet. 
And the second one. 
(Violin) That's a violin. 
These have similar wave forms. They're both sustained instruments. 
Cochlear implant users cannot tell the difference between these instruments. 
The sound quality, or the sound of the sound is how I like to describe timbre, tone color — they cannot tell these things whatsoever. 
This implant is not transmitting the quality of music that usually provides things like warmth. 
Now if you look at the brain of an individual who has a cochlear implant and you have them listen to speech, have them listen to rhythm and have them listen to melody, what you find is that the auditory cortex is the most active during speech. 
You would think that because these implants are optimized for speech, they were designed for speech. 
But actually if you look at melody, what you find is that there's very little cortical activity in implant users compared with normal hearing controls. 
So for whatever reason, this implant is not successfully stimulating auditory cortices during melody perception. 
Now the next question is, well how does it really sound? 
Now we've been doing some studies to really get a sense of what sound quality is like for these implant users. 
I'm going to play you two clips of Usher, one which is normal and one which has almost no high frequencies, almost no low frequencies and not even that many mid frequencies. 
Go ahead and play that. 
(Music) (Limited Frequency Music) I had patients tell me that those sound the same. 
They cannot differentiate sound quality differences between those two clips. 
Again, we are very, very far away in just getting to where we want to get to. 
Now the question comes to mind: Is there any hope? 
And yes, there is hope. 
Now I don't know if anybody knows who this is. 
This is... does somebody know? 
This is Beethoven. 
Now why would we know what Beethoven's skull looks like? 
Because his grave was exhumed. 
And it turns out that his temporal bones were harvested when he died to try to look at the cause of his deafness, which is why he has molding clay and his skull is bulging out on the side there. 
But Beethoven composed music long after he lost his hearing. 
What that suggests is that, even in the case of hearing loss, the capacity for music remains. 
The brains remain hardwired for music. 
I've been very lucky to work with Dr. David Ryugo where I've been working on deaf cats that are white and trying to figure out what happens when we give them cochlear implants. 
This is a cat that's been trained to respond to a trumpet for food. 
(Music) Text: Beethoven doesn't excite her. (Music) 
The "" 1812 Overture "" isn't worth waking for. 
(Trumpet) But she jumps to action when called to duty! (Trumpet) 
CL: Now I'm not suggesting that the cat is hearing that trumpet the way we're hearing it. 
I'm suggesting that with training you can imbue a musical sound with significance, even in a cat. 
If we were to direct efforts towards training cochlear implant users to hear music — because right now there's virtually no effort put towards that, no rehabilitative strategies, very little in the way of technological advances to actually improve music — we would come a long way. 
Now I want to show you one last video. 
And this is of a student of mine named Joseph who I had the good fortune to work with for three years in my lab. 
He's deaf, and he learned to play the piano after he received the cochlear implant. 
And here's a video of Joseph. 
(Music) (Video) Joseph: I was born in 1986. 
And at about four months old, I was diagnosed with profoundly severe hearing loss. 
Not long after, I was fitted with hearing aids. 
But although these hearing aids were the most powerful hearing aids on the market at the time, they weren't very helpful. 
So as a result, I had to rely on lip reading a lot, and I couldn't really hear what people were saying. 
When I was 12 years old, I was one of the first few people in Singapore who underwent cochlear implantation. 
And not long after I got my cochlear implant, I started learning how to play piano. 
And it was absolutely wonderful. 
Since then, I've never looked back. 
CL: Joseph is phenomenal. He's brilliant. 
He is now a medical student at Yale University, and he's contemplating a surgical career — one of the first deaf individuals to consider a career in surgery. 
There are almost no deaf surgeons anywhere. 
And this is really unheard of stuff, and this is all because of this technology. 
And the fact that he can play the piano like that is a testament to his brain. 
Truth of the matter is you can play the piano without a cochlear implant, because all you have to do is press the keys at the right time. 
You don't actually have to hear it. 
I know he doesn't hear well, because I've heard him do Karaoke. 
(Laughter) And it's one of the most awful things — heartwarming, but awful. (Laughter) 
And so there is certainly a lot of hope, but there's a lot more that needs to be done. 
So I just want to conclude with the following words. 
When it comes to restoration of hearing, we have certainly come a long way, a remarkably long way. 
And we have a much longer way to go when it comes to the idea of restoring perfect hearing. 
And let me tell you right now, it's fine that we would all be very happy with speech. 
But I tell you, if we lost our hearing, if anyone here suddenly lost your hearing, you would want perfect hearing back. 
You wouldn't want decent hearing, you would want perfect hearing. 
Restoration of basic sensory function is critical. 
And I don't mean to understate how important it is to restore basic function. 
But it's really restoration of the ability to perceive beauty where we can get inspiring. 
And I don't think that we should give up on beauty. 
And I want to thank you for your time. 
(Applause) 

If Australia had to send 1,000 people tomorrow to West Papua, for example, we don't have 1,000 police officers hanging around that could go tomorrow, and we do have 1,000 soldiers that could go. 

I'm a filmmaker. 
For the last 8 years, I have dedicated my life to documenting the work of Israelis and Palestinians who are trying to end the conflict using peaceful means. 
When I travel with my work across Europe and the United States, one question always comes up: Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? 
Why aren't Palestinians using nonviolent resistance? 
The challenge I face when I hear this question is that often I have just returned from the Middle East where I spent my time filming dozens of Palestinians who are using nonviolence to defend their lands and water resources from Israeli soldiers and settlers. 
These leaders are trying to forge a massive national nonviolent movement to end the occupation and build peace in the region. 
Yet, most of you have probably never heard about them. 
This divide between what's happening on the ground and perceptions abroad is one of the key reasons why we don't have yet a Palestinian peaceful resistance movement that has been successful. 
So I'm here today to talk about the power of attention, the power of your attention, and the emergence and development of nonviolent movements in the West Bank, Gaza and elsewhere — but today, my case study is going to be Palestine. 
I believe that what's mostly missing for nonviolence to grow is not for Palestinians to start adopting nonviolence, but for us to start paying attention to those who already are. 
Allow me to illustrate this point by taking you to this village called Budrus. 
About seven years ago, they faced extinction, because Israel announced it would build a separation barrier, and part of this barrier would be built on top of the village. 
They would lose 40 percent of their land and be surrounded, so they would lose free access to the rest of the West Bank. 
Through inspired local leadership, they launched a peaceful resistance campaign to stop that from happening. 
Let me show you some brief clips, so you have a sense for what that actually looked like on the ground. 
(Music) Palestinian Woman: We were told the wall would separate Palestine from Israel. 
Here in Budrus, we realized the wall would steal our land. 
Israeli Man: The fence has, in fact, created a solution to terror. 
Man: Today you're invited to a peaceful march. 
You are joined by dozens of your Israeli brothers and sisters. 
Israeli Activist: Nothing scares the army more than nonviolent opposition. 
Woman: We saw the men trying to push the soldiers, but none of them could do that. 
But I think the girls could do it. 
Fatah Party Member: We must empty our minds of traditional thinking. 
Hamas Party Member: We were in complete harmony, and we wanted to spread it to all of Palestine. 
Chanting: One united nation. 
Fatah, Hamas and the Popular Front! 
News Anchor: The clashes over the fence continue. 
Reporter: Israeli border police were sent to disperse the crowd. 
They were allowed to use any force necessary. 
(Gunshots) Man: These are live bullets. 
It's like Fallujah. Shooting everywhere. 
Israeli Activist: I was sure we were all going to die. 
But there were others around me who weren't even cowering. 
Israeli Soldier: A nonviolent protest is not going to stop the [unclear]. 
Protester: This is a peaceful march. 
There is no need to use violence. 
Chanting: We can do it! We can do it! We can do it! 
Julia Bacha: When I first heard 
about the story of Budrus, I was surprised that the international media had failed to cover the extraordinary set of events that happened seven years ago, in 2003. 
What was even more surprising was the fact that Budrus was successful. 
The residents, after 10 months of peaceful resistance, convinced the Israeli government to move the route of the barrier off their lands and to the green line, which is the internationally recognized boundary between Israel and the Palestinian Territories. 
The resistance in Budrus has since spread to villages across the West Bank and to Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem. 
Yet the media remains mostly silent on these stories. 
This silence carries profound consequences for the likelihood that nonviolence can grow, or even survive, in Palestine. 
Violent resistance and nonviolent resistance share one very important thing in common; they are both a form of theater seeking an audience to their cause. 
If violent actors are the only ones constantly getting front-page covers and attracting international attention to the Palestinian issue, it becomes very hard for nonviolent leaders to make the case to their communities that civil disobedience is a viable option in addressing their plight. 
The power of attention is probably going to come as no surprise to the parents in the room. 
The surest way to make your child throw increasingly louder tantrums is by giving him attention the first time he throws a fit. 
The tantrum will become what childhood psychologists call a functional behavior, since the child has learned that he can get parental attention out of it. 
Parents can incentivize or disincentivize behavior simply by giving or withdrawing attention to their children. 
But that's true for adults too. 
In fact, the behavior of entire communities and countries can be influenced, depending on where the international community chooses to focus its attention. 
I believe that at the core of ending the conflict in the Middle East and bringing peace is for us to transform nonviolence into a functional behavior by giving a lot more attention to the nonviolent leaders on the ground today. 
In the course of taking my film to villages in the West Bank, in Gaza and in East Jerusalem, I have seen the impact that even one documentary film can have in influencing the transformation. 
In a village called Wallajeh, which sits very close to Jerusalem, the community was facing a very similar plight to Budrus. 
They were going to be surrounded, lose a lot of their lands and not have freedom of access, either to the West Bank or Jerusalem. 
They had been using nonviolence for about two years but had grown disenchanted since nobody was paying attention. 
So we organized a screening. 
A week later, they held the most well-attended and disciplined demonstration to date. 
The organizers say that the villagers, upon seeing the story of Budrus documented in a film, felt that there were indeed people following what they were doing, that people cared. 
So they kept on going. 
On the Israeli side, there is a new peace movement called Solidariot, which means solidarity in Hebrew. 
The leaders of this movement have been using Budrus as one of their primary recruiting tools. 
They report that Israelis who had never been active before, upon seeing the film, understand the power of nonviolence and start joining their activities. 
The examples of Wallajeh and the Solidariot movement show that even a small-budget independent film can play a role in transforming nonviolence into a functional behavior. 
Now imagine the power that big media players could have if they started covering the weekly nonviolent demonstrations happening in villages like Bil'in, Ni'lin, Wallajeh, in Jerusalem neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan — the nonviolent leaders would become more visible, valued and effective in their work. 
I believe that the most important thing is to understand that if we don't pay attention to these efforts, they are invisible, and it's as if they never happened. 
But I have seen first hand that if we do, they will multiply. 
If they multiply, their influence will grow in the overall Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 
And theirs is the kind of influence that can finally unblock the situation. 
These leaders have proven that nonviolence works in places like Budrus. 
Let's give them attention so they can prove it works everywhere. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

As a boy in Lima, my grandfather told me a legend of the Spanish conquest of Peru. 
Atahualpa, emperor of the Inca, had been captured and killed. 
Pizarro and his conquistadors had grown rich, and tales of their conquest and glory had reached Spain and was bringing new waves of Spaniards, hungry for gold and glory. 
They would go into towns and ask the Inca, "Where's another civilization we can conquer? Where's more gold?" 
And the Inca, out of vengeance, told them, "" Go to the Amazon. 
You'll find all the gold you want there. 
In fact, there is a city called Paititi — El Dorado in Spanish — made entirely of gold. "" The Spanish set off into the jungle, but the few that return come back with stories, stories of powerful shamans, of warriors with poisoned arrows, of trees so tall they blotted out the sun, spiders that ate birds, snakes that swallowed men whole and a river that boiled. 
All this became a childhood memory. 
And years passed. 
I'm working on my PhD at SMU, trying to understand Peru's geothermal energy potential, when I remember this legend, and I began asking that question. 
Could the boiling river exist? 
I asked colleagues from universities, the government, oil, gas and mining companies, and the answer was a unanimous no. 
And this makes sense. 
You see, boiling rivers do exist in the world, but they're generally associated with volcanoes. 
You need a powerful heat source to produce such a large geothermal manifestation. 
And as you can see from the red dots here, which are volcanoes, we don't have volcanoes in the Amazon, nor in most of Peru. 
So it follows: We should not expect to see a boiling river. 
Telling this same story at a family dinner, my aunt tells me, "But no, Andrés, I've been there. I've swum in that river." 
(Laughter) Then my uncle jumps in. 
"" No, Andrés, she's not kidding. 
You see, you can only swim in it after a very heavy rain, and it's protected by a powerful shaman. 
Your aunt, she's friends with his wife. "" (Laughter) "" ¿Cómo? "" ["" Huh? ""] You know, despite all my scientific skepticism, I found myself hiking into the jungle, guided by my aunt, over 700 kilometers away from the nearest volcanic center, and well, honestly, mentally preparing myself to behold the legendary "" warm stream of the Amazon. "" But then... 
I heard something, a low surge that got louder and louder as we came closer. 
It sounded like ocean waves constantly crashing, and as we got closer, I saw smoke, vapor, coming up through the trees. 
And then, I saw this. 
I immediately grabbed for my thermometer, and the average temperatures in the river were 86 degrees C. 
This is not quite the 100-degree C boiling but definitely close enough. 
The river flowed hot and fast. 
I followed it upriver and was led by, actually, the shaman's apprentice to the most sacred site on the river. 
And this is what's bizarre — It starts off as a cold stream. 
And here, at this site, is the home of the Yacumama, mother of the waters, a giant serpent spirit who births hot and cold water. 
And here we find a hot spring, mixing with cold stream water underneath her protective motherly jaws and thus bringing their legends to life. 
The next morning, I woke up and — (Laughter) I asked for tea. 
I was handed a mug, a tea bag and, well, pointed towards the river. 
To my surprise, the water was clean and had a pleasant taste, which is a little weird for geothermal systems. 
What was amazing is that the locals had always known about this place, and that I was by no means the first outsider to see it. 
It was just part of their everyday life. 
They drink its water. 
They take in its vapor. 
They cook with it, clean with it, even make their medicines with it. 
I met the shaman, and he seemed like an extension of the river and his jungle. 
He asked for my intentions and listened carefully. 
Then, to my tremendous relief — I was freaking out, to be honest with you — a smile began to snake across his face, and he just laughed. 
(Laughter) I had received the shaman's blessing to study the river, on the condition that after I take the water samples and analyze them in my lab, wherever I was in the world, that I pour the waters back into the ground so that, as the shaman said, the waters could find their way back home. 
I've been back every year since that first visit in 2011, and the fieldwork has been exhilarating, demanding and at times dangerous. 
One story was even featured in National Geographic Magazine. 
I was trapped on a small rock about the size of a sheet of paper in sandals and board shorts, in between an 80 degree C river and a hot spring that, well, looked like this, close to boiling. 
And on top of that, it was Amazon rain forest. 
Pshh, pouring rain, couldn't see a thing. 
The temperature differential made it all white. It was a whiteout. 
Intense. 
Now, after years of work, I'll soon be submitting my geophysical and geochemical studies for publication. 
And I'd like to share, today, with all of you here, on the TED stage, for the first time, some of these discoveries. 
Well, first off, it's not a legend. 
Surprise! 
(Laughter) When I first started the research, the satellite imagery was too low-resolution to be meaningful. 
There were just no good maps. 
Thanks to the support of the Google Earth team, I now have this. 
Not only that, the indigenous name of the river, Shanay-timpishka, "boiled with the heat of the sun," indicating that I'm not the first to wonder why the river boils, and showing that humanity has always sought to explain the world around us. 
So why does the river boil? 
(Bubbling sounds) It actually took me three years to get that footage. 
Fault-fed hot springs. 
As we have hot blood running through our veins and arteries, so, too, the earth has hot water running through its cracks and faults. 
Where these arteries come to the surface, these earth arteries, we'll get geothermal manifestations: fumaroles, hot springs and in our case, the boiling river. 
What's truly incredible, though, is the scale of this place. 
Next time you cross the road, think about this. 
The river flows wider than a two-lane road along most of its path. 
It flows hot for 6.24 kilometers. 
Truly impressive. 
There are thermal pools larger than this TED stage, and that waterfall that you see there is six meters tall — and all with near-boiling water. 
We mapped the temperatures along the river, and this was by far the most demanding part of the fieldwork. 
And the results were just awesome. 
Sorry — the geoscientist in me coming out. 
And it showed this amazing trend. 
You see, the river starts off cold. 
It then heats up, cools back down, heats up, cools back down, heats up again, and then has this beautiful decay curve until it smashes into this cold river. 
Now, I understand not all of you are geothermal scientists, so to put it in more everyday terms: Everyone loves coffee. 
Yes? Good. 
Your regular cup of coffee, 54 degrees C, an extra-hot one, well, 60. 
So, put in coffee shop terms, the boiling river plots like this. 
There you have your hot coffee. 
Here you have your extra-hot coffee, and you can see that there's a bit point there where the river is still hotter than even the extra-hot coffee. 
And these are average water temperatures. 
We took these in the dry season to ensure the purest geothermal temperatures. 
But there's a magic number here that's not being shown, and that number is 47 degrees C, because that's where things start to hurt, and I know this from very personal experience. 
Above that temperature, you don't want to get in that water. 
You need to be careful. 
It can be deadly. 
I've seen all sorts of animals fall in, and what's shocking to me, is the process is pretty much the same. 
So they fall in and the first thing to go are the eyes. 
Eyes, apparently, cook very quickly. They turn this milky-white color. 
The stream is carrying them. 
They're trying to swim out, but their meat is cooking on the bone because it's so hot. 
So they're losing power, losing power, until finally they get to a point where hot water goes into their mouths and they cook from the inside out. 
(Laughter) A bit sadistic, aren't we? 
Jeez. 
Leave them marinating for a little longer. 
What's, again, amazing are these temperatures. 
They're similar to things that I've seen on volcanoes all over the world and even super-volcanoes like Yellowstone. 
But here's the thing: the data is showing that the boiling river exists independent of volcanism. 
It's neither magmatic or volcanic in origin, and again, over 700 kilometers away from the nearest volcanic center. 
How can a boiling river exist like this? 
I've asked geothermal experts and volcanologists for years, and I'm still unable to find another non-volcanic geothermal system of this magnitude. 
It's unique. 
It's special on a global scale. 
So, still — how does it work? 
Where do we get this heat? 
There's still more research to be done to better constrain the problem and better understand the system, but from what the data is telling us now, it looks to be the result of a large hydrothermal system. 
Basically, it works like this: So, the deeper you go into the earth, the hotter it gets. 
We refer to this as the geothermal gradient. 
The waters could be coming from as far away as glaciers in the Andes, then seeping down deep into the earth and coming out to form the boiling river after getting heated up from the geothermal gradient, all due to this unique geologic setting. 
Now, we found that in and around the river — this is working with colleagues from National Geographic, Dr. Spencer Wells, and Dr. Jon Eisen from UC Davis — we genetically sequenced the extremophile lifeforms living in and around the river, and have found new lifeforms, unique species living in the boiling river. 
But again, despite all of these studies, all of these discoveries and the legends, a question remains: What is the significance of the boiling river? 
What is the significance of this stationary cloud that always hovers over this patch of jungle? 
And what is the significance of a detail in a childhood legend? 
To the shaman and his community, it's a sacred site. 
To me, as a geoscientist, it's a unique geothermal phenomenon. 
But to the illegal loggers and cattle farmers, it's just another resource to exploit. 
And to the Peruvian government, it's just another stretch of unprotected land ready for development. 
My goal is to ensure that whoever controls this land understands the boiling river's uniqueness and significance. 
Because that's the question, one of significance. 
And the thing there is, we define significance. 
It's us. We have that power. 
We are the ones who draw that line between the sacred and the trivial. 
And in this age, where everything seems mapped, measured and studied, in this age of information, I remind you all that discoveries are not just made in the black void of the unknown but in the white noise of overwhelming data. 
There remains so much to explore. 
We live in an incredible world. 
So go out. 
Be curious. 
Because we do live in a world where shamans still sing to the spirits of the jungle, where rivers do boil and where legends do come to life. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Now, in my favorite paper on the subject, which is entitled, "" Why I Don't Have a Girlfriend "" — (Laughter) Peter Backus tries to rate his chances of finding love. 
Of all of the available women in the UK, all Peter's looking for is somebody who lives near him, somebody in the right age range, somebody with a university degree, somebody he's likely to get on well with, somebody who's likely to be attractive, somebody who's likely to find him attractive. 
Now, just to put that into perspective, that's about 400 times fewer than the best estimates of how many intelligent extraterrestrial life forms there are. 
And it also gives Peter a 1 in 285,000 chance of bumping into any one of these special ladies on a given night out. 
I'd like to think that's why mathematicians don't really bother going on nights out anymore. 
And so, to try to persuade you of how totally amazing, excellent and relevant mathematics is, I want to give you my top three mathematically verifiable tips for love. 
Now, because they're mathematicians, they have been collecting data on everybody who uses their site for almost a decade. 
And they've come up with some seriously interesting findings. 
But my particular favorite is that it turns out that on an online dating website, how attractive you are does not dictate how popular you are, and actually, having people think that you're ugly can work to your advantage. 
In a thankfully voluntary section of OkCupid, you are allowed to rate how attractive you think people are on a scale between one and five. 
So let me try to illustrate their findings with an example. 
If you compare Portia de Rossi to someone like Sarah Jessica Parker, now, a lot of people, myself included, I should say, think that Sarah Jessica Parker is seriously fabulous and possibly one of the most beautiful creatures to have ever have walked on the face of the Earth. 
It's this spread that makes you more popular on an online Internet dating website. 
So what that means then is that if some people think that you're attractive, you're actually better off having some other people think that you're a massive minger. 
That's much better than everybody just thinking that you're the cute girl next door. 
That means there's less competition for you and it's an extra incentive for you to get in touch. 
The classic example is people who are, perhaps, a little bit overweight deliberately choosing a very cropped photo, (Laughter) or bald men, for example, deliberately choosing pictures where they're wearing hats. 
So let's imagine then that you're a roaring success on the dating scene. 
Now generally, it's not advisable to just cash in and marry the first person who comes along and shows you any interest at all. 
As my favorite author, Jane Austen, puts it, "" An unmarried woman of seven and twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again. "" (Laughter) Thanks a lot, Jane. 
Now the rules are that once you cash in and get married, you can't look ahead to see what you could have had, and equally, you can't go back and change your mind. 
In my experience at least, I find that typically people don't much like being recalled years after being passed up for somebody else, or that's just me. 
So the math says then that what you should do in the first 37 percent of your dating window, you should just reject everybody as serious marriage potential. 
(Laughter) And then, you should pick the next person that comes along that is better than everybody that you've seen before. 
So here's the example. 
Now if you do this, it can be mathematically proven, in fact, that this is the best possible way of maximizing your chances of finding the perfect partner. 
(Laughter) Now, if you're following the maths, I'm afraid no one else comes along that's better than anyone you've seen before, so you have to go on rejecting everyone and die alone. (Laughter) 
OK, another risk is, let's imagine, instead, that the first people that you dated in your first 37 percent are just incredibly dull, boring, terrible people. 
So they reject every possible suitor that turns up in the first 37 percent of the mating season, and then they pick the next fish that comes along after that window that's, I don't know, bigger and burlier than all of the fish that they've seen before. 
And then we only start looking seriously at potential marriage candidates once we hit our mid-to-late 20s. 
Now, Top Tip # 3: How to avoid divorce. 
(Laughter) But it's a sad fact of modern life that one in two marriages in the States ends in divorce, with the rest of the world not being far behind. 
Now, you can be forgiven, perhaps for thinking that the arguments that precede a marital breakup are not an ideal candidate for mathematical investigation. 
So he recorded what was said in the conversation, he recorded their skin conductivity, he recorded their facial expressions, their heart rates, their blood pressure, basically everything apart from whether or not the wife was actually always right, which incidentally she totally is. 
Whereas bad relationships, by which I mean, probably going to get divorced, they found themselves getting into a spiral of negativity. 
Now just by using these very simple ideas, Gottman and his group were able to predict whether a given couple was going to get divorced with a 90 percent accuracy. 
And the results that they found, I think, are just incredibly impressively simple and interesting. 
Now, I think it's important to point out at this stage, that these exact equations have also been shown to be perfectly able at describing what happens between two countries in an arms race. 
(Laughter) So that an arguing couple spiraling into negativity and teetering on the brink of divorce is actually mathematically equivalent to the beginning of a nuclear war. (Laughter) 
But the really important term in this equation is the influence that people have on one another, and in particular, something called "" the negativity threshold. "" Now, the negativity threshold, you can think of as how annoying the husband can be before the wife starts to get really pissed off, and vice versa. 
Now, I always thought that good marriages were about compromise and understanding and allowing the person to have the space to be themselves. 
Where couples let things go and only brought things up if they really were a big deal. 
But actually, the mathematics and subsequent findings by the team have shown the exact opposite is true. 
These are the couples that don't let anything go unnoticed and allow each other some room to complain. 
These are the couples that are continually trying to repair their own relationship, that have a much more positive outlook on their marriage. 
Couples that don't let things go and couples that don't let trivial things end up being a really big deal. 
Now of course, it takes a bit more than just a low negativity threshold and not compromising to have a successful relationship. 
But I think that it's quite interesting to know that there is really mathematical evidence to say that you should never let the sun go down on your anger. 
So those are my top three tips of how maths can help you with love and relationships. 
But I hope, that aside from their use as tips, they also give you a little bit of insight into the power of mathematics. 
Because for me, equations and symbols aren't just a thing. 
They're a voice that speaks out about the incredible richness of nature and the startling simplicity in the patterns that twist and turn and warp and evolve all around us, from how the world works to how we behave. 

There's something about caves — a shadowy opening in a limestone cliff that draws you in. 
As you pass through the portal between light and dark, you enter a subterranean world — a place of perpetual gloom, of earthy smells, of hushed silence. 
Long ago in Europe, ancient people also entered these underground worlds. 
As witness to their passage, they left behind mysterious engravings and paintings, like this panel of humans, triangles and zigzags from Ojo Guareña in Spain. 
You now walk the same path as these early artists. 
And in this surreal, otherworldly place, it's almost possible to imagine that you hear the muffled footfall of skin boots on soft earth, or that you see the flickering of a torch around the next bend. 
When I'm in a cave, I often find myself wondering what drove these people to go so deep to brave dangerous and narrow passageways to leave their mark? 
In this video clip, that was shot half a kilometer, or about a third of a mile, underground, in the cave of Cudon in Spain, we found a series of red paintings on a ceiling in a previously unexplored section of the cave. 
As we crawled forward, military-style, with the ceiling getting ever lower, we finally got to a point where the ceiling was so low that my husband and project photographer, Dylan, could no longer achieve focus on the ceiling with his DSLR camera. 
So while he filmed me, I kept following the trail of red paint with a single light and a point-and-shoot camera that we kept for that type of occasion. 
Half a kilometer underground. 
Seriously. 
What was somebody doing down there with a torch or a stone lamp? 
(Laughter) I mean — me, it makes sense, right? 
But you know, this is the kind of question that I'm trying to answer with my research. 
I study some of the oldest art in the world. 
It was created by these early artists in Europe, between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago. 
And the thing is that I'm not just studying it because it's beautiful, though some of it certainly is. 
But what I'm interested in is the development of the modern mind, of the evolution of creativity, of imagination, of abstract thought, about what it means to be human. 
While all species communicate in one way or another, only we humans have really taken it to another level. 
Our desire and ability to share and collaborate has been a huge part of our success story. 
Our modern world is based on a global network of information exchange made possible, in large part, by our ability to communicate — in particular, using graphic or written forms of communication. 
The thing is, though, that we've been building on the mental achievements of those that came before us for so long that it's easy to forget that certain abilities haven't already existed. 
It's one of the things I find most fascinating about studying our deep history. 
Those people didn't have the shoulders of any giants to stand on. 
They were the original shoulders. 
And while a surprising number of important inventions come out of that distant time, what I want to talk to you about today is the invention of graphic communication. 
There are three main types of communication, spoken, gestural — so things like sign language — and graphic communication. 
Spoken and gestural are by their very nature ephemeral. 
It requires close contact for a message to be sent and received. 
And after the moment of transmission, it's gone forever. 
Graphic communication, on the other hand, decouples that relationship. 
And with its invention, it became possible for the first time for a message to be transmitted and preserved beyond a single moment in place and time. 
Europe is one of the first places that we start to see graphic marks regularly appearing in caves, rock shelters and even a few surviving open-air sites. 
But this is not the Europe we know today. 
This was a world dominated by towering ice sheets, three to four kilometers high, with sweeping grass plains and frozen tundra. 
This was the Ice Age. 
Over the last century, more than 350 Ice Age rock art sites have been found across the continent, decorated with animals, abstract shapes and even the occasional human like these engraved figures from Grotta dell'Addaura in Sicily. 
They provide us with a rare glimpse into the creative world and imagination of these early artists. 
Since their discovery, it's been the animals that have received the majority of the study like this black horse from Cullalvera in Spain, or this unusual purple bison from La Pasiega. 
But for me, it was the abstract shapes, what we call geometric signs, that drew me to study the art. 
The funny this is that at most sites the geometric signs far outnumber the animal and human images. 
But when I started on this back in 2007, there wasn't even a definitive list of how many shapes there were, nor was there a strong sense of whether the same ones appeared across space or time. 
Before I could even get started on my questions, my first step was to compile a database of all known geometric signs from all of the rock art sites. 
The problem was that while they were well documented at some sites, usually the ones with the very nice animals, there was also a large number of them where it was very vague — there wasn't a lot of description or detail. 
Some of them hadn't been visited in half a century or more. 
These were the ones that I targeted for my field work. 
Over the course of two years, my faithful husband Dylan and I each spent over 300 hours underground, hiking, crawling and wriggling around 52 sites in France, Spain, Portugal and Sicily. 
And it was totally worth it. 
We found new, undocumented geometric signs at 75 percent of the sites we visited. 
This is the level of accuracy I knew I was going to need if I wanted to start answering those larger questions. 
So let's get to those answers. 
Barring a handful of outliers, there are only 32 geometric signs. 
Only 32 signs across a 30,000-year time span and the entire continent of Europe. 
That is a very small number. 
Now, if these were random doodles or decorations, we would expect to see a lot more variation, but instead what we find are the same signs repeating across both space and time. 
Some signs start out strong, before losing popularity and vanishing, while other signs are later inventions. 
But 65 percent of those signs stayed in use during that entire time period — things like lines, rectangles triangles, ovals and circles like we see here from the end of the Ice Age, at a 10,000-year-old site high in the Pyrenees Mountains. 
And while certain signs span thousands of kilometers, other signs had much more restricted distribution patterns, with some being limited to a single territory, like we see here with these divided rectangles that are only found in northern Spain, and which some researchers have speculated could be some sort of family or clan signs. 
On a side note, there is surprising degree of similarity in the earliest rock art found all the way from France and Spain to Indonesia and Australia. 
With many of the same signs appearing in such far-flung places, especially in that 30,000 to 40,000-year range, it's starting to seem increasingly likely that this invention actually traces back to a common point of origin in Africa. 
But that I'm afraid, is a subject for a future talk. 
So back to the matter at hand. 
There could be no doubt that these signs were meaningful to their creators, like these 25,000-year-old bas-relief sculptures from La Roque de Venasque in France. 
We might not know what they meant, but the people of the time certainly did. 
The repetition of the same signs, for so long, and at so many sites tells us that the artists were making intentional choices. 
If we're talking about geometric shapes, with specific, culturally recognized, agreed-upon meanings, than we could very well be looking at one of the oldest systems of graphic communication in the world. 
I'm not talking about writing yet. 
There's just not enough characters at this point to have represented all of the words in the spoken language, something which is a requirement for a full writing system. 
Nor do we see the signs repeating regularly enough to suggest that they were some sort of alphabet. 
But what we do have are some intriguing one-offs, like this panel from La Pasiega in Spain, known as "" The Inscription, "" with its symmetrical markings on the left, possible stylized representations of hands in the middle, and what looks a bit like a bracket on the right. 
The oldest systems of graphic communication in the world — Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the earliest Chinese script, all emerged between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, with each coming into existence from an earlier protosystem made up of counting marks and pictographic representations, where the meaning and the image were the same. 
So a picture of a bird would really have represented that animal. 
It's only later that we start to see these pictographs become more stylized, until they almost become unrecognizable and that we also start to see more symbols being invented to represent all those other missing words in language — things like pronouns, adverbs, adjectives. 
So knowing all this, it seems highly unlikely that the geometric signs from Ice Age Europe were truly abstract written characters. 
Instead, what's much more likely is that these early artists were also making counting marks, maybe like this row of lines from Riparo di Za Minic in Sicily, as well as creating stylized representations of things from the world around them. 
Could some of the signs be weaponry or housing? 
Or what about celestial objects like star constellations? 
Or maybe even rivers, mountains, trees — landscape features, possibly like this black penniform surrounded by strange bell-shaped signs from the site of El Castillo in Spain. 
The term penniform means "" feather-shaped "" in Latin, but could this actually be a depiction of a plant or a tree? 
Some researchers have begun to ask these questions about certain signs at specific sites, but I believe the time has come to revisit this category as a whole. 
The irony in all of this, of course, is that having just carefully classified all of the signs into a single category, I have a feeling that my next step will involve breaking it back apart as different types of imagery are identified and separated off. 
Now don't get me wrong, the later creation of fully developed writing was an impressive feat in its own right. 
But it's important to remember that those early writing systems didn't come out of a vacuum. 
And that even 5,000 years ago, people were already building on something much older, with its origins stretching back tens of thousands of years — to the geometric signs of Ice Age Europe and far beyond, to that point, deep in our collective history, when someone first came up with the idea of making a graphic mark, and forever changed the nature of how we communicate. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When I was in my 20s, I saw my very first psychotherapy client. 
Now Alex walked into her first session wearing jeans and a big slouchy top, and she dropped onto the couch in my office and kicked off her flats and told me she was there to talk about guy problems. 
(Laughter) And I got a twentysomething who wanted to talk about boys. 
With the funny stories that Alex would bring to session, it was easy for me just to nod my head while we kicked the can down the road. 
"" Thirty's the new 20, "" Alex would say, and as far as I could tell, she was right. 
Work happened later, marriage happened later, kids happened later, even death happened later. 
I pushed back. 
I said, "" Sure, she's dating down, she's sleeping with a knucklehead, but it's not like she's going to marry the guy. "" And then my supervisor said, "" Not yet, but she might marry the next one. 
Besides, the best time to work on Alex's marriage is before she has one. "" That's what psychologists call an "" Aha! "" moment. 
That was the moment I realized, 30 is not the new 20. 
That made Alex's 20s a developmental sweet spot, and we were sitting there, blowing it. 
That was when I realized that this sort of benign neglect was a real problem, and it had real consequences, not just for Alex and her love life but for the careers and the families and the futures of twentysomethings everywhere. 
We're talking about 15 percent of the population, or 100 percent if you consider that no one's getting through adulthood without going through their 20s first. 
I really want to see some twentysomethings here. 
If you work with twentysomethings, you love a twentysomething, you're losing sleep over twentysomethings, I want to see — Okay. Awesome, twentysomethings really matter. 
So, I specialize in twentysomethings because I believe that every single one of those 50 million twentysomethings deserves to know what psychologists, sociologists, neurologists and fertility specialists already know: that claiming your 20s is one of the simplest, yet most transformative, things you can do for work, for love, for your happiness, maybe even for the world. 
We know that 80 percent of life's most defining moments take place by age 35. 
That means that eight out of 10 of the decisions and experiences and "" Aha! "" moments that make your life what it is will have happened by your mid-30s. 
We know that the first 10 years of a career has an exponential impact on how much money you're going to earn. 
We know that more than half of Americans are married or are living with or dating their future partner by 30. 
We know that the brain caps off its second and last growth spurt in your 20s as it rewires itself for adulthood, which means that whatever it is you want to change about yourself, now is the time to change it. 
We know that personality changes more during your 20s than at any other time in life, and we know that female fertility peaks at age 28, and things get tricky after age 35. 
So when we think about child development, we all know that the first five years are a critical period for language and attachment in the brain. 
It's a time when your ordinary, day-to-day life has an inordinate impact on who you will become. 
Journalists coin silly nicknames for twentysomethings like "" twixters "" and "" kidults. "" (Laughing) It's true! 
As a culture, we have trivialized what is actually the defining decade of adulthood. 
Leonard Bernstein said that to achieve great things, you need a plan and not quite enough time. 
(Laughing) Isn't that true? 
So what do you think happens when you pat a twentysomething on the head and you say, "" You have 10 extra years to start your life ""? 
You have robbed that person of his urgency and ambition, and absolutely nothing happens. 
And then every day, smart, interesting twentysomethings like you or like your sons and daughters come into my office and say things like this: "" I know my boyfriend's no good for me, but this relationship doesn't count. I'm just killing time. "" Or they say, "" Everybody says as long as I get started on a career by the time I'm 30, I'll be fine. "" But then it starts to sound like this: "" My 20s are almost over, and I have nothing to show for myself. 
Everybody was running around and having fun, but then sometime around 30 it was like the music turned off and everybody started sitting down. 
I didn't want to be the only one left standing up, so sometimes I think I married my husband because he was the closest chair to me at 30. "" Where are the twentysomethings here? 
Do not do that. 
(Laughter) Okay, now that sounds a little flip, but make no mistake, the stakes are very high. 
When a lot has been pushed to your 30s, there is enormous thirtysomething pressure to jump-start a career, pick a city, partner up, and have two or three kids in a much shorter period of time. 
Many of these things are incompatible, and as research is just starting to show, simply harder and more stressful to do all at once in our 30s. 
Too many thirtysomethings and fortysomethings look at themselves, and at me, sitting across the room, and say about their 20s, "What was I doing? What was I thinking?" 
I want to change what twentysomethings are doing and thinking. 
Here's a story about how that can go. 
At 25, Emma came to my office because she was, in her words, having an identity crisis. 
She said she thought she might like to work in art or entertainment, but she hadn't decided yet, so she'd spent the last few years waiting tables instead. 
And as hard as her 20s were, her early life had been even harder. 
She often cried in our sessions, but then would collect herself by saying, "You can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends." 
She'd just bought a new address book, and she'd spent the morning filling in her many contacts, but then she'd been left staring at that empty blank that comes after the words "In case of emergency, please call..." 
She was nearly hysterical when she looked at me and said, "" Who's going to be there for me if I get in a car wreck? 
Who's going to take care of me if I have cancer? "" Now in that moment, it took everything I had not to say, "" I will. "" But what Emma needed wasn't some therapist who really, really cared. 
I had learned too much since I first worked with Alex to just sit there while Emma's defining decade went parading by. 
Do something that's an investment in who you might want to be next. 
I didn't know the future of Emma's career, and no one knows the future of work, but I do know this: Identity capital begets identity capital. 
So now is the time for that cross-country job, that internship, that startup you want to try. 
Best friends are great for giving rides to the airport, but twentysomethings who huddle together with like-minded peers limit who they know, what they know, how they think, how they speak, and where they work. 
That new piece of capital, that new person to date almost always comes from outside the inner circle. 
New things come from what are called our weak ties, our friends of friends of friends. 
Half of new jobs are never posted, so reaching out to your neighbor's boss is how you get that unposted job. 
Last but not least, Emma believed that you can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends. 
Now this was true for her growing up, but as a twentysomething, soon Emma would pick her family when she partnered with someone and created a family of her own. 
Now you may be thinking that 30 is actually a better time to settle down than 20, or even 25, and I agree with you. 
The best time to work on your marriage is before you have one, and that means being as intentional with love as you are with work. 
Picking your family is about consciously choosing who and what you want rather than just making it work or killing time with whoever happens to be choosing you. 
So what happened to Emma? 
Well, we went through that address book, and she found an old roommate's cousin who worked at an art museum in another state. 
She loves her new career, she loves her new family, and she sent me a card that said, "" Now the emergency contact blanks don't seem big enough. "" Now Emma's story made that sound easy, but that's what I love about working with twentysomethings. 
Twentysomethings are like airplanes just leaving LAX, bound for somewhere west. 
Right after takeoff, a slight change in course is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji. 
Likewise, at 21 or 25 or even 29, one good conversation, one good break, one good TED Talk, can have an enormous effect across years and even generations to come. 
So here's an idea worth spreading to every twentysomething you know. 
It's as simple as what I learned to say to Alex. 
It's what I now have the privilege of saying to twentysomethings like Emma every single day: Thirty is not the new 20, so claim your adulthood, get some identity capital, use your weak ties, pick your family. 
Don't be defined by what you didn't know or didn't do. 
Thank you. 

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

And it's really unfair to humanity, because humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than given credit for. 
Now you can probably make it, but it's going to be a pretty clumsy apparatus, I think. 
(Laughter) But it shows the intelligence that the elephants have. 
So it doesn't matter whatsoever. 
(Laughter) It's as if they're saying, "If you're not behaving, I'm not going to be pro-social today." 
And there are now many more, because after we did this about 10 years ago, it became very well-known. 
Then she sees the other one getting grape, and you will see what happens. 
(Applause) I still have two minutes left — let me tell you a funny story about this. 
(Laughter) And another one wrote a whole chapter saying that he would believe it had something to do with fairness, if the one who got grapes would refuse the grapes. 

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

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

The first time I stood in the operating room and watched a real surgery, I had no idea what to expect. 
I was a college student in engineering. 
I thought it was going to be like on TV. 
Ominous music playing in the background, beads of sweat pouring down the surgeon's face. 
But it wasn't like that at all. 
There was music playing on this day, I think it was Madonna's greatest hits. (Laughter) And there was plenty of conversation, not just about the patient's heart rate, but about sports and weekend plans. 
And since then, the more surgeries I watched, the more I realized this is how it is. 
In some weird way, it's just another day at the office. 
But every so often the music gets turned down, everyone stops talking, and stares at exactly the same thing. 
And that's when you know that something absolutely critical and dangerous is happening. 
The first time I saw that I was watching a type of surgery called laparoscopic surgery And for those of you who are unfamiliar, laparoscopic surgery, instead of the large open incision you might be used to with surgery, a laparoscopic surgery is where the surgeon creates these three or more small incisions in the patient. 
And then inserts these long, thin instruments and a camera, and actually does the procedure inside the patient. 
This is great because there's much less risk of infection, much less pain, shorter recovery time. 
But there is a trade-off, because these incisions are created with a long, pointed device called a trocar. 
And the way the surgeon uses this device is that he takes it and he presses it into the abdomen until it punctures through. 
And now the reason why everyone in the operating room was staring at that device on that day was because he had to be absolutely careful not to plunge it through and puncture it into the organs and blood vessels below. 
But this problem should seem pretty familiar to all of you because I'm pretty sure you've seen it somewhere else. 
(Laughter) Remember this? 
(Applause) You knew that at any second that straw was going to plunge through, and you didn't know if it was going to go out the other side and straight into your hand, or if you were going to get juice everywhere, but you were terrified. Right? 
Every single time you did this, you experienced the same fundamental physics that I was watching in the operating room that day. 
And it turns out it really is a problem. 
In 2003, the FDA actually came out and said that trocar incisions might be the most dangerous step in minimally invasive surgery. 
Again in 2009, we see a paper that says that trocars account for over half of all major complications in laparoscopic surgery. 
And, oh by the way, this hasn't changed for 25 years. 
So when I got to graduate school, this is what I wanted to work on. 
I was trying to explain to a friend of mine what exactly I was spending my time doing, and I said, "" It's like when you're drilling through a wall to hang something in your apartment. 
There's that moment when the drill first punctures through the wall and there's this plunge. Right? 
And he looked at me and he said, "You mean like when they drill into people's brains?" 
And I said, "" Excuse me? "" (Laughter) And then I looked it up and they do drill into people's brains. 
A lot of neurosurgical procedures actually start with a drill incision through the skull. 
And if the surgeon isn't careful, he can plunge directly into the brain. 
So this is the moment when I started thinking, okay, cranial drilling, laparoscopic surgery, why not other areas of medicine? 
Because think about it, when was the last time you went to the doctor and you didn't get stuck with something? Right? 
So the truth is in medicine puncture is everywhere. 
And here are just a couple of the procedures that I've found that involve some tissue puncture step. 
And if we take just three of them — laparoscopic surgery, epidurals, and cranial drilling — these procedures account for over 30,000 complications every year in this country alone. 
I call that a problem worth solving. 
So let's take a look at some of the devices that are used in these types of procedures. 
I mentioned epidurals. This is an epidural needle. 
It's used to puncture through the ligaments in the spine and deliver anesthesia during childbirth. 
Here's a set of bone marrow biopsy tools. 
These are actually used to burrow into the bone and collect bone marrow or sample bone lesions. 
Here's a bayonette from the Civil War. 
(Laughter) If I had told you it was a medical puncture device you probably would have believed me. 
Because what's the difference? 
So, the more I did this research the more I thought there has to be a better way to do this. 
And for me the key to this problem is that all these different puncture devices share a common set of fundamental physics. 
So what are those physics? 
Let's go back to drilling through a wall. 
So you're applying a force on a drill towards the wall. 
And Newton says the wall is going to apply force back, equal and opposite. 
So, as you drill through the wall, those forces balance. 
But then there's that moment when the drill first punctures through the other side of the wall, and right at that moment the wall can't push back anymore. 
But your brain hasn't reacted to that change in force. 
So for that millisecond, or however long it takes you to react, you're still pushing, and that unbalanced force causes an acceleration, and that is the plunge. 
But what if right at the moment of puncture you could pull that tip back, actually oppose the forward acceleration? 
That's what I set out to do. 
So imagine you have a device and it's got some kind of sharp tip to cut through tissue. 
What's the simplest way you could pull that tip back? 
I chose a spring. 
So when you extend that spring, you extend that tip out so it's ready to puncture tissue, the spring wants to pull the tip back. 
How do you keep the tip in place until the moment of puncture? 
I used this mechanism. 
When the tip of the device is pressed against tissue, the mechanism expands outwards and wedges in place against the wall. 
And the friction that's generated locks it in place and prevents the spring from retracting the tip. 
But right at the moment of puncture, the tissue can't push back on the tip anymore. 
So the mechanism unlocks and the spring retracts the tip. 
Let me show you that happening in slow motion. 
This is about 2,000 frames a second, and I'd like you to notice the tip that's right there on the bottom, about to puncture through tissue. 
And you'll see that right at the moment of puncture, right there, the mechanism unlocks and retracts that tip back. 
I want to show it to you again, a little closer up. 
You're going to see the sharp bladed tip, and right when it punctures that rubber membrane it's going to disappear into this white blunt sheath. 
Right there. 
That happens within four 100ths of a second after puncture. 
And because this device is designed to address the physics of puncture and not the specifics of cranial drilling or laparoscopic surgery, or another procedure, it's applicable across these different medical disciplines and across different length scales. 
But it didn't always look like this. 
This was my first prototype. 
Yes, those are popsicle sticks, and there's a rubber band at the top. 
It took about 30 minutes to do this, but it worked. 
And it proved to me that my idea worked and it justified the next couple years of work on this project. 
I worked on this because this problem really fascinated me. 
It kept me up at night. 
But I think it should fascinate you too, because I said puncture is everywhere. 
That means at some point it's going to be your problem too. 
That first day in the operating room I never expected to find myself on the other end of a trocar. 
But last year, I got appendicitis when I was visiting Greece. 
So I was in the hospital in Athens, and the surgeon was telling me he was going to perform a laparoscopic surgery. 
He was going to remove my appendix through these tiny incisions, and he was talking about what I could expect for the recovery, and what was going to happen. 
He said, "" Do you have any questions? "" And I said, "" Just one, doc. 
What kind of trocar do you use? "" So my favorite quote about laparoscopic surgery comes from a Doctor H. C. Jacobaeus: "It is puncture itself that causes risk." 
That's my favorite quote because H.C. Jacobaeus was the first person to ever perform laparoscopic surgery on humans, and he wrote that in 1912. 
This is a problem that's been injuring and even killing people for over 100 years. 
So it's easy to think that for every major problem out there there's some team of experts working around the clock to solve it. 
The truth is that's not always the case. 
We have to be better at finding those problems and finding ways to solve them. 
So if you come across a problem that grabs you, let it keep you up at night. 
Allow yourself to be fascinated, because there are so many lives to save. 
(Applause) 

Every day, I listen to harrowing stories of people fleeing for their lives, across dangerous borders and unfriendly seas. 
But there's one story that keeps me awake at night, and it's about Doaa. 
A Syrian refugee, 19 years old, she was living a grinding existence in Egypt working day wages. 
Her dad was constantly thinking of his thriving business back in Syria that had been blown to pieces by a bomb. 
And the war that drove them there was still raging in its fourth year. 
And the community that once welcomed them there had become weary of them. 
And one day, men on motorcycles tried to kidnap her. 
Once an aspiring student thinking only of her future, now she was scared all the time. 
But she was also full of hope, because she was in love with a fellow Syrian refugee named Bassem. 
Bassem was also struggling in Egypt, and he said to Doaa, "" Let's go to Europe; seek asylum, safety. 
I will work, you can study — the promise of a new life. "" And he asked her father for her hand in marriage. 
But they knew to get to Europe they had to risk their lives, traveling across the Mediterranean Sea, putting their hands in smugglers', notorious for their cruelty. 
And Doaa was terrified of the water. 
She always had been. She never learned to swim. 
It was August that year, and already 2,000 people had died trying to cross the Mediterranean, but Doaa knew of a friend who had made it all the way to Northern Europe, and she thought, "" Maybe we can, too. "" So she asked her parents if they could go, and after a painful discussion, they consented, and Bassem paid his entire life savings — 2,500 dollars each — to the smugglers. 
It was a Saturday morning when the call came, and they were taken by bus to a beach, hundreds of people on the beach. 
They were taken then by small boats onto an old fishing boat, 500 of them crammed onto that boat, 300 below, [200] above. 
There were Syrians, Palestinians, Africans, Muslims and Christians, 100 children, including Sandra — little Sandra, six years old — and Masa, 18 months. 
There were families on that boat, crammed together shoulder to shoulder, feet to feet. 
Doaa was sitting with her legs crammed up to her chest, Bassem holding her hand. 
Day two on the water, they were sick with worry and sick to their stomachs from the rough sea. 
Day three, Doaa had a premonition. 
And she said to Bassem, "" I fear we're not going to make it. 
I fear the boat is going to sink. "" And Bassem said to her, "" Please be patient. 
We will make it to Sweden, we will get married and we will have a future. "" Day four, the passengers were getting agitated. 
They asked the captain, "" When will we get there? "" He told them to shut up, and he insulted them. 
He said, "" In 16 hours we will reach the shores of Italy. "" They were weak and weary. 
Soon they saw a boat approach — a smaller boat, 10 men on board, who started shouting at them, hurling insults, throwing sticks, asking them to all disembark and get on this smaller, more unseaworthy boat. 
The parents were terrified for their children, and they collectively refused to disembark. 
So the boat sped away in anger, and a half an hour later, came back and started deliberately ramming a hole in the side of Doaa's boat, just below where she and Bassem were sitting. 
And she heard how they yelled, "Let the fish eat your flesh!" 
And they started laughing as the boat capsized and sank. 
The 300 people below deck were doomed. 
Doaa was holding on to the side of the boat as it sank, and watched in horror as a small child was cut to pieces by the propeller. 
Bassem said to her, "" Please let go, or you'll be swept in and the propeller will kill you, too. "" And remember — she can't swim. 
But she let go and she started moving her arms and her legs, thinking, "" This is swimming. "" And miraculously, Bassem found a life ring. 
It was one of those child's rings that they use to play in swimming pools and on calm seas. 
And Doaa climbed onto the ring, her arms and her legs dangling by the side. 
Bassem was a good swimmer, so he held her hand and tread water. 
Around them there were corpses. 
Around 100 people survived initially, and they started coming together in groups, praying for rescue. 
But when a day went by and no one came, some people gave up hope, and Doaa and Bassem watched as men in the distance took their life vests off and sank into the water. 
One man approached them with a small baby perched on his shoulder, nine months old — Malek. 
He was holding onto a gas canister to stay afloat, and he said to them, "" I fear I am not going to survive. 
I'm too weak. I don't have the courage anymore. "" And he handed little Malek over to Bassem and to Doaa, and they perched her onto the life ring. 
So now they were three, Doaa, Bassem and little Malek. 
And let me take a pause in this story right here and ask the question: why do refugees like Doaa take these kinds of risks? 
Millions of refugees are living in exile, in limbo. 
They're living in countries [fleeing] from a war that has been raging for four years. 
Even if they wanted to return, they can't. 
Their homes, their businesses, their towns and their cities have been completely destroyed. 
This is a UNESCO World Heritage City, Homs, in Syria. 
So people continue to flee into neighboring countries, and we build refugee camps for them in the desert. 
Hundreds of thousands of people live in camps like these, and thousands and thousands more, millions, live in towns and cities. 
And the communities, the neighboring countries that once welcomed them with open arms and hearts are overwhelmed. 
There are simply not enough schools, water systems, sanitation. 
Even rich European countries could never handle such an influx without massive investment. 
The Syria war has driven almost four million people over the borders, but over seven million people are on the run inside the country. 
That means that over half the Syrian population has been forced to flee. 
Back to those neighboring countries hosting so many. 
They feel that the richer world has done too little to support them. 
And days have turned into months, months into years. 
A refugee's stay is supposed to be temporary. 
Back to Doaa and Bassem in the water. 
It was their second day, and Bassem was getting very weak. 
And now it was Doaa's turn to say to Bassem, "My love, please hold on to hope, to our future. We will make it." 
And he said to her, "" I'm sorry, my love, that I put you in this situation. 
I have never loved anyone as much as I love you. "" And he released himself into the water, and Doaa watched as the love of her life drowned before her eyes. 
Later that day, a mother came up to Doaa with her small 18-month-old daughter, Masa. 
This was the little girl I showed you in the picture earlier, with the life vests. 
Her older sister Sandra had just drowned, and her mother knew she had to do everything in her power to save her daughter. 
And she said to Doaa, "" Please take this child. 
Let her be part of you. I will not survive. "" And then she went away and drowned. 
So Doaa, the 19-year-old refugee who was terrified of the water, who couldn't swim, found herself in charge of two little baby kids. 
And they were thirsty and they were hungry and they were agitated, and she tried her best to amuse them, to sing to them, to say words to them from the Quran. 
Around them, the bodies were bloating and turning black. 
The sun was blazing during the day. 
At night, there was a cold moon and fog. 
It was very frightening. 
On the fourth day in the water, this is how Doaa probably looked on the ring with her two children. 
A woman came on the fourth day and approached her and asked her to take another child — a little boy, just four years old. 
When Doaa took the little boy and the mother drowned, she said to the sobbing child, "She just went away to find you water and food." 
But his heart soon stopped, and Doaa had to release the little boy into the water. 
Later that day, she looked up into the sky with hope, because she saw two planes crossing in the sky. 
And she waved her arms, hoping they would see her, but the planes were soon gone. 
But that afternoon, as the sun was going down, she saw a boat, a merchant vessel. 
And she said, "" Please, God, let them rescue me. "" She waved her arms and she felt like she shouted for about two hours. 
And it had become dark, but finally the searchlights found her and they extended a rope, astonished to see a woman clutching onto two babies. 
They pulled them onto the boat, they got oxygen and blankets, and a Greek helicopter came to pick them up and take them to the island of Crete. 
But Doaa looked down and asked, "" What of Malek? "" And they told her the little baby did not survive — she drew her last breath in the boat's clinic. 
But Doaa was sure that as they had been pulled up onto the rescue boat, that little baby girl had been smiling. 
Only 11 people survived that wreck, of the 500. 
There was never an international investigation into what happened. 
There were some media reports about mass murder at sea, a terrible tragedy, but that was only for one day. 
And then the news cycle moved on. 
Meanwhile, in a pediatric hospital on Crete, little Masa was on the edge of death. 
She was really dehydrated. Her kidneys were failing. 
Her glucose levels were dangerously low. 
The doctors did everything in their medical power to save them, and the Greek nurses never left her side, holding her, hugging her, singing her words. 
My colleagues also visited and said pretty words to her in Arabic. 
Amazingly, little Masa survived. 
And soon the Greek press started reporting about the miracle baby, who had survived four days in the water without food or anything to drink, and offers to adopt her came from all over the country. 
And meanwhile, Doaa was in another hospital on Crete, thin, dehydrated. 
An Egyptian family took her into their home as soon as she was released. 
And soon word went around about Doaa's survival, and a phone number was published on Facebook. 
Messages started coming in. 
"" Doaa, do you know what happened to my brother? 
My sister? My parents? My friends? Do you know if they survived? "" One of those messages said, "I believe you saved my little niece, Masa." 
And it had this photo. 
This was from Masa's uncle, a Syrian refugee who had made it to Sweden with his family and also Masa's older sister. 
Soon, we hope, Masa will be reunited with him in Sweden, and until then, she's being cared for in a beautiful orphanage in Athens. 
And Doaa? Well, word went around about her survival, too. 
And the media wrote about this slight woman, and couldn't imagine how she could survive all this time under such conditions in that sea, and still save another life. 
The Academy of Athens, one of Greece's most prestigious institutions, gave her an award of bravery, and she deserves all that praise, and she deserves a second chance. 
But she wants to still go to Sweden. 
She wants to reunite with her family there. 
She wants to bring her mother and her father and her younger siblings away from Egypt there as well, and I believe she will succeed. 
She wants to become a lawyer or a politician or something that can help fight injustice. 
She is an extraordinary survivor. 
But I have to ask: what if she didn't have to take that risk? 
Why did she have to go through all that? 
Why wasn't there a legal way for her to study in Europe? 
Why couldn't Masa have taken an airplane to Sweden? 
Why couldn't Bassem have found work? 
Why is there no massive resettlement program for Syrian refugees, the victims of the worst war of our times? 
The world did this for the Vietnamese in the 1970s. Why not now? 
Why is there so little investment in the neighboring countries hosting so many refugees? 
And why, the root question, is so little being done to stop the wars, the persecution and the poverty that is driving so many people to the shores of Europe? 
Until these issues are resolved, people will continue to take to the seas and to seek safety and asylum. 
And what happens next? 
Well, that is largely Europe's choice. 
And I understand the public fears. 
People are worried about their security, their economies, the changes of culture. 
But is that more important than saving human lives? 
Because there is something fundamental here that I think overrides the rest, and it is about our common humanity. 
No person fleeing war or persecution should have to die crossing a sea to reach safety. 
(Applause) One thing is for sure, that no refugee would be on those dangerous boats if they could thrive where they are. 
And no migrant would take that dangerous journey if they had enough food for themselves and their children. 
And no one would put their life savings in the hands of those notorious smugglers if there was a legal way to migrate. 
So on behalf of little Masa and on behalf of Doaa and of Bassem and of those 500 people who drowned with them, can we make sure that they did not die in vain? 
Could we be inspired by what happened, and take a stand for a world in which every life matters? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I am a reformed marketer, and I now work in international development. 
In October, I spent some time in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is the [second] largest country in Africa. 
In fact, it's as large as Western Europe, but it only has 300 miles of paved roads. 
The DRC is a dangerous place. 
In the past 10 years, five million people have died due to a war in the east. 
But war isn't the only reason that life is difficult in the DRC. 
There are many health issues as well. 
In fact, the HIV prevalence rate is 1.3 percent among adults. 
This might not sound like a large number, but in a country with 76 million people, it means there are 930,000 that are infected. 
And due to the poor infrastructure, only 25 percent of those are receiving the life-saving drugs that they need. 
Which is why, in part, donor agencies provide condoms at low or no cost. 
And so while I was in the DRC, I spent a lot of time talking to people about condoms, including Damien. 
Damien runs a hotel outside of Kinshasa. 
It's a hotel that's only open until midnight, so it's not a place that you stay. 
But it is a place where sex workers and their clients come. 
Now Damien knows all about condoms, but he doesn't sell them. 
He said there's just not in demand. 
It's not surprising, because only three percent of people in the DRC use condoms. 
Joseph and Christine, who run a pharmacy where they sell a number of these condoms, said despite the fact that donor agencies provide them at low or no cost, and they have marketing campaigns that go along with them, their customers don't buy the branded versions. 
They like the generics. 
And as a marketer, I found that curious. 
And so I started to look at what the marketing looked like. 
And it turns out that there are three main messages used by the donor agencies for these condoms: fear, financing and fidelity. 
They name the condoms things like Vive, "" to live "" or Trust. 
They package it with the red ribbon that reminds us of HIV, put it in boxes that remind you who paid for them, show pictures of your wife or husband and tell you to protect them or to act prudently. 
Now these are not the kinds of things that someone is thinking about just before they go get a condom. 
(Laughter) What is it that you think about just before you get a condom? 
Sex! 
And the private companies that sell condoms in these places, they understand this. 
Their marketing is slightly different. 
The name might not be much different, but the imagery sure is. 
Some brands are aspirational, and certainly the packaging is incredibly provocative. 
And this made me think that perhaps the donor agencies had just missed out on a key aspect of marketing: understanding who's the audience. 
And for donor agencies, unfortunately, the audience tends to be people that aren't even in the country they're working [in]. 
It's people back home, people that support their work, people like these. 
But if what we're really trying to do is stop the spread of HIV, we need to think about the customer, the people whose behavior needs to change — the couples, the young women, the young men — whose lives depend on it. 
And so the lesson is this: it doesn't really matter what you're selling; you just have to think about who is your customer, and what are the messages that are going to get them to change their behavior. 
It might just save their lives. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time. 
If we extrapolate back, we find we must have all been on top of each other about 15 billion years ago. 
We used to think that the theory of the universe could be divided into two parts. 
First, there were the laws like Maxwell's equations and general relativity that determined the evolution of the universe, given its state over all of space at one time. 
We have made good progress on the first part, and now have the knowledge of the laws of evolution in all but the most extreme conditions. 
But until recently, we have had little idea about the initial conditions for the universe. 
Moreover, we can calculate a probability that the universe was created in different states. 
We believe that life arose spontaneously on the Earth, so it must be possible for life to appear on other suitable planets, of which there seem to be a large number in the galaxy. 
We have two pieces of observational evidence on the probability of life appearing. 
The Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago and was probably too hot for about the first half billion years. 
If there is a government conspiracy to suppress the reports and keep for itself the scientific knowledge the aliens bring, it seems to have been a singularly ineffective policy so far. 
Furthermore, despite an extensive search by the SETI project, we haven't heard any alien television quiz shows. 
Issuing an insurance policy against abduction by aliens seems a pretty safe bet. 
Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space. 
That is why I am in favor of manned — or should I say, personned — space flight. 
All of my life I have sought to understand the universe and find answers to these questions. 
The ultimate goal is a complete theory of the universe, and we are making good progress. 
This answer took seven minutes, and really gave me an insight into the incredible act of generosity this whole talk was for TED. 
Stephen Hawking: I think it quite likely that we are the only civilization within several hundred light years; otherwise we would have heard radio waves. 
We will take it as a salutary warning, I think, for the rest of our conference this week. 

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

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

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

Have you heard the news? 
We're in a clean energy revolution. 
And where I live in Berkeley, California, it seems like every day I see a new roof with new solar panels going up, electric car in the driveway. 
Germany sometimes gets half its power from solar, and India is now committed to building 10 times more solar than we have in California, by the year 2022. 
Even nuclear seems to be making a comeback. 
Bill Gates is in China working with engineers, there's 40 different companies that are working together to try to race to build the first reactor that runs on waste, that can't melt down and is cheaper than coal. 
And so you might start to ask: Is this whole global warming problem going to be a lot easier to solve than anybody imagined? 
That was the question we wanted to know, so my colleagues and I decided to take a deep dive into the data. 
We were a little skeptical of some parts of the clean energy revolution story, but what we found really surprised us. 
The first thing is that clean energy has been increasing. 
This is electricity from clean energy sources over the last 20 years. 
But when you look at the percentage of global electricity from clean energy sources, it's actually been in decline from 36 percent to 31 percent. 
And if you care about climate change, you've got to go in the opposite direction to 100 percent of our electricity from clean energy sources, as quickly as possible. 
Now, you might wonder, "Come on, how much could five percentage points of global electricity be?" 
Well, it turns out to be quite a bit. 
It's the equivalent of 60 nuclear plants the size of Diablo Canyon, California's last nuclear plant, or 900 solar farms the size of Topaz, which is one of the biggest solar farms in the world, and certainly our biggest in California. 
A big part of this is simply that fossil fuels are increasing faster than clean energy. 
And that's understandable. 
There's just a lot of poor countries that are still using wood and dung and charcoal as their main source of energy, and they need modern fuels. 
But there's something else going on, which is that one of those clean energy sources in particular has actually been on the decline in absolute terms, not just relatively. 
And that's nuclear. 
You can see its generation has declined seven percent over the last 10 years. 
Now, solar and wind have been making huge strides, so you hear a lot of talk about how it doesn't really matter, because solar and wind is going to make up the difference. 
But the data says something different. 
When you combine all the electricity from solar and wind, you see it actually barely makes up half of the decline from nuclear. 
Let's take a closer look in the United States. 
Over the last couple of years — really 2013, 2014 — we prematurely retired four nuclear power plants. 
They were almost entirely replaced with fossil fuels, and so the consequence was that we wiped out almost as much clean energy electricity that we get from solar. 
And it's not unique to us. 
People think of California as a clean energy and climate leader, but when we looked at the data, what we found is that, in fact, California reduced emissions more slowly than the national average, between 2000 and 2015. 
What about Germany? 
They're doing a lot of clean energy. 
But when you look at the data, German emissions have actually been going up since 2009, and there's really not anybody who's going to tell you that they're going to meet their climate commitments in 2020. 
The reason isn't hard to understand. 
Solar and wind provide power about 10 to 20 percent of the time, which means that when the sun's not shining, the wind's not blowing, you still need power for your hospitals, your homes, your cities, your factories. 
And while batteries have made some really cool improvements lately, the truth is, they're just never going to be as efficient as the electrical grid. 
Every time you put electricity into a battery and take it out, you lose about 20 to 40 percent of the power. 
That's why when, in California, we try to deal with all the solar we've brought online — we now get about 10 percent of electricity from solar — when the sun goes down, and people come home from work and turn on their air conditioners and their TV sets, and every other appliance in the house, we need a lot of natural gas backup. 
So what we've been doing is stuffing a lot of natural gas into the side of a mountain. 
And that worked pretty well for a while, but then late last year, it sprung a leak. 
This is Aliso Canyon. 
So much methane gas was released, it was the equivalent of putting half a million cars on the road. 
It basically blew through all of our climate commitments for the year. 
Well, what about India? 
Sometimes you have to go places to really get the right data, so we traveled to India a few months ago. 
We met with all the top officials — solar, nuclear, the rest — and what they told us is, "" We're actually having more serious problems than both Germany and California. 
We don't have backup; we don't have all the natural gas. 
And that's just the start of it. 
Say we want to get to 100 gigawatts by 2022. 
But last year we did just five, and the year before that, we did five. "" So, let's just take a closer look at nuclear. 
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has looked at the carbon content of all these different fuels, and nuclear comes out really low — it's actually lower even than solar. 
And nuclear obviously provides a lot of power — 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 
During a year, a single plant can provide power 92 percent of the time. 
What's interesting is that when you look at countries that have deployed different kinds of clean energies, there's only a few that have done so at a pace consistent with dealing with the climate crisis. 
So nuclear seems like a pretty good option, but there's this big problem with it, which all of you, I'm sure, are aware of, which is that people really don't like it. 
There was a study, a survey done of people around the world, not just in the United States or Europe, about a year and a half ago. 
And what they found is that nuclear is actually one of the least popular forms of energy. 
Even oil is more popular than nuclear. 
And while nuclear kind of edges out coal, the thing is, people don't really fear coal in the same way they fear nuclear, which really operates on our unconscious. 
So what is it that we fear? 
There's really three things. 
There's the safety of the plants themselves — the fears that they're going to melt down and cause damage; there's the waste from them; and there's the association with weapons. 
And I think, understandably, engineers look at those concerns and look for technological fixes. 
That's why Bill Gates is in China developing advanced reactors. 
That's why 40 different entrepreneurs are working on this problem. 
And I, myself, have been very excited about it. 
We did a report: "" How to Make Nuclear Cheap. "" In particular, the thorium reactor shows a lot of promise. 
So when the climate scientist, James Hansen, asked if I wanted to go to China with him and look at the Chinese advanced nuclear program, I jumped at the chance. 
We were there with MIT and UC Berkeley engineers. 
And I had in my mind that the Chinese would be able to do with nuclear what they did with so many other things — start to crank out small nuclear reactors on assembly lines, ship them up like iPhones or MacBooks and send them around the world. 
I would get one at home in Berkeley. 
But what I found was somewhat different. 
The presentations were all very exciting and very promising; they have multiple reactors that they're working on. 
The time came for the thorium reactor, and a bunch of us were excited. 
They went through the whole presentation, they got to the timeline, and they said, "" We're going to have a thorium molten salt reactor ready for sale to the world by 2040. "" And I was like, "" What? "" (Laughter) I looked at my colleagues and I was like, "" Excuse me — can you guys speed that up a little bit? 
Because we're in a little bit of a climate crisis right now. 
And your cities are really polluted, by the way. "" And they responded back, they were like, "" I'm not sure what you've heard about our thorium program, but we don't have a third of our budget, and your department of energy hasn't been particularly forthcoming with all that data you guys have on testing reactors. "" And I said, "" Well, I've got an idea. 
You know how you've got 10 years where you're demonstrating that reactor? 
Let's just skip that part, and let's just go right to commercializing it. 
That will save money and time. "" And the engineer just looked at me and said, "" Let me ask you a question: Would you buy a car that had never been demonstrated before? "" So what about the other reactors? 
There's a reactor that's coming online now, they're starting to sell it. 
It's a high-temperature gas reactor. 
It can't melt down. 
But it's really big and bulky, that's part of the safety, and nobody thinks it's going to ever get cheaper than the reactors that we have. 
The ones that use waste as fuel are really cool ideas, but the truth is, we don't actually know how to do that yet. 
There's some risk that you'll actually make more waste, and most people think that if you're including that waste part of the process, it's just going to make the whole machine a lot more expensive, it's just adding another complicated step. 
The truth is, there's real questions about how much of that we're going to do. 
I mean, we went to India and asked about the nuclear program. 
The government said before the Paris climate talks that they were going to do something like 30 new nuclear plants. 
But when we got there and interviewed people and even looked at the internal documents, they're now saying they're going to do about five. 
And in most of the world, especially the rich world, they're not talking about building new reactors. 
We're actually talking about taking reactors down before their lifetimes are over. 
Germany's actually pressuring its neighbors to do that. 
I mentioned the United States — we could lose half of our reactors over the next 15 years, which would wipe out 40 percent of the emissions reductions we're supposed to get under the Clean Power Plan. 
Of course, in Japan, they took all their nuclear plants offline, replaced them with coal, natural gas, oil burning, and they're only expected to bring online about a third to two-thirds. 
So when we went through the numbers, and just added that up — how much nuclear do we see China and India bringing online over the next 15 years, how much do we see at risk of being taken offline — this was the most startling finding. 
What we found is that the world is actually at risk of losing four times more clean energy than we lost over the last 10 years. 
In other words: we're not in a clean energy revolution; we're in a clean energy crisis. 
So it's understandable that engineers would look for a technical fix to the fears that people have of nuclear. 
But when you consider that these are big challenges to do, that they're going to take a long time to solve, there's this other issue, which is: Are those technical fixes really going to solve people's fears? 
Let's take safety. 
You know, despite what people think, it's hard to figure out how to make nuclear power much safer. 
I mean, every medical journal that looks at it — this is the most recent study from the British journal, "" Lancet, "" one of the most respected journals in the world — nuclear is the safest way to make reliable power. 
Everybody's scared of the accidents. 
So you go look at the accident data — Fukushima, Chernobyl — the World Health Organization finds the same thing: the vast majority of harm is caused by people panicking, and they're panicking because they're afraid. 
In other words, the harm that's caused isn't actually caused by the machines or the radiation. 
It's caused by our fears. 
And what about the waste? 
Everyone worries about the waste. 
Well, the interesting thing about the waste is how little of it there is. 
This is just from one plant. 
If you take all the nuclear waste we've ever made in the United States, put it on a football field, stacked it up, it would only reach 20 feet high. 
And people say it's poisoning people or doing something — it's not, it's just sitting there, it's just being monitored. 
There's not very much of it. 
By contrast, the waste that we don't control from energy production — we call it "" pollution, "" and it kills seven million people a year, and it's threatening very serious levels of global warming. 
And the truth is that even if we get good at using that waste as fuel, there's always going to be some fuel left over. 
That means there's always going to be people that think it's a big problem for reasons that maybe don't have as much to do with the actual waste as we think. 
Well, what about the weapons? 
Maybe the most surprising thing is that we can't find any examples of countries that have nuclear power and then, "" Oh! "" decide to go get a weapon. 
In fact, it works the opposite. 
What we find is the only way we know how to get rid large numbers of nuclear weapons is by using the plutonium in the warheads as fuel in our nuclear power plants. 
And so, if you are wanting to get the world rid of nuclear weapons, then we're going to need a lot more nuclear power. 
(Applause) As I was leaving China, the engineer that brought Bill Gates there kind of pulled me aside, and he said, "" You know, Michael, I appreciate your interest in all the different nuclear supply technologies, but there's this more basic issue, which is that there's just not enough global demand. 
I mean, we can crank out these machines on assembly lines, we do know how to make things cheap, but there's just not enough people that want them. "" And so, let's do solar and wind and efficiency and conservation. 
Let's accelerate the advanced nuclear programs. 
I think we should triple the amount of money we're spending on it. 
But I just think the most important thing, if we're going to overcome the climate crisis, is to keep in mind that the cause of the clean energy crisis isn't from within our machines, it's from within ourselves. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I'm a blogger, a filmmaker and a butcher, and I'll explain how these identities come together. 
It started four years ago, when a friend and I opened our first Ramadan fast at one of the busiest mosques in New York City. 
Crowds of men with beards and skullcaps were swarming the streets. 
It was an FBI agent's wet dream. (Laughter) But being a part of this community, we knew how welcoming this space was. 
For years, I'd seen photos of this space being documented as a lifeless and cold monolith, much like the stereotypical image painted of the American Muslim experience. 
Frustrated by this myopic view, my friend and I had this crazy idea: Let's break our fast at a different mosque in a different state each night of Ramadan and share those stories on a blog. 
We called it "" 30 Mosques in 30 Days, "" and we drove to all the 50 states and shared stories from over 100 vastly different Muslim communities, ranging from the Cambodian refugees in the L.A. projects to the black Sufis living in the woods of South Carolina. 
What emerged was a beautiful and complicated portrait of America. 
The media coverage forced local journalists to revisit their Muslim communities, but what was really exciting was seeing people from around the world being inspired to take their own 30-mosque journey. 
There were even these two NFL athletes who took a sabbatical from the league to do so. 
And as 30 Mosques was blossoming around the world, I was actually stuck in Pakistan working on a film. 
My codirector, Omar, and I were at a breaking point with many of our friends on how to position the film. 
The movie is called "" These Birds Walk, "" and it is about wayward street kids who are struggling to find some semblance of family. 
We focus on the complexities of youth and family discord, but our friends kept on nudging us to comment on drones and target killings to make the film "" more relevant, "" essentially reducing these people who have entrusted us with their stories into sociopolitical symbols. 
Of course, we didn't listen to them, and instead, we championed the tender gestures of love and headlong flashes of youth. 
The agenda behind our cinematic immersion was only empathy, an emotion that's largely deficient from films that come from our region of the world. 
And as "" These Birds Walk "" played at film festivals and theaters internationally, I finally had my feet planted at home in New York, and with all the extra time and still no real money, my wife tasked me to cook more for us. 
And whenever I'd go to the local butcher to purchase some halal meat, something felt off. 
For those that don't know, halal is a term used for meat that is raised and slaughtered humanely following very strict Islamic guidelines. 
Unfortunately, the majority of halal meat in America doesn't rise to the standard that my faith calls for. 
The more I learned about these unethical practices, the more violated I felt, particularly because businesses from my own community were the ones taking advantage of my orthodoxy. 
So, with emotions running high, and absolutely no experience in butchery, some friends and I opened a meat store in the heart of the East Village fashion district. 
(Laughter) We call it Honest Chops, and we're reclaiming halal by sourcing organic, humanely raised animals, and by making it accessible and affordable to working-class families. 
There's really nothing like it in America. 
The unbelievable part is actually that 90 percent of our in-store customers are not even Muslim. 
For many, it is their first time interacting with Islam on such an intimate level. 
So all these disparate projects — (Laughter) — are the result of a restlessness. 
They are a visceral response to the businesses and curators who work hard to oversimplify my beliefs and my community, and the only way to beat their machine is to play by different rules. 
We must fight with an inventive approach. 
With the trust, with the access, with the love that only we can bring, we must unapologetically reclaim our beliefs in every moving image, in every cut of meat, because if we whitewash our stories for the sake of mass appeal, not only will we fail, but we will be trumped by those with more money and more resources to tell our stories. 
But the call for creative courage is not for novelty or relevance. 
It is simply because our communities are so damn unique and so damn beautiful. 
They demand us to find uncompromising ways to be acknowledged and respected. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So, before I became a dermatologist, I started in general medicine, as most dermatologists do in Britain. 
At the end of that time, I went off to Australia, about 20 years ago. 
What you learn when you go to Australia is the Australians are very competitive. 
And they are not magnanimous in victory. 
And that happened a lot: "You pommies, you can't play cricket, rugby." 
I could accept that. 
But moving into work — and we have each week what's called a journal club, when you'd sit down with the other doctors and you'd study a scientific paper in relation to medicine. 
And after week one, it was about cardiovascular mortality, a dry subject — how many people die of heart disease, what the rates are. 
And they were competitive about this: "You pommies, your rates of heart disease are shocking." 
And of course, they were right. 
Australians have about a third less heart disease than we do — less deaths from heart attacks, heart failure, less strokes — they're generally a healthier bunch. 
And of course they said this was because of their fine moral standing, their exercise, because they're Australians and we're weedy pommies, and so on. 
But it's not just Australia that has better health than Britain. 
Within Britain, there is a gradient of health — and this is what's called standardized mortality, basically your chances of dying. 
This is looking at data from the paper about 20 years ago, but it's true today. 
Comparing your rates of dying 50 degrees north — that's the South, that's London and places — by latitude, and 55 degrees — the bad news is that's here, Glasgow. 
I'm from Edinburgh. Worse news, that's even Edinburgh. 
(Laughter) So what accounts for this horrible space here between us up here in southern Scotland and the South? 
Now, we know about smoking, deep-fried Mars bars, chips — the Glasgow diet. 
All of these things. 
But this graph is after taking into account all of these known risk factors. 
This is after accounting for smoking, social class, diet, all those other known risk factors. 
We are left with this missing space of increased deaths the further north you go. 
Now, sunlight, of course, comes into this. 
And vitamin D has had a great deal of press, and a lot of people get concerned about it. 
And we need vitamin D. It's now a requirement that children have a certain amount. 
My grandmother grew up in Glasgow, back in the 1920s and '30s when rickets was a real problem and cod liver oil was brought in. 
And that really prevented the rickets that used to be common in this city. 
And I as a child was fed cod liver oil by my grandmother. 
I distinctly — nobody forgets cod liver oil. 
But an association: The higher people's blood levels of vitamin D are, the less heart disease they have, the less cancer. 
There seems to be a lot of data suggesting that vitamin D is very good for you. 
And it is, to prevent rickets and so on. 
But if you give people vitamin D supplements, you don't change that high rate of heart disease. 
And the evidence for it preventing cancers is not yet great. 
So what I'm going to suggest is that vitamin D is not the only story in town. 
It's not the only reason preventing heart disease. 
High vitamin D levels, I think, are a marker for sunlight exposure, and sunlight exposure, in methods I'm going to show, is good for heart disease. 
Anyway, I came back from Australia, and despite the obvious risks to my health, I moved to Aberdeen. 
(Laughter) Now, in Aberdeen, I started my dermatology training. 
But I also became interested in research, and in particular I became interested in this substance, nitric oxide. 
Now these three guys up here, Furchgott, Ignarro and Murad, won the Nobel Prize for medicine back in 1998. 
And they were the first people to describe this new chemical transmitter, nitric oxide. 
What nitric oxide does is it dilates blood vessels, so it lowers your blood pressure. 
It also dilates the coronary arteries, so it stops angina. 
And what was remarkable about it was in the past when we think of chemical messengers within the body, we thought of complicated things like estrogen and insulin, or nerve transmission. 
Very complex processes with very complex chemicals that fit into very complex receptors. 
And here's this incredibly simple molecule, a nitrogen and an oxygen that are stuck together, and yet these are hugely important for [unclear] our low blood pressure, for neurotransmission, for many, many things, but particularly cardiovascular health. 
And I started doing research, and we found, very excitingly, that the skin produces nitric oxide. 
So it's not just in the cardiovascular system it arises. 
It arises in the skin. 
Well, having found that and published that, I thought, well, what's it doing? 
How do you have low blood pressure in your skin? 
It's not the heart. What do you do? 
So I went off to the States, as many people do if they're going to do research, and I spent a few years in Pittsburgh. This is Pittsburgh. 
And I was interested in these really complex systems. 
We thought that maybe nitric oxide affected cell death, and how cells survive, and their resistance to other things. 
And I first off started work in cell culture, growing cells, and then I was using knockout mouse models — mice that couldn't make the gene. 
We worked out a mechanism, which — NO was helping cells survive. 
And I then moved back to Edinburgh. 
And in Edinburgh, the experimental animal we use is the medical student. 
It's a species close to human, with several advantages over mice: They're free, you don't shave them, they feed themselves, and nobody pickets your office saying, "Save the lab medical student." 
So they're really an ideal model. 
But what we found was that we couldn't reproduce in man the data we had shown in mice. 
It seemed we couldn't turn off the production of nitric oxide in the skin of humans. 
We put on creams that blocked the enzyme that made it, we injected things. We couldn't turn off the nitric oxide. 
And the reason for this, it turned out, after two or three years' work, was that in the skin we have huge stores not of nitric oxide, because nitric oxide is a gas, and it's released — (Poof!) — and in a few seconds it's away, but it can be turned into these forms of nitric oxide — nitrate, NO3; nitrite, NO2; nitrosothiols. 
And these are more stable, and your skin has got really large stores of NO. 
And we then thought to ourselves, with those big stores, I wonder if sunlight might activate those stores and release them from the skin, where the stores are about 10 times as big as what's in the circulation. 
Could the sun activate those stores into the circulation, and there in the circulation do its good things for your cardiovascular system? 
Well, I'm an experimental dermatologist, so what we did was we thought we'd have to expose our experimental animals to sunlight. 
And so what we did was we took a bunch of volunteers and we exposed them to ultraviolet light. 
So these are kind of sunlamps. 
Now, what we were careful to do was, vitamin D is made by ultraviolet B rays and we wanted to separate our story from the vitamin D story. 
So we used ultraviolet A, which doesn't make vitamin D. 
When we put people under a lamp for the equivalent of about 30 minutes of sunshine in summer in Edinburgh, what we produced was, we produced a rise in circulating nitric oxide. 
So we put patients with these subjects under the UV, and their NO levels do go up, and their blood pressure goes down. 
Not by much, as an individual level, but enough at a population level to shift the rates of heart disease in a whole population. 
And when we shone UV at them, or when we warmed them up to the same level as the lamps, but didn't actually let the rays hit the skin, this didn't happen. 
So this seems to be a feature of ultraviolet rays hitting the skin. 
Now, we're still collecting data. 
A few good things here: This appeared to be more marked in older people. 
I'm not sure exactly how much. 
One of the subjects here was my mother-in-law, and clearly I do not know her age. 
But certainly in people older than my wife, this appears to be a more marked effect. 
And the other thing I should mention was there was no change in vitamin D. 
This is separate from vitamin D. 
So vitamin D is good for you — it stops rickets, it prevents calcium metabolism, important stuff. 
But this is a separate mechanism from vitamin D. 
Now, one of the problems with looking at blood pressure is your body does everything it can to keep your blood pressure at the same place. 
If your leg is chopped off and you lose blood, your body will clamp down, increase the heart rate, do everything it can to keep your blood pressure up. 
That is an absolutely fundamental physiological principle. 
So what we've next done is we've moved on to looking at blood vessel dilatation. 
So we've measured — this is again, notice no tail and hairless, this is a medical student. 
In the arm, you can measure blood flow in the arm by how much it swells up as some blood flows into it. 
And what we've shown is that doing a sham irradiation — this is the thick line here — this is shining UV on the arm so it warms up but keeping it covered so the rays don't hit the skin. 
There is no change in blood flow, in dilatation of the blood vessels. 
But the active irradiation, during the UV and for an hour after it, there is dilation of the blood vessels. 
This is the mechanism by which you lower blood pressure, by which you dilate the coronary arteries also, to let the blood be supplied with the heart. 
So here, further data that ultraviolet — that's sunlight — has benefits on the blood flow and the cardiovascular system. 
So we thought we'd just kind of model — Different amounts of UV hit different parts of the Earth at different times of year, so you can actually work out those stores of nitric oxide — the nitrates, nitrites, nitrosothiols in the skin — cleave to release NO. 
Different wavelengths of light have different activities of doing that. 
So you can look at the wavelengths of light that do that. 
And you can look — So, if you live on the equator, the sun comes straight overhead, it comes through a very thin bit of atmosphere. 
In winter or summer, it's the same amount of light. 
If you live up here, in summer the sun is coming fairly directly down, but in winter it's coming through a huge amount of atmosphere, and much of the ultraviolet is weeded out, and the range of wavelengths that hit the Earth are different from summer to winter. 
So what you can do is you can multiply those data by the NO that's released and you can calculate how much nitric oxide would be released from the skin into the circulation. 
Now, if you're on the equator here — that's these two lines here, the red line and the purple line — the amount of nitric oxide that's released is the area under the curve, it's the area in this space here. 
So if you're on the equator, December or June, you've got masses of NO being released from the skin. 
So Ventura is in southern California. 
In summer, you might as well be at the equator. 
It's great. Lots of NO is released. 
Ventura mid-winter, well, there's still a decent amount. 
Edinburgh in summer, the area beneath the curve is pretty good, but Edinburgh in winter, the amount of NO that can be released is next to nothing, tiny amounts. 
So what do we think? 
We're still working at this story, we're still developing it, we're still expanding it. 
We think it's very important. 
We think it probably accounts for a lot of the north-south health divide within Britain, It's of relevance to us. 
We think that the skin — well, we know that the skin has got very large stores of nitric oxide as these various other forms. 
We suspect a lot of these come from diet, green leafy vegetables, beetroot, lettuce has a lot of these nitric oxides that we think go to the skin. 
We think they're then stored in the skin, and we think the sunlight releases this where it has generally beneficial effects. 
And this is ongoing work, but dermatologists — I mean, I'm a dermatologist. 
My day job is saying to people, "" You've got skin cancer, it's caused by sunlight, don't go in the sun. "" I actually think a far more important message is that there are benefits as well as risks to sunlight. 
Yes, sunlight is the major alterable risk factor for skin cancer, but deaths from heart disease are a hundred times higher than deaths from skin cancer. 
And I think that we need to be more aware of, and we need to find the risk-benefit ratio. 
How much sunlight is safe, and how can we finesse this best for our general health? 
So, thank you very much indeed. 
(Applause) 

"" We're declaring war against cancer, and we will win this war by 2015. "" This is what the US Congress and the National Cancer Institute declared just a few years ago, in 2003. 
Now, I don't know about you, but I don't buy that. 
I don't think we quite won this war yet, and I don't think anyone here will question that. 
Now, I will argue that a primary reason why we're not winning this war against cancer is because we're fighting blindly. 
I'm going to start by sharing with you a story about a good friend of mine. 
His name is Ehud, and a few years ago, Ehud was diagnosed with brain cancer. 
And not just any type of brain cancer: he was diagnosed with one of the most deadly forms of brain cancer. 
In fact, it was so deadly that the doctors told him that they only have 12 months, and during those 12 months, they have to find a treatment. 
They have to find a cure, and if they cannot find a cure, he will die. 
Now, the good news, they said, is that there are tons of different treatments to choose from, but the bad news is that in order for them to tell if a treatment is even working or not, well, that takes them about three months or so. 
So they cannot try that many things. 
Well, Ehud is now going into his first treatment, and during that first treatment, just a few days into that treatment, I'm meeting with him, and he tells me, "" Adam, I think this is working. 
I think we really lucked out here. Something is happening. "" And I ask him, "" Really? How do you know that, Ehud? "" And he says, "" Well, I feel so terrible inside. 
Something's gotta be working up there. 
It just has to. "" Well, unfortunately, three months later, we got the news, it didn't work. 
And so Ehud goes into his second treatment. 
And again, the same story. 
"It feels so bad, something's gotta be working there." 
And then three months later, again we get bad news. 
Ehud is going into his third treatment, and then his fourth treatment. 
And then, as predicted, Ehud dies. 
Now, when someone really close to you is going through such a huge struggle, you get really swamped with emotions. 
A lot of things are going through your head. 
For me, it was mostly outrage. 
I was just outraged that, how come this is the best that we can offer? 
And I started looking more and more into this. 
As it turns out, this is not just the best that doctors could offer Ehud. 
It's not just the best doctors could offer patients with brain cancer generally. 
We're actually not doing that well all across the board with cancer. 
I picked up one of those statistics, and I'm sure some of you have seen those statistics before. 
This is going to show you here how many patients actually died of cancer, in this case females in the United States, ever since the 1930s. 
You'll notice that there aren't that many things that have changed. 
It's still a huge issue. 
You'll see a few changes, though. 
You'll see lung cancer, for example, on the rise. 
Thank you, cigarettes. 
And you'll also see that, for example, stomach cancer once used to be one of the biggest killers of all cancers, is essentially eliminated. 
Now, why is that? Anyone knows, by the way? 
Why is it that humanity is no longer struck by stomach cancer? 
What was the huge, huge medical technology breakthrough that came to our world that saved humanity from stomach cancer? 
Was it maybe a new drug, or a better diagnostic? 
You guys are right, yeah. 
It's the invention of the refrigerator, and the fact that we're no longer eating spoiled meats. 
So the best thing that happened to us so far in the medical arena in cancer research is the fact that the refrigerator was invented. 
(Laughter) And so — yeah, I know. 
We're not doing so well here. 
I don't want to miniaturize the progress and everything that's been done in cancer research. 
Look, there is like 50-plus years of good cancer research that discovered major, major things that taught us about cancer. 
But all that said, we have a lot of heavy lifting to still do ahead of us. 
Again, I will argue that the primary reason why this is the case, why we have not done that remarkably well, is really we're fighting blindly here. 
And this is where medical imaging comes in. 
This is where my own work comes in. 
And so to give you a sense of the best medical imaging that's offered today to brain cancer patients, or actually generally to all cancer patients, take a look at this PET scan right here. 
Let's see. There we go. 
So this is a PET / CT scan, and what you'll see in this PET / CT scan is the CT scan will show you where the bones are, and the PET scan will show you where tumors are. 
Now, what you can see here is essentially a sugar molecule that was added a small little tag that is signaling to us outside of the body, "Hey, I'm here." 
And those sugar molecules are injected into these patients by the billions, and they're going all over the body looking for cells that are hungry for sugar. 
You'll see that the heart, for example, lights up there. 
That's because the heart needs a lot of sugar. 
You'll also see that the bladder lights up there. 
That's because the bladder is the thing that's clearing the sugar away from our body. 
And then you'll see a few other hot spots, and these are in fact the tumors. 
Now, this is a really a wonderful technology. 
For the first time it allowed us to look into someone's body without picking up each and every one of the cells and putting them under the microscope, but in a noninvasive way allowing us to look into someone's body and ask, "" Hey, has the cancer metastasized? 
Where is it? "" And the PET scans here are showing you very clearly where are these hot spots, where is the tumor. 
So as miraculous as this might seem, unfortunately, well, it's not that great. 
You see, those small little hot spots there. 
Can anyone guess how many cancer cells are in any one of these tumors? 
So it's about 100 million cancer cells, and let me make sure that this number sunk in. 
In each and every one of these small little blips that you're seeing on the image, there needs to be at least 100 million cancer cells in order for it to be detected. 
Now, if that seemed to you like a very large number, it is a very large number. 
This is in fact an incredibly large number, because what we really need in order to pick up something early enough to do something about it, to do something meaningful about it, well, we need to pick up tumors that are a thousand cells in size, and ideally just a handful of cells in size. 
I'm going to ask each of you to now play and imagine that you are brain surgeons. 
And you guys are now at an operating room, and there's a patient in front of you, and your task is to make sure that the tumor is out. 
So you're looking down at the patient, the skin and the skull have already been removed, so you're looking at the brain. 
And all you know about this patient is that there's a tumor about the size of a golf ball or so in the right frontal lobe of this person's brain. 
And that's more or less it. 
So you're looking down, and unfortunately everything looks the same, because brain cancer tissue and healthy brain tissue really just look the same. 
And so you're going in with your thumb, and you start to press a little bit on the brain, because tumors tend to be a little harder, stiffer, and so you go in and go a little bit like this and say, "It seems like the tumor is right there." 
Then you take out your knife and start cutting the tumor piece by piece by piece. 
And as you're taking the tumor out, then you're getting to a stage where you think, "Alright, I'm done. I took out everything." 
And at this stage, if that's — so far everything sounded, like, pretty crazy — you're now about to face the most challenging decision of your life here. 
Because now you need to decide, should I stop here and let this patient go, risking that there might be some leftover cancer cells behind that I just couldn't see, or should I take away some extra margins, typically about an inch or so around the tumor just to be sure that I removed everything? 
So this is not a simple decision to make, and unfortunately this is the decision that brain cancer surgeons have to take every single day as they're seeing their patients. 
And so I remember talking to a few friends of mine in the lab, and we say, "" Boy, there's got to be a better way. "" But not just like you tell a friend that there's got to be a better way. 
There's just got to be a better way here. 
This is just incredible. 
And so we looked back. 
Remember those PET scans I told you about, the sugar and so on. 
We said, hey, how about instead of using sugar molecules, let's maybe take tiny, tiny little particles made of gold, and let's program them with some interesting chemistry around them. 
Let's program them to look for cancer cells. 
And then we will inject these gold particles into these patients by the billions again, and we'll have them go all over the body, and just like secret agents, if you will, go and walk by every single cell in our body and knock on the door of that cell, and ask, "" Are you a cancer cell or are you a healthy cell? 
If you're a healthy cell, we're moving on. 
If you're a cancer cell, we're sticking in and shining out and telling us, "" Hey, look at me, I'm here. "" And they'll do it through some interesting cameras that we developed in the lab. 
And once we see that, maybe we can guide brain cancer surgeons towards taking only the tumor and leaving the healthy brain alone. 
And so we've tested that, and boy, this works well. 
So I'm going to show you an example now. 
What you're looking at here is an image of a mouse's brain, and we've implanted into this mouse's brain a small little tumor. 
And so this tumor is now growing in this mouse's brain, and then we've taken a doctor and asked the doctor to please operate on the mouse as if that was a patient, and take out piece by piece out of the tumor. 
And while he's doing that, we're going to take images to see where the gold particles are. 
And so we're going to first start by injecting these gold particles into this mouse, and we're going to see right here at the very left there that image at the bottom is the image that shows where the gold particles are. 
The nice thing is that these gold particles actually made it all the way to the tumor, and then they shine out and tell us, "" Hey, we're here. Here's the tumor. "" So now we can see the tumor, but we're not showing this to the doctor yet. 
We're asking the doctor, now please start cutting away the tumor, and you'll see here the doctor just took the first quadrant of the tumor and you see that first quadrant is now missing. 
The doctor then took the second quadrant, the third, and now it appears to be everything. 
And so at this stage, the doctor came back to us and said, "" Alright, I'm done. What do you want me to do? 
Should I keep things as they are or do you want me to take some extra margins around? "" And then we said, "" Well, hang on. "" We told the doctor, "" You've missed those two spots, so rather than taking huge margins around, only take out those tiny little areas. 
Take them out, and then let's take a look. "" And so the doctor took them away, and lo and behold, the cancer is now completely gone. 
Now, the important thing is that it's not just that the cancer is completely gone from this person's brain, or from this mouse's brain. 
The most important thing is that we did not have to take huge amounts of healthy brain in the process. 
And so now we can actually imagine a world where doctors and surgeons, as they take away a tumor, they actually know what to take out, and they no longer have to guess with their thumb. 
Now, here's why it's extremely important to take those tiny little leftover tumors. 
Those leftover tumors, even if it's just a handful of cells, they will grow to recur the tumor, for the tumor to come back. 
In fact, the reason why 80 to 90 percent of those brain cancer surgeries ultimately fail is because of those small little extra margins that were left positive, those small little leftover tumors that were left there. 
So this is clearly very nice, but what I really want to share with you is where I think we're heading from here. 
And so in my lab at Stanford, my students and I are asking, what should we be working on now? 
And I think where medical imaging is heading to is the ability to look into the human body and actually see each and every one of these cells separately. 
The ability like this would allow us to actually pick up tumors way, way earlier in the process, way before it's 100 million cells inside, so we can actually do something about it. 
An ability to see each and every one of the cells might also allow us to ask insightful questions. 
So in the lab, we are now getting to a point where we can actually start asking these cancer cells real questions, like, for example, are you responding to the treatment we are giving you or not? 
And so also for patients like Ehud that are going through these nasty, nasty chemotherapy drugs, for them not to suffer through those horrendous side effects of the drugs when the drugs are in fact not even helping them. 
So to be frank here, we're pretty far away from winning the war against cancer, just to be realistic. 
But at least I am hopeful that we should be able to fight this war with better medical imaging techniques in the way that is not blind. 

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

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

The first thing I want to do is say thank you to all of you. 
The second thing I want to do is introduce my co-author and dear friend and co-teacher. 
Ken and I have been working together for almost 40 years. 
That's Ken Sharpe over there. 
(Applause) So there is among many people — certainly me and most of the people I talk to — a kind of collective dissatisfaction with the way things are working, with the way our institutions run. 
Our kids' teachers seem to be failing them. 
Our doctors don't know who the hell we are, and they don't have enough time for us. 
We certainly can't trust the bankers, and we certainly can't trust the brokers. 
They almost brought the entire financial system down. 
And even as we do our own work, all too often, we find ourselves having to choose between doing what we think is the right thing and doing the expected thing, or the required thing, or the profitable thing. 
So everywhere we look, pretty much across the board, we worry that the people we depend on don't really have our interests at heart. 
Or if they do have our interests at heart, we worry that they don't know us well enough to figure out what they need to do in order to allow us to secure those interests. 
They don't understand us. 
They don't have the time to get to know us. 
There are two kinds of responses that we make to this sort of general dissatisfaction. 
If things aren't going right, the first response is: let's make more rules, let's set up a set of detailed procedures to make sure that people will do the right thing. 
Give teachers scripts to follow in the classroom, so even if they don't know what they're doing and don't care about the welfare of our kids, as long as they follow the scripts, our kids will get educated. 
Give judges a list of mandatory sentences to impose for crimes, so that you don't need to rely on judges using their judgment. 
Instead, all they have to do is look up on the list what kind of sentence goes with what kind of crime. 
Impose limits on what credit card companies can charge in interest and on what they can charge in fees. 
More and more rules to protect us against an indifferent, uncaring set of institutions we have to deal with. 
Or — or maybe and — in addition to rules, let's see if we can come up with some really clever incentives so that, even if the people we deal with don't particularly want to serve our interests, it is in their interest to serve our interest — the magic incentives that will get people to do the right thing even out of pure selfishness. 
So we offer teachers bonuses if the kids they teach score passing grades on these big test scores that are used to evaluate the quality of school systems. 
Rules and incentives — "sticks" and "carrots." 
We passed a bunch of rules to regulate the financial industry in response to the recent collapse. 
There's the Dodd-Frank Act, there's the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency that is temporarily being headed through the backdoor by Elizabeth Warren. 
Maybe these rules will actually improve the way these financial services companies behave. 
We'll see. 
In addition, we are struggling to find some way to create incentives for people in the financial services industry that will have them more interested in serving the long-term interests even of their own companies, rather than securing short-term profits. 
So if we find just the right incentives, they'll do the right thing — as I said — selfishly, and if we come up with the right rules and regulations, they won't drive us all over a cliff. 
And Ken [Sharpe] and I certainly know that you need to reign in the bankers. 
If there is a lesson to be learned from the financial collapse it is that. 
But what we believe, and what we argue in the book, is that there is no set of rules, no matter how detailed, no matter how specific, no matter how carefully monitored and enforced, there is no set of rules that will get us what we need. 
Why? Because bankers are smart people. 
And, like water, they will find cracks in any set of rules. 
You design a set of rules that will make sure that the particular reason why the financial system "" almost-collapse "" can't happen again. 
It is naive beyond description to think that having blocked this source of financial collapse, you have blocked all possible sources of financial collapse. 
So it's just a question of waiting for the next one and then marveling at how we could have been so stupid as not to protect ourselves against that. 
What we desperately need, beyond, or along with, better rules and reasonably smart incentives, is we need virtue. 
We need character. 
We need people who want to do the right thing. 
And in particular, the virtue that we need most of all is the virtue that Aristotle called "practical wisdom." 
Practical wisdom is the moral will to do the right thing and the moral skill to figure out what the right thing is. 
So Aristotle was very interested in watching how the craftsmen around him worked. 
And he was impressed at how they would improvise novel solutions to novel problems — problems that they hadn't anticipated. 
So one example is he sees these stonemasons working on the Isle of Lesbos, and they need to measure out round columns. 
Well if you think about it, it's really hard to measure out round columns using a ruler. 
So what do they do? 
They fashion a novel solution to the problem. 
They created a ruler that bends, what we would call these days a tape measure — a flexible rule, a rule that bends. 
And Aristotle said, "" Hah, they appreciated that sometimes to design rounded columns, you need to bend the rule. "" And Aristotle said often in dealing with other people, we need to bend the rules. 
Dealing with other people demands a kind of flexibility that no set of rules can encompass. 
Wise people know when and how to bend the rules. 
Wise people know how to improvise. 
The way my co-author, Ken, and I talk about it, they are kind of like jazz musicians. 
The rules are like the notes on the page, and that gets you started, but then you dance around the notes on the page, coming up with just the right combination for this particular moment with this particular set of fellow players. 
So for Aristotle, the kind of rule-bending, rule exception-finding and improvisation that you see in skilled craftsmen is exactly what you need to be a skilled moral craftsman. 
And in interactions with people, almost all the time, it is this kind of flexibility that is required. 
A wise person knows when to bend the rules. 
A wise person knows when to improvise. 
And most important, a wise person does this improvising and rule-bending in the service of the right aims. 
If you are a rule-bender and an improviser mostly to serve yourself, what you get is ruthless manipulation of other people. 
So it matters that you do this wise practice in the service of others and not in the service of yourself. 
And so the will to do the right thing is just as important as the moral skill of improvisation and exception-finding. 
Together they comprise practical wisdom, which Aristotle thought was the master virtue. 
So I'll give you an example of wise practice in action. 
It's the case of Michael. 
Michael's a young guy. 
He had a pretty low-wage job. 
He was supporting his wife and a child, and the child was going to parochial school. 
Then he lost his job. 
He panicked about being able to support his family. 
One night, he drank a little too much, and he robbed a cab driver — stole 50 dollars. 
He robbed him at gunpoint. 
It was a toy gun. 
He got caught. He got tried. 
He got convicted. 
The Pennsylvania sentencing guidelines required a minimum sentence for a crime like this of two years, 24 months. 
The judge on the case, Judge Lois Forer thought that this made no sense. 
He had never committed a crime before. 
He was a responsible husband and father. 
He had been faced with desperate circumstances. 
All this would do is wreck a family. 
And so she improvised a sentence — 11 months, and not only that, but release every day to go to work. 
Spend your night in jail, spend your day holding down a job. 
He did. He served out his sentence. 
He made restitution and found himself a new job. 
And the family was united. 
And it seemed on the road to some sort of a decent life — a happy ending to a story involving wise improvisation from a wise judge. 
But it turned out the prosecutor was not happy that Judge Forer ignored the sentencing guidelines and sort of invented her own, and so he appealed. 
And he asked for the mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery. 
He did after all have a toy gun. 
The mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery is five years. 
He won the appeal. 
Michael was sentenced to five years in prison. 
Judge Forer had to follow the law. 
And by the way, this appeal went through after he had finished serving his sentence, so he was out and working at a job and taking care of his family and he had to go back into jail. 
Judge Forer did what she was required to do, and then she quit the bench. 
And Michael disappeared. 
So that is an example, both of wisdom in practice and the subversion of wisdom by rules that are meant, of course, to make things better. 
Now consider Ms. Dewey. 
Ms. Dewey's a teacher in a Texas elementary school. 
She found herself listening to a consultant one day who was trying to help teachers boost the test scores of the kids, so that the school would reach the elite category in percentage of kids passing big tests. 
All these schools in Texas compete with one another to achieve these milestones, and there are bonuses and various other treats that come if you beat the other schools. 
So here was the consultant's advice: first, don't waste your time on kids who are going to pass the test no matter what you do. 
Second, don't waste your time on kids who can't pass the test no matter what you do. 
Third, don't waste your time on kids who moved into the district too late for their scores to be counted. 
Focus all of your time and attention on the kids who are on the bubble, the so-called "" bubble kids "" — kids where your intervention can get them just maybe over the line from failing to passing. 
So Ms. Dewey heard this, and she shook her head in despair while fellow teachers were sort of cheering each other on and nodding approvingly. 
It's like they were about to go play a football game. 
For Ms. Dewey, this isn't why she became a teacher. 
Now Ken and I are not naive, and we understand that you need to have rules. 
You need to have incentives. 
People have to make a living. 
But the problem with relying on rules and incentives is that they demoralize professional activity, and they demoralize professional activity in two senses. 
First, they demoralize the people who are engaged in the activity. 
Judge Forer quits, and Ms. Dewey in completely disheartened. 
And second, they demoralize the activity itself. 
The very practice is demoralized, and the practitioners are demoralized. 
It creates people — when you manipulate incentives to get people to do the right thing — it creates people who are addicted to incentives. 
That is to say, it creates people who only do things for incentives. 
Now the striking thing about this is that psychologists have known this for 30 years. 
Psychologists have known about the negative consequences of incentivizing everything for 30 years. 
We know that if you reward kids for drawing pictures, they stop caring about the drawing and care only about the reward. 
If you reward kids for reading books, they stop caring about what's in the books and only care about how long they are. 
If you reward teachers for kids' test scores, they stop caring about educating and only care about test preparation. 
If you were to reward doctors for doing more procedures — which is the current system — they would do more. 
If instead you reward doctors for doing fewer procedures, they will do fewer. 
What we want, of course, is doctors who do just the right amount of procedures and do the right amount for the right reason — namely, to serve the welfare of their patients. 
Psychologists have known this for decades, and it's time for policymakers to start paying attention and listen to psychologists a little bit, instead of economists. 
And it doesn't have to be this way. 
We think, Ken and I, that there are real sources of hope. 
We identify one set of people in all of these practices who we call canny outlaws. 
These are people who, being forced to operate in a system that demands rule-following and creates incentives, find away around the rules, find a way to subvert the rules. 
So there are teachers who have these scripts to follow, and they know that if they follow these scripts, the kids will learn nothing. 
And so what they do is they follow the scripts, but they follow the scripts at double-time and squirrel away little bits of extra time during which they teach in the way that they actually know is effective. 
So these are little ordinary, everyday heroes, and they're incredibly admirable, but there's no way that they can sustain this kind of activity in the face of a system that either roots them out or grinds them down. 
So canny outlaws are better than nothing, but it's hard to imagine any canny outlaw sustaining that for an indefinite period of time. 
More hopeful are people we call system-changers. 
These are people who are looking not to dodge the system's rules and regulations, but to transform the system, and we talk about several. 
One in particular is a judge named Robert Russell. 
And one day he was faced with the case of Gary Pettengill. 
Pettengill was a 23-year-old vet who had planned to make the army a career, but then he got a severe back injury in Iraq, and that forced him to take a medical discharge. 
He was married, he had a third kid on the way, he suffered from PTSD, in addition to the bad back, and recurrent nightmares, and he had started using marijuana to ease some of the symptoms. 
He was only able to get part-time work because of his back, and so he was unable to earn enough to put food on the table and take care of his family. 
So he started selling marijuana. 
He was busted in a drug sweep. 
His family was kicked out of their apartment, and the welfare system was threatening to take away his kids. 
Under normal sentencing procedures, Judge Russell would have had little choice but to sentence Pettengill to serious jail-time as a drug felon. 
But Judge Russell did have an alternative. 
And that's because he was in a special court. 
He was in a court called the Veterans' Court. 
In the Veterans' Court — this was the first of its kind in the United States. 
Judge Russell created the Veterans' Court. 
It was a court only for veterans who had broken the law. 
And he had created it exactly because mandatory sentencing laws were taking the judgment out of judging. 
No one wanted non-violent offenders — and especially non-violent offenders who were veterans to boot — to be thrown into prison. 
They wanted to do something about what we all know, namely the revolving door of the criminal justice system. 
And what the Veterans' Court did, was it treated each criminal as an individual, tried to get inside their problems, tried to fashion responses to their crimes that helped them to rehabilitate themselves, and didn't forget about them once the judgment was made. 
Stayed with them, followed up on them, made sure that they were sticking to whatever plan had been jointly developed to get them over the hump. 
There are now 22 cities that have Veterans' Courts like this. 
Why has the idea spread? 
Well, one reason is that Judge Russell has now seen 108 vets in his Veterans' Court as of February of this year, and out of 108, guess how many have gone back through the revolving door of justice into prison. 
None. None. 
Anyone would glom onto a criminal justice system that has this kind of a record. 
So here's is a system-changer, and it seems to be catching. 
There's a banker who created a for-profit community bank that encouraged bankers — I know this is hard to believe — encouraged bankers who worked there to do well by doing good for their low-income clients. 
The bank helped finance the rebuilding of what was otherwise a dying community. 
Though their loan recipients were high-risk by ordinary standards, the default rate was extremely low. 
The bank was profitable. 
The bankers stayed with their loan recipients. 
They didn't make loans and then sell the loans. 
They serviced the loans. 
They made sure that their loan recipients were staying up with their payments. 
Banking hasn't always been the way we read about it now in the newspapers. 
Even Goldman Sachs once used to serve clients, before it turned into an institution that serves only itself. 
Banking wasn't always this way, and it doesn't have to be this way. 
So there are examples like this in medicine — doctors at Harvard who are trying to transform medical education, so that you don't get a kind of ethical erosion and loss of empathy, which characterizes most medical students in the course of their medical training. 
And the way they do it is to give third-year medical students patients who they follow for an entire year. 
So the patients are not organ systems, and they're not diseases; they're people, people with lives. 
And in order to be an effective doctor, you need to treat people who have lives and not just disease. 
In addition to which there's an enormous amount of back and forth, mentoring of one student by another, of all the students by the doctors, and the result is a generation — we hope — of doctors who do have time for the people they treat. 
We'll see. 
So there are lots of examples like this that we talk about. 
Each of them shows that it is possible to build on and nurture character and keep a profession true to its proper mission — what Aristotle would have called its proper telos. 
And Ken and I believe that this is what practitioners actually want. 
People want to be allowed to be virtuous. 
They want to have permission to do the right thing. 
They don't want to feel like they need to take a shower to get the moral grime off their bodies everyday when they come home from work. 
Aristotle thought that practical wisdom was the key to happiness, and he was right. 
There's now a lot of research being done in psychology on what makes people happy, and the two things that jump out in study after study — I know this will come as a shock to all of you — the two things that matter most to happiness are love and work. 
Love: managing successfully relations with the people who are close to you and with the communities of which you are a part. 
Work: engaging in activities that are meaningful and satisfying. 
If you have that, good close relations with other people, work that's meaningful and fulfilling, you don't much need anything else. 
Well, to love well and to work well, you need wisdom. 
Rules and incentives don't tell you how to be a good friend, how to be a good parent, how to be a good spouse, or how to be a good doctor or a good lawyer or a good teacher. Rules and incentives 
are no substitutes for wisdom. 
Indeed, we argue, there is no substitute for wisdom. 
And so practical wisdom does not require heroic acts of self-sacrifice on the part of practitioners. 
In giving us the will and the skill to do the right thing — to do right by others — practical wisdom also gives us the will and the skill to do right by ourselves. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

This is me building a prototype for six hours straight. 
This is slave labor to my own project. 
This is what the DIY and maker movements really look like. 
And this is an analogy for today's construction and manufacturing world with brute-force assembly techniques. 
And this is exactly why I started studying how to program physical materials to build themselves. 
But there is another world. 
Today at the micro- and nanoscales, there's an unprecedented revolution happening. 
And this is the ability to program physical and biological materials to change shape, change properties and even compute outside of silicon-based matter. 
There's even a software called cadnano that allows us to design three-dimensional shapes like nano robots or drug delivery systems and use DNA to self-assemble those functional structures. 
But if we look at the human scale, there's massive problems that aren't being addressed by those nanoscale technologies. 
If we look at construction and manufacturing, there's major inefficiencies, energy consumption and excessive labor techniques. 
In infrastructure, let's just take one example. 
Take piping. 
In water pipes, we have fixed-capacity water pipes that have fixed flow rates, except for expensive pumps and valves. 
We bury them in the ground. 
If anything changes — if the environment changes, the ground moves, or demand changes — we have to start from scratch and take them out and replace them. 
So I'd like to propose that we can combine those two worlds, that we can combine the world of the nanoscale programmable adaptive materials and the built environment. 
And I don't mean automated machines. 
I don't just mean smart machines that replace humans. 
But I mean programmable materials that build themselves. 
And that's called self-assembly, which is a process by which disordered parts build an ordered structure through only local interaction. 
So what do we need if we want to do this at the human scale? 
We need a few simple ingredients. 
The first ingredient is materials and geometry, and that needs to be tightly coupled with the energy source. 
And you can use passive energy — so heat, shaking, pneumatics, gravity, magnetics. 
And then you need smartly designed interactions. 
And those interactions allow for error correction, and they allow the shapes to go from one state to another state. 
So now I'm going to show you a number of projects that we've built, from one-dimensional, two-dimensional, three-dimensional and even four-dimensional systems. 
So in one-dimensional systems — this is a project called the self-folding proteins. 
And the idea is that you take the three-dimensional structure of a protein — in this case it's the crambin protein — you take the backbone — so no cross-linking, no environmental interactions — and you break that down into a series of components. 
And then we embed elastic. 
And when I throw this up into the air and catch it, it has the full three-dimensional structure of the protein, all of the intricacies. 
And this gives us a tangible model of the three-dimensional protein and how it folds and all of the intricacies of the geometry. 
So we can study this as a physical, intuitive model. 
And we're also translating that into two-dimensional systems — so flat sheets that can self-fold into three-dimensional structures. 
In three dimensions, we did a project last year at TEDGlobal with Autodesk and Arthur Olson where we looked at autonomous parts — so individual parts not pre-connected that can come together on their own. 
And we built 500 of these glass beakers. 
They had different molecular structures inside and different colors that could be mixed and matched. 
And we gave them away to all the TEDsters. 
And so these became intuitive models to understand how molecular self-assembly works at the human scale. 
This is the polio virus. 
You shake it hard and it breaks apart. 
And then you shake it randomly and it starts to error correct and built the structure on its own. 
And this is demonstrating that through random energy, we can build non-random shapes. 
We even demonstrated that we can do this at a much larger scale. 
Last year at TED Long Beach, we built an installation that builds installations. 
The idea was, could we self-assemble furniture-scale objects? 
So we built a large rotating chamber, and people would come up and spin the chamber faster or slower, adding energy to the system and getting an intuitive understanding of how self-assembly works and how we could use this as a macroscale construction or manufacturing technique for products. 
So remember, I said 4D. 
So today for the first time, we're unveiling a new project, which is a collaboration with Stratasys, and it's called 4D printing. 
The idea behind 4D printing is that you take multi-material 3D printing — so you can deposit multiple materials — and you add a new capability, which is transformation, that right off the bed, the parts can transform from one shape to another shape directly on their own. 
And this is like robotics without wires or motors. 
So you completely print this part, and it can transform into something else. 
We also worked with Autodesk on a software they're developing called Project Cyborg. 
And this allows us to simulate this self-assembly behavior and try to optimize which parts are folding when. 
But most importantly, we can use this same software for the design of nanoscale self-assembly systems and human scale self-assembly systems. 
These are parts being printed with multi-material properties. 
Here's the first demonstration. 
A single strand dipped in water that completely self-folds on its own into the letters M I T. 
I'm biased. 
This is another part, single strand, dipped in a bigger tank that self-folds into a cube, a three-dimensional structure, on its own. 
So no human interaction. 
And we think this is the first time that a program and transformation has been embedded directly into the materials themselves. 
And it also might just be the manufacturing technique that allows us to produce more adaptive infrastructure in the future. 
So I know you're probably thinking, okay, that's cool, but how do we use any of this stuff for the built environment? 
So I've started a lab at MIT, and it's called the Self-Assembly Lab. 
And we're dedicated to trying to develop programmable materials for the built environment. 
And we think there's a few key sectors that have fairly near-term applications. 
One of those is in extreme environments. 
These are scenarios where it's difficult to build, our current construction techniques don't work, it's too large, it's too dangerous, it's expensive, too many parts. 
And space is a great example of that. 
We're trying to design new scenarios for space that have fully reconfigurable and self-assembly structures that can go from highly functional systems from one to another. 
Let's go back to infrastructure. 
In infrastructure, we're working with a company out of Boston called Geosyntec. 
And we're developing a new paradigm for piping. 
Imagine if water pipes could expand or contract to change capacity or change flow rate, or maybe even undulate like peristaltics to move the water themselves. 
So this isn't expensive pumps or valves. 
This is a completely programmable and adaptive pipe on its own. 
So I want to remind you today of the harsh realities of assembly in our world. 
These are complex things built with complex parts that come together in complex ways. 
So I would like to invite you from whatever industry you're from to join us in reinventing and reimagining the world, how things come together from the nanoscale to the human scale, so that we can go from a world like this to a world that's more like this. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

(Nature sounds) When I first began recording wild soundscapes 45 years ago, I had no idea that ants, insect larvae, sea anemones and viruses created a sound signature. 
But they do. 
And so does every wild habitat on the planet, like the Amazon rainforest you're hearing behind me. 
In fact, temperate and tropical rainforests each produce a vibrant animal orchestra, that instantaneous and organized expression of insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals. 
And every soundscape that springs from a wild habitat generates its own unique signature, one that contains incredible amounts of information, and it's some of that information I want to share with you today. 
The soundscape is made up of three basic sources. 
The first is the geophony, or the nonbiological sounds that occur in any given habitat, like wind in the trees, water in a stream, waves at the ocean shore, movement of the Earth. 
The second of these is the biophony. 
The biophony is all of the sound that's generated by organisms in a given habitat at one time and in one place. 
And the third is all of the sound that we humans generate that's called anthrophony. 
Some of it is controlled, like music or theater, but most of it is chaotic and incoherent, which some of us refer to as noise. 
There was a time when I considered wild soundscapes to be a worthless artifact. 
They were just there, but they had no significance. 
Well, I was wrong. What I learned from these encounters was that careful listening gives us incredibly valuable tools by which to evaluate the health of a habitat across the entire spectrum of life. 
When I began recording in the late '60s, the typical methods of recording were limited to the fragmented capture of individual species like birds mostly, in the beginning, but later animals like mammals and amphibians. 
To me, this was a little like trying to understand the magnificence of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony by abstracting the sound of a single violin player out of the context of the orchestra and hearing just that one part. 
Fortunately, more and more institutions are implementing the more holistic models that I and a few of my colleagues have introduced to the field of soundscape ecology. 
When I began recording over four decades ago, I could record for 10 hours and capture one hour of usable material, good enough for an album or a film soundtrack or a museum installation. 
Now, because of global warming, resource extraction, and human noise, among many other factors, it can take up to 1,000 hours or more to capture the same thing. 
Fully 50 percent of my archive comes from habitats so radically altered that they're either altogether silent or can no longer be heard in any of their original form. 
The usual methods of evaluating a habitat have been done by visually counting the numbers of species and the numbers of individuals within each species in a given area. 
However, by comparing data that ties together both density and diversity from what we hear, I'm able to arrive at much more precise fitness outcomes. 
And I want to show you some examples that typify the possibilities unlocked by diving into this universe. 
This is Lincoln Meadow. 
Lincoln Meadow's a three-and-a-half-hour drive east of San Francisco in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, at about 2,000 meters altitude, and I've been recording there for many years. 
In 1988, a logging company convinced local residents that there would be absolutely no environmental impact from a new method they were trying called "" selective logging, "" taking out a tree here and there rather than clear-cutting a whole area. 
With permission granted to record both before and after the operation, I set up my gear and captured a large number of dawn choruses to very strict protocol and calibrated recordings, because I wanted a really good baseline. 
This is an example of a spectrogram. 
A spectrogram is a graphic illustration of sound with time from left to right across the page — 15 seconds in this case is represented — and frequency from the bottom of the page to the top, lowest to highest. 
And you can see that the signature of a stream is represented here in the bottom third or half of the page, while birds that were once in that meadow are represented in the signature across the top. 
There were a lot of them. 
And here's Lincoln Meadow before selective logging. 
(Nature sounds) Well, a year later I returned, and using the same protocols and recording under the same conditions, I recorded a number of examples of the same dawn choruses, and now this is what we've got. 
This is after selective logging. 
You can see that the stream is still represented in the bottom third of the page, but notice what's missing in the top two thirds. 
(Nature sounds) Coming up is the sound of a woodpecker. 
Well, I've returned to Lincoln Meadow 15 times in the last 25 years, and I can tell you that the biophony, the density and diversity of that biophony, has not yet returned to anything like it was before the operation. 
But here's a picture of Lincoln Meadow taken after, and you can see that from the perspective of the camera or the human eye, hardly a stick or a tree appears to be out of place, which would confirm the logging company's contention that there's nothing of environmental impact. 
However, our ears tell us a very different story. 
Young students are always asking me what these animals are saying, and really I've got no idea. 
But I can tell you that they do express themselves. 
Whether or not we understand it is a different story. 
I was walking along the shore in Alaska, and I came across this tide pool filled with a colony of sea anemones, these wonderful eating machines, relatives of coral and jellyfish. 
And curious to see if any of them made any noise, I dropped a hydrophone, an underwater microphone covered in rubber, down the mouth part, and immediately the critter began to absorb the microphone into its belly, and the tentacles were searching out of the surface for something of nutritional value. 
The static-like sounds that are very low, that you're going to hear right now. 
(Static sounds) Yeah, but watch. When it didn't find anything to eat — (Honking sound) (Laughter) I think that's an expression that can be understood in any language. (Laughter) 
At the end of its breeding cycle, the Great Basin Spadefoot toad digs itself down about a meter under the hard-panned desert soil of the American West, where it can stay for many seasons until conditions are just right for it to emerge again. 
And when there's enough moisture in the soil in the spring, frogs will dig themselves to the surface and gather around these large, vernal pools in great numbers. 
And they vocalize in a chorus that's absolutely in sync with one another. 
And they do that for two reasons. 
The first is competitive, because they're looking for mates, and the second is cooperative, because if they're all vocalizing in sync together, it makes it really difficult for predators like coyotes, foxes and owls to single out any individual for a meal. 
This is a spectrogram of what the frog chorusing looks like when it's in a very healthy pattern. 
(Frogs croaking) Mono Lake is just to the east of Yosemite National Park in California, and it's a favorite habitat of these toads, and it's also favored by U.S. Navy jet pilots, who train in their fighters flying them at speeds exceeding 1,100 kilometers an hour and altitudes only a couple hundred meters above ground level of the Mono Basin, very fast, very low, and so loud that the anthrophony, the human noise, even though it's six and a half kilometers from the frog pond you just heard a second ago, it masked the sound of the chorusing toads. 
You can see in this spectrogram that all of the energy that was once in the first spectrogram is gone from the top end of the spectrogram, and that there's breaks in the chorusing at two and a half, four and a half, and six and a half seconds, and then the sound of the jet, the signature, is in yellow at the very bottom of the page. 
(Frogs croaking) Now at the end of that flyby, it took the frogs fully 45 minutes to regain their chorusing synchronicity, during which time, and under a full moon, we watched as two coyotes and a great horned owl came in to pick off a few of their numbers. 
The good news is that, with a little bit of habitat restoration and fewer flights, the frog populations, once diminishing during the 1980s and early '90s, have pretty much returned to normal. 
I want to end with a story told by a beaver. 
It's a very sad story, but it really illustrates how animals can sometimes show emotion, a very controversial subject among some older biologists. 
A colleague of mine was recording in the American Midwest around this pond that had been formed maybe 16,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. 
It was also formed in part by a beaver dam at one end that held that whole ecosystem together in a very delicate balance. 
And one afternoon, while he was recording, there suddenly appeared from out of nowhere a couple of game wardens, who for no apparent reason, walked over to the beaver dam, dropped a stick of dynamite down it, blowing it up, killing the female and her young babies. 
Horrified, my colleagues remained behind to gather his thoughts and to record whatever he could the rest of the afternoon, and that evening, he captured a remarkable event: the lone surviving male beaver swimming in slow circles crying out inconsolably for its lost mate and offspring. 
This is probably the saddest sound I've ever heard coming from any organism, human or other. 
(Beaver crying) Yeah. Well. 
There are many facets to soundscapes, among them the ways in which animals taught us to dance and sing, which I'll save for another time. 
But you have heard how biophonies help clarify our understanding of the natural world. 
You've heard the impact of resource extraction, human noise and habitat destruction. 
And where environmental sciences have typically tried to understand the world from what we see, a much fuller understanding can be got from what we hear. 
Biophonies and geophonies are the signature voices of the natural world, and as we hear them, we're endowed with a sense of place, the true story of the world we live in. 
In a matter of seconds, a soundscape reveals much more information from many perspectives, from quantifiable data to cultural inspiration. 
Visual capture implicitly frames a limited frontal perspective of a given spatial context, while soundscapes widen that scope to a full 360 degrees, completely enveloping us. 
And while a picture may be worth 1,000 words, a soundscape is worth 1,000 pictures. 
And our ears tell us that the whisper of every leaf and creature speaks to the natural sources of our lives, which indeed may hold the secrets of love for all things, especially our own humanity, and the last word goes to a jaguar from the Amazon. 
(Growling) Thank you for listening. 
(Applause) 

You know, I'm struck by how one of the implicit themes of TED is compassion, these very moving demonstrations we've just seen: HIV in Africa, President Clinton last night. 
And I'd like to do a little collateral thinking, if you will, about compassion and bring it from the global level to the personal. 
I'm a psychologist, but rest assured, I will not bring it to the scrotal. 
(Laughter) There was a very important study done a while ago at Princeton Theological Seminary that speaks to why it is that when all of us have so many opportunities to help, we do sometimes, and we don't other times. 
A group of divinity students at the Princeton Theological Seminary were told that they were going to give a practice sermon and they were each given a sermon topic. 
Half of those students were given, as a topic, the parable of the Good Samaritan: the man who stopped the stranger in — to help the stranger in need by the side of the road. 
Half were given random Bible topics. 
Then one by one, they were told they had to go to another building and give their sermon. 
As they went from the first building to the second, each of them passed a man who was bent over and moaning, clearly in need. The question is: Did they stop to help? 
The more interesting question is: Did it matter they were contemplating the parable of the Good Samaritan? Answer: No, not at all. 
What turned out to determine whether someone would stop and help a stranger in need was how much of a hurry they thought they were in — were they feeling they were late, or were they absorbed in what they were going to talk about. 
And this is, I think, the predicament of our lives: that we don't take every opportunity to help because our focus is in the wrong direction. 
There's a new field in brain science, social neuroscience. 
This studies the circuitry in two people's brains that activates while they interact. 
And the new thinking about compassion from social neuroscience is that our default wiring is to help. 
That is to say, if we attend to the other person, we automatically empathize, we automatically feel with them. 
There are these newly identified neurons, mirror neurons, that act like a neuro Wi-Fi, activating in our brain exactly the areas activated in theirs. We feel "" with "" automatically. 
And if that person is in need, if that person is suffering, we're automatically prepared to help. At least that's the argument. 
But then the question is: Why don't we? 
And I think this speaks to a spectrum that goes from complete self-absorption, to noticing, to empathy and to compassion. 
And the simple fact is, if we are focused on ourselves, if we're preoccupied, as we so often are throughout the day, we don't really fully notice the other. 
And this difference between the self and the other focus can be very subtle. 
I was doing my taxes the other day, and I got to the point where I was listing all of the donations I gave, and I had an epiphany, it was — I came to my check to the Seva Foundation and I noticed that I thought, boy, my friend Larry Brilliant would really be happy that I gave money to Seva. 
Then I realized that what I was getting from giving was a narcissistic hit — that I felt good about myself. 
Then I started to think about the people in the Himalayas whose cataracts would be helped, and I realized that I went from this kind of narcissistic self-focus to altruistic joy, to feeling good for the people that were being helped. I think that's a motivator. 
But this distinction between focusing on ourselves and focusing on others is one that I encourage us all to pay attention to. 
You can see it at a gross level in the world of dating. 
I was at a sushi restaurant a while back and I overheard two women talking about the brother of one woman, who was in the singles scene. And this woman says, "" My brother is having trouble getting dates, so he's trying speed dating. "" I don't know if you know speed dating? 
Women sit at tables and men go from table to table, and there's a clock and a bell, and at five minutes, bingo, the conversation ends and the woman can decide whether to give her card or her email address to the man for follow up. And this woman says, "" My brother's never gotten a card, and I know exactly why. 
The moment he sits down, he starts talking non-stop about himself; he never asks about the woman. "" And I was doing some research in the Sunday Styles section of The New York Times, looking at the back stories of marriages — because they're very interesting — and I came to the marriage of Alice Charney Epstein. And she said that when she was in the dating scene, she had a simple test she put people to. 
The test was: from the moment they got together, how long it would take the guy to ask her a question with the word "" you "" in it. 
And apparently Epstein aced the test, therefore the article. 
(Laughter) Now this is a — it's a little test I encourage you to try out at a party. 
Here at TED there are great opportunities. 
The Harvard Business Review recently had an article called "" The Human Moment, "" about how to make real contact with a person at work. And they said, well, the fundamental thing you have to do is turn off your BlackBerry, close your laptop, end your daydream and pay full attention to the person. 
There is a newly coined word in the English language for the moment when the person we're with whips out their BlackBerry or answers that cell phone, and all of a sudden we don't exist. 
The word is "" pizzled "": it's a combination of puzzled and pissed off. 
(Laughter) I think it's quite apt. It's our empathy, it's our tuning in which separates us from Machiavellians or sociopaths. 
I have a brother-in-law who's an expert on horror and terror — he wrote the Annotated Dracula, the Essential Frankenstein — he was trained as a Chaucer scholar, but he was born in Transylvania and I think it affected him a little bit. 
At any rate, at one point my brother-in-law, Leonard, decided to write a book about a serial killer. 
This is a man who terrorized the very vicinity we're in many years ago. He was known as the Santa Cruz strangler. 
And before he was arrested, he had murdered his grandparents, his mother and five co-eds at UC Santa Cruz. 
So my brother-in-law goes to interview this killer and he realizes when he meets him that this guy is absolutely terrifying. 
For one thing, he's almost seven feet tall. 
But that's not the most terrifying thing about him. 
The scariest thing is that his IQ is 160: a certified genius. 
But there is zero correlation between IQ and emotional empathy, feeling with the other person. 
They're controlled by different parts of the brain. 
So at one point, my brother-in-law gets up the courage to ask the one question he really wants to know the answer to, and that is: how could you have done it? 
Didn't you feel any pity for your victims? 
These were very intimate murders — he strangled his victims. 
And the strangler says very matter-of-factly, "" Oh no. If I'd felt the distress, I could not have done it. 
I had to turn that part of me off. I had to turn that part of me off. "" And I think that that is very troubling, and in a sense, I've been reflecting on turning that part of us off. 
When we focus on ourselves in any activity, we do turn that part of ourselves off if there's another person. 
Think about going shopping and think about the possibilities of a compassionate consumerism. 
Right now, as Bill McDonough has pointed out, the objects that we buy and use have hidden consequences. 
We're all unwitting victims of a collective blind spot. 
We don't notice and don't notice that we don't notice the toxic molecules emitted by a carpet or by the fabric on the seats. 
Or we don't know if that fabric is a technological or manufacturing nutrient; it can be reused or does it just end up at landfill? In other words, we're oblivious to the ecological and public health and social and economic justice consequences of the things we buy and use. 
In a sense, the room itself is the elephant in the room, but we don't see it. And we've become victims of a system that points us elsewhere. Consider this. 
There's a wonderful book called Stuff: The Hidden Life of Everyday Objects. 
And it talks about the back story of something like a t-shirt. 
And it talks about where the cotton was grown and the fertilizers that were used and the consequences for soil of that fertilizer. And it mentions, for instance, that cotton is very resistant to textile dye; about 60 percent washes off into wastewater. 
And it's well known by epidemiologists that kids who live near textile works tend to have high rates of leukemia. 
There's a company, Bennett and Company, that supplies Polo.com, Victoria's Secret — they, because of their CEO, who's aware of this, in China formed a joint venture with their dye works to make sure that the wastewater would be properly taken care of before it returned to the groundwater. 
Right now, we don't have the option to choose the virtuous t-shirt over the non-virtuous one. So what would it take to do that? 
Well, I've been thinking. For one thing, there's a new electronic tagging technology that allows any store to know the entire history of any item on the shelves in that store. 
You can track it back to the factory. Once you can track it back to the factory, you can look at the manufacturing processes that were used to make it, and if it's virtuous, you can label it that way. Or if it's not so virtuous, you can go into — today, go into any store, put your scanner on a palm onto a barcode, which will take you to a website. 
They have it for people with allergies to peanuts. 
That website could tell you things about that object. 
In other words, at point of purchase, we might be able to make a compassionate choice. 
There's a saying in the world of information science: ultimately everybody will know everything. 
And the question is: will it make a difference? 
Some time ago when I was working for The New York Times, it was in the '80s, I did an article on what was then a new problem in New York — it was homeless people on the streets. 
And I spent a couple of weeks going around with a social work agency that ministered to the homeless. And I realized seeing the homeless through their eyes that almost all of them were psychiatric patients that had nowhere to go. They had a diagnosis. It made me — what it did was to shake me out of the urban trance where, when we see, when we're passing someone who's homeless in the periphery of our vision, it stays on the periphery. 
We don't notice and therefore we don't act. 
One day soon after that — it was a Friday — at the end of the day, I went down — I was going down to the subway. It was rush hour and thousands of people were streaming down the stairs. 
And all of a sudden as I was going down the stairs I noticed that there was a man slumped to the side, shirtless, not moving, and people were just stepping over him — hundreds and hundreds of people. 
And because my urban trance had been somehow weakened, I found myself stopping to find out what was wrong. 
The moment I stopped, half a dozen other people immediately ringed the same guy. 
And we found out that he was Hispanic, he didn't speak any English, he had no money, he'd been wandering the streets for days, starving, and he'd fainted from hunger. 
Immediately someone went to get orange juice, someone brought a hotdog, someone brought a subway cop. 
This guy was back on his feet immediately. 
But all it took was that simple act of noticing, and so I'm optimistic. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

So I want to talk a little bit about seeing the world from a totally unique point of view, and this world I'm going to talk about is the micro world. 
I've found, after doing this for many, many years, that there's a magical world behind reality. 
And that can be seen directly through a microscope, and I'm going to show you some of this today. 
So let's start off looking at something rather not-so-small, something that we can see with our naked eye, and that's a bee. So when you look at this bee, it's about this size here, it's about a centimeter. 
But to really see the details of the bee, and really appreciate what it is, you have to look a little bit closer. 
So that's just the eye of the bee with a microscope, and now all of a sudden you can see that the bee has thousands of individual eyes called ommatidia, and they actually have sensory hairs in their eyes so they know when they're right up close to something, because they can't see in stereo. 
As we go smaller, here is a human hair. 
A human hair is about the smallest thing that the eye can see. 
It's about a tenth of a millimeter. 
And as we go smaller again, about ten times smaller than that, is a cell. 
So you could fit 10 human cells across the diameter of a human hair. 
So when we would look at cells, this is how I really got involved in biology and science is by looking at living cells in the microscope. 
When I first saw living cells in a microscope, I was absolutely enthralled and amazed at what they looked like. 
So if you look at the cell like that from the immune system, they're actually moving all over the place. 
This cell is looking for foreign objects, bacteria, things that it can find. 
And it's looking around, and when it finds something, and recognizes it being foreign, it will actually engulf it and eat it. 
So if you look right there, it finds that little bacterium, and it engulfs it and eats it. 
If you take some heart cells from an animal, and put it in a dish, they'll just sit there and beat. 
That's their job. Every cell has a mission in life, and these cells, the mission is to move blood around our body. 
These next cells are nerve cells, and right now, as we see and understand what we're looking at, our brains and our nerve cells are actually doing this right now. They're not just static. They're moving around making new connections, and that's what happens when we learn. 
As you go farther down this scale here, that's a micron, or a micrometer, and we go all the way down to here to a nanometer and an angstrom. Now, an angstrom is the size of the diameter of a hydrogen atom. 
That's how small that is. 
And microscopes that we have today can actually see individual atoms. So these are some pictures of individual atoms. Each bump here is an individual atom. 
This is a ring of cobalt atoms. 
So this whole world, the nano world, this area in here is called the nano world, and the nano world, the whole micro world that we see, there's a nano world that is wrapped up within that, and the whole — and that is the world of molecules and atoms. 
But I want to talk about this larger world, the world of the micro world. 
So if you were a little tiny bug living in a flower, what would that flower look like, if the flower was this big? 
It wouldn't look or feel like anything that we see when we look at a flower. So if you look at this flower here, and you're a little bug, if you're on that surface of that flower, that's what the terrain would look like. 
The petal of that flower looks like that, so the ant is kind of crawling over these objects, and if you look a little bit closer at this stigma and the stamen here, this is the style of that flower, and you notice that it's got these little — these are like little jelly-like things that are what are called spurs. These are nectar spurs. 
So this little ant that's crawling here, it's like it's in a little Willy Wonka land. 
It's like a little Disneyland for them. It's not like what we see. 
These are little bits of individual grain of pollen there and there, and here is a — what you see as one little yellow dot of pollen, when you look in a microscope, it's actually made of thousands of little grains of pollen. 
So this, for example, when you see bees flying around these little plants, and they're collecting pollen, those pollen grains that they're collecting, they pack into their legs and they take it back to the hive, and that's what makes the beehive, the wax in the beehive. And they're also collecting nectar, and that's what makes the honey that we eat. 
Here's a close-up picture, or this is actually a regular picture of a water hyacinth, and if you had really, really good vision, with your naked eye, you'd see it about that well. 
There's the stamen and the pistil. But look what the stamen and the pistil look like in a microscope. That's the stamen. 
So that's thousands of little grains of pollen there, and there's the pistil there, and these are the little things called trichomes. And that's what makes the flower give a fragrance, and plants actually communicate with one another through their fragrances. 
I want to talk about something really ordinary, just ordinary sand. 
I became interested in sand about 10 years ago, when I first saw sand from Maui, and in fact, this is a little bit of sand from Maui. 
So sand is about a tenth of a millimeter in size. 
Each sand grain is about a tenth of a millimeter in size. 
But when you look closer at this, look at what's there. 
It's really quite amazing. You have microshells there. 
You have things like coral. 
You have fragments of other shells. You have olivine. 
You have bits of a volcano. There's a little bit of a volcano there. You have tube worms. 
An amazing array of incredible things exist in sand. 
And the reason that is, is because in a place like this island, a lot of the sand is made of biological material because the reefs provide a place where all these microscopic animals or macroscopic animals grow, and when they die, their shells and their teeth and their bones break up and they make grains of sand, things like coral and so forth. 
So here's, for example, a picture of sand from Maui. 
This is from Lahaina, and when we're walking along a beach, we're actually walking along millions of years of biological and geological history. 
We don't realize it, but it's actually a record of that entire ecology. 
So here we see, for example, a sponge spicule, two bits of coral here, that's a sea urchin spine. Really some amazing stuff. 
So when I first looked at this, I was — I thought, gee, this is like a little treasure trove here. 
I couldn't believe it, and I'd go around dissecting the little bits out and making photographs of them. 
Here's what most of the sand in our world looks like. 
These are quartz crystals and feldspar, so most sand in the world on the mainland is made of quartz crystal and feldspar. It's the erosion of granite rock. 
So mountains are built up, and they erode away by water and rain and ice and so forth, and they become grains of sand. 
There's some sand that's really much more colorful. 
These are sand from near the Great Lakes, and you can see that it's filled with minerals like pink garnet and green epidote, all kinds of amazing stuff, and if you look at different sands from different places, every single beach, every single place you look at sand, it's different. Here's from Big Sur, like they're little jewels. 
There are places in Africa where they do the mining of jewels, and you go to the sand where the rivers have the sand go down to the ocean, and it's like literally looking at tiny jewels through the microscope. 
So every grain of sand is unique. Every beach is different. 
Every single grain is different. There are no two grains of sand alike in the world. 
Every grain of sand is coming somewhere and going somewhere. 
They're like a snapshot in time. 
Now sand is not only on Earth, but sand is ubiquitous throughout the universe. In fact, outer space is filled with sand, and that sand comes together to make our planets and the Moon. 
And you can see those in micrometeorites. 
This is some micrometeorites that the Army gave me, and they get these out of the drinking wells in the South Pole. 
And they're quite amazing-looking, and these are the tiny constituents that make up the world that we live in — the planets and the Moon. 
So NASA wanted me to take some pictures of Moon sand, so they sent me sand from all the different landings of the Apollo missions that happened 40 years ago. 
And I started taking pictures with my three-dimensional microscopes. 
This was the first picture I took. It was kind of amazing. 
I thought it looked kind of a little bit like the Moon, which is sort of interesting. 
Now, the way my microscopes work is, normally in a microscope you can see very little at one time, so what you have to do is you have to refocus the microscope, keep taking pictures, and then I have a computer program that puts all those pictures together into one picture so you can see actually what it looks like, and I do that in 3D. So there, you can see, is a left-eye view. There's a right-eye view. 
So sort of left-eye view, right-eye view. 
Now something's interesting here. This looks very different than any sand on Earth that I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of sand on Earth, believe me. (Laughter) Look at this hole in the middle. That hole was caused by a micrometeorite hitting the Moon. 
Now, the Moon has no atmosphere, so micrometeorites come in continuously, and the whole surface of the Moon is covered with powder now, because for four billion years it's been bombarded by micrometeorites, and when micrometeorites come in at about 20 to 60,000 miles an hour, they vaporize on contact. 
And you can see here that that is — that's sort of vaporized, and that material is holding this little clump of little sand grains together. 
This is a very small grain of sand, this whole thing. 
And that's called a ring agglutinate. 
And many of the grains of sand on the Moon look like that, and you'd never find that on Earth. 
Most of the sand on the Moon, especially — and you know when you look at the Moon, there's the dark areas and the light areas. The dark areas are lava flows. They're basaltic lava flows, and that's what this sand looks like, very similar to the sand that you would see in Haleakala. 
Other sands, when these micrometeorites come in, they vaporize and they make these fountains, these microscopic fountains that go up into the — I was going to say "" up into the air, "" but there is no air — goes sort of up, and these microscopic glass beads are formed instantly, and they harden, and by the time they fall down back to the surface of the Moon, they have these beautiful colored glass spherules. 
And these are actually microscopic; you need a microscope to see these. 
Now here's a grain of sand that is from the Moon, and you can see that the entire crystal structure is still there. 
This grain of sand is probably about three and a half or four billion years old, and it's never eroded away like the way we have sand on Earth erodes away because of water and tumbling, air, and so forth. All you can see is a little bit of erosion down here by the Sun, has these solar storms, and that's erosion by solar radiation. 
So what I've been trying to tell you today is things even as ordinary as a grain of sand can be truly extraordinary if you look closely and if you look from a different and a new point of view. 
I think that this was best put by William Blake when he said, "" To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour. "" Thank you. (Applause) 

This is a story about capitalism. 
It's a system I love because of the successes and opportunities it's afforded me and millions of others. 
I started in my 20s trading commodities, cotton in particular, in the pits, and if there was ever a free market free-for-all, this was it, where men wearing ties but acting like gladiators fought literally and physically for a profit. 
Fortunately, I was good enough that by the time I was 30, I was able to move into the upstairs world of money management, where I spent the next three decades as a global macro trader. 
And over that time, I've seen a lot of crazy things in the markets, and I've traded a lot of crazy manias. 
And unfortunately, I'm sad to report that right now we might be in the grips of one of the most disastrous, certainly of my career, and one consistent takeaway is manias never end well. 
Now, over the past 50 years, we as a society have come to view our companies and corporations in a very narrow, almost monomaniacal fashion with regard to how we value them, and we have put so much emphasis on profits, on short-term quarterly earnings and share prices, at the exclusion of all else. 
It's like we've ripped the humanity out of our companies. 
Now, we don't do that — conveniently reduce something to a set of numbers that you can play with like Lego toys — we don't do that in our individual life. 
We don't treat somebody or value them based on their monthly income or their credit score, but we have this double standard when it comes to the way that we value our businesses, and you know what? 
It's threatening the very underpinnings of our society. 
And here's how you'll see. 
This chart is corporate profit margins going back 40 years as a percentage of revenues, and you can see that we're at a 40-year high of 12.5 percent. 
Now, hooray if you're a shareholder, but if you're the other side of that, and you're the average American worker, then you can see it's not such a good thing. 
["" U.S. Share of Income Going to Labor vs. CEO-to-Worker Compensation Ratio ""] Now, higher profit margins do not increase societal wealth. 
What they actually do is they exacerbate income inequality, and that's not a good thing. 
But intuitively, that makes sense, right? 
Because if the top 10 percent of American families own 90 percent of the stocks, as they take a greater share of corporate profits, then there's less wealth left for the rest of society. 
Again, income inequality is not a good thing. 
This next chart, made by The Equality Trust, shows 21 countries from Austria to Japan to New Zealand. 
On the horizontal axis is income inequality. 
The further to the right you go, the greater the income inequality. 
On the vertical axis are nine social and health metrics. 
The more you go up that, the worse the problems are, and those metrics include life expectancy, teenage pregnancy, literacy, social mobility, just to name a few. 
Now, those of you in the audience who are Americans may wonder, well, where does the United States rank? 
Where does it lie on that chart? 
And guess what? 
We're literally off the chart. 
Yes, that's us, with the greatest income inequality and the greatest social problems, according to those metrics. 
Now, here's a macro forecast that's easy to make, and that's, that gap between the wealthiest and the poorest, it will get closed. 
History always does it. 
It typically happens in one of three ways: either through revolution, higher taxes, or wars. 
None of those are on my bucket list. 
(Laughter) Now, there's another way to do it, and that's by increasing justness in corporate behavior, but the way that we're operating right now, that would require a tremendous change in behavior, and like an addict trying to kick a habit, the first step is to acknowledge that you have a problem. 
And let me just say, this profits mania that we're on is so deeply entrenched that we don't even realize how we're harming society. 
Here's a small but startling example of exactly how we're doing that: this chart shows corporate giving as a percentage of profits, not revenues, over the last 30 years. 
Juxtapose that to the earlier chart of corporate profit margins, and I ask you, does that feel right? 
In all fairness, when I started writing this, I thought, "Oh wow, what does my company, what does Tudor do?" 
And I realized we give one percent of corporate profits to charity every year. 
And I'm supposed to be a philanthropist. 
When I realized that, I literally wanted to throw up. 
But the point is, this mania is so deeply entrenched that well-intentioned people like myself don't even realize that we're part of it. 
Now, we're not going to change corporate behavior by simply increasing corporate philanthropy or charitable contributions. 
And oh, by the way, we've since quadrupled that, but — (Applause) — Please. 
But we can do it by driving more just behavior. 
And one way to do it is actually trusting the system that got us here in the first place, and that's the free market system. 
About a year ago, some friends of mine and I started a not-for-profit called Just Capital. 
Its mission is very simple: to help companies and corporations learn how to operate in a more just fashion by using the public's input to define exactly what the criteria are for just corporate behavior. 
Now, right now, there's no widely accepted standard that a company or corporation can follow, and that's where Just Capital comes in, because beginning this year and every year we'll be conducting a nationwide survey of a representative sample of 20,000 Americans to find out exactly what they think are the criteria for justness in corporate behavior. 
Now, this is a model that's going to start in the United States but can be expanded anywhere around the globe, and maybe we'll find out that the most important thing for the public is that we create living wage jobs, or make healthy products, or help, not harm, the environment. 
At Just Capital, we don't know, and it's not for us to decide. 
We're but messengers, but we have 100 percent confidence and faith in the American public to get it right. 
So we'll release the findings this September for the first time, and then next year, we'll poll again, and we'll take the additive step this time of ranking the 1,000 largest U.S. companies from number one to number 1,000 and everything in between. 
We're calling it the Just Index, and remember, we're an independent not-for-profit with no bias, and we will be giving the American public a voice. 
And maybe over time, we'll find out that as people come to know which companies are the most just, human and economic resources will be driven towards them, and they'll become the most prosperous and help our country be the most prosperous. 
Now, capitalism has been responsible for every major innovation that's made this world a more inspiring and wonderful place to live in. 
Capitalism has to be based on justice. 
It has to be, and now more than ever, with economic divisions growing wider every day. 
It's estimated that 47 percent of American workers can be displaced in the next 20 years. 
I'm not against progress. 
I want the driverless car and the jet pack just like everyone else. 
But I'm pleading for recognition that with increased wealth and profits has to come greater corporate social responsibility. 
"" If justice is removed, "" said Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, "" the great, the immense fabric of human society must in a moment crumble into atoms. "" Now, when I was young, and there was a problem, my mama used to always sigh and shake her head and say, "Have mercy, have mercy." 
Now's not the time for us, for the rest of us to show them mercy. 
The time is now for us to show them fairness, and we can do that, you and I, by starting where we work, in the businesses that we operate in. 
And when we put justness on par with profits, we'll get the most wonderful thing in all the world. 
We'll take back our humanity. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Today I'm going to unpack for you three examples of iconic design, and it makes perfect sense that I should be the one to do it because I have a Bachelor's degree in Literature. 
(Laughter) But I'm also a famous minor television personality and an avid collector of Design Within Reach catalogs, so I pretty much know everything there is. 
Now, I'm sure you recognize this object; many of you probably saw it as you were landing your private zeppelins at Los Angeles International Airport over the past couple of days. 
This is known as the Theme Building; that is its name for reasons that are still very murky. 
And it is perhaps the best example we have in Los Angeles of ancient extraterrestrial architecture. 
It was first excavated in 1961 as they were building LAX, although scientists believe that it dates back to the year 2000 Before Common Era, when it was used as a busy transdimensional space port by the ancient astronauts who first colonized this planet and raised our species from savagery by giving us the gift of written language and technology and the gift of revolving restaurants. 
It is thought to have been a replacement for the older space ports located, of course, at Stonehenge and considered to be quite an improvement due to the uncluttered design, the lack of druids hanging around all the time and obviously, the much better access to parking. 
When it was uncovered, it ushered in a new era of streamlined, archaically futuristic design called Googie, which came to be synonymous with the Jet Age, a misnomer. 
After all, the ancient astronauts who used it did not travel by jet very often, preferring instead to travel by feathered serpent powered by crystal skulls. 
(Applause) (Music) Ah yes, a table. 
We use these every day. 
And on top of it, the juicy salif. 
This is a design by Philippe Starck, who I believe is in the audience at this very moment. 
And you can tell it is a Starck design by its precision, its playfulness, its innovation and its promise of imminent violence. 
(Laughter) It is a design that challenges your intuition — it is not what you think it is when you first see it. 
It is not a fork designed to grab three hors d'oeuvres at a time, which would be useful out in the lobby, I would say. 
And despite its obvious influence by the ancient astronauts and its space agey-ness and tripodism, it is not something designed to attach to your brain and suck out your thoughts. 
It is in fact a citrus juicer and when I say that, you never see it as anything else again. 
It is also not a monument to design, it is a monument to design's utility. 
You can take it home with you, unlike the Theme Building, which will stay where it is forever. 
This is affordable and can come home with you and, as such, it can sit on your kitchen counter — it can't go in your drawers; trust me, I found that out the hard way — and make your kitchen counter into a monument to design. 
One other thing about it, if you do have one at home, let me tell you one of the features you may not know: when you fall asleep, it comes alive and it walks around your house and goes through your mail and watches you as you sleep. 
(Applause) Okay, what is this object? 
I have no idea. I don't know what that thing is. 
It looks terrible. Is it a little hot plate? 
I don't get it. 
Does anyone know? Chi? 
It's an... iPhone. iPhone. 
Oh yes, that's right, I remember those; I had my whole bathroom tiles redone with those back in the good old days. 
No, I have an iPhone. Of course I do. 
Here is my well-loved iPhone. 
I do so many things on this little device. 
I like to read books on it. 
More than that, I like to buy books on it that I never have to feel guilty about not reading because they go in here and I never look at them again and it's perfect. 
I use it every day to measure the weight of an ox, for example. 
Every now and then, I admit that I complete a phone call on it occasionally. 
And yet I forget about it all the time. 
This is a design that once you saw it, you forgot about it. 
It is easy to forget the gasp-inducement that occurred in 2007 when you first touched this thing because it became so quickly pervasive and because of how instantly we adopted these gestures and made it an extension of our life. 
Unlike the Theme Building, this is not alien technology. 
Or I should say, what it did was it took technology which, unlike people in this room, to many other people in the world, still feels very alien, and made it immediately and instantly feel familiar and intimate. 
And unlike the juicy salif, it does not threaten to attach itself to your brain, rather, it simply attaches itself to your brain. 
(Laughter) And you didn't even notice it happened. 
So there you go. My name is John Hodgman. 
I just explained design. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

And so, needless to say, over those years I've had a chance to look at education reform from a lot of perspectives. 
Some of those reforms have been good. 
And we know why kids drop out. 
We know why kids don't learn. 
It's either poverty, low attendance, negative peer influences... 
But one of the things that we never discuss or we rarely discuss is the value and importance of human connection. 
George Washington Carver says all learning is understanding relationships. 
Everyone in this room has been affected by a teacher or an adult. 
I have looked at the best and I've looked at some of the worst. 
A colleague said to me one time, "" They don't pay me to like the kids. 
I should teach it, they should learn it, Case closed. "" Well, I said to her, "You know, kids don't learn from people they don't like." 
(Laughter) (Applause) She said, "" That's just a bunch of hooey. "" And I said to her, "Well, your year is going to be long and arduous, dear." 
Needless to say, it was. 
He said you ought to just throw in a few simple things, like seeking first to understand, as opposed to being understood. 
You ever thought about that? 
(Laughter) I taught a lesson once on ratios. 
I taught the whole lesson wrong. I'm so sorry. "" They said, "" That's okay, Ms. Pierson. 
You were so excited, we just let you go. "" I have had classes that were so low, so academically deficient, that I cried. 
How do I raise the self-esteem of a child and his academic achievement at the same time? 
I told all my students, "" You were chosen to be in my class because I am the best teacher and you are the best students, they put us all together so we could show everybody else how to do it. "" One of the students said, "" Really? "" (Laughter) I said, "" Really. We have to show the other classes how to do it, so when we walk down the hall, people will notice us, so you can't make noise. 
You just have to strut. "" (Laughter) And I gave them a saying to say: "" I am somebody. 
I am powerful, and I am strong. 
I deserve the education that I get here. 
I have things to do, people to impress, and places to go. "" And they said, "" Yeah! "" (Laughter) You say it long enough, it starts to be a part of you. 
(Laughter) He said, "" Ms. Pierson, is this an F? "" I said, "" Yes. "" (Laughter) He said, "" Then why'd you put a smiley face? "" I said, "" Because you're on a roll. 
You got two right. You didn't miss them all. "" (Laughter) I said, "" And when we review this, won't you do better? "" He said, "" Yes, ma'am, I can do better. "" You see, "" -18 "" sucks all the life out of you. 
"+ 2" said, "I ain't all bad." 
For years, I watched my mother take the time at recess to review, go on home visits in the afternoon, buy combs and brushes and peanut butter and crackers to put in her desk drawer for kids that needed to eat, and a washcloth and some soap for the kids who didn't smell so good. 
(Laughter) And kids can be cruel. 
And so she kept those things in her desk, and years later, after she retired, I watched some of those same kids come through and say to her, "" You know, Ms. Walker, you made a difference in my life. 
You made me feel like I was somebody, when I knew, at the bottom, I wasn't. 
And I want you to just see what I've become. "" And when my mama died two years ago at 92, there were so many former students at her funeral, it brought tears to my eyes, not because she was gone, but because she left a legacy of relationships that could never disappear. 
Can we stand to have more relationships? 
Never. 
You won't like them all, and the tough ones show up for a reason. 
It's the connection. It's the relationships. 
So teachers become great actors and great actresses, and we come to work when we don't feel like it, and we're listening to policy that doesn't make sense, and we teach anyway. 
We teach anyway, because that's what we do. 
Teaching and learning should bring joy. 
How powerful would our world be if we had kids who were not afraid to take risks, who were not afraid to think, and who had a champion? 
Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be. 
We're born to make a difference. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Have you ever wondered why extremism seems to have been on the rise in Muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decade? Have you ever wondered 
how such a situation can be turned around? 
Have you ever looked at the Arab uprisings and thought, "" How could we have predicted that? "" or "" How could we have better prepared for that? "" Well my personal story, my personal journey, what brings me to the TED stage here today, is a demonstration of exactly what's been happening in Muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decades, at least, and beyond. 
I want to share some of that story with you, but also some of my ideas around change and the role of social movements in creating change in Muslim-majority societies. 
So let me begin by first of all giving a very, very brief history of time, if I may indulge. 
In medieval societies there were defined allegiances. 
An identity was defined primarily by religion. 
And then we moved on into an era in the 19th century with the rise of a European nation-state where identities and allegiances were defined by ethnicity. 
So identity was primarily defined by ethnicity, and the nation-state reflected that. 
In the age of globalization, we moved on. 
I call it the era of citizenship — where people could be from multi-racial, multi-ethnic backgrounds, but all be equal as citizens in a state. 
You could be American-Italian; you could be American-Irish; you could be British-Pakistani. 
But I believe now that we're moving into a new age, and that age The New York Times dubbed recently as "" the age of behavior. "" How I define the age of behavior is a period of transnational allegiances, where identity is defined more so by ideas and narratives. 
And these ideas and narratives that bump people across borders are increasingly beginning to affect the way in which people behave. 
Now this is not all necessarily good news, because it's also my belief that hatred has gone global just as much as love. 
But actually it's my belief that the people who've been truly capitalizing on this age of behavior, up until now, up until recent times, up until the last six months, the people who have been capitalizing most on the age of behavior and the transnational allegiances, using digital activism and other sorts of borderless technologies, those who've been benefiting from this have been extremists. 
And that's something which I'd like to elaborate on. 
If we look at Islamists, if we look at the phenomenon of far-right fascists, one thing they've been very good at, one thing that they've actually been exceeding in, is communicating across borders, using technologies to organize themselves, to propagate their message and to create truly global phenomena. 
Now I should know, because for 13 years of my life, I was involved in an extreme Islamist organization. 
And I was actually a potent force in spreading ideas across borders, and I witnessed the rise of Islamist extremism as distinct from Islam the faith, and the way in which it influenced my co-religionists across the world. 
And my story, my personal story, is truly evidence for the age of behavior that I'm attempting to elaborate upon here. 
I was, by the way — I'm an Essex lad, born and raised in Essex in the U.K. 
Anyone who's from England knows the reputation we have from Essex. 
But having been born in Essex, at the age of 16, I joined an organization. 
At the age of 17, I was recruiting people from Cambridge University to this organization. 
At the age of 19, I was on the national leadership of this organization in the U.K. 
At the age of 21, I was co-founding this organization in Pakistan. 
At the age of 22, I was co-founding this organization in Denmark. 
By the age of 24, I found myself convicted in prison in Egypt, being blacklisted from three countries in the world for attempting to overthrow their governments, being subjected to torture in Egyptian jails and sentenced to five years as a prisoner of conscience. 
Now that journey, and what took me from Essex all the way across the world — by the way, we were laughing at democratic activists. 
We felt they were from the age of yesteryear. 
We felt that they were out of date. 
I learned how to use email from the extremist organization that I used. 
I learned how to effectively communicate across borders without being detected. 
Eventually I was detected, of course, in Egypt. 
But the way in which I learned to use technology to my advantage was because I was within an extremist organization that was forced to think beyond the confines of the nation-state. 
The age of behavior: where ideas and narratives were increasingly defining behavior and identity and allegiances. 
So as I said, we looked to the status quo and ridiculed it. 
And it's not just Islamist extremists that did this. 
But even if you look across the mood music in Europe of late, far-right fascism is also on the rise. 
A form of anti-Islam rhetoric is also on the rise and it's transnational. 
And the consequences that this is having is that it's affecting the political climate across Europe. 
What's actually happening is that what were previously localized parochialisms, individual or groupings of extremists who were isolated from one another, have become interconnected in a globalized way and have thus become, or are becoming, mainstream. 
Because the Internet and connection technologies are connecting them across the world. 
If you look at the rise of far-right fascism across Europe of late, you will see some things that are happening that are influencing domestic politics, yet the phenomenon is transnational. 
In certain countries, mosque minarets are being banned. 
In others, headscarves are being banned. 
In others, kosher and halal meat are being banned, as we speak. 
And on the flip side, we have transnational Islamist extremists doing the same thing across their own societies. 
And so they are pockets of parochialism that are being connected in a way that makes them feel like they are mainstream. 
Now that never would have been possible before. 
They would have felt isolated, until these sorts of technologies came around and connected them in a way that made them feel part of a larger phenomenon. 
Where does that leave democracy aspirants? 
Well I believe they're getting left far behind. 
And I'll give you an example here at this stage. 
If any of you remembers the Christmas Day bomb plot: there's a man called Anwar al-Awlaki. 
As an American citizen, ethnically a Yemeni, in hiding currently in Yemen, who inspired a Nigerian, son of the head of Nigeria's national bank. 
This Nigerian student studied in London, trained in Yemen, boarded a flight in Amsterdam to attack America. 
In the meanwhile, the Old mentality with a capital O, was represented by his father, the head of the Nigerian bank, warning the CIA that his own son was about to attack, and this warning fell on deaf ears. 
The Old mentality with a capital O, as represented by the nation-state, not yet fully into the age of behavior, not recognizing the power of transnational social movements, got left behind. 
And the Christmas Day bomber almost succeeded in attacking the United States of America. 
Again with the example of the far right: that we find, ironically, xenophobic nationalists are utilizing the benefits of globalization. 
So why are they succeeding? 
And why are democracy aspirants falling behind? 
Well we need to understand the power of the social movements who understand this. 
And a social movement is comprised, in my view, it's comprised of four main characteristics. 
It's comprised of ideas and narratives and symbols and leaders. 
I'll talk you through one example, and that's the example that everyone here will be aware of, and that's the example of Al-Qaeda. 
If I asked you to think of the ideas of Al-Qaeda, that's something that comes to your mind immediately. 
If I ask you to think of their narratives — the West being at war with Islam, the need to defend Islam against the West — these narratives, they come to your mind immediately. 
Incidentally, the difference between ideas and narratives: the idea is the cause that one believes in; and the narrative is the way to sell that cause — the propaganda, if you like, of the cause. 
So the ideas and the narratives of Al-Qaeda come to your mind immediately. 
If I ask you to think of their symbols and their leaders, they come to your mind immediately. 
One of their leaders was killed in Pakistan recently. 
So these symbols and these leaders come to your mind immediately. 
And that's the power of social movements. 
They're transnational, and they bond around these ideas and narratives and these symbols and these leaders. 
However, if I ask your minds to focus currently on Pakistan, and I ask you to think of the symbols and the leaders for democracy in Pakistan today, you'll be hard pressed to think beyond perhaps the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. 
Which means, by definition, that particular leader no longer exists. 
One of the problems we're facing is, in my view, that there are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies. 
There is no equivalent of the Al-Qaeda, without the terrorism, for democracy across Muslim-majority societies. 
There are no ideas and narratives and leaders and symbols advocating the democratic culture on the ground. 
So that begs the next question. 
Why is it that extremist organizations, whether of the far-right or of the Islamist extremism — Islamism meaning those who wish to impose one version of Islam over the rest of society — why is it that they are succeeding in organizing in a globalized way, whereas those who aspire to democratic culture are falling behind? 
And I believe that's for four reasons. 
I believe, number one, it's complacency. 
Because those who aspire to democratic culture are in power, or have societies that are leading globalized, powerful societies, powerful countries. 
And that level of complacency means they don't feel the need to advocate for that culture. 
The second, I believe, is political correctness. 
That we have a hesitation in espousing the universality of democratic culture because we are associating that — we associate believing in the universality of our values — with extremists. 
Yet actually, whenever we talk about human rights, we do say that human rights are universal. 
But actually going out to propagate that view is associated with either neoconservativism or with Islamist extremism. 
To go around saying that I believe democratic culture is the best that we've arrived at as a form of political organizing is associated with extremism. 
And the third, democratic choice in Muslim-majority societies has been relegated to a political choice, meaning political parties in many of these societies ask people to vote for them as the democratic party, but then the other parties ask them to vote for them as the military party — wanting to rule by military dictatorship. 
And then you have a third party saying, "Vote for us; we'll establish a theocracy." 
So democracy has become merely one political choice among many other forms of political choices available in those societies. 
And what happens as a result of this is, when those parties are elected, and inevitably they fail, or inevitably they make political mistakes, democracy takes the blame for their political mistakes. 
And then people say, "" We've tried democracy. It doesn't really work. 
Let's bring the military back again. "" And the fourth reason, I believe, is what I've labeled here on the slide as the ideology of resistance. 
What I mean by that is, if the world superpower today was a communist, it would be much easier for democracy activists to use democracy activism as a form of resistance against colonialism, than it is today with the world superpower being America, occupying certain lands and also espousing democratic ideals. 
So roughly these four reasons make it a lot more difficult for democratic culture to spread as a civilizational choice, not merely as a political choice. 
When talking about those reasons, let's break down certain preconceptions. 
Is it just about grievances? 
Is it just about a lack of education? 
Well statistically, the majority of those who join extremist organizations are highly educated. 
Statistically, they are educated, on average, above the education levels of Western society. 
Anecdotally, we can demonstrate that if poverty was the only factor, well Bin Laden is from one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia. 
His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was a pediatrician — not an ill-educated man. 
International aid and development has been going on for years, but extremism in those societies, in many of those societies, has been on the rise. 
And what I believe is missing is genuine grassroots activism on the ground, in addition to international aid, in addition to education, in addition to health. 
Not exclusive to these things, but in addition to them, is propagating a genuine demand for democracy on the ground. 
And this is where I believe neoconservatism had it upside-down. 
Neoconservatism had the philosophy that you go in with a supply-led approach to impose democratic values from the top down. 
Whereas Islamists and far-right organizations, for decades, have been building demand for their ideology on the grassroots. 
They've been building civilizational demand for their values on the grassroots, and we've been seeing those societies slowly transition to societies that are increasingly asking for a form of Islamism. 
Mass movements in Pakistan have been represented after the Arab uprisings mainly by organizations claiming for some form of theocracy, rather than for a democratic uprising. 
Because since pre-partition, they've been building demand for their ideology on the ground. 
And what's needed is a genuine transnational youth-led movement that works to actively advocate for the democratic culture — which is necessarily more than just elections. 
But without freedom of speech, you can't have free and fair elections. 
Without human rights, you don't have the protection granted to you to campaign. 
Without freedom of belief, you don't have the right to join organizations. 
So what's needed is those organizations on the ground advocating for the democratic culture itself to create the demand on the ground for this culture. 
What that will do is avoid the problem I was talking about earlier, where currently we have political parties presenting democracy as merely a political choice in those societies alongside other choices such as military rule and theocracy. 
Whereas if we start building this demand on the ground on a civilizational level, rather than merely on a political level, a level above politics — movements that are not political parties, but are rather creating this civilizational demand for this democratic culture. 
What we'll have in the end is this ideal that you see on the slide here — the ideal that people should vote in an existing democracy, not for a democracy. 
But to get to that stage, where democracy builds the fabric of society and the political choices within that fabric, but are certainly not theocratic and military dictatorship — i.e. you're voting in a democracy, in an existing democracy, and that democracy is not merely one of the choices at the ballot box. 
To get to that stage, we genuinely need to start building demand in those societies on the ground. 
Now to conclude, how does that happen? 
Well, Egypt is a good starting point. 
The Arab uprisings have demonstrated that this is already beginning. 
But what happened in the Arab uprisings and what happened in Egypt was particularly cathartic for me. 
What happened there was a political coalition gathered together for a political goal, and that was to remove the leader. 
We need to move one step beyond that now. 
We need to see how we can help those societies move from political coalitions, loosely based political coalitions, to civilizational coalitions that are working for the ideals and narratives of the democratic culture on the ground. 
Because it's not enough to remove a leader or ruler or dictator. 
That doesn't guarantee that what comes next will be a society built on democratic values. 
But generally, the trends that start in Egypt have historically spread across the MENA region, the Middle East and North Africa region. 
So when Arab socialism started in Egypt, it spread across the region. 
In the '80s and' 90s when Islamism started in the region, it spread across the MENA region as a whole. 
And the aspiration that we have at the moment — as young Arabs are proving today and instantly rebranding themselves as being prepared to die for more than just terrorism — is that there is a chance that democratic culture can start in the region and spread across to the rest of the countries that are surrounding that. 
But that will require helping these societies transition from having merely political coalitions to building genuinely grassroots-based social movements that advocate for the democratic culture. 
And we've made a start for that in Pakistan with a movement called Khudi, where we are working on the ground to encourage the youth to create genuine buy-in for the democratic culture. 
And it's with that thought that I'll end. 
And my time is up, and thank you for your time. 
(Applause) 

Fifty-four percent of the world's population lives in our cities. 
In developing countries, one third of that population is living in slums. 
Seventy-five percent of global energy consumption occurs in our cities, and 80 percent of gas emissions that cause global warming come from our cities. 
So things that you and I might think about as global problems, like climate change, the energy crisis or poverty, are really, in many ways, city problems. 
They will not be solved unless people who live in cities, like most of us, actually start doing a better job, because right now, we are not doing a very good one. 
And that becomes very clear when we look into three aspects of city life: first, our citizens' willingness to engage with democratic institutions; second, our cities' ability to really include all of their residents; and lastly, our own ability to live fulfilling and happy lives. 
When it comes to engagement, the data is very clear. 
Voter turnout around the world peaked in the late '80s, and it has been declining at a pace that we have never seen before, and if those numbers are bad at the national level, at the level of our cities, they are just dismal. 
In the last two years, two of the world's most consolidated, oldest democracies, the U.S. and France, held nationwide municipal elections. 
In France, voter turnout hit a record low. 
Almost 40 percent of voters decided not to show up. 
In the U.S., the numbers were even scarier. 
In some American cities, voter turnout was close to five percent. 
I'll let that sink in for a second. 
We're talking about democratic cities in which 95 percent of people decided that it was not important to elect their leaders. 
The city of L.A., a city of four million people, elected its mayor with just a bit over 200,000 votes. 
That was the lowest turnout the city had seen in 100 years. 
Right here, in my city of Rio, in spite of mandatory voting, almost 30 percent of the voting population chose to either annul their votes or stay home and pay a fine in the last mayoral elections. 
When it comes to inclusiveness, our cities are not the best cases of success either, and again, you don't need to look very far in order to find proof of that. 
The city of Rio is incredibly unequal. 
This is Leblon. 
Leblon is the city's richest neighborhood. 
And this is Complexo do Alemão. 
This is where over 70,000 of the city's poorest residents live. 
Leblon has an HDI, a Human Development Index, of .967. 
That is higher than Norway, Switzerland or Sweden. 
Complexo do Alemão has an HDI of .711. 
It sits somewhere in between the HDI of Algeria and Gabon. 
So Rio, like so many cities across the global South, is a place where you can go from northern Europe to sub-Saharan Africa in the space of 30 minutes. 
If you drive, that is. 
If you take public transit, it's about two hours. 
And lastly, perhaps most importantly, cities, with the incredible wealth of relations that they enable, could be the ideal places for human happiness to flourish. 
We like being around people. 
We are social animals. 
Instead, countries where urbanization has already peaked seem to be the very countries in which cities have stopped making us happy. 
The United States population has suffered from a general decrease in happiness for the past three decades, and the main reason is this. 
The American way of building cities has caused good quality public spaces to virtually disappear in many, many American cities, and as a result, they have seen a decline of relations, of the things that make us happy. 
Many studies show an increase in solitude and a decrease in solidarity, honesty, and social and civic participation. 
So how do we start building cities that make us care? 
Cities that value their most important asset: the incredible diversity of the people who live in them? 
Cities that make us happy? 
Well, I believe that if we want to change what our cities look like, then we really have to change the decision-making processes that have given us the results that we have right now. 
We need a participation revolution, and we need it fast. 
The idea of voting as our only exercise in citizenship does not make sense anymore. 
People are tired of only being treated as empowered individuals every few years when it's time to delegate that power to someone else. 
If the protests that swept Brazil in June 2013 have taught us anything, it's that every time we try to exercise our power outside of an electoral context, we are beaten up, humiliated or arrested. 
And this needs to change, because when it does, not only will people re-engage with the structures of representation, but also complement these structures with direct, effective, and collective decision making, decision making of the kind that attacks inequality by its very inclusive nature, decision making of the kind that can change our cities into better places for us to live. 
But there is a catch, obviously: Enabling widespread participation and redistributing power can be a logistical nightmare, and there's where technology can play an incredibly helpful role, by making it easier for people to organize, communicate and make decisions without having to be in the same room at the same time. 
Unfortunately for us, when it comes to fostering democratic processes, our city governments have not used technology to its full potential. 
So far, most city governments have been effective at using tech to turn citizens into human sensors who serve authorities with data on the city: potholes, fallen trees or broken lamps. 
They have also, to a lesser extent, invited people to participate in improving the outcome of decisions that were already made for them, just like my mom when I was eight and she told me that I had a choice: I had to be in bed by 8 p.m., but I could choose my pink pajamas or my blue pajamas. 
That's not participation, and in fact, governments have not been very good at using technology to enable participation on what matters — the way we allocate our budget, the way we occupy our land, and the way we manage our natural resources. 
Those are the kinds of decisions that can actually impact global problems that manifest themselves in our cities. 
The good news is, and I do have good news to share with you, we don't need to wait for governments to do this. 
I have reason to believe that it's possible for citizens to build their own structures of participation. 
Three years ago, I cofounded an organization called Meu Rio, and we make it easier for people in the city of Rio to organize around causes and places that they care about in their own city, and have an impact on those causes and places every day. 
In these past three years, Meu Rio grew to a network of 160,000 citizens of Rio. 
About 40 percent of those members are young people aged 20 to 29. 
That is one in every 15 young people of that age in Rio today. 
Amongst our members is this adorable little girl, Bia, to your right, and Bia was just 11 years old when she started a campaign using one of our tools to save her model public school from demolition. 
Her school actually ranks among the best public schools in the country, and it was going to be demolished by the Rio de Janeiro state government to build, I kid you not, a parking lot for the World Cup right before the event happened. 
Bia started a campaign, and we even watched her school 24 / 7 through webcam monitoring, and many months afterwards, the government changed their minds. 
Bia's school stayed in place. 
There's also Jovita. 
She's an amazing woman whose daughter went missing about 10 years ago, and since then, she has been looking for her daughter. 
In that process, she found out that first, she was not alone. 
In the last year alone, 2013, 6,000 people disappeared in the state of Rio. 
But she also found out that in spite of that, Rio had no centralized intelligence system for solving missing persons cases. 
In other Brazilian cities, those systems have helped solve up to 80 percent of missing persons cases. 
She started a campaign, and after the secretary of security got 16,000 emails from people asking him to do this, he responded, and started to build a police unit specializing in those cases. 
It was open to the public at the end of last month, and Jovita was there giving interviews and being very fancy. 
And then, there is Leandro. 
Leandro is an amazing guy in a slum in Rio, and he created a recycling project in the slum. 
At the end of last year, December 16, he received an eviction order by the Rio de Janeiro state government giving him two weeks to leave the space that he had been using for two years. 
The plan was to hand it over to a developer, who planned to turn it into a construction site. 
Leandro started a campaign using one of our tools, the Pressure Cooker, the same one that Bia and Jovita used, and the state government changed their minds before Christmas Eve. 
These stories make me happy, but not just because they have happy endings. 
They make me happy because they are happy beginnings. 
The teacher and parent community at Bia's school is looking for other ways they could improve that space even further. 
Leandro has ambitious plans to take his model to other low-income communities in Rio, and Jovita is volunteering at the police unit that she helped created. 
Bia, Jovita and Leandro are living examples of something that citizens and city governments around the world need to know: We are ready. 
As citizens, we are ready to decide on our common destinies, because we know that the way we distribute power says a lot about how we actually value everyone, and because we know that enabling and participating in local politics is a sign that we truly care about our relations to one another, and we are ready to do this in cities around the world right now. 
With the Our Cities network, the Meu Rio team hopes to share what we have learned with other people who want to create similar initiatives in their own cities. 
We have already started doing it in São Paulo with incredible results, and want to take it to cities around the world through a network of citizen-centric, citizen-led organizations that can inspire us, challenge us, and remind us to demand real participation in our city lives. 
It is up to us to decide whether we want schools or parking lots, community-driven recycling projects or construction sites, loneliness or solidarity, cars or buses, and it is our responsibility to do that now, for ourselves, for our families, for the people who make our lives worth living, and for the incredible creativity, beauty, and wonder that make our cities, in spite of all of their problems, the greatest invention of our time. 
Obrigado. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I've been in Afghanistan for 21 years. 
I work for the Red Cross and I'm a physical therapist. 
My job is to make arms and legs — well it's not completely true. 
We do more than that. 
We provide the patients, the Afghan disabled, first with the physical rehabilitation then with the social reintegration. 
It's a very logical plan, but it was not always like this. 
For many years, we were just providing them with artificial limbs. 
It took quite many years for the program to become what it is now. 
Today, I would like to tell you a story, the story of a big change, and the story of the people who made this change possible. 
I arrived in Afghanistan in 1990 to work in a hospital for war victims. 
And then, not only for war victims, but it was for any kind of patient. 
I was also working in the orthopedic center, we call it. 
This is the place where we make the legs. 
At that time I found myself in a strange situation. 
I felt not quite ready for that job. 
There was so much to learn. 
There were so many things new to me. 
But it was a terrific job. 
But as soon as the fighting intensified, the physical rehabilitation was suspended. 
There were many other things to do. 
So the orthopedic center was closed because physical rehabilitation was not considered a priority. 
It was a strange sensation. 
Anyway, you know every time I make this speech — it's not the first time — but it's an emotion. 
It's something that comes out from the past. 
It's 21 years, but they are still all there. 
Anyway, in 1992, the Mujahideen took all Afghanistan. 
And the orthopedic center was closed. 
I was assigned to work for the homeless, for the internally displaced people. 
But one day, something happened. 
I was coming back from a big food distribution in a mosque where tens and tens of people were squatting in terrible conditions. 
I wanted to go home. I was driving. 
You know, when you want to forget, you don't want to see things, so you just want to go to your room, to lock yourself inside and say, "" That's enough. "" A bomb fell not far from my car — well, far enough, but big noise. 
And everybody disappeared from the street. 
The cars disappeared as well. 
I ducked. 
And only one figure remained in the middle of the road. 
It was a man in a wheelchair desperately trying to move away. 
Well I'm not a particularly brave person, I have to confess it, but I could not just ignore him. 
So I stopped the car and I went to help. 
The man was without legs and only with one arm. 
Behind him there was a child, his son, red in the face in an effort to push the father. 
So I took him into a safe place. 
And I ask, "" What are you doing out in the street in this situation? "" "" I work, "" he said. 
I wondered, what work? 
And then I ask an even more stupid question: "" Why don't you have the prostheses? 
Why don't you have the artificial legs? "" And he said, "" The Red Cross has closed. "" Well without thinking, I told him "" Come tomorrow. 
We will provide you with a pair of legs. "" The man, his name was Mahmoud, and the child, whose name was Rafi, left. 
And then I said, "" Oh, my God. What did I say? 
The center is closed, no staff around. 
Maybe the machinery is broken. 
Who is going to make the legs for him? "" So I hoped that he would not come. 
This is the streets of Kabul in those days. 
So I said, "" Well I will give him some money. "" And so the following day, I went to the orthopedic center. 
And I spoke with a gatekeeper. 
I was ready to tell him, "" Listen, if someone such-and-such comes tomorrow, please tell him that it was a mistake. 
Nothing can be done. 
Give him some money. "" But Mahmoud and his son were already there. 
And they were not alone. 
There were 15, maybe 20, people like him waiting. 
And there was some staff too. 
Among them there was my right-hand man, Najmuddin. 
And the gatekeeper told me, "They come everyday to see if the center will open." 
I said, "" No. 
We have to go away. We cannot stay here. "" They were bombing — not very close — but you could hear the noise of the bombs. 
So, "" We cannot stay here, it's dangerous. 
It's not a priority. "" But Najmuddin told me, "" Listen now, we're here. "" At least we can start repairing the prostheses, the broken prostheses of the people and maybe try to do something for people like Mahmoud. "" I said, "" No, please. We cannot do that. 
It's really dangerous. 
We have other things to do. "" But they insisted. 
When you have 20 people in front of you, looking at you and you are the one who has to decide... 
So we started doing some repairs. 
Also one of the physical therapists reported that Mahmoud could be provided with a leg, but not immediately. 
The legs were swollen and the knees were stiff, so he needed a long preparation. 
Believe me, I was worried because I was breaking the rules. 
I was doing something that I was not supposed to do. 
In the evening, I went to speak with the bosses at the headquarters, and I told them — I lied — I told them, "" Listen, we are going to start a couple of hours per day, just a few repairs. "" Maybe some of them are here now. 
(Laughter) So we started. 
I was working, I was going everyday to work for the homeless. 
And Najmuddin was staying there, doing everything and reporting on the patients. 
He was telling me, "" Patients are coming. "" We knew that many more patients could not come, prevented by the fighting. 
But people were coming. 
And Mahmoud was coming every day. 
And slowly, slowly week after week his legs were improving. 
The stump or cast prosthesis was made, and he was starting the real physical rehabilitation. 
He was coming every day, crossing the front line. 
A couple of times I crossed the front line in the very place where Mahmoud and his son were crossing. 
I tell you, it was something so sinister that I was astonished he could do it every day. 
But finally, the great day arrived. 
Mahmoud was going to be discharged with his new legs. 
It was April, I remember, a very beautiful day. 
April in Kabul is beautiful, full of roses, full of flowers. 
We could not possibly stay indoors, with all these sandbags at the windows. 
Very sad, dark. 
So we chose a small spot in the garden. 
And Mahmoud put on his prostheses, the other patients did the same, and they started practicing for the last time before being discharged. 
Suddenly, they started fighting. 
Two groups of Mujahideen started fighting. 
We could hear in the air the bullets passing. 
So we dashed, all of us, towards the shelter. 
Mahmoud grabbed his son, I grabbed someone else. 
Everybody was grabbing something. 
And we ran. 
You know, 50 meters can be a long distance if you are totally exposed, but we managed to reach the shelter. 
Inside, all of us panting, I sat a moment and I heard Rafi telling his father, "Father, you can run faster than me." 
(Laughter) And Mahmoud, "" Of course I can. 
I can run, and now you can go to school. 
No need of staying with me all the day pushing my wheelchair. "" Later on, we took them home. 
And I will never forget Mahmoud and his son walking together pushing the empty wheelchair. 
And then I understood, physical rehabilitation is a priority. 
Dignity cannot wait for better times. 
From that day on, we never closed a single day. 
Well sometimes we were suspended for a few hours, but we never, we never closed it again. 
I met Mahmoud one year later. 
He was in good shape — a bit thinner. 
He needed to change his prostheses — a new pair of prostheses. 
I asked about his son. 
He told me, "" He's at school. He'd doing quite well. "" But I understood he wanted to tell me something. 
So I asked him, "" What is that? "" He was sweating. 
He was clearly embarrassed. 
And he was standing in front of me, his head down. 
He said, "" You have taught me to walk. 
Thank you very much. 
Now help me not to be a beggar anymore. "" That was the job. 
"" My children are growing. 
I feel ashamed. 
I don't want them to be teased at school by the other students. "" I said, "" Okay. "" I thought, how much money do I have in my pocket? 
Just to give him some money. 
It was the easiest way. 
He read my mind, and he said, "" I ask for a job. "" And then he added something I will never forget for the rest of my life. 
He said, "" I am a scrap of a man, but if you help me, I'm ready to do anything, even if I have to crawl on the ground. "" And then he sat down. 
I sat down too with goosebumps everywhere. 
Legless, with only one arm, illiterate, unskilled — what job for him? 
Najmuddin told me, "" Well we have a vacancy in the carpentry shop. "" "What?" I said, "Stop." 
"" Well yes, we need to increase the production of feet. 
We need to employ someone to glue and to screw the sole of the feet. 
We need to increase the production. "" "Excuse me?" 
I could not believe. 
And then he said, "" No, we can modify the workbench maybe to put a special stool, a special anvil, special vice, and maybe an electric screwdriver. "" I said, "" Listen, it's insane. 
And it's even cruel to think of anything like this. 
That's a production line and a very fast one. 
It's cruel to offer him a job knowing that he's going to fail. "" But with Najmuddin, we cannot discuss. 
So the only things I could manage to obtain was a kind of a compromise. 
Only one week — one week try and not a single day more. 
One week later, Mahmoud was the fastest in the production line. 
I told Najmuddin, "" That's a trick. 
I can't believe it. "" The production was up 20 percent. 
"" It's a trick, it's a trick, "" I said. 
And then I asked for verification. 
It was true. 
The comment of Najmuddin was Mahmoud has something to prove. 
I understood that I was wrong again. 
Mahmoud had looked taller. 
I remember him sitting behind the workbench smiling. 
He was a new man, taller again. 
Of course, I understood that what made him stand tall — yeah they were the legs, thank you very much — but as a first step, it was the dignity. 
He has regained his full dignity thanks to that job. 
So of course, I understood. 
And then we started a new policy — a new policy completely different. 
We decided to employ as many disabled as possible to train them in any possible job. 
It became a policy of "" positive discrimination, "" we call it now. 
And you know what? 
It's good for everybody. 
Everybody benefits from that — those employed, of course, because they get a job and dignity. 
But also for the newcomers. 
They are 7,000 every year — people coming for the first time. 
And you should see the faces of these people when they realize that those assisting them are like them. 
Sometimes you see them, they look, "" Oh. "" And you see the faces. 
And then the surprise turns into hope. 
And it's easy for me as well to train someone who has already passed through the experience of disability. 
Poof, they learn much faster — the motivation, the empathy they can establish with the patient is completely different, completely. 
Scraps of men do not exist. 
People like Mahmoud are agents of change. 
And when you start changing, you cannot stop. 
So employing people, yes, but also we started programming projects of microfinance, education. 
And when you start, you cannot stop. 
So you do vocational training, home education for those who cannot go to school. 
Physical therapies can be done, not only in the orthopedic center, but also in the houses of the people. 
There is always a better way to do things. 
That's Najmuddin, the one with the white coat. 
Terrible Najmuddin, is that one. 
I have learned a lot from people like Najmuddin, Mahmoud, Rafi. 
They are my teachers. 
I have a wish, a big wish, that this way of working, this way of thinking, is going to be implemented in other countries. 
There are plenty of countries at war like Afghanistan. 
It is possible and it is not difficult. 
All we have to do is to listen to the people that we are supposed assist, to make them part of the decision-making process and then, of course, to adapt. 
This is my big wish. 
Well don't think that the changes in Afghanistan are over; not at all. We are going on. 
Recently we have just started a program, a sport program — basketball for wheelchair users. 
We transport the wheelchairs everywhere. 
We have several teams in the main part of Afghanistan. 
At the beginning, when Anajulina told me, "We would like to start it," I hesitated. 
I said, "" No, "" you can imagine. 
I said, "" No, no, no, no, we can't. "" And then I asked the usual question: "" Is it a priority? 
Is it really necessary? "" Well now you should see me. 
I never miss a single training session. 
The night before a match I'm very nervous. 
And you should see me during the match. 
I shout like a true Italian. 
(Laughter) What's next? What is going to be the next change? 
Well I don't know yet, but I'm sure Najmuddin and his friends, they have it already in mind. 
That was my story. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

I would like to share with you this morning some stories about the ocean through my work as a still photographer for National Geographic magazine. 
I guess I became an underwater photographer and a photojournalist because I fell in love with the sea as a child. 
And I wanted to tell stories about all the amazing things I was seeing underwater, incredible wildlife and interesting behaviors. 
And after even 30 years of doing this, after 30 years of exploring the ocean, I never cease to be amazed at the extraordinary encounters that I have while I'm at sea. 
But more and more frequently these days I'm seeing terrible things underwater as well, things that I don't think most people realize. 
And I've been compelled to turn my camera towards these issues to tell a more complete story. 
I want people to see what's happening underwater, both the horror and the magic. 
The first story that I did for National Geographic, where I recognized the ability to include environmental issues within a natural history coverage, was a story I proposed on harp seals. 
The story I wanted to do initially was just a small focus to look at the few weeks each year where these animals migrate down from the Canadian arctic to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada to engage in courtship, mating and to have their pups. 
And all of this is played out against the backdrop of transient pack ice that moves with wind and tide. 
And because I'm an underwater photographer, I wanted to do this story from both above and below, to make pictures like this that show one of these little pups making its very first swim in the icy 29-degree water. 
But as I got more involved in the story, I realized that there were two big environmental issues I couldn't ignore. 
The first was that these animals continue to be hunted, killed with hakapiks at about eight, 15 days old. 
It actually is the largest marine mammal slaughter on the planet, with hundreds of thousands of these seals being killed every year. 
But as disturbing as that is, I think the bigger problem for harp seals is the loss of sea ice due to global warming. 
This is an aerial picture that I made that shows the Gulf of St. Lawrence during harp seal season. 
And even though we see a lot of ice in this picture, there's a lot of water as well, which wasn't there historically. 
And the ice that is there is quite thin. 
The problem is that these pups need a stable platform of solid ice in order to nurse from their moms. 
They only need 12 days from the moment they're born until they're on their own. 
But if they don't get 12 days, they can fall into the ocean and die. 
This is a photo that I made showing one of these pups that's only about five or seven days old — still has a little bit of the umbilical cord on its belly — that has fallen in because of the thin ice, and the mother is frantically trying to push it up to breathe and to get it back to stable purchase. 
This problem has continued to grow each year since I was there. 
I read that last year the pup mortality rate was 100 percent in parts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. 
So, clearly, this species has a lot of problems going forward. 
This ended up becoming a cover story at National Geographic. 
And it received quite a bit of attention. 
And with that, I saw the potential to begin doing other stories about ocean problems. 
So I proposed a story on the global fish crisis, in part because I had personally witnessed a lot of degradation in the ocean over the last 30 years, but also because I read a scientific paper that stated that 90 percent of the big fish in the ocean have disappeared in the last 50 or 60 years. 
These are the tuna, the billfish and the sharks. 
When I read that, I was blown away by those numbers. 
I thought this was going to be headline news in every media outlet, but it really wasn't, so I wanted to do a story that was a very different kind of underwater story. 
I wanted it to be more like war photography, where I was making harder-hitting pictures that showed readers what was happening to marine wildlife around the planet. 
The first component of the story that I thought was essential, however, was to give readers a sense of appreciation for the ocean animals that they were eating. 
You know, I think people go into a restaurant, and somebody orders a steak, and we all know where steak comes from, and somebody orders a chicken, and we know what a chicken is, but when they're eating bluefin sushi, do they have any sense of the magnificent animal that they're consuming? 
These are the lions and tigers of the sea. 
In reality, these animals have no terrestrial counterpart; they're unique in the world. 
These are animals that can practically swim from the equator to the poles and can crisscross entire oceans in the course of a year. 
If we weren't so efficient at catching them, because they grow their entire life, would have 30-year-old bluefin out there that weigh a ton. 
But the truth is we're way too efficient at catching them, and their stocks have collapsed worldwide. 
This is the daily auction at the Tsukiji Fish Market that I photographed a couple years ago. 
And every single day these tuna, bluefin like this, are stacked up like cordwood, just warehouse after warehouse. 
As I wandered around and made these pictures, it sort of occurred to me that the ocean's not a grocery store, you know. 
We can't keep taking without expecting serious consequences as a result. 
I also, with the story, wanted to show readers how fish are caught, some of the methods that are used to catch fish, like a bottom trawler, which is one of the most common methods in the world. 
This was a small net that was being used in Mexico to catch shrimp, but the way it works is essentially the same everywhere in the world. 
You have a large net in the middle with two steel doors on either end. 
And as this assembly is towed through the water, the doors meet resistance with the ocean, and it opens the mouth of the net, and they place floats at the top and a lead line on the bottom. 
And this just drags over the bottom, in this case to catch shrimp. 
But as you can imagine, it's catching everything else in its path as well. 
And it's destroying that precious benthic community on the bottom, things like sponges and corals, that critical habitat for other animals. 
This photograph I made of the fisherman holding the shrimp that he caught after towing his nets for one hour. 
So he had a handful of shrimp, maybe seven or eight shrimp, and all those other animals on the deck of the boat are bycatch. 
These are animals that died in the process, but have no commercial value. 
So this is the true cost of a shrimp dinner, maybe seven or eight shrimp and 10 pounds of other animals that had to die in the process. 
And to make that point even more visual, I swam under the shrimp boat and made this picture of the guy shoveling this bycatch into the sea as trash and photographed this cascade of death, you know, animals like guitarfish, bat rays, flounder, pufferfish, that only an hour before, were on the bottom of the ocean, alive, but now being thrown back as trash. 
I also wanted to focus on the shark fishing industry because, currently on planet Earth, we're killing over 100 million sharks every single year. 
But before I went out to photograph this component, I sort of wrestled with the notion of how do you make a picture of a dead shark that will resonate with readers You know, I think there's still a lot of people out there who think the only good shark is a dead shark. 
But this one morning I jumped in and found this thresher that had just recently died in the gill net. 
And with its huge pectoral fins and eyes still very visible, it struck me as sort of a crucifixion, if you will. 
This ended up being the lead picture in the global fishery story in National Geographic. 
And I hope that it helped readers to take notice of this problem of 100 million sharks. 
And because I love sharks — I'm somewhat obsessed with sharks — I wanted to do another, more celebratory, story about sharks, as a way of talking about the need for shark conservation. 
So I went to the Bahamas because there're very few places in the world where sharks are doing well these days, but the Bahamas seem to be a place where stocks were reasonably healthy, largely due to the fact that the government there had outlawed longlining several years ago. 
And I wanted to show several species that we hadn't shown much in the magazine and worked in a number of locations. 
One of the locations was this place called Tiger Beach, in the northern Bahamas where tiger sharks aggregate in shallow water. 
This is a low-altitude photograph that I made showing our dive boat with about a dozen of these big old tiger sharks sort of just swimming around behind. 
But the one thing I definitely didn't want to do with this coverage was to continue to portray sharks as something like monsters. 
I didn't want them to be overly threatening or scary. 
And with this photograph of a beautiful 15-feet, probably 14-feet, I guess, female tiger shark, I sort of think I got to that goal, where she was swimming with these little barjacks off her nose, and my strobe created a shadow on her face. 
And I think it's a gentler picture, a little less threatening, a little more respectful of the species. 
I also searched on this story for the elusive great hammerhead, an animal that really hadn't been photographed much until maybe about seven or 10 years ago. 
It's a very solitary creature. 
But this is an animal that's considered data deficient by science in both Florida and in the Bahamas. 
You know, we know almost nothing about them. 
We don't know where they migrate to or from, where they mate, where they have their pups, and yet, hammerhead populations in the Atlantic have declined about 80 percent in the last 20 to 30 years. 
You know, we're losing them faster than we can possibly find them. 
This is the oceanic whitetip shark, an animal that is considered the fourth most dangerous species, if you pay attention to such lists. 
But it's an animal that's about 98 percent in decline throughout most of its range. 
Because this is a pelagic animal and it lives out in the deeper water, and because we weren't working on the bottom, I brought along a shark cage here, and my friend, shark biologist Wes Pratt is inside the cage. 
You'll see that the photographer, of course, was not inside the cage here, so clearly the biologist is a little smarter than the photographer I guess. 
And lastly with this story, I also wanted to focus on baby sharks, shark nurseries. 
And I went to the island of Bimini, in the Bahamas, to work with lemon shark pups. 
This is a photo of a lemon shark pup, and it shows these animals where they live for the first two to three years of their lives in these protective mangroves. 
This is a very sort of un-shark-like photograph. 
It's not what you typically might think of as a shark picture. 
But, you know, here we see a shark that's maybe 10 or 11 inches long swimming in about a foot of water. 
But this is crucial habitat and it's where they spend the first two, three years of their lives, until they're big enough to go out on the rest of the reef. 
After I left Bimini, I actually learned that this habitat was being bulldozed to create a new golf course and resort. 
And other recent stories have looked at single, flagship species, if you will, that are at risk in the ocean as a way of talking about other threats. 
One such story I did documented the leatherback sea turtle. 
This is the largest, widest-ranging, deepest-diving and oldest of all turtle species. 
Here we see a female crawling out of the ocean under moonlight on the island of Trinidad. 
These are animals whose lineage dates back about 100 million years. 
And there was a time in their lifespan where they were coming out of the water to nest and saw Tyrannosaurus rex running by. 
And today, they crawl out and see condominiums. 
But despite this amazing longevity, they're now considered critically endangered. 
In the Pacific, where I made this photograph, their stocks have declined about 90 percent in the last 15 years. 
This is a photograph that shows a hatchling about to taste saltwater for the very first time beginning this long and perilous journey. 
Only one in a thousand leatherback hatchlings will reach maturity. 
But that's due to natural predators like vultures that pick them off on a beach or predatory fish that are waiting offshore. 
Nature has learned to compensate with that, and females have multiple clutches of eggs to overcome those odds. 
But what they can't deal with is anthropogenic stresses, human things, like this picture that shows a leatherback caught at night in a gill net. 
I actually jumped in and photographed this, and with the fisherman's permission, I cut the turtle out, and it was able to swim free. 
But, you know, thousands of other leatherbacks each year are not so fortunate, and the species' future is in great danger. 
Another charismatic megafauna species that I worked with is the story I did on the right whale. 
And essentially, the story is this with right whales, that about a million years ago, there was one species of right whale on the planet, but as land masses moved around and oceans became isolated, the species sort of separated, and today we have essentially two distinct stocks. 
We have the Southern right whale that we see here and the North Atlantic right whale that we see here with a mom and calf off the coast of Florida. 
Now, both species were hunted to the brink of extinction by the early whalers, but the Southern right whales have rebounded a lot better because they're located in places farther away from human activity. 
The North Atlantic right whale is listed as the most endangered species on the planet today because they are urban whales; they live along the east coast of North America, United States and Canada, and they have to deal with all these urban ills. 
This photo shows an animal popping its head out at sunset off the coast of Florida. 
You can see the coal burning plant in the background. 
They have to deal with things like toxins and pharmaceuticals that are flushed out into the ocean, and maybe even affecting their reproduction. 
They also get entangled in fishing gear. 
This is a picture that shows the tail of a right whale. 
And those white markings are not natural markings. 
These are entanglement scars. 
72 percent of the population has such scars, but most don't shed the gear, things like lobster traps and crab pots. 
They hold on to them, and it eventually kills them. 
And the other problem is they get hit by ships. 
And this was an animal that was struck by a ship in Nova Scotia, Canada being towed in, where they did a necropsy to confirm the cause of death, which was indeed a ship strike. 
So all of these ills are stacking up against these animals and keeping their numbers very low. 
And to draw a contrast with that beleaguered North Atlantic population, I went to a new pristine population of Southern right whales that had only been discovered about 10 years ago in the sub-Antarctic of New Zealand, a place called the Auckland Islands. 
I went down there in the winter time. 
And these are animals that had never seen humans before, and I was one of the first people they probably had ever seen. 
And I got in the water with them, and I was amazed at how curious they were. 
This photograph shows my assistant standing on the bottom at about 70 feet and one of these amazingly beautiful, 45-foot, 70-ton whales, like a city bus just swimming up, you know. 
They were in perfect condition, very fat and healthy, robust, no entanglement scars, the way they're supposed to look. 
You know, I read that the pilgrims, when they landed at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts in 1620, wrote that you could walk across Cape Cod Bay on the backs of right whales. 
And we can't go back and see that today, but maybe we can preserve what we have left. 
And I wanted to close this program with a story of hope, a story I did on marine reserves as sort of a solution to the problem of overfishing, the global fish crisis story. 
I settled on working in the country of New Zealand because New Zealand was rather progressive, and is rather progressive in terms of protecting their ocean. 
And I really wanted this story to be about three things: I wanted it to be about abundance, about diversity and about resilience. 
And one of the first places I worked was a reserve called Goat Island in Leigh of New Zealand. 
What the scientists there told me was that when protected this first marine reserve in 1975, they hoped and expected that certain things might happen. 
For example, they hoped that certain species of fish like the New Zealand snapper would return because they had been fished to the brink of commercial extinction. 
And they did come back. What they couldn't predict was that other things would happen. 
For example, these fish predate on sea urchins, and when the fish were all gone, all anyone ever saw underwater was just acres and acres of sea urchins. 
But when the fish came back and began predating and controlling the urchin population, low and behold, kelp forests emerged in shallow water. 
And that's because the urchins eat kelp. 
So when the fish control the urchin population, the ocean was restored to its natural equilibrium. 
You know, this is probably how the ocean looked here one or 200 years ago, but nobody was around to tell us. 
I worked in other parts of New Zealand as well, in beautiful, fragile, protected areas like in Fiordland, where this sea pen colony was found. 
Little blue cod swimming in for a dash of color. 
In the northern part of New Zealand, I dove in the blue water, where the water's a little warmer, and photographed animals like this giant sting ray swimming through an underwater canyon. 
Every part of the ecosystem in this place seems very healthy, from tiny, little animals like a nudibrank crawling over encrusting sponge or a leatherjacket that is a very important animal in this ecosystem because it grazes on the bottom and allows new life to take hold. 
And I wanted to finish with this photograph, a picture I made on a very stormy day in New Zealand when I just laid on the bottom amidst a school of fish swirling around me. 
And I was in a place that had only been protected about 20 years ago. 
And I talked to divers that had been diving there for many years, and they said that the marine life was better here today than it was in the 1960s. 
And that's because it's been protected, that it has come back. 
So I think the message is clear. 
The ocean is, indeed, resilient and tolerant to a point, but we must be good custodians. 
I became an underwater photographer because I fell in love with the sea, and I make pictures of it today because I want to protect it, and I don't think it's too late. 
Thank you very much. 

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

And I'm going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, "" Oh, I know that like the back of my hand. "" And she's going to learn that this life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. 
So the first time she realizes that Wonder Woman isn't coming, I'll make sure she knows she doesn't have to wear the cape all by herself, because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. 
You're just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house, so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him. 
Or else find the boy who lit the fire in the first place, to see if you can change him. 
But I know she will anyway, so instead I'll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boots nearby, because there is no heartbreak that chocolate can't fix. 
I want her to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind, because that's the way my mom taught me. 
(Singing) There'll be days like this, my momma said. 
When you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises; when you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape; when your boots will fill with rain, and you'll be up to your knees in disappointment. 
And those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you. 
And no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute, be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life. 
But I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar. 
It can crumble so easily, but don't be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it. 
"" Baby, "" I'll tell her, "" remember, your momma is a worrier, and your poppa is a warrior, and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more. "" Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things. 
And when they finally hand you heartache, when they slip war and hatred under your door and offer you handouts on street-corners of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
Thanks. 
All right, so I want you to take a moment, and I want you to think of three things that you know to be true. They can be about whatever you want — 
technology, entertainment, design, your family, what you had for breakfast. 
I know that Jean-Luc Godard was right when he said that, "" A good story has a beginning, a middle and an end, although not necessarily in that order. "" I know that I'm incredibly nervous and excited to be up here, which is greatly inhibiting my ability to keep it cool. 
(Laughter) And I know that I have been waiting all week to tell this joke. (Laughter) 
Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem. 
And despite my fear of ever being looked at for too long, I was fascinated by the idea of spoken-word poetry. 
My first spoken-word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. 
The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken-word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that's what was expected of me. 
The first time that I performed, the audience of teenagers hooted and hollered their sympathy, and when I came off the stage, I was shaking. 
I felt this tap on my shoulder, and I turned around to see this giant girl in a hoodie sweatshirt emerge from the crowd. 
I discovered this bar on Manhattan's Lower East Side that hosted a weekly poetry open Mic, and my bewildered, but supportive, parents took me to soak in every ounce of spoken word that I could. 
Step one was the moment I said, "I can. I can do this." 
And that was thanks to a girl in a hoodie. 
But Phil and I decided to reinvent Project V.O.I.C.E., this time changing the mission to using spoken-word poetry as a way to entertain, educate and inspire. 
We stayed full-time students, but in between we traveled, performing and teaching nine-year-olds to MFA candidates, from California to Indiana to India to a public high school just up the street from campus. 
And we saw over and over the way that spoken-word poetry cracks open locks. 
And I tell people that this is where great stories start from — these four intersections of what you're passionate about and what others might be invested in. 
I don't have anything interesting to say. "" So I assigned her list after list, and one day I assigned the list "10 Things I Should Have Learned by Now." 
After the race, he tossed his wet, cloud-white hair and said, 'You're a god.' No, Anderson, you're the god. "" (Laughter) (Applause) Now, I know that the number one rule to being cool is to seem unfazed, to never admit that anything scares you or impresses you or excites you. 
I use spoken word to help my students rediscover wonder, to fight their instincts to be cool and unfazed and, instead, actively pursue being engaged with what goes on around them, so that they can reinterpret and create something from it. 
It's not uncommon to feel like you're alone or that nobody understands you, but spoken word teaches that if you have the ability to express yourself and the courage to present those stories and opinions, you could be rewarded with a room full of your peers, or your community, who will listen. 
And that is step three: infusing the work you're doing with the specific things that make you you, even while those things are always changing. 
I spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to tell this story, and I wondered if the best way was going to be a PowerPoint, a short film — And where exactly was the beginning, the middle or the end? 
It's clear that when I was a child, I definitely walked through life like this. 
I would like to help others rediscover that wonder — to want to engage with it, to want to learn, to want to share what they've learned, what they've figured out to be true and what they're still figuring out. 
When my Grandpa Genji died, I was only five years old, but I took my mom by the hand and told her, "Don't worry, he'll come back as a baby." 
My knees still buckle every time I get on a stage. 
My self-confidence can be measured out in teaspoons mixed into my poetry, and it still always tastes funny in my mouth. 
Well, neither do I, but I see the impossible every day. 
Impossible is trying to connect in this world, trying to hold onto others while things are blowing up around you, knowing that while you're speaking, they aren't just waiting for their turn to talk — they hear you. 
After the A-bomb, specialists said it would take 75 years for the radiation-damaged soil of Hiroshima City to ever grow anything again. 
But that spring, there were new buds popping up from the earth. 

Imagine if you could record your life — everything you said, everything you did, available in a perfect memory store at your fingertips, so you could go back and find memorable moments and relive them, or sift through traces of time and discover patterns in your own life that previously had gone undiscovered. 
Well that's exactly the journey that my family began five and a half years ago. 
This is my wife and collaborator, Rupal. 
And on this day, at this moment, we walked into the house with our first child, our beautiful baby boy. 
And we walked into a house with a very special home video recording system. 
(Video) Man: Okay. 
Deb Roy: This moment and thousands of other moments special for us were captured in our home because in every room in the house, if you looked up, you'd see a camera and a microphone, and if you looked down, you'd get this bird's-eye view of the room. 
Here's our living room, the baby bedroom, kitchen, dining room and the rest of the house. 
And all of these fed into a disc array that was designed for a continuous capture. 
So here we are flying through a day in our home as we move from sunlit morning through incandescent evening and, finally, lights out for the day. 
Over the course of three years, we recorded eight to 10 hours a day, amassing roughly a quarter-million hours of multi-track audio and video. 
So you're looking at a piece of what is by far the largest home video collection ever made. 
(Laughter) And what this data represents for our family at a personal level, the impact has already been immense, and we're still learning its value. 
Countless moments of unsolicited natural moments, not posed moments, are captured there, and we're starting to learn how to discover them and find them. 
But there's also a scientific reason that drove this project, which was to use this natural longitudinal data to understand the process of how a child learns language — that child being my son. 
And so with many privacy provisions put in place to protect everyone who was recorded in the data, we made elements of the data available to my trusted research team at MIT so we could start teasing apart patterns in this massive data set, trying to understand the influence of social environments on language acquisition. 
So we're looking here at one of the first things we started to do. 
This is my wife and I cooking breakfast in the kitchen, and as we move through space and through time, a very everyday pattern of life in the kitchen. 
In order to convert this opaque, 90,000 hours of video into something that we could start to see, we use motion analysis to pull out, as we move through space and through time, what we call space-time worms. 
And this has become part of our toolkit for being able to look and see where the activities are in the data, and with it, trace the pattern of, in particular, where my son moved throughout the home, so that we could focus our transcription efforts, all of the speech environment around my son — all of the words that he heard from myself, my wife, our nanny, and over time, the words he began to produce. 
So with that technology and that data and the ability to, with machine assistance, transcribe speech, we've now transcribed well over seven million words of our home transcripts. 
And with that, let me take you now for a first tour into the data. 
So you've all, I'm sure, seen time-lapse videos where a flower will blossom as you accelerate time. 
I'd like you to now experience the blossoming of a speech form. 
My son, soon after his first birthday, would say "" gaga "" to mean water. 
And over the course of the next half-year, he slowly learned to approximate the proper adult form, "" water. "" So we're going to cruise through half a year in about 40 seconds. 
No video here, so you can focus on the sound, the acoustics, of a new kind of trajectory: gaga to water. 
(Audio) Baby: Gagagagagaga Gaga gaga gaga guga guga guga wada gaga gaga guga gaga wader guga guga water water water water water water water water water. 
DR: He sure nailed it, didn't he. 
(Applause) So he didn't just learn water. 
Over the course of the 24 months, the first two years that we really focused on, this is a map of every word he learned in chronological order. 
And because we have full transcripts, we've identified each of the 503 words that he learned to produce by his second birthday. 
He was an early talker. 
And so we started to analyze why. 
Why were certain words born before others? 
This is one of the first results that came out of our study a little over a year ago that really surprised us. 
The way to interpret this apparently simple graph is, on the vertical is an indication of how complex caregiver utterances are based on the length of utterances. 
And the [horizontal] axis is time. 
And all of the data, we aligned based on the following idea: Every time my son would learn a word, we would trace back and look at all of the language he heard that contained that word. 
And we would plot the relative length of the utterances. 
And what we found was this curious phenomena, that caregiver speech would systematically dip to a minimum, making language as simple as possible, and then slowly ascend back up in complexity. 
And the amazing thing was that bounce, that dip, lined up almost precisely with when each word was born — word after word, systematically. 
So it appears that all three primary caregivers — myself, my wife and our nanny — were systematically and, I would think, subconsciously restructuring our language to meet him at the birth of a word and bring him gently into more complex language. 
And the implications of this — there are many, but one I just want to point out, is that there must be amazing feedback loops. 
Of course, my son is learning from his linguistic environment, but the environment is learning from him. 
That environment, people, are in these tight feedback loops and creating a kind of scaffolding that has not been noticed until now. 
But that's looking at the speech context. 
What about the visual context? 
We're not looking at — think of this as a dollhouse cutaway of our house. 
We've taken those circular fish-eye lens cameras, and we've done some optical correction, and then we can bring it into three-dimensional life. 
So welcome to my home. 
This is a moment, one moment captured across multiple cameras. 
The reason we did this is to create the ultimate memory machine, where you can go back and interactively fly around and then breathe video-life into this system. 
What I'm going to do is give you an accelerated view of 30 minutes, again, of just life in the living room. 
That's me and my son on the floor. 
And there's video analytics that are tracking our movements. 
My son is leaving red ink. I am leaving green ink. 
We're now on the couch, looking out through the window at cars passing by. 
And finally, my son playing in a walking toy by himself. 
Now we freeze the action, 30 minutes, we turn time into the vertical axis, and we open up for a view of these interaction traces we've just left behind. 
And we see these amazing structures — these little knots of two colors of thread we call "" social hot spots. "" The spiral thread we call a "" solo hot spot. "" And we think that these affect the way language is learned. 
What we'd like to do is start understanding the interaction between these patterns and the language that my son is exposed to to see if we can predict how the structure of when words are heard affects when they're learned — so in other words, the relationship between words and what they're about in the world. 
So here's how we're approaching this. 
In this video, again, my son is being traced out. 
He's leaving red ink behind. 
And there's our nanny by the door. 
(Video) Nanny: You want water? (Baby: Aaaa.) Nanny: All right. (Baby: Aaaa.) DR: She offers water, and off go the two worms over to the kitchen to get water. 
And what we've done is use the word "" water "" to tag that moment, that bit of activity. 
And now we take the power of data and take every time my son ever heard the word water and the context he saw it in, and we use it to penetrate through the video and find every activity trace that co-occurred with an instance of water. 
And what this data leaves in its wake is a landscape. 
We call these wordscapes. 
This is the wordscape for the word water, and you can see most of the action is in the kitchen. 
That's where those big peaks are over to the left. 
And just for contrast, we can do this with any word. 
We can take the word "" bye "" as in "" good bye. "" And we're now zoomed in over the entrance to the house. 
And we look, and we find, as you would expect, a contrast in the landscape where the word "" bye "" occurs much more in a structured way. 
So we're using these structures to start predicting the order of language acquisition, and that's ongoing work now. 
In my lab, which we're peering into now, at MIT — this is at the media lab. 
This has become my favorite way of videographing just about any space. 
Three of the key people in this project, Philip DeCamp, Rony Kubat and Brandon Roy are pictured here. 
Philip has been a close collaborator on all the visualizations you're seeing. 
And Michael Fleischman was another Ph.D. student in my lab who worked with me on this home video analysis, and he made the following observation: that "" just the way that we're analyzing how language connects to events which provide common ground for language, that same idea we can take out of your home, Deb, and we can apply it to the world of public media. "" And so our effort took an unexpected turn. 
Think of mass media as providing common ground and you have the recipe for taking this idea to a whole new place. 
We've started analyzing television content using the same principles — analyzing event structure of a TV signal — episodes of shows, commercials, all of the components that make up the event structure. 
And we're now, with satellite dishes, pulling and analyzing a good part of all the TV being watched in the United States. 
And you don't have to now go and instrument living rooms with microphones to get people's conversations, you just tune into publicly available social media feeds. 
So we're pulling in about three billion comments a month, and then the magic happens. 
You have the event structure, the common ground that the words are about, coming out of the television feeds; you've got the conversations that are about those topics; and through semantic analysis — and this is actually real data you're looking at from our data processing — each yellow line is showing a link being made between a comment in the wild and a piece of event structure coming out of the television signal. 
And the same idea now can be built up. 
And we get this wordscape, except now words are not assembled in my living room. 
Instead, the context, the common ground activities, are the content on television that's driving the conversations. 
And what we're seeing here, these skyscrapers now, are commentary that are linked to content on television. 
Same concept, but looking at communication dynamics in a very different sphere. 
And so fundamentally, rather than, for example, measuring content based on how many people are watching, this gives us the basic data for looking at engagement properties of content. 
And just like we can look at feedback cycles and dynamics in a family, we can now open up the same concepts and look at much larger groups of people. 
This is a subset of data from our database — just 50,000 out of several million — and the social graph that connects them through publicly available sources. 
And if you put them on one plain, a second plain is where the content lives. 
So we have the programs and the sporting events and the commercials, and all of the link structures that tie them together make a content graph. 
And then the important third dimension. 
Each of the links that you're seeing rendered here is an actual connection made between something someone said and a piece of content. 
And there are, again, now tens of millions of these links that give us the connective tissue of social graphs and how they relate to content. 
And we can now start to probe the structure in interesting ways. 
So if we, for example, trace the path of one piece of content that drives someone to comment on it, and then we follow where that comment goes, and then look at the entire social graph that becomes activated and then trace back to see the relationship between that social graph and content, a very interesting structure becomes visible. 
We call this a co-viewing clique, a virtual living room if you will. 
And there are fascinating dynamics at play. 
It's not one way. 
A piece of content, an event, causes someone to talk. 
They talk to other people. 
That drives tune-in behavior back into mass media, and you have these cycles that drive the overall behavior. 
Another example — very different — another actual person in our database — and we're finding at least hundreds, if not thousands, of these. 
We've given this person a name. 
This is a pro-amateur, or pro-am media critic who has this high fan-out rate. 
So a lot of people are following this person — very influential — and they have a propensity to talk about what's on TV. 
So this person is a key link in connecting mass media and social media together. 
One last example from this data: Sometimes it's actually a piece of content that is special. 
So if we go and look at this piece of content, President Obama's State of the Union address from just a few weeks ago, and look at what we find in this same data set, at the same scale, the engagement properties of this piece of content are truly remarkable. 
A nation exploding in conversation in real time in response to what's on the broadcast. 
And of course, through all of these lines are flowing unstructured language. 
We can X-ray and get a real-time pulse of a nation, real-time sense of the social reactions in the different circuits in the social graph being activated by content. 
So, to summarize, the idea is this: As our world becomes increasingly instrumented and we have the capabilities to collect and connect the dots between what people are saying and the context they're saying it in, what's emerging is an ability to see new social structures and dynamics that have previously not been seen. 
It's like building a microscope or telescope and revealing new structures about our own behavior around communication. 
And I think the implications here are profound, whether it's for science, for commerce, for government, or perhaps most of all, for us as individuals. 
And so just to return to my son, when I was preparing this talk, he was looking over my shoulder, and I showed him the clips I was going to show to you today, and I asked him for permission — granted. 
And then I went on to reflect, "" Isn't it amazing, this entire database, all these recordings, I'm going to hand off to you and to your sister "" — who arrived two years later — "" and you guys are going to be able to go back and re-experience moments that you could never, with your biological memory, possibly remember the way you can now? "" And he was quiet for a moment. 
And I thought, "" What am I thinking? 
He's five years old. He's not going to understand this. "" And just as I was having that thought, he looked up at me and said, "" So that when I grow up, I can show this to my kids? "" And I thought, "" Wow, this is powerful stuff. "" So I want to leave you with one last memorable moment from our family. 
This is the first time our son took more than two steps at once — captured on film. 
And I really want you to focus on something as I take you through. 
It's a cluttered environment; it's natural life. 
My mother's in the kitchen, cooking, and, of all places, in the hallway, I realize he's about to do it, about to take more than two steps. 
And so you hear me encouraging him, realizing what's happening, and then the magic happens. 
Listen very carefully. 
About three steps in, he realizes something magic is happening, and the most amazing feedback loop of all kicks in, and he takes a breath in, and he whispers "" wow "" and instinctively I echo back the same. 
And so let's fly back in time to that memorable moment. 
(Video) DR: Hey. 
Come here. 
Can you do it? 
Oh, boy. 
Can you do it? 
Baby: Yeah. 
DR: Ma, he's walking. 
(Laughter) (Applause) DR: Thank you. (Applause) 

So I'm going to talk about trust, and I'm going to start by reminding you of the standard views that people have about trust. 
I think these are so commonplace, they've become clichés of our society. 
And I think there are three. 
One's a claim: there has been a great decline in trust, very widely believed. 
The second is an aim: we should have more trust. 
And the third is a task: we should rebuild trust. 
I think that the claim, the aim and the task are all misconceived. 
So what I'm going to try to tell you today is a different story about a claim, an aim and a task which I think give one quite a lot better purchase on the matter. 
First the claim: Why do people think trust has declined? 
And if I really think about it on the basis of my own evidence, I don't know the answer. 
I'm inclined to think it may have declined in some activities or some institutions and it might have grown in others. 
I don't have an overview. 
But, of course, I can look at the opinion polls, and the opinion polls are supposedly the source of a belief that trust has declined. 
When you actually look at opinion polls across time, there's not much evidence for that. 
That's to say, the people who were mistrusted 20 years ago, principally journalists and politicians, are still mistrusted. 
And the people who were highly trusted 20 years ago are still rather highly trusted: judges, nurses. 
The rest of us are in between, and by the way, the average person in the street is almost exactly midway. 
But is that good evidence? 
What opinion polls record is, of course, opinions. 
What else can they record? 
So they're looking at the generic attitudes that people report when you ask them certain questions. 
Do you trust politicians? Do you trust teachers? 
Now if somebody said to you, "" Do you trust greengrocers? 
Do you trust fishmongers? 
Do you trust elementary school teachers? "" you would probably begin by saying, "" To do what? "" And that would be a perfectly sensible response. 
And you might say, when you understood the answer to that, "Well, I trust some of them, but not others." 
That's a perfectly rational thing. 
In short, in our real lives, we seek to place trust in a differentiated way. 
We don't make an assumption that the level of trust that we will have in every instance of a certain type of official or office-holder or type of person is going to be uniform. 
I might, for example, say that I certainly trust a certain elementary school teacher I know to teach the reception class to read, but in no way to drive the school minibus. 
I might, after all, know that she wasn't a good driver. 
I might trust my most loquacious friend to keep a conversation going but not — but perhaps not to keep a secret. 
Simple. 
So if we've got those evidence in our ordinary lives of the way that trust is differentiated, why do we sort of drop all that intelligence when we think about trust more abstractly? 
I think the polls are very bad guides to the level of trust that actually exists, because they try to obliterate the good judgment that goes into placing trust. 
Secondly, what about the aim? 
The aim is to have more trust. 
Well frankly, I think that's a stupid aim. 
It's not what I would aim at. 
I would aim to have more trust in the trustworthy but not in the untrustworthy. 
In fact, I aim positively to try not to trust the untrustworthy. 
And I think, of those people who, for example, placed their savings with the very aptly named Mr. Madoff, who then made off with them, and I think of them, and I think, well, yes, too much trust. 
More trust is not an intelligent aim in this life. 
Intelligently placed and intelligently refused trust is the proper aim. 
Well once one says that, one says, yeah, okay, that means that what matters in the first place is not trust but trustworthiness. 
It's judging how trustworthy people are in particular respects. 
And I think that judgment requires us to look at three things. 
Are they competent? Are they honest? Are they reliable? 
And if we find that a person is competent in the relevant matters, and reliable and honest, we'll have a pretty good reason to trust them, because they'll be trustworthy. 
But if, on the other hand, they're unreliable, we might not. 
I have friends who are competent and honest, but I would not trust them to post a letter, because they're forgetful. 
I have friends who are very confident they can do certain things, but I realize that they overestimate their own competence. 
And I'm very glad to say, I don't think I have many friends who are competent and reliable but extremely dishonest. 
(Laughter) If so, I haven't yet spotted it. 
But that's what we're looking for: trustworthiness before trust. 
Trust is the response. 
Trustworthiness is what we have to judge. 
And, of course, it's difficult. 
Across the last few decades, we've tried to construct systems of accountability for all sorts of institutions and professionals and officials and so on that will make it easier for us to judge their trustworthiness. 
A lot of these systems have the converse effect. 
They don't work as they're supposed to. 
I remember I was talking with a midwife who said, "" Well, you see, the problem is it takes longer to do the paperwork than to deliver the baby. "" And all over our public life, our institutional life, we find that problem, that the system of accountability that is meant to secure trustworthiness and evidence of trustworthiness is actually doing the opposite. 
It is distracting people who have to do difficult tasks, like midwives, from doing them by requiring them to tick the boxes, as we say. 
You can all give your own examples there. 
So so much for the aim. 
The aim, I think, is more trustworthiness, and that is going to be different if we are trying to be trustworthy and communicate our trustworthiness to other people, and if we are trying to judge whether other people or office-holders or politicians are trustworthy. 
It's not easy. It is judgment, and simple reaction, attitudes, don't do adequately here. 
Now thirdly, the task. 
Calling the task rebuilding trust, I think, also gets things backwards. 
It suggests that you and I should rebuild trust. 
Well, we can do that for ourselves. 
We can rebuild a bit of trustworthiness. 
We can do it two people together trying to improve trust. 
But trust, in the end, is distinctive because it's given by other people. 
You can't rebuild what other people give you. 
You have to give them the basis for giving you their trust. 
So you have to, I think, be trustworthy. 
And that, of course, is because you can't fool all of the people all of the time, usually. 
But you also have to provide usable evidence that you are trustworthy. 
How to do it? 
Well every day, all over the place, it's being done by ordinary people, by officials, by institutions, quite effectively. 
Let me give you a simple commercial example. 
The shop where I buy my socks says I may take them back, and they don't ask any questions. 
They take them back and give me the money or give me the pair of socks of the color I wanted. 
That's super. I trust them because they have made themselves vulnerable to me. 
I think there's a big lesson in that. 
If you make yourself vulnerable to the other party, then that is very good evidence that you are trustworthy and you have confidence in what you are saying. 
So in the end, I think what we are aiming for is not very difficult to discern. 
It is relationships in which people are trustworthy and can judge when and how the other person is trustworthy. 
So the moral of all this is, we need to think much less about trust, let alone about attitudes of trust detected or mis-detected by opinion polls, much more about being trustworthy, and how you give people adequate, useful and simple evidence that you're trustworthy. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

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

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

The magical moment, the magical moment of conducting. 
Which is, you go onto a stage. There is an orchestra sitting. 
They are all, you know, warming up and doing stuff. 
And I go on the podium. 
You know, this little office of the conductor. 
Or rather a cubicle, an open-space cubicle, with a lot of space. 
And in front of all that noise, you do a very small gesture. 
Something like this, not very pomp, not very sophisticated, this. 
And suddenly, out of the chaos, order. 
Noise becomes music. 
And this is fantastic. And it's so tempting to think that it's all about me. 
(Laughter) All those great people here, virtuosos, they make noise, they need me to do that. 
Not really. If it were that, I would just save you the talk, and teach you the gesture. 
So you could go out to the world and do this thing in whatever company or whatever you want, and you have perfect harmony. It doesn't work. 
Let's look at the first video. 
I hope you'll think it's a good example of harmony. 
And then speak a little bit about how it comes about. 
(Music) Was that nice? 
So that was a sort of a success. 
Now, who should we thank for the success? 
I mean, obviously the orchestra musicians playing beautifully, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. 
They don't often even look at the conductor. 
Then you have the clapping audience, yeah, actually taking part in doing the music. 
You know Viennese audiences usually don't interfere with the music. 
This is the closest to an Oriental bellydancing feast that you will ever get in Vienna. 
(Laughter) Unlike, for example Israel, where audiences cough all the time. 
You know, Arthur Rubinstein, the pianist, used to say that, "" Anywhere in the world, people that have the flu, they go to the doctor. 
In Tel Aviv they come to my concerts. "" (Laughter) So that's a sort of a tradition. 
But Viennese audiences do not do that. 
Here they go out of their regular, just to be part of that, to become part of the orchestra, and that's great. 
You know, audiences like you, yeah, make the event. 
But what about the conductor? What can you say the conductor was doing, actually? 
Um, he was happy. 
And I often show this to senior management. 
People get annoyed. 
"You come to work. How come you're so happy?" 
Something must be wrong there, yeah? But he's spreading happiness. 
And I think the happiness, the important thing is this happiness does not come from only his own story and his joy of the music. 
The joy is about enabling other people's stories to be heard at the same time. 
You have the story of the orchestra as a professional body. 
You have the story of the audience as a community. Yeah. 
You have the stories of the individuals in the orchestra and in the audience. 
And then you have other stories, unseen. 
People who build this wonderful concert hall. 
People who made those Stradivarius, Amati, all those beautiful instruments. 
And all those stories are being heard at the same time. 
This is the true experience of a live concert. 
That's a reason to go out of home. Yeah? 
And not all conductors do just that. 
Let's see somebody else, a great conductor. 
Riccardo Muti, please. 
(Music) Yeah, that was very short, but you could see it's a completely different figure. Right? 
He's awesome. He's so commanding. Yeah? 
So clear. Maybe a little bit over-clear. 
Can we have a little demonstration? Would you be my orchestra for a second? 
Can you sing, please, the first note of Don Giovanni? 
You have to sing "" Aaaaaah, "" and I'll stop you. 
Okay? Ready? 
Audience: ♫ Aaaaaaah... ♫ Itay Talgam: Come on, with me. If you do it without me I feel even more redundant than I already feel. 
So please, wait for the conductor. 
Now look at me. "" Aaaaaah, "" and I stop you. Let's go. 
Audience: ♫... Aaaaaaaah... ♫ (Laughter) Itay Talgam: So we'll have a little chat later. (Laughter) 
But... There is a vacancy for a... 
But — (Laughter) — you could see that you could stop an orchestra with a finger. 
Now what does Riccardo Muti do? He does something like this... 
(Laughter) And then — sort of — (Laughter) So not only the instruction is clear, but also the sanction, what will happen if you don't do what I tell you. (Laughter) 
So, does it work? Yes, it works — to a certain point. 
When Muti is asked, "" Why do you conduct like this? "" He says, "" I'm responsible. "" Responsible in front of him. 
No he doesn't really mean Him. He means Mozart, which is — (Laughter) — like a third seat from the center. (Laughter) 
So he says, "" If I'm — (Applause) if I'm responsible for Mozart, this is going to be the only story to be told. 
It's Mozart as I, Riccardo Muti, understand it. "" And you know what happened to Muti? 
Three years ago he got a letter signed by all 700 employees of La Scala, musical employees, I mean the musicians, saying, "" You're a great conductor. We don't want to work with you. Please resign. "" (Laughter) "" Why? Because you don't let us develop. 
You're using us as instruments, not as partners. 
And our joy of music, etc., etc.... "" So he had to resign. Isn't that nice? 
(Laughter) He's a nice guy. He's a really nice guy. 
Well, can you do it with less control, or with a different kind of control? 
Let's look at the next conductor, Richard Strauss. 
(Music) I'm afraid you'll get the feeling that I really picked on him because he's old. 
It's not true. When he was a young man of about 30, he wrote what he called "The Ten Commandments for Conductors." 
The first one was: If you sweat by the end of the concert it means that you must have done something wrong. 
That's the first one. The fourth one you'll like better. 
It says: Never look at the trombones — it only encourages them. 
(Laughter) So, the whole idea is really to let it happen by itself. 
Do not interfere. 
But how does it happen? Did you see him turning pages in the score? 
Now, either he is senile, and doesn't remember his own music, because he wrote the music. 
Or he is actually transferring a very strong message to them, saying, "" Come on guys. You have to play by the book. 
So it's not about my story. It's not about your story. 
It's only the execution of the written music, no interpretation. "" Interpretation is the real story of the performer. 
So, no, he doesn't want that. That's a different kind of control. 
Let's see another super-conductor, a German super-conductor. Herbert von Karajan, please. 
(Music) What's different? Did you see the eyes? Closed. 
Did you see the hands? 
Did you see this kind of movement? Let me conduct you. Twice. 
Once like a Muti, and you'll — (Claps) — clap, just once. 
And then like Karajan. Let's see what happens. Okay? 
Like Muti. You ready? Because Muti... 
(Laughter) Okay? Ready? Let's do it. 
Audience: (Claps) Itay Talgam: Hmm... again. Audience: (Claps) 
Itay Talgam: Good. Now like a Karajan. Since you're already trained, let me concentrate, close my eyes. Come, come. 
Audience: (Claps) (Laughter) Itay Talgam: Why not together? (Laughter) Because you didn't know when to play. 
Now I can tell you, even the Berlin Philharmonic doesn't know when to play. 
(Laughter) But I'll tell you how they do it. No cynicism. 
This is a German orchestra, yes? 
They look at Karajan. And then they look at each other. 
(Laughter) "Do you understand what this guy wants?" 
And after doing that, they really look at each other, and the first players of the orchestra lead the whole ensemble in playing together. 
And when Karajan is asked about it he actually says, "" Yes, the worst damage I can do to my orchestra is to give them a clear instruction. 
Because that would prevent the ensemble, the listening to each other that is needed for an orchestra. "" Now that's great. What about the eyes? 
Why are the eyes closed? 
There is a wonderful story about Karajan conducting in London. 
And he cues in a flute player like this. 
The guy has no idea what to do. (Laughter) "Maestro, with all due respect, when should I start?" 
What do you think Karajan's reply was? When should I start? 
Oh yeah. He says, "" You start when you can't stand it anymore. "" (Laughter) Meaning that you know you have no authority to change anything. 
It's my music. The real music is only in Karajan's head. 
And you have to guess my mind. So you are under tremendous pressure because I don't give you instruction, and yet, you have to guess my mind. 
So it's a different kind of, a very spiritual but yet very firm control. 
Can we do it in another way? Of course we can. Let's go back to the first conductor we've seen: Carlos Kleiber, his name. Next video, please. 
(Music) (Laughter) Yeah. 
Well, it is different. But isn't that controlling in the same way? 
No, it's not, because he is not telling them what to do. 
When he does this, it's not, "" Take your Stradivarius and like Jimi Hendrix, smash it on the floor. "" It's not that. 
He says, "" This is the gesture of the music. 
I'm opening a space for you to put in another layer of interpretation. "" That is another story. 
But how does it really work together if it doesn't give them instructions? 
It's like being on a rollercoaster. Yeah? 
You're not really given any instructions, but the forces of the process itself keep you in place. 
That's what he does. 
The interesting thing is of course the rollercoaster does not really exist. 
It's not a physical thing. It's in the players' heads. 
And that's what makes them into partners. 
You have the plan in your head. 
You know what to do, even though Kleiber is not conducting you. 
But here and there and that. You know what to do. 
And you become a partner building the rollercoaster, yeah, with sound, as you actually take the ride. 
This is very exciting for those players. 
They do need to go to a sanatorium for two weeks, later. 
(Laughter) It is very tiring. Yeah? 
But it's the best music making, like this. 
But of course it's not only about motivation and giving them a lot of physical energy. 
You also have to be very professional. 
And look again at this Kleiber. 
Can we have the next video, quickly? 
You'll see what happens when there is a mistake. 
(Music) Again you see the beautiful body language. (Music) 
And now there is a trumpet player who does something not exactly the way it should be done. 
Go along with the video. Look. 
See, second time for the same player. 
(Laughter) And now the third time for the same player. (Laughter) 
"" Wait for me after the concert. 
I have a short notice to give you. "" You know, when it's needed, the authority is there. It's very important. 
But authority is not enough to make people your partners. 
Let's see the next video, please. See what happens here. 
You might be surprised having seen Kleiber as such a hyperactive guy. 
He's conducting Mozart. 
(Music) The whole orchestra is playing. (Music) 
Now something else. (Music) 
See? He is there 100 percent, but not commanding, not telling what to do. 
Rather enjoying what the soloist is doing. 
(Music) Another solo now. See what you can pick up from this. (Music) 
Look at the eyes. 
Okay. You see that? 
First of all, it's a kind of a compliment we all like to get. 
It's not feedback. It's an "" Mmmm... "" Yeah, it comes from here. 
So that's a good thing. 
And the second thing is it's about actually being in control, but in a very special way. 
When Kleiber does — did you see the eyes, going from here? (Singing) You know what happens? Gravitation is no more. 
Kleiber not only creates a process, but also creates the conditions in the world in which this process takes place. 
So again, the oboe player is completely autonomous and therefore happy and proud of his work, and creative and all of that. 
And the level in which Kleiber is in control is in a different level. 
So control is no longer a zero-sum game. 
You have this control. You have this control. And all you put together, in partnership, brings about the best music. 
So Kleiber is about process. 
Kleiber is about conditions in the world. 
But you need to have process and content to create the meaning. 
Lenny Bernstein, my own personal maestro. 
Since he was a great teacher, Lenny Bernstein always started from the meaning. Look at this, please. 
(Music) Do you remember the face of Muti, at the beginning? 
Well he had a wonderful expression, but only one. 
(Laughter) Did you see Lenny's face? 
You know why? Because the meaning of the music is pain. 
And you're playing a painful sound. 
And you look at Lenny and he's suffering. 
But not in a way that you want to stop. 
It's suffering, like, enjoying himself in a Jewish way, as they say. 
(Laughter) But you can see the music on his face. 
You can see the baton left his hand. No more baton. 
Now it's about you, the player, telling the story. 
Now it's a reversed thing. You're telling the story. And you're telling the story. 
And even briefly, you become the storyteller to which the community, the whole community, listens to. 
And Bernstein enables that. Isn't that wonderful? 
Now, if you are doing all the things we talked about, together, and maybe some others, you can get to this wonderful point of doing without doing. 
And for the last video, I think this is simply the best title. 
My friend Peter says, "" If you love something, give it away. "" So, please. 
(Music) (Applause) 

So here it is. You can check: I am short, I'm French, I have a pretty strong French accent, so that's going to be clear in a moment. 
Maybe a sobering thought and something you all know about. 
And I suspect many of you gave something to the people of Haiti this year. 
And there is something else I believe in the back of your mind you also know. 
That is, every day, 25,000 children die of entirely preventable causes. 
That's a Haiti earthquake every eight days. 
And I suspect many of you probably gave something towards that problem as well, but somehow it doesn't happen with the same intensity. 
So why is that? 
Well, here is a thought experiment for you. 
Imagine you have a few million dollars that you've raised — maybe you're a politician in a developing country and you have a budget to spend. You want to spend it on the poor: How do you go about it? 
Do you believe the people who tell you that all we need to do is to spend money? 
That we know how to eradicate poverty, we just need to do more? 
Or do you believe the people who tell you that aid is not going to help, on the contrary it might hurt, it might exacerbate corruption, dependence, etc.? 
Or maybe you turn to the past. 
After all, we have spent billions of dollars on aid. 
Maybe you look at the past and see. 
Has it done any good? 
And, sadly, we don't know. 
And worst of all, we will never know. 
And the reason is that — take Africa for example. 
Africans have already got a lot of aid. 
These are the blue bars. 
And the GDP in Africa is not making much progress. 
Okay, fine. How do you know what would have happened without the aid? 
Maybe it would have been much worse, or maybe it would have been better. 
We have no idea. We don't know what the counterfactual is. 
There's only one Africa. 
So what do you do? 
To give the aid, and hope and pray that something comes out of it? 
Or do you focus on your everyday life and let the earthquake every eight days continue to happen? 
The thing is, if we don't know whether we are doing any good, we are not any better than the Medieval doctors and their leeches. 
Sometimes the patient gets better, sometimes the patient dies. 
Is it the leeches? Is it something else? 
We don't know. 
So here are some other questions. 
They're smaller questions, but they are not that small. 
Immunization, that's the cheapest way to save a child's life. 
And the world has spent a lot of money on it: The GAVI and the Gates Foundations are each pledging a lot of money towards it, and developing countries themselves have been doing a lot of effort. 
And yet, every year at least 25 million children do not get the immunization they should get. 
So this is what you call a "" last mile problem. "" The technology is there, the infrastructure is there, and yet it doesn't happen. 
So you have your million. 
How do you use your million to solve this last mile problem? 
And here's another question: Malaria. Malaria kills almost 900,000 people every year, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa, most of them under five. 
In fact, that is the leading cause of under-five mortality. 
We already know how to kill malaria, but some people come to you and say, "You have your millions. How about bed nets?" 
Bed nets are very cheap. 
For 10 dollars, you can manufacture and ship an insecticide treated bed net and you can teach someone to use them. 
And, not only do they protect the people who sleep under them, but they have these great contagion benefits. 
If half of a community sleeps under a net, the other half also benefits because the contagion of the disease spread. 
And yet, only a quarter of kids at risk sleep under a net. 
Societies should be willing to go out and subsidize the net, give them for free, or, for that matter, pay people to use them because of those contagion benefits. 
"" Not so fast, "" say other people. 
"" If you give the nets for free, people are not going to value them. 
They're not going to use them, or at least they're not going to use them as bed nets, maybe as fishing nets. "" So, what do you do? 
Do you give the nets for free to maximize coverage, or do you make people pay in order to make sure that they really value them? 
How do you know? 
And a third question: Education. 
Maybe that's the solution, maybe we should send kids to school. 
But how do you do that? 
Do you hire teachers? Do you build more schools? 
Do you provide school lunch? 
How do you know? 
So here is the thing. 
I cannot answer the big question, whether aid did any good or not. 
But these three questions, I can answer them. 
It's not the Middle Ages anymore, it's the 21st century. 
And in the 20th century, randomized, controlled trials have revolutionized medicine by allowing us to distinguish between drugs that work and drugs that don't work. 
And you can do the same randomized, controlled trial for social policy. 
You can put social innovation to the same rigorous, scientific tests that we use for drugs. 
And in this way, you can take the guesswork out of policy-making by knowing what works, what doesn't work and why. 
And I'll give you some examples with those three questions. 
So I start with immunization. 
Here's Udaipur District, Rajasthan. Beautiful. 
Well, when I started working there, about one percent of children were fully immunized. 
That's bad, but there are places like that. 
Now, it's not because the vaccines are not there — they are there and they are free — and it's not because parents do not care about their kids. 
The same child that is not immunized against measles, if they do get measles, parents will spend thousands of rupees to help them. 
So you get these empty village subcenters and crowded hospitals. 
So what is the problem? 
Well, part of the problem, surely, is people do not fully understand. 
After all, in this country as well, all sorts of myths and misconceptions go around immunization. 
So if that's the case, that's difficult, because persuasion is really difficult. 
But maybe there is another problem as well. 
It's going from intention to action. 
Imagine you are a mother in Udaipur District, Rajasthan. 
You have to walk a few kilometers to get your kids immunized. 
And maybe when you get there, what you find is this: The subcenter is closed. Ao you have to come back, and you are so busy and you have so many other things to do, you will always tend to postpone and postpone, and eventually it gets too late. 
Well, if that's the problem, then that's much easier. 
Because A, we can make it easy, and B, we can maybe give people a reason to act today, rather than wait till tomorrow. 
So these are simple ideas, but we didn't know. 
So let's try them. 
So what we did is we did a randomized, controlled trial in 134 villages in Udaipur Districts. 
So the blue dots are selected randomly. 
We made it easy — I'll tell you how in a moment. 
In the red dots, we made it easy and gave people a reason to act now. 
The white dots are comparisons, nothing changed. 
So we make it easy by organizing this monthly camp where people can get their kids immunized. 
And then you make it easy and give a reason to act now by adding a kilo of lentils for each immunization. 
Now, a kilo of lentils is tiny. 
It's never going to convince anybody to do something that they don't want to do. 
On the other hand, if your problem is you tend to postpone, then it might give you a reason to act today rather than later. 
So what do we find? 
Well, beforehand, everything is the same. 
That's the beauty of randomization. 
Afterwards, the camp — just having the camp — increases immunization from six percent to 17 percent. 
That's full immunization. 
That's not bad, that's a good improvement. 
Add the lentils and you reach to 38 percent. 
So here you've got your answer. 
Make it easy and give a kilo of lentils, you multiply immunization rate by six. 
Now, you might say, "" Well, but it's not sustainable. 
We cannot keep giving lentils to people. "" Well, it turns out it's wrong economics, because it is cheaper to give lentils than not to give them. 
Since you have to pay for the nurse anyway, the cost per immunization ends up being cheaper if you give incentives than if you don't. 
How about bed nets? 
Should you give them for free, or should you ask people to pay for them? 
So the answer hinges on the answer to three simple questions. 
One is: If people must pay for a bed net, are they going to purchase them? 
The second one is: If I give bed nets for free, are people going to use them? 
And the third one is: Do free bed nets discourage future purchase? 
The third one is important because if we think people get used to handouts, it might destroy markets to distribute free bed nets. 
Now this is a debate that has generated a lot of emotion and angry rhetoric. 
It's more ideological than practical, but it turns out it's an easy question. 
We can know the answer to this question. 
We can just run an experiment. 
And many experiments have been run, and they all have the same results, so I'm just going to talk to you about one. 
And this one that was in Kenya, they went around and distributed to people vouchers, discount vouchers. 
So people with their voucher could get the bed net in the local pharmacy. 
And some people get 100 percent discount, and some people get 20 percent discounts, and some people get 50 percent discount, etc. 
And now we can see what happens. 
So, how about the purchasing? 
Well, what you can see is that when people have to pay for their bed nets, the coverage rate really falls down a lot. 
So even with partial subsidy, three dollars is still not the full cost of a bed net, and now you only have 20 percent of the people with the bed nets, you lose the health immunity, that's not great. 
Second thing is, how about the use? 
Well, the good news is, people, if they have the bed nets, will use the bed nets regardless of how they got it. 
If they get it for free, they use it. 
If they have to pay for it, they use it. 
How about the long term? 
In the long term, people who got the free bed nets, one year later, were offered the option to purchase a bed net at two dollars. 
And people who got the free one were actually more likely to purchase the second one than people who didn't get a free one. 
So people do not get used to handouts; they get used to nets. 
Maybe we need to give them a little bit more credit. 
So, that's for bed nets. So you will think, "" That's great. 
You know how to immunize kids, you know how to give bed nets. "" But what politicians need is a range of options. 
They need to know: Out of all the things I could do, what is the best way to achieve my goals? 
So suppose your goal is to get kids into school. 
There are so many things you could do. You could pay for uniforms, you could eliminate fees, you could build latrines, you could give girls sanitary pads, etc., etc. 
So what's the best? 
Well, at some level, we think all of these things should work. 
So, is that sufficient? If we think they should work intuitively, should we go for them? 
Well, in business, that's certainly not the way we would go about it. 
Consider for example transporting goods. 
Before the canals were invented in Britain before the Industrial Revolution, goods used to go on horse carts. 
And then canals were built, and with the same horseman and the same horse, you could carry ten times as much cargo. 
So should they have continued to carry the goods on the horse carts, on the ground, that they would eventually get there? 
Well, if that had been the case, there would have been no Industrial Revolution. 
So why shouldn't we do the same with social policy? 
In technology, we spend so much time experimenting, fine-tuning, getting the absolute cheapest way to do something, so why aren't we doing that with social policy? 
Well, with experiments, what you can do is answer a simple question. 
Suppose you have 100 dollars to spend on various interventions. 
How many extra years of education do you get for your hundred dollars? 
Now I'm going to show you what we get with various education interventions. 
So the first ones are if you want the usual suspects, hire teachers, school meals, school uniforms, scholarships. 
And that's not bad. For your hundred dollars, you get between one and three extra years of education. 
Things that don't work so well is bribing parents, just because so many kids are already going to school that you end up spending a lot of money. 
And here are the most surprising results. 
Tell people the benefits of education, that's very cheap to do. 
So for every hundred dollars you spend doing that, you get 40 extra years of education. 
And, in places where there are worms, intestinal worms, cure the kids of their worms. 
And for every hundred dollars, you get almost 30 extra years of education. 
So this is not your intuition, this is not what people would have gone for, and yet, these are the programs that work. 
We need that kind of information, we need more of it, and then we need to guide policy. 
So now, I started from the big problem, and I couldn't answer it. 
And I cut it into smaller questions, and I have the answer to these smaller questions. 
And they are good, scientific, robust answers. 
So let's go back to Haiti for a moment. 
In Haiti, about 200,000 people died — actually, a bit more by the latest estimate. 
And the response of the world was great: Two billion dollars got pledged just last month, so that's about 10,000 dollars per death. 
That doesn't sound like that much when you think about it. 
But if we were willing to spend 10,000 dollars for every child under five who dies, that would be 90 billion per year just for that problem. 
And yet it doesn't happen. 
So, why is that? 
Well, I think what part of the problem is that, in Haiti, although the problem is huge, somehow we understand it, it's localized. 
You give your money to Doctors Without Borders, you give your money to Partners In Health, and they'll send in the doctors, and they'll send in the lumber, and they'll helicopter things out and in. 
And the problem of poverty is not like that. 
So, first, it's mostly invisible; second, it's huge; and third, we don't know whether we are doing the right thing. 
There's no silver bullet. 
You cannot helicopter people out of poverty. 
And that's very frustrating. 
But look what we just did today. 
I gave you three simple answers to three questions: Give lentils to immunize people, provide free bed nets, deworm children. 
With immunization or bed nets, you can save a life for 300 dollars per life saved. 
With deworming, you can get an extra year of education for three dollars. 
So we cannot eradicate poverty just yet, but we can get started. 
And maybe we can get started small with things that we know are effective. 
Here's an example of how this can be powerful. 
Deworming. 
Worms have a little bit of a problem grabbing the headlines. 
They are not beautiful and don't kill anybody. 
And yet, when the young global leader in Davos showed the numbers I gave you, they started Deworm the World. 
And thanks to Deworm the World, and the effort of many country governments and foundations, 20 million school-aged children got dewormed in 2009. 
So this evidence is powerful. 
It can prompt action. 
So we should get started now. 
It's not going to be easy. 
It's a very slow process. 
You have to keep experimenting, and sometimes ideology has to be trumped by practicality. 
And sometimes what works somewhere doesn't work elsewhere. 
So it's a slow process, but there is no other way. 
These economics I'm proposing, it's like 20th century medicine. 
It's a slow, deliberative process of discovery. 
There is no miracle cure, but modern medicine is saving millions of lives every year, and we can do the same thing. 
And now, maybe, we can go back to the bigger question that I started with at the beginning. 
I cannot tell you whether the aid we have spent in the past has made a difference, but can we come back here in 30 years and say, "" What we have done, it really prompted a change for the better. "" I believe we can and I hope we will. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

And I worked in mines. And I realized that this was a world unseen. 
And I wanted, through color and large format cameras and very large prints, to make a body of work that somehow became symbols of our use of the landscape, how we use the land. 
And to me this was a key component that somehow, through this medium of photography, which allows us to contemplate these landscapes, that I thought photography was perfectly suited to doing this type of work. 
And after 17 years of photographing large industrial landscapes, it occurred to me that oil is underpinning the scale and speed. 
Because that is what has changed, is the speed at which we're taking all our resources. 
And so then I went out to develop a whole series on the landscape of oil. 
And what I want to do is to kind of map an arc that there is extraction, where we're taking it from the ground, refinement. And that's one chapter. 
The other chapter that I wanted to look at was how we use it — our cities, our cars, our motorcultures, where people gather around the vehicle as a celebration. 
And then the third one is this idea of the end of oil, this entropic end, where all of our parts of cars, our tires, oil filters, helicopters, planes — where are the landscapes where all of that stuff ends up? 
And to me, again, photography was a way in which I could explore and research the world, and find those places. 
And another idea that I had as well, that was brought forward by an ecologist — he basically did a calculation where he took one liter of gas and said, well, how much carbon it would take, and how much organic material? 
It was 23 metric tons for one liter. 
So whenever I fill up my gas, I think of that liter, and how much carbon. 
And I know that oil comes from the ocean and phytoplankton, but he did the calculations for our Earth and what it had to do to produce that amount of energy. 
From the photosynthetic growth, it would take 500 years of that growth to produce what we use, the 30 billion barrels we use per year. 
And that also brought me to the fact that this poses such a risk to our society. 
Looking at 30 billion per year, we look at our two largest suppliers, Saudi Arabia and now Canada, with its dirty oil. 
And together they only form about 15 years of supply. 
The whole world, at 1.2 trillion estimated reserves, only gives us about 45 years. 
So, it's not a question of if, but a question of when peak oil will come upon us. 
So, to me, using photography — and I feel that all of us need to now begin to really take the task of using our talents, our ways of thinking, to begin to deal with what I think is probably one of the most challenging issues of our time, how to deal with our energy crisis. 
And I would like to say that, on the other side of it, 30, 40 years from now, the children that I have, I can look at them and say, "" We did everything we possibly, humanly could do, to begin to mitigate this, what I feel is one of the most important and critical moments in our time. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

One day in 1819, 3,000 miles off the coast of Chile, in one of the most remote regions of the Pacific Ocean, 20 American sailors watched their ship flood with seawater. 
They'd been struck by a sperm whale, which had ripped a catastrophic hole in the ship's hull. 
As their ship began to sink beneath the swells, the men huddled together in three small whaleboats. 
These men were 10,000 miles from home, more than 1,000 miles from the nearest scrap of land. 
In their small boats, they carried only rudimentary navigational equipment and limited supplies of food and water. 
These were the men of the whaleship Essex, whose story would later inspire parts of "" Moby Dick. "" Even in today's world, their situation would be really dire, but think about how much worse it would have been then. 
No one on land had any idea that anything had gone wrong. 
No search party was coming to look for these men. 
So most of us have never experienced a situation as frightening as the one in which these sailors found themselves, but we all know what it's like to be afraid. 
We know how fear feels, but I'm not sure we spend enough time thinking about what our fears mean. 
As we grow up, we're often encouraged to think of fear as a weakness, just another childish thing to discard like baby teeth or roller skates. 
And I think it's no accident that we think this way. 
Neuroscientists have actually shown that human beings are hard-wired to be optimists. 
So maybe that's why we think of fear, sometimes, as a danger in and of itself. 
"Don't worry," we like to say to one another. "Don't panic." 
In English, fear is something we conquer. 
It's something we fight. It's something we overcome. 
But what if we looked at fear in a fresh way? 
What if we thought of fear as an amazing act of the imagination, something that can be as profound and insightful as storytelling itself? 
It's easiest to see this link between fear and the imagination in young children, whose fears are often extraordinarily vivid. 
When I was a child, I lived in California, which is, you know, mostly a very nice place to live, but for me as a child, California could also be a little scary. 
I remember how frightening it was to see the chandelier that hung above our dining table swing back and forth during every minor earthquake, and I sometimes couldn't sleep at night, terrified that the Big One might strike while we were sleeping. 
And what we say about kids who have fears like that is that they have a vivid imagination. 
But at a certain point, most of us learn to leave these kinds of visions behind and grow up. 
We learn that there are no monsters hiding under the bed, and not every earthquake brings buildings down. 
But maybe it's no coincidence that some of our most creative minds fail to leave these kinds of fears behind as adults. 
The same incredible imaginations that produced "" The Origin of Species, "" "Jane Eyre" and "The Remembrance of Things Past," also generated intense worries that haunted the adult lives of Charles Darwin, Charlotte BrontĂŤ and Marcel Proust. 
So the question is, what can the rest of us learn about fear from visionaries and young children? 
Well let's return to the year 1819 for a moment, to the situation facing the crew of the whaleship Essex. 
Let's take a look at the fears that their imaginations were generating as they drifted in the middle of the Pacific. 
Twenty-four hours had now passed since the capsizing of the ship. 
The time had come for the men to make a plan, but they had very few options. 
In his fascinating account of the disaster, Nathaniel Philbrick wrote that these men were just about as far from land as it was possible to be anywhere on Earth. 
The men knew that the nearest islands they could reach were the Marquesas Islands, 1,200 miles away. 
But they'd heard some frightening rumors. 
They'd been told that these islands, and several others nearby, were populated by cannibals. 
So the men pictured coming ashore only to be murdered and eaten for dinner. 
Another possible destination was Hawaii, but given the season, the captain was afraid they'd be struck by severe storms. 
Now the last option was the longest, and the most difficult: to sail 1,500 miles due south in hopes of reaching a certain band of winds that could eventually push them toward the coast of South America. 
But they knew that the sheer length of this journey would stretch their supplies of food and water. 
To be eaten by cannibals, to be battered by storms, to starve to death before reaching land. 
These were the fears that danced in the imaginations of these poor men, and as it turned out, the fear they chose to listen to would govern whether they lived or died. 
Now we might just as easily call these fears by a different name. 
What if instead of calling them fears, we called them stories? 
Because that's really what fear is, if you think about it. 
It's a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do. 
And fears and storytelling have the same components. 
They have the same architecture. 
Like all stories, fears have characters. 
In our fears, the characters are us. 
Fears also have plots. They have beginnings and middles and ends. 
You board the plane. The plane takes off. The engine fails. 
Our fears also tend to contain imagery that can be every bit as vivid as what you might find in the pages of a novel. 
Picture a cannibal, human teeth sinking into human skin, human flesh roasting over a fire. 
Fears also have suspense. 
If I've done my job as a storyteller today, you should be wondering what happened to the men of the whaleship Essex. 
Our fears provoke in us a very similar form of suspense. 
Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next? 
In other words, our fears make us think about the future. 
And humans, by the way, are the only creatures capable of thinking about the future in this way, of projecting ourselves forward in time, and this mental time travel is just one more thing that fears have in common with storytelling. 
As a writer, I can tell you that a big part of writing fiction is learning to predict how one event in a story will affect all the other events, and fear works in that same way. 
In fear, just like in fiction, one thing always leads to another. 
When I was writing my first novel, "" The Age Of Miracles, "" I spent months trying to figure out what would happen if the rotation of the Earth suddenly began to slow down. 
What would happen to our days? What would happen to our crops? 
What would happen to our minds? 
And then it was only later that I realized how very similar these questions were to the ones I used to ask myself as a child frightened in the night. 
If an earthquake strikes tonight, I used to worry, what will happen to our house? What will happen to my family? 
And the answer to those questions always took the form of a story. 
So if we think of our fears as more than just fears but as stories, we should think of ourselves as the authors of those stories. 
But just as importantly, we need to think of ourselves as the readers of our fears, and how we choose to read our fears can have a profound effect on our lives. 
Now, some of us naturally read our fears more closely than others. 
I read about a study recently of successful entrepreneurs, and the author found that these people shared a habit that he called "" productive paranoia, "" which meant that these people, instead of dismissing their fears, these people read them closely, they studied them, and then they translated that fear into preparation and action. 
So that way, if their worst fears came true, their businesses were ready. 
And sometimes, of course, our worst fears do come true. 
That's one of the things that is so extraordinary about fear. 
Once in a while, our fears can predict the future. 
But we can't possibly prepare for all of the fears that our imaginations concoct. 
So how can we tell the difference between the fears worth listening to and all the others? 
I think the end of the story of the whaleship Essex offers an illuminating, if tragic, example. 
After much deliberation, the men finally made a decision. 
Terrified of cannibals, they decided to forgo the closest islands and instead embarked on the longer and much more difficult route to South America. 
After more than two months at sea, the men ran out of food as they knew they might, and they were still quite far from land. 
When the last of the survivors were finally picked up by two passing ships, less than half of the men were left alive, and some of them had resorted to their own form of cannibalism. 
Herman Melville, who used this story as research for "" Moby Dick, "" wrote years later, and from dry land, quote, "" All the sufferings of these miserable men of the Essex might in all human probability have been avoided had they, immediately after leaving the wreck, steered straight for Tahiti. 
But, "" as Melville put it, "" they dreaded cannibals. "" So the question is, why did these men dread cannibals so much more than the extreme likelihood of starvation? 
Why were they swayed by one story so much more than the other? 
Looked at from this angle, theirs becomes a story about reading. 
The novelist Vladimir Nabokov said that the best reader has a combination of two very different temperaments, the artistic and the scientific. 
A good reader has an artist's passion, a willingness to get caught up in the story, but just as importantly, the readers also needs the coolness of judgment of a scientist, which acts to temper and complicate the reader's intuitive reactions to the story. 
As we've seen, the men of the Essex had no trouble with the artistic part. 
They dreamed up a variety of horrifying scenarios. 
The problem was that they listened to the wrong story. 
Of all the narratives their fears wrote, they responded only to the most lurid, the most vivid, the one that was easiest for their imaginations to picture: cannibals. 
But perhaps if they'd been able to read their fears more like a scientist, with more coolness of judgment, they would have listened instead to the less violent but the more likely tale, the story of starvation, and headed for Tahiti, just as Melville's sad commentary suggests. 
And maybe if we all tried to read our fears, we too would be less often swayed by the most salacious among them. 
Maybe then we'd spend less time worrying about serial killers and plane crashes, and more time concerned with the subtler and slower disasters we face: the silent buildup of plaque in our arteries, the gradual changes in our climate. 
Just as the most nuanced stories in literature are often the richest, so too might our subtlest fears be the truest. 
Read in the right way, our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination, a kind of everyday clairvoyance, a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out. 
Properly read, our fears can offer us something as precious as our favorite works of literature: a little wisdom, a bit of insight and a version of that most elusive thing — the truth. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

So I thought of a different way, by thinking, well, the talks revolve around certain themes. 

Mark Zuckerberg, a journalist was asking him a question about the news feed. 
And the journalist was asking him, "Why is this so important?" 
And Zuckerberg said, "" A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. "" And I want to talk about what a Web based on that idea of relevance might look like. 
So when I was growing up in a really rural area in Maine, the Internet meant something very different to me. 
It meant a connection to the world. 
It meant something that would connect us all together. 
And I was sure that it was going to be great for democracy and for our society. 
But there's this shift in how information is flowing online, and it's invisible. 
And if we don't pay attention to it, it could be a real problem. 
So I first noticed this in a place I spend a lot of time — my Facebook page. 
I'm progressive, politically — big surprise — but I've always gone out of my way to meet conservatives. 
I like hearing what they're thinking about; I like seeing what they link to; I like learning a thing or two. 
And so I was surprised when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed. 
And what it turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on, and it was noticing that, actually, I was clicking more on my liberal friends' links than on my conservative friends' links. 
And without consulting me about it, it had edited them out. 
They disappeared. 
So Facebook isn't the only place that's doing this kind of invisible, algorithmic editing of the Web. 
Google's doing it too. 
If I search for something, and you search for something, even right now at the very same time, we may get very different search results. 
Even if you're logged out, one engineer told me, there are 57 signals that Google looks at — everything from what kind of computer you're on to what kind of browser you're using to where you're located — that it uses to personally tailor your query results. 
Think about it for a second: there is no standard Google anymore. 
And you know, the funny thing about this is that it's hard to see. 
You can't see how different your search results are from anyone else's. 
But a couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of friends to Google "" Egypt "" and to send me screen shots of what they got. 
So here's my friend Scott's screen shot. 
And here's my friend Daniel's screen shot. 
When you put them side-by-side, you don't even have to read the links to see how different these two pages are. 
But when you do read the links, it's really quite remarkable. 
Daniel didn't get anything about the protests in Egypt at all in his first page of Google results. 
Scott's results were full of them. 
And this was the big story of the day at that time. 
That's how different these results are becoming. 
So it's not just Google and Facebook either. 
This is something that's sweeping the Web. 
There are a whole host of companies that are doing this kind of personalization. 
Yahoo News, the biggest news site on the Internet, is now personalized — different people get different things. 
Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the New York Times — all flirting with personalization in various ways. 
And this moves us very quickly toward a world in which the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see. 
As Eric Schmidt said, "" It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them. "" So I do think this is a problem. 
And I think, if you take all of these filters together, you take all these algorithms, you get what I call a filter bubble. 
And your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. 
And what's in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. 
But the thing is that you don't decide what gets in. 
And more importantly, you don't actually see what gets edited out. 
So one of the problems with the filter bubble was discovered by some researchers at Netflix. 
And they were looking at the Netflix queues, and they noticed something kind of funny that a lot of us probably have noticed, which is there are some movies that just sort of zip right up and out to our houses. 
They enter the queue, they just zip right out. 
So "" Iron Man "" zips right out, and "" Waiting for Superman "" can wait for a really long time. 
What they discovered was that in our Netflix queues there's this epic struggle going on between our future aspirational selves and our more impulsive present selves. 
You know we all want to be someone who has watched "" Rashomon, "" but right now we want to watch "" Ace Ventura "" for the fourth time. 
(Laughter) So the best editing gives us a bit of both. 
It gives us a little bit of Justin Bieber and a little bit of Afghanistan. 
It gives us some information vegetables; it gives us some information dessert. 
And the challenge with these kinds of algorithmic filters, these personalized filters, is that, because they're mainly looking at what you click on first, it can throw off that balance. 
And instead of a balanced information diet, you can end up surrounded by information junk food. 
What this suggests is actually that we may have the story about the Internet wrong. 
In a broadcast society — this is how the founding mythology goes — in a broadcast society, there were these gatekeepers, the editors, and they controlled the flows of information. 
And along came the Internet and it swept them out of the way, and it allowed all of us to connect together, and it was awesome. 
But that's not actually what's happening right now. 
What we're seeing is more of a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones. 
And the thing is that the algorithms don't yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the editors did. 
So if algorithms are going to curate the world for us, if they're going to decide what we get to see and what we don't get to see, then we need to make sure that they're not just keyed to relevance. 
We need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important — this is what TED does — other points of view. 
And the thing is, we've actually been here before as a society. 
In 1915, it's not like newspapers were sweating a lot about their civic responsibilities. 
Then people noticed that they were doing something really important. 
That, in fact, you couldn't have a functioning democracy if citizens didn't get a good flow of information, that the newspapers were critical because they were acting as the filter, and then journalistic ethics developed. 
It wasn't perfect, but it got us through the last century. 
And so now, we're kind of back in 1915 on the Web. 
And we need the new gatekeepers to encode that kind of responsibility into the code that they're writing. 
I know that there are a lot of people here from Facebook and from Google — Larry and Sergey — people who have helped build the Web as it is, and I'm grateful for that. 
But we really need you to make sure that these algorithms have encoded in them a sense of the public life, a sense of civic responsibility. 
We need you to make sure that they're transparent enough that we can see what the rules are that determine what gets through our filters. 
And we need you to give us some control so that we can decide what gets through and what doesn't. 
Because I think we really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being. 
We need it to connect us all together. 
We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives. 
And it's not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a Web of one. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Last year when I was here, I was speaking to you about a swim which I did across the North Pole. 
And while that swim took place three years ago, I can remember it as if it was yesterday. 
I remember standing on the edge of the ice, about to dive into the water, and thinking to myself, I have never ever seen any place on this earth which is just so frightening. 
The water is completely black. 
The water is minus 1.7 degrees centigrade, or 29 degrees Fahrenheit. 
It's flipping freezing in that water. 
And then a thought came across my mind: if things go pear-shaped on this swim, how long will it take for my frozen body to sink the four and a half kilometers to the bottom of the ocean? 
And then I said to myself, I've just got to get this thought out of my mind as quickly as possible. 
And the only way I can dive into that freezing cold water and swim a kilometer is by listening to my iPod and really revving myself up, listening to everything from beautiful opera all the way across to Puff Daddy, and then committing myself a hundred percent — there is nothing more powerful than the made-up mind — and then walking up to the edge of the ice and just diving into the water. 
And that swim took me 18 minutes and 50 seconds, and it felt like 18 days. 
And I remember getting out of the water and my hands feeling so painful and looking down at my fingers, and my fingers were literally the size of sausages because — you know, we're made partially of water — when water freezes it expands, and so the cells in my fingers had frozen and expanded and burst. 
And the most immediate thought when I came out of that water was the following: I'm never, ever going to do another cold water swim in my life again. 
Anyway, last year, I heard about the Himalayas and the melting of the — (Laughter) and the melting of the glaciers because of climate change. 
I heard about this lake, Lake Imja. 
This lake has been formed in the last couple of years because of the melting of the glacier. 
The glacier's gone all the way up the mountain and left in its place this big lake. 
And I firmly believe that what we're seeing in the Himalayas is the next great, big battleground on this earth. 
Nearly two billion people — so one in three people on this earth — rely on the water from the Himalayas. 
And with a population increasing as quickly as it is, and with the water supply from these glaciers — because of climate change — decreasing so much, I think we have a real risk of instability. 
North, you've got China; south, you've India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, all these countries. 
And so I decided to walk up to Mt. Everest, the highest mountain on this earth, and go and do a symbolic swim underneath the summit of Mt. Everest. 
Now, I don't know if any of you have had the opportunity to go to Mt. Everest, but it's quite an ordeal getting up there. 
28 great, big, powerful yaks carrying all the equipment up onto this mountain — I don't just have my Speedo, but there's a big film crew who then send all the images around the world. 
The other thing which was so challenging about this swim is not just the altitude. 
I wanted to do the swim at 5,300 meters above sea level. 
So it's right up in the heavens. 
It's very, very difficult to breath. You get altitude sickness. 
I feels like you've got a man standing behind you with a hammer just hitting your head all the time. 
That's not the worst part of it. 
The worst part was this year was the year where they decided to do a big cleanup operation on Mt. Everest. 
Many, many people have died on Mt. Everest, and this was the year they decided to go and recover all the bodies of the mountaineers and then bring them down the mountain. 
And when you're walking up the mountain to attempt to do something which no human has ever done before, and, in fact, no fish — there are no fish up there swimming at 5,300 meters — When you're trying to do that, and then the bodies are coming past you, it humbles you, and you also realize very, very clearly that nature is so much more powerful than we are. 
And we walked up this pathway, all the way up. 
And to the right hand side of us was this great Khumbu Glacier. 
And all the way along the glacier we saw these big pools of melting ice. 
And then we got up to this small lake underneath the summit of Mt. Everest, and I prepared myself the same way as I've always prepared myself, for this swim which was going to be so very difficult. 
I put on my iPod, I listened to some music, I got myself as aggressive as possible — but controlled aggression — and then I hurled myself into that water. 
I swam as quickly as I could for the first hundred meters, and then I realized very, very quickly, I had a huge problem on my hands. 
I could barely breathe. 
I was gasping for air. 
I then began to choke, and then it quickly led to me vomiting in the water. 
And it all happened so quickly: I then — I don't know how it happened — but I went underwater. 
And luckily, the water was quite shallow, and I was able to push myself off the bottom of the lake and get up and then take another gasp of air. 
And then I said, carry on. Carry on. Carry on. 
I carried on for another five or six strokes, and then I had nothing in my body, and I went down to the bottom of the lake. 
And I don't where I got it from, but I was able to somehow pull myself up and as quickly as possible get to the side of the lake. 
I've heard it said that drowning is the most peaceful death that you can have. 
I have never, ever heard such utter bollocks. 
(Laughter) It is the most frightening and panicky feeling that you can have. 
I got myself to the side of the lake. 
My crew grabbed me, and then we walked as quickly as we could down — over the rubble — down to our camp. 
And there, we sat down, and we did a debrief about what had gone wrong there on Mt. Everest. 
And my team just gave it to me straight. 
They said, Lewis, you need to have a radical tactical shift if you want to do this swim. 
Every single thing which you have learned in the past 23 years of swimming, you must forget. 
Every single thing which you learned when you were serving in the British army, about speed and aggression, you put that to one side. 
We want you to walk up the hill in another two days' time. 
Take some time to rest and think about things. 
We want you to walk up the mountain in two days' time, and instead of swimming fast, swim as slowly as possible. 
Instead of swimming crawl, swim breaststroke. 
And remember, never ever swim with aggression. 
This is the time to swim with real humility. 
And so we walked back up to the mountain two days later. 
And I stood there on the edge of the lake, and I looked up at Mt. Everest — and she is one of the most beautiful mountains on the earth — and I said to myself, just do this slowly. 
And I swam across the lake. 
And I can't begin to tell you how good I felt when I came to the other side. 
But I learned two very, very important lessons there on Mt. Everest, and I thank my team of Sherpas who taught me this. 
The first one is that just because something has worked in the past so well, doesn't mean it's going to work in the future. 
And similarly, now, before I do anything, I ask myself what type of mindset do I require to successfully complete a task. 
And taking that into the world of climate change — which is, frankly, the Mt. Everest of all problems — just because we've lived the way we have lived for so long, just because we have consumed the way we have for so long and populated the earth the way we have for so long, doesn't mean that we can carry on the way we are carrying on. 
The warning signs are all there. 
When I was born, the world's population was 3.5 billion people. 
We're now 6.8 billion people, and we're expected to be 9 billion people by 2050. 
And then the second lesson, the radical, tactical shift. 
And I've come here to ask you today: what radical tactical shift can you take in your relationship to the environment, which will ensure that our children and our grandchildren live in a safe world and a secure world, and most importantly, in a sustainable world? 
And I ask you, please, to go away from here and think about that one radical tactical shift which you could make, which will make that big difference, and then commit a hundred percent to doing it. 
Blog about it, tweet about it, talk about it, and commit a hundred percent, because very, very few things are impossible to achieve if we really put our whole minds to it. 
So thank you very, very much. 
(Applause) 

I think I was supposed to talk about my new book, which is called "" Blink, "" and it's about snap judgments and first impressions. 
And it comes out in January, and I hope you all buy it in triplicate. 
(Laughter) But I was thinking about this, and I realized that although my new book makes me happy, and I think would make my mother happy, it's not really about happiness. 
So I decided instead, I would talk about someone who I think has done as much to make Americans happy as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years, a man who is a great personal hero of mine: someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz, who is most famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce. 
Howard's about this high, and he's round, and he's in his 60s, and he has big huge glasses and thinning gray hair, and he has a kind of wonderful exuberance and vitality, and he has a parrot, and he loves the opera, and he's a great aficionado of medieval history. 
And Howard is very interested in measuring things. 
We'd like you to figure out how much aspartame we should put in each can of Diet Pepsi in order to have the perfect drink. "" Now that sounds like an incredibly straightforward question to answer, and that's what Howard thought. 
What we do is you make up a big experimental batch of Pepsi, at every degree of sweetness — eight percent, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, all the way up to 12 — and we try this out with thousands of people, and we plot the results on a curve, and we take the most popular concentration, right? 
Now, most people in that business, in the world of testing food and such, are not dismayed when the data comes back a mess. 
Howard is not so easily placated. 
Howard is a man of a certain degree of intellectual standards. 
And this was not good enough for him, and this question bedeviled him for years. 
Why could we not make sense of this experiment with Diet Pepsi? "" And one day, he was sitting in a diner in White Plains, about to go trying to dream up some work for Nescafé. 
This was one of the most brilliant breakthroughs in all of food science. 
And they would say, "" Move! Next! "" Tried to get business, nobody would hire him — he was obsessed, though, and he talked about it and talked about it. 
And finally, he had a breakthrough. 
Vlasic Pickles came to him, and they said, "" Doctor Moskowitz, we want to make the perfect pickle. "" And he said, "There is no perfect pickle; there are only perfect pickles." 
And this was even more important. 
And he varied them according to every conceivable way that you can vary tomato sauce: by sweetness, by level of garlic, by tomatoey-ness, by tartness, by sourness, by visible solids — my favorite term in the spaghetti sauce business. 
And then he analyzed the data. 
Let's see if they congregate around certain ideas. 
And sure enough, if you sit down, and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce, you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups. 
There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain; there are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy; and there are people who like it extra chunky. 
And of those three facts, the third one was the most significant, because at the time, in the early 1980s, if you went to a supermarket, you would not find extra-chunky spaghetti sauce. 
And Prego turned to Howard, and they said, "" You're telling me that one third of Americans crave extra-chunky spaghetti sauce and yet no one is servicing their needs? "" And he said "" Yes! "" (Laughter) And Prego then went back, and completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce, and came out with a line of extra chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti sauce business in this country. 
Everyone else in the industry looked at what Howard had done, and they said, "Oh my god! We've been thinking all wrong!" 
And then eventually even Ragù hired Howard, and Howard did the exact same thing for Ragù that he did for Prego. 
(Laughter) That's Howard's doing. 
Now why is that important? 
(Laughter) It is, in fact, enormously important. 
Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people want to eat, what will make people happy, is to ask them. 
Tell us what you want in a spaghetti sauce. "" And for all those years — 20, 30 years — through all those focus group sessions, no one ever said they wanted extra-chunky. 
Number two thing that Howard did is he made us realize — it's another very critical point — he made us realize the importance of what he likes to call "" horizontal segmentation. "" Why is this critical? 
Used to be, there were two mustards: French's and Gulden's. 
(Laughter) And instead of charging a dollar fifty for the eight-ounce bottle, the way that French's and Gulden's did, they decided to charge four dollars. 
And everyone's take-home lesson from that was that the way to make people happy is to give them something that is more expensive, something to aspire to. 
They don't say, "" Do you want the extra-chunky reduction, or...? "" No! 
And she serves it that way time and time again, and if you quarrel with her, she will say, "" You know what? You're wrong! 
Italian tomato sauce is what? 
Which were thin, you just put a little bit and it sunk down to the bottom of the pasta. 
Now in medical science, we don't want to know, necessarily, just how cancer works, we want to know how your cancer is different from my cancer. 
I guess my cancer different from your cancer. 
And for that, we owe him a great vote of thanks. 
And the example he used was coffee. 
If, however, you allowed me to break you into coffee clusters, maybe three or four coffee clusters, and I could make coffee just for each of those individual clusters, your scores would go from 60 to 75 or 78. 
The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 is a difference between coffee that makes you wince, and coffee that makes you deliriously happy. 
That is the final, and I think most beautiful lesson, of Howard Moskowitz: that in embracing the diversity of human beings, we will find a surer way to true happiness. 

Steve Ramirez: My first year of grad school, I found myself in my bedroom eating lots of Ben & Jerry's watching some trashy TV and maybe, maybe listening to Taylor Swift. 
I had just gone through a breakup. 
(Laughter) So for the longest time, all I would do is recall the memory of this person over and over again, wishing that I could get rid of that gut-wrenching, visceral "" blah "" feeling. 
Now, as it turns out, I'm a neuroscientist, so I knew that the memory of that person and the awful, emotional undertones that color in that memory, are largely mediated by separate brain systems. 
And so I thought, what if we could go into the brain and edit out that nauseating feeling but while keeping the memory of that person intact? 
Then I realized, maybe that's a little bit lofty for now. 
So what if we could start off by going into the brain and just finding a single memory to begin with? 
Could we jump-start that memory back to life, maybe even play with the contents of that memory? 
All that said, there is one person in the entire world right now that I really hope is not watching this talk. 
(Laughter) So there is a catch. There is a catch. 
These ideas probably remind you of "" Total Recall, "" "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," or of "" Inception. "" But the movie stars that we work with are the celebrities of the lab. 
Xu Liu: Test mice. 
(Laughter) As neuroscientists, we work in the lab with mice trying to understand how memory works. 
And today, we hope to convince you that now we are actually able to activate a memory in the brain at the speed of light. 
To do this, there's only two simple steps to follow. 
First, you find and label a memory in the brain, and then you activate it with a switch. 
As simple as that. 
(Laughter) SR: Are you convinced? 
So, turns out finding a memory in the brain isn't all that easy. 
XL: Indeed. This is way more difficult than, let's say, finding a needle in a haystack, because at least, you know, the needle is still something you can physically put your fingers on. 
But memory is not. 
And also, there's way more cells in your brain than the number of straws in a typical haystack. 
So yeah, this task does seem to be daunting. 
But luckily, we got help from the brain itself. 
It turned out that all we need to do is basically to let the brain form a memory, and then the brain will tell us which cells are involved in that particular memory. 
SR: So what was going on in my brain while I was recalling the memory of an ex? 
If you were to just completely ignore human ethics for a second and slice up my brain right now, you would see that there was an amazing number of brain regions that were active while recalling that memory. 
Now one brain region that would be robustly active in particular is called the hippocampus, which for decades has been implicated in processing the kinds of memories that we hold near and dear, which also makes it an ideal target to go into and to try and find and maybe reactivate a memory. 
XL: When you zoom in into the hippocampus, of course you will see lots of cells, but we are able to find which cells are involved in a particular memory, because whenever a cell is active, like when it's forming a memory, it will also leave a footprint that will later allow us to know these cells are recently active. 
SR: So the same way that building lights at night let you know that somebody's probably working there at any given moment, in a very real sense, there are biological sensors within a cell that are turned on only when that cell was just working. 
They're sort of biological windows that light up to let us know that that cell was just active. 
XL: So we clipped part of this sensor, and attached that to a switch to control the cells, and we packed this switch into an engineered virus and injected that into the brain of the mice. 
So whenever a memory is being formed, any active cells for that memory will also have this switch installed. 
SR: So here is what the hippocampus looks like after forming a fear memory, for example. 
The sea of blue that you see here are densely packed brain cells, but the green brain cells, the green brain cells are the ones that are holding on to a specific fear memory. 
So you are looking at the crystallization of the fleeting formation of fear. 
You're actually looking at the cross-section of a memory right now. 
XL: Now, for the switch we have been talking about, ideally, the switch has to act really fast. 
It shouldn't take minutes or hours to work. 
It should act at the speed of the brain, in milliseconds. 
SR: So what do you think, Xu? 
Could we use, let's say, pharmacological drugs to activate or inactivate brain cells? 
XL: Nah. Drugs are pretty messy. They spread everywhere. 
And also it takes them forever to act on cells. 
So it will not allow us to control a memory in real time. 
So Steve, how about let's zap the brain with electricity? 
SR: So electricity is pretty fast, but we probably wouldn't be able to target it to just the specific cells that hold onto a memory, and we'd probably fry the brain. 
XL: Oh. That's true. So it looks like, hmm, indeed we need to find a better way to impact the brain at the speed of light. 
SR: So it just so happens that light travels at the speed of light. 
So maybe we could activate or inactive memories by just using light — XL: That's pretty fast. 
SR: — and because normally brain cells don't respond to pulses of light, so those that would respond to pulses of light are those that contain a light-sensitive switch. 
Now to do that, first we need to trick brain cells to respond to laser beams. 
XL: Yep. You heard it right. 
We are trying to shoot lasers into the brain. 
(Laughter) SR: And the technique that lets us do that is optogenetics. 
Optogenetics gave us this light switch that we can use to turn brain cells on or off, and the name of that switch is channelrhodopsin, seen here as these green dots attached to this brain cell. 
You can think of channelrhodopsin as a sort of light-sensitive switch that can be artificially installed in brain cells so that now we can use that switch to activate or inactivate the brain cell simply by clicking it, and in this case we click it on with pulses of light. 
XL: So we attach this light-sensitive switch of channelrhodopsin to the sensor we've been talking about and inject this into the brain. 
So whenever a memory is being formed, any active cell for that particular memory will also have this light-sensitive switch installed in it so that we can control these cells by the flipping of a laser just like this one you see. 
SR: So let's put all of this to the test now. 
What we can do is we can take our mice and then we can put them in a box that looks exactly like this box here, and then we can give them a very mild foot shock so that they form a fear memory of this box. 
Now with our system, the cells that are active in the hippocampus in the making of this memory, only those cells will now contain channelrhodopsin. 
XL: When you are as small as a mouse, it feels as if the whole world is trying to get you. 
So your best response of defense is trying to be undetected. 
Whenever a mouse is in fear, it will show this very typical behavior by staying at one corner of the box, trying to not move any part of its body, and this posture is called freezing. 
So if a mouse remembers that something bad happened in this box, and when we put them back into the same box, it will basically show freezing because it doesn't want to be detected by any potential threats in this box. 
SR: So you can think of freezing as, you're walking down the street minding your own business, and then out of nowhere you almost run into an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend, and now those terrifying two seconds where you start thinking, "" What do I do? Do I say hi? 
Do I shake their hand? Do I turn around and run away? 
Do I sit here and pretend like I don't exist? "" Those kinds of fleeting thoughts that physically incapacitate you, that temporarily give you that deer-in-headlights look. 
XL: However, if you put the mouse in a completely different new box, like the next one, it will not be afraid of this box because there's no reason that it will be afraid of this new environment. 
But what if we put the mouse in this new box but at the same time, we activate the fear memory using lasers just like we did before? 
Are we going to bring back the fear memory for the first box into this completely new environment? 
SR: All right, and here's the million-dollar experiment. 
Now to bring back to life the memory of that day, I remember that the Red Sox had just won, it was a green spring day, perfect for going up and down the river and then maybe going to the North End to get some cannolis, # justsaying. 
Now Xu and I, on the other hand, were in a completely windowless black room not making any ocular movement that even remotely resembles an eye blink because our eyes were fixed onto a computer screen. 
We were looking at this mouse here trying to activate a memory for the first time using our technique. 
When we first put the mouse into this box, it's exploring, sniffing around, walking around, minding its own business, because actually by nature, mice are pretty curious animals. 
They want to know, what's going on in this new box? 
It's interesting. 
But the moment we turned on the laser, like you see now, all of a sudden the mouse entered this freezing mode. 
It stayed here and tried not to move any part of its body. 
Clearly it's freezing. 
So indeed, it looks like we are able to bring back the fear memory for the first box in this completely new environment. 
While watching this, Steve and I are as shocked as the mouse itself. 
(Laughter) So after the experiment, the two of us just left the room without saying anything. 
After a kind of long, awkward period of time, Steve broke the silence. 
SR: "" Did that just work? "" XL: "" Yes, "" I said. "" Indeed it worked! "" We're really excited about this. 
And then we published our findings in the journal Nature. 
Ever since the publication of our work, we've been receiving numerous comments from all over the Internet. 
Maybe we can take a look at some of those. 
["" OMGGGGG FINALLY... so much more to come, virtual reality, neural manipulation, visual dream emulation... neural coding, 'writing and re-writing of memories', mental illnesses. Ahhh the future is awesome ""] SR: So the first thing that you'll notice is that people have really strong opinions about this kind of work. 
Now I happen to completely agree with the optimism of this first quote, because on a scale of zero to Morgan Freeman's voice, it happens to be one of the most evocative accolades that I've heard come our way. 
(Laughter) But as you'll see, it's not the only opinion that's out there. 
["" This scares the hell out of me... What if they could do that easily in humans in a couple of years?! OH MY GOD WE'RE DOOMED ""] XL: Indeed, if we take a look at the second one, I think we can all agree that it's, meh, probably not as positive. 
But this also reminds us that, although we are still working with mice, it's probably a good idea to start thinking and discussing about the possible ethical ramifications of memory control. 
SR: Now, in the spirit of the third quote, we want to tell you about a recent project that we've been working on in lab that we've called Project Inception. 
["" They should make a movie about this. Where they plant ideas into peoples minds, so they can control them for their own personal gain. We'll call it: Inception. ""] So we reasoned that now that we can reactivate a memory, what if we do so but then begin to tinker with that memory? 
Could we possibly even turn it into a false memory? 
XL: So all memory is sophisticated and dynamic, but if just for simplicity, let's imagine memory as a movie clip. 
So far what we've told you is basically we can control this "" play "" button of the clip so that we can play this video clip any time, anywhere. 
But is there a possibility that we can actually get inside the brain and edit this movie clip so that we can make it different from the original? 
Yes we can. 
Turned out that all we need to do is basically reactivate a memory using lasers just like we did before, but at the same time, if we present new information and allow this new information to incorporate into this old memory, this will change the memory. 
It's sort of like making a remix tape. 
SR: So how do we do this? 
Rather than finding a fear memory in the brain, we can start by taking our animals, and let's say we put them in a blue box like this blue box here and we find the brain cells that represent that blue box and we trick them to respond to pulses of light exactly like we had said before. 
Now the next day, we can take our animals and place them in a red box that they've never experienced before. 
We can shoot light into the brain to reactivate the memory of the blue box. 
So what would happen here if, while the animal is recalling the memory of the blue box, we gave it a couple of mild foot shocks? 
So here we're trying to artificially make an association between the memory of the blue box and the foot shocks themselves. 
We're just trying to connect the two. 
So to test if we had done so, we can take our animals once again and place them back in the blue box. 
Again, we had just reactivated the memory of the blue box while the animal got a couple of mild foot shocks, and now the animal suddenly freezes. 
It's as though it's recalling being mildly shocked in this environment even though that never actually happened. 
So it formed a false memory, because it's falsely fearing an environment where, technically speaking, nothing bad actually happened to it. 
XL: So, so far we are only talking about this light-controlled "" on "" switch. 
In fact, we also have a light-controlled "" off "" switch, and it's very easy to imagine that by installing this light-controlled "" off "" switch, we can also turn off a memory, any time, anywhere. 
So everything we've been talking about today is based on this philosophically charged principle of neuroscience that the mind, with its seemingly mysterious properties, is actually made of physical stuff that we can tinker with. 
SR: And for me personally, I see a world where we can reactivate any kind of memory that we'd like. 
I also see a world where we can erase unwanted memories. 
Now, I even see a world where editing memories is something of a reality, because we're living in a time where it's possible to pluck questions from the tree of science fiction and to ground them in experimental reality. 
XL: Nowadays, people in the lab and people in other groups all over the world are using similar methods to activate or edit memories, whether that's old or new, positive or negative, all sorts of memories so that we can understand how memory works. 
SR: For example, one group in our lab was able to find the brain cells that make up a fear memory and converted them into a pleasurable memory, just like that. 
That's exactly what I mean about editing these kinds of processes. 
Now one dude in lab was even able to reactivate memories of female mice in male mice, which rumor has it is a pleasurable experience. 
XL: Indeed, we are living in a very exciting moment where science doesn't have any arbitrary speed limits but is only bound by our own imagination. 
SR: And finally, what do we make of all this? 
These are the questions that should not remain just inside the lab, and so one goal of today's talk was to bring everybody up to speed with the kind of stuff that's possible in modern neuroscience, but now, just as importantly, to actively engage everybody in this conversation. 
So let's think together as a team about what this all means and where we can and should go from here, because Xu and I think we all have some really big decisions ahead of us. 
Thank you. XL: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

We all make decisions every day; we want to know what the right thing is to do — in domains from the financial to the gastronomic to the professional to the romantic. 
And surely, if somebody could really tell us how to do exactly the right thing at all possible times, that would be a tremendous gift. 
It turns out that, in fact, the world was given this gift in 1738 by a Dutch polymath named Daniel Bernoulli. 
And what I want to talk to you about today is what that gift is, and I also want to explain to you why it is that it hasn't made a damn bit of difference. 
Now, this is Bernoulli's gift. This is a direct quote. 
And if it looks like Greek to you, it's because, well, it's Greek. 
But the simple English translation — much less precise, but it captures the gist of what Bernoulli had to say — was this: The expected value of any of our actions — that is, the goodness that we can count on getting — is the product of two simple things: the odds that this action will allow us to gain something, and the value of that gain to us. 
In a sense, what Bernoulli was saying is, if we can estimate and multiply these two things, we will always know precisely how we should behave. 
Now, this simple equation, even for those of you who don't like equations, is something that you're quite used to. 
Here's an example: if I were to tell you, let's play a little coin toss game, and I'm going to flip a coin, and if it comes up heads, I'm going to pay you 10 dollars, but you have to pay four dollars for the privilege of playing with me, most of you would say, sure, I'll take that bet. Because you know that the odds of you winning are one half, the gain if you do is 10 dollars, that multiplies to five, and that's more than I'm charging you to play. So, the answer is, yes. 
This is what statisticians technically call a damn fine bet. 
Now, the idea is simple when we're applying it to coin tosses, but in fact, it's not very simple in everyday life. 
People are horrible at estimating both of these things, and that's what I want to talk to you about today. 
There are two kinds of errors people make when trying to decide what the right thing is to do, and those are errors in estimating the odds that they're going to succeed, and errors in estimating the value of their own success. 
Now, let me talk about the first one first. 
Calculating odds would seem to be something rather easy: there are six sides to a die, two sides to a coin, 52 cards in a deck. 
You all know what the likelihood is of pulling the ace of spades or of flipping a heads. 
But as it turns out, this is not a very easy idea to apply in everyday life. That's why Americans spend more — I should say, lose more — gambling than on all other forms of entertainment combined. 
The reason is, this isn't how people do odds. 
The way people figure odds requires that we first talk a bit about pigs. 
Now, the question I'm going to put to you is whether you think there are more dogs or pigs on leashes observed in any particular day in Oxford. 
And of course, you all know that the answer is dogs. 
And the way that you know that the answer is dogs is you quickly reviewed in memory the times you've seen dogs and pigs on leashes. 
It was very easy to remember seeing dogs, not so easy to remember pigs. And each one of you assumed that if dogs on leashes came more quickly to your mind, then dogs on leashes are more probable. 
That's not a bad rule of thumb, except when it is. 
So, for example, here's a word puzzle. 
Are there more four-letter English words with R in the third place or R in the first place? 
Well, you check memory very briefly, make a quick scan, and it's awfully easy to say to yourself, Ring, Rang, Rung, and very hard to say to yourself, Pare, Park: they come more slowly. 
But in fact, there are many more words in the English language with R in the third than the first place. 
The reason words with R in the third place come slowly to your mind isn't because they're improbable, unlikely or infrequent. 
It's because the mind recalls words by their first letter. 
You kind of shout out the sound, S — and the word comes. 
It's like the dictionary; it's hard to look things up by the third letter. 
So, this is an example of how this idea that the quickness with which things come to mind can give you a sense of their probability — how this idea could lead you astray. It's not just puzzles, though. 
For example, when Americans are asked to estimate the odds that they will die in a variety of interesting ways — these are estimates of number of deaths per year per 200 million U.S. citizens. 
And these are just ordinary people like yourselves who are asked to guess how many people die from tornado, fireworks, asthma, drowning, etc. 
Compare these to the actual numbers. 
Now, you see a very interesting pattern here, which is first of all, two things are vastly over-estimated, namely tornadoes and fireworks. 
Two things are vastly underestimated: dying by drowning and dying by asthma. Why? 
When was the last time that you picked up a newspaper and the headline was, "" Boy dies of Asthma? "" It's not interesting because it's so common. 
It's very easy for all of us to bring to mind instances of news stories or newsreels where we've seen tornadoes devastating cities, or some poor schmuck who's blown his hands off with a firework on the Fourth of July. 
Drownings and asthma deaths don't get much coverage. 
They don't come quickly to mind, and as a result, we vastly underestimate them. 
Indeed, this is kind of like the Sesame Street game of "" Which thing doesn't belong? "" And you're right to say it's the swimming pool that doesn't belong, because the swimming pool is the only thing on this slide that's actually very dangerous. 
The way that more of you are likely to die than the combination of all three of the others that you see on the slide. 
The lottery is an excellent example, of course — an excellent test-case of people's ability to compute probabilities. 
And economists — forgive me, for those of you who play the lottery — but economists, at least among themselves, refer to the lottery as a stupidity tax, because the odds of getting any payoff by investing your money in a lottery ticket are approximately equivalent to flushing the money directly down the toilet — which, by the way, doesn't require that you actually go to the store and buy anything. 
Why in the world would anybody ever play the lottery? 
Well, there are many answers, but one answer surely is, we see a lot of winners. Right? When this couple wins the lottery, or Ed McMahon shows up at your door with this giant check — how the hell do you cash things that size, I don't know. 
We see this on TV; we read about it in the paper. 
When was the last time that you saw extensive interviews with everybody who lost? 
Indeed, if we required that television stations run a 30-second interview with each loser every time they interview a winner, the 100 million losers in the last lottery would require nine-and-a-half years of your undivided attention just to watch them say, "Me? I lost." "Me? I lost." 
Now, if you watch nine-and-a-half years of television — no sleep, no potty breaks — and you saw loss after loss after loss, and then at the end there's 30 seconds of, "" and I won, "" the likelihood that you would play the lottery is very small. 
Look, I can prove this to you: here's a little lottery. 
There's 10 tickets in this lottery. 
Nine of them have been sold to these individuals. 
It costs you a dollar to buy the ticket and, if you win, you get 20 bucks. Is this a good bet? 
Well, Bernoulli tells us it is. 
The expected value of this lottery is two dollars; this is a lottery in which you should invest your money. 
And most people say, "" OK, I'll play. "" Now, a slightly different version of this lottery: imagine that the nine tickets are all owned by one fat guy named Leroy. 
Leroy has nine tickets; there's one left. 
Do you want it? Most people won't play this lottery. 
Now, you can see the odds of winning haven't changed, but it's now fantastically easy to imagine who's going to win. 
It's easy to see Leroy getting the check, right? 
You can't say to yourself, "" I'm as likely to win as anybody, "" because you're not as likely to win as Leroy. 
The fact that all those tickets are owned by one guy changes your decision to play, even though it does nothing whatsoever to the odds. 
Now, estimating odds, as difficult as it may seem, is a piece of cake compared to trying to estimate value: trying to say what something is worth, how much we'll enjoy it, how much pleasure it will give us. 
I want to talk now about errors in value. 
How much is this Big Mac worth? Is it worth 25 dollars? 
Most of you have the intuition that it's not — you wouldn't pay that for it. 
But in fact, to decide whether a Big Mac is worth 25 dollars requires that you ask one, and only one question, which is: What else can I do with 25 dollars? 
If you've ever gotten on one of those long-haul flights to Australia and realized that they're not going to serve you any food, but somebody in the row in front of you has just opened the McDonald's bag, and the smell of golden arches is wafting over the seat, you think, I can't do anything else with this 25 dollars for 16 hours. 
I can't even set it on fire — they took my cigarette lighter! 
Suddenly, 25 dollars for a Big Mac might be a good deal. 
On the other hand, if you're visiting an underdeveloped country, and 25 dollars buys you a gourmet meal, it's exorbitant for a Big Mac. 
Why were you all sure that the answer to the question was no, before I'd even told you anything about the context? 
Because most of you compared the price of this Big Mac to the price you're used to paying. Rather than asking, "" What else can I do with my money, "" comparing this investment to other possible investments, you compared to the past. 
And this is a systematic error people make. 
What you knew is, you paid three dollars in the past; 25 is outrageous. 
This is an error, and I can prove it to you by showing the kinds of irrationalities to which it leads. 
For example, this is, of course, one of the most delicious tricks in marketing, is to say something used to be higher, and suddenly it seems like a very good deal. 
When people are asked about these two different jobs: a job where you make 60K, then 50K, then 40K, a job where you're getting a salary cut each year, and one in which you're getting a salary increase, people like the second job better than the first, despite the fact they're all told they make much less money. Why? 
Because they had the sense that declining wages are worse than rising wages, even when the total amount of wages is higher in the declining period. Here's another nice example. 
Here's a $2,000 Hawaiian vacation package; it's now on sale for 1,600. 
Assuming you wanted to go to Hawaii, would you buy this package? 
Most people say they would. Here's a slightly different story: $2,000 Hawaiian vacation package is now on sale for 700 dollars, so you decide to mull it over for a week. 
By the time you get to the ticket agency, the best fares are gone — the package now costs 1,500. Would you buy it? Most people say, no. 
Why? Because it used to cost 700, and there's no way I'm paying 1,500 for something that was 700 last week. 
This tendency to compare to the past is causing people to pass up the better deal. In other words, a good deal that used to be a great deal is not nearly as good as an awful deal that was once a horrible deal. 
Here's another example of how comparing to the past can befuddle our decisions. 
Imagine that you're going to the theater. 
You're on your way to the theater. 
In your wallet you have a ticket, for which you paid 20 dollars. 
You also have a 20-dollar bill. 
When you arrive at the theater, you discover that somewhere along the way you've lost the ticket. 
Would you spend your remaining money on replacing it? 
Most people answer, no. 
Now, let's just change one thing in this scenario. 
You're on your way to the theater, and in your wallet you have two 20-dollar bills. 
When you arrive you discover you've lost one of them. 
Would you spend your remaining 20 dollars on a ticket? 
Well, of course, I went to the theater to see the play. 
What does the loss of 20 dollars along the way have to do? 
Now, just in case you're not getting it, here's a schematic of what happened, OK? 
(Laughter) Along the way, you lost something. 
In both cases, it was a piece of paper. 
In one case, it had a U.S. president on it; in the other case it didn't. 
What the hell difference should it make? 
The difference is that when you lost the ticket you say to yourself, I'm not paying twice for the same thing. 
You compare the cost of the play now — 40 dollars — to the cost that it used to have — 20 dollars — and you say it's a bad deal. 
Comparing with the past causes many of the problems that behavioral economists and psychologists identify in people's attempts to assign value. 
But even when we compare with the possible, instead of the past, we still make certain kinds of mistakes. 
And I'm going to show you one or two of them. 
One of the things we know about comparison: that when we compare one thing to the other, it changes its value. 
So in 1992, this fellow, George Bush, for those of us who were kind of on the liberal side of the political spectrum, didn't seem like such a great guy. 
Suddenly, we're almost longing for him to return. 
(Laughter) The comparison changes how we evaluate him. 
Now, retailers knew this long before anybody else did, of course, and they use this wisdom to help you — spare you the undue burden of money. 
And so a retailer, if you were to go into a wine shop and you had to buy a bottle of wine, and you see them here for eight, 27 and 33 dollars, what would you do? 
Most people don't want the most expensive, they don't want the least expensive. 
So, they will opt for the item in the middle. 
If you're a smart retailer, then, you will put a very expensive item that nobody will ever buy on the shelf, because suddenly the $33 wine doesn't look as expensive in comparison. 
So I'm telling you something you already knew: namely, that comparison changes the value of things. 
Here's why that's a problem: the problem is that when you get that $33 bottle of wine home, it won't matter what it used to be sitting on the shelf next to. 
The comparisons we make when we are appraising value, where we're trying to estimate how much we'll like things, are not the same comparisons we'll be making when we consume them. 
This problem of shifting comparisons can bedevil our attempts to make rational decisions. 
Let me just give you an example. 
I have to show you something from my own lab, so let me sneak this in. 
These are subjects coming to an experiment to be asked the simplest of all questions: How much will you enjoy eating potato chips one minute from now? 
They're sitting in a room with potato chips in front of them. 
For some of the subjects, sitting in the far corner of a room is a box of Godiva chocolates, and for others is a can of Spam. 
In fact, these items that are sitting in the room change how much the subjects think they're going to enjoy the potato chips. 
Namely, those who are looking at Spam think potato chips are going to be quite tasty; those who are looking at Godiva chocolate think they won't be nearly so tasty. 
Of course, what happens when they eat the potato chips? 
Well, look, you didn't need a psychologist to tell you that when you have a mouthful of greasy, salty, crispy, delicious snacks, what's sitting in the corner of the room makes not a damn bit of difference to your gustatory experience. 
Nonetheless, their predictions are perverted by a comparison that then does not carry through and change their experience. 
You've all experienced this yourself, even if you've never come into our lab to eat potato chips. So here's a question: You want to buy a car stereo. 
The dealer near your house sells this particular stereo for 200 dollars, but if you drive across town, you can get it for 100 bucks. 
So would you drive to get 50 percent off, saving 100 dollars? 
Most people say they would. 
They can't imagine buying it for twice the price when, with one trip across town, they can get it for half off. 
Now, let's imagine instead you wanted to buy a car that had a stereo, and the dealer near your house had it for 31,000. 
But if you drove across town, you could get it for 30,900. 
Would you drive to get it? At this point, 0.003 savings — the 100 dollars. 
Most people say, no, I'm going to schlep across town to save 100 bucks on the purchase of a car? 
This kind of thinking drives economists crazy, and it should. 
Because this 100 dollars that you save — hello! — doesn't know where it came from. 
It doesn't know what you saved it on. 
When you go to buy groceries with it, it doesn't go, I'm the money saved on the car stereo, or, I'm the dumb money saved on the car. It's money. 
And if a drive across town is worth 100 bucks, it's worth 100 bucks no matter what you're saving it on. People don't think that way. 
That's why they don't know whether their mutual fund manager is taking 0.1 percent or 0.15 percent of their investment, but they clip coupons to save one dollar off of toothpaste. 
Now, you can see, this is the problem of shifting comparisons, because what you're doing is, you're comparing the 100 bucks to the purchase that you're making, but when you go to spend that money you won't be making that comparison. 
You've all had this experience. 
If you're an American, for example, you've probably traveled in France. 
And at some point you may have met a couple from your own hometown, and you thought, "" Oh, my God, these people are so warm. They're so nice to me. 
I mean, compared to all these people who hate me when I try to speak their language and hate me more when I don't, these people are just wonderful. "" And so you tour France with them, and then you get home and you invite them over for dinner, and what do you find? 
Compared to your regular friends, they are boring and dull, right? Because in this new context, the comparison is very, very different. In fact, you find yourself disliking them enough almost to qualify for French citizenship. 
Now, you have exactly the same problem when you shop for a stereo. 
You go to the stereo store, you see two sets of speakers — these big, boxy, monoliths, and these little, sleek speakers, and you play them, and you go, you know, I do hear a difference: the big ones sound a little better. 
And so you buy them, and you bring them home, and you entirely violate the décor of your house. 
And the problem, of course, is that this comparison you made in the store is a comparison you'll never make again. 
What are the odds that years later you'll turn on the stereo and go, "Sounds so much better than those little ones," which you can't even remember hearing. 
The problem of shifting comparisons is even more difficult when these choices are arrayed over time. 
People have a lot of trouble making decisions about things that will happen at different points in time. 
And what psychologists and behavioral economists have discovered is that by and large people use two simple rules. 
So let me give you one very easy problem, a second very easy problem and then a third, hard, problem. 
Here's the first easy problem: You can have 60 dollars now or 50 dollars now. Which would you prefer? 
This is what we call a one-item IQ test, OK? 
All of us, I hope, prefer more money, and the reason is, we believe more is better than less. 
Here's the second problem: You can have 60 dollars today or 60 dollars in a month. Which would you prefer? 
Again, an easy decision, because we all know that now is better than later. 
What's hard in our decision-making is when these two rules conflict. 
For example, when you're offered 50 dollars now or 60 dollars in a month. 
This typifies a lot of situations in life in which you will gain by waiting, but you have to be patient. 
What do we know? What do people do in these kinds of situations? 
Well, by and large people are enormously impatient. 
That is, they require interest rates in the hundred or thousands of percents in order to delay gratification and wait until next month for the extra 10 dollars. 
Maybe that isn't so remarkable, but what is remarkable is how easy it is to make this impatience go away by simply changing when the delivery of these monetary units will happen. 
Imagine that you can have 50 dollars in a year — that's 12 months — or 60 dollars in 13 months. 
What do we find now? 
People are gladly willing to wait: as long as they're waiting 12, they might as well wait 13. 
What makes this dynamic inconsistency happen? 
Comparison. Troubling comparison. Let me show you. 
This is just a graph showing the results that I just suggested you would show if I gave you time to respond, which is, people find that the subjective value of 50 is higher than the subjective value of 60 when they'll be delivered in now or one month, respectively — a 30-day delay — but they show the reverse pattern when you push the entire decision off into the future a year. 
Now, why in the world do you get this pattern of results? 
These guys can tell us. 
What you see here are two lads, one of them larger than the other: the fireman and the fiddler. 
They are going to recede towards the vanishing point in the horizon, and I want you to notice two things. 
At no point will the fireman look taller than the fiddler. No point. 
However, the difference between them seems to be getting smaller. 
First it's an inch in your view, then it's a quarter-inch, then a half-inch, and then finally they go off the edge of the earth. 
Here are the results of what I just showed you. 
This is the subjective height — the height you saw of these guys at various points. 
And I want you to see that two things are true. 
One, the farther away they are, the smaller they look; and two, the fireman is always bigger than the fiddler. 
But watch what happens when we make some of them disappear. Right. 
At a very close distance, the fiddler looks taller than the fireman, but at a far distance their normal, their true, relations are preserved. 
As Plato said, what space is to size, time is to value. 
These are the results of the hard problem I gave you: 60 now or 50 in a month? 
And these are subjective values, and what you can see is, our two rules are preserved. 
People always think more is better than less: 60 is always better than 50, and they always think now is better than later: the bars on this side are higher than the bars on this side. 
Watch what happens when we drop some out. 
Suddenly we have the dynamic inconsistency that puzzled us. 
We have the tendency for people to go for 50 dollars now over waiting a month, but not if that decision is far in the future. 
Notice something interesting that this implies — namely, that when people get to the future, they will change their minds. 
That is, as that month 12 approaches, you will say, what was I thinking, waiting an extra month for 60 dollars? 
I'll take the 50 dollars now. 
Well, the question with which I'd like to end is this: If we're so damn stupid, how did we get to the moon? 
Because I could go on for about two hours with evidence of people's inability to estimate odds and inability to estimate value. 
The answer to this question, I think, is an answer you've already heard in some of the talks, and I dare say you will hear again: namely, that our brains were evolved for a very different world than the one in which we are living. 
They were evolved for a world in which people lived in very small groups, rarely met anybody who was terribly different from themselves, had rather short lives in which there were few choices and the highest priority was to eat and mate today. 
Bernoulli's gift, Bernoulli's little formula, allows us, it tells us how we should think in a world for which nature never designed us. 
That explains why we are so bad at using it, but it also explains why it is so terribly important that we become good, fast. 
We are the only species on this planet that has ever held its own fate in its hands. 
We have no significant predators, we're the masters of our physical environment; the things that normally cause species to become extinct are no longer any threat to us. 
The only thing — the only thing — that can destroy us and doom us are our own decisions. 
If we're not here in 10,000 years, it's going to be because we could not take advantage of the gift given to us by a young Dutch fellow in 1738, because we underestimated the odds of our future pains and overestimated the value of our present pleasures. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: That was remarkable. 
We have time for some questions for Dan Gilbert. One and two. 
Bill Lyell: Would you say that this mechanism is in part how terrorism actually works to frighten us, and is there some way that we could counteract that? 
Dan Gilbert: I actually was consulting recently with the Department of Homeland Security, which generally believes that American security dollars should go to making borders safer. 
I tried to point out to them that terrorism was a name based on people's psychological reaction to a set of events, and that if they were concerned about terrorism they might ask what causes terror and how can we stop people from being terrified, rather than — not rather than, but in addition to stopping the atrocities that we're all concerned about. 
Surely the kinds of play that at least American media give to — and forgive me, but in raw numbers these are very tiny accidents. 
We already know, for example, in the United States, more people have died as a result of not taking airplanes — because they were scared — and driving on highways, than were killed in 9 / 11. OK? 
If I told you that there was a plague that was going to kill 15,000 Americans next year, you might be alarmed if you didn't find out it was the flu. 
These are small-scale accidents, and we should be wondering whether they should get the kind of play, the kind of coverage, that they do. 
Surely that causes people to overestimate the likelihood that they'll be hurt in these various ways, and gives power to the very people who want to frighten us. 
CA: Dan, I'd like to hear more on this. So, you're saying that our response to terror is, I mean, it's a form of mental bug? 
Talk more about it. 
DG: It's out-sized. I mean, look. 
If Australia disappears tomorrow, terror is probably the right response. 
That's an awful large lot of very nice people. On the other hand, when a bus blows up and 30 people are killed, more people than that were killed by not using their seatbelts in the same country. 
Is terror the right response? 
CA: What causes the bug? Is it the drama of the event — that it's so spectacular? 
Is it the fact that it's an intentional attack by, quote, outsiders? 
What is it? 
DG: Yes. It's a number of things, and you hit on several of them. 
First, it's a human agent trying to kill us — it's not a tree falling on us by accident. 
Second, these are enemies who may want to strike and hurt us again. 
People are being killed for no reason instead of good reason — as if there's good reason, but sometimes people think there are. 
So there are a number of things that together make this seem like a fantastic event, but let's not play down the fact that newspapers sell when people see something in it they want to read. So there's a large role here played by the media, who want these things to be as spectacular as they possibly can. 
CA: I mean, what would it take to persuade our culture to downplay it? 
DG: Well, go to Israel. You know, go to Israel. And a mall blows up, and then everybody's unhappy about it, and an hour-and-a-half later — at least when I was there, and I was 150 feet from the mall when it blew up — I went back to my hotel and the wedding that was planned was still going on. 
And as the Israeli mother said, she said, "" We never let them win by stopping weddings. "" I mean, this is a society that has learned — and there are others too — that has learned to live with a certain amount of terrorism and not be quite as upset by it, shall I say, as those of us who have not had many terror attacks. 
CA: But is there a rational fear that actually, the reason we're frightened about this is because we think that the Big One is to come? 
DG: Yes, of course. So, if we knew that this was the worst attack there would ever be, there might be more and more buses of 30 people — we would probably not be nearly so frightened. 
I don't want to say — please, I'm going to get quoted somewhere as saying, "" Terrorism is fine and we shouldn't be so distressed. "" That's not my point at all. 
What I'm saying is that, surely, rationally, our distress about things that happen, about threats, should be roughly proportional to the size of those threats and threats to come. 
I think in the case of terrorism, it isn't. 
And many of the things we've heard about from our speakers today — how many people do you know got up and said, Poverty! I can't believe what poverty is doing to us. 
People get up in the morning; they don't care about poverty. 
It's not making headlines, it's not making news, it's not flashy. 
There are no guns going off. 
I mean, if you had to solve one of these problems, Chris, which would you solve? Terrorism or poverty? 
(Laughter) (Applause) That's a tough one. 
CA: There's no question. 
Poverty, by an order of magnitude, a huge order of magnitude, unless someone can show that there's, you know, terrorists with a nuke are really likely to come. 
The latest I've read, seen, thought is that it's incredibly hard for them to do that. 
If that turns out to be wrong, we all look silly, but with poverty it's a bit — DG: Even if that were true, still more people die from poverty. 
CA: We've evolved to get all excited about these dramatic attacks. Is that because in the past, in the ancient past, we just didn't understand things like disease and systems that cause poverty and so forth, and so it made no sense for us as a species to put any energy into worrying about those things? 
People died; so be it. 
But if you got attacked, that was something you could do something about. 
And so we evolved these responses. 
Is that what happened? 
DG: Well, you know, the people who are most skeptical about leaping to evolutionary explanations for everything are the evolutionary psychologists themselves. 
My guess is that there's nothing quite that specific in our evolutionary past. But rather, if you're looking for an evolutionary explanation, you might say that most organisms are neo-phobic — that is, they're a little scared of stuff that's new and different. 
And there's a good reason to be, because old stuff didn't eat you. Right? 
Any animal you see that you've seen before is less likely to be a predator than one that you've never seen before. 
So, you know, when a school bus is blown up and we've never seen this before, our general tendency is to orient towards that which is new and novel is activated. 
I don't think it's quite as specific a mechanism as the one you alluded to, but maybe a more fundamental one underlying it. 
Jay Walker: You know, economists love to talk about the stupidity of people who buy lottery tickets. But I suspect you're making the exact same error you're accusing those people of, which is the error of value. 
I know, because I've interviewed about 1,000 lottery buyers over the years. 
It turns out that the value of buying a lottery ticket is not winning. 
That's what you think it is. All right? 
The average lottery buyer buys about 150 tickets a year, so the buyer knows full well that he or she is going to lose, and yet she buys 150 tickets a year. Why is that? 
It's not because she is stupid or he is stupid. 
It's because the anticipation of possibly winning releases serotonin in the brain, and actually provides a good feeling until the drawing indicates you've lost. 
Or, to put it another way, for the dollar investment, you can have a much better feeling than flushing the money down the toilet, which you cannot have a good feeling from. 
Now, economists tend to — (Applause) — economists tend to view the world through their own lenses, which is: this is just a bunch of stupid people. 
And as a result, many people look at economists as stupid people. 
And so fundamentally, the reason we got to the moon is, we didn't listen to the economists. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) DG: Well, no, it's a great point. It remains to be seen whether the joy of anticipation is exactly equaled by the amount of disappointment after the lottery. Because remember, people who didn't buy tickets don't feel awful the next day either, even though they don't feel great during the drawing. 
I would disagree that people know they're not going to win. 
I think they think it's unlikely, but it could happen, which is why they prefer that to the flushing. 
But certainly I see your point: that there can be some utility to buying a lottery ticket other than winning. 
Now, I think there's many good reasons not to listen to economists. 
That isn't one of them, for me, but there's many others. 
CA: Last question. 
Aubrey de Grey: My name's Aubrey de Grey, from Cambridge. 
I work on the thing that kills more people than anything else kills — I work on aging — and I'm interested in doing something about it, as we'll all hear tomorrow. 
I very much resonate with what you're saying, because it seems to me that the problem with getting people interested in doing anything about aging is that by the time aging is about to kill you it looks like cancer or heart disease or whatever. Do you have any advice? 
(Laughter) DG: For you or for them? 
AdG: In persuading them. 
DG: Ah, for you in persuading them. 
Well, it's notoriously difficult to get people to be farsighted. 
But one thing that psychologists have tried that seems to work is to get people to imagine the future more vividly. 
One of the problems with making decisions about the far future and the near future is that we imagine the near future much more vividly than the far future. 
To the extent that you can equalize the amount of detail that people put into the mental representations of near and far future, people begin to make decisions about the two in the same way. 
So, would you like to have an extra 100,000 dollars when you're 65 is a question that's very different than, imagine who you'll be when you're 65: will you be living, what will you look like, how much hair will you have, who will you be living with. 
Once we have all the details of that imaginary scenario, suddenly we feel like it might be important to save so that that guy has a little retirement money. 
But these are tricks around the margins. 
I think in general you're battling a very fundamental human tendency, which is to say, "" I'm here today, and so now is more important than later. "" CA: Dan, thank you. Members of the audience, that was a fantastic session. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Sarge Salman: All the way from Los Altos Hills, California, Mr. Henry Evans. 
(Applause) Henry Evans: Hello. 
My name is Henry Evans, and until August 29, 2002, I was living my version of the American dream. 
I grew up in a typical American town near St. Louis. 
My dad was a lawyer. 
My mom was a homemaker. 
My six siblings and I were good kids, but caused our fair share of trouble. 
After high school, I left home to study and learn more about the world. 
I went to Notre Dame University and graduated with degrees in accounting and German, including spending a year of study in Austria. 
Later on, I earned an MBA at Stanford. 
I married my high school sweetheart, Jane. 
I am lucky to have her. 
Together, we raised four wonderful children. 
I worked and studied hard to move up the career ladder, eventually becoming a chief financial officer in Silicon Valley, a job I really enjoyed. 
My family and I bought our first and only home on December 13, 2001, a fixer-upper in a beautiful spot of Los Altos Hills, California, from where I am speaking to you now. 
We were looking forward to rebuilding it, but eight months after we moved in, I suffered a stroke-like attack caused by a birth defect. 
Overnight, I became a mute quadriplegic at the ripe old age of 40. 
It took me several years, but with the help of an incredibly supportive family, I finally decided life was still worth living. 
I became fascinated with using technology to help the severely disabled. 
Head tracking devices sold commercially by the company Madentec convert my tiny head movements into cursor movements, and enable my use of a regular computer. 
I can surf the web, exchange email with people, and routinely destroy my friend Steve Cousins in online word games. 
This technology allows me to remain engaged, mentally active, and feel like I am a part of the world. 
One day, I was lying in bed watching CNN, when I was amazed by Professor Charlie Kemp of the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech demonstrating a PR2 robot. 
I emailed Charlie and Steve Cousins of Willow Garage, and we formed the Robots for Humanity project. 
For about two years, Robots for Humanity developed ways for me to use the PR2 as my body surrogate. 
I shaved myself for the first time in 10 years. 
From my home in California, I shaved Charlie in Atlanta. (Laughter) I handed out Halloween candy. 
I opened my refrigerator on my own. 
I began doing tasks around the house. 
I saw new and previously unthinkable possibilities to live and contribute, both for myself and others in my circumstance. 
All of us have disabilities in one form or another. 
For example, if either of us wants to go 60 miles an hour, both of us will need an assistive device called a car. 
Your disability doesn't make you any less of a person, and neither does mine. 
By the way, check out my sweet ride. (Laughter) Since birth, we have both suffered from the inability to fly on our own. 
Last year, Kaijen Hsiao of Willow Garage connected with me Chad Jenkins. 
Chad showed me how easy it is to purchase and fly aerial drones. 
It was then I realized that I could also use an aerial drone to expand the worlds of bedridden people through flight, giving a sense of movement and control that is incredible. 
Using a mouse cursor I control with my head, these web interfaces allow me to see video from the robot and send control commands by pressing buttons in a web browser. 
With a little practice, I became good enough with this interface to drive around my home on my own. 
I could look around our garden and see the grapes we are growing. 
I inspected the solar panels on our roof. (Laughter) One of my challenges as a pilot is to land the drone on our basketball hoop. 
I went even further by seeing if I could use a head-mounted display, the Oculus Rift, as modified by Fighting Walrus, to have an immersive experience controlling the drone. 
With Chad's group at Brown, I regularly fly drones around his lab several times a week, from my home 3,000 miles away. 
All work and no fun makes for a dull quadriplegic, so we also find time to play friendly games of robot soccer. (Laughter) I never thought I would be able to casually move around a campus like Brown on my own. 
I just wish I could afford the tuition. (Laughter) Chad Jenkins: Henry, all joking aside, I bet all of these people here would love to see you fly this drone from your bed in California 3,000 miles away. 
(Applause) Okay, Henry, have you been to D.C. lately? 
(Laughter) Are you excited to be at TEDxMidAtlantic? 
(Laughter) (Applause) Can you show us how excited you are? (Laughter) 
All right, big finish. 
Can you show us how good of a pilot you are? 
(Applause) All right, we still have a little ways to go with that, but I think it shows the promise. 
What makes Henry's story amazing is it's about understanding Henry's needs, understanding what people in Henry's situation need from technology, and then also understanding what advanced technology can provide, and then bringing those two things together for use in a wise and responsible way. 
What we're trying to do is democratize robotics, so that anybody can be a part of this. 
We're providing affordable, off-the-shelf robot platforms such as the A.R. drone, 300 dollars, the Suitable Technologies beam, only 17,000 dollars, along with open-source robotics software so that you can be a part of what we're trying to do. 
And our hope is that, by providing these tools, that you'll be able to think of better ways to provide movement for the disabled, to provide care for our aging population, to help better educate our children, to think about what the new types of middle class jobs could be for the future, to both monitor and protect our environment, and to explore the universe. 
Back to you, Henry. 
HE: Thank you, Chad. 
With this drone setup, we show the potential for bedridden people to once again be able to explore the outside world, and robotics will eventually provide a level playing field where one is only limited by their mental acuity and imagination, where the disabled are able to perform the same activities as everyone else, and perhaps better, and technology will even allow us to provide an outlet for many people who are presently considered vegetables. 
One hundred years ago, I would have been treated like a vegetable. 
Actually, that's not true. 
I would have died. 
It is up to us, all of us, to decide how robotics will be used, for good or for evil, for simply replacing people or for making people better, for allowing us to do and enjoy more. 
Our goal for robotics is to unlock everyone's mental power by making the world more physically accessible to people such as myself and others like me around the globe. 
With the help of people like you, we can make this dream a reality. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When I got my current job, I was given a good piece of advice, which was to interview three politicians every day. 
And from that much contact with politicians, I can tell you they're all emotional freaks of one sort or another. 
They have what I called "" logorrhea dementia, "" which is they talk so much they drive themselves insane. 
(Laughter) But what they do have is incredible social skills. 
When you meet them, they lock into you, they look you in the eye, they invade your personal space, they massage the back of your head. 
I had dinner with a Republican senator several months ago who kept his hand on my inner thigh throughout the whole meal — squeezing it. 
I once — this was years ago — I saw Ted Kennedy and Dan Quayle meet in the well of the Senate. 
And they were friends, and they hugged each other and they were laughing, and their faces were like this far apart. 
And they were moving and grinding and moving their arms up and down each other. 
And I was like, "" Get a room. I don't want to see this. "" But they have those social skills. 
Another case: Last election cycle, I was following Mitt Romney around New Hampshire, and he was campaigning with his five perfect sons: Bip, Chip, Rip, Zip, Lip and Dip. 
(Laughter) And he's going into a diner. 
And he goes into the diner, introduces himself to a family and says, "" What village are you from in New Hampshire? "" And then he describes the home he owned in their village. 
And so he goes around the room, and then as he's leaving the diner, he first-names almost everybody he's just met. 
I was like, "" Okay, that's social skill. "" But the paradox is, when a lot of these people slip into the policy-making mode, that social awareness vanishes and they start talking like accountants. 
So in the course of my career, I have covered a series of failures. 
We sent economists in the Soviet Union with privatization plans when it broke up, and what they really lacked was social trust. 
We invaded Iraq with a military oblivious to the cultural and psychological realities. 
We had a financial regulatory regime based on the assumptions that traders were rational creatures who wouldn't do anything stupid. 
For 30 years, I've been covering school reform and we've basically reorganized the bureaucratic boxes — charters, private schools, vouchers — but we've had disappointing results year after year. 
And the fact is, people learn from people they love. 
And if you're not talking about the individual relationship between a teacher and a student, you're not talking about that reality. 
But that reality is expunged from our policy-making process. 
And so that's led to a question for me: Why are the most socially-attuned people on earth completely dehumanized when they think about policy? 
And I came to the conclusion, this is a symptom of a larger problem. 
That, for centuries, we've inherited a view of human nature based on the notion that we're divided selves, that reason is separated from the emotions and that society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions. 
And it's led to a view of human nature that we're rational individuals who respond in straightforward ways to incentives, and it's led to ways of seeing the world where people try to use the assumptions of physics to measure how human behavior is. 
And it's produced a great amputation, a shallow view of human nature. 
We're really good at talking about material things, but we're really bad at talking about emotions. 
We're really good at talking about skills and safety and health; we're really bad at talking about character. 
Alasdair MacIntyre, the famous philosopher, said that, "" We have the concepts of the ancient morality of virtue, honor, goodness, but we no longer have a system by which to connect them. "" And so this has led to a shallow path in politics, but also in a whole range of human endeavors. 
You can see it in the way we raise our young kids. 
You go to an elementary school at three in the afternoon and you watch the kids come out, and they're wearing these 80-pound backpacks. 
If the wind blows them over, they're like beetles stuck there on the ground. 
You see these cars that drive up — usually it's Saabs and Audis and Volvos, because in certain neighborhoods it's socially acceptable to have a luxury car, so long as it comes from a country hostile to U.S. foreign policy — that's fine. 
They get picked up by these creatures I've called uber-moms, who are highly successful career women who have taken time off to make sure all their kids get into Harvard. 
And you can usually tell the uber-moms because they actually weigh less than their own children. 
(Laughter) So at the moment of conception, they're doing little butt exercises. 
Babies flop out, they're flashing Mandarin flashcards at the things. 
Driving them home, and they want them to be enlightened, so they take them to Ben & Jerry's ice cream company with its own foreign policy. 
In one of my books, I joke that Ben & Jerry's should make a pacifist toothpaste — doesn't kill germs, just asks them to leave. 
It would be a big seller. 
(Laughter) And they go to Whole Foods to get their baby formula, and Whole Foods is one of those progressive grocery stores where all the cashiers look like they're on loan from Amnesty International. (Laughter) 
They buy these seaweed-based snacks there called Veggie Booty with Kale, which is for kids who come home and say, "Mom, mom, I want a snack that'll help prevent colon-rectal cancer." (Laughter) 
And so the kids are raised in a certain way, jumping through achievement hoops of the things we can measure — SAT prep, oboe, soccer practice. 
They get into competitive colleges, they get good jobs, and sometimes they make a success of themselves in a superficial manner, and they make a ton of money. 
And sometimes you can see them at vacation places like Jackson Hole or Aspen. 
And they've become elegant and slender — they don't really have thighs; they just have one elegant calve on top of another. 
(Laughter) They have kids of their own, and they've achieved a genetic miracle by marrying beautiful people, so their grandmoms look like Gertrude Stein, their daughters looks like Halle Berry — I don't know how they've done that. 
They get there and they realize it's fashionable now to have dogs a third as tall as your ceiling heights. 
So they've got these furry 160-pound dogs — all look like velociraptors, all named after Jane Austen characters. 
And then when they get old, they haven't really developed a philosophy of life, but they've decided, "" I've been successful at everything; I'm just not going to die. "" And so they hire personal trainers; they're popping Cialis like breath mints. 
You see them on the mountains up there. 
They're cross-country skiing up the mountain with these grim expressions that make Dick Cheney look like Jerry Lewis. 
(Laughter) And as they whiz by you, it's like being passed by a little iron Raisinet going up the hill. (Laughter) 
And so this is part of what life is, but it's not all of what life is. 
And over the past few years, I think we've been given a deeper view of human nature and a deeper view of who we are. 
And it's not based on theology or philosophy, it's in the study of the mind, across all these spheres of research, from neuroscience to the cognitive scientists, behavioral economists, psychologists, sociology, we're developing a revolution in consciousness. 
And when you synthesize it all, it's giving us a new view of human nature. 
And far from being a coldly materialistic view of nature, it's a new humanism, it's a new enchantment. 
And I think when you synthesize this research, you start with three key insights. 
The first insight is that while the conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species, the unconscious mind does most of the work. 
And so one way to formulate that is the human mind can take in millions of pieces of information a minute, of which it can be consciously aware of about 40. 
And this leads to oddities. 
One of my favorite is that people named Dennis are disproportionately likely to become dentists, people named Lawrence become lawyers, because unconsciously we gravitate toward things that sound familiar, which is why I named my daughter President of the United States Brooks. 
(Laughter) Another finding is that the unconscious, far from being dumb and sexualized, is actually quite smart. 
So one of the most cognitively demanding things we do is buy furniture. 
It's really hard to imagine a sofa, how it's going to look in your house. 
And the way you should do that is study the furniture, let it marinate in your mind, distract yourself, and then a few days later, go with your gut, because unconsciously you've figured it out. 
The second insight is that emotions are at the center of our thinking. 
People with strokes and lesions in the emotion-processing parts of the brain are not super smart, they're actually sometimes quite helpless. 
And the "" giant "" in the field is in the room tonight and is speaking tomorrow morning — Antonio Damasio. 
And one of the things he's really shown us is that emotions are not separate from reason, but they are the foundation of reason because they tell us what to value. 
And so reading and educating your emotions is one of the central activities of wisdom. 
Now I'm a middle-aged guy. 
I'm not exactly comfortable with emotions. 
One of my favorite brain stories described these middle-aged guys. 
They put them into a brain scan machine — this is apocryphal by the way, but I don't care — and they had them watch a horror movie, and then they had them describe their feelings toward their wives. 
And the brain scans were identical in both activities. 
It was just sheer terror. 
So me talking about emotion is like Gandhi talking about gluttony, but it is the central organizing process of the way we think. 
It tells us what to imprint. 
The brain is the record of the feelings of a life. 
And the third insight is that we're not primarily self-contained individuals. 
We're social animals, not rational animals. 
We emerge out of relationships, and we are deeply interpenetrated, one with another. 
And so when we see another person, we reenact in our own minds what we see in their minds. 
When we watch a car chase in a movie, it's almost as if we are subtly having a car chase. 
When we watch pornography, it's a little like having sex, though probably not as good. 
And we see this when lovers walk down the street, when a crowd in Egypt or Tunisia gets caught up in an emotional contagion, the deep interpenetration. 
And this revolution in who we are gives us a different way of seeing, I think, politics, a different way, most importantly, of seeing human capital. 
We are now children of the French Enlightenment. 
We believe that reason is the highest of the faculties. 
But I think this research shows that the British Enlightenment, or the Scottish Enlightenment, with David Hume, Adam Smith, actually had a better handle on who we are — that reason is often weak, our sentiments are strong, and our sentiments are often trustworthy. 
And this work corrects that bias in our culture, that dehumanizing bias. 
It gives us a deeper sense of what it actually takes for us to thrive in this life. 
When we think about human capital we think about the things we can measure easily — things like grades, SAT's, degrees, the number of years in schooling. 
What it really takes to do well, to lead a meaningful life, are things that are deeper, things we don't really even have words for. 
And so let me list just a couple of the things I think this research points us toward trying to understand. 
The first gift, or talent, is mindsight — the ability to enter into other people's minds and learn what they have to offer. 
Babies come with this ability. 
Meltzoff, who's at the University of Washington, leaned over a baby who was 43 minutes old. 
He wagged his tongue at the baby. 
The baby wagged her tongue back. 
Babies are born to interpenetrate into Mom's mind and to download what they find — their models of how to understand reality. 
In the United States, 55 percent of babies have a deep two-way conversation with Mom and they learn models to how to relate to other people. 
And those people who have models of how to relate have a huge head start in life. 
Scientists at the University of Minnesota did a study in which they could predict with 77 percent accuracy, at age 18 months, who was going to graduate from high school, based on who had good attachment with mom. 
Twenty percent of kids do not have those relationships. 
They are what we call avoidantly attached. 
They have trouble relating to other people. 
They go through life like sailboats tacking into the wind — wanting to get close to people, but not really having the models of how to do that. 
And so this is one skill of how to hoover up knowledge, one from another. 
A second skill is equipoise, the ability to have the serenity to read the biases and failures in your own mind. 
So for example, we are overconfidence machines. 
Ninety-five percent of our professors report that they are above-average teachers. 
Ninety-six percent of college students say they have above-average social skills. 
Time magazine asked Americans, "" Are you in the top one percent of earners? "" Nineteen percent of Americans are in the top one percent of earners. 
(Laughter) This is a gender-linked trait, by the way. 
Men drown at twice the rate of women, because men think they can swim across that lake. 
But some people have the ability and awareness of their own biases, their own overconfidence. 
They have epistemological modesty. 
They are open-minded in the face of ambiguity. 
They are able to adjust strength of the conclusions to the strength of their evidence. 
They are curious. 
And these traits are often unrelated and uncorrelated with IQ. 
The third trait is metis, what we might call street smarts — it's a Greek word. 
It's a sensitivity to the physical environment, the ability to pick out patterns in an environment — derive a gist. 
One of my colleagues at the Times did a great story about soldiers in Iraq who could look down a street and detect somehow whether there was an IED, a landmine, in the street. 
They couldn't tell you how they did it, but they could feel cold, they felt a coldness, and they were more often right than wrong. 
The third is what you might call sympathy, the ability to work within groups. 
And that comes in tremendously handy, because groups are smarter than individuals. 
And face-to-face groups are much smarter than groups that communicate electronically, because 90 percent of our communication is non-verbal. 
And the effectiveness of a group is not determined by the IQ of the group; it's determined by how well they communicate, how often they take turns in conversation. 
Then you could talk about a trait like blending. 
Any child can say, "" I'm a tiger, "" pretend to be a tiger. 
It seems so elementary. 
But in fact, it's phenomenally complicated to take a concept "" I "" and a concept "" tiger "" and blend them together. 
But this is the source of innovation. 
What Picasso did, for example, was take the concept "" Western art "" and the concept "" African masks "" and blend them together — not only the geometry, but the moral systems entailed in them. 
And these are skills, again, we can't count and measure. 
And then the final thing I'll mention is something you might call limerence. 
And this is not an ability; it's a drive and a motivation. 
The conscious mind hungers for success and prestige. 
The unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence, when the skull line disappears and we are lost in a challenge or a task — when a craftsman feels lost in his craft, when a naturalist feels at one with nature, when a believer feels at one with God's love. 
That is what the unconscious mind hungers for. 
And many of us feel it in love when lovers feel fused. 
And one of the most beautiful descriptions I've come across in this research of how minds interpenetrate was written by a great theorist and scientist named Douglas Hofstadter at the University of Indiana. 
He was married to a woman named Carol, and they had a wonderful relationship. 
When their kids were five and two, Carol had a stroke and a brain tumor and died suddenly. 
And Hofstadter wrote a book called "" I Am a Strange Loop. "" In the course of that book, he describes a moment — just months after Carol has died — he comes across her picture on the mantel, or on a bureau in his bedroom. 
And here's what he wrote: "" I looked at her face, and I looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes. 
And all at once I found myself saying as tears flowed, 'That's me. That's me.' And those simple words brought back many thoughts that I had had before, about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity, about the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children, about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes, but were just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, that welded us into a unit — the kind of unit I had but dimly imagined before being married and having children. 
I realized that, though Carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all, but had lived on very determinedly in my brain. "" The Greeks say we suffer our way to wisdom. 
Through his suffering, Hofstadter understood how deeply interpenetrated we are. 
Through the policy failures of the last 30 years, we have come to acknowledge, I think, how shallow our view of human nature has been. 
And now as we confront that shallowness and the failures that derive from our inability to get the depths of who we are, comes this revolution in consciousness — these people in so many fields exploring the depth of our nature and coming away with this enchanted, this new humanism. 
And when Freud discovered his sense of the unconscious, it had a vast effect on the climate of the times. 
Now we are discovering a more accurate vision of the unconscious, of who we are deep inside, and it's going to have a wonderful and profound and humanizing effect on our culture. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The 2011 Arab Spring captured the attention of the world. 
It also captured the attention of authoritarian governments in other countries, who were worried that revolution would spread. 
To respond, they ramped up surveillance of activists, journalists and dissidents who they feared would inspire revolution in their own countries. 
One prominent Bahraini activist, who was arrested and tortured by his government, has said that the interrogators showed him transcripts of his telephone calls and text messages. 
Of course, it's no secret that governments are able to intercept telephone calls and text messages. 
It's for that reason that many activists specifically avoid using the telephone. 
Instead, they use tools like Skype, which they think are immune to interception. 
They're wrong. 
There have now been over the last few years an industry of companies who provide surveillance technology to governments, specifically technology that allows those governments to hack into the computers of surveillance targets. 
Rather than intercepting the communications as they go over the wire, instead they now hack into your computer, enable your webcam, enable your microphone, and steal documents from your computer. 
When the government of Egypt fell in 2011, activists raided the office of the secret police, and among the many documents they found was this document by the Gamma Corporation, by Gamma International. 
Gamma is a German company that manufactures surveillance software and sells it only to governments. 
It's important to note that most governments don't really have the in-house capabilities to develop this software. 
Smaller ones don't have the resources or the expertise, and so there's this market of Western companies who are happy to supply them with the tools and techniques for a price. 
Gamma is just one of these companies. 
I should note also that Gamma never actually sold their software to the Egyptian government. 
They'd sent them an invoice for a sale, but the Egyptians never bought it. 
Instead, apparently, the Egyptian government used a free demo version of Gamma's software. 
(Laughter) So this screenshot is from a sales video that Gamma produced. 
Really, they're just emphasizing in a relatively slick presentation the fact that the police can sort of sit in an air-conditioned office and remotely monitor someone without them having any idea that it's going on. 
You know, your webcam light won't turn on. 
There's nothing to indicate that the microphone is enabled. 
This is the managing director of Gamma International. 
His name is Martin Muench. 
There are many photos of Mr. Muench that exist. 
This is perhaps my favorite. 
I'm just going to zoom in a little bit onto his webcam. 
You can see there's a little sticker that's placed over his camera. 
He knows what kind of surveillance is possible, and so clearly he doesn't want it to be used against him. 
Muench has said that he intends for his software to be used to capture terrorists and locate pedophiles. 
Of course, he's also acknowledged that once the software has been sold to governments, he has no way of knowing how it can be used. 
Gamma's software has been located on servers in countries around the world, many with really atrocious track records and human rights violations. 
They really are selling their software around the world. 
Gamma is not the only company in the business. 
As I said, it's a $5 billion industry. 
One of the other big guys in the industry is an Italian company called Hacking Team. 
Now, Hacking Team has what is probably the slickest presentation. 
The video they've produced is very sexy, and so I'm going to play you a clip just so you can get a feel both for the capabilities of the software but also how it's marketed to their government clients. 
(Video) Narrator: You want to look through your target's eyes. 
(Music) You have to hack your target. 
["" While your target is browsing the web, exchanging documents, receiving SMS, crossing the borders ""] You have to hit many different platforms. 
["" Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Linux ""] You have to overcome encryption and capture relevant data. 
[Skype & encrypted calls, target location, messaging, relationships, web browsing, audio & video ""] Being stealth and untraceable. 
["" Immune to any protection system Hidden collection infrastructure ""] Deployed all over your country. 
["" Up to hundreds of thousands of targets Managed from a single spot ""] Exactly what we do. 
Christopher Soghoian: So, it would be funny if it wasn't true, but, in fact, Hacking Team's software is being sold to governments around the world. 
Last year we learned, for example, that it's been used to target Moroccan journalists by the Moroccan government. 
Many, many countries it's been found in. 
So, Hacking Team has also been actively courting the U.S. law enforcement market. 
In the last year or so, the company has opened a sales office in Maryland. 
The company has also hired a spokesperson. 
They've been attending surveillance industry conferences where law enforcement officials show up. 
They've spoken at the conferences. 
What I thought was most fascinating was they've actually paid for the coffee break at one of the law enforcement conferences earlier this year. 
I can't tell you for sure that Hacking Team has sold their technology in the United States, but what I can tell you that if they haven't sold it, it isn't because they haven't been trying hard. 
So as I said before, governments that don't really have the resources to build their own tools will buy off-the-shelf surveillance software, and so for that reason, you see that the government of, say, Tunisia, might use the same software as the government of Germany. 
They're all buying off-the-shelf stuff. 
The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States does have the budget to build their own surveillance technology, and so for several years, I've been trying to figure out if and how the FBI is hacking into the computers of surveillance targets. 
My friends at an organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation — they're a civil society group — obtained hundreds of documents from the FBI detailing their next generation of surveillance technologies. 
Most of these documents were heavily redacted, but what you can see from the slides, if I zoom in, is this term: Remote Operations Unit. 
Now, when I first looked into this, I'd never heard of this unit before. 
I've been studying surveillance for more than six years. 
I'd never heard of it. 
And so I went online and I did some research, and ultimately I hit the mother lode when I went to LinkedIn, the social networking site for job seekers. 
There were lots of former U.S. government contractors who had at one point worked for the Remote Operating Unit, and were describing in surprising detail on their CVs what they had done in their former job. 
(Laughter) So I took this information and I gave it to a journalist that I know and trust at the Wall Street Journal, and she was able to contact several other former law enforcement officials who spoke on background and confirmed that yes, in fact, the FBI has a dedicated team that does nothing but hack into the computers of surveillance targets. 
Like Gamma and Hacking Team, the FBI also has the capability to remotely activate webcams, microphones, steal documents, get web browsing information, the works. 
There's sort of a big problem with governments going into hacking, and that's that terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, journalists and human rights activists all use the same kinds of computers. 
There's no drug dealer phone and there's no journalist laptop. 
We all use the same technology, and what that means then is that for governments to have the capability to hack into the computers of the real bad guys, they also have to have the capability to hack into our devices too. 
So governments around the world have been embracing this technology. 
They've been embracing hacking as a law enforcement technique, but without any real debate. 
In the United States, where I live, there have been no congressional hearings. 
There's no law that's been passed specifically authorizing this technique, and because of its power and potential for abuse, it's vital that we have an informed public debate. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Four years ago, a security researcher, or, as most people would call it, a hacker, found a way to literally make ATMs throw money at him. 
His name was Barnaby Jack, and this technique was later called "" jackpotting "" in his honor. 
I'm here today because I think we actually need hackers. 
Barnaby Jack could have easily turned into a career criminal or James Bond villain with his knowledge, but he chose to show the world his research instead. 
He believed that sometimes you have to demo a threat to spark a solution. 
And I feel the same way. 
That's why I'm here today. 
We are often terrified and fascinated by the power hackers now have. 
They scare us. 
But the choices they make have dramatic outcomes that influence us all. 
So I am here today because I think we need hackers, and in fact, they just might be the immune system for the information age. 
Sometimes they make us sick, but they also find those hidden threats in our world, and they make us fix it. 
I knew that I might get hacked for giving this talk, so let me save you the effort. 
In true TED fashion, here is my most embarrassing picture. 
But it would be difficult for you to find me in it, because I'm the one who looks like a boy standing to the side. 
I was such a nerd back then that even the boys on the Dungeons and Dragons team wouldn't let me join. 
This is who I was, but this is who I wanted to be: Angelina Jolie. 
She portrayed Acid Burn in the '95 film "" Hackers. "" She was pretty and she could rollerblade, but being a hacker, that made her powerful. 
And I wanted to be just like her, so I started spending a lot of time on hacker chat rooms and online forums. 
I remember one late night I found a bit of PHP code. 
I didn't really know what it did, but I copy-pasted it and used it anyway to get into a password-protected site like that. 
Open Sesame. 
It was a simple trick, and I was just a script kiddie back then, but to me, that trick, it felt like this, like I had discovered limitless potential at my fingertips. 
This is the rush of power that hackers feel. 
It's geeks just like me discovering they have access to superpower, one that requires the skill and tenacity of their intellect, but thankfully no radioactive spiders. 
But with great power comes great responsibility, and you all like to think that if we had such powers, we would only use them for good. 
But what if you could read your ex's emails, or add a couple zeros to your bank account. 
What would you do then? 
Indeed, many hackers do not resist those temptations, and so they are responsible in one way or another to billions of dollars lost each year to fraud, malware or plain old identity theft, which is a serious issue. 
But there are other hackers, hackers who just like to break things, and it is precisely those hackers that can find the weaker elements in our world and make us fix it. 
This is what happened last year when another security researcher called Kyle Lovett discovered a gaping hole in the design of certain wireless routers like you might have in your home or office. 
He learned that anyone could remotely connect to these devices over the Internet and download documents from hard drives attached to those routers, no password needed. 
He reported it to the company, of course, but they ignored his report. 
Perhaps they thought universal access was a feature, not a bug, until two months ago when a group of hackers used it to get into people's files. 
But they didn't steal anything. 
They left a note: Your router and your documents can be accessed by anyone in the world. 
Here's what you should do to fix it. 
We hope we helped. 
By getting into people's files like that, yeah, they broke the law, but they also forced that company to fix their product. 
Making vulnerabilities known to the public is a practice called full disclosure in the hacker community, and it is controversial, but it does make me think of how hackers have an evolving effect on technologies we use every day. 
This is what Khalil did. 
Khalil is a Palestinian hacker from the West Bank, and he found a serious privacy flaw on Facebook which he attempted to report through the company's bug bounty program. 
These are usually great arrangements for companies to reward hackers disclosing vulnerabilities they find in their code. 
Unfortunately, due to some miscommunications, his report was not acknowledged. 
Frustrated with the exchange, he took to use his own discovery to post on Mark Zuckerberg's wall. 
This got their attention, all right, and they fixed the bug, but because he hadn't reported it properly, he was denied the bounty usually paid out for such discoveries. 
Thankfully for Khalil, a group of hackers were watching out for him. 
In fact, they raised more than 13,000 dollars to reward him for this discovery, raising a vital discussion in the technology industry about how we come up with incentives for hackers to do the right thing. 
But I think there's a greater story here still. 
Even companies founded by hackers, like Facebook was, still have a complicated relationship when it comes to hackers. 
And so for more conservative organizations, it is going to take time and adapting in order to embrace hacker culture and the creative chaos that it brings with it. 
But I think it's worth the effort, because the alternative, to blindly fight all hackers, is to go against the power you cannot control at the cost of stifling innovation and regulating knowledge. 
These are things that will come back and bite you. 
It is even more true if we go after hackers that are willing to risk their own freedom for ideals like the freedom of the web, especially in times like this, like today even, as governments and corporates fight to control the Internet. 
I find it astounding that someone from the shadowy corners of cyberspace can become its voice of opposition, its last line of defense even, perhaps someone like Anonymous, the leading brand of global hacktivism. 
This universal hacker movement needs no introduction today, but six years ago they were not much more than an Internet subculture dedicated to sharing silly pictures of funny cats and Internet trolling campaigns. 
Their moment of transformation was in early 2008 when the Church of Scientology attempted to remove certain leaked videos from appearing on certain websites. 
This is when Anonymous was forged out of the seemingly random collection of Internet dwellers. 
It turns out, the Internet doesn't like it when you try to remove things from it, and it will react with cyberattacks and elaborate pranks and with a series of organized protests all around the world, from my hometown of Tel Aviv to Adelaide, Australia. 
This proved that Anonymous and this idea can rally the masses from the keyboards to the streets, and it laid the foundations for dozens of future operations against perceived injustices to their online and offline world. 
Since then, they've gone after many targets. 
They've uncovered corruption, abuse. 
They've hacked popes and politicians, and I think their effect is larger than simple denial of service attacks that take down websites or even leak sensitive documents. 
I think that, like Robin Hood, they are in the business of redistribution, but what they are after isn't your money. 
It's not your documents. It's your attention. 
They grab the spotlight for causes they support, forcing us to take note, acting as a global magnifying glass for issues that we are not as aware of but perhaps we should be. 
They have been called many names from criminals to terrorists, and I cannot justify their illegal means, but the ideas they fight for are ones that matter to us all. 
The reality is, hackers can do a lot more than break things. 
They can bring people together. 
And if the Internet doesn't like it when you try to remove things from it, just watch what happens when you try to shut the Internet down. 
This took place in Egypt in January 2011, and as President Hosni Mubarak attempted a desperate move to quash the rising revolution on the streets of Cairo, he sent his personal troops down to Egypt's Internet service providers and had them physically kill the switch on the country's connection to the world overnight. 
For a government to do a thing like that was unprecedented, and for hackers, it made it personal. 
Hackers like the Telecomix group were already active on the ground, helping Egyptians bypass censorship using clever workarounds like Morse code and ham radio. 
It was high season for low tech, which the government couldn't block, but when the Net went completely down, Telecomix brought in the big guns. 
They found European service providers that still had 20-year-old analog dial-up access infrastructure. 
They opened up 300 of those lines for Egyptians to use, serving slow but sweet Internet connection for Egyptians. 
This worked. 
It worked so well, in fact, one guy even used it to download an episode of "" How I Met Your Mother. "" But while Egypt's future is still uncertain, when the same thing happened in Syria just one year later, Telecomix were prepared with those Internet lines, and Anonymous, they were perhaps the first international group to officially denounce the actions of the Syrian military by defacing their website. 
But with this sort of power, it really depends on where you stand, because one man's hero can be another's villain, and so the Syrian Electronic Army is a pro-Assad group of hackers who support his contentious regime. 
They've taken down multiple high-profile targets in the past few years, including the Associated Press's Twitter account, in which they posted a message about an attack on the White House injuring President Obama. 
This tweet was fake, of course, but the resulting drop in the Dow Jones index that day was most certainly not, and a lot of people lost a lot of money. 
This sort of thing is happening all over the world right now. 
In conflicts from the Crimean Peninsula to Latin America, from Europe to the United States, hackers are a force for social, political and military influence. 
As individuals or in groups, volunteers or military conflicts, there are hackers everywhere. 
They come from all walks of life, ethnicities, ideologies and genders, I might add. 
They are now shaping the world's stage. 
Hackers represent an exceptional force for change in the 21st century. 
This is because access to information is a critical currency of power, one which governments would like to control, a thing they attempt to do by setting up all-you-can-eat surveillance programs, a thing they need hackers for, by the way. 
And so the establishment has long had a love-hate relationship when it comes to hackers, because the same people who demonize hacking also utilize it at large. 
Two years ago, I saw General Keith Alexander. 
He's the NSA director and U.S. cyber commander, but instead of his four star general uniform, he was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. 
This was at DEF CON, the world's largest hacker conference. 
Perhaps like me, General Alexander didn't see 12,000 criminals that day in Vegas. 
I think he saw untapped potential. 
In fact, he was there to give a hiring pitch. 
"" In this room right here, "" he said, "is the talent our nation needs." 
Well, hackers in the back row replied, "Then stop arresting us." 
(Applause) Indeed, for years, hackers have been on the wrong side of the fence, but in light of what we know now, who is more watchful of our online world? 
The rules of the game are not that clear anymore, but hackers are perhaps the only ones still capable of challenging overreaching governments and data-hoarding corporates on their own playing field. 
To me, that represents hope. 
For the past three decades, hackers have done a lot of things, but they have also impacted civil liberties, innovation and Internet freedom, so I think it's time we take a good look at how we choose to portray them, because if we keep expecting them to be the bad guys, how can they be the heroes too? 
My years in the hacker world have made me realize both the problem and the beauty about hackers: They just can't see something broken in the world and leave it be. 
They are compelled to either exploit it or try and change it, and so they find the vulnerable aspects in our rapidly changing world. 
They make us, they force us to fix things or demand something better, and I think we need them to do just that, because after all, it is not information that wants to be free, it's us. 
Thank you very much. 
Thank you. (Applause) Hack the planet! 

If there's any power in design, that's the power of synthesis. 
The more complex the problem, the more the need for simplicity. 
So allow me to share three cases where we tried to apply design's power of synthesis. 
Let's start with the global challenge of urbanization. 
It's a fact that people are moving towards cities. 
and even if counterintuitive, it's good news. 
Evidence shows that people are better off in cities. 
But there's a problem that I would call the "" 3S "" menace: The scale, speed, and scarcity of means with which we will have to respond to this phenomenon has no precedence in history. 
For you to have an idea, out of the three billion people living in cities today, one billion are under the line of poverty. 
By 2030, out of the five billion people that will be living in cities, two billion are going to be under the line of poverty. 
That means that we will have to build a one million-person city per week with 10,000 dollars per family during the next 15 years. 
A one million-person city per week with 10,000 dollars per family. 
If we don't solve this equation, it is not that people will stop coming to cities. 
They will come anyhow, but they will live in slums, favelas and informal settlements. 
So what to do? Well, an answer may come from favelas and slums themselves. 
A clue could be in this question we were asked 10 years ago. 
We were asked to accommodate 100 families that had been occupying illegally half a hectare in the center of the city of Iquique in the north of Chile using a $10,000 subsidy with which we had to buy the land, provide the infrastructure, and build the houses that, in the best of the cases, would be of around 40 square meters. 
And by the way, they said, the cost of the land, because it's in the center of the city, is three times more than what social housing can normally afford. 
Due to the difficulty of the question, we decided to include the families in the process of understanding the constraints, and we started a participatory design process, and testing what was available there in the market. 
Detached houses, 30 families could be accommodated. 
Row houses, 60 families. 
["" 100 families ""] The only way to accommodate all of them was by building in height, and they threatened us to go on a hunger strike if we even dared to offer this as a solution, because they could not make the tiny apartments expand. 
So the conclusion with the families — and this is important, not our conclusion — with the families, was that we had a problem. 
We had to innovate. 
So what did we do? 
Well, a middle-class family lives reasonably well in around 80 square meters, but when there's no money, what the market does is to reduce the size of the house to 40 square meters. 
What we said was, what if, instead of thinking of 40 square meters as a small house, why don't we consider it half of a good one? 
When you rephrase the problem as half of a good house instead of a small one, the key question is, which half do we do? 
And we thought we had to do with public money the half that families won't be able to do individually. 
We identified five design conditions that belonged to the hard half of a house, and we went back to the families to do two things: join forces and split tasks. 
Our design was something in between a building and a house. 
As a building, it could pay for expensive, well-located land, and as a house, it could expand. 
If, in the process of not being expelled to the periphery while getting a house, families kept their network and their jobs, we knew that the expansion would begin right away. 
So we went from this initial social housing to a middle-class unit achieved by families themselves within a couple of weeks. 
This was our first project in Iquique 10 years ago. 
This is our last project in Chile. 
Different designs, same principle: You provide the frame, and from then on, families take over. 
So the purpose of design, trying to understand and trying to give an answer to the "" 3S "" menace, scale, speed, and scarcity, is to channel people's own building capacity. 
We won't solve the one million people per week equation unless we use people's own power for building. 
So, with the right design, slums and favelas may not be the problem but actually the only possible solution. 
The second case is how design can contribute to sustainability. 
In 2012, we entered the competition for the Angelini Innovation Center, and the aim was to build the right environment for knowledge creation. 
It is accepted that for such an aim, knowledge creation, interaction among people, face-to-face contact, it's important, and we agreed on that. 
But for us, the question of the right environment was a very literal question. 
We wanted to have a working space with the right light, with the right temperature, with the right air. 
So we asked ourselves: Does the typical office building help us in that sense? 
Well, how does that building look, typically? 
It's a collection of floors, one on top of each other, with a core in the center with elevators, stairs, pipes, wires, everything, and then a glass skin on the outside that, due to direct sun radiation, creates a huge greenhouse effect inside. 
In addition to that, let's say a guy working on the seventh floor goes every single day through the third floor, but has no idea what the guy on that floor is working on. 
So we thought, well, maybe we have to turn this scheme inside out. 
And what we did was, let's have an open atrium, a hollowed core, the same collection of floors, but have the walls and the mass in the perimeter, so that when the sun hits, it's not impacting directly glass, but a wall. 
When you have an open atrium inside, you are able to see what others are doing from within the building, and you have a better way to control light, and when you place the mass and the walls in the perimeter, then you are preventing direct sun radiation. 
You may also open those windows and get cross-ventilation. 
We just made those openings of such a scale that they could work as elevated squares, outdoor spaces throughout the entire height of the building. 
None of this is rocket science. 
You don't require sophisticated programming. 
It's not about technology. 
This is just archaic, primitive common sense, and by using common sense, we went from 120 kilowatts per square meter per year, which is the typical energy consumption for cooling a glass tower, to 40 kilowatts per square meter per year. 
So with the right design, sustainability is nothing but the rigorous use of common sense. 
Last case I would like to share is how design can provide more comprehensive answers against natural disasters. 
You may know that Chile, in 2010, was hit by an 8.8 Richter scale earthquake and tsunami, and we were called to work in the reconstruction of the Constitución, in the southern part of the country. 
We were given 100 days, three months, to design almost everything, from public buildings to public space, street grid, transportation, housing, and mainly how to protect the city against future tsunamis. 
This was new in Chilean urban design, and there were in the air a couple of alternatives. 
First one: Forbid installation on ground zero. 
Thirty million dollars spent mainly in land expropriation. 
This is exactly what's being discussed in Japan nowadays, and if you have a disciplined population like the Japanese, this may work, but we know that in Chile, this land is going to be occupied illegally anyhow, so this alternative was unrealistic and undesirable. 
Second alternative: build a big wall, heavy infrastructure to resist the energy of the waves. 
This alternative was conveniently lobbied by big building companies, because it meant 42 million dollars in contracts, and was also politically preferred, because it required no land expropriation. 
But Japan proved that trying to resist the force of nature is useless. 
So this alternative was irresponsible. 
As in the housing process, we had to include the community in the way of finding a solution for this, and we started a participatory design process. 
(Video) [In Spanish] Loudspeaker: What kind of city do you want? 
Vote for Constitución. 
Go to the Open House and express your options. 
Participate! 
Fisherman: I am a fisherman. 
Twenty-five fishermen work for me. 
Where should I take them? To the forest? 
Man: So why can't we have a concrete defense? 
Done well, of course. 
Man 2: I am the history of Constitución. 
And you come here to tell me that I cannot keep on living here? 
My whole family has lived here, I raised my children here, and my children will also raise their children here. 
and my grandchildren and everyone else will. 
But why are you imposing this on me? 
You! You are imposing this on me! 
In danger zone I am not authorized to build. 
He himself is saying that. 
Man 3: No, no, no, Nieves... 
Alejandro Aravena: I don't know if you were able to read the subtitles, but you can tell from the body language that participatory design is not a hippie, romantic, let's-all-dream-together-about- the-future-of-the-city kind of thing. 
It is actually — (Applause) It is actually not even with the families trying to find the right answer. 
It is mainly trying to identify with precision what is the right question. 
There is nothing worse than answering well the wrong question. 
So it was pretty obvious after this process that, well, we chicken out here and go away because it's too tense, or we go even further in asking, what else is bothering you? 
What other problems do you have and you want us to take care of now that the city will have to be rethought from scratch? 
And what they said was, look, fine to protect the city against future tsunamis, we really appreciate, but the next one is going to come in, what, 20 years? 
But every single year, we have problems of flooding due to rain. 
In addition, we are in the middle of the forest region of the country, and our public space sucks. 
It's poor and it's scarce. 
And the origin of the city, our identity, is not really connected to the buildings that fell, it is connected to the river, but the river cannot be accessed publicly, because its shores are privately owned. 
So we thought that we had to produce a third alternative, and our approach was against geographical threats, have geographical answers. 
What if, in between the city and the sea we have a forest, a forest that doesn't try to resist the energy of nature, but dissipates it by introducing friction? 
A forest that may be able to laminate the water and prevent the flooding? 
That may pay the historical debt of public space, and that may provide, finally, democratic access to the river. 
So as a conclusion of the participatory design, the alternative was validated politically and socially, but there was still the problem of the cost: 48 million dollars. 
So what we did was a survey in the public investment system, and found out that there were three ministries with three projects in the exact same place, not knowing of the existence of the other projects. 
The sum of them: 52 million dollars. 
So design's power of synthesis is trying to make a more efficient use of the scarcest resource in cities, which is not money but coordination. 
By doing so, we were able to save four million dollars, and that is why the forest is today under construction. 
(Applause) So be it the force of self construction, the force of common sense, or the force of nature, all these forces need to be translated into form, and what that form is modeling and shaping is not cement, bricks, or wood. 
It is life itself. 
Design's power of synthesis is just an attempt to put at the innermost core of architecture the force of life. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

"Mom, who are these people?" 
It was an innocent question from my young daughter Alia around the time when she was three. 
We were walking along with my husband in one of Abu Dhabi's big fancy malls. 
Alia was peering at a huge poster standing tall in the middle of the mall. 
It featured the three rulers of the United Arab Emirates. 
As she tucked in my side, I bent down and explained that these were the rulers of the UAE who had worked hard to develop their nation and preserve its unity. 
She asked, "" Mom, why is it that here where we live, and back in Lebanon, where grandma and grandpa live, we never see the pictures of powerful women on the walls? 
Is it because women are not important? "" This is probably the hardest question I've had to answer in my years as a parent and in my 16-plus years of professional life, for that matter. 
I had grown up in my hometown in Lebanon, the younger of two daughters to a very hard-working pilot and director of operations for the Lebanese Airlines and a super-supportive stay-at-home mom and grandma. 
My father had encouraged my sister and I to pursue our education even though our culture emphasized at the time that it was sons and not daughters who should be professionally motivated. 
I was one of very few girls of my generation who left home at 18 to study abroad. 
My father didn't have a son, and so I, in a sense, became his. 
Fast-forward a couple of decades, and I hope I didn't do too badly in making my father proud of his would-be son. 
As I got my Bachelor's and PhD in electrical engineering, did R & D in the UK, then consulting in the Middle East, I have always been in male-dominated environments. 
Truth be told, I have never found a role model I could truly identify with. 
My mother's generation wasn't into professional leadership. 
There were some encouraging men along the way, but none knew the demands and pressures I was facing, pressures that got particularly acute when I had my own two beautiful children. 
And although Western women love to give us poor, oppressed Arab women advice, they live different lives with different constraints. 
So Arab women of my generation have had to become our own role models. 
We have had to juggle more than Arab men, and we have had to face more cultural rigidity than Western women. 
As a result, I would like to think that we poor, oppressed women actually have some useful, certainly hard-earned lessons to share, lessons that might turn out useful for anyone wishing to thrive in the modern world. 
Here are three of mine. 
["" Convert their sh * t into your fuel. ""] (Laughter) (Applause) There is this word that everybody is touting as the key to success: resilience. 
Well, what exactly is resilience, and how do you develop it? 
I believe resilience is simply the ability to transform shit into fuel. 
In my previous job, well before my current firm, I was working with a man we will call John. 
I had teamed up with John and was working hard, hoping he would notice how great I was and that he would come to support my case to make partner at the firm. 
I was, in addition to delivering on my consulting projects, writing passionately on the topic of women economic empowerment. 
One day, I got to present my research to a roomful of MBA students. 
John was part of the audience listening for the first time to the details of my study. 
As I proceeded with my presentation, I could see John in the corner of my eye. 
He had turned a dark shade of pink and had slid under his chair in apparent shame. 
I finished my presentation to an applauding audience and we rushed out and jumped into the car. 
There he exploded. 
"" What you did up there was unacceptable! 
You are a consultant, not an activist! "" I said, "" John, I don't understand. 
I presented a couple of gender parity indices, and some conclusions about the Arab world. 
Yes, we do happen to be today at the bottom of the index, but what is it that I said or presented that was not factual? "" To which he replied, "" The whole premise of your study is wrong. 
What you are doing is dangerous and will break the social fabric of our society. "" He paused, then added, "When women have children, their place is in the home." 
Time stood still for a long while, and all I could think and repeat in the chaos of my brain was: "" You can forget about that partnership, Leila. 
It's just never going to happen. "" It took me a couple of days to fully absorb this incident and its implications, but once I did, I reached three conclusions. 
One, that these were his issues, his complexes. 
There may be many like him in our society, but I would never let their issues become mine. 
Two, that I needed another sponsor, and fast. 
(Laughter) I got one, by the way, and boy, was he great. 
And three, that I would get to show John what women with children can do. 
I apply this lesson equally well to my personal life. 
As I have progressed in my career, I have received many words of encouragement, but I have also often been met by women, men and couples who have clearly had an issue with my husband and I having chosen the path of a dual-career couple. 
So you get this well-meaning couple who tells you straight out at a family gathering or at a friends gathering, that, come on, you must know you're not a great mom, given how much you're investing in your career, right? 
I would lie if I said these words didn't hurt. 
My children are the most precious thing to me, and the thought that I could be failing them in any way is intolerable. 
But just like I did with John, I quickly reminded myself that these were their issues, their complexes. 
So instead of replying, I gave back one of my largest smiles as I saw, in flashing light, the following sign in my mind's eye. 
[Be happy, it drives people crazy.] (Applause) You see, as a young woman in these situations, you have two options. 
You can either decide to internalize these negative messages that are being thrown at you, to let them make you feel like a failure, like success is way too hard to ever achieve, or you can choose to see that others' negativity is their own issue, and instead transform it into your own personal fuel. 
I have learned to always go for option two, and I have found that it has taken me from strength to strength. 
And it's true what they say: success is the best revenge. 
Some women in the Middle East are lucky enough to be married to someone supportive of their career. 
Correction: I should say "" smart enough, "" because who you marry is your own choice, and you'd better marry someone supportive if you plan to have a long career. 
Still today, the Arab man is not an equal contributor in the home. 
It's simply not expected by our society, and even frowned upon as not very manly. 
As for the Arab woman, our society still assumes that her primary source of happiness should be the happiness and prosperity of her children and husband. 
She mostly exists for her family. 
Things are changing, but it will take time. 
For now, it means that the professional Arab woman has to somehow maintain the perfect home, make sure that her children's every need is being taken care of and manage her demanding career. 
To achieve this, I have found the hard way that you need to apply your hard-earned professional skills to your personal life. 
You need to work your life. 
Here is how I do this in my personal life. 
One thing to know about the Middle East is that nearly every family has access to affordable domestic help. 
The challenge therefore becomes how to recruit effectively. 
Just like I would in my business life, I have based the selection of who would support me with my children while I'm at work on a strong referral. 
Cristina had worked for four years with my sister and the quality of her work was well-established. 
She is now an integral member of our family, having been with us since Alia was six months old. 
She makes sure that the house is running smoothly while I'm at work, and I make sure to empower her in the most optimal conditions for her and my children, just like I would my best talent at work. 
This lesson applies whatever your childcare situation, whether an au pair, nursery, part-time nanny that you share with someone else. 
Choose very carefully, and empower. 
If you look at my calendar, you will see every working day one and a half hours from 7pm to 8: 30pm UAE time blocked and called "" family time. "" This is sacred time. 
I have done this ever since Alia was a baby. 
I do everything in my power to protect this time so that I can be home by then to spend quality time with my children, asking them about their day, checking up on homework, reading them a bedtime story and giving them lots of kisses and cuddles. 
If I'm traveling, in whatever the time zone, I use Skype to connect with my children even if I am miles away. 
Our son Burhan is five years old, and he's learning to read and do basic maths. 
Here's another confession: I have found that our daughter is actually more successful at teaching him these skills than I am. 
(Laughter) It started as a game, but Alia loves playing teacher to her little brother, and I have found that these sessions actually improve Burhan's literacy, increase Alia's sense of responsibility, and strengthen the bonding between them, a win-win all around. 
The successful Arab women I know have each found their unique approach to working their life as they continue to shoulder the lion's share of responsibility in the home. 
But this is not just about surviving in your dual role as a career woman and mother. 
This is also about being in the present. 
When I am with my children, I try to leave work out of our lives. 
Instead of worrying about how many minutes I can spend with them every day, I focus on turning these minutes into memorable moments, moments where I'm seeing my kids, hearing them, connecting with them. 
["" Join forces, don't compete. ""] Arab women of my generation have not been very visible in the public eye as they grew up. 
This explains, I think, to some extent, why you find so few women in politics in the Arab world. 
The upside of this, however, is that we have spent a lot of time developing a social skill behind the scenes, in coffee shops, in living rooms, on the phone, a social skill that is very important to success: networking. 
I would say the average Arab woman has a large network of friends and acquaintances. 
The majority of those are also women. 
In the West, it seems like ambitious women often compare themselves to other women hoping to be noticed as the most successful woman in the room. 
This leads to the much-spoken-about competitive behavior between professional women. 
If there's only room for one woman at the top, then you can't make room for others, much less lift them up. 
Arab women, generally speaking, have not fallen for this psychological trap. 
Faced with a patriarchal society, they have found that by helping each other out, all benefit. 
In my previous job, I was the most senior woman in the Middle East, so one could think that investing in my network of female colleagues couldn't bring many benefits and that I should instead invest my time developing my relationships with male seniors and peers. 
Yet two of my biggest breaks came through the support of other women. 
It was the head of marketing who initially suggested I be considered as a young global leader to the World Economic Forum. 
She was familiar with my media engagements and my publications, and when she was asked to voice her opinion, she highlighted my name. 
It was a young consultant, a Saudi lady and friend, who helped me sell my first project in Saudi Arabia, a market I was finding hard to gain traction in as a woman. 
She introduced me to a client, and that introduction led to the first of very many projects for me in Saudi. 
Today, I have two senior women on my team, and I see making them successful as key to my own success. 
Women continue to advance in the world, not fast enough, but we're moving. 
The Arab world, too, is making progress, despite many recent setbacks. 
Just this year, the UAE appointed five new female ministers to its cabinet, for a total of eight female ministers. 
That's nearly 28 percent of the cabinet, and more than many developed countries can claim. 
This is today my daughter Alia's favorite picture. 
This is the result, no doubt, of great leadership, but it is also the result of strong Arab women not giving up and continuously pushing the boundaries. 
It is the result of Arab women deciding every day like me to convert shit into fuel, to work their life to keep work out of their life, and to join forces and not compete. 
As I look to the future, my hopes for my daughter when she stands on this stage some 20, 30 years from now are that she be as proud to call herself her mother's daughter as her father's daughter. 
My hopes for my son are that by then, the expression "" her mother's son "" or "" mama's boy "" would have taken on a completely different meaning. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When I was little — and by the way, I was little once — my father told me a story about an 18th century watchmaker. 
And what this guy had done: he used to produce these fabulously beautiful watches. 
And one day, one of his customers came into his workshop and asked him to clean the watch that he'd bought. 
And the guy took it apart, and one of the things he pulled out was one of the balance wheels. 
And as he did so, his customer noticed that on the back side of the balance wheel was an engraving, were words. 
And he said to the guy, "" Why have you put stuff on the back that no one will ever see? "" And the watchmaker turned around and said, "God can see it." 
Now I'm not in the least bit religious, neither was my father, but at that point, I noticed something happening here. 
I felt something in this plexus of blood vessels and nerves, and there must be some muscles in there as well somewhere, I guess. 
But I felt something. 
And it was a physiological response. 
And from that point on, from my age at the time, I began to think of things in a different way. 
And as I took on my career as a designer, I began to ask myself the simple question: Do we actually think beauty, or do we feel it? 
Now you probably know the answer to this already. 
You probably think, well, I don't know which one you think it is, but I think it's about feeling beauty. 
And so I then moved on into my design career and began to find some exciting things. 
One of the most early work was done in automotive design — some very exciting work was done there. 
And during a lot of this work, we found something, or I found something, that really fascinated me, and maybe you can remember it. 
Do you remember when lights used to just go on and off, click click, when you closed the door in a car? 
And then somebody, I think it was BMW, introduced a light that went out slowly. 
Remember that? 
I remember it clearly. 
Do you remember the first time you were in a car and it did that? 
I remember sitting there thinking, this is fantastic. 
In fact, I've never found anybody that doesn't like the light that goes out slowly. 
I thought, well what the hell's that about? 
So I started to ask myself questions about it. 
And the first was, I'd ask other people: "" Do you like it? "" "" Yes. "" "Why?" And they'd say, "Oh, it feels so natural," or, "" It's nice. "" I thought, well that's not good enough. 
Can we cut down a little bit further, because, as a designer, I need the vocabulary, I need the keyboard, of how this actually works. 
And so I did some experiments. 
And I suddenly realized that there was something that did exactly that — light to dark in six seconds — exactly that. 
Do you know what it is? Anyone? 
You see, using this bit, the thinky bit, the slow bit of the brain — using that. 
And this isn't a think, it's a feel. 
And would you do me a favor? 
For the next 14 minutes or whatever it is, will you feel stuff? 
I don't need you to think so much as I want you to feel it. 
I felt a sense of relaxation tempered with anticipation. 
And that thing that I found was the cinema or the theater. 
It's actually just happened here — light to dark in six seconds. 
And when that happens, are you sitting there going, "No, the movie's about to start," or are you going, "" That's fantastic. I'm looking forward to it. 
I get a sense of anticipation ""? 
Now I'm not a neuroscientist. 
I don't know even if there is something called a conditioned reflex. 
But it might be. 
Because the people I speak to in the northern hemisphere that used to go in the cinema get this. 
And some of the people I speak to that have never seen a movie or been to the theater don't get it in the same way. 
Everybody likes it, but some like it more than others. 
So this leads me to think of this in a different way. 
We're not feeling it. We're thinking beauty is in the limbic system — if that's not an outmoded idea. 
These are the bits, the pleasure centers, and maybe what I'm seeing and sensing and feeling is bypassing my thinking. 
The wiring from your sensory apparatus to those bits is shorter than the bits that have to pass through the thinky bit, the cortex. 
They arrive first. 
So how do we make that actually work? 
And how much of that reactive side of it is due to what we already know, or what we're going to learn, about something? 
This is one of the most beautiful things I know. 
It's a plastic bag. 
And when I looked at it first, I thought, no, there's no beauty in that. 
Then I found out, post exposure, that this plastic bag if I put it into a filthy puddle or a stream filled with coliforms and all sorts of disgusting stuff, that that filthy water will migrate through the wall of the bag by osmosis and end up inside it as pure, potable drinking water. 
And all of a sudden, this plastic bag was extremely beautiful to me. 
Now I'm going to ask you again to switch on the emotional bit. 
Would you mind taking the brain out, and I just want you to feel something. 
Look at that. What are you feeling about it? 
Is it beautiful? Is it exciting? 
I'm watching your faces very carefully. 
There's some rather bored-looking gentlemen and some slightly engaged-looking ladies who are picking up something off that. 
Maybe there's an innocence to it. 
Now I'm going to tell you what it is. Are you ready? 
This is the last act on this Earth of a little girl called Heidi, five years old, before she died of cancer to the spine. 
It's the last thing she did, the last physical act. 
Look at that picture. 
Look at the innocence. Look at the beauty in it. 
Is it beautiful now? 
Stop. Stop. How do you feel? 
Where are you feeling this? 
I'm feeling it here. I feel it here. 
And I'm watching your faces, because your faces are telling me something. 
The lady over there is actually crying, by the way. 
But what are you doing? 
I watch what people do. 
I watch faces. 
I watch reactions. 
Because I have to know how people react to things. 
And one of the most common faces on something faced with beauty, something stupefyingly delicious, is what I call the OMG. 
And by the way, there's no pleasure in that face. 
It's not a "" this is wonderful! "" The eyebrows are doing this, the eyes are defocused, and the mouth is hanging open. 
That's not the expression of joy. 
There's something else in that. 
There's something weird happening. 
So pleasure seems to be tempered by a whole series of different things coming in. 
Poignancy is a word I love as a designer. 
It means something triggering a big emotional response, often quite a sad emotional response, but it's part of what we do. 
It isn't just about nice. 
And this is the dilemma, this is the paradox, of beauty. 
Sensorily, we're taking in all sorts of things — mixtures of things that are good, bad, exciting, frightening — to come up with that sensorial exposure, that sensation of what's going on. 
Pathos appears obviously as part of what you just saw in that little girl's drawing. 
And also triumph, this sense of transcendence, this "" I never knew that. Ah, this is something new. "" And that's packed in there as well. 
And as we assemble these tools, from a design point of view, I get terribly excited about it, because these are things, as we've already said, they're arriving at the brain, it would seem, before cognition, before we can manipulate them — electrochemical party tricks. 
Now what I'm also interested in is: Is it possible to separate intrinsic and extrinsic beauty? 
By that, I mean intrinsically beautiful things, just something that's exquisitely beautiful, that's universally beautiful. 
Very hard to find. Maybe you've got some examples of it. 
Very hard to find something that, to everybody, is a very beautiful thing, without a certain amount of information packed in there before. 
So a lot of it tends to be extrinsic. 
It's mediated by information before the comprehension. 
Or the information's added on at the back, like that little girl's drawing that I showed you. 
Now when talking about beauty you can't get away from the fact that a lot experiments have been done in this way with faces and what have you. 
And one of the most tedious ones, I think, was saying that beauty was about symmetry. 
Well it obviously isn't. 
This is a more interesting one where half faces were shown to some people, and then to add them into a list of most beautiful to least beautiful and then exposing a full face. 
And they found that it was almost exact coincidence. 
So it wasn't about symmetry. 
In fact, this lady has a particularly asymmetrical face, of which both sides are beautiful. 
But they're both different. 
And as a designer, I can't help meddling with this, so I pulled it to bits and sort of did stuff like this, and tried to understand what the individual elements were, but feeling it as I go. 
Now I can feel a sensation of delight and beauty if I look at that eye. 
I'm not getting it off the eyebrow. 
And the earhole isn't doing it to me at all. 
So I don't know how much this is helping me, but it's helping to guide me to the places where the signals are coming off. 
And as I say, I'm not a neuroscientist, but to understand how I can start to assemble things that will very quickly bypass this thinking part and get me to the enjoyable precognitive elements. 
Anais Nin and the Talmud have told us time and time again that we see things not as they are, but as we are. 
So I'm going to shamelessly expose something to you, which is beautiful to me. 
And this is the F1 MV Agusta. 
Ahhhh. 
It is really — I mean, I can't express to you how exquisite this object is. 
But I also know why it's exquisite to me, because it's a palimpsest of things. 
It's masses and masses of layers. 
This is just the bit that protrudes into our physical dimension. 
It's something much bigger. 
Layer after layer of legend, sport, details that resonate. 
I mean, if I just go through some of them now — I know about laminar flow when it comes to air-piercing objects, and that does it consummately well, you can see it can. 
So that's getting me excited. 
And I feel that here. 
This bit, the big secret of automotive design — reflection management. 
It's not about the shapes, it's how the shapes reflect light. 
Now that thing, light flickers across it as you move, so it becomes a kinetic object, even though it's standing still — managed by how brilliantly that's done on the reflection. 
This little relief on the footplate, by the way, to a rider means there's something going on underneath it — in this case, a drive chain running at 300 miles and hour probably, taking the power from the engine. 
I'm getting terribly excited as my mind and my eyes flick across these things. 
Titanium lacquer on this. 
I can't tell you how wonderful this is. 
That's how you stop the nuts coming off at high speed on the wheel. 
I'm really getting into this now. 
And of course, a racing bike doesn't have a prop stand, but this one, because it's a road bike, it all goes away and it folds into this little gap. 
So it disappears. 
And then I can't tell you how hard it is to do that radiator, which is curved. 
Why would you do that? 
Because I know we need to bring the wheel farther into the aerodynamics. 
So it's more expensive, but it's wonderful. 
And to cap it all, brand royalty — Agusta, Count Agusta, from the great histories of this stuff. 
The bit that you can't see is the genius that created this. 
Massimo Tamburini. 
They call him "" The Plumber "" in Italy, as well as "" Maestro, "" because he actually is engineer and craftsman and sculptor at the same time. 
There's so little compromise on this, you can't see it. 
But unfortunately, the likes of me and people that are like me have to deal with compromise all the time with beauty. 
We have to deal with it. 
So I have to work with a supply chain, and I've got to work with the technologies, and I've got to work with everything else all the time, and so compromises start to fit into it. 
And so look at her. 
I've had to make a bit of a compromise there. 
I've had to move that part across, but only a millimeter. 
No one's noticed, have they yet? 
Did you see what I did? 
I moved three things by a millimeter. 
Pretty? Yes. 
Beautiful? Maybe lesser. 
But then, of course, the consumer says that doesn't really matter. 
So that's okay, isn't it? 
Another millimeter? 
No one's going to notice those split lines and changes. 
It's that easy to lose beauty, because beauty's incredibly difficult to do. 
And only a few people can do it. 
And a focus group cannot do it. 
And a team rarely can do it. 
It takes a central cortex, if you like, to be able to orchestrate all those elements at the same time. 
This is a beautiful water bottle — some of you know of it — done by Ross Lovegrove, the designer. 
This is pretty close to intrinsic beauty. This one, as long as you know what water is like then you can experience this. 
It's lovely because it is an embodiment of something refreshing and delicious. 
I might like it more than you like it, because I know how bloody hard it is to do it. 
It's stupefyingly difficult to make something that refracts light like that, that comes out of the tool correctly, that goes down the line without falling over. 
Underneath this, like the story of the swan, is a million things very difficult to do. 
So all hail to that. 
It's a fantastic example, a simple object. 
And the one I showed you before was, of course, a massively complex one. 
And they're working in beauty in slightly different ways because of it. 
You all, I guess, like me, enjoy watching a ballet dancer dance. 
And part of the joy of it is, you know the difficulty. 
You also may be taking into account the fact that it's incredibly painful. 
Anybody seen a ballet dancer's toes when they come out of the points? 
While she's doing these graceful arabesques and plies and what have you, something horrible's going on down here. 
The comprehension of it leads us to a greater and heightened sense of the beauty of what's actually going on. 
Now I'm using microseconds wrongly here, so please ignore me. 
But what I have to do now, feeling again, what I've got to do is to be able to supply enough of these enzymes, of these triggers into something early on in the process, that you pick it up, not through your thinking, but through your feeling. 
So we're going to have a little experiment. 
Right, are you ready? I'm going to show you something for a very, very brief moment. 
Are you ready? Okay. 
Did you think that was a bicycle when I showed it to you at the first flash? 
It's not. 
Tell me something, did you think it was quick when you first saw it? Yes you did. 
Did you think it was modern? Yes you did. 
That blip, that information, shot into you before that. 
And because your brain starter motor began there, now it's got to deal with it. 
And the great thing is, this motorcycle has been styled this way specifically to engender a sense that it's green technology and it's good for you and it's light and it's all part of the future. 
So is that wrong? 
Well in this case it isn't, because it's a very, very ecologically-sound piece of technology. 
But you're a slave of that first flash. 
We are slaves to the first few fractions of a second — and that's where much of my work has to win or lose, on a shelf in a shop. 
It wins or loses at that point. 
You may see 50, 100, 200 things on a shelf as you walk down it, but I have to work within that domain, to ensure that it gets you there first. 
And finally, the layer that I love, of knowledge. 
Some of you, I'm sure, will be familiar with this. 
What's incredible about this, and the way I love to come back to it, is this is taking something that you hate or bores you, folding clothes, and if you can actually do this — who can actually do this? Anybody try to do this? 
Yeah? 
It's fantastic, isn't it? 
Look at that. Do you want to see it again? 
No time. It says I have two minutes left, so we can't do this. 
But just go to the Web, YouTube, pull it down, "" folding T-shirt. "" That's how underpaid younger-aged people have to fold your T-shirt. 
You didn't maybe know it. 
But how do you feel about it? 
It feels fantastic when you do it, you look forward to doing it, and when you tell somebody else about it — like you probably have — you look really smart. 
The knowledge bubble that sits around the outside, the stuff that costs nothing, because that knowledge is free — bundle that together and where do we come out? 
Form follows function? 
Only sometimes. Only sometimes. 
Form is function. Form is function. 
It informs, it tells us, it supplies us answers before we've even thought about it. 
And so I've stopped using words like "" form, "" and I've stopped using words like "" function "" as a designer. 
What I try to pursue now is the emotional functionality of things. 
Because if I can get that right, I can make them wonderful, and I can make them repeatedly wonderful. 
And you know what those products and services are, because you own some of them. 
They're the things that you'd snatch if the house was on fire. 
Forming the emotional bond between this thing and you is an electrochemical party trick that happens before you even think about it. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Hey guys. 
It's funny, someone just mentioned MacGyver, because that was, like, I loved it, and when I was seven, I taped a fork to a drill and I was like, "" Hey, Mom, I'm going to Olive Garden. "" And — (Drilling noise) (Laughter) And it worked really well there. 
And you know, it had a profound effect on me. 
It sounds silly, but I thought, okay, the way the world works can be changed, and it can be changed by me in these small ways. 
And my relationship to especially human-made objects which someone else said they work like this, well, I can say they work a different way, a little bit. 
And so, about 20 years later, I didn't realize the full effect of this, but I went to Costa Rica and I stayed with these Guaymí natives there, and they could pull leaves off of trees and make shingles out of them, and they could make beds out of trees, and they could — I watched this woman for three days. 
I was there. She was peeling this palm frond apart, these little threads off of it, and she'd roll the threads together and make little thicker threads, like strings, and she would weave the strings together, and as the materiality of this exact very bag formed before my eyes over those three days, the materiality of the way the world works, of reality, kind of started to unravel in my mind, because I realized that this bag and these clothes and the trampoline you have at home and the pencil sharpener, everything you have is made out of either a tree or a rock 
or something we dug out of the ground and did some process to, maybe a more complicated one, but still, everything was made that way. 
And so I had to start studying, who is it that's making these decisions? 
Who's making these things? How did they make them? 
What stops us from making them? 
Because this is how reality is created. 
So I started right away. I was at MIT Media Lab, and I was studying the maker movement and makers and creativity. 
And I started in nature, because I saw these Guaymís doing it in nature, and there just seems to be less barriers. 
So I went to Vermont to Not Back to School Camp, where there's unschoolers who are just kind of hanging out and willing to try anything. 
So I said, "" Let's go into the woods near this stream and just put stuff together, you know, make something, I don't care, geometrical shapes, just grab some junk from around you. 
We won't bring anything with us. 
And, like, within minutes, this is very easy for adults and teens to do. 
Here's a triangle that was being formed underneath a flowing stream, and the shape of an oak leaf being made by other small oak leaves being put together. 
A leaf tied to a stick with a blade of grass. 
The materiality and fleshiness and meat of the mushroom being explored by how it can hold up different objects being stuck into it. 
And after about 45 minutes, you get really intricate projects like leaves sorted by hue, so you get a color fade and put in a circle like a wreath. 
And the creator of this, he said, "This is fire. I call this fire." 
And someone asked him, "" How do you get those sticks to stay on that tree? "" And he's like, "" I don't know, but I can show you. "" And I'm like, "" Wow, that's really amazing. 
He doesn't know, but he can show you. "" So his hands know and his intuition knows, but sometimes what we know gets in the way of what could be, especially when it comes to the human-made, human-built world. 
We think we already know how something works, so we can't imagine how it could work. 
We know how it's supposed to work, so we can't suppose all the things that could be possible. 
So kids don't have as hard of a time with this, and I saw in my own son, I gave him this book. 
I'm a good hippie dad, so I'm like, "" Okay, you're going to learn to love the moon. 
I'm going to give you some building blocks and they're nonrectilinear cactus building blocks, so it's totally legit. "" But he doesn't really know what to do with these. 
I didn't show him. 
And so he's like, "" Okay, I'll just mess around with this. "" This is no different than the sticks are to the teens in the forest. 
Just going to try to put them in shapes and push on them and stuff. 
And before long, he's kind of got this mechanism where you can almost launch and catapult objects around, and he enlists us in helping him. 
And at this point, I'm starting to wonder, what kind of tools can we give people, especially adults, who know too much, so that they can see the world as malleable, so they see themselves as agents of change in their everyday lives. 
Because the most advanced scientists are really just kind of pushing the way the world itself works, pushing what matter can do, the most advanced artists are just pushing the medium, and any sufficiently complicated task, whether you're a cook or a carpenter or you're raising a child — anything that's complicated — comes up with problems that aren't solved in the middle of it, and you can't do a good job getting it done unless you can say, "" Okay, well we're just going to have to refigure this. 
I don't care that pencils are supposed to be for writing. 
I'm going to use them a different way. "" So let me show you a little demo. 
This is a little piano circuit right in here, and this is an ordinary paintbrush that I smashed it together with. (Beeping) And so, with some ketchup, — (musical notes) — and then I can kind of — (musical notes) — (Laughter) (Applause) And that's awesome, right? 
But this is not what's awesome. 
What's awesome is what happens when you give the piano circuit to people. 
A pencil is not just a pencil. 
Look what it has in the middle of it. 
That's a wire running down the middle, and not only is it a wire, if you take that piano circuit, you can thumbtack into the middle of a pencil, and you can lay out wire on the page, too, and get electrical current to run through it. 
And so you can kind of hack a pencil, just by thumbtacking into it with a little piano electrical circuit. 
And the electricity runs through your body too. 
And then you can take the little piano circuit off the pencil. 
You can make one of these brushes just on the fly. 
All you do is connect to the bristles, and the bristles are wet, so they conduct, and the person's body conducts, and leather is great to paint on, and then you can start hooking to everything, even the kitchen sink. 
The metal in the sink is conductive. 
Flowing water acts like a theremin or a violin. 
(Musical notes) And you can even hook to the trees. 
Anything in the world is either conductive or not conductive, and you can use those together. 
So — (Laughter) — I took this to those same teens, because those teens are really awesome, and they'll try things that I won't try. 
I don't even have access to a facial piercing if I wanted to. 
And this young woman, she made what she called a hula-looper, and as the hula hoop traveled around her body, she has a circuit taped to her shirt right there. 
You can see her pointing to it in the picture. 
And every time the hula hoop would smush against her body, it would connect two little pieces of copper tape, and it would make a sound, and the next sound, and it would loop the same sounds over and over again. 
I ran these workshops everywhere. 
In Taiwan, at an art museum, this 12-year-old girl made a mushroom organ out of some mushrooms that were from Taiwan and some electrical tape and hot glue. 
And professional designers were making artifacts with this thing strapped onto it. 
And big companies like Intel or smaller design firms like Ideo or startups like Bump, were inviting me to give workshops, just to practice this idea of smashing electronics and everyday objects together. 
And then we came up with this idea to not just use electronics, but let's just smash computers with everyday objects and see how that goes over. 
And so I just want to do a quick demo. 
So this is the MaKey MaKey circuit, and I'm just going to set it up from the beginning in front of you. 
So I'll just plug it in, and now it's on by USB. 
And I'll just hook up the forward arrow. 
You guys are facing that way, so I'll hook it to this one. 
And I'll just hook up a little ground wire to it. 
And now, if I touch this piece of pizza, the slides that I showed you before should go forward. 
And now if I hook up this wire just by connecting it to the left arrow, I'm kind of programming it by where I hook it up, now I have a left arrow and a right arrow, so I should be able to go forwards and backwards and forwards and backwards. Awesome. 
And so we're like, "" We gotta put a video out about this. "" Because no one really believed that this was important or meaningful except me and, like, one other guy. 
So we made a video to prove that there's lots of stuff you can do. 
You can kind of sketch with Play-Doh and just Google for game controllers. 
Just ordinary Play-Doh, nothing special. 
And you can literally draw joysticks and just find Pacman on your computer and then just hook it up. (Video game noises) And you know the little plastic drawers you can get at Target? 
Well, if you take those out, they hold water great, but you can totally cut your toes, so yeah, just be careful. 
You know the Happiness Project, where the experts are setting up the piano stairs, and how cool that is? 
Well, I think it's cool, but we should be doing that stuff ourselves. 
It shouldn't be a set of experts engineering the way the world works. 
We should all be participating in changing the way the world works together. 
Aluminum foil. Everybody has a cat. 
Get a bowl of water. This is just Photo Booth on your Mac OS. 
Hover the mouse over the "" take a photo "" button, and you've got a little cat photo booth. 
And so we needed hundreds of people to buy this. 
If hundreds of people didn't buy this, we couldn't put it on the market. 
And so we put it up on Kickstarter, and hundreds of people bought it in the first day. 
And then 30 days later, 11,000 people had backed the project. 
And then what the best part is, we started getting a flood of videos in of people doing crazy things with it. 
So this is "" The Star-Spangled Banner "" by eating lunch, including drinking Listerine. 
And we actually sent this guy materials. 
We're like, "" We're sponsoring you, man. 
You're, like, a pro maker. "" Okay, just wait for this one. This is good. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And these guys at the exploratorium are playing house plants as if they were drums. 
And dads and daughters are completing circuits in special ways. 
And then this brother — look at this diagram. 
See where it says "" sister ""? 
I love when people put humans on the diagram. 
I always add humans to any technical — if you're drawing a technical diagram, put a human in it. 
And this kid is so sweet. He made this trampoline slideshow advancer for his sister so that on her birthday, she could be the star of the show, jumping on the trampoline to advance the slides. 
And this guy rounded up his dogs and he made a dog piano. 
And this is fun, and what could be more useful than feeling alive and fun? 
But it's also very serious because all this accessibility stuff started coming up, where people can't use computers, necessarily. 
Like this dad who wrote us, his son has cerebral palsy and he can't use a normal keyboard. 
And so his dad couldn't necessarily afford to buy all these custom controllers. 
And so, with the MaKey MaKey, he planned to make these gloves to allow him to navigate the web. 
And a huge eruption of discussion around accessibility came, and we're really excited about that. 
We didn't plan for that at all. 
And then all these professional musicians started using it, like at Coachella, just this weekend Jurassic 5 was using this onstage, and this D.J. is just from Brooklyn, right around here, and he put this up last month. 
And I love the carrot on the turntable. 
(Music: Massive Attack — "" Teardrop "") Most people cannot play them that way. (Laughter) And when this started to get serious, I thought, I'd better put a really serious warning label on the box that this comes in, because otherwise people are going to be getting this and they're going to be turning into agents of creative change, and governments will be crumbling, and I wouldn't have told people, so I thought I'd better warn them. 
And I also put this little surprise. When you open the lid of the box, it says, "" The world is a construction kit. "" And as you start to mess around this way, I think that, in some small ways, you do start to see the landscape of your everyday life a little bit more like something you could express yourself with, and a little bit more like you could participate in designing the future of the way the world works. 
And so next time you're on an escalator and you drop an M & M by accident, you know, maybe that's an M & M surfboard, not an escalator, so don't pick it up right away. 
Maybe take some more stuff out of your pockets and throw it down, and maybe some chapstick, whatever. 
I used to want to design a utopian society or a perfect world or something like that. 
But as I'm kind of getting older and kind of messing with all this stuff, I'm realizing that my idea of a perfect world really can't be designed by one person or even by a million experts. 
It's really going to be seven billion pairs of hands, each following their own passions, and each kind of like a mosaic coming up and creating this world in their backyards and in their kitchens. 
And that's the world I really want to live in. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

The world makes you something that you're not, but you know inside what you are, and that question burns in your heart: How will you become that? 
I may be somewhat unique in this, but I am not alone, not alone at all. 
So when I became a fashion model, I felt that I'd finally achieved the dream that I'd always wanted since I was a young child. 
My outside self finally matched my inner truth, my inner self. 
For complicated reasons which I'll get to later, when I look at this picture, at that time I felt like, Geena, you've done it, you've made it, you have arrived. 
But this past October, I realized that I'm only just beginning. 
All of us are put in boxes by our family, by our religion, by our society, our moment in history, even our own bodies. 
Some people have the courage to break free, not to accept the limitations imposed by the color of their skin or by the beliefs of those that surround them. 
Those people are always the threat to the status quo, to what is considered acceptable. 
In my case, for the last nine years, some of my neighbors, some of my friends, colleagues, even my agent, did not know about my history. 
I think, in mystery, this is called the reveal. 
Here is mine. 
I was assigned boy at birth based on the appearance of my genitalia. 
I remember when I was five years old in the Philippines walking around our house, I would always wear this t-shirt on my head. 
And my mom asked me, "How come you always wear that t-shirt on your head?" 
I said, "" Mom, this is my hair. I'm a girl. "" I knew then how to self-identify. 
Gender has always been considered a fact, immutable, but we now know it's actually more fluid, complex and mysterious. 
Because of my success, I never had the courage to share my story, not because I thought what I am is wrong, but because of how the world treats those of us who wish to break free. 
Every day, I am so grateful because I am a woman. 
I have a mom and dad and family who accepted me for who I am. 
Many are not so fortunate. 
There's a long tradition in Asian culture that celebrates the fluid mystery of gender. 
There is a Buddhist goddess of compassion. 
There is a Hindu goddess, hijra goddess. 
So when I was eight years old, I was at a fiesta in the Philippines celebrating these mysteries. 
I was in front of the stage, and I remember, out comes this beautiful woman right in front of me, and I remember that moment something hit me: That is the kind of woman I would like to be. 
So when I was 15 years old, still dressing as a boy, I met this woman named T.L. 
She is a transgender beauty pageant manager. 
That night she asked me, "How come you are not joining the beauty pageant?" 
She convinced me that if I joined that she would take care of the registration fee and the garments, and that night, I won best in swimsuit and best in long gown and placed second runner up among 40-plus candidates. 
That moment changed my life. 
All of a sudden, I was introduced to the world of beauty pageants. 
Not a lot of people could say that your first job is a pageant queen for transgender women, but I'll take it. 
So from 15 to 17 years old, I joined the most prestigious pageant to the pageant where it's at the back of the truck, literally, or sometimes it would be a pavement next to a rice field, and when it rains — it rains a lot in the Philippines — the organizers would have to move it inside someone's house. 
I also experienced the goodness of strangers, especially when we would travel in remote provinces in the Philippines. 
But most importantly, I met some of my best friends in that community. 
In 2001, my mom, who had moved to San Francisco, called me and told me that my green card petition came through, that I could now move to the United States. 
I resisted it. 
I told my mom, "" Mom, I'm having fun. 
I'm here with my friends, I love traveling, being a beauty pageant queen. "" But then two weeks later she called me, she said, "" Did you know that if you move to the United States you could change your name and gender marker? "" That was all I needed to hear. 
My mom also told me to put two E's in the spelling of my name. 
She also came with me when I had my surgery in Thailand at 19 years old. 
It's interesting, in some of the most rural cities in Thailand, they perform some of the most prestigious, safe and sophisticated surgery. 
At that time in the United States, you needed to have surgery before you could change your name and gender marker. 
So in 2001, I moved to San Francisco, and I remember looking at my California driver's license with the name Geena and gender marker F. 
That was a powerful moment. 
For some people, their I.D. is their license to drive or even to get a drink, but for me, that was my license to live, to feel dignified. 
All of a sudden, my fears were minimized. 
I felt that I could conquer my dream and move to New York and be a model. 
Many are not so fortunate. 
I think of this woman named Islan Nettles. 
She's from New York, she's a young woman who was courageously living her truth, but hatred ended her life. 
For most of my community, this is the reality in which we live. 
Our suicide rate is nine times higher than that of the general population. 
Every November 20, we have a global vigil for Transgender Day of Remembrance. 
I'm here at this stage because it's a long history of people who fought and stood up for injustice. 
This is Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. 
Today, this very moment, is my real coming out. 
I could no longer live my truth for and by myself. 
I want to do my best to help others live their truth without shame and terror. 
I am here, exposed, so that one day there will never be a need for a November 20 vigil. 
My deepest truth allowed me to accept who I am. 
Will you? 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Kathryn Schulz: Geena, one quick question for you. 
I'm wondering what you would say, especially to parents, but in a more broad way, to friends, to family, to anyone who finds themselves encountering a child or a person who is struggling with and uncomfortable with a gender that's being assigned them, what might you say to the family members of that person to help them become good and caring and kind family members to them? 
Geena Rocero: Sure. Well, first, really, I'm so blessed. 
The support system, with my mom especially, and my family, that in itself is just so powerful. 
I remember every time I would coach young trans women, I would mentor them, and sometimes when they would call me and tell me that their parents can't accept it, I would pick up that phone call and tell my mom, "Mom, can you call this woman?" 
And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, so — But it's just, gender identity is in the core of our being, right? 
I mean, we're all assigned gender at birth, so what I'm trying to do is to have this conversation that sometimes that gender assignment doesn't match, and there should be a space that would allow people to self-identify, and that's a conversation that we should have with parents, with colleagues. 
The transgender movement, it's at the very beginning, to compare to how the gay movement started. 
There's still a lot of work that needs to be done. 
There should be an understanding. 
There should be a space of curiosity and asking questions, and I hope all of you guys will be my allies. 
KS: Thank you. That was so lovely. GR: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Look, I had second thoughts, really, about whether I could talk about this to such a vital and alive audience as you guys. 
Then I remembered the quote from Gloria Steinem, which goes, "" The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. "" (Laughter) So — (Laughter) So with that in mind, I'm going to set about trying to do those things here, and talk about dying in the 21st century. 
Now the first thing that will piss you off, undoubtedly, is that all of us are, in fact, going to die in the 21st century. 
There will be no exceptions to that. 
There are, apparently, about one in eight of you who think you're immortal, on surveys, but — (Laughter) Unfortunately, that isn't going to happen. 
While I give this talk, in the next 10 minutes, a hundred million of my cells will die, and over the course of today, 2,000 of my brain cells will die and never come back, so you could argue that the dying process starts pretty early in the piece. 
Anyway, the second thing I want to say about dying in the 21st century, apart from it's going to happen to everybody, is it's shaping up to be a bit of a train wreck for most of us, unless we do something to try and reclaim this process from the rather inexorable trajectory that it's currently on. 
So there you go. That's the truth. 
No doubt that will piss you off, and now let's see whether we can set you free. I don't promise anything. 
Now, as you heard in the intro, I work in intensive care, and I think I've kind of lived through the heyday of intensive care. It's been a ride, man. 
This has been fantastic. 
We have machines that go ping. 
There's many of them up there. 
And we have some wizard technology which I think has worked really well, and over the course of the time I've worked in intensive care, the death rate for males in Australia has halved, and intensive care has had something to do with that. 
Certainly, a lot of the technologies that we use have got something to do with that. 
So we have had tremendous success, and we kind of got caught up in our own success quite a bit, and we started using expressions like "" lifesaving. "" I really apologize to everybody for doing that, because obviously, we don't. 
What we do is prolong people's lives, and delay death, and redirect death, but we can't, strictly speaking, save lives on any sort of permanent basis. 
And what's really happened over the period of time that I've been working in intensive care is that the people whose lives we started saving back in the '70s,' 80s, and '90s, are now coming to die in the 21st century of diseases that we no longer have the answers to in quite the way we did then. 
So what's happening now is there's been a big shift in the way that people die, and most of what they're dying of now isn't as amenable to what we can do as what it used to be like when I was doing this in the '80s and' 90s. 
So we kind of got a bit caught up with this, and we haven't really squared with you guys about what's really happening now, and it's about time we did. 
I kind of woke up to this bit in the late '90s when I met this guy. 
This guy is called Jim, Jim Smith, and he looked like this. 
I was called down to the ward to see him. 
His is the little hand. 
I was called down to the ward to see him by a respiratory physician. 
He said, "" Look, there's a guy down here. 
He's got pneumonia, and he looks like he needs intensive care. 
His daughter's here and she wants everything possible to be done. "" Which is a familiar phrase to us. 
So I go down to the ward and see Jim, and his skin his translucent like this. 
You can see his bones through the skin. 
He's very, very thin, and he is, indeed, very sick with pneumonia, and he's too sick to talk to me, so I talk to his daughter Kathleen, and I say to her, "" Did you and Jim ever talk about what you would want done if he ended up in this kind of situation? "" And she looked at me and said, "" No, of course not! "" I thought, "" Okay. Take this steady. "" And I got talking to her, and after a while, she said to me, "You know, we always thought there'd be time." 
Jim was 94. (Laughter) And I realized that something wasn't happening here. 
There wasn't this dialogue going on that I imagined was happening. 
So a group of us started doing survey work, and we looked at four and a half thousand nursing home residents in Newcastle, in the Newcastle area, and discovered that only one in a hundred of them had a plan about what to do when their hearts stopped beating. 
One in a hundred. 
And only one in 500 of them had plan about what to do if they became seriously ill. 
And I realized, of course, this dialogue is definitely not occurring in the public at large. 
Now, I work in acute care. 
This is John Hunter Hospital. 
And I thought, surely, we do better than that. 
So a colleague of mine from nursing called Lisa Shaw and I went through hundreds and hundreds of sets of notes in the medical records department looking at whether there was any sign at all that anybody had had any conversation about what might happen to them if the treatment they were receiving was unsuccessful to the point that they would die. 
And we didn't find a single record of any preference about goals, treatments or outcomes from any of the sets of notes initiated by a doctor or by a patient. 
So we started to realize that we had a problem, and the problem is more serious because of this. 
What we know is that obviously we are all going to die, but how we die is actually really important, obviously not just to us, but also to how that features in the lives of all the people who live on afterwards. 
How we die lives on in the minds of everybody who survives us, and the stress created in families by dying is enormous, and in fact you get seven times as much stress by dying in intensive care as by dying just about anywhere else, so dying in intensive care is not your top option if you've got a choice. 
And, if that wasn't bad enough, of course, all of this is rapidly progressing towards the fact that many of you, in fact, about one in 10 of you at this point, will die in intensive care. 
In the U.S., it's one in five. 
In Miami, it's three out of five people die in intensive care. 
So this is the sort of momentum that we've got at the moment. 
The reason why this is all happening is due to this, and I do have to take you through what this is about. 
These are the four ways to go. 
So one of these will happen to all of us. 
The ones you may know most about are the ones that are becoming increasingly of historical interest: sudden death. 
It's quite likely in an audience this size this won't happen to anybody here. 
Sudden death has become very rare. 
The death of Little Nell and Cordelia and all that sort of stuff just doesn't happen anymore. 
The dying process of those with terminal illness that we've just seen occurs to younger people. 
By the time you've reached 80, this is unlikely to happen to you. 
Only one in 10 people who are over 80 will die of cancer. 
The big growth industry are these. 
What you die of is increasing organ failure, with your respiratory, cardiac, renal, whatever organs packing up. Each of these would be an admission to an acute care hospital, at the end of which, or at some point during which, somebody says, enough is enough, and we stop. 
And this one's the biggest growth industry of all, and at least six out of 10 of the people in this room will die in this form, which is the dwindling of capacity with increasing frailty, and frailty's an inevitable part of aging, and increasing frailty is in fact the main thing that people die of now, and the last few years, or the last year of your life is spent with a great deal of disability, unfortunately. 
Enjoying it so far? (Laughs) (Laughter) Sorry, I just feel such a, I feel such a Cassandra here. (Laughter) 
What can I say that's positive? What's positive is that this is happening at very great age, now. 
We are all, most of us, living to reach this point. 
You know, historically, we didn't do that. 
This is what happens to you when you live to be a great age, and unfortunately, increasing longevity does mean more old age, not more youth. 
I'm sorry to say that. (Laughter) What we did, anyway, look, what we did, we didn't just take this lying down at John Hunter Hospital and elsewhere. 
We've started a whole series of projects to try and look about whether we could, in fact, involve people much more in the way that things happen to them. 
But we realized, of course, that we are dealing with cultural issues, and this is, I love this Klimt painting, because the more you look at it, the more you kind of get the whole issue that's going on here, which is clearly the separation of death from the living, and the fear — Like, if you actually look, there's one woman there who has her eyes open. 
She's the one he's looking at, and [she's] the one he's coming for. Can you see that? 
She looks terrified. 
It's an amazing picture. 
Anyway, we had a major cultural issue. 
Clearly, people didn't want us to talk about death, or, we thought that. 
So with loads of funding from the Federal Government and the local Health Service, we introduced a thing at John Hunter called Respecting Patient Choices. 
We trained hundreds of people to go to the wards and talk to people about the fact that they would die, and what would they prefer under those circumstances. 
They loved it. The families and the patients, they loved it. 
Ninety-eight percent of people really thought this just should have been normal practice, and that this is how things should work. 
And when they expressed wishes, all of those wishes came true, as it were. 
We were able to make that happen for them. 
But then, when the funding ran out, we went back to look six months later, and everybody had stopped again, and nobody was having these conversations anymore. 
So that was really kind of heartbreaking for us, because we thought this was going to really take off. 
The cultural issue had reasserted itself. 
So here's the pitch: I think it's important that we don't just get on this freeway to ICU without thinking hard about whether or not that's where we all want to end up, particularly as we become older and increasingly frail and ICU has less and less and less to offer us. 
There has to be a little side road off there for people who don't want to go on that track. 
And I have one small idea, and one big idea about what could happen. 
And this is the small idea. 
The small idea is, let's all of us engage more with this in the way that Jason has illustrated. 
Why can't we have these kinds of conversations with our own elders and people who might be approaching this? 
There are a couple of things you can do. 
One of them is, you can, just ask this simple question. This question never fails. 
"" In the event that you became too sick to speak for yourself, who would you like to speak for you? "" That's a really important question to ask people, because giving people the control over who that is produces an amazing outcome. 
The second thing you can say is, "" Have you spoken to that person about the things that are important to you so that we've got a better idea of what it is we can do? "" So that's the little idea. 
The big idea, I think, is more political. 
I think we have to get onto this. 
I suggested we should have Occupy Death. 
(Laughter) My wife said, "" Yeah, right, sit-ins in the mortuary. 
Yeah, yeah. Sure. "" (Laughter) So that one didn't really run, but I was very struck by this. 
Now, I'm an aging hippie. 
I don't know, I don't think I look like that anymore, but I had, two of my kids were born at home in the '80s when home birth was a big thing, and we baby boomers are used to taking charge of the situation, so if you just replace all these words of birth, I like "" Peace, Love, Natural Death "" as an option. 
I do think we have to get political and start to reclaim this process from the medicalized model in which it's going. 
Now, listen, that sounds like a pitch for euthanasia. 
I want to make it absolutely crystal clear to you all, I hate euthanasia. I think it's a sideshow. 
I don't think euthanasia matters. 
I actually think that, in places like Oregon, where you can have physician-assisted suicide, you take a poisonous dose of stuff, only half a percent of people ever do that. 
I'm more interested in what happens to the 99.5 percent of people who don't want to do that. 
I think most people don't want to be dead, but I do think most people want to have some control over how their dying process proceeds. 
So I'm an opponent of euthanasia, but I do think we have to give people back some control. 
It deprives euthanasia of its oxygen supply. 
I think we should be looking at stopping the want for euthanasia, not for making it illegal or legal or worrying about it at all. 
This is a quote from Dame Cicely Saunders, whom I met when I was a medical student. 
She founded the hospice movement. 
And she said, "" You matter because you are, and you matter to the last moment of your life. "" And I firmly believe that that's the message that we have to carry forward. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

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

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

One of the first patients I had to see as a pediatrician was Sol, a beautiful month-old baby who was admitted with signs of a severe respiratory infection. 
Until then, I had never seen a patient worsen so fast. 
In just two days she was connected to a respirator and on the third day she died. 
Sol had whooping cough. 
After discussing the case in the room and after a quite distressing catharsis, I remember my chief resident said to me, "" Okay, take a deep breath. Wash your face. 
And now comes the hardest part: We have to go talk to her parents. "" At that time, a thousand questions came to mind, from, "" How could a one-month-old baby be so unfortunate? "" to, "" Could we have done something about it? "" Before vaccines existed, many infectious diseases killed millions of people per year. 
During the 1918 flu pandemic 50 million people died. 
That's greater than Argentina's current population. 
Perhaps, the older ones among you remember the polio epidemic that occurred in Argentina in 1956. 
People didn't know what to do. They were going crazy. 
They would go painting trees with caustic lime. 
They'd put little bags of camphor in their children's underwear, as if that could do something. 
And thousands of people were left with very significant neurological damage. 
I know this because I read about it, because thanks to vaccines, my generation was lucky to not live through an epidemic as terrible as this. 
Vaccines are one of the great successes of the 20th century's public health. 
After potable water, they are the interventions that have most reduced mortality, even more than antibiotics. 
Vaccines eradicated terrible diseases such as smallpox from the planet and succeeded in significantly reducing mortality due to other diseases such as measles, whooping cough, polio and many more. 
All these diseases are considered vaccine-preventable diseases. 
What does this mean? 
That they are potentially preventable, but in order to be so, something must be done. 
You need to get vaccinated. 
I imagine that most, if not all of us here today, received a vaccine at some point in our life. 
Now, I'm not so sure that many of us know which vaccines or boosters we should receive after adolescence. 
Have you ever wondered who we are protecting when we vaccinate? 
What do I mean by that? 
Is there any other effect beyond protecting ourselves? 
Imagine for a moment that we are in a city that has never had a case of a particular disease, such as the measles. 
This would mean that no one in the city has ever had contact with the disease. 
No one has natural defenses against, nor been vaccinated against measles. 
If one day, a person sick with the measles appears in this city the disease won't find much resistance and will begin spreading from person to person, and in no time it will disseminate throughout the community. 
After a certain time a big part of the population will be ill. 
This happened when there were no vaccines. 
Now, imagine the complete opposite case. 
We are in a city where more than 90 percent of the population has defenses against the measles, which means that they either had the disease, survived, and developed natural defenses; or that they had been immunized against measles. 
If one day, a person sick with the measles appears in this city, the disease will find much more resistance and won't be transmitted that much from person to person. 
The spread will probably remain contained and a measles outbreak won't happen. 
I would like you to pay attention to something. 
People who are vaccinated are not only protecting themselves, but by blocking the dissemination of the disease within the community, they are indirectly protecting the people in this community who are not vaccinated. 
They create a kind of protective shield which prevents them from coming in contact with the disease, so that these people are protected. 
This indirect protection that the unvaccinated people within a community receive simply by being surrounded by vaccinated people, is called herd immunity. 
Many people in the community depend almost exclusively on this herd immunity to be protected against disease. 
The unvaccinated people you see in infographics are not just hypothetical. 
Those people are our nieces and nephews, our children, who may be too young to receive their first shots. 
They are our parents, our siblings, our acquaintances, who may have a disease, or take medication that lowers their defenses. 
They could even be among us, any of us who got vaccinated, but the vaccine didn't produce the expected effect, because not all vaccines are always 100 percent effective. 
All these people depend almost exclusively on herd immunity to be protected against diseases. 
To achieve this effect of herd immunity, it is necessary that a large percentage of the population be vaccinated. 
This percentage is called the threshold. 
The threshold depends on many variables: It depends on the germ's characteristics, and those of the immune response that the vaccine generates. 
But they all have something in common. 
If the percentage of the population in a vaccinated community is below this threshold number, the disease will begin to spread more freely and may generate an outbreak of this disease within the community. 
Even diseases which were at some point controlled may reappear. 
This has happened, and is still happening. 
In 1998, a British researcher published an article in one of the most important medical journals, saying that the MMR vaccine, which is given for measles, mumps and rubella, was associated with autism. 
This generated an immediate impact. 
People began to stop getting vaccinated, and stopped vaccinating their children. 
And what happened? 
The number of people vaccinated, in many communities around the world, fell below this threshold. 
And there were outbreaks of measles in many cities in the world — in the U.S., in Europe. 
Many people got sick. 
People died of measles. 
This article also generated a huge stir within the medical community. 
Not only could no one find a causal association between MMR and autism at the population level, but it was also found that this article had incorrect claims. 
Even more, it was fraudulent. 
It was fraudulent. 
One of the main concerns and excuses for not getting vaccinated are the adverse effects. 
Vaccines, like other drugs, can have potential adverse effects. 
Most are mild and temporary. 
But the benefits are always greater than possible complications. 
When we are ill, we want to heal fast. 
Many of us who are here take antibiotics when we have an infection, we take anti-hypertensives when we have high blood pressure, we take cardiac medications. 
Why? Because we are sick and we want to heal fast. 
And we don't question it much. 
Why is it so difficult to think of preventing diseases, by taking care of ourselves when we are healthy? 
We take care of ourselves a lot when affected by an illness, or in situations of imminent danger. 
I imagine most of us here, remember the influenza-A pandemic which broke out in 2009 in Argentina and worldwide. 
When the first cases began to come to light, we, here in Argentina, were entering the winter season. 
We knew absolutely nothing. 
Everything was a mess. 
People wore masks on the street, ran into pharmacies to buy alcohol gel. 
People would line up in pharmacies to get a vaccine, without even knowing if it was the right vaccine that would protect them against this new virus. 
We knew absolutely nothing. 
At that time, in addition to doing my fellowship at the Infant Foundation, I worked as a home pediatrician for a prepaid medicine company. 
I remember that I started my shift at 8 a.m., and by 8, I already had a list of 50 scheduled visits. 
It was chaos; people didn't know what to do. 
The patients were a little older than what we were used to seeing in winter, with longer fevers. 
And I mentioned that to my fellowship mentor, and he, for his part, had heard the same from a colleague, about the large number of pregnant women and young adults being hospitalized in intensive care, with hard-to-manage clinical profiles. 
At that time, we set out to understand what was happening. 
First thing Monday morning, we took the car and went to a hospital in Buenos Aires Province, that served as a referral hospital for cases of the new influenza virus. 
We arrived at the hospital; it was crowded. 
All health staff were dressed in NASA-like bio-safety suits. 
We all had face masks in our pockets. 
I, being a hypochondriac, didn't breathe for two hours. 
But we could see what was happening. 
Immediately, we started reaching out to pediatricians from six hospitals in the city and in Buenos Aires Province. 
Our main goal was to find out how this new virus behaved in contact with our children, in the shortest time possible. 
A marathon work. 
In less than three months, we could see what effect this new H1N1 virus had on the 251 children hospitalized by this virus. 
We could see which children got more seriously ill: children under four, especially those less than one year old; patients with neurological diseases; and young children with chronic pulmonary diseases. 
Identifying these at-risk groups was important to include them as priority groups in the recommendations for getting the influenza vaccine, not only here in Argentina, but also in other countries which the pandemic not yet reached. 
A year later, when a vaccine against the pandemic H1N1 virus became available, we wanted to see what happened. 
After a huge vaccination campaign aimed at protecting at-risk groups, these hospitals, with 93 percent of the at-risk groups vaccinated, had not hospitalized a single patient for the pandemic H1N1 virus. 
(Applause) In 2009: 251. 
In 2010: zero. 
Vaccination is an act of individual responsibility, but it has a huge collective impact. 
If I get vaccinated, not only am I protecting myself, but I am also protecting others. 
Sol had whooping cough. 
Sol was very young, and she hadn't yet received her first vaccine against whooping cough. 
I still wonder what would have happened if everyone around Sol had been vaccinated. 
(Applause) 

I would like to invite you to come along on a visit to a dark continent. 
It is the continent hidden under the surface of the earth. 
It is largely unexplored, poorly understood, and the stuff of legends. 
But it is made also of dramatic landscapes like this huge underground chamber, and it is rich with surprising biological and mineralogical worlds. 
Thanks to the efforts of intrepid voyagers in the last three centuries — actually, we know also thanks to satellite technology, of course — we know almost every single square meter of our planet's surface. 
However, we know still very little about what is hidden inside the earth. 
Because a cave landscape, like this deep shaft in Italy, is hidden, the potential of cave exploration — the geographical dimension — is poorly understood and unappreciated. 
Because we are creatures living on the surface, our perception of the inner side of the planet is in some ways skewed, as is that of the depth of the oceans or of the upper atmosphere. 
However, since systematic cave exploration started about one century ago, we know actually that caves exist in every continent of the world. 
A single cave system, like Mammoth Cave, which is in Kentucky, can be as long as more than 600 kilometers. 
And an abyss like Krubera Voronya, which is in the Caucasus region, actually the deepest cave explored in the world, can go as far as more than 2,000 meters below the surface. 
That means a journey of weeks for a cave explorer. 
Caves form in karstic regions. 
So karstic regions are areas of the world where the infiltrating water along cracks, fractures, can easily dissolve soluble lithologies, forming a drainage system of tunnels, conduits — a three-dimensional network, actually. 
Karstic regions cover almost 20 percent of the continents' surface, and we know actually that speleologists in the last 50 years have explored roughly 30,000 kilometers of cave passages around the world, which is a big number. 
But geologists have estimated that what is still missing, to be discovered and mapped, is something around 10 million kilometers. 
That means that for each meter of a cave that we already know, that we have explored, there are still some tens of kilometers of undiscovered passages. 
That means that this is really an endless continent, and we will never be able to explore it completely. 
And this estimation is made without considering other types of caves, like, for example, inside glaciers or even volcanic caves, which are not karstic, but are formed by lava flows. 
And if we have a look at other planets like, for example, Mars, you will see that this characteristic is not so specific of our home planet. 
However, I will show to you now that we do not need to go to Mars to explore alien worlds. 
I'm a speleologist, that means a cave explorer. 
And I started with this passion when I was really young in the mountains not far from my hometown in North Italy, in the karstic regions of the Alps and the Dolomites. 
But soon, the quest for exploration brought me to the farthest corner of the planet, searching for new potential entrances of this undiscovered continent. 
And in 2009, I had the opportunity to visit the tepui table mountains, which are in the Orinoco and Amazon basins. 
These massifs enchanted me from the first time I saw them. 
They are surrounded by vertical, vertiginous rock walls with silvery waterfalls that are lost in the forest. 
They really inspired in me a sense of wilderness, with a soul older than millions and millions of years. 
And this dramatic landscape inspired among other things also Conan Doyle's "" The Lost World "" novel in 1912. 
And they are, really, a lost world. 
Scientists consider those mountains as islands in time, being separated from the surrounding lowlands since tens of millions of years ago. 
They are surrounded by up to 1,000-meter-high walls, resembling a fortress, impregnable by humans. 
And, in fact, only a few of these mountains have been climbed and explored on their top. 
These mountains contain also a scientific paradox: They are made by quartz, which is a very common mineral on the earth's crust, and the rock made up by quartz is called quartzite, and quartzite is one of the hardest and least soluble minerals on earth. 
So we do not expect at all to find a cave there. 
Despite this, in the last 10 years, speleologists from Italy, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and, of course, Venezuela and Brazil, have explored several caves in this area. 
So how can it be possible? 
To understand this contradiction, we have to consider the time factor, because the history of the tepuis is extremely long, starting about 1.6 billion years ago with the formation of the rock, and then evolving with the uplift of the region 150 million years ago, after the disruption of the Pangaea supercontinent and the opening of the Atlantic Ocean. 
So you can imagine that the water had tens or even hundreds of millions of years to sculpt the strangest forms on the tepuis' surfaces, but also to open the fractures and form stone cities, rock cities, fields of towers which are characterized in the famous landscape of the tepuis. 
But nobody could have imagined what was happening inside a mountain in so long a time frame. 
And so I was focusing in 2010 on one of those massifs, the Auyán-tepui, which is very famous because it hosts Angel Falls, which is the highest waterfall in the world — about 979 meters of vertical drop. 
And I was searching for hints of the existence of cave systems through satellite images, and finally we identified an area of collapses of the surface — so, big boulders, rock piles — and that means that there was a void below. 
It was a clear indication that there was something inside the mountain. 
So we did several attempts to reach this area, by land and with a helicopter, but it was really difficult because — you have to imagine that these mountains are covered by clouds most of the year, by fog. 
There are strong winds, and there are almost 4,000 millimeters of rainfall per year, so it's really, really difficult to find good conditions. 
And only in 2013 we finally landed on the spot and we started the exploration of the cave. 
The cave is huge. 
It's a huge network under the surface of the tepui plateau, and in only ten days of expedition, we explored more than 20 kilometers of cave passages. 
And it's a huge network of underground rivers, channels, big rooms, extremely deep shafts. 
So it's really an incredible place. 
And we named it Imawarì Yeuta. 
That means, in the Pemón indigenous language, "" The House of the Gods. "" You have to imagine that indigenous people have never been there. 
It was impossible for them to reach this area. 
However, there were legends about the existence of a cave in the mountain. 
So when we started the exploration, we had to explore with a great respect, both because of the religious beliefs of the indigenous people, but also because it was really a sacred place, because no human had entered there before. 
So we had to use special protocols to not contaminate the environment with our presence, and we tried also to share with the community, with the indigenous community, our discoveries. 
And the caves represent, really, a snapshot of the past. 
The time needed for their formation could be as long as 50 or even 100 million years, which makes them possibly the oldest caves that we can explore on earth. 
What you can find there is really evidence of a lost world. 
When you enter a quartzite cave, you have to completely forget what you know about caves — classic limestone caves or the touristic caves that you can visit in several places in the world. 
Because what seems a simple stalactite here is not made by calcium carbonate, but is made by opal, and one of those stalactites can require tens of millions of years to be formed. 
But you can find even stranger forms, like these mushrooms of silica growing on a boulder. 
And you can imagine our talks when we were exploring the cave. 
We were the first entering and discovering those unknown things, things like those monster eggs. 
And we were a bit scared because it was all a discovery, and we didn't want to find a dinosaur. 
We didn't find a dinosaur. 
(Laughter) Anyway, actually, we know that this kind of formation, after several studies, we know that these kinds of formations are living organisms. 
They are bacterial colonies using silica to build mineral structures resembling stromatolites. 
Stromatolites are some of the oldest forms of life that we can find on earth. 
And here in the tepuis, the interesting thing is that these bacteria colonies have evolved in complete isolation from the external surface, and without being in contact with humans. 
They have never been in contact with humans. 
So the implications for science are enormous, because here you could find, for example, microbes that could be useful to resolve diseases in medicine, or you could find even a new kind of material with unknown properties. 
And, in fact, we discovered in the cave a new mineral structure for science, which is rossiantonite, a phosphate-sulfate. 
So whatever you find in the cave, even a small cricket, has evolved in the dark in complete isolation. 
And, really, everything that you can feel in the cave are real connections between the biological and the mineralogical world. 
So as we explore this dark continent and discover its mineralogical and biological diversity and uniqueness, we will find probably clues about the origin of life on our planet and on the relationship and evolution of life in relationship with the mineral world. 
What seems only a dark, empty environment could be in reality a chest of wonders full of useful information. 
With a team of Italian, Venezuelan and Brazilian speleologists, which is called La Venta Teraphosa, we will be back soon to Latin America, because we want to explore other tepuis in the farthest areas of the Amazon. 
There are still very unknown mountains, like Marahuaca, which is almost 3,000 meters high above sea level, or Aracà, which is in the upper region of Rio Negro in Brazil. 
And we suppose that we could find there even bigger cave systems, and each one with its own undiscovered world. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Francesco. Give me that to start so we don't forget. 
Francesco, you said we don't need to go to Mars to find alien life, and indeed, last time we spoke, you were in Sardinia and you were training European astronauts. 
So what do you, a speleologist, tell and teach to the astronauts? 
Francesco Sauro: Yeah, we are — it's a program of training for not only European, but also NASA, Roskosmos, JAXA astronauts, in a cave. 
So they stay in a cave for about one week in isolation. 
They have to work together in a real, real dangerous environment, and it's a real alien environment for them because it's unusual. 
It's always dark. They have to do science. They have a lot of tasks. 
And it's very similar to a journey to Mars or the International Space Station. 
BG: In principle. FS: Yes. 
BG: I want to go back to one of the pictures that was in your slide show, and it's just representative of the other photos — Weren't those photos amazing? Yeah? 
Audience: Yeah! 
(Applause) FS: I have to thank the photographers from the team La Venta, because all of those photos are from the photographers. 
BG: You bring, actually, photographers with you in the expedition. 
They're professionals, they're speleologists and photographers. 
But when I look at these pictures, I wonder: there is zero light down there, and yet they look incredibly well-exposed. 
How do you take these pictures? 
How do your colleagues, the photographers, take these pictures? 
FS: Yeah. They are working in a darkroom, basically, so you can open the shutter of the camera and use the lights to paint the environment. 
BG: So you're basically — FS: Yes. You can even keep the shutter open for one minute and then paint the environment. 
The final result is what you want to achieve. 
BG: You spray the environment with light and that's what you get. 
Maybe we can try this at home someday, I don't know. 
(Laughter) BG: Francesco, grazie. FS: Grazie. 
(Applause) 

Early visions of wireless power actually were thought of by Nikola Tesla basically about 100 years ago. 
The thought that you wouldn't want to transfer electric power wirelessly, no one ever thought of that. 
They thought, "" Who would use it if you didn't? "" And so, in fact, he actually set about doing a variety of things. 
Built the Tesla coil. This tower was built on Long Island back at the beginning of the 1900s. 
And the idea was, it was supposed to be able to transfer power anywhere on Earth. 
We'll never know if this stuff worked. Actually, I think the Federal Bureau of Investigation took it down for security purposes, sometime in the early 1900s. 
But the one thing that did come out of electricity is that we love this stuff so much. 
I mean, think about how much we love this. 
If you just walk outside, there are trillions of dollars that have been invested in infrastructure around the world, putting up wires to get power from where it's created to where it's used. 
The other thing is, we love batteries. 
And for those of us that have an environmental element to us, there is something like 40 billion disposable batteries built every year for power that, generally speaking, is used within a few inches or a few feet of where there is very inexpensive power. 
So, before I got here, I thought, "" You know, I am from North America. 
We do have a little bit of a reputation in the United States. "" So I thought I'd better look it up first. 
So definition number six is the North American definition of the word "" suck. "" Wires suck, they really do. 
Think about it. Whether that's you in that picture or something under your desk. 
The other thing is, batteries suck too. 
And they really, really do. 
Do you ever wonder what happens to this stuff? 
40 billion of these things built. 
This is what happens. 
They fall apart, they disintegrate, and they end up here. 
So when you talk about expensive power, the cost per kilowatt-hour to supply battery power to something is on the order of two to three hundred pounds. 
Think about that. 
The most expensive grid power in the world is thousandths of that. 
So fortunately, one of the other definitions of "" suck "" that was in there, it does create a vacuum. 
And nature really does abhor a vacuum. 
What happened back a few years ago was a group of theoretical physicists at MIT actually came up with this concept of transferring power over distance. 
Basically they were able to light a 60 watt light bulb at a distance of about two meters. 
It got about 50 percent of the efficiency — by the way, that's still a couple thousand times more efficient than a battery would be, to do the same thing. 
But were able to light that, and do it very successfully. 
This was actually the experiment. So you can see the coils were somewhat larger. 
The light bulb was a fairly simple task, from their standpoint. 
This all came from a professor waking up at night to the third night in a row that his wife's cellphone was beeping because it was running out of battery power. 
And he was thinking, "" With all the electricity that's out there in the walls, why couldn't some of that just come into the phone so I could get some sleep? "" And he actually came up with this concept of resonant energy transfer. 
But inside a standard transformer are two coils of wire. 
And those two coils of wire are really, really close to each other, and actually do transfer power magnetically and wirelessly, only over a very short distance. 
What Dr. Soljacic figured out how to do was separate the coils in a transformer to a greater distance than the size of those transformers using this technology, which is not dissimilar from the way an opera singer shatters a glass on the other side of the room. 
It's a resonant phenomenon for which he actually received a MacArthur Fellowship Award, which is nicknamed the Genius Award, last September, for his discovery. 
So how does it work? 
Imagine a coil. For those of you that are engineers, there's a capacitor attached to it too. 
And if you can cause that coil to resonate, what will happen is it will pulse at alternating current frequencies — at a fairly high frequency, by the way. 
And if you can bring another device close enough to the source, that will only work at exactly that frequency, you can actually get them to do what's called strongly couple, and transfer magnetic energy between them. 
And then what you do is, you start out with electricity, turn it into magnetic field, take that magnetic field, turn it back into electricity, and then you can use it. 
Number one question I get asked. 
I mean, people are worried about cellphones being safe. 
You know. What about safety? 
The first thing is this is not a "" radiative "" technology. 
It doesn't radiate. 
There aren't electric fields here. It's a magnetic field. 
It stays within either what we call the source, or within the device. 
And actually, the magnetic fields we're using are basically about the same as the Earth's magnetic field. 
We live in a magnetic field. 
And the other thing that's pretty cool about the technology is that it only transfers energy to things that work at exactly the same frequency. 
And it's virtually impossible in nature to make that happen. 
Then finally we have governmental bodies everywhere that will regulate everything we do. 
They've pretty much set field exposure limits, which all of the things in the stuff I'll show you today sort of sit underneath those guidelines. 
Mobile electronics. 
Home electronics. 
Those cords under your desk, I bet everybody here has something that looks like that or those batteries. 
There are industrial applications. 
And then finally, electric vehicles. 
These electric cars are beautiful. 
But who is going to want to plug them in? 
Imagine driving into your garage — we've built a system to do this — you drive into your garage, and the car charges itself, because there is a mat on the floor that's plugged into the wall. 
And it actually causes your car to charge safely and efficiently. 
Then there's all kinds of other applications. Implanted medical devices, where people don't have to die of infections anymore if you can seal the thing up. 
Credit cards, robot vacuum cleaners. 
So what I'd like to do is take a couple minutes and show you, actually, how it works. 
And what I'm going to do is to show you pretty much what's here. 
You've got a coil. 
That coil is connected to an R.F. amplifier that creates a high-frequency oscillating magnetic field. 
We put one on the back of the television set. 
By the way, I do make it look a little bit easier than it is. 
There's lots of electronics and secret sauce and all kinds of intellectual property that go into it. 
But then what's going to happen is, it will create a field. 
It will cause one to get created on the other side. 
And if the demo gods are willing, in about 10 seconds or so we should see it. 
The 10 seconds actually are because we — I don't know if any of you have ever thought about plugging a T.V. in when you use just a cord. 
Generally, you have to go over and hit the button. So I thought we put a little computer in it that has to wake up to tell it to do that. 
So, I'll plug that in. 
It creates a magnetic field here. 
It causes one to be created out here. 
And as I said, in sort of about 10 seconds we should start to see... 
This is a commercially — (Applause) available color television set. 
Imagine, you get one of these things. You want to hang them on the wall. 
How many people want to hang them on the wall? 
Think about it. You don't want those ugly cords coming down. 
Imagine if you can get rid of it. 
The other thing I wanted to talk about was safety. 
So, there is nothing going on. I'm okay. 
And I'll do it again, just for safety's sake. 
Almost immediately, though, people ask, "How small can you make this? Can you make this small enough?" 
Because remember Dr. Soljacic's original idea was his wife's cellphone beeping. 
So, I wanted to show you something. 
We're an equal opportunity designer of this sort of thing. 
This a Google G1. 
You know, it's the latest thing that's come out. 
It runs the Android operating system. 
I think I heard somebody talk about that before. 
It's odd. It has a battery. 
It also has coiled electronics that WiTricity has put into the back of it. 
And if I can get the camera — okay, great — you'll see, as I get sort of close... 
you're looking at a cellphone powered completely wirelessly. 
(Applause) And I know some of you are Apple aficionados. 
So, you know they don't make it easy at Apple to get inside their phones. 
So we put a little sleeve on the back, but we should be able to get this guy to wake up too. 
And those of you that have an iPhone recognize the green center. 
(Applause) And Nokia as well. 
You'll see that what we did there is put a little thing in the back, to do that, and it probably beeps, actually, as it goes on as well. 
But they typically use it to light up the screen. 
So, imagine these things could go... they could go in your ceiling. 
They could go in the floor. They could go, actually, underneath your desktop. 
So that when you walk in or you come in from home, if you carry a purse, it works in your purse. 
You never have to worry about plugging these things in again. 
And think of what that would do for you. 
So I think in closing, sort of in the immortal visions of The New Yorker magazine, I thought I'd put up one more slide. 
And for those of you who can't read it, it says, "It does appear to be some kind of wireless technology." 
So, thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

I live in South Central. 
This is South Central: liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots. 
So the city planners, they get together and they figure they're going to change the name South Central to make it represent something else, so they change it to South Los Angeles, like this is going to fix what's really going wrong in the city. 
This is South Los Angeles. (Laughter) Liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots. 
Just like 26.5 million other Americans, I live in a food desert, South Central Los Angeles, home of the drive-thru and the drive-by. 
Funny thing is, the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys. 
People are dying from curable diseases in South Central Los Angeles. 
For instance, the obesity rate in my neighborhood is five times higher than, say, Beverly Hills, which is probably eight, 10 miles away. 
I got tired of seeing this happening. 
And I was wondering, how would you feel if you had no access to healthy food, if every time you walk out your door you see the ill effects that the present food system has on your neighborhood? 
I see wheelchairs bought and sold like used cars. 
I see dialysis centers popping up like Starbucks. 
And I figured, this has to stop. 
So I figured that the problem is the solution. 
Food is the problem and food is the solution. 
Plus I got tired of driving 45 minutes round trip to get an apple that wasn't impregnated with pesticides. 
So what I did, I planted a food forest in front of my house. 
It was on a strip of land that we call a parkway. 
It's 150 feet by 10 feet. 
Thing is, it's owned by the city. 
But you have to maintain it. 
So I'm like, "" Cool. I can do whatever the hell I want, since it's my responsibility and I gotta maintain it. "" And this is how I decided to maintain it. 
So me and my group, L.A. Green Grounds, we got together and we started planting my food forest, fruit trees, you know, the whole nine, vegetables. 
What we do, we're a pay-it-forward kind of group, where it's composed of gardeners from all walks of life, from all over the city, and it's completely volunteer, and everything we do is free. 
And the garden, it was beautiful. 
And then somebody complained. 
The city came down on me, and basically gave me a citation saying that I had to remove my garden, which this citation was turning into a warrant. 
And I'm like, "" Come on, really? 
A warrant for planting food on a piece of land that you could care less about? "" (Laughter) And I was like, "" Cool. Bring it. "" Because this time it wasn't coming up. 
So L.A. Times got ahold of it. Steve Lopez did a story on it and talked to the councilman, and one of the Green Grounds members, they put up a petition on Change.org, and with 900 signatures, we were a success. 
We had a victory on our hands. 
My councilman even called in and said how they endorse and love what we're doing. 
I mean, come on, why wouldn't they? 
L.A. leads the United States in vacant lots that the city actually owns. 
They own 26 square miles of vacant lots. 
That's 20 Central Parks. 
That's enough space to plant 725 million tomato plants. 
Why in the hell would they not okay this? 
Growing one plant will give you 1,000, 10,000 seeds. 
When one dollar's worth of green beans will give you 75 dollars' worth of produce. 
It's my gospel, when I'm telling people, grow your own food. 
Growing your own food is like printing your own money. 
(Applause) See, I have a legacy in South Central. 
I grew up there. I raised my sons there. 
And I refuse to be a part of this manufactured reality that was manufactured for me by some other people, and I'm manufacturing my own reality. 
See, I'm an artist. 
Gardening is my graffiti. I grow my art. 
Just like a graffiti artist, where they beautify walls, me, I beautify lawns, parkways. 
I use the garden, the soil, like it's a piece of cloth, and the plants and the trees, that's my embellishment for that cloth. 
You'd be surprised what the soil could do if you let it be your canvas. 
You just couldn't imagine how amazing a sunflower is and how it affects people. 
So what happened? 
I have witnessed my garden become a tool for the education, a tool for the transformation of my neighborhood. 
To change the community, you have to change the composition of the soil. 
We are the soil. 
You'd be surprised how kids are affected by this. 
Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city. 
Plus you get strawberries. 
(Laughter) I remember this time, there was this mother and a daughter came, it was, like, 10: 30 at night, and they were in my yard, and I came out and they looked so ashamed. 
So I'm like, man, it made me feel bad that they were there, and I told them, you know, you don't have to do this like this. 
This is on the street for a reason. 
It made me feel ashamed to see people that were this close to me that were hungry, and this only reinforced why I do this, and people asked me, "" Fin, aren't you afraid people are going to steal your food? "" And I'm like, "" Hell no, I ain't afraid they're gonna steal it. 
That's why it's on the street. 
That's the whole idea. 
I want them to take it, but at the same time, I want them to take back their health. "" There's another time when I put a garden in this homeless shelter in downtown Los Angeles. 
These are the guys, they helped me unload the truck. 
It was cool, and they just shared the stories about how this affected them and how they used to plant with their mother and their grandmother, and it was just cool to see how this changed them, if it was only for that one moment. 
So Green Grounds has gone on to plant maybe 20 gardens. 
We've had, like, 50 people come to our dig-ins and participate, and it's all volunteers. 
If kids grow kale, kids eat kale. 
(Laughter) If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes. (Applause) But when none of this is presented to them, if they're not shown how food affects the mind and the body, they blindly eat whatever the hell you put in front of them. 
I see young people and they want to work, but they're in this thing where they're caught up — I see kids of color and they're just on this track that's designed for them, that leads them to nowhere. 
So with gardening, I see an opportunity where we can train these kids to take over their communities, to have a sustainable life. 
And when we do this, who knows? 
We might produce the next George Washington Carver. 
but if we don't change the composition of the soil, we will never do this. 
Now this is one of my plans. This is what I want to do. 
I want to plant a whole block of gardens where people can share in the food in the same block. 
I want to take shipping containers and turn them into healthy cafes. 
Now don't get me wrong. 
I'm not talking about no free shit, because free is not sustainable. 
The funny thing about sustainability, you have to sustain it. 
(Laughter) (Applause) What I'm talking about is putting people to work, and getting kids off the street, and letting them know the joy, the pride and the honor in growing your own food, opening farmer's markets. 
So what I want to do here, we gotta make this sexy. 
So I want us all to become ecolutionary renegades, gangstas, gangsta gardeners. 
We gotta flip the script on what a gangsta is. 
If you ain't a gardener, you ain't gangsta. 
Get gangsta with your shovel, okay? 
And let that be your weapon of choice. 
(Applause) So basically, if you want to meet with me, you know, if you want to meet, don't call me if you want to sit around in cushy chairs and have meetings where you talk about doing some shit — where you talk about doing some shit. 
If you want to meet with me, come to the garden with your shovel so we can plant some shit. 
Peace. Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

All human life, all life, depends on plants. 
Let me try to convince you of that in a few seconds. 
Just think for a moment. 
It doesn't matter whether you live in a small African village, or you live in a big city, everything comes back to plants in the end: whether it's for the food, the medicine, the fuel, the construction, the clothing, all the obvious things; or whether it's for the spiritual and recreational things that matter to us so much; or whether it's soil formation, or the effect on the atmosphere, or primary production. 
Damn it, even the books here are made out of plants. 
All these things, they come back to plants. 
And without them we wouldn't be here. 
Now plants are under threat. 
They're under threat because of changing climate. 
And they are also under threat because they are sharing a planet with people like us. 
And people like us want to do things that destroy plants, and their habitats. 
And whether that's because of food production, or because of the introduction of alien plants into places that they really oughtn't be, or because of habitats being used for other purposes — all these things are meaning that plants have to adapt, or die, or move. 
And plants sometimes find it rather difficult to move because there might be cities and other things in the way. 
So if all human life depends on plants, doesn't it make sense that perhaps we should try to save them? 
I think it does. 
And I want to tell you about a project to save plants. 
And the way that you save plants is by storing seeds. 
Because seeds, in all their diverse glory, are plants' futures. 
All the genetic information for future generations of plants are held in seeds. 
So here is the building; it looks rather unassuming, really. 
But it goes down below ground many stories. 
And it's the largest seed bank in the world. 
It exists not only in southern England, but distributed around the world. I'll come to that. 
This is a nuclear-proof facility. 
God forbid that it should have to withstand that. 
So if you're going to build a seed bank, you have to decide what you're going to store in it. Right? 
And we decided that what we want to store first of all, are the species that are most under threat. 
And those are the dry land species. 
So first of all we did deals with 50 different countries. 
It means negotiating with heads of state, and with secretaries of state in 50 countries to sign treaties. 
We have 120 partner institutions all over the world, in all those countries colored orange. 
People come from all over the world to learn, and then they go away and plan exactly how they're going to collect these seeds. 
They have thousands of people all over the world tagging places where those plants are said to exist. 
They search for them. They find them in flower. 
And they go back when their seeds have arrived. 
And they collect the seeds. All over the world. 
The seeds — some of if is very untechnical. 
You kind of shovel them all in to bags and dry them off. 
You label them. You do some high-tech things here and there, some low-tech things here and there. 
And the main thing is that you have to dry them very carefully, at low temperature. 
And then you have to store them at about minus 20 degrees C — that's about minus four Fahrenheit, I think — with a very critically low moisture content. 
And these seeds will be able to germinate, we believe, with many of the species, in thousands of years, and certainly in hundreds of years. 
It's no good storing the seeds if you don't know they're still viable. 
So every 10 years we do germination tests on every sample of seeds that we have. 
And this is a distributed network. 
So all around the world people are doing the same thing. 
And that enables us to develop germination protocols. 
That means that we know the right combination of heat and cold and the cycles that you have to get to make the seed germinate. 
And that is very useful information. 
And then we grow these things, and we tell people, back in the countries where these seeds have come from, "" Look, actually we're not just storing this to get the seeds later, but we can give you this information about how to germinate these difficult plants. "" And that's already happening. 
So where have we got to? 
I am pleased to unveil that our three billionth seed — that's three thousand millionth seed — is now stored. 
Ten percent of all plant species on the planet, 24,000 species are safe; 30,000 species, if we get the funding, by next year. 
Twenty-five percent of all the world's plants, by 2020. 
These are not just crop plants, as you might have seen stored in Svalbard in Norway — fantastic work there. 
This is at least 100 times bigger. 
We have thousands of collections that have been sent out all over the world: drought-tolerant forest species sent to Pakistan and Egypt; especially photosynthetic-efficient plants come here to the United States; salt-tolerant pasture species sent to Australia; the list goes on and on. 
These seeds are used for restoration. 
So in habitats that have already been damaged, like the tall grass prairie here in the USA, or in mined land in various countries, restoration is already happening because of these species — and because of this collection. 
Some of these plants, like the ones on the bottom to the left of your screen, they are down to the last few remaining members. 
The one where the guy is collecting seeds there on the truck, that is down to about 30 last remaining trees. 
Fantastically useful plant, both for protein and for medicine. 
We have training going on in China, in the USA, and many other countries. 
How much does it cost? 
2,800 dollars per species is the average. 
I think that's cheap, at the price. 
And that gets you all the scientific data that goes with it. 
The future research is "" How can we find the genetic and molecular markers for the viability of seeds, without having to plant them every 10 years? "" And we're almost there. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

How many are there in the human genome? Three billion. 
Then he compared those two genomes in software, and what he found, among other things, was a deletion — a 2,000-base deletion across three billion bases in a particular gene called TP53. 
So unfortunately, this doesn't help this woman, but it does have severe — profound, if you will — implications to her family. 
I'm in so much pain. "" His pediatrician happens to have a background in clinical genetics and he has no idea what's going on, but he says, "" Let's get this kid's genome sequenced. "" And what they find is a single-point mutation in a gene responsible for controlling programmed cell death. 
(Laughter) Look — (Laughter) These genomes, these 23 chromosomes, they don't in any way represent the quality of our relationships or the nature of our society — at least not yet. 

I'm a tourism entrepreneur and a peacebuilder, but this is not how I started. 
When I was seven years old, I remember watching television and seeing people throwing rocks, and thinking, this must be a fun thing to do. 
So I got out to the street and threw rocks, not realizing I was supposed to throw rocks at Israeli cars. 
Instead, I ended up stoning my neighbors' cars. (Laughter) They were not enthusiastic about my patriotism. 
This is my picture with my brother. 
This is me, the little one, and I know what you're thinking: "You used to look cute, what the heck happened to you?" 
But my brother, who is older than me, was arrested when he was 18, taken to prison on charges of throwing stones. 
He was beaten up when he refused to confess that he threw stones, and as a result, had internal injuries that caused his death soon after he was released from prison. 
I was angry, I was bitter, and all I wanted was revenge. 
But that changed when I was 18. 
I decided that I needed Hebrew to get a job, and going to study Hebrew in that classroom was the first time I ever met Jews who were not soldiers. 
And we connected over really small things, like the fact that I love country music, which is really strange for Palestinians. 
But it was then that I realized also that we have a wall of anger, of hatred and of ignorance that separates us. 
I decided that it doesn't matter what happens to me. 
What really matters is how I deal with it. 
And therefore, I decided to dedicate my life to bringing down the walls that separate people. 
I do so through many ways. 
Tourism is one of them, but also media and education, and you might be wondering, really, can tourism change things? 
Can it bring down walls? Yes. 
Tourism is the best sustainable way to bring down those walls and to create a sustainable way of connecting with each other and creating friendships. 
In 2009, I cofounded Mejdi Tours, a social enterprise that aims to connect people, with two Jewish friends, by the way, and what we'll do, the model we did, for example, in Jerusalem, we would have two tour guides, one Israeli and one Palestinian, guiding the trips together, telling history and narrative and archaeology and conflict from totally different perspectives. 
I remember running a trip together with a friend named Kobi — Jewish congregation from Chicago, the trip was in Jerusalem — and we took them to a refugee camp, a Palestinian refugee camp, and there we had this amazing food. 
By the way, this is my mother. She's cool. 
And that's the Palestinian food called maqluba. 
It means "" upside-down. "" You cook it with rice and chicken, and you flip it upside-down. 
It's the best meal ever. 
And we'll eat together. 
Then we had a joint band, Israeli and Palestinian musicians, and we did some belly-dancing. 
If you don't know any, I'll teach you later. 
But when we left, both sides, they were crying because they did not want to leave. 
Three years later, those relationships still exist. 
Imagine with me if the one billion people who travel internationally every year travel like this, not being taken in the bus from one side to another, from one hotel to another, taking pictures from the windows of their buses of people and cultures, but actually connecting with people. 
You know, I remember having a Muslim group from the U.K. 
going to the house of an Orthodox Jewish family, and having their first Friday night dinners, that Sabbath dinner, and eating together hamin, which is a Jewish food, a stew, just having the connection of realizing, after a while, that a hundred years ago, their families came out of the same place in Northern Africa. 
This is not a photo profile for your Facebook. 
This is not disaster tourism. 
This is the future of travel, and I invite you to join me to do that, to change your travel. 
We're doing it all over the world now, from Ireland to Iran to Turkey, and we see ourselves going everywhere to change the world. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Trees epitomize stasis. 
Trees are rooted in the ground in one place for many human generations, but if we shift our perspective from the trunk to the twigs, trees become very dynamic entities, moving and growing. 
And I decided to explore this movement by turning trees into artists. 
I simply tied the end of a paintbrush onto a twig. 
I waited for the wind to come up and held up a canvas, and that produced art. 
The piece of art you see on your left is painted by a western red cedar and that on your right by a Douglas fir, and what I learned was that different species have different signatures, like a Picasso versus a Monet. 
But I was also interested in the movement of trees and how this art might let me capture that and quantify it, so to measure the distance that a single vine maple tree — which produced this painting — moved in a single year, I simply measured and summed each of those lines. 
I multiplied them by the number of twigs per branch and the number of branches per tree and then divided that by the number of minutes per year. 
And so I was able to calculate how far a single tree moved in a single year. 
You might have a guess. 
The answer is actually 186,540 miles, or seven times around the globe. 
And so simply by shifting our perspective from a single trunk to the many dynamic twigs, we are able to see that trees are not simply static entities, but rather extremely dynamic. 
And I began to think about ways that we might consider this lesson of trees, to consider other entities that are also static and stuck, but which cry for change and dynamicism, and one of those entities is our prisons. 
Prisons, of course, are where people who break our laws are stuck, confined behind bars. 
And our prison system itself is stuck. 
The United States has over 2.3 million incarcerated men and women. 
That number is rising. 
Of the 100 incarcerated people that are released, 60 will return to prison. 
Funds for education, for training and for rehabilitation are declining, so this despairing cycle of incarceration continues. 
I decided to ask whether the lesson I had learned from trees as artists could be applied to a static institution such as our prisons, and I think the answer is yes. 
In the year 2007, I started a partnership with the Washington State Department of Corrections. 
Working with four prisons, we began bringing science and scientists, sustainability and conservation projects to four state prisons. 
We give science lectures, and the men here are choosing to come to our science lectures instead of watching television or weightlifting. 
That, I think, is movement. 
We partnered with the Nature Conservancy for inmates at Stafford Creek Correctional Center to grow endangered prairie plants for restoration of relic prairie areas in Washington state. 
That, I think, is movement. 
We worked with the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife to grow endangered frogs — the Oregon spotted frog — for later release into protected wetlands. 
That, I think, is movement. 
And just recently, we've begun to work with those men who are segregated in what we call Supermax facilities. 
They've incurred violent infractions by becoming violent with guards and with other prisoners. 
They're kept in bare cells like this for 23 hours a day. 
When they have meetings with their review boards or mental health professionals, they're placed in immobile booths like this. 
For one hour a day they're brought to these bleak and bland exercise yards. 
Although we can't bring trees and prairie plants and frogs into these environments, we are bringing images of nature into these exercise yards, putting them on the walls, so at least they get contact with visual images of nature. 
This is Mr. Lopez, who has been in solitary confinement for 18 months, and he's providing input on the types of images that he believes would make him and his fellow inmates more serene, more calm, less apt to violence. 
And so what we see, I think, is that small, collective movements of change can perhaps move an entity such as our own prison system in a direction of hope. 
We know that trees are static entities when we look at their trunks. 
But if trees can create art, if they can encircle the globe seven times in one year, if prisoners can grow plants and raise frogs, then perhaps there are other static entities that we hold inside ourselves, like grief, like addictions, like racism, that can also change. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Today I want to tell you about a project being carried out by scientists all over the world to paint a neural portrait of the human mind. 
And the central idea of this work is that the human mind and brain is not a single, general-purpose processor, but a collection of highly specialized components, each solving a different specific problem, and yet collectively making up who we are as human beings and thinkers. 
To give you a feel for this idea, imagine the following scenario: You walk into your child's day care center. 
As usual, there's a dozen kids there waiting to get picked up, but this time, the children's faces look weirdly similar, and you can't figure out which child is yours. 
Do you need new glasses? 
Are you losing your mind? 
You run through a quick mental checklist. 
No, you seem to be thinking clearly, and your vision is perfectly sharp. 
And everything looks normal except the children's faces. 
You can see the faces, but they don't look distinctive, and none of them looks familiar, and it's only by spotting an orange hair ribbon that you find your daughter. 
This sudden loss of the ability to recognize faces actually happens to people. 
It's called prosopagnosia, and it results from damage to a particular part of the brain. 
The striking thing about it is that only face recognition is impaired; everything else is just fine. 
Prosopagnosia is one of many surprisingly specific mental deficits that can happen after brain damage. 
These syndromes collectively have suggested for a long time that the mind is divvied up into distinct components, but the effort to discover those components has jumped to warp speed with the invention of brain imaging technology, especially MRI. 
So MRI enables you to see internal anatomy at high resolution, so I'm going to show you in a second a set of MRI cross-sectional images through a familiar object, and we're going to fly through them and you're going to try to figure out what the object is. 
Here we go. 
It's not that easy. It's an artichoke. 
Okay, let's try another one, starting from the bottom and going through the top. 
Broccoli! It's a head of broccoli. 
Isn't it beautiful? I love that. 
Okay, here's another one. It's a brain, of course. 
In fact, it's my brain. 
We're going through slices through my head like that. 
That's my nose over on the right, and now we're going over here, right there. 
So this picture's nice, if I do say so myself, but it shows only anatomy. 
The really cool advance with functional imaging happened when scientists figured out how to make pictures that show not just anatomy but activity, that is, where neurons are firing. 
So here's how this works. 
Brains are like muscles. 
When they get active, they need increased blood flow to supply that activity, and lucky for us, blood flow control to the brain is local, so if a bunch of neurons, say, right there get active and start firing, then blood flow increases just right there. 
So functional MRI picks up on that blood flow increase, producing a higher MRI response where neural activity goes up. 
So to give you a concrete feel for how a functional MRI experiment goes and what you can learn from it and what you can't, let me describe one of the first studies I ever did. 
We wanted to know if there was a special part of the brain for recognizing faces, and there was already reason to think there might be such a thing based on this phenomenon of prosopagnosia that I described a moment ago, but nobody had ever seen that part of the brain in a normal person, so we set out to look for it. 
So I was the first subject. 
I went into the scanner, I lay on my back, I held my head as still as I could while staring at pictures of faces like these and objects like these and faces and objects for hours. 
So as somebody who has pretty close to the world record of total number of hours spent inside an MRI scanner, I can tell you that one of the skills that's really important for MRI research is bladder control. 
(Laughter) When I got out of the scanner, I did a quick analysis of the data, looking for any parts of my brain that produced a higher response when I was looking at faces than when I was looking at objects, and here's what I saw. 
Now this image looks just awful by today's standards, but at the time I thought it was beautiful. 
What it shows is that region right there, that little blob, it's about the size of an olive and it's on the bottom surface of my brain about an inch straight in from right there. 
And what that part of my brain is doing is producing a higher MRI response, that is, higher neural activity, when I was looking at faces than when I was looking at objects. 
So that's pretty cool, but how do we know this isn't a fluke? 
Well, the easiest way is to just do the experiment again. 
So I got back in the scanner, I looked at more faces and I looked at more objects and I got a similar blob, and then I did it again and I did it again and again and again, and around about then I decided to believe it was for real. 
But still, maybe this is something weird about my brain and no one else has one of these things in there, so to find out, we scanned a bunch of other people and found that pretty much everyone has that little face-processing region in a similar neighborhood of the brain. 
So the next question was, what does this thing really do? 
Is it really specialized just for face recognition? 
Well, maybe not, right? 
Maybe it responds not only to faces but to any body part. 
Maybe it responds to anything human or anything alive or anything round. 
The only way to be really sure that that region is specialized for face recognition is to rule out all of those hypotheses. 
So we spent much of the next couple of years scanning subjects while they looked at lots of different kinds of images, and we showed that that part of the brain responds strongly when you look at any images that are faces of any kind, and it responds much less strongly to any image you show that isn't a face, like some of these. 
So have we finally nailed the case that this region is necessary for face recognition? 
No, we haven't. 
Brain imaging can never tell you if a region is necessary for anything. 
All you can do with brain imaging is watch regions turn on and off as people think different thoughts. 
To tell if a part of the brain is necessary for a mental function, you need to mess with it and see what happens, and normally we don't get to do that. 
But an amazing opportunity came about very recently when a couple of colleagues of mine tested this man who has epilepsy and who is shown here in his hospital bed where he's just had electrodes placed on the surface of his brain to identify the source of his seizures. 
So it turned out by total chance that two of the electrodes happened to be right on top of his face area. 
So with the patient's consent, the doctors asked him what happened when they electrically stimulated that part of his brain. 
Now, the patient doesn't know where those electrodes are, and he's never heard of the face area. 
So let's watch what happens. 
It's going to start with a control condition that will say "" Sham "" nearly invisibly in red in the lower left, when no current is delivered, and you'll hear the neurologist speaking to the patient first. So let's watch. 
(Video) Neurologist: Okay, just look at my face and tell me what happens when I do this. 
All right? 
Patient: Okay. 
Neurologist: One, two, three. 
Patient: Nothing. Neurologist: Nothing? Okay. 
I'm going to do it one more time. 
Look at my face. 
One, two, three. 
Patient: You just turned into somebody else. 
Your face metamorphosed. 
Your nose got saggy, it went to the left. 
You almost looked like somebody I'd seen before, but somebody different. 
That was a trip. 
(Laughter) Nancy Kanwisher: So this experiment — (Applause) — this experiment finally nails the case that this region of the brain is not only selectively responsive to faces but causally involved in face perception. 
So I went through all of these details about the face region to show you what it takes to really establish that a part of the brain is selectively involved in a specific mental process. 
Next, I'll go through much more quickly some of the other specialized regions of the brain that we and others have found. 
So to do this, I've spent a lot of time in the scanner over the last month so I can show you these things in my brain. 
So let's get started. Here's my right hemisphere. 
So we're oriented like that. You're looking at my head this way. 
Imagine taking the skull off and looking at the surface of the brain like that. 
Okay, now as you can see, the surface of the brain is all folded up. 
So that's not good. Stuff could be hidden in there. 
We want to see the whole thing, so let's inflate it so we can see the whole thing. 
Next, let's find that face area I've been talking about that responds to images like these. 
To see that, let's turn the brain around and look on the inside surface on the bottom, and there it is, that's my face area. 
Just to the right of that is another region that is shown in purple that responds when you process color information, and near those regions are other regions that are involved in perceiving places, like right now, I'm seeing this layout of space around me and these regions in green right there are really active. 
There's another one out on the outside surface again where there's a couple more face regions as well. 
Also in this vicinity is a region that's selectively involved in processing visual motion, like these moving dots here, and that's in yellow at the bottom of the brain, and near that is a region that responds when you look at images of bodies and body parts like these, and that region is shown in lime green at the bottom of the brain. 
Now all these regions I've shown you so far are involved in specific aspects of visual perception. 
Do we also have specialized brain regions for other senses, like hearing? 
Yes, we do. So if we turn the brain around a little bit, here's a region in dark blue that we reported just a couple of months ago, and this region responds strongly when you hear sounds with pitch, like these. 
(Sirens) (Cello music) (Doorbell) In contrast, that same region does not respond strongly when you hear perfectly familiar sounds that don't have a clear pitch, like these. 
(Chomping) (Drum roll) (Toilet flushing) Okay. Next to the pitch region is another set of regions that are selectively responsive when you hear the sounds of speech. 
Okay, now let's look at these same regions. 
In my left hemisphere, there's a similar arrangement — not identical, but similar — and most of the same regions are in here, albeit sometimes different in size. 
Now, everything I've shown you so far are regions that are involved in different aspects of perception, vision and hearing. 
Do we also have specialized brain regions for really fancy, complicated mental processes? 
Yes, we do. 
So here in pink are my language regions. 
So it's been known for a very long time that that general vicinity of the brain is involved in processing language, but we showed very recently that these pink regions respond extremely selectively. 
They respond when you understand the meaning of a sentence, but not when you do other complex mental things, like mental arithmetic or holding information in memory or appreciating the complex structure in a piece of music. 
The most amazing region that's been found yet is this one right here in turquoise. 
This region responds when you think about what another person is thinking. 
So that may seem crazy, but actually, we humans do this all the time. 
You're doing this when you realize that your partner is going to be worried if you don't call home to say you're running late. 
I'm doing this with that region of my brain right now when I realize that you guys are probably now wondering about all that gray, uncharted territory in the brain, and what's up with that? 
Well, I'm wondering about that too, and we're running a bunch of experiments in my lab right now to try to find a number of other possible specializations in the brain for other very specific mental functions. 
But importantly, I don't think we have specializations in the brain for every important mental function, even mental functions that may be critical for survival. 
In fact, a few years ago, there was a scientist in my lab who became quite convinced that he'd found a brain region for detecting food, and it responded really strongly in the scanner when people looked at images like this. 
And further, he found a similar response in more or less the same location in 10 out of 12 subjects. 
So he was pretty stoked, and he was running around the lab telling everyone that he was going to go on "" Oprah "" with his big discovery. 
But then he devised the critical test: He showed subjects images of food like this and compared them to images with very similar color and shape, but that weren't food, like these. 
And his region responded the same to both sets of images. 
So it wasn't a food area, it was just a region that liked colors and shapes. 
So much for "" Oprah. "" But then the question, of course, is, how do we process all this other stuff that we don't have specialized brain regions for? 
Well, I think the answer is that in addition to these highly specialized components that I've been describing, we also have a lot of very general- purpose machinery in our heads that enables us to tackle whatever problem comes along. 
In fact, we've shown recently that these regions here in white respond whenever you do any difficult mental task at all — well, of the seven that we've tested. 
So each of the brain regions that I've described to you today is present in approximately the same location in every normal subject. 
I could take any of you, pop you in the scanner, and find each of those regions in your brain, and it would look a lot like my brain, although the regions would be slightly different in their exact location and in their size. 
What's important to me about this work is not the particular locations of these brain regions, but the simple fact that we have selective, specific components of mind and brain in the first place. 
I mean, it could have been otherwise. 
The brain could have been a single, general-purpose processor, more like a kitchen knife than a Swiss Army knife. 
Instead, what brain imaging has delivered is this rich and interesting picture of the human mind. 
So we have this picture of very general-purpose machinery in our heads in addition to this surprising array of very specialized components. 
It's early days in this enterprise. 
We've painted only the first brushstrokes in our neural portrait of the human mind. 
The most fundamental questions remain unanswered. 
So for example, what does each of these regions do exactly? 
Why do we need three face areas and three place areas, and what's the division of labor between them? 
Second, how are all these things connected in the brain? 
With diffusion imaging, you can trace bundles of neurons that connect to different parts of the brain, and with this method shown here, you can trace the connections of individual neurons in the brain, potentially someday giving us a wiring diagram of the entire human brain. 
Third, how does all of this very systematic structure get built, both over development in childhood and over the evolution of our species? 
To address questions like that, scientists are now scanning other species of animals, and they're also scanning human infants. 
Many people justify the high cost of neuroscience research by pointing out that it may help us someday to treat brain disorders like Alzheimer's and autism. 
That's a hugely important goal, and I'd be thrilled if any of my work contributed to it, but fixing things that are broken in the world is not the only thing that's worth doing. 
The effort to understand the human mind and brain is worthwhile even if it never led to the treatment of a single disease. 
What could be more thrilling than to understand the fundamental mechanisms that underlie human experience, to understand, in essence, who we are? 
This is, I think, the greatest scientific quest of all time. 
(Applause) 

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

Just after Christmas last year, 132 kids in California got the measles by either visiting Disneyland or being exposed to someone who'd been there. 
The virus then hopped the Canadian border, infecting more than 100 children in Quebec. 
One of the tragic things about this outbreak is that measles, which can be fatal to a child with a weakened immune system, is one of the most easily preventable diseases in the world. 
An effective vaccine against it has been available for more than half a century, but many of the kids involved in the Disneyland outbreak had not been vaccinated because their parents were afraid of something allegedly even worse: autism. 
But wait — wasn't the paper that sparked the controversy about autism and vaccines debunked, retracted, and branded a deliberate fraud by the British Medical Journal? 
Don't most science-savvy people know that the theory that vaccines cause autism is B.S.? 
I think most of you do, but millions of parents worldwide continue to fear that vaccines put their kids at risk for autism. 
Why? 
Here's why. 
This is a graph of autism prevalence estimates rising over time. 
For most of the 20th century, autism was considered an incredibly rare condition. 
The few psychologists and pediatricians who'd even heard of it figured they would get through their entire careers without seeing a single case. 
For decades, the prevalence estimates remained stable at just three or four children in 10,000. 
But then, in the 1990s, the numbers started to skyrocket. 
Fundraising organizations like Autism Speaks routinely refer to autism as an epidemic, as if you could catch it from another kid at Disneyland. 
So what's going on? 
If it isn't vaccines, what is it? 
If you ask the folks down at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta what's going on, they tend to rely on phrases like "" broadened diagnostic criteria "" and "" better case finding "" to explain these rising numbers. 
But that kind of language doesn't do much to allay the fears of a young mother who is searching her two-year-old's face for eye contact. 
If the diagnostic criteria had to be broadened, why were they so narrow in the first place? 
Why were cases of autism so hard to find before the 1990s? 
Five years ago, I decided to try to uncover the answers to these questions. 
I learned that what happened has less to do with the slow and cautious progress of science than it does with the seductive power of storytelling. 
For most of the 20th century, clinicians told one story about what autism is and how it was discovered, but that story turned out to be wrong, and the consequences of it are having a devastating impact on global public health. 
There was a second, more accurate story of autism which had been lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the clinical literature. 
This second story tells us everything about how we got here and where we need to go next. 
The first story starts with a child psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Leo Kanner. 
In 1943, Kanner published a paper describing 11 young patients who seemed to inhabit private worlds, ignoring the people around them, even their own parents. 
They could amuse themselves for hours by flapping their hands in front of their faces, but they were panicked by little things like their favorite toy being moved from its usual place without their knowledge. 
Based on the patients who were brought to his clinic, Kanner speculated that autism is very rare. 
By the 1950s, as the world's leading authority on the subject, he declared that he had seen less than 150 true cases of his syndrome while fielding referrals from as far away as South Africa. 
That's actually not surprising, because Kanner's criteria for diagnosing autism were incredibly selective. 
For example, he discouraged giving the diagnosis to children who had seizures but now we know that epilepsy is very common in autism. 
He once bragged that he had turned nine out of 10 kids referred to his office as autistic by other clinicians without giving them an autism diagnosis. 
Kanner was a smart guy, but a number of his theories didn't pan out. 
He classified autism as a form of infantile psychosis caused by cold and unaffectionate parents. 
These children, he said, had been kept neatly in a refrigerator that didn't defrost. 
At the same time, however, Kanner noticed that some of his young patients had special abilities that clustered in certain areas like music, math and memory. 
One boy in his clinic could distinguish between 18 symphonies before he turned two. 
When his mother put on one of his favorite records, he would correctly declare, "" Beethoven! "" But Kanner took a dim view of these abilities, claiming that the kids were just regurgitating things they'd heard their pompous parents say, desperate to earn their approval. 
As a result, autism became a source of shame and stigma for families, and two generations of autistic children were shipped off to institutions for their own good, becoming invisible to the world at large. 
Amazingly, it wasn't until the 1970s that researchers began to test Kanner's theory that autism was rare. 
Lorna Wing was a cognitive psychologist in London who thought that Kanner's theory of refrigerator parenting were "" bloody stupid, "" as she told me. 
She and her husband John were warm and affectionate people, and they had a profoundly autistic daughter named Susie. 
Lorna and John knew how hard it was to raise a child like Susie without support services, special education, and the other resources that are out of reach without a diagnosis. 
To make the case to the National Health Service that more resources were needed for autistic children and their families, Lorna and her colleague Judith Gould decided to do something that should have been done 30 years earlier. 
They undertook a study of autism prevalence in the general population. 
They pounded the pavement in a London suburb called Camberwell to try to find autistic children in the community. 
What they saw made clear that Kanner's model was way too narrow, while the reality of autism was much more colorful and diverse. 
Some kids couldn't talk at all, while others waxed on at length about their fascination with astrophysics, dinosaurs or the genealogy of royalty. 
In other words, these children didn't fit into nice, neat boxes, as Judith put it, and they saw lots of them, way more than Kanner's monolithic model would have predicted. 
At first, they were at a loss to make sense of their data. 
How had no one noticed these children before? 
But then Lorna came upon a reference to a paper that had been published in German in 1944, the year after Kanner's paper, and then forgotten, buried with the ashes of a terrible time that no one wanted to remember or think about. 
Kanner knew about this competing paper, but scrupulously avoided mentioning it in his own work. 
It had never even been translated into English, but luckily, Lorna's husband spoke German, and he translated it for her. 
The paper offered an alternate story of autism. 
Its author was a man named Hans Asperger, who ran a combination clinic and residential school in Vienna in the 1930s. 
Asperger's ideas about teaching children with learning differences were progressive even by contemporary standards. 
Mornings at his clinic began with exercise classes set to music, and the children put on plays on Sunday afternoons. 
Instead of blaming parents for causing autism, Asperger framed it as a lifelong, polygenetic disability that requires compassionate forms of support and accommodations over the course of one's whole life. 
Rather than treating the kids in his clinic like patients, Asperger called them his little professors, and enlisted their help in developing methods of education that were particularly suited to them. 
Crucially, Asperger viewed autism as a diverse continuum that spans an astonishing range of giftedness and disability. 
He believed that autism and autistic traits are common and always have been, seeing aspects of this continuum in familiar archetypes from pop culture like the socially awkward scientist and the absent-minded professor. 
He went so far as to say, it seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential. 
Lorna and Judith realized that Kanner had been as wrong about autism being rare as he had been about parents causing it. 
Over the next several years, they quietly worked with the American Psychiatric Association to broaden the criteria for diagnosis to reflect the diversity of what they called "" the autism spectrum. "" In the late '80s and early 1990s, their changes went into effect, swapping out Kanner's narrow model for Asperger's broad and inclusive one. 
These changes weren't happening in a vacuum. 
By coincidence, as Lorna and Judith worked behind the scenes to reform the criteria, people all over the world were seeing an autistic adult for the first time. 
Before "" Rain Man "" came out in 1988, only a tiny, ingrown circle of experts knew what autism looked like, but after Dustin Hoffman's unforgettable performance as Raymond Babbitt earned "" Rain Man "" four Academy Awards, pediatricians, psychologists, teachers and parents all over the world knew what autism looked like. 
Coincidentally, at the same time, the first easy-to-use clinical tests for diagnosing autism were introduced. 
You no longer had to have a connection to that tiny circle of experts to get your child evaluated. 
The combination of "" Rain Man, "" the changes to the criteria, and the introduction of these tests created a network effect, a perfect storm of autism awareness. 
The number of diagnoses started to soar, just as Lorna and Judith predicted, indeed hoped, that it would, enabling autistic people and their families to finally get the support and services they deserved. 
Then Andrew Wakefield came along to blame the spike in diagnoses on vaccines, a simple, powerful, and seductively believable story that was as wrong as Kanner's theory that autism was rare. 
If the CDC's current estimate, that one in 68 kids in America are on the spectrum, is correct, autistics are one of the largest minority groups in the world. 
In recent years, autistic people have come together on the Internet to reject the notion that they are puzzles to be solved by the next medical breakthrough, coining the term "" neurodiversity "" to celebrate the varieties of human cognition. 
One way to understand neurodiversity is to think in terms of human operating systems. 
Just because a P.C. is not running Windows doesn't mean that it's broken. 
By autistic standards, the normal human brain is easily distractable, obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail. 
To be sure, autistic people have a hard time living in a world not built for them. 
[Seventy] years later, we're still catching up to Asperger, who believed that the "" cure "" for the most disabling aspects of autism is to be found in understanding teachers, accommodating employers, supportive communities, and parents who have faith in their children's potential. 
An autistic [man] named Zosia Zaks once said, "We need all hands on deck to right the ship of humanity." 
As we sail into an uncertain future, we need every form of human intelligence on the planet working together to tackle the challenges that we face as a society. 
We can't afford to waste a brain. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I'm a garbage man. 
And you might find it interesting that I became a garbage man, because I absolutely hate waste. 
I hope, within the next 10 minutes, to change the way you think about a lot of the stuff in your life. 
And I'd like to start at the very beginning. 
Think back when you were just a kid. 
How did look at the stuff in your life? 
Perhaps it was like these toddler rules: It's my stuff if I saw it first. 
The entire pile is my stuff if I'm building something. 
The more stuff that's mine, the better. 
And of course, it's your stuff if it's broken. 
(Laughter) Well after spending about 20 years in the recycling industry, it's become pretty clear to me that we don't necessarily leave these toddler rules behind as we develop into adults. 
And let me tell you why I have that perspective. 
Because each and every day at our recycling plants around the world we handle about one million pounds of people's discarded stuff. 
Now a million pounds a day sounds like a lot of stuff, but it's a tiny drop of the durable goods that are disposed each and every year around the world — well less than one percent. 
In fact, the United Nations estimates that there's about 85 billion pounds a year of electronics waste that gets discarded around the world each and every year — and that's one of the most rapidly growing parts of our waste stream. 
And if you throw in other durable goods like automobiles and so forth, that number well more than doubles. 
And of course, the more developed the country, the bigger these mountains. 
Now when you see these mountains, most people think of garbage. 
We see above-ground mines. 
And the reason we see mines is because there's a lot of valuable raw materials that went into making all of this stuff in the first place. 
And it's becoming increasingly important that we figure out how to extract these raw materials from these extremely complicated waste streams. 
Because as we've heard all week at TED, the world's getting to be a smaller place with more people in it who want more and more stuff. 
And of course, they want the toys and the tools that many of us take for granted. 
And what goes into making those toys and tools that we use every single day? 
It's mostly many types of plastics and many types of metals. 
And the metals, we typically get from ore that we mine in ever widening mines and ever deepening mines around the world. 
And the plastics, we get from oil, which we go to more remote locations and drill ever deeper wells to extract. 
And these practices have significant economic and environmental implications that we're already starting to see today. 
The good news is we are starting to recover materials from our end-of-life stuff and starting to recycle our end-of-life stuff, particularly in regions of the world like here in Europe that have recycling policies in place that require that this stuff be recycled in a responsible manner. 
Most of what's extracted from our end-of-life stuff, if it makes it to a recycler, are the metals. 
To put that in perspective — and I'm using steel as a proxy here for metals, because it's the most common metal — if your stuff makes it to a recycler, probably over 90 percent of the metals are going to be recovered and reused for another purpose. 
Plastics are a whole other story: well less than 10 percent are recovered. 
In fact, it's more like five percent. 
Most of it's incinerated or landfilled. 
Now most people think that's because plastics are a throw-away material, have very little value. 
But actually, plastics are several times more valuable than steel. 
And there's more plastics produced and consumed around the world on a volume basis every year than steel. 
So why is such a plentiful and valuable material not recovered at anywhere near the rate of the less valuable material? 
Well it's predominantly because metals are very easy to recycle from other materials and from one another. 
They have very different densities. 
They have different electrical and magnetic properties. 
And they even have different colors. 
So it's very easy for either humans or machines to separate these metals from one another and from other materials. 
Plastics have overlapping densities over a very narrow range. 
They have either identical or very similar electrical and magnetic properties. 
And any plastic can be any color, as you probably well know. 
So the traditional ways of separating materials just simply don't work for plastics. 
Another consequence of metals being so easy to recycle by humans is that a lot of our stuff from the developed world — and sadly to say, particularly from the United States, where we don't have any recycling policies in place like here in Europe — finds its way to developing countries for low-cost recycling. 
People, for as little as a dollar a day, pick through our stuff. 
They extract what they can, which is mostly the metals — circuit boards and so forth — and they leave behind mostly what they can't recover, which is, again, mostly the plastics. 
Or they burn the plastics to get to the metals in burn houses like you see here. 
And they extract the metals by hand. 
Now while this may be the low-economic-cost solution, this is certainly not the low-environmental or human health-and-safety solution. 
I call this environmental arbitrage. 
And it's not fair, it's not safe and it's not sustainable. 
Now because the plastics are so plentiful — and by the way, those other methods don't lead to the recovery of plastics, obviously — but people do try to recover the plastics. 
This is just one example. 
This is a photo I took standing on the rooftops of one of the largest slums in the world in Mumbai, India. 
They store the plastics on the roofs. 
They bring them below those roofs into small workshops like these, and people try very hard to separate the plastics, by color, by shape, by feel, by any technique they can. 
And sometimes they'll resort to what's known as the "" burn and sniff "" technique where they'll burn the plastic and smell the fumes to try to determine the type of plastic. 
None of these techniques result in any amount of recycling in any significant way. 
And by the way, please don't try this technique at home. 
So what are we to do about this space-age material, at least what we used to call a space-aged material, these plastics? 
Well I certainly believe that it's far too valuable and far too abundant to keep putting back in the ground or certainly send up in smoke. 
So about 20 years ago, I literally started in my garage tinkering around, trying to figure out how to separate these very similar materials from each other, and eventually enlisted a lot of my friends, in the mining world actually, and in the plastics world, and we started going around to mining laboratories around the world. 
Because after all, we're doing above-ground mining. 
And we eventually broke the code. 
This is the last frontier of recycling. 
It's the last major material to be recovered in any significant amount on the Earth. 
And we finally figured out how to do it. 
And in the process, we started recreating how the plastics industry makes plastics. 
The traditional way to make plastics is with oil or petrochemicals. 
You breakdown the molecules, you recombine them in very specific ways, to make all the wonderful plastics that we enjoy each and every day. 
We said, there's got to be a more sustainable way to make plastics. 
And not just sustainable from an environmental standpoint, sustainable from an economic standpoint as well. 
Well a good place to start is with waste. 
It certainly doesn't cost as much as oil, and it's plentiful, as I hope that you've been able to see from the photographs. 
And because we're not breaking down the plastic into molecules and recombining them, we're using a mining approach to extract the materials. 
We have significantly lower capital costs in our plant equipment. 
We have enormous energy savings. 
I don't know how many other projects on the planet right now can save 80 to 90 percent of the energy compared to making something the traditional way. 
And instead of plopping down several hundred million dollars to build a chemical plant that will only make one type of plastic for its entire life, our plants can make any type of plastic we feed them. 
And we make a drop-in replacement for that plastic that's made from petrochemicals. 
Our customers get to enjoy huge CO2 savings. 
They get to close the loop with their products. 
And they get to make more sustainable products. 
In the short time period I have, I want to show you a little bit of a sense about how we do this. 
It starts with metal recyclers who shred our stuff into very small bits. 
They recover the metals and leave behind what's called shredder residue — it's their waste — a very complex mixture of materials, but predominantly plastics. 
We take out the things that aren't plastics, such as the metals they missed, carpeting, foam, rubber, wood, glass, paper, you name it. 
Even an occasional dead animal, unfortunately. 
And it goes in the first part of our process here, which is more like traditional recycling. 
We're sieving the material, we're using magnets, we're using air classification. 
It looks like the Willy Wonka factory at this point. 
At the end of this process, we have a mixed plastic composite: many different types of plastics and many different grades of plastics. 
This goes into the more sophisticated part of our process, and the really hard work, multi-step separation process begins. 
We grind the plastic down to about the size of your small fingernail. 
We use a very highly automated process to sort those plastics, not only by type, but by grade. 
And out the end of that part of the process come little flakes of plastic: one type, one grade. 
We then use optical sorting to color sort this material. 
We blend it in 50,000-lb. blending silos. 
We push that material to extruders where we melt it, push it through small die holes, make spaghetti-like plastic strands. 
And we chop those strands into what are called pellets. 
And this becomes the currency of the plastics industry. 
This is the same material that you would get from oil. 
And today, we're producing it from your old stuff, and it's going right back into your new stuff. 
(Applause) So now, instead of your stuff ending up on a hillside in a developing country or literally going up in smoke, you can find your old stuff back on top of your desk in new products, in your office, or back at work in your home. 
And these are just a few examples of companies that are buying our plastic, replacing virgin plastic, to make their new products. 
So I hope I've changed the way you look at at least some of the stuff in your life. 
We took our clues from mother nature. 
Mother nature wastes very little, reuses practically everything. 
And I hope that you stop looking at yourself as a consumer — that's a label I've always hated my entire life — and think of yourself as just using resources in one form, until they can be transformed to another form for another use later in time. 
And finally, I hope you agree with me to change that last toddler rule just a little bit to: "" If it's broken, it's my stuff. "" Thank you for your time. 
(Applause) 

College presidents are not the first people who come to mind when the subject is the uses of the creative imagination. 
So I thought I'd start by telling you how I got here. 
The story begins in the late '90s. 
I was invited to meet with leading educators from the newly free Eastern Europe and Russia. 
They were trying to figure out how to rebuild their universities. 
Since education under the Soviet Union was essentially propaganda serving the purposes of a state ideology, they appreciated that it would take wholesale transformations if they were to provide an education worthy of free men and women. 
Given this rare opportunity to start fresh, they chose liberal arts as the most compelling model because of its historic commitment to furthering its students' broadest intellectual, and deepest ethical potential. 
Having made that decision they came to the United States, home of liberal arts education, to talk with some of us most closely identified with that kind of education. 
They spoke with a passion, an urgency, an intellectual conviction that, for me, was a voice I had not heard in decades, a dream long forgotten. 
For, in truth, we had moved light years from the passions that animated them. 
But for me, unlike them, in my world, the slate was not clean, and what was written on it was not encouraging. 
In truth, liberal arts education no longer exists — at least genuine liberal arts education — in this country. 
We have professionalized liberal arts to the point where they no longer provide the breadth of application and the enhanced capacity for civic engagement that is their signature. 
Over the past century the expert has dethroned the educated generalist to become the sole model of intellectual accomplishment. (Applause) Expertise has for sure had its moments. 
But the price of its dominance is enormous. 
Subject matters are broken up into smaller and smaller pieces, with increasing emphasis on the technical and the obscure. 
We have even managed to make the study of literature arcane. 
You may think you know what is going on in that Jane Austen novel — that is, until your first encounter with postmodern deconstructionism. 
The progression of today's college student is to jettison every interest except one. 
And within that one, to continually narrow the focus, learning more and more about less and less; this, despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of things. 
Lest you think I exaggerate, here are the beginnings of the A-B-Cs of anthropology. 
As one moves up the ladder, values other than technical competence are viewed with increasing suspicion. 
Questions such as, "" What kind of a world are we making? 
What kind of a world should we be making? 
What kind of a world can we be making? "" are treated with more and more skepticism, and move off the table. 
In so doing, the guardians of secular democracy in effect yield the connection between education and values to fundamentalists, who, you can be sure, have no compunctions about using education to further their values: the absolutes of a theocracy. 
Meanwhile, the values and voices of democracy are silent. 
Either we have lost touch with those values or, no better, believe they need not or cannot be taught. 
This aversion to social values may seem at odds with the explosion of community service programs. 
But despite the attention paid to these efforts, they remain emphatically extracurricular. 
In effect, civic-mindedness is treated as outside the realm of what purports to be serious thinking and adult purposes. 
Simply put, when the impulse is to change the world, the academy is more likely to engender a learned helplessness than to create a sense of empowerment. 
This brew — oversimplification of civic engagement, idealization of the expert, fragmentation of knowledge, emphasis on technical mastery, neutrality as a condition of academic integrity — is toxic when it comes to pursuing the vital connections between education and the public good, between intellectual integrity and human freedom, which were at the heart — (Applause) — of the challenge posed to and by my European colleagues. 
When the astronomical distance between the realities of the academy and the visionary intensity of this challenge were more than enough, I can assure you, to give one pause, what was happening outside higher education made backing off unthinkable. 
Whether it was threats to the environment, inequities in the distribution of wealth, lack of a sane policy or a sustainable policy with respect to the continuing uses of energy, we were in desperate straits. 
And that was only the beginning. 
The corrupting of our political life had become a living nightmare; nothing was exempt — separation of powers, civil liberties, the rule of law, the relationship of church and state. 
Accompanied by a squandering of the nation's material wealth that defied credulity. 
A harrowing predilection for the uses of force had become commonplace, with an equal distaste for the alternative forms of influence. 
At the same time, all of our firepower was impotent when it came to halting or even stemming the slaughter in Rwanda, Darfur, Myanmar. 
Our public education, once a model for the world, has become most noteworthy for its failures. 
Mastery of basic skills and a bare minimum of cultural literacy eludes vast numbers of our students. 
Despite having a research establishment that is the envy of the world, more than half of the American public don't believe in evolution. 
And don't press your luck about how much those who do believe in it actually understand it. 
Incredibly, this nation, with all its material, intellectual and spiritual resources, seems utterly helpless to reverse the freefall in any of these areas. 
Equally startling, from my point of view, is the fact that no one was drawing any connections between what is happening to the body politic, and what is happening in our leading educational institutions. 
We may be at the top of the list when it comes to influencing access to personal wealth. 
We are not even on the list when it comes to our responsibility for the health of this democracy. 
We are playing with fire. 
You can be sure Jefferson knew what he was talking about when he said, "" If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was, and never will be. "" (Applause) On a more personal note, this betrayal of our principles, our decency, our hope, made it impossible for me to avoid the question, "" What will I say, years from now, when people ask, 'Where were you?' "" As president of a leading liberal arts college, famous for its innovative history, there were no excuses. 
So the conversation began at Bennington. 
Knowing that if we were to regain the integrity of liberal education, it would take radical rethinking of basic assumptions, beginning with our priorities. 
Enhancing the public good becomes a primary objective. 
The accomplishment of civic virtue is tied to the uses of intellect and imagination at their most challenging. 
Our ways of approaching agency and authority turn inside out to reflect the reality that no one has the answers to the challenges facing citizens in this century, and everyone has the responsibility for trying and participating in finding them. 
Bennington would continue to teach the arts and sciences as areas of immersion that acknowledge differences in personal and professional objectives. 
But the balances redressed, our shared purposes assume an equal if not greater importance. 
When the design emerged it was surprisingly simple and straightforward. 
The idea is to make the political-social challenges themselves — from health and education to the uses of force — the organizers of the curriculum. 
They would assume the commanding role of traditional disciplines. 
But structures designed to connect, rather than divide mutually dependent circles, rather than isolating triangles. 
And the point is not to treat these topics as topics of study, but as frameworks of action. 
The challenge: to figure out what it will take to actually do something that makes a significant and sustainable difference. 
Contrary to widely held assumptions, an emphasis on action provides a special urgency to thinking. 
The importance of coming to grips with values like justice, equity, truth, becomes increasingly evident as students discover that interest alone cannot tell them what they need to know when the issue is rethinking education, our approach to health, or strategies for achieving an economics of equity. 
The value of the past also comes alive; it provides a lot of company. 
You are not the first to try to figure this out, just as you are unlikely to be the last. 
Even more valuable, history provides a laboratory in which we see played out the actual, as well as the intended consequences of ideas. 
In the language of my students, "" Deep thought matters when you're contemplating what to do about things that matter. "" A new liberal arts that can support this action-oriented curriculum has begun to emerge. 
Rhetoric, the art of organizing the world of words to maximum effect. 
Design, the art of organizing the world of things. 
Mediation and improvisation also assume a special place in this new pantheon. 
Quantitative reasoning attains its proper position at the heart of what it takes to manage change where measurement is crucial. 
As is a capacity to discriminate systematically between what is at the core and what is at the periphery. 
And when making connections is of the essence, the power of technology emerges with special intensity. 
But so does the importance of content. 
The more powerful our reach, the more important the question "" About what? "" When improvisation, resourcefulness, imagination are key, artists, at long last, take their place at the table, when strategies of action are in the process of being designed. 
In this dramatically expanded ideal of a liberal arts education where the continuum of thought and action is its life's blood, knowledge honed outside the academy becomes essential. 
Social activists, business leaders, lawyers, politicians, professionals will join the faculty as active and ongoing participants in this wedding of liberal education to the advancement of the public good. 
Students, in turn, continuously move outside the classroom to engage the world directly. 
And of course, this new wine needs new bottles if we are to capture the liveliness and dynamism of this idea. 
The most important discovery we made in our focus on public action was to appreciate that the hard choices are not between good and evil, but between competing goods. 
This discovery is transforming. 
It undercuts self-righteousness, radically alters the tone and character of controversy, and enriches dramatically the possibilities for finding common ground. 
Ideology, zealotry, unsubstantiated opinions simply won't do. 
This is a political education, to be sure. 
But it is a politics of principle, not of partisanship. 
So the challenge for Bennington is to do it. 
On the cover of Bennington's 2008 holiday card is the architect's sketch of a building opening in 2010 that is to be a center for the advancement of public action. 
The center will embody and sustain this new educational commitment. 
Think of it as a kind of secular church. 
The words on the card describe what will happen inside. 
We intend to turn the intellectual and imaginative power, passion and boldness of our students, faculty and staff to developing strategies for acting on the critical challenges of our time. 
So we are doing our job. 
While these past weeks have been a time of national exhilaration in this country, it would be tragic if you thought this meant your job was done. 
The glacial silence we have experienced in the face of the shredding of the constitution, the unraveling of our public institutions, the deterioration of our infrastructure is not limited to the universities. 
We the people have become inured to our own irrelevance when it comes to doing anything significant about anything that matters concerning governance, beyond waiting another four years. 
We persist also in being sidelined by the idea of the expert as the only one capable of coming up with answers, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. 
The problem is there is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians and spectators. 
(Applause) People will continue and should continue to learn everything there is to know about something or other. 
We actually do it all the time. 
And there will be and should be those who spend a lifetime pursuing a very highly defined area of inquiry. 
But this single-mindedness will not yield the flexibilities of mind, the multiplicity of perspectives, the capacities for collaboration and innovation this country needs. 
That is where you come in. 
What is certain is that the individual talent exhibited in such abundance here, needs to turn its attention to that collaborative, messy, frustrating, contentious and impossible world of politics and public policy. 
President Obama and his team simply cannot do it alone. 
If the question of where to start seems overwhelming you are at the beginning, not the end of this adventure. 
Being overwhelmed is the first step if you are serious about trying to get at things that really matter, on a scale that makes a difference. 
So what do you do when you feel overwhelmed? 
Well, you have two things. 
You have a mind. And you have other people. 
Start with those, and change the world. 
(Applause) 

I'm afraid I'm one of those speakers you hope you're not going to meet at TED. 
First, I don't have a mobile, so I'm on the safe side. 
Secondly, a political theorist who's going to talk about the crisis of democracy is probably not the most exciting topic you can think about. 
And plus, I'm not going to give you any answers. 
I'm much more trying to add to some of the questions we're talking about. 
And one of the things that I want to question is this very popular hope these days that transparency and openness can restore the trust in democratic institutions. 
There is one more reason for you to be suspicious about me. 
You people, the Church of TED, are a very optimistic community. 
(Laughter) Basically you believe in complexity, but not in ambiguity. 
As you have been told, I'm Bulgarian. 
And according to the surveys, we are marked the most pessimistic people in the world. 
(Laughter) The Economist magazine recently wrote an article covering one of the recent studies on happiness, and the title was "" The Happy, the Unhappy and the Bulgarians. "" (Laughter) So now when you know what to expect, let's give you the story. 
And this is a rainy election day in a small country — that can be my country, but could be also your country. 
And because of the rain until four o'clock in the afternoon, nobody went to the polling stations. 
But then the rain stopped, people went to vote. 
And when the votes had been counted, three-fourths of the people have voted with a blank ballot. 
The government and the opposition, they have been simply paralyzed. 
Because you know what to do about the protests. 
You know who to arrest, who to negotiate with. 
But what to do about people who are voting with a blank ballot? 
So the government decided to have the elections once again. 
And this time even a greater number, 83 percent of the people, voted with blank ballots. 
Basically they went to the ballot boxes to tell that they have nobody to vote for. 
This is the opening of a beautiful novel by Jose Saramago called "" Seeing. "" But in my view it very well captures part of the problem that we have with democracy in Europe these days. 
On one level nobody's questioning that democracy is the best form of government. 
Democracy is the only game in town. 
The problem is that many people start to believe that it is not a game worth playing. 
For the last 30 years, political scientists have observed that there is a constant decline in electoral turnout, and the people who are least interested to vote are the people whom you expect are going to gain most out of voting. 
I mean the unemployed, the under-privileged. 
And this is a major issue. 
Because especially now with the economic crisis, you can see that the trust in politics, that the trust in democratic institutions, was really destroyed. 
According to the latest survey being done by the European Commission, 89 percent of the citizens of Europe believe that there is a growing gap between the opinion of the policy-makers and the opinion of the public. 
Only 18 percent of Italians and 15 percent of Greeks believe that their vote matters. 
Basically people start to understand that they can change governments, but they cannot change policies. 
And the question which I want to ask is the following: How did it happen that we are living in societies which are much freer than ever before — we have more rights, we can travel easier, we have access to more information — at the same time that trust in our democratic institutions basically has collapsed? 
So basically I want to ask: What went right and what went wrong in these 50 years when we talk about democracy? 
And I'll start with what went right. 
And the first thing that went right was, of course, these five revolutions which, in my view, very much changed the way we're living and deepened our democratic experience. 
And the first was the cultural and social revolution of 1968 and 1970s, which put the individual at the center of politics. 
It was the human rights moment. 
Basically this was also a major outbreak, a culture of dissent, a culture of basically non-conformism, which was not known before. 
So I do believe that even things like that are very much the children of '68 — nevertheless that most of us had been even not born then. 
But after that you have the market revolution of the 1980s. 
And nevertheless that many people on the left try to hate it, the truth is that it was very much the market revolution that sent the message: "The government does not know better." 
And you have more choice-driven societies. 
And of course, you have 1989 — the end of Communism, the end of the Cold War. 
And it was the birth of the global world. 
And you have the Internet. 
And this is not the audience to which I'm going to preach to what extent the Internet empowered people. 
It has changed the way we are communicating and basically we are viewing politics. 
The very idea of political community totally has changed. 
And I'm going to name one more revolution, and this is the revolution in brain sciences, which totally changed the way we understand how people are making decisions. 
So this is what went right. 
But if we're going to see what went wrong, we're going to end up with the same five revolutions. 
Because first you have the 1960s and 1970s, cultural and social revolution, which in a certain way destroyed the idea of a collective purpose. 
The very idea, all these collective nouns that we have been taught about — nation, class, family. 
We start to like divorcing, if we're married at all. 
All this was very much under attack. 
And it is so difficult to engage people in politics when they believe that what really matters is where they personally stand. 
And you have the market revolution of the 1980s and the huge increase of inequality in societies. 
Remember, until the 1970s, the spread of democracy has always been accompanied by the decline of inequality. 
The more democratic our societies have been, the more equal they have been becoming. 
Now we have the reverse tendency. 
The spread of democracy now is very much accompanied by the increase in inequality. 
And I find this very much disturbing when we're talking about what's going on right and wrong with democracy these days. 
And if you go to 1989 — something that basically you don't expect that anybody's going to criticize — but many are going to tell you, "" Listen, it was the end of the Cold War that tore the social contract between the elites and the people in Western Europe. "" When the Soviet Union was still there, the rich and the powerful, they needed the people, because they feared them. 
Now the elites basically have been liberated. 
They're very mobile. You cannot tax them. 
And basically they don't fear the people. 
So as a result of it, you have this very strange situation in which the elites basically got out of the control of the voters. 
So this is not by accident that the voters are not interested to vote anymore. 
And when we talk about the Internet, yes, it's true, the Internet connected all of us, but we also know that the Internet created these echo chambers and political ghettos in which for all your life you can stay with the political community you belong to. 
And it's becoming more and more difficult to understand the people who are not like you. 
I know that many people here have been splendidly speaking about the digital world and the possibility for cooperation, but [have you] seen what the digital world has done to American politics these days? 
This is also partly a result of the Internet revolution. 
This is the other side of the things that we like. 
And when you go to the brain sciences, what political consultants learned from the brain scientists is don't talk to me about ideas anymore, don't talk to me about policy programs. 
What really matters is basically to manipulate the emotions of the people. 
And you have this very strongly to the extent that, even if you see when we talk about revolutions these days, these revolutions are not named anymore around ideologies or ideas. 
Before, revolutions used to have ideological names. 
They could be communist, they could be liberal, they could be fascist or Islamic. 
Now the revolutions are called under the medium which is most used. 
You have Facebook revolutions, Twitter revolutions. 
The content doesn't matter anymore, the problem is the media. 
I'm saying this because one of my major points is what went right is also what went wrong. 
And when we're now trying to see how we can change the situation, when basically we're trying to see what can be done about democracy, we should keep this ambiguity in mind. 
Because probably some of the things that we love most are going to be also the things that can hurt us most. 
These days it's very popular to believe that this push for transparency, this kind of a combination between active citizens, new technologies and much more transparency-friendly legislation can restore trust in politics. 
You believe that when you have these new technologies and people who are ready to use this, it can make it much more difficult for the governments to lie, it's going to be more difficult for them to steal and probably even going to be more difficult for them to kill. 
This is probably true. 
But I do believe that we should be also very clear that now when we put the transparency at the center of politics where the message is, "" It's transparency, stupid. "" Transparency is not about restoring trust in institutions. 
Transparency is politics' management of mistrust. 
We are assuming that our societies are going to be based on mistrust. 
And by the way, mistrust was always very important for democracy. 
This is why you have checks and balances. 
This is why basically you have all this creative mistrust between the representatives and those whom they represent. 
But when politics is only management of mistrust, then — I'm very glad that "" 1984 "" has been mentioned — now we're going to have "" 1984 "" in reverse. 
It's not going to be the Big Brother watching you, it's going to be we being the Big Brother watching the political class. 
But is this the idea of a free society? 
For example, can you imagine that decent, civic, talented people are going to run for office if they really do believe that politics is also about managing mistrust? 
Are you not afraid with all these technologies that are going to track down any statement the politicians are going to make on certain issues, are you not afraid that this is going to be a very strong signal to politicians to repeat their positions, even the very wrong positions, because consistency is going to be more important than common sense? 
And the Americans who are in the room, are you not afraid that your presidents are going to govern on the basis of what they said in the primary elections? 
I find this extremely important, because democracy is about people changing their views based on rational arguments and discussions. 
And we can lose this with the very noble idea to keep people accountable for showing the people that we're not going to tolerate politicians the opportunism in politics. 
So for me this is extremely important. 
And I do believe that when we're discussing politics these days, probably it makes sense to look also at this type of a story. 
But also don't forget, any unveiling is also veiling. 
[Regardless of] how transparent our governments want to be, they're going to be selectively transparent. 
In a small country that could be my country, but could be also your country, they took a decision — it is a real case story — that all of the governmental decisions, discussions of the council of ministers, were going to be published on the Internet 24 hours after the council discussions took place. 
And the public was extremely all for it. 
So I had the opportunity to talk to the prime minister, why he made this decision. 
He said, "" Listen, this is the best way to keep the mouths of my ministers closed. 
Because it's going to be very difficult for them to dissent knowing that 24 hours after this is going to be on the public space, and this is in a certain way going to be a political crisis. "" So when we talk about transparency, when we talk about openness, I really do believe that what we should keep in mind is that what went right is what went wrong. 
And this is Goethe, who is neither Bulgarian nor a political scientist, some centuries ago he said, "There is a big shadow where there is much light." 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Okay, this morning I'm speaking on the question of corruption. 
And corruption is defined as the abuse of a position of trust for the benefit of yourself — or, in the case of our context, your friends, your family or your financiers. 
Okay? Friends, family and financiers. 
But we need to understand what we understand about corruption, and we need to understand that we have been miseducated about it, and we have to admit that. 
We have to have the courage to admit that to start changing how we deal with it. 
The first thing is that the big myth, number one, is that in fact it's not really a crime. 
When we get together with friends and family and we discuss crime in our country, crime in Belmont or crime in Diego or crime in Marabella, nobody's speaking about corruption. 
That's the honest truth. 
When the Commissioner of Police comes on TV to talk about crime, he isn't speaking about corruption. 
And we know for sure when the Minister of National Security is speaking about crime, he's not talking about corruption either. 
The point I'm making is that it is a crime. 
It is an economic crime, because we're involving the looting of taxpayers' money. 
Public and private corruption is a reality. 
As somebody who comes from the private sector, I can tell you there's a massive amount of corruption in the private sector that has nothing to do with government. 
The same bribes and backhanders and things that take place under the table, it all takes place in the private sector. 
Today, I'm focusing on public sector corruption, which the private sector also participates in. 
The second important myth to understand — because we have to destroy these myths, dismantle them and destroy them and ridicule them — the second important myth to understand is the one that says that in fact corruption is only a small problem — if it is a problem, it's only a small problem, that in fact it's only a little 10 or 15 percent, it's been going on forever, it probably will continue forever, and there's no point passing any laws, because there's little we can do about it. 
And I want to demonstrate that that, too, is a dangerous myth, very dangerous. 
It's a piece of public mischief. 
And I want to speak a little bit, take us back about 30 years. 
We're coming out today from Trinidad and Tobago, a resource-rich, small Caribbean country, and in the early 1970s we had a massive increase in the country's wealth, and that increase was caused by the increase in world oil prices. 
We call them petrodollars. The treasury was bursting with money. 
And it's ironic, because we're standing today in the Central Bank. 
You see, history's rich in irony. 
We're standing today in the Central Bank, and the Central Bank is responsible for a lot of the things I'm going to be speaking about. 
Okay? We're talking about irresponsibility in public office. 
We're speaking about the fact that across the terrace, the next tower is the Ministry of Finance, and there's a lot of connection with us today, so we're speaking within your temple today. Okay? 
(Applause) The first thing I want to talk about is that when all of this money flowed into our country about 40 years ago, we embarked, the government of the day embarked on a series of government-to-government arrangements to have rapidly develop the country. 
And some of the largest projects in the country were being constructed through government-to-government arrangements with some of the leading countries in the world, the United States and Britain and France and so on and so on. 
As I said, even this building we're standing in — that's one of the ironies — this building was part of that series of complexes, what they called the Twin Towers. 
It became so outrageous, the whole situation, that in fact a commission of inquiry was appointed, and it reported in 1982, 30 years ago it reported — the Ballah Report — 30 years ago, and immediately the government-to-government arrangements were stopped. 
The then-Prime Minister went to Parliament to give a budget speech, and he said some things that I'll never forget. 
They went right in here. I was a young man at the time. 
It went right into my heart. 
And he said that, in fact — Let me see if this thing works. 
Are we getting a, yeah? — That's what he told us. 
He told us that, in fact, two out of every three dollars of our petrodollars that we spent, the taxpayers' money, was wasted or stolen. 
So the 10 or 15 percent is pure mischief. 
As we say, it's a nancy-story. Forget it. 
That's for little children. We are big people, and we're trying to deal with what's happening in our society. 
Okay? This is the size of the problem. 
Okay? Two thirds of the money stolen or wasted. 
That was 30 years ago. 1982 was Ballah. 
So what has changed? 
I don't like to bring up embarrassing secrets to an international audience, but I have to. 
Four months ago, we suffered a constitutional outrage in this country. 
We call it the Section 34 fiasco, the Section 34 fiasco, a suspicious piece of law, and I'm going to say it like it is, a suspicious piece of law was passed at a suspicious time to free some suspects. (Laughter) And it was called, those people are called the Piarco Airport accused. 
I'm going to have my own lexicon speaking here today. 
They are the Piarco Airport accused. 
It was a constitutional outrage of the first order, and I have labeled it the Plot to Pervert Parliament. 
Our highest institution in our country was perverted. 
We are dealing with perverts here of an economic and financial nature. 
Do you get how serious this problem is? 
There was massive protest. A lot of us in this room took part in the protest in different forms. 
Most importantly, the American embassy complained, so Parliament was swiftly reconvened, and the law was reversed, it was repealed. 
That's the word lawyers use. It was repealed. 
But the point is that Parliament was outwitted in the whole course of events, because what really happened is that, because of the suspicious passage of that law, the law was actually passed into effect on the weekend we celebrated our 50th anniversary of independence, our jubilee of independence. 
So that is the kind of outrage of the thing. 
It was kind of a nasty way to get maturation, but we got it, because we all understood it, and for the first time that I could remember, there were mass protests against this corruption. 
And that gave me a lot of hope. Okay? 
Those of us who are, sometimes you feel like you're a little bit on your own doing some of this work. 
That passage of the law and the repeal of the law fortified the case of the Piarco Airport accused. 
So it was one of those really superior double bluff kind of things that took place. 
But what were they accused of? 
What was it that they were accused of? 
I'm being a bit mysterious for those of you out there. What were they accused of? 
We were trying to build, or reconstruct largely, an airport that had grown outdated. 
The entire project cost about 1.6 billion dollars, Trinidad and Tobago dollars, and in fact, we had a lot of bid-rigging and suspicious activity, corrupt activity took place. 
And to get an idea of what it consisted of, and to put it in context in relationship to this whole second myth about it being no big thing, we can look at this second slide here. 
And what we have here — I am not saying so, this is the Director of Public Prosecutions in a written statement. He said so. 
And he's telling us that for the $1.6 billion cost of the project, one billion dollars has been traced to offshore bank accounts. 
One billion dollars of our taxpayers' money has been located in offshore bank accounts. 
Being the kind of suspicious person I am, I am outraged at that, and I'm going to pause here, I'm going to pause now and again and bring in different things. 
I'm going to pause here and bring in something I saw in November last year at Wall Street. I was at Zuccotti Park. 
It was autumn. It was cool. It was damp. It was getting dark. 
And I was walking around with the protesters looking at the One Wall Street, Occupy Wall Street movement walking around. 
And there was a lady with a sign, a very simple sign, a kind of battered-looking blonde lady, and the sign was made out of Bristol board, as we say in these parts, and it was made with a marker. 
And what it said on that sign hit me right in the center. 
It said, "" If you're not outraged, you haven't been paying attention. "" If you're not outraged by all of this, you haven't been paying attention. 
So listen up, because we're getting into even deeper waters. 
My brain started thinking. 
Well, what if — because I'm suspicious like that. I read a lot of spy novels and stuff. 
What if — (Laughter) But to make it in these wrongs, you have to read a lot of spy novels and follow some of that stuff, right? (Laughter) But what if this wasn't the first time? 
What if this is just the first time that the so-and-sos had been caught? 
What if it had happened before? How would I find out? 
Now, the previous two examples I gave were to do with construction sector corruption, okay? 
And I have the privilege at this time to lead the Joint Consultative Council, which is a not-for-profit. 
We're at jcc.org.tt, and we have the — we are the leaders in the struggle to produce a new public procurement system about how public money is transacted. 
So those of you interested in finding out more about it, or joining us or signing up on any of our petitions, please get involved. 
But I'm going to segue to another thing that relates, because one of my private campaigns I've been conducting for over three and a half years is for transparency and accountability around the bailout of CL Financial. 
CL Financial is the Caribbean's largest ever conglomerate, okay? 
And without getting into all of the details, it is said to have collapsed — I'm using my words very carefully — it's said to have collapsed in January of '09, which is just coming up to nearly four years. 
In an unprecedented fit of generosity — and you have to be very suspicious about these people — in an unprecedented — and I'm using that word carefully — unprecedented fit of generosity, the government of the day signed, made a written commitment, to repay all of the creditors. 
And I can tell you without fear of contradiction that hasn't happened anywhere else on the planet. 
Let's understand, because we lack context. 
People are telling us it's just like Wall Street. It's not just like Wall Street. 
Trinidad and Tobago is like a place with different laws of physics or biology or something. 
It's not just like anywhere. (Applause) It's not just like anywhere. It's not just like anywhere. 
Here is here, and out there is out there. Okay? 
I'm serious now. 
Listen. They've had bailouts on Wall Street. 
They've had bailouts in London. 
They've had bailouts in Europe. 
In Africa, they've had bailouts. In Nigeria, six of the major commercial banks collapsed at the same time as ours, eh? 
It's interesting to parallel how the Nigerian experience has — how they've treated it, and they've treated it very well compared to us. 
Nowhere on the planet have all the creditors been bailed out in excess of what their statutory entitlements were. 
Only here. So what was the reason for the generosity? 
Is our government that generous? And maybe they are. 
Let's look at it. Let's look into it. 
So I started digging and writing and so and so on, and that work can be found, my personal work can be found at AfraRaymond.com, which is my name. 
It's a not-for-profit blog that I run. 
Not as popular as some of the other people, but there you go. 
(Laughter) But the point is that the bitter experience of Section 34, that plot to pervert Parliament, that bitter experience that took place in August, when we were supposed to be celebrating our independence, going into September, forced me to check myself and recalculate my bearings, and to go back into some of the work, some of the stuff I'd written and some of the exchanges I'd had with the officials to see what was really what. 
As we say in Trinidad and Tobago, who is who and what is what? 
Okay? We want to try to recalculate. 
And I made a Freedom of Information application in May this year to the Ministry of Finance. 
The Ministry of Finance is the next tower over. 
This is the other context. 
The Ministry of Finance, we are told, is subject to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. 
I'm going to take you through a worked example of whether that's really so. 
The Central Bank in which we stand this morning is immune from the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. 
So in fact, you can't ask them anything, and they don't have to answer anything. 
That is the law since 1999. 
So I plunged into this struggle, and I asked four questions. 
And I'll relate the questions to you in the short form with the reply, so you could understand, as I said, where we are. 
Here is not like anywhere else. 
Question number one: I asked to see the accounts of CL Financial, and if you can't show me the accounts — the Minister of Finance is making statements, passing new laws and giving speeches and so on. 
What are the figures he's relying on? 
It's like that joke: I want whatever he's drinking. 
And they wrote back and said to me, well what do you really mean? 
So they hit my question with a question. 
Second point: I want to see who are the creditors of the group who have been repaid? 
Let me pause here to point out to you all that 24 billion dollars of our money has been spent on this. 
That is about three and a half billion U.S. dollars coming out of a small — we used to be resource-rich — Caribbean country. Okay? 
And I asked the question, who was getting that three and a half billion dollars? 
And I want to pause again to bring up context, because context helps us to get clarity understanding this thing. 
There's a particular individual who is in the government now. 
The name of the person doesn't matter. 
And that person made a career out of using the Freedom of Information Act to advance his political cause. 
Okay? His name isn't important. 
I wouldn't dignify it. I'm on a point. 
The point is, that person made a career out of using the Freedom of Information Act to advance his cause. 
And the most famous case was what we came to call the Secret Scholarship Scandal, where in fact there was about 60 million dollars in government money that had been dispersed in a series of scholarships, and the scholarships hadn't been advertised, and so and so on and so on. 
And he was able to get the court, using that act of Parliament, Freedom of Information Act, to release the information, and I thought that was excellent. 
Fantastic. 
But you see, the question is this: If it's right and proper for us to use the Freedom of Information Act and to use the court to force a disclosure about 60 million dollars in public money, it must be right and proper for us to force a disclosure about 24 billion dollars. 
You see? But the Ministry of Finance, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Finance, wrote me and said to me, that information is exempt too. 
You see? This is what we're dealing with, okay? 
The third thing I will tell you is that I also asked for the directors of CL Financial, whether in fact they were making filings under our Integrity in Public Life Act. 
We have an Integrity in Public Life Act as part of our framework supposed to safeguard the nation's interest. 
And public officials are supposed to file to say what it is they have in terms of assets and liabilities. 
And of course I've since discovered that they're not filing, and in fact the Minister of Finance has not even asked them to file. 
So here we have it. We have a situation where the basic safeguards of integrity and accountability and transparency have all been discarded. 
I've asked the question in the legal and required fashion. 
It's been ignored. 
The sort of thing that motivated us around Section 34, we need to continue to work on that. We can't forget it. 
I have defined this as the single largest expenditure in the country's history. 
It's also the single largest example of public corruption according to this equation. 
And this is my reality check. 
Where you have an expenditure of public money and it is without accountability and it's without transparency, it will always be equal to corruption, whether you're in Russia or Nigeria or Alaska, it will always be equal to corruption, and that is what we are dealing with here. 
I'm going to continue the work to press on, to get some resolution of those matters at the Ministry of Finance. 
If it is I have to go to court personally, I will do that. 
We will continue to press on. 
We will continue to work within JCC. 
But I want to step back from the Trinidad and Tobago context and bring something new to the table in terms of an international example. 
We had the journalist [Heather] Brooke speaking about her battle against government corruption, and she introduced me to this website, Alaveteli.com. 
And Alaveteli.com is a way for us to have an open database for Freedom of Information applications, and speak with each other. 
I could see what you're applying for. 
You could see what I applied for and what replies I got. 
We can work on it together. We need to build a collective database and a collective understanding of where we are to go to the next point. 
We need to increase the consciousness. 
The final thing I want to say is in relation to this one, which is a lovely website from India called IPaidABribe.com. 
They have international branches, and it's important for us to tune into this one. 
IPaidABribe.com is really important, a good one to log on to and see. 
I'm going to pause there. I'm going to ask you for your courage. 
Discard the first myth; it is a crime. 
Discard the second myth; it is a big thing. 
It's a huge problem. It's an economic crime. 
And let us continue working together to betterment in this situation, stability and sustainability in our society. Thank you. 

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

Right when I was 15 was when I first got interested in solar energy. 
This engine, because it was so interesting — it only worked on air, no steam — has led to hundreds of creative designs over the years that use the Stirling engine principle. 
There have been hundreds of millions of internal combustion engines built, compared to thousands of Stirling engines built. 
There are thermocouples on the engine — little sensors that detect the heat when the sunlight strikes them. 
And is only affects the payback period, it doesn't mean that you couldn't use solar energy; you could use it anywhere on Earth. 
It's just how many watts do you get per dollar, and how could you benefit from that to change your life in some way. 
So there's basically 15 horses running at full speed just to keep the stage lit. 

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

So there are lands few and far between on Earth itself that are hospitable to humans by any measure, but survive we have. 
Our primitive ancestors, when they found their homes and livelihood endangered, they dared to make their way into unfamiliar territories in search of better opportunities. 
And as the descendants of these explorers, we have their nomadic blood coursing through our own veins. 
But at the same time, distracted by our bread and circuses and embroiled in the wars that we have waged on each other, it seems that we have forgotten this desire to explore. 
We, as a species, we're evolved uniquely for Earth, on Earth, and by Earth, and so content are we with our living conditions that we have grown complacent and just too busy to notice that its resources are finite, and that our Sun's life is also finite. 
While Mars and all the movies made in its name have reinvigorated the ethos for space travel, few of us seem to truly realize that our species' fragile constitution is woefully unprepared for long duration journeys into space. 
Let us take a trek to your local national forest for a quick reality check. 
So just a quick show of hands here: how many of you think you would be able to survive in this lush wilderness for a few days? 
Well, that's a lot of you. 
How about a few weeks? 
That's a decent amount. 
How about a few months? 
That's pretty good too. 
Now, let us imagine that this local national forest experiences an eternal winter. 
Same questions: how many of you think you would be able to survive for a few days? 
That's quite a lot. 
How about a few weeks? 
So for a fun twist, let us imagine that the only source of water available is trapped as frozen blocks miles below the surface. 
Soil nutrients are so minimal that no vegetation can be found, and of course hardly any atmosphere exists to speak of. 
Such examples are only a few of the many challenges we would face on a planet like Mars. 
So how do we steel ourselves for voyages whose destinations are so far removed from a tropical vacation? 
Will we continuously ship supplies from Planet Earth? 
Build space elevators, or impossible miles of transport belts that tether your planet of choice to our home planet? 
And how do we grow things like food that grew up on Earth like us? 
But I'm getting ahead of myself. 
In our species' journey to find a new home under a new sun, we are more likely than not going to be spending much time in the journey itself, in space, on a ship, a hermetic flying can, possibly for many generations. 
The longest continuous amount of time that any human has spent in space is in the vicinity of 12 to 14 months. 
From astronauts' experiences in space, we know that spending time in a microgravity environment means bone loss, muscle atrophy, cardiovascular problems, among many other complications that range for the physiological to the psychological. 
And what about macrogravity, or any other variation in gravitational pull of the planet that we find ourselves on? 
In short, our cosmic voyages will be fraught with dangers both known and unknown. 
So far we've been looking to this new piece of mechanical technology or that great next generation robot as part of a lineup to ensure our species safe passage in space. 
Wonderful as they are, I believe the time has come for us to complement these bulky electronic giants with what nature has already invented: the microbe, a single-celled organism that is itself a self-generating, self-replenishing, living machine. 
It requires fairly little to maintain, offers much flexibility in design and only asks to be carried in a single plastic tube. 
The field of study that has enabled us to utilize the capabilities of the microbe is known as synthetic biology. 
It comes from molecular biology, which has given us antibiotics, vaccines and better ways to observe the physiological nuances of the human body. 
Using the tools of synthetic biology, we can now edit the genes of nearly any organism, microscopic or not, with incredible speed and fidelity. 
Given the limitations of our man-made machines, synthetic biology will be a means for us to engineer not only our food, our fuel and our environment, but also ourselves to compensate for our physical inadequacies and to ensure our survival in space. 
To give you an example of how we can use synthetic biology for space exploration, let us return to the Mars environment. 
The Martian soil composition is similar to that of Hawaiian volcanic ash, with trace amounts of organic material. 
Let's say, hypothetically, what if martian soil could actually support plant growth without using Earth-derived nutrients? 
The first question we should probably ask is, how would we make our plants cold-tolerant? 
Because, on average, the temperature on Mars is a very uninviting negative 60 degrees centigrade. 
The next question we should ask is, how do we make our plants drought-tolerant? 
Considering that most of the water that forms as frost evaporates more quickly than I can say the word "" evaporate. "" Well, it turns out we've already done things like this. 
By borrowing genes for anti-freeze protein from fish and genes for drought tolerance from other plants like rice and then stitching them into the plants that need them, we now have plants that can tolerate most droughts and freezes. 
They're known on Earth as GMOs, or genetically modified organisms, and we rely on them to feed all the mouths of human civilization. 
Nature does stuff like this already, without our help. 
We have simply found more precise ways to do it. 
So why would we want to change the genetic makeup of plants for space? 
Well, to not do so would mean needing to engineer endless acres of land on an entirely new planet by releasing trillions of gallons of atmospheric gasses and then constructing a giant glass dome to contain it all. 
It's an unrealistic engineering enterprise that quickly becomes a high-cost cargo transport mission. 
One of the best ways to ensure that we will have the food supplies and the air that we need is to bring with us organisms that have been engineered to adapt to new and harsh environments. 
In essence, using engineered organisms to help us terraform a planet both in the short and long term. 
These organisms can then also be engineered to make medicine or fuel. 
So we can use synthetic biology to bring highly engineered plants with us, but what else can we do? 
Well, I mentioned earlier that we, as a species, were evolved uniquely for planet Earth. 
That fact has not changed much in the last five minutes that you were sitting here and I was standing there. 
And so, if we were to dump any of us on Mars right this minute, even given ample food, water, air and a suit, we are likely to experience very unpleasant health problems from the amount of ionizing radiation that bombards the surface of planets like Mars that have little or nonexistent atmosphere. 
Unless we plan to stay holed up underground for the duration of our stay on every new planet, we must find better ways of protecting ourselves without needing to resort to wearing a suit of armor that weighs something equal to your own body weight, or needing to hide behind a wall of lead. 
So let us appeal to nature for inspiration. 
Among the plethora of life here on Earth, there's a subset of organisms known as extremophiles, or lovers of extreme living conditions, if you'll remember from high school biology. 
And among these organisms is a bacterium by the name of Deinococcus radiodurans. 
It is known to be able to withstand cold, dehydration, vacuum, acid, and, most notably, radiation. 
While its radiation tolerance mechanisms are known, we have yet to adapt the relevant genes to mammals. 
To do so is not particularly easy. 
There are many facets that go into its radiation tolerance, and it's not as simple as transferring one gene. 
But given a little bit of human ingenuity and a little bit of time, I think to do so is not very hard either. 
Even if we borrow just a fraction of its ability to tolerate radiation, it would be infinitely better than what we already have, which is just the melanin in our skin. 
Using the tools of synthetic biology, we can harness Deinococcus radiodurans' ability to thrive under otherwise very lethal doses of radiation. 
As difficult as it is to see, homo sapiens, that is humans, evolves every day, and still continues to evolve. 
Thousands of years of human evolution has not only given us humans like Tibetans, who can thrive in low-oxygen conditions, but also Argentinians, who can ingest and metabolize arsenic, the chemical element that can kill the average human being. 
Every day, the human body evolves by accidental mutations that equally accidentally allow certain humans to persevere in dismal situations. 
But, and this is a big but, such evolution requires two things that we may not always have, or be able to afford, and they are death and time. 
In our species' struggle to find our place in the universe, we may not always have the time necessary for the natural evolution of extra functions for survival on non-Earth planets. 
We're living in what E.O. Wilson has termed the age of gene circumvention, during which we remedy our genetic defects like cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy with temporary external supplements. 
But with every passing day, we approach the age of volitional evolution, a time during which we as a species will have the capacity to decide for ourselves our own genetic destiny. 
Augmenting the human body with new abilities is no longer a question of how, but of when. 
Using synthetic biology to change the genetic makeup of any living organisms, especially our own, is not without its moral and ethical quandaries. 
Will engineering ourselves make us less human? 
But then again, what is humanity but star stuff that happens to be conscious? 
Where should human genius direct itself? 
Surely it is a bit of a waste to sit back and marvel at it. 
How do we use our knowledge to protect ourselves from the external dangers and then protect ourselves from ourselves? 
I pose these questions not to engender the fear of science but to bring to light the many possibilities that science has afforded and continues to afford us. 
We must coalesce as humans to discuss and embrace the solutions not only with caution but also with courage. 
Mars is a destination, but it will not be our last. 
Our true final frontier is the line we must cross in deciding what we can and should make of our species' improbable intelligence. 
Space is cold, brutal and unforgiving. 
Our path to the stars will be rife with trials that will bring us to question not only who we are but where we will be going. 
The answers will lie in our choice to use or abandon the technology that we have gleaned from life itself, and it will define us for the remainder of our term in this universe. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm very pleased to be here today to talk to you all about how we might repair the damaged brain, and I'm particularly excited by this field, because as a neurologist myself, I believe that this offers one of the great ways that we might be able to offer hope for patients who today live with devastating and yet untreatable diseases of the brain. 
So here's the problem. 
You can see here the picture of somebody's brain with Alzheimer's disease next to a healthy brain, and what's obvious is, in the Alzheimer's brain, ringed red, there's obvious damage — atrophy, scarring. 
And I could show you equivalent pictures from other disease: multiple sclerosis, motor neuron disease, Parkinson's disease, even Huntington's disease, and they would all tell a similar story. 
And collectively these brain disorders represent one of the major public health threats of our time. 
And the numbers here are really rather staggering. 
At any one time, there are 35 million people today living with one of these brain diseases, and the annual cost globally is 700 billion dollars. 
I mean, just think about that. 
That's greater than one percent of the global GDP. 
And it gets worse, because all these numbers are rising because these are by and large age-related diseases, and we're living longer. 
So the question we really need to ask ourselves is, why, given the devastating impact of these diseases to the individual, never mind the scale of the societal problem, why are there no effective treatments? 
Now in order to consider this, I first need to give you a crash course in how the brain works. 
So in other words, I need to tell you everything I learned at medical school. 
(Laughter) But believe me, this isn't going to take very long. 
Okay? (Laughter) So the brain is terribly simple: it's made up of four cells, and two of them are shown here. 
There's the nerve cell, and then there's the myelinating cell, or the insulating cell. 
It's called oligodendrocyte. 
And when these four cells work together in health and harmony, they create an extraordinary symphony of electrical activity, and it is this electrical activity that underpins our ability to think, to emote, to remember, to learn, move, feel and so on. 
But equally, each of these individual four cells alone or together, can go rogue or die, and when that happens, you get damage. 
You get damaged wiring. 
You get disrupted connections. 
And that's evident here with the slower conduction. 
But ultimately, this damage will manifest as disease, clearly. 
And if the starting dying nerve cell is a motor nerve, for example, you'll get motor neuron disease. 
So I'd like to give you a real-life illustration of what happens with motor neuron disease. 
So this is a patient of mine called John. 
John I saw just last week in the clinic. 
And I've asked John to tell us something about what were his problems that led to the initial diagnosis of motor neuron disease. 
John: I was diagnosed in October in 2011, and the main problem was a breathing problem, difficulty breathing. 
Siddharthan Chandran: I don't know if you caught all of that, but what John was telling us was that difficulty with breathing led eventually to the diagnosis of motor neuron disease. 
So John's now 18 months further down in that journey, and I've now asked him to tell us something about his current predicament. 
John: What I've got now is the breathing's gotten worse. 
I've got weakness in my hands, my arms and my legs. 
So basically I'm in a wheelchair most of the time. 
SC: John's just told us he's in a wheelchair most of the time. 
So what these two clips show is not just the devastating consequence of the disease, but they also tell us something about the shocking pace of the disease, because in just 18 months, a fit adult man has been rendered wheelchair- and respirator-dependent. 
And let's face it, John could be anybody's father, brother or friend. 
So that's what happens when the motor nerve dies. 
But what happens when that myelin cell dies? 
You get multiple sclerosis. 
So the scan on your left is an illustration of the brain, and it's a map of the connections of the brain, and superimposed upon which are areas of damage. 
We call them lesions of demyelination. 
But they're damage, and they're white. 
So I know what you're thinking here. 
You're thinking, "" My God, this bloke came up and said he's going to talk about hope, and all he's done is give a really rather bleak and depressing tale. "" I've told you these diseases are terrible. 
They're devastating, numbers are rising, the costs are ridiculous, and worst of all, we have no treatment. Where's the hope? 
Well, you know what? I think there is hope. 
And there's hope in this next section, of this brain section of somebody else with M.S., because what it illustrates is, amazingly, the brain can repair itself. 
It just doesn't do it well enough. 
And so again, there are two things I want to show you. 
First of all is the damage of this patient with M.S. 
And again, it's another one of these white masses. 
But crucially, the area that's ringed red highlights an area that is pale blue. 
But that area that is pale blue was once white. 
So it was damaged. It's now repaired. 
Just to be clear: It's not because of doctors. 
It's in spite of doctors, not because of doctors. 
This is spontaneous repair. 
It's amazing and it's occurred because there are stem cells in the brain, even, which can enable new myelin, new insulation, to be laid down over the damaged nerves. 
And this observation is important for two reasons. 
The first is it challenges one of the orthodoxies that we learnt at medical school, or at least I did, admittedly last century, which is that the brain doesn't repair itself, unlike, say, the bone or the liver. 
But actually it does, but it just doesn't do it well enough. 
And the second thing it does, and it gives us a very clear direction of travel for new therapies — I mean, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to know what to do here. 
You simply need to find ways of promoting the endogenous, spontaneous repair that occurs anyway. 
So the question is, why, if we've known that for some time, as we have, why do we not have those treatments? 
And that in part reflects the complexity of drug development. 
Now, drug development you might think of as a rather expensive but risky bet, and the odds of this bet are roughly this: they're 10,000 to one against, because you need to screen about 10,000 compounds to find that one potential winner. 
And then you need to spend 15 years and spend over a billion dollars, and even then, you may not have a winner. 
So the question for us is, can you change the rules of the game and can you shorten the odds? 
And in order to do that, you have to think, where is the bottleneck in this drug discovery? 
And one of the bottlenecks is early in drug discovery. 
All that screening occurs in animal models. 
But we know that the proper study of mankind is man, to borrow from Alexander Pope. 
So the question is, can we study these diseases using human material? 
And of course, absolutely we can. 
We can use stem cells, and specifically we can use human stem cells. 
And human stem cells are these extraordinary but simple cells that can do two things: they can self-renew or make more of themselves, but they can also become specialized to make bone, liver or, crucially, nerve cells, maybe even the motor nerve cell or the myelin cell. 
And the challenge has long been, can we harness the power, the undoubted power of these stem cells in order to realize their promise for regenerative neurology? 
And I think we can now, and the reason we can is because there have been several major discoveries in the last 10, 20 years. 
One of them was here in Edinburgh, and it must be the only celebrity sheep, Dolly. 
So Dolly was made in Edinburgh, and Dolly was an example of the first cloning of a mammal from an adult cell. 
But I think the even more significant breakthrough for the purposes of our discussion today was made in 2006 by a Japanese scientist called Yamanaka. 
And what Yamaka did, in a fantastic form of scientific cookery, was he showed that four ingredients, just four ingredients, could effectively convert any cell, adult cell, into a master stem cell. 
And the significance of this is difficult to exaggerate, because what it means that from anybody in this room, but particularly patients, you could now generate a bespoke, personalized tissue repair kit. 
Take a skin cell, make it a master pluripotent cell, so you could then make those cells that are relevant to their disease, both to study but potentially to treat. 
Now, the idea of that at medical school — this is a recurring theme, isn't it, me and medical school? — would have been ridiculous, but it's an absolute reality today. 
And I see this as the cornerstone of regeneration, repair and hope. 
And whilst we're on the theme of hope, for those of you who might have failed at school, there's hope for you as well, because this is the school report of John Gerdon. 
["" I believe he has ideas about becoming a scientist; on his present showing this is quite ridiculous. ""] So they didn't think much of him then. 
But what you may not know is that he got the Nobel Prize for medicine just three months ago. 
So to return to the original problem, what is the opportunity of these stem cells, or this disruptive technology, for repairing the damaged brain, which we call regenerative neurology? 
I think there are two ways you can think about this: as a fantastic 21st-century drug discovery tool, and / or as a form of therapy. 
So I want to tell you a little bit about both of those in the next few moments. 
Drug discovery in a dish is how people often talk about this. 
It's very simple: You take a patient with a disease, let's say motor neuron disease, you take a skin sample, you do the pluripotent reprogramming, as I've already told you, and you generate live motor nerve cells. 
That's straightforward, because that's what pluripotent cells can do. 
But crucially, you can then compare their behavior to their equivalent but healthy counterparts, ideally from an unaffected relative. 
That way, you're matching for genetic variation. 
And that's exactly what we did here. 
This was a collaboration with colleagues: in London, Chris Shaw; in the U.S., Steve Finkbeiner and Tom Maniatis. 
And what you're looking at, and this is amazing, these are living, growing, motor nerve cells from a patient with motor neuron disease. 
It happens to be an inherited form. 
I mean, just imagine that. 
This would have been unimaginable 10 years ago. 
So apart from seeing them grow and put out processes, we can also engineer them so that they fluoresce, but crucially, we can then track their individual health and compare the diseased motor nerve cells to the healthy ones. 
And when you do all that and put it together, you realize that the diseased ones, which is represented in the red line, are two and a half times more likely to die than the healthy counterpart. 
And the crucial point about this is that you then have a fantastic assay to discover drugs, because what would you ask of the drugs, and you could do this through a high-throughput automated screening system, you'd ask the drugs, give me one thing: find me a drug that will bring the red line closer to the blue line, because that drug will be a high-value candidate that you could probably take direct to human trial and almost bypass that bottleneck that I've told you about in drug discovery with the animal models, if that makes sense. It's fantastic. 
But I want to come back to how you might use stem cells directly to repair damage. 
And again there are two ways to think about this, and they're not mutually exclusive. 
The first, and I think in the long run the one that will give us the biggest dividend, but it's not thought of that way just yet, is to think about those stem cells that are already in your brain, and I've told you that. 
All of us have stem cells in the brain, even the diseased brain, and surely the smart way forward is to find ways that you can promote and activate those stem cells in your brain already to react and respond appropriately to damage to repair it. 
That will be the future. 
There will be drugs that will do that. 
But the other way is to effectively parachute in cells, transplant them in, to replace dying or lost cells, even in the brain. 
And I want to tell you now an experiment, it's a clinical trial that we did, which recently completed, which is with colleagues in UCL, David Miller in particular. 
So this study was very simple. 
We took patients with multiple sclerosis and asked a simple question: Would stem cells from the bone marrow be protective of their nerves? 
So what we did was we took this bone marrow, grew up the stem cells in the lab, and then injected them back into the vein. 
I'm making this sound really simple. 
It took five years off a lot of people, okay? 
And it put gray hair on me and caused all kinds of issues. 
But conceptually, it's essentially simple. 
So we've given them into the vein, right? 
So in order to measure whether this was successful or not, we measured the optic nerve as our outcome measure. 
And that's a good thing to measure in M.S., because patients with M.S. sadly suffer with problems with vision — loss of vision, unclear vision. 
And so we measured the size of the optic nerve using the scans with David Miller three times — 12 months, six months, and before the infusion — and you can see the gently declining red line. 
And that's telling you that the optic nerve is shrinking, which makes sense, because their nerves are dying. 
We then gave the stem cell infusion and repeated the measurement twice — three months and six months — and to our surprise, almost, the line's gone up. 
That suggests that the intervention has been protective. 
I don't think myself that what's happened is that those stem cells have made new myelin or new nerves. 
What I think they've done is they've promoted the endogenous stem cells, or precursor cells, to do their job, wake up, lay down new myelin. 
So this is a proof of concept. 
I'm very excited about that. 
So I just want to end with the theme I began on, which was regeneration and hope. 
So here I've asked John what his hopes are for the future. 
John: I would hope that sometime in the future through the research that you people are doing, we can come up with a cure so that people like me can lead a normal life. 
SC: I mean, that speaks volumes. 
But I'd like to close by first of all thanking John — thanking John for allowing me to share his insights and these clips with you all. 
But I'd also like to add to John and to others that my own view is, I'm hopeful for the future. 
I do believe that the disruptive technologies like stem cells that I've tried to explain to you do offer very real hope. 
And I do think that the day that we might be able to repair the damaged brain is sooner than we think. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

But energy and climate are extremely important to these people; in fact, more important than to anyone else on the planet. 
In fact, if you could pick just one thing to lower the price of to reduce poverty, by far you would pick energy. 
The coal revolution fueled the Industrial Revolution, and, even in the 1900s, we've seen a very rapid decline in the price of electricity, and that's why we have refrigerators, air-conditioning; we can make modern materials and do so many things. 
If you sum up the CO2 that gets emitted, that leads to a temperature increase, and that temperature increase leads to some very negative effects: the effects on the weather; perhaps worse, the indirect effects, in that the natural ecosystems can't adjust to these rapid changes, and so you get ecosystem collapses. 
And the answer is, until we get near to zero, the temperature will continue to rise. 
It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. 
So you've got a thing on the left, CO2, that you want to get to zero, and that's going to be based on the number of people, the services each person is using on average, the energy, on average, for each service, and the CO2 being put out per unit of energy. 
That's headed up to about nine billion. 
In the rich world, perhaps the top one billion, we probably could cut back and use less, but every year, this number, on average, is going to go up, and so, overall, that will more than double the services delivered per person. 
Now, efficiency, "" E, "" the energy for each service — here, finally we have some good news. 
Through various inventions and new ways of doing lighting, through different types of cars, different ways of building buildings — there are a lot of services where you can bring the energy for that service down quite substantially. 
Some individual services even bring it down by 90 percent. 
But for these first three factors now, we've gone from 26 billion to, at best, maybe 13 billion tons, and that just won't cut it. 
Is there some kind of natural illustration, some demonstration that would grab people's imagination here? "" I thought back to a year ago when I brought mosquitoes, and somehow people enjoyed that. 
I'm told they don't bite; in fact, they might not even leave that jar. 
And that's to take all the CO2, after you've burned it, going out the flue, pressurize it, create a liquid, put it somewhere, and hope it stays there. 
It also has three big problems: cost, particularly in highly regulated countries, is high; the issue of safety, really feeling good about nothing could go wrong, that, even though you have these human operators, the fuel doesn't get used for weapons. 
So three very tough problems that might be solvable, and so, should be worked on. 
And so, if you depend on these sources, you have to have some way of getting the energy during those time periods that it's not available. 
And so, in fact, we need a big breakthrough here, something that's going to be a factor of 100 better than the approaches we have now. 
Now, this shows up when you try to get the intermittent source to be above, say, 20 to 30 percent of what you're using. 
Now, how are we going to go forward on this — what's the right approach? 
Bill Gross has several companies, including one called eSolar that has some great solar thermal technologies. 
Nathan Myhrvold and I actually are backing a company that, perhaps surprisingly, is actually taking the nuclear approach. 
And because you're burning that 99 percent, you have greatly improved cost profile. 
The other grade is: Are we deploying this zero-emission technology, have we deployed it in all the developed countries and are in the process of getting it elsewhere? 
That's a key element of making that report card. 
Backing up from there, what should the 2020 report card look like? 
The Al Gore book, "" Our Choice, "" and the David MacKay book, "" Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. "" They really go through it and create a framework that this can be discussed broadly, because we need broad backing for this. 
What am I appealing to you to step forward and drive? 
You'd be stunned at the ridiculously low levels of spending on these innovative approaches. 
We do need the market incentives — CO2 tax, cap and trade — something that gets that price signal out there. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) Thank you. 
And we start out, actually, by taking the waste that exists today that's sitting in these cooling pools or dry-casking by reactors — that's our fuel to begin with. 
It's an important advance, but it's like a fast reactor, and a lot of countries have built them, so anybody who's done a fast reactor is a candidate to be where the first one gets built. 
CA: So, in your mind, timescale and likelihood of actually taking something like this live? 
We certainly need one to succeed. 
And so, there are different ones, but the beauty of this is a molecule of uranium has a million times as much energy as a molecule of, say, coal. 
Do we have to start taking emergency measures to try and keep the temperature of the earth stable? 
BG: If you get into that situation, it's like if you've been overeating, and you're about to have a heart attack. 
Then where do you go? 
But I guess I'll accept it, because it's cheaper than what's come before. "" (Applause) CA: So that would be your response to the Bjørn Lomborg argument, basically if you spend all this energy trying to solve the CO2 problem, it's going to take away all your other goals of trying to rid the world of poverty and malaria and so forth, it's a stupid waste of the Earth's resources to put money towards that when there are better things we can do. 
It shouldn't take away from other things. 
The thing you get into big money on, and reasonable people can disagree, is when you have something that's non-economic and you're trying to fund that — that, to me, mostly is a waste. 
If the trade-off you get into is, "" Let's make energy super expensive, "" then the rich can afford that. 
His shtick now is, "" Why isn't the R & D getting more discussed? "" He's still, because of his earlier stuff, still associated with the skeptic camp, but he's realized that's a pretty lonely camp, and so, he's making the R & D point. 
The R & D piece — it's crazy how little it's funded. 

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

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

Good morning everybody. 
I'd like to talk about a couple of things today. 
The first thing is water. 
Now I see you've all been enjoying the water that's been provided for you here at the conference, over the past couple of days. 
And I'm sure you'll feel that it's from a safe source. 
But what if it wasn't? 
What if it was from a source like this? 
Then statistics would actually say that half of you would now be suffering with diarrhea. 
I talked a lot in the past about statistics, and the provision of safe drinking water for all. 
But they just don't seem to get through. 
And I think I've worked out why. 
It's because, using current thinking, the scale of the problem just seems too huge to contemplate solving. 
So we just switch off: us, governments and aid agencies. 
Well, today, I'd like to show you that through thinking differently, the problem has been solved. 
By the way, since I've been speaking, another 13,000 people around the world are suffering now with diarrhea. 
And four children have just died. 
I invented Lifesaver bottle because I got angry. 
I, like most of you, was sitting down, the day after Christmas in 2004, when I was watching the devastating news of the Asian tsunami as it rolled in, playing out on TV. 
The days and weeks that followed, people fleeing to the hills, being forced to drink contaminated water or face death. 
That really stuck with me. 
Then, a few months later, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the side of America. 
"Okay," I thought, "here's a First World country, let's see what they can do." 
Day one: nothing. 
Day two: nothing. 
Do you know it took five days to get water to the Superdome? 
People were shooting each other on the streets for TV sets and water. 
That's when I decided I had to do something. 
Now I spent a lot of time in my garage, over the next weeks and months, and also in my kitchen — much to the dismay of my wife. (Laughter) However, after a few failed prototypes, I finally came up with this, the Lifesaver bottle. 
Okay, now for the science bit. 
Before Lifesaver, the best hand filters were only capable of filtering down to about 200 nanometers. 
The smallest bacteria is about 200 nanometers. 
So a 200-nanometer bacteria is going to get through a 200-nanometer hole. 
The smallest virus, on the other hand, is about 25 nanometers. 
So that's definitely going to get through those 200 nanometer holes. 
Lifesaver pores are 15 nanometers. 
So nothing is getting through. 
Okay, I'm going to give you a bit of a demonstration. 
Would you like to see that? 
I spent all the time setting this up, so I guess I should. 
We're in the fine city of Oxford. 
So — someone's done that up. 
Fine city of Oxford, so what I've done is I've gone and got some water from the River Cherwell, and the River Thames, that flow through here. And this is the water. 
But I got to thinking, you know, if we were in the middle of a flood zone in Bangladesh, the water wouldn't look like this. 
So I've gone and got some stuff to add into it. 
And this is from my pond. 
(Sniffs) (Coughs) Have a smell of that, mister cameraman. 
Okay. (Laughs) Right. 
We're just going to pour that in there. 
Audience: Ugh! 
Michael Pritchard: Okay. We've got some runoff from a sewage plant farm. 
So I'm just going to put that in there. 
(Laughter) Put that in there. There we go. (Laughter) 
And some other bits and pieces, chuck that in there. 
And I've got a gift here from a friend of mine's rabbit. 
So we're just going to put that in there as well. 
(Laughter) Okay. (Laughter) Now. 
The Lifesaver bottle works really simply. 
You just scoop the water up. 
Today I'm going to use a jug just to show you all. Let's get a bit of that poo in there. 
That's not dirty enough. Let's just stir that up a little bit. 
Okay, so I'm going to take this really filthy water, and put it in here. Do you want a drink yet? 
(Laughter) Okay. There we go. 
Replace the top. 
Give it a few pumps. Okay? 
That's all that's necessary. 
Now as soon as I pop the teat, sterile drinking water is going to come out. 
I've got to be quick. Okay, ready? 
There we go. Mind the electrics. 
That is safe, sterile drinking water. 
(Applause) Cheers. (Applause) 
There you go Chris. (Applause) 
What's it taste of? 
Chris Anderson: Delicious. 
Michael Pritchard: Okay. 
Let's see Chris's program throughout the rest of the show. Okay? 
(Laughter) Okay. Lifesaver bottle is used by thousands of people around the world. 
It'll last for 6,000 liters. 
And when it's expired, using failsafe technology, the system will shut off, protecting the user. 
Pop the cartridge out. Pop a new one in. 
It's good for another 6,000 liters. 
So let's look at the applications. 
Traditionally, in a crisis, what do we do? 
We ship water. 
Then, after a few weeks, we set up camps. 
And people are forced to come into the camps to get their safe drinking water. 
What happens when 20,000 people congregate in a camp? 
Diseases spread. More resources are required. 
The problem just becomes self-perpetuating. 
But by thinking differently, and shipping these, people can stay put. 
They can make their own sterile drinking water, and start to get on with rebuilding their homes and their lives. 
Now, it doesn't require a natural disaster for this to work. 
Using the old thinking, of national infrastructure and pipe work, is too expensive. 
When you run the numbers on a calculator, you run out of noughts. 
So here is the "" thinking different "" bit. 
Instead of shipping water, and using man-made processes to do it, let's use Mother Nature. She's got a fantastic system. 
She picks the water up from there, desalinates it, for free, transports it over there, and dumps it onto the mountains, rivers, and streams. 
And where do people live? Near water. 
All we've go to do is make it sterile. How do we do that? 
Well, we could use the Lifesaver bottle. 
Or we could use one of these. 
The same technology, in a jerry can. 
This will process 25,000 liters of water; that's good enough for a family of four, for three years. 
And how much does it cost? 
About half a cent a day to run. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) So, by thinking differently, and processing water at the point of use, mothers and children no longer have to walk four hours a day to collect their water. 
They can get it from a source nearby. 
So with just eight billion dollars, we can hit the millennium goal's target of halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water. 
To put that into context, The U.K. government spends about 12 billion pounds a year on foreign aid. 
But why stop there? 
With 20 billion dollars, everyone can have access to safe drinking water. 
So the three-and-a-half billion people that suffer every year as a result, and the two million kids that die every year, will live. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Restaurants and the food industry in general are pretty much the most wasteful industry in the world. 
For every calorie of food that we consume here in Britain today, 10 calories are taken to produce it. 
That's a lot. 
I want to take something rather humble to discuss. 
I found this in the farmers' market today, and if anybody wants to take it home and mash it later, you're very welcome to. 
The humble potato — and I've spent a long time, 25 years, preparing these. 
And it pretty much goes through eight different forms in its lifetime. 
First of all, it's planted, and that takes energy. 
It grows and is nurtured. 
It's then harvested. 
It's then distributed, and distribution is a massive issue. 
It's then sold and bought, and it's then delivered to me. 
I basically take it, prepare it, and then people consume it — hopefully they enjoy it. 
The last stage is basically waste, and this is is pretty much where everybody disregards it. 
There are different types of waste. 
There's a waste of time; there's a waste of space; there's a waste of energy; and there's a waste of waste. 
And every business I've been working on over the past five years, I'm trying to lower each one of these elements. 
Okay, so you ask what a sustainable restaurant looks like. 
Basically a restaurant just like any other. 
This is the restaurant, Acorn House. 
Front and back. 
So let me run you through a few ideas. 
Floor: sustainable, recyclable. 
Chairs: recycled and recyclable. 
Tables: Forestry Commission. 
This is Norwegian Forestry Commission wood. 
This bench, although it was uncomfortable for my mom — she didn't like sitting on it, so she went and bought these cushions for me from a local jumble sale — reusing, a job that was pretty good. 
I hate waste, especially walls. 
If they're not working, put a shelf on it, which I did, and that shows all the customers my products. 
The whole business is run on sustainable energy. 
This is powered by wind. All of the lights are daylight bulbs. 
Paint is all low-volume chemical, which is very important when you're working in the room all the time. 
I was experimenting with these — I don't know if you can see it — but there's a work surface there. 
And that's a plastic polymer. 
And I was thinking, well I'm trying to think nature, nature, nature. 
But I thought, no, no, experiment with resins, experiment with polymers. 
Will they outlive me? They probably might. 
Right, here's a reconditioned coffee machine. 
It actually looks better than a brand new one — so looking good there. 
Now reusing is vital. 
And we filter our own water. 
We put them in bottles, refrigerate them, and then we reuse that bottle again and again and again. 
Here's a great little example. 
If you can see this orange tree, it's actually growing in a car tire, which has been turned inside out and sewn up. 
It's got my compost in it, which is growing an orange tree, which is great. 
This is the kitchen, which is in the same room. 
I basically created a menu that allowed people to choose the amount and volume of food that they wanted to consume. 
Rather than me putting a dish down, they were allowed to help themselves to as much or as little as they wanted. 
Okay, it's a small kitchen. It's about five square meters. 
It serves 220 people a day. 
We generate quite a lot of waste. 
This is the waste room. 
You can't get rid of waste. 
But this story's not about eliminating it, it's about minimizing it. 
In here, I have produce and boxes that are unavoidable. 
I put my food waste into this dehydrating, desiccating macerator — turns food into an inner material, which I can store and then compost later. 
I compost it in this garden. 
All of the soil you can see there is basically my food, which is generated by the restaurant, and it's growing in these tubs, which I made out of storm-felled trees and wine casks and all kinds of things. 
Three compost bins — go through about 70 kilos of raw vegetable waste a week — really good, makes fantastic compost. 
A couple of wormeries in there too. 
And actually one of the wormeries was a big wormery. I had a lot of worms in it. 
And I tried taking the dried food waste, putting it to the worms, going, "" There you go, dinner. "" It was like vegetable jerky, and killed all of them. 
I don't know how many worms [were] in there, but I've got some heavy karma coming, I tell you. 
(Laughter) What you're seeing here is a water filtration system. 
This takes the water out of the restaurant, runs it through these stone beds — this is going to be mint in there — and I sort of water the garden with it. 
And I ultimately want to recycle that, put it back into the loos, maybe wash hands with it, I don't know. 
So, water is a very important aspect. 
I started meditating on that and created a restaurant called Waterhouse. 
If I could get Waterhouse to be a no-carbon restaurant that is consuming no gas to start with, that would be great. 
I managed to do it. 
This restaurant looks a little bit like Acorn House — same chairs, same tables. 
They're all English and a little bit more sustainable. 
But this is an electrical restaurant. 
The whole thing is electric, the restaurant and the kitchen. 
And it's run on hydroelectricity, so I've gone from air to water. 
Now it's important to understand that this room is cooled by water, heated by water, filters its own water, and it's powered by water. 
It literally is Waterhouse. 
The air handling system inside it — I got rid of air-conditioning because I thought there was too much consumption going on there. 
This is basically air-handling. 
I'm taking the temperature of the canal outside, pumping it through the heat exchange mechanism, it's turning through these amazing sails on the roof, and that, in turn, is falling softly onto the people in the restaurant, cooling them, or heating them, as the need may be. 
And this is an English willow air diffuser, and that's softly moving that air current through the room. 
Very advanced, no air-conditioning — I love it. 
In the canal, which is just outside the restaurant, there is hundreds of meters of coil piping. 
This takes the temperature of the canal and turns it into this four-degrees of heat exchange. 
I have no idea how it works, but I paid a lot of money for it. 
(Laughter) And what's great is one of the chefs who works in that restaurant lives on this boat — it's off-grid; it generates all its own power. 
He's growing all his own fruit, and that's fantastic. 
There's no accident in names of these restaurants. 
Acorn House is the element of wood; Waterhouse is the element of water; and I'm thinking, well, I'm going to be making five restaurants based on the five Chinese medicine acupuncture specialities. 
I've got water and wood. I'm just about to do fire. 
I've got metal and earth to come. 
So you've got to watch your space for that. 
Okay. So this is my next project. 
Five weeks old, it's my baby, and it's hurting real bad. 
The People's Supermarket. 
So basically, the restaurants only really hit people who believed in what I was doing anyway. 
What I needed to do was get food out to a broader spectrum of people. 
So people — i.e., perhaps, more working-class — or perhaps people who actually believe in a cooperative. 
This is a social enterprise, not-for-profit cooperative supermarket. 
It really is about the social disconnect between food, communities in urban settings and their relationship to rural growers — connecting communities in London to rural growers. 
Really important. 
So I'm committing to potatoes; I'm committing to milk; I'm committing to leeks and broccoli — all very important stuff. 
I've kept the tiles; I've kept the floors; I've kept the trunking; I've got in some recycled fridges; I've got some recycled tills; I've got some recycled trolleys. 
I mean, the whole thing is is super-sustainable. 
In fact, I'm trying and I'm going to make this the most sustainable supermarket in the world. 
That's zero food waste. 
And no one's doing that just yet. 
In fact, Sainsbury's, if you're watching, let's have a go. Try it on. 
I'm going to get there before you. 
So nature doesn't create waste doesn't create waste as such. 
Everything in nature is used up in a closed continuous cycle with waste being the end of the beginning, and that's been something that's been nurturing me for some time, and it's an important statement to understand. 
If we don't stand up and make a difference and think about sustainable food, think about the sustainable nature of it, then we may fail. 
But, I wanted to get up and show you that we can do it if we're more responsible. 
Environmentally conscious businesses are doable. 
They're here. You can see I've done three so far; I've got a few more to go. 
The idea is embryonic. 
I think it's important. 
I think that if we reduce, reuse, refuse and recycle — right at the end there — recycling is the last point I want to make; but it's the four R's, rather than the three R's — then I think we're going to be on our way. 
So these three are not perfect — they're ideas. 
I think that there are many problems to come, but with help, I'm sure I'm going to find solutions. 
And I hope you all take part. 
Thank you very much. (Applause) 

When I was growing up in Montana, I had two dreams. 
I wanted to be a paleontologist, a dinosaur paleontologist, and I wanted to have a pet dinosaur. 
And so that's what I've been striving for all of my life. 
I was very fortunate early in my career. 
I was fortunate in finding things. 
I wasn't very good at reading things. 
In fact, I don't read much of anything. 
I am extremely dyslexic, and so reading is the hardest thing I do. 
But instead, I go out and I find things. 
Then I just pick things up. 
I basically practice for finding money on the street. 
(Laughter) And I wander about the hills, and I have found a few things. 
And I have been fortunate enough to find things like the first eggs in the Western hemisphere and the first baby dinosaurs in nests, the first dinosaur embryos and massive accumulations of bones. 
And it happened to be at a time when people were just starting to begin to realize that dinosaurs weren't the big, stupid, green reptiles that people had thought for so many years. 
People were starting to get an idea that dinosaurs were special. 
And so, at that time, I was able to make some interesting hypotheses along with my colleagues. 
We were able to actually say that dinosaurs — based on the evidence we had — that dinosaurs built nests and lived in colonies and cared for their young, brought food to their babies and traveled in gigantic herds. 
So it was pretty interesting stuff. 
I have gone on to find more things and discover that dinosaurs really were very social. 
We have found a lot of evidence that dinosaurs changed from when they were juveniles to when they were adults. 
The appearance of them would have been different — which it is in all social animals. 
In social groups of animals, the juveniles always look different than the adults. 
The adults can recognize the juveniles; the juveniles can recognize the adults. 
And so we're making a better picture of what a dinosaur looks like. 
And they didn't just all chase Jeeps around. 
(Laughter) But it is that social thing that I guess attracted Michael Crichton. 
And in his book, he talked about the social animals. 
And then Steven Spielberg, of course, depicts these dinosaurs as being very social creatures. 
The theme of this story is building a dinosaur, and so we come to that part of "" Jurassic Park. "" Michael Crichton really was one of the first people to talk about bringing dinosaurs back to life. 
You all know the story, right. 
I mean, I assume everyone here has seen "" Jurassic Park. "" If you want to make a dinosaur, you go out, you find yourself a piece of petrified tree sap — otherwise known as amber — that has some blood-sucking insects in it, good ones, and you get your insect and you drill into it and you suck out some DNA, because obviously all insects that sucked blood in those days sucked dinosaur DNA out. 
And you take your DNA back to the laboratory and you clone it. 
And I guess you inject it into maybe an ostrich egg, or something like that, and then you wait, and, lo and behold, out pops a little baby dinosaur. 
And everybody's happy about that. 
(Laughter) And they're happy over and over again. 
They keep doing it; they just keep making these things. 
And then, then, then, and then... 
Then the dinosaurs, being social, act out their socialness, and they get together, and they conspire. 
And, of course, that's what makes Steven Spielberg's movie — conspiring dinosaurs chasing people around. 
So I assume everybody knows that if you actually had a piece of amber and it had an insect in it, and you drilled into it, and you got something out of that insect, and you cloned it, and you did it over and over and over again, you'd have a room full of mosquitos. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And probably a whole bunch of trees as well. 
Now if you want dinosaur DNA, I say go to the dinosaur. 
So that's what we've done. 
Back in 1993 when the movie came out, we actually had a grant from the National Science Foundation to attempt to extract DNA from a dinosaur, and we chose the dinosaur on the left, a Tyrannosaurus rex, which was a very nice specimen. 
And one of my former doctoral students, Dr. Mary Schweitzer, actually had the background to do this sort of thing. 
And so she looked into the bone of this T. rex, one of the thigh bones, and she actually found some very interesting structures in there. 
They found these red circular-looking objects, and they looked, for all the world, like red blood cells. 
And they're in what appear to be the blood channels that go through the bone. 
And so she thought, well, what the heck. 
So she sampled some material out of it. 
Now it wasn't DNA; she didn't find DNA. 
But she did find heme, which is the biological foundation of hemoglobin. 
And that was really cool. 
That was interesting. 
That was — here we have 65-million-year-old heme. 
Well we tried and tried and we couldn't really get anything else out of it. 
So a few years went by, and then we started the Hell Creek Project. 
And the Hell Creek Project was this massive undertaking to get as many dinosaurs as we could possibly find, and hopefully find some dinosaurs that had more material in them. 
And out in eastern Montana there's a lot of space, a lot of badlands, and not very many people, and so you can go out there and find a lot of stuff. 
And we did find a lot of stuff. 
We found a lot of Tyrannosaurs, but we found one special Tyrannosaur, and we called it B-rex. 
And B-rex was found under a thousand cubic yards of rock. 
It wasn't a very complete T. rex, and it wasn't a very big T. rex, but it was a very special B-rex. 
And I and my colleagues cut into it, and we were able to determine, by looking at lines of arrested growth, some lines in it, that B-rex had died at the age of 16. 
We don't really know how long dinosaurs lived, because we haven't found the oldest one yet. 
But this one died at the age of 16. 
We gave samples to Mary Schweitzer, and she was actually able to determine that B-rex was a female based on medullary tissue found on the inside of the bone. 
Medullary tissue is the calcium build-up, the calcium storage basically, when an animal is pregnant, when a bird is pregnant. 
So here was the character that linked birds and dinosaurs. 
But Mary went further. 
She took the bone, and she dumped it into acid. 
Now we all know that bones are fossilized, and so if you dump it into acid, there shouldn't be anything left. 
But there was something left. 
There were blood vessels left. 
There were flexible, clear blood vessels. 
And so here was the first soft tissue from a dinosaur. 
It was extraordinary. 
But she also found osteocytes, which are the cells that laid down the bones. 
And try and try, we could not find DNA, but she did find evidence of proteins. 
But we thought maybe — well, we thought maybe that the material was breaking down after it was coming out of the ground. 
We thought maybe it was deteriorating very fast. 
And so we built a laboratory in the back of an 18-wheeler trailer, and actually took the laboratory to the field where we could get better samples. 
And we did. We got better material. 
The cells looked better. 
The vessels looked better. 
Found the protein collagen. 
I mean, it was wonderful stuff. 
But it's not dinosaur DNA. 
So we have discovered that dinosaur DNA, and all DNA, just breaks down too fast. 
We're just not going to be able to do what they did in "" Jurassic Park. "" We're not going to be able to make a dinosaur based on a dinosaur. 
But birds are dinosaurs. 
Birds are living dinosaurs. 
We actually classify them as dinosaurs. 
We now call them non-avian dinosaurs and avian dinosaurs. 
So the non-avian dinosaurs are the big clunky ones that went extinct. 
Avian dinosaurs are our modern birds. 
So we don't have to make a dinosaur because we already have them. 
(Laughter) I know, you're as bad as the sixth-graders. (Laughter) 
The sixth-graders look at it and they say, "" No. "" (Laughter) "" You can call it a dinosaur, but look at the velociraptor: the velociraptor is cool. "" (Laughter) "The chicken is not." (Laughter) 
So this is our problem, as you can imagine. 
The chicken is a dinosaur. 
I mean it really is. 
You can't argue with it because we're the classifiers and we've classified it that way. 
(Laughter) (Applause) But the sixth-graders demand it. 
"Fix the chicken." 
(Laughter) So that's what I'm here to tell you about: how we are going to fix a chicken. 
So we have a number of ways that we actually can fix the chicken. 
Because evolution works, we actually have some evolutionary tools. 
We'll call them biological modification tools. 
We have selection. 
And we know selection works. 
We started out with a wolf-like creature and we ended up with a Maltese. 
I mean, that's — that's definitely genetic modification. 
Or any of the other funny-looking little dogs. 
We also have transgenesis. 
Transgenesis is really cool too. 
That's where you take a gene out of one animal and stick it in another one. 
That's how people make GloFish. 
You take a glow gene out of a coral or a jellyfish and you stick it in a zebrafish, and, puff, they glow. 
And that's pretty cool. 
And they obviously make a lot of money off of them. 
And now they're making Glow-rabbits and Glow-all-sorts-of-things. 
I guess we could make a glow chicken. 
(Laughter) But I don't think that'll satisfy the sixth-graders either. 
But there's another thing. 
There's what we call atavism activation. 
And atavism activation is basically — an atavism is an ancestral characteristic. 
You heard that occasionally children are born with tails, and it's because it's an ancestral characteristic. 
And so there are a number of atavisms that can happen. 
Snakes are occasionally born with legs. 
And here's an example. 
This is a chicken with teeth. 
A fellow by the name of Matthew Harris at the University of Wisconsin in Madison actually figured out a way to stimulate the gene for teeth, and so was able to actually turn the tooth gene on and produce teeth in chickens. 
Now that's a good characteristic. 
We can save that one. 
We know we can use that. 
We can make a chicken with teeth. 
That's getting closer. 
That's better than a glowing chicken. 
(Laughter) A friend of mine, a colleague of mine, Dr. Hans Larsson at McGill University, is actually looking at atavisms. 
And he's looking at them by looking at the embryo genesis of birds and actually looking at how they develop, and he's interested in how birds actually lost their tail. 
He's also interested in the transformation of the arm, the hand, to the wing. 
He's looking for those genes as well. 
And I said, "" Well, if you can find those, I can just reverse them and make what I need to make for the sixth-graders. "" And so he agreed. 
And so that's what we're looking into. 
If you look at dinosaur hands, a velociraptor has that cool-looking hand with the claws on it. 
Archaeopteryx, which is a bird, a primitive bird, still has that very primitive hand. 
But as you can see, the pigeon, or a chicken or anything else, another bird, has kind of a weird-looking hand, because the hand is a wing. 
But the cool thing is that, if you look in the embryo, as the embryo is developing the hand actually looks pretty much like the archaeopteryx hand. 
It has the three fingers, the three digits. 
But a gene turns on that actually fuses those together. 
And so what we're looking for is that gene. 
We want to stop that gene from turning on, fusing those hands together, so we can get a chicken that hatches out with a three-fingered hand, like the archaeopteryx. 
And the same goes for the tails. 
Birds have basically rudimentary tails. 
And so we know that in embryo, as the animal is developing, it actually has a relatively long tail. 
But a gene turns on and resorbs the tail, gets rid of it. 
So that's the other gene we're looking for. 
We want to stop that tail from resorbing. 
So what we're trying to do really is take our chicken, modify it and make the chickenosaurus. 
(Laughter) It's a cooler-looking chicken. 
But it's just the very basics. 
So that really is what we're doing. 
And people always say, "" Why do that? 
Why make this thing? 
What good is it? "" Well, that's a good question. 
Actually, I think it's a great way to teach kids about evolutionary biology and developmental biology and all sorts of things. 
And quite frankly, I think if Colonel Sanders was to be careful how he worded it, he could actually advertise an extra piece. 
(Laughter) Anyway — When our dino-chicken hatches, it will be, obviously, the poster child, or what you might call a poster chick, for technology, entertainment and design. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Approximately 30 years ago, when I was in oncology at the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, a father and a son walked into my office and they both had their right eye missing, and as I took the history, it became apparent that the father and the son had a rare form of inherited eye tumor, retinoblastoma, and the father knew that he had passed that fate on to his son. 
That moment changed my life. 
It propelled me to go on and to co-lead a team that discovered the first cancer susceptibility gene, and in the intervening decades since then, there has been literally a seismic shift in our understanding of what goes on, what genetic variations are sitting behind various diseases. 
In fact, for thousands of human traits, a molecular basis that's known for that, and for thousands of people, every day, there's information that they gain about the risk of going on to get this disease or that disease. 
At the same time, if you ask, "" Has that impacted the efficiency, how we've been able to develop drugs? "" the answer is not really. 
If you look at the cost of developing drugs, how that's done, it basically hasn't budged that. 
And so it's as if we have the power to diagnose yet not the power to fully treat. 
And there are two commonly given reasons for why that happens. 
One of them is it's early days. 
We're just learning the words, the fragments, the letters in the genetic code. 
We don't know how to read the sentences. 
We don't know how to follow the narrative. 
The other reason given is that most of those changes are a loss of function, and it's actually really hard to develop drugs that restore function. 
But today, I want us to step back and ask a more fundamental question, and ask, "" What happens if we're thinking about this maybe in the wrong context? "" We do a lot of studying of those who are sick and building up long lists of altered components. 
But maybe, if what we're trying to do is to develop therapies for prevention, maybe what we should be doing is studying those who don't get sick. 
Maybe we should be studying those that are well. 
A vast majority of those people are not necessarily carrying a particular genetic load or risk factor. 
They're not going to help us. 
There are going to be those individuals who are carrying a potential future risk, they're going to go on to get some symptom. 
That's not what we're looking for. 
What we're asking and looking for is, are there a very few set of individuals who are actually walking around with the risk that normally would cause a disease, but something in them, something hidden in them is actually protective and keeping them from exhibiting those symptoms? 
If you're going to do a study like that, you can imagine you'd like to look at lots and lots of people. 
We'd have to go and have a pretty wide study, and we realized that actually one way to think of this is, let us look at adults who are over 40 years of age, and let's make sure that we look at those who were healthy as kids. 
They might have had individuals in their families who had had a childhood disease, but not necessarily. 
And let's go and then screen those to find those who are carrying genes for childhood diseases. 
Now, some of you, I can see you putting your hands up going, "" Uh, a little odd. 
What's your evidence that this could be feasible? "" I want to give you two examples. 
The first comes from San Francisco. 
It comes from the 1980s and the 1990s, and you may know the story where there were individuals who had very high levels of the virus HIV. 
They went on to get AIDS. 
But there was a very small set of individuals who also had very high levels of HIV. 
They didn't get AIDS. 
And astute clinicians tracked that down, and what they found was they were carrying mutations. 
Notice, they were carrying mutations from birth that were protective, that were protecting them from going on to get AIDS. 
You may also know that actually a line of therapy has been coming along based on that fact. 
Second example, more recent, is elegant work done by Helen Hobbs, who said, "" I'm going to look at individuals who have very high lipid levels, and I'm going to try to find those people with high lipid levels who don't go on to get heart disease. "" And again, what she found was some of those individuals had mutations that were protective from birth that kept them, even though they had high lipid levels, and you can see this is an interesting way of thinking about how you could develop preventive therapies. 
The project that we're working on is called "" The Resilience Project: A Search for Unexpected Heroes, "" because what we are interested in doing is saying, can we find those rare individuals who might have these hidden protective factors? 
And in some ways, think of it as a decoder ring, a sort of resilience decoder ring that we're going to try to build. 
We've realized that we should do this in a systematic way, so we've said, let's take every single childhood inherited disease. 
Let's take them all, and let's pull them back a little bit by those that are known to have severe symptoms, where the parents, the child, those around them would know that they'd gotten sick, and let's go ahead and then frame them again by those parts of the genes where we know that there is a particular alteration that is known to be highly penetrant to cause that disease. 
Where are we going to look? 
Well, we could look locally. That makes sense. 
But we began to think, maybe we should look all over the world. 
Maybe we should look not just here but in remote places where their might be a distinct genetic context, there might be environmental factors that protect people. 
And let's look at a million individuals. 
Now the reason why we think it's a good time to do that now is, in the last couple of years, there's been a remarkable plummeting in the cost to do this type of analysis, this type of data generation, to where it actually costs less to do the data generation and analysis than it does to do the sample processing and the collection. 
The other reason is that in the last five years, there have been awesome tools, things about network biology, systems biology, that have come up that allow us to think that maybe we could decipher those positive outliers. 
And as we went around talking to researchers and institutions and telling them about our story, something happened. 
They started saying, "" This is interesting. 
I would be glad to join your effort. 
I would be willing to participate. "" And they didn't say, "" Where's the MTA? "" They didn't say, "" Where is my authorship? "" They didn't say, "" Is this data going to be mine? Am I going to own it? "" They basically said, "" Let's work on this in an open, crowd-sourced, team way to do this decoding. "" Six months ago, we locked down the screening key for this decoder. 
My co-lead, a brilliant scientist, Eric Schadt at the Icahn Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and his team, locked in that decoder key ring, and we began looking for samples, because what we realized is, maybe we could just go and look at some existing samples to get some sense of feasibility. 
Maybe we could take two, three percent of the project on, and see if it was there. 
And so we started asking people such as Hakon at the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia. 
We asked Leif up in Finland. 
We talked to Anne Wojcicki at 23andMe, and Wang Jun at BGI, and again, something remarkable happened. 
They said, "" Huh, not only do we have samples, but often we've analyzed them, and we would be glad to go into our anonymized samples and see if we could find those that you're looking for. "" And instead of being 20,000 or 30,000, last month we passed one half million samples that we've already analyzed. 
So you must be going, "Huh, did you find any unexpected heroes?" 
And the answer is, we didn't find one or two. 
We found dozens of these strong candidate unexpected heroes. 
So we think that the time is now to launch the beta phase of this project and actually start getting prospective individuals. 
Basically all we need is information. 
We need a swab of DNA and a willingness to say, "" What's inside me? 
I'm willing to be re-contacted. "" Most of us spend our lives, when it comes to health and disease, acting as if we're voyeurs. 
We delegate the responsibility for the understanding of our disease, for the treatment of our disease, to anointed experts. 
In order for us to get this project to work, we need individuals to step up in a different role and to be engaged, to realize this dream, this open crowd-sourced project, to find those unexpected heroes, to evolve from the current concepts of resources and constraints, to design those preventive therapies, and to extend it beyond childhood diseases, to go all the way up to ways that we could look at Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, we're going to need us to be looking inside ourselves and asking, "" What are our roles? 
What are our genes? "" and looking within ourselves for information we used to say we should go to the outside, to experts, and to be willing to share that with others. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Just a few minutes ago, I took this picture about 10 blocks from here. 
This is the Grand Cafe here in Oxford. 
I took this picture because this turns out to be the first coffeehouse to open in England in 1650. 
That's its great claim to fame, and I wanted to show it to you, not because I want to give you the kind of Starbucks tour of historic England, but rather because the English coffeehouse was crucial to the development and spread of one of the great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years, what we now call the Enlightenment. 
And the coffeehouse played such a big role in the birth of the Enlightenment, in part, because of what people were drinking there. 
Because, before the spread of coffee and tea through British culture, what people drank — both elite and mass folks drank — day-in and day-out, from dawn until dusk was alcohol. 
Alcohol was the daytime beverage of choice. 
You would drink a little beer with breakfast and have a little wine at lunch, a little gin — particularly around 1650 — and top it off with a little beer and wine at the end of the day. 
That was the healthy choice — right — because the water wasn't safe to drink. 
And so, effectively until the rise of the coffeehouse, you had an entire population that was effectively drunk all day. 
And you can imagine what that would be like, right, in your own life — and I know this is true of some of you — if you were drinking all day, and then you switched from a depressant to a stimulant in your life, you would have better ideas. 
You would be sharper and more alert. 
And so it's not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened as England switched to tea and coffee. 
But the other thing that makes the coffeehouse important is the architecture of the space. 
It was a space where people would get together from different backgrounds, different fields of expertise, and share. 
It was a space, as Matt Ridley talked about, where ideas could have sex. 
This was their conjugal bed, in a sense — ideas would get together there. 
And an astonishing number of innovations from this period have a coffeehouse somewhere in their story. 
I've been spending a lot of time thinking about coffeehouses for the last five years, because I've been kind of on this quest to investigate this question of where good ideas come from. 
What are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation, unusual levels of creativity? 
What's the kind of environmental — what is the space of creativity? 
And what I've done is I've looked at both environments like the coffeehouse; I've looked at media environments, like the world wide web, that have been extraordinarily innovative; I've gone back to the history of the first cities; I've even gone to biological environments, like coral reefs and rainforests, that involve unusual levels of biological innovation; and what I've been looking for is shared patterns, kind of signature behavior that shows up again and again in all of these environments. 
Are there recurring patterns that we can learn from, that we can take and kind of apply to our own lives, or our own organizations, or our own environments to make them more creative and innovative? 
And I think I've found a few. 
But what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand these principles is you have to do away with a lot of the way in which our conventional metaphors and language steers us towards certain concepts of idea-creation. 
We have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration. 
We have the kind of the flash of insight, the stroke of insight, we have epiphanies, we have "" eureka! "" moments, we have the lightbulb moments, right? 
All of these concepts, as kind of rhetorically florid as they are, share this basic assumption, which is that an idea is a single thing, it's something that happens often in a wonderful illuminating moment. 
But in fact, what I would argue and what you really need to kind of begin with is this idea that an idea is a network on the most elemental level. 
I mean, this is what is happening inside your brain. 
An idea — a new idea — is a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside your brain. 
It's a new configuration that has never formed before. 
And the question is: how do you get your brain into environments where these new networks are going to be more likely to form? 
And it turns out that, in fact, the kind of network patterns of the outside world mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of the human brain. 
So the metaphor I'd like the use I can take from a story of a great idea that's quite recent — a lot more recent than the 1650s. 
A wonderful guy named Timothy Prestero, who has a company called... an organization called Design That Matters. 
They decided to tackle this really pressing problem of, you know, the terrible problems we have with infant mortality rates in the developing world. 
One of the things that's very frustrating about this is that we know, by getting modern neonatal incubators into any context, if we can keep premature babies warm, basically — it's very simple — we can halve infant mortality rates in those environments. 
So, the technology is there. 
These are standard in all the industrialized worlds. 
The problem is, if you buy a $40,000 incubator, and you send it off to a mid-sized village in Africa, it will work great for a year or two years, and then something will go wrong and it will break, and it will remain broken forever, because you don't have a whole system of spare parts, and you don't have the on-the-ground expertise to fix this $40,000 piece of equipment. 
And so you end up having this problem where you spend all this money getting aid and all these advanced electronics to these countries, and then it ends up being useless. 
So what Prestero and his team decided to do is to look around and see: what are the abundant resources in these developing world contexts? 
And what they noticed was they don't have a lot of DVRs, they don't have a lot of microwaves, but they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their cars on the road. 
There's a Toyota Forerunner on the street in all these places. 
They seem to have the expertise to keep cars working. 
So they started to think, "" Could we build a neonatal incubator that's built entirely out of automobile parts? "" And this is what they ended up coming with. 
It's called a "" neonurture device. "" From the outside, it looks like a normal little thing you'd find in a modern, Western hospital. 
In the inside, it's all car parts. 
It's got a fan, it's got headlights for warmth, it's got door chimes for alarm — it runs off a car battery. 
And so all you need is the spare parts from your Toyota and the ability to fix a headlight, and you can repair this thing. 
Now, that's a great idea, but what I'd like to say is that, in fact, this is a great metaphor for the way that ideas happen. 
We like to think our breakthrough ideas, you know, are like that $40,000, brand new incubator, state-of-the-art technology, but more often than not, they're cobbled together from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby. 
We take ideas from other people, from people we've learned from, from people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new. 
That's really where innovation happens. 
And that means that we have to change some of our models of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like, right. 
I mean, this is one vision of it. 
Another is Newton and the apple, when Newton was at Cambridge. 
This is a statue from Oxford. 
You know, you're sitting there thinking a deep thought, and the apple falls from the tree, and you have the theory of gravity. 
In fact, the spaces that have historically led to innovation tend to look like this, right. 
This is Hogarth's famous painting of a kind of political dinner at a tavern, but this is what the coffee shops looked like back then. 
This is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come together, where people were likely to have new, interesting, unpredictable collisions — people from different backgrounds. 
So, if we're trying to build organizations that are more innovative, we have to build spaces that — strangely enough — look a little bit more like this. 
This is what your office should look like, is part of my message here. 
And one of the problems with this is that people are actually — when you research this field — people are notoriously unreliable, when they actually kind of self-report on where they have their own good ideas, or their history of their best ideas. 
And a few years ago, a wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar decided to go around and basically do the Big Brother approach to figuring out where good ideas come from. 
He went to a bunch of science labs around the world and videotaped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job. 
So when they were sitting in front of the microscope, when they were talking to their colleague at the water cooler, and all these things. 
And he recorded all of these conversations and tried to figure out where the most important ideas, where they happened. 
And when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab, we have this image — you know, they're pouring over the microscope, and they see something in the tissue sample. 
And "" oh, eureka, "" they've got the idea. 
What happened actually when Dunbar kind of looked at the tape is that, in fact, almost all of the important breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab, in front of the microscope. 
They happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting, when everybody got together and shared their kind of latest data and findings, oftentimes when people shared the mistakes they were having, the error, the noise in the signal they were discovering. 
And something about that environment — and I've started calling it the "" liquid network, "" where you have lots of different ideas that are together, different backgrounds, different interests, jostling with each other, bouncing off each other — that environment is, in fact, the environment that leads to innovation. 
The other problem that people have is they like to condense their stories of innovation down to kind of shorter time frames. 
So they want to tell the story of the "" eureka! "" moment. 
They want to say, "" There I was, I was standing there and I had it all suddenly clear in my head. "" But in fact, if you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods — I call this the "" slow hunch. "" We've heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people's minds. 
They have a feeling that there's an interesting problem, but they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them. 
They spend all this time working on certain problems, but there's another thing lingering there that they're interested in, but they can't quite solve. 
Darwin is a great example of this. 
Darwin himself, in his autobiography, tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection as a classic "" eureka! "" moment. 
He's in his study, it's October of 1838, and he's reading Malthus, actually, on population. 
And all of a sudden, the basic algorithm of natural selection kind of pops into his head and he says, "" Ah, at last, I had a theory with which to work. "" That's in his autobiography. 
About a decade or two ago, a wonderful scholar named Howard Gruber went back and looked at Darwin's notebooks from this period. 
And Darwin kept these copious notebooks where he wrote down every little idea he had, every little hunch. 
And what Gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months and months before he had his alleged epiphany, reading Malthus in October of 1838. 
There are passages where you can read it, and you think you're reading from a Darwin textbook, from the period before he has this epiphany. 
And so what you realize is that Darwin, in a sense, had the idea, he had the concept, but was unable of fully thinking it yet. 
And that is actually how great ideas often happen; they fade into view over long periods of time. 
Now the challenge for all of us is: how do you create environments that allow these ideas to have this kind of long half-life, right? 
It's hard to go to your boss and say, "" I have an excellent idea for our organization. 
It will be useful in 2020. 
Could you just give me some time to do that? "" Now a couple of companies — like Google — they have innovation time off, 20 percent time, where, in a sense, those are hunch-cultivating mechanisms in an organization. 
But that's a key thing. 
And the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people's hunches; that's what often happens. 
You have half of an idea, somebody else has the other half, and if you're in the right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts. 
So, in a sense, we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property, you know, building barricades, having secretive R & D labs, patenting everything that we have, so that those ideas will remain valuable, and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas, and the culture will be more innovative. 
But I think there's a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time, if not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them. 
And I'll leave you with this story, which I think captures a lot of these values, and it's just wonderful kind of tale of innovation and how it happens in unlikely ways. 
It's October of 1957, and Sputnik has just launched, and we're in Laurel Maryland, at the applied physics lab associated with Johns Hopkins University. 
And it's Monday morning, and the news has just broken about this satellite that's now orbiting the planet. 
And of course, this is nerd heaven, right? 
There are all these physics geeks who are there thinking, "Oh my gosh! This is incredible. I can't believe this has happened." 
And two of them, two 20-something researchers at the APL are there at the cafeteria table having an informal conversation with a bunch of their colleagues. 
And these two guys are named Guier and Weiffenbach. 
And they start talking, and one of them says, "" Hey, has anybody tried to listen for this thing? 
There's this, you know, man-made satellite up there in outer space that's obviously broadcasting some kind of signal. 
We could probably hear it, if we tune in. "" And so they ask around to a couple of their colleagues, and everybody's like, "" No, I hadn't thought of doing that. 
That's an interesting idea. "" And it turns out Weiffenbach is kind of an expert in microwave reception, and he's got a little antennae set up with an amplifier in his office. 
And so Guier and Weiffenbach go back to Weiffenbach's office, and they start kind of noodling around — hacking, as we might call it now. 
And after a couple of hours, they actually start picking up the signal, because the Soviets made Sputnik very easy to track. 
It was right at 20 MHz, so you could pick it up really easily, because they were afraid that people would think it was a hoax, basically. 
So they made it really easy to find it. 
So these two guys are sitting there listening to this signal, and people start kind of coming into the office and saying, "Wow, that's pretty cool. Can I hear? Wow, that's great." 
And before long, they think, "" Well jeez, this is kind of historic. 
We may be the first people in the United States to be listening to this. 
We should record it. "" And so they bring in this big, clunky analog tape recorder and they start recording these little bleep, bleeps. 
And they start writing the kind of date stamp, time stamps for each little bleep that they record. 
And they they start thinking, "" Well gosh, you know, we're noticing small little frequency variations here. 
We could probably calculate the speed that the satellite is traveling, if we do a little basic math here using the Doppler effect. "" And then they played around with it a little bit more, and they talked to a couple of their colleagues who had other kind of specialties. 
And they said, "" Jeez, you know, we think we could actually take a look at the slope of the Doppler effect to figure out the points at which the satellite is closest to our antennae and the points at which it's farthest away. 
That's pretty cool. "" And eventually, they get permission — this is all a little side project that hadn't been officially part of their job description. 
They get permission to use the new, you know, UNIVAC computer that takes up an entire room that they'd just gotten at the APL. 
They run some more of the numbers, and at the end of about three or four weeks, turns out they have mapped the exact trajectory of this satellite around the Earth, just from listening to this one little signal, going off on this little side hunch that they'd been inspired to do over lunch one morning. 
A couple weeks later their boss, Frank McClure, pulls them into the room and says, "" Hey, you guys, I have to ask you something about that project you were working on. 
You've figured out an unknown location of a satellite orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground. 
Could you go the other way? 
Could you figure out an unknown location on the ground, if you knew the location of the satellite? "" And they thought about it and they said, "Well, I guess maybe you could. Let's run the numbers here." 
So they went back, and they thought about it. 
And they came back and said, "" Actually, it'll be easier. "" And he said, "" Oh, that's great. 
Because see, I have these new nuclear submarines that I'm building. 
And it's really hard to figure out how to get your missile so that it will land right on top of Moscow, if you don't know where the submarine is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. 
So we're thinking, we could throw up a bunch of satellites and use it to track our submarines and figure out their location in the middle of the ocean. 
Could you work on that problem? "" And that's how GPS was born. 
30 years later, Ronald Reagan actually opened it up and made it an open platform that anybody could kind of build upon and anybody could come along and build new technology that would create and innovate on top of this open platform, left it open for anyone to do pretty much anything they wanted with it. 
And now, I guarantee you certainly half of this room, if not more, has a device sitting in their pocket right now that is talking to one of these satellites in outer space. 
And I bet you one of you, if not more, has used said device and said satellite system to locate a nearby coffeehouse somewhere in the last — (Laughter) in the last day or last week, right? 
(Applause) And that, I think, is a great case study, a great lesson in the power, the marvelous, kind of unplanned emergent, unpredictable power of open innovative systems. 
When you build them right, they will be led to completely new directions that the creators never even dreamed of. 
I mean, here you have these guys who basically thought they were just following this hunch, this little passion that had developed, then they thought they were fighting the Cold War, and then it turns out they're just helping somebody find a soy latte. 
(Laughter) That is how innovation happens. 
Chance favors the connected mind. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

So I grew up in East Los Angeles, not even realizing I was poor. 
My dad was a high-ranking gang member who ran the streets. 
Everyone knew who I was, so I thought I was a pretty big deal, and I was protected, and even though my dad spent most of my life in and out of jail, I had an amazing mom who was just fiercely independent. 
She worked at the local high school as a secretary in the dean's office, so she got to see all the kids that got thrown out of class, for whatever reason, who were waiting to be disciplined. 
Man, her office was packed. 
So, see, kids like us, we have a lot of things to deal with outside of school, and sometimes we're just not ready to focus. 
But that doesn't mean that we can't. 
It just takes a little bit more. 
Like, I remember one day I found my dad convulsing, foaming at the mouth, OD-ing on the bathroom floor. 
Really, do you think that doing my homework that night was at the top of my priority list? 
Not so much. 
But I really needed a support network, a group of people who were going to help me make sure that I wasn't going to be a victim of my own circumstance, that they were going to push me beyond what I even thought I could do. 
I needed teachers, in the classroom, every day, who were going to say, "" You can move beyond that. "" And unfortunately, the local junior high was not going to offer that. 
It was gang-infested, huge teacher turnover rate. 
So my mom said, "" You're going on a bus an hour and a half away from where we live every day. "" So for the next two years, that's what I did. 
I took a school bus to the fancy side of town. 
And eventually, I ended up at a school where there was a mixture. 
There were some people who were really gang-affiliated, and then there were those of us really trying to make it to high school. 
Well, trying to stay out of trouble was a little unavoidable. 
You had to survive. 
You just had to do things sometimes. 
So there were a lot of teachers who were like, "" She's never going to make it. 
She has an issue with authority. 
She's not going to go anywhere. "" Some teachers completely wrote me off as a lost cause. 
But then, they were very surprised when I graduated from high school. 
I was accepted to Pepperdine University, and I came back to the same school that I attended to be a special ed assistant. 
And then I told them, "" I want to be a teacher. "" And boy, they were like, "" What? Why? 
Why would you want to do that? "" So I began my teaching career at the exact same middle school that I attended, and I really wanted to try to save more kids who were just like me. 
And so every year, I share my background with my kids, because they need to know that everyone has a story, everyone has a struggle, and everyone needs help along the way. 
And I am going to be their help along the way. 
So as a rookie teacher, I created opportunity. 
I had a kid one day come into my class having been stabbed the night before. 
I was like, "" You need to go to a hospital, the school nurse, something. "" He's like, "" No, Miss, I'm not going. 
I need to be in class because I need to graduate. "" So he knew that I was not going to let him be a victim of his circumstance, but we were going to push forward and keep moving on. 
And this idea of creating a safe haven for our kids and getting to know exactly what they're going through, getting to know their families — I wanted that, but I couldn't do it in a school with 1,600 kids, and teachers turning over year after year after year. 
How do you get to build those relationships? 
So we created a new school. 
And we created the San Fernando Institute for Applied Media. 
And we made sure that we were still attached to our school district for funding, for support. 
But with that, we were going to gain freedom: freedom to hire the teachers that we knew were going to be effective; freedom to control the curriculum so that we're not doing lesson 1.2 on page five, no; and freedom to control a budget, to spend money where it matters, not how a district or a state says you have to do it. 
We wanted those freedoms. 
But now, shifting an entire paradigm, it hasn't been an easy journey, nor is it even complete. 
But we had to do it. 
Our community deserved a new way of doing things. 
And as the very first pilot middle school in all of Los Angeles Unified School District, you better believe there was some opposition. 
And it was out of fear — fear of, well, what if they get it wrong? 
Yeah, what if we get it wrong? 
But what if we get it right? 
And we did. 
So even though teachers were against it because we employ one-year contracts — you can't teach, or you don't want to teach, you don't get to be at my school with my kids. 
(Applause) So in our third year, how did we do it? 
Well, we're making school worth coming to every day. 
We make our kids feel like they matter to us. 
We make our curriculum rigorous and relevant to them, and they use all the technology that they're used to. 
Laptops, computers, tablets — you name it, they have it. 
Animation, software, moviemaking software, they have it all. 
And because we connect it to what they're doing — For example, they made public service announcements for the Cancer Society. 
These were played in the local trolley system. 
Teaching elements of persuasion, it doesn't get any more real than that. 
Our state test scores have gone up more than 80 points since we've become our own school. 
But it's taken all stakeholders, working together — teachers and principals on one-year contracts, working over and above and beyond their contract hours without compensation. 
And it takes a school board member who is going to lobby for you and say, "" Know, the district is trying to impose this, but you have the freedom to do otherwise. "" And it takes an active parent center who is not only there, showing a presence every day, but who is part of our governance, making decisions for their kids, our kids. 
Because why should our students have to go so far away from where they live? 
They deserve a quality school in their neighborhood, a school that they can be proud to say they attend, and a school that the community can be proud of as well, and they need teachers to fight for them every day and empower them to move beyond their circumstances. 
Because it's time that kids like me stop being the exception, and we become the norm. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

This is Charley Williams. 
He was 94 when this photograph was taken. 
In the 1930s, Roosevelt put thousands and thousands of Americans back to work by building bridges and infrastructure and tunnels, but he also did something interesting, which was to hire a few hundred writers to scour America to capture the stories of ordinary Americans. 
Charley Williams, a poor sharecropper, wouldn't ordinarily be the subject of a big interview, but Charley had actually been a slave until he was 22 years old. 
And the stories that were captured of his life make up one of the crown jewels of histories, of human-lived experiences filled with ex-slaves. 
Anna Deavere Smith famously said that there's a literature inside of each of us, and three generations later, I was part of a project called StoryCorps, which set out to capture the stories of ordinary Americans by setting up a soundproof booth in public spaces. 
The idea is very, very simple. 
You go into these booths, you interview your grandmother or relative, you leave with a copy of the interview and an interview goes into the Library of Congress. 
It's essentially a way to make a national oral histories archive one conversation at a time. 
And the question is, who do you want to remember — if you had just 45 minutes with your grandmother? 
What's interesting, in conversations with the founder, Dave Isay, we always actually talked about this as a little bit of a subversive project, because when you think about it, it's actually not really about the stories that are being told, it's about listening, and it's about the questions that you get to ask, questions that you may not have permission to on any other day. 
I'm going to play you just a couple of quick excerpts from the project. 
[Jesus Melendez talking about poet Pedro Pietri's final moments] Jesus Melendez: We took off, and as we were ascending, before we had leveled off, our level-off point was 45,000 feet, so before we had leveled off, Pedro began leaving us, and the beauty about it is that I believe that there's something after life. 
You can see it in Pedro. 
[Danny Perasa to his wife Annie Perasa married 26 years] Danny Perasa: See, the thing of it is, I always feel guilty when I say "" I love you "" to you, and I say it so often. I say it to remind you that as dumpy as I am, it's coming from me, it's like hearing a beautiful song from a busted old radio, and it's nice of you to keep the radio around the house. 
(Laughter) [Michael Wolmetz with his girlfriend Debora Brakarz] Michael Wolmetz: So this is the ring that my father gave to my mother, and we can leave it there. 
And he saved up and he purchased this, and he proposed to my mother with this, and so I thought that I would give it to you so that he could be with us for this also. 
So I'm going to share a mic with you right now, Debora. 
Where's the right finger? 
Debora Brakarz: (Crying) MW: Debora, will you please marry me? 
DB: Yes. Of course. I love you. 
(Kissing) MW: So kids, this is how your mother and I got married, in a booth in Grand Central Station with my father's ring. 
My grandfather was a cab driver for 40 years. 
He used to pick people up here every day. 
So it seems right. 
Jake Barton: So I have to say I did not actually choose those individual samples to make you cry because they all make you cry. 
The entire project is predicated on this act of love which is listening itself. 
And that motion of building an institution out of a moment of conversation and listening is actually a lot of what my firm, Local Projects, is doing with our engagements in general. 
So we're a media design firm, and we're working with a broad array of different institutions building media installations for museums and public spaces. 
Our latest engagement is the Cleveland Museum of Art, which we've created an engagement called Gallery One for. 
And Gallery One is an interesting project because it started with this massive, $350 million expansion for the Cleveland Museum of Art, and we actually brought in this piece specifically to grow new capacity, new audiences, at the same time that the museum itself is growing. 
Glenn Lowry, the head of MoMA, put it best when he said, "" We want visitors to actually cease being visitors. 
Visitors are transient. We want people who live here, people who have ownership. "" And so what we're doing is making a broad array of different ways for people to actually engage with the material inside of these galleries, so you can still have a traditional gallery experience, but if you're interested, you can actually engage with any individual artwork and see the original context from where it's from, or manipulate the work itself. 
So, for example, you can click on this individual lion head, and this is where it originated from, 1300 B.C. 
Or this individual piece here, you can see the actual bedroom. It really changes the way you think about this type of a tempera painting. 
This is one of my favorites because you see the studio itself. 
This is Rodin's bust. You get the sense of this incredible factory for creativity. 
And it makes you think about literally the hundreds or thousands of years of human creativity and how each individual artwork stands in for part of that story. 
This is Picasso, of course embodying so much of it from the 20th century. 
And so our next interface, which I'll show you, actually leverages that idea of this lineage of creativity. 
It's an algorithm that actually allows you to browse the actual museum's collection using facial recognition. 
So this person's making different faces, and it's actually drawing forth different objects from the collection that connect with exactly how she's looking. 
And so you can imagine that, as people are performing inside of the museum itself, you get this sense of this emotional connection, this way in which our face connects with the thousands and tens of thousands of years. 
This is an interface that actually allows you to draw and then draws forth objects using those same shapes. 
So more and more we're trying to find ways for people to actually author things inside of the museums themselves, to be creative even as they're looking at other people's creativity and understanding them. 
So in this wall, the collections wall, you can actually see all 3,000 artworks all at the same time, and you can actually author your own individual walking tours of the museum, so you can share them, and someone can take a tour with the museum director or a tour with their little cousin. 
But all the while that we've been working on this engagement for Cleveland, we've also been working in the background on really our largest engagement to date, and that's the 9 / 11 Memorial and Museum. 
So we started in 2006 as part of a team with Thinc Design to create the original master plan for the museum, and then we've done all the media design both for the museum and the memorial and then the media production. 
So the memorial opened in 2011, and the museum's going to open next year in 2014. 
And you can see from these images, the site is so raw and almost archaeological. 
And of course the event itself is so recent, somewhere between history and current events, it was a huge challenge to imagine how do you actually live up to a space like this, an event like this, to actually tell that story. 
And so what we started with was really a new way of thinking about building an institution, through a project called Make History, which we launched in 2009. 
So it's estimated that a third of the world watched 9 / 11 live, and a third of the world heard about it within 24 hours, making it really by nature of when it happened, this unprecedented moment of global awareness. 
And so we launched this to capture the stories from all around the world, through video, through photos, through written history, and so people's experiences on that day, which was, in fact, this huge risk for the institution to make its first move this open platform. 
But that was coupled together with this oral histories booth, really the simplest we've ever made, where you locate yourself on a map. 
It's in six languages, and you can tell your own story about what happened to you on that day. 
And when we started seeing the incredible images and stories that came forth from all around the world — this is obviously part of the landing gear — we really started to understand that there was this amazing symmetry between the event itself, between the way that people were telling the stories of the event, and how we ourselves needed to tell that story. 
This image in particular really captured our attention at the time, because it so much sums up that event. 
This is a shot from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. 
There's a firefighter that's stuck, actually, in traffic, and so the firefighters themselves are running a mile and a half to the site itself with upwards of 70 pounds of gear on their back. 
And we got this amazing email that said, "" While viewing the thousands of photos on the site, I unexpectedly found a photo of my son. 
It was a shock emotionally, yet a blessing to find this photo, "" and he was writing because he said, "" I'd like to personally thank the photographer for posting the photo, as it meant more than words can describe to me to have access to what is probably the last photo ever taken of my son. "" And it really made us recognize what this institution needed to be in order to actually tell that story. 
We can't have just a historian or a curator narrating objectively in the third person about an event like that, when you have the witnesses to history who are going to make their way through the actual museum itself. 
And so we started imagining the museum, along with the creative team at the museum and the curators, thinking about how the first voice that you would hear inside the museum would actually be of other visitors. 
And so we created this idea of an opening gallery called We Remember. 
And I'll just play you part of a mockup of it, but you get a sense of what it's like to actually enter into that moment in time and be transported back in history. 
(Video) Voice 1: I was in Honolulu, Hawaii. Voice 2: I was in Cairo, Egypt. 
Voice 3: Sur les Champs-Élysées, à Paris. Voice 4: In college, at U.C. Berkeley. 
Voice 5: I was in Times Square. Voice 6: São Paolo, Brazil. 
(Multiple voices) Voice 7: It was probably about 11 o'clock at night. 
Voice 8: I was driving to work at 5: 45 local time in the morning. 
Voice 9: We were actually in a meeting when someone barged in and said, "Oh my God, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center." 
Voice 10: Trying to frantically get to a radio. 
Voice 11: When I heard it over the radio — Voice 12: Heard it on the radio. 
(Multiple voices) Voice 13: I got a call from my father. Voice 14: The phone rang, it woke me up. 
My business partner told me to turn on the television. 
Voice 15: So I switched on the television. 
Voice 16: All channels in Italy were displaying the same thing. 
Voice 17: The Twin Towers. Voice 18: The Twin Towers. 
JB: And you move from there into that open, cavernous space. 
This is the so-called slurry wall. 
It's the original, excavated wall at the base of the World Trade Center that withstood the actual pressure from the Hudson River for a full year after the event itself. 
And so we thought about carrying that sense of authenticity, of presence of that moment into the actual exhibition itself. 
And we tell the stories of being inside the towers through that same audio collage, so you're hearing people literally talking about seeing the planes as they make their way into the building, or making their way down the stairwells. 
And as you make your way into the exhibition where it talks about the recovery, we actually project directly onto these moments of twisted steel all of the experiences from people who literally excavated on top of the pile itself. 
And so you can hear oral histories — so people who were actually working the so-called bucket brigades as you're seeing literally the thousands of experiences from that moment. 
And as you leave that storytelling moment understanding about 9 / 11, we then turn the museum back into a moment of listening and actually talk to the individual visitors and ask them their own experiences about 9 / 11. 
And we ask them questions that are actually not really answerable, the types of questions that 9 / 11 itself draws forth for all of us. 
And so these are questions like, "How can a democracy balance freedom and security?" 
"How could 9 / 11 have happened?" 
"And how did the world change after 9 / 11?" 
And so these oral histories, which we've actually been capturing already for years, are then mixed together with interviews that we're doing with people like Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, and you mix together these different players and these different experiences, these different reflection points about 9 / 11. 
And suddenly the institution, once again, turns into a listening experience. 
So I'll play you just a short excerpt of a mockup that we made of a couple of these voices, but you really get a sense of the poetry of everyone's reflection on the event. 
(Video) Voice 1: 9 / 11 was not just a New York experience. 
Voice 2: It's something that we shared, and it's something that united us. 
Voice 3: And I knew when I saw that, people who were there that day who immediately went to help people known and unknown to them was something that would pull us through. 
Voice 4: All the outpouring of affection and emotion that came from our country was something really that will forever, ever stay with me. 
Voice 5: Still today I pray and think about those who lost their lives, and those who gave their lives to help others, but I'm also reminded of the fabric of this country, the love, the compassIon, the strength, and I watched a nation come together in the middle of a terrible tragedy. 
JB: And so as people make their way out of the museum, reflecting on the experience, reflecting on their own thoughts of it, they then move into the actual space of the memorial itself, because they've gone back up to grade, and we actually got involved in the memorial after we'd done the museum for a few years. 
The original designer of the memorial, Michael Arad, had this image in his mind of all the names appearing undifferentiated, almost random, really a poetic reflection on top of the nature of a terrorism event itself, but it was a huge challenge for the families, for the foundation, certainly for the first responders, and there was a negotiation that went forth and a solution was found to actually create not an order in terms of chronology, or in terms of alphabetical, but through what's called meaningful adjacency. 
So these are groupings of the names themselves which appear undifferentiated but actually have an order, and we, along with Jer Thorp, created an algorithm to take massive amounts of data to actually start to connect together all these different names themselves. 
So this is an image of the actual algorithm itself with the names scrambled for privacy, but you can see that these blocks of color are actually the four different flights, the two different towers, the first responders, and you can actually see within that different floors, and then the green lines are the interpersonal connections that were requested by the families themselves. 
And so when you go to the memorial, you can actually see the overarching organization inside of the individual pools themselves. 
You can see the way that the geography of the event is reflected inside of the memorial, and you can search for an individual name, or in this case an employer, Cantor Fitzgerald, and see the way in which all of those names, those hundreds of names, are actually organized onto the memorial itself, and use that to navigate the memorial. 
And more importantly, when you're actually at the site of the memorial, you can see those connections. 
You can see the relationships between the different names themselves. 
So suddenly what is this undifferentiated, anonymous group of names springs into reality as an individual life. 
In this case, Harry Ramos, who was the head trader at an investment bank, who stopped to aid Victor Wald on the 55th floor of the South Tower. 
And Ramos told Wald, according to witnesses, "I'm not going to leave you." 
And Wald's widow requested that they be listed next to each other. 
Three generations ago, we had to actually get people to go out and capture the stories for common people. 
Today, of course, there's an unprecedented amount of stories for all of us that are being captured for future generations. 
And this is our hope, that's there's poetry inside of each of our stories. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Hi. I'm here to talk about congestion, namely road congestion. 
Road congestion is a pervasive phenomenon. 
It exists in basically all of the cities all around the world, which is a little bit surprising when you think about it. 
I mean, think about how different cities are, actually. 
I mean, you have the typical European cities, with a dense urban core, good public transportation mostly, not a lot of road capacity. 
But then, on the other hand, you have the American cities. 
It's moving by itself, okay. 
Anyway, the American cities: lots of roads dispersed over large areas, almost no public transportation. 
And then you have the emerging world cities, with a mixed variety of vehicles, mixed land-use patterns, also rather dispersed but often with a very dense urban core. 
And traffic planners all around the world have tried lots of different measures: dense cities or dispersed cities, lots of roads or lots of public transport or lots of bike lanes or more information, or lots of different things, but nothing seems to work. 
But all of these attempts have one thing in common. 
They're basically attempts at figuring out what people should do instead of rush hour car driving. 
They're essentially, to a point, attempts at planning what other people should do, planning their life for them. 
Now, planning a complex social system is a very hard thing to do, and let me tell you a story. 
Back in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, an urban planner in London got a phone call from a colleague in Moscow saying, basically, "" Hi, this is Vladimir. I'd like to know, who's in charge of London's bread supply? "" And the urban planner in London goes, "" What do you mean, who's in charge of London's — I mean, no one is in charge. "" "" Oh, but surely someone must be in charge. 
I mean, it's a very complicated system. Someone must control all of this. "" "" No. No. No one is in charge. 
I mean, it basically — I haven't really thought of it. 
It basically organizes itself. "" It organizes itself. 
That's an example of a complex social system which has the ability of self-organizing, and this is a very deep insight. 
When you try to solve really complex social problems, the right thing to do is most of the time to create the incentives. 
You don't plan the details, and people will figure out what to do, how to adapt to this new framework. 
And let's now look at how we can use this insight to combat road congestion. 
This is a map of Stockholm, my hometown. 
Now, Stockholm is a medium-sized city, roughly two million people, but Stockholm also has lots of water and lots of water means lots of bridges — narrow bridges, old bridges — which means lots of road congestion. 
And these red dots show the most congested parts, which are the bridges that lead into the inner city. 
And then someone came up with the idea that, apart from good public transport, apart from spending money on roads, let's try to charge drivers one or two euros at these bottlenecks. 
Now, one or two euros, that isn't really a lot of money, I mean compared to parking charges and running costs, etc., so you would probably expect that car drivers wouldn't really react to this fairly small charge. 
You would be wrong. 
One or two euros was enough to make 20 percent of cars disappear from rush hours. 
Now, 20 percent, well, that's a fairly huge figure, you might think, but you've still got 80 percent left of the problem, right? 
Because you still have 80 percent of the traffic. 
Now, that's also wrong, because traffic happens to be a nonlinear phenomenon, meaning that once you reach above a certain capacity threshold then congestion starts to increase really, really rapidly. 
But fortunately, it also works the other way around. 
If you can reduce traffic even somewhat, then congestion will go down much faster than you might think. 
Now, congestion charges were introduced in Stockholm on January 3, 2006, and the first picture here is a picture of Stockholm, one of the typical streets, January 2. 
The first day with the congestion charges looked like this. 
This is what happens when you take away 20 percent of the cars from the streets. 
You really reduce congestion quite substantially. 
But, well, as I said, I mean, car drivers adapt, right? 
So after a while they would all come back because they have sort of gotten used to charges. 
Wrong again. It's now six and a half years ago since the congestion charges were introduced in Stockholm, and we basically have the same low traffic levels still. 
But you see, there's an interesting gap here in the time series in 2007. 
Well, the thing is that, the congestion charges, they were introduced first as a trial, so they were introduced in January and then abolished again at the end of July, followed by a referendum, and then they were reintroduced again in 2007, which of course was a wonderful scientific opportunity. 
I mean, this was a really fun experiment to start with, and we actually got to do it twice. 
And personally, I would like to do this every once a year or so, but they won't let me do that. 
But it was fun anyway. 
So, we followed up. What happened? 
This is the last day with the congestion charges, July 31, and you see the same street but now it's summer, and summer in Stockholm is a very nice and light time of the year, and the first day without the congestion charges looked like this. 
All the cars were back again, and you even have to admire the car drivers. They adapt so extremely quickly. 
The first day they all came back. 
And this effect hanged on. So 2007 figures looked like this. 
Now these traffic figures are really exciting and a little bit surprising and very useful to know, but I would say that the most surprising slide here I'm going to show you today is not this one. It's this one. 
This shows public support for congestion pricing of Stockholm, and you see that when congestion pricing were introduced in the beginning of Spring 2006, people were fiercely against it. 
Seventy percent of the population didn't want this. 
But what happened when the congestion charges were there is not what you would expect, that people hated it more and more. 
No, on the contrary, they changed, up to a point where we now have 70 percent support for keeping the charges, meaning that — I mean, let me repeat that: 70 percent of the population in Stockholm want to keep a price for something that used to be free. 
Okay. So why can that be? Why is that? 
Well, think about it this way. Who changed? 
I mean, the 20 percent of the car drivers that disappeared, surely they must be discontent in a way. 
And where did they go? If we can understand this, then maybe we can figure out how people can be so happy with this. 
Well, so we did this huge interview survey with lots of travel services, and tried to figure out who changed, and where did they go? 
And it turned out that they don't know themselves. (Laughter) For some reason, the car drivers are — they are confident they actually drive the same way that they used to do. 
And why is that? It's because that travel patterns are much less stable than you might think. 
Each day, people make new decisions, and people change and the world changes around them, and each day all of these decisions are sort of nudged ever so slightly away from rush hour car driving in a way that people don't even notice. 
They're not even aware of this themselves. 
And the other question, who changed their mind? 
Who changed their opinion, and why? 
So we did another interview survey, tried to figure out why people changed their mind, and what type of group changed their minds? 
And after analyzing the answers, it turned out that more than half of them believe that they haven't changed their minds. 
They're actually confident that they have liked congestion pricing all along. 
Which means that we are now in a position where we have reduced traffic across this toll cordon with 20 percent, and reduced congestion by enormous numbers, and people aren't even aware that they have changed, and they honestly believe that they have liked this all along. 
This is the power of nudges when trying to solve complex social problems, and when you do that, you shouldn't try to tell people how to adapt. 
You should just nudge them in the right direction. 
And if you do it right, people will actually embrace the change, and if you do it right, people will actually even like it. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

Pat Mitchell: You have brought us images from the Yemen Times. 
And take us through those, and introduce us to another Yemen. 
Nadia Al-Sakkaf: Well, I'm glad to be here. 
And I would like to share with you all some of the pictures that are happening today in Yemen. 
This picture shows a revolution started by women, and it shows women and men leading a mixed protest. 
The other picture is the popularity of the real need for change. 
So many people are there. 
The intensity of the upspring. 
This picture shows that the revolution has allowed opportunities for training, for education. 
These women are learning about first aid and their rights according to the constitution. 
I love this picture. 
I just wanted to show that over 60 percent of the Yemeni population are 15 years and below. 
And they were excluded from decision-making, and now they are in the forefront of the news, raising the flag. 
English — you will see, this is jeans and tights, and an English expression — the ability to share with the world what is going on in our own country. 
And expression also, it has brought talents. 
Yemenis are using cartoons and art, paintings, comics, to tell the world and each other about what's going on. 
Obviously, there's always the dark side of it. 
And this is just one of the less-gruesome pictures of the revolution and the cost that we have to pay. 
The solidarity of millions of Yemenis across the country just demanding the one thing. 
And finally, lots of people are saying that Yemen's revolution is going to break the country. 
Is it going to be so many different countries? 
Is it going to be another Somalia? 
But we want to tell the world that, no, under the one flag, we'll still remain as Yemeni people. 
PM: Thank you for those images, Nadia. 
And they do, in many ways, tell a different story than the story of Yemen, the one that is often in the news. 
And yet, you yourself defy all those characterizations. 
So let's talk about the personal story for a moment. 
Your father is murdered. 
The Yemen Times already has a strong reputation in Yemen as an independent English language newspaper. 
How did you then make the decision and assume the responsibilities of running a newspaper, especially in such times of conflict? 
NA: Well, let me first warn you that I'm not the traditional Yemeni girl. 
I've guessed you've already noticed this by now. 
(Laughter) In Yemen, most women are veiled and they are sitting behind doors and not very much part of the public life. 
But there's so much potential. 
I wish I could show you my Yemen. 
I wish you could see Yemen through my eyes. 
Then you would know that there's so much to it. 
And I was privileged because I was born into a family, my father would always encourage the boys and the girls. 
He would say we are equal. 
And he was such an extraordinary man. 
And even my mother — I owe it to my family. 
A story: I studied in India. 
And in my third year, I started becoming confused because I was Yemeni, but I was also mixing up with a lot of my friends in college. 
And I went back home and I said, "" Daddy, I don't know who I am. 
I'm not a Yemeni; I'm not an Indian. "" And he said, "" You are the bridge. "" And that is something I will keep in my heart forever. 
So since then I've been the bridge, and a lot of people have walked over me. 
PM: I don't think so. (Laughter) NA: But it just helps tell that some people are change agents in the society. 
And when I became editor-in-chief after my brother actually — my father passed away in 1999, and then my brother until 2005 — and everybody was betting that I will not be able to do it. 
"" What's this young girl coming in and showing off because it's her family business, "" or something. 
It was very hard at first. 
I didn't want to clash with people. 
But with all due respect to all the men, and the older men especially, they did not want me around. 
It was very hard, you know, to impose my authority. 
But a woman's got to do what a woman's got to do. 
(Applause) And in the first year, I had to fire half of the men. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Brought in more women. 
Brought in younger men. 
And we have a more gender-balanced newsroom today. 
The other thing is that it's about professionalism. 
It's about proving who you are and what you can do. 
And I don't know if I'm going to be boasting now, but in 2006 alone, we won three international awards. 
One of them is the IPI Free Media Pioneer Award. 
So that was the answer to all the Yemeni people. 
And I want to score a point here, because my husband is in the room over there. 
If you could please stand up, [unclear]. 
He has been very supportive of me. 
(Applause) PM: And we should point out that he works with you as well at the paper. 
But in assuming this responsibility and going about it as you have, you have become a bridge between an older and traditional society and the one that you are now creating at the paper. 
And so along with changing who worked there, you must have come up against another positioning that we always run into, in particular with women, and it has to do with outside image, dress, the veiled woman. 
So how have you dealt with this on a personal level as well as the women who worked for you? 
NA: As you know, the image of a lot of Yemeni women is a lot of black and covered, veiled women. 
And this is true. 
And a lot of it is because women are not able, are not free, to show their face to their self. 
It's a lot of traditional imposing coming by authority figures such as the men, the grandparents and so on. 
And it's economic empowerment and the ability for a woman to say, "" I am as much contributing to this family, or more, than you are. "" And the more empowered the women become, the more they are able to remove the veil, for example, or to drive their own car or to have a job or to be able to travel. 
So the other face of Yemen is actually one that lies behind the veil, and it's economic empowerment mostly that allows the woman to just uncover it. 
And I have done this throughout my work. 
I've tried to encourage young girls. 
We started with, you can take it off in the office. 
And then after that, you can take it off on assignments. 
Because I didn't believe a journalist can be a journalist with — how can you talk to people if you have your face covered? — and so on; it's just a movement. 
And I am a role model in Yemen. 
A lot of people look up to me. 
A lot of young girls look up to me. 
And I need to prove to them that, yes, you can still be married, you can still be a mother, and you can still be respected within the society, but at the same time, that doesn't mean you [should] just be one of the crowd. 
You can be yourself and have your face. 
PM: But by putting yourself personally out there — both projecting a different image of Yemeni women, but also what you have made possible for the women who work at the paper — has this put you in personal danger? 
NA: Well the Yemen Times, across 20 years, has been through so much. 
We've suffered prosecution; the paper was closed down more than three times. 
It's an independent newspaper, but tell that to the people in charge. 
They think that if there's anything against them, then we are being an opposition newspaper. 
And very, very difficult times. 
Some of my reporters were arrested. 
We had some court cases. 
My father was assassinated. 
Today, we are in a much better situation. 
We've created the credibility. 
And in times of revolution or change like today, it is very important for independent media to have a voice. 
It's very important for you to go to YemenTimes.com, and it's very important to listen to our voice. 
And this is probably something I'm going to share with you in Western media probably — and how there's a lot of stereotypes — thinking of Yemen in one single frame: this is what Yemen is all about. 
And that's not fair. 
It's not fair for me; it's not fair for my country. 
A lot of reporters come to Yemen and they want to write a story on Al-Qaeda or terrorism. 
And I just wanted to share with you: there's one reporter that came. 
He wanted to do a documentary on what his editors wanted. 
And he ended up writing about a story that even surprised me — hip hop — that there are young Yemeni men who express themselves through dancing and puchu puchu. 
(Laughter) That thing. (PM: Rap. Break dancing.) Yeah, break dancing. 
I'm not so old. 
I'm just not in touch. 
(Laughter) (Applause) PM: Yes, you are. 
Actually, that's a documentary that's available online; the video's online. 
NA: ShaketheDust.org. 
PM: "" Shake the Dust. "" (NA: "" Shake the Dust. "") PM: ShaketheDust.org. 
And it definitely does give a different image of Yemen. 
You spoke about the responsibility of the press. 
And certainly, when we look at the ways in which we have separated ourselves from others and we've created fear and danger, often from lack of knowledge, lack of real understanding, how do you see the way that the Western press in particular is covering this and all other stories out of the region, but in particular, in your country? 
NA: Well there is a saying that says, "" You fear what you don't know, and you hate what you fear. "" So it's about the lack of research, basically. 
It's almost, "" Do your homework, "" — some involvement. 
And you cannot do parachute reporting — just jump into a country for two days and think that you've done your homework and a story. 
So I wish that the world would know my Yemen, my country, my people. 
I am an example, and there are others like me. 
We may not be that many, but if we are promoted as a good, positive example, there will be others — men and women — who can eventually bridge the gap — again, coming to the bridge — between Yemen and the world and telling first about recognition and then about communication and compassion. 
I think Yemen is going to be in a very bad situation in the next two or three years. 
It's natural. 
But after the two years, which is a price we are willing to pay, we are going to stand up again on our feet, but in the new Yemen with a younger and more empowered people — democratic. 
(Applause) PM: Nadia, I think you've just given us a very different view of Yemen. 
And certainly you yourself and what you do have given us a view of the future that we will embrace and be grateful for. 
And the very best of luck to you. 
YemenTimes.com. 
NA: On Twitter also. 
PM: So you are plugged in. 
(Applause) 

Raise your hand if you've ever been asked the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" 
Now if you had to guess, how old would you say you were when you were first asked this question? 
You can just hold up fingers. 
Three. Five. Three. Five. Five. OK. 
Now, raise your hand if the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" 
has ever caused you any anxiety. 
(Laughter) Any anxiety at all. 
I'm someone who's never been able to answer the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" 
See, the problem wasn't that I didn't have any interests — it's that I had too many. 
In high school, I liked English and math and art and I built websites and I played guitar in a punk band called Frustrated Telephone Operator. 
Maybe you've heard of us. 
(Laughter) This continued after high school, and at a certain point, I began to notice this pattern in myself where I would become interested in an area and I would dive in, become all-consumed, and I'd get to be pretty good at whatever it was, and then I would hit this point where I'd start to get bored. 
And usually I would try and persist anyway, because I had already devoted so much time and energy and sometimes money into this field. 
But eventually this sense of boredom, this feeling of, like, yeah, I got this, this isn't challenging anymore — it would get to be too much. 
And I would have to let it go. 
But then I would become interested in something else, something totally unrelated, and I would dive into that, and become all-consumed, and I'd be like, "" Yes! I found my thing, "" and then I would hit this point again where I'd start to get bored. 
And eventually, I would let it go. 
But then I would discover something new and totally different, and I would dive into that. 
This pattern caused me a lot of anxiety, for two reasons. 
The first was that I wasn't sure how I was going to turn any of this into a career. 
I thought that I would eventually have to pick one thing, deny all of my other passions, and just resign myself to being bored. 
The other reason it caused me so much anxiety was a little bit more personal. 
I worried that there was something wrong with this, and something wrong with me for being unable to stick with anything. 
I worried that I was afraid of commitment, or that I was scattered, or that I was self-sabotaging, afraid of my own success. 
If you can relate to my story and to these feelings, I'd like you to ask yourself a question that I wish I had asked myself back then. 
Ask yourself where you learned to assign the meaning of wrong or abnormal to doing many things. 
I'll tell you where you learned it: you learned it from the culture. 
We are first asked the question "" What do you want to be when you grow up? "" when we're about five years old. 
And the truth is that no one really cares what you say when you're that age. 
(Laughter) It's considered an innocuous question, posed to little kids to elicit cute replies, like, "" I want to be an astronaut, "" or "" I want to be a ballerina, "" or "" I want to be a pirate. "" Insert Halloween costume here. (Laughter) 
But this question gets asked of us again and again as we get older in various forms — for instance, high school students might get asked what major they're going to pick in college. 
And at some point, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" 
goes from being the cute exercise it once was to the thing that keeps us up at night. 
Why? 
See, while this question inspires kids to dream about what they could be, it does not inspire them to dream about all that they could be. 
In fact, it does just the opposite, because when someone asks you what you want to be, you can't reply with 20 different things, though well-meaning adults will likely chuckle and be like, "" Oh, how cute, but you can't be a violin maker and a psychologist. 
You have to choose. "" This is Dr. Bob Childs — (Laughter) and he's a luthier and psychotherapist. 
And this is Amy Ng, a magazine editor turned illustrator, entrepreneur, teacher and creative director. 
But most kids don't hear about people like this. 
All they hear is that they're going to have to choose. 
But it's more than that. 
The notion of the narrowly focused life is highly romanticized in our culture. 
It's this idea of destiny or the one true calling, the idea that we each have one great thing we are meant to do during our time on this earth, and you need to figure out what that thing is and devote your life to it. 
But what if you're someone who isn't wired this way? 
What if there are a lot of different subjects that you're curious about, and many different things you want to do? 
Well, there is no room for someone like you in this framework. 
And so you might feel alone. 
You might feel like you don't have a purpose. 
And you might feel like there's something wrong with you. 
There's nothing wrong with you. 
What you are is a multipotentialite. 
(Laughter) (Applause) A multipotentialite is someone with many interests and creative pursuits. 
It's a mouthful to say. 
It might help if you break it up into three parts: multi, potential, and ite. 
You can also use one of the other terms that connote the same idea, such as polymath, the Renaissance person. 
Actually, during the Renaissance period, it was considered the ideal to be well-versed in multiple disciplines. 
Barbara Sher refers to us as "" scanners. "" Use whichever term you like, or invent your own. 
I have to say I find it sort of fitting that as a community, we cannot agree on a single identity. 
(Laughter) It's easy to see your multipotentiality as a limitation or an affliction that you need to overcome. 
But what I've learned through speaking with people and writing about these ideas on my website, is that there are some tremendous strengths to being this way. 
Here are three multipotentialite super powers. 
One: idea synthesis. 
That is, combining two or more fields and creating something new at the intersection. 
Sha Hwang and Rachel Binx drew from their shared interests in cartography, data visualization, travel, mathematics and design, when they founded Meshu. 
Meshu is a company that creates custom geographically-inspired jewelry. 
Sha and Rachel came up with this unique idea not despite, but because of their eclectic mix of skills and experiences. 
Innovation happens at the intersections. 
That's where the new ideas come from. 
And multipotentialites, with all of their backgrounds, are able to access a lot of these points of intersection. 
The second multipotentialite superpower is rapid learning. 
When multipotentialites become interested in something, we go hard. 
We observe everything we can get our hands on. 
We're also used to being beginners, because we've been beginners so many times in the past, and this means that we're less afraid of trying new things and stepping out of our comfort zones. 
What's more, many skills are transferable across disciplines, and we bring everything we've learned to every new area we pursue, so we're rarely starting from scratch. 
Nora Dunn is a full-time traveler and freelance writer. 
As a child concert pianist, she honed an incredible ability to develop muscle memory. 
Now, she's the fastest typist she knows. 
(Laughter) Before becoming a writer, Nora was a financial planner. 
She had to learn the finer mechanics of sales when she was starting her practice, and this skill now helps her write compelling pitches to editors. 
It is rarely a waste of time to pursue something you're drawn to, even if you end up quitting. 
You might apply that knowledge in a different field entirely, in a way that you couldn't have anticipated. 
The third multipotentialite superpower is adaptability; that is, the ability to morph into whatever you need to be in a given situation. 
Abe Cajudo is sometimes a video director, sometimes a web designer, sometimes a Kickstarter consultant, sometimes a teacher, and sometimes, apparently, James Bond. 
(Laughter) He's valuable because he does good work. 
He's even more valuable because he can take on various roles, depending on his clients' needs. 
Fast Company magazine identified adaptability as the single most important skill to develop in order to thrive in the 21st century. 
The economic world is changing so quickly and unpredictably that it is the individuals and organizations that can pivot in order to meet the needs of the market that are really going to thrive. 
Idea synthesis, rapid learning and adaptability: three skills that multipotentialites are very adept at, and three skills that they might lose if pressured to narrow their focus. 
As a society, we have a vested interest in encouraging multipotentialites to be themselves. 
We have a lot of complex, multidimensional problems in the world right now, and we need creative, out-of-the-box thinkers to tackle them. 
Now, let's say that you are, in your heart, a specialist. 
You came out of the womb knowing you wanted to be a pediatric neurosurgeon. 
Don't worry — there's nothing wrong with you, either. 
(Laughter) In fact, some of the best teams are comprised of a specialist and multipotentialite paired together. 
The specialist can dive in deep and implement ideas, while the multipotentialite brings a breadth of knowledge to the project. 
It's a beautiful partnership. 
But we should all be designing lives and careers that are aligned with how we're wired. 
And sadly, multipotentialites are largely being encouraged simply to be more like their specialist peers. 
So with that said, if there is one thing you take away from this talk, I hope that it is this: embrace your inner wiring, whatever that may be. 
If you're a specialist at heart, then by all means, specialize. 
That is where you'll do your best work. 
But to the multipotentialites in the room, including those of you who may have just realized in the last 12 minutes that you are one — (Laughter) to you I say: embrace your many passions. 
Follow your curiosity down those rabbit holes. 
Explore your intersections. 
Embracing our inner wiring leads to a happier, more authentic life. 
And perhaps more importantly — multipotentialites, the world needs us. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

B.J. was one of many fellow inmates who had big plans for the future. 
He had a vision. When he got out, he was going to leave the dope game for good and fly straight, and he was actually working on merging his two passions into one vision. 
He'd spent 10,000 dollars to buy a website that exclusively featured women having sex on top of or inside of luxury sports cars. (Laughter) It was my first week in federal prison, and I was learning quickly that it wasn't what you see on TV. 
In fact, it was teeming with smart, ambitious men whose business instincts were in many cases as sharp as those of the CEOs who had wined and dined me six months earlier when I was a rising star in the Missouri Senate. 
Now, 95 percent of the guys that I was locked up with had been drug dealers on the outside, but when they talked about what they did, they talked about it in a different jargon, but the business concepts that they talked about weren't unlike those that you'd learn in a first year MBA class at Wharton: promotional incentives, you never charge a first-time user, focus-grouping new product launches, territorial expansion. 
But they didn't spend a lot of time reliving the glory days. 
For the most part, everyone was just trying to survive. 
It's a lot harder than you might think. 
Contrary to what most people think, people don't pay, taxpayers don't pay, for your life when you're in prison. You've got to pay for your own life. 
You've got to pay for your soap, your deodorant, toothbrush, toothpaste, all of it. 
And it's hard for a couple of reasons. 
First, everything's marked up 30 to 50 percent from what you'd pay on the street, and second, you don't make a lot of money. 
I unloaded trucks. That was my full-time job, unloading trucks at a food warehouse, for $5.25, not an hour, but per month. 
So how do you survive? 
Well, you learn to hustle, all kinds of hustles. 
There's legal hustles. 
You pay everything in stamps. Those are the currency. 
You charge another inmate to clean his cell. 
There's sort of illegal hustles, like you run a barbershop out of your cell. 
There's pretty illegal hustles: You run a tattoo parlor out of your own cell. 
And there's very illegal hustles, which you smuggle in, you get smuggled in, drugs, pornography, cell phones, and just as in the outer world, there's a risk-reward tradeoff, so the riskier the enterprise, the more profitable it can potentially be. 
You want a cigarette in prison? Three to five dollars. 
You want an old-fashioned cell phone that you flip open and is about as big as your head? Three hundred bucks. 
You want a dirty magazine? 
Well, it can be as much as 1,000 dollars. 
So as you can probably tell, one of the defining aspects of prison life is ingenuity. 
Whether it was concocting delicious meals from stolen scraps from the warehouse, sculpting people's hair with toenail clippers, or constructing weights from boulders in laundry bags tied on to tree limbs, prisoners learn how to make do with less, and many of them want to take this ingenuity that they've learned to the outside and start restaurants, barber shops, personal training businesses. 
But there's no training, nothing to prepare them for that, no rehabilitation at all in prison, no one to help them write a business plan, figure out a way to translate the business concepts they intuitively grasp into legal enterprises, no access to the Internet, even. 
And then, when they come out, most states don't even have a law prohibiting employers from discriminating against people with a background. 
So none of us should be surprised that two out of three ex-offenders re-offend within five years. 
Look, I lied to the Feds. I lost a year of my life from it. 
But when I came out, I vowed that I was going to do whatever I could to make sure that guys like the ones I was locked up with didn't have to waste any more of their life than they already had. 
So I hope that you'll think about helping in some way. 
The best thing we can do is figure out ways to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit and the tremendous untapped potential in our prisons, because if we don't, they're not going to learn any new skills that's going to help them, and they'll be right back. 
All they'll learn on the inside is new hustles. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

I have had the distinct pleasure of living inside two biospheres. 
Of course we all here in this room live in Biosphere 1. 
I've also lived in Biosphere 2. 
And the wonderful thing about that is that I get to compare biospheres. 
And hopefully from that I get to learn something. 
So what did I learn? Well, here I am inside Biosphere 2, making a pizza. 
So I am harvesting the wheat, in order to make the dough. 
And then of course I have to milk the goats and feed the goats in order to make the cheese. 
It took me four months in Biosphere 2 to make a pizza. 
Here in Biosphere 1, well it takes me about two minutes, because I pick up the phone and I call and say, "Hey, can you deliver the pizza?" 
So Biosphere 2 was essentially a three-acre, entirely sealed, miniature world that I lived in for two years and 20 minutes. 
(Laughter) Over the top it was sealed with steel and glass, underneath it was sealed with a pan of steel — essentially entirely sealed. 
So we had our own miniature rainforest, a private beach with a coral reef. 
We had a savanna, a marsh, a desert. 
We had our own half-acre farm that we had to grow everything. 
And of course we had our human habitat, where we lived. 
Back in the mid- '80s when we were designing Biosphere 2, we had to ask ourselves some pretty basic questions. 
I mean, what is a biosphere? 
Back then, yes, I guess we all know now that it is essentially the sphere of life around the Earth, right? 
Well, you have to get a little more specific than that if you're going to build one. 
And so we decided that what it really is is that it is entirely materially closed — that is, nothing goes in or out at all, no material — and energetically open, which is essentially what planet Earth is. 
This is a chamber that was 1 / 400th the size of Biosphere 2 that we called our Test Module. 
And the very first day that this fellow, John Allen, walked in, to spend a couple of days in there with all the plants and animals and bacteria that we'd put in there to hopefully keep him alive, the doctors were incredibly concerned that he was going to succumb to some dreadful toxin, or that his lungs were going to get choked with bacteria or something, fungus. 
But of course none of that happened. 
And over the ensuing few years, there were great sagas about designing Biosphere 2. 
But by 1991 we finally had this thing built. 
And it was time for us to go in and give it a go. 
We needed to know, is life this malleable? 
Can you take this biosphere, that has evolved on a planetary scale, and jam it into a little bottle, and will it survive? 
Big questions. 
And we wanted to know this both for being able to go somewhere else in the universe — if we were going to go to Mars, for instance, would we take a biosphere with us, to live in it? 
We also wanted to know so we can understand more about the Earth that we all live in. 
Well, in 1991 it was finally time for us to go in and try out this baby. 
Let's take it on a maiden voyage. 
Will it work? Or will something happen that we can't understand and we can't fix, thereby negating the concept of man-made biospheres? 
So eight of us went in: four men and four women. 
More on that later. 
(Laughter) And this is the world that we lived in. 
So, on the top, we had these beautiful rainforests and an ocean, and underneath we had all this technosphere, we called it, which is where all the pumps and the valves and the water tanks and the air handlers, and all of that. 
One of the Biospherians called it "" garden of Eden on top of an aircraft carrier. "" And then also we had the human habitat of course, with the laboratories, and all of that. 
This is the agriculture. 
It was essentially an organic farm. 
The day I walked into Biosphere 2, I was, for the first time, breathing a completely different atmosphere than everybody else in the world, except seven other people. 
At that moment I became part of that biosphere. 
And I don't mean that in an abstract sense; I mean it rather literally. 
When I breathed out, my CO2 fed the sweet potatoes that I was growing. 
And we ate an awful lot of the sweet potatoes. 
(Laughter) And those sweet potatoes became part of me. 
In fact, we ate so many sweet potatoes I became orange with sweet potato. 
I literally was eating the same carbon over and over again. 
I was eating myself in some strange sort of bizarre way. 
When it came to our atmosphere, however, it wasn't that much of a joke over the long term, because it turned out that we were losing oxygen, quite a lot of oxygen. 
And we knew that we were losing CO2. 
And so we were working to sequester carbon. 
Good lord — we know that term now. 
We were growing plants like crazy. 
We were taking their biomass, storing them in the basement, growing plants, going around, around, around, trying to take all of that carbon out of the atmosphere. 
We were trying to stop carbon from going into the atmosphere. 
We stopped irrigating our soil, as much as we could. 
We stopped tilling, so that we could prevent greenhouse gasses from going into the air. 
But our oxygen was going down faster than our CO2 was going up, which was quite unexpected, because we had seen them going in tandem in the test module. 
And it was like playing atomic hide-and-seek. 
We had lost seven tons of oxygen. 
And we had no clue where it was. 
And I tell you, when you lose a lot of oxygen — and our oxygen went down quite far; it went from 21 percent down to 14.2 percent — my goodness, do you feel dreadful. 
I mean we were dragging ourselves around the Biosphere. 
And we had sleep apnea at night. 
So you'd wake up gasping with breath, because your blood chemistry has changed. 
And that you literally do that. You stop breathing and then you — (Gasps) — take a breath and it wakes you up. And it's very irritating. 
And everybody outside thought we were dying. 
I mean, the media was making it sound like were were dying. 
And I had to call up my mother every other day saying, "" No, Mum, it's fine, fine. 
We're not dead. We're fine. We're fine. "" And the doctor was, in fact, checking us to make sure we were, in fact, fine. 
But in fact he was the person who was most susceptible to the oxygen. 
And one day he couldn't add up a line of figures. 
And it was time for us to put oxygen in. 
And you might think, well, "" Boy, your life support system was failing you. Wasn't that dreadful? "" Yes. In a sense it was terrifying. 
Except that I knew I could walk out the airlock door at any time, if it really got bad, though who was going to say, "" I can't take it anymore! ""? 
Not me, that was for sure. 
But on the other hand, it was the scientific gold of the project, because we could really crank this baby up, as a scientific tool, and see if we could, in fact, find where those seven tons of oxygen had gone. 
And we did indeed find it. 
And we found it in the concrete. 
Essentially it had done something very simple. 
We had put too much carbon in the soil in the form of compost. 
It broke down; it took oxygen out of the air; it put CO2 into the air; and it went into the concrete. 
Pretty straightforward really. 
So at the end of the two years when we came out, we were elated, because, in fact, although you might say we had discovered something that was quite "" uhh, "" when your oxygen is going down, stopped working, essentially, in your life support system, that's a very bad failure. 
Except that we knew what it was. And we knew how to fix it. 
And nothing else emerged that really was as serious as that. 
And we proved the concept, more or less. 
People, on the other hand, was a different subject. 
We were — yeah I don't know that we were fixable. 
We all went quite nuts, I will say. 
And the day I came out of Biosphere 2, I was thrilled I was going to see all my family and my friends. 
For two years I'd been seeing people through the glass. 
And everybody ran up to me. 
And I recoiled. They stank! 
People stink! 
We stink of hairspray and underarm deodorant, and all kinds of stuff. 
Now we had stuff inside Biosphere to keep ourselves clean, but nothing with perfume. 
And boy do we stink out here. 
Not only that, but I lost touch of where my food came from. 
I had been growing all my own food. 
I had no idea what was in my food, where it came from. 
I didn't even recognize half the names in most of the food that I was eating. 
In fact, I would stand for hours in the aisles of shops, reading all the names on all of the things. 
People must have thought I was nuts. 
It was really quite astonishing. 
And I slowly lost track of where I was in this big biosphere, in this big biosphere that we all live in. 
In Biosphere 2 I totally understood that I had a huge impact on my biosphere, everyday, and it had an impact on me, very viscerally, very literally. 
So I went about my business: Paragon Space Development Corporation, a little firm I started with people while I was in the Biosphere, because I had nothing else to do. 
And one of the things we did was try to figure out: how small can you make these biospheres, and what can you do with them? 
And so we sent one onto the Mir Space Station. 
We had one on the shuttle and one on the International Space Station, for 16 months, where we managed to produce the first organisms to go through complete multiple life cycles in space — really pushing the envelope of understanding how malleable our life systems are. 
And I'm also proud to announce that you're getting a sneak preview — on Friday we're going to announce that we're actually forming a team to develop a system to grow plants on the Moon, which is going to be pretty fun. 
And the legacy of that is a system that we were designing: an entirely sealed system to grow plants to grow on Mars. 
And part of that is that we had to model very rapid circulation of CO2 and oxygen and water through this plant system. 
As a result of that modeling I ended up in all places, in Eritrea, in the Horn of Africa. 
Eritrea, formerly part of Ethiopia, is one of those places that is astonishingly beautiful, incredibly stark, and I have no understanding of how people eke out a living there. 
It is so dry. 
This is what I saw. 
But this is also what I saw. 
I saw a company that had taken seawater and sand, and they were growing a kind of crop that will grow on pure salt water without having to treat it. 
And it will produce a food crop. 
In this case it was oilseed. 
It was astonishing. They were also producing mangroves in a plantation. 
And the mangroves were providing wood and honey and leaves for the animals, so that they could produce milk and whatnot, like we had in the Biosphere. 
And all of it was coming from this: shrimp farms. 
Shrimp farms are a scourge on the earth, frankly, from an environmental point of view. 
They pour huge amounts of pollutants into the ocean. 
They also pollute their next-door neighbors. 
So they're all shitting each other's ponds, quite literally. 
And what this project was doing was taking the effluent of these, and turning them into all of this food. 
They were literally turning pollution into abundance for a desert people. 
They had created an industrial ecosystem, of a sense. 
I was there because I was actually modeling the mangrove portion for a carbon credit program, under the U.N. 
Kyoto Protocol system. 
And as I was modeling this mangrove swamp, I was thinking to myself, "" How do you put a box around this? "" When I'm modeling a plant in a box, literally, I know where to draw the boundary. 
In a mangrove forest like this I have no idea. 
Well, of course you have to draw the boundary around the whole of the Earth. 
And understand its interactions with the entire Earth. 
And put your project in that context. 
Around the world today we're seeing an incredible transformation, from what I would call a biocidal species, one that — whether we intentionally or unintentionally — have designed our systems to kill life, a lot of the time. 
This is in fact, this beautiful photograph, is in fact over the Amazon. 
And here the light green are areas of massive deforestation. 
And those beautiful wispy clouds are, in fact, fires, human-made fires. 
We're in the process of transforming from this, to what I would call a biophilic society, one where we learn to nurture society. 
Now it may not seem like it, but we are. 
It is happening all across the world, in every kind of walk of life, and every kind of career and industry that you can think of. 
And I think often times people get lost in that. 
They go, "" But how can I possibly find my way in that? 
It's such a huge subject. "" And I would say that the small stuff counts. It really does. 
This is the story of a rake in my backyard. 
This was my backyard, very early on, when I bought my property. 
And in Arizona, of course, everybody puts gravel down. 
And they like to keep everything beautifully raked. And they keep all the leaves away. 
And on Sunday morning the neighbors leaf blower comes out, and I want to throttle them. 
It's a certain type of aesthetic. 
We're very uncomfortable with untidiness. 
And I threw away my rake. 
And I let all of the leaves fall from the trees that I have on my property. 
And over time, essentially what have I been doing? 
I've been building topsoil. 
And so now all the birds come in. And I have hawks. 
And I have an oasis. 
This is what happens every spring. For six weeks, six to eight weeks, I have this flush of green oasis. 
This is actually in a riparian area. 
And all of Tucson could be like this if everybody would just revolt and throw away the rake. 
The small stuff counts. 
The Industrial Revolution — and Prometheus — has given us this, the ability to light up the world. 
It has also given us this, the ability to look at the world from the outside. 
Now we may not all have another biosphere that we can run to, and compare it to this biosphere. 
But we can look at the world, and try to understand where we are in its context, and how we choose to interact with it. 
And if you lose where you are in your biosphere, or are perhaps having a difficulty connecting with where you are in the biosphere, I would say to you, take a deep breath. 
The yogis had it right. 
Breath does, in fact, connect us all in a very literal way. 
Take a breath now. 
And as you breathe, think about what is in your breath. 
There perhaps is the CO2 from the person sitting next-door to you. 
Maybe there is a little bit of oxygen from some algae on the beach not far from here. 
It also connects us in time. 
There may be some carbon in your breath from the dinosaurs. 
There could also be carbon that you are exhaling now that will be in the breath of your great-great-great-grandchildren. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

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

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

He was interested in productivity — I think it's something that concerns all of us — but it's easy to measure in chickens because you just count the eggs. 
(Laughter) He wanted to know what could make his chickens more productive, so he devised a beautiful experiment. 
Chickens live in groups, so first of all, he selected just an average flock, and he let it alone for six generations. 
But then he created a second group of the individually most productive chickens — you could call them superchickens — and he put them together in a superflock, and each generation, he selected only the most productive for breeding. 
After six generations had passed, what did he find? 
Well, the first group, the average group, was doing just fine. 
What about the second group? 
(Laughter) The individually productive chickens had only achieved their success by suppressing the productivity of the rest. 
Now, as I've gone around the world talking about this and telling this story in all sorts of organizations and companies, people have seen the relevance almost instantly, and they come up and they say things to me like, "That superflock, that's my company." 
(Laughter) Or, "" That's my country. "" Or, "" That's my life. "" All my life I've been told that the way we have to get ahead is to compete: get into the right school, get into the right job, get to the top, and I've really never found it very inspiring. 
I've started and run businesses because invention is a joy, and because working alongside brilliant, creative people is its own reward. 
And I've never really felt very motivated by pecking orders or by superchickens or by superstars. 
But for the past 50 years, we've run most organizations and some societies along the superchicken model. 
We've thought that success is achieved by picking the superstars, the brightest men, or occasionally women, in the room, and giving them all the resources and all the power. 
And the result has been just the same as in William Muir's experiment: aggression, dysfunction and waste. 
If the only way the most productive can be successful is by suppressing the productivity of the rest, then we badly need to find a better way to work and a richer way to live. 
(Applause) So what is it that makes some groups obviously more successful and more productive than others? 
Well, that's the question a team at MIT took to research. 
They brought in hundreds of volunteers, they put them into groups, and they gave them very hard problems to solve. 
And what happened was exactly what you'd expect, that some groups were very much more successful than others, but what was really interesting was that the high-achieving groups were not those where they had one or two people with spectacularly high I.Q. 
Nor were the most successful groups the ones that had the highest aggregate I.Q. 
Instead, they had three characteristics, the really successful teams. 
First of all, they showed high degrees of social sensitivity to each other. 
This is measured by something called the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test. 
It's broadly considered a test for empathy, and the groups that scored highly on this did better. 
Secondly, the successful groups gave roughly equal time to each other, so that no one voice dominated, but neither were there any passengers. 
And thirdly, the more successful groups had more women in them. 
(Applause) Now, was this because women typically score more highly on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, so you're getting a doubling down on the empathy quotient? 
Or was it because they brought a more diverse perspective? 
We don't really know, but the striking thing about this experiment is that it showed what we know, which is some groups do better than others, but what's key to that is their social connectedness to each other. 
So how does this play out in the real world? 
Well, it means that what happens between people really counts, because in groups that are highly attuned and sensitive to each other, ideas can flow and grow. 
People don't get stuck. They don't waste energy down dead ends. 
An example: Arup is one of the world's most successful engineering firms, and it was commissioned to build the equestrian center for the Beijing Olympics. 
Now, this building had to receive two and a half thousand really highly strung thoroughbred horses that were coming off long-haul flights, highly jet-lagged, not feeling their finest. 
And the problem the engineer confronted was, what quantity of waste to cater for? 
Now, you don't get taught this in engineering school — (Laughter) — and it's not really the kind of thing you want to get wrong, so he could have spent months talking to vets, doing the research, tweaking the spreadsheet. 
Instead, he asked for help and he found someone who had designed the Jockey Club in New York. 
The problem was solved in less than a day. 
Arup believes that the culture of helpfulness is central to their success. 
Now, helpfulness sounds really anemic, but it's absolutely core to successful teams, and it routinely outperforms individual intelligence. 
Helpfulness means I don't have to know everything, I just have to work among people who are good at getting and giving help. 
At SAP, they reckon that you can answer any question in 17 minutes. 
But there isn't a single high-tech company I've worked with that imagines for a moment that this is a technology issue, because what drives helpfulness is people getting to know each other. 
Now that sounds so obvious, and we think it'll just happen normally, but it doesn't. 
When I was running my first software company, I realized that we were getting stuck. 
There was a lot of friction, but not much else, and I gradually realized the brilliant, creative people that I'd hired didn't know each other. 
They were so focused on their own individual work, they didn't even know who they were sitting next to, and it was only when I insisted that we stop working and invest time in getting to know each other that we achieved real momentum. 
Now, that was 20 years ago, and now I visit companies that have banned coffee cups at desks because they want people to hang out around the coffee machines and talk to each other. 
The Swedes even have a special term for this. 
They call it fika, which means more than a coffee break. 
It means collective restoration. 
At Idexx, a company up in Maine, they've created vegetable gardens on campus so that people from different parts of the business can work together and get to know the whole business that way. 
Have they all gone mad? 
Quite the opposite — they've figured out that when the going gets tough, and it always will get tough if you're doing breakthrough work that really matters, what people need is social support, and they need to know who to ask for help. 
Companies don't have ideas; only people do. 
And what motivates people are the bonds and loyalty and trust they develop between each other. 
What matters is the mortar, not just the bricks. 
Now, when you put all of this together, what you get is something called social capital. 
Social capital is the reliance and interdependency that builds trust. 
The term comes from sociologists who were studying communities that proved particularly resilient in times of stress. 
Social capital is what gives companies momentum, and social capital is what makes companies robust. 
It means that time is everything, because social capital compounds with time. 
So teams that work together longer get better, because it takes time to develop the trust you need for real candor and openness. 
And time is what builds value. 
When Alex Pentland suggested to one company that they synchronize coffee breaks so that people would have time to talk to each other, profits went up 15 million dollars, and employee satisfaction went up 10 percent. 
Not a bad return on social capital, which compounds even as you spend it. 
Now, this isn't about chumminess, and it's no charter for slackers, because people who work this way tend to be kind of scratchy, impatient, absolutely determined to think for themselves because that's what their contribution is. 
Conflict is frequent because candor is safe. 
And that's how good ideas turn into great ideas, because no idea is born fully formed. 
It emerges a little bit as a child is born, kind of messy and confused, but full of possibilities. 
And it's only through the generous contribution, faith and challenge that they achieve their potential. 
And that's what social capital supports. 
Now, we aren't really used to talking about this, about talent, about creativity, in this way. 
We're used to talking about stars. 
So I started to wonder, well, if we start working this way, does that mean no more stars? 
So I went and I sat in on the auditions at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. 
And what I saw there really surprised me, because the teachers weren't looking for individual pyrotechnics. 
They were looking for what happened between the students, because that's where the drama is. 
And when I talked to producers of hit albums, they said, "" Oh sure, we have lots of superstars in music. 
It's just, they don't last very long. 
It's the outstanding collaborators who enjoy the long careers, because bringing out the best in others is how they found the best in themselves. "" And when I went to visit companies that are renowned for their ingenuity and creativity, I couldn't even see any superstars, because everybody there really mattered. 
And when I reflected on my own career, and the extraordinary people I've had the privilege to work with, I realized how much more we could give each other if we just stopped trying to be superchickens. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Once you appreciate truly how social work is, a lot of things have to change. 
Management by talent contest has routinely pitted employees against each other. 
Now, rivalry has to be replaced by social capital. 
For decades, we've tried to motivate people with money, even though we've got a vast amount of research that shows that money erodes social connectedness. 
Now, we need to let people motivate each other. 
And for years, we've thought that leaders were heroic soloists who were expected, all by themselves, to solve complex problems. 
Now, we need to redefine leadership as an activity in which conditions are created in which everyone can do their most courageous thinking together. 
When the Montreal Protocol called for the phasing out of CFCs, the chlorofluorocarbons implicated in the hole in the ozone layer, the risks were immense. 
CFCs were everywhere, and nobody knew if a substitute could be found. 
But one team that rose to the challenge adopted three key principles. 
The first was the head of engineering, Frank Maslen, said, there will be no stars in this team. 
We need everybody. 
Everybody has a valid perspective. 
Second, we work to one standard only: the best imaginable. 
And third, he told his boss, Geoff Tudhope, that he had to butt out, because he knew how disruptive power can be. 
Now, this didn't mean Tudhope did nothing. 
He gave the team air cover, and he listened to ensure that they honored their principles. 
And it worked: Ahead of all the other companies tackling this hard problem, this group cracked it first. 
And to date, the Montreal Protocol is the most successful international environmental agreement ever implemented. 
There was a lot at stake then, and there's a lot at stake now, and we won't solve our problems if we expect it to be solved by a few supermen or superwomen. 
Now we need everybody, because it is only when we accept that everybody has value that we will liberate the energy and imagination and momentum we need to create the best beyond measure. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Last January, my company, Fark.com, was sued along with Yahoo, MSN, Reddit, AOL, TechCrunch and others by a company called Gooseberry Natural Resources. 
Gooseberry owned a patent for the creation and distribution of news releases via email. 
(Laughter) Now it may seem kind of strange that such a thing can actually be patented, but it does happen all the time. 
Take something already being done and patent it for an emerging technology — like phone calls on the internet or video listings for TV shows or radio but for cellphones, and so on. 
The problem with these patents is that the mechanisms are obscure and the patent system is dysfunctional, and as a result, most of these lawsuits end in settlements. 
And because these settlements are under a non-disclosure agreement, no one knows what the terms were. 
And as a result, the patent troll can claim that they won the case. 
In the case of Gooseberry Natural Resources, this patent on emailing news releases had sort of a fatal flaw as it pertained to myself, and that was that in the mainstream media world there is only one definition for news release, and it turns out that is press release — as in P.R. 
Now my company, Fark, deals with news, ostensibly, and as a result we were not in violation of this patent. 
So case closed, right? 
Wrong. 
One of the major problems with patent law is that, in the case that when you are sued by a patent troll, the burden of proof that you did not infringe on the patent is actually on the defendant, which means you have to prove that you do not infringe on the patent they're suing you on. 
And this can take quite a while. 
You need to know that the average patent troll defense costs two million dollars and takes 18 months when you win. 
That is your best case outcome when you get sued by a patent troll. 
Now I had hoped to team up with some of these larger companies in order to defend against this lawsuit, but one-by-one they settled out of the case, even though — and this is important — none of these companies infringed on this patent — not a one of them. 
And they started settling out. 
The reason they settled out is because it's cheaper to settle than to fight the lawsuit — clearly, two million dollars cheaper in some cases, and much worse if you actually lose. 
It would also constitute a massive distraction for management of a company, especially a small eight-man shop like my company. 
Six months into the lawsuit, we finally reached the discovery phase. 
And in discovery phase, we asked the patent troll to please provide screenshots of Fark where the infringement of their patent was actually occurring. 
Now perhaps it's because no such screenshots actually existed, but suddenly Gooseberry wanted to settle. 
Their attorney: "Ah, yes. My company's having a reorganization on our end." 
Never mind the fact that the address led to a strip mall somewhere in Northern L.A. 
with no employees. 
"" And we'd like to go ahead and close this out. 
So would you mind giving us your best and final offer? "" My response: "How about nothing?!" 
(Applause) We didn't have high hopes for that outcome. 
(Laughter) But they settled. 
No counter offer. 
Now, as mentioned before, one of the reasons I can talk to you about this is because there's no non-disclosure agreement on this case. 
Now how did that happen? 
Well during the settlement process, when we received our copy, I struck it. 
My attorney said, "" Nah, no chance of that working. "" It came back signed. 
Now why? You can call them. 
They're not under NDA either. 
Now what did I learn from this case? Well, three things. 
First of all, if you can, don't fight the patent, fight the infringement. 
Patents are very difficult to overturn. 
Infringement is a lot easier to disprove. 
Secondly, make it clear from the beginning that either you have no money at all or that you would rather spend money with your attorney fighting the troll than actually giving them the money. 
Now the reason this works is because patent trolls are paid a percentage of what they're able to recover in settlements. 
If it becomes clear to them that they cannot recover any money, they become less interested in pursuing the case. 
Finally, make sure that you can tell them that you will make this process as annoying and as painful and as difficult as possible for them. 
Now this is a tactic that patent trolls are supposed to use on people to get their way. 
It turns out, because they're paid on contingency, it works really, really well in reverse. 
Don't forget that. 
So what does all this mean? 
Well to sum up, it boils down to one thing: Don't negotiate with terrorists. 
(Applause) Patent trolls have done more damage to the United States economy than any domestic or foreign terrorist organization in history every year. 
And what do they do with that money? 
They plow it right back into filing more troll lawsuits. 
Now this is the point in the Talk where I'm supposed to come up with some kind of a solution for the patent system. 
And the problem with that is that there are two very large industry groups that have different outcomes in mind for the patent system. 
The health care industry would like stronger protections for inventors. 
The hi-tech industry would like stronger protections for producers. 
And these goals aren't necessarily diametrically opposed, but they are at odds. 
And as a result, patent trolls can kind of live in the space in between. 
So unfortunately I'm not smart enough to have a solution for the patent troll problem. 
However, I did have this idea, and it was kind of good. 
And I thought, "" I should patent this. "" (Laughter) Behold, patent infringement via mobile device — defined as a computer which is not stationary. 
My solution: award me this patent and I will troll them out of existence. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

So last year, on the Fourth of July, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson. 
It was a historical day. 
There's no doubt that from now on, the Fourth of July will be remembered not as the day of the Declaration of Independence, but as the day of the discovery of the Higgs boson. 
Well, at least, here at CERN. 
But for me, the biggest surprise of that day was that there was no big surprise. 
In the eye of a theoretical physicist, the Higgs boson is a clever explanation of how some elementary particles gain mass, but it seems a fairly unsatisfactory and incomplete solution. 
Too many questions are left unanswered. 
The Higgs boson does not share the beauty, the symmetry, the elegance, of the rest of the elementary particle world. 
For this reason, the majority of theoretical physicists believe that the Higgs boson could not be the full story. 
We were expecting new particles and new phenomena accompanying the Higgs boson. 
Instead, so far, the measurements coming from the LHC show no signs of new particles or unexpected phenomena. 
Of course, the verdict is not definitive. 
In 2015, the LHC will almost double the energy of the colliding protons, and these more powerful collisions will allow us to explore further the particle world, and we will certainly learn much more. 
But for the moment, since we have found no evidence for new phenomena, let us suppose that the particles that we know today, including the Higgs boson, are the only elementary particles in nature, even at energies much larger than what we have explored so far. 
Let's see where this hypothesis is going to lead us. 
We will find a surprising and intriguing result about our universe, and to explain my point, let me first tell you what the Higgs is about, and to do so, we have to go back to one tenth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. 
And according to the Higgs theory, at that instant, a dramatic event took place in the universe. 
Space-time underwent a phase transition. 
It was something very similar to the phase transition that occurs when water turns into ice below zero degrees. 
But in our case, the phase transition is not a change in the way the molecules are arranged inside the material, but is about a change of the very fabric of space-time. 
During this phase transition, empty space became filled with a substance that we now call Higgs field. 
And this substance may seem invisible to us, but it has a physical reality. 
It surrounds us all the time, just like the air we breathe in this room. 
And some elementary particles interact with this substance, gaining energy in the process. 
And this intrinsic energy is what we call the mass of a particle, and by discovering the Higgs boson, the LHC has conclusively proved that this substance is real, because it is the stuff the Higgs bosons are made of. 
And this, in a nutshell, is the essence of the Higgs story. 
But this story is far more interesting than that. 
By studying the Higgs theory, theoretical physicists discovered, not through an experiment but with the power of mathematics, that the Higgs field does not necessarily exist only in the form that we observe today. 
Just like matter can exist as liquid or solid, so the Higgs field, the substance that fills all space-time, could exist in two states. 
Besides the known Higgs state, there could be a second state in which the Higgs field is billions and billions times denser than what we observe today, and the mere existence of another state of the Higgs field poses a potential problem. 
This is because, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, it is possible to have transitions between two states, even in the presence of an energy barrier separating the two states, and the phenomenon is called, quite appropriately, quantum tunneling. 
Because of quantum tunneling, I could disappear from this room and reappear in the next room, practically penetrating the wall. 
But don't expect me to actually perform the trick in front of your eyes, because the probability for me to penetrate the wall is ridiculously small. 
You would have to wait a really long time before it happens, but believe me, quantum tunneling is a real phenomenon, and it has been observed in many systems. 
For instance, the tunnel diode, a component used in electronics, works thanks to the wonders of quantum tunneling. 
But let's go back to the Higgs field. 
If the ultra-dense Higgs state existed, then, because of quantum tunneling, a bubble of this state could suddenly appear in a certain place of the universe at a certain time, and it is analogous to what happens when you boil water. 
Bubbles of vapor form inside the water, then they expand, turning liquid into gas. 
In the same way, a bubble of the ultra-dense Higgs state could come into existence because of quantum tunneling. 
The bubble would then expand at the speed of light, invading all space, and turning the Higgs field from the familiar state into a new state. 
Is this a problem? Yes, it's a big a problem. 
We may not realize it in ordinary life, but the intensity of the Higgs field is critical for the structure of matter. 
If the Higgs field were only a few times more intense, we would see atoms shrinking, neutrons decaying inside atomic nuclei, nuclei disintegrating, and hydrogen would be the only possible chemical element in the universe. 
And the Higgs field, in the ultra-dense Higgs state, is not just a few times more intense than today, but billions of times, and if space-time were filled by this Higgs state, all atomic matter would collapse. 
No molecular structures would be possible, no life. 
So, I wonder, is it possible that in the future, the Higgs field will undergo a phase transition and, through quantum tunneling, will be transformed into this nasty, ultra-dense state? 
In other words, I ask myself, what is the fate of the Higgs field in our universe? 
And the crucial ingredient necessary to answer this question is the Higgs boson mass. 
And experiments at the LHC found that the mass of the Higgs boson is about 126 GeV. 
This is tiny when expressed in familiar units, because it's equal to something like 10 to the minus 22 grams, but it is large in particle physics units, because it is equal to the weight of an entire molecule of a DNA constituent. 
So armed with this information from the LHC, together with some colleagues here at CERN, we computed the probability that our universe could quantum tunnel into the ultra-dense Higgs state, and we found a very intriguing result. 
Our calculations showed that the measured value of the Higgs boson mass is very special. 
It has just the right value to keep the universe hanging in an unstable situation. 
The Higgs field is in a wobbly configuration that has lasted so far but that will eventually collapse. 
So according to these calculations, we are like campers who accidentally set their tent at the edge of a cliff. 
And eventually, the Higgs field will undergo a phase transition and matter will collapse into itself. 
So is this how humanity is going to disappear? 
I don't think so. 
Our calculation shows that quantum tunneling of the Higgs field is not likely to occur in the next 10 to the 100 years, and this is a very long time. 
It's even longer than the time it takes for Italy to form a stable government. 
(Laughter) Even so, we will be long gone by then. 
In about five billion years, our sun will become a red giant, as large as the Earth's orbit, and our Earth will be kaput, and in a thousand billion years, if dark energy keeps on fueling space expansion at the present rate, you will not even be able to see as far as your toes, because everything around you expands at a rate faster than the speed of light. 
So it is really unlikely that we will be around to see the Higgs field collapse. 
But the reason why I am interested in the transition of the Higgs field is because I want to address the question, why is the Higgs boson mass so special? 
Why is it just right to keep the universe at the edge of a phase transition? 
Theoretical physicists always ask "" why "" questions. 
More than how a phenomenon works, theoretical physicists are always interested in why a phenomenon works in the way it works. 
We think that this these "" why "" questions can give us clues about the fundamental principles of nature. 
And indeed, a possible answer to my question opens up new universes, literally. 
It has been speculated that our universe is only a bubble in a soapy multiverse made out of a multitude of bubbles, and each bubble is a different universe with different fundamental constants and different physical laws. 
And in this context, you can only talk about the probability of finding a certain value of the Higgs mass. 
Then the key to the mystery could lie in the statistical properties of the multiverse. 
It would be something like what happens with sand dunes on a beach. 
In principle, you could imagine to find sand dunes of any slope angle in a beach, and yet, the slope angles of sand dunes are typically around 30, 35 degrees. 
And the reason is simple: because wind builds up the sand, gravity makes it fall. 
As a result, the vast majority of sand dunes have slope angles around the critical value, near to collapse. 
And something similar could happen for the Higgs boson mass in the multiverse. 
In the majority of bubble universes, the Higgs mass could be around the critical value, near to a cosmic collapse of the Higgs field, because of two competing effects, just as in the case of sand. 
My story does not have an end, because we still don't know the end of the story. 
This is science in progress, and to solve the mystery, we need more data, and hopefully, the LHC will soon add new clues to this story. 
Just one number, the Higgs boson mass, and yet, out of this number we learn so much. 
I started from a hypothesis, that the known particles are all there is in the universe, even beyond the domain explored so far. 
From this, we discovered that the Higgs field that permeates space-time may be standing on a knife edge, ready for cosmic collapse, and we discovered that this may be a hint that our universe is only a grain of sand in a giant beach, the multiverse. 
But I don't know if my hypothesis is right. 
That's how physics works: A single measurement can put us on the road to a new understanding of the universe or it can send us down a blind alley. 
But whichever it turns out to be, there is one thing I'm sure of: The journey will be full of surprises. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Similar problems are emerging in the East as well. 
And in 1921, the Montana Supreme Court ruled in a case involving Prickly Pear that the folks who were there first had the first, or "" senior water rights. "" These senior water rights are key. 
In some states, senior water rights holders can leave their water in the stream while legally protecting it from others, and maintaining their water right. 

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

Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. 
It's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people's minds. 
I'm talking about your language, of course, because it allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind, and they can attempt to do the same to you, without either of you having to perform surgery. 
Instead, when you speak, you're actually using a form of telemetry not so different from the remote control device for your television. 
It's just that, whereas that device relies on pulses of infrared light, your language relies on pulses, discrete pulses, of sound. 
And just as you use the remote control device to alter the internal settings of your television to suit your mood, you use your language to alter the settings inside someone else's brain to suit your interests. 
Languages are genes talking, getting things that they want. 
And just imagine the sense of wonder in a baby when it first discovers that, merely by uttering a sound, it can get objects to move across a room as if by magic, and maybe even into its mouth. 
Now language's subversive power has been recognized throughout the ages in censorship, in books you can't read, phrases you can't use and words you can't say. 
In fact, the Tower of Babel story in the Bible is a fable and warning about the power of language. 
According to that story, early humans developed the conceit that, by using their language to work together, they could build a tower that would take them all the way to heaven. 
Now God, angered at this attempt to usurp his power, destroyed the tower, and then to ensure that it would never be rebuilt, he scattered the people by giving them different languages — confused them by giving them different languages. 
And this leads to the wonderful irony that our languages exist to prevent us from communicating. 
Even today, we know that there are words we cannot use, phrases we cannot say, because if we do so, we might be accosted, jailed, or even killed. 
And all of this from a puff of air emanating from our mouths. 
Now all this fuss about a single one of our traits tells us there's something worth explaining. 
And that is how and why did this remarkable trait evolve, and why did it evolve only in our species? 
Now it's a little bit of a surprise that to get an answer to that question, we have to go to tool use in the chimpanzees. 
Now these chimpanzees are using tools, and we take that as a sign of their intelligence. 
But if they really were intelligent, why would they use a stick to extract termites from the ground rather than a shovel? 
And if they really were intelligent, why would they crack open nuts with a rock? 
Why wouldn't they just go to a shop and buy a bag of nuts that somebody else had already cracked open for them? 
Why not? I mean, that's what we do. 
Now the reason the chimpanzees don't do that is that they lack what psychologists and anthropologists call social learning. 
They seem to lack the ability to learn from others by copying or imitating or simply watching. 
As a result, they can't improve on others' ideas or learn from others' mistakes — benefit from others' wisdom. 
And so they just do the same thing over and over and over again. 
In fact, we could go away for a million years and come back and these chimpanzees would be doing the same thing with the same sticks for the termites and the same rocks to crack open the nuts. 
Now this may sound arrogant, or even full of hubris. 
How do we know this? 
Because this is exactly what our ancestors, the Homo erectus, did. 
These upright apes evolved on the African savanna about two million years ago, and they made these splendid hand axes that fit wonderfully into your hands. 
But if we look at the fossil record, we see that they made the same hand axe over and over and over again for one million years. 
You can follow it through the fossil record. 
Now if we make some guesses about how long Homo erectus lived, what their generation time was, that's about 40,000 generations of parents to offspring, and other individuals watching, in which that hand axe didn't change. 
It's not even clear that our very close genetic relatives, the Neanderthals, had social learning. 
Sure enough, their tools were more complicated than those of Homo erectus, but they too showed very little change over the 300,000 years or so that those species, the Neanderthals, lived in Eurasia. 
Okay, so what this tells us is that, contrary to the old adage, "monkey see, monkey do," the surprise really is that all of the other animals really cannot do that — at least not very much. 
And even this picture has the suspicious taint of being rigged about it — something from a Barnum & Bailey circus. 
But by comparison, we can learn. 
We can learn by watching other people and copying or imitating what they can do. 
We can then choose, from among a range of options, the best one. 
We can benefit from others' ideas. 
We can build on their wisdom. 
And as a result, our ideas do accumulate, and our technology progresses. 
And this cumulative cultural adaptation, as anthropologists call this accumulation of ideas, is responsible for everything around you in your bustling and teeming everyday lives. 
I mean the world has changed out of all proportion to what we would recognize even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago. 
And all of this because of cumulative cultural adaptation. 
The chairs you're sitting in, the lights in this auditorium, my microphone, the iPads and iPods that you carry around with you — all are a result of cumulative cultural adaptation. 
Now to many commentators, cumulative cultural adaptation, or social learning, is job done, end of story. 
Our species can make stuff, therefore we prospered in a way that no other species has. 
In fact, we can even make the "" stuff of life "" — as I just said, all the stuff around us. 
But in fact, it turns out that some time around 200,000 years ago, when our species first arose and acquired social learning, that this was really the beginning of our story, not the end of our story. 
Because our acquisition of social learning would create a social and evolutionary dilemma, the resolution of which, it's fair to say, would determine not only the future course of our psychology, but the future course of the entire world. 
And most importantly for this, it'll tell us why we have language. 
And the reason that dilemma arose is, it turns out, that social learning is visual theft. 
If I can learn by watching you, I can steal your best ideas, and I can benefit from your efforts, without having to put in the time and energy that you did into developing them. 
If I can watch which lure you use to catch a fish, or I can watch how you flake your hand axe to make it better, or if I follow you secretly to your mushroom patch, I can benefit from your knowledge and wisdom and skills, and maybe even catch that fish before you do. 
Social learning really is visual theft. 
And in any species that acquired it, it would behoove you to hide your best ideas, lest somebody steal them from you. 
And so some time around 200,000 years ago, our species confronted this crisis. 
And we really had only two options for dealing with the conflicts that visual theft would bring. 
One of those options was that we could have retreated into small family groups. 
Because then the benefits of our ideas and knowledge would flow just to our relatives. 
Had we chosen this option, sometime around 200,000 years ago, we would probably still be living like the Neanderthals were when we first entered Europe 40,000 years ago. 
And this is because in small groups there are fewer ideas, there are fewer innovations. 
And small groups are more prone to accidents and bad luck. 
So if we'd chosen that path, our evolutionary path would have led into the forest — and been a short one indeed. 
The other option we could choose was to develop the systems of communication that would allow us to share ideas and to cooperate amongst others. 
Choosing this option would mean that a vastly greater fund of accumulated knowledge and wisdom would become available to any one individual than would ever arise from within an individual family or an individual person on their own. 
Well, we chose the second option, and language is the result. 
Language evolved to solve the crisis of visual theft. 
Language is a piece of social technology for enhancing the benefits of cooperation — for reaching agreements, for striking deals and for coordinating our activities. 
And you can see that, in a developing society that was beginning to acquire language, not having language would be a like a bird without wings. 
Just as wings open up this sphere of air for birds to exploit, language opened up the sphere of cooperation for humans to exploit. 
And we take this utterly for granted, because we're a species that is so at home with language, but you have to realize that even the simplest acts of exchange that we engage in are utterly dependent upon language. 
And to see why, consider two scenarios from early in our evolution. 
Let's imagine that you are really good at making arrowheads, but you're hopeless at making the wooden shafts with the flight feathers attached. 
Two other people you know are very good at making the wooden shafts, but they're hopeless at making the arrowheads. 
So what you do is — one of those people has not really acquired language yet. 
And let's pretend the other one is good at language skills. 
So what you do one day is you take a pile of arrowheads, and you walk up to the one that can't speak very well, and you put the arrowheads down in front of him, hoping that he'll get the idea that you want to trade your arrowheads for finished arrows. 
But he looks at the pile of arrowheads, thinks they're a gift, picks them up, smiles and walks off. 
Now you pursue this guy, gesticulating. 
A scuffle ensues and you get stabbed with one of your own arrowheads. 
Okay, now replay this scene now, and you're approaching the one who has language. 
You put down your arrowheads and say, "I'd like to trade these arrowheads for finished arrows. I'll split you 50 / 50." 
The other one says, "" Fine. Looks good to me. 
We'll do that. "" Now the job is done. 
Once we have language, we can put our ideas together and cooperate to have a prosperity that we couldn't have before we acquired it. 
And this is why our species has prospered around the world while the rest of the animals sit behind bars in zoos, languishing. 
That's why we build space shuttles and cathedrals while the rest of the world sticks sticks into the ground to extract termites. 
All right, if this view of language and its value in solving the crisis of visual theft is true, any species that acquires it should show an explosion of creativity and prosperity. 
And this is exactly what the archeological record shows. 
If you look at our ancestors, the Neanderthals and the Homo erectus, our immediate ancestors, they're confined to small regions of the world. 
But when our species arose about 200,000 years ago, sometime after that we quickly walked out of Africa and spread around the entire world, occupying nearly every habitat on Earth. 
Now whereas other species are confined to places that their genes adapt them to, with social learning and language, we could transform the environment to suit our needs. 
And so we prospered in a way that no other animal has. 
Language really is the most potent trait that has ever evolved. 
It is the most valuable trait we have for converting new lands and resources into more people and their genes that natural selection has ever devised. 
Language really is the voice of our genes. 
Now having evolved language, though, we did something peculiar, even bizarre. 
As we spread out around the world, we developed thousands of different languages. 
Currently, there are about seven or 8,000 different languages spoken on Earth. 
Now you might say, well, this is just natural. 
As we diverge, our languages are naturally going to diverge. 
But the real puzzle and irony is that the greatest density of different languages on Earth is found where people are most tightly packed together. 
If we go to the island of Papua New Guinea, we can find about 800 to 1,000 distinct human languages, different human languages, spoken on that island alone. 
There are places on that island where you can encounter a new language every two or three miles. 
Now, incredible as this sounds, I once met a Papuan man, and I asked him if this could possibly be true. 
And he said to me, "" Oh no. 
They're far closer together than that. "" And it's true; there are places on that island where you can encounter a new language in under a mile. 
And this is also true of some remote oceanic islands. 
And so it seems that we use our language, not just to cooperate, but to draw rings around our cooperative groups and to establish identities, and perhaps to protect our knowledge and wisdom and skills from eavesdropping from outside. 
And we know this because when we study different language groups and associate them with their cultures, we see that different languages slow the flow of ideas between groups. 
They slow the flow of technologies. 
And they even slow the flow of genes. 
Now I can't speak for you, but it seems to be the case that we don't have sex with people we can't talk to. 
(Laughter) Now we have to counter that, though, against the evidence we've heard that we might have had some rather distasteful genetic dalliances with the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. (Laughter) 
Okay, this tendency we have, this seemingly natural tendency we have, towards isolation, towards keeping to ourselves, crashes head first into our modern world. 
This remarkable image is not a map of the world. 
In fact, it's a map of Facebook friendship links. 
And when you plot those friendship links by their latitude and longitude, it literally draws a map of the world. 
Our modern world is communicating with itself and with each other more than it has at any time in its past. 
And that communication, that connectivity around the world, that globalization now raises a burden. 
Because these different languages impose a barrier, as we've just seen, to the transfer of goods and ideas and technologies and wisdom. 
And they impose a barrier to cooperation. 
And nowhere do we see that more clearly than in the European Union, whose 27 member countries speak 23 official languages. 
The European Union is now spending over one billion euros annually translating among their 23 official languages. 
That's something on the order of 1.45 billion U.S. dollars on translation costs alone. 
Now think of the absurdity of this situation. 
If 27 individuals from those 27 member states sat around table, speaking their 23 languages, some very simple mathematics will tell you that you need an army of 253 translators to anticipate all the pairwise possibilities. 
The European Union employs a permanent staff of about 2,500 translators. 
And in 2007 alone — and I'm sure there are more recent figures — something on the order of 1.3 million pages were translated into English alone. 
And so if language really is the solution to the crisis of visual theft, if language really is the conduit of our cooperation, the technology that our species derived to promote the free flow and exchange of ideas, in our modern world, we confront a question. 
And that question is whether in this modern, globalized world we can really afford to have all these different languages. 
To put it this way, nature knows no other circumstance in which functionally equivalent traits coexist. 
One of them always drives the other extinct. 
And we see this in the inexorable march towards standardization. 
There are lots and lots of ways of measuring things — weighing them and measuring their length — but the metric system is winning. 
There are lots and lots of ways of measuring time, but a really bizarre base 60 system known as hours and minutes and seconds is nearly universal around the world. 
There are many, many ways of imprinting CDs or DVDs, but those are all being standardized as well. 
And you can probably think of many, many more in your own everyday lives. 
And so our modern world now is confronting us with a dilemma. 
And it's the dilemma that this Chinese man faces, who's language is spoken by more people in the world than any other single language, and yet he is sitting at his blackboard, converting Chinese phrases into English language phrases. 
And what this does is it raises the possibility to us that in a world in which we want to promote cooperation and exchange, and in a world that might be dependent more than ever before on cooperation to maintain and enhance our levels of prosperity, his actions suggest to us it might be inevitable that we have to confront the idea that our destiny is to be one world with one language. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Matt Ridley: Mark, one question. 
Svante found that the FOXP2 gene, which seems to be associated with language, was also shared in the same form in Neanderthals as us. 
Do we have any idea how we could have defeated Neanderthals if they also had language? 
Mark Pagel: This is a very good question. 
So many of you will be familiar with the idea that there's this gene called FOXP2 that seems to be implicated in some ways in the fine motor control that's associated with language. 
The reason why I don't believe that tells us that the Neanderthals had language is — here's a simple analogy: Ferraris are cars that have engines. 
My car has an engine, but it's not a Ferrari. 
Now the simple answer then is that genes alone don't, all by themselves, determine the outcome of very complicated things like language. 
What we know about this FOXP2 and Neanderthals is that they may have had fine motor control of their mouths — who knows. 
But that doesn't tell us they necessarily had language. 
MR: Thank you very much indeed. 
(Applause) 

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

Science. 
The very word for many of you conjures unhappy memories of boredom in high school biology or physics class. 
But let me assure that what you did there had very little to do with science. 
That was really the "" what "" of science. 
It was the history of what other people had discovered. 
What I'm most interested in as a scientist is the "" how "" of science. 
Because science is knowledge in process. 
We make an observation, guess an explanation for that observation, and then make a prediction that we can test with an experiment or other observation. 
A couple of examples. 
First of all, people noticed that the Earth was below, the sky above, and both the Sun and the Moon seemed to go around them. 
Their guessed explanation was that the Earth must be the center of the universe. 
The prediction: everything should circle around the Earth. 
This was first really tested when Galileo got his hands on one of the first telescopes, and as he gazed into the night sky, what he found there was a planet, Jupiter, with four moons circling around it. 
He then used those moons to follow the path of Jupiter and found that Jupiter also was not going around the Earth but around the Sun. 
So the prediction test failed. 
And this led to the discarding of the theory that the Earth was the center of the universe. 
Another example: Sir Isaac Newton noticed that things fall to the Earth. 
The guessed explanation was gravity, the prediction that everything should fall to the Earth. 
But of course, not everything does fall to the Earth. 
So did we discard gravity? 
No. We revised the theory and said, gravity pulls things to the Earth unless there is an equal and opposite force in the other direction. 
This led us to learn something new. 
We began to pay more attention to the bird and the bird's wings, and just think of all the discoveries that have flown from that line of thinking. 
So the test failures, the exceptions, the outliers teach us what we don't know and lead us to something new. 
This is how science moves forward. This is how science learns. 
Sometimes in the media, and even more rarely, but sometimes even scientists will say that something or other has been scientifically proven. 
But I hope that you understand that science never proves anything definitively forever. 
Hopefully science remains curious enough to look for and humble enough to recognize when we have found the next outlier, the next exception, which, like Jupiter's moons, teaches us what we don't actually know. 
We're going to change gears here for a second. 
The caduceus, or the symbol of medicine, means a lot of different things to different people, but most of our public discourse on medicine really turns it into an engineering problem. 
We have the hallways of Congress, and the boardrooms of insurance companies that try to figure out how to pay for it. 
The ethicists and epidemiologists try to figure out how best to distribute medicine, and the hospitals and physicians are absolutely obsessed with their protocols and checklists, trying to figure out how best to safely apply medicine. 
These are all good things. 
However, they also all assume at some level that the textbook of medicine is closed. 
We start to measure the quality of our health care by how quickly we can access it. 
It doesn't surprise me that in this climate, many of our institutions for the provision of health care start to look a heck of a lot like Jiffy Lube. 
(Laughter) The only problem is that when I graduated from medical school, I didn't get one of those little doohickeys that your mechanic has to plug into your car and find out exactly what's wrong with it, because the textbook of medicine is not closed. 
Medicine is science. 
Medicine is knowledge in process. 
We make an observation, we guess an explanation of that observation, and then we make a prediction that we can test. 
Now, the testing ground of most predictions in medicine is populations. 
And you may remember from those boring days in biology class that populations tend to distribute around a mean as a Gaussian or a normal curve. 
Therefore, in medicine, after we make a prediction from a guessed explanation, we test it in a population. 
That means that what we know in medicine, our knowledge and our know-how, comes from populations but extends only as far as the next outlier, the next exception, which, like Jupiter's moons, will teach us what we don't actually know. 
Now, I am a surgeon who looks after patients with sarcoma. 
Sarcoma is a very rare form of cancer. 
It's the cancer of flesh and bones. 
And I would tell you that every one of my patients is an outlier, is an exception. 
There is no surgery I have ever performed for a sarcoma patient that has ever been guided by a randomized controlled clinical trial, what we consider the best kind of population-based evidence in medicine. 
People talk about thinking outside the box, but we don't even have a box in sarcoma. 
What we do have as we take a bath in the uncertainty and unknowns and exceptions and outliers that surround us in sarcoma is easy access to what I think are those two most important values for any science: humility and curiosity. 
Because if I am humble and curious, when a patient asks me a question, and I don't know the answer, I'll ask a colleague who may have a similar albeit distinct patient with sarcoma. 
We'll even establish international collaborations. 
Those patients will start to talk to each other through chat rooms and support groups. 
It's through this kind of humbly curious communication that we begin to try and learn new things. 
As an example, this is a patient of mine who had a cancer near his knee. 
Because of humbly curious communication in international collaborations, we have learned that we can repurpose the ankle to serve as the knee when we have to remove the knee with the cancer. 
He can then wear a prosthetic and run and jump and play. 
This opportunity was available to him because of international collaborations. 
It was desirable to him because he had contacted other patients who had experienced it. 
And so exceptions and outliers in medicine teach us what we don't know, but also lead us to new thinking. 
Now, very importantly, all the new thinking that outliers and exceptions lead us to in medicine does not only apply to the outliers and exceptions. 
It is not that we only learn from sarcoma patients ways to manage sarcoma patients. 
Sometimes, the outliers and the exceptions teach us things that matter quite a lot to the general population. 
Like a tree standing outside a forest, the outliers and the exceptions draw our attention and lead us into a much greater sense of perhaps what a tree is. 
We often talk about losing the forests for the trees, but one also loses a tree within a forest. 
But the tree that stands out by itself makes those relationships that define a tree, the relationships between trunk and roots and branches, much more apparent. 
Even if that tree is crooked or even if that tree has very unusual relationships between trunk and roots and branches, it nonetheless draws our attention and allows us to make observations that we can then test in the general population. 
I told you that sarcomas are rare. 
They make up about one percent of all cancers. 
You also probably know that cancer is considered a genetic disease. 
By genetic disease we mean that cancer is caused by oncogenes that are turned on in cancer and tumor suppressor genes that are turned off to cause cancer. 
You might think that we learned about oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes from common cancers like breast cancer and prostate cancer and lung cancer, but you'd be wrong. 
We learned about oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes for the first time in that itty-bitty little one percent of cancers called sarcoma. 
In 1966, Peyton Rous got the Nobel Prize for realizing that chickens had a transmissible form of sarcoma. 
Thirty years later, Harold Varmus and Mike Bishop discovered what that transmissible element was. 
It was a virus carrying a gene, the src oncogene. 
Now, I will not tell you that src is the most important oncogene. I will not tell you 
that src is the most frequently turned on oncogene in all of cancer. 
But it was the first oncogene. 
The exception, the outlier drew our attention and led us to something that taught us very important things about the rest of biology. 
Now, TP53 is the most important tumor suppressor gene. 
It is the most frequently turned off tumor suppressor gene in almost every kind of cancer. 
But we didn't learn about it from common cancers. 
We learned about it when doctors Li and Fraumeni were looking at families, and they realized that these families had way too many sarcomas. 
I told you that sarcoma is rare. 
Remember that a one in a million diagnosis, if it happens twice in one family, is way too common in that family. 
The very fact that these are rare draws our attention and leads us to new kinds of thinking. 
Now, many of you may say, and may rightly say, that yeah, Kevin, that's great, but you're not talking about a bird's wing. 
You're not talking about moons floating around some planet Jupiter. 
This is a person. 
This outlier, this exception, may lead to the advancement of science, but this is a person. 
And all I can say is that I know that all too well. 
I have conversations with these patients with rare and deadly diseases. 
I write about these conversations. 
These conversations are terribly fraught. 
They're fraught with horrible phrases like "" I have bad news "" or "" There's nothing more we can do. "" Sometimes these conversations turn on a single word: "terminal." 
Silence can also be rather uncomfortable. 
Where the blanks are in medicine can be just as important as the words that we use in these conversations. 
What are the unknowns? 
What are the experiments that are being done? 
Do this little exercise with me. 
Up there on the screen, you see this phrase, "" no where. "" Notice where the blank is. 
If we move that blank one space over "no where" becomes "" now here, "" the exact opposite meaning, just by shifting the blank one space over. 
I'll never forget the night that I walked into one of my patients' rooms. 
I had been operating long that day but I still wanted to come and see him. 
He was a boy I had diagnosed with a bone cancer a few days before. 
He and his mother had been meeting with the chemotherapy doctors earlier that day, and he had been admitted to the hospital to begin chemotherapy. 
It was almost midnight when I got to his room. 
He was asleep, but I found his mother reading by flashlight next to his bed. 
She came out in the hall to chat with me for a few minutes. 
It turned out that what she had been reading was the protocol that the chemotherapy doctors had given her that day. 
She had memorized it. 
She said, "" Dr. Jones, you told me that we don't always win with this type of cancer, but I've been studying this protocol, and I think I can do it. 
I think I can comply with these very difficult treatments. 
I'm going to quit my job. I'm going to move in with my parents. 
I'm going to keep my baby safe. "" I didn't tell her. 
I didn't stop to correct her thinking. 
She was trusting in a protocol that even if complied with, wouldn't necessarily save her son. 
I didn't tell her. 
I didn't fill in that blank. 
But a year and a half later her boy nonetheless died of his cancer. 
Should I have told her? 
Now, many of you may say, "" So what? 
I don't have sarcoma. 
No one in my family has sarcoma. 
And this is all fine and well, but it probably doesn't matter in my life. "" And you're probably right. 
Sarcoma may not matter a whole lot in your life. 
But where the blanks are in medicine does matter in your life. 
I didn't tell you one dirty little secret. 
I told you that in medicine, we test predictions in populations, but I didn't tell you, and so often medicine never tells you that every time an individual encounters medicine, even if that individual is firmly embedded in the general population, neither the individual nor the physician knows where in that population the individual will land. 
Therefore, every encounter with medicine is an experiment. 
You will be a subject in an experiment. 
And the outcome will be either a better or a worse result for you. 
As long as medicine works well, we're fine with fast service, bravado, brimmingly confident conversations. 
But when things don't work well, sometimes we want something different. 
A colleague of mine removed a tumor from a patient's limb. 
He was concerned about this tumor. 
In our physician conferences, he talked about his concern that this was a type of tumor that had a high risk for coming back in the same limb. 
But his conversations with the patient were exactly what a patient might want: brimming with confidence. 
He said, "" I got it all and you're good to go. "" She and her husband were thrilled. 
They went out, celebrated, fancy dinner, opened a bottle of champagne. 
The only problem was a few weeks later, she started to notice another nodule in the same area. 
It turned out he hadn't gotten it all, and she wasn't good to go. 
But what happened at this juncture absolutely fascinates me. 
My colleague came to me and said, "Kevin, would you mind looking after this patient for me?" 
I said, "" Why, you know the right thing to do as well as I do. 
You haven't done anything wrong. "" He said, "" Please, just look after this patient for me. "" He was embarrassed — not by what he had done, but by the conversation that he had had, by the overconfidence. 
So I performed a much more invasive surgery and had a very different conversation with the patient afterwards. 
I said, "" Most likely I've gotten it all and you're most likely good to go, but this is the experiment that we're doing. 
This is what you're going to watch for. 
This is what I'm going to watch for. 
And we're going to work together to find out if this surgery will work to get rid of your cancer. "" I can guarantee you, she and her husband did not crack another bottle of champagne after talking to me. 
But she was now a scientist, not only a subject in her experiment. 
And so I encourage you to seek humility and curiosity in your physicians. 
Almost 20 billion times each year, a person walks into a doctor's office, and that person becomes a patient. 
You or someone you love will be that patient sometime very soon. 
How will you talk to your doctors? 
What will you tell them? 
What will they tell you? 
They cannot tell you what they do not know, but they can tell you when they don't know if only you'll ask. 
So please, join the conversation. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

For over a decade as a doctor, I've cared for homeless veterans, for working-class families. 
I've cared for people who live and work in conditions that can be hard, if not harsh, and that work has led me to believe that we need a fundamentally different way of looking at healthcare. 
We simply need a healthcare system that moves beyond just looking at the symptoms that bring people into clinics, but instead actually is able to look and improve health where it begins. 
And where health begins is not in the four walls of a doctor's office, but where we live and where we work, where we eat, sleep, learn and play, where we spend the majority of our lives. 
So what does this different approach to healthcare look like, an approach that can improve health where it begins? 
To illustrate this, I'll tell you about Veronica. 
Veronica was the 17th patient out of my 26-patient day at that clinic in South Central Los Angeles. 
She came into our clinic with a chronic headache. 
This headache had been going on for a number of years, and this particular episode was very, very troubling. 
In fact, three weeks before she came to visit us for the first time, she went to an emergency room in Los Angeles. 
The emergency room doctors said, "" We've run some tests, Veronica. 
The results are normal, so here's some pain medication, and follow up with a primary care doctor, but if the pain persists or if it worsens, then come on back. "" Veronica followed those standard instructions and she went back. 
She went back not just once, but twice more. 
In the three weeks before Veronica met us, she went to the emergency room three times. 
She went back and forth, in and out of hospitals and clinics, just like she had done in years past, trying to seek relief but still coming up short. 
Veronica came to our clinic, and despite all these encounters with healthcare professionals, Veronica was still sick. 
When she came to our clinic, though, we tried a different approach. 
Our approach started with our medical assistant, someone who had a GED-level training but knew the community. 
Our medical assistant asked some routine questions. 
She asked, "" What's your chief complaint? "" "Headache." 
"" Let's get your vital signs "" — measure your blood pressure and your heart rate, but let's also ask something equally as vital to Veronica and a lot of patients like her in South Los Angeles. 
"" Veronica, can you tell me about where you live? 
Specifically, about your housing conditions? 
Do you have mold? Do you have water leaks? 
Do you have roaches in your home? "" Turns out, Veronica said yes to three of those things: roaches, water leaks, mold. 
I received that chart in hand, reviewed it, and I turned the handle on the door and I entered the room. 
You should understand that Veronica, like a lot of patients that I have the privilege of caring for, is a dignified person, a formidable presence, a personality that's larger than life, but here she was doubled over in pain sitting on my exam table. 
Her head, clearly throbbing, was resting in her hands. 
She lifted her head up, and I saw her face, said hello, and then I immediately noticed something across the bridge of her nose, a crease in her skin. 
In medicine, we call that crease the allergic salute. 
It's usually seen among children who have chronic allergies. 
It comes from chronically rubbing one's nose up and down, trying to get rid of those allergy symptoms, and yet, here was Veronica, a grown woman, with the same telltale sign of allergies. 
A few minutes later, in asking Veronica some questions, and examining her and listening to her, I said, "" Veronica, I think I know what you have. 
I think you have chronic allergies, and I think you have migraine headaches and some sinus congestion, and I think all of those are related to where you live. "" She looked a little bit relieved, because for the first time, she had a diagnosis, but I said, "" Veronica, now let's talk about your treatment. 
We're going to order some medications for your symptoms, but I also want to refer you to a specialist, if that's okay. "" Now, specialists are a little hard to find in South Central Los Angeles, so she gave me this look, like, "" Really? "" And I said, "" Veronica, actually, the specialist I'm talking about is someone I call a community health worker, someone who, if it's okay with you, can come to your home and try to understand what's going on with those water leaks and that mold, trying to help you manage those conditions in your housing that I think are causing your symptoms, 
and if required, that specialist might refer you to another specialist that we call a public interest lawyer, because it might be that your landlord isn't making the fixes he's required to make. "" Veronica came back in a few months later. 
She agreed to all of those treatment plans. 
She told us that her symptoms had improved by 90 percent. 
She was spending more time at work and with her family and less time shuttling back and forth between the emergency rooms of Los Angeles. 
Veronica had improved remarkably. 
Her sons, one of whom had asthma, were no longer as sick as they used to be. 
She had gotten better, and not coincidentally, Veronica's home was better too. 
What was it about this different approach we tried that led to better care, fewer visits to the E.R., better health? 
Well, quite simply, it started with that question: "Veronica, where do you live?" 
But more importantly, it was that we put in place a system that allowed us to routinely ask questions to Veronica and hundreds more like her about the conditions that mattered in her community, about where health, and unfortunately sometimes illness, do begin in places like South L.A. 
In that community, substandard housing and food insecurity are the major conditions that we as a clinic had to be aware of, but in other communities it could be transportation barriers, obesity, access to parks, gun violence. 
The important thing is, we put in place a system that worked, and it's an approach that I call an upstream approach. 
It's a term many of you are familiar with. 
It comes from a parable that's very common in the public health community. 
This is a parable of three friends. 
Imagine that you're one of these three friends who come to a river. 
It's a beautiful scene, but it's shattered by the cries of a child, and actually several children, in need of rescue in the water. 
So you do hopefully what everybody would do. 
You jump right in along with your friends. 
The first friend says, I'm going to rescue those who are about to drown, those at most risk of falling over the waterfall. 
The second friends says, I'm going to build a raft. 
I'm going to make sure that fewer people need to end up at the waterfall's edge. 
Let's usher more people to safety by building this raft, coordinating those branches together. 
Over time, they're successful, but not really, as much as they want to be. 
More people slip through, and they finally look up and they see that their third friend is nowhere to be seen. 
They finally spot her. 
She's in the water. She's swimming away from them upstream, rescuing children as she goes, and they shout to her, "" Where are you going? 
There are children here to save. "" And she says back, "" I'm going to find out who or what is throwing these children in the water. "" In healthcare, we have that first friend — we have the specialist, we have the trauma surgeon, the ICU nurse, the E.R. doctors. 
We have those people that are vital rescuers, people you want to be there when you're in dire straits. 
We also know that we have the second friend — we have that raft-builder. 
That's the primary care clinician, people on the care team who are there to manage your chronic conditions, your diabetes, your hypertension, there to give you your annual checkups, there to make sure your vaccines are up to date, but also there to make sure that you have a raft to sit on and usher yourself to safety. 
But while that's also vital and very necessary, what we're missing is that third friend. 
We don't have enough of that upstreamist. 
The upstreamists are the health care professionals who know that health does begin where we live and work and play, but beyond that awareness, is able to mobilize the resources to create the system in their clinics and in their hospitals that really does start to approach that, to connect people to the resources they need outside the four walls of the clinic. 
Now you might ask, and it's a very obvious question that a lot of colleagues in medicine ask: "" Doctors and nurses thinking about transportation and housing? 
Shouldn't we just provide pills and procedures and just make sure we focus on the task at hand? "" Certainly, rescuing people at the water's edge is important enough work. 
Who has the time? 
I would argue, though, that if we were to use science as our guide, that we would find an upstream approach is absolutely necessary. 
Scientists now know that the living and working conditions that we all are part of have more than twice the impact on our health than does our genetic code, and living and working conditions, the structures of our environments, the ways in which our social fabric is woven together, and the impact those have on our behaviors, all together, those have more than five times the impact on our health than do all the pills and procedures administered by doctors and hospitals combined. 
All together, living and working conditions account for 60 percent of preventable death. 
Let me give you an example of what this feels like. 
Let's say there was a company, a tech startup that came to you and said, "" We have a great product. 
It's going to lower your risk of death from heart disease. "" Now, you might be likely to invest if that product was a drug or a device, but what if that product was a park? 
A study in the U.K., a landmark study that reviewed the records of over 40 million residents in the U.K., looked at several variables, controlled for a lot of factors, and found that when trying to adjust the risk of heart disease, one's exposure to green space was a powerful influence. 
The closer you were to green space, to parks and trees, the lower your chance of heart disease, and that stayed true for rich and for poor. 
That study illustrates what my friends in public health often say these days: that one's zip code matters more than your genetic code. 
We're also learning that zip code is actually shaping our genetic code. 
The science of epigenetics looks at those molecular mechanisms, those intricate ways in which our DNA is literally shaped, genes turned on and off based on the exposures to the environment, to where we live and to where we work. 
So it's clear that these factors, these upstream issues, do matter. 
They matter to our health, and therefore our healthcare professionals should do something about it. 
And yet, Veronica asked me perhaps the most compelling question I've been asked in a long time. 
In that follow-up visit, she said, "" Why did none of my doctors ask about my home before? 
In those visits to the emergency room, I had two CAT scans, I had a needle placed in the lower part of my back to collect spinal fluid, I had nearly a dozen blood tests. 
I went back and forth, I saw all sorts of people in healthcare, and no one asked about my home. "" The honest answer is that in healthcare, we often treat symptoms without addressing the conditions that make you sick in the first place. 
And there are many reasons for that, but the big three are first, we don't pay for that. 
In healthcare, we often pay for volume and not value. 
We pay doctors and hospitals usually for the number of services they provide, but not necessarily on how healthy they make you. 
That leads to a second phenomenon that I call the "" don't ask, don't tell "" approach to upstream issues in healthcare. 
We don't ask about where you live and where you work, because if there's a problem there, we don't know what to tell you. 
It's not that doctors don't know these are important issues. 
In a recent survey done in the U.S. among physicians, over 1,000 physicians, 80 percent of them actually said that they know that their patients' upstream problems are as important as their health issues, as their medical problems, and yet despite that widespread awareness of the importance of upstream issues, only one in five doctors said they had any sense of confidence to address those issues, to improve health where it begins. 
There's this gap between knowing that patients' lives, the context of where they live and work, matters, and the ability to do something about it in the systems in which we work. 
This is a huge problem right now, because it leads them to this next question, which is, whose responsibility is it? 
And that brings me to that third point, that third answer to Veronica's compelling question. 
Part of the reason that we have this conundrum is because there are not nearly enough upstreamists in the healthcare system. 
There are not nearly enough of that third friend, that person who is going to find out who or what is throwing those kids in the water. 
Now, there are many upstreamists, and I've had the privilege of meeting many of them, in Los Angeles and in other parts of the country and around the world, and it's important to note that upstreamists sometimes are doctors, but they need not be. 
They can be nurses, other clinicians, care managers, social workers. 
It's not so important what specific degree upstreamists have at the end of their name. 
What's more important is that they all seem to share the same ability to implement a process that transforms their assistance, transforms the way they practice medicine. 
That process is a quite simple process. 
It's one, two and three. 
First, they sit down and they say, let's identify the clinical problem among a certain set of patients. 
Let's say, for instance, let's try to help children who are bouncing in and out of the hospital with asthma. 
After identifying the problem, they then move on to that second step, and they say, let's identify the root cause. 
Now, a root cause analysis, in healthcare, usually says, well, let's look at your genes, let's look at how you're behaving. 
Maybe you're not eating healthy enough. 
Eat healthier. 
It's a pretty simplistic approach to root cause analyses. 
It turns out, it doesn't really work when we just limit ourselves that worldview. 
The root cause analysis that an upstreamist brings to the table is to say, let's look at the living and the working conditions in your life. 
Perhaps, for children with asthma, it's what's happening in their home, or perhaps they live close to a freeway with major air pollution that triggers their asthma. 
And perhaps that's what we should mobilize our resources to address, because that third element, that third part of the process, is that next critical part of what upstreamists do. 
They mobilize the resources to create a solution, both within the clinical system, and then by bringing in people from public health, from other sectors, lawyers, whoever is willing to play ball, let's bring in to create a solution that makes sense, to take those patients who actually have clinical problems and address their root causes together by linking them to the resources you need. 
It's clear to me that there are so many stories of upstreamists who are doing remarkable things. 
The problem is that there's just not nearly enough of them out there. 
By some estimates, we need one upstreamist for every 20 to 30 clinicians in the healthcare system. 
In the U.S., for instance, that would mean that we need 25,000 upstreamists by the year 2020. 
But we only have a few thousand upstreamists out there right now, by all accounts, and that's why, a few years ago, my colleagues and I said, you know what, we need to train and make more upstreamists. 
So we decided to start an organization called Health Begins, and Health Begins simply does that: We train upstreamists. 
And there are a lot of measures that we use for our success, but the main thing that we're interested in is making sure that we're changing the sense of confidence, that "" don't ask, don't tell "" metric among clinicians. 
We're trying to make sure that clinicians, and therefore their systems that they work in have the ability, the confidence to address the problems in the living and working conditions in our lives. 
We're seeing nearly a tripling of that confidence in our work. 
It's remarkable, but I'll tell you the most compelling part of what it means to be working with upstreamists to gather them together. 
What is most compelling is that every day, every week, I hear stories just like Veronica's. 
There are stories out there of Veronica and many more like her, people who are coming to the healthcare system and getting a glimpse of what it feels like to be part of something that works, a health care system that stops bouncing you back and forth but actually improves your health, listens to you who you are, addresses the context of your life, whether you're rich or poor or middle class. 
These stories are compelling because not only do they tell us that we're this close to getting the healthcare system that we want, but that there's something that we can all do to get there. 
Doctors and nurses can get better at asking about the context of patients' lives, not simply because it's better bedside manner, but frankly, because it's a better standard of care. 
Healthcare systems and payers can start to bring in public health agencies and departments and say, let's look at our data together. 
Let's see if we can discover some patterns in our data about our patients' lives and see if we can identify an upstream cause, and then, as importantly, can we align the resources to be able to address them? 
Medical schools, nursing schools, all sorts of health professional education programs can help by training the next generation of upstreamists. 
We can also make sure that these schools certify a backbone of the upstream approach, and that's the community health worker. 
We need many more of them in the healthcare system if we're truly going to have it be effective, to move from a sickcare system to a healthcare system. 
But finally, and perhaps most importantly, what do we do? What do we do as patients? 
We can start by simply going to our doctors and our nurses, to our clinics, and asking, "" Is there something in where I live and where I work that I should be aware of? "" Are there barriers to health that I'm just not aware of, and more importantly, if there are barriers that I'm surfacing, if I'm coming to you and I'm saying I think have a problem with my apartment or at my workplace or I don't have access to transportation, or there's a park that's way too far, so sorry doctor, I can't take your advice to go and jog, 
if those problems exist, then doctor, are you willing to listen? 
And what can we do together to improve my health where it begins? 
If we're all able to do this work, doctors and healthcare systems, payers, and all of us together, we'll realize something about health. 
Health is not just a personal responsibility or phenomenon. 
Health is a common good. 
It comes from our personal investment in knowing that our lives matter, the context of where we live and where we work, eat, and sleep, matter, and that what we do for ourselves, we also should do for those whose living and working conditions again, can be hard, if not harsh. 
We can all invest in making sure that we improve the allocation of resources upstream, but at the same time work together and show that we can move healthcare upstream. 
We can improve health where it begins. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm going to ask and try to answer, in some ways, kind of an uncomfortable question. 
Both civilians, obviously, and soldiers suffer in war; I don't think any civilian has ever missed the war that they were subjected to. 
I've been covering wars for almost 20 years, and one of the remarkable things for me is how many soldiers find themselves missing it. 
How is it someone can go through the worst experience imaginable, and come home, back to their home, and their family, their country, and miss the war? 
How does that work? What does it mean? 
We have to answer that question, because if we don't, it'll be impossible to bring soldiers back to a place in society where they belong, and I think it'll also be impossible to stop war, if we don't understand how that mechanism works. 
The problem is that war does not have a simple, neat truth, one simple, neat truth. 
Any sane person hates war, hates the idea of war, wouldn't want to have anything to do with it, doesn't want to be near it, doesn't want to know about it. 
That's a sane response to war. 
But if I asked all of you in this room, who here has paid money to go to a cinema and be entertained by a Hollywood war movie, most of you would probably raise your hands. 
That's what's so complicated about war. 
And trust me, if a room full of peace-loving people finds something compelling about war, so do 20-year-old soldiers who have been trained in it, I promise you. 
That's the thing that has to be understood. 
I've covered war for about 20 years, as I said, but my most intense experiences in combat were with American soldiers in Afghanistan. 
I've been in Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan in the '90s, but it was with American soldiers in 2007, 2008, that I was confronted with very intense combat. 
I was in a small valley called the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan. 
It was six miles long. 
There were 150 men of Battle Company in that valley, and for a while, while I was there, almost 20 percent of all the combat in all of Afghanistan was happening in those six miles. 
A hundred and fifty men were absorbing almost a fifth of the combat for all of NATO forces in the country, for a couple months. 
It was very intense. 
I spent most of my time at a small outpost called Restrepo. 
It was named after the platoon medic that had been killed about two months into the deployment. 
It was a few plywood B-huts clinging to a side of a ridge, and sandbags, bunkers, gun positions, and there were 20 men up there of Second Platoon, Battle Company. 
I spent most of my time up there. 
There was no running water. 
There was no way to bathe. 
The guys were up there for a month at a time. 
They never even got out of their clothes. 
They fought. The worked. 
They slept in the same clothes. 
They never took them off, and at the end of the month, they went back down to the company headquarters, and by then, their clothes were unwearable. 
They burned them and got a new set. 
There was no Internet. There was no phone. 
There was no communication with the outside world up there. 
There was no cooked food. 
There was nothing up there that young men typically like: no cars, no girls, no television, nothing except combat. 
Combat they did learn to like. 
I remember one day, it was a very hot day in the spring, and we hadn't been in a fight in a couple of weeks, maybe. 
Usually, the outpost was attacked, and we hadn't seen any combat in a couple of weeks, and everyone was just stunned with boredom and heat. 
And I remember the lieutenant walking past me sort of stripped to the waist. 
It was incredibly hot. 
Stripped to the waist, walked past me muttering, "Oh God, please someone attack us today." 
That's how bored they were. 
That's war too, is a lieutenant saying, "" Please make something happen because we're going crazy. "" To understand that, you have to, for a moment, think about combat not morally — that's an important job to do — but for a moment, don't think about it morally, think about it neurologically. 
Let's think about what happens in your brain when you're in combat. 
First of all, the experience is very bizarre, it's a very bizarre one. 
It's not what I had expected. 
Usually, you're not scared. 
I've been very scared in combat, but most of the time when I was out there, I wasn't scared. 
I was very scared beforehand and incredibly scared afterwards, and that fear that comes afterwards can last years. 
I haven't been shot at in six years, and I was woken up very abruptly this morning by a nightmare that I was being strafed by aircraft, six years later. 
I've never even been strafed by aircraft, and I was having nightmares about it. 
Time slows down. 
You get this weird tunnel vision. 
You notice some details very, very, very accurately and other things drop out. 
It's almost a slightly altered state of mind. 
What's happening in your brain is you're getting an enormous amount of adrenaline pumped through your system. 
Young men will go to great lengths to have that experience. 
It's wired into us. 
It's hormonally supported. 
The mortality rate for young men in society is six times what it is for young women from violence and from accidents, just the stupid stuff that young men do: jumping off of things they shouldn't jump off of, lighting things on fire they shouldn't light on fire, I mean, you know what I'm talking about. 
They die at six times the rate that young women do. 
Statistically, you are safer as a teenage boy, you would be safer in the fire department or the police department in most American cities than just walking around the streets of your hometown looking for something to do, statistically. 
You can imagine how that plays out in combat. 
At Restrepo, every guy up there was almost killed, including me, including my good friend Tim Hetherington, who was later killed in Libya. 
There were guys walking around with bullet holes in their uniforms, rounds that had cut through the fabric and didn't touch their bodies. 
I was leaning against some sandbags one morning, not much going on, sort of spacing out, and some sand was kicked into the side of, sort of hit the side of my face. 
Something hit the side of my face, and I didn't know what it was. 
You have to understand about bullets that they go a lot faster than sound, so if someone shoots at you from a few hundred meters, the bullet goes by you, or hits you obviously, half a second or so before the sound catches up to it. 
So I had some sand sprayed in the side of my face. 
Half a second later, I heard dut-dut-dut-dut-duh. 
It was machine gun fire. 
It was the first round, the first burst of an hour-long firefight. 
What had happened was the bullet hit, a bullet hit three or four inches from the side of my head. 
Imagine, just think about it, because I certainly did, think about the angle of deviation that saved my life. 
At 400 meters, it missed me by three inches. 
Just think about the math on that. 
Every guy up there had some experience like that, at least once, if not many times. 
The boys are up there for a year. 
They got back. 
Some of them got out of the Army and had tremendous psychological problems when they got home. 
Some of them stayed in the Army and were more or less okay, psychologically. 
I was particularly close to a guy named Brendan O'Byrne. 
I'm still very good friends with him. 
He came back to the States. He got out of the Army. 
I had a dinner party one night. 
I invited him, and he started talking with a woman, one of my friends, and she knew how bad it had been out there, and she said, "" Brendan, is there anything at all that you miss about being out in Afghanistan, about the war? "" And he thought about it quite a long time, and finally he said, "" Ma'am, I miss almost all of it. "" And he's one of the most traumatized people I've seen from that war. "Ma'am, I miss almost all of it." 
What is he talking about? He's not a psychopath. He doesn't miss killing people. He's not crazy. He doesn't miss getting shot at 
and seeing his friends get killed. 
What is it that he misses? We have to answer that. 
If we're going to stop war, we have to answer that question. 
I think what he missed is brotherhood. 
He missed, in some ways, the opposite of killing. 
What he missed was connection to the other men he was with. 
Now, brotherhood is different from friendship. 
Friendship happens in society, obviously. 
The more you like someone, the more you'd be willing to do for them. 
Brotherhood has nothing to do with how you feel about the other person. 
It's a mutual agreement in a group that you will put the welfare of the group, you will put the safety of everyone in the group above your own. 
In effect, you're saying, "I love these other people more than I love myself." 
Brendan was a team leader in command of three men, and the worst day in Afghanistan — He was almost killed so many times. 
It didn't bother him. 
The worst thing that happened to him in Afghanistan was one of his men was hit in the head with a bullet in the helmet, knocked him over. 
They thought he was dead. 
It was in the middle of a huge firefight. 
No one could deal with it, and a minute later, Kyle Steiner sat back up from the dead, as it were, because he'd come back to consciousness. 
The bullet had just knocked him out. 
It glanced off the helmet. 
He remembers people saying, as he was sort of half-conscious, he remembers people saying, "Steiner's been hit in the head. Steiner's dead." 
And he was thinking, "" I'm not dead. "" And he sat up. 
And Brendan realized after that that he could not protect his men, and that was the only time he cried in Afghanistan, was realizing that. 
That's brotherhood. 
This wasn't invented recently. 
Many of you have probably read "" The Iliad. "" Achilles surely would have risked his life or given his life to save his friend Patroclus. 
In World War II, there were many stories of soldiers who were wounded, were brought to a rear base hospital, who went AWOL, crawled out of windows, slipped out doors, went AWOL, wounded, to make their way back to the front lines to rejoin their brothers out there. 
So you think about Brendan, you think about all these soldiers having an experience like that, a bond like that, in a small group, where they loved 20 other people in some ways more than they loved themselves, you think about how good that would feel, imagine it, and they are blessed with that experience for a year, and then they come home, and they are just back in society like the rest of us are, not knowing who they can count on, not knowing who loves them, who they can love, not knowing exactly what anyone they know would do for them if it came down to it. 
That is terrifying. 
Compared to that, war, psychologically, in some ways, is easy, compared to that kind of alienation. 
That's why they miss it, and that's what we have to understand and in some ways fix in our society. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

On the basis that a picture is worth a thousand words, what I did was, I asked Bill and Melinda to dig out from their archive some images that would help explain some of what they've done, and do a few things that way. 
So, we're going to start here. 
Melinda, when and where was this, and who is that handsome man next to you? 
Melinda Gates: With those big glasses, huh? 
This is in Africa, our very first trip, the first time either of us had ever been to Africa, in the fall of 1993. 
We were already engaged to be married. 
We married a few months later, and this was the trip where we really went to see the animals and to see the savanna. 
It was incredible. Bill had never taken that much time off from work. 
But what really touched us, actually, were the people, and the extreme poverty. 
We started asking ourselves questions. 
Does it have to be like this? 
And at the end of the trip, we went out to Zanzibar, and took some time to walk on the beach, which is something we had done a lot while we were dating. 
And we'd already been talking about during that time that the wealth that had come from Microsoft would be given back to society, but it was really on that beach walk that we started to talk about, well, what might we do and how might we go about it? 
CA: So, given that this vacation led to the creation of the world's biggest private foundation, it's pretty expensive as vacations go. (Laughter) MG: I guess so. We enjoyed it. 
CA: Which of you was the key instigator here, or was it symmetrical? 
Bill Gates: Well, I think we were excited that there'd be a phase of our life where we'd get to work together and figure out how to give this money back. 
At this stage, we were talking about the poorest, and could you have a big impact on them? 
Were there things that weren't being done? 
There was a lot we didn't know. 
Our naïveté is pretty incredible, when we look back on it. 
But we had a certain enthusiasm that that would be the phase, the post-Microsoft phase would be our philanthropy. 
MG: Which Bill always thought was going to come after he was 60, so he hasn't quite hit 60 yet, so some things change along the way. 
CA: So it started there, but it got accelerated. 
So that was' 93, and it was' 97, really, before the foundation itself started. 
MA: Yeah, in '97, we read an article about diarrheal diseases killing so many kids around the world, and we kept saying to ourselves, "" Well that can't be. 
In the U.S., you just go down to the drug store. "" And so we started gathering scientists and started learning about population, learning about vaccines, learning about what had worked and what had failed, and that's really when we got going, was in late 1998, 1999. 
CA: So, you've got a big pot of money and a world full of so many different issues. 
How on Earth do you decide what to focus on? 
BG: Well, we decided that we'd pick two causes, whatever the biggest inequity was globally, and there we looked at children dying, children not having enough nutrition to ever develop, and countries that were really stuck, because with that level of death, and parents would have so many kids that they'd get huge population growth, and that the kids were so sick that they really couldn't be educated and lift themselves up. 
So that was our global thing, and then in the U.S., both of us have had amazing educations, and we saw that as the way that the U.S. 
could live up to its promise of equal opportunity is by having a phenomenal education system, and the more we learned, the more we realized we're not really fulfilling that promise. 
And so we picked those two things, and everything the foundation does is focused there. 
CA: So, I asked each of you to pick an image that you like that illustrates your work, and Melinda, this is what you picked. 
What's this about? 
MG: So I, one of the things I love to do when I travel is to go out to the rural areas and talk to the women, whether it's Bangladesh, India, lots of countries in Africa, and I go in as a Western woman without a name. 
I don't tell them who I am. Pair of khakis. 
And I kept hearing from women, over and over and over, the more I traveled, "I want to be able to use this shot." 
I would be there to talk to them about childhood vaccines, and they would bring the conversation around to "But what about the shot I get?" 
which is an injection they were getting called Depo-Provera, which is a contraceptive. 
And I would come back and talk to global health experts, and they'd say, "" Oh no, contraceptives are stocked in in the developing world. "" Well, you had to dig deeper into the reports, and this is what the team came to me with, which is, to have the number one thing that women tell you in Africa they want to use stocked out more than 200 days a year explains why women were saying to me, "" I walked 10 kilometers without my husband knowing it, and I got to the clinic, and there was nothing there. "" And so condoms were stocked in in Africa 
because of all the AIDS work that the U.S. 
and others supported. 
But women will tell you over and over again, "" I can't negotiate a condom with my husband. 
I'm either suggesting he has AIDS or I have AIDS, and I need that tool because then I can space the births of my children, and I can feed them and have a chance of educating them. "" CA: Melinda, you're Roman Catholic, and you've often been embroiled in controversy over this issue, and on the abortion question, on both sides, really. 
How do you navigate that? 
MG: Yeah, so I think that's a really important point, which is, we had backed away from contraceptives as a global community. 
We knew that 210 million women were saying they wanted access to contraceptives, even the contraceptives we have here in the United States, and we weren't providing them because of the political controversy in our country, and to me that was just a crime, and I kept looking around trying to find the person that would get this back on the global stage, and I finally realized I just had to do it. 
And even though I'm Catholic, I believe in contraceptives just like most of the Catholic women in the United States who report using contraceptives, and I shouldn't let that controversy be the thing that holds us back. 
We used to have consensus in the United States around contraceptives, and so we got back to that global consensus, and actually raised 2.6 billion dollars around exactly this issue for women. 
(Applause) CA: Bill, this is your graph. What's this about? 
BG: Well, my graph has numbers on it. 
(Laughter) I really like this graph. 
This is the number of children who die before the age of five every year. 
And what you find is really a phenomenal success story which is not widely known, that we are making incredible progress. 
We go from 20 million not long after I was born to now we're down to about six million. 
So this is a story largely of vaccines. 
Smallpox was killing a couple million kids a year. 
That was eradicated, so that got down to zero. 
Measles was killing a couple million a year. 
That's down to a few hundred thousand. 
Anyway, this is a chart where you want to get that number to continue, and it's going to be possible, using the science of new vaccines, getting the vaccines out to kids. 
We can actually accelerate the progress. 
The last decade, that number has dropped faster than ever in history, and so I just love the fact that you can say, okay, if we can invent new vaccines, we can get them out there, use the very latest understanding of these things, and get the delivery right, that we can perform a miracle. 
CA: I mean, you do the math on this, and it works out, I think, literally to thousands of kids' lives saved every day compared to the prior year. 
It's not reported. 
An airliner with 200-plus deaths is a far, far bigger story than that. 
Does that drive you crazy? 
BG: Yeah, because it's a silent thing going on. 
It's a kid, one kid at a time. 
Ninety-eight percent of this has nothing to do with natural disasters, and yet, people's charity, when they see a natural disaster, are wonderful. 
It's incredible how people think, okay, that could be me, and the money flows. 
These causes have been a bit invisible. 
Now that the Millennium Development Goals and various things are getting out there, we are seeing some increased generosity, so the goal is to get this well below a million, which should be possible in our lifetime. 
CA: Maybe it needed someone who is turned on by numbers and graphs rather than just the big, sad face to get engaged. 
I mean, you've used it in your letter this year, you used basically this argument to say that aid, contrary to the current meme that aid is kind of worthless and broken, that actually it has been effective. 
BG: Yeah, well people can take, there is some aid that was well-meaning and didn't go well. 
There's some venture capital investments that were well-meaning and didn't go well. 
You shouldn't just say, okay, because of that, because we don't have a perfect record, this is a bad endeavor. 
You should look at, what was your goal? 
How are you trying to uplift nutrition and survival and literacy so these countries can take care of themselves, and say wow, this is going well, and be smarter. 
We can spend aid smarter. 
It is not all a panacea. 
We can do better than venture capital, I think, including big hits like this. 
CA: Traditional wisdom is that it's pretty hard for married couples to work together. 
How have you guys managed it? 
MG: Yeah, I've had a lot of women say to me, "" I really don't think I could work with my husband. 
That just wouldn't work out. "" You know, we enjoy it, and we don't — this foundation has been a coming to for both of us in its continuous learning journey, and we don't travel together as much for the foundation, actually, as we used to when Bill was working at Microsoft. 
We have more trips where we're traveling separately, but I always know when I come home, Bill's going to be interested in what I learned, whether it's about women or girls or something new about the vaccine delivery chain, or this person that is a great leader. 
He's going to listen and be really interested. 
And he knows when he comes home, even if it's to talk about the speech he did or the data or what he's learned, I'm really interested, and I think we have a really collaborative relationship. 
But we don't every minute together, that's for sure. 
(Laughter) CA: But now you are, and we're very happy that you are. 
Melinda, early on, you were basically largely running the show. 
Six years ago, I guess, Bill came on full time, so moved from Microsoft and became full time. 
That must have been hard, adjusting to that. No? 
MG: Yeah. I think actually, for the foundation employees, there was way more angst for them than there was for me about Bill coming. 
I was actually really excited. 
I mean, Bill made this decision even obviously before it got announced in 2006, and it was really his decision, but again, it was a beach vacation where we were walking on the beach and he was starting to think of this idea. 
And for me, the excitement of Bill putting his brain and his heart against these huge global problems, these inequities, to me that was exciting. 
Yes, the foundation employees had angst about that. 
(Applause) CA: That's cool. 
MG: But that went away within three months, once he was there. 
BG: Including some of the employees. 
MG: That's what I said, the employees, it went away for them three months after you were there. 
BG: No, I'm kidding. MG: Oh, you mean, the employees didn't go away. 
BG: A few of them did, but — (Laughter) CA: So what do you guys argue about? 
Sunday, 11 o'clock, you're away from work, what comes up? What's the argument? 
BG: Because we built this thing together from the beginning, it's this great partnership. 
I had that with Paul Allen in the early days of Microsoft. 
I had it with Steve Ballmer as Microsoft got bigger, and now Melinda, and in even stronger, equal ways, is the partner, so we talk a lot about which things should we give more to, which groups are working well? 
She's got a lot of insight. 
She'll sit down with the employees a lot. 
We'll take the different trips she described. 
So there's a lot of collaboration. 
I can't think of anything where one of us had a super strong opinion about one thing or another? 
CA: How about you, Melinda, though? Can you? (Laughter) You never know. 
MG: Well, here's the thing. 
We come at things from different angles, and I actually think that's really good. 
So Bill can look at the big data and say, "" I want to act based on these global statistics. "" For me, I come at it from intuition. 
I meet with lots of people on the ground and Bill's taught me to take that and read up to the global data and see if they match, and I think what I've taught him is to take that data and meet with people on the ground to understand, can you actually deliver that vaccine? 
Can you get a woman to accept those polio drops in her child's mouth? 
Because the delivery piece is every bit as important as the science. 
So I think it's been more a coming to over time towards each other's point of view, and quite frankly, the work is better because of it. 
CA: So, in vaccines and polio and so forth, you've had some amazing successes. 
What about failure, though? 
Can you talk about a failure and maybe what you've learned from it? 
BG: Yeah. Fortunately, we can afford a few failures, because we've certainly had them. 
We do a lot of drug work or vaccine work that you know you're going to have different failures. 
Like, we put out, one that got a lot of publicity was asking for a better condom. 
Well, we got hundreds of ideas. 
Maybe a few of those will work out. 
We were very naïve, certainly I was, about a drug for a disease in India, visceral leishmaniasis, that I thought, once I got this drug, we can just go wipe out the disease. 
Well, turns out it took an injection every day for 10 days. 
It took three more years to get it than we expected, and then there was no way it was going to get out there. 
Fortunately, we found out that if you go kill the sand flies, you probably can have success there, but we spent five years, you could say wasted five years, and about 60 million, on a path that turned out to have very modest benefit when we got there. 
CA: You're spending, like, a billion dollars a year in education, I think, something like that. 
Is anything, the story of what's gone right there is quite a long and complex one. 
Are there any failures that you can talk about? 
MG: Well, I would say a huge lesson for us out of the early work is we thought that these small schools were the answer, and small schools definitely help. 
They bring down the dropout rate. 
They have less violence and crime in those schools. 
But the thing that we learned from that work, and what turned out to be the fundamental key, is a great teacher in front of the classroom. 
If you don't have an effective teacher in the front of the classroom, I don't care how big or small the building is, you're not going to change the trajectory of whether that student will be ready for college. 
(Applause) CA: So Melinda, this is you and your eldest daughter, Jenn. 
And just taken about three weeks ago, I think, three or four weeks ago. Where was this? 
MG: So we went to Tanzania. 
Jenn's been to Tanzania. 
All our kids have been to Africa quite a bit, actually. 
And we did something very different, which is, we decided to go spend two nights and three days with a family. 
Anna and Sanare are the parents. 
They invited us to come and stay in their boma. 
Actually, the goats had been there, I think, living in that particular little hut on their little compound before we got there. 
And we stayed with their family, and we really, really learned what life is like in rural Tanzania. 
And the difference between just going and visiting for half a day or three quarters of a day versus staying overnight was profound, and so let me just give you one explanation of that. 
They had six children, and as I talked to Anna in the kitchen, we cooked for about five hours in the cooking hut that day, and as I talked to her, she had absolutely planned and spaced with her husband the births of their children. 
It was a very loving relationship. 
This was a Maasai warrior and his wife, but they had decided to get married, they clearly had respect and love in the relationship. 
Their children, their six children, the two in the middle were twins, 13, a boy, and a girl named Grace. 
And when we'd go out to chop wood and do all the things that Grace and her mother would do, Grace was not a child, she was an adolescent, but she wasn't an adult. 
She was very, very shy. 
So she kept wanting to talk to me and Jenn. 
We kept trying to engage her, but she was shy. 
And at night, though, when all the lights went out in rural Tanzania, and there was no moon that night, the first night, and no stars, and Jenn came out of our hut with her REI little headlamp on, Grace went immediately, and got the translator, came straight up to my Jenn and said, "" When you go home, can I have your headlamp so I can study at night? "" CA: Oh, wow. 
MG: And her dad had told me how afraid he was that unlike the son, who had passed his secondary exams, because of her chores, she'd not done so well and wasn't in the government school yet. 
He said, "" I don't know how I'm going to pay for her education. 
I can't pay for private school, and she may end up on this farm like my wife. "" So they know the difference that an education can make in a huge, profound way. 
CA: I mean, this is another pic of your other two kids, Rory and Phoebe, along with Paul Farmer. 
Bringing up three children when you're the world's richest family seems like a social experiment without much prior art. 
How have you managed it? 
What's been your approach? 
BG: Well, I'd say overall the kids get a great education, but you've got to make sure they have a sense of their own ability and what they're going to go and do, and our philosophy has been to be very clear with them — most of the money's going to the foundation — and help them find something they're excited about. 
We want to strike a balance where they have the freedom to do anything but not a lot of money showered on them so they could go out and do nothing. 
And so far, they're fairly diligent, excited to pick their own direction. 
CA: You've obviously guarded their privacy carefully for obvious reasons. 
I'm curious why you've given me permission to show this picture now here at TED. 
MG: Well, it's interesting. 
As they get older, they so know that our family belief is about responsibility, that we are in an unbelievable situation just to live in the United States and have a great education, and we have a responsibility to give back to the world. 
And so as they get older and we are teaching them — they have been to so many countries around the world — they're saying, we do want people to know that we believe in what you're doing, Mom and Dad, and it is okay to show us more. 
So we have their permission to show this picture, and I think Paul Farmer is probably going to put it eventually in some of his work. 
But they really care deeply about the mission of the foundation, too. 
CA: You've easily got enough money despite your vast contributions to the foundation to make them all billionaires. 
Is that your plan for them? 
BG: Nope. No. They won't have anything like that. 
They need to have a sense that their own work is meaningful and important. 
We read an article long, actually, before we got married, where Warren Buffett talked about that, and we're quite convinced that it wasn't a favor either to society or to the kids. 
CA: Well, speaking of Warren Buffett, something really amazing happened in 2006, when somehow your only real rival for richest person in America suddenly turned around and agreed to give 80 percent of his fortune to your foundation. 
How on Earth did that happen? 
I guess there's a long version and a short version of that. 
We've got time for the short version. 
BG: All right. Well, Warren was a close friend, and he was going to have his wife Suzie give it all away. 
Tragically, she passed away before he did, and he's big on delegation, and — (Laughter) — he said — CA: Tweet that. 
BG: If he's got somebody who is doing something well, and is willing to do it at no charge, maybe that's okay. But we were stunned. 
MG: Totally stunned. BG: We had never expected it, and it has been unbelievable. 
It's allowed us to increase our ambition in what the foundation can do quite dramatically. 
Half the resources we have come from Warren's mind-blowing generosity. 
CA: And I think you've pledged that by the time you're done, more than, or 95 percent of your wealth, will be given to the foundation. 
BG: Yes. 
CA: And since this relationship, it's amazing — (Applause) And recently, you and Warren have been going around trying to persuade other billionaires and successful people to pledge to give, what, more than half of their assets for philanthropy. 
The thing that's great is that we get together yearly and talk about, okay, do you hire staff, what do you give to them? 
We're not trying to homogenize it. 
I mean, the beauty of philanthropy is this mind-blowing diversity. 
People give to some things. 
We look and go, "" Wow. "" But that's great. 
That's the role of philanthropy is to pick different approaches, including even in one space, like education. 
We need more experimentation. 
But it's been wonderful, meeting those people, sharing their journey to philanthropy, how they involve their kids, where they're doing it differently, and it's been way more successful than we expected. 
Now it looks like it'll just keep growing in size in the years ahead. 
MG: And having people see that other people are making change with philanthropy, I mean, these are people who have created their own businesses, put their own ingenuity behind incredible ideas. 
If they put their ideas and their brain behind philanthropy, they can change the world. 
And they start to see others doing it, and saying, "Wow, I want to do that with my own money." 
To me, that's the piece that's incredible. 
CA: It seems to me, it's actually really hard for some people to figure out even how to remotely spend that much money on something else. 
There are probably some billionaires in the room and certainly some successful people. 
I'm curious, can you make the pitch? 
What's the pitch? 
BG: Well, it's the most fulfilling thing we've ever done, and you can't take it with you, and if it's not good for your kids, let's get together and brainstorm about what we can be done. 
The world is a far better place because of the philanthropists of the past, and the U.S. tradition here, which is the strongest, is the envy of the world. 
And part of the reason I'm so optimistic is because I do think philanthropy is going to grow and take some of these things government's not just good at working on and discovering and shine some light in the right direction. 
CA: The world's got this terrible inequality, growing inequality problem that seems structural. 
It does seem to me that if more of your peers took the approach that you two have made, it would make a dent both in that problem and certainly in the perception of that problem. 
Is that a fair comment? 
BG: Oh yeah. If you take from the most wealthy and give to the least wealthy, it's good. 
It tries to balance out, and that's just. 
MG: But you change systems. 
In the U.S., we're trying to change the education system so it's just for everybody and it works for all students. 
That, to me, really changes the inequality balance. 
BG: That's the most important. 
(Applause) CA: Well, I really think that most people here and many millions around the world are just in awe of the trajectory your lives have taken and the spectacular degree to which you have shaped the future. 
Thank you so much for coming to TED and for sharing with us and for all you do. 
BG: Thank you. MG: Thank you. 
(Applause) BG: Thank you. MG: Thank you very much. 
BG: All right, good job. (Applause) 

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

My name is Ursus Wehrli, and I would like to talk to you this morning about my project, Tidying Up Art. 
First of all — any questions so far? 
First of all, I have to say I'm not from around here. 
I'm from a completely different cultural area, maybe you noticed? 
I mean, I'm wearing a tie, first. And then secondly, I'm a little bit nervous because I'm speaking in a foreign language, and I want to apologize in advance, for any mistakes I might make. 
Because I'm from Switzerland, and I just don't hope you think this is Swiss German I'm speaking now here. This is just what it sounds like if we Swiss try to speak American. 
But don't worry — I don't have trouble with English, as such. 
I mean, it's not my problem, it's your language after all. 
(Laughter) I am fine. After this presentation here at TED, I can simply go back to Switzerland, and you have to go on talking like this all the time. (Laughter) 
So I've been asked by the organizers to read from my book. 
It's called "" Tidying Up Art "" and it's, as you can see, it's more or less a picture book. 
So the reading would be over very quickly. 
But since I'm here at TED, I decided to hold my talk here in a more modern way, in the spirit of TED here, and I managed to do some slides here for you. 
I'd like to show them around so we can just, you know — (Laughter) Actually, I managed to prepare for you some enlarged pictures — even better. 
So Tidying Up Art, I mean, I have to say, that's a relatively new term. 
You won't be familiar with it. 
I mean, it's a hobby of mine that I've been indulging in for the last few years, and it all started out with this picture of the American artist, Donald Baechler I had hanging at home. I had to look at it every day and after a while I just couldn't stand the mess anymore this guy was looking at all day long. 
Yeah, I kind of felt sorry for him. 
And it seemed to me even he felt really bad facing these unorganized red squares day after day. 
So I decided to give him a little support, and brought some order into neatly stacking the blocks on top of each other. 
(Laughter) Yeah. And I think he looks now less miserable. 
And it was great. With this experience, I started to look more closely at modern art. Then I realized how, you know, the world of modern art is particularly topsy-turvy. 
And I can show here a very good example. 
It's actually a simple one, but it's a good one to start with. 
It's a picture by Paul Klee. 
And we can see here very clearly, it's a confusion of color. 
(Laughter) Yeah. The artist doesn't really seem to know where to put the different colors. 
The various pictures here of the various elements of the picture — the whole thing is unstructured. 
We don't know, maybe Mr. Klee was probably in a hurry, I mean — (Laughter) — maybe he had to catch a plane, or something. 
We can see here he started out with orange, and then he already ran out of orange, and here we can see he decided to take a break for a square. 
And I would like to show you here my tidied up version of this picture. 
(Laughter) We can see now what was barely recognizable in the original: 17 red and orange squares are juxtaposed with just two green squares. 
Yeah, that's great. 
So I mean, that's just tidying up for beginners. 
I would like to show you here a picture which is a bit more advanced. 
(Laughter) What can you say? What a mess. 
I mean, you see, everything seems to have been scattered aimlessly around the space. 
If my room back home had looked like this, my mother would have grounded me for three days. 
So I'd like to — I wanted to reintroduce some structure into that picture. 
And that's really advanced tidying up. 
(Applause) Yeah, you're right. Sometimes people clap at this point, but that's actually more in Switzerland. 
(Laughter) We Swiss are famous for chocolate and cheese. Our trains run on time. 
We are only happy when things are in order. 
But to go on, here is a very good example to see. 
This is a picture by Joan Miro. 
And yeah, we can see the artist has drawn a few lines and shapes and dropped them any old way onto a yellow background. 
And yeah, it's the sort of thing you produce when you're doodling on the phone. 
(Laughter) And this is my — (Laughter) — you can see now the whole thing takes up far less space. 
It's more economical and also more efficient. 
With this method Mr. Miro could have saved canvas for another picture. 
But I can see in your faces that you're still a little bit skeptical. 
So that you can just appreciate how serious I am about all this, I brought along the patents, the specifications for some of these works, because I've had my working methods patented at the Eidgenössische Amt für Geistiges Eigentum in Bern, Switzerland. 
(Laughter) I'll just quote from the specification. 
"Laut den Kunstprüfer Dr. Albrecht —" It's not finished yet. 
"" Laut den Kunstprüfer Dr. Albrecht Götz von Ohlenhusen wird die Verfahrensweise rechtlich geschützt welche die Kunst durch spezifisch aufgeräumte Regelmässigkeiten des allgemeinen Formenschatzes neue Wirkungen zu erzielen möglich wird. "" Ja, well I could have translated that, but you would have been none the wiser. 
I'm not sure myself what it means but it sounds good anyway. 
I just realized it's important how one introduces new ideas to people, that's why these patents are sometimes necessary. 
I would like to do a short test with you. 
Everyone is sitting in quite an orderly fashion here this morning. 
So I would like to ask you all to raise your right hand. Yeah. 
The right hand is the one we write with, apart from the left-handers. 
And now, I'll count to three. I mean, it still looks very orderly to me. 
Now, I'll count to three, and on the count of three I'd like you all to shake hands with the person behind you. OK? 
One, two, three. 
(Laughter) You can see now, that's a good example: even behaving in an orderly, systematic way can sometimes lead to complete chaos. 
So we can also see that very clearly in this next painting. 
This is a painting by the artist, Niki de Saint Phalle. 
And I mean, in the original it's completely unclear to see what this tangle of colors and shapes is supposed to depict. 
But in the tidied up version, it's plain to see that it's a sunburnt woman playing volleyball. 
(Laughter) Yeah, it's a — this one here, that's much better. 
That's a picture by Keith Haring. 
(Laughter) I think it doesn't matter. 
So, I mean, this picture has not even got a proper title. 
It's called "" Untitled "" and I think that's appropriate. 
So, in the tidied-up version we have a sort of Keith Haring spare parts shop. 
(Laughter) This is Keith Haring looked at statistically. 
One can see here quite clearly, you can see we have 25 pale green elements, of which one is in the form of a circle. 
Or here, for example, we have 27 pink squares with only one pink curve. 
I mean, that's interesting. One could extend this sort of statistical analysis to cover all Mr. Haring's various works, in order to establish in which period the artist favored pale green circles or pink squares. 
And the artist himself could also benefit from this sort of listing procedure by using it to estimate how many pots of paint he's likely to need in the future. 
(Laughter) One can obviously also make combinations. 
For example, with the Keith Haring circles and Kandinsky's dots. 
You can add them to all the squares of Paul Klee. 
In the end, one has a list with which one then can arrange. 
Then you categorize it, then you file it, put that file in a filing cabinet, put it in your office and you can make a living doing it. 
(Laughter) Yeah, from my own experience. So I'm — (Laughter) Actually, I mean, here we have some artists that are a bit more structured. It's not too bad. 
This is Jasper Johns. We can see here he was practicing with his ruler. 
(Laughter) But I think it could still benefit from more discipline. 
And I think the whole thing adds up much better if you do it like this. 
(Laughter) And here, that's one of my favorites. 
Tidying up Rene Magritte — this is really fun. 
You know, there is a — (Laughter) I'm always being asked what inspired me to embark on all this. 
It goes back to a time when I was very often staying in hotels. 
So once I had the opportunity to stay in a ritzy, five-star hotel. 
And you know, there you had this little sign — I put this little sign outside the door every morning that read, "" Please tidy room. "" I don't know if you have them over here. 
So actually, my room there hasn't been tidied once daily, but three times a day. 
So after a while I decided to have a little fun, and before leaving the room each day I'd scatter a few things around the space. 
Like books, clothes, toothbrush, etc. And it was great. 
By the time I returned everything had always been neatly returned to its place. 
But then one morning, I hang the same little sign onto that picture by Vincent van Gogh. 
(Laughter) And you have to say this room hadn't been tidied up since 1888. 
And when I returned it looked like this. 
(Laughter) Yeah, at least it is now possible to do some vacuuming. (Laughter) 
OK, I mean, I can see there are always people that like reacting that one or another picture hasn't been properly tidied up. So we can make a short test with you. 
This is a picture by Rene Magritte, and I'd like you all to inwardly — like in your head, that is — to tidy that up. So it's possible that some of you would make it like this. 
(Laughter) Yeah? I would actually prefer to do it more this way. 
Some people would make apple pie out of it. 
But it's a very good example to see that the whole work was more of a handicraft endeavor that involved the very time-consuming job of cutting out the various elements and sticking them back in new arrangements. 
And it's not done, as many people imagine, with the computer, otherwise it would look like this. 
(Laughter) So now I've been able to tidy up pictures that I've wanted to tidy up for a long time. 
Here is a very good example. Take Jackson Pollock, for example. 
It's — oh, no, it's — that's a really hard one. 
But after a while, I just decided here to go all the way and put the paint back into the cans. 
(Applause) Or you could go into three-dimensional art. 
Here we have the fur cup by Meret Oppenheim. 
Here I just brought it back to its original state. 
(Laughter) But yeah, and it's great, you can even go, you know — Or we have this pointillist movement for those of you who are into art. 
The pointillist movement is that kind of paintings where everything is broken down into dots and pixels. 
And then I — this sort of thing is ideal for tidying up. 
(Laughter) So I once applied myself to the work of the inventor of that method, Georges Seurat, and I collected together all his dots. 
And now they're all in here. 
(Laughter) You can count them afterwards, if you like. 
You see, that's the wonderful thing about the tidy up art idea: it's new. So there is no existing tradition in it. 
There is no textbooks, I mean, not yet, anyway. 
I mean, it's "" the future we will create. "" (Laughter) But to round things up I would like to show you just one more. 
This is the village square by Pieter Bruegel. 
That's how it looks like when you send everyone home. 
(Laughter) Yeah, maybe you're asking yourselves where old Bruegel's people went? 
Of course, they're not gone. They're all here. 
(Laughter) I just piled them up. (Laughter) 
So I'm — yeah, actually I'm kind of finished at that moment. 
And for those who want to see more, I've got my book downstairs in the bookshop. 
And I'm happy to sign it for you with any name of any artist. 
(Laughter) But before leaving I would like to show you, I'm working right now on another — in a related field with my tidying up art method. I'm working in a related field. 
And I started to bring some order into some flags. 
Here — that's just my new proposal here for the Union Jack. 
(Laughter) And then maybe before I leave you... 
yeah, I think, after you have seen that I have to leave anyway. 
(Laughter) Yeah, that was a hard one. I couldn't find a way to tidy that up properly, so I just decided to make it a little bit more simpler. (Laughter) 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

This is my niece, Stella. 
She's just turned one and started to walk. 
And she's walking in that really cool way that one-year-olds do, a kind of teetering, my-body's-moving- too-fast-for-my-legs kind of way. 
It is absolutely gorgeous. 
And one of her favorite things to do at the moment is to stare at herself in the mirror. 
She absolutely loves her reflection. 
She giggles and squeals, and gives herself these big, wet kisses. 
It is beautiful. 
Apparently, all of her friends do this and my mom tells me that I used to do this, and it got me thinking: When did I stop doing this? 
When is it suddenly not okay to love the way that we look? 
Because apparently we don't. 
Ten thousand people every month google, "Am I ugly?" 
This is Faye. Faye is 13 and she lives in Denver. 
And like any teenager, she just wants to be liked and to fit in. 
It's Sunday night. 
She's getting ready for the week ahead at school. 
And she's slightly dreading it, and she's a bit confused because despite her mom telling her all the time that she's beautiful, every day at school, someone tells her that she's ugly. 
Because of the difference between what her mom tells her and what her friends at school, or her peers at school are telling her, she doesn't know who to believe. 
So, she takes a video of herself. She posts it to YouTube and she asks people to please leave a comment: "Am I pretty or am I ugly?" 
Well, so far, Faye has received over 13,000 comments. 
This is an average, healthy-looking teenage girl receiving this feedback at one of the most emotionally vulnerable times in her life. 
Thousands of people are posting videos like this, mostly teenage girls, reaching out in this way. 
But what's leading them to do this? 
Well, today's teenagers are rarely alone. 
They're under pressure to be online and available at all times, talking, messaging, liking, commenting, sharing, posting — it never ends. 
Never before have we been so connected, so continuously, so instantaneously, so young. 
And as one mom told me, it's like there's a party in their bedroom every night. 
There's simply no privacy. 
And the social pressures that go along with that are relentless. 
This always-on environment is training our kids to value themselves based on the number of likes they get and the types of comments that they receive. 
There's no separation between online and offline life. 
What's real or what isn't is really hard to tell the difference between. 
And it's also really hard to tell the difference between what's authentic and what's digitally manipulated. 
What's a highlight in someone's life versus what's normal in the context of everyday. 
And where are they looking to for inspiration? 
Well, you can see the kinds of images that are covering the newsfeeds of girls today. 
Size zero models still dominate our catwalks. 
Airbrushing is now routine. 
And trends like # thinspiration, # thighgap, # bikinibridge and # proana. 
For those who don't know, # proana means pro-anorexia. 
These trends are teamed with the stereotyping and flagrant objectification of women in today's popular culture. 
It is not hard to see what girls are benchmarking themselves against. 
But boys are not immune to this either. 
Aspiring to the chiseled jaw lines and ripped six packs of superhero-like sports stars and playboy music artists. 
But, what's the problem with all of this? 
Well, surely we want our kids to grow up as healthy, well balanced individuals. 
But in an image-obsessed culture, we are training our kids to spend more time and mental effort on their appearance at the expense of all of the other aspects of their identities. 
So, things like their relationships, the development of their physical abilities, and their studies and so on begin to suffer. 
Six out of 10 girls are now choosing not to do something because they don't think they look good enough. 
These are fundamental activities to their development as humans and as contributors to society and to the workforce. 
Thirty-one percent, nearly one in three teenagers, are withdrawing from classroom debate. They're failing to engage in classroom debate because they don't want to draw attention to the way that they look. 
One in five are not showing up to class at all on days when they don't feel good about it. 
And when it comes to exams, if you don't think you look good enough, specifically if you don't think you are thin enough, you will score a lower grade point average than your peers who are not concerned with this. 
And this is consistent across Finland, the U.S. 
and China, and is true regardless of how much you actually weigh. 
So to be super clear, we're talking about the way you think you look, not how you actually look. 
Low body confidence is undermining academic achievement. 
But it's also damaging health. 
Teenagers with low body confidence do less physical activity, eat less fruits and vegetables, partake in more unhealthy weight control practices that can lead to eating disorders. 
They have lower self-esteem. 
They're more easily influenced by people around them and they're at greater risk of depression. 
And we think it's for all of these reasons that they take more risks with things like alcohol and drug use; crash dieting; cosmetic surgery; unprotected, earlier sex; and self-harm. 
The pursuit of the perfect body is putting pressure on our healthcare systems and costing our governments billions of dollars every year. 
And we don't grow out of it. 
Women who think they're overweight — again, regardless of whether they are or are not — have higher rates of absenteeism. 
Seventeen percent of women would not show up to a job interview on a day when they weren't feeling confident about the way that they look. 
Have a think about what this is doing to our economy. 
If we could overcome this, what that opportunity looks like. 
Unlocking this potential is in the interest of every single one of us. 
But how do we do that? 
Well, talking, on its own, only gets you so far. 
It's not enough by itself. 
If you actually want to make a difference, you have to do something. 
And we've learned there are three key ways: The first is we have to educate for body confidence. 
We have to help our teenagers develop strategies to overcome image-related pressures and build their self-esteem. 
Now, the good news is that there are many programs out there available to do this. 
The bad news is that most of them don't work. 
I was shocked to learn that many well-meaning programs are inadvertently actually making the situation worse. 
So we need to make damn sure that the programs that our kids are receiving are not only having a positive impact, but having a lasting impact as well. 
And the research shows that the best programs address six key areas: The first is the influence of family, friends and relationships. 
The second is media and celebrity culture, then how to handle teasing and bullying, the way we compete and compare with one another based on looks, talking about appearance — some people call this "" body talk "" or "" fat talk "" — and finally, the foundations of respecting and looking after yourself. 
These six things are crucial starting points for anyone serious about delivering body-confidence education that works. 
An education is critical, but tackling this problem is going to require each and everyone of us to step up and be better role models for the women and girls in our own lives. 
Challenging the status quo of how women are seen and talked about in our own circles. 
It is not okay that we judge the contribution of our politicians by their haircuts or the size of their breasts, or to infer that the determination or the success of an Olympian is down to her not being a looker. 
We need to start judging people by what they do, not what they look like. 
We can all start by taking responsibility for the types of pictures and comments that we post on our own social networks. 
We can compliment people based on their effort and their actions and not on their appearance. 
And let me ask you, when was the last time that you kissed a mirror? 
Ultimately, we need to work together as communities, as governments and as businesses to really change this culture of ours so that our kids grow up valuing their whole selves, valuing individuality, diversity, inclusion. 
We need to put the people that are making a real difference on our pedestals, making a difference in the real world. 
Giving them the airtime, because only then will we create a different world. 
A world where our kids are free to become the best versions of themselves, where the way they think they look never holds them back from being who they are or achieving what they want in life. 
Think about what this might mean for someone in your life. 
Who have you got in mind? 
Is it your wife? 
Your sister? 
Your daughter? 
Your niece? 
Your friend? It could just be the woman a couple of seats away from you today. 
What would it mean for her if she were freed from that voice of her inner critic, nagging her to have longer legs, thinner thighs, smaller stomach, shorter feet? 
What could it mean for her if we overcame this and unlocked her potential in that way? 
Right now, our culture's obsession with image is holding us all back. 
But let's show our kids the truth. 
Let's show them that the way you look is just one part of your identity and that the truth is we love them for who they are and what they do and how they make us feel. 
Let's each and every one of us change the way we talk and compare ourselves to other people. 
And let's work together as communities, from grassroots to governments, so that the happy little one-year-olds of today become the confident changemakers of tomorrow. 
Let's do this. 
(Applause) 

You know, cadaver dissection is the traditional way of learning human anatomy. 
For students, it's quite an experience, but for a school, it could be very difficult or expensive to maintain. 
So we learned the majority of anatomic classes taught, they do not have a cadaver dissection lab. 
Maybe those reasons, or depending on where you are, cadavers may not be easily available. 
So to address this, we developed with a Dr. Brown in Stanford: virtual dissection table. 
So we call this Anatomage Table. 
So with this Anatomage Table, students can experience the dissection without a human cadaver. 
And the table form is important, and since it's touch-interactive, just like the way they do dissections in the lab, or furthermore just the way a surgeon operates on a patient you can literally interact with your table. 
Our digital body is one-to-one life size, so this is exactly the way students will see the real anatomy. 
I'm going to do some demonstrations. 
As you can see, I use my finger to interact with my digital body. 
I'm going to do some cuts. 
I can cut any way I want to, so I cut right here. 
Then it's going to show inside. 
And I can change my cut to see different parts. 
Maybe I can cut there, see the brain, and I can change my cut. 
You can see some internal organs. 
So we call this the slicer mode. 
OK, I'm going to do another cut. 
Right there. 
This shows a lot of internal structures. 
So if I want to see the back side, I can flip and see from behind. 
Like this. 
So if these images are uncomfortable to you or disturbing to you, that means we did the right job. 
So our doctors said these are eye candies. 
So instead of just butchering the body, I'd like to do more clinically meaningful dissections. 
What I'm going to do is I'm going to peel off all the skin, muscles and bones, just to see a few internal organs. 
Right here. 
Let's say I'm going to cut the liver right here. 
OK. 
Let's say I'm interested in looking at the heart. 
I'm going to do some surgery here. 
I'm going to cut some veins, arteries. 
Oops!... 
You don't want to hear "" oops "" in real surgery. 
(Laughter) But fortunately, our digital man has "" undo. "" (Laughter) Okay. 
All right then. 
Let me zoom in. 
I'm going to make a cut right there. 
And then you can see the inside of the heart. 
You can see the atrium and the ventricles, how blood flows to our arteries and veins. 
Just like this, students can isolate anybody and dissect any way you want to. 
It doesn't have to be always dissection. 
Since it's digital, we can do reverse dissection. 
So let me show you, I'm going to start with the skeletal structure, and I can add a few internal organs. 
Yep. 
Maybe I can add quickly this way. 
And I can build muscles gradually, just like that. 
We can see tendons and muscles. 
Wish I could build my muscle this fast. 
(Laughter) And this is another way to learn anatomy. 
Another thing I can show you is, more often than not, doctors get to meet patients in X-ray form. 
So, Anatomage Table shows exactly how the anatomy will appear in X-ray. 
You can also interact with your X-ray, and also if you want, you can compare with how anatomy would appear in X-ray, too. 
So when you are done, just bring back the body and then it's ready for another session. 
It looks like our table also can transform gender, too. 
It's a female now. 
So this is Anatomage Table. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

The shocking police crackdown on protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown, underscored the extent to which advanced military weapons and equipment, designed for the battlefield, are making their way to small-town police departments across the United States. 
Although much tougher to observe, this same thing is happening with surveillance equipment. 
NSA-style mass surveillance is enabling local police departments to gather vast quantities of sensitive information about each and every one of us in a way that was never previously possible. 
Location information can be very sensitive. 
If you drive your car around the United States, it can reveal if you go to a therapist, attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, if you go to church or if you don't go to church. 
And when that information about you is combined with the same information about everyone else, the government can gain a detailed portrait of how private citizens interact. 
This information used to be private. 
Thanks to modern technology, the government knows far too much about what happens behind closed doors. 
And local police departments make decisions about who they think you are based on this information. 
One of the key technologies driving mass location tracking is the innocuous-sounding Automatic License Plate Reader. 
If you haven't seen one, it's probably because you didn't know what to look for — they're everywhere. 
Mounted on roads or on police cars, Automatic License Plate Readers capture images of every passing car and convert the license plate into machine-readable text so that they can be checked against hot lists of cars potentially wanted for wrongdoing. 
But more than that, increasingly, local police departments are keeping records not just of people wanted for wrongdoing, but of every plate that passes them by, resulting in the collection of mass quantities of data about where Americans have gone. 
Did you know this was happening? 
When Mike Katz-Lacabe asked his local police department for information about the plate reader data they had on him, this is what they got: in addition to the date, time and location, the police department had photographs that captured where he was going and often who he was with. 
The second photo from the top is a picture of Mike and his two daughters getting out of their car in their own driveway. 
The government has hundreds of photos like this about Mike going about his daily life. 
And if you drive a car in the United States, I would bet money that they have photographs like this of you going about your daily life. 
Mike hasn't done anything wrong. 
Why is it okay that the government is keeping all of this information? 
The reason it's happening is because, as the cost of storing this data has plummeted, the police departments simply hang on to it, just in case it could be useful someday. 
The issue is not just that one police department is gathering this information in isolation or even that multiple police departments are doing it. 
At the same time, the federal government is collecting all of these individual pots of data, and pooling them together into one vast database with hundreds of millions of hits, showing where Americans have traveled. 
This document from the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which is one of the agencies primarily interested in this, is one of several that reveal the existence of this database. 
Meanwhile, in New York City, the NYPD has driven police cars equipped with license plate readers past mosques in order to figure out who is attending. 
The uses and abuses of this technology aren't limited to the United States. 
In the U.K., the police department put 80-year-old John Kat on a plate reader watch list after he had attended dozens of lawful political demonstrations where he liked to sit on a bench and sketch the attendees. 
License plate readers aren't the only mass location tracking technology available to law enforcement agents today. 
Through a technique known as a cell tower dump, law enforcement agents can uncover who was using one or more cell towers at a particular time, a technique which has been known to reveal the location of tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people. 
Also, using a device known as a StingRay, law enforcement agents can send tracking signals inside people's houses to identify the cell phones located there. 
And if they don't know which house to target, they've been known to drive this technology around through whole neighborhoods. 
Just as the police in Ferguson possess high-tech military weapons and equipment, so too do police departments across the United States possess high-tech surveillance gear. 
Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there. 
The question is, what should we do about this? 
I think this poses a serious civil liberties threat. 
History has shown that once the police have massive quantities of data, tracking the movements of innocent people, it gets abused, maybe for blackmail, maybe for political advantage, or maybe for simple voyeurism. 
Fortunately, there are steps we can take. 
Local police departments can be governed by the city councils, which can pass laws requiring the police to dispose of the data about innocent people while allowing the legitimate uses of the technology to go forward. 
Thank you. 
(Applause). 

When I was five, I thought I was a genius, but my professors have beaten that idea out of my head long since. "" (Laughter) "And now I know I am completely competent." 
Now, do you really want me to say now, tell you, "Really, I swear I don't kick children." 
Might fail, kid. Don't make a lot of money at that, kid. 
But then, you were born. "" (Laughter) (Applause) Do you really want to use your family, do you really ever want to look at your spouse and your kid, and see your jailers? 

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

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

So this right here is the tiny village of Elle, close to Lista. 
It's right at the southernmost tip of Norway. 
And on January 2 this year, an elderly guy who lives in the village, he went out to see what was cast ashore during a recent storm. 
And on a patch of grass right next to the water's edge, he found a wetsuit. 
It was grey and black, and he thought it looked cheap. 
Out of each leg of the wetsuit there were sticking two white bones. 
It was clearly the remains of a human being. 
And usually, in Norway, dead people are identified quickly. 
So the police started searching through missing reports from the local area, national missing reports, and looked for accidents with a possible connection. 
They found nothing. 
So they ran a DNA profile, and they started searching internationally through Interpol. 
Nothing. 
This was a person that nobody seemed to be missing. 
It was an invisible life heading for a nameless grave. 
But then, after a month, the police in Norway got a message from the police in the Netherlands. 
A couple of months earlier, they had found a body, in an identical wetsuit, and they had no idea who this person was. 
But the police in the Netherlands managed to trace the wetsuit by an RFID chip that was sewn in the suit. 
So they were then able to tell that both wetsuits were bought by the same customer at the same time, October 7, 2014, in the French city of Calais by the English Channel. 
But this was all they were able to figure out. 
The customer paid cash. 
There was no surveillance footage from the shop. 
So it became a cold case. 
We heard this story, and it triggered me and my colleague, photographer Tomm Christiansen, and we of course had the obvious question: who were these people? 
At the time, I'd barely heard about Calais, but it took about two or three seconds to figure out Calais is basically known for two things. 
It's the spot in continental Europe closest to Britain, and a lot of migrants and refugees are staying in this camp and are trying desperately to cross over to Britain. 
And right there was a plausible theory about the identity of the two people, and the police made this theory as well. 
Because if you or I or anybody else with a firm connection to Europe goes missing off the coast of France, people would just know. 
Your friends or family would report you missing, the police would come search for you, the media would know, and there would be pictures of you on lampposts. 
It's difficult to disappear without a trace. 
But if you just fled the war in Syria, and your family, if you have any family left, don't necessarily know where you are, and you're staying here illegally amongst thousands of others who come and go every day. 
Well, if you disappear one day, nobody will notice. 
The police won't come search for you because nobody knows you're gone. 
And this is what happened to Shadi Omar Kataf and Mouaz Al Balkhi from Syria. 
Me and Tomm went to Calais for the first time in April this year, and after three months of investigation, we were able to tell the story about how these two young men fled the war in Syria, ended up stuck in Calais, bought wetsuits and drowned in what seems to have been an attempt to swim across the English Channel in order to reach England. 
It is a story about the fact that everybody has a name, everybody has a story, everybody is someone. 
But it is also a story about what it's like to be a refugee in Europe today. 
So this is where we started our search. 
This is in Calais. 
Right now, between 3,500 and 5,000 people are living here under horrible conditions. 
It has been dubbed the worst refugee camp in Europe. 
Limited access to food, limited access to water, limited access to health care. 
Disease and infections are widespread. 
And they're all stuck here because they're trying to get to England in order to claim asylum. 
And they do that by hiding in the back of trucks headed for the ferry, or the Eurotunnel, or they sneak inside the tunnel terminal at night to try to hide on the trains. 
Most want to go to Britain because they know the language, and so they figure it would be easier to restart their lives from there. 
They want to work, they want to study, they want to be able to continue their lives. 
A lot of these people are highly educated and skilled workers. 
If you go to Calais and talk to refugees, you'll meet lawyers, politicians, engineers, graphic designers, farmers, soldiers. 
You've got the whole spectrum. 
But who all of these people are usually gets lost in the way we talk about refugees and migrants, because we usually do that in statistics. 
So you have 60 million refugees globally. 
About half a million have made the crossing over the Mediterranean into Europe so far this year, and roughly 4,000 are staying in Calais. 
But these are numbers, and the numbers don't say anything about who these people are, where they came from, or why they're here. 
And first, I want to tell you about one of them. 
This is 22-year-old Mouaz Al Balkhi from Syria. 
We first heard about him after being in Calais the first time looking for answers to the theory of the two dead bodies. 
And after a while, we heard this story about a Syrian man who was living in Bradford in England, and had been desperately searching for his nephew Mouaz for months. 
And it turned out the last time anybody had heard anything from Mouaz was October 7, 2014. 
That was the same date the wetsuits were bought. 
So we flew over there and we met the uncle and we did DNA samples of him, and later on got additional DNA samples from Mouaz's closest relative who now lives in Jordan. 
The analysis concluded the body who was found in a wetsuit on a beach in the Netherlands was actually Mouaz Al Balkhi. 
And while we were doing all this investigation, we got to know Mouaz's story. 
He was born in the Syrian capital of Damascus in 1991. 
He was raised in a middle class family, and his father in the middle there is a chemical engineer who spent 11 years in prison for belonging to the political opposition in Syria. 
While his father was in prison, Mouaz took responsibility and he cared for his three sisters. 
They said he was that kind of guy. 
Mouaz studied to become an electrical engineer at the University of Damascus. 
So a couple of years into the Syrian war, the family fled Damascus and went to the neighboring country, Jordan. 
Their father had problems finding work in Jordan, and Mouaz could not continue his studies, so he figured, "" OK, the best thing I can do to help my family would be to go somewhere where I can finish my studies and find work. "" So he goes to Turkey. 
In Turkey, he's not accepted at a university, and once he had left Jordan as a refugee, he was not allowed to reenter. 
So then he decides to head for the UK, where his uncle lives. 
He makes it into Algeria, walks into Libya, pays a people smuggler to help him with the crossing into Italy by boat, and from there on he heads to Dunkirk, the city right next to Calais by the English Channel. 
We know he made at least 12 failed attempts to cross the English Channel by hiding in a truck. 
But at some point, he must have given up all hope. 
The last night we know he was alive, he spent at a cheap hotel close to the train station in Dunkirk. 
We found his name in the records, and he seems to have stayed there alone. 
The day after, he went into Calais, entered a sports shop a couple of minutes before 8 o'clock in the evening, along with Shadi Kataf. 
They both bought wetsuits, and the woman in the shop was the last person we know of to have seen them alive. 
We have tried to figure out where Shadi met Mouaz, but we weren't able to do that. 
But they do have a similar story. 
We first heard about Shadi after a cousin of his, living in Germany, had read an Arabic translation of the story made of Mouaz on Facebook. 
So we got in touch with him. 
Shadi, a couple of years older than Mouaz, was also raised in Damascus. 
He was a working kind of guy. 
He ran a tire repair shop and later worked in a printing company. 
He lived with his extended family, but their house got bombed early in the war. 
So the family fled to an area of Damascus known as Camp Yarmouk. 
Yarmouk is being described as the worst place to live on planet Earth. 
They've been bombed by the military, they've been besieged, they've been stormed by ISIS and they've been cut off from supplies for years. 
There was a UN official who visited last year, and he said, "" They ate all the grass so there was no grass left. "" Out of a population of 150,000, only 18,000 are believed to still be left in Yarmouk. 
Shadi and his sisters got out. 
The parents are still stuck inside. 
So Shadi and one of his sisters, they fled to Libya. 
This was after the fall of Gaddafi, but before Libya turned into full-blown civil war. 
And in this last remaining sort of stability in Libya, Shadi took up scuba diving, and he seemed to spend most of his time underwater. 
He fell completely in love with the ocean, so when he finally decided that he could no longer be in Libya, late August 2014, he hoped to find work as a diver when he reached Italy. 
Reality was not that easy. 
We don't know much about his travels because he had a hard time communicating with his family, but we do know that he struggled. 
And by the end of September, he was living on the streets somewhere in France. 
On October 7, he calls his cousin in Belgium, and explains his situation. 
He said, "" I'm in Calais. I need you to come get my backpack and my laptop. 
I can't afford to pay the people smugglers to help me with the crossing to Britain, but I will go buy a wetsuit and I will swim. "" His cousin, of course, tried to warn him not to, but Shadi's battery on the phone went flat, and his phone was never switched on again. 
What was left of Shadi was found nearly three months later, 800 kilometers away in a wetsuit on a beach in Norway. 
He's still waiting for his funeral in Norway, and none of his family will be able to attend. 
Many may think that the story about Shadi and Mouaz is a story about death, but I don't agree. 
To me, this is a story about two questions that I think we all share: what is a better life, and what am I willing to do to achieve it? 
And to me, and probably a lot of you, a better life would mean being able to do more of what we think of as meaningful, whether that be spending more time with your family and friends, travel to an exotic place, or just getting money to buy that cool new device or a pair of new sneakers. 
And this is all within our reach pretty easily. 
But if you are fleeing a war zone, the answers to those two questions are dramatically different. 
A better life is a life in safety. 
It's a life in dignity. 
A better life means not having your house bombed, not fearing being kidnapped. 
It means being able to send your children to school, go to university, or just find work to be able to provide for yourself and the ones you love. 
A better life would be a future of some possibilities compared to nearly none, and that's a strong motivation. 
And I have no trouble imagining that after spending weeks or even months as a second-grade citizen, living on the streets or in a horrible makeshift camp with a stupid, racist name like "" The Jungle, "" most of us would be willing to do just about anything. 
If I could ask Shadi and Mouaz the second they stepped into the freezing waters of the English Channel, they would probably say, "" This is worth the risk, "" because they could no longer see any other option. 
And that's desperation, but that's the reality of living as a refugee in Western Europe in 2015. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Anders. 
This is Tomm Christiansen, who took most of the pictures you have seen and they've done reporting together. 
Tomm, you two have been back to Calais recently. 
This was the third trip. 
It was after the publication of the article. 
What has changed? What have you seen there? 
Tomm Christiansen: The first time we were in Calais, it was about 1,500 refugees there. 
They had a difficult time, but they were positive, they had hope. 
The last time, the camp has grown, maybe four or five thousand people. 
It seemed more permanent, NGOs have arrived, a small school has opened. 
But the thing is that the refugees have stayed for a longer time, and the French government has managed to seal off the borders better, so now The Jungle is growing, along with the despair and hopelessness among the refugees. 
BG: Are you planning to go back? And continue the reporting? 
TC: Yes. 
BG: Anders, I'm a former journalist, and to me, it's amazing that in the current climate of slashing budgets and publishers in crisis, Dagbladet has consented so many resources for this story, which tells a lot about newspapers taking the responsibility, but how did you sell it to your editors? 
Anders Fjellberg: It wasn't easy at first, because we weren't able to know what we actually could figure out. 
As soon as it became clear that we actually could be able to identify who the first one was, we basically got the message that we could do whatever we wanted, just travel wherever you need to go, do whatever you need to do, just get this done. 
BG: That's an editor taking responsibility. 
The story, by the way, has been translated and published across several European countries, and certainly will continue to do. 
And we want to read the updates from you. Thank you Anders. Thank you Tomm. 
(Applause) 

So let me ask for a show of hands. 
How many people here are over the age of 48? 
Well, there do seem to be a few. 
Well, congratulations, because if you look at this particular slide of U.S. life expectancy, you are now in excess of the average life span of somebody who was born in 1900. 
But look what happened in the course of that century. 
If you follow that curve, you'll see that it starts way down there. 
There's that dip there for the 1918 flu. 
And here we are at 2010, average life expectancy of a child born today, age 79, and we are not done yet. 
Now, that's the good news. 
But there's still a lot of work to do. 
So, for instance, if you ask, how many diseases do we now know the exact molecular basis? 
Turns out it's about 4,000, which is pretty amazing, because most of those molecular discoveries have just happened in the last little while. 
It's exciting to see that in terms of what we've learned, but how many of those 4,000 diseases now have treatments available? 
Only about 250. 
So we have this huge challenge, this huge gap. 
You would think this wouldn't be too hard, that we would simply have the ability to take this fundamental information that we're learning about how it is that basic biology teaches us about the causes of disease and build a bridge across this yawning gap between what we've learned about basic science and its application, a bridge that would look maybe something like this, where you'd have to put together a nice shiny way to get from one side to the other. 
Well, wouldn't it be nice if it was that easy? 
Unfortunately, it's not. 
In reality, trying to go from fundamental knowledge to its application is more like this. 
There are no shiny bridges. 
You sort of place your bets. 
Maybe you've got a swimmer and a rowboat and a sailboat and a tugboat and you set them off on their way, and the rains come and the lightning flashes, and oh my gosh, there are sharks in the water and the swimmer gets into trouble, and, uh oh, the swimmer drowned and the sailboat capsized, and that tugboat, well, it hit the rocks, and maybe if you're lucky, somebody gets across. 
Well, what does this really look like? 
Well, what is it to make a therapeutic, anyway? 
What's a drug? A drug is made up of a small molecule of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and a few other atoms all cobbled together in a shape, and it's those shapes that determine whether, in fact, that particular drug is going to hit its target. 
Is it going to land where it's supposed to? 
So look at this picture here — a lot of shapes dancing around for you. 
Now what you need to do, if you're trying to develop a new treatment for autism or Alzheimer's disease or cancer is to find the right shape in that mix that will ultimately provide benefit and will be safe. 
And when you look at what happens to that pipeline, you start out maybe with thousands, tens of thousands of compounds. 
You weed down through various steps that cause many of these to fail. 
Ultimately, maybe you can run a clinical trial with four or five of these, and if all goes well, 14 years after you started, you will get one approval. 
And it will cost you upwards of a billion dollars for that one success. 
So we have to look at this pipeline the way an engineer would, and say, "" How can we do better? "" And that's the main theme of what I want to say to you this morning. 
How can we make this go faster? 
How can we make it more successful? 
Well, let me tell you about a few examples where this has actually worked. 
One that has just happened in the last few months is the successful approval of a drug for cystic fibrosis. 
But it's taken a long time to get there. 
Cystic fibrosis had its molecular cause discovered in 1989 by my group working with another group in Toronto, discovering what the mutation was in a particular gene on chromosome 7. 
That picture you see there? 
Here it is. That's the same kid. 
That's Danny Bessette, 23 years later, because this is the year, and it's also the year where Danny got married, where we have, for the first time, the approval by the FDA of a drug that precisely targets the defect in cystic fibrosis based upon all this molecular understanding. 
That's the good news. 
The bad news is, this drug doesn't actually treat all cases of cystic fibrosis, and it won't work for Danny, and we're still waiting for that next generation to help him. 
But it took 23 years to get this far. That's too long. 
How do we go faster? 
Well, one way to go faster is to take advantage of technology, and a very important technology that we depend on for all of this is the human genome, the ability to be able to look at a chromosome, to unzip it, to pull out all the DNA, and to be able to then read out the letters in that DNA code, the A's, C's, G's and T's that are our instruction book and the instruction book for all living things, and the cost of doing this, which used to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, has in the course of the last 10 years 
fallen faster than Moore's Law, down to the point where it is less than 10,000 dollars today to have your genome sequenced, or mine, and we're headed for the $1,000 genome fairly soon. 
Well, that's exciting. 
How does that play out in terms of application to a disease? 
I want to tell you about another disorder. 
This one is a disorder which is quite rare. 
It's called Hutchinson-Gilford progeria, and it is the most dramatic form of premature aging. 
Only about one in every four million kids has this disease, and in a simple way, what happens is, because of a mutation in a particular gene, a protein is made that's toxic to the cell and it causes these individuals to age at about seven times the normal rate. 
Let me show you a video of what that does to the cell. 
The normal cell, if you looked at it under the microscope, would have a nucleus sitting in the middle of the cell, which is nice and round and smooth in its boundaries and it looks kind of like that. 
A progeria cell, on the other hand, because of this toxic protein called progerin, has these lumps and bumps in it. 
So what we would like to do after discovering this back in 2003 is to come up with a way to try to correct that. 
Well again, by knowing something about the molecular pathways, it was possible to pick one of those many, many compounds that might have been useful and try it out. 
In an experiment done in cell culture and shown here in a cartoon, if you take that particular compound and you add it to that cell that has progeria, and you watch to see what happened, in just 72 hours, that cell becomes, for all purposes that we can determine, almost like a normal cell. 
Well that was exciting, but would it actually work in a real human being? 
This has led, in the space of only four years from the time the gene was discovered to the start of a clinical trial, to a test of that very compound. 
And the kids that you see here all volunteered to be part of this, 28 of them, and you can see as soon as the picture comes up that they are in fact a remarkable group of young people all afflicted by this disease, all looking quite similar to each other. 
And instead of telling you more about it, I'm going to invite one of them, Sam Berns from Boston, who's here this morning, to come up on the stage and tell us about his experience as a child affected with progeria. 
Sam is 15 years old. His parents, Scott Berns and Leslie Gordon, both physicians, are here with us this morning as well. 
Sam, please have a seat. 
(Applause) So Sam, why don't you tell these folks what it's like being affected with this condition called progeria? 
Sam Burns: Well, progeria limits me in some ways. 
I cannot play sports or do physical activities, but I have been able to take interest in things that progeria, luckily, does not limit. 
But when there is something that I really do want to do that progeria gets in the way of, like marching band or umpiring, we always find a way to do it, and that just shows that progeria isn't in control of my life. 
(Applause) Francis Collins: So what would you like to say to researchers here in the auditorium and others listening to this? 
What would you say to them both about research on progeria and maybe about other conditions as well? 
SB: Well, research on progeria has come so far in less than 15 years, and that just shows the drive that researchers can have to get this far, and it really means a lot to myself and other kids with progeria, and it shows that if that drive exists, anybody can cure any disease, and hopefully progeria can be cured in the near future, and so we can eliminate those 4,000 diseases that Francis was talking about. 
FC: Excellent. So Sam took the day off from school today to be here, and he is — (Applause) — He is, by the way, a straight-A + student in the ninth grade in his school in Boston. 
Please join me in thanking and welcoming Sam. 
SB: Thank you very much. FC: Well done. Well done, buddy. 
(Applause) So I just want to say a couple more things about that particular story, and then try to generalize how could we have stories of success all over the place for these diseases, as Sam says, these 4,000 that are waiting for answers. 
You might have noticed that the drug that is now in clinical trial for progeria is not a drug that was designed for that. 
It's such a rare disease, it would be hard for a company to justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars to generate a drug. 
This is a drug that was developed for cancer. 
Turned out, it didn't work very well for cancer, but it has exactly the right properties, the right shape, to work for progeria, and that's what's happened. 
Wouldn't it be great if we could do that more systematically? 
Could we, in fact, encourage all the companies that are out there that have drugs in their freezers that are known to be safe in humans but have never actually succeeded in terms of being effective for the treatments they were tried for? 
Now we're learning about all these new molecular pathways — some of those could be repositioned or repurposed, or whatever word you want to use, for new applications, basically teaching old drugs new tricks. 
That could be a phenomenal, valuable activity. 
We have many discussions now between NIH and companies about doing this that are looking very promising. 
And you could expect quite a lot to come from this. 
There are quite a number of success stories one can point to about how this has led to major advances. 
The first drug for HIV / AIDS was not developed for HIV / AIDS. 
It was developed for cancer. It was AZT. 
It didn't work very well for cancer, but became the first successful antiretroviral, and you can see from the table there are others as well. 
So how do we actually make that a more generalizable effort? 
Well, we have to come up with a partnership between academia, government, the private sector, and patient organizations to make that so. 
At NIH, we have started this new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. 
It just started last December, and this is one of its goals. 
Let me tell you another thing we could do. 
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to a test a drug to see if it's effective and safe without having to put patients at risk, because that first time you're never quite sure? 
How do we know, for instance, whether drugs are safe before we give them to people? We test them on animals. 
And it's not all that reliable, and it's costly, and it's time-consuming. 
Suppose we could do this instead on human cells. 
You probably know, if you've been paying attention to some of the science literature that you can now take a skin cell and encourage it to become a liver cell or a heart cell or a kidney cell or a brain cell for any of us. 
So what if you used those cells as your test for whether a drug is going to work and whether it's going to be safe? 
Here you see a picture of a lung on a chip. 
This is something created by the Wyss Institute in Boston, and what they have done here, if we can run the little video, is to take cells from an individual, turn them into the kinds of cells that are present in the lung, and determine what would happen if you added to this various drug compounds to see if they are toxic or safe. 
You can see this chip even breathes. 
It has an air channel. It has a blood channel. 
And it has cells in between that allow you to see what happens when you add a compound. 
Are those cells happy or not? 
You can do this same kind of chip technology for kidneys, for hearts, for muscles, all the places where you want to see whether a drug is going to be a problem, for the liver. 
And ultimately, because you can do this for the individual, we could even see this moving to the point where the ability to develop and test medicines will be you on a chip, what we're trying to say here is the individualizing of the process of developing drugs and testing their safety. 
So let me sum up. 
We are in a remarkable moment here. 
For me, at NIH now for almost 20 years, there has never been a time where there was more excitement about the potential that lies in front of us. 
We have made all these discoveries pouring out of laboratories across the world. 
What do we need to capitalize on this? First of all, we need resources. 
This is research that's high-risk, sometimes high-cost. 
The payoff is enormous, both in terms of health and in terms of economic growth. We need to support that. 
Second, we need new kinds of partnerships between academia and government and the private sector and patient organizations, just like the one I've been describing here, in terms of the way in which we could go after repurposing new compounds. 
And third, and maybe most important, we need talent. 
We need the best and the brightest from many different disciplines to come and join this effort — all ages, all different groups — because this is the time, folks. 
This is the 21st-century biology that you've been waiting for, and we have the chance to take that and turn it into something which will, in fact, knock out disease. That's my goal. 
I hope that's your goal. 
I think it'll be the goal of the poets and the muppets and the surfers and the bankers and all the other people who join this stage and think about what we're trying to do here and why it matters. 
It matters for now. It matters as soon as possible. 
If you don't believe me, just ask Sam. 
Thank you all very much. 
(Applause) 

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

I don't know why, but I'm continually amazed to think that two and a half billion of us around the world are connected to each other through the Internet and that at any point in time more than 30 percent of the world's population can go online to learn, to create and to share. 
And the amount of time each of us is spending doing all of this is also continuing to go grow. 
A recent study showed that the young generation alone is spending over eight hours a day online. 
As the parent of a nine-year-old girl, that number seems awfully low. 
(Laughter) But just as the Internet has opened up the world for each and every one of us, it has also opened up each and every one of us to the world. 
And increasingly, the price we're being asked to pay for all of this connectedness is our privacy. 
Today, what many of us would love to believe is that the Internet is a private place; it's not. 
And with every click of the mouse and every touch of the screen, we are like Hansel and Gretel leaving breadcrumbs of our personal information everywhere we travel through the digital woods. 
We are leaving our birthdays, our places of residence, our interests and preferences, our relationships, our financial histories, and on and on it goes. 
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not for one minute suggesting that sharing data is a bad thing. 
In fact, when I know the data that's being shared and I'm asked explicitly for my consent, I want some sites to understand my habits. 
It helps them suggest books for me to read or movies for my family to watch or friends for us to connect with. 
But when I don't know and when I haven't been asked, that's when the problem arises. 
It's a phenomenon on the Internet today called behavioral tracking, and it is very big business. 
In fact, there's an entire industry formed around following us through the digital woods and compiling a profile on each of us. 
And when all of that data is held, they can do almost whatever they want with it. 
This is an area today that has very few regulations and even fewer rules. 
Except for some of the recent announcements here in the United States and in Europe, it's an area of consumer protection that's almost entirely naked. 
So let me expose this lurking industry a little bit further. 
The visualization you see forming behind me is called Collusion and it's an experimental browser add-on that you can install in your Firefox browser that helps you see where your Web data is going and who's tracking you. 
The red dots you see up there are sites that are behavioral tracking that I have not navigated to, but are following me. 
The blue dots are the sites that I've actually navigated directly to. 
And the gray dots are sites that are also tracking me, but I have no idea who they are. 
All of them are connected, as you can see, to form a picture of me on the Web. 
And this is my profile. 
So let me go from an example to something very specific and personal. 
I installed Collusion in my own laptop two weeks ago and I let it follow me around for what was a pretty typical day. 
Now like most of you, I actually start my day going online and checking email. 
I then go to a news site, look for some headlines. 
And in this particular case I happened to like one of them on the merits of music literacy in schools and I shared it over a social network. 
Our daughter then joined us at the breakfast table, and I asked her, "" Is there an emphasis on music literacy in your school? "" And she, of course, naturally as a nine-year-old, looked at me and said quizzically, "" What's literacy? "" So I sent her online, of course, to look it up. 
Now let me stop here. 
We are not even two bites into breakfast and there are already nearly 25 sites that are tracking me. 
I have navigated to a total of four. 
So let me fast-forward through the rest of my day. 
I go to work, I check email, I log onto a few more social sites, I blog, I check more news reports, I share some of those news reports, I go look at some videos, pretty typical day — in this case, actually fairly pedantic — and at the end of the day, as my day winds down, look at my profile. 
The red dots have exploded. 
The gray dots have grown exponentially. 
All in all, there's over 150 sites that are now tracking my personal information, most all of them without my consent. 
I look at this picture and it freaks me out. 
This is nothing. I am being stalked across the Web. 
And why is this happening? 
Pretty simple — it's huge business. 
The revenue of the top handful of companies in this space is over 39 billion dollars today. 
And as adults, we're certainly not alone. 
At the same time I installed my own Collusion profile, I installed one for my daughter. 
And on one single Saturday morning, over two hours on the Internet, here's her Collusion profile. 
This is a nine-year-old girl navigating to principally children's sites. 
I move from this, from freaked out to enraged. 
This is no longer me being a tech pioneer or a privacy advocate; this is me being a parent. 
Imagine in the physical world if somebody followed our children around with a camera and a notebook and recorded their every movement. 
I can tell you, there isn't a person in this room that would sit idly by. 
We'd take action. It may not be good action, but we would take action. 
(Laughter) We can't sit idly by here either. 
This is happening today. 
Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn't be the price we accept for just getting on the Internet. 
Our voices matter and our actions matter even more. 
Today we've launched Collusion. 
You can download it, install it in Firefox, to see who is tracking you across the Web and following you through the digital woods. 
Going forward, all of our voices need to be heard. 
Because what we don't know can actually hurt us. 
Because the memory of the Internet is forever. 
We are being watched. 
It's now time for us to watch the watchers. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I love video games. 
I'm also slightly in awe of them. 
I'm in awe of their power in terms of imagination, in terms of technology, in terms of concept. 
But I think, above all, I'm in awe at their power to motivate, to compel us, to transfix us, like really nothing else we've ever invented has quite done before. 
And I think that we can learn some pretty amazing things by looking at how we do this. 
And in particular, I think we can learn things about learning. 
Now the video games industry is far and away the fastest growing of all modern media. 
From about 10 billion in 1990, it's worth 50 billion dollars globally today, and it shows no sign of slowing down. 
In four years' time, it's estimated it'll be worth over 80 billion dollars. 
That's about three times the recorded music industry. 
This is pretty stunning, but I don't think it's the most telling statistic of all. 
The thing that really amazes me is that, today, people spend about eight billion real dollars a year buying virtual items that only exist inside video games. 
This is a screenshot from the virtual game world, Entropia Universe. 
Earlier this year, a virtual asteroid in it sold for 330,000 real dollars. 
And this is a Titan class ship in the space game, EVE Online. 
And this virtual object takes 200 real people about 56 days of real time to build, plus countless thousands of hours of effort before that. 
And yet, many of these get built. 
At the other end of the scale, the game Farmville that you may well have heard of, has 70 million players around the world and most of these players are playing it almost every day. 
This may all sound really quite alarming to some people, an index of something worrying or wrong in society. 
But we're here for the good news, and the good news is that I think we can explore why this very real human effort, this very intense generation of value, is occurring. 
And by answering that question, I think we can take something extremely powerful away. 
And I think the most interesting way to think about how all this is going on is in terms of rewards. 
And specifically, it's in terms of the very intense emotional rewards that playing games offers to people both individually and collectively. 
Now if we look at what's going on in someone's head when they are being engaged, two quite different processes are occurring. 
On the one hand, there's the wanting processes. 
This is a bit like ambition and drive — I'm going to do that. I'm going to work hard. 
On the other hand, there's the liking processes, fun and affection and delight and an enormous flying beast with an orc on the back. 
It's a really great image. It's pretty cool. 
It's from the game World of Warcraft with more than 10 million players globally, one of whom is me, another of whom is my wife. 
And this kind of a world, this vast flying beast you can ride around, shows why games are so very good at doing both the wanting and the liking. 
Because it's very powerful. It's pretty awesome. 
It gives you great powers. 
Your ambition is satisfied, but it's very beautiful. 
It's a very great pleasure to fly around. 
And so these combine to form a very intense emotional engagement. 
But this isn't the really interesting stuff. 
The really interesting stuff about virtuality is what you can measure with it. 
Because what you can measure in virtuality is everything. 
Every single thing that every single person who's ever played in a game has ever done can be measured. 
The biggest games in the world today are measuring more than one billion points of data about their players, about what everybody does — far more detail than you'd ever get from any website. 
And this allows something very special to happen in games. 
It's something called the reward schedule. 
And by this, I mean looking at what millions upon millions of people have done and carefully calibrating the rate, the nature, the type, the intensity of rewards in games to keep them engaged over staggering amounts of time and effort. 
Now, to try and explain this in sort of real terms, I want to talk about a kind of task that might fall to you in so many games. 
Go and get a certain amount of a certain little game-y item. 
Let's say, for the sake of argument, my mission is to get 15 pies and I can get 15 pies by killing these cute, little monsters. 
Simple game quest. 
Now you can think about this, if you like, as a problem about boxes. 
I've got to keep opening boxes. 
I don't know what's inside them until I open them. 
And I go around opening box after box until I've got 15 pies. 
Now, if you take a game like Warcraft, you can think about it, if you like, as a great box-opening effort. 
The game's just trying to get people to open about a million boxes, getting better and better stuff in them. 
This sounds immensely boring but games are able to make this process incredibly compelling. 
And the way they do this is through a combination of probability and data. 
Let's think about probability. 
If we want to engage someone in the process of opening boxes to try and find pies, we want to make sure it's neither too easy, nor too difficult, to find a pie. 
So what do you do? Well, you look at a million people — no, 100 million people, 100 million box openers — and you work out, if you make the pie rate about 25 percent — that's neither too frustrating, nor too easy. 
It keeps people engaged. 
But of course, that's not all you do — there's 15 pies. 
Now, I could make a game called Piecraft, where all you had to do was get a million pies or a thousand pies. 
That would be very boring. 
Fifteen is a pretty optimal number. 
You find that — you know, between five and 20 is about the right number for keeping people going. 
But we don't just have pies in the boxes. 
There's 100 percent up here. 
And what we do is make sure that every time a box is opened, there's something in it, some little reward that keeps people progressing and engaged. 
In most adventure games, it's a little bit in-game currency, a little bit experience. 
But we don't just do that either. 
We also say there's going to be loads of other items of varying qualities and levels of excitement. 
There's going to be a 10 percent chance you get a pretty good item. 
There's going to be a 0.1 percent chance you get an absolutely awesome item. 
And each of these rewards is carefully calibrated to the item. 
And also, we say, "Well, how many monsters? Should I have the entire world full of a billion monsters?" 
No, we want one or two monsters on the screen at any one time. 
So I'm drawn on. It's not too easy, not too difficult. 
So all this is very powerful. 
But we're in virtuality. These aren't real boxes. 
So we can do some rather amazing things. 
We notice, looking at all these people opening boxes, that when people get to about 13 out of 15 pies, their perception shifts, they start to get a bit bored, a bit testy. 
They're not rational about probability. 
They think this game is unfair. 
It's not giving me my last two pies. I'm going to give up. 
If they're real boxes, there's not much we can do, but in a game we can just say, "" Right, well. 
When you get to 13 pies, you've got 75 percent chance of getting a pie now. "" Keep you engaged. Look at what people do — adjust the world to match their expectation. 
Our games don't always do this. 
And one thing they certainly do at the moment is if you got a 0.1 percent awesome item, they make very sure another one doesn't appear for a certain length of time to keep the value, to keep it special. 
And the point is really that we evolved to be satisfied by the world in particular ways. 
Over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, we evolved to find certain things stimulating, and as very intelligent, civilized beings, we're enormously stimulated by problem solving and learning. 
But now, we can reverse engineer that and build worlds that expressly tick our evolutionary boxes. 
So what does all this mean in practice? 
Well, I've come up with seven things that, I think, show how you can take these lessons from games and use them outside of games. 
The first one is very simple: experience bars measuring progress — something that's been talked about brilliantly by people like Jesse Schell earlier this year. 
It's already been done at the University of Indiana in the States, among other places. 
It's the simple idea that instead of grading people incrementally in little bits and pieces, you give them one profile character avatar which is constantly progressing in tiny, tiny, tiny little increments which they feel are their own. 
And everything comes towards that, and they watch it creeping up, and they own that as it goes along. 
Second, multiple long and short-term aims — 5,000 pies, boring, 15 pies, interesting. 
So, you give people lots and lots of different tasks. 
You say, it's about doing 10 of these questions, but another task is turning up to 20 classes on time, but another task is collaborating with other people, another task is showing you're working five times, another task is hitting this particular target. 
You break things down into these calibrated slices that people can choose and do in parallel to keep them engaged and that you can use to point them towards individually beneficial activities. 
Third, you reward effort. 
It's your 100 percent factor. Games are brilliant at this. 
Every time you do something, you get credit; you get a credit for trying. 
You don't punish failure. You reward every little bit of effort — a little bit of gold, a little bit of credit. You've done 20 questions — tick. 
It all feeds in as minute reinforcement. 
Fourth, feedback. 
This is absolutely crucial, and virtuality is dazzling at delivering this. 
If you look at some of the most intractable problems in the world today that we've been hearing amazing things about, it's very, very hard for people to learn if they cannot link consequences to actions. 
Pollution, global warming, these things — the consequences are distant in time and space. 
It's very hard to learn, to feel a lesson. 
But if you can model things for people, if you can give things to people that they can manipulate and play with and where the feedback comes, then they can learn a lesson, they can see, they can move on, they can understand. 
And fifth, the element of uncertainty. 
Now this is the neurological goldmine, if you like, because a known reward excites people, but what really gets them going is the uncertain reward, the reward pitched at the right level of uncertainty, that they didn't quite know whether they were going to get it or not. 
The 25 percent. This lights the brain up. 
And if you think about using this in testing, in just introducing control elements of randomness in all forms of testing and training, you can transform the levels of people's engagement by tapping into this very powerful evolutionary mechanism. 
When we don't quite predict something perfectly, we get really excited about it. 
We just want to go back and find out more. 
As you probably know, the neurotransmitter associated with learning is called dopamine. 
It's associated with reward-seeking behavior. 
And something very exciting is just beginning to happen in places like the University of Bristol in the U.K., where we are beginning to be able to model mathematically dopamine levels in the brain. 
And what this means is we can predict learning, we can predict enhanced engagement, these windows, these windows of time, in which the learning is taking place at an enhanced level. 
And two things really flow from this. 
The first has to do with memory, that we can find these moments. 
When someone is more likely to remember, we can give them a nugget in a window. 
And the second thing is confidence, that we can see how game-playing and reward structures make people braver, make them more willing to take risks, more willing to take on difficulty, harder to discourage. 
This can all seem very sinister. 
But you know, sort of "" our brains have been manipulated; we're all addicts. "" The word "" addiction "" is thrown around. 
There are real concerns there. 
But the biggest neurological turn-on for people is other people. 
This is what really excites us. 
In reward terms, it's not money; it's not being given cash — that's nice — it's doing stuff with our peers, watching us, collaborating with us. 
And I want to tell you a quick story about 1999 — a video game called EverQuest. 
And in this video game, there were two really big dragons, and you had to team up to kill them — 42 people, up to 42 to kill these big dragons. 
That's a problem because they dropped two or three decent items. 
So players addressed this problem by spontaneously coming up with a system to motivate each other, fairly and transparently. 
What happened was, they paid each other a virtual currency they called "" dragon kill points. "" And every time you turned up to go on a mission, you got paid in dragon kill points. 
They tracked these on a separate website. 
So they tracked their own private currency, and then players could bid afterwards for cool items they wanted — all organized by the players themselves. 
Now the staggering system, not just that this worked in EverQuest, but that today, a decade on, every single video game in the world with this kind of task uses a version of this system — tens of millions of people. 
And the success rate is at close to 100 percent. 
This is a player-developed, self-enforcing, voluntary currency, and it's incredibly sophisticated player behavior. 
And I just want to end by suggesting a few ways in which these principles could fan out into the world. 
Let's start with business. 
I mean, we're beginning to see some of the big problems around something like business are recycling and energy conservation. 
We're beginning to see the emergence of wonderful technologies like real-time energy meters. 
And I just look at this, and I think, yes, we could take that so much further by allowing people to set targets by setting calibrated targets, by using elements of uncertainty, by using these multiple targets, by using a grand, underlying reward and incentive system, by setting people up to collaborate in terms of groups, in terms of streets to collaborate and compete, to use these very sophisticated group and motivational mechanics we see. 
In terms of education, perhaps most obviously of all, we can transform how we engage people. 
We can offer people the grand continuity of experience and personal investment. 
We can break things down into highly calibrated small tasks. 
We can use calculated randomness. 
We can reward effort consistently as everything fields together. 
And we can use the kind of group behaviors that we see evolving when people are at play together, these really quite unprecedentedly complex cooperative mechanisms. 
Government, well, one thing that comes to mind is the U.S. government, among others, is literally starting to pay people to lose weight. 
So we're seeing financial reward being used to tackle the great issue of obesity. 
But again, those rewards could be calibrated so precisely if we were able to use the vast expertise of gaming systems to just jack up that appeal, to take the data, to take the observations, of millions of human hours and plow that feedback into increasing engagement. 
And in the end, it's this word, "" engagement, "" that I want to leave you with. 
It's about how individual engagement can be transformed by the psychological and the neurological lessons we can learn from watching people that are playing games. 
But it's also about collective engagement and about the unprecedented laboratory for observing what makes people tick and work and play and engage on a grand scale in games. 
And if we can look at these things and learn from them and see how to turn them outwards, then I really think we have something quite revolutionary on our hands. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

I'm speaking to you about what I call the "" mesh. "" It's essentially a fundamental shift in our relationship with stuff, with the things in our lives. 
And it's starting to look at — not always and not for everything — but in certain moments of time, access to certain kinds of goods and service will trump ownership of them. 
And so it's the pursuit of better things, easily shared. 
And we come from a long tradition of sharing. 
We've shared transportation. 
We've shared wine and food and other sorts of fabulous experiences in coffee bars in Amsterdam. 
We've also shared other sorts of entertainment — sports arenas, public parks, concert halls, libraries, universities. 
All these things are share-platforms, but sharing ultimately starts and ends with what I refer to as the "" mother of all share-platforms. "" And as I think about the mesh and I think about, well, what's driving it, how come it's happening now, I think there's a number of vectors that I want to give you as background. 
One is the recession — that the recession has caused us to rethink our relationship with the things in our lives relative to the value — so starting to align the value with the true cost. 
Secondly, population growth and density into cities. 
More people, smaller spaces, less stuff. 
Climate change: we're trying to reduce the stress in our personal lives and in our communities and on the planet. 
Also, there's been this recent distrust of big brands, global big brands, in a bunch of different industries, and that's created an opening. 
Research is showing here, in the States, and in Canada and Western Europe, that most of us are much more open to local companies, or brands that maybe we haven't heard of. 
Whereas before, we went with the big brands that we were sure we trusted. 
And last is that we're more connected now to more people on the planet than ever before — except for if you're sitting next to someone. 
(Laughter) The other thing that's worth considering is that we've made a huge investment over decades and decades, and tens of billions of dollars have gone into this investment that now is our inheritance. 
It's a physical infrastructure that allows us to get from point A to point B and move things that way. 
It's also — Web and mobile allow us to be connected and create all kinds of platforms and systems, and the investment of those technologies and that infrastructure is really our inheritance. 
It allows us to engage in really new and interesting ways. 
And so for me, a mesh company, the "" classic "" mesh company, brings together these three things: our ability to connect to each other — most of us are walking around with these mobile devices that are GPS-enabled and Web-enabled — allows us to find each other and find things in time and space. 
And third is that physical things are readable on a map — so restaurants, a variety of venues, but also with GPS and other technology like RFID and it continues to expand beyond that, we can also track things that are moving, like a car, a taxicab, a transit system, a box that's moving through time and space. 
And so that sets up for making access to get goods and services more convenient and less costly in many cases than owning them. 
For example, I want to use Zipcar. 
How many people here have experienced car-sharing or bike-sharing? 
Wow, that's great. Okay, thank you. 
Basically Zipcar is the largest car-sharing company in the world. 
They did not invent car-sharing. 
Car-sharing was actually invented in Europe. 
One of the founders went to Switzerland, saw it implemented someplace, said, "" Wow, that looks really cool. 
I think we can do that in Cambridge, "" brought it to Cambridge and they started — two women — Robin Chase being the other person who started it. 
Zipcar got some really important things right. 
First, they really understood that a brand is a voice and a product is a souvenir. 
And so they were very clever about the way that they packaged car-sharing. 
They made it sexy. They made it fresh. 
They made it aspirational. 
If you were a member of the club, when you're a member of a club, you're a Zipster. 
The cars they picked didn't look like ex-cop cars that were hollowed out or something. 
They picked these sexy cars. 
They targeted to universities. 
They made sure that the demographic for who they were targeting and the car was all matching. 
It was a very nice experience, and the cars were clean and reliable, and it all worked. 
And so from a branding perspective, they got a lot right. 
But they understood fundamentally that they are not a car company. 
They understand that they are an information company. 
Because when we buy a car we go to the dealer once, we have an interaction, and we're chow — usually as quickly as possible. 
But when you're sharing a car and you have a car-share service, you might use an E.V. to commute, you get a truck because you're doing a home project. 
When you pick your aunt up at the airport, you get a sedan. 
And you're going to the mountains to ski, you get different accessories put on the car for doing that sort of thing. 
Meanwhile, these guys are sitting back, collecting all sorts of data about our behavior and how we interact with the service. 
And so it's not only an option for them, but I believe it's an imperative for Zipcar and other mesh companies to actually just wow us, to be like a concierge service. 
Because we give them so much information, and they are entitled to really see how it is that we're moving. 
They're in really good shape to anticipate what we're going to want next. 
And so what percent of the day do you think the average person uses a car? 
What percentage of the time? 
Any guesses? 
Those are really very good. 
I was imagining it was like 20 percent when I first started. 
The number across the U.S. and Western Europe is eight percent. 
And so basically even if you think it's 10 percent, 90 percent of the time, something that costs us a lot of money — personally, and also we organize our cities around it and all sorts of things — 90 percent of the time it's sitting around. 
So for this reason, I think one of the other themes with the mesh is essentially that, if we squeeze hard on things that we've thrown away, there's a lot of value in those things. 
What set up with Zipcar — Zipcar started in 2000. 
In the last year, 2010, two car companies started, one that's in the U.K. called WhipCar, and the other one, RelayRides, in the U.S. 
They're both peer-to-peer car-sharing services, because the two things that really work for car-sharing is, one, the car has to be available, and two, it's within one or two blocks of where you stand. 
Well the car that's one or two blocks from your home or your office is probably your neighbor's car, and it's probably also available. 
So people have created this business. 
Zipcar started a decade earlier, in 2000. 
It took them six years to get 1,000 cars in service. 
WhipCar, which started April of last year, it took them six months to get 1,000 cars in the service. 
So, really interesting. 
People are making anywhere between 200 and 700 dollars a month letting their neighbors use their car when they're not using it. 
So it's like vacation rentals for cars. 
Since I'm here — and I hope some people in the audience are in the car business — (Laughter) — I'm thinking that, coming from the technology side of things — we saw cable-ready TVs and WiFi-ready Notebooks — it would be really great if, any minute now, you guys could start rolling share-ready cars off. 
Because it just creates more flexibility. 
It allows us as owners to have other options. 
And I think we're going there anyway. 
The opportunity and the challenge with mesh businesses — and those are businesses like Zipcar or Netflix that are full mesh businesses, or other ones where you have a lot of the car companies, car manufacturers, who are beginning to offer their own car-share services as well as a second flanker brand, or as really a test, I think — is to make sharing irresistible. 
We have experiences in our lives, certainly, when sharing has been irresistible. 
It's just, how do we make that recurrent and scale it? 
We know also, because we're connected in social networks, that it's easy to create delight in one little place. 
It's contagious because we're all connected to each other. 
So if I have a terrific experience and I tweet it, or I tell five people standing next to me, news travels. 
The opposite, as we know, is also true, often more true. 
So here we have LudoTruck, which is in L.A., doing the things that gourmet food trucks do, and they've gathered quite a following. 
In general, and maybe, again, it's because I'm a tech entrepreneur, I look at things as platforms. 
Platforms are invitations. 
So creating Craigslist or iTunes and the iPhone developer network, there are all these networks — Facebook as well. 
These platforms invite all sorts of developers and all sorts of people to come with their ideas and their opportunity to create and target an application for a particular audience. 
And honestly, it's full of surprises. 
Because I don't think any of us in this room could have predicted the sorts of applications that have happened at Facebook, around Facebook, for example, two years ago, when Mark announced that they were going to go with a platform. 
So in this way, I think that cities are platforms, and certainly Detroit is a platform. 
The invitation of bringing makers and artists and entrepreneurs — it really helps stimulate this fiery creativity and helps a city to thrive. 
It's inviting participation, and cities have, historically, invited all sorts of participation. 
Now we're saying that there's other options as well. 
So, for example, city departments can open up transit data. 
Google has made available transit data API. 
And so there's about seven or eight cities already in the U.S. 
that have provided the transit data, and different developers are building applications. 
So I was having a coffee in Portland, and half-of-a-latte in and the little board in the cafe all of a sudden starts showing me that the next bus is coming in three minutes and the train is coming in 16 minutes. 
And so it's reliable, real data that's right in my face, where I am, so I can finish the latte. 
There's this fabulous opportunity we have across the U.S. now: about 21 percent of vacant commercial and industrial space. 
That space is not vital. 
The areas around it lack vitality and vibrancy and engagement. 
There's this thing — how many people here have heard of pop-up stores or pop-up shops? 
Oh, great. So I'm a big fan of this. 
And this is a very mesh-y thing. 
Essentially, there are all sorts of restaurants in Oakland, near where I live. 
There's a pop-up general store every three weeks, and they do a fantastic job of making a very social event happening for foodies. 
Super fun, and it happens in a very transitional neighborhood. 
Subsequent to that, after it's been going for about a year now, they actually started to lease and create and extend. 
An area that was edgy-artsy is now starting to become much cooler and engage a lot more people. 
So this is an example. 
The Crafty Fox is this woman who's into crafts, and she does these pop-up crafts fairs around London. 
But these sorts of things are happening in many different environments. 
From my perspective, one of the things pop-up stores do is create perishability and urgency. 
It creates two of the favorite words of any businessperson: sold out. 
And the opportunity to really focus trust and attention is a wonderful thing. 
So a lot of what we see in the mesh, and a lot of what we have in the platform that we built allows us to define, refine and scale. 
It allows us to test things as an entrepreneur, to go to market, to be in conversation with people, listen, refine something and go back. 
It's very cost-effective, and it's very mesh-y. 
The infrastructure enables that. 
In closing, and as we're moving towards the end, I just also want to encourage — and I'm willing to share my failures as well, though not from the stage. 
(Laughter) I would just like to say that one of the big things, when we look at waste and when we look at ways that we can really be generous and contribute to each other, but also move to create a better economic situation and a better environmental situation, is by sharing failures. 
And one quick example is Velib, in 2007, came forward in Paris with a very bold proposition, a very big bike-sharing service. 
They made a lot of mistakes. 
They had some number of big successes. 
But they were very transparent, or they had to be, in the way that they exposed what worked and didn't work. 
And so B.C. in Barcelona and B-cycle and Boris Bikes in London — no one has had to repeat the version 1.0 screw-ups and expensive learning exercises that happened in Paris. 
So the opportunity when we're connected is also to share failures and successes. 
We're at the very beginning of something that, what we're seeing and the way that mesh companies are coming forward, is inviting, it's engaging, but it's very early. 
I have a website — it's a directory — and it started with about 1,200 companies, and in the last two-and-a-half months it's up to about 3,300 companies. 
And it grows on a very regular daily basis. 
But it's very much at the beginning. 
So I just want to welcome all of you onto the ride. 
And thank you very much. 

You may be wondering why a marine biologist from Oceana would come here today to talk to you about world hunger. 
I'm here today because saving the oceans is more than an ecological desire. 
It's more than a thing we're doing because we want to create jobs for fishermen or preserve fishermen's jobs. 
It's more than an economic pursuit. 
Saving the oceans can feed the world. 
Let me show you how. 
As you know, there are already more than a billion hungry people on this planet. 
We're expecting that problem to get worse as world population grows to nine billion or 10 billion by midcentury, and we can expect to have greater pressure on our food resources. 
And this is a big concern, especially considering where we are now. 
Now we know that our arable land per capita is already on the decline in both developed and developing countries. 
We know that we're headed for climate change, which is going to change rainfall patterns, making some areas drier, as you can see in orange, and others wetter, in blue, causing droughts in our breadbaskets, in places like the Midwest and Central Europe, and floods in others. 
It's going to make it harder for the land to help us solve the hunger problem. 
And that's why the oceans need to be their most abundant, so that the oceans can provide us as much food as possible. 
And that's something the oceans have been doing for us for a long time. 
As far back as we can go, we've seen an increase in the amount of food we've been able to harvest from our oceans. 
It just seemed like it was continuing to increase, until about 1980, when we started to see a decline. 
You've heard of peak oil. 
Maybe this is peak fish. 
I hope not. I'm going to come back to that. 
But you can see about an 18-percent decline in the amount of fish we've gotten in our world catch since 1980. 
And this is a big problem. It's continuing. 
This red line is continuing to go down. 
But we know how to turn it around, and that's what I'm going to talk about today. 
We know how to turn that curve back upwards. 
This doesn't have to be peak fish. 
If we do a few simple things in targeted places, we can bring our fisheries back and use them to feed people. 
First we want to know where the fish are, so let's look where the fish are. 
It turns out the fish, conveniently, are located for the most part in our coastal areas of the countries, in coastal zones, and these are areas that national jurisdictions have control over, and they can manage their fisheries in these coastal areas. 
Coastal countries tend to have jurisdictions that go out about 200 nautical miles, in areas that are called exclusive economic zones, and this is a good thing that they can control their fisheries in these areas, because the high seas, which are the darker areas on this map, the high seas, it's a lot harder to control things, because it has to be done internationally. 
You get into international agreements, and if any of you are tracking the climate change agreement, you know this can be a very slow, frustrating, tedious process. 
And so controlling things nationally is a great thing to be able to do. 
How many fish are actually in these coastal areas compared to the high seas? 
Well, you can see here about seven times as many fish in the coastal areas than there are in the high seas, so this is a perfect place for us to be focusing, because we can actually get a lot done. 
We can restore a lot of our fisheries if we focus in these coastal areas. 
But how many of these countries do we have to work in? 
There's something like 80 coastal countries. 
Do we have to fix fisheries management in all of those countries? 
So we asked ourselves, how many countries do we need to focus on, keeping in mind that the European Union conveniently manages its fisheries through a common fisheries policy? 
So if we got good fisheries management in the European Union and, say, nine other countries, how much of our fisheries would we be covering? 
Turns out, European Union plus nine countries covers about two thirds of the world's fish catch. 
If we took it up to 24 countries plus the European Union, we would up to 90 percent, almost all of the world's fish catch. 
So we think we can work in a limited number of places to make the fisheries come back. 
But what do we have to do in these places? 
Well, based on our work in the United States and elsewhere, we know that there are three key things we have to do to bring fisheries back, and they are: We need to set quotas or limits on how much we take; we need to reduce bycatch, which is the accidental catching and killing of fish that we're not targeting, and it's very wasteful; and three, we need to protect habitats, the nursery areas, the spawning areas that these fish need to grow and reproduce successfully so that they can rebuild their populations. 
If we do those three things, we know the fisheries will come back. 
How do we know? 
We know because we've seen it happening in a lot of different places. 
This is a slide that shows the herring population in Norway that was crashing since the 1950s. 
It was coming down, and when Norway set limits, or quotas, on its fishery, what happens? 
The fishery comes back. 
This is another example, also happens to be from Norway, of the Norwegian Arctic cod. 
Same deal. The fishery is crashing. 
They set limits on discards. 
Discards are these fish they weren't targeting and they get thrown overboard wastefully. 
When they set the discard limit, the fishery came back. 
And it's not just in Norway. 
We've seen this happening in countries all around the world, time and time again. 
When these countries step in and they put in sustainable fisheries management policies, the fisheries, which are always crashing, it seems, are starting to come back. 
So there's a lot of promise here. 
What does this mean for the world fish catch? 
This means that if we take that fishery catch that's on the decline and we could turn it upwards, we could increase it up to 100 million metric tons per year. 
So we didn't have peak fish yet. 
We still have an opportunity to not only bring the fish back but to actually get more fish that can feed more people than we currently are now. 
How many more? Right about now, we can feed about 450 million people a fish meal a day based on the current world fish catch, which, of course, you know is going down, so that number will go down over time if we don't fix it, but if we put fishery management practices like the ones I've described in place in 10 to 25 countries, we could bring that number up and feed as many as 700 million people a year a healthy fish meal. 
We should obviously do this just because it's a good thing to deal with the hunger problem, but it's also cost-effective. 
It turns out fish is the most cost-effective protein on the planet. 
If you look at how much fish protein you get per dollar invested compared to all of the other animal proteins, obviously, fish is a good business decision. 
It also doesn't need a lot of land, something that's in short supply, compared to other protein sources. 
And it doesn't need a lot of fresh water. 
It uses a lot less fresh water than, for example, cattle, where you have to irrigate a field so that you can grow the food to graze the cattle. 
It also has a very low carbon footprint. 
It has a little bit of a carbon footprint because we do have to get out and catch the fish. 
It takes a little bit of fuel, but as you know, agriculture can have a carbon footprint, and fish has a much smaller one, so it's less polluting. 
It's already a big part of our diet, but it can be a bigger part of our diet, which is a good thing, because we know that it's healthy for us. 
It can reduce our risks of cancer, heart disease and obesity. 
In fact, our CEO Andy Sharpless, who is the originator of this concept, actually, he likes to say fish is the perfect protein. 
Andy also talks about the fact that our ocean conservation movement really grew out of the land conservation movement, and in land conservation, we have this problem where biodiversity is at war with food production. 
You have to cut down the biodiverse forest if you want to get the field to grow the corn to feed people with, and so there's a constant push-pull there. 
There's a constant tough decision that has to be made between two very important things: maintaining biodiversity and feeding people. 
But in the oceans, we don't have that war. 
In the oceans, biodiversity is not at war with abundance. 
In fact, they're aligned. 
When we do things that produce biodiversity, we actually get more abundance, and that's important so that we can feed people. 
Now, there's a catch. 
Didn't anyone get that? (Laughter) Illegal fishing. 
Illegal fishing undermines the type of sustainable fisheries management I'm talking about. 
It can be when you catch fish using gears that have been prohibited, when you fish in places where you're not supposed to fish, you catch fish that are the wrong size or the wrong species. 
Illegal fishing cheats the consumer and it also cheats honest fishermen, and it needs to stop. 
The way illegal fish get into our market is through seafood fraud. 
You might have heard about this. 
It's when fish are labeled as something they're not. 
Think about the last time you had fish. 
What were you eating? 
Are you sure that's what it was? 
Because we tested 1,300 different fish samples and about a third of them were not what they were labeled to be. 
Snappers, nine out of 10 snappers were not snapper. 
Fifty-nine percent of the tuna we tested was mislabeled. 
And red snapper, we tested 120 samples, and only seven of them were really red snapper, so good luck finding a red snapper. 
Seafood has a really complex supply chain, and at every step in this supply chain, there's an opportunity for seafood fraud, unless we have traceability. 
Traceability is a way where the seafood industry can track the seafood from the boat to the plate to make sure that the consumer can then find out where their seafood came from. 
This is a really important thing. 
It's being done by some in the industry, but not enough, so we're pushing a law in Congress called the SAFE Seafood Act, and I'm very excited today to announce the release of a chef's petition, where 450 chefs have signed a petition calling on Congress to support the SAFE Seafood Act. 
It has a lot of celebrity chefs you may know — Anthony Bourdain, Mario Batali, Barton Seaver and others — and they've signed it because they believe that people have a right to know about what they're eating. 
(Applause) Fishermen like it too, so there's a good chance we can get the kind of support we need to get this bill through, and it comes at a critical time, because this is the way we stop seafood fraud, this is the way we curb illegal fishing, and this is the way we make sure that quotas, habitat protection, and bycatch reductions can do the jobs they can do. 
We know that we can manage our fisheries sustainably. 
We know that we can produce healthy meals for hundreds of millions of people that don't use the land, that don't use much water, have a low carbon footprint, and are cost-effective. 
We know that saving the oceans can feed the world, and we need to start now. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

One billion people in the world today do not have access to all-season roads. 
One billion people. 
One seventh of the Earth's population are totally cut off for some part of the year. 
We cannot get medicine to them reliably, they cannot get critical supplies, and they cannot get their goods to market in order to create a sustainable income. 
In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, 85 percent of roads are unusable in the wet season. 
Investments are being made, but at the current level, it's estimated it's going to take them 50 years to catch up. 
In the U.S. alone, there's more than four million miles of roads, very expensive to build, very expensive to maintain infrastructure, with a huge ecological footprint, and yet, very often, congested. 
So we saw this and we thought, can there be a better way? 
Can we create a system using today's most advanced technologies that can allow this part of the world to leapfrog in the same way they've done with mobile telephones in the last 10 years? 
Many of those nations have excellent telecommunications today without ever putting copper lines in the ground. 
Could we do the same for transportation? 
Imagine this scenario. 
Imagine you are in a maternity ward in Mali, and have a newborn in need of urgent medication. 
What would you do today? 
Well, you would place a request via mobile phone, and someone would get the request immediately. 
That's the part that works. 
The medication may take days to arrive, though, because of bad roads. 
That's the part that's broken. 
We believe we can deliver it within hours with an electric autonomous flying vehicle such as this. 
This can transport a small payload today, about two kilograms, over a short distance, about 10 kilometers, but it's part of a wider network that may cover the entire country, maybe even the entire continent. 
It's an ultra-flexible, automated logistics network. 
It's a network for a transportation of matter. 
We call it Matternet. 
We use three key technologies. 
The first is electric autonomous flying vehicles. 
The second is automated ground stations that the vehicles fly in and out of to swap batteries and fly farther, or pick up or deliver loads. 
And the third is the operating system that manages the whole network. 
Let's look at each one of those technologies in a bit more detail. 
First of all, the UAVs. 
Eventually, we're going to be using all sorts of vehicles for different payload capacities and different ranges. 
Today, we're using small quads. 
These are able to transport two kilograms over 10 kilometers in just about 15 minutes. 
Compare this with trying to trespass a bad road in the developing world, or even being stuck in traffic in a developed world country. 
These fly autonomously. 
This is the key to the technology. 
So they use GPS and other sensors on board to navigate between ground stations. 
Every vehicle is equipped with an automatic payload and battery exchange mechanism, so these vehicles navigate to those ground stations, they dock, swap a battery automatically, and go out again. 
The ground stations are located on safe locations on the ground. 
They secure the most vulnerable part of the mission, which is the landing. 
They are at known locations on the ground, so the paths between them are also known, which is very important from a reliability perspective from the whole network. 
Apart from fulfilling the energy requirements of the vehicles, eventually they're going to be becoming commercial hubs where people can take out loads or put loads into the network. 
The last component is the operating system that manages the whole network. 
It monitors weather data from all the ground stations and optimizes the routes of the vehicles through the system to avoid adverse weather conditions, avoid other risk factors, and optimize the use of the resources throughout the network. 
I want to show you what one of those flights looks like. 
Here we are flying in Haiti last summer, where we've done our first field trials. 
We're modeling here a medical delivery in a camp we set up after the 2010 earthquake. 
People there love this. 
And I want to show you what one of those vehicles looks like up close. 
So this is a $3,000 vehicle. 
Costs are coming down very rapidly. 
We use this in all sorts of weather conditions, very hot and very cold climates, very strong winds. They're very sturdy vehicles. 
Imagine if your life depended on this package, somewhere in Africa or in New York City, after Sandy. 
The next big question is, what's the cost? 
Well, it turns out that the cost to transport two kilograms over 10 kilometers with this vehicle is just 24 cents. 
(Applause) And it's counterintuitive, but the cost of energy expended for the flight is only two cents of a dollar today, and we're just at the beginning of this. 
When we saw this, we felt that this is something that can have significant impact in the world. 
So we said, okay, how much does it cost to set up a network somewhere in the world? 
And we looked at setting up a network in Lesotho for transportation of HIV / AIDS samples. 
The problem there is how do you take them from clinics where they're being collected to hospitals where they're being analyzed? 
And we said, what if we wanted to cover an area spanning around 140 square kilometers? 
That's roughly one and a half times the size of Manhattan. 
Well it turns out that the cost to do that there would be less than a million dollars. 
Compare this to normal infrastructure investments. 
We think this can be — this is the power of a new paradigm. 
So here we are: a new idea about a network for transportation that is based on the ideas of the Internet. 
It's decentralized, it's peer-to-peer, it's bidirectional, highly adaptable, with very low infrastructure investment, very low ecological footprint. 
If it is a new paradigm, though, there must be other uses for it. 
It can be used perhaps in other places in the world. 
So let's look at the other end of the spectrum: our cities and megacities. 
Half of the Earth's population lives in cities today. 
Half a billion of us live in megacities. 
We are living through an amazing urbanization trend. 
China alone is adding a megacity the size of New York City every two years. 
These are places that do have road infrastructure, but it's very inefficient. 
Congestion is a huge problem. 
So we think it makes sense in those places to set up a network of transportation that is a new layer that sits between the road and the Internet, initially for lightweight, urgent stuff, and over time, we would hope to develop this into a new mode of transportation that is truly a modern solution to a very old problem. 
It's ultimately scalable with a very small ecological footprint, operating in the background 24 / 7, just like the Internet. 
So when we started this a couple of years ago now, we've had a lot of people come up to us who said, "" This is a very interesting but crazy idea, and certainly not something that you should engage with anytime soon. "" And of course, we're talking about drones, right, a technology that's not only unpopular in the West but one that has become a very, very unpleasant fact of life for many living in poor countries, especially those engaged in conflict. 
So why are we doing this? 
Well, we chose to do this one not because it's easy, but because it can have amazing impact. 
Imagine one billion people being connected to physical goods in the same way that mobile telecommunications connected them to information. 
Imagine if the next big network we built in the world was a network for the transportation of matter. 
In the developing world, we would hope to reach millions of people with better vaccines, reach them with better medication. 
It would give us an unfair advantage against battling HIV / AIDS, tuberculosis and other epidemics. 
Over time, we would hope it would become a new platform for economic transactions, lifting millions of people out of poverty. 
In the developed world and the emerging world, we would hope it would become a new mode of transportation that could help make our cities more livable. 
So for those that still believe that this is science fiction, I firmly say to you that it is not. 
We do need to engage, though, in social fiction to make it happen. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The recent debate over copyright laws like SOPA in the United States and the ACTA agreement in Europe has been very emotional. 
And I think some dispassionate, quantitative reasoning could really bring a great deal to the debate. 
I'd therefore like to propose that we employ, we enlist, the cutting edge field of copyright math whenever we approach this subject. 
For instance, just recently the Motion Picture Association revealed that our economy loses 58 billion dollars a year to copyright theft. 
Now rather than just argue about this number, a copyright mathematician will analyze it and he'll soon discover that this money could stretch from this auditorium all the way across Ocean Boulevard to the Westin, and then to Mars... 
(Laughter)... if we use pennies. 
Now this is obviously a powerful, some might say dangerously powerful, insight. 
But it's also a morally important one. 
Because this isn't just the hypothetical retail value of some pirated movies that we're talking about, but this is actual economic losses. 
This is the equivalent to the entire American corn crop failing along with all of our fruit crops, as well as wheat, tobacco, rice, sorghum — whatever sorghum is — losing sorghum. 
But identifying the actual losses to the economy is almost impossible to do unless we use copyright math. 
Now music revenues are down by about eight billion dollars a year since Napster first came on the scene. 
So that's a chunk of what we're looking for. 
But total movie revenues across theaters, home video and pay-per-view are up. 
And TV, satellite and cable revenues are way up. 
Other content markets like book publishing and radio are also up. 
So this small missing chunk here is puzzling. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Since the big content markets have grown in line with historic norms, it's not additional growth that piracy has prevented, but copyright math tells us it must therefore be foregone growth in a market that has no historic norms — one that didn't exist in the 90's. 
What we're looking at here is the insidious cost of ringtone piracy. 
(Laughter) 50 billion dollars of it a year, which is enough, at 30 seconds a ringtone, that could stretch from here to Neanderthal times. (Laughter) 
It's true. 
(Applause) I have Excel. 
(Laughter) The movie folks also tell us that our economy loses over 370,000 jobs to content theft, which is quite a lot when you consider that, back in '98, the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that the motion picture and video industries were employing 270,000 people. 
Other data has the music industry at about 45,000 people. 
And so the job losses that came with the Internet and all that content theft, have therefore left us with negative employment in our content industries. 
And this is just one of the many mind-blowing statistics that copyright mathematicians have to deal with every day. 
And some people think that string theory is tough. 
(Laughter) Now this is a key number from the copyright mathematicians' toolkit. 
It's the precise amount of harm that comes to media companies whenever a single copyrighted song or movie gets pirated. 
Hollywood and Congress derived this number mathematically back when they last sat down to improve copyright damages and made this law. 
Some people think this number's a little bit large, but copyright mathematicians who are media lobby experts are merely surprised that it doesn't get compounded for inflation every year. 
Now when this law first passed, the world's hottest MP3 player could hold just 10 songs. 
And it was a big Christmas hit. 
Because what little hoodlum wouldn't want a million and a half bucks-worth of stolen goods in his pocket. 
(Laughter) (Applause) These days an iPod Classic can hold 40,000 songs, which is to say eight billion dollars-worth of stolen media. (Applause) 
Or about 75,000 jobs. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Now you might find copyright math strange, but that's because it's a field that's best left to experts. 
So that's it for now. 
I hope you'll join me next time when I will be making an equally scientific and fact-based inquiry into the cost of alien music piracy to he American economy. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

I want to help you re-perceive what philanthropy is, what it could be, and what your relationship to it is. 
And in doing that, I want to offer you a vision, an imagined future, if you will, of how, as the poet Seamus Heaney has put it, "" Once in a lifetime the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme. "" I want to start with these word pairs here. 
We all know which side of these we'd like to be on. 
When philanthropy was reinvented a century ago, when the foundation form was actually invented, they didn't think of themselves on the wrong side of these either. 
In fact they would never have thought of themselves as closed and set in their ways, as slow to respond to new challenges, as small and risk-averse. 
And in fact they weren't. They were reinventing charity in those times, what Rockefeller called "" the business of benevolence. "" But by the end of the 20th century, a new generation of critics and reformers had come to see philanthropy just this way. 
The thing to watch for as a global philanthropy industry comes about — and that's exactly what is happening — is how the aspiration is to flip these old assumptions, for philanthropy to become open and big and fast and connected, in service of the long term. 
This entrepreneurial energy is emerging from many quarters. 
And it's driven and propelled forward by new leaders, like many of the people here, by new tools, like the ones we've seen here, and by new pressures. 
I've been following this change for quite a while now, and participating in it. 
This report is our main public report. 
What it tells is the story of how today actually could be as historic as 100 years ago. 
What I want to do is share some of the coolest things that are going on with you. 
And as I do that, I'm not going to dwell much on the very large philanthropy that everybody already knows about — the Gates or the Soros or the Google. 
Instead, what I want to do is talk about the philanthropy of all of us: the democratization of philanthropy. 
This is a moment in history when the average person has more power than at any time. 
What I'm going to do is look at five categories of experiments, each of which challenges an old assumption of philanthropy. 
The first is mass collaboration, represented here by Wikipedia. 
Now, this may surprise you. 
But remember, philanthropy is about giving of time and talent, not just money. 
Clay Shirky, that great chronicler of everything networked, has captured the assumption that this challenges in such a beautiful way. 
He said, "" We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. 
Now we have Wikipedia. 
Suddenly big things can be done for love. "" Watch, this spring, for Paul Hawken's new book — Author and entrepreneur many of you may know about. 
The book is called "" Blessed Unrest. "" And when it comes out, a series of wiki sites under the label WISER, are going to launch at the same time. 
WISER stands for World Index for Social and Environmental Responsibility. 
WISER sets out to document, link and empower what Paul calls the largest movement, and fastest-growing movement in human history: humanity's collective immune response to today's threats. 
Now, all of these big things for love — experiments — aren't going to take off. 
But the ones that do are going to be the biggest, the most open, the fastest, the most connected form of philanthropy in human history. 
Second category is online philanthropy marketplaces. 
This is, of course, to philanthropy what eBay and Amazon are to commerce. 
Think of it as peer-to-peer philanthropy. 
And this challenges yet another assumption, which is that organized philanthropy is only for the very wealthy. 
Take a look, if you haven't, at DonorsChoose. 
Omidyar Network has made a big investment in DonorsChoose. 
It's one of the best known of these new marketplaces where a donor can go straight into a classroom and connect with what a teacher says they need. 
Take a look at Changing the Present, started by a TEDster, next time you need a wedding present or a holiday present. 
GiveIndia is for a whole country. 
And it goes on and on. 
The third category is represented by Warren Buffet, which I call aggregated giving. 
It's not just that Warren Buffet was so amazingly generous in that historic act last summer. 
It's that he challenged another assumption, that every giver should have his or her own fund or foundation. 
There are now, today, so many new funds that are aggregating giving and investing, bringing together people around a common goal, to think bigger. 
One of the best known is Acumen Fund, led by Jacqueline Novogratz, a TEDster who got a big boost here at TED. 
But there are many others: New Profit in Cambridge, New School's Venture Fund in Silicon Valley, Venture Philanthropy Partners in Washington, Global Fund for Women in San Francisco. 
Take a look at these. 
These funds are to philanthropy what venture capital, private equity, and eventually mutual funds are to investing, but with a twist — because often a community forms around these funds, as it has at Acumen and other places. 
Now, imagine for a second these first three types of experiments: mass collaboration, online marketplaces, aggregated giving. 
And understand how they help us re-perceive what organized philanthropy is. 
It's not about foundations necessarily; it's about the rest of us. 
And imagine the mash-up, if you will, of these things, in the future, when these things come together in the experiments of the future — imagine that somebody puts up, say, 100 million dollars for an inspiring goal — there were 21 gifts of 100 million dollars or more in the US last year, not out of the question — but only puts it up if it's matched by millions of small gifts from around the globe, thereby engaging lots of people, and building visibility and engaging people in the goal that's stated. 
I'm going to look quickly at the fourth and fifth categories, which are innovation, competitions and social investing. 
They're betting a visible competition, a prize, can attract talent and money to some of the most difficult issues, and thereby speed the solution. 
This tackles yet another assumption, that the giver and the organization is at the center, as opposed to putting the problem at the center. 
You can look to these innovators to help us especially with things that require technological or scientific solution. 
That leaves the final category, social investing, which is really, anyway, the biggest of them all, represented here by Xigi.net. 
And this, of course, tackles the biggest assumption of all, that business is business, and philanthropy is the vehicle of people who want to create change in the world. 
Xigi is a new community site that's built by the community, linking and mapping this new social capital market. 
It lists already 1,000 entities that are offering debt and equity for social enterprise. 
So we can look to these innovators to help us remember that if we can leverage even a small amount of the capital that seeks a return, the good that can be driven could be astonishing. 
Now, what's really interesting here is that we're not thinking our way into a new way of acting; we're acting our way into a new way of thinking. 
Philanthropy is reorganizing itself before our very eyes. 
And even though all of the experiments and all of the big givers don't yet fulfill this aspiration, I think this is the new zeitgeist: open, big, fast, connected, and, let us also hope, long. 
We have got to realize that it is going to take a long time to do these things. 
If we don't develop the stamina to stick with things — whatever it is you pick, stick with it — all of this stuff is just going to be, you know, a fad. 
But I'm really hopeful. 
And I'm hopeful because it's not only philanthropy that's reorganizing itself, it's also whole other portions of the social sector, and of business, that are busy challenging "" business as usual. "" And everywhere I go, including here at TED, I feel that there is a new moral hunger that is growing. 
What we're seeing is people really wrestling to describe what is this new thing that's happening. 
Words like "" philanthrocapitalism, "" and "" natural capitalism, "" and "" philanthroentrepreneur, "" and "" venture philanthropy. "" We don't have a language for it yet. 
Whatever we call it, it's new, it's beginning, and I think it's gong to quite significant. 
And that's where my imagined future comes in, which I am going to call the social singularity. 
Many of you will realize that I'm ripping a bit off of the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge's notion of a technological singularity, where a number of trends accelerate and converge and come together to create, really, a shockingly new reality. 
It may be that the social singularity ahead is the one that we fear the most: a convergence of catastrophes, of environmental degradation, of weapons of mass destruction, of pandemics, of poverty. 
That's because our ability to confront the problems that we face has not kept pace with our ability to create them. 
And as we've heard here, it is no exaggeration to say that we hold the future of our civilization in our hands as never before. 
The question is, is there a positive social singularity? 
Is there a frontier for us of how we live together? 
Our future doesn't have to be imagined. 
We can create a future where hope and history rhyme. 
But we have a problem. 
Our experience to date, both individually and collectively, hasn't prepared us for what we're going to need to do, or who we're going to need to be. 
We are going to need a new generation of citizen leaders willing to commit ourselves to growing and changing and learning as rapidly as possible. 
That's why I have one last thing I want to show you. 
This is a photograph taken about 100 years ago of my grandfather and great-grandfather. 
This is a newspaper publisher and a banker. 
And they were great community leaders. 
And, yes, they were great philanthropists. 
I keep this photograph close by to me — it's in my office — because I've always felt a mystical connection to these two men, both of whom I never knew. 
And so, in their honor, I want to offer you this blank slide. 
And I want you to imagine that this a photograph of you. 
And I want you to think about the community that you want to be part of creating. 
Whatever that means to you. 
And I want you to imagine that it's 100 years from now, and your grandchild, or great-grandchild, or niece or nephew or god-child, is looking at this photograph of you. 
What is the story you most want for them to tell? 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Well, indeed, I'm very, very lucky. 
My talk essentially got written by three historic events that happened within days of each other in the last two months — seemingly unrelated, but as you will see, actually all having to do with the story I want to tell you today. 
The first one was actually a funeral — to be more precise, a reburial. 
On May 22nd, there was a hero's reburial in Frombork, Poland of the 16th-century astronomer who actually changed the world. 
He did that, literally, by replacing the Earth with the Sun in the center of the Solar System, and then with this simple-looking act, he actually launched a scientific and technological revolution, which many call the Copernican Revolution. 
Now that was, ironically, and very befittingly, the way we found his grave. 
As it was the custom of the time, Copernicus was actually simply buried in an unmarked grave, together with 14 others in that cathedral. 
DNA analysis, one of the hallmarks of the scientific revolution of the last 400 years that he started, was the way we found which set of bones actually belonged to the person who read all those astronomical books which were filled with leftover hair that was Copernicus' hair — obviously not many other people bothered to read these books later on. 
That match was unambiguous. 
The DNA matched, and we know that this was indeed Nicolaus Copernicus. 
Now, the connection between biology and DNA and life is very tantalizing when you talk about Copernicus because, even back then, his followers very quickly made the logical step to ask: if the Earth is just a planet, then what about planets around other stars? 
What about the idea of the plurality of the worlds, about life on other planets? 
In fact, I'm borrowing here from one of those very popular books of the time. 
And at the time, people actually answered that question positively: "" Yes. "" But there was no evidence. 
And here begins 400 years of frustration, of unfulfilled dreams — the dreams of Galileo, Giordano Bruno, many others — which never led to the answer of those very basic questions which humanity has asked all the time. 
"" What is life? What is the origin of life? 
Are we alone? "" And that especially happened in the last 10 years, at the end of the 20th century, when the beautiful developments due to molecular biology, understanding the code of life, DNA, all of that seemed to actually put us, not closer, but further apart from answering those basic questions. 
Now, the good news. 
A lot has happened in the last few years, and let's start with the planets. 
Let's start with the old Copernican question: Are there earths around other stars? 
And as we already heard, there is a way in which we are trying, and now able, to answer that question. 
It's a new telescope. 
Our team, befittingly I think, named it after one of those dreamers of the Copernican time, Johannes Kepler, and that telescope's sole purpose is to go out, find the planets that orbit other stars in our galaxy, and tell us how often do planets like our own Earth happen to be out there. 
The telescope is actually built similarly to the, well-known to you, Hubble Space Telescope, except it does have an additional lens — a wide-field lens, as you would call it as a photographer. 
And if, in the next couple of months, you walk out in the early evening and look straight up and place you palm like this, you will actually be looking at the field of the sky where this telescope is searching for planets day and night, without any interruption, for the next four years. 
The way we do that, actually, is with a method, which we call the transit method. 
It's actually mini-eclipses that occur when a planet passes in front of its star. 
Not all of the planets will be fortuitously oriented for us to be able do that, but if you have a million stars, you'll find enough planets. 
And as you see on this animation, what Kepler is going to detect is just the dimming of the light from the star. 
We are not going to see the image of the star and the planet as this. 
All the stars for Kepler are just points of light. 
But we learn a lot from that: not only that there is a planet there, but we also learn its size. 
How much of the light is being dimmed depends on how big the planet is. 
We learn about its orbit, the period of its orbit and so on. 
So, what have we learned? 
Well, let me try to walk you through what we actually see and so you understand the news that I'm here to tell you today. 
What Kepler does is discover a lot of candidates, which we then follow up and find as planets, confirm as planets. 
It basically tells us this is the distribution of planets in size. 
There are small planets, there are bigger planets, there are big planets, okay. 
So we count many, many such planets, and they have different sizes. 
We do that in our solar system. 
In fact, even back during the ancients, the Solar System in that sense would look on a diagram like this. 
There will be the smaller planets, and there will be the big planets, even back to the time of Epicurus and then of course Copernicus and his followers. 
Up until recently, that was the Solar System — four Earth-like planets with small radius, smaller than about two times the size of the Earth — and that was of course Mercury, Venus, Mars, and of course the Earth, and then the two big, giant planets. 
Then the Copernican Revolution brought in telescopes, and of course three more planets were discovered. 
Now the total planet number in our solar system was nine. 
The small planets dominated, and there was a certain harmony to that, which actually Copernicus was very happy to note, and Kepler was one of the big proponents of. 
So now we have Pluto to join the numbers of small planets. 
But up until, literally, 15 years ago, that was all we knew about planets. 
And that's what the frustration was. 
The Copernican dream was unfulfilled. 
Finally, 15 years ago, the technology came to the point where we could discover a planet around another star, and we actually did pretty well. 
In the next 15 years, almost 500 planets were discovered orbiting other stars, with different methods. 
Unfortunately, as you can see, there was a very different picture. 
There was of course an explanation for it: We only see the big planets, so that's why most of those planets are really in the category of "" like Jupiter. "" But you see, we haven't gone very far. 
We were still back where Copernicus was. 
We didn't have any evidence whether planets like the Earth are out there. 
And we do care about planets like the Earth because by now we understood that life as a chemical system really needs a smaller planet with water and with rocks and with a lot of complex chemistry to originate, to emerge, to survive. 
And we didn't have the evidence for that. 
So today, I'm here to actually give you a first glimpse of what the new telescope, Kepler, has been able to tell us in the last few weeks, and, lo and behold, we are back to the harmony and to fulfilling the dreams of Copernicus. 
You can see here, the small planets dominate the picture. 
The planets which are marked "" like Earth, "" [are] definitely more than any other planets that we see. 
And now for the first time, we can say that. 
There is a lot more work we need to do with this. 
Most of these are candidates. 
In the next few years we will confirm them. 
But the statistical result is loud and clear. 
And the statistical result is that planets like our own Earth are out there. 
Our own Milky Way Galaxy is rich in this kind of planets. 
So the question is: what do we do next? 
Well, first of all, we can study them now that we know where they are. 
And we can find those that we would call habitable, meaning that they have similar conditions to the conditions that we experience here on Earth and where a lot of complex chemistry can happen. 
So, we can even put a number to how many of those planets now do we expect our own Milky Way Galaxy harbors. 
And the number, as you might expect, is pretty staggering. 
It's about 100 million such planets. 
That's great news. Why? 
Because with our own little telescope, just in the next two years, we'll be able to identify at least 60 of them. 
So that's great because then we can go and study them — remotely, of course — with all the techniques that we already have tested in the past five years. 
We can find what they're made of, would their atmospheres have water, carbon dioxide, methane. 
We know and expect that we'll see that. 
That's great, but that is not the whole news. 
That's not why I'm here. 
Why I'm here is to tell you that the next step is really the exciting part. 
The one that this step is enabling us to do is coming next. 
And here comes biology — biology, with its basic question, which still stands unanswered, which is essentially: "" If there is life on other planets, do we expect it to be like life on Earth? "" And let me immediately tell you here, when I say life, I don't mean "" dolce vita, "" good life, human life. 
I really mean life on Earth, past and present, from microbes to us humans, in its rich molecular diversity, the way we now understand life on Earth as being a set of molecules and chemical reactions — and we call that, collectively, biochemistry, life as a chemical process, as a chemical phenomenon. 
So the question is: is that chemical phenomenon universal, or is it something which depends on the planet? 
Is it like gravity, which is the same everywhere in the universe, or there would be all kinds of different biochemistries wherever we find them? 
We need to know what we are looking for when we try to do that. 
And that's a very basic question, which we don't know the answer to, but which we can try — and we are trying — to answer in the lab. 
We don't need to go to space to answer that question. 
And so, that's what we are trying to do. 
And that's what many people now are trying to do. 
And a lot of the good news comes from that part of the bridge that we are trying to build as well. 
So this is one example that I want to show you here. 
When we think of what is necessary for the phenomenon that we call life, we think of compartmentalization, keeping the molecules which are important for life in a membrane, isolated from the rest of the environment, but yet, in an environment in which they actually could originate together. 
And in one of our labs, Jack Szostak's labs, it was a series of experiments in the last four years that showed that the environments — which are very common on planets, on certain types of planets like the Earth, where you have some liquid water and some clays — you actually end up with naturally available molecules which spontaneously form bubbles. 
But those bubbles have membranes very similar to the membrane of every cell of every living thing on Earth looks like, like this. 
And they really help molecules, like nucleic acids, like RNA and DNA, stay inside, develop, change, divide and do some of the processes that we call life. 
Now this is just an example to tell you the pathway in which we are trying to answer that bigger question about the universality of the phenomenon. 
And in a sense, you can think of that work that people are starting to do now around the world as building a bridge, building a bridge from two sides of the river. 
On one hand, on the left bank of the river, are the people like me who study those planets and try to define the environments. 
We don't want to go blind because there's too many possibilities, and there is not too much lab, and there is not enough human time to actually to do all the experiments. 
So that's what we are building from the left side of the river. 
From the right bank of the river are the experiments in the lab that I just showed you, where we actually tried that, and it feeds back and forth, and we hope to meet in the middle one day. 
So why should you care about that? 
Why am I trying to sell you a half-built bridge? 
Am I that charming? 
Well, there are many reasons, and you heard some of them in the short talk today. 
This understanding of chemistry actually can help us with our daily lives. 
But there is something more profound here, something deeper. 
And that deeper, underlying point is that science is in the process of redefining life as we know it. 
And that is going to change our worldview in a profound way — not in a dissimilar way as 400 years ago, Copernicus' act did, by changing the way we view space and time. 
Now it's about something else, but it's equally profound. 
And half the time, what's happened is it's related this kind of sense of insignificance to humankind, to the Earth in a bigger space. 
And the more we learn, the more that was reinforced. 
You've all learned that in school — how small the Earth is compared to the immense universe. 
And the bigger the telescope, the bigger that universe becomes. 
And look at this image of the tiny, blue dot. 
This pixel is the Earth. 
It is the Earth as we know it. 
It is seen from, in this case, from outside the orbit of Saturn. 
But it's really tiny. 
We know that. 
Let's think of life as that entire planet because, in a sense, it is. 
The biosphere is the size of the Earth. 
Life on Earth is the size of the Earth. 
And let's compare it to the rest of the world in spatial terms. 
What if that Copernican insignificance was actually all wrong? 
Would that make us more responsible for what is happening today? 
Let's actually try that. 
So in space, the Earth is very small. 
Can you imagine how small it is? 
Let me try it. 
Okay, let's say this is the size of the observable universe, with all the galaxies, with all the stars, okay, from here to here. 
Do you know what the size of life in this necktie will be? 
It will be the size of a single, small atom. 
It is unimaginably small. 
We can't imagine it. 
I mean look, you can see the necktie, but you can't even imagine seeing the size of a little, small atom. 
But that's not the whole story, you see. 
The universe and life are both in space and time. 
If that was the age of the universe, then this is the age of life on Earth. 
Think about those oldest living things on Earth, but in a cosmic proportion. 
This is not insignificant. 
This is very significant. 
So life might be insignificant in size, but it is not insignificant in time. 
Life and the universe compare to each other like a child and a parent, parent and offspring. 
So what does this tell us? 
This tells us that that insignificance paradigm that we somehow got to learn from the Copernican principle, it's all wrong. 
There is immense, powerful potential in life in this universe — especially now that we know that places like the Earth are common. 
And that potential, that powerful potential, is also our potential, of you and me. 
And if we are to be stewards of our planet Earth and its biosphere, we'd better understand the cosmic significance and do something about it. 
And the good news is we can actually, indeed do it. 
And let's do it. 
Let's start this new revolution at the tail end of the old one, with synthetic biology being the way to transform both our environment and our future. 
And let's hope that we can build this bridge together and meet in the middle. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Could I protect my father from the Armed Islamic Group with a paring knife? 
That was the question I faced one Tuesday morning in June of 1993, when I was a law student. 
I woke up early that morning in Dad's apartment on the outskirts of Algiers, Algeria, to an unrelenting pounding on the front door. 
It was a season as described by a local paper when every Tuesday a scholar fell to the bullets of fundamentalist assassins. 
My father's university teaching of Darwin had already provoked a classroom visit from the head of the so-called Islamic Salvation Front, who denounced Dad as an advocate of biologism before Dad had ejected the man, and now whoever was outside would neither identify himself nor go away. 
So my father tried to get the police on the phone, but perhaps terrified by the rising tide of armed extremism that had already claimed the lives of so many Algerian officers, they didn't even answer. 
And that was when I went to the kitchen, got out a paring knife, and took up a position inside the entryway. 
It was a ridiculous thing to do, really, but I couldn't think of anything else, and so there I stood. 
When I look back now, I think that that was the moment that set me on the path was to writing a book called "" Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism. "" The title comes from a Pakistani play. 
I think it was actually that moment that sent me on the journey to interview 300 people of Muslim heritage from nearly 30 countries, from Afghanistan to Mali, to find out how they fought fundamentalism peacefully like my father did, and how they coped with the attendant risks. 
Luckily, back in June of 1993, our unidentified visitor went away, but other families were so much less lucky, and that was the thought that motivated my research. 
In any case, someone would return a few months later and leave a note on Dad's kitchen table, which simply said, "" Consider yourself dead. "" Subsequently, Algeria's fundamentalist armed groups would murder as many as 200,000 civilians in what came to be known as the dark decade of the 1990s, including every single one of the women that you see here. 
In its harsh counterterrorist response, the state resorted to torture and to forced disappearances, and as terrible as all of these events became, the international community largely ignored them. 
Finally, my father, an Algerian peasant's son turned professor, was forced to stop teaching at the university and to flee his apartment, but what I will never forget about Mahfoud Bennoune, my dad, was that like so many other Algerian intellectuals, he refused to leave the country and he continued to publish pointed criticisms, both of the fundamentalists and sometimes of the government they battled. 
For example, in a November 1994 series in the newspaper El Watan entitled "" How Fundamentalism Produced a Terrorism without Precedent, "" he denounced what he called the terrorists' radical break with the true Islam as it was lived by our ancestors. 
These were words that could get you killed. 
My father's country taught me in that dark decade of the 1990s that the popular struggle against Muslim fundamentalism is one of the most important and overlooked human rights struggles in the world. 
This remains true today, nearly 20 years later. 
You see, in every country where you hear about armed jihadis targeting civilians, there are also unarmed people defying those militants that you don't hear about, and those people need our support to succeed. 
In the West, it's often assumed that Muslims generally condone terrorism. 
Some on the right think this because they view Muslim culture as inherently violent, and some on the left imagine this because they view Muslim violence, fundamentalist violence, solely as a product of legitimate grievances. 
But both views are dead wrong. 
In fact, many people of Muslim heritage around the world are staunch opponents both of fundamentalism and of terrorism, and often for very good reason. 
You see, they're much more likely to be victims of this violence than its perpetrators. 
Let me just give you one example. 
According to a 2009 survey of Arabic language media resources, between 2004 and 2008, no more than 15 percent of al Qaeda's victims were Westerners. 
That's a terrible toll, but the vast majority were people of Muslim heritage, killed by Muslim fundamentalists. 
Now I've been talking for the last five minutes about fundamentalism, and you have a right to know exactly what I mean. 
I cite the definition given by the Algerian sociologist Marieme Helie Lucas, and she says that fundamentalisms, note the "" s, "" so within all of the world's great religious traditions, "" fundamentalisms are political movements of the extreme right which in a context of globalization manipulate religion in order to achieve their political aims. "" Sadia Abbas has called this the radical politicization of theology. 
Now I want to avoid projecting the notion that there's sort of a monolith out there called Muslim fundamentalism that is the same everywhere, because these movements also have their diversities. 
Some use and advocate violence. 
Some do not, though they're often interrelated. 
They take different forms. 
Some may be non-governmental organizations, even here in Britain like Cageprisoners. 
Some may become political parties, like the Muslim Brotherhood, and some may be openly armed groups like the Taliban. 
But in any case, these are all radical projects. 
They're not conservative or traditional approaches. 
They're most often about changing people's relationship with Islam rather than preserving it. 
What I am talking about is the Muslim extreme right, and the fact that its adherents are or purport to be Muslim makes them no less offensive than the extreme right anywhere else. 
So in my view, if we consider ourselves liberal or left-wing, human rights-loving or feminist, we must oppose these movements and support their grassroots opponents. 
Now let me be clear that I support an effective struggle against fundamentalism, but also a struggle that must itself respect international law, so nothing I am saying should be taken as a justification for refusals to democratize, and here I send out a shout-out of support to the pro-democracy movement in Algeria today, Barakat. 
Nor should anything I say be taken as a justification of violations of human rights, like the mass death sentences handed out in Egypt earlier this week. 
But what I am saying is that we must challenge these Muslim fundamentalist movements because they threaten human rights across Muslim-majority contexts, and they do this in a range of ways, most obviously with the direct attacks on civilians by the armed groups that carry those out. 
But that violence is just the tip of the iceberg. 
These movements as a whole purvey discrimination against religious minorities and sexual minorities. 
They seek to curtail the freedom of religion of everyone who either practices in a different way or chooses not to practice. 
And most definingly, they lead an all-out war on the rights of women. 
Now, faced with these movements in recent years, Western discourse has most often offered two flawed responses. 
The first that one sometimes finds on the right suggests that most Muslims are fundamentalist or something about Islam is inherently fundamentalist, and this is just offensive and wrong, but unfortunately on the left one sometimes encounters a discourse that is too politically correct to acknowledge the problem of Muslim fundamentalism at all or, even worse, apologizes for it, and this is unacceptable as well. 
So what I'm seeking is a new way of talking about this all together, which is grounded in the lived experiences and the hope of the people on the front lines. 
I'm painfully aware that there has been an increase in discrimination against Muslims in recent years in countries like the U.K. and the U.S., and that too is a matter of grave concern, but I firmly believe that telling these counter-stereotypical stories of people of Muslim heritage who have confronted the fundamentalists and been their primary victims is also a great way of countering that discrimination. 
So now let me introduce you to four people whose stories I had the great honor of telling. 
Faizan Peerzada and the Rafi Peer Theatre workshop named for his father have for years promoted the performing arts in Pakistan. 
With the rise of jihadist violence, they began to receive threats to call off their events, which they refused to heed. 
And so a bomber struck their 2008 eighth world performing arts festival in Lahore, producing rain of glass that fell into the venue injuring nine people, and later that same night, the Peerzadas made a very difficult decision: they announced that their festival would continue as planned the next day. 
As Faizan said at the time, if we bow down to the Islamists, we'll just be sitting in a dark corner. 
But they didn't know what would happen. 
Would anyone come? 
In fact, thousands of people came out the next day to support the performing arts in Lahore, and this simultaneously thrilled and terrified Faizan, and he ran up to a woman who had come in with her two small children, and he said, "" You do know there was a bomb here yesterday, and you do know there's a threat here today. "" And she said, "" I know that, but I came to your festival with my mother when I was their age, and I still have those images in my mind. 
We have to be here. "" With stalwart audiences like this, the Peerzadas were able to conclude their festival on schedule. 
And then the next year, they lost all of their sponsors due to the security risk. 
So when I met them in 2010, they were in the middle of the first subsequent event that they were able to have in the same venue, and this was the ninth youth performing arts festival held in Lahore in a year when that city had already experienced 44 terror attacks. 
This was a time when the Pakistani Taliban had commenced their systematic targeting of girls' schools that would culminate in the attack on Malala Yousafzai. 
What did the Peerzadas do in that environment? 
They staged girls' school theater. 
So I had the privilege of watching "" Naang Wal, "" which was a musical in the Punjabi language, and the girls of Lahore Grammar School played all the parts. 
They sang and danced, they played the mice and the water buffalo, and I held my breath, wondering, would we get to the end of this amazing show? 
And when we did, the whole audience collectively exhaled, and a few people actually wept, and then they filled the auditorium with the peaceful boom of their applause. 
And I remember thinking in that moment that the bombers made headlines here two years before but this night and these people are as important a story. 
Maria Bashir is the first and only woman chief prosecutor in Afghanistan. 
She's been in the post since 2008 and actually opened an office to investigate cases of violence against women, which she says is the most important area in her mandate. 
When I meet her in her office in Herat, she enters surrounded by four large men with four huge guns. 
In fact, she now has 23 bodyguards, because she has weathered bomb attacks that nearly killed her kids, and it took the leg off of one of her guards. 
Why does she continue? 
She says with a smile that that is the question that everyone asks — as she puts it, "" Why you risk not living? "" And it is simply that for her, a better future for all the Maria Bashirs to come is worth the risk, and she knows that if people like her do not take the risk, there will be no better future. 
Later on in our interview, Prosecutor Bashir tells me how worried she is about the possible outcome of government negotiations with the Taliban, the people who have been trying to kill her. 
"If we give them a place in the government," she asks, "" Who will protect women's rights? "" And she urges the international community not to forget its promise about women because now they want peace with Taliban. 
A few weeks after I leave Afghanistan, I see a headline on the Internet. 
An Afghan prosecutor has been assassinated. 
I google desperately, and thankfully that day I find out that Maria was not the victim, though sadly, another Afghan prosecutor was gunned down on his way to work. 
And when I hear headlines like that now, I think that as international troops leave Afghanistan this year and beyond, we must continue to care about what happens to people there, to all of the Maria Bashirs. 
Sometimes I still hear her voice in my head saying, with no bravado whatsoever, "" The situation of the women of Afghanistan will be better someday. 
We should prepare the ground for this, even if we are killed. "" There are no words adequate to denounce the al Shabaab terrorists who attacked the Westgate Mall in Nairobi on the same day as a children's cooking competition in September of 2013. 
They killed 67, including poets and pregnant women. 
Far away in the American Midwest, I had the good fortune of meeting Somali-Americans who were working to counter the efforts of al Shabaab to recruit a small number of young people from their city of Minneapolis to take part in atrocities like Westgate. 
Abdirizak Bihi's studious 17-year-old nephew Burhan Hassan was recruited here in 2008, spirited to Somalia, and then killed when he tried to come home. 
Since that time, Mr. Bihi, who directs the no-budget Somali Education and Advocacy Center, has been vocally denouncing the recruitment and the failures of government and Somali-American institutions like the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center where he believes his nephew was radicalized during a youth program. 
But he doesn't just criticize the mosque. 
He also takes on the government for its failure to do more to prevent poverty in his community. 
Given his own lack of financial resources, Mr. Bihi has had to be creative. 
To counter the efforts of al Shabaab to sway more disaffected youth, in the wake of the group's 2010 attack on World Cup viewers in Uganda, he organized a Ramadan basketball tournament in Minneapolis in response. 
Scores of Somali-American kids came out to embrace sport despite the fatwa against it. 
They played basketball as Burhan Hassan never would again. 
For his efforts, Mr. Bihi has been ostracized by the leadership of the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center, with which he used to have good relations. 
He told me, "" One day we saw the imam on TV calling us infidels and saying, 'These families are trying to destroy the mosque.' "" This is at complete odds with how Abdirizak Bihi understands what he is trying to do by exposing al Shabaab recruitment, which is to save the religion I love from a small number of extremists. 
Now I want to tell one last story, that of a 22-year-old law student in Algeria named Amel Zenoune-Zouani who had the same dreams of a legal career that I did back in the '90s. 
She refused to give up her studies, despite the fact that the fundamentalists battling the Algerian state back then threatened all who continued their education. 
On January 26, 1997, Amel boarded the bus in Algiers where she was studying to go home and spend a Ramadan evening with her family, and would never finish law school. 
When the bus reached the outskirts of her hometown, it was stopped at a checkpoint manned by men from the Armed Islamic Group. 
Carrying her schoolbag, Amel was taken off the bus and killed in the street. 
The men who cut her throat then told everyone else, "" If you go to university, the day will come when we will kill all of you just like this. "" Amel died at exactly 5: 17 p.m., which we know because when she fell in the street, her watch broke. 
Her mother showed me the watch with the second hand still aimed optimistically upward towards a 5: 18 that would never come. 
Shortly before her death, Amel had said to her mother of herself and her sisters, "" Nothing will happen to us, Inshallah, God willing, but if something happens, you must know that we are dead for knowledge. 
You and father must keep your heads held high. "" The loss of such a young woman is unfathomable, and so as I did my research I found myself searching for Amel's hope again and her name even means "" hope "" in Arabic. 
I think I found it in two places. 
The first is in the strength of her family and all the other families to continue telling their stories and to go on with their lives despite the terrorism. 
In fact, Amel's sister Lamia overcame her grief, went to law school, and practices as a lawyer in Algiers today, something which is only possible because the armed fundamentalists were largely defeated in the country. 
And the second place I found Amel's hope was everywhere that women and men continue to defy the jihadis. 
We must support all of those in honor of Amel who continue this human rights struggle today, like the Network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws. 
It is not enough, as the victims rights advocate Cherifa Kheddar told me in Algiers, it is not enough just to battle terrorism. 
We must also challenge fundamentalism, because fundamentalism is the ideology that makes the bed of this terrorism. 
Why is it that people like her, like all of them are not more well known? 
Why is it that everyone knows who Osama bin Laden was and so few know of all of those standing up to the bin Ladens in their own contexts. 
We must change that, and so I ask you to please help share these stories through your networks. 
Look again at Amel Zenoune's watch, forever frozen, and now please look at your own watch and decide this is the moment that you commit to supporting people like Amel. 
We don't have the right to be silent about them because it is easier or because Western policy is flawed as well, because 5: 17 is still coming to too many Amel Zenounes in places like northern Nigeria, where jihadis still kill students. 
The time to speak up in support of all of those who peacefully challenge fundamentalism and terrorism in their own communities is now. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I am multidisciplinary. 
As a scientist, I've been a crew commander for a NASA Mars simulation last year, and as an artist, I create multicultural community art all over the planet. 
And recently, I've actually been combining both. 
But let me first talk a little more about that NASA mission. 
This is the HI-SEAS program. 
HI-SEAS is a NASA-funded planetary surface analogue on the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, and it's a research program that is specifically designed to study the effects of long-term isolation of small crews. 
I lived in this dome for four months with a crew of six, a very interesting experience, of course. 
We did all kinds of research. 
Our main research was actually a food study, but apart from that food study — developing a new food system for astronauts living in deep space — we also did all kinds of other research. 
We did extra-vehicular activities, as you can see here, wearing mock-up space suits, but we also had our chores and lots of other stuff to do, like questionnaires at the end of every day. 
Busy, busy work. 
Now, as you can imagine, it's quite challenging to live with just a small group of people in a small space for a long time. 
There's all kinds of psychological challenges: how to keep a team together in these circumstances; how to deal with the warping of time you start to sense when you're living in these circumstances; sleep problems that arise; etc. 
But also we learned a lot. 
I learned a lot about how individual crew members actually cope with a situation like this; how you can keep a crew productive and happy, for example, giving them a good deal of autonomy is a good trick to do that; and honestly, I learned a lot about leadership, because I was a crew commander. 
So doing this mission, I really started thinking more deeply about our future in outer space. 
We will venture into outer space, and we will start inhabiting outer space. 
I have no doubt about it. 
It might take 50 years or it might take 500 years, but it's going to happen nevertheless. 
So I came up with a new art project called Seeker. 
And the Seeker project is actually challenging communities all over the world to come up with starship prototypes that re-envision human habitation and survival. 
That's the core of the project. 
Now, one important thing: This is not a dystopian project. 
This is not about, "" Oh my God, the world is going wrong and we have to escape because we need another future somewhere else. "" No, no. 
The project is basically inviting people to take a step away from earthbound constraints and, as such, reimagine our future. 
And it's really helpful, and it works really well, so that's really the important part of what we're doing. 
Now, in this project, I'm using a cocreation approach, which is a slightly different approach from what you would expect from many artists. 
I'm essentially dropping a basic idea into a group, into a community, people start gravitating to the idea, and together, we shape and build the artwork. 
It's a little bit like termites, really. 
We just work together, and even, for example, when architects visit what we're doing, sometimes they have a bit of a hard time understanding how we build without a master plan. 
We always come up with these fantastic large-scale scupltures that actually we can also inhabit. 
The first version was done in Belgium and Holland. 
It was built with a team of almost 50 people. 
This is the second iteration of that same project, but in Slovenia, in a different country, and the new group was like, we're going to do the architecture differently. 
So they took away the architecture, they kept the base of the artwork, and they built an entirely new, much more biomorphic architecture on top of that. 
And that's another crucial part of the project. 
It's an evolving artwork, evolving architecture. 
This was the last version that was just presented a few weeks ago in Holland, which was using caravans as modules to build a starship. 
We bought some second-hand caravans, cut them open, and reassembled them into a starship. 
Now, when we're thinking about starships, we're not just approaching it as a technological challenge. 
We're really looking at it as a combination of three systems: ecology, people and technology. 
So there's always a strong ecological component in the project. 
Here you can see aquaponic systems that are actually surrounding the astronauts, so they're constantly in contact with part of the food that they're eating. 
Now, a very typical thing for this project is that we run our own isolation missions inside these art and design projects. 
We actually lock ourselves up for multiple days on end, and test what we build. 
And this is, for example, on the right hand side you can see an isolation mission in the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana in Slovenia, where six artists and designers locked themselves up — I was part of that — for four days inside the museum. 
And, of course, obviously, this is a very performative and very strong experience for all of us. 
Now, the next version of the project is currently being developed together with Camilo Rodriguez-Beltran, who is also a TED Fellow, in the Atacama Desert in Chile, a magical place. 
First of all, it's really considered a Mars analogue. 
It really does look like Mars in certain locations and has been used by NASA to test equipment. 
And it has a long history of being connected to space through observations of the stars. 
It's now home to ALMA, the large telescope that's being developed there. 
But also, it's the driest location on the planet, and that makes it extremely interesting to build our project, because suddenly, sustainability is something we have to explore fully. 
We have no other option, so I'm very curious to see what's going to happen. 
Now, a specific thing for this particular version of the project is that I'm very interested to see how we can connect with the local population, the native population. 
These people have been living there for a very long time and can be considered experts in sustainability, and so I'm very interested to see what we can learn from them, and have an input of indigenous knowledge into space exploration. 
So we're trying to redefine how we look at our future in outer space by exploring integration, biology, technology and people; by using a cocreation approach; and by using and exploring local traditions and to see how we can learn from the past and integrate that into our deep future. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

This is my first time at TED. Normally, as an advertising man, I actually speak at TED Evil, which is TED's secret sister that pays all the bills. 
It's held every two years in Burma. 
And I particularly remember a really good speech by Kim Jong Il on how to get teens smoking again. 
(Laughter) But, actually, it's suddenly come to me after years working in the business, that what we create in advertising, which is intangible value — you might call it perceived value, you might call it badge value, subjective value, intangible value of some kind — gets rather a bad rap. 
If you think about it, if you want to live in a world in the future where there are fewer material goods, you basically have two choices. 
You can either live in a world which is poorer, which people in general don't like. 
Or you can live in a world where actually intangible value constitutes a greater part of overall value, that actually intangible value, in many ways is a very, very fine substitute for using up labor or limited resources in the creation of things. 
Here is one example. This is a train which goes from London to Paris. 
The question was given to a bunch of engineers, about 15 years ago, "" How do we make the journey to Paris better? "" And they came up with a very good engineering solution, which was to spend six billion pounds building completely new tracks from London to the coast, and knocking about 40 minutes off a three-and-half-hour journey time. 
Now, call me Mister Picky. I'm just an ad man... 
... but it strikes me as a slightly unimaginative way of improving a train journey merely to make it shorter. 
Now what is the hedonic opportunity cost on spending six billion pounds on those railway tracks? 
Here is my naive advertising man's suggestion. 
What you should in fact do is employ all of the world's top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train, handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Now, you'll still have about three billion pounds left in change, and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down. (Laughter) 
Now, here is another naive advertising man's question again. 
And this shows that engineers, medical people, scientific people, have an obsession with solving the problems of reality, when actually most problems, once you reach a basic level of wealth in society, most problems are actually problems of perception. 
So I'll ask you another question. 
What on earth is wrong with placebos? 
They seem fantastic to me. They cost very little to develop. 
They work extraordinarily well. 
They have no side effects, or if they do, they're imaginary, so you can safely ignore them. 
(Laughter) So I was discussing this. And I actually went to the Marginal Revolution blog by Tyler Cowen. I don't know if anybody knows it. 
Someone was actually suggesting that you can take this concept further, and actually produce placebo education. 
The point is that education doesn't actually work by teaching you things. 
It actually works by giving you the impression that you've had a very good education, which gives you an insane sense of unwarranted self-confidence, which then makes you very, very successful in later life. 
So, welcome to Oxford, ladies and gentlemen. 
(Laughter) (Applause) But, actually, the point of placebo education is interesting. 
How many problems of life can be solved actually by tinkering with perception, rather than that tedious, hardworking and messy business of actually trying to change reality? 
Here's a great example from history. I've heard this attributed to several other kings, but doing a bit of historical research, it seems to be Fredrick the Great. 
Fredrick the Great of Prussia was very, very keen for the Germans to adopt the potato and to eat it, because he realized that if you had two sources of carbohydrate, wheat and potatoes, you get less price volatility in bread. 
And you get a far lower risk of famine, because you actually had two crops to fall back on, not one. 
The only problem is: potatoes, if you think about it, look pretty disgusting. 
And also, 18th century Prussians ate very, very few vegetables — rather like contemporary Scottish people. 
(Laughter) So, actually, he tried making it compulsory. 
The Prussian peasantry said, "" We can't even get the dogs to eat these damn things. 
They are absolutely disgusting and they're good for nothing. "" There are even records of people being executed for refusing to grow potatoes. 
So he tried plan B. 
He tried the marketing solution, which is he declared the potato as a royal vegetable, and none but the royal family could consume it. 
And he planted it in a royal potato patch, with guards who had instructions to guard over it, night and day, but with secret instructions not to guard it very well. 
(Laughter) Now, 18th century peasants know that there is one pretty safe rule in life, which is if something is worth guarding, it's worth stealing. 
Before long, there was a massive underground potato-growing operation in Germany. 
What he'd effectively done is he'd re-branded the potato. 
It was an absolute masterpiece. 
I told this story and a gentleman from Turkey came up to me and said, "Very, very good marketer, Fredrick the Great. But not a patch on Ataturk." 
Ataturk, rather like Nicolas Sarkozy, was very keen to discourage the wearing of a veil, in Turkey, to modernize it. 
Now, boring people would have just simply banned the veil. 
But that would have ended up with a lot of awful kickback and a hell of a lot of resistance. 
Ataturk was a lateral thinker. 
He made it compulsory for prostitutes to wear the veil. 
(Laughter) (Applause) I can't verify that fully, but it does not matter. 
There is your environmental problem solved, by the way, guys: All convicted child molesters have to drive a Porsche Cayenne. 
(Laughter) What Ataturk realized actually is two very fundamental things. 
Which is that, actually, first one, all value is actually relative. 
All value is perceived value. 
For those of you who don't speak Spanish, jugo de naranja — it's actually the Spanish for "" orange juice. "" Because actually it's not the dollar. It's actually the peso in Buenos Aires. Very clever Buenos Aires street vendors decided to practice price discrimination to the detriment of any passing gringo tourists. 
As an advertising man, I have to admire that. 
But the first thing is that all value is subjective. 
Second point is that persuasion is often better than compulsion. 
These funny signs that flash your speed at you, some of the new ones, on the bottom right, now actually show a smiley face or a frowny face, to act as an emotional trigger. 
What's fascinating about these signs is they cost about 10 percent of the running cost of a conventional speed camera, but they prevent twice as many accidents. 
So, the bizarre thing, which is baffling to conventional, classically trained economists, is that a weird little smiley face has a better effect on changing your behavior than the threat of a £60 fine and three penalty points. 
Tiny little behavioral economics detail: in Italy, penalty points go backwards. 
You start with 12 and they take them away. 
Because they found that loss aversion is a more powerful influence on people's behavior. 
In Britain we tend to feel, "" Whoa! Got another three! "" Not so in Italy. 
Another fantastic case of creating intangible value to replace actual or material value, which remember, is what, after all, the environmental movement needs to be about: This again is from Prussia, from, I think, about 1812, 1813. 
The wealthy Prussians, to help in the war against the French, were encouraged to give in all their jewelry. 
And it was replaced with replica jewelry made of cast iron. 
Here's one: "" Gold gab ich für Eisen, 1813. "" The interesting thing is that for 50 years hence, the highest status jewelry you could wear in Prussia wasn't made of gold or diamonds. 
It was made of cast iron. 
Because actually, never mind the actual intrinsic value of having gold jewelry. This actually had symbolic value, badge value. 
It said that your family had made a great sacrifice in the past. 
So, the modern equivalent would of course be this. 
(Laughter) But, actually, there is a thing, just as there are Veblen goods, where the value of the good depends on it being expensive and rare — there are opposite kind of things where actually the value in them depends on them being ubiquitous, classless and minimalistic. 
If you think about it, Shakerism was a proto-environmental movement. 
Adam Smith talks about 18th century America, where the prohibition against visible displays of wealth was so great, it was almost a block in the economy in New England, because even wealthy farmers could find nothing to spend their money on without incurring the displeasure of their neighbors. 
It's perfectly possible to create these social pressures which lead to more egalitarian societies. 
What's also interesting, if you look at products that have a high component of what you might call messaging value, a high component of intangible value, versus their intrinsic value: They are often quite egalitarian. 
In terms of dress, denim is perhaps the perfect example of something which replaces material value with symbolic value. 
Coca-Cola. A bunch of you may be a load of pinkos, and you may not like the Coca-Cola company, but it's worth remembering Andy Warhol's point about Coke. 
What Warhol said about Coke is, he said, "" What I really like about Coca-Cola is the president of the United States can't get a better Coke than the bum on the corner of the street. "" Now, that is, actually, when you think about it — we take it for granted — it's actually a remarkable achievement, to produce something that's that democratic. 
Now, we basically have to change our views slightly. 
There is a basic view that real value involves making things, involves labor. It involves engineering. 
It involves limited raw materials. 
And that what we add on top is kind of false. It's a fake version. 
And there is a reason for some suspicion and uncertainly about it. 
It patently veers toward propaganda. 
However, what we do have now is a much more variegated media ecosystem in which to kind of create this kind of value, and it's much fairer. 
When I grew up, this was basically the media environment of my childhood as translated into food. 
You had a monopoly supplier. On the left, you have Rupert Murdoch, or the BBC. 
(Laughter) And on your right you have a dependent public which is pathetically grateful for anything you give it. (Laughter) 
Nowadays, the user is actually involved. 
This is actually what's called, in the digital world, "" user-generated content. "" Although it's called agriculture in the world of food. 
(Laughter) This is actually called a mash-up, where you take content that someone else has produced and you do something new with it. 
In the world of food we call it cooking. 
This is food 2.0, which is food you produce for the purpose of sharing it with other people. 
This is mobile food. British are very good at that. 
Fish and chips in newspaper, the Cornish Pasty, the pie, the sandwich. 
We invented the whole lot of them. 
We're not very good at food in general. Italians do great food, but it's not very portable, generally. 
(Laughter) I only learned this the other day. The Earl of Sandwich didn't invent the sandwich. 
He actually invented the toasty. But then, the Earl of Toasty would be a ridiculous name. 
(Laughter) Finally, we have contextual communication. 
Now, the reason I show you Pernod — it's only one example. 
Every country has a contextual alcoholic drink. In France it's Pernod. 
It tastes great within the borders of that country, but absolute shite if you take it anywhere else. 
(Laughter) Unicum in Hungary, for example. 
The Greeks have actually managed to produce something called Retsina, which even tastes shite when you're in Greece. 
(Laughter) But so much communication now is contextual that the capacity for actually nudging people, for giving them better information — B.J. Fogg, at the University of Stanford, makes the point that actually the mobile phone is — He's invented the phrase, "" persuasive technologies. "" He believes the mobile phone, by being location-specific, contextual, timely and immediate, is simply the greatest persuasive technology device ever invented. 
Now, if we have all these tools at our disposal, we simply have to ask the question, and Thaler and Sunstein have, of how we can use these more intelligently. 
I'll give you one example. 
If you had a large red button of this kind, on the wall of your home, and every time you pressed it, it saved 50 dollars for you, put 50 dollars into your pension, you would save a lot more. 
The reason is that the interface fundamentally determines the behavior. Okay? 
Now, marketing has done a very, very good job of creating opportunities for impulse buying. 
Yet we've never created the opportunity for impulse saving. 
If you did this, more people would save more. 
It's simply a question of changing the interface by which people make decisions, and the very nature of the decisions changes. 
Obviously, I don't want people to do this, because as an advertising man I tend to regard saving as just consumerism needlessly postponed. 
(Laughter) But if anybody did want to do that, that's the kind of thing we need to be thinking about, actually: fundamental opportunities to change human behavior. 
Now, I've got an example here from Canada. 
There was a young intern at Ogilvy Canada called Hunter Somerville, who was working in improv in Toronto, and got a part-time job in advertising, and was given the job of advertising Shreddies. 
Now this is the most perfect case of creating intangible, added value, without changing the product in the slightest. 
Shreddies is a strange, square, whole-grain cereal, only available in New Zealand, Canada and Britain. 
It's Kraft's peculiar way of rewarding loyalty to the crown. 
(Laughter) In working out how you could re-launch Shreddies, he came up with this. 
Video: (Buzzer) Man: Shreddies is supposed to be square. 
(Laughter) Woman: Have any of these diamond shapes gone out? (Laughter) 
Voiceover: New Diamond Shreddies cereal. 
Same 100 percent whole-grain wheat in a delicious diamond shape. 
(Applause) Rory Sutherland: I'm not sure this isn't the most perfect example of intangible value creation. All it requires is photons, neurons, and a great idea to create this thing. 
I would say it's a work of genius. 
But, naturally, you can't do this kind of thing without a little bit of market research. 
Man: So, Shreddies is actually producing a new product, which is something very exciting for them. 
So they are introducing new Diamond Shreddies. 
(Laughter) So I just want to get your first impressions when you see that, when you see the Diamond Shreddies box there. (Laughter) 
Woman: Weren't they square? 
Woman # 2: I'm a little bit confused. Woman # 3: They look like the squares to me. 
Man: They — Yeah, it's all in the appearance. 
But it's kind of like flipping a six or a nine. Like a six, if you flip it over it looks like a nine. 
But a six is very different from a nine. 
Woman # 3: Or an "" M "" and a "" W "". Man: An "" M "" and a "" W "", exactly. 
Man # 2: [unclear] You just looked like you turned it on its end. But when you see it like that it's more interesting looking. 
Man: Just try both of them. 
Take a square one there, first. 
(Laughter) Man: Which one did you prefer? Man # 2: The first one. 
Man: The first one? 
(Laughter) Rory Sutherland: Now, naturally, a debate raged. 
There were conservative elements in Canada, unsurprisingly, who actually resented this intrusion. 
So, eventually, the manufacturers actually arrived at a compromise, which was the combo pack. 
(Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) If you think it's funny, bear in mind there is an organization called the American Institute of Wine Economics, which actually does extensive research into perception of things, and discovers that except for among perhaps five or ten percent of the most knowledgeable people, there is no correlation between quality and enjoyment in wine, except when you tell the people how expensive it is, in which case they tend to enjoy the more expensive stuff more. 
So drink your wine blind in the future. 
But this is both hysterically funny — but I think an important philosophical point, which is, going forward, we need more of this kind of value. 
We need to spend more time appreciating what already exists, and less time agonizing over what else we can do. 
Two quotations to more or less end with. 
One of them is, "" Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new. "" Which isn't a bad definition of what our job is, to help people appreciate what is unfamiliar, but also to gain a greater appreciation, and place a far higher value on those things which are already existing. 
There is some evidence, by the way, that things like social networking help do that. 
Because they help people share news. 
They give badge value to everyday little trivial activities. 
So they actually reduce the need for actually spending great money on display, and increase the kind of third-party enjoyment you can get from the smallest, simplest things in life. Which is magic. 
The second one is the second G.K. Chesterton quote of this session, which is, "" We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders, "" which I think for anybody involved in technology, is perfectly true. 
And a final thing: When you place a value on things like health, love, sex and other things, and learn to place a material value on what you've previously discounted for being merely intangible, a thing not seen, you realize you're much, much wealthier than you ever imagined. 
Thank you very much indeed. 
(Applause) 

A tourist is backpacking through the highlands of Scotland, and he stops at a pub to get a drink. 
And the only people in there is a bartender and an old man nursing a beer. 
And he orders a pint, and they sit in silence for a while. 
And suddenly the old man turns to him and goes, "" You see this bar? 
I built this bar with my bare hands from the finest wood in the county. 
Gave it more love and care than my own child. 
But do they call me MacGregor the bar builder? No. "" Points out the window. 
"" You see that stone wall out there? 
I built that stone wall with my bare hands. 
Found every stone, placed them just so through the rain and the cold. 
But do they call me MacGregor the stone wall builder? No. "" Points out the window. 
"" You see that pier on the lake out there? 
I built that pier with my bare hands. 
Drove the pilings against the tide of the sand, plank by plank. 
But do they call me MacGregor the pier builder? No. 
But you fuck one goat... "" (Laughter) Storytelling — (Laughter) is joke telling. 
It's knowing your punchline, your ending, knowing that everything you're saying, from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal, and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understandings of who we are as human beings. 
We all love stories. 
We're born for them. 
Stories affirm who we are. 
We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning. 
And nothing does a greater affirmation than when we connect through stories. 
It can cross the barriers of time, past, present and future, and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others, real and imagined. 
The children's television host Mr. Rogers always carried in his wallet a quote from a social worker that said, "" Frankly, there isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story. "" And the way I like to interpret that is probably the greatest story commandment, which is "" Make me care "" — please, emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically, just make me care. 
We all know what it's like to not care. 
You've gone through hundreds of TV channels, just switching channel after channel, and then suddenly you actually stop on one. 
It's already halfway over, but something's caught you and you're drawn in and you care. 
That's not by chance, that's by design. 
So it got me thinking, what if I told you my history was story, how I was born for it, how I learned along the way this subject matter? 
And to make it more interesting, we'll start from the ending and we'll go to the beginning. 
And so if I were going to give you the ending of this story, it would go something like this: And that's what ultimately led me to speaking to you here at TED about story. 
And the most current story lesson that I've had was completing the film I've just done this year in 2012. 
The film is "" John Carter. "" It's based on a book called "" The Princess of Mars, "" which was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. 
And Edgar Rice Burroughs actually put himself as a character inside this movie, and as the narrator. 
And he's summoned by his rich uncle, John Carter, to his mansion with a telegram saying, "" See me at once. "" But once he gets there, he's found out that his uncle has mysteriously passed away and been entombed in a mausoleum on the property. 
(Video) Butler: You won't find a keyhole. 
Thing only opens from the inside. 
He insisted, no embalming, no open coffin, no funeral. 
You don't acquire the kind of wealth your uncle commanded by being like the rest of us, huh? 
Come, let's go inside. 
AS: What this scene is doing, and it did in the book, is it's fundamentally making a promise. 
It's making a promise to you that this story will lead somewhere that's worth your time. 
And that's what all good stories should do at the beginning, is they should give you a promise. 
You could do it an infinite amount of ways. 
Sometimes it's as simple as "" Once upon a time... "" These Carter books always had Edgar Rice Burroughs as a narrator in it. 
And I always thought it was such a fantastic device. 
It's like a guy inviting you around the campfire, or somebody in a bar saying, "" Here, let me tell you a story. 
It didn't happen to me, it happened to somebody else, but it's going to be worth your time. "" A well told promise is like a pebble being pulled back in a slingshot and propels you forward through the story to the end. 
In 2008, I pushed all the theories that I had on story at the time to the limits of my understanding on this project. 
(Video) (Mechanical Sounds) ♫ And that is all ♫ ♫ that love's about ♫ ♫ And we'll recall ♫ ♫ when time runs out ♫ ♫ That it only ♫ (Laughter) AS: Storytelling without dialogue. 
It's the purest form of cinematic storytelling. 
It's the most inclusive approach you can take. 
It confirmed something I really had a hunch on, is that the audience actually wants to work for their meal. 
They just don't want to know that they're doing that. 
That's your job as a storyteller, is to hide the fact that you're making them work for their meal. 
We're born problem solvers. 
We're compelled to deduce and to deduct, because that's what we do in real life. 
It's this well-organized absence of information that draws us in. 
There's a reason that we're all attracted to an infant or a puppy. 
It's not just that they're damn cute; it's because they can't completely express what they're thinking and what their intentions are. 
And it's like a magnet. 
We can't stop ourselves from wanting to complete the sentence and fill it in. 
I first started really understanding this storytelling device when I was writing with Bob Peterson on "" Finding Nemo. "" And we would call this the unifying theory of two plus two. 
Make the audience put things together. 
Don't give them four, give them two plus two. 
The elements you provide and the order you place them in is crucial to whether you succeed or fail at engaging the audience. 
Editors and screenwriters have known this all along. 
It's the invisible application that holds our attention to story. 
I don't mean to make it sound like this is an actual exact science, it's not. 
That's what's so special about stories, they're not a widget, they aren't exact. 
Stories are inevitable, if they're good, but they're not predictable. 
I took a seminar in this year with an acting teacher named Judith Weston. 
And I learned a key insight to character. 
She believed that all well-drawn characters have a spine. 
And the idea is that the character has an inner motor, a dominant, unconscious goal that they're striving for, an itch that they can't scratch. 
She gave a wonderful example of Michael Corleone, Al Pacino's character in "" The Godfather, "" and that probably his spine was to please his father. 
And it's something that always drove all his choices. 
Even after his father died, he was still trying to scratch that itch. 
I took to this like a duck to water. 
Wall-E's was to find the beauty. 
Marlin's, the father in "" Finding Nemo, "" was to prevent harm. 
And Woody's was to do what was best for his child. 
And these spines don't always drive you to make the best choices. 
Sometimes you can make some horrible choices with them. 
I'm really blessed to be a parent, and watching my children grow, I really firmly believe that you're born with a temperament and you're wired a certain way, and you don't have any say about it, and there's no changing it. 
All you can do is learn to recognize it and own it. 
And some of us are born with temperaments that are positive, some are negative. 
But a major threshold is passed when you mature enough to acknowledge what drives you and to take the wheel and steer it. 
As parents, you're always learning who your children are. 
They're learning who they are. 
And you're still learning who you are. 
So we're all learning all the time. 
And that's why change is fundamental in story. 
If things go static, stories die, because life is never static. 
In 1998, I had finished writing "" Toy Story "" and "" A Bug's Life "" and I was completely hooked on screenwriting. 
So I wanted to become much better at it and learn anything I could. 
So I researched everything I possibly could. 
And I finally came across this fantastic quote by a British playwright, William Archer: "" Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty. "" It's an incredibly insightful definition. 
When you're telling a story, have you constructed anticipation? 
In the short-term, have you made me want to know what will happen next? 
But more importantly, have you made me want to know how it will all conclude in the long-term? 
Have you constructed honest conflicts with truth that creates doubt in what the outcome might be? 
An example would be in "" Finding Nemo, "" in the short tension, you were always worried, would Dory's short-term memory make her forget whatever she was being told by Marlin. 
But under that was this global tension of will we ever find Nemo in this huge, vast ocean? 
In our earliest days at Pixar, before we truly understood the invisible workings of story, we were simply a group of guys just going on our gut, going on our instincts. 
And it's interesting to see how that led us places that were actually pretty good. 
You've got to remember that in this time of year, 1993, what was considered a successful animated picture was "" The Little Mermaid, "" "" Beauty and the Beast, "" "Aladdin," "Lion King." 
So when we pitched "" Toy Story "" to Tom Hanks for the first time, he walked in and he said, "You don't want me to sing, do you?" 
And I thought that epitomized perfectly what everybody thought animation had to be at the time. 
But we really wanted to prove that you could tell stories completely different in animation. 
We didn't have any influence then, so we had a little secret list of rules that we kept to ourselves. 
And they were: No songs, no "" I want "" moment, no happy village, no love story. 
And the irony is that, in the first year, our story was not working at all and Disney was panicking. 
So they privately got advice from a famous lyricist, who I won't name, and he faxed them some suggestions. 
And we got a hold of that fax. 
And the fax said, there should be songs, there should be an "" I want "" song, there should be a happy village song, there should be a love story and there should be a villain. 
And thank goodness we were just too young, rebellious and contrarian at the time. 
That just gave us more determination to prove that you could build a better story. 
And a year after that, we did conquer it. 
And it just went to prove that storytelling has guidelines, not hard, fast rules. 
Another fundamental thing we learned was about liking your main character. 
And we had naively thought, well Woody in "" Toy Story "" has to become selfless at the end, so you've got to start from someplace. 
So let's make him selfish. And this is what you get. 
(Voice Over) Woody: What do you think you're doing? 
Off the bed. 
Hey, off the bed! 
Mr. Potato Head: You going to make us, Woody? 
Woody: No, he is. 
Slinky? Slink... Slinky! 
Get up here and do your job. 
Are you deaf? 
I said, take care of them. 
Slinky: I'm sorry, Woody, but I have to agree with them. 
I don't think what you did was right. 
Woody: What? Am I hearing correctly? 
You don't think I was right? 
Who said your job was to think, Spring Wiener? 
AS: So how do you make a selfish character likable? 
We realized, you can make him kind, generous, funny, considerate, as long as one condition is met for him, is that he stays the top toy. 
And that's what it really is, is that we all live life conditionally. 
We're all willing to play by the rules and follow things along, as long as certain conditions are met. 
After that, all bets are off. 
And before I'd even decided to make storytelling my career, I can now see key things that happened in my youth that really sort of opened my eyes to certain things about story. 
In 1986, I truly understood the notion of story having a theme. 
And that was the year that they restored and re-released "Lawrence of Arabia." 
And I saw that thing seven times in one month. 
I couldn't get enough of it. 
I could just tell there was a grand design under it — in every shot, every scene, every line. 
Yet, on the surface it just seemed to be depicting his historical lineage of what went on. 
Yet, there was something more being said. What exactly was it? 
And it wasn't until, on one of my later viewings, that the veil was lifted and it was in a scene where he's walked across the Sinai Desert and he's reached the Suez Canal, and I suddenly got it. 
(Video) Boy: Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! 
Cyclist: Who are you? Who are you? 
AS: That was the theme: Who are you? Here were all these seemingly disparate 
events and dialogues that just were chronologically telling the history of him, but underneath it was a constant, a guideline, a road map. 
Everything Lawrence did in that movie was an attempt for him to figure out where his place was in the world. 
A strong theme is always running through a well-told story. 
When I was five, I was introduced to possibly the most major ingredient that I feel a story should have, but is rarely invoked. 
And this is what my mother took me to when I was five. 
(Video) Thumper: Come on. It's all right. 
Look. 
The water's stiff. 
Bambi: Yippee! 
Thumper: Some fun, huh, Bambi? 
Come on. Get up. 
Like this. 
Ha ha. No, no, no. 
AS: I walked out of there wide-eyed with wonder. 
And that's what I think the magic ingredient is, the secret sauce, is can you invoke wonder. 
Wonder is honest, it's completely innocent. 
It can't be artificially evoked. 
For me, there's no greater ability than the gift of another human being giving you that feeling — to hold them still just for a brief moment in their day and have them surrender to wonder. 
When it's tapped, the affirmation of being alive, it reaches you almost to a cellular level. 
And when an artist does that to another artist, it's like you're compelled to pass it on. 
It's like a dormant command that suddenly is activated in you, like a call to Devil's Tower. 
Do unto others what's been done to you. 
The best stories infuse wonder. 
When I was four years old, I have a vivid memory of finding two pinpoint scars on my ankle and asking my dad what they were. 
And he said I had a matching pair like that on my head, but I couldn't see them because of my hair. 
And he explained that when I was born, I was born premature, that I came out much too early, and I wasn't fully baked; I was very, very sick. 
And when the doctor took a look at this yellow kid with black teeth, he looked straight at my mom and said, "He's not going to live." 
And I was in the hospital for months. 
And many blood transfusions later, I lived, and that made me special. 
I don't know if I really believe that. 
I don't know if my parents really believe that, but I didn't want to prove them wrong. 
Whatever I ended up being good at, I would strive to be worthy of the second chance I was given. 
(Video) (Crying) Marlin: There, there, there. 
It's okay, daddy's here. 
Daddy's got you. 
I promise, I will never let anything happen to you, Nemo. 
AS: And that's the first story lesson I ever learned. 
Use what you know. Draw from it. 
It doesn't always mean plot or fact. 
It means capturing a truth from your experiencing it, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core. 
And that's what ultimately led me to speaking to you here at TEDTalk today. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

A few months ago the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to two teams of astronomers for a discovery that has been hailed as one of the most important astronomical observations ever. 
And today, after briefly describing what they found, I'm going to tell you about a highly controversial framework for explaining their discovery, namely the possibility that way beyond the Earth, the Milky Way and other distant galaxies, we may find that our universe is not the only universe, but is instead part of a vast complex of universes that we call the multiverse. 
Now the idea of a multiverse is a strange one. 
I mean, most of us were raised to believe that the word "" universe "" means everything. 
And I say most of us with forethought, as my four-year-old daughter has heard me speak of these ideas since she was born. 
And last year I was holding her and I said, "" Sophia, I love you more than anything in the universe. "" And she turned to me and said, "" Daddy, universe or multiverse? "" (Laughter) But barring such an anomalous upbringing, it is strange to imagine other realms separate from ours, most with fundamentally different features, that would rightly be called universes of their own. 
And yet, speculative though the idea surely is, I aim to convince you that there's reason for taking it seriously, as it just might be right. 
I'm going to tell the story of the multiverse in three parts. 
In part one, I'm going to describe those Nobel Prize-winning results and to highlight a profound mystery which those results revealed. 
In part two, I'll offer a solution to that mystery. 
It's based on an approach called string theory, and that's where the idea of the multiverse will come into the story. 
Finally, in part three, I'm going to describe a cosmological theory called inflation, which will pull all the pieces of the story together. 
Okay, part one starts back in 1929 when the great astronomer Edwin Hubble realized that the distant galaxies were all rushing away from us, establishing that space itself is stretching, it's expanding. 
Now this was revolutionary. 
The prevailing wisdom was that on the largest of scales the universe was static. 
But even so, there was one thing that everyone was certain of: The expansion must be slowing down. 
That, much as the gravitational pull of the Earth slows the ascent of an apple tossed upward, the gravitational pull of each galaxy on every other must be slowing the expansion of space. 
Now let's fast-forward to the 1990s when those two teams of astronomers I mentioned at the outset were inspired by this reasoning to measure the rate at which the expansion has been slowing. 
And they did this by painstaking observations of numerous distant galaxies, allowing them to chart how the expansion rate has changed over time. 
Here's the surprise: They found that the expansion is not slowing down. 
Instead they found that it's speeding up, going faster and faster. 
That's like tossing an apple upward and it goes up faster and faster. 
Now if you saw an apple do that, you'd want to know why. 
What's pushing on it? 
Similarly, the astronomers' results are surely well-deserving of the Nobel Prize, but they raised an analogous question. 
What force is driving all galaxies to rush away from every other at an ever-quickening speed? 
Well the most promising answer comes from an old idea of Einstein's. 
You see, we are all used to gravity being a force that does one thing, pulls objects together. 
But in Einstein's theory of gravity, his general theory of relativity, gravity can also push things apart. 
How? Well according to Einstein's math, if space is uniformly filled with an invisible energy, sort of like a uniform, invisible mist, then the gravity generated by that mist would be repulsive, repulsive gravity, which is just what we need to explain the observations. 
Because the repulsive gravity of an invisible energy in space — we now call it dark energy, but I've made it smokey white here so you can see it — its repulsive gravity would cause each galaxy to push against every other, driving expansion to speed up, not slow down. 
And this explanation represents great progress. 
But I promised you a mystery here in part one. 
Here it is. 
When the astronomers worked out how much of this dark energy must be infusing space to account for the cosmic speed up, look at what they found. 
This number is small. 
Expressed in the relevant unit, it is spectacularly small. 
And the mystery is to explain this peculiar number. 
We want this number to emerge from the laws of physics, but so far no one has found a way to do that. 
Now you might wonder, should you care? 
Maybe explaining this number is just a technical issue, a technical detail of interest to experts, but of no relevance to anybody else. 
Well it surely is a technical detail, but some details really matter. 
Some details provide windows into uncharted realms of reality, and this peculiar number may be doing just that, as the only approach that's so far made headway to explain it invokes the possibility of other universes — an idea that naturally emerges from string theory, which takes me to part two: string theory. 
So hold the mystery of the dark energy in the back of your mind as I now go on to tell you three key things about string theory. 
First off, what is it? 
Well it's an approach to realize Einstein's dream of a unified theory of physics, a single overarching framework that would be able to describe all the forces at work in the universe. 
And the central idea of string theory is quite straightforward. 
It says that if you examine any piece of matter ever more finely, at first you'll find molecules and then you'll find atoms and subatomic particles. 
But the theory says that if you could probe smaller, much smaller than we can with existing technology, you'd find something else inside these particles — a little tiny vibrating filament of energy, a little tiny vibrating string. 
And just like the strings on a violin, they can vibrate in different patterns producing different musical notes. 
These little fundamental strings, when they vibrate in different patterns, they produce different kinds of particles — so electrons, quarks, neutrinos, photons, all other particles would be united into a single framework, as they would all arise from vibrating strings. 
It's a compelling picture, a kind of cosmic symphony, where all the richness that we see in the world around us emerges from the music that these little, tiny strings can play. 
But there's a cost to this elegant unification, because years of research have shown that the math of string theory doesn't quite work. 
It has internal inconsistencies, unless we allow for something wholly unfamiliar — extra dimensions of space. 
That is, we all know about the usual three dimensions of space. 
And you can think about those as height, width and depth. 
But string theory says that, on fantastically small scales, there are additional dimensions crumpled to a tiny size so small that we have not detected them. 
But even though the dimensions are hidden, they would have an impact on things that we can observe because the shape of the extra dimensions constrains how the strings can vibrate. 
And in string theory, vibration determines everything. 
So particle masses, the strengths of forces, and most importantly, the amount of dark energy would be determined by the shape of the extra dimensions. 
So if we knew the shape of the extra dimensions, we should be able to calculate these features, calculate the amount of dark energy. 
The challenge is we don't know the shape of the extra dimensions. 
All we have is a list of candidate shapes allowed by the math. 
Now when these ideas were first developed, there were only about five different candidate shapes, so you can imagine analyzing them one-by-one to determine if any yield the physical features we observe. 
But over time the list grew as researchers found other candidate shapes. 
From five, the number grew into the hundreds and then the thousands — A large, but still manageable, collection to analyze, since after all, graduate students need something to do. 
But then the list continued to grow into the millions and the billions, until today. 
The list of candidate shapes has soared to about 10 to the 500. 
So, what to do? 
Well some researchers lost heart, concluding that was so many candidate shapes for the extra dimensions, each giving rise to different physical features, string theory would never make definitive, testable predictions. 
But others turned this issue on its head, taking us to the possibility of a multiverse. 
Here's the idea. 
Maybe each of these shapes is on an equal footing with every other. 
Each is as real as every other, in the sense that there are many universes, each with a different shape, for the extra dimensions. 
And this radical proposal has a profound impact on this mystery: the amount of dark energy revealed by the Nobel Prize-winning results. 
Because you see, if there are other universes, and if those universes each have, say, a different shape for the extra dimensions, then the physical features of each universe will be different, and in particular, the amount of dark energy in each universe will be different. 
Which means that the mystery of explaining the amount of dark energy we've now measured would take on a wholly different character. 
In this context, the laws of physics can't explain one number for the dark energy because there isn't just one number, there are many numbers. 
Which means we have been asking the wrong question. 
It's that the right question to ask is, why do we humans find ourselves in a universe with a particular amount of dark energy we've measured instead of any of the other possibilities that are out there? 
And that's a question on which we can make headway. 
Because those universes that have much more dark energy than ours, whenever matter tries to clump into galaxies, the repulsive push of the dark energy is so strong that it blows the clump apart and galaxies don't form. 
And in those universes that have much less dark energy, well they collapse back on themselves so quickly that, again, galaxies don't form. 
And without galaxies, there are no stars, no planets and no chance for our form of life to exist in those other universes. 
So we find ourselves in a universe with the particular amount of dark energy we've measured simply because our universe has conditions hospitable to our form of life. 
And that would be that. 
Mystery solved, multiverse found. 
Now some find this explanation unsatisfying. 
We're used to physics giving us definitive explanations for the features we observe. 
But the point is, if the feature you're observing can and does take on a wide variety of different values across the wider landscape of reality, then thinking one explanation for a particular value is simply misguided. 
An early example comes from the great astronomer Johannes Kepler who was obsessed with understanding a different number — why the Sun is 93 million miles away from the Earth. 
And he worked for decades trying to explain this number, but he never succeeded, and we know why. 
Kepler was asking the wrong question. 
We now know that there are many planets at a wide variety of different distances from their host stars. 
So hoping that the laws of physics will explain one particular number, 93 million miles, well that is simply wrongheaded. 
Instead the right question to ask is, why do we humans find ourselves on a planet at this particular distance, instead of any of the other possibilities? 
And again, that's a question we can answer. 
Those planets which are much closer to a star like the Sun would be so hot that our form of life wouldn't exist. 
And those planets that are much farther away from the star, well they're so cold that, again, our form of life would not take hold. 
So we find ourselves on a planet at this particular distance simply because it yields conditions vital to our form of life. 
And when it comes to planets and their distances, this clearly is the right kind of reasoning. 
The point is, when it comes to universes and the dark energy that they contain, it may also be the right kind of reasoning. 
One key difference, of course, is we know that there are other planets out there, but so far I've only speculated on the possibility that there might be other universes. 
So to pull it all together, we need a mechanism that can actually generate other universes. 
And that takes me to my final part, part three. 
Because such a mechanism has been found by cosmologists trying to understand the Big Bang. 
You see, when we speak of the Big Bang, we often have an image of a kind of cosmic explosion that created our universe and set space rushing outward. 
But there's a little secret. 
The Big Bang leaves out something pretty important, the Bang. 
It tells us how the universe evolved after the Bang, but gives us no insight into what would have powered the Bang itself. 
And this gap was finally filled by an enhanced version of the Big Bang theory. 
It's called inflationary cosmology, which identified a particular kind of fuel that would naturally generate an outward rush of space. 
The fuel is based on something called a quantum field, but the only detail that matters for us is that this fuel proves to be so efficient that it's virtually impossible to use it all up, which means in the inflationary theory, the Big Bang giving rise to our universe is likely not a one-time event. 
Instead the fuel not only generated our Big Bang, but it would also generate countless other Big Bangs, each giving rise to its own separate universe with our universe becoming but one bubble in a grand cosmic bubble bath of universes. 
And now, when we meld this with string theory, here's the picture we're led to. 
Each of these universes has extra dimensions. 
The extra dimensions take on a wide variety of different shapes. 
The different shapes yield different physical features. 
And we find ourselves in one universe instead of another simply because it's only in our universe that the physical features, like the amount of dark energy, are right for our form of life to take hold. 
And this is the compelling but highly controversial picture of the wider cosmos that cutting-edge observation and theory have now led us to seriously consider. 
One big remaining question, of course, is, could we ever confirm the existence of other universes? 
Well let me describe one way that might one day happen. 
The inflationary theory already has strong observational support. 
Because the theory predicts that the Big Bang would have been so intense that as space rapidly expanded, tiny quantum jitters from the micro world would have been stretched out to the macro world, yielding a distinctive fingerprint, a pattern of slightly hotter spots and slightly colder spots, across space, which powerful telescopes have now observed. 
Going further, if there are other universes, the theory predicts that every so often those universes can collide. 
And if our universe got hit by another, that collision would generate an additional subtle pattern of temperature variations across space that we might one day be able to detect. 
And so exotic as this picture is, it may one day be grounded in observations, establishing the existence of other universes. 
I'll conclude with a striking implication of all these ideas for the very far future. 
You see, we learned that our universe is not static, that space is expanding, that that expansion is speeding up and that there might be other universes all by carefully examining faint pinpoints of starlight coming to us from distant galaxies. 
But because the expansion is speeding up, in the very far future, those galaxies will rush away so far and so fast that we won't be able to see them — not because of technological limitations, but because of the laws of physics. 
The light those galaxies emit, even traveling at the fastest speed, the speed of light, will not be able to overcome the ever-widening gulf between us. 
So astronomers in the far future looking out into deep space will see nothing but an endless stretch of static, inky, black stillness. 
And they will conclude that the universe is static and unchanging and populated by a single central oasis of matter that they inhabit — a picture of the cosmos that we definitively know to be wrong. 
Now maybe those future astronomers will have records handed down from an earlier era, like ours, attesting to an expanding cosmos teeming with galaxies. 
But would those future astronomers believe such ancient knowledge? 
Or would they believe in the black, static empty universe that their own state-of-the-art observations reveal? 
I suspect the latter. 
Which means that we are living through a remarkably privileged era when certain deep truths about the cosmos are still within reach of the human spirit of exploration. 
It appears that it may not always be that way. 
Because today's astronomers, by turning powerful telescopes to the sky, have captured a handful of starkly informative photons — a kind of cosmic telegram billions of years in transit. 
and the message echoing across the ages is clear. 
Sometimes nature guards her secrets with the unbreakable grip of physical law. 
Sometimes the true nature of reality beckons from just beyond the horizon. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Brian, thank you. 
The range of ideas you've just spoken about are dizzying, exhilarating, incredible. 
How do you think of where cosmology is now, in a sort of historical side? 
Are we in the middle of something unusual historically in your opinion? 
BG: Well it's hard to say. 
When we learn that astronomers of the far future may not have enough information to figure things out, the natural question is, maybe we're already in that position and certain deep, critical features of the universe already have escaped our ability to understand because of how cosmology evolves. 
So from that perspective, maybe we will always be asking questions and never be able to fully answer them. 
On the other hand, we now can understand how old the universe is. 
We can understand how to understand the data from the microwave background radiation that was set down 13.72 billion years ago — and yet, we can do calculations today to predict how it will look and it matches. 
Holy cow! That's just amazing. 
So on the one hand, it's just incredible where we've gotten, but who knows what sort of blocks we may find in the future. 
CA: You're going to be around for the next few days. 
Maybe some of these conversations can continue. 
Thank you. Thank you, Brian. (BG: My pleasure.) (Applause) 

Why can't we solve these problems? 
We know what they are. 
Something always seems to stop us. 
Why? 
I remember March the 15th, 2000. 
The B15 iceberg broke off the Ross Ice Shelf. 
In the newspaper it said "it was all part of a normal process." 
A little bit further on in the article it said "" a loss that would normally take the ice shelf 50-100 years to replace. "" That same word, "" normal, "" had two different, almost opposite meanings. 
If we walk into the B15 iceberg when we leave here today, we're going to bump into something a thousand feet tall, 76 miles long, 17 miles wide, and it's going to weigh two gigatons. 
I'm sorry, there's nothing normal about this. 
And yet I think it's this perspective of us as humans to look at our world through the lens of normal is one of the forces that stops us developing real solutions. 
Only 90 days after this, arguably the greatest discovery of the last century occurred. 
It was the sequencing for the first time of the human genome. 
This is the code that's in every single one of our 50 trillion cells that makes us who we are and what we are. 
And if we just take one cell's worth of this code and unwind it, it's a meter long, two nanometers thick. 
Two nanometers is 20 atoms in thickness. 
And I wondered, what if the answer to some of our biggest problems could be found in the smallest of places, where the difference between what is valuable and what is worthless is merely the addition or subtraction of a few atoms? 
And what if we could get exquisite control over the essence of energy, the electron? 
So I started to go around the world finding the best and brightest scientists I could at universities whose collective discoveries have the chance to take us there, and we formed a company to build on their extraordinary ideas. 
Six and a half years later, a hundred and eighty researchers, they have some amazing developments in the lab, and I will show you three of those today, such that we can stop burning up our planet and instead, we can generate all the energy we need right where we are, cleanly, safely, and cheaply. 
Think of the space that we spend most of our time. 
A tremendous amount of energy is coming at us from the sun. 
We like the light that comes into the room, but in the middle of summer, all that heat is coming into the room that we're trying to keep cool. 
In winter, exactly the opposite is happening. 
We're trying to heat up the space that we're in, and all that is trying to get out through the window. 
Wouldn't it be really great if the window could flick back the heat into the room if we needed it or flick it away before it came in? 
One of the materials that can do this is a remarkable material, carbon, that has changed its form in this incredibly beautiful reaction where graphite is blasted by a vapor, and when the vaporized carbon condenses, it condenses back into a different form: chickenwire rolled up. 
But this chickenwire carbon, called a carbon nanotube, is a hundred thousand times smaller than the width of one of your hairs. 
It's a thousand times more conductive than copper. 
How is that possible? 
One of the things about working at the nanoscale is things look and act very differently. 
You think of carbon as black. 
Carbon at the nanoscale is actually transparent and flexible. 
And when it's in this form, if I combine it with a polymer and affix it to your window when it's in its colored state, it will reflect away all heat and light, and when it's in its bleached state it will let all the light and heat through and any combination in between. 
To change its state, by the way, takes two volts from a millisecond pulse. 
And once you've changed its state, it stays there until you change its state again. 
As we were working on this incredible discovery at University of Florida, we were told to go down the corridor to visit another scientist, and he was working on a pretty incredible thing. 
Imagine if we didn't have to rely on artificial lighting to get around at night. 
We'd have to see at night, right? 
This lets you do it. 
It's a nanomaterial, two nanomaterials, a detector and an imager. 
The total width of it is 600 times smaller than the width of a decimal place. 
And it takes all the infrared available at night, converts it into an electron in the space of two small films, and is enabling you to play an image which you can see through. 
I'm going to show to TEDsters, the first time, this operating. 
Firstly I'm going to show you the transparency. 
Transparency is key. 
It's a film that you can look through. 
And then I'm going to turn the lights out. 
And you can see, off a tiny film, incredible clarity. 
As we were working on this, it dawned on us: this is taking infrared radiation, wavelengths, and converting it into electrons. 
What if we combined it with this? 
Suddenly you've converted energy into an electron on a plastic surface that you can stick on your window. 
But because it's flexible, it can be on any surface whatsoever. 
The power plant of tomorrow is no power plant. 
We talked about generating and using. 
We want to talk about storing energy, and unfortunately the best thing we've got going is something that was developed in France a hundred and fifty years ago, the lead acid battery. 
In terms of dollars per what's stored, it's simply the best. 
Knowing that we're not going to put fifty of these in our basements to store our power, we went to a group at University of Texas at Dallas, and we gave them this diagram. 
It was in actually a diner outside of Dallas / Fort Worth Airport. 
We said, "" Could you build this? "" And these scientists, instead of laughing at us, said, "" Yeah. "" And what they built was eBox. 
EBox is testing new nanomaterials to park an electron on the outside, hold it until you need it, and then be able to release it and pass it off. 
Being able to do that means that I can generate energy cleanly, efficiently and cheaply right where I am. 
It's my energy. 
And if I don't need it, I can convert it back up on the window to energy, light, and beam it, line of site, to your place. 
And for that I do not need an electric grid between us. 
The grid of tomorrow is no grid, and energy, clean efficient energy, will one day be free. 
If you do this, you get the last puzzle piece, which is water. 
Each of us, every day, need just eight glasses of this, because we're human. 
When we run out of water, as we are in some parts of the world and soon to be in other parts of the world, we're going to have to get this from the sea, and that's going to require us to build desalination plants. 
19 trillion dollars is what we're going to have to spend. 
These also require tremendous amounts of energy. 
In fact, it's going to require twice the world's supply of oil to run the pumps to generate the water. 
We're simply not going to do that. 
But in a world where energy is freed and transmittable easily and cheaply, we can take any water wherever we are and turn it into whatever we need. 
I'm glad to be working with incredibly brilliant and kind scientists, no kinder than many of the people in the world, but they have a magic look at the world. 
And I'm glad to see their discoveries coming out of the lab and into the world. 
It's been a long time in coming for me. 
18 years ago, I saw a photograph in the paper. 
It was taken by Kevin Carter who went to the Sudan to document their famine there. 
I've carried this photograph with me every day since then. 
It's a picture of a little girl dying of thirst. 
By any standard this is wrong. 
It's just wrong. 
We can do better than this. 
We should do better than this. 
And whenever I go round to somebody who says, "" You know what, you're working on something that's too difficult. 
It'll never happen. You don't have enough money. 
You don't have enough time. 
There's something much more interesting around the corner, "" I say, "" Try saying that to her. "" That's what I say in my mind. And I just say "" thank you, "" and I go on to the next one. 
This is why we have to solve our problems, and I know the answer as to how is to be able to get exquisite control over a building block of nature, the stuff of life: the simple electron. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

In the year 1919, a virtually unknown German mathematician, named Theodor Kaluza suggested a very bold and, in some ways, a very bizarre idea. 
He proposed that our universe might actually have more than the three dimensions that we are all aware of. 
That is in addition to left, right, back, forth and up, down, Kaluza proposed that there might be additional dimensions of space that for some reason we don't yet see. 
Now, when someone makes a bold and bizarre idea, sometimes that's all it is — bold and bizarre, but it has nothing to do with the world around us. 
This particular idea, however — although we don't yet know whether it's right or wrong, and at the end I'll discuss experiments which, in the next few years, may tell us whether it's right or wrong — this idea has had a major impact on physics in the last century and continues to inform a lot of cutting-edge research. 
So, I'd like to tell you something about the story of these extra dimensions. 
So where do we go? 
To begin we need a little bit of back story. Go to 1907. 
This is a year when Einstein is basking in the glow of having discovered the special theory of relativity and decides to take on a new project, to try to understand fully the grand, pervasive force of gravity. 
And in that moment, there are many people around who thought that that project had already been resolved. 
Newton had given the world a theory of gravity in the late 1600s that works well, describes the motion of planets, the motion of the moon and so forth, the motion of apocryphal of apples falling from trees, hitting people on the head. 
All of that could be described using Newton's work. 
But Einstein realized that Newton had left something out of the story, because even Newton had written that although he understood how to calculate the effect of gravity, he'd been unable to figure out how it really works. 
How is it that the Sun, 93 million miles away, [that] somehow it affects the motion of the Earth? 
How does the Sun reach out across empty inert space and exert influence? 
And that is a task to which Einstein set himself — to figure out how gravity works. 
And let me show you what it is that he found. 
So Einstein found that the medium that transmits gravity is space itself. 
The idea goes like this: imagine space is a substrate of all there is. 
Einstein said space is nice and flat, if there's no matter present. 
But if there is matter in the environment, such as the Sun, it causes the fabric of space to warp, to curve. 
And that communicates the force of gravity. 
Even the Earth warps space around it. 
Now look at the Moon. 
The Moon is kept in orbit, according to these ideas, because it rolls along a valley in the curved environment that the Sun and the Moon and the Earth can all create by virtue of their presence. 
We go to a full-frame view of this. 
The Earth itself is kept in orbit because it rolls along a valley in the environment that's curved because of the Sun's presence. 
That is this new idea about how gravity actually works. 
Now, this idea was tested in 1919 through astronomical observations. 
It really works. It describes the data. 
And this gained Einstein prominence around the world. 
And that is what got Kaluza thinking. 
He, like Einstein, was in search of what we call a unified theory. 
That's one theory that might be able to describe all of nature's forces from one set of ideas, one set of principles, one master equation, if you will. 
So Kaluza said to himself, Einstein has been able to describe gravity in terms of warps and curves in space — in fact, space and time, to be more precise. 
Maybe I can play the same game with the other known force, which was, at that time, known as the electromagnetic force — we know of others today, but at that time that was the only other one people were thinking about. 
You know, the force responsible for electricity and magnetic attraction and so forth. 
So Kaluza says, maybe I can play the same game and describe electromagnetic force in terms of warps and curves. 
That raised a question: warps and curves in what? 
Einstein had already used up space and time, warps and curves, to describe gravity. 
There didn't seem to be anything else to warp or curve. 
So Kaluza said, well, maybe there are more dimensions of space. 
He said, if I want to describe one more force, maybe I need one more dimension. 
So he imagined that the world had four dimensions of space, not three, and imagined that electromagnetism was warps and curves in that fourth dimension. Now here's the thing: when he wrote down the equations describing warps and curves in a universe with four space dimensions, not three, he found the old equations that Einstein had already derived in three dimensions — those were for gravity — but he found one more equation because of the one more dimension. 
And when he looked at that equation, it was none other than the equation that scientists had long known to describe the electromagnetic force. 
Amazing — it just popped out. 
He was so excited by this realization that he ran around his house screaming, "" Victory! "" — that he had found the unified theory. 
Now clearly, Kaluza was a man who took theory very seriously. 
He, in fact — there is a story that when he wanted to learn how to swim, he read a book, a treatise on swimming — (Laughter) — then dove into the ocean. 
This is a man who would risk his life on theory. 
Now, but for those of us who are a little bit more practically minded, two questions immediately arise from his observation. 
Number one: if there are more dimensions in space, where are they? 
We don't seem to see them. 
And number two: does this theory really work in detail, when you try to apply it to the world around us? 
Now, the first question was answered in 1926 by a fellow named Oskar Klein. 
He suggested that dimensions might come in two varieties — there might be big, easy-to-see dimensions, but there might also be tiny, curled-up dimensions, curled up so small, even though they're all around us, that we don't see them. 
Let me show you that one visually. 
So, imagine you're looking at something like a cable supporting a traffic light. 
It's in Manhattan. You're in Central Park — it's kind of irrelevant — but the cable looks one-dimensional from a distant viewpoint, but you and I all know that it does have some thickness. 
It's very hard to see it, though, from far away. 
But if we zoom in and take the perspective of, say, a little ant walking around — little ants are so small that they can access all of the dimensions — the long dimension, but also this clockwise, counter-clockwise direction. 
And I hope you appreciate this. 
It took so long to get these ants to do this. 
(Laughter) But this illustrates the fact that dimensions can be of two sorts: big and small. And the idea that maybe the big dimensions around us are the ones that we can easily see, but there might be additional dimensions curled up, sort of like the circular part of that cable, so small that they have so far remained invisible. 
Let me show you what that would look like. 
So, if we take a look, say, at space itself — I can only show, of course, two dimensions on a screen. 
Some of you guys will fix that one day, but anything that's not flat on a screen is a new dimension, goes smaller, smaller, smaller, and way down in the microscopic depths of space itself, this is the idea, you could have additional curled up dimensions — here is a little shape of a circle — so small that we don't see them. 
But if you were a little ultra microscopic ant walking around, you could walk in the big dimensions that we all know about — that's like the grid part — but you could also access the tiny curled-up dimension that's so small that we can't see it with the naked eye or even with any of our most refined equipment. 
But deeply tucked into the fabric of space itself, the idea is there could be more dimensions, as we see there. 
Now that's an explanation about how the universe could have more dimensions than the ones that we see. 
But what about the second question that I asked: does the theory actually work when you try to apply it to the real world? 
Well, it turns out that Einstein and Kaluza and many others worked on trying to refine this framework and apply it to the physics of the universe as was understood at the time, and, in detail, it didn't work. 
In detail, for instance, they couldn't get the mass of the electron to work out correctly in this theory. 
So many people worked on it, but by the '40s, certainly by the' 50s, this strange but very compelling idea of how to unify the laws of physics had gone away. 
Until something wonderful happened in our age. 
In our era, a new approach to unify the laws of physics is being pursued by physicists such as myself, many others around the world, it's called superstring theory, as you were indicating. 
And the wonderful thing is that superstring theory has nothing to do at first sight with this idea of extra dimensions, but when we study superstring theory, we find that it resurrects the idea in a sparkling, new form. 
So, let me just tell you how that goes. 
Superstring theory — what is it? 
Well, it's a theory that tries to answer the question: what are the basic, fundamental, indivisible, uncuttable constituents making up everything in the world around us? 
The idea is like this. 
So, imagine we look at a familiar object, just a candle in a holder, and imagine that we want to figure out what it is made of. 
So we go on a journey deep inside the object and examine the constituents. 
So deep inside — we all know, you go sufficiently far down, you have atoms. 
We also all know that atoms are not the end of the story. 
They have little electrons that swarm around a central nucleus with neutrons and protons. 
Even the neutrons and protons have smaller particles inside of them known as quarks. 
That is where conventional ideas stop. 
Here is the new idea of string theory. 
Deep inside any of these particles, there is something else. 
This something else is this dancing filament of energy. 
It looks like a vibrating string — that's where the idea, string theory comes from. 
And just like the vibrating strings that you just saw in a cello can vibrate in different patterns, these can also vibrate in different patterns. 
They don't produce different musical notes. 
Rather, they produce the different particles making up the world around us. 
So if these ideas are correct, this is what the ultra-microscopic landscape of the universe looks like. 
It's built up of a huge number of these little tiny filaments of vibrating energy, vibrating in different frequencies. 
The different frequencies produce the different particles. 
The different particles are responsible for all the richness in the world around us. 
And there you see unification, because matter particles, electrons and quarks, radiation particles, photons, gravitons, are all built up from one entity. 
So matter and the forces of nature all are put together under the rubric of vibrating strings. 
And that's what we mean by a unified theory. 
Now here is the catch. 
When you study the mathematics of string theory, you find that it doesn't work in a universe that just has three dimensions of space. 
It doesn't work in a universe with four dimensions of space, nor five, nor six. 
Finally, you can study the equations, and show that it works only in a universe that has 10 dimensions of space and one dimension of time. 
It leads us right back to this idea of Kaluza and Klein — that our world, when appropriately described, has more dimensions than the ones that we see. 
Now you might think about that and say, well, OK, you know, if you have extra dimensions, and they're really tightly curled up, yeah, perhaps we won't see them, if they're small enough. 
But if there's a little tiny civilization of green people walking around down there, and you make them small enough, and we won't see them either. That is true. 
One of the other predictions of string theory — no, that's not one of the other predictions of string theory. 
(Laughter) But it raises the question: are we just trying to hide away these extra dimensions, or do they tell us something about the world? 
In the remaining time, I'd like to tell you two features of them. 
First is, many of us believe that these extra dimensions hold the answer to what perhaps is the deepest question in theoretical physics, theoretical science. 
And that question is this: when we look around the world, as scientists have done for the last hundred years, there appear to be about 20 numbers that really describe our universe. 
These are numbers like the mass of the particles, like electrons and quarks, the strength of gravity, the strength of the electromagnetic force — a list of about 20 numbers that have been measured with incredible precision, but nobody has an explanation for why the numbers have the particular values that they do. 
Now, does string theory offer an answer? 
Not yet. 
But we believe the answer for why those numbers have the values they do may rely on the form of the extra dimensions. 
And the wonderful thing is, if those numbers had any other values than the known ones, the universe, as we know it, wouldn't exist. 
This is a deep question. 
Why are those numbers so finely tuned to allow stars to shine and planets to form, when we recognize that if you fiddle with those numbers — if I had 20 dials up here and I let you come up and fiddle with those numbers, almost any fiddling makes the universe disappear. 
So can we explain those 20 numbers? 
And string theory suggests that those 20 numbers have to do with the extra dimensions. 
Let me show you how. 
So when we talk about the extra dimensions in string theory, it's not one extra dimension, as in the older ideas of Kaluza and Klein. 
This is what string theory says about the extra dimensions. 
They have a very rich, intertwined geometry. 
This is an example of something known as a Calabi-Yau shape — name isn't all that important. 
But, as you can see, the extra dimensions fold in on themselves and intertwine in a very interesting shape, interesting structure. 
And the idea is that if this is what the extra dimensions look like, then the microscopic landscape of our universe all around us would look like this on the tiniest of scales. 
When you swing your hand, you'd be moving around these extra dimensions over and over again, but they're so small that we wouldn't know it. 
So what is the physical implication, though, relevant to those 20 numbers? 
Consider this. If you look at the instrument, a French horn, notice that the vibrations of the airstreams are affected by the shape of the instrument. 
Now in string theory, all the numbers are reflections of the way strings can vibrate. 
So just as those airstreams are affected by the twists and turns in the instrument, strings themselves will be affected by the vibrational patterns in the geometry within which they are moving. 
So let me bring some strings into the story. 
And if you watch these little fellows vibrating around — they'll be there in a second — right there, notice that they way they vibrate is affected by the geometry of the extra dimensions. 
So, if we knew exactly what the extra dimensions look like — we don't yet, but if we did — we should be able to calculate the allowed notes, the allowed vibrational patterns. 
And if we could calculate the allowed vibrational patterns, we should be able to calculate those 20 numbers. 
And if the answer that we get from our calculations agrees with the values of those numbers that have been determined through detailed and precise experimentation, this in many ways would be the first fundamental explanation for why the structure of the universe is the way it is. 
Now, the second issue that I want to finish up with is: how might we test for these extra dimensions more directly? 
Is this just an interesting mathematical structure that might be able to explain some previously unexplained features of the world, or can we actually test for these extra dimensions? 
And we think — and this is, I think, very exciting — that in the next five years or so we may be able to test for the existence of these extra dimensions. 
Here's how it goes. In CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, a machine is being built called the Large Hadron Collider. 
It's a machine that will send particles around a tunnel, opposite directions, near the speed of light. 
Every so often those particles will be aimed at each other, so there's a head-on collision. 
The hope is that if the collision has enough energy, it may eject some of the debris from the collision from our dimensions, forcing it to enter into the other dimensions. 
How would we know it? 
Well, we'll measure the amount of energy after the collision, compare it to the amount of energy before, and if there's less energy after the collision than before, this will be evidence that the energy has drifted away. 
And if it drifts away in the right pattern that we can calculate, this will be evidence that the extra dimensions are there. 
Let me show you that idea visually. 
So, imagine we have a certain kind of particle called a graviton — that's the kind of debris we expect to be ejected out, if the extra dimensions are real. 
But here's how the experiment will go. 
You take these particles. You slam them together. 
You slam them together, and if we are right, some of the energy of that collision will go into debris that flies off into these extra dimensions. 
So this is the kind of experiment that we'll be looking at in the next five, seven to 10 years or so. 
And if this experiment bears fruit, if we see that kind of particle ejected by noticing that there's less energy in our dimensions than when we began, this will show that the extra dimensions are real. 
And to me this is a really remarkable story, and a remarkable opportunity. Going back to Newton with absolute space — didn't provide anything but an arena, a stage in which the events of the universe take place. 
Einstein comes along and says, well, space and time can warp and curve — that's what gravity is. 
And now string theory comes along and says, yes, gravity, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, all together in one package, but only if the universe has more dimensions than the ones that we see. 
And this is an experiment that may test for them in our lifetime. 
Amazing possibility. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Well, I was introduced as the former Governor of Michigan, but actually I'm a scientist. 
All right, a political scientist, it doesn't really count, but my laboratory was the laboratory of democracy that is Michigan, and, like any good scientist, I was experimenting with policy about what would achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. 
But there were three problems, three enigmas that I could not solve, and I want to share with you those problems, but most importantly, I think I figured out a proposal for a solution. 
The first problem that not just Michigan, but every state, faces is, how do you create good jobs in America in a global economy? 
So let me share with you some empirical data from my lab. 
I was elected in 2002 and, at the end of my first year in office in 2003, I got a call from one of my staff members, who said, "" Gov, we have a big problem. 
We have a little tiny community called Greenville, Michigan, population 8,000, and they are about to lose their major employer, which is a refrigerator factory that's operated by Electrolux. "" And I said, "" Well, how many people work at Electrolux? "" And he said, "" 3,000 of the 8,000 people in Greenville. "" So it is a one-company town. 
And Electrolux was going to go to Mexico. 
So I said, "" Forget that. I'm the new Governor. 
We can fix this. We're going to go to Greenville with my whole cabinet and we will just make Electrolux an offer they can't refuse. "" So I brought my whole cabinet, and we met with all of the pooh-bahs of little Greenville — the mayor, the city manager, the head of the community college — and we basically emptied our pockets and put all of our chips on the table, incentives, you name it, to convince Electrolux to stay, and as we made our pile of chips, we slid them across the table to the management of Electrolux. 
And in the pile were things like zero taxes for 20 years, or that we'd help to build a new factory for the company, we'd help to finance it. The UAW, who represented the workers, said they would offer unprecedented concessions, sacrifices to just keep those jobs in Greenville. 
So the management of Electrolux took our pile, our list of incentives, and they went outside the room for 17 minutes, and they came back in and they said, "" Wow, this is the most generous any community has ever been to try to keep jobs here. 
But there's nothing you can do to compensate for the fact that we can pay $1.57 an hour in Juarez, Mexico. So we're leaving. "" And they did. And when they did, it was like a nuclear bomb went off in little Greenville. 
In fact, they did implode the factory. 
That's a guy that is walking on his last day of work. 
And on the month that the last refrigerator rolled off the assembly line, the employees of Electrolux in Greenville, Michigan, had a gathering for themselves that they called the last supper. 
It was in a big pavilion in Greenville, an indoor pavilion, and I went to it because I was so frustrated as Governor that I couldn't stop the outflow of these jobs, and I wanted to grieve with them, and as I went into the room — there's thousands of people there. 
It was a just big thing. People were eating boxed lunches on roundtop tables, and there was a sad band playing music, or a band playing sad music, probably both. (Laughter) And this guy comes up to me, and he's got tattoos and his ponytail and his baseball cap on, and he had his two daughters with him, and he said, "" Gov, these are my two daughters. "" He said, "" I'm 48 years old, and I have worked at this factory for 30 years. 
I went from high school to factory. 
My father worked at this factory, "" he said. 
"" My grandfather worked at this factory. 
All I know is how to make refrigerators. "" And he looked at his daughters, and he puts his hand on his chest, and he says, "" So, Gov, tell me, who is ever going to hire me? 
Who is ever going to hire me? "" And that was asked not just by that guy but by everyone in the pavilion, and frankly, by every worker at one of the 50,000 factories that closed in the first decade of this century. 
Enigma number one: How do you create jobs in America in a global economy? 
Number two, very quickly: How do you solve global climate change when we don't even have a national energy policy in this country and when gridlock in Congress seems to be the norm? 
In fact, there was a poll that was done recently and the pollster compared Congress's approval ratings to a number of other unpleasant things, and it was found, in fact, that Congress's approval rating is worse than cockroaches, lice, Nickelback the band, root canals and Donald Trump. (Laughter) But wait, the good news is it's at least better than meth labs and gonorrhea. (Laughter) We got a problem, folks. 
So it got me thinking, what is it? 
What in the laboratory that I see out there, the laboratories of democracy, what has happened? 
What policy prescriptions have happened that actually cause changes to occur and that have been accepted in a bipartisan way? 
So if I asked you, for example, what was the Obama Administration policy that caused massive changes across the country, what would you say? 
You might say Obamacare, except for those were not voluntary changes. 
As we know, only half the states have opted in. 
We might say the Recovery Act, but those didn't require policy changes. 
The thing that caused massive policy changes to occur was Race to the Top for education. 
Why? The government put a $4.5 billion pot and said to the governors across the country, compete for it. 
Forty-eight governors competed, convincing 48 state legislatures to essentially raise standards for high schoolers so that they all take a college prep curriculum. 
Forty-eight states opted in, creating a national [education] policy from the bottom up. 
So I thought, well, why can't we do something like that and create a clean energy jobs race to the top? 
Because after all, if you look at the context, 1.6 trillion dollars has been invested in the past eight years from the private sector globally, and every dollar represents a job, and where are those jobs going? 
Well, they're going to places that have policy, like China. 
In fact, I was in China to see what they were doing, and they were putting on a dog-and-pony show for the group that I was with, and I was standing in the back of the room during one of the demonstrations and standing next to one of the Chinese officials, and we were watching, and he says, "So, Gov, when do you think the U.S. is going to get national energy policy?" 
And I said, "" Oh my God — Congress, gridlock, who knows? "" And this is what he did, he goes, he says, "Take your time." 
Because they see our passivity as their opportunity. 
So what if we decided to create a challenge to the governors of the country, and the price to entry into this competition used the same amount that the bipartisan group approved in Congress for the Race to the Top for education, 4.5 billion, which sounds like a lot, but actually it's less than one tenth of one percent of federal spending. 
It's a rounding error on the federal side. 
But price to entry into that competition would be, you could just, say, use the President's goal. 
He wants Congress to adopt a clean energy standard of 80 percent by 2030, in other words, that you'd have to get 80 percent of your energy from clean sources by the year 2030. 
Why not ask all of the states to do that instead? 
And imagine what might happen, because every region has something to offer. 
You might take states like Iowa and Ohio — two very important political states, by the way — those two governors, and they would say, we're going to lead the nation in producing the wind turbines and the wind energy. 
You might say the solar states, the sun belt, we're going to be the states that produce solar energy for the country, and maybe Jerry Brown says, "" Well, I'm going to create an industry cluster in California to be able to produce the solar panels so that we're not buying them from China but we're buying them from the U.S. "" In fact, every region of the country could do this. 
You see, you've got solar and wind opportunity all across the nation. 
In fact, if you look just at the upper and northern states in the West, they could do geothermal, or you could look at Texas and say, we could lead the nation in the solutions to smart grid. 
In the middle eastern states which have access to forests and to agricultural waste, they might say, we're going to lead the nation in biofuels. 
In the upper northeast, we're going to lead the nation in energy efficiency solutions. 
Along the eastern seaboard, we're going to lead the nation in offshore wind. 
You might look at Michigan and say, we're going to lead the nation in producing the guts for the electric vehicle, like the lithium ion battery. 
Every region has something to offer, and if you created a competition, it respects the states and it respects federalism. 
It's opt-in. You might even get Texas and South Carolina, who didn't opt into the education Race to the Top, you might even get them to opt in. Why? 
Because Republican and Democratic governors love to cut ribbons. 
We want to bring jobs. I'm just saying. 
And it fosters innovation at the state level in these laboratories of democracy. 
Now, any of you who are watching anything about politics lately might say, "" Okay, great idea, but really? 
Congress putting four and a half billion dollars on the table? 
They can't agree to anything. "" So you could wait and go through Congress, although you should be very impatient. 
Or, you renegades, we could go around Congress. 
Go around Congress. 
What if we created a private sector challenge to the governors? 
What if several of the high-net worth companies and individuals who are here at TED decided that they would create, band together, just a couple of them, and create a national competition to the governors to have a race to the top and see how the governors respond? 
What if it all started here at TED? 
What if you were here when we figured out how to crack the code to create good paying jobs in America — (Applause) — and get national energy policy and we created a national energy strategy from the bottom up? 
Because, dear TEDsters, if you are impatient like I am, you know that our economic competitors, our other nations, are in the game and are eating us for lunch. 
And we can get in the game or not. 
We can be at the table or we can be on the table. 
And I don't know about you, but I prefer to dine. 
Thank you all so much. (Applause) 

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

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

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

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

♫ Like the heather ♫ ♫ on the hillside ♫ ♫ as they drove us ♫ ♫ from the Highlands ♫ ♫ Like the ice flow ♫ ♫ from the Arctic ♫ ♫ where we landed ♫ ♫ in Newfoundland ♫ ♫ There's a color ♫ ♫ to my sorrow ♫ ♫ There's a name for ♫ ♫ all this sadness ♫ ♫ Like the ocean ♫ ♫ in between us ♫ ♫ I am blue ♫ ♫ Blue is a river ♫ ♫ Blue remembered ♫ ♫ Blue water ♫ ♫ running clear ♫ ♫ Blue like a planet ♫ 
♫ to a spaceman ♫ ♫ Blue river ♫ ♫ of my tears ♫ (Fiddle and synthesizer) ♫ So I came here ♫ ♫ to the city ♫ ♫ where the dream burns ♫ ♫ like a furnace ♫ ♫ And I dazzled ♫ ♫ in these dark streets ♫ ♫ like a diamond ♫ ♫ in a coalface ♫ ♫ Then the cold wind ♫ ♫ from the islands ♫ ♫ blew a storm cloud ♫ ♫ across the new moon ♫ ♫ Like the gun smoke ♫ ♫ above the houses ♫ ♫ in my home ♫ ♫ Blue is a river ♫ 
♫ Blue remembered ♫ ♫ Blue water ♫ ♫ running clear ♫ ♫ Blue like a planet ♫ ♫ to a spaceman ♫ ♫ Blue river ♫ ♫ of my tears ♫ ♫ Blue river ♫ ♫ of my tears ♫ (Fiddle and synthesizer) (Applause) 

One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. 
And I was just a little kid, so I didn't really understand why, but as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction in my family, including later cocaine addiction. 
I'd been thinking about it a lot lately, partly because it's now exactly 100 years since drugs were first banned in the United States and Britain, and we then imposed that on the rest of the world. 
It's a century since we made this really fateful decision to take addicts and punish them and make them suffer, because we believed that would deter them; it would give them an incentive to stop. 
And a few years ago, I was looking at some of the addicts in my life who I love, and trying to figure out if there was some way to help them. 
And I realized there were loads of incredibly basic questions I just didn't know the answer to, like, what really causes addiction? 
Why do we carry on with this approach that doesn't seem to be working, and is there a better way out there that we could try instead? 
So I read loads of stuff about it, and I couldn't really find the answers I was looking for, so I thought, okay, I'll go and sit with different people around the world who lived this and studied this and talk to them and see if I could learn from them. 
And I didn't realize I would end up going over 30,000 miles at the start, but I ended up going and meeting loads of different people, from a transgender crack dealer in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to a scientist who spends a lot of time feeding hallucinogens to mongooses to see if they like them — it turns out they do, but only in very specific circumstances — to the only country that's ever decriminalized all drugs, from cannabis to crack, Portugal. 
And the thing I realized that really blew my mind is, almost everything we think we know about addiction is wrong, and if we start to absorb the new evidence about addiction, I think we're going to have to change a lot more than our drug policies. 
But let's start with what we think we know, what I thought I knew. 
Let's think about this middle row here. 
Imagine all of you, for 20 days now, went off and used heroin three times a day. 
(Laughter) Don't worry, it's just a thought experiment. 
Imagine you did that, right? 
What would happen? 
We think, because there are chemical hooks in heroin, as you took it for a while, your body would become dependent on those hooks, you'd start to physically need them, and at the end of those 20 days, you'd all be heroin addicts. Right? 
That's what I thought. 
If I step out of this TED Talk today and I get hit by a car and I break my hip, I'll be taken to hospital and I'll be given loads of diamorphine. 
Diamorphine is heroin. 
It's actually much better heroin than you're going to buy on the streets, because the stuff you buy from a drug dealer is contaminated. 
And anyone who is watching this anywhere in the world, this is happening. 
And if what we believe about addiction is right — those people are exposed to all those chemical hooks — What should happen? They should become addicts. 
This has been studied really carefully. 
It doesn't happen; you will have noticed if your grandmother had a hip replacement, she didn't come out as a junkie. (Laughter) And when I learned this, it seemed so weird to me, so contrary to everything I'd been told, everything I thought I knew, I just thought it couldn't be right, until I met a man called Bruce Alexander. 
He's a professor of psychology in Vancouver who carried out an incredible experiment I think really helps us to understand this issue. 
Professor Alexander explained to me, the idea of addiction we've all got in our heads, that story, comes partly from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. 
You can do them tonight at home if you feel a little sadistic. 
You get a rat and you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles: One is just water, and the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. 
They've got loads of cheese, they've got loads of colored balls, they've got loads of tunnels. 
But here's the fascinating thing: In Rat Park, they don't like the drug water. 
They almost never use it. 
None of them ever use it compulsively. 
None of them ever overdose. 
You go from almost 100 percent overdose when they're isolated to zero percent overdose when they have happy and connected lives. 
Now, when he first saw this, Professor Alexander thought, maybe this is just a thing about rats, they're quite different to us. 
Maybe not as different as we'd like, but, you know — But fortunately, there was a human experiment into the exact same principle happening at the exact same time. 
It was called the Vietnam War. 
In Vietnam, 20 percent of all American troops were using loads of heroin, and if you look at the news reports from the time, they were really worried, because they thought, my God, we're going to have hundreds of thousands of junkies on the streets of the United States when the war ends; it made total sense. 
Now, those soldiers who were using loads of heroin were followed home. 
It turns out they didn't go to rehab. They didn't go into withdrawal. 
Ninety-five percent of them just stopped. 
Now, if you believe the story about chemical hooks, that makes absolutely no sense, but Professor Alexander began to think there might be a different story about addiction. 
He said, what if addiction isn't about your chemical hooks? 
What if addiction is about your cage? 
What if addiction is an adaptation to your environment? 
Looking at this, there was another professor called Peter Cohen in the Netherlands who said, maybe we shouldn't even call it addiction. 
Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond, and when we're happy and healthy, we'll bond and connect with each other, but if you can't do that, because you're traumatized or isolated or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that will give you some sense of relief. 
Now, that might be gambling, that might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be cannabis, but you will bond and connect with something because that's our nature. 
That's what we want as human beings. 
And at first, I found this quite a difficult thing to get my head around, but one way that helped me to think about it is, I can see, I've got over by my seat a bottle of water, right? 
I'm looking at lots of you, and lots of you have bottles of water with you. 
Totally legally, all of those bottles of water could be bottles of vodka, right? 
We could all be getting drunk — I might after this — (Laughter) — but we're not. 
You wouldn't end up homeless. 
You're not going to do that, and the reason you're not going to do that is not because anyone's stopping you. 
It's because you've got bonds and connections that you want to be present for. 
And a core part of addiction, I came to think, and I believe the evidence suggests, is about not being able to bear to be present in your life. 
Now, this has really significant implications. 
The most obvious implications are for the War on Drugs. 
In Arizona, I went out with a group of women who were made to wear t-shirts saying, "" I was a drug addict, "" and go out on chain gangs and dig graves while members of the public jeer at them, and when those women get out of prison, they're going to have criminal records that mean they'll never work in the legal economy again. 
Now, that's a very extreme example, obviously, in the case of the chain gang, but actually almost everywhere in the world we treat addicts to some degree like that. 
There was a doctor in Canada, Dr. Gabor Maté, an amazing man, who said to me, if you wanted to design a system that would make addiction worse, you would design that system. 
Now, there's a place that decided to do the exact opposite, and I went there to see how it worked. 
In the year 2000, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. 
One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of mind-blowing, and every year, they tried the American way more and more. 
They punished people and stigmatized them and shamed them more, and every year, the problem got worse. 
And one day, the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition got together, and basically said, look, we can't go on with a country where we're having ever more people becoming heroin addicts. 
And they set up a panel led by an amazing man called Dr. João Goulão, to look at all this new evidence, and they came back and they said, "" Decriminalize all drugs from cannabis to crack, but "" — and this is the crucial next step — "" take all the money we used to spend on cutting addicts off, on disconnecting them, and spend it instead on reconnecting them with society. "" And that's not really what we think of as drug treatment in the United States and Britain. 
So they do do residential rehab, they do psychological therapy, that does have some value. 
But the biggest thing they did was the complete opposite of what we do: a massive program of job creation for addicts, and microloans for addicts to set up small businesses. 
So say you used to be a mechanic. 
When you're ready, they'll go to a garage, and they'll say, if you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages. 
The goal was to make sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of bed for in the morning. 
And when I went and met the addicts in Portugal, what they said is, as they rediscovered purpose, they rediscovered bonds and relationships with the wider society. 
It'll be 15 years this year since that experiment began, and the results are in: injecting drug use is down in Portugal, according to the British Journal of Criminology, by 50 percent, five-zero percent. 
Overdose is massively down, HIV is massively down among addicts. 
Addiction in every study is significantly down. 
One of the ways you know it's worked so well is that almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back to the old system. 
Now, that's the political implications. 
I actually think there's a layer of implications to all this research below that. 
We live in a culture where people feel really increasingly vulnerable to all sorts of addictions, whether it's to their smartphones or to shopping or to eating. 
Before these talks began — you guys know this — we were told we weren't allowed to have our smartphones on, and I have to say, a lot of you looked an awful lot like addicts who were told their dealer was going to be unavailable for the next couple of hours. (Laughter) A lot of us feel like that, and it might sound weird to say, I've been talking about how disconnection is a major driver of addiction and weird to say it's growing, because you think we're the most connected society that's ever been, surely. 
It'll be your flesh and blood friends who you have deep and nuanced and textured, face-to-face relationships with, and there's a study I learned about from Bill McKibben, the environmental writer, that I think tells us a lot about this. 
It looked at the number of close friends the average American believes they can call on in a crisis. 
That number has been declining steadily since the 1950s. 
The amount of floor space an individual has in their home has been steadily increasing, and I think that's like a metaphor for the choice we've made as a culture. 
We've traded floorspace for friends, we've traded stuff for connections, and the result is we are one of the loneliest societies there has ever been. 
And Bruce Alexander, the guy who did the Rat Park experiment, says, we talk all the time in addiction about individual recovery, and it's right to talk about that, but we need to talk much more about social recovery. 
Something's gone wrong with us, not just with individuals but as a group, and we've created a society where, for a lot of us, life looks a whole lot more like that isolated cage and a whole lot less like Rat Park. 
If I'm honest, this isn't why I went into it. 
I didn't go in to the discover the political stuff, the social stuff. 
I wanted to know how to help the people I love. 
And when I came back from this long journey and I'd learned all this, I looked at the addicts in my life, and if you're really candid, it's hard loving an addict, and there's going to be lots of people who know in this room. 
You are angry a lot of the time, and I think one of the reasons why this debate is so charged is because it runs through the heart of each of us, right? 
Everyone has a bit of them that looks at an addict and thinks, I wish someone would just stop you. 
If you've ever seen the show "" Intervention, "" it's a pretty simple premise. 
Get an addict, all the people in their life, gather them together, confront them with what they're doing, and they say, if you don't shape up, we're going to cut you off. 
So what they do is they take the connection to the addict, and they threaten it, they make it contingent on the addict behaving the way they want. 
And I began to think, I began to see why that approach doesn't work, and I began to think that's almost like the importing of the logic of the Drug War into our private lives. 
So I was thinking, how could I be Portuguese? 
And what I've tried to do now, and I can't tell you I do it consistently and I can't tell you it's easy, is to say to the addicts in my life that I want to deepen the connection with them, to say to them, I love you whether you're using or you're not. 
I love you, whatever state you're in, and if you need me, I'll come and sit with you because I love you and I don't want you to be alone or to feel alone. 
And I think the core of that message — you're not alone, we love you — has to be at every level of how we respond to addicts, socially, politically and individually. 
For 100 years now, we've been singing war songs about addicts. 
I think all along we should have been singing love songs to them, because the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. 
The opposite of addiction is connection. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Being a child, and sort of crawling around the house, I remember these Turkish carpets, and there were these scenes, these battle scenes, these love scenes. 
I mean, look, this animal is trying to fight back this spear from this soldier. 
And my mom took these pictures actually, last week, of our carpets, and I remember this to this day. 
There was another object, this sort of towering piece of furniture with creatures and gargoyles and nudity — pretty scary stuff, when you're a little kid. 
What I remember today from this is that objects tell stories, so storytelling has been a really strong influence in my work. 
And then there was another influence. 
I was a teenager, and at 15 or 16, I guess like all teenagers, we want to just do what we love and what we believe in. 
And so, I fused together the two things I loved the most, which was skiing and windsurfing. 
Those are pretty good escapes from the drab weather in Switzerland. 
So, I created this compilation of the two: I took my skis and I took a board and I put a mast foot in there, and some foot straps, and some metal fins, and here I was, going really fast on frozen lakes. 
It was really a death trap. I mean, it was incredible, it worked incredibly well, but it was really dangerous. 
And I realized then I had to go to design school. 
(Laughter) I mean, look at those graphics there. (Laughter) 
So, I went to design school, and it was the early '90s when I finished. 
And I saw something extraordinary happening in Silicon Valley, so I wanted to be there, and I saw that the computer was coming into our homes, that it had to change in order to be with us in our homes. 
And so I got myself a job and I was working for a consultancy, and we would get in to these meetings, and these managers would come in, and they would say, "Well, what we're going to do here is really important, you know." 
And they would give the projects code names, you know, mostly from "" Star Wars, "" actually: things like C3PO, Yoda, Luke. 
So, in anticipation, I would be this young designer in the back of the room, and I would raise my hand, and I would ask questions. 
I mean, in retrospect, probably stupid questions, but things like, "" What's this Caps Lock key for? "" or "" What's this Num Lock key for? "" You know, that thing? 
"" You know, do people really use it? 
Do they need it? Do they want it in their homes? "" (Laughter) What I realized then is, they didn't really want to change the legacy stuff; they didn't want to change the insides. 
They were really looking for us, the designers, to create the skins, to put some pretty stuff outside of the box. 
And I didn't want to be a colorist. 
It wasn't what I wanted to do. 
I didn't want to be a stylist in this way. 
And then I saw this quote: "advertising is the price companies pay for being unoriginal." 
(Laughter) So, I had to start on my own. So I moved to San Francisco, and I started a little company, fuseproject. 
And what I wanted to work on is important stuff. 
And I wanted to really not just work on the skins, but I wanted to work on the entire human experience. 
And so the first projects were sort of humble, but they took technology and maybe made it into things that people would use in a new way, and maybe finding some new functionality. 
This is a watch we made for Mini Cooper, the car company, right when it launched, and it's the first watch that has a display that switches from horizontal to vertical. 
And that allows me to check my timer discretely, here, without bending my elbow. 
And other projects, which were really about transformation, about matching the human need. 
This is a little piece of furniture for an Italian manufacturer, and it ships completely flat, and then it folds into a coffee table and a stool and whatnot. 
And something a little bit more experimental: this is a light fixture for Swarovski, and what it does is, it changes shape. 
So, it goes from a circle, to a round, to a square, to a figure eight. 
And just by drawing on a little computer tablet, the entire light fixture adjusts to what shape you want. 
And then finally, the leaf lamp for Herman Miller. 
This is a pretty involved process; it took us about four and a half years. 
But I really was looking for creating a unique experience of light, a new experience of light. 
So, we had to design both the light and the light bulb. 
And that's a unique opportunity, I would say, in design. 
And the new experience I was looking for is giving the choice for the user to go from a warm, sort of glowing kind of mood light, all the way to a bright work light. 
So, the light bulb actually does that. 
It allows the person to switch, and to mix these two colorations. 
And it's done in a very simple way: one just touches the base of the light, and on one side, you can mix the brightness, and on the other, the coloration of the light. 
So, all of these projects have a humanistic sense to them, and I think as designers we need to really think about how we can create a different relationship between our work and the world, whether it's for business, or, as I'm going to show, on some civic-type projects. 
Because I think everybody agrees that as designers we bring value to business, value to the users also, but I think it's the values that we put into these projects that ultimately create the greater value. 
And the values we bring can be about environmental issues, about sustainability, about lower power consumption. 
You know, they can be about function and beauty; they can be about business strategy. 
But designers are really the glue that brings these things together. 
So Jawbone is a project that you're familiar with, and it has a humanistic technology. 
It feels your skin. It rests on your skin, and it knows when it is you're talking. 
And by knowing when it is you're talking, it gets rid of the other noises that it knows about, which is the environmental noises. 
But the other thing that is humanistic about Jawbone is that we really decided to take out all the techie stuff, and all the nerdy stuff out of it, and try to make it as beautiful as we can. 
I mean, think about it: the care we take in selecting sunglasses, or jewelry, or accessories is really important, so if it isn't beautiful, it really doesn't belong on your face. 
And this is what we're pursuing here. 
But how we work on Jawbone is really unique. 
I want to point at something here, on the left. 
This is the board, this is one of the things that goes inside that makes this technology work. 
But this is the design process: there's somebody changing the board, putting tracers on the board, changing the location of the ICs, as the designers on the other side are doing the work. 
So, it's not about slapping skins, anymore, on a technology. 
It's really about designing from the inside out. 
And then, on the other side of the room, the designers are making small adjustments, sketching, drawing by hand, putting it in the computer. 
And it's what I call being design driven. 
You know, there is some push and pull, but design is really helping define the whole experience from the inside out. 
And then, of course, design is never done. 
And this is — the other new way that is unique in how we work is, because it's never done, you have to do all this other stuff. 
The packaging, and the website, and you need to continue to really touch the user, in many ways. 
But how do you retain somebody, when it's never done? 
And Hosain Rahman, the CEO of Aliph Jawbone, you know, really understands that you need a different structure. 
So, in a way, the different structure is that we're partners, it's a partnership. We can continue to work and dedicate ourselves to this project, and then we also share in the rewards. 
And here's another project, another partnership-type approach. 
This is called Y Water, and it's this guy from Los Angeles, Thomas Arndt, Austrian originally, who came to us, and all he wanted to do was to create a healthy drink, or an organic drink for his kids, to replace the high-sugar-content sodas that he's trying to get them away from. 
So, we worked on this bottle, and it's completely symmetrical in every dimension. 
And this allows the bottle to turn into a game. 
The bottles connect together, and you can create different shapes, different forms. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
And then while we were doing this, the shape of the bottle upside down reminded us of a Y, and then we thought, well these words, "" why "" and "" why not, "" are probably the most important words that kids ask. 
So we called it Y Water. And so this is another place where it all comes together in the same room: the three-dimensional design, the ideas, the branding, it all becomes deeply connected. 
And then the other thing about this project is, we bring intellectual property, we bring a marketing approach, we bring all this stuff, but I think, at the end of the day, what we bring is these values, and these values create a soul for the companies we work with. 
And it's especially rewarding when your design work becomes a creative endeavor, when others can be creative and do more with it. 
Here's another project, which I think really emulates that. 
This is the One Laptop per Child, the $100 laptop. 
This picture is incredible. 
In Nigeria, people carry their most precious belongings on their heads. 
This girl is going to school with a laptop on her head. 
I mean, to me, it just means so much. 
But when Nicholas Negroponte — and he has spoken about this project a lot, he's the founder of OLPC — came to us about two and a half years ago, there were some clear ideas. 
He wanted to bring education and he wanted to bring technology, and those are pillars of his life, but also pillars of the mission of One Laptop per Child. 
But the third pillar that he talked about was design. 
And at the time, I wasn't really working on computers. 
I didn't really want to, from the previous adventure. 
But what he said was really significant, is that design was going to be why the kids were going to love this product, how we were going to make it low cost, robust. 
And plus, he said he was going to get rid of the Caps Lock key — (Laughter) — and the Num Lock key, too. 
So, I was convinced. We designed it to be iconic, to look different. To look like it's for a kid, but not like a toy. 
And then the integration of all these great technologies, which you've heard about, the Wi-Fi antennas that allow the kids to connect; the screen, which you can read in sunlight; the keyboard, which is made out of rubber, and it's protected from the environment. 
You know, all these great technologies really happened because of the passion and the OLPC people and the engineers. 
They fought the suppliers, they fought the manufacturers. 
I mean, they fought like animals for this to remain they way it is. 
And in a way, it is that will that makes projects like this one — allows the process from not destroying the original idea. 
And I think this is something really important. 
So, now you get these pictures — you get up in the morning, and you see the kids in Nigeria and you see them in Uruguay with their computers, and in Mongolia. 
And we went away from obviously the beige. 
I mean it's colorful, it's fun. 
In fact, you can see each logo is a little bit different. 
It's because we were able to run, during the manufacturing process, 20 colors for the X and the O, which is the name of the computer, and by mixing them on the manufacturing floor, you get 20 times 20: you get 400 different options there. 
So, the lessons from seeing the kids using them in the developing world are incredible. 
But this is my nephew, Anthony, in Switzerland, and he had the laptop for an afternoon, and I had to take it back. It was hard. 
(Laughter) And it was a prototype. And a month and a half later, I come back to Switzerland, and there he is playing with his own version. (Laughter) 
Like paper, paper and cardboard. 
So, I'm going to finish with one last project, and this is a little bit more of adult play. 
(Laughter) Some of you might have heard about the New York City condom. 
It's actually just launched, actually launched on Valentine's Day, February 14, about 10 days ago. 
So, the Department of Health in New York came to us, and they needed a way to distribute 36 million condoms for free to the citizens of New York. 
So a pretty big endeavor, and we worked on the dispensers. 
These are the dispensers. There's this friendly shape. 
It's a little bit like designing a fire hydrant, and it has to be easily serviceable: you have to know where it is and what it does. 
And we also designed the condoms themselves. 
And I was just in New York at the launch, and I went to see all these places where they're installed: this is at a Puerto Rican little mom-and-pop store; at a bar in Christopher Street; at a pool hall. 
I mean, they're being installed in homeless clinics — everywhere. 
Of course, clubs and discos, too. 
And here's the public service announcement for this project. 
(Music) (Laughter) Get some. 
(Applause) So, this is really where design is able to create a conversation. 
I was in these venues, and people were, you know, really into getting them. They were excited. 
It was breaking the ice, it was getting over a stigma, and I think that's also what design can do. 
So, I was going to throw some condoms in the room and whatnot, but I'm not sure it's the etiquette here. 
(Laughter) Yeah? All right, all right. I have only a few. (Laughter) 
(Applause) So, I have more, you can always ask me for some more later. (Laughter) 
And if anybody asks why you're carrying a condom, you can just say you like the design. (Laughter) 
So, I'll finish with just one thought: if we all work together on creating value, but if we really keep in mind the values of the work that we do, I think we can change the work that we do. 
We can change these values, can change the companies we work with, and eventually, together, maybe we can change the world. 
So, thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm a medical illustrator, and I come from a slightly different point of view. 
I've been watching, since I grew up, the expressions of truth and beauty in the arts and truth and beauty in the sciences. 
And while these are both wonderful things in their own right — they both have very wonderful things going for them — truth and beauty as ideals that can be looked at by the sciences and by math are almost like the ideal conjoined twins that a scientist would want to date. 
(Laughter) These are expressions of truth as awe-full things, by meaning they are things you can worship. 
They are ideals that are powerful. They are irreducible. 
They are unique. They are useful — sometimes, often a long time after the fact. 
And you can actually roll some of the pictures now, because I don't want to look at me on the screen. 
Truth and beauty are things that are often opaque to people who are not in the sciences. 
They are things that describe beauty in a way that is often only accessible if you understand the language and the syntax of the person who studies the subject in which truth and beauty is expressed. 
If you look at the math, E = mc squared, if you look at the cosmological constant, where there's an anthropic ideal, where you see that life had to evolve from the numbers that describe the universe — these are things that are really difficult to understand. 
And what I've tried to do since I had my training as a medical illustrator — since I was taught animation by my father, who was a sculptor and my visual mentor — I wanted to figure out a way to help people understand truth and beauty in the biological sciences by using animation, by using pictures, by telling stories so that the things that are not necessarily evident to people can be brought forth, and can be taught, and can be understood. 
Students today are often immersed in an environment where what they learn is subjects that have truth and beauty embedded in them, but the way they're taught is compartmentalized and it's drawn down to the point where the truth and beauty are not always evident. 
It's almost like that old recipe for chicken soup where you boil the chicken until the flavor is just gone. 
We don't want to do that to our students. 
So we have an opportunity to really open up education. 
And I had a telephone call from Robert Lue at Harvard, in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department, a couple of years ago. He asked me if my team and I would be interested and willing to really change how medical and scientific education is done at Harvard. 
So we embarked on a project that would explore the cell — that would explore the truth and beauty inherent in molecular and cellular biology so that students could understand a larger picture that they could hang all of these facts on. 
They could have a mental image of the cell as a large, bustling, hugely complicated city that's occupied by micro-machines. 
And these micro-machines really are at the heart of life. 
These micro-machines, which are the envy of nanotechnologists the world over, are self-directed, powerful, precise, accurate devices that are made out of strings of amino acids. 
And these micro-machines power how a cell moves. 
They power how a cell replicates. They power our hearts. 
They power our minds. 
And so what we wanted to do was to figure out how we could make this story into an animation that would be the centerpiece of BioVisions at Harvard, which is a website that Harvard has for its molecular and cellular biology students that will — in addition to all the textual information, in addition to all the didactic stuff — put everything together visually, so that these students would have an internalized view of what a cell really is in all of its truth and beauty, and be able to study with this view in mind, so that their imaginations would be sparked, 
so that their passions would be sparked and so that they would be able to go on and use these visions in their head to make new discoveries and to be able to find out, really, how life works. 
So we set out by looking at how these molecules are put together. 
We worked with a theme, which is, you've got macrophages that are streaming down a capillary, and they're touching the surface of the capillary wall, and they're picking up information from cells that are on the capillary wall, and they are given this information that there's an inflammation somewhere outside, where they can't see and sense. 
But they get the information that causes them to stop, causes them to internalize that they need to make all of the various parts that will cause them to change their shape, and try to get out of this capillary and find out what's going on. 
So these molecular motors — we had to work with the Harvard scientists and databank models of the atomically accurate molecules and figure out how they moved, and figure out what they did. 
And figure out how to do this in a way that was truthful in that it imparted what was going on, but not so truthful that the compact crowding in a cell would prevent the vista from happening. 
And so what I'm going to show you is a three-minute Reader's Digest version of the first aspect of this film that we produced. It's an ongoing project that's going to go another four or five years. 
And I want you to look at this and see the paths that the cell manufactures — these little walking machines, they're called kinesins — that take these huge loads that would challenge an ant in relative size. 
Run the movie, please. 
But these machines that power the inside of the cells are really quite amazing, and they really are the basis of all life because all of these machines interact with each other. 
They pass information to each other. 
They cause different things to happen inside the cell. 
And the cell will actually manufacture the parts that it needs on the fly, from information that's brought from the nucleus by molecules that read the genes. 
No life, from the smallest life to everybody here, would be possible without these little micro-machines. 
In fact, it would really, in the absence of these machines, have made the attendance here, Chris, really quite sparse. 
(Laughter) (Music) This is the FedEx delivery guy of the cell. 
This little guy is called the kinesin, and he pulls a sack that's full of brand new manufactured proteins to wherever it's needed in the cell — whether it's to a membrane, whether it's to an organelle, whether it's to build something or repair something. 
And each of us has about 100,000 of these things running around, right now, inside each one of your 100 trillion cells. 
So no matter how lazy you feel, you're not really intrinsically doing nothing. 
(Laughter) So what I want you to do when you go home is think about this, and think about how powerful our cells are. 
And think about some of the things that we're learning about cellular mechanics. 
Once we figure out all that's going on — and believe me, we know almost a percent of what's going on — once we figure out what's going on, we're really going to be able to have a lot of control over what we do with our health, with what we do with future generations, and how long we're going to live. 
And hopefully we'll be able to use this to discover more truth, and more beauty. 
(Music) But it's really quite amazing that these cells, these micro-machines, are aware enough of what the cell needs that they do their bidding. 
They work together. They make the cell do what it needs to do. 
And their working together helps our bodies — huge entities that they will never see — function properly. 
Enjoy the rest of the show. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Penelope Jagessar Chaffer: I was going to ask if there's a doctor in the house. 
No, I'm just joking. 
It's interesting, because it was six years ago when I was pregnant with my first child that I discovered that the most commonly used preservative in baby care products mimics estrogen when it gets into the human body. 
Now it's very easy actually to get a chemical compound from products into the human body through the skin. 
And these preservatives had been found in breast cancer tumors. 
That was the start of my journey to make this film, "" Toxic Baby. "" And it doesn't take much time to discover some really astonishing statistics with this issue. 
One is that you and I all have between 30 to 50,000 chemicals in our bodies that our grandparents didn't have. 
And many of these chemicals are now linked to the skyrocketing incidents of chronic childhood disease that we're seeing across industrialized nations. 
I'll show you some statistics. 
So for example, in the United Kingdom, the incidence of childhood leukemia has risen by 20 percent just in a generation. 
Very similar statistic for childhood cancer in the U.S. 
In Canada, we're now looking at one in 10 Canadian children with asthma. 
That's a four-fold increase. 
Again, similar story around the world. 
In the United States, probably the most astonishing statistic is a 600 percent increase in autism and autistic spectrum disorders and other learning disabilities. 
Again, we're seeing that trend across Europe, across North America. 
And in Europe, there's certain parts of Europe, where we're seeing a four-fold increase in certain genital birth defects. 
Interestingly, one of those birth defects has seen a 200 percent increase in the U.S. 
So a real skyrocketing of chronic childhood disease that includes other things like obesity and juvenile diabetes, premature puberty. 
So it's interesting for me, when I'm looking for someone who can really talk to me and talk to an audience about these things, that probably one of the most important people in the world who can discuss toxicity in babies is expert in frogs. 
(Laughter) Tyrone Hayes: It was a surprise to me as well that I would be talking about pesticides, that I'd be talking about public health, because, in fact, I never thought I would do anything useful. (Laughter) 
Frogs. 
In fact, my involvement in the whole pesticide issue was sort of a surprise as well when I was approached by the largest chemical company in the world and they asked me if I would evaluate how atrazine affected amphibians, or my frogs. 
It turns out, atrazine is the largest selling product for the largest chemical company in the world. 
It's the number one contaminant of groundwater, drinking water, rain water. 
In 2003, after my studies, it was banned in the European Union, but in that same year, the United States EPA re-registered the compound. 
We were a bit surprised when we found out that when we exposed frogs to very low levels of atrazine — 0.1 parts per billion — that it produced animals that look like this. 
These are the dissected gonads of an animal that has two testes, two ovaries, another large testis, more ovaries, which is not normal... 
(Laughter) even for amphibians. 
In some cases, another species like the North American Leopard Frog showed that males exposed to atrazine grew eggs in their testes. 
And you can see these large, yolked-up eggs bursting through the surface of this male's testes. 
Now my wife tells me, and I'm sure Penelope can as well, that there's nothing more painful than childbirth — which that I'll never experience, I can't really argue that — but I would guess that a dozen chicken eggs in my testicle would probably be somewhere in the top five. 
(Laughter) In recent studies that we've published, we've shown that some of these animals when they're exposed to atrazine, some of the males grow up and completely become females. 
So these are actually two brothers consummating a relationship. 
And not only do these genetic males mate with other males, they actually have the capacity to lay eggs even though they're genetic males. 
What we proposed, and what we've now generated support for, is that what atrazine is doing is wreaking havoc causing a hormone imbalance. 
Normally the testes should make testosterone, the male hormone. 
But what atrazine does is it turns on an enzyme, the machinery if you will, aromatase, that converts testosterone into estrogen. 
And as a result, these exposed males lose their testosterone, they're chemically castrated, and they're subsequently feminized because now they're making the female hormone. 
Now this is what brought me to the human-related issues. 
Because it turns out that the number one cancer in women, breast cancer, is regulated by estrogen and by this enzyme aromatase. 
So when you develop a cancerous cell in your breast, aromatase converts androgens into estrogens, and that estrogen turns on or promotes the growth of that cancer so that it turns into a tumor and spreads. 
In fact, this aromatase is so important in breast cancer that the latest treatment for breast cancer is a chemical called letrozole, which blocks aromatase, blocks estrogen, so that if you developed a mutated cell, it doesn't grow into a tumor. 
Now what's interesting is, of course, that we're still using 80 million pounds of atrazine, the number one contaminant in drinking water, that does the opposite — turns on aromatase, increases estrogen and promotes tumors in rats and is associated with tumors, breast cancer, in humans. 
What's interesting is, in fact, the same company that sold us 80 million pounds of atrazine, the breast cancer promoter, now sells us the blocker — the exact same company. 
And so I find it interesting that instead of treating this disease by preventing exposure to the chemicals that promote it, we simply respond by putting more chemicals into the environment. 
PJC: So speaking of estrogen, one of the other compounds that Tyrone talks about in the film is something called bisphenol A, BPA, which has been in the news recently. 
It's a plasticizer. 
It's a compound that's found in polycarbonate plastic, which is what baby bottles are made out of. 
And what's interesting about BPA is that it's such a potent estrogen that it was actually once considered for use as a synthetic estrogen in hormone placement therapy. 
And there have been many, many, many studies that have shown that BPA leaches from babies' bottles into the formula, into the milk, and therefore into the babies. 
So we're dosing our babies, our newborns, our infants, with a synthetic estrogen. 
Now two weeks ago or so, the European Union passed a law banning the use of BPA in babies' bottles and sippy cups. 
And for those of you who are not parents, sippy cups are those little plastic things that your child graduates to after using bottles. 
But just two weeks before that, the U.S. Senate refused to even debate the banning of BPA in babies' bottles and sippy cups. 
So it really makes you realize the onus on parents to have to look at this and regulate this and police this in their own lives and how astonishing that is. 
(Video) PJC: With many plastic baby bottles now proven to leak the chemical bisphenol A, it really shows how sometimes it is only a parent's awareness that stands between chemicals and our children. 
The baby bottle scenario proves that we can prevent unnecessary exposure. 
However, if we parents are unaware, we are leaving our children to fend for themselves. 
TH: And what Penelope says here is even more true. 
For those of you who don't know, we're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction. 
Scientists agree now. 
We are losing species from the Earth faster than the dinosaurs disappeared, and leading that loss are amphibians. 
80 percent of all amphibians are threatened and in come decline. 
And I believe, many scientists believe that pesticides are an important part of that decline. 
In part, amphibians are good indicators and more sensitive because they don't have protection from contaminants in the water — no eggshells, no membranes and no placenta. 
In fact, our invention — by "" our "" I mean we mammals — one of our big inventions was the placenta. 
But we also start out as aquatic organisms. 
But it turns out that this ancient structure that separates us from other animals, the placenta, cannot evolve or adapt fast enough because of the rate that we're generating new chemicals that it's never seen before. 
The evidence of that is that studies in rats, again with atrazine, show that the hormone imbalance atrazine generates causes abortion. 
Because maintaining a pregnancy is dependent on hormones. 
Of those rats that don't abort, atrazine causes prostate disease in the pups so the sons are born with an old man's disease. 
Of those that don't abort, atrazine causes impaired mammary, or breast, development in the exposed daughters in utero, so that their breast don't develop properly. 
And as a result, when those rats grow up, their pups experience retarded growth and development because they can't make enough milk to nourish their pups. 
So the pup you see on the bottom is affected by atrazine that its grandmother was exposed to. 
And given the life of many of these chemicals, generations, years, dozens of years, that means that we right now are affecting the health of our grandchildren's grandchildren by things that we're putting into the environment today. 
And this is not just philosophical, it's already known, that chemicals like diethylstilbestrol and estrogen, PCBs, DDT cross the placenta and effectively determine the likelihood of developing breast cancer and obesity and diabetes already when the baby's in the womb. 
In addition to that, after the baby's born, our other unique invention as mammals is that we nourish our offspring after they're born. 
We already know that chemicals like DDT and DES and atrazine can also pass over into milk, again, affecting our babies even after their born. 
PJC: So when Tyrone tells me that the placenta is an ancient organ, I'm thinking, how do I demonstrate that? 
How do you show that? 
And it's interesting when you make a film like this, because you're stuck trying to visualize science that there's no visualization for. 
And I have to take a little bit of artistic license. 
(Video) (Ringing) Old man: Placenta control. 
What is it? 
Oh what? 
(Snoring) (Honk) Puffuffuff, what? 
Perflourooctanoic acid. 
Blimey. 
Never heard of it. 
PJC: And neither had I actually before I started making this film. 
And so when you realize that chemicals can pass the placenta and go into your unborn child, it made me start to think, what would my fetus say to me? 
What would our unborn children say to us when they have an exposure that's happening everyday, day after day? 
(Music) (Video) Child: Today, I had some octyphenols, some artificial musks and some bisphenol A. 
Help me. 
PJC: It's a very profound notion to know that we as women are at the vanguard of this. 
This is our issue, because we collect these compounds our entire life and then we end up dumping it and dumping them into our unborn children. 
We are in effect polluting our children. 
And this was something that was really brought home to me a year ago when I found out I was pregnant and the first scan revealed that my baby had a birth defect associated with exposure to estrogenic chemicals in the womb and the second scan revealed no heartbeat. 
So my child's death, my baby's death, really brought home the resonance of what I was trying to make in this film. 
And it's sometimes a weird place when the communicator becomes part of the story, which is not what you originally intend. 
And so when Tyrone talks about the fetus being trapped in a contaminated environment, this is my contaminated environment. 
This is my toxic baby. 
And that's something that's just profound and sad, but astonishing because so many of us don't actually know this. 
TH: One of this things that's exciting and appropriate for me to be here at TEDWomen is that, well, I think it was summed up best last night at dinner when someone said, "" Turn to the man at your table and tell them, 'When the revolution starts, we've got your back.' "" The truth is, women, you've had our back on this issue for a very long time, starting with Rachel Carson's "" Silent Spring "" to Theo Colborn's "" Our Stolen Future "" to Sandra Steingraber's books "Living Downstream" and "Having Faith." 
And perhaps it's the connection to our next generation — like my wife and my beautiful daughter here about 13 years ago — perhaps it's that connection that makes women activists in this particular area. 
But for the men here, I want to say it's not just women and children that are at risk. 
And the frogs that are exposed to atrazine, the testes are full of holes and spaces, because the hormone imbalance, instead of allowing sperm to be generated, such as in the testis here, the testicular tubules end up empty and fertility goes down by as much as 50 percent. 
It's not just my work in amphibians, but similar work has been shown in fish in Europe, holes in the testes and absence of sperm in reptiles in a group from South America and in rats, an absence of sperm in the testicular tubules as well. 
And of course, we don't do these experiments in humans, but just by coincidence, my colleague has shown that men who have low sperm count, low semen quality have significantly more atrazine in their urine. 
These are just men who live in an agricultural community. 
Men who actually work in agriculture have much higher levels of atrazine. 
And the men who actually apply atrazine have even more atrazine in their urine, up to levels that are 24,000 times what we know to be active are present in the urine of these men. 
Of course, most of them, 90 percent are Mexican, Mexican-American. 
And it's not just atrazine they're exposed to. 
They're exposed to chemicals like chloropicrin, which was originally used as a nerve gas. 
And many of these workers have life expectancies of only 50. 
It shouldn't come to any surprise that the things that happen in wildlife are also a warning to us, just like Rachel Carson and others have warned. 
As evident in this slide from Lake Nabugabo in Uganda, the agricultural runoff from this crop, which goes into these buckets, is the sole source of drinking, cooking and bathing water for this village. 
Now if I told the men in this village that the frogs have pour immune function and eggs developing in their testes, the connection between environmental health and public health would be clear. 
You would not drink water that you knew was having this kind of impact on the wildlife that lived in it. 
The problem is, in my village, Oakland, in most of our villages, we don't see that connection. 
We turn on the faucet, the water comes out, we assume it's safe, and we assume that we are masters of our environment, rather than being part of it. 
PJC: So it doesn't take much to realize that actually this is an environmental issue. 
And I kept thinking over and over again this question. 
We know so much about global warming and climate change, and yet, we have no concept of what I've been calling internal environmentalism. 
We know what we're putting out there, we have a sense of those repercussions, but we are so ignorant of this sense of what happens when we put things, or things are put into our bodies. 
And it's my feeling and it's my urging being here to know that, as we women move forward as the communicators of this, but also as the ones who carry that burden of carrying the children, bearing the children, we hold most of the buying power in the household, is that it's going to be us moving forward to carry the work of Tyrone and other scientists around the world. 
And my urging is that when we think about environmental issues that we remember that it's not just about melting glaciers and ice caps, but it's also about our children as well. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Now, I'm an ethnobotanist. 
That's a scientist who works in the rainforest to document how people use local plants. 
I've been doing this for a long time, and I want to tell you, these people know these forests and these medicinal treasures better than we do and better than we ever will. 
But also, these cultures, these indigenous cultures, are disappearing much faster than the forests themselves. 
And the greatest and most endangered species in the Amazon Rainforest is not the jaguar, it's not the harpy eagle, it's the isolated and uncontacted tribes. 
Now four years ago, I injured my foot in a climbing accident and I went to the doctor. 
She gave me heat, she gave me cold, aspirin, narcotic painkillers, anti-inflammatories, cortisone shots. 
It didn't work. 
Several months later, I was in the northeast Amazon, walked into a village, and the shaman said, "" You're limping. "" And I'll never forget this as long as I live. 
He looked me in the face and he said, "Take off your shoe and give me your machete." 
(Laughter) He walked over to a palm tree and carved off a fern, threw it in the fire, applied it to my foot, threw it in a pot of water, and had me drink the tea. 
The pain disappeared for seven months. 
When it came back, I went to see the shaman again. 
He gave me the same treatment, and I've been cured for three years now. 
Who would you rather be treated by? 
(Applause) Now, make no mistake — Western medicine is the most successful system of healing ever devised, but there's plenty of holes in it. 
Where's the cure for breast cancer? 
Where's the cure for schizophrenia? 
Where's the cure for acid reflux? 
Where's the cure for insomnia? 
The fact is that these people can sometimes, sometimes, sometimes cure things we cannot. 
Here you see a medicine man in the northeast Amazon treating leishmaniasis, a really nasty protozoal disease that afflicts 12 million people around the world. 
Western treatment are injections of antimony. 
They're painful, they're expensive, and they're probably not good for your heart; it's a heavy metal. 
This man cures it with three plants from the Amazon Rainforest. 
This is the magic frog. 
My colleague, the late great Loren McIntyre, discoverer of the source lake of the Amazon, Laguna McIntyre in the Peruvian Andes, was lost on the Peru-Brazil border about 30 years ago. 
He was rescued by a group of isolated Indians called the Matsés. 
They beckoned for him to follow them into the forest, which he did. 
There, they took out palm leaf baskets. 
There, they took out these green monkey frogs — these are big suckers, they're like this — and they began licking them. 
It turns out, they're highly hallucinogenic. 
McIntyre wrote about this and it was read by the editor of High Times magazine. 
You see that ethnobotanists have friends in all sorts of strange cultures. 
This guy decided he would go down to the Amazon and give it a whirl, or give it a lick, and he did, and he wrote, "" My blood pressure went through the roof, I lost full control of my bodily functions, I passed out in a heap, I woke up in a hammock six hours later, felt like God for two days. "" (Laughter) An Italian chemist read this and said, "" I'm not really interested in the theological aspects of the green monkey frog. 
What's this about the change in blood pressure? "" Now, this is an Italian chemist who's working on a new treatment for high blood pressure based on peptides in the skin of the green monkey frog, and other scientists are looking at a cure for drug-resistant Staph aureus. 
How ironic if these isolated Indians and their magic frog prove to be one of the cures. 
Here's an ayahuasca shaman in the northwest Amazon, in the middle of a yage ceremony. 
I took him to Los Angeles to meet a foundation officer looking for support for monies to protect their culture. 
This fellow looked at the medicine man, and he said, "You didn't go to medical school, did you?" 
The shaman said, "" No, I did not. "" He said, "" Well, then what can you know about healing? "" The shaman looked at him and he said, "" You know what? If you have an infection, go to a doctor. 
But many human afflictions are diseases of the heart, the mind and the spirit. 
Western medicine can't touch those. I cure them. "" (Applause) But all is not rosy in learning from nature about new medicines. 
This is a viper from Brazil, the venom of which was studied at the Universidade de São Paulo here. 
It was later developed into ACE inhibitors. 
This is a frontline treatment for hypertension. 
Hypertension causes over 10 percent of all deaths on the planet every day. 
This is a $4 billion industry based on venom from a Brazilian snake, and the Brazilians did not get a nickel. 
This is not an acceptable way of doing business. 
The rainforest has been called the greatest expression of life on Earth. 
There's a saying in Suriname that I dearly love: "The rainforests hold answers to questions we have yet to ask." 
But as you all know, it's rapidly disappearing. 
Here in Brazil, in the Amazon, around the world. 
I took this picture from a small plane flying over the eastern border of the Xingu indigenous reserve in the state of Mato Grosso to the northwest of here. 
The top half of the picture, you see where the Indians live. 
The line through the middle is the eastern border of the reserve. 
Top half Indians, bottom half white guys. 
Top half wonder drugs, bottom half just a bunch of skinny-ass cows. 
Top half carbon sequestered in the forest where it belongs, bottom half carbon in the atmosphere where it's driving climate change. 
In fact, the number two cause of carbon being released into the atmosphere is forest destruction. 
But in talking about destruction, it's important to keep in mind that the Amazon is the mightiest landscape of all. 
It's a place of beauty and wonder. 
The biggest anteater in the world lives in the rain forest, tips the scale at 90 pounds. 
The goliath bird-eating spider is the world's largest spider. 
It's found in the Amazon as well. 
The harpy eagle wingspan is over seven feet. 
And the black cayman — these monsters can tip the scale at over half a ton. 
They're known to be man-eaters. 
The anaconda, the largest snake, the capybara, the largest rodent. 
A specimen from here in Brazil tipped the scale at 201 pounds. 
Let's visit where these creatures live, the northeast Amazon, home to the Akuriyo tribe. 
Uncontacted peoples hold a mystical and iconic role in our imagination. 
These are the people who know nature best. 
These are the people who truly live in total harmony with nature. 
By our standards, some would dismiss these people as primitive. 
"" They don't know how to make fire, or they didn't when they were first contacted. "" But they know the forest far better than we do. 
The Akuriyos have 35 words for honey, and other Indians look up to them as being the true masters of the emerald realm. 
Here you see the face of my friend Pohnay. 
When I was a teenager rocking out to the Rolling Stones in my hometown of New Orleans, Pohnay was a forest nomad roaming the jungles of the northeast Amazon in a small band, looking for game, looking for medicinal plants, looking for a wife, in other small nomadic bands. 
But it's people like these that know things that we don't, and they have lots of lessons to teach us. 
However, if you go into most of the forests of the Amazon, there are no indigenous peoples. 
This is what you find: rock carvings which indigenous peoples, uncontacted peoples, used to sharpen the edge of the stone axe. 
These cultures that once danced, made love, sang to the gods, worshipped the forest, all that's left is an imprint in stone, as you see here. 
Let's move to the western Amazon, which is really the epicenter of isolated peoples. 
Each of these dots represents a small, uncontacted tribe, and the big reveal today is we believe there are 14 or 15 isolated groups in the Colombian Amazon alone. 
Why are these people isolated? 
They know we exist, they know there's an outside world. 
This is a form of resistance. 
They have chosen to remain isolated, and I think it is their human right to remain so. 
Why are these the tribes that hide from man? 
Here's why. 
Obviously, some of this was set off in 1492. 
But at the turn of the last century was the rubber trade. 
The demand for natural rubber, which came from the Amazon, set off the botanical equivalent of a gold rush. 
Rubber for bicycle tires, rubber for automobile tires, rubber for zeppelins. 
It was a mad race to get that rubber, and the man on the left, Julio Arana, is one of the true thugs of the story. 
His people, his company, and other companies like them killed, massacred, tortured, butchered Indians like the Witotos you see on the right hand side of the slide. 
Even today, when people come out of the forest, the story seldom has a happy ending. 
These are Nukaks. They were contacted in the '80s. 
Within a year, everybody over 40 was dead. 
And remember, these are preliterate societies. 
The elders are the libraries. 
Every time a shaman dies, it's as if a library has burned down. 
They have been forced off their lands. 
The drug traffickers have taken over the Nukak lands, and the Nukaks live as beggars in public parks in eastern Colombia. 
From the Nukak lands, I want to take you to the southwest, to the most spectacular landscape in the world: Chiribiquete National Park. 
It was surrounded by three isolated tribes and thanks to the Colombian government and Colombian colleagues, it has now expanded. 
It's bigger than the state of Maryland. 
It is a treasure trove of botanical diversity. 
It was first explored botanically in 1943 by my mentor, Richard Schultes, seen here atop the Bell Mountain, the sacred mountains of the Karijonas. 
And let me show you what it looks like today. 
Flying over Chiribiquete, realize that these lost world mountains are still lost. 
No scientist has been atop them. 
In fact, nobody has been atop the Bell Mountain since Schultes in '43. 
And we'll end up here with the Bell Mountain just to the east of the picture. 
Let me show you what it looks like today. 
Not only is this a treasure trove of botanical diversity, not only is it home to three isolated tribes, but it's the greatest treasure trove of pre-Colombian art in the world: over 200,000 paintings. 
The Dutch scientist Thomas van der Hammen described this as the Sistine Chapel of the Amazon Rainforest. 
But move from Chiribiquete down to the southeast, again in the Colombian Amazon. 
Remember, the Colombian Amazon is bigger than New England. 
The Amazon's a big forest, and Brazil's got a big part of it, but not all of it. 
Moving down to these two national parks, Cahuinari and Puré in the Colombian Amazon — that's the Brazilian border to the right — it's home to several groups of isolated and uncontacted peoples. 
To the trained eye, you can look at the roofs of these malocas, these longhouses, and see that there's cultural diversity. 
These are, in fact, different tribes. 
As isolated as these areas are, let me show you how the outside world is crowding in. 
Here we see trade and transport increased in Putumayo. 
With the diminishment of the Civil War in Colombia, the outside world is showing up. 
To the north, we have illegal gold mining, also from the east, from Brazil. 
There's increased hunting and fishing for commercial purposes. 
We see illegal logging coming from the south, and drug runners are trying to move through the park and get into Brazil. 
This, in the past, is why you didn't mess with isolated Indians. 
And if it looks like this picture is out of focus because it was taken in a hurry, here's why. 
(Laughter) This looks like — (Applause) This looks like a hangar from the Brazilian Amazon. 
This is an art exhibit in Havana, Cuba. 
A group called Los Carpinteros. 
This is their perception of why you shouldn't mess with uncontacted Indians. 
But the world is changing. 
These are Mashco-Piros on the Brazil-Peru border who stumbled out of the jungle because they were essentially chased out by drug runners and timber people. 
And in Peru, there's a very nasty business. 
It's called human safaris. 
They will take you in to isolated groups to take their picture. 
Of course, when you give them clothes, when you give them tools, you also give them diseases. 
We call these "" inhuman safaris. "" These are Indians again on the Peru border, who were overflown by flights sponsored by missionaries. 
They want to get in there and turn them into Christians. 
We know how that turns out. 
What's to be done? 
Introduce technology to the contacted tribes, not the uncontacted tribes, in a culturally sensitive way. 
This is the perfect marriage of ancient shamanic wisdom and 21st century technology. 
We've done this now with over 30 tribes, mapped, managed and increased protection of over 70 million acres of ancestral rainforest. 
(Applause) So this allows the Indians to take control of their environmental and cultural destiny. 
They also then set up guard houses to keep outsiders out. 
These are Indians, trained as indigenous park rangers, patrolling the borders and keeping the outside world at bay. 
This is a picture of actual contact. 
These are Chitonahua Indians on the Brazil-Peru border. 
They've come out of the jungle asking for help. 
They were shot at, their malocas, their longhouses, were burned. 
Some of them were massacred. 
Using automatic weapons to slaughter uncontacted peoples is the single most despicable and disgusting human rights abuse on our planet today, and it has to stop. 
(Applause) But let me conclude by saying, this work can be spiritually rewarding, but it's difficult and it can be dangerous. 
Two colleagues of mine passed away recently in the crash of a small plane. 
They were serving the forest to protect those uncontacted tribes. 
So the question is, in conclusion, is what the future holds. 
These are the Uray people in Brazil. 
What does the future hold for them, and what does the future hold for us? 
Let's think differently. 
Let's make a better world. 
If the climate's going to change, let's have a climate that changes for the better rather than the worse. 
Let's live on a planet full of luxuriant vegetation, in which isolated peoples can remain in isolation, can maintain that mystery and that knowledge if they so choose. 
Let's live in a world where the shamans live in these forests and heal themselves and us with their mystical plants and their sacred frogs. 
Thanks again. 
(Applause) 

So, here we go: a flyby of play. 
It's got to be serious if the New York Times puts a cover story of their February 17th Sunday magazine about play. 
At the bottom of this, it says, "" It's deeper than gender. 
Seriously, but dangerously fun. 
And a sandbox for new ideas about evolution. "" Not bad, except if you look at that cover, what's missing? 
You see any adults? 
Well, lets go back to the 15th century. 
This is a courtyard in Europe, and a mixture of 124 different kinds of play. 
All ages, solo play, body play, games, taunting. 
And there it is. And I think this is a typical picture of what it was like in a courtyard then. 
I think we may have lost something in our culture. 
So I'm gonna take you through what I think is a remarkable sequence. 
North of Churchill, Manitoba, in October and November, there's no ice on Hudson Bay. 
And this polar bear that you see, this 1200-pound male, he's wild and fairly hungry. 
And Norbert Rosing, a German photographer, is there on scene, making a series of photos of these huskies, who are tethered. 
And from out of stage left comes this wild, male polar bear, with a predatory gaze. 
Any of you who've been to Africa or had a junkyard dog come after you, there is a fixed kind of predatory gaze that you know you're in trouble. 
But on the other side of that predatory gaze is a female husky in a play bow, wagging her tail. 
And something very unusual happens. 
That fixed behavior — which is rigid and stereotyped and ends up with a meal — changes. 
And this polar bear stands over the husky, no claws extended, no fangs taking a look. 
And they begin an incredible ballet. 
A play ballet. 
This is in nature: it overrides a carnivorous nature and what otherwise would have been a short fight to the death. 
And if you'll begin to look closely at the husky that's bearing her throat to the polar bear, and look a little more closely, they're in an altered state. 
They're in a state of play. 
And it's that state that allows these two creatures to explore the possible. 
They are beginning to do something that neither would have done without the play signals. 
And it is a marvelous example of how a differential in power can be overridden by a process of nature that's within all of us. 
Now how did I get involved in this? 
John mentioned that I've done some work with murderers, and I have. 
The Texas Tower murderer opened my eyes, in retrospect, when we studied his tragic mass murder, to the importance of play, in that that individual, by deep study, was found to have severe play deprivation. 
Charles Whitman was his name. 
And our committee, which consisted of a lot of hard scientists, did feel at the end of that study that the absence of play and a progressive suppression of developmentally normal play led him to be more vulnerable to the tragedy that he perpetrated. 
And that finding has stood the test of time — unfortunately even into more recent times, at Virginia Tech. 
And other studies of populations at risk sensitized me to the importance of play, but I didn't really understand what it was. 
And it was many years in taking play histories of individuals before I really began to recognize that I didn't really have a full understanding of it. 
And I don't think any of us has a full understanding of it, by any means. 
But there are ways of looking at it that I think can give you — give us all a taxonomy, a way of thinking about it. 
And this image is, for humans, the beginning point of play. 
When that mother and infant lock eyes, and the infant's old enough to have a social smile, what happens — spontaneously — is the eruption of joy on the part of the mother. 
And she begins to babble and coo and smile, and so does the baby. 
If we've got them wired up with an electroencephalogram, the right brain of each of them becomes attuned, so that the joyful emergence of this earliest of play scenes and the physiology of that is something we're beginning to get a handle on. 
And I'd like you to think that every bit of more complex play builds on this base for us humans. 
And so now I'm going to take you through sort of a way of looking at play, but it's never just singularly one thing. 
We're going to look at body play, which is a spontaneous desire to get ourselves out of gravity. 
This is a mountain goat. 
If you're having a bad day, try this: jump up and down, wiggle around — you're going to feel better. 
And you may feel like this character, who is also just doing it for its own sake. 
It doesn't have a particular purpose, and that's what's great about play. 
If its purpose is more important than the act of doing it, it's probably not play. 
And there's a whole other type of play, which is object play. 
And this Japanese macaque has made a snowball, and he or she's going to roll down a hill. 
And — they don't throw it at each other, but this is a fundamental part of being playful. 
The human hand, in manipulation of objects, is the hand in search of a brain; the brain is in search of a hand; and play is the medium by which those two are linked in the best way. 
JPL we heard this morning — JPL is an incredible place. 
They have located two consultants, Frank Wilson and Nate Johnson, who are — Frank Wilson is a neurologist, Nate Johnson is a mechanic. 
He taught mechanics in a high school in Long Beach, and found that his students were no longer able to solve problems. 
And he tried to figure out why. And he came to the conclusion, quite on his own, that the students who could no longer solve problems, such as fixing cars, hadn't worked with their hands. 
Frank Wilson had written a book called "" The Hand. "" They got together — JPL hired them. 
Now JPL, NASA and Boeing, before they will hire a research and development problem solver — even if they're summa cum laude from Harvard or Cal Tech — if they haven't fixed cars, haven't done stuff with their hands early in life, played with their hands, they can't problem-solve as well. 
So play is practical, and it's very important. 
Now one of the things about play is that it is born by curiosity and exploration. (Laughter) But it has to be safe exploration. 
This happens to be OK — he's an anatomically interested little boy and that's his mom. Other situations wouldn't be quite so good. 
But curiosity, exploration, are part of the play scene. 
If you want to belong, you need social play. 
And social play is part of what we're about here today, and is a byproduct of the play scene. 
Rough and tumble play. 
These lionesses, seen from a distance, looked like they were fighting. 
But if you look closely, they're kind of like the polar bear and husky: no claws, flat fur, soft eyes, open mouth with no fangs, balletic movements, curvilinear movements — all specific to play. 
And rough-and-tumble play is a great learning medium for all of us. 
Preschool kids, for example, should be allowed to dive, hit, whistle, scream, be chaotic, and develop through that a lot of emotional regulation and a lot of the other social byproducts — cognitive, emotional and physical — that come as a part of rough and tumble play. 
Spectator play, ritual play — we're involved in some of that. 
Those of you who are from Boston know that this was the moment — rare — where the Red Sox won the World Series. 
But take a look at the face and the body language of everybody in this fuzzy picture, and you can get a sense that they're all at play. 
Imaginative play. 
I love this picture because my daughter, who's now almost 40, is in this picture, but it reminds me of her storytelling and her imagination, her ability to spin yarns at this age — preschool. 
A really important part of being a player is imaginative solo play. 
And I love this one, because it's also what we're about. 
We all have an internal narrative that's our own inner story. 
The unit of intelligibility of most of our brains is the story. 
I'm telling you a story today about play. 
Well, this bushman, I think, is talking about the fish that got away that was that long, but it's a fundamental part of the play scene. 
So what does play do for the brain? 
Well, a lot. 
We don't know a whole lot about what it does for the human brain, because funding has not been exactly heavy for research on play. 
I walked into the Carnegie asking for a grant. 
They'd given me a large grant when I was an academician for the study of felony drunken drivers, and I thought I had a pretty good track record, and by the time I had spent half an hour talking about play, it was obvious that they were not — did not feel that play was serious. 
I think that — that's a few years back — I think that wave is past, and the play wave is cresting, because there is some good science. 
Nothing lights up the brain like play. 
Three-dimensional play fires up the cerebellum, puts a lot of impulses into the frontal lobe — the executive portion — helps contextual memory be developed, and — and, and, and. 
So it's — for me, its been an extremely nourishing scholarly adventure to look at the neuroscience that's associated with play, and to bring together people who in their individual disciplines hadn't really thought of it that way. 
And that's part of what the National Institute for Play is all about. 
And this is one of the ways you can study play — is to get a 256-lead electroencephalogram. 
I'm sorry I don't have a playful-looking subject, but it allows mobility, which has limited the actual study of play. 
And we've got a mother-infant play scenario that we're hoping to complete underway at the moment. 
The reason I put this here is also to queue up my thoughts about objectifying what play does. 
The animal world has objectified it. 
In the animal world, if you take rats, who are hardwired to play at a certain period of their juvenile years and you suppress play — they squeak, they wrestle, they pin each other, that's part of their play. 
If you stop that behavior on one group that you're experimenting with, and you allow it in another group that you're experimenting with, and then you present those rats with a cat odor-saturated collar, they're hardwired to flee and hide. 
Pretty smart — they don't want to get killed by a cat. 
So what happens? 
They both hide out. 
The non-players never come out — they die. 
The players slowly explore the environment, and begin again to test things out. 
That says to me, at least in rats — and I think they have the same neurotransmitters that we do and a similar cortical architecture — that play may be pretty important for our survival. 
And, and, and — there are a lot more animal studies that I could talk about. 
Now, this is a consequence of play deprivation. (Laughter) This took a long time — I had to get Homer down and put him through the fMRI and the SPECT and multiple EEGs, but as a couch potato, his brain has shrunk. 
And we do know that in domestic animals and others, when they're play deprived, they don't — and rats also — they don't develop a brain that is normal. 
Now, the program says that the opposite of play is not work, it's depression. 
And I think if you think about life without play — no humor, no flirtation, no movies, no games, no fantasy and, and, and. 
Try and imagine a culture or a life, adult or otherwise without play. 
And the thing that's so unique about our species is that we're really designed to play through our whole lifetime. 
And we all have capacity to play signal. 
Nobody misses that dog I took a picture of on a Carmel beach a couple of weeks ago. 
What's going to follow from that behavior is play. 
And you can trust it. 
The basis of human trust is established through play signals. 
And we begin to lose those signals, culturally and otherwise, as adults. 
That's a shame. 
I think we've got a lot of learning to do. 
Now, Jane Goodall has here a play face along with one of her favorite chimps. 
So part of the signaling system of play has to do with vocal, facial, body, gestural. 
You know, you can tell — and I think when we're getting into collective play, its really important for groups to gain a sense of safety through their own sharing of play signals. 
You may not know this word, but it should be your biological first name and last name. 
Because neoteny means the retention of immature qualities into adulthood. 
And we are, by physical anthropologists, by many, many studies, the most neotenous, the most youthful, the most flexible, the most plastic of all creatures. 
And therefore, the most playful. 
And this gives us a leg up on adaptability. 
Now, there is a way of looking at play that I also want to emphasize here, which is the play history. 
Your own personal play history is unique, and often is not something we think about particularly. 
This is a book written by a consummate player by the name of Kevin Carroll. 
Kevin Carroll came from extremely deprived circumstances: alcoholic mother, absent father, inner-city Philadelphia, black, had to take care of a younger brother. 
Found that when he looked at a playground out of a window into which he had been confined, he felt something different. 
And so he followed up on it. 
And his life — the transformation of his life from deprivation and what one would expect — potentially prison or death — he become a linguist, a trainer for the 76ers and now is a motivational speaker. 
And he gives play as a transformative force over his entire life. 
Now there's another play history that I think is a work in progress. 
Those of you who remember Al Gore, during the first term and then during his successful but unelected run for the presidency, may remember him as being kind of wooden and not entirely his own person, at least in public. 
And looking at his history, which is common in the press, it seems to me, at least — looking at it from a shrink's point of view — that a lot of his life was programmed. 
Summers were hard, hard work, in the heat of Tennessee summers. 
He had the expectations of his senatorial father and Washington, D.C. 
And although I think he certainly had the capacity for play — because I do know something about that — he wasn't as empowered, I think, as he now is by paying attention to what is his own passion and his own inner drive, which I think has its basis in all of us in our play history. 
So what I would encourage on an individual level to do, is to explore backwards as far as you can go to the most clear, joyful, playful image that you have, whether it's with a toy, on a birthday or on a vacation. 
And begin to build to build from the emotion of that into how that connects with your life now. 
And you'll find, you may change jobs — which has happened to a number people when I've had them do this — in order to be more empowered through their play. 
Or you'll be able to enrich your life by prioritizing it and paying attention to it. 
Most of us work with groups, and I put this up because the d.school, the design school at Stanford, thanks to David Kelley and a lot of others who have been visionary about its establishment, has allowed a group of us to get together and create a course called "" From Play to Innovation. "" And you'll see this course is to investigate the human state of play, which is kind of like the polar bear-husky state and its importance to creative thinking: "" to explore play behavior, its development and its biological basis; to apply those principles, through design thinking, to promote innovation in the corporate world; 
and the students will work with real-world partners on design projects with widespread application. "" This is our maiden voyage in this. 
We're about two and a half, three months into it, and it's really been fun. 
There is our star pupil, this labrador, who taught a lot of us what a state of play is, and an extremely aged and decrepit professor in charge there. 
And Brendan Boyle, Rich Crandall — and on the far right is, I think, a person who will be in cahoots with George Smoot for a Nobel Prize — Stuart Thompson, in neuroscience. 
So we've had Brendan, who's from IDEO, and the rest of us sitting aside and watching these students as they put play principles into practice in the classroom. 
And one of their projects was to see what makes meetings boring, and to try and do something about it. 
So what will follow is a student-made film about just that. 
Narrator: Flow is the mental state of apparition in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. 
Characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and success in the process of the activity. 
An important key insight that we learned about meetings is that people pack them in one after another, disruptive to the day. 
Attendees at meetings don't know when they'll get back to the task that they left at their desk. 
But it doesn't have to be that way. 
(Music) Some sage and repeatedly furry monks at this place called the d.school designed a meeting that you can literally step out of when it's over. 
Take the meeting off, and have peace of mind that you can come back to me. 
Because when you need it again, the meeting is literally hanging in your closet. 
The Wearable Meeting. 
Because when you put it on, you immediately get everything you need to have a fun and productive and useful meeting. 
But when you take it off — that's when the real action happens. 
(Music) (Laughter) (Applause) Stuart Brown: So I would encourage you all to engage not in the work-play differential — where you set aside time to play — but where your life becomes infused minute by minute, hour by hour, with body, object, social, fantasy, transformational kinds of play. 
And I think you'll have a better and more empowered life. 
Thank You. 
(Applause) John Hockenberry: So it sounds to me like what you're saying is that there may be some temptation on the part of people to look at your work and go — I think I've heard this, in my kind of pop psychological understanding of play, that somehow, the way animals and humans deal with play, is that it's some sort of rehearsal for adult activity. 
Your work seems to suggest that that is powerfully wrong. 
SB: Yeah, I don't think that's accurate, and I think probably because animals have taught us that. 
If you stop a cat from playing — which you can do, and we've all seen how cats bat around stuff — they're just as good predators as they would be if they hadn't played. 
And if you imagine a kid pretending to be King Kong, or a race car driver, or a fireman, they don't all become race car drivers or firemen, you know. 
So there's a disconnect between preparation for the future — which is what most people are comfortable in thinking about play as — and thinking of it as a separate biological entity. 
And this is where my chasing animals for four, five years really changed my perspective from a clinician to what I am now, which is that play has a biological place, just like sleep and dreams do. 
And if you look at sleep and dreams biologically, animals sleep and dream, and they rehearse and they do some other things that help memory and that are a very important part of sleep and dreams. 
The next step of evolution in mammals and creatures with divinely superfluous neurons will be to play. 
And the fact that the polar bear and husky or magpie and a bear or you and I and our dogs can crossover and have that experience sets play aside as something separate. 
And its hugely important in learning and crafting the brain. 
So it's not just something you do in your spare time. 
JH: How do you keep — and I know you're part of the scientific research community, and you have to justify your existence with grants and proposals like everyone else — how do you prevent — and some of the data that you've produced, the good science that you're talking about you've produced, is hot to handle. 
How do you prevent either the media's interpretation of your work or the scientific community's interpretation of the implications of your work, kind of like the Mozart metaphor, where, "" Oh, MRIs show that play enhances your intelligence. 
Well, let's round these kids up, put them in pens and make them play for months at a time; they'll all be geniuses and go to Harvard. "" How do you prevent people from taking that sort of action on the data that you're developing? 
SB: Well, I think the only way I know to do it is to have accumulated the advisers that I have who go from practitioners — who can establish through improvisational play or clowning or whatever — a state of play. 
So people know that it's there. 
And then you get an fMRI specialist, and you get Frank Wilson, and you get other kinds of hard scientists, including neuroendocrinologists. 
And you get them into a group together focused on play, and it's pretty hard not to take it seriously. 
Unfortunately, that hasn't been done sufficiently for the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Mental Health or anybody else to really look at it in this way seriously. 
I mean you don't hear about anything that's like cancer or heart disease associated with play. 
And yet I see it as something that's just as basic for survival — long term — as learning some of the basic things about public health. 
JH: Stuart Brown, thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

It's amazing, when you meet a head of state and you say, "" What is your most precious natural resource? "" — they will not say children at first. 
And then when you say children, they will pretty quickly agree with you. 
(Video): We're traveling today with the Minister of Defense of Colombia, head of the army and the head of the police, and we're dropping off 650 laptops today to children who have no television, no telephone and have been in a community cut off from the rest of the world for the past 40 years. 
The importance of delivering laptops to this region is connecting kids who have otherwise been unconnected because of the FARC, the guerrillas that started off 40 years ago as a political movement and then became a drug movement. 
There are one billion children in the world, and 50 percent of them don't have electricity at home or at school. 
And in some countries — let me pick Afghanistan — 75 percent of the little girls don't go to school. 
And I don't mean that they drop out of school in the third or fourth grade — they don't go. 
So in the three years since I talked at TED and showed a prototype, it's gone from an idea to a real laptop. 
We have half a million laptops today in the hands of children. 
We have about a quarter of a million in transit to those and other children, and then there are another quarter of a million more that are being ordered at this moment. 
That's smaller than I predicted — I predicted three to 10 million — but is still a very large number. 
In Colombia, we have about 3,000 laptops. 
It's the Minister of Defense with whom we're working, not the Minister of Education, because it is seen as a strategic defense issue in the sense of liberating these zones that had been completely closed off, in which the people who had been causing, if you will, 40 years' worth of bombings and kidnappings and assassinations lived. 
And suddenly, the kids have connected laptops. 
They've leapfrogged. 
The change is absolutely monumental, because it's not just opening it up, but it's opening it up to the rest of the world. 
So yes, they're building roads, yes, they're putting in telephone, yes, there will be television. 
But the kids six to 12 years old are surfing the Internet in Spanish and in local languages, so the children grow up with access to information, with a window into the rest of the world. 
Before, they were closed off. 
Interestingly enough, in other countries, it will be the Minister of Finance who sees it as an engine of economic growth. 
And that engine is going to see the results in 20 years. 
It's not going to happen, you know, in one year, but it's an important, deeply economic and cultural change that happens through children. 
Thirty-one countries in total are involved, and in the case of Uruguay, half the children already have them, and by the middle of 2009, every single child in Uruguay will have a laptop — a little green laptop. 
Now what are some of the results? 
Some of the results that go across every single country include teachers saying they have never loved teaching so much, and reading comprehension measured by third parties — not by us — skyrockets. 
Probably the most important thing we see is children teaching parents. 
They own the laptops. They take them home. 
And so when I met with three children from the schools, who had traveled all day to come to Bogota, one of the three children brought her mother. 
And the reason she brought her mother is that this six-year-old child had been teaching her mother how to read and write. 
Her mother had not gone to primary school. 
And this is such an inversion, and such a wonderful example of children being the agents of change. 
So now, in closing, people say, now why laptops? 
Laptops are a luxury; it's like giving them iPods. No. 
The reason you want laptops is that the word is education, not laptop. 
This is an education project, not a laptop project. 
In a village, you have 100 laptops, each with a different set of 100 books, and so that village suddenly has 10,000 books. 
Sometimes school is under a tree, or in many cases, the teacher has only a fifth-grade education, so you need a collaborative model of learning, not just building more schools and training more teachers, which you have to do anyway. 
So we're once again doing "" Give One, Get One. "" Last year, we ran a "" Give One, Get One "" program, and it generated over 100,000 laptops that we were then able to give free. 
And by being a zero-dollar laptop, we can go to countries that can't afford it at all. 
And that's what we did. We went to Haiti, we went to Rwanda, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mongolia. 
Places that are not markets, seeding it with the principles of saturation, connectivity, low ages, etc. 
And then we can actually roll out large numbers. 
So think of it this way: think of it as inoculating children against ignorance. 
And think of the laptop as a vaccine. 
You don't vaccinate a few children. 
You vaccinate all the children in an area. 

Strap yourselves in, we're going to Mars. 
Not just a few astronauts — thousands of people are going to colonize Mars. 
And I am telling you that they're going to do this soon. 
Some of you will end up working on projects on Mars, and I guarantee that some of your children will end up living there. 
That probably sounds preposterous, so I'm going to share with you how and when that will happen. 
But first I want to discuss the obvious question: Why the heck should we do this? 
12 years ago, I gave a TED talk on 10 ways the world could end suddenly. 
We are incredibly vulnerable to the whims of our own galaxy. 
A single, large asteroid could take us out forever. 
To survive we have to reach beyond the home planet. 
Think what a tragedy it would be if all that humans have accomplished were suddenly obliterated. 
And there's another reason we should go: exploration is in our DNA. 
Two million years ago humans evolved in Africa and then slowly but surely spread out across the entire planet by reaching into the wilderness that was beyond their horizons. 
This stuff is inside us. 
And they prospered doing that. 
Some of the greatest advances in civilization and technology came because we explored. 
Yes, we could do a lot of good with the money it will take to establish a thriving colony on Mars. 
And yes we should all be taking far better care of our own home planet. 
And yes, I worry we could screw up Mars the way we've screwed up Earth. 
But think for a moment, what we had when John F. Kennedy told us we would put a human on the moon. 
He excited an entire generation to dream. 
Think how inspired we will be to see a landing on Mars. 
Perhaps then we will look back at Earth and see that that is one people instead of many and perhaps then we will look back at Earth, as we struggle to survive on Mars, and realize how precious the home planet is. 
So let me tell you about the extraordinary adventure we're about to undertake. 
But first, a few fascinating facts about where we're going. 
This picture actually represents the true size of Mars compared to Earth. 
Mars is not our sister planet. 
It's far less than half the size of the Earth, and yet despite the fact that it's smaller, the surface area of Mars that you can stand on is equivalent to the surface area of the Earth that you can stand on, because the Earth is mostly covered by water. 
The atmosphere on Mars is really thin — 100 times thinner than on Earth — and it's not breathable, it's 96 percent carbon dioxide. 
It's really cold there. 
The average temperature is minus 81 degrees, although there is quite a range of temperature. 
A day on Mars is about as long as a day on Earth, plus about 39 minutes. 
Seasons and years on Mars are twice as long as they are on Earth. 
And for anybody who wants to strap on some wings and go flying one day, Mars has a lot less gravity than on Earth, and it's the kind of place where you can jump over your car instead of walk around it. 
Now, as you can see, Mars isn't exactly Earth-like, but it's by far the most livable other place in our entire solar system. 
Here's the problem. 
Mars is a long way away, a thousand times farther away from us than our own moon. 
The Moon is 250,000 miles away and it took Apollo astronauts three days to get there. 
Mars is 250 million miles away and it will take us eight months to get there — 240 days. 
And that's only if we launch on a very specific day, at a very specific time, once every two years, when Mars and the Earth are aligned just so, so the distance that the rocket would have to travel will be the shortest. 
240 days is a long time to spend trapped with your colleagues in a tin can. 
And meanwhile, our track record of getting to Mars is lousy. 
We and the Russians, the Europeans, the Japanese, the Chinese and the Indians, have actually sent 44 rockets there, and the vast majority of them have either missed or crashed. 
Only about a third of the missions to Mars have been successful. 
And we don't at the moment have a rocket big enough to get there anyway. 
We once had that rocket, the Saturn V. 
A couple of Saturn Vs would have gotten us there. 
It was the most magnificent machine ever built by humans, and it was the rocket that took us to the Moon. 
But the last Saturn V was used in 1973 to launch the Skylab space station, and we decided to do something called the shuttle instead of continuing on to Mars after we landed on the Moon. 
The biggest rocket we have now is only half big enough to get us anything to Mars. 
So getting to Mars is not going to be easy and that brings up a really interesting question... 
how soon will the first humans actually land here? 
Now, some pundits think if we got there by 2050, that'd be a pretty good achievement. 
These days, NASA seems to be saying that it can get humans to Mars by 2040. 
Maybe they can. 
I believe that they can get human beings into Mars orbit by 2035. 
But frankly, I don't think they're going to bother in 2035 to send a rocket to Mars, because we will already be there. 
We're going to land on Mars in 2027. 
And the reason is this man is determined to make that happen. 
His name is Elon Musk, he's the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. 
Now, he actually told me that we would land on Mars by 2025, but Elon Musk is more optimistic than I am — and that's going a ways — so I'm giving him a couple of years of slack. 
Still... 
you've got to ask yourself, can this guy really do this by 2025 or 2027? 
Well, let's put a decade with Elon Musk into a little perspective. 
Where was this 10 years ago? 
That's the Tesla electric automobile. 
In 2005, a lot of people in the automobile industry were saying, we would not have a decent electric car for 50 years. 
And where was that? 
That is SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, lifting six tons of supplies to the International Space Station. 
10 years ago, SpaceX had not launched anything, or fired a rocket to anywhere. 
So I think it's a pretty good bet that the person who is revolutionizing the automobile industry in less than 10 years and the person who created an entire rocket company in less than 10 years will get us to Mars by 2027. 
Now, you need to know this: governments and robots no longer control this game. 
Private companies are leaping into space and they will be happy to take you to Mars. 
And that raises a really big question. 
Can we actually live there? 
Now, NASA may not be able to get us there until 2040, or we may get there a long time before NASA, but NASA has taken a huge responsibility in figuring out how we can live on Mars. 
Let's look at the problem this way. 
Here's what you need to live on Earth: food, water, shelter and clothing. 
And here's what you need to live on Mars: all of the above, plus oxygen. 
So let's look at the most important thing on this list first. 
Water is the basis of all life as we know it, and it's far too heavy for us to carry water from the Earth to Mars to live, so we have to find water if our life is going to succeed on Mars. 
And if you look at Mars, it looks really dry, it looks like the entire planet is a desert. 
But it turns out that it's not. 
The soil alone on Mars contains up to 60 percent water. 
And a number of orbiters that we still have flying around Mars have shown us — and by the way, that's a real photograph — that lots of craters on Mars have a sheet of water ice in them. 
It's not a bad place to start a colony. 
Now, here's a view of a little dig the Phoenix Lander did in 2008, showing that just below the surface of the soil is ice — that white stuff is ice. 
In the second picture, which is four days later than the first picture, you can see that some of it is evaporating. 
Orbiters also tell us that there are huge amounts of underground water on Mars as well as glaciers. 
In fact, if only the water ice at the poles on Mars melted, most of the planet would be under 30 feet of water. 
So there's plenty of water there, but most of it's ice, most of it's underground, it takes a lot of energy to get it and a lot of human labor. 
This is a device cooked up at the University of Washington back in 1998. 
It's basically a low-tech dehumidifier. 
And it turns out the Mars atmosphere is often 100 percent humid. 
So this device can extract all the water that humans will need simply from the atmosphere on Mars. 
Next we have to worry about what we will breathe. 
Frankly, I was really shocked to find out that NASA has this problem worked out. 
This is a scientist at MIT named Michael Hecht. 
And he's developed this machine, Moxie. 
I love this thing. 
It's a reverse fuel cell, essentially, that sucks in the Martian atmosphere and pumps out oxygen. 
And you have to remember that CO2 — carbon dioxide, which is 96 percent of Mars' atmosphere — CO2 is basically 78 percent oxygen. 
Now, the next big rover that NASA sends to Mars in 2020 is going to have one of these devices aboard, and it will be able to produce enough oxygen to keep one person alive indefinitely. 
But the secret to this — and that's just for testing — the secret to this is that this thing was designed from the get-go to be scalable by a factor of 100. 
Next, what will we eat? 
Well, we'll use hydroponics to grow food, but we're not going to be able to grow more than 15 to 20 percent of our food there, at least not until water is running on the surface of Mars and we actually have the probability and the capability of planting crops. 
In the meantime, most of our food will arrive from Earth, and it will be dried. 
And then we need some shelter. 
At first we can use inflatable, pressurized buildings as well as the landers themselves. 
But this really only works during the daytime. 
There is too much solar radiation and too much radiation from cosmic rays. 
So we really have to go underground. 
Now, it turns out that the soil on Mars, by and large, is perfect for making bricks. 
And NASA has figured this one out, too. 
They're going to throw some polymer plastic into the bricks, shove them in a microwave oven, and then you will be able to build buildings with really thick walls. 
Or we may choose to live underground in caves or in lava tubes, of which there are plenty. 
And finally there's clothing. 
On Earth we have miles of atmosphere piled up on us, which creates 15 pounds of pressure on our bodies at all times, and we're constantly pushing out against that. 
On Mars there's hardly any atmospheric pressure. 
So Dava Newman, a scientist at MIT, has created this sleek space suit. 
It will keep us together, block radiation and keep us warm. 
So let's think about this for a minute. 
Food, shelter, clothing, water, oxygen... 
we can do this. 
We really can. 
But it's still a little complicated and a little difficult. 
So that leads to the next big — really big step — in living the good life on Mars. 
And that's terraforming the planet: making it more like Earth, reengineering an entire planet. 
That sounds like a lot of hubris, but the truth is that the technology to do everything I'm about to tell you already exists. 
First we've got to warm it up. 
Mars is incredibly cold because it has a very thin atmosphere. 
The answer lies here, at the south pole and at the north pole of Mars, both of which are covered with an incredible amount of frozen carbon dioxide — dry ice. 
If we heat it up, it sublimes directly into the atmosphere and thickens the atmosphere the same way it does on Earth. 
And as we know, CO2 is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas. 
Now, my favorite way of doing this is to erect a very, very large solar sail and focus it — it essentially serves as a mirror — and focus it on the south pole of Mars at first. 
As the planet spins, it will heat up all that dry ice, sublime it, and it will go into the atmosphere. 
It actually won't take long for the temperature on Mars to start rising, probably less than 20 years. 
Right now, on a perfect day at the equator, in the middle of summer on Mars, temperatures can actually reach 70 degrees, but then they go down to minus 100 at night. 
(Laughter) What we're shooting for is a runaway greenhouse effect: enough temperature rise to see a lot of that ice on Mars — especially the ice in the ground — melt. 
Then we get some real magic. 
As the atmosphere gets thicker, everything gets better. 
We get more protection from radiation, more atmosphere makes us warmer, makes the planet warmer, so we get running water and that makes crops possible. 
Then more water vapor goes into the air, forming yet another potent greenhouse gas. 
It will rain and it will snow on Mars. 
And a thicker atmosphere will create enough pressure so that we can throw away those space suits. 
We only need about five pounds of pressure to survive. 
Eventually, Mars will be made to feel a lot like British Columbia. 
We'll still be left with the complicated problem of making the atmosphere breathable, and frankly that could take 1,000 years to accomplish. 
But humans are amazingly smart and incredibly adaptable. 
There is no telling what our future technology will be able to accomplish and no telling what we can do with our own bodies. 
In biology right now, we are on the very verge of being able to control our own genetics, what the genes in our own bodies are doing, and certainly, eventually, our own evolution. 
We could end up with a species of human being on Earth that is slightly different from the species of human beings on Mars. 
But what would you do there? How would you live? 
It's going to be the same as it is on Earth. 
Somebody's going to start a restaurant, somebody's going to build an iron foundry. 
Someone will make documentary movies of Mars and sell them on Earth. 
Some idiot will start a reality TV show. 
(Laughter) There will be software companies, there will be hotels, there will be bars. 
This much is certain: it will be the most disruptive event in our lifetimes, and I think it will be the most inspiring. 
Ask any 10-year-old girl if she wants to go to Mars. 
Children who are now in elementary school are going to choose to live there. 
Remember when we landed humans on the Moon? 
When that happened, people looked at each other and said, "If we can do this, we can do anything." 
What are they going to think when we actually form a colony on Mars? 
Most importantly, it will make us a spacefaring species. 
And that means humans will survive no matter what happens on Earth. 
We will never be the last of our kind. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hans Rosling: I'm going to ask you three multiple choice questions. 
Use this device. Use this device to answer. 
The first question is, how did the number of deaths per year from natural disaster, how did that change during the last century? 
Did it more than double, did it remain about the same in the world as a whole, or did it decrease to less than half? 
Please answer A, B or C. 
I see lots of answers. This is much faster than I do it at universities. 
They are so slow. They keep thinking, thinking, thinking. 
Oh, very, very good. 
And we go to the next question. 
So how long did women 30 years old in the world go to school: seven years, five years or three years? 
A, B or C? Please answer. 
And we go to the next question. 
In the last 20 years, how did the percentage of people in the world who live in extreme poverty change? 
Extreme poverty — not having enough food for the day. 
Did it almost double, did it remain more or less the same, or did it halve? 
A, B or C? 
Now, answers. 
You see, deaths from natural disasters in the world, you can see it from this graph here, from 1900 to 2000. 
In 1900, there was about half a million people who died every year from natural disasters: floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruption, whatever, droughts. 
And then, how did that change? 
Gapminder asked the public in Sweden. 
This is how they answered. 
The Swedish public answered like this: Fifty percent thought it had doubled, 38 percent said it's more or less the same, 12 said it had halved. 
This is the best data from the disaster researchers, and it goes up and down, and it goes to the Second World War, and after that it starts to fall and it keeps falling and it's down to much less than half. 
The world has been much, much more capable as the decades go by to protect people from this, you know. 
So only 12 percent of the Swedes know this. 
So I went to the zoo and I asked the chimps. 
(Laughter) (Applause) The chimps don't watch the evening news, so the chimps, they choose by random, so the Swedes answer worse than random. 
Now how did you do? 
That's you. 
You were beaten by the chimps. 
(Laughter) But it was close. 
You were three times better than the Swedes, but that's not enough. 
You shouldn't compare yourself to Swedes. 
You must have higher ambitions in the world. 
Let's look at the next answer here: women in school. 
Here, you can see men went eight years. 
How long did women go to school? 
Well, we asked the Swedes like this, and that gives you a hint, doesn't it? 
The right answer is probably the one the fewest Swedes picked, isn't it? 
(Laughter) Let's see, let's see. Here we come. 
Yes, yes, yes, women have almost caught up. 
This is the U.S. public. 
And this is you. Here you come. 
Ooh. 
Well, congratulations, you're twice as good as the Swedes, but you don't need me — So how come? I think it's like this, that everyone is aware that there are countries and there are areas where girls have great difficulties. 
They are stopped when they go to school, and it's disgusting. 
But in the majority of the world, where most people in the world live, most countries, girls today go to school as long as boys, more or less. 
That doesn't mean that gender equity is achieved, not at all. 
They still are confined to terrible, terrible limitations, but schooling is there in the world today. 
Now, we miss the majority. 
When you answer, you answer according to the worst places, and there you are right, but you miss the majority. 
What about poverty? 
Well, it's very clear that poverty here was almost halved, and in U.S., when we asked the public, only five percent got it right. 
And you? 
Ah, you almost made it to the chimps. 
(Laughter) (Applause) That little, just a few of you! 
There must be preconceived ideas, you know. 
And many in the rich countries, they think that oh, we can never end extreme poverty. 
Of course they think so, because they don't even know what has happened. 
The first thing to think about the future is to know about the present. 
These questions were a few of the first ones in the pilot phase of the Ignorance Project in Gapminder Foundation that we run, and it was started, this project, last year by my boss, and also my son, Ola Rosling. (Laughter) He's cofounder and director, and he wanted, Ola told me we have to be more systematic when we fight devastating ignorance. 
So already the pilots reveal this, that so many in the public score worse than random, so we have to think about preconceived ideas, and one of the main preconceived ideas is about world income distribution. 
Look here. This is how it was in 1975. 
It's the number of people on each income, from one dollar a day — (Applause) See, there was one hump here, around one dollar a day, and then there was one hump here somewhere between 10 and 100 dollars. 
The world was two groups. 
It was a camel world, like a camel with two humps, the poor ones and the rich ones, and there were fewer in between. 
But look how this has changed: As I go forward, what has changed, the world population has grown, and the humps start to merge. 
The lower humps merged with the upper hump, and the camel dies and we have a dromedary world with one hump only. 
The percent in poverty has decreased. 
Still it's appalling that so many remain in extreme poverty. 
We still have this group, almost a billion, over there, but that can be ended now. 
The challenge we have now is to get away from that, understand where the majority is, and that is very clearly shown in this question. 
We asked, what is the percentage of the world's one-year-old children who have got those basic vaccines against measles and other things that we have had for many years: 20, 50 or 80 percent? 
Now, this is what the U.S. public and the Swedish answered. 
Look at the Swedish result: you know what the right answer is. 
(Laughter) Who the heck is a professor of global health in that country? 
Well, it's me. It's me. 
(Laughter) It's very difficult, this. It's very difficult. 
(Applause) However, Ola's approach to really measure what we know made headlines, and CNN published these results on their web and they had the questions there, millions answered, and I think there were about 2,000 comments, and this was one of the comments. 
"" I bet no member of the media passed the test, "" he said. 
So Ola told me, "" Take these devices. 
You are invited to media conferences. 
Give it to them and measure what the media know. "" And ladies and gentlemen, for the first time, the informal results from a conference with U.S. media. 
And then, lately, from the European Union media. 
(Laughter) You see, the problem is not that people don't read and listen to the media. 
The problem is that the media doesn't know themselves. 
What shall we do about this, Ola? 
Do we have any ideas? 
(Applause) Ola Rosling: Yes, I have an idea, but first, I'm so sorry that you were beaten by the chimps. 
Fortunately, I will be able to comfort you by showing why it was not your fault, actually. 
Then, I will equip you with some tricks for beating the chimps in the future. 
That's basically what I will do. 
But first, let's look at why are we so ignorant, and it all starts in this place. 
It's Hudiksvall. It's a city in northern Sweden. 
It's a neighborhood where I grew up, and it's a neighborhood with a large problem. 
Actually, it has exactly the same problem which existed in all the neighborhoods where you grew up as well. 
It was not representative. Okay? 
It gave me a very biased view of how life is on this planet. 
So this is the first piece of the ignorance puzzle. 
We have a personal bias. 
We have all different experiences from communities and people we meet, and on top of this, we start school, and we add the next problem. 
Well, I like schools, but teachers tend to teach outdated worldviews, because they learned something when they went to school, and now they describe this world to the students without any bad intentions, and those books, of course, that are printed are outdated in a world that changes. 
And there is really no practice to keep the teaching material up to date. 
So that's what we are focusing on. 
So we have these outdated facts added on top of our personal bias. 
What happens next is news, okay? 
An excellent journalist knows how to pick the story that will make headlines, and people will read it because it's sensational. 
Unusual events are more interesting, no? 
And they are exaggerated, and especially things we're afraid of. 
A shark attack on a Swedish person will get headlines for weeks in Sweden. 
So these three skewed sources of information were really hard to get away from. 
They kind of bombard us and equip our mind with a lot of strange ideas, and on top of it we put the very thing that makes us humans, our human intuition. 
It was good in evolution. 
It helped us generalize and jump to conclusions very, very fast. 
It helped us exaggerate what we were afraid of, and we seek causality where there is none, and we then get an illusion of confidence where we believe that we are the best car drivers, above the average. 
Everybody answered that question, "Yeah, I drive cars better." 
Okay, this was good evolutionarily, but now when it comes to the worldview, it is the exact reason why it's upside down. 
The trends that are increasing are instead falling, and the other way around, and in this case, the chimps use our intuition against us, and it becomes our weakness instead of our strength. 
It was supposed to be our strength, wasn't it? 
So how do we solve such problems? 
First, we need to measure it, and then we need to cure it. 
So by measuring it we can understand what is the pattern of ignorance. 
We started the pilot last year, and now we're pretty sure that we will encounter a lot of ignorance across the whole world, and the idea is really to scale it up to all domains or dimensions of global development, such as climate, endangered species, human rights, gender equality, energy, finance. 
All different sectors have facts, and there are organizations trying to spread awareness about these facts. 
So I've started actually contacting some of them, like WWF and Amnesty International and UNICEF, and asking them, what are your favorite facts which you think the public doesn't know? 
Okay, I gather those facts. 
Imagine a long list with, say, 250 facts. 
And then we poll the public and see where they score worst. 
So we get a shorter list with the terrible results, like some few examples from Hans, and we have no problem finding these kinds of terrible results. 
Okay, this little shortlist, what are we going to do with it? 
Well, we turn it into a knowledge certificate, a global knowledge certificate, which you can use, if you're a large organization, a school, a university, or maybe a news agency, to certify yourself as globally knowledgeable. 
Basically meaning, we don't hire people who score like chimpanzees. 
Of course you shouldn't. 
So maybe 10 years from now, if this project succeeds, you will be sitting in an interview having to fill out this crazy global knowledge. 
So now we come to the practical tricks. 
How are you going to succeed? 
There is, of course, one way, which is to sit down late nights and learn all the facts by heart by reading all these reports. 
That will never happen, actually. 
Not even Hans thinks that's going to happen. 
People don't have that time. 
People like shortcuts, and here are the shortcuts. 
We need to turn our intuition into strength again. 
We need to be able to generalize. 
So now I'm going to show you some tricks where the misconceptions are turned around into rules of thumb. 
Let's start with the first misconception. 
This is very widespread. 
Everything is getting worse. 
You heard it. You thought it yourself. 
The other way to think is, most things improve. 
So you're sitting with a question in front of you and you're unsure. You should guess "" improve. "" Okay? Don't go for the worse. 
That will help you score better on our tests. 
(Applause) That was the first one. 
There are rich and poor and the gap is increasing. 
It's a terrible inequality. 
Yeah, it's an unequal world, but when you look at the data, it's one hump. 
Okay? If you feel unsure, go for "" the most people are in the middle. "" That's going to help you get the answer right. 
Now, the next preconceived idea is first countries and people need to be very, very rich to get the social development like girls in school and be ready for natural disasters. 
No, no, no. That's wrong. 
Look: that huge hump in the middle already have girls in school. 
So if you are unsure, go for the "the majority already have this," like electricity and girls in school, these kinds of things. 
They're only rules of thumb, so of course they don't apply to everything, but this is how you can generalize. 
Let's look at the last one. 
If something, yes, this is a good one, sharks are dangerous. 
No — well, yes, but they are not so important in the global statistics, that is what I'm saying. 
I actually, I'm very afraid of sharks. 
So as soon as I see a question about things I'm afraid of, which might be earthquakes, other religions, maybe I'm afraid of terrorists or sharks, anything that makes me feel, assume you're going to exaggerate the problem. 
That's a rule of thumb. 
Of course there are dangerous things that are also great. 
Sharks kill very, very few. That's how you should think. 
With these four rules of thumb, you could probably answer better than the chimps, because the chimps cannot do this. 
They cannot generalize these kinds of rules. 
And hopefully we can turn your world around and we're going to beat the chimps. Okay? 
(Applause) That's a systematic approach. 
Now the question, is this important? 
Yeah, it's important to understand poverty, extreme poverty and how to fight it, and how to bring girls in school. 
When we realize that actually it's succeeding, we can understand it. 
But is it important for everyone else who cares about the rich end of this scale? 
I would say yes, extremely important, for the same reason. 
If you have a fact-based worldview of today, you might have a chance to understand what's coming next in the future. 
We're going back to these two humps in 1975. 
That's when I was born, and I selected the West. 
That's the current EU countries and North America. 
Let's now see how the rest and the West compares in terms of how rich you are. 
These are the people who can afford to fly abroad with an airplane for a vacation. 
In 1975, only 30 percent of them lived outside EU and North America. 
But this has changed, okay? 
So first, let's look at the change up till today, 2014. 
Today it's 50 / 50. 
The Western domination is over, as of today. 
That's nice. So what's going to happen next? 
Do you see the big hump? Did you see how it moved? 
I did a little experiment. I went to the IMF, International Monetary Fund, website. 
They have a forecast for the next five years of GDP per capita. 
So I can use that to go five years into the future, assuming the income inequality of each country is the same. 
I did that, but I went even further. 
I used those five years for the next 20 years with the same speed, just as an experiment what might actually happen. 
Let's move into the future. 
In 2020, it's 57 percent in the rest. 
In 2025, 63 percent. 
2030, 68. And in 2035, the West is outnumbered in the rich consumer market. 
These are just projections of GDP per capita into the future. 
Seventy-three percent of the rich consumers are going to live outside North America and Europe. 
So yes, I think it's a good idea for a company to use this certificate to make sure to make fact- based decisions in the future. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Hans and Ola Rosling! 

They need to be part of the pack. 

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

We are here today because [the] United Nations have defined goals for the progress of countries. 
They're called Millennium Development Goals. 
And the reason I really like these goals is that there are eight of them. 
And by specifying eight different goals, the United Nations has said that there are so many things needed to change in a country in order to get the good life for people. 
Look here — you have to end poverty, education, gender, child and maternal health, control infections, protect the environment and get the good global links between nations in every aspect from aid to trade. 
There's a second reason I like these development goals, and that is because each and every one is measured. 
Take child mortality; the aim here is to reduce child mortality by two-thirds, from 1990 to 2015. 
That's a four percent reduction per year — and this, with measuring. 
That's what makes the difference between political talking like this and really going for the important thing, a better life for people. 
And what I'm so happy about with this is that we have already documented that there are many countries in Asia, in the Middle East, in Latin America and East Europe that [are] reducing with this rate. 
And even mighty Brazil is going down with five percent per year, and Turkey with seven percent per year. 
So there's good news. 
But then I hear people saying, "" There is no progress in Africa. 
And there's not even statistics on Africa to know what is happening. "" I'll prove them wrong on both points. 
Come with me to the wonderful world of statistics. 
I bring you to the webpage, ChildMortality.org, where you can take deaths in children below five years of age for all countries — it's done by U.N. specialists. 
And I will take Kenya as an example. 
Here you see the data. 
Don't panic — don't panic now, I'll help you through this. 
It looks nasty, like in college when you didn't like statistics. 
But first thing, when you see dots like this, you have to ask yourself: from where do the data come? 
What is the origin of the data? 
Is it so that in Kenya, there are doctors and other specialists who write the death certificate at the death of the child and it's sent to the statistical office? 
No — low-income countries like Kenya still don't have that level of organization. 
It exists, but it's not complete because so many deaths occur in the home with the family, and it's not registered. 
What we rely on is not an incomplete system. 
We have interviews, we have surveys. 
And this is highly professional female interviewers who sit down for one hour with a woman and ask her about [her] birth history. 
How many children did you have? 
Are they alive? 
If they died, at what age and what year? 
And then this is done in a representative sample of thousands of women in the country and put together in what used to be called a demographic health survey report. 
But these surveys are costly, so they can only be done [in] three- to five-year intervals. 
But they have good quality. 
So this is a limitation. 
And all these colored lines here are results; each color is one survey. 
But that's too complicated for today, so I'll simplify it for you, and I give you one average point for each survey. 
This was 1977, 1988, 1992, '97 and 2002. 
And when the experts in the U.N. 
have got these surveys in place in their database, then they use advanced mathematical formulas to produce a trend line, and the trend line looks like this. 
See here — it's the best fit they can get of this point. 
But watch out — they continue the line beyond the last point out into nothing. 
And they estimated that in 2008, Kenya had per child mortality of 128. 
And I was sad, because we could see this reversal in Kenya with an increased child mortality in the 90s. 
It was so tragic. 
But in June, I got a mail in my inbox from Demographic Health Surveys, and it showed good news from Kenya. 
I was so happy. 
This was the estimate of the new survey. 
Then it just took another three months for [the] U.N. to get it into their server, and on Friday we got the new trend line — it was down here. 
Isn't it nice — isn't it nice, yeah? 
I was actually, on Friday, sitting in front of my computer, and I saw the death rate fall from 128 to 84 just that morning. 
So we celebrated. 
But now, when you have this trend line, how do we measure progress? 
I'm going into some details here, because [the] U.N. do it like this. 
They start [in] 1990 — they measure to 2009. 
They say, "" 0.9 percent, no progress. "" That's unfair. 
As a professor, I think I have the right to propose something differently. 
I would say, at least do this — 10 years is enough to follow the trend. 
It's two surveys, and you can see what's happening now. 
They have 2.4 percent. 
Had I been in the Ministry of Health in Kenya, I may have joined these two points. 
So what I'm telling you is that we know the child mortality. 
We have a decent trend. 
It's coming into some tricky things then when we are measuring MDGs. 
And the reason here for Africa is especially important, because '90s was a bad decade, not only in Kenya, but across Africa. 
The HIV epidemic peaked. 
There was resistance for the old malaria drugs, until we got the new drugs. 
We got, later, the mosquito netting. 
And there was socio-economic problems, which are now being solved at a much better scale. 
So look at the average here — this is the average for all of sub-Saharan Africa. 
And [the] U.N. says it's a reduction with 1.8 percent. 
Now this sounds a little theoretical, but it's not so theoretical. 
You know, these economists, they love money, they want more and more of it, they want it to grow. 
So they calculate the percent annual growth rate of [the] economy. 
We in public health, we hate child death, so we want less and less and less of child deaths. 
So we calculate the percent reduction per year, but it's sort of the same percentage. 
If your economy grows with four percent, you ought to reduce child mortality four percent; if it's used well and people are really involved and can get the use of the resources in the way they want it. 
So is this fair now to measure this over 19 years? 
An economist would never do that. 
I have just divided it into two periods. 
In the 90s, only 1.2 percent, only 1.2 percent. 
Whereas now, second gear — it's like Africa had first gear, now they go into second gear. 
But even this is not a fair representation of Africa, because it's an average, it's an average speed of reduction in Africa. 
And look here when I take you into my bubble graphs. 
Still here, child death per 1,000 on that axis. 
Here we have [the] year. 
And I'm now giving you a wider picture than the MDG. 
I start 50 years ago when Africa celebrated independence in most countries. 
I give you Congo, which was high, Ghana — lower. And Kenya — even lower. 
And what has happened over the years since then? Here we go. 
You can see, with independence, literacy improved and vaccinations started, smallpox was eradicated, hygiene was improved, and things got better. 
But then, in the '80s, watch out here. 
Congo got into civil war, and they leveled off here. 
Ghana got very ahead, fast. 
This was the backlash in Kenya, and Ghana bypassed, but then Kenya and Ghana go down together — still a standstill in Congo. 
That's where we are today. 
You can see it doesn't make sense to make an average of this zero improvement and this very fast improvement. 
Time has come to stop thinking about sub-Saharan Africa as one place. 
Their countries are so different, and they merit to be recognized in the same way, as we don't talk about Europe as one place. 
I can tell you that the economy in Greece and Sweden are very different — everyone knows that. 
And they are judged, each country, on how they are doing. 
So let me show the wider picture. 
My country, Sweden: 1800, we were up there. 
What a strange personality disorder we must have, counting the children so meticulously in spite of a high child death rate. 
It's very strange. It's sort of embarrassing. 
But we had that habit in Sweden, you know, that we counted all the child deaths, even if we didn't do anything about it. 
And then, you see, these were famine years. 
These were bad years, and people got fed up with Sweden. 
My ancestors moved to the United States. 
And eventually, soon they started to get better and better here. 
And here we got better education, and we got health service, and child mortality came down. 
We never had a war; Sweden was in peace all this time. 
But look, the rate of lowering in Sweden was not fast. 
Sweden achieved a low child mortality because we started early. 
We had primary school actually started in 1842. 
And then you get that wonderful effect when we got female literacy one generation later. 
You have to realize that the investments we do in progress are long-term investments. 
It's not about just five years — it's long-term investments. 
And Sweden never reached [the] Millennium Development Goal rate, 3.1 percent when I calculated. 
So we are off track — that's what Sweden is. 
But you don't talk about it so much. 
We want others to be better than we were, and indeed, others have been better. 
Let me show you Thailand, see what a success story, Thailand from the 1960s — how they went down here and reached almost the same child mortality levels as Sweden. 
And I'll give you another story — Egypt, the most hidden, glorious success in public health. 
Egypt was up here in 1960, higher than Congo. 
The Nile Delta was a misery for children with diarrheal disease and malaria and a lot of problems. 
And then they got the Aswan Dam. They got electricity in their homes, they increased education and they got primary health care. 
And down they went, you know. 
And they got safer water, they eradicated malaria. 
And isn't it a success story. 
Millennium Development Goal rates for child mortality is fully possible. 
And the good thing is that Ghana today is going with the same rate as Egypt did at its fastest. 
Kenya is now speeding up. 
Here we have a problem. 
We have a severe problem in countries which are at a standstill. 
Now, let me now bring you to a wider picture, a wider picture of child mortality. 
I'm going to show you the relationship between child mortality on this axis here — this axis here is child mortality — and here I have the family size. 
The relationship between child mortality and family size. 
One, two, three, four children per woman: six, seven, eight children per woman. 
This is, once again, 1960 — 50 years ago. 
Each bubble is a country — the color, you can see, a continent. 
The dark blue here is sub-Saharan Africa. 
And the size of the bubble is the population. 
And these are the so-called "" developing "" countries. 
They had high, or very high, child mortality and family size, six to eight. 
And the ones over there, they were so-called Western countries. 
They had low child mortality and small families. 
What has happened? 
What I want you [to do] now is to see with your own eyes the relation between fall in child mortality and decrease in family size. 
I just want not to have any room for doubt — you have to see that for yourself. 
This is what happened. Now I start the world. 
Here we come down with the eradication of smallpox, better education, health service. 
It got down there — China comes into the Western box here. 
And here Brazil is in the Western Box. 
India is approaching. The first African countries coming into the Western box, and we get a lot a new neighbors. 
Welcome to a decent life. 
Come on. We want everyone down there. 
This is the vision we have, isn't it. 
And look now, the first African countries here are coming in. 
There we are today. 
There is no such thing as a "" Western world "" and "" developing world. "" This is the report from [the] U.N., which came out on Friday. 
It's very good — "" Levels and Trends in Child Mortality "" — except this page. 
This page is very bad; it's a categorization of countries. 
It labels "" developing countries, "" — I can read from the list here — developing countries: Republic of Korea — South Korea. 
Huh? 
They get Samsung, how can they be [a] developing country? 
They have here Singapore. 
They have the lowest child mortality in the world, Singapore. 
They bypassed Sweden five years ago, and they are labeled a developing country. 
They have here Qatar. 
It's the richest country in the world with Al Jazeera. 
How the heck could they be [a] developing country? 
This is crap. 
(Applause) The rest here is good — the rest is good. 
We have to have a modern concept, which fits to the data. 
And we have to realize that we are all going to into this, down to here. 
What is the importance now with the relations here. 
Look — even if we look in Africa — these are the African countries. 
You can clearly see the relation with falling child mortality and decreasing family size, even within Africa. 
It's very clear that this is what happens. 
And a very important piece of research came out on Friday from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle showing that almost 50 percent of the fall in child mortality can be attributed to female education. 
That is, when we get girls in school, we'll get an impact 15 to 20 years later, which is a secular trend which is very strong. 
That's why we must have that long-term perspective, but we must measure the impact over 10-year periods. 
It's fully possible to get child mortality down in all of these countries and to get them down in the corner where we all would like to live together. 
And of course, lowering child mortality is a matter of utmost importance from humanitarian aspects. 
It's a decent life for children, we are talking about. 
But it is also a strategic investment in the future of all mankind, because it's about the environment. 
We will not be able to manage the environment and avoid the terrible climate crisis if we don't stabilize the world population. 
Let's be clear about that. 
And the way to do that, that is to get child mortality down, get access to family planning and behind that drive female education. 
And that is fully possible. Let's do it. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

I'm assuming everyone here has watched a TED Talk online at one time or another, right? 
So what I'm going to do is play this. 
This is the song from the TED Talks online. 
(Music) And I'm going to slow it down because things sound cooler when they're slower. (Music) 
Ken Robinson: Good morning. How are you? 
Mark Applebaum: I'm going to — Kate Stone: — mix some music. 
MA: I'm going to do so in a way that tells a story. 
Tod Machover: Something nobody's ever heard before. 
KS: I have a crossfader. 
Julian Treasure: I call this the mixer. 
KS: Two D.J. decks. 
Chris Anderson: You turn up the dials, the wheel starts to turn. 
Dan Ellsey: I have always loved music. 
Michael Tilson Thomas: Is it a melody or a rhythm or a mood or an attitude? 
Daniel Wolpert: Feeling everything that's going on inside my body. 
Adam Ockelford: In your brain is this amazing musical computer. 
MTT: Using computers and synthesizers to create works. It's a language that's still evolving. 
And the 21st century. 
KR: Turn on the radio. Pop into the discotheque. 
You will know what this person is doing: moving to the music. 
Mark Ronson: This is my favorite part. 
MA: You gotta have doorstops. That's important. 
TM: We all love music a great deal. 
MTT: Anthems, dance crazes, ballads and marches. 
Kirby Ferguson and JT: The remix: It is new music created from old music. 
Ryan Holladay: Blend seamlessly. 
Kathryn Schulz: And that's how it goes. 
MTT: What happens when the music stops? 
KS: Yay! 
(Applause) MR: Obviously, I've been watching a lot of TED Talks. 
When I was first asked to speak at TED, I wasn't quite sure what my angle was, at first, so yeah, I immediately started watching tons of TED Talks, which is pretty much absolutely the worst thing that you can do because you start to go into panic mode, thinking, I haven't mounted a successful expedition to the North Pole yet. 
Neither have I provided electricity to my village through sheer ingenuity. 
In fact, I've pretty much wasted most of my life DJing in night clubs and producing pop records. 
But I still kept watching the videos, because I'm a masochist, and eventually, things like Michael Tilson Thomas and Tod Machover, and seeing their visceral passion talking about music, it definitely stirred something in me, and I'm a sucker for anyone talking devotedly about the power of music. 
And I started to write down on these little note cards every time I heard something that struck a chord in me, pardon the pun, or something that I thought I could use, and pretty soon, my studio looked like this, kind of like a John Nash, "" Beautiful Mind "" vibe. 
The other good thing about watching TED Talks, when you see a really good one, you kind of all of a sudden wish the speaker was your best friend, don't you? Like, just for a day. 
They seem like a nice person. 
You'd take a bike ride, maybe share an ice cream. 
You'd certainly learn a lot. 
And every now and then they'd chide you, when they got frustrated that you couldn't really keep up with half of the technical things they're banging on about all the time. 
But then they'd remember that you're but a mere human of ordinary, mortal intelligence that didn't finish university, and they'd kind of forgive you, and pet you like the dog. 
(Laughter) Man, yeah, back to the real world, probably Sir Ken Robinson and I are not going to end up being best of friends. 
He lives all the way in L.A. and I imagine is quite busy, but through the tools available to me — technology and the innate way that I approach making music — I can sort of bully our existences into a shared event, which is sort of what you saw. 
I can hear something that I love in a piece of media and I can co-opt it and insert myself in that narrative, or alter it, even. 
In a nutshell, that's what I was trying to do with these things, but more importantly, that's what the past 30 years of music has been. 
That's the major thread. 
See, 30 years ago, you had the first digital samplers, and they changed everything overnight. 
All of a sudden, artists could sample from anything and everything that came before them, from a snare drum from the Funky Meters, to a Ron Carter bassline, the theme to "" The Price Is Right. "" Albums like De La Soul's "" 3 Feet High and Rising "" and the Beastie Boys' "" Paul's Boutique "" looted from decades of recorded music to create these sonic, layered masterpieces that were basically the Sgt. Peppers of their day. 
And they weren't sampling these records because they were too lazy to write their own music. 
They weren't sampling these records to cash in on the familiarity of the original stuff. 
To be honest, it was all about sampling really obscure things, except for a few obvious exceptions like Vanilla Ice and "" doo doo doo da da doo doo "" that we know about. 
But the thing is, they were sampling those records because they heard something in that music that spoke to them that they instantly wanted to inject themselves into the narrative of that music. 
They heard it, they wanted to be a part of it, and all of a sudden they found themselves in possession of the technology to do so, not much unlike the way the Delta blues struck a chord with the Stones and the Beatles and Clapton, and they felt the need to co-opt that music for the tools of their day. 
You know, in music we take something that we love and we build on it. 
I'd like to play a song for you. 
(Music: "" La Di Da Di "" by Doug E. Fresh & Slick Rick) That's "" La Di Da Di "" and it's the fifth-most sampled song of all time. 
It's been sampled 547 times. 
It was made in 1984 by these two legends of hip-hop, Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh, and the Ray-Ban and Jheri curl look is so strong. 
I do hope that comes back soon. 
Anyway, this predated the sampling era. 
There were no samples in this record, although I did look up on the Internet last night, I mean several months ago, that "" La Di Da Di "" means, it's an old Cockney expression from the late 1800s in England, so maybe a remix with Mrs. Patmore from "" Downton Abbey "" coming soon, or that's for another day. 
Doug E. Fresh was the human beat box. 
Slick Rick is the voice you hear on the record, and because of Slick Rick's sing-songy, super-catchy vocals, it provides endless sound bites and samples for future pop records. 
That was 1984. 
This is me in 1984, in case you were wondering how I was doing, thank you for asking. 
It's Throwback Thursday already. 
I was involved in a heavy love affair with the music of Duran Duran, as you can probably tell from my outfit. 
I was in the middle. 
And the simplest way that I knew how to co-opt myself into that experience of wanting to be in that song somehow was to just get a band together of fellow nine-year-olds and play "" Wild Boys "" at the school talent show. 
So that's what we did, and long story short, we were booed off the stage, and if you ever have a chance to live your life escaping hearing the sound of an auditorium full of second- and third-graders booing, I would highly recommend it. It's not really fun. 
But it didn't really matter, because what I wanted somehow was to just be in the history of that song for a minute. 
I didn't care who liked it. 
I just loved it, and I thought I could put myself in there. 
Over the next 10 years, "" La Di Da Di "" continues to be sampled by countless records, ending up on massive hits like "" Here Comes the Hotstepper "" and "" I Wanna Sex You Up. "" Snoop Doggy Dogg covers this song on his debut album "" Doggystyle "" and calls it "" Lodi Dodi. "" Copyright lawyers are having a field day at this point. 
And then you fast forward to 1997, and the Notorious B.I.G., or Biggie, reinterprets "" La Di Da Di "" on his number one hit called "" Hypnotize, "" which I will play a little bit of and I will play you a little bit of the Slick Rick to show you where they got it from. 
(Music: "" Hypnotize "" by The Notorious B.I.G.) So Biggie was killed weeks before that song made it to number one, in one of the great tragedies of the hip-hop era, but he would have been 13 years old and very much alive when "" La Di Da Di "" first came out, and as a young boy growing up in Brooklyn, it's hard not to think that that song probably held some fond memories for him. 
But the way he interpreted it, as you hear, is completely his own. 
He flips it, makes it, there's nothing pastiche whatsoever about it. 
It's thoroughly modern Biggie. 
I had to make that joke in this room, because you would be the only people that I'd ever have a chance of getting it. 
And so, it's a groaner. (Laughter) Elsewhere in the pop and rap world, we're going a little bit sample-crazy. 
We're getting away from the obscure samples that we were doing, and all of a sudden everyone's taking these massive '80s tunes like Bowie, "" Let's Dance, "" and all these disco records, and just rapping on them. 
These records don't really age that well. 
You don't hear them now, because they borrowed from an era that was too steeped in its own connotation. 
You can't just hijack nostalgia wholesale. 
It leaves the listener feeling sickly. 
You have to take an element of those things and then bring something fresh and new to it, which was something that I learned when I was working with the late, amazing Amy Winehouse on her album "" Back to Black. "" A lot of fuss was made about the sonic of the album that myself and Salaam Remi, the other producer, achieved, how we captured this long-lost sound, but without the very, very 21st-century personality and firebrand that was Amy Winehouse and her lyrics about rehab and Roger Moore and even a mention of Slick Rick, the whole thing would have run the risk 
of being very pastiche, to be honest. 
Imagine any other singer from that era over it singing the same old lyrics. 
It runs a risk of being completely bland. 
I mean, there was no doubt that Amy and I and Salaam all had this love for this gospel, soul and blues and jazz that was evident listening to the musical arrangements. 
She brought the ingredients that made it urgent and of the time. 
So if we come all the way up to the present day now, the cultural tour de force that is Miley Cyrus, she reinterprets "" La Di Da Di "" completely for her generation, and we'll take a listen to the Slick Rick part and then see how she sort of flipped it. 
(Music: "" La Di Da Di "" by Slick Rick & Doug E. Fresh) (Music: "" We Can't Stop "" by Miley Cyrus) So Miley Cyrus, who wasn't even born yet when "" La Di Da Di "" was made, and neither were any of the co-writers on the song, has found this song that somehow etched its way into the collective consciousness of pop music, and now, with its timeless playfulness of the original, has kind of translated to a whole new generation who will probably co-opt it as their own. 
Since the dawn of the sampling era, there's been endless debate about the validity of music that contains samples. 
You know, the Grammy committee says that if your song contains some kind of pre-written or pre-existing music, you're ineligible for song of the year. 
Rockists, who are racist but only about rock music, constantly use the argument to — That's a real word. That is a real word. 
They constantly use the argument to devalue rap and modern pop, and these arguments completely miss the point, because the dam has burst. 
We live in the post-sampling era. 
We take the things that we love and we build on them. 
That's just how it goes. 
And when we really add something significant and original and we merge our musical journey with this, then we have a chance to be a part of the evolution of that music that we love and be linked with it once it becomes something new again. 
So I would like to do one more piece that I put together for you tonight, and it takes place with two pretty inspiring TED performances that I've seen. 
One of them is the piano player Derek Paravicini, who happens to be a blind, autistic genius at the piano, and Emmanuel Jal, who is an ex-child soldier from the South Sudan, who is a spoken word poet and rapper. 
And once again I found a way to annoyingly me-me-me myself into the musical history of these songs, but I can't help it, because they're these things that I love, and I want to mess around with them. 
So I hope you enjoy this. Here we go. 
Let's hear that TED sound again, right? 
(Music) Thank you very much. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

I'm going to talk today about saving more, but not today, tomorrow. 
I'm going to talk about Save More Tomorrow. 
It's a program that Richard Thaler from the University of Chicago and I devised maybe 15 years ago. 
The program, in a sense, is an example of behavioral finance on steroids — how we could really use behavioral finance. 
Now you might ask, what is behavioral finance? 
So let's think about how we manage our money. 
Let's start with mortgages. 
It's kind of a recent topic, at least in the U.S. 
A lot of people buy the biggest house they can afford, and actually slightly bigger than that. 
And then they foreclose. 
And then they blame the banks for being the bad guys who gave them the mortgages. 
Let's also think about how we manage risks — for example, investing in the stock market. 
Two years ago, three years ago, about four years ago, markets did well. 
We were risk takers, of course. 
Then market stocks seize and we're like, "" Wow. 
These losses, they feel, emotionally, they feel very different from what we actually thought about it when markets were going up. "" So we're probably not doing a great job when it comes to risk taking. 
How many of you have iPhones? 
Anyone? Wonderful. 
I would bet many more of you insure your iPhone — you're implicitly buying insurance by having an extended warranty. 
What if you lose your iPhone? 
What if you do this? 
How many of you have kids? 
Anyone? 
Keep your hands up if you have sufficient life insurance. 
I see a lot of hands coming down. 
I would predict, if you're a representative sample, that many more of you insure your iPhones than your lives, even when you have kids. 
We're not doing that well when it comes to insurance. 
The average American household spends 1,000 dollars a year on lotteries. 
And I know it sounds crazy. 
How many of you spend a thousand dollars a year on lotteries? 
No one. 
So that tells us that the people not in this room are spending more than a thousand to get the average to a thousand. 
Low-income people spend a lot more than a thousand on lotteries. 
So where does it take us? 
We're not doing a great job managing money. 
Behavioral finance is really a combination of psychology and economics, trying to understand the money mistakes people make. 
And I can keep standing here for the 12 minutes and 53 seconds that I have left and make fun of all sorts of ways we manage money, and at the end you're going to ask, "" How can we help people? "" And that's what I really want to focus on today. 
How do we take an understanding of the money mistakes people make, and then turning the behavioral challenges into behavioral solutions? 
And what I'm going to talk about today is Save More Tomorrow. 
I want to address the issue of savings. 
We have on the screen a representative sample of 100 Americans. 
And we're going to look at their saving behavior. 
First thing to notice is, half of them do not even have access to a 401 (k) plan. 
They cannot make savings easy. 
They cannot have money go away from their paycheck into a 401 (k) plan before they see it, before they can touch it. 
What about the remaining half of the people? 
Some of them elect not to save. 
They're just too lazy. 
They never get around to logging into a complicated website and doing 17 clicks to join the 401 (k) plan. 
And then they have to decide how they're going to invest in their 52 choices, and they never heard about what is a money market fund. 
And they get overwhelmed and the just don't join. 
How many people end up saving to a 401 (k) plan? 
One third of Americans. 
Two thirds are not saving now. 
Are they saving enough? 
Take out those who say they save too little. 
One out of 10 are saving enough. 
Nine out of 10 either cannot save through their 401 (k) plan, decide not to save — or don't decide — or save too little. 
We think we have a problem of people saving too much. 
Let's look at that. 
We have one person — well, actually we're going to slice him in half because it's less than one percent. 
Roughly half a percent of Americans feel that they save too much. 
What are we going to do about it? 
That's what I really want to focus on. 
We have to understand why people are not saving, and then we can hopefully flip the behavioral challenges into behavioral solutions, and then see how powerful it might be. 
So let me divert for a second as we're going to identify the problems, the challenges, the behavioral challenges, that prevent people from saving. 
I'm going to divert and talk about bananas and chocolate. 
Suppose we had another wonderful TED event next week. 
And during the break there would be a snack and you could choose bananas or chocolate. 
How many of you think you would like to have bananas during this hypothetical TED event next week? 
Who would go for bananas? 
Wonderful. 
I predict scientifically 74 percent of you will go for bananas. 
Well that's at least what one wonderful study predicted. 
And then count down the days and see what people ended up eating. 
The same people that imagined themselves eating the bananas ended up eating chocolates a week later. 
Self-control is not a problem in the future. 
It's only a problem now when the chocolate is next to us. 
What does it have to do with time and savings, this issue of immediate gratification? 
Or as some economists call it, present bias. 
We think about saving. We know we should be saving. 
We know we'll do it next year, but today let us go and spend. 
Christmas is coming, we might as well buy a lot of gifts for everyone we know. 
So this issue of present bias causes us to think about saving, but end up spending. 
Let me now talk about another behavioral obstacle to saving having to do with inertia. 
But again, a little diversion to the topic of organ donation. 
Wonderful study comparing different countries. 
We're going to look at two similar countries, Germany and Austria. 
And in Germany, if you would like to donate your organs — God forbid something really bad happens to you — when you get your driving license or an I.D., you check the box saying, "I would like to donate my organs." 
Not many people like checking boxes. 
It takes effort. You need to think. 
Twelve percent do. 
Austria, a neighboring country, slightly similar, slightly different. 
What's the difference? 
Well, you still have choice. 
You will decide whether you want to donate your organs or not. 
But when you get your driving license, you check the box if you do not want to donate your organ. 
Nobody checks boxes. 
That's kind of too much effort. 
One percent check the box. The rest do nothing. 
Doing nothing is very common. 
Not many people check boxes. 
What are the implications to saving lives and having organs available? 
In Germany, 12 percent check the box. 
Twelve percent are organ donors. 
Huge shortage of organs, God forbid, if you need one. 
In Austria, again, nobody checks the box. 
Therefore, 99 percent of people are organ donors. 
Inertia, lack of action. 
What is the default setting if people do nothing, if they keep procrastinating, if they don't check the boxes? 
Very powerful. 
We're going to talk about what happens if people are overwhelmed and scared to make their 401 (k) choices. 
Are we going to make them automatically join the plan, or are they going to be left out? 
In too many 401 (k) plans, if people do nothing, it means they're not saving for retirement, if they don't check the box. 
And checking the box takes effort. 
So we've chatted about a couple of behavioral challenges. 
One more before we flip the challenges into solutions, having to do with monkeys and apples. 
No, no, no, this is a real study and it's got a lot to do with behavioral economics. 
One group of monkeys gets an apple, they're pretty happy. 
The other group gets two apples, one is taken away. 
They still have an apple left. 
They're really mad. 
Why have you taken our apple? 
This is the notion of loss aversion. 
We hate losing stuff, even if it doesn't mean a lot of risk. 
You would hate to go to the ATM, take out 100 dollars and notice that you lost one of those $20 bills. 
It's very painful, even though it doesn't mean anything. 
Those 20 dollars might have been a quick lunch. 
So this notion of loss aversion kicks in when it comes to savings too, because people, mentally and emotionally and intuitively frame savings as a loss because I have to cut my spending. 
So we talked about all sorts of behavioral challenges having to do with savings eventually. 
Whether you think about immediate gratification, and the chocolates versus bananas, it's just painful to save now. 
It's a lot more fun to spend now. 
We talked about inertia and organ donations and checking the box. 
If people have to check a lot of boxes to join a 401 (k) plan, they're going to keep procrastinating and not join. 
And last, we talked about loss aversion, and the monkeys and the apples. 
If people frame mentally saving for retirement as a loss, they're not going to be saving for retirement. 
So we've got these challenges, and what Richard Thaler and I were always fascinated by — take behavioral finance, make it behavioral finance on steroids or behavioral finance 2.0 or behavioral finance in action — flip the challenges into solutions. 
And we came up with an embarrassingly simple solution called Save More, not today, Tomorrow. 
How is it going to solve the challenges we chatted about? 
If you think about the problem of bananas versus chocolates, we think we're going to eat bananas next week. 
We think we're going to save more next year. 
Save More Tomorrow invites employees to save more maybe next year — sometime in the future when we can imagine ourselves eating bananas, volunteering more in the community, exercising more and doing all the right things on the planet. 
Now we also talked about checking the box and the difficulty of taking action. 
Save More Tomorrow makes it easy. 
It's an autopilot. 
Once you tell me you would like to save more in the future, let's say every January you're going to be saving more automatically and it's going to go away from your paycheck to the 401 (k) plan before you see it, before you touch it, before you get the issue of immediate gratification. 
But what are we going to do about the monkeys and loss aversion? 
Next January comes and people might feel that if they save more, they have to spend less, and that's painful. 
Well, maybe it shouldn't be just January. 
Maybe we should make people save more when they make more money. 
That way, when they make more money, when they get a pay raise, they don't have to cut their spending. 
They take a little bit of the increase in the paycheck home and spend more — take a little bit of the increase and put it in a 401 (k) plan. 
So that is the program, embarrassingly simple, but as we're going to see, extremely powerful. 
We first implemented it, Richard Thaler and I, back in 1998. 
Mid-sized company in the Midwest, blue collar employees struggling to pay their bills repeatedly told us they cannot save more right away. 
Saving more today is not an option. 
We invited them to save three percentage points more every time they get a pay raise. 
And here are the results. 
We're seeing here a three and a half-year period, four pay raises, people who were struggling to save, were saving three percent of their paycheck, three and a half years later saving almost four times as much, almost 14 percent. 
And there's shoes and bicycles and things on this chart because I don't want to just throw numbers in a vacuum. 
I want, really, to think about the fact that saving four times more is a huge difference in terms of the lifestyle that people will be able to afford. 
It's real. 
It's not just numbers on a piece of paper. 
Whereas with saving three percent, people might have to add nice sneakers so they can walk, because they won't be able to afford anything else, when they save 14 percent they might be able to maybe have nice dress shoes to walk to the car to drive. 
This is a real difference. 
By now, about 60 percent of the large companies actually have programs like this in place. 
It's been part of the Pension Protection Act. 
And needless to say that Thaler and I have been blessed to be part of this program and make a difference. 
Let me wrap with two key messages. 
One is behavioral finance is extremely powerful. 
This is just one example. 
Message two is there's still a lot to do. 
This is really the tip of the iceberg. 
If you think about people and mortgages and buying houses and then not being able to pay for it, we need to think about that. 
If you're thinking about people taking too much risk and not understanding how much risk they're taking or taking too little risk, we need to think about that. 
If you think about people spending a thousand dollars a year on lottery tickets, we need to think about that. 
The average actually, the record is in Singapore. 
The average household spends $4,000 a year on lottery tickets. 
We've got a lot to do, a lot to solve, also in the retirement area when it comes to what people do with their money after retirement. 
One last question: How many of you feel comfortable that as you're planning for retirement you have a really solid plan when you're going to retire, when you're going to claim Social Security benefits, what lifestyle to expect, how much to spend every month so you're not going to run out of money? 
How many of you feel you have a solid plan for the future when it comes to post-retirement decisions. 
One, two, three, four. 
Less than three percent of a very sophisticated audience. 
Behavioral finance has a long way. 
There's a lot of opportunities to make it powerful again and again and again. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I'm going to be showing some of the cybercriminals' latest and nastiest creations. 
So basically, please don't go and download any of the viruses that I show you. 
Some of you might be wondering what a cybersecurity specialist looks like, and I thought I'd give you a quick insight into my career so far. 
It's a pretty accurate description. 
This is what someone that specializes in malware and hacking looks like. 
So today, computer viruses and trojans, designed to do everything from stealing data to watching you in your webcam to the theft of billions of dollars. 
Some malicious code today goes as far as targeting power, utilities and infrastructure. 
Let me give you a quick snapshot of what malicious code is capable of today. 
Right now, every second, eight new users are joining the Internet. 
Today, we will see 250,000 individual new computer viruses. 
We will see 30,000 new infected websites. 
And, just to kind of tear down a myth here, lots of people think that when you get infected with a computer virus, it's because you went to a porn site. 
Right? Well, actually, statistically speaking, if you only visit porn sites, you're safer. 
People normally write that down, by the way. (Laughter) Actually, about 80 percent of these are small business websites getting infected. 
Today's cybercriminal, what do they look like? 
Well, many of you have the image, don't you, of the spotty teenager sitting in a basement, hacking away for notoriety. 
But actually today, cybercriminals are wonderfully professional and organized. 
In fact, they have product adverts. 
You can go online and buy a hacking service to knock your business competitor offline. 
Check out this one I found. 
(Video) Man: So you're here for one reason, and that reason is because you need your business competitors, rivals, haters, or whatever the reason is, or who, they are to go down. 
Well you, my friend, you've came to the right place. 
If you want your business competitors to go down, well, they can. 
If you want your rivals to go offline, well, they will. 
Not only that, we are providing a short-term-to-long-term DDOS service or scheduled attack, starting five dollars per hour for small personal websites to 10 to 50 dollars per hour. 
James Lyne: Now, I did actually pay one of these cybercriminals to attack my own website. 
Things got a bit tricky when I tried to expense it at the company. 
Turns out that's not cool. 
But regardless, it's amazing how many products and services are available now to cybercriminals. 
For example, this testing platform, which enables the cybercriminals to test the quality of their viruses before they release them on the world. 
For a small fee, they can upload it and make sure everything is good. 
But it goes further. 
Cybercriminals now have crime packs with business intelligence reporting dashboards to manage the distribution of their malicious code. 
This is the market leader in malware distribution, the Black Hole Exploit Pack, responsible for nearly one third of malware distribution in the last couple of quarters. 
It comes with technical installation guides, video setup routines, and get this, technical support. 
You can email the cybercriminals and they'll tell you how to set up your illegal hacking server. 
So let me show you what malicious code looks like today. 
What I've got here is two systems, an attacker, which I've made look all Matrix-y and scary, and a victim, which you might recognize from home or work. 
Now normally, these would be on different sides of the planet or of the Internet, but I've put them side by side because it makes things much more interesting. 
Now, there are many ways you can get infected. 
You will have come in contact with some of them. 
Maybe some of you have received an email that says something like, "" Hi, I'm a Nigerian banker, and I'd like to give you 53 billion dollars because I like your face. "" Or funnycats.exe, which rumor has it was quite successful in China's recent campaign against America. 
Now there are many ways you can get infected. 
I want to show you a couple of my favorites. 
This is a little USB key. 
Now how do you get a USB key to run in a business? 
Well, you could try looking really cute. 
Awww. 
Or, in my case, awkward and pathetic. 
So imagine this scenario: I walk into one of your businesses, looking very awkward and pathetic, with a copy of my C.V. 
which I've covered in coffee, and I ask the receptionist to plug in this USB key and print me a new one. 
So let's have a look here on my victim computer. 
What I'm going to do is plug in the USB key. 
After a couple of seconds, things start to happen on the computer on their own, usually a bad sign. 
This would, of course, normally happen in a couple of seconds, really, really quickly, but I've kind of slowed it down so you can actually see the attack occurring. 
Malware is very boring otherwise. 
So this is writing out the malicious code, and a few seconds later, on the left-hand side, you'll see the attacker's screen get some interesting new text. 
Now if I place the mouse cursor over it, this is what we call a command prompt, and using this we can navigate around the computer. 
We can access your documents, your data. 
You can turn on the webcam. 
That can be very embarrassing. 
Or just to really prove a point, we can launch programs like my personal favorite, the Windows Calculator. 
So isn't it amazing how much control the attackers can get with such a simple operation? 
Let me show you how most malware is now distributed today. 
What I'm going to do is open up a website that I wrote. 
It's a terrible website. It's got really awful graphics. 
And it's got a comments section here where we can submit comments to the website. 
Many of you will have used something a bit like this before. 
Unfortunately, when this was implemented, the developer was slightly inebriated and managed to forget all of the secure coding practices he had learned. 
So let's imagine that our attacker, called Evil Hacker just for comedy value, inserts something a little nasty. 
This is a script. 
It's code which will be interpreted on the webpage. 
So I'm going to submit this post, and then, on my victim computer, I'm going to open up the web browser and browse to my website, www.incrediblyhacked.com. 
Notice that after a couple of seconds, I get redirected. 
That website address at the top there, which you can just about see, microshaft.com, the browser crashes as it hits one of these exploit packs, and up pops fake antivirus. 
This is a virus pretending to look like antivirus software, and it will go through and it will scan the system, have a look at what its popping up here. 
It creates some very serious alerts. 
Oh look, a child porn proxy server. 
We really should clean that up. 
What's really insulting about this is not only does it provide the attackers with access to your data, but when the scan finishes, they tell you in order to clean up the fake viruses, you have to register the product. 
Now I liked it better when viruses were free. 
(Laughter) People now pay cybercriminals money to run viruses, which I find utterly bizarre. 
So anyway, let me change pace a little bit. 
Chasing 250,000 pieces of malware a day is a massive challenge, and those numbers are only growing directly in proportion to the length of my stress line, you'll note here. 
So I want to talk to you briefly about a group of hackers we tracked for a year and actually found — and this is a rare treat in our job. 
Now this was a cross-industry collaboration, people from Facebook, independent researchers, guys from Sophos. 
So here we have a couple of documents which our cybercriminals had uploaded to a cloud service, kind of like Dropbox or SkyDrive, like many of you might use. 
At the top, you'll notice a section of source code. 
What this would do is send the cybercriminals a text message every day telling them how much money they'd made that day, so a kind of cybercriminal billings report, if you will. 
If you look closely, you'll notice a series of what are Russian telephone numbers. 
Now that's obviously interesting, because that gives us a way of finding our cybercriminals. 
Down below, highlighted in red, in the other section of source code, is this bit "" leded: leded. "" That's a username, kind of like you might have on Twitter. 
So let's take this a little further. 
There are a few other interesting pieces the cybercriminals had uploaded. 
Lots of you here will use smartphones to take photos and post them from the conference. 
An interesting feature of lots of modern smartphones is that when you take a photo, it embeds GPS data about where that photo was taken. 
In fact, I've been spending a lot of time on Internet dating sites recently, obviously for research purposes, and I've noticed that about 60 percent of the profile pictures on Internet dating sites contain the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken, which is kind of scary because you wouldn't give out your home address to lots of strangers, but we're happy to give away our GPS coordinates to plus or minus 15 meters. 
And our cybercriminals had done the same thing. 
So here's a photo which resolves to St. Petersburg. 
We then deploy the incredibly advanced hacking tool. 
We used Google. 
Using the email address, the telephone number and the GPS data, on the left you see an advert for a BMW that one of our cybercriminals is selling, on the other side an advert for the sale of sphynx kittens. 
One of these was more stereotypical for me. 
A little more searching, and here's our cybercriminal. 
Imagine, these are hardened cybercriminals sharing information scarcely. 
Imagine what you could find about each of the people in this room. 
A bit more searching through the profile and there's a photo of their office. 
They were working on the third floor. 
And you can also see some photos from his business companion where he has a taste in a certain kind of image. 
It turns out he's a member of the Russian Adult Webmasters Federation. 
But this is where our investigation starts to slow down. 
The cybercriminals have locked down their profiles quite well. 
And herein is the greatest lesson of social media and mobile devices for all of us right now. 
Our friends, our families and our colleagues can break our security even when we do the right things. 
This is MobSoft, one of the companies that this cybercriminal gang owned, and an interesting thing about MobSoft is the 50-percent owner of this posted a job advert, and this job advert matched one of the telephone numbers from the code earlier. 
This woman was Maria, and Maria is the wife of one of our cybercriminals. 
And it's kind of like she went into her social media settings and clicked on every option imaginable to make herself really, really insecure. 
By the end of the investigation, where you can read the full 27-page report at that link, we had photos of the cybercriminals, even the office Christmas party when they were out on an outing. 
That's right, cybercriminals do have Christmas parties, as it turns out. 
Now you're probably wondering what happened to these guys. 
Let me come back to that in just a minute. 
I want to change pace to one last little demonstration, a technique that is wonderfully simple and basic, but is interesting in exposing how much information we're all giving away, and it's relevant because it applies to us as a TED audience. 
This is normally when people start kind of shuffling in their pockets trying to turn their phones onto airplane mode desperately. 
Many of you all know about the concept of scanning for wireless networks. 
You do it every time you take out your iPhone or your Blackberry and connect to something like TEDAttendees. 
But what you might not know is that you're also beaming out a list of networks you've previously connected to, even when you're not using wireless actively. 
So I ran a little scan. 
I was relatively inhibited compared to the cybercriminals, who wouldn't be so concerned by law, and here you can see my mobile device. 
Okay? So you can see a list of wireless networks. 
TEDAttendees, HyattLB. Where do you think I'm staying? 
My home network, PrettyFlyForAWifi, which I think is a great name. 
Sophos _ Visitors, SANSEMEA, companies I work with. 
Loganwifi, that's in Boston. HiltonLondon. 
CIASurveillanceVan. 
We called it that at one of our conferences because we thought that would freak people out, which is quite fun. 
This is how geeks party. 
So let's make this a little bit more interesting. 
Let's talk about you. 
Twenty-three percent of you have been to Starbucks recently and used the wireless network. 
Things get more interesting. 
Forty-six percent of you I could link to a business, XYZ Employee network. 
This isn't an exact science, but it gets pretty accurate. 
Seven hundred and sixty-one of you I could identify a hotel you'd been to recently, absolutely with pinpoint precision somewhere on the globe. 
Two hundred and thirty-four of you, well, I know where you live. 
Your wireless network name is so unique that I was able to pinpoint it using data available openly on the Internet with no hacking or clever, clever tricks. 
And I should mention as well that some of you do use your names, "" James Lyne's iPhone, "" for example. 
And two percent of you have a tendency to extreme profanity. 
So something for you to think about: As we adopt these new applications and mobile devices, as we play with these shiny new toys, how much are we trading off convenience for privacy and security? 
Next time you install something, look at the settings and ask yourself, "" Is this information that I want to share? 
Would someone be able to abuse it? "" We also need to think very carefully about how we develop our future talent pool. 
You see, technology's changing at a staggering rate, and that 250,000 pieces of malware won't stay the same for long. 
There's a very concerning trend that whilst many people coming out of schools now are much more technology-savvy, they know how to use technology, fewer and fewer people are following the feeder subjects to know how that technology works under the covers. 
In the U.K., a 60 percent reduction since 2003, and there are similar statistics all over the world. 
We also need to think about the legal issues in this area. 
The cybercriminals I talked about, despite theft of millions of dollars, actually still haven't been arrested, and at this point possibly never will. 
Most laws are national in their implementation, despite cybercrime conventions, where the Internet is borderless and international by definition. 
Countries do not agree, which makes this area exceptionally challenging from a legal perspective. 
But my biggest ask is this: You see, you're going to leave here and you're going to see some astonishing stories in the news. 
You're going to read about malware doing incredible and terrifying, scary things. 
However, 99 percent of it works because people fail to do the basics. 
So my ask is this: Go online, find these simple best practices, find out how to update and patch your computer. 
Get a secure password. 
Make sure you use a different password on each of your sites and services online. 
Find these resources. Apply them. 
The Internet is a fantastic resource for business, for political expression, for art and for learning. 
Help me and the security community make life much, much more difficult for cybercriminals. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

With the siege on Gaza, tunnels brought people all the basic needs like food, building material, other stuff we needed. 

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

Let's talk dirty. 
A few years ago, oddly enough, I needed the bathroom, and I found one, a public bathroom, and I went into the stall, and I prepared to do what I'd done most of my life: use the toilet, flush the toilet, forget about the toilet. 
And for some reason that day, instead, I asked myself a question, and it was, where does this stuff go? 
And with that question, I found myself plunged into the world of sanitation — there's more coming — (Laughter) — sanitation, toilets and poop, and I have yet to emerge. 
And that's because it's such an enraging, yet engaging place to be. 
To go back to that toilet, it wasn't a particularly fancy toilet, it wasn't as nice as this one from the World Toilet Organization. 
That's the other WTO. (Laughter) But it had a lockable door, it had privacy, it had water, it had soap so I could wash my hands, and I did because I'm a woman, and we do that. 
(Laughter) (Applause) But that day, when I asked that question, I learned something, and that was that I'd grown up thinking that a toilet like that was my right, when in fact it's a privilege. 
2.5 billion people worldwide have no adequate toilet. 
They don't have a bucket or a box. 
Forty percent of the world with no adequate toilet. 
And they have to do what this little boy is doing by the side of the Mumbai Airport expressway, which is called open defecation, or poo-pooing in the open. 
And he does that every day, and every day, probably, that guy in the picture walks on by, because he sees that little boy, but he doesn't see him. 
But he should, because the problem with all that poop lying around is that poop carries passengers. 
Fifty communicable diseases like to travel in human shit. 
All those things, the eggs, the cysts, the bacteria, the viruses, all those can travel in one gram of human feces. 
How? Well, that little boy will not have washed his hands. 
He's barefoot. He'll run back into his house, and he will contaminate his drinking water and his food and his environment with whatever diseases he may be carrying by fecal particles that are on his fingers and feet. 
In what I call the flushed-and-plumbed world that most of us in this room are lucky to live in, the most common symptoms associated with those diseases, diarrhea, is now a bit of a joke. 
It's the runs, the Hershey squirts, the squits. 
Where I come from, we call it Delhi belly, as a legacy of empire. 
But if you search for a stock photo of diarrhea in a leading photo image agency, this is the picture that you come up with. 
(Laughter) Still not sure about the bikini. 
And here's another image of diarrhea. 
This is Marie Saylee, nine months old. 
You can't see her, because she's buried under that green grass in a little village in Liberia, because she died in three days from diarrhea — the Hershey squirts, the runs, a joke. 
And that's her dad. 
But she wasn't alone that day, because 4,000 other children died of diarrhea, and they do every day. 
Diarrhea is the second biggest killer of children worldwide, and you've probably been asked to care about things like HIV / AIDS or T.B. or measles, but diarrhea kills more children than all those three things put together. 
It's a very potent weapon of mass destruction. 
And the cost to the world is immense: 260 billion dollars lost every year on the losses to poor sanitation. 
These are cholera beds in Haiti. 
You'll have heard of cholera, but we don't hear about diarrhea. 
It gets a fraction of the attention and funding given to any of those other diseases. 
But we know how to fix this. 
We know, because in the mid-19th century, wonderful Victorian engineers installed systems of sewers and wastewater treatment and the flush toilet, and disease dropped dramatically. 
Child mortality dropped by the most it had ever dropped in history. 
The flush toilet was voted the best medical advance of the last 200 years by the readers of the British Medical Journal, and they were choosing over the Pill, anesthesia, and surgery. 
It's a wonderful waste disposal device. 
But I think that it's so good — it doesn't smell, we can put it in our house, we can lock it behind a door — and I think we've locked it out of conversation too. 
We don't have a neutral word for it. 
Poop's not particularly adequate. 
Shit offends people. Feces is too medical. 
Because I can't explain otherwise, when I look at the figures, what's going on. 
We know how to solve diarrhea and sanitation, but if you look at the budgets of countries, developing and developed, you'll think there's something wrong with the math, because you'll expect absurdities like Pakistan spending 47 times more on its military than it does on water and sanitation, even though 150,000 children die of diarrhea in Pakistan every year. 
But then you look at that already minuscule water and sanitation budget, and 75 to 90 percent of it will go on clean water supply, which is great; we all need water. 
No one's going to refuse clean water. 
But the humble latrine, or flush toilet, reduces disease by twice as much as just putting in clean water. 
Think about it. That little boy who's running back into his house, he may have a nice, clean fresh water supply, but he's got dirty hands that he's going to contaminate his water supply with. 
And I think that the real waste of human waste is that we are wasting it as a resource and as an incredible trigger for development, because these are a few things that toilets and poop itself can do for us. 
So a toilet can put a girl back in school. 
Twenty-five percent of girls in India drop out of school because they have no adequate sanitation. 
They've been used to sitting through lessons for years and years holding it in. 
We've all done that, but they do it every day, and when they hit puberty and they start menstruating, it just gets too much. 
And I understand that. Who can blame them? 
So if you met an educationalist and said, "" I can improve education attendance rates by 25 percent with just one simple thing, "" you'd make a lot of friends in education. 
That's not the only thing it can do for you. 
Poop can cook your dinner. 
It's got nutrients in it. 
We ingest nutrients. We excrete nutrients as well. 
We don't keep them all. 
In Rwanda, they are now getting 75 percent of their cooking fuel in their prison system from the contents of prisoners' bowels. 
So these are a bunch of inmates in a prison in Butare. 
They're genocidal inmates, most of them, and they're stirring the contents of their own latrines, because if you put poop in a sealed environment, in a tank, pretty much like a stomach, then, pretty much like a stomach, it gives off gas, and you can cook with it. 
And you might think it's just good karma to see these guys stirring shit, but it's also good economic sense, because they're saving a million dollars a year. 
They're cutting down on deforestation, and they've found a fuel supply that is inexhaustible, infinite and free at the point of production. 
It's not just in the poor world that poop can save lives. 
Here's a woman who's about to get a dose of the brown stuff in those syringes, which is what you think it is, except not quite, because it's actually donated. 
There is now a new career path called stool donor. 
It's like the new sperm donor. 
Because she has been suffering from a superbug called C. diff, and it's resistant to antibiotics in many cases. 
She's been suffering for years. 
She gets a dose of healthy human feces, and the cure rate for this procedure is 94 percent. 
It's astonishing, but hardly anyone is still doing it. 
Maybe it's the ick factor. 
That's okay, because there's a team of research scientists in Canada who have now created a stool sample, a fake stool sample which is called RePOOPulate. 
So you'd be thinking by now, okay, the solution's simple, we give everyone a toilet. 
And this is where it gets really interesting, because it's not that simple, because we are not simple. 
So the really interesting, exciting work — this is the engaging bit — in sanitation is that we need to understand human psychology. 
We need to understand software as well as just giving someone hardware. 
They've found in many developing countries that governments have gone in and given out free latrines and gone back a few years later and found that they've got lots of new goat sheds or temples or spare rooms with their owners happily walking past them and going over to the open defecating ground. 
So the idea is to manipulate human emotion. 
It's been done for decades. The soap companies did it in the early 20th century. 
They tried selling soap as healthy. No one bought it. 
They tried selling it as sexy. Everyone bought it. 
In India now there's a campaign which persuades young brides not to marry into families that don't have a toilet. 
It's called "" No Loo, No I Do. "" (Laughter) And in case you think that poster's just propaganda, here's Priyanka, 23 years old. 
I met her last October in India, and she grew up in a conservative environment. 
She grew up in a rural village in a poor area of India, and she was engaged at 14, and then at 21 or so, she moved into her in-law's house. 
And she was horrified to get there and find that they didn't have a toilet. 
She'd grown up with a latrine. 
It was no big deal, but it was a latrine. 
And the first night she was there, she was told that at 4 o'clock in the morning — her mother-in-law got her up, told her to go outside and go and do it in the dark in the open. 
And she was scared. She was scared of drunks hanging around. 
She was scared of snakes. She was scared of rape. 
After three days, she did an unthinkable thing. 
She left. 
And if you know anything about rural India, you'll know that's an unspeakably courageous thing to do. 
But not just that. 
She got her toilet, and now she goes around all the other villages in India persuading other women to do the same thing. 
It's what I call social contagion, and it's really powerful and really exciting. 
Another version of this, another village in India near where Priyanka lives is this village, called Lakara, and about a year ago, it had no toilets whatsoever. 
Kids were dying of diarrhea and cholera. 
Some visitors came, using various behavioral change tricks like putting out a plate of food and a plate of shit and watching the flies go one to the other. 
Somehow, people who'd been thinking that what they were doing was not disgusting at all suddenly thought, "" Oops. "" Not only that, but they were ingesting their neighbors' shit. 
That's what really made them change their behavior. 
So this woman, this boy's mother installed this latrine in a few hours. 
Her entire life, she'd been using the banana field behind, but she installed the latrine in a few hours. 
It cost nothing. It's going to save that boy's life. 
So when I get despondent about the state of sanitation, even though these are pretty exciting times because we've got the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation reinventing the toilet, which is great, we've got Matt Damon going on bathroom strike, which is great for humanity, very bad for his colon. 
But there are things to worry about. 
It's the most off-track Millennium Development Goal. 
It's about 50 or so years off track. 
We're not going to meet targets, providing people with sanitation at this rate. 
So when I get sad about sanitation, I think of Japan, because Japan 70 years ago was a nation of people who used pit latrines and wiped with sticks, and now it's a nation of what are called Woshurettos, washlet toilets. 
They have in-built bidet nozzles for a lovely, hands-free cleaning experience, and they have various other features like a heated seat and an automatic lid-raising device which is known as the "" marriage-saver. "" (Laughter) But most importantly, what they have done in Japan, which I find so inspirational, is they've brought the toilet out from behind the locked door. 
They've made it conversational. 
People go out and upgrade their toilet. 
They talk about it. They've sanitized it. 
I hope that we can do that. It's not a difficult thing to do. 
All we really need to do is look at this issue as the urgent, shameful issue that it is. 
And don't think that it's just in the poor world that things are wrong. 
Our sewers are crumbling. 
Things are going wrong here too. 
The solution to all of this is pretty easy. 
I'm going to make your lives easy this afternoon and just ask you to do one thing, and that's to go out, protest, speak about the unspeakable, and talk shit. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm a visual artist, and I'm also one of the co-founders of the Plastic Pollution Coalition. 
I've been working with plastic bags, which I cut up and sew back together as my primary material for my artwork for the last 20 years. 
I turn them into two and three-dimensional pieces and sculptures and installations. 
Upon working with the plastic, after about the first eight years, some of my work started to fissure and break down into smaller little bits of plastic. 
And I thought, "" Great. 
It's ephemeral just like us. "" Upon educating myself a little further about plastics, I actually realized this was a bad thing. 
It's a bad thing that plastic breaks down into smaller little bits, because it's always still plastic. 
And what we're finding is that a lot of it is in the marine environment. 
I then, in the last few years, learned about the Pacific garbage patch and the gyre. 
And my initial reaction — and I think this is a lot of people's first reaction to learning about it — is, "" Oh my God! 
We've got to go out there and clean this thing up. "" So I actually developed a proposal to go out with a cargo ship and two decommissioned fishing trawlers, a crane, a chipping machine and a cold-molding machine. 
And my intention was to go out to the gyre, raise awareness about this issue and begin to pick up the plastic, chip it into little bits and cold mold it into bricks that could potentially be used as building materials in underdeveloped communities. 
I began talking with people who actually had been out to the gyre and were studying the plastic problem in the marine environment and upon doing so, I realized actually that cleaning it up would be a very small drop in the bucket relative to how much is being generated every day around the world, and that actually I needed to back up and look at the bigger picture. 
And the bigger picture is: we need to find a way to turn off the faucet. 
We need to cut the spigot of single-use and disposable plastics, which are entering the marine environment every day on a global scale. 
So in looking at that, I also realized that I was really angry. 
I wasn't just concerned about plastic that you're trying to imagine out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean — of which I have learned there are now 11 gyres, potentially, of plastic in five major oceans in the world. 
It's not just that gyre of plastic that I'm concerned about — it's the gyre of plastic in the supermarket. 
I'd go to the supermarket and all of my food is packaged in plastic. 
All of my beverages are packaged in plastic, even at the health food market. 
I'm also concerned about the plastic in the refrigerator, and I'm concerned about the plastic and the toxins that leach from plastic into us and into our bodies. 
So I came together with a group of other people who were all looking at this issue, and we created the Plastic Pollution Coalition. 
We have many initiatives that we're working on, but some of them are very basic. 
One is: if 80 to 90 percent of what we're finding in the ocean — of the marine debris that we're finding in the ocean — is plastic, then why don't we call it what it is. 
It's plastic pollution. 
Recycling — everybody kind of ends their books about being sustainable and greening with the idea of recycling. 
You put something in a bin and you don't have to think about it again. 
What is the reality of that? 
In the United States, less than seven percent of our plastics are recycled. 
And if you really look into it, particularly when it comes to plastic bottles, most of it is only down-cycled, or incinerated, or shipped to China. 
It is down-cycled and turned into lesser things, while a glass bottle can be a glass bottle again or can be used again — a plastic bottle can never be a plastic bottle again. 
So this is a big issue for us. 
Another thing that we're looking at and asking people to think about is we've added a fourth R onto the front of the "" Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, "" three R's, and that is refuse. 
Whenever possible, refuse single-use and disposable plastics. 
Alternatives exist; some of them are very old-school. 
I myself am now collecting these cool Pyrex containers and using those instead of Glad and Tupperware containers to store food in. 
And I know that I am doing a service to myself and my family. 
It's very easy to pick up a stainless-steel bottle or a glass bottle, if you're traveling and you've forgotten to bring your stainless-steel bottle and fill that up with water or filtered water, versus purchasing plastic bottled water. 
I guess what I want to say to everybody here — and I know that you guys know a lot about this issue — is that this is a huge problem in the oceans, but this is a problem that we've created as consumers and we can solve. 
We can solve this by raising awareness of the issue and teaching people to choose alternatives. 
So whenever possible, to choose alternatives to single-use plastics. 
We can cut the stem — tide the stem of this into our oceans and in doing so, save our oceans, save our planet, save ourselves. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

2014 is a very special year for me: 20 years as a consultant, 20 years of marriage, and I'm turning 50 in one month. 
That means I was born in 1964 in a small town in Germany. 
It was a gray November day, and I was overdue. 
The hospital's maternity ward was really stressed out because a lot of babies were born on this gray November day. 
As a matter of fact, 1964 was the year with the highest birth rate ever in Germany: more than 1.3 million. 
Last year, we just hit over 600,000, so half of my number. 
What you can see here is the German age pyramid, and there, the small black point at the top, that's me. 
(Laughter) (Applause) In red, you can see the potential working-age population, so people over 15 and under 65, and I'm actually only interested in this red area. 
Now, let's do a simple simulation of how this age structure will develop over the next couple of years. 
As you can see, the peak is moving to the right, and I, with many other baby boomers, will retire in 2030. 
By the way, I don't need any forecasts of birth rates for predicting this red area. 
The red area, so the potential working-age population in 2030, is already set in stone today, except for much higher migration rates. 
And if you compare this red area in 2030 with the red area in 2014, it is much, much smaller. 
So before I show you the rest of the world, what does this mean for Germany? 
So what we know from this picture is that the labor supply, so people who provide labor, will go down in Germany, and will go down significantly. 
Now, what about labor demand? 
That's where it gets tricky. 
As you might know, the consultant's favorite answer to any question is, "It depends." 
So I would say it depends. 
We didn't want to forecast the future. 
Highly speculative. 
We did something else. 
We looked at the GDP and productivity growth of Germany over the last 20 years, and calculated the following scenario: if Germany wants to continue this GDP and productivity growth, we could directly calculate how many people Germany would need to support this growth. 
And this is the green line: labor demand. 
So Germany will run into a major talent shortage very quickly. 
Eight million people are missing, which is more than 20 percent of our current workforce, so big numbers, really big numbers. 
And we calculated several scenarios, and the picture always looked like this. 
Now, to close the gap, Germany has to significantly increase migration, get many more women in the workforce, increase retirement age — by the way, we just lowered it this year — and all these measures at once. 
If Germany fails here, Germany will stagnate. 
We won't grow anymore. Why? 
Because the workers are not there who can generate this growth. 
But where? 
Now, we simulated labor supply and labor demand for the largest 15 economies in the world, representing more than 70 percent of world GDP, and the overall picture looks like this by 2020. 
Blue indicates a labor surplus, red indicates a labor shortfall, and gray are those countries which are borderline. 
So by 2020, we still see a labor surplus in some countries, like Italy, France, the U.S., but this picture will change dramatically by 2030. 
By 2030, we will face a global workforce crisis in most of our largest economies, including three out of the four BRIC countries. 
China, with its former one-child policy, will be hit, as well as Brazil and Russia. 
Now, to tell the truth, in reality, the situation will be even more challenging. 
What you can see here are average numbers. 
We de-averaged them and broke them down into different skill levels, and what we found were even higher shortfalls for high-skilled people and a partial surplus for low-skilled workers. 
So on top of an overall labor shortage, we will face a big skill mismatch in the future, and this means huge challenges in terms of education, qualification, upskilling for governments and companies. 
Now, the next thing we looked into was robots, automation, technology. 
Will technology change this picture and boost productivity? 
Now, the short answer would be that our numbers already include a significant growth in productivity driven by technology. 
A long answer would go like this. 
Let's take Germany again. 
The Germans have a certain reputation in the world when it comes to productivity. 
In the '90s, I worked in our Boston office for almost two years, and when I left, an old senior partner told me, literally, "Send me more of these Germans, they work like machines." 
(Laughter) That was 1998. 
Sixteen years later, you'd probably say the opposite. 
"Send me more of these machines. They work like Germans." 
(Laughter) (Applause) Technology will replace a lot of jobs, regular jobs. 
Not only in the production industry, but even office workers are in jeopardy and might be replaced by robots, artificial intelligence, big data, or automation. 
So the key question is not if technology replaces some of these jobs, but when, how fast, and to what extent? 
Or in other words, will technology help us to solve this global workforce crisis? 
Yes and no. 
This is a more sophisticated version of "" it depends. "" (Laughter) Let's take the automotive industry as an example, because there, more than 40 percent of industrial robots are already working and automation has already taken place. 
In 1980, less than 10 percent of the production cost of a car was caused by electronic parts. 
Today, this number is more than 30 percent and it will grow to more than 50 percent by 2030. 
And these new electronic parts and applications require new skills and have created a lot of new jobs, like the cognitive systems engineer who optimizes the interaction between driver and electronic system. 
In 1980, no one had the slightest clue that such a job would ever exist. 
As a matter of fact, the overall number of people involved in the production of a car has only changed slightly in the last decades, in spite of robots and automation. 
So what does this mean? 
Yes, technology will replace a lot of jobs, but we will also see a lot of new jobs and new skills on the horizon, and that means technology will worsen our overall skill mismatch. 
And this kind of de-averaging reveals the crucial challenge for governments and businesses. 
So people, high-skilled people, talents, will be the big thing in the next decade. 
If they are the scarce resource, we have to understand them much better. 
Are they actually willing to work abroad? 
What are their job preferences? 
To find out, this year we conducted a global survey among more than 200,000 job seekers from 189 countries. 
Migration is certainly one key measure to close a gap, at least in the short term, so we asked about mobility. 
More than 60 percent of these 200,000 job seekers are willing to work abroad. 
For me, a surprisingly high number. 
If you look at the employees aged 21 to 30, this number is even higher. 
If you split this number up by country, yes, the world is mobile, but only partly. 
The least mobile countries are Russia, Germany and the U.S. 
Now where would these people like to move? 
Number seven is Australia, where 28 percent could imagine moving. 
Then France, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, U.K., and the top choice worldwide is the U.S. 
Now, what are the job preferences of these 200,000 people? 
So, what are they looking for? 
Out of a list of 26 topics, salary is only number eight. 
The top four topics are all around culture. 
Number four, having a great relationship with the boss; three, enjoying a great work-life balance; two, having a great relationship with colleagues; and the top priority worldwide is being appreciated for your work. 
So, do I get a thank you? 
Not only once a year with the annual bonus payment, but every day. 
And now, our global workforce crisis becomes very personal. 
People are looking for recognition. 
Aren't we all looking for recognition in our jobs? 
Now, let me connect the dots. 
We will face a global workforce crisis which consists of an overall labor shortage plus a huge skill mismatch, plus a big cultural challenge. 
And this global workforce crisis is approaching very fast. 
Right now, we are just at the turning point. 
So what can we, what can governments, what can companies do? 
Every company, but also every country, needs a people strategy, and to act on it immediately, and such a people strategy consists of four parts. 
Number one, a plan for how to forecast supply and demand for different jobs and different skills. 
Workforce planning will become more important than financial planning. 
Two, a plan for how to attract great people: generation Y, women, but also retirees. 
Three, a plan for how to educate and upskill them. 
There's a huge upskilling challenge ahead of us. 
And four, for how to retain the best people, or in other words, how to realize an appreciation and relationship culture. 
However, one crucial underlying factor is to change our attitudes. 
Employees are resources, are assets, not costs, not head counts, not machines, not even the Germans. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I want to talk to you today a little bit about predictable irrationality. 
And my interest in irrational behavior started many years ago in the hospital. 
I was burned very badly. 
And if you spend a lot of time in hospital, you'll see a lot of types of irrationalities. 
And the one that particularly bothered me in the burn department was the process by which the nurses took the bandage off me. 
Now, you must have all taken a Band-Aid off at some point, and you must have wondered what's the right approach. 
Do you rip it off quickly — short duration but high intensity — or do you take your Band-Aid off slowly — you take a long time, but each second is not as painful — which one of those is the right approach? 
The nurses in my department thought that the right approach was the ripping one, so they would grab hold and they would rip, and they would grab hold and they would rip. 
And because I had 70 percent of my body burned, it would take about an hour. 
And as you can imagine, I hated that moment of ripping with incredible intensity. 
And I would try to reason with them and say, "" Why don't we try something else? 
Why don't we take it a little longer — maybe two hours instead of an hour — and have less of this intensity? "" And the nurses told me two things. 
They told me that they had the right model of the patient — that they knew what was the right thing to do to minimize my pain — and they also told me that the word patient doesn't mean to make suggestions or to interfere or... 
This is not just in Hebrew, by the way. 
It's in every language I've had experience with so far. 
And, you know, there's not much — there wasn't much I could do, and they kept on doing what they were doing. 
And about three years later, when I left the hospital, I started studying at the university. 
And one of the most interesting lessons I learned was that there is an experimental method that if you have a question you can create a replica of this question in some abstract way, and you can try to examine this question, maybe learn something about the world. 
So that's what I did. 
I was still interested in this question of how do you take bandages off burn patients. 
So originally I didn't have much money, so I went to a hardware store and I bought a carpenter's vice. 
And I would bring people to the lab and I would put their finger in it, and I would crunch it a little bit. 
(Laughter) And I would crunch it for long periods and short periods, and pain that went up and pain that went down, and with breaks and without breaks — all kinds of versions of pain. 
And when I finished hurting people a little bit, I would ask them, so, how painful was this? Or, how painful was this? 
Or, if you had to choose between the last two, which one would you choose? 
(Laughter) I kept on doing this for a while. (Laughter) 
And then, like all good academic projects, I got more funding. 
I moved to sounds, electrical shocks — I even had a pain suit that I could get people to feel much more pain. 
But at the end of this process, what I learned was that the nurses were wrong. 
Here were wonderful people with good intentions and plenty of experience, and nevertheless they were getting things wrong predictably all the time. 
It turns out that because we don't encode duration in the way that we encode intensity, I would have had less pain if the duration would have been longer and the intensity was lower. 
It turns out it would have been better to start with my face, which was much more painful, and move toward my legs, giving me a trend of improvement over time — that would have been also less painful. 
And it also turns out that it would have been good to give me breaks in the middle to kind of recuperate from the pain. 
All of these would have been great things to do, and my nurses had no idea. 
And from that point on I started thinking, are the nurses the only people in the world who get things wrong in this particular decision, or is it a more general case? 
And it turns out it's a more general case — there's a lot of mistakes we do. 
And I want to give you one example of one of these irrationalities, and I want to talk to you about cheating. 
And the reason I picked cheating is because it's interesting, but also it tells us something, I think, about the stock market situation we're in. 
So, my interest in cheating started when Enron came on the scene, exploded all of a sudden, and I started thinking about what is happening here. 
Is it the case that there was kind of a few apples who are capable of doing these things, or are we talking a more endemic situation, that many people are actually capable of behaving this way? 
So, like we usually do, I decided to do a simple experiment. 
And here's how it went. 
If you were in the experiment, I would pass you a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems that everybody could solve, but I wouldn't give you enough time. 
When the five minutes were over, I would say, "Pass me the sheets of paper, and I'll pay you a dollar per question." 
People did this. I would pay people four dollars for their task — on average people would solve four problems. 
Other people I would tempt to cheat. 
I would pass their sheet of paper. 
When the five minutes were over, I would say, "" Please shred the piece of paper. 
Put the little pieces in your pocket or in your backpack, and tell me how many questions you got correctly. "" People now solved seven questions on average. 
Now, it wasn't as if there was a few bad apples — a few people cheated a lot. 
Instead, what we saw is a lot of people who cheat a little bit. 
Now, in economic theory, cheating is a very simple cost-benefit analysis. 
You say, what's the probability of being caught? 
How much do I stand to gain from cheating? 
And how much punishment would I get if I get caught? 
And you weigh these options out — you do the simple cost-benefit analysis, and you decide whether it's worthwhile to commit the crime or not. 
So, we try to test this. 
For some people, we varied how much money they could get away with — how much money they could steal. 
We paid them 10 cents per correct question, 50 cents, a dollar, five dollars, 10 dollars per correct question. 
You would expect that as the amount of money on the table increases, people would cheat more, but in fact it wasn't the case. 
We got a lot of people cheating by stealing by a little bit. 
What about the probability of being caught? 
Some people shredded half the sheet of paper, so there was some evidence left. 
Some people shredded the whole sheet of paper. 
Some people shredded everything, went out of the room, and paid themselves from the bowl of money that had over 100 dollars. 
You would expect that as the probability of being caught goes down, people would cheat more, but again, this was not the case. 
Again, a lot of people cheated by just by a little bit, and they were insensitive to these economic incentives. 
So we said, "" If people are not sensitive to the economic rational theory explanations, to these forces, what could be going on? "" And we thought maybe what is happening is that there are two forces. 
At one hand, we all want to look at ourselves in the mirror and feel good about ourselves, so we don't want to cheat. 
On the other hand, we can cheat a little bit, and still feel good about ourselves. 
So, maybe what is happening is that there's a level of cheating we can't go over, but we can still benefit from cheating at a low degree, as long as it doesn't change our impressions about ourselves. 
We call this like a personal fudge factor. 
Now, how would you test a personal fudge factor? 
Initially we said, what can we do to shrink the fudge factor? 
So, we got people to the lab, and we said, "We have two tasks for you today." 
First, we asked half the people to recall either 10 books they read in high school, or to recall The Ten Commandments, and then we tempted them with cheating. 
Turns out the people who tried to recall The Ten Commandments — and in our sample nobody could recall all of The Ten Commandments — but those people who tried to recall The Ten Commandments, given the opportunity to cheat, did not cheat at all. 
It wasn't that the more religious people — the people who remembered more of the Commandments — cheated less, and the less religious people — the people who couldn't remember almost any Commandments — cheated more. 
The moment people thought about trying to recall The Ten Commandments, they stopped cheating. 
In fact, even when we gave self-declared atheists the task of swearing on the Bible and we give them a chance to cheat, they don't cheat at all. 
Now, Ten Commandments is something that is hard to bring into the education system, so we said, "Why don't we get people to sign the honor code?" 
So, we got people to sign, "I understand that this short survey falls under the MIT Honor Code." 
Then they shredded it. No cheating whatsoever. 
And this is particularly interesting, because MIT doesn't have an honor code. 
(Laughter) So, all this was about decreasing the fudge factor. 
What about increasing the fudge factor? 
The first experiment — I walked around MIT and I distributed six-packs of Cokes in the refrigerators — these were common refrigerators for the undergrads. 
And I came back to measure what we technically call the half-lifetime of Coke — how long does it last in the refrigerators? 
As you can expect it doesn't last very long; people take it. 
In contrast, I took a plate with six one-dollar bills, and I left those plates in the same refrigerators. 
No bill ever disappeared. 
Now, this is not a good social science experiment, so to do it better I did the same experiment as I described to you before. 
A third of the people we passed the sheet, they gave it back to us. 
A third of the people we passed it to, they shredded it, they came to us and said, "Mr. Experimenter, I solved X problems. Give me X dollars." 
A third of the people, when they finished shredding the piece of paper, they came to us and said, "Mr Experimenter, I solved X problems. Give me X tokens." 
We did not pay them with dollars; we paid them with something else. 
And then they took the something else, they walked 12 feet to the side, and exchanged it for dollars. 
Think about the following intuition. 
How bad would you feel about taking a pencil from work home, compared to how bad would you feel about taking 10 cents from a petty cash box? 
These things feel very differently. 
Would being a step removed from cash for a few seconds by being paid by token make a difference? 
Our subjects doubled their cheating. 
I'll tell you what I think about this and the stock market in a minute. 
But this did not solve the big problem I had with Enron yet, because in Enron, there's also a social element. 
People see each other behaving. 
In fact, every day when we open the news we see examples of people cheating. 
What does this cause us? 
So, we did another experiment. 
We got a big group of students to be in the experiment, and we prepaid them. 
So everybody got an envelope with all the money for the experiment, and we told them that at the end, we asked them to pay us back the money they didn't make. OK? 
The same thing happens. 
When we give people the opportunity to cheat, they cheat. 
They cheat just by a little bit, all the same. 
But in this experiment we also hired an acting student. 
This acting student stood up after 30 seconds, and said, "I solved everything. What do I do now?" 
And the experimenter said, "" If you've finished everything, go home. 
That's it. The task is finished. "" So, now we had a student — an acting student — that was a part of the group. 
Nobody knew it was an actor. 
And they clearly cheated in a very, very serious way. 
What would happen to the other people in the group? 
Will they cheat more, or will they cheat less? 
Here is what happens. 
It turns out it depends on what kind of sweatshirt they're wearing. 
Here is the thing. 
We ran this at Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh. 
And at Pittsburgh there are two big universities, Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh. 
All of the subjects sitting in the experiment were Carnegie Mellon students. 
When the actor who was getting up was a Carnegie Mellon student — he was actually a Carnegie Mellon student — but he was a part of their group, cheating went up. 
But when he actually had a University of Pittsburgh sweatshirt, cheating went down. 
(Laughter) Now, this is important, because remember, when the moment the student stood up, it made it clear to everybody that they could get away with cheating, because the experimenter said, "" You've finished everything. Go home, "" and they went with the money. 
So it wasn't so much about the probability of being caught again. 
It was about the norms for cheating. 
If somebody from our in-group cheats and we see them cheating, we feel it's more appropriate, as a group, to behave this way. 
But if it's somebody from another group, these terrible people — I mean, not terrible in this — but somebody we don't want to associate ourselves with, from another university, another group, all of a sudden people's awareness of honesty goes up — a little bit like The Ten Commandments experiment — and people cheat even less. 
So, what have we learned from this about cheating? 
We've learned that a lot of people can cheat. 
They cheat just by a little bit. 
When we remind people about their morality, they cheat less. 
When we get bigger distance from cheating, from the object of money, for example, people cheat more. 
And when we see cheating around us, particularly if it's a part of our in-group, cheating goes up. 
Now, if we think about this in terms of the stock market, think about what happens. 
What happens in a situation when you create something where you pay people a lot of money to see reality in a slightly distorted way? 
Would they not be able to see it this way? 
Of course they would. 
What happens when you do other things, like you remove things from money? 
You call them stock, or stock options, derivatives, mortgage-backed securities. 
Could it be that with those more distant things, it's not a token for one second, it's something that is many steps removed from money for a much longer time — could it be that people will cheat even more? 
And what happens to the social environment when people see other people behave around them? 
I think all of those forces worked in a very bad way in the stock market. 
More generally, I want to tell you something about behavioral economics. 
We have many intuitions in our life, and the point is that many of these intuitions are wrong. 
The question is, are we going to test those intuitions? 
We can think about how we're going to test this intuition in our private life, in our business life, and most particularly when it goes to policy, when we think about things like No Child Left Behind, when you create new stock markets, when you create other policies — taxation, health care and so on. 
And the difficulty of testing our intuition was the big lesson I learned when I went back to the nurses to talk to them. 
So I went back to talk to them and tell them what I found out about removing bandages. 
And I learned two interesting things. 
One was that my favorite nurse, Ettie, told me that I did not take her pain into consideration. 
She said, "" Of course, you know, it was very painful for you. 
But think about me as a nurse, taking, removing the bandages of somebody I liked, and had to do it repeatedly over a long period of time. 
Creating so much torture was not something that was good for me, too. "" And she said maybe part of the reason was it was difficult for her. 
But it was actually more interesting than that, because she said, "" I did not think that your intuition was right. 
I felt my intuition was correct. "" So, if you think about all of your intuitions, it's very hard to believe that your intuition is wrong. 
And she said, "" Given the fact that I thought my intuition was right... "" — she thought her intuition was right — it was very difficult for her to accept doing a difficult experiment to try and check whether she was wrong. 
But in fact, this is the situation we're all in all the time. 
We have very strong intuitions about all kinds of things — our own ability, how the economy works, how we should pay school teachers. 
But unless we start testing those intuitions, we're not going to do better. 
And just think about how better my life would have been if these nurses would have been willing to check their intuition, and how everything would have been better if we just start doing more systematic experimentation of our intuitions. 
Thank you very much. 

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

I still remember the day in school when our teacher told us that the world population had become three billion people, and that was in 1960. 
I'm going to talk now about how world population has changed from that year and into the future, but I will not use digital technology, as I've done during my first five TEDTalks. 
Instead, I have progressed, and I am, today, launching a brand new analog teaching technology that I picked up from IKEA: this box. 
This box contains one billion people. 
And our teacher told us that the industrialized world, 1960, had one billion people. 
In the developing world, she said, they had two billion people. 
And they lived away then. 
There was a big gap between the one billion in the industrialized world and the two billion in the developing world. 
In the industrialized world, people were healthy, educated, rich, and they had small families. 
And their aspiration was to buy a car. 
And in 1960, all Swedes were saving to try to buy a Volvo like this. 
This was the economic level at which Sweden was. 
But in contrast to this, in the developing world, far away, the aspiration of the average family there was to have food for the day. 
They were saving to be able to buy a pair of shoes. 
There was an enormous gap in the world when I grew up. 
And this gap between the West and the rest has created a mindset of the world, which we still use linguistically when we talk about "" the West "" and "" the Developing World. "" But the world has changed, and it's overdue to upgrade that mindset and that taxonomy of the world, and to understand it. 
And that's what I'm going to show you, because since 1960 what has happened in the world up to 2010 is that a staggering four billion people have been added to the world population. 
Just look how many. 
The world population has doubled since I went to school. 
And of course, there's been economic growth in the West. 
A lot of companies have happened to grow the economy, so the Western population moved over to here. 
And now their aspiration is not only to have a car. 
Now they want to have a holiday on a very remote destination and they want to fly. 
So this is where they are today. 
And the most successful of the developing countries, they have moved on, you know, and they have become emerging economies, we call them. 
They are now buying cars. 
And what happened a month ago was that the Chinese company, Geely, they acquired the Volvo company, and then finally the Swedes understood that something big had happened in the world. 
(Laughter) So there they are. 
And the tragedy is that the two billion over here that is struggling for food and shoes, they are still almost as poor as they were 50 years ago. 
The new thing is that we have the biggest pile of billions, the three billions here, which are also becoming emerging economies, because they are quite healthy, relatively well-educated, and they already also have two to three children per woman, as those [richer also] have. 
And their aspiration now is, of course, to buy a bicycle, and then later on they would like to have a motorbike also. 
But this is the world we have today, no longer any gap. 
But the distance from the poorest here, the very poorest, to the very richest over here is wider than ever. 
But there is a continuous world from walking, biking, driving, flying — there are people on all levels, and most people tend to be somewhere in the middle. 
This is the new world we have today in 2010. 
And what will happen in the future? 
Well, I'm going to project into 2050. 
I was in Shanghai recently, and I listened to what's happening in China, and it's pretty sure that they will catch up, just as Japan did. 
All the projections [say that] this one [billion] will [only] grow with one to two or three percent. 
[But this second] grows with seven, eight percent, and then they will end up here. 
They will start flying. 
And these lower or middle income countries, the emerging income countries, they will also forge forwards economically. 
And if, but only if, we invest in the right green technology — so that we can avoid severe climate change, and energy can still be relatively cheap — then they will move all the way up here. 
And they will start to buy electric cars. 
This is what we will find there. 
So what about the poorest two billion? 
What about the poorest two billion here? 
Will they move on? 
Well, here population [growth] comes in because there [among emerging economies] we already have two to three children per woman, family planning is widely used, and population growth is coming to an end. 
Here [among the poorest], population is growing. 
So these [poorest] two billion will, in the next decades, increase to three billion, and they will thereafter increase to four billion. 
There is nothing — but a nuclear war of a kind we've never seen — that can stop this [growth] from happening. 
Because we already have this [growth] in process. 
But if, and only if, [the poorest] get out of poverty, they get education, they get improved child survival, they can buy a bicycle and a cell phone and come [to live] here, then population growth will stop in 2050. 
We cannot have people on this level looking for food and shoes because then we get continued population growth. 
And let me show you why by converting back to the old-time digital technology. 
Here I have on the screen my country bubbles. 
Every bubble is a country. The size is population. 
The colors show the continent. 
The yellow on there is the Americas; dark blue is Africa; brown is Europe; green is the Middle East and this light blue is South Asia. 
That's India and this is China. Size is population. 
Here I have children per woman: two children, four children, six children, eight children — big families, small families. 
The year is 1960. 
And down here, child survival, the percentage of children surviving childhood up to starting school: 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent, 90, and almost 100 percent, as we have today in the wealthiest and healthiest countries. 
But look, this is the world my teacher talked about in 1960: one billion Western world here — high child-survival, small families — and all the rest, the rainbow of developing countries, with very large families and poor child survival. 
What has happened? I start the world. Here we go. 
Can you see, as the years pass by, child survival is increasing? 
They get soap, hygiene, education, vaccination, penicillin and then family planning. Family size is decreasing. 
[When] they get up to 90-percent child survival, then families decrease, and most of the Arab countries in the Middle East is falling down there [to small families]. 
Look, Bangladesh catching up with India. 
The whole emerging world joins the Western world with good child survival and small family size, but we still have the poorest billion. 
Can you see the poorest billion, those [two] boxes I had over here? 
They are still up here. 
And they still have a child survival of only 70 to 80 percent, meaning that if you have six children born, there will be at least four who survive to the next generation. 
And the population will double in one generation. 
So the only way of really getting world population [growth] to stop is to continue to improve child survival to 90 percent. 
That's why investments by Gates Foundation, UNICEF and aid organizations, together with national government in the poorest countries, are so good; because they are actually helping us to reach a sustainable population size of the world. 
We can stop at nine billion if we do the right things. 
Child survival is the new green. 
It's only by child survival that we will stop population growth. 
And will it happen? 
Well, I'm not an optimist, neither am I a pessimist. 
I'm a very serious "" possibilist. "" It's a new category where we take emotion apart, and we just work analytically with the world. 
It can be done. 
We can have a much more just world. 
With green technology and with investments to alleviate poverty, and global governance, the world can become like this. 
And look at the position of the old West. 
Remember when this blue box was all alone, leading the world, living its own life. 
This will not happen [again]. 
The role of the old West in the new world is to become the foundation of the modern world — nothing more, nothing less. 
But it's a very important role. 
Do it well and get used to it. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

When I was about 16 years old I can remember flipping through channels at home during summer vacation, looking for a movie to watch on HBO — and how many of you remember "" Ferris Bueller's Day Off ""? 
Oh yeah, great movie, right? — Well, I saw Matthew Broderick on the screen, and so I thought, "Sweet! Ferris Bueller. I'll watch this!" 
It wasn't Ferris Bueller. And forgive me Matthew Broderick, I know you've done other movies besides Ferris Bueller, but that's how I remember you; you're Ferris. 
But you weren't doing Ferris-y things at the time; you were doing gay things at the time. 
He was in a movie called "" Torch Song Trilogy. "" And "" Torch Song Trilogy "" was based on a play about this drag queen who essentially was looking for love. 
Love and respect — that's what the whole film was about. 
And as I'm watching it, I'm realizing that they're talking about me. 
Not the drag queen part — I am not shaving my hair for anyone — but the gay part. 
The finding love and respect, the part about trying to find your place in the world. 
So as I'm watching this, I see this powerful scene that brought me to tears, and it stuck with me for the past 25 years. 
And there's this quote that the main character, Arnold, tells his mother as they're fighting about who he is and the life that he lives. 
"" There's one thing more — there's just one more thing you better understand. 
I've taught myself to sew, cook, fix plumbing, build furniture, I can even pat myself on the back when necessary, all so I don't have to ask anyone for anything. 
There's nothing I need from anyone except for love and respect, and anyone who can't give me those two things has no place in my life. "" I remember that scene like it was yesterday; I was 16, I was in tears, I was in the closet, and I'm looking at these two people, Ferris Bueller and some guy I'd never seen before, fighting for love. 
When I finally got to a place in my life where I came out and accepted who I was, and was really quite happy, to tell you the truth, I was happily gay and I guess that's supposed to be right because gay means happy too. 
I realized there were a lot of people who weren't as gay as I was — gay being happy, not gay being attracted to the same sex. 
In fact, I heard that there was a lot of hate and a lot of anger and a lot of frustration and a lot of fear about who I was and the gay lifestyle. 
Now, I'm sitting here trying to figure out "" the gay lifestyle, "" "" the gay lifestyle, "" and I keep hearing this word over and over and over again: lifestyle, lifestyle, lifestyle. 
I've even heard politicians say that the gay lifestyle is a greater threat to civilization than terrorism. 
That's when I got scared. 
Because I'm thinking, if I'm gay and I'm doing something that's going to destroy civilization, I need to figure out what this stuff is, and I need to stop doing it right now. 
(Laughter) So, I took a look at my life, a hard look at my life, and I saw some things very disturbing. (Laughter) 
And I want to begin sharing these evil things that I've been doing with you, starting with my mornings. 
I drink coffee. 
Not only do I drink coffee, I know other gay people who drink coffee. 
I get stuck in traffic — evil, evil traffic. 
Sometimes I get stuck in lines at airports. 
I look around, and I go, "" My God, look at all these gay people! 
We're all trapped in these lines! These long lines trying to get on an airplane! 
My God, this lifestyle that I'm living is so freaking evil! "" I clean up. This is not an actual photograph of my son's room; his is messier. 
And because I have a 15-year-old, all I do is cook and cook and cook. 
Any parents out there of teenagers? All we do is cook for these people — they eat two, three, four dinners a night — it's ridiculous! 
This is the gay lifestyle. 
And after I'm done cooking and cleaning and standing in line and getting stuck in traffic, my partner and I, we get together and we decide that we're gonna go and have some wild and crazy fun. 
(Laughter) We're usually in bed before we find out who's eliminated on "" American Idol. "" We have to wake up and find out the next day who's still on because we're too freaking tired to hear who stays on. 
This is the super duper evil gay lifestyle. 
Run for your heterosexual lives, people. 
(Applause) When my partner, Steve, and I first started dating, he told me this story about penguins. 
And I didn't know where he was going with it at first. 
He was kind of a little bit nervous when he was sharing it with me, but he told me that when a penguin finds a mate that they want to spend the rest of their life with, they present them with a pebble — the perfect pebble. 
And then he reaches into his pocket, and he brings this out to me. 
And I looked at it, and I was like, this is really cool. 
And he says, "" I want to spend the rest of my life with you. "" So I wear this whenever I have to do something that makes me a little nervous, like, I don't know, a TEDx talk. 
I wear this when I am apart from him for a long period of time. 
And sometimes I just wear it just because. 
How many people out there are in love? Anyone in love out there? 
You might be gay. 
(Laughter) Because I, too, am in love, and apparently that's part of the gay lifestyle that I warned you about. 
(Applause) You may want to tell your spouse. Who, if they're in love, might be gay as well. 
How many of you are single? Any single people out there? 
You too might be gay! Because I know some gay people who are also single. 
It's really scary, this gay lifestyle thing; it's super duper evil and there's no end to it! 
It goes and goes and engulfs! 
It's really quite silly, isn't it? 
That's why I'm so happy to finally hear President Obama come out and say (Applause) that he supports — (Applause) that he supports marriage equality. 
It's a wonderful day in our country's history; it's a wonderful day in the globe's history to be able to have an actual sitting president say, enough of this — first to himself, and then to the rest of the world. 
It's wonderful. 
But there's something that's been disturbing me since he made that remark just a short time ago. 
And that is, apparently, this is just another move by the gay activists that's on the gay agenda. 
And I'm disturbed by this because I've been openly gay now for quite some time. 
I've been to all of the functions, I've been to fundraisers, I've written about the topic, and I have yet to receive my copy of this gay agenda. 
(Laughter) I've paid my dues on time, (Laughter) I've marched in gay pride flags parades and the whole nine, and I've yet to see a copy of the gay agenda. 
It's very, very frustrating, and I was feeling left out, like I wasn't quite gay enough. 
But then something wonderful happened: I was out shopping, as I tend to do, and I came across a bootleg copy of the official gay agenda. 
And I said to myself, "" LZ, for so long, you have been denied this. 
When you get in front of this crowd, you're gonna share the news. 
You're gonna spread the gay agenda so no one else has to wonder, what exactly is in the gay agenda? 
What are these gays up to? 
What do they want? "" So, without further ado, I will present to you, ladies and gentlemen — now be careful, 'cause it's evil — a copy, the official copy, of the gay agenda. 
(Music) The gay agenda, people! 
(Applause) There it is! 
Did you soak it all in? The gay agenda. 
Some of you may be calling it, what, the Constitution of the United States, is that what you call it too? 
The U.S. Constitution is the gay agenda. 
These gays, people like me, want to be treated like full citizens and it's all written down in plain sight. 
I was blown away when I saw it. I was like, wait, this is the gay agenda? 
Why didn't you just call it the Constitution so I knew what you were talking about? 
I wouldn't have been so confused; I wouldn't have been so upset. 
But there it is. The gay agenda. 
Run for your heterosexual lives. 
Did you know that in all the states where there is no shading that people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered can be kicked out of their apartments for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered? 
That's the only reason that a landlord needs to have them removed, because there's no protection from discrimination of GLBT people. 
Did you know in the states where there's no shading that you can be fired for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered? 
Not based upon the quality of your work, how long you've been there, if you stink, just if you're gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered. 
All of which flies in the face of the gay agenda, also known as the U.S. Constitution. 
Specifically, this little amendment right here: "" No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. "" I'm looking at you, North Carolina. 
But you're not looking at the U.S. Constitution. 
This is the gay agenda: equality. Not special rights, but the rights that were already written by these people — these elitists, if you will. 
Educated, well-dressed, (Laughter) some would dare say questionably dressed. (Laughter) 
Nonetheless, our forefathers, right? 
The people that, we say, knew what they were doing when they wrote the Constitution — the gay agenda, if you will. 
All of that flies in the face of what they did. 
That is the reason why I felt it was imperative that I presented you with this copy of the gay agenda. 
Because I figured if I made it funny, you wouldn't be as threatened. 
I figured if I was a bit irreverent, you wouldn't find it serious. 
But when you see the map, and you see our state of Michigan — it's legal to fire someone for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered, that it's legal to remove someone from their home because they're gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered, then you realize that this whole conversation about marriage equality is not about stripping someone's rights away, it's about granting them the rights that [have] already been stated. 
And we're just trying to walk in those rights that have already been stated, that we've already agreed upon. 
There are people living in fear of losing their jobs so they don't show anyone who they really are right here at home. This isn't just about North Carolina; all those states that were clear, it's legal. 
If I could brag for a second, I have a 15-year-old son from my marriage. 
He has a 4.0. 
He is starting a new club at school, Policy Debate. 
He's a budding track star; he has almost every single record in middle school for every event that he competed in. 
He volunteers. 
He prays before he eats. 
I would like to think, as his father — and he lives with me primarily — that I had a little something to do with all of that. 
I would like to think that he's a good boy, a respectful young man. I would like to think that I've proven to be a capable father. 
But if I were to go to the state of Michigan today, and try to adopt a young person who is in an orphanage, I would be disqualified for only one reason: because I'm gay. 
It doesn't matter what I've already proven, what I can do with my heart. 
It's because of what the state of Michigan says that I am that I am disqualified for any sort of adoption. 
And that's not just about me, that's about so many other Michiganders, U.S. citizens, who don't understand why what they are is so much more significant than who they are. 
This story just keeps playing over and over and over again in our country's history. 
There was a time in which, I don't know, people who were black couldn't have the same rights. 
People who happened to be women didn't have the same rights, couldn't vote. 
There was a point in our history in which, if you were considered disabled, that an employer could just fire you, before the Americans with Disabilities Act. 
We keep doing this over and over again. 
And so here we are, 2012, gay agenda, gay lifestyle, and I'm not a good dad and people don't deserve to be able to protect their families because of what they are, not who they are. 
So when you hear the words "" gay lifestyle "" and "" gay agenda "" in the future, I encourage you to do two things: One, remember the U.S. Constitution, and then two, if you wouldn't mind looking to your left, please. 
Look to your right. 
That person next to you is a brother, is a sister. 
And they should be treated with love and respect. 
Thank you. 

This is the Large Hadron Collider. 
It's 27 kilometers in circumference. 
It's the biggest scientific experiment ever attempted. 
Over 10,000 physicists and engineers from 85 countries around the world have come together over several decades to build this machine. 
What we do is we accelerate protons — so, hydrogen nuclei — around 99.999999 percent the speed of light. 
Right? At that speed, they go around that 27 kilometers 11,000 times a second. 
And we collide them with another beam of protons going in the opposite direction. 
We collide them inside giant detectors. 
They're essentially digital cameras. 
And this is the one that I work on, ATLAS. 
You get some sense of the size — you can just see these EU standard-size people underneath. 
(Laughter) You get some sense of the size: 44 meters wide, 22 meters in diameter, 7,000 tons. 
And we re-create the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began up to 600 million times a second inside that detector — immense numbers. 
And if you see those metal bits there — those are huge magnets that bend electrically charged particles, so it can measure how fast they're traveling. 
This is a picture about a year ago. 
Those magnets are in there. 
And, again, a EU standard-size, real person, so you get some sense of the scale. 
And it's in there that those mini-Big Bangs will be created, sometime in the summer this year. 
And actually, this morning, I got an email saying that we've just finished, today, building the last piece of ATLAS. 
So as of today, it's finished. I'd like to say that I planned that for TED, but I didn't. So it's been completed as of today. 
(Applause) Yeah, it's a wonderful achievement. 
So, you might be asking, "" Why? 
Why create the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began? "" Well, particle physicists are nothing if not ambitious. 
And the aim of particle physics is to understand what everything's made of, and how everything sticks together. 
And by everything I mean, of course, me and you, the Earth, the Sun, the 100 billion suns in our galaxy and the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. 
Absolutely everything. 
Now you might say, "" Well, OK, but why not just look at it? 
You know? If you want to know what I'm made of, let's look at me. "" Well, we found that as you look back in time, the universe gets hotter and hotter, denser and denser, and simpler and simpler. 
Now, there's no real reason I'm aware of for that, but that seems to be the case. 
So, way back in the early times of the universe, we believe it was very simple and understandable. 
All this complexity, all the way to these wonderful things — human brains — are a property of an old and cold and complicated universe. 
Back at the start, in the first billionth of a second, we believe, or we've observed, it was very simple. 
It's almost like... 
imagine a snowflake in your hand, and you look at it, and it's an incredibly complicated, beautiful object. But as you heat it up, it'll melt into a pool of water, and you would be able to see that, actually, it was just made of H20, water. 
So it's in that same sense that we look back in time to understand what the universe is made of. 
And, as of today, it's made of these things. 
Just 12 particles of matter, stuck together by four forces of nature. 
The quarks, these pink things, are the things that make up protons and neutrons that make up the atomic nuclei in your body. 
The electron — the thing that goes around the atomic nucleus — held around in orbit, by the way, by the electromagnetic force that's carried by this thing, the photon. 
The quarks are stuck together by other things called gluons. 
And these guys, here, they're the weak nuclear force, probably the least familiar. 
But, without it, the sun wouldn't shine. 
And when the sun shines, you get copious quantities of these things, called neutrinos, pouring out. 
Actually, if you just look at your thumbnail — about a square centimeter — there are something like 60 billion neutrinos per second from the sun, passing through every square centimeter of your body. 
But you don't feel them, because the weak force is correctly named — very short range and very weak, so they just fly through you. 
And these particles have been discovered over the last century, pretty much. 
The first one, the electron, was discovered in 1897, and the last one, this thing called the tau neutrino, in the year 2000. Actually just — I was going to say, just up the road in Chicago. I know it's a big country, America, isn't it? 
Just up the road. 
Relative to the universe, it's just up the road. 
(Laughter) So, this thing was discovered in the year 2000, so it's a relatively recent picture. 
One of the wonderful things, actually, I find, is that we've discovered any of them, when you realize how tiny they are. 
You know, they're a step in size from the entire observable universe. 
So, 100 billion galaxies, 13.7 billion light years away — a step in size from that to Monterey, actually, is about the same as from Monterey to these things. 
Absolutely, exquisitely minute, and yet we've discovered pretty much the full set. 
So, one of my most illustrious forebears at Manchester University, Ernest Rutherford, discoverer of the atomic nucleus, once said, "" All science is either physics or stamp collecting. "" Now, I don't think he meant to insult the rest of science, although he was from New Zealand, so it's possible. 
(Laughter) But what he meant was that what we've done, really, is stamp collect there. 
OK, we've discovered the particles, but unless you understand the underlying reason for that pattern — you know, why it's built the way it is — really you've done stamp collecting. You haven't done science. 
Fortunately, we have probably one of the greatest scientific achievements of the twentieth century that underpins that pattern. 
It's the Newton's laws, if you want, of particle physics. 
It's called the standard model — beautifully simple mathematical equation. 
You could stick it on the front of a T-shirt, which is always the sign of elegance. 
This is it. 
(Laughter) I've been a little disingenuous, because I've expanded it out in all its gory detail. 
This equation, though, allows you to calculate everything — other than gravity — that happens in the universe. 
So, you want to know why the sky is blue, why atomic nuclei stick together — in principle, you've got a big enough computer — why DNA is the shape it is. 
In principle, you should be able to calculate it from that equation. 
But there's a problem. 
Can anyone see what it is? 
A bottle of champagne for anyone that tells me. 
I'll make it easier, actually, by blowing one of the lines up. 
Basically, each of these terms refers to some of the particles. 
So those Ws there refer to the Ws, and how they stick together. 
These carriers of the weak force, the Zs, the same. 
But there's an extra symbol in this equation: H. 
Right, H. 
H stands for Higgs particle. 
Higgs particles have not been discovered. 
But they're necessary: they're necessary to make that mathematics work. 
So all the exquisitely detailed calculations we can do with that wonderful equation wouldn't be possible without an extra bit. 
So it's a prediction: a prediction of a new particle. 
What does it do? 
Well, we had a long time to come up with good analogies. 
And back in the 1980s, when we wanted the money for the LHC from the U.K. government, Margaret Thatcher, at the time, said, "" If you guys can explain, in language a politician can understand, what the hell it is that you're doing, you can have the money. 
I want to know what this Higgs particle does. "" And we came up with this analogy, and it seemed to work. 
Well, what the Higgs does is, it gives mass to the fundamental particles. 
And the picture is that the whole universe — and that doesn't mean just space, it means me as well, and inside you — the whole universe is full of something called a Higgs field. 
Higgs particles, if you will. 
The analogy is that these people in a room are the Higgs particles. 
Now when a particle moves through the universe, it can interact with these Higgs particles. 
But imagine someone who's not very popular moves through the room. 
Then everyone ignores them. They can just pass through the room very quickly, essentially at the speed of light. They're massless. 
And imagine someone incredibly important and popular and intelligent walks into the room. 
They're surrounded by people, and their passage through the room is impeded. 
It's almost like they get heavy. They get massive. 
And that's exactly the way the Higgs mechanism works. 
The picture is that the electrons and the quarks in your body and in the universe that we see around us are heavy, in a sense, and massive, because they're surrounded by Higgs particles. 
They're interacting with the Higgs field. 
If that picture's true, then we have to discover those Higgs particles at the LHC. 
If it's not true — because it's quite a convoluted mechanism, although it's the simplest we've been able to think of — then whatever does the job of the Higgs particles we know have to turn up at the LHC. 
So, that's one of the prime reasons we built this giant machine. 
I'm glad you recognize Margaret Thatcher. 
Actually, I thought about making it more culturally relevant, but — (Laughter) anyway. 
So that's one thing. 
That's essentially a guarantee of what the LHC will find. 
There are many other things. You've heard many of the big problems in particle physics. 
One of them you heard about: dark matter, dark energy. 
There's another issue, which is that the forces in nature — it's quite beautiful, actually — seem, as you go back in time, they seem to change in strength. 
Well, they do change in strength. 
So, the electromagnetic force, the force that holds us together, gets stronger as you go to higher temperatures. 
The strong force, the strong nuclear force, which sticks nuclei together, gets weaker. And what you see is the standard model — you can calculate how these change — is the forces, the three forces, other than gravity, almost seem to come together at one point. 
It's almost as if there was one beautiful kind of super-force, back at the beginning of time. 
But they just miss. 
Now there's a theory called super-symmetry, which doubles the number of particles in the standard model, which, at first sight, doesn't sound like a simplification. 
But actually, with this theory, we find that the forces of nature do seem to unify together, back at the Big Bang — absolutely beautiful prophecy. The model wasn't built to do that, but it seems to do it. 
Also, those super-symmetric particles are very strong candidates for the dark matter. 
So a very compelling theory that's really mainstream physics. 
And if I was to put money on it, I would put money on — in a very unscientific way — that that these things would also crop up at the LHC. 
Many other things that the LHC could discover. 
But in the last few minutes, I just want to give you a different perspective of what I think — what particle physics really means to me — particle physics and cosmology. 
And that's that I think it's given us a wonderful narrative — almost a creation story, if you'd like — about the universe, from modern science over the last few decades. 
And I'd say that it deserves, in the spirit of Wade Davis' talk, to be at least put up there with these wonderful creation stories of the peoples of the high Andes and the frozen north. 
This is a creation story, I think, equally as wonderful. 
The story goes like this: we know that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago, in an immensely hot, dense state, much smaller than a single atom. 
It began to expand about a million, billion, billion, billion billionth of a second — I think I got that right — after the Big Bang. 
Gravity separated away from the other forces. 
The universe then underwent an exponential expansion called inflation. 
In about the first billionth of a second or so, the Higgs field kicked in, and the quarks and the gluons and the electrons that make us up got mass. 
The universe continued to expand and cool. 
After about a few minutes, there was hydrogen and helium in the universe. That's all. 
The universe was about 75 percent hydrogen, 25 percent helium. It still is today. 
It continued to expand about 300 million years. 
Then light began to travel through the universe. 
It was big enough to be transparent to light, and that's what we see in the cosmic microwave background that George Smoot described as looking at the face of God. 
After about 400 million years, the first stars formed, and that hydrogen, that helium, then began to cook into the heavier elements. 
So the elements of life — carbon, and oxygen and iron, all the elements that we need to make us up — were cooked in those first generations of stars, which then ran out of fuel, exploded, threw those elements back into the universe. 
They then re-collapsed into another generation of stars and planets. 
And on some of those planets, the oxygen, which had been created in that first generation of stars, could fuse with hydrogen to form water, liquid water on the surface. 
On at least one, and maybe only one of those planets, primitive life evolved, which evolved over millions of years into things that walked upright and left footprints about three and a half million years ago in the mud flats of Tanzania, and eventually left a footprint on another world. 
And built this civilization, this wonderful picture, that turned the darkness into light, and you can see the civilization from space. 
As one of my great heroes, Carl Sagan, said, these are the things — and actually, not only these, but I was looking around — these are the things, like Saturn V rockets, and Sputnik, and DNA, and literature and science — these are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years. 
Absolutely remarkable. 
And, the laws of physics. Right? 
So, the right laws of physics — they're beautifully balanced. 
If the weak force had been a little bit different, then carbon and oxygen wouldn't be stable inside the hearts of stars, and there would be none of that in the universe. 
And I think that's a wonderful and significant story. 
50 years ago, I couldn't have told that story, because we didn't know it. 
It makes me really feel that that civilization — which, as I say, if you believe the scientific creation story, has emerged purely as a result of the laws of physics, and a few hydrogen atoms — then I think, to me anyway, it makes me feel incredibly valuable. 
So that's the LHC. 
The LHC is certainly, when it turns on in summer, going to write the next chapter of that book. 
And I'm certainly looking forward with immense excitement to it being turned on. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

Suppose that two American friends are traveling together in Italy. 
They go to see Michelangelo's "" David, "" and when they finally come face to face with the statue, they both freeze dead in their tracks. 
The first guy — we'll call him Adam — is transfixed by the beauty of the perfect human form. 
The second guy — we'll call him Bill — is transfixed by embarrassment, at staring at the thing there in the center. 
So here's my question for you: which one of these two guys was more likely to have voted for George Bush, which for Al Gore? 
I don't need a show of hands because we all have the same political stereotypes. 
We all know that it's Bill. 
And in this case, the stereotype corresponds to reality. 
It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called openness to experience. 
People who are high in openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel. 
People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable. 
If you know about this trait, you can understand a lot of puzzles about human behavior. 
You can understand why artists are so different from accountants. 
You can actually predict what kinds of books they like to read, what kinds of places they like to travel to, and what kinds of food they like to eat. 
Once you understand this trait, you can understand why anybody would eat at Applebee's, but not anybody that you know. 
(Laughter) This trait also tells us a lot about politics. 
The main researcher of this trait, Robert McCrae says that, "" Open individuals have an affinity for liberal, progressive, left-wing political views "" — they like a society which is open and changing — "whereas closed individuals prefer conservative, traditional, right-wing views." 
This trait also tells us a lot about the kinds of groups people join. 
So here's the description of a group I found on the Web. 
What kinds of people would join a global community welcoming people from every discipline and culture, who seek a deeper understanding of the world, and who hope to turn that understanding into a better future for us all? 
This is from some guy named Ted. 
(Laughter) Well, let's see now, if openness predicts who becomes liberal, and openness predicts who becomes a TEDster, then might we predict that most TEDsters are liberal? 
Let's find out. 
I'm going to ask you to raise your hand, whether you are liberal, left of center — on social issues, we're talking about, primarily — or conservative, and I'll give a third option, because I know there are a number of libertarians in the audience. 
So, right now, please raise your hand — down in the simulcast rooms, too, let's let everybody see who's here — please raise your hand if you would say that you are liberal or left of center. 
Please raise your hand high right now. OK. 
Please raise your hand if you'd say you're libertarian. 
OK, about a — two dozen. 
And please raise your hand if you'd say you are right of center or conservative. 
One, two, three, four, five — about eight or 10. 
OK. This is a bit of a problem. 
Because if our goal is to understand the world, to seek a deeper understanding of the world, our general lack of moral diversity here is going to make it harder. 
Because when people all share values, when people all share morals, they become a team, and once you engage the psychology of teams, it shuts down open-minded thinking. 
When the liberal team loses, as it did in 2004, and as it almost did in 2000, we comfort ourselves. 
(Laughter) We try to explain why half of America voted for the other team. 
We think they must be blinded by religion, or by simple stupidity. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So, if you think that half of America votes Republican because they are blinded in this way, then my message to you is that you're trapped in a moral matrix, in a particular moral matrix. 
And by the matrix, I mean literally the matrix, like the movie "" The Matrix. "" But I'm here today to give you a choice. 
You can either take the blue pill and stick to your comforting delusions, or you can take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix. 
Now, because I know — (Applause) — OK, I assume that answers my question. 
I was going to ask you which one you picked, but no need. 
You're all high in openness to experience, and besides, it looks like it might even taste good, and you're all epicures. 
So anyway, let's go with the red pill. 
Let's study some moral psychology and see where it takes us. 
Let's start at the beginning. 
What is morality and where does it come from? 
The worst idea in all of psychology is the idea that the mind is a blank slate at birth. 
Developmental psychology has shown that kids come into the world already knowing so much about the physical and social worlds, and programmed to make it really easy for them to learn certain things and hard to learn others. 
The best definition of innateness I've ever seen — this just clarifies so many things for me — is from the brain scientist Gary Marcus. 
He says, "" The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. 
Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. 
Built-in doesn't mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience. "" OK, so what's on the first draft of the moral mind? 
To find out, my colleague, Craig Joseph, and I read through the literature on anthropology, on culture variation in morality and also on evolutionary psychology, looking for matches. 
What are the sorts of things that people talk about across disciplines? 
That you find across cultures and even across species? 
We found five — five best matches, which we call the five foundations of morality. 
The first one is harm / care. 
We're all mammals here, we all have a lot of neural and hormonal programming that makes us really bond with others, care for others, feel compassion for others, especially the weak and vulnerable. 
It gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm. 
This moral foundation underlies about 70 percent of the moral statements I've heard here at TED. 
The second foundation is fairness / reciprocity. 
There's actually ambiguous evidence as to whether you find reciprocity in other animals, but the evidence for people could not be clearer. 
This Norman Rockwell painting is called "" The Golden Rule, "" and we heard about this from Karen Armstrong, of course, as the foundation of so many religions. 
That second foundation underlies the other 30 percent of the moral statements I've heard here at TED. 
The third foundation is in-group / loyalty. 
You do find groups in the animal kingdom — you do find cooperative groups — but these groups are always either very small or they're all siblings. 
It's only among humans that you find very large groups of people who are able to cooperate, join together into groups, but in this case, groups that are united to fight other groups. 
This probably comes from our long history of tribal living, of tribal psychology. 
And this tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we don't have tribes, we go ahead and make them, because it's fun. 
(Laughter) Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. 
We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives. 
The fourth foundation is authority / respect. 
Here you see submissive gestures from two members of very closely related species. 
But authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality, as it is in other primates. 
It's based on more voluntary deference, and even elements of love, at times. 
The fifth foundation is purity / sanctity. 
This painting is called "" The Allegory Of Chastity, "" but purity's not just about suppressing female sexuality. 
It's about any kind of ideology, any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body, by controlling what you put into your body. 
And while the political right may moralize sex much more, the political left is really doing a lot of it with food. 
Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays, and a lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you're willing to touch, or put into your body. 
I believe these are the five best candidates for what's written on the first draft of the moral mind. 
I think this is what we come with, at least a preparedness to learn all of these things. 
But as my son, Max, grows up in a liberal college town, how is this first draft going to get revised? 
And how will it end up being different from a kid born 60 miles south of us in Lynchburg, Virginia? 
To think about culture variation, let's try a different metaphor. 
If there really are five systems at work in the mind — five sources of intuitions and emotions — then we can think of the moral mind as being like one of those audio equalizers that has five channels, where you can set it to a different setting on every channel. 
And my colleagues, Brian Nosek and Jesse Graham, and I, made a questionnaire, which we put up on the Web at www.YourMorals.org. 
And so far, 30,000 people have taken this questionnaire, and you can too. 
Here are the results. 
Here are the results from about 23,000 American citizens. 
On the left, I've plotted the scores for liberals; on the right, those for conservatives; in the middle, the moderates. 
The blue line shows you people's responses on the average of all the harm questions. 
So, as you see, people care about harm and care issues. 
They give high endorsement of these sorts of statements all across the board, but as you also see, liberals care about it a little more than conservatives — the line slopes down. 
Same story for fairness. 
But look at the other three lines. 
For liberals, the scores are very low. 
Liberals are basically saying, "" No, this is not morality. 
In-group, authority, purity — this stuff has nothing to do with morality. I reject it. "" But as people get more conservative, the values rise. 
We can say that liberals have a kind of a two-channel, or two-foundation morality. 
Conservatives have more of a five-foundation, or five-channel morality. 
We find this in every country we look at. 
Here's the data for 1,100 Canadians. 
I'll just flip through a few other slides. 
The U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia. 
Notice also that on all of these graphs, the slope is steeper on in-group, authority, purity. 
Which shows that within any country, the disagreement isn't over harm and fairness. 
Everybody — I mean, we debate over what's fair — but everybody agrees that harm and fairness matter. 
Moral arguments within cultures are especially about issues of in-group, authority, purity. 
This effect is so robust that we find it no matter how we ask the question. 
In one recent study, we asked people to suppose you're about to get a dog. 
You picked a particular breed, you learned some new information about the breed. 
Suppose you learn that this particular breed is independent-minded, and relates to its owner as a friend and an equal? 
Well, if you are a liberal, you say, "" Hey, that's great! "" Because liberals like to say, "" Fetch, please. "" (Laughter) But if you're conservative, that's not so attractive. 
If you're conservative, and you learn that a dog's extremely loyal to its home and family, and doesn't warm up quickly to strangers, for conservatives, well, loyalty is good — dogs ought to be loyal. 
But to a liberal, it sounds like this dog is running for the Republican nomination. 
(Laughter) So, you might say, OK, there are these differences between liberals and conservatives, but what makes those three other foundations moral? 
Aren't those just the foundations of xenophobia and authoritarianism and Puritanism? 
What makes them moral? 
The answer, I think, is contained in this incredible triptych from Hieronymus Bosch, "The Garden of Earthly Delights." 
In the first panel, we see the moment of creation. 
All is ordered, all is beautiful, all the people and animals are doing what they're supposed to be doing, where they're supposed to be. 
But then, given the way of the world, things change. 
We get every person doing whatever he wants, with every aperture of every other person and every other animal. 
Some of you might recognize this as the '60s. 
(Laughter) But the '60s inevitably gives way to the' 70s, where the cuttings of the apertures hurt a little bit more. 
Of course, Bosch called this hell. 
So this triptych, these three panels portray the timeless truth that order tends to decay. 
The truth of social entropy. 
But lest you think this is just some part of the Christian imagination where Christians have this weird problem with pleasure, here's the same story, the same progression, told in a paper that was published in Nature a few years ago, in which Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter had people play a commons dilemma. 
A game in which you give people money, and then, on each round of the game, they can put money into a common pot, and then the experimenter doubles what's in there, and then it's all divided among the players. 
So it's a really nice analog for all sorts of environmental issues, where we're asking people to make a sacrifice and they themselves don't really benefit from their own sacrifice. 
But you really want everybody else to sacrifice, but everybody has a temptation to a free ride. 
And what happens is that, at first, people start off reasonably cooperative — and this is all played anonymously. 
On the first round, people give about half of the money that they can. 
But they quickly see, "" You know what, other people aren't doing so much though. 
I don't want to be a sucker. I'm not going to cooperate. "" And so cooperation quickly decays from reasonably good, down to close to zero. 
But then — and here's the trick — Fehr and Gachter said, on the seventh round, they told people, "" You know what? New rule. 
If you want to give some of your own money to punish people who aren't contributing, you can do that. "" And as soon as people heard about the punishment issue going on, cooperation shoots up. 
It shoots up and it keeps going up. 
There's a lot of research showing that to solve cooperative problems, it really helps. 
It's not enough to just appeal to people's good motives. 
It really helps to have some sort of punishment. 
Even if it's just shame or embarrassment or gossip, you need some sort of punishment to bring people, when they're in large groups, to cooperate. 
There's even some recent research suggesting that religion — priming God, making people think about God — often, in some situations, leads to more cooperative, more pro-social behavior. 
Some people think that religion is an adaptation evolved both by cultural and biological evolution to make groups to cohere, in part for the purpose of trusting each other, and then being more effective at competing with other groups. 
I think that's probably right, although this is a controversial issue. 
But I'm particularly interested in religion, and the origin of religion, and in what it does to us and for us. 
Because I think that the greatest wonder in the world is not the Grand Canyon. 
The Grand Canyon is really simple. 
It's just a lot of rock, and then a lot of water and wind, and a lot of time, and you get the Grand Canyon. 
It's not that complicated. 
This is what's really complicated, that there were people living in places like the Grand Canyon, cooperating with each other, or on the savannahs of Africa, or on the frozen shores of Alaska, and then some of these villages grew into the mighty cities of Babylon, and Rome, and Tenochtitlan. 
How did this happen? 
This is an absolute miracle, much harder to explain than the Grand Canyon. 
The answer, I think, is that they used every tool in the toolbox. 
It took all of our moral psychology to create these cooperative groups. 
Yes, you do need to be concerned about harm, you do need a psychology of justice. 
But it really helps to organize a group if you can have sub-groups, and if those sub-groups have some internal structure, and if you have some ideology that tells people to suppress their carnality, to pursue higher, nobler ends. 
And now we get to the crux of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives. 
Because liberals reject three of these foundations. 
They say "" No, let's celebrate diversity, not common in-group membership. "" They say, "" Let's question authority. "" And they say, "" Keep your laws off my body. "" Liberals have very noble motives for doing this. 
Traditional authority, traditional morality can be quite repressive, and restrictive to those at the bottom, to women, to people that don't fit in. 
So liberals speak for the weak and oppressed. 
They want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos. 
This guy's shirt says, "" Stop bitching, start a revolution. "" If you're high in openness to experience, revolution is good, it's change, it's fun. 
Conservatives, on the other hand, speak for institutions and traditions. 
They want order, even at some cost to those at the bottom. 
The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. 
It's really precious, and it's really easy to lose. 
So as Edmund Burke said, "" The restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. "" This was after the chaos of the French Revolution. 
So once you see this — once you see that liberals and conservatives both have something to contribute, that they form a balance on change versus stability — then I think the way is open to step outside the moral matrix. 
This is the great insight that all the Asian religions have attained. 
Think about yin and yang. 
Yin and yang aren't enemies. Yin and yang don't hate each other. 
Yin and yang are both necessary, like night and day, for the functioning of the world. 
You find the same thing in Hinduism. 
There are many high gods in Hinduism. 
Two of them are Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer. 
This image actually is both of those gods sharing the same body. 
You have the markings of Vishnu on the left, so we could think of Vishnu as the conservative god. 
You have the markings of Shiva on the right, Shiva's the liberal god. And they work together. 
You find the same thing in Buddhism. 
These two stanzas contain, I think, the deepest insights that have ever been attained into moral psychology. 
From the Zen master Seng-ts'an: "" If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. 
The struggle between for and against is the mind's worst disease. "" Now unfortunately, it's a disease that has been caught by many of the world's leaders. 
But before you feel superior to George Bush, before you throw a stone, ask yourself, do you accept this? 
Do you accept stepping out of the battle of good and evil? 
Can you be not for or against anything? 
So, what's the point? What should you do? 
Well, if you take the greatest insights from ancient Asian philosophies and religions, and you combine them with the latest research on moral psychology, I think you come to these conclusions: that our righteous minds were designed by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams and then to blind us to the truth. 
So what should you do? Am I telling you to not strive? 
Am I telling you to embrace Seng-ts'an and stop, stop with this struggle of for and against? 
No, absolutely not. I'm not saying that. 
This is an amazing group of people who are doing so much, using so much of their talent, their brilliance, their energy, their money, to make the world a better place, to fight — to fight wrongs, to solve problems. 
But as we learned from Samantha Power, in her story about Sergio Vieira de Mello, you can't just go charging in, saying, "" You're wrong, and I'm right. "" Because, as we just heard, everybody thinks they are right. 
A lot of the problems we have to solve are problems that require us to change other people. 
And if you want to change other people, a much better way to do it is to first understand who we are — understand our moral psychology, understand that we all think we're right — and then step out, even if it's just for a moment, step out — check in with Seng-ts'an. 
Step out of the moral matrix, just try to see it as a struggle playing out, in which everybody does think they're right, and everybody, at least, has some reasons — even if you disagree with them — everybody has some reasons for what they're doing. 
Step out. 
And if you do that, that's the essential move to cultivate moral humility, to get yourself out of this self-righteousness, which is the normal human condition. 
Think about the Dalai Lama. 
Think about the enormous moral authority of the Dalai Lama — and it comes from his moral humility. 
So I think the point — the point of my talk, and I think the point of TED — is that this is a group that is passionately engaged in the pursuit of changing the world for the better. 
People here are passionately engaged in trying to make the world a better place. 
But there is also a passionate commitment to the truth. 
And so I think that the answer is to use that passionate commitment to the truth to try to turn it into a better future for us all. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Is there anything unique about human beings? 
There is. 
We're the only creatures with fully developed moral sentiments. 
We're obsessed with morality as social creatures. 
We need to know why people are doing what they're doing. 
And I personally am obsessed with morality. 
It was all due to this woman, Sister Mary Marastela, also known as my mom. 
As an altar boy, I breathed in a lot of incense, and I learned to say phrases in Latin, but I also had time to think about whether my mother's top-down morality applied to everybody. 
I saw that people who were religious and non-religious were equally obsessed with morality. 
I thought, maybe there's some earthly basis for moral decisions. 
But I wanted to go further than to say our brains make us moral. 
I want to know if there's a chemistry of morality. I want to know 
if there was a moral molecule. 
After 10 years of experiments, I found it. 
Would you like to see it? I brought some with me. 
This little syringe contains the moral molecule. 
(Laughter) It's called oxytocin. 
So oxytocin is a simple and ancient molecule found only in mammals. 
In rodents, it was known to make mothers care for their offspring, and in some creatures, allowed for toleration of burrowmates. 
But in humans, it was only known to facilitate birth and breastfeeding in women, and is released by both sexes during sex. 
So I had this idea that oxytocin might be the moral molecule. 
I did what most of us do — I tried it on some colleagues. 
One of them told me, "" Paul, that is the world's stupidist idea. 
It is, "" he said, "" only a female molecule. 
It can't be that important. "" But I countered, "" Well men's brains make this too. 
There must be a reason why. "" But he was right, it was a stupid idea. 
But it was testably stupid. 
In other words, I thought I could design an experiment to see if oxytocin made people moral. 
Turns out it wasn't so easy. 
First of all, oxytocin is a shy molecule. 
Baseline levels are near zero, without some stimulus to cause its release. 
And when it's produced, it has a three-minute half-life, and degrades rapidly at room temperature. 
So this experiment would have to cause a surge of oxytocin, have to grab it fast and keep it cold. 
I think I can do that. 
Now luckily, oxytocin is produced both in the brain and in the blood, so I could do this experiment without learning neurosurgery. 
Then I had to measure morality. 
So taking on Morality with a capital M is a huge project. 
So I started smaller. 
I studied one single virtue: trustworthiness. 
Why? I had shown in the early 2000s that countries with a higher proportion of trustworthy people are more prosperous. 
So in these countries, more economic transactions occur and more wealth is created, alleviating poverty. 
So poor countries are by and large low trust countries. 
So if I understood the chemistry of trustworthiness, I might help alleviate poverty. 
But I'm also a skeptic. 
I don't want to just ask people, "" Are you trustworthy? "" So instead I use the Jerry Maguire approach to research. 
If you're so virtuous, show me the money. 
So what we do in my lab is we tempt people with virtue and vice by using money. 
Let me show you how we do that. 
So we recruit some people for an experiment. 
They all get $10 if they agree to show up. 
We give them lots of instruction, and we never ever deceive them. 
Then we match them in pairs by computer. 
And in that pair, one person gets a message saying, "" Do you want to give up some of your $10 you earned for being here and ship it to someone else in the lab? "" The trick is you can't see them, you can't talk to them. 
You only do it one time. 
Now whatever you give up gets tripled in the other person's account. 
You're going to make them a lot wealthier. 
And they get a message by computer saying person one sent you this amount of money. 
Do you want to keep it all, or do you want to send some amount back? 
So think about this experiment for minute. 
You're going to sit on these hard chairs for an hour and a half. 
Some mad scientist is going to jab your arm with a needle and take four tubes of blood. 
And now you want me to give up this money and ship it to a stranger? 
So this was the birth of vampire economics. 
Make a decision and give me some blood. 
So in fact, experimental economists had run this test around the world, and for much higher stakes, and the consensus view was that the measure from the first person to the second was a measure of trust, and the transfer from the second person back to the first measured trustworthiness. 
But in fact, economists were flummoxed on why the second person would ever return any money. 
They assumed money is good, why not keep it all? 
That's not what we found. 
We found 90 percent of the first decision-makers sent money, and of those who received money, 95 percent returned some of it. 
But why? 
Well by measuring oxytocin we found that the more money the second person received, the more their brain produced oxytocin, and the more oxytocin on board, the more money they returned. 
So we have a biology of trustworthiness. 
But wait. What's wrong with this experiment? 
Two things. 
One is that nothing in the body happens in isolation. 
So we measured nine other molecules that interact with oxytocin, but they didn't have any effect. 
But the second is that I still only had this indirect relationship between oxytocin and trustworthiness. 
I didn't know for sure oxytocin caused trustworthiness. 
So to make the experiment, I knew I'd have to go into the brain and manipulate oxytocin directly. 
I used everything short of a drill to get oxytocin into my own brain. 
And I found I could do it with a nasal inhaler. 
So along with colleagues in Zurich, we put 200 men on oxytocin or placebo, had that same trust test with money, and we found that those on oxytocin not only showed more trust, we can more than double the number of people who sent all their money to a stranger — all without altering mood or cognition. 
So oxytocin is the trust molecule, but is it the moral molecule? 
Using the oxytocin inhaler, we ran more studies. 
We showed that oxytocin infusion increases generosity in unilateral monetary transfers by 80 percent. 
We showed it increases donations to charity by 50 percent. 
We've also investigated non-pharmacologic ways to raise oxytocin. 
These include massage, dancing and praying. 
Yes, my mom was happy about that last one. 
And whenever we raise oxytocin, people willingly open up their wallets and share money with strangers. 
But why do they do this? 
What does it feel like when your brain is flooded with oxytocin? 
To investigate this question, we ran an experiment where we had people watch a video of a father and his four year-old son, and his son has terminal brain cancer. 
After they watched the video, we had them rate their feelings and took blood before and after to measure oxytocin. 
The change in oxytocin predicted their feelings of empathy. 
So it's empathy that makes us connect to other people. 
It's empathy that makes us help other people. 
It's empathy that makes us moral. 
Now this idea is not new. 
A then unknown philosopher named Adam Smith wrote a book in 1759 called "" The Theory of Moral Sentiments. "" In this book, Smith argued that we are moral creatures, not because of a top-down reason, but for a bottom-up reason. 
He said we're social creatures, so we share the emotions of others. 
So if I do something that hurts you, I feel that pain. 
So I tend to avoid that. 
If I do something that makes you happy, I get to share your joy. 
So I tend to do those things. 
Now this is the same Adam Smith who, 17 years later, would write a little book called "" The Wealth of Nations "" — the founding document of economics. 
But he was, in fact, a moral philosopher, and he was right on why we're moral. 
I just found the molecule behind it. 
But knowing that molecule is valuable, because it tells us how to turn up this behavior and what turns it off. 
In particular, it tells us why we see immorality. 
So to investigate immorality, let me bring you back now to 1980. 
I'm working at a gas station on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California. 
You sit in a gas station all day, you see lots of morality and immorality, let me tell you. 
So one Sunday afternoon, a man walks into my cashier's booth with this beautiful jewelry box. 
Opens it up and there's a pearl necklace inside. 
And he said, "" Hey, I was in the men's room. 
I just found this. What do you think we should do with it? "" "I don't know, put it in the lost and found." 
"" Well this is very valuable. 
We have to find the owner for this. "" I said, "" Yea. "" So we're trying to decide what to do with this, and the phone rings. 
And a man says very excitedly, "" I was in your gas station a while ago, and I bought this jewelry for my wife, and I can't find it. "" I said, "" Pearl necklace? "" "" Yeah. "" "Hey, a guy just found it." 
"" Oh, you're saving my life. Here's my phone number. 
Tell that guy to wait half an hour. 
I'll be there and I'll give him a $200 reward. "" Great, so I tell the guy, "" Look, relax. 
Get yourself a fat reward. Life's good. "" He said, "" I can't do it. 
I have this job interview in Galena in 15 minutes, and I need this job, I've got to go. "" Again he asked me, "" What do you think we should do? "" I'm in high school. I have no idea. 
So I said, "" I'll hold it for you. "" He said, "" You know, you've been so nice, let's split the reward. "" I'll give you the jewelry, you give me a hundred dollars, and when the guy comes... "" You see it. I was conned. 
So this is a classic con called the pigeon drop, and I was the pigeon. 
So the way many cons work is not that the conman gets the victim to trust him, it's that he shows he trusts the victim. 
Now we know what happens. 
The victim's brain releases oxytocin, and you're opening up your wallet or purse, giving away the money. 
So who are these people who manipulate our oxytocin systems? 
We found, testing thousands of individuals, that five percent of the population don't release oxytocin on stimulus. 
So if you trust them, their brains don't release oxytocin. 
If there's money on the table, they keep it all. 
So there's a technical word for these people in my lab. 
We call them bastards. 
(Laughter) These are not people you want to have a beer with. 
They have many of the attributes of psychopaths. 
Now there are other ways the system can be inhibited. 
One is through improper nurturing. 
So we've studied sexually abused women, and about half those don't release oxytocin on stimulus. 
You need enough nurturing for this system to develop properly. 
Also, high stress inhibits oxytocin. 
So we all know this, when we're really stressed out, we're not acting our best. 
There's another way oxytocin is inhibited, which is interesting — through the action of testosterone. 
So we, in experiments, have administered testosterone to men. 
And instead of sharing money, they become selfish. 
But interestingly, high testosterone males are also more likely to use their own money to punish others for being selfish. 
(Laughter) Now think about this. It means, within our own biology, we have the yin and yang of morality. 
We have oxytocin that connects us to others, makes us feel what they feel. 
And we have testosterone. 
And men have 10 times the testosterone as women, so men do this more than women — we have testosterone that makes us want to punish people who behave immorally. 
We don't need God or government telling us what to do. 
It's all inside of us. 
So you may be wondering: these are beautiful laboratory experiments, do they really apply to real life? 
Yeah, I've been worrying about that too. 
So I've gone out of the lab to see if this really holds in our daily lives. 
So last summer, I attended a wedding in Southern England. 
200 people in this beautiful Victorian mansion. 
I didn't know a single person. 
And I drove up in my rented Vauxhall. 
And I took out a centrifuge and dry ice and needles and tubes. 
And I took blood from the bride and the groom and the wedding party and the family and the friends before and immediately after the vows. 
(Laughter) And guess what? 
Weddings cause a release of oxytocin, but they do so in a very particular way. 
Who is the center of the wedding solar system? 
The bride. 
She had the biggest increase in oxytocin. 
Who loves the wedding almost as much as the bride? 
Her mother, that's right. 
Her mother was number two. 
Then the groom's father, then the groom, then the family, then the friends — arrayed around the bride like planets around the Sun. 
So I think it tells us that we've designed this ritual to connect us to this new couple, connect us emotionally. 
Why? Because we need them to be successful at reproducing to perpetuate the species. 
I also worried that my trust experiments with small amounts of money didn't really capture how often we actually trust our lives to strangers. 
So even though I have a fear of heights, I recently strapped myself to another human being and stepped out of an airplane at 12,000 ft. 
I took my blood before and after, and I had a huge spike of oxytocin. 
And there are so many ways we can connect to people. 
For example, through social media. 
Many people are Tweeting right now. 
So we investigated the role of social media and found the using social media produced a solid double-digit increase in oxytocin. 
So I ran this experiment recently for the Korean Broadcasting System. 
And they had the reporters and their producers participate. 
And one of these guys, he must have been 22, he had 150 percent spike in oxytocin. 
I mean, astounding; no one has this. 
So he was using social media in private. 
When I wrote my report to the Koreans, I said, "" Look, I don't know what this guy was doing, "" but my guess was interacting with his mother or his girlfriend. 
They checked. 
He was interacting on his girlfriend's Facebook page. 
There you go. That's connection. 
So there's tons of ways that we can connect to other people, and it seems to be universal. 
Two weeks ago, I just got back from Papua New Guinea where I went up to the highlands — very isolated tribes of subsistence farmers living as they have lived for millenia. 
There are 800 different languages in the highlands. 
These are the most primitive people in the world. 
And they indeed also release oxytocin. 
So oxytocin connects us to other people. 
Oxytocin makes us feel what other people feel. 
And it's so easy to cause people's brains to release oxytocin. 
I know how to do it, and my favorite way to do it is, in fact, the easiest. 
Let me show it to you. 
Come here. Give me a hug. 
(Laughter) There you go. 
(Applause) So my penchant for hugging other people has earned me the nickname Dr. Love. 
I'm happy to share a little more love in the world, it's great, but here's your prescription from Dr. Love: eight hugs a day. 
We have found that people who release more oxytocin are happier. 
And they're happier because they have better relationships of all types. 
Dr. Love says eight hugs a day. 
Eight hugs a day — you'll be happier and the world will be a better place. 
Of course, if you don't like to touch people, I can always shove this up your nose. 
(Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

I love a great mystery, and I'm fascinated by the greatest unsolved mystery in science, perhaps because it's personal. 
It's about who we are, and I can't help but be curious. 
The mystery is this: What is the relationship between your brain and your conscious experiences, such as your experience of the taste of chocolate or the feeling of velvet? 
Now, this mystery is not new. 
In 1868, Thomas Huxley wrote, "" How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the genie when Aladdin rubbed his lamp. "" Now, Huxley knew that brain activity and conscious experiences are correlated, but he didn't know why. 
To the science of his day, it was a mystery. 
In the years since Huxley, science has learned a lot about brain activity, but the relationship between brain activity and conscious experiences is still a mystery. 
Why? Why have we made so little progress? 
Well, some experts think that we can't solve this problem because we lack the necessary concepts and intelligence. 
We don't expect monkeys to solve problems in quantum mechanics, and as it happens, we can't expect our species to solve this problem either. 
Well, I disagree. I'm more optimistic. 
I think we've simply made a false assumption. 
Once we fix it, we just might solve this problem. 
Today, I'd like tell you what that assumption is, why it's false, and how to fix it. 
Let's begin with a question: Do we see reality as it is? 
I open my eyes and I have an experience that I describe as a red tomato a meter away. 
As a result, I come to believe that in reality, there's a red tomato a meter away. 
I then close my eyes, and my experience changes to a gray field, but is it still the case that in reality, there's a red tomato a meter away? 
I think so, but could I be wrong? 
Could I be misinterpreting the nature of my perceptions? 
We have misinterpreted our perceptions before. 
We used to think the Earth is flat, because it looks that way. 
Pythagorus discovered that we were wrong. 
Then we thought that the Earth is the unmoving center of the Universe, again because it looks that way. 
Copernicus and Galileo discovered, again, that we were wrong. 
Galileo then wondered if we might be misinterpreting our experiences in other ways. 
He wrote: "" I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on reside in consciousness. 
Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be annihilated. "" Now, that's a stunning claim. 
Could Galileo be right? 
Could we really be misinterpreting our experiences that badly? 
What does modern science have to say about this? 
Well, neuroscientists tell us that about a third of the brain's cortex is engaged in vision. 
When you simply open your eyes and look about this room, billions of neurons and trillions of synapses are engaged. 
Now, this is a bit surprising, because to the extent that we think about vision at all, we think of it as like a camera. 
It just takes a picture of objective reality as it is. 
Now, there is a part of vision that's like a camera: the eye has a lens that focuses an image on the back of the eye where there are 130 million photoreceptors, so the eye is like a 130-megapixel camera. 
But that doesn't explain the billions of neurons and trillions of synapses that are engaged in vision. 
What are these neurons up to? 
Well, neuroscientists tell us that they are creating, in real time, all the shapes, objects, colors, and motions that we see. 
It feels like we're just taking a snapshot of this room the way it is, but in fact, we're constructing everything that we see. 
We don't construct the whole world at once. 
We construct what we need in the moment. 
Now, there are many demonstrations that are quite compelling that we construct what we see. 
I'll just show you two. 
In this example, you see some red discs with bits cut out of them, but if I just rotate the disks a little bit, suddenly, you see a 3D cube pop out of the screen. 
Now, the screen of course is flat, so the three-dimensional cube that you're experiencing must be your construction. 
In this next example, you see glowing blue bars with pretty sharp edges moving across a field of dots. 
In fact, no dots move. 
All I'm doing from frame to frame is changing the colors of dots from blue to black or black to blue. 
But when I do this quickly, your visual system creates the glowing blue bars with the sharp edges and the motion. 
There are many more examples, but these are just two that you construct what you see. 
But neuroscientists go further. 
They say that we reconstruct reality. 
So, when I have an experience that I describe as a red tomato, that experience is actually an accurate reconstruction of the properties of a real red tomato that would exist even if I weren't looking. 
Now, why would neuroscientists say that we don't just construct, we reconstruct? 
Well, the standard argument given is usually an evolutionary one. 
Those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage compared to those who saw less accurately, and therefore they were more likely to pass on their genes. 
We are the offspring of those who saw more accurately, and so we can be confident that, in the normal case, our perceptions are accurate. 
You see this in the standard textbooks. 
One textbook says, for example, "" Evolutionarily speaking, vision is useful precisely because it is so accurate. "" So the idea is that accurate perceptions are fitter perceptions. 
They give you a survival advantage. 
Now, is this correct? 
Is this the right interpretation of evolutionary theory? 
Well, let's first look at a couple of examples in nature. 
The Australian jewel beetle is dimpled, glossy and brown. 
The female is flightless. 
The male flies, looking, of course, for a hot female. 
When he finds one, he alights and mates. 
There's another species in the outback, Homo sapiens. 
The male of this species has a massive brain that he uses to hunt for cold beer. 
(Laughter) And when he finds one, he drains it, and sometimes throws the bottle into the outback. 
Now, as it happens, these bottles are dimpled, glossy, and just the right shade of brown to tickle the fancy of these beetles. 
The males swarm all over the bottles trying to mate. 
They lose all interest in the real females. 
Classic case of the male leaving the female for the bottle. 
(Laughter) (Applause) The species almost went extinct. 
Australia had to change its bottles to save its beetles. 
(Laughter) Now, the males had successfully found females for thousands, perhaps millions of years. 
It looked like they saw reality as it is, but apparently not. 
Evolution had given them a hack. 
A female is anything dimpled, glossy and brown, the bigger the better. 
(Laughter) Even when crawling all over the bottle, the male couldn't discover his mistake. 
Now, you might say, beetles, sure, they're very simple creatures, but surely not mammals. 
Mammals don't rely on tricks. 
Well, I won't dwell on this, but you get the idea. (Laughter) So this raises an important technical question: Does natural selection really favor seeing reality as it is? 
Fortunately, we don't have to wave our hands and guess; evolution is a mathematically precise theory. 
We can use the equations of evolution to check this out. 
We can have various organisms in artificial worlds compete and see which survive and which thrive, which sensory systems are more fit. 
A key notion in those equations is fitness. 
Consider this steak: What does this steak do for the fitness of an animal? 
Well, for a hungry lion looking to eat, it enhances fitness. 
For a well-fed lion looking to mate, it doesn't enhance fitness. 
And for a rabbit in any state, it doesn't enhance fitness, so fitness does depend on reality as it is, yes, but also on the organism, its state and its action. 
Fitness is not the same thing as reality as it is, and it's fitness, and not reality as it is, that figures centrally in the equations of evolution. 
So, in my lab, we have run hundreds of thousands of evolutionary game simulations with lots of different randomly chosen worlds and organisms that compete for resources in those worlds. 
Some of the organisms see all of the reality, others see just part of the reality, and some see none of the reality, only fitness. 
Who wins? 
Well, I hate to break it to you, but perception of reality goes extinct. 
In almost every simulation, organisms that see none of reality but are just tuned to fitness drive to extinction all the organisms that perceive reality as it is. 
So the bottom line is, evolution does not favor veridical, or accurate perceptions. 
Those perceptions of reality go extinct. 
Now, this is a bit stunning. 
How can it be that not seeing the world accurately gives us a survival advantage? 
That is a bit counterintuitive. 
But remember the jewel beetle. 
The jewel beetle survived for thousands, perhaps millions of years, using simple tricks and hacks. 
What the equations of evolution are telling us is that all organisms, including us, are in the same boat as the jewel beetle. 
We do not see reality as it is. 
We're shaped with tricks and hacks that keep us alive. 
Still, we need some help with our intuitions. 
How can not perceiving reality as it is be useful? 
Well, fortunately, we have a very helpful metaphor: the desktop interface on your computer. 
Consider that blue icon for a TED Talk that you're writing. 
Now, the icon is blue and rectangular and in the lower right corner of the desktop. 
Does that mean that the text file itself in the computer is blue, rectangular, and in the lower right-hand corner of the computer? 
Of course not. 
Anyone who thought that misinterprets the purpose of the interface. 
It's not there to show you the reality of the computer. 
In fact, it's there to hide that reality. 
You don't want to know about the diodes and resistors and all the megabytes of software. 
If you had to deal with that, you could never write your text file or edit your photo. 
So the idea is that evolution has given us an interface that hides reality and guides adaptive behavior. 
Space and time, as you perceive them right now, are your desktop. 
Physical objects are simply icons in that desktop. 
There's an obvious objection. 
Hoffman, if you think that train coming down the track at 200 MPH is just an icon of your desktop, why don't you step in front of it? 
And after you're gone, and your theory with you, we'll know that there's more to that train than just an icon. 
Well, I wouldn't step in front of that train for the same reason that I wouldn't carelessly drag that icon to the trash can: not because I take the icon literally — the file is not literally blue or rectangular — but I do take it seriously. 
I could lose weeks of work. 
Similarly, evolution has shaped us with perceptual symbols that are designed to keep us alive. 
We'd better take them seriously. 
If you see a snake, don't pick it up. 
If you see a cliff, don't jump off. 
They're designed to keep us safe, and we should take them seriously. 
That does not mean that we should take them literally. 
That's a logical error. 
Another objection: There's nothing really new here. 
Physicists have told us for a long time that the metal of that train looks solid but really it's mostly empty space with microscopic particles zipping around. 
There's nothing new here. 
Well, not exactly. 
It's like saying, I know that that blue icon on the desktop is not the reality of the computer, but if I pull out my trusty magnifying glass and look really closely, I see little pixels, and that's the reality of the computer. 
Well, not really — you're still on the desktop, and that's the point. 
Those microscopic particles are still in space and time: they're still in the user interface. 
So I'm saying something far more radical than those physicists. 
Finally, you might object, look, we all see the train, therefore none of us constructs the train. 
But remember this example. 
In this example, we all see a cube, but the screen is flat, so the cube that you see is the cube that you construct. 
We all see a cube because we all, each one of us, constructs the cube that we see. 
The same is true of the train. 
We all see a train because we each see the train that we construct, and the same is true of all physical objects. 
We're inclined to think that perception is like a window on reality as it is. 
The theory of evolution is telling us that this is an incorrect interpretation of our perceptions. 
Instead, reality is more like a 3D desktop that's designed to hide the complexity of the real world and guide adaptive behavior. 
Space as you perceive it is your desktop. 
Physical objects are just the icons in that desktop. 
We used to think that the Earth is flat because it looks that way. 
Then we thought that the Earth is the unmoving center of reality because it looks that way. 
We were wrong. 
We had misinterpreted our perceptions. 
Now we believe that spacetime and objects are the nature of reality as it is. 
The theory of evolution is telling us that once again, we're wrong. 
We're misinterpreting the content of our perceptual experiences. 
There's something that exists when you don't look, but it's not spacetime and physical objects. 
It's as hard for us to let go of spacetime and objects as it is for the jewel beetle to let go of its bottle. 
Why? Because we're blind to our own blindnesses. 
But we have an advantage over the jewel beetle: our science and technology. 
By peering through the lens of a telescope we discovered that the Earth is not the unmoving center of reality, and by peering through the lens of the theory of evolution we discovered that spacetime and objects are not the nature of reality. 
When I have a perceptual experience that I describe as a red tomato, I am interacting with reality, but that reality is not a red tomato and is nothing like a red tomato. 
Similarly, when I have an experience that I describe as a lion or a steak, I'm interacting with reality, but that reality is not a lion or a steak. 
And here's the kicker: When I have a perceptual experience that I describe as a brain, or neurons, I am interacting with reality, but that reality is not a brain or neurons and is nothing like a brain or neurons. 
And that reality, whatever it is, is the real source of cause and effect in the world — not brains, not neurons. 
Brains and neurons have no causal powers. 
They cause none of our perceptual experiences, and none of our behavior. 
Brains and neurons are a species-specific set of symbols, a hack. 
What does this mean for the mystery of consciousness? 
Well, it opens up new possibilities. 
For instance, perhaps reality is some vast machine that causes our conscious experiences. 
I doubt this, but it's worth exploring. 
Perhaps reality is some vast, interacting network of conscious agents, simple and complex, that cause each other's conscious experiences. 
Actually, this isn't as crazy an idea as it seems, and I'm currently exploring it. 
But here's the point: Once we let go of our massively intuitive but massively false assumption about the nature of reality, it opens up new ways to think about life's greatest mystery. 
I bet that reality will end up turning out to be more fascinating and unexpected than we've ever imagined. 
The theory of evolution presents us with the ultimate dare: Dare to recognize that perception is not about seeing truth, it's about having kids. 
And by the way, even this TED is just in your head. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: If that's really you there, thank you. 
So there's so much from this. 
I mean, first of all, some people may just be profoundly depressed at the thought that, if evolution does not favor reality, I mean, doesn't that to some extent undermine all our endeavors here, all our ability to think that we can think the truth, possibly even including your own theory, if you go there? 
Donald Hoffman: Well, this does not stop us from a successful science. 
What we have is one theory that turned out to be false, that perception is like reality and reality is like our perceptions. 
That theory turns out to be false. 
Okay, throw that theory away. 
That doesn't stop us from now postulating all sorts of other theories about the nature of reality, so it's actually progress to recognize that one of our theories was false. 
So science continues as normal. There's no problem here. 
CA: So you think it's possible — (Laughter) — This is cool, but what you're saying I think is it's possible that evolution can still get you to reason. 
DH: Yes. Now that's a very, very good point. 
The evolutionary game simulations that I showed were specifically about perception, and they do show that our perceptions have been shaped not to show us reality as it is, but that does not mean the same thing about our logic or mathematics. 
We haven't done these simulations, but my bet is that we'll find that there are some selection pressures for our logic and our mathematics to be at least in the direction of truth. 
I mean, if you're like me, math and logic is not easy. 
We don't get it all right, but at least the selection pressures are not uniformly away from true math and logic. 
So I think that we'll find that we have to look at each cognitive faculty one at a time and see what evolution does to it. 
What's true about perception may not be true about math and logic. 
CA: I mean, really what you're proposing is a kind of modern-day Bishop Berkeley interpretation of the world: consciousness causes matter, not the other way around. 
DH: Well, it's slightly different than Berkeley. 
Berkeley thought that, he was a deist, and he thought that the ultimate nature of reality is God and so forth, and I don't need to go where Berkeley's going, so it's quite a bit different from Berkeley. 
I call this conscious realism. It's actually a very different approach. 
CA: Don, I could literally talk with you for hours, and I hope to do that. 
Thanks so much for that. DH: Thank you. (Applause) 

Once there was a star. 
Like everything else, she was born; grew to be around 30 times the mass of our sun and lived for a very long time. 
Exactly how long, people cannot really tell. 
Just like everything in life, she reached the end of her regular star days when her heart, the core of her life, exhausted its fuel. 
But that was no end. 
She transformed into a supernova, and in the process releasing a tremendous amount of energy, outshining the rest of the galaxy and emitting, in one second, the same amount of energy our sun will release in 10 days. 
And she evolved into another role in our galaxy. 
Supernova explosions are very extreme. 
But the ones that emit gamma rays are even more extreme. 
In the process of becoming a supernova, the interior of the star collapses under its own weight and it starts rotating ever faster, like an ice skater when pulling their arms in close to their body. 
In that way, it starts rotating very fast and it increases, powerfully, its magnetic field. 
The matter around the star is dragged around, and some energy from that rotation is transferred to that matter and the magnetic field is increased even further. 
In that way, our star had extra energy to outshine the rest of the galaxy in brightness and gamma ray emission. 
My star, the one in my story, became what is known as a magnetar. 
And just for your information, the magnetic field of a magnetar is 1,000 trillion times the magnetic field of Earth. 
The most energetic events ever measured by astronomers carry the name gamma-ray bursts because we observe them as bursts most or explosions, most strongly measured as gamma-ray light. 
Our star, like the one in our story that became a magnetar, is detected as a gamma-ray burst during the most energetic portion of the explosion. 
Yet, even though gamma-ray bursts are the strongest events ever measured by astronomers, we cannot see them with our naked eye. 
We depend, we rely on other methods in order to study this gamma-ray light. 
We cannot see them with our naked eye. 
We can only see an itty bitty, tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we call visible light. 
And beyond that, we rely on other methods. 
Yet as astronomers, we study a wider range of light and we depend on other methods to do that. 
On the screen, it may look like this. 
You're seeing a plot. 
That is a light curve. 
It's a plot of intensity of light over time. 
It is a gamma-ray light curve. 
Sighted astronomers depend on this kind of plot in order to interpret how this light intensity changes over time. 
On the left, you will be seeing the light intensity without a burst, and on the right, you will be seeing the light intensity with the burst. 
Early during my career, I could also see this kind of plot. 
But then, I lost my sight. 
I completely lost my sight because of extended illness, and with it, I lost the opportunity to see this plot and the opportunity to do my physics. 
It was a very strong transition for me in many ways. 
And professionally, it left me without a way to do my science. 
I longed to access and scrutinize this energetic light and figure out the astrophysical cause. 
I wanted to experience the spacious wonder, the excitement, the joy produced by the detection of such a titanic celestial event. 
I thought long and hard about it, when I suddenly realized that all a light curve is, is a table of numbers converted into a visual plot. 
So along with my collaborators, we worked really hard and we translated the numbers into sound. 
I achieved access to the data, and today I'm able to do physics at the level of the best astronomer, using sound. 
And what people have been able to do, mainly visually, for hundreds of years, now I do it using sound. 
(Applause) Listening to this gamma-ray burst that you're seeing on the — (Applause continues) Thank you. 
Listening to this burst that you're seeing on the screen brought something to the ear beyond the obvious burst. 
Now I'm going to play the burst for you. 
It's not music, it's sound. 
(Digital beeping sounds) This is scientific data converted into sound, and it's mapped in pitch. 
The process is called sonification. 
So listening to this brought something to the ear besides the obvious burst. 
When I examine the very strong low-frequency regions, or bass line — I'm zooming into the bass line now. 
We noted resonances characteristic of electrically charged gasses like the solar wind. 
And I want you to hear what I heard. 
You will hear it as a very fast decrease in volume. 
And because you're sighted, I'm giving you a red line indicating what intensity of light is being converted into sound. 
(Digital hum and whistling sound) The (Whistles) is frogs at home, don't pay attention to that. 
(Laughter) (Digital hum and whistling sound) I think you heard it, right? 
So what we found is that the bursts last long enough in order to support wave resonances, which are things caused by exchanges of energy between particles that may have been excited, that depend on the volume. 
You may remember that I said that the matter around the star is dragged around? 
It transmits power with frequency and field distribution determined by the dimensions. 
You may remember that we were talking about a super-massive star that became a very strong magnetic field magnetar. 
If this is the case, then outflows from the exploding star may be associated with this gamma-ray burst. 
What does that mean? 
That star formation may be a very important part of these supernova explosions. 
Listening to this very gamma-ray burst brought us to the notion that the use of sound as an adjunctive visual display may also support sighted astronomers in the search for more information in the data. 
Simultaneously, I worked on analyzing measurements from other telescopes, and my experiments demonstrated that when you use sound as an adjunctive visual display, astronomers can find more information in this now more accessible data set. 
This ability to transform data into sound gives astronomy a tremendous power of transformation. 
And the fact that a field that is so visual may be improved in order to include anyone with interest in understanding what lies in the heavens is a spirit-lifter. 
When I lost my sight, I noticed that I didn't have access to the same amount and quality of information a sighted astronomer had. 
It was not until we innovated with the sonification process that I regained the hope to be a productive member of the field that I had worked so hard to be part of. 
Yet, information access is not the only area in astronomy where this is important. 
The situation is systemic and scientific fields are not keeping up. 
The body is something changeable — anyone may develop a disability at any point. 
Let's think about, for example, scientists that are already at the top of their careers. 
What happens to them if they develop a disability? 
Will they feel excommunicated as I did? 
Information access empowers us to flourish. 
It gives us equal opportunities to display our talents and choose what we want to do with our lives, based on interest and not based on potential barriers. 
When we give people the opportunity to succeed without limits, that will lead to personal fulfillment and prospering life. 
And I think that the use of sound in astronomy is helping us to achieve that and to contribute to science. 
While other countries told me that the study of perception techniques in order to study astronomy data is not relevant to astronomy because there are no blind astronomers in the field, South Africa said, "" We want people with disabilities to contribute to the field. "" Right now, I'm working at the South African Astronomical Observatory, at the Office of Astronomy for Development. 
There, we are working on sonification techniques and analysis methods to impact the students of the Athlone School for the Blind. 
These students will be learning radio astronomy, and they will be learning the sonification methods in order to study astronomical events like huge ejections of energy from the sun, known as coronal mass ejections. 
What we learn with these students — these students have multiple disabilities and coping strategies that will be accommodated — what we learn with these students will directly impact the way things are being done at the professional level. 
I humbly call this development. 
And this is happening right now. 
I think that science is for everyone. 
It belongs to the people, and it has to be available to everyone, because we are all natural explorers. 
I think that if we limit people with disabilities from participating in science, we'll sever our links with history and with society. 
I dream of a level scientific playing field, where people encourage respect and respect each other, where people exchange strategies and discover together. 
If people with disabilities are allowed into the scientific field, an explosion, a huge titanic burst of knowledge will take place, I am sure. 
(Digital beeping sounds) That is the titanic burst. 
Thank you. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hello, Doha. Hello! 
It feels like the United Nations here. 
You land at the airport, and you're welcomed by an Indian lady who takes you to Al Maha Services, where you meet a Filipino lady who hands you off to a South African lady who then takes you to a Korean who takes you to a Pakistani guy with the luggage who takes you to the car with a Sri Lankan. 
I said, "" Where are the Qataris? "" (Laughter) (Applause) They said, "" No, no, it's too hot. They come out later. They're smart. "" "They know." (Laughter) 
You know, like sometimes you run into people that you think know the city well, but they don't know it that well. 
My Indian cab driver showed up at the W, and I asked him to take me to the Sheraton, and he said, "" No problem, sir. "" And then we sat there for two minutes. 
I said, "" What's wrong? "" He said, "" One problem, sir. "" (Laughter) I said, "" What? "" He goes, "" Where is it? "" (Laughter) I go, "" You're the driver, you should know. "" He goes, "" No, I just arrived, sir. "" I go, "" You just arrived at the W? "" "" No, I just arrived in Doha, sir. "" (Laughter) "" I was on my way home from the airport, I got a job. I'm working already. "" (Laughter) He goes, "" Sir, why don't you drive? "" (Laughter) "I don't know where we're going." 
(Laughter) Every country is different and it's confusing, okay? 
In Saudi Arabia, they go one, two, and then they stay on the same side: three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 — (Laughter) Next time you see a Saudi, look closely. 
Why is that? Are you too tired to go all the way around? 
(Laughter) "" Habibi, it's so hot. Just come here for a second. Say hello. 
Hello, Habibi. Just don't move. Just stay there, please. 
I need to rest. "" (Laughter) Iranians, sometimes we do two, sometimes we do three. 
So with Iranians, you can tell whose side the person is on based on the number of kisses they give you. 
But no, guys, really, it is exciting to be here, and like I said, you guys are doing a lot culturally, you know, and it's amazing, and it helps change the image of the Middle East in the West. 
There's so much, we laugh, right? 
One guy wrote another guy. He said, "" I never knew these people laughed. "" Think about it. You never see us laughing in American film or television, right? 
But never like, "" Ha ha ha ha la. "" (Laughter) We like to laugh. We like to celebrate life. 
For example, I don't know if you heard about this, a little while ago in the US, there was a Muslim family walking down the aisle of an airplane, talking about the safest place to sit on the plane. 
I'm not supposed to be walking down the aisle, and be like, "" Hi, Jack. "" That's not cool. 
(Laughter) Even if I'm there with my friend named Jack, I say, "Greetings, Jack. Salutations, Jack." 
So my advice to all my Middle Eastern friends and Muslim friends and anyone who looks Middle Eastern or Muslim, so to, you know, Indians, and Latinos, everyone, if you're brown — (Laughter) Here's my advice to my brown friends. (Laughter) 
The next time you're on an airplane in the US, just speak your mother tongue. 
(Laughter) (Imitating Arabic) Rainbow! (Laughter) (Imitating Arabic) 

I'd like to introduce you to an organism: a slime mold, Physarum polycephalum. 
It's a mold with an identity crisis, because it's not a mold, so let's get that straight to start with. 
It is one of 700 known slime molds belonging to the kingdom of the amoeba. 
It is a single-celled organism, a cell, that joins together with other cells to form a mass super-cell to maximize its resources. 
So within a slime mold you might find thousands or millions of nuclei, all sharing a cell wall, all operating as one entity. 
In its natural habitat, you might find the slime mold foraging in woodlands, eating rotting vegetation, but you might equally find it in research laboratories, classrooms, and even artists' studios. 
I first came across the slime mold about five years ago. 
A microbiologist friend of mine gave me a petri dish with a little yellow blob in it and told me to go home and play with it. 
The only instructions I was given, that it likes it dark and damp and its favorite food is porridge oats. 
I'm an artist who's worked for many years with biology, with scientific processes, so living material is not uncommon for me. 
I've worked with plants, bacteria, cuttlefish, fruit flies. 
So I was keen to get my new collaborator home to see what it could do. 
So I took it home and I watched. 
I fed it a varied diet. 
I observed as it networked. 
It formed a connection between food sources. 
I watched it leave a trail behind it, indicating where it had been. 
And I noticed that when it was fed up with one petri dish, it would escape and find a better home. 
I captured my observations through time-lapse photography. 
Slime mold grows at about one centimeter an hour, so it's not really ideal for live viewing unless there's some form of really extreme meditation, but through the time lapse, I could observe some really interesting behaviors. 
For instance, having fed on a nice pile of oats, the slime mold goes off to explore new territories in different directions simultaneously. 
When it meets itself, it knows it's already there, it recognizes it's there, and instead retreats back and grows in other directions. 
I was quite impressed by this feat, at how what was essentially just a bag of cellular slime could somehow map its territory, know itself, and move with seeming intention. 
I found countless scientific studies, research papers, journal articles, all citing incredible work with this one organism, and I'm going to share a few of those with you. 
For example, a team in Hokkaido University in Japan filled a maze with slime mold. 
They introduced food at two points, oats of course, and it formed a connection between the food. 
It retracted from empty areas and dead ends. 
There are four possible routes through this maze, yet time and time again, the slime mold established the shortest and the most efficient route. 
Quite clever. 
The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold had a primitive form of intelligence. 
Another study exposed cold air at regular intervals to the slime mold. 
It didn't like it. It doesn't like it cold. 
It doesn't like it dry. 
They did this at repeat intervals, and each time, the slime mold slowed down its growth in response. 
However, at the next interval, the researchers didn't put the cold air on, yet the slime mold slowed down in anticipation of it happening. 
It somehow knew that it was about the time for the cold air that it didn't like. 
The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold was able to learn. 
A third experiment: the slime mold was invited to explore a territory covered in oats. 
It fans out in a branching pattern. 
As it goes, each food node it finds, it forms a network, a connection to, and keeps foraging. 
After 26 hours, it established quite a firm network between the different oats. 
Now there's nothing remarkable in this until you learn that the center oat that it started from represents the city of Tokyo, and the surrounding oats are suburban railway stations. 
The slime mold had replicated the Tokyo transport network — (Laughter) — a complex system developed over time by community dwellings, civil engineering, urban planning. 
What had taken us well over 100 years took the slime mold just over a day. 
The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold can form efficient networks and solve the traveling salesman problem. 
It is a biological computer. 
As such, it has been mathematically modeled, algorithmically analyzed. 
It's been sonified, replicated, simulated. 
World over, teams of researchers are decoding its biological principles to understand its computational rules and applying that learning to the fields of electronics, programming and robotics. 
So the question is, how does this thing work? 
It doesn't have a central nervous system. 
It doesn't have a brain, yet it can perform behaviors that we associate with brain function. 
It can learn, it can remember, it can solve problems, it can make decisions. 
So where does that intelligence lie? 
So this is a microscopy, a video I shot, and it's about 100 times magnification, sped up about 20 times, and inside the slime mold, there is a rhythmic pulsing flow, a vein-like structure carrying cellular material, nutrients and chemical information through the cell, streaming first in one direction and then back in another. 
And it is this continuous, synchronous oscillation within the cell that allows it to form quite a complex understanding of its environment, but without any large-scale control center. 
This is where its intelligence lies. 
So it's not just academic researchers in universities that are interested in this organism. 
A few years ago, I set up SliMoCo, the Slime Mould Collective. 
It's an online, open, democratic network for slime mold researchers and enthusiasts to share knowledge and experimentation across disciplinary divides and across academic divides. 
The Slime Mould Collective membership is self-selecting. 
People have found the collective as the slime mold finds the oats. 
And it comprises of scientists and computer scientists and researchers but also artists like me, architects, designers, writers, activists, you name it. 
It's a very interesting, eclectic membership. 
Just a few examples: an artist who paints with fluorescent Physarum; a collaborative team who are combining biological and electronic design with 3D printing technologies in a workshop; another artist who is using the slime mold as a way of engaging a community to map their area. 
Here, the slime mold is being used directly as a biological tool, but metaphorically as a symbol for ways of talking about social cohesion, communication and cooperation. 
Other public engagement activities, I run lots of slime mold workshops, a creative way of engaging with the organism. 
So people are invited to come and learn about what amazing things it can do, and they design their own petri dish experiment, an environment for the slime mold to navigate so they can test its properties. 
Everybody takes home a new pet and is invited to post their results on the Slime Mould Collective. 
And the collective has enabled me to form collaborations with a whole array of interesting people. 
I've been working with filmmakers on a feature-length slime mold documentary, and I stress feature-length, which is in the final stages of edit and will be hitting your cinema screens very soon. 
(Laughter) It's also enabled me to conduct what I think is the world's first human slime mold experiment. 
This is part of an exhibition in Rotterdam last year. 
We invited people to become slime mold for half an hour. 
So we essentially tied people together so they were a giant cell, and invited them to follow slime mold rules. 
You have to communicate through oscillations, no speaking. 
You have to operate as one entity, one mass cell, no egos, and the motivation for moving and then exploring the environment is in search of food. 
So a chaotic shuffle ensued as this bunch of strangers tied together with yellow ropes wearing "" Being Slime Mold "" t-shirts wandered through the museum park. 
When they met trees, they had to reshape their connections and reform as a mass cell through not speaking. 
This is a ludicrous experiment in many, many ways. 
This isn't hypothesis-driven. 
We're not trying to prove, demonstrate anything. 
But what it did provide us was a way of engaging a broad section of the public with ideas of intelligence, agency, autonomy, and provide a playful platform for discussions about the things that ensued. 
One of the most exciting things about this experiment was the conversation that happened afterwards. 
An entirely spontaneous symposium happened in the park. 
People talked about the human psychology, of how difficult it was to let go of their individual personalities and egos. 
Other people talked about bacterial communication. 
Each person brought in their own individual interpretation, and our conclusion from this experiment was that the people of Rotterdam were highly cooperative, especially when given beer. 
We didn't just give them oats. 
We gave them beer as well. 
But they weren't as efficient as the slime mold, and the slime mold, for me, is a fascinating subject matter. 
It's biologically fascinating, it's computationally interesting, but it's also a symbol, a way of engaging with ideas of community, collective behavior, cooperation. 
A lot of my work draws on the scientific research, so this pays homage to the maze experiment but in a different way. 
And the slime mold is also my working material. 
It's a coproducer of photographs, prints, animations, participatory events. 
Whilst the slime mold doesn't choose to work with me, exactly, it is a collaboration of sorts. 
I can predict certain behaviors by understanding how it operates, but I can't control it. 
The slime mold has the final say in the creative process. 
And after all, it has its own internal aesthetics. 
These branching patterns that we see we see across all forms, scales of nature, from river deltas to lightning strikes, from our own blood vessels to neural networks. 
There's clearly significant rules at play in this simple yet complex organism, and no matter what our disciplinary perspective or our mode of inquiry, there's a great deal that we can learn from observing and engaging with this beautiful, brainless blob. 
I give you Physarum polycephalum. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I have a confession to make. 
I am addicted to adventure, and as a young boy, I would rather look outside the window at the birds in the trees and the sky than looking at that two-dimensional chalky blackboard where time stands still and even sometimes dies. 
My teachers thought there was something wrong with me because I wasn't paying attention in class. 
They didn't find anything specifically wrong with me, other than being slightly dyslexic because I'm a lefty. 
But they didn't test for curiosity. 
Curiosity, to me, is about our connection with the world, with the universe. 
It's about seeing what's around that next coral head or what's around that next tree, and learning more not only about our environment but about ourselves. 
Now, my dream of dreams, I want to go explore the oceans of Mars, but until we can go there, I think the oceans still hold quite a few secrets. 
As a matter of fact, if you take our planet as the oasis in space that it is and dissect it into a living space, the ocean represents over 3.4 billion cubic kilometers of volume, within which we've explored less than five percent. 
And I look at this, and I go, well, there are tools to go deeper, longer and further: submarines, ROVs, even Scuba diving. 
But if we're going to explore the final frontier on this planet, we need to live there. 
We need to build a log cabin, if you will, at the bottom of the sea. 
And so there was a great curiosity in my soul when I went to go visit a TED [Prize winner] by the name of Dr. Sylvia Earle. 
Maybe you've heard of her. 
Two years ago, she was staked out at the last undersea marine laboratory to try and save it, to try and petition for us not to scrap it and bring it back on land. 
We've only had about a dozen or so scientific labs at the bottom of the sea. 
There's only one left in the world: it's nine miles offshore and 65 feet down. 
It's called Aquarius. 
Aquarius, in some fashion, is a dinosaur, an ancient robot chained to the bottom, this Leviathan. 
In other ways, it's a legacy. 
And so with that visit, I realized that my time is short if I wanted to experience what it was like to become an aquanaut. 
When we swam towards this after many moons of torture and two years of preparation, this habitat waiting to invite us was like a new home. 
And the point of going down to and living at this habitat was not to stay inside. 
It wasn't about living at something the size of a school bus. 
It was about giving us the luxury of time outside to wander, to explore, to understand more about this oceanic final frontier. 
We had megafauna come and visit us. 
This spotted eagle ray is a fairly common sight in the oceans. 
But why this is so important, why this picture is up, is because this particular animal brought his friends around, and instead of being the pelagic animals that they were, they started getting curious about us, these new strangers that were moving into the neighborhood, doing things with plankton. 
We were studying all sorts of animals and critters, and they got closer and closer to us, and because of the luxury of time, these animals, these residents of the coral reef, were starting to get used to us, and these pelagics that normal travel through stopped. 
This particular animal actually circled for 31 full days during our mission. 
So mission 31 wasn't so much about breaking records. 
It was about that human-ocean connection. 
Because of the luxury of time, we were able to study animals such as sharks and grouper in aggregations that we've never seen before. 
It's like seeing dogs and cats behaving well together. 
Even being able to commune with animals that are much larger than us, such as this endangered goliath grouper who only still resides in the Florida Keys. 
Of course, just like any neighbor, after a while, if they get tired, the goliath grouper barks at us, and this bark is so powerful that it actually stuns its prey before it aspirates it all within a split second. 
For us, it's just telling us to go back into the habitat and leave them alone. 
Now, this wasn't just about adventure. 
There was actually a serious note to it. 
We did a lot of science, and again, because of the luxury of time, we were able to do over three years of science in 31 days. 
In this particular case, we were using a PAM, or, let me just see if I can get this straight, a Pulse Amplitude Modulated Fluorometer. 
And our scientists from FIU, MIT, and from Northeastern were able to get a gauge for what coral reefs do when we're not around. 
The Pulse Amplitude Modulated Fluorometer, or PAM, gauges the fluorescence of corals as it pertains to pollutants in the water as well as climate change-related issues. 
We used all sorts of other cutting-edge tools, such as this sonde, or what I like to call the sponge proctologist, whereby the sonde itself tests for metabolism rates in what in this particular case is a barrel sponge, or the redwoods of the [ocean]. 
And this gives us a much better gauge of what's happening underwater with regard to climate change-related issues, and how the dynamics of that affect us here on land. 
And finally, we looked at predator-prey behavior. 
And predator-prey behavior is an interesting thing, because as we take away some of the predators on these coral reefs around the world, the prey, or the forage fish, act very differently. 
What we realized is not only do they stop taking care of the reef, darting in, grabbing a little bit of algae and going back into their homes, they start spreading out and disappearing from those particular coral reefs. 
Well, within that 31 days, we were able to generate over 10 scientific papers on each one of these topics. 
But the point of adventure is not only to learn, it's to be able to share that knowledge with the world, and with that, thanks to a couple of engineers at MIT, we were able to use a prototype camera called the Edgertronic to capture slow-motion video, up to 20,000 frames per second in a little box that's worth 3,000 dollars. 
It's available to every one of us. 
And that particular camera gives us an insight into what fairly common animals do but we can't even see it in the blink of an eye. 
Let me show you a quick video of what this camera does. 
You can see the silky bubble come out of our hard hats. 
It gives us an insight into some of the animals that we were sitting right next to for 31 days and never normally would have paid attention to, such as hermit crabs. 
Now, using a cutting-edge piece of technology that's not really meant for the oceans is not always easy. 
We sometimes had to put the camera upside down, cordon it back to the lab, and actually man the trigger from the lab itself. 
But what this gives us is the foresight to look at and analyze in scientific and engineering terms some of the most amazing behavior that the human eye just can't pick up, such as this manta shrimp trying to catch its prey, within about .3 seconds. 
That punch is as strong as a .22 caliber bullet, and if you ever try to catch a bullet in mid-flight with your eye, impossible. 
But now we can see things such as these Christmas tree worms pulling in and fanning out in a way that the eye just can't capture, or in this case, a fish throwing up grains of sand. 
This is an actual sailfin goby, and if you look at it in real time, it actually doesn't even show its fanning motion because it's so quick. 
One of the most precious gifts that we had underwater is that we had WiFi, and for 31 days straight we were able to connect with the world in real time from the bottom of the sea and share all of these experiences. 
Quite literally right there I am Skyping in the classroom with one of the six continents and some of the 70,000 students that we connected every single day to some of these experiences. 
As a matter of fact, I'm showing a picture that I took with my smartphone from underwater of a goliath grouper laying on the bottom. 
We had never seen that before. 
And I dream of the day that we have underwater cities, and maybe, just maybe, if we push the boundaries of adventure and knowledge, and we share that knowledge with others out there, we can solve all sorts of problems. 
My grandfather used to say, "People protect what they love." 
My father, "" How can people protect what they don't understand? "" And I've thought about this my whole life. 
Nothing is impossible. 
We need to dream, we need to be creative, and we all need to have an adventure in order to create miracles in the darkest of times. 
And whether it's about climate change or eradicating poverty or giving back to future generations what we've taken for granted, it's about adventure. 
And who knows, maybe there will be underwater cities, and maybe some of you will become the future aquanauts. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I was a student in the '60s, a time of social upheaval and questioning, and — on a personal level — an awakening sense of idealism. 
The war in Vietnam was raging, the Civil Rights movement was under way and pictures had a powerful influence on me. 
Our political and military leaders were telling us one thing and photographers were telling us another. 
I believed the photographers and so did millions of other Americans. 
Their images fuelled resistance to the war and to racism. 
They not only recorded history — they helped change the course of history. 
Their pictures became part of our collective consciousness and, as consciousness evolved into a shared sense of conscience, change became not only possible, but inevitable. 
It puts a human face on issues which, from afar, can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact. 
What happens at ground level, far from the halls of power, happens to ordinary citizens one by one. 
And I understood that documentary photography has the ability to interpret events from their point of view. 
It gives a voice to those who otherwise would not have a voice. 
My TED wish. There ’ s a vital story that needs to be told and I wish for TED to help me gain access to it and then to help me come up with innovative and exciting ways to use news photography in the digital era. 
Thank you very much. 
[10.3.08 — The story breaks.] ["" I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. ""] [South Africa] [This is happening now.] [Cambodia] [Swaziland] [One person dies every 20 seconds.] [Thailand] [An ancient disease is taking on a deadly new form.] [Siberia] [Lesotho] [Tuberculosis: the next pandemic?] [India] [TB is preventable and curable,] [but it is mutating due to inadequate treatment.] [XDR-TB:] [extreme drug resistant tuberculosis.] [There is no reliable cure.] 
[Patients often die within weeks of diagnosis.] [49 countries have reported XDR-TB.] [XDR-TB is a critical threat to global health.] [Extreme outbreak, suffering, affliction] [Extreme loss, pain, pandemic] [Extremely preventable.] [XDR-TB.] [We can stop this now.] [Spread the story. Stop the disease.] [Go to XDRTB.org now.] [XDRTB.org: we are the treatment.] [We are the treatment.] [Made possible through the kind support of BD.] 

The electricity powering the lights in this theater was generated just moments ago. 
Because the way things stand today, electricity demand must be in constant balance with electricity supply. 
If in the time that it took me to walk out here on this stage, some tens of megawatts of wind power stopped pouring into the grid, the difference would have to be made up from other generators immediately. 
But coal plants, nuclear plants can't respond fast enough. 
A giant battery could. 
With a giant battery, we'd be able to address the problem of intermittency that prevents wind and solar from contributing to the grid in the same way that coal, gas and nuclear do today. 
You see, the battery is the key enabling device here. 
With it, we could draw electricity from the sun even when the sun doesn't shine. 
And that changes everything. 
Because then renewables such as wind and solar come out from the wings, here to center stage. 
Today I want to tell you about such a device. 
It's called the liquid metal battery. 
It's a new form of energy storage that I invented at MIT along with a team of my students and post-docs. 
Now the theme of this year's TED Conference is Full Spectrum. 
The OED defines spectrum as "" The entire range of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, from the longest radio waves to the shortest gamma rays of which the range of visible light is only a small part. "" So I'm not here today only to tell you how my team at MIT has drawn out of nature a solution to one of the world's great problems. 
I want to go full spectrum and tell you how, in the process of developing this new technology, we've uncovered some surprising heterodoxies that can serve as lessons for innovation, ideas worth spreading. 
And you know, if we're going to get this country out of its current energy situation, we can't just conserve our way out; we can't just drill our way out; we can't bomb our way out. 
We're going to do it the old-fashioned American way, we're going to invent our way out, working together. 
(Applause) Now let's get started. 
The battery was invented about 200 years ago by a professor, Alessandro Volta, at the University of Padua in Italy. 
His invention gave birth to a new field of science, electrochemistry, and new technologies such as electroplating. 
Perhaps overlooked, Volta's invention of the battery for the first time also demonstrated the utility of a professor. 
(Laughter) Until Volta, nobody could imagine a professor could be of any use. 
Here's the first battery — a stack of coins, zinc and silver, separated by cardboard soaked in brine. 
This is the starting point for designing a battery — two electrodes, in this case metals of different composition, and an electrolyte, in this case salt dissolved in water. 
The science is that simple. 
Admittedly, I've left out a few details. 
Now I've taught you that battery science is straightforward and the need for grid-level storage is compelling, but the fact is that today there is simply no battery technology capable of meeting the demanding performance requirements of the grid — namely uncommonly high power, long service lifetime and super-low cost. 
We need to think about the problem differently. 
We need to think big, we need to think cheap. 
So let's abandon the paradigm of let's search for the coolest chemistry and then hopefully we'll chase down the cost curve by just making lots and lots of product. 
Instead, let's invent to the price point of the electricity market. 
So that means that certain parts of the periodic table are axiomatically off-limits. 
This battery needs to be made out of earth-abundant elements. 
I say, if you want to make something dirt cheap, make it out of dirt — (Laughter) preferably dirt that's locally sourced. 
And we need to be able to build this thing using simple manufacturing techniques and factories that don't cost us a fortune. 
So about six years ago, I started thinking about this problem. 
And in order to adopt a fresh perspective, I sought inspiration from beyond the field of electricity storage. 
In fact, I looked to a technology that neither stores nor generates electricity, but instead consumes electricity, huge amounts of it. 
I'm talking about the production of aluminum. 
The process was invented in 1886 by a couple of 22-year-olds — Hall in the United States and Heroult in France. 
And just a few short years following their discovery, aluminum changed from a precious metal costing as much as silver to a common structural material. 
You're looking at the cell house of a modern aluminum smelter. 
It's about 50 feet wide and recedes about half a mile — row after row of cells that, inside, resemble Volta's battery, with three important differences. 
Volta's battery works at room temperature. 
It's fitted with solid electrodes and an electrolyte that's a solution of salt and water. 
The Hall-Heroult cell operates at high temperature, a temperature high enough that the aluminum metal product is liquid. 
The electrolyte is not a solution of salt and water, but rather salt that's melted. 
It's this combination of liquid metal, molten salt and high temperature that allows us to send high current through this thing. 
Today, we can produce virgin metal from ore at a cost of less than 50 cents a pound. 
That's the economic miracle of modern electrometallurgy. 
It is this that caught and held my attention to the point that I became obsessed with inventing a battery that could capture this gigantic economy of scale. 
And I did. 
I made the battery all liquid — liquid metals for both electrodes and a molten salt for the electrolyte. 
I'll show you how. 
So I put low-density liquid metal at the top, put a high-density liquid metal at the bottom, and molten salt in between. 
So now, how to choose the metals? 
For me, the design exercise always begins here with the periodic table, enunciated by another professor, Dimitri Mendeleyev. 
Everything we know is made of some combination of what you see depicted here. 
And that includes our own bodies. 
I recall the very moment one day when I was searching for a pair of metals that would meet the constraints of earth abundance, different, opposite density and high mutual reactivity. 
I felt the thrill of realization when I knew I'd come upon the answer. 
Magnesium for the top layer. 
And antimony for the bottom layer. 
You know, I've got to tell you, one of the greatest benefits of being a professor: colored chalk. 
(Laughter) So to produce current, magnesium loses two electrons to become magnesium ion, which then migrates across the electrolyte, accepts two electrons from the antimony, and then mixes with it to form an alloy. 
The electrons go to work in the real world out here, powering our devices. 
Now to charge the battery, we connect a source of electricity. 
It could be something like a wind farm. 
And then we reverse the current. 
And this forces magnesium to de-alloy and return to the upper electrode, restoring the initial constitution of the battery. 
And the current passing between the electrodes generates enough heat to keep it at temperature. 
It's pretty cool, at least in theory. 
But does it really work? 
So what to do next? 
We go to the laboratory. 
Now do I hire seasoned professionals? 
No, I hire a student and mentor him, teach him how to think about the problem, to see it from my perspective and then turn him loose. 
This is that student, David Bradwell, who, in this image, appears to be wondering if this thing will ever work. 
What I didn't tell David at the time was I myself wasn't convinced it would work. 
But David's young and he's smart and he wants a Ph.D., and he proceeds to build — (Laughter) He proceeds to build the first ever liquid metal battery of this chemistry. 
And based on David's initial promising results, which were paid with seed funds at MIT, I was able to attract major research funding from the private sector and the federal government. 
And that allowed me to expand my group to 20 people, a mix of graduate students, post-docs and even some undergraduates. 
And I was able to attract really, really good people, people who share my passion for science and service to society, not science and service for career building. 
And if you ask these people why they work on liquid metal battery, their answer would hearken back to President Kennedy's remarks at Rice University in 1962 when he said — and I'm taking liberties here — "" We choose to work on grid-level storage, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. "" (Applause) So this is the evolution of the liquid metal battery. 
We start here with our workhorse one watt-hour cell. 
I called it the shotglass. 
We've operated over 400 of these, perfecting their performance with a plurality of chemistries — not just magnesium and antimony. 
Along the way we scaled up to the 20 watt-hour cell. 
I call it the hockey puck. 
And we got the same remarkable results. 
And then it was onto the saucer. 
That's 200 watt-hours. 
The technology was proving itself to be robust and scalable. 
But the pace wasn't fast enough for us. 
So a year and a half ago, David and I, along with another research staff-member, formed a company to accelerate the rate of progress and the race to manufacture product. 
So today at LMBC, we're building cells 16 inches in diameter with a capacity of one kilowatt-hour — 1,000 times the capacity of that initial shotglass cell. 
We call that the pizza. 
And then we've got a four kilowatt-hour cell on the horizon. 
It's going to be 36 inches in diameter. 
We call that the bistro table, but it's not ready yet for prime-time viewing. 
And one variant of the technology has us stacking these bistro tabletops into modules, aggregating the modules into a giant battery that fits in a 40-foot shipping container for placement in the field. 
And this has a nameplate capacity of two megawatt-hours — two million watt-hours. 
That's enough energy to meet the daily electrical needs of 200 American households. 
So here you have it, grid-level storage: silent, emissions-free, no moving parts, remotely controlled, designed to the market price point without subsidy. 
So what have we learned from all this? 
(Applause) So what have we learned from all this? 
Let me share with you some of the surprises, the heterodoxies. 
They lie beyond the visible. 
Temperature: Conventional wisdom says set it low, at or near room temperature, and then install a control system to keep it there. 
Avoid thermal runaway. 
Liquid metal battery is designed to operate at elevated temperature with minimum regulation. 
Our battery can handle the very high temperature rises that come from current surges. 
Scaling: Conventional wisdom says reduce cost by producing many. 
Liquid metal battery is designed to reduce cost by producing fewer, but they'll be larger. 
And finally, human resources: Conventional wisdom says hire battery experts, seasoned professionals, who can draw upon their vast experience and knowledge. 
To develop liquid metal battery, I hired students and post-docs and mentored them. 
In a battery, I strive to maximize electrical potential; when mentoring, I strive to maximize human potential. 
So you see, the liquid metal battery story is more than an account of inventing technology, it's a blueprint for inventing inventors, full-spectrum. 
(Applause) 

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

Do we live in a borderless world? 
Before you answer that, have a look at this map. 
Contemporary political map shows that we have over 200 countries in the world today. 
That's probably more than at any time in centuries. 
Now, many of you will object. 
For you this would be a more appropriate map. 
You could call it TEDistan. 
In TEDistan, there are no borders, just connected spaces and unconnected spaces. 
Most of you probably reside in one of the 40 dots on this screen, of the many more that represent 90 percent of the world economy. 
But let's talk about the 90 percent of the world population that will never leave the place in which they were born. 
For them, nations, countries, boundaries, borders still matter a great deal, and often violently. 
Now here at TED, we're solving some of the great riddles of science and mysteries of the universe. 
Well here is a fundamental problem we have not solved: our basic political geography. 
How do we distribute ourselves around the world? 
Now this is important, because border conflicts justify so much of the world's military-industrial complex. 
Border conflicts can derail so much of the progress that we hope to achieve here. 
So I think we need a deeper understanding of how people, money, power, religion, culture, technology interact to change the map of the world. 
And we can try to anticipate those changes, and shape them in a more constructive direction. 
So we're going to look at some maps of the past, the present and some maps you haven't seen in order to get a sense of where things are going. 
Let's start with the world of 1945. 
1945 there were just 100 countries in the world. 
After World War II, Europe was devastated, but still held large overseas colonies: French West Africa, British East Africa, South Asia, and so forth. 
Then over the late '40s,' 50s, '60s,' 70s and '80s, waves of decolonization took place. 
Over 50 new countries were born. 
You can see that Africa has been fragmented. 
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South East Asian nations created. 
Then came the end of the Cold War. 
The end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. 
You had the creation of new states in Eastern Europe, the former Yugoslav republics and the Balkans, and the 'stans of central Asia. 
Today we have 200 countries in the world. 
The entire planet is covered by sovereign, independent nation-states. 
Does that mean that someone's gain has to be someone else's loss? 
Let's zoom in on one of the most strategic areas of the world, Eastern Eurasia. 
As you can see on this map, Russia is still the largest country in the world. 
And as you know, China is the most populous. 
And they share a lengthy land border. 
What you don't see on this map is that most of Russia's 150 million people are concentrated in its western provinces and areas that are close to Europe. 
And only 30 million people are in its eastern areas. 
In fact, the World Bank predicts that Russia's population is declining towards about 120 million people And there is another thing that you don't see on this map. 
Stalin, Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders forced Russians out to the far east to be in gulags, labor camps, nuclear cities, whatever the case was. 
But as oil prices rose, Russian governments have invested in infrastructure to unite the country, east and west. 
But nothing has more perversely impacted Russia's demographic distribution, because the people in the east, who never wanted to be there anyway, have gotten on those trains and roads and gone back to the west. 
As a result, in the Russian far east today, which is twice the size of India, you have exactly six million Russians. 
So let's get a sense of what is happening in this part of the world. 
We can start with Mongolia, or as some call it, Mine-golia. 
Why do they call it that? 
Because in Mine-golia, Chinese firms operate and own most of the mines — copper, zinc, gold — and they truck the resources south and east into mainland China. 
China isn't conquering Mongolia. 
It's buying it. 
Colonies were once conquered. Today countries are bought. 
So let's apply this principle to Siberia. 
Siberia most of you probably think of as a cold, desolate, unlivable place. 
But in fact, with global warming and rising temperatures, all of a sudden you have vast wheat fields and agribusiness, and grain being produced in Siberia. 
But who is it going to feed? 
Well, just on the other side of the Amo River, in the Heilongjiang and Harbin provinces of China, you have over 100 million people. 
That's larger than the entire population of Russia. 
Every single year, for at least a decade or more, [60,000] of them have been voting with their feet, crossing, moving north and inhabiting this desolate terrain. 
They set up their own bazaars and medical clinics. 
They've taken over the timber industry and been shipping the lumber east, back into China. 
Again, like Mongolia, China isn't conquering Russia. It's just leasing it. 
That's what I call globalization Chinese style. 
Now maybe this is what the map of the region might look like in 10 to 20 years. 
But hold on. This map is 700 years old. 
This is the map of the Yuan Dynasty, led by Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan. 
So history doesn't necessarily repeat itself, but it does rhyme. 
This is just to give you a taste of what's happening in this part of the world. 
Again, globalization Chinese style. 
Because globalization opens up all kinds of ways for us to undermine and change the way we think about political geography. 
So, the history of East Asia in fact, people don't think about nations and borders. 
They think more in terms of empires and hierarchies, usually Chinese or Japanese. 
Well it's China's turn again. 
So let's look at how China is re-establishing that hierarchy in the far East. 
It starts with the global hubs. 
Remember the 40 dots on the nighttime map that show the hubs of the global economy? 
East Asia today has more of those global hubs than any other region in the world. 
Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sidney. 
These are the filters and funnels of global capital. 
Trillions of dollars a year are being brought into the region, so much of it being invested into China. 
Then there is trade. 
These vectors and arrows represent ever stronger trade relationships that China has with every country in the region. 
Specifically, it targets Japan and Korea and Australia, countries that are strong allies of the United States. 
Australia, for example, is heavily dependent on exporting iron ore and natural gas to China. 
For poorer countries, China reduces tariffs so that Laos and Cambodia can sell their goods more cheaply and become dependent on exporting to China as well. 
And now many of you have been reading in the news how people are looking to China to lead the rebound, the economic rebound, not just in Asia, but potentially for the world. 
The Asian free trade zone, almost free trade zone, that's emerging now has a greater trade volume than trade across the Pacific. 
So China is becoming the anchor of the economy in the region. 
Another pillar of this strategy is diplomacy. 
China has signed military agreements with many countries in the region. 
It has become the hub of diplomatic institutions such as the East Asian Community. 
Some of these organizations don't even have the United States as a member. 
There is a treaty of nonaggression between countries, such that if there were a conflict between China and the United States, most countries vow to just sit it out, including American allies like Korea and Australia. 
Another pillar of the strategy, like Russia, is demographic. 
China exports business people, nannies, students, teachers to teach Chinese around the region, to intermarry and to occupy ever greater commanding heights of the economies. 
Already ethnic Chinese people in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia are the real key factors and drivers in the economies there. 
Chinese pride is resurgent in the region as a result. 
Singapore, for example, used to ban Chinese language education. 
Now it encourages it. 
If you add it all up what do you get? 
Well, if you remember before World War II, Japan had a vision for a greater Japanese co-prosperity sphere. 
What's emerging today is what you might call a greater Chinese co-prosperity sphere. 
So no matter what the lines on the map tell you in terms of nations and borders, what you really have emerging in the far east are national cultures, but in a much more fluid, imperial zone. 
All of this is happening without firing a shot. 
That's most certainly not the case in the Middle East where countries are still very uncomfortable in the borders left behind by European colonialists. 
So what can we do to think about borders differently in this part of the world? 
What lines on the map should we focus on? 
What I want to present to you is what I call state building, day by day. 
Let's start with Iraq. 
Six years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the country still exists more on a map than it does in reality. 
Oil used to be one of the forces holding Iraq together; now it is the most significant cause of the country's disintegration. 
The reason is Kurdistan. 
The Kurds for 3,000 years have been waging a struggle for independence, and now is their chance to finally have it. 
These are pipeline routes, which emerge from Kurdistan, which is an oil-rich region. 
And today, if you go to Kurdistan, you'll see that Kurdish Peshmerga guerillas are squaring off against the Sunni Iraqi army. 
But what are they guarding? 
Is it really a border on the map? 
No. It's the pipelines. 
If the Kurds can control their pipelines, they can set the terms of their own statehood. 
Now should we be upset about this, about the potential disintegration of Iraq? 
I don't believe we should. 
Iraq will still be the second largest oil producer in the world, behind Saudi Arabia. 
And we'll have a chance to solve a 3,000 year old dispute. 
Now remember Kurdistan is landlocked. 
It has no choice but to behave. 
In order to profit from its oil it has to export it through Turkey or Syria, and other countries, and Iraq itself. 
And therefore it has to have amicable relations with them. 
Now lets look at a perennial conflict in the region. 
That is, of course, in Palestine. 
Palestine is something of a cartographic anomaly because it's two parts Palestinian, one part Israel. 
30 years of rose garden diplomacy have not delivered us peace in this conflict. 
What might? I believe that what might solve the problem is infrastructure. 
Today donors are spending billions of dollars on this. 
These two arrows are an arc, an arc of commuter railroads and other infrastructure that link the West Bank and Gaza. 
If Gaza can have a functioning port and be linked to the West Bank, you can have a viable Palestinian state, Palestinian economy. 
That, I believe, is going to bring peace to this particular conflict. 
The lesson from Kurdistan and from Palestine is that independence alone, without infrastructure, is futile. 
Now what might this entire region look like if in fact we focus on other lines on the map besides borders, when the insecurities might abate? 
The last time that was the case was actually a century ago, during the Ottoman Empire. 
This is the Hejaz Railway. 
The Hejaz Railway ran from Istanbul to Medina via Damascus. 
It even had an offshoot running to Haifa in what is today Israel, on the Mediterranean Sea. 
But today the Hejaz Railway lies in tatters, ruins. 
If we were to focus on reconstructing these curvy lines on the map, infrastructure, that cross the straight lines, the borders, I believe the Middle East would be a far more peaceful region. 
Now let's look at another part of the world, the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, the 'stans. 
These countries' borders originate from Stalin's decrees. 
He purposely did not want these countries to make sense. 
He wanted ethnicities to mingle in ways that would allow him to divide and rule. 
Fortunately for them, most of their oil and gas resources were discovered after the Soviet Union collapsed. 
Now I know some of you may be thinking, "" Oil, oil, oil. 
Why is it all he's talking about is oil? "" Well, there is a big difference in the way we used to talk about oil and the way we're talking about it now. 
Before it was, how do we control their oil? 
Now it's their oil for their own purposes. 
And I assure you it's every bit as important to them as it might have been to colonizers and imperialists. 
Here are just some of the pipeline projections and possibilities and scenarios and routes that are being mapped out for the next several decades. 
A great deal of them. 
For a number of countries in this part of the world, having pipelines is the ticket to becoming part of the global economy and for having some meaning besides the borders that they are not loyal to themselves. 
Just take Azerbaijan. 
Azerbaijan was a forgotten corner of the Caucuses, but now with the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline into Turkey, it has rebranded itself as the frontier of the west. 
Then there is Turkmenistan, which most people think of as a frozen basket case. 
But now it's contributing gas across the Caspian Sea to provide for Europe, and even a potentially Turkmen- Afghan-Pakistan-India pipeline as well. 
Then there is Kazakhstan, which didn't even have a name before. 
It was more considered South Siberia during the Soviet Union. 
Today most people recognize Kazakhstan as an emerging geopolitical player. Why? 
Because it has shrewdly designed pipelines to flow across the Caspian, north through Russia, and even east to China. 
More pipelines means more silk roads, instead of the Great Game. 
The Great Game connotes dominance of one over the other. 
Silk road connotes independence and mutual trust. 
The more pipelines we have, the more silk roads we'll have, and the less of a dominant Great Game competition we'll have in the 21st century. 
Now let's look at the only part of the world that really has brought down its borders, and how that has enhanced its strength. 
And that is, of course, Europe. 
The European Union began as just the coal and steel community of six countries, and their main purpose was really to keep the rehabilitation of Germany to happen in a peaceful way. 
But then eventually it grew into 12 countries, and those are the 12 stars on the European flag. 
The E.U. also became a currency block, and is now the most powerful trade block in the entire world. 
On average, the E.U. has grown by one country per year since the end of the Cold War. 
In fact most of that happened on just one day. 
In 2004, 15 new countries joined the E.U. 
and now you have what most people consider a zone of peace spanning 27 countries and 450 million people. 
So what is next? What is the future of the European Union? 
Well in light blue, you see the zones or the regions that are at least two-thirds or more dependent on the European Union for trade and investment. 
What does that tell us? Trade and investment tell us that Europe is putting its money where its mouth is. 
Even if these regions aren't part of the E.U., they are becoming part of its sphere of influence. 
Just take the Balkans. Croatia, Serbia Bosnia, they're not members of the E.U. yet. 
But you can get on a German ICE train and make it almost to Albania. 
In Bosnia you use the Euro currency already, and that's the only currency they're probably ever going to have. 
So, looking at other parts of Europe's periphery, such as North Africa. 
On average, every year or two, a new oil or gas pipeline opens up under the Mediterranean, connecting North Africa to Europe. 
That not only helps Europe diminish its reliance on Russia for energy, but if you travel to North Africa today, you'll hear more and more people saying that they don't really think of their region as the Middle East. 
So in other words, I believe that President Sarkozy of France is right when he talks about a Mediterranean union. 
Now let's look at Turkey and the Caucasus. 
I mentioned Azerbaijan before. 
That corridor of Turkey and the Caucasus has become the conduit for 20 percent of Europe's energy supply. 
So does Turkey really have to be a member of the European Union? 
I don't think it does. I think it's already part of a Euro-Turkish superpower. 
So what's next? Where are we going to see borders change and new countries born? 
Well, South Central Asia, South West Asia is a very good place to start. 
Eight years after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan there is still a tremendous amount of instability. 
Pakistan and Afghanistan are still so fragile that neither of them have dealt constructively with the problem of Pashtun nationalism. 
This is the flag that flies in the minds of 20 million Pashtuns who live on both sides of the Afghan and Pakistan border. 
Let's not neglect the insurgency just to the south, Balochistan. Two weeks ago, Balochi rebels attacked a Pakistani military garrison, and this was the flag that they raised over it. 
The post-colonial entropy that is happening around the world is accelerating, and I expect more such changes to occur in the map as the states fragment. 
Of course, we can't forget Africa. 
53 countries, and by far the most number of suspiciously straight lines on the map. 
If we were to look at all of Africa we could most certainly acknowledge far more, tribal divisions and so forth. 
But let's just look at Sudan, the second-largest country in Africa. 
It has three ongoing civil wars, the genocide in Darfur, which you all know about, the civil war in the east of the country, and south Sudan. 
South Sudan is going to be having a referendum in 2011 in which it is very likely to vote itself independence. 
Now let's go up to the Arctic Circle. 
There is a great race on for energy resources under the Arctic seabed. 
Who will win? Canada? Russia? The United States? 
Actually Greenland. 
Several weeks ago Greenland's [60,000] people voted themselves self-governance rights from Denmark. 
So Denmark is about to get a whole lot smaller. 
What is the lesson from all of this? 
Geopolitics is a very unsentimental discipline. 
It's constantly morphing and changing the world, like climate change. 
And like our relationship with the ecosystem we're always searching for equilibrium in how we divide ourselves across the planet. 
Now we fear changes on the map. 
We fear civil wars, death tolls, having to learn the names of new countries. 
But I believe that the inertia of the existing borders that we have today is far worse and far more violent. 
The question is how do we change those borders, and what lines do we focus on? 
I believe we focus on the lines that cross borders, the infrastructure lines. 
Then we'll wind up with the world we want, a borderless one. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I've got a great idea that's going to change the world. 
Here's the thing: everybody loves a beautiful baby. 
It's the knockout. 
You see it and you go, "" Oh, my God. I'd buy that in a second! "" So why is it that this year's new cars look pretty much exactly like last year's new cars? 
(Laughter) What went wrong between the design studio and the factory? 
Today, I don't want to talk about beautiful babies, I want to talk about the awkward adolescence of design — those sort of dorky teenage years where you're trying to figure out how the world works. 
So here's a problem: four million babies around the world, mostly in developing countries, die every year before their first birthday, even before their first month of life. 
It turns out half of those kids, or about 1.8 million newborns around the world, would make it if you could just keep them warm for the first three days, maybe the first week. 
This is a donated Japanese Atom incubator that we found in a NICU in Kathmandu. 
Probably what happened is a hospital in Japan upgraded their equipment and donated their old stuff to Nepal. 
The problem is, without technicians, without spare parts, donations like this very quickly turn into junk. 
We partnered with a leading medical research institution here in Boston. 
We conducted months of user research overseas, trying to think like designers, human-centered design — "Let's figure out what people want." 
We killed thousands of Post-it notes. 
So the idea here is, unlike the concept car, we want to marry something beautiful with something that actually works. 
And our idea is that this design would inspire manufacturers and other people of influence to take this model and run with it. 
Here's the bad news: the only baby ever actually put inside the NeoNurture incubator was this kid during a Time magazine photo shoot. 
It won lots of awards. 
We wanted to make beautiful things that are going to make the world a better place, and I don't think this kid was even in it long enough to get warm. 
So, really, I want to design for outcomes. 
Those decisions are made by the Ministry of Health or by foreign donors, and it just kind of shows up. 
So it turns out that design for outcomes in one aspect really means thinking about design for manufacture and distribution. 
So we started by finding a manufacturer, an organization called MTTS in Vietnam, that manufactures newborn-care technologies for Southeast Asia. 
Of those newborns, one in 10 roughly, if it's not treated, the jaundice gets so severe that it leads to either a life-long disability, or the kids could even die. 
I went to MIT. OK, we'll figure that out. 
It's over the baby, illuminating a single patient. 
But without training, without some kind of light meter, how would you know? 
Except, what we've learned is that there's no such thing as a dumb user — there are only dumb products. 
We have to think like existentialists: it's not the painting we would have painted, it's the painting that we actually painted. 
How are people actually going to use this? 
So, similarly, when we think about our partner MTTS, they've made some amazing technologies for treating newborn illnesses. 
It sounds crazy, it sounds dumb, but there are actually hospitals who would rather have no equipment than something that looks cheap and crummy. 
So thinking about outcomes, it turns out appearances matter. 
We took all that information together. 
When we think about actual use, you'll notice that Firefly has a single bassinet. 
If you try to put more than one kid in, you're stacking them on top of each other. 
In other words, you want to make the right way to use it the easiest way to use it. 
I have to accept that there are no dumb users, only dumb products. "" We have to ask ourselves hard questions. 
Are we designing for the world that we have? 

When I tried my first trick, it looked like this: (Laughter) I couldn't even do the simplest trick, but it was very natural for me, because I was not dextrous, and hated all sports. 
But after one week of practicing, my throws became more like this: A bit better. 
It took me hours and hours a day to build my skills up to the next level. 
And I won. 
I may get many sponsors, a lot of money, tons of interviews, and be on TV! "" I thought. 
(Laughter) But after coming back to Japan, totally nothing changed in my life. (Laughter) 
As a result of these efforts, and the help of many others, it happened. 
I won the World YoYo Contest again in the artistic performance division. 
(Applause) What I learned from the yo-yo is, if I make enough effort with huge passion, there is no impossible. 
(Applause) (Water sound) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) (Applause ends) (Music) (Applause) 

In the 1600s, there were so many right whales in Cape Cod Bay off the east coast of the U.S. 
that apparently you could walk across their backs from one end of the bay to the other. 
Today, they number in the hundreds, and they're endangered. 
Like them, many species of whales saw their numbers drastically reduced by 200 years of whaling, where they were hunted and killed for their whale meat, oil and whale bone. 
We only have whales in our waters today because of the Save the Whales movement of the '70s. 
It was instrumental in stopping commercial whaling, and was built on the idea that if we couldn't save whales, what could we save? 
It was ultimately a test of our political ability to halt environmental destruction. 
So in the early '80s, there was a ban on commercial whaling that came into force as a result of this campaign. 
Whales in our waters are still low in numbers, however, because they do face a range of other human-induced threats. 
Unfortunately, many people still think that whale conservationists like myself do what we do only because these creatures are charismatic and beautiful. 
This is actually a disservice, because whales are ecosystem engineers. 
They help maintain the stability and health of the oceans, and even provide services to human society. 
So let's talk about why saving whales is critical to the resiliency of the oceans. 
It boils down to two main things: whale poop and rotting carcasses. 
As whales dive to the depths to feed and come up to the surface to breathe, they actually release these enormous fecal plumes. 
This whale pump, as it's called, actually brings essential limiting nutrients from the depths to the surface waters where they stimulate the growth of phytoplankton, which forms the base of all marine food chains. 
So really, having more whales in the oceans pooping is really beneficial to the entire ecosystem. 
Whales are also known to undertake some of the longest migrations of all mammals. 
Gray whales off America migrate 16,000 kilometers between productive feeding areas and less productive calving, or birthing, areas and back every year. 
As they do so, they transport fertilizer in the form of their feces from places that have it to places that need it. 
So clearly, whales are really important in nutrient cycling, both horizontally and vertically, through the oceans. 
But what's really cool is that they're also really important after they're dead. 
Whale carcasses are some of the largest form of detritus to fall from the ocean's surface, and they're called whale fall. 
As these carcasses sink, they provide a feast to some 400-odd species, including the eel-shaped, slime-producing hagfish. 
So over the 200 years of whaling, when we were busy killing and removing these carcasses from the oceans, we likely altered the rate and geographic distribution of these whale falls that would descend into deep oceans, and as a result, probably led to a number of extinctions of species that were most specialized and dependent on these carcasses for their survival. 
Whale carcasses are also known to transport about 190,000 tons of carbon, which is the equivalent of that produced by 80,000 cars per year from the atmosphere to the deep oceans, and the deep oceans are what we call "" carbon sinks, "" because they trap and hold excess carbon from the atmosphere, and therefore help to delay global warming. 
Sometimes these carcasses also wash up on beaches and provide a meal to a number of predatory species on land. 
The 200 years of whaling was clearly detrimental and caused a reduction in the populations of whales between 60 to 90 percent. 
Clearly, the Save the Whales movement was instrumental in preventing commercial whaling from going on, but we need to revise this. 
We need to address the more modern, pressing problems that these whales face in our waters today. 
Amongst other things, we need to stop them from getting plowed down by container ships when they're in their feeding areas, and stop them from getting entangled in fishing nets as they float around in the ocean. 
We also need to learn to contextualize our conservation messages, so people really understand the true ecosystem value of these creatures. 
So, let's save the whales again, but this time, let's not just do it for their sake. 
Let's also do it for ours. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

When I was nine years old, I went off to summer camp for the first time. 
And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do. 
And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social. 
And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better. 
(Laughter) I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns. (Laughter) 
Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. 
And on the very first day, our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit. 
And it went like this: "" R-O-W-D-I-E, that's the way we spell rowdie. 
Rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie. "" (Laughter) Yeah. 
So I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly. 
(Laughter) But I recited a cheer. I recited a cheer along with everybody else. 
And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books. 
And so I put my books away, back in their suitcase, and I put them under my bed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer. 
Now, I tell you this story about summer camp. 
I could have told you 50 others just like it — all the times that I got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of being was not necessarily the right way to go, that I should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert. 
And I always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were. 
But for years I denied this intuition, and so I became a Wall Street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that I had always longed to be — partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive too. 
And I was always going off to crowded bars when I really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. 
And I made these self-negating choices so reflexively, that I wasn't even aware that I was making them. 
So even if you're an extrovert yourself, I'm talking about your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sitting next to you right now — all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society. 
It's different from being shy. 
Shyness is about fear of social judgment. 
Introversion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation. 
So extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments. 
So the key then to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us. 
And also we have this belief system right now that I call the new groupthink, which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place. 
So if you picture the typical classroom nowadays: When I was going to school, we sat in rows. 
We sat in rows of desks like this, and we did most of our work pretty autonomously. 
And the vast majority of teachers reports believing that the ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert, even though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable, according to research. 
And when it comes to leadership, introverts are routinely passed over for leadership positions, even though introverts tend to be very careful, much less likely to take outsize risks — which is something we might all favor nowadays. 
And interesting research by Adam Grant at the Wharton School has found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do, because when they are managing proactive employees, they're much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extrovert can, quite unwittingly, get so excited about things that they're putting their own stamp on things, and other people's ideas might not as easily then bubble up to the surface. 
And I often think that they have the best of all worlds. 
This is especially important when it comes to creativity and to productivity, because when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas, but who also have a serious streak of introversion in them. 
And he was actually afraid to meet the young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting him this kind of jolly Santa Claus-like figure and would be disappointed with his more reserved persona. 
If you look at most of the world's major religions, you will find seekers — Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad — seekers who are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness, where they then have profound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of the community. 
And groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas — I mean zero. 
So — (Laughter) You might be following the person with the best ideas, but you might not. 
Much better for everybody to go off by themselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics, and then come together as a team to talk them through in a well-managed environment and take it from there. 
One answer lies deep in our cultural history. 
Western societies, and in particular the U.S., have always favored the man of action over the "" man "" of contemplation. 
And they featured role models like Abraham Lincoln, who was praised for being modest and unassuming. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "A man who does not offend by superiority." 
But then we hit the 20th century, and we entered a new culture that historians call the culture of personality. 
So, quite understandably, qualities like magnetism and charisma suddenly come to seem really important. 
And sure enough, the self-help books change to meet these new needs and they start to have names like "" How to Win Friends and Influence People. "" And they feature as their role models really great salesmen. 
The same religions who send their sages off to lonely mountain tops also teach us love and trust. 
And the problems that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics are so vast and so complex that we are going to need armies of people coming together to solve them working together. 
So now I'd like to share with you what's in my suitcase today. 
Here's Margaret Atwood, "" Cat's Eye. "" Here's a novel by Milan Kundera. 
My grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when I was growing up, partly because it was filled with his very gentle, very courtly presence and partly because it was filled with books. 
And so I am going to leave you now with three calls for action for those who share this vision. 
(Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) And I want to be clear about what I'm saying, because I deeply believe our offices should be encouraging casual, chatty cafe-style types of interactions — you know, the kind where people come together and serendipitously have an exchange of ideas. 
It's great for introverts and it's great for extroverts. 
This is especially important for extroverted children too. 
Number three: Take a good look at what's inside your own suitcase and why you put it there. 
But introverts, you being you, you probably have the impulse to guard very carefully what's inside your own suitcase. 

I'll start with my favorite muse, Emily Dickinson, who said that wonder is not knowledge, neither is it ignorance. 
It's something which is suspended between what we believe we can be, and a tradition we may have forgotten. 
And I think, when I listen to these incredible people here, I've been so inspired — so many incredible ideas, so many visions. 
And yet, when I look at the environment outside, you see how resistant architecture is to change. 
You see how resistant it is to those very ideas. 
We can think them out. We can create incredible things. 
And yet, at the end, it's so hard to change a wall. 
We applaud the well-mannered box. 
But to create a space that never existed is what interests me; to create something that has never been, a space that we have never entered except in our minds and our spirits. 
And I think that's really what architecture is based on. 
Architecture is not based on concrete and steel and the elements of the soil. 
It's based on wonder. 
And that wonder is really what has created the greatest cities, the greatest spaces that we have had. 
And I think that is indeed what architecture is. It is a story. 
By the way, it is a story that is told through its hard materials. 
But it is a story of effort and struggle against improbabilities. 
If you think of the great buildings, of the cathedrals, of the temples, of the pyramids, of pagodas, of cities in India and beyond, you think of how incredible this is that that was realized not by some abstract idea, but by people. 
So, anything that has been made can be unmade. 
Anything that has been made can be made better. 
There it is: the things that I really believe are of important architecture. 
These are the dimensions that I like to work with. 
It's something very personal. 
It's not, perhaps, the dimensions appreciated by art critics or architecture critics or city planners. 
But I think these are the necessary oxygen for us to live in buildings, to live in cities, to connect ourselves in a social space. 
And I therefore believe that optimism is what drives architecture forward. 
It's the only profession where you have to believe in the future. 
You can be a general, a politician, an economist who is depressed, a musician in a minor key, a painter in dark colors. 
But architecture is that complete ecstasy that the future can be better. 
And it is that belief that I think drives society. 
And today we have a kind of evangelical pessimism all around us. 
And yet it is in times like this that I think architecture can thrive with big ideas, ideas that are not small. Think of the great cities. 
Think of the Empire State Building, the Rockefeller Center. 
They were built in times that were not really the best of times in a certain way. 
And yet that energy and power of architecture has driven an entire social and political space that these buildings occupy. 
So again, I am a believer in the expressive. 
I have never been a fan of the neutral. 
I don't like neutrality in life, in anything. 
I think expression. 
And it's like espresso coffee, you know, you take the essence of the coffee. 
That's what expression is. 
It's been missing in much of the architecture, because we think architecture is the realm of the neutered, the realm of the kind of a state that has no opinion, that has no value. 
And yet, I believe it is the expression — expression of the city, expression of our own space — that gives meaning to architecture. 
And, of course, expressive spaces are not mute. 
Expressive spaces are not spaces that simply confirm what we already know. 
Expressive spaces may disturb us. 
And I think that's also part of life. 
Life is not just an anesthetic to make us smile, but to reach out across the abyss of history, to places we have never been, and would have perhaps been, had we not been so lucky. 
So again, radical versus conservative. 
Radical, what does it mean? It's something which is rooted, and something which is rooted deep in a tradition. 
And I think that is what architecture is, it's radical. 
It's not just a conservation in formaldehyde of dead forms. 
It is actually a living connection to the cosmic event that we are part of, and a story that is certainly ongoing. 
It's not something that has a good ending or a bad ending. 
It's actually a story in which our acts themselves are pushing the story in a particular way. 
So again I am a believer in the radical architecture. 
You know the Soviet architecture of that building is the conservation. 
It's like the old Las Vegas used to be. 
It's about conserving emotions, conserving the traditions that have obstructed the mind in moving forward and of course what is radical is to confront them. 
And I think our architecture is a confrontation with our own senses. 
Therefore I believe it should not be cool. 
There is a lot of appreciation for the kind of cool architecture. 
I've always been an opponent of it. I think emotion is needed. 
Life without emotion would really not be life. 
Even the mind is emotional. 
There is no reason which does not take a position in the ethical sphere, in the philosophical mystery of what we are. 
So I think emotion is a dimension that is important to introduce into city space, into city life. 
And of course, we are all about the struggle of emotions. 
And I think that is what makes the world a wondrous place. 
And of course, the confrontation of the cool, the unemotional with emotion, is a conversation that I think cities themselves have fostered. 
I think that is the progress of cities. 
It's not only the forms of cities, but the fact that they incarnate emotions, not just of those who build them, but of those who live there as well. 
Inexplicable versus understood. You know, too often we want to understand everything. 
But architecture is not the language of words. 
It's a language. But it is not a language that can be reduced to a series of programmatic notes that we can verbally write. 
Too many buildings that you see outside that are so banal tell you a story, but the story is very short, which says, "" We have no story to tell you. "" (Laughter) So the important thing actually, is to introduce the actual architectural dimensions, which might be totally inexplicable in words, because they operate in proportions, in materials, in light. 
They connect themselves into various sources, into a kind of complex vector matrix that isn't really frontal but is really embedded in the lives, and in the history of a city, and of a people. 
So again, the notion that a building should just be explicit I think is a false notion, which has reduced architecture into banality. 
Hand versus the computer. 
Of course, what would we be without computers? 
Our whole practice depends on computing. 
But the computer should not just be the glove of the hand; the hand should really be the driver of the computing power. 
Because I believe that the hand in all its primitive, in all its physiological obscurity, has a source, though the source is unknown, though we don't have to be mystical about it. 
We realize that the hand has been given us by forces that are beyond our own autonomy. 
And I think when I draw drawings which may imitate the computer, but are not computer drawings — drawings that can come from sources that are completely not known, not normal, not seen, yet the hand — and that's what I really, to all of you who are working — how can we make the computer respond to our hand rather than the hand responding to the computer. 
I think that's part of what the complexity of architecture is. 
Because certainly we have gotten used to the propaganda that the simple is the good. But I don't believe it. 
Listening to all of you, the complexity of thought, the complexity of layers of meaning is overwhelming. 
And I think we shouldn't shy away in architecture, You know, brain surgery, atomic theory, genetics, economics are complex complex fields. 
There is no reason that architecture should shy away and present this illusory world of the simple. 
It is complex. Space is complex. 
Space is something that folds out of itself into completely new worlds. 
And as wondrous as it is, it cannot be reduced to a kind of simplification that we have often come to be admired. 
And yet, our lives are complex. 
Our emotions are complex. 
Our intellectual desires are complex. 
So I do believe that architecture as I see it needs to mirror that complexity in every single space that we have, in every intimacy that we possess. 
Of course that means that architecture is political. 
The political is not an enemy of architecture. 
The politeama is the city. It's all of us together. 
And I've always believed that the act of architecture, even a private house, when somebody else will see it, is a political act, because it will be visible to others. 
And we live in a world which is connecting us more and more. 
So again, the evasion of that sphere, which has been so endemic to that sort of pure architecture, the autonomous architecture that is just an abstract object has never appealed to me. 
And I do believe that this interaction with the history, with history that is often very difficult, to grapple with it, to create a position that is beyond our normal expectations and to create a critique. 
Because architecture is also the asking of questions. 
It's not only the giving of answers. 
It's also, just like life, the asking of questions. 
Therefore it is important that it be real. 
You know we can simulate almost anything. 
But the one thing that can be ever simulated is the human heart, the human soul. 
And architecture is so closely intertwined with it because we are born somewhere and we die somewhere. 
So the reality of architecture is visceral. It's not intellectual. 
It's not something that comes to us from books and theories. 
It's the real that we touch — the door, the window, the threshold, the bed — such prosaic objects. And yet, I try, in every building, to take that virtual world, which is so enigmatic and so rich, and create something in the real world. 
Create a space for an office, a space of sustainability that really works between that virtuality and yet can be realized as something real. 
Unexpected versus habitual. 
What is a habit? It's just a shackle for ourselves. 
It's a self-induced poison. 
So the unexpected is always unexpected. 
You know, it's true, the cathedrals, as unexpected, will always be unexpected. 
You know Frank Gehry's buildings, they will continue to be unexpected in the future. 
So not the habitual architecture that instills in us the false sort of stability, but an architecture that is full of tension, an architecture that goes beyond itself to reach a human soul and a human heart, and that breaks out of the shackles of habits. 
And of course habits are enforced by architecture. 
When we see the same kind of architecture we become immured in that world of those angles, of those lights, of those materials. 
We think the world really looks like our buildings. 
And yet our buildings are pretty much limited by the techniques and wonders that have been part of them. 
So again, the unexpected which is also the raw. 
And I often think of the raw and the refined. 
What is raw? The raw, I would say is the naked experience, untouched by luxury, untouched by expensive materials, untouched by the kind of refinement that we associate with high culture. 
So the rawness, I think, in space, the fact that sustainability can actually, in the future translate into a raw space, a space that isn't decorated, a space that is not mannered in any source, but a space that might be cool in terms of its temperature, might be refractive to our desires. 
A space that doesn't always follow us like a dog that has been trained to follow us, but moves ahead into directions of demonstrating other possibilities, other experiences, that have never been part of the vocabulary of architecture. 
And of course that juxtaposition is of great interest to me because it creates a kind of a spark of new energy. 
And so I do like something which is pointed, not blunt, something which is focused on reality, something that has the power, through its leverage, to transform even a very small space. 
So architecture maybe is not so big, like science, but through its focal point it can leverage in an Archimedian way what we think the world is really about. 
And often it takes just a building to change our experience of what could be done, what has been done, how the world has remained both in between stability and instability. 
And of course buildings have their shapes. 
Those shapes are difficult to change. 
And yet, I do believe that in every social space, in every public space, there is a desire to communicate more than just that blunt thought, that blunt technique, but something that pinpoints, and can point in various directions forward, backward, sideways and around. 
So that is indeed what is memory. 
So I believe that my main interest is to memory. 
Without memory we would be amnesiacs. 
We would not know which way we were going, and why we are going where we're going. 
So I've been never interested in the forgettable reuse, rehashing of the same things over and over again, which, of course, get accolades of critics. 
Critics like the performance to be repeated again and again the same way. 
But I rather play something completely unheard of, and even with flaws, than repeat the same thing over and over which has been hollowed by its meaninglessness. 
So again, memory is the city, memory is the world. 
Without the memory there would be no story to tell. 
There would be nowhere to turn. 
The memorable, I think, is really our world, what we think the world is. 
And it's not only our memory, but those who remember us, which means that architecture is not mute. 
It's an art of communication. 
It tells a story. The story can reach into obscure desires. 
It can reach into sources that are not explicitly available. 
It can reach into millennia that have been buried, and return them in a just and unexpected equity. 
So again, I think the notion that the best architecture is silent has never appealed to me. 
Silence maybe is good for a cemetery but not for a city. 
Cities should be full of vibrations, full of sound, full of music. 
And that indeed is the architectural mission that I believe is important, is to create spaces that are vibrant, that are pluralistic, that can transform the most prosaic activities, and raise them to a completely different expectation. 
Create a shopping center, a swimming place that is more like a museum than like entertainment. 
And these are our dreams. 
And of course risk. I think architecture should be risky. 
You know it costs a lot of money and so on, but yes, it should not play it safe. 
It should not play it safe, because if it plays it safe it's not moving us in a direction that we want to be. 
And I think, of course, risk is what underlies the world. 
World without risk would not be worth living. 
So yes, I do believe that the risk we take in every building. 
Risks to create spaces that have never been cantilevered to that extent. 
Risks of spaces that have never been so dizzying, as they should be, for a pioneering city. 
Risks that really move architecture even with all its flaws, into a space which is much better that the ever again repeated hollowness of a ready-made thing. 
And of course that is finally what I believe architecture to be. 
It's about space. It's not about fashion. 
It's not about decoration. 
It's about creating with minimal means something which can not be repeated, cannot be simulated in any other sphere. 
And there of course is the space that we need to breathe, is the space we need to dream. 
These are the spaces that are not just luxurious spaces for some of us, but are important for everybody in this world. 
So again, it's not about the changing fashions, changing theories. 
It's about carving out a space for trees. 
It's carving out a space where nature can enter the domestic world of a city. 
A space where something which has never seen a light of day can enter into the inner workings of a density. 
And I think that is really the nature of architecture. 
Now I am a believer in democracy. 
I don't like beautiful buildings built for totalitarian regimes. 
Where people cannot speak, cannot vote, cannot do anything. 
We too often admire those buildings. We think they are beautiful. 
And yet when I think of the poverty of society which doesn't give freedom to its people, I don't admire those buildings. 
So democracy, as difficult as it is, I believe in it. 
And of course, at Ground Zero what else? 
It's such a complex project. 
It's emotional. There is so many interests. 
It's political. There is so many parties to this project. 
There is so many interests. There's money. There's political power. 
There are emotions of the victims. 
And yet, in all its messiness, in all its difficulties, I would not have liked somebody to say, "This is the tabula rasa, mister architect — do whatever you want." 
I think nothing good will come out of that. 
I think architecture is about consensus. 
And it is about the dirty word "" compromise. "" Compromise is not bad. 
Compromise, if it's artistic, if it is able to cope with its strategies — and there is my first sketch and the last rendering — it's not that far away. 
And yet, compromise, consensus, that is what I believe in. 
And Ground Zero, despite all its difficulties, it's moving forward. 
It's difficult. 2011, 2013. Freedom Tower, the memorial. 
And that is where I end. 
I was inspired when I came here as an immigrant on a ship like millions of others, looking at America from that point of view. 
This is America. This is liberty. 
This is what we dream about. Its individuality, demonstrated in the skyline. It's resilience. 
And finally, it's the freedom that America represents, not just to me, as an immigrant, but to everyone in the world. Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: I've got a question. 
So have you come to peace with the process that happened at Ground Zero and the loss of the original, incredible design that you came up with? 
Daniel Libeskind: Look. We have to cure ourselves of the notion that we are authoritarian, that we can determine everything that happens. 
We have to rely on others, and shape the process in the best way possible. 
I came from the Bronx. I was taught not to be a loser, not to be somebody who just gives up in a fight. 
You have to fight for what you believe. You don't always win everything you want to win. But you can steer the process. 
And I believe that what will be built at Ground Zero will be meaningful, will be inspiring, will tell other generations of the sacrifices, of the meaning of this event. 
Not just for New York, but for the world. 
Chris Anderson: Thank you so much, Daniel Libeskind. 
(Applause) 

Gabriel García Márquez is one of my favorite writers, for his storytelling, but even more, I think, for the beauty and precision of his prose. 
And whether it's the opening line from "" One Hundred Years of Solitude "" or the fantastical stream of consciousness in "" Autumn of the Patriarch, "" where the words rush by, page after page of unpunctuated imagery sweeping the reader along like some wild river twisting through a primal South American jungle, reading Márquez is a visceral experience. 
Which struck me as particularly remarkable during one session with the novel when I realized that I was being swept along on this remarkable, vivid journey in translation. 
Now I was a comparative literature major in college, which is like an English major, only instead of being stuck studying Chaucer for three months, we got to read great literature in translation from around the world. 
And as great as these books were, you could always tell that you were getting close to the full effect. 
But not so with Márquez who once praised his translator's versions as being better than his own, which is an astonishing compliment. 
So when I heard that the translator, Gregory Rabassa, had written his own book on the subject, I couldn't wait to read it. 
It's called apropos of the Italian adage that I lifted from his forward, "If This Be Treason." 
And it's a charming read. 
It's highly recommended for anyone who's interested in the translator's art. 
But the reason that I mention it is that early on, Rabassa offers this elegantly simple insight: "" Every act of communication is an act of translation. "" Now maybe that's been obvious to all of you for a long time, but for me, as often as I'd encountered that exact difficulty on a daily basis, I had never seen the inherent challenge of communication in so crystalline a light. 
Ever since I can remember thinking consciously about such things, communication has been my central passion. 
Even as a child, I remember thinking that what I really wanted most in life was to be able to understand everything and then to communicate it to everyone else. 
So no ego problems. 
It's funny, my wife, Daisy, whose family is littered with schizophrenics — and I mean littered with them — once said to me, "" Chris, I already have a brother who thinks he's God. 
I don't need a husband who wants to be. "" (Laughter) Anyway, as I plunged through my 20s ever more aware of how unobtainable the first part of my childhood ambition was, it was that second part, being able to successfully communicate to others whatever knowledge I was gaining, where the futility of my quest really set in. 
Time after time, whenever I set out to share some great truth with a soon-to-be grateful recipient, it had the opposite effect. 
Interestingly, when your opening line of communication is, "" Hey, listen up, because I'm about to drop some serious knowledge on you, "" it's amazing how quickly you'll discover both ice and the firing squad. 
Finally, after about 10 years of alienating friends and strangers alike, I finally got it, a new personal truth all my own, that if I was going to ever communicate well with other people the ideas that I was gaining, I'd better find a different way of going about it. 
And that's when I discovered comedy. 
Now comedy travels along a distinct wavelength from other forms of language. 
If I had to place it on an arbitrary spectrum, I'd say it falls somewhere between poetry and lies. 
And I'm not talking about all comedy here, because, clearly, there's plenty of humor that colors safely within the lines of what we already think and feel. 
What I want to talk about is the unique ability that the best comedy and satire has at circumventing our ingrained perspectives — comedy as the philosopher's stone. 
It takes the base metal of our conventional wisdom and transforms it through ridicule into a different way of seeing and ultimately being in the world. 
Because that's what I take from the theme of this conference: Gained in Translation. 
That it's about communication that doesn't just produce greater understanding within the individual, but leads to real change. 
Which in my experience means communication that manages to speak to and expand our concept of self-interest. 
Now I'm big on speaking to people's self-interest because we're all wired for that. 
It's part of our survival package, and that's why it's become so important for us, and that's why we're always listening at that level. 
And also because that's where, in terms of our own self-interest, we finally begin to grasp our ability to respond, our responsibility to the rest of the world. 
Now as to what I mean by the best comedy and satire, I mean work that comes first and foremost from a place of honesty and integrity. 
Now if you think back on Tina Fey's impersonations on Saturday Night Live of the newly nominated vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, they were devastating. 
Fey demonstrated far more effectively than any political pundit the candidate's fundamental lack of seriousness, cementing an impression that the majority of the American public still holds today. 
And the key detail of this is that Fey's scripts weren't written by her and they weren't written by the SNL writers. 
They were lifted verbatim from Palin's own remarks. 
(Laughter) Here was a Palin impersonator quoting Palin word for word. 
Now that's honesty and integrity, and it's also why Fey's performances left such a lasting impression. 
On the other side of the political spectrum, the first time that I heard Rush Limbaugh refer to presidential hopeful John Edwards as the Breck girl I knew that he'd made a direct hit. 
Now it's not often that I'm going to associate the words honesty and integrity with Limbaugh, but it's really hard to argue with that punchline. 
The description perfectly captured Edwards' personal vanity. 
And guess what? 
That ended up being the exact personality trait that was at the core of the scandal that ended his political career. 
Now The Daily Show with John Stewart is by far the most — (Applause) (Laughter) it's by far the most well-documented example of the effectiveness of this kind of comedy. 
Survey after survey, from Pew Research to the Annenberg Center for Public Policy, has found that Daily Show viewers are better informed about current events than the viewers of all major network and cable news shows. 
(Applause) Now whether this says more about the conflict between integrity and profitability of corporate journalism than it does about the attentiveness of Stewart's viewers, the larger point remains that Stewart's material is always grounded in a commitment to the facts — not because his intent is to inform. It's not. 
His intent is to be funny. 
It just so happens that Stewart's brand of funny doesn't work unless the facts are true. 
And the result is great comedy that's also an information delivery system that scores markedly higher in both credibility and retention than the professional news media. 
Now this is doubly ironic when you consider that what gives comedy its edge at reaching around people's walls is the way that it uses deliberate misdirection. 
A great piece of comedy is a verbal magic trick, where you think it's going over here and then all of a sudden you're transported over here. 
And there's this mental delight that's followed by the physical response of laughter, which, not coincidentally, releases endorphins in the brain. 
And just like that, you've been seduced into a different way of looking at something because the endorphins have brought down your defenses. 
This is the exact opposite of the way that anger and fear and panic, all of the flight-or-fight responses, operate. 
Flight-or-fight releases adrenalin, which throws our walls up sky-high. 
And the comedy comes along, dealing with a lot of the same areas where our defenses are the strongest — race, religion, politics, sexuality — only by approaching them through humor instead of adrenalin, we get endorphins and the alchemy of laughter turns our walls into windows, revealing a fresh and unexpected point of view. 
Now let me give you an example from my act. 
I have some material about the so-called radical gay agenda, which starts off by asking, how radical is the gay agenda? 
Because from what I can tell, the three things gay Americans seem to want most are to join the military, get married and start a family. 
(Laughter) Three things I've tried to avoid my entire life. (Laughter) 
Have at it you radical bastards. The field is yours. (Laughter) 
And that's followed by these lines about gay adoption: What is the problem with gay adoption? 
Why is this remotely controversial? 
If you have a baby and you think that baby's gay, you should be allowed to put it up for adoption. 
(Laughter) You have given birth to an abomination. 
Remove it from your household. 
Now by taking the biblical epithet "" abomination "" and attaching it to the ultimate image of innocence, a baby, this joke short circuits the emotional wiring behind the debate and it leaves the audience with the opportunity, through their laughter, to question its validity. 
Misdirection isn't the only trick that comedy has up its sleeve. 
Economy of language is another real strong suit of great comedy. 
There are few phrases that pack a more concentrated dose of subject and symbol than the perfect punchline. 
Bill Hicks — and if you don't know his work, you should really Google him — Hicks had a routine about getting into one of those childhood bragging contests on the playground, where finally the other kid says to him, "Huh? Well my dad can beat up your dad," to which Hicks replies, "Really? How soon?" 
(Laughter) That's an entire childhood in three words. (Laughter) 
Not to mention what it reveals about the adult who's speaking them. 
And one last powerful attribute that comedy has as communication is that it's inherently viral. 
People can't wait to pass along that new great joke. 
And this isn't some new phenomenon of our wired world. 
Comedy has been crossing country with remarkable speed way before the Internet, social media, even cable TV. 
Back in 1980 when comedian Richard Pryor accidentally set himself on fire during a freebasing accident, I was in Los Angeles the day after it happened and then I was in Washington D.C. two days after that. 
And I heard the exact same punchline on both coasts — something about the Ignited Negro College Fund. 
Clearly, it didn't come out of a Tonight Show monologue. 
And my guess here — and I have no research on this — is that if you really were to look back at it and if you could research it, you'd find out that comedy is the second oldest viral profession. 
First there were drums and then knock-knock jokes. 
(Laughter) But it's when you put all of these elements together — when you get the viral appeal of a great joke with a powerful punchline that's crafted from honesty and integrity, it can have a real world impact at changing a conversation. 
Now I have a close friend, Joel Pett, who's the editorial cartoonist for the Lexington Herald-Leader. 
And he used to be the USA Today Monday morning guy. 
I was visiting with Joel the weekend before the Copenhagen conference on climate change opened in December of 2009. 
And Joel was explaining to me that, because USA Today was one of America's four papers of record, it would be scanned by virtually everyone in attendance at the conference, which meant that, if he hit it out of the park with his cartoon on Monday, the opening day of the conference, it could get passed around at the highest level among actual decision-makers. 
So we started talking about climate change. 
And it turned out that Joel and I were both bothered by the same thing, which was how so much of the debate was still focused on the science and how complete it was or wasn't, which, to both of us, seems somewhat intentionally off point. 
Because first of all, there's this false premise that such a thing as complete science exists. 
Now Governor Perry of my newly-adopted state of Texas was pushing this same line this past summer at the beginning of his oops-fated campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, proclaiming over and over that the science wasn't complete at the same time that 250 out of 254 counties in the state of Texas were on fire. 
And Perry's policy solution was to ask the people of Texas to pray for rain. 
Personally, I was praying for four more fires so we could finally complete the damn science. 
(Laughter) But back in 2009, the question Joel and I kept turning over and over was why this late in the game so much energy was being spent talking about the science when the policies necessary to address climate change were unequivocally beneficial for humanity in the long run regardless of the science. 
So we tossed it back and forth until Joel came up with this. 
Cartoon: "" What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing? "" (Laughter) You've got to love that idea. 
(Applause) How about that? How about we create a better world for nothing? 
Not for God, not for country, not for profit — just as a basic metric for global decision-making. 
And this cartoon hit the bull's eye. 
Shortly after the conference was over, Joel got a request for a signed copy from the head of the EPA in Washington whose wall it now hangs on. 
And not long after that, he got another request for a copy from the head of the EPA in California who used it as part of her presentation at an international conference on climate change in Sacramento last year. 
And it didn't stop there. 
To date, Joel's gotten requests from over 40 environmental groups, in the United States, Canada and Europe. 
And earlier this year, he got a request from the Green Party in Australia who used it in their campaign where it became part of the debate that resulted in the Australian parliament adopting the most rigorous carbon tax regime of any country in the world. 
(Applause) That is a lot of punch for 14 words. 
So my suggestion to those of you out here who are seriously focused on creating a better world is to take a little bit of time each day and practice thinking funny, because you might just find the question that you've been looking for. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I've been thinking a lot about the world recently and how it's changed over the last 20, 30, 40 years. 
Twenty or 30 years ago, if a chicken caught a cold and sneezed and died in a remote village in East Asia, it would have been a tragedy for the chicken and its closest relatives, but I don't think there was much possibility of us fearing a global pandemic and the deaths of millions. 
Twenty or 30 years ago, if a bank in North America lent too much money to some people who couldn't afford to pay it back and the bank went bust, that was bad for the lender and bad for the borrower, but we didn't imagine it would bring the global economic system to its knees for nearly a decade. 
This is globalization. 
This is the miracle that has enabled us to transship our bodies and our minds and our words and our pictures and our ideas and our teaching and our learning around the planet ever faster and ever cheaper. 
It's brought a lot of bad stuff, like the stuff that I just described, but it's also brought a lot of good stuff. 
A lot of us are not aware of the extraordinary successes of the Millennium Development Goals, several of which have achieved their targets long before the due date. 
That proves that this species of humanity is capable of achieving extraordinary progress if it really acts together and it really tries hard. 
But if I had to put it in a nutshell these days, I sort of feel that globalization has taken us by surprise, and we've been slow to respond to it. 
If you look at the downside of globalization, it really does seem to be sometimes overwhelming. 
All of the grand challenges that we face today, like climate change and human rights and demographics and terrorism and pandemics and narco-trafficking and human slavery and species loss, I could go on, we're not making an awful lot of progress against an awful lot of those challenges. 
So in a nutshell, that's the challenge that we all face today at this interesting point in history. 
That's clearly what we've got to do next. 
We've somehow got to get our act together and we've got to figure out how to globalize the solutions better so that we don't simply become a species which is the victim of the globalization of problems. 
Why are we so slow at achieving these advances? 
What's the reason for it? 
Well, there are, of course, a number of reasons, but perhaps the primary reason is because we're still organized as a species in the same way that we were organized 200 or 300 years ago. 
There's one superpower left on the planet and that is the seven billion people, the seven billion of us who cause all these problems, the same seven billion, by the way, who will resolve them all. 
But how are those seven billion organized? 
They're still organized in 200 or so nation-states, and the nations have governments that make rules and cause us to behave in certain ways. 
And that's a pretty efficient system, but the problem is that the way that those laws are made and the way those governments think is absolutely wrong for the solution of global problems, because it all looks inwards. 
The politicians that we elect and the politicians we don't elect, on the whole, have minds that microscope. 
They don't have minds that telescope. 
They look in. They pretend, they behave, as if they believed that every country was an island that existed quite happily, independently of all the others on its own little planet in its own little solar system. 
This is the problem: countries competing against each other, countries fighting against each other. 
This week, as any week you care to look at, you'll find people actually trying to kill each other from country to country, but even when that's not going on, there's competition between countries, each one trying to shaft the next. 
This is clearly not a good arrangement. 
We clearly need to change it. 
We clearly need to find ways of encouraging countries to start working together a little bit better. 
And why won't they do that? 
Why is it that our leaders still persist in looking inwards? 
Well, the first and most obvious reason is because that's what we ask them to do. 
That's what we tell them to do. 
When we elect governments or when we tolerate unelected governments, we're effectively telling them that what we want is for them to deliver us in our country a certain number of things. 
We want them to deliver prosperity, growth, competitiveness, transparency, justice and all of those things. 
So unless we start asking our governments to think outside a little bit, to consider the global problems that will finish us all if we don't start considering them, then we can hardly blame them if what they carry on doing is looking inwards, if they still have minds that microscope rather than minds that telescope. 
That's the first reason why things tend not to change. 
The second reason is that these governments, just like all the rest of us, are cultural psychopaths. 
I don't mean to be rude, but you know what a psychopath is. 
A psychopath is a person who, unfortunately for him or her, lacks the ability to really empathize with other human beings. 
When they look around, they don't see other human beings with deep, rich, three-dimensional personal lives and aims and ambitions. 
What they see is cardboard cutouts, and it's very sad and it's very lonely, and it's very rare, fortunately. 
But actually, aren't most of us not really so very good at empathy? 
Oh sure, we're very good at empathy when it's a question of dealing with people who kind of look like us and kind of walk and talk and eat and pray and wear like us, but when it comes to people who don't do that, who don't quite dress like us and don't quite pray like us and don't quite talk like us, do we not also have a tendency to see them ever so slightly as cardboard cutouts too? 
And this is a question we need to ask ourselves. 
I think constantly we have to monitor it. 
Are we and our politicians to a degree cultural psychopaths? 
The third reason is hardly worth mentioning because it's so silly, but there's a belief amongst governments that the domestic agenda and the international agenda are incompatible and always will be. 
This is just nonsense. 
In my day job, I'm a policy adviser. 
I've spent the last 15 years or so advising governments around the world, and in all of that time I have never once seen a single domestic policy issue that could not be more imaginatively, effectively and rapidly resolved than by treating it as an international problem, looking at the international context, comparing what others have done, bringing in others, working externally instead of working internally. 
And so you may say, well, given all of that, why then doesn't it work? 
Why can we not make our politicians change? 
Why can't we demand them? 
Well I, like a lot of us, spend a lot of time complaining about how hard it is to make people change, and I don't think we should fuss about it. 
I think we should just accept that we are an inherently conservative species. 
We don't like to change. 
It exists for very sensible evolutionary reasons. 
We probably wouldn't still be here today if we weren't so resistant to change. 
It's very simple: Many thousands of years ago, we discovered that if we carried on doing the same things, we wouldn't die, because the things that we've done before by definition didn't kill us, and therefore as long as we carry on doing them, we'll be okay, and it's very sensible not to do anything new, because it might kill you. 
But of course, there are exceptions to that. 
Otherwise, we'd never get anywhere. 
And one of the exceptions, the interesting exception, is when you can show to people that there might be some self-interest in them making that leap of faith and changing a little bit. 
So I've spent a lot of the last 10 or 15 years trying to find out what could be that self-interest that would encourage not just politicians but also businesses and general populations, all of us, to start to think a little more outwardly, to think in a bigger picture, not always to look inwards, sometimes to look outwards. 
And this is where I discovered something quite important. 
In 2005, I launched a study called the Nation Brands Index. 
What it is, it's a very large-scale study that polls a very large sample of the world's population, a sample that represents about 70 percent of the planet's population, and I started asking them a series of questions about how they perceive other countries. 
And the Nation Brands Index over the years has grown to be a very, very large database. 
It's about 200 billion data points tracking what ordinary people think about other countries and why. 
Why did I do this? Well, because the governments that I advise are very, very keen on knowing how they are regarded. 
They've known, partly because I've encouraged them to realize it, that countries depend enormously on their reputations in order to survive and prosper in the world. 
If a country has a great, positive image, like Germany has or Sweden or Switzerland, everything is easy and everything is cheap. 
You get more tourists. You get more investors. 
You sell your products more expensively. 
If, on the other hand, you have a country with a very weak or a very negative image, everything is difficult and everything is expensive. 
So governments care desperately about the image of their country, because it makes a direct difference to how much money they can make, and that's what they've promised their populations they're going to deliver. 
So a couple of years ago, I thought I would take some time out and speak to that gigantic database and ask it, why do some people prefer one country more than another? 
And the answer that the database gave me completely staggered me. 
It was 6.8. 
I haven't got time to explain in detail. 
Basically what it told me was — (Laughter) (Applause) — the kinds of countries we prefer are good countries. 
We don't admire countries primarily because they're rich, because they're powerful, because they're successful, because they're modern, because they're technologically advanced. 
We primarily admire countries that are good. 
What do we mean by good? 
We mean countries that seem to contribute something to the world in which we live, countries that actually make the world safer or better or richer or fairer. 
Those are the countries we like. 
This is a discovery of significant importance — you see where I'm going — because it squares the circle. 
I can now say, and often do, to any government, in order to do well, you need to do good. 
If you want to sell more products, if you want to get more investment, if you want to become more competitive, then you need to start behaving, because that's why people will respect you and do business with you, and therefore, the more you collaborate, the more competitive you become. 
This is quite an important discovery, and as soon as I discovered this, I felt another index coming on. 
I swear that as I get older, my ideas become simpler and more and more childish. 
This one is called the Good Country Index, and it does exactly what it says on the tin. 
It measures, or at least it tries to measure, exactly how much each country on Earth contributes not to its own population but to the rest of humanity. 
Bizarrely, nobody had ever thought of measuring this before. 
So my colleague Dr. Robert Govers and I have spent the best part of the last two years, with the help of a large number of very serious and clever people, cramming together all the reliable data in the world we could find about what countries give to the world. 
And you're waiting for me to tell you which one comes top. 
And I'm going to tell you, but first of all I want to tell you precisely what I mean when I say a good country. 
I do not mean morally good. 
When I say that Country X is the goodest country on Earth, and I mean goodest, I don't mean best. 
Best is something different. 
When you're talking about a good country, you can be good, gooder and goodest. 
It's not the same thing as good, better and best. 
This is a country which simply gives more to humanity than any other country. 
I don't talk about how they behave at home because that's measured elsewhere. 
And the winner is Ireland. 
(Applause) According to the data here, no country on Earth, per head of population, per dollar of GDP, contributes more to the world that we live in than Ireland. 
What does this mean? 
This means that as we go to sleep at night, all of us in the last 15 seconds before we drift off to sleep, our final thought should be, godammit, I'm glad that Ireland exists. 
(Laughter) And that — (Applause) — In the depths of a very severe economic recession, I think that there's a really important lesson there, that if you can remember your international obligations whilst you are trying to rebuild your own economy, that's really something. 
Finland ranks pretty much the same. 
The only reason why it's below Ireland is because its lowest score is lower than Ireland's lowest score. 
Now the other thing you'll notice about the top 10 there is, of course, they're all, apart from New Zealand, Western European nations. 
They're also all rich. 
This depressed me, because one of the things that I did not want to discover with this index is that it's purely the province of rich countries to help poor countries. 
This is not what it's all about. 
And indeed, if you look further down the list, I don't have the slide here, you will see something that made me very happy indeed, that Kenya is in the top 30, and that demonstrates one very, very important thing. 
This is not about money. 
This is about attitude. 
This is about culture. 
This is about a government and a people that care about the rest of the world and have the imagination and the courage to think outwards instead of only thinking selfishly. 
I'm going to whip through the other slides just so you can see some of the lower-lying countries. 
There's Germany at 13th, the U.S. comes 21st, Mexico comes 66th, and then we have some of the big developing countries, like Russia at 95th, China at 107th. 
Countries like China and Russia and India, which is down in the same part of the index, well, in some ways, it's not surprising. 
They've spent a great deal of time over the last decades building their own economy, building their own society and their own polity, but it is to be hoped that the second phase of their growth will be somewhat more outward-looking than the first phase has been so far. 
And then you can break down each country in terms of the actual datasets that build into it. 
I'll allow you to do that. 
From midnight tonight it's going to be on goodcountry.org, and you can look at the country. 
You can look right down to the level of the individual datasets. 
Now that's the Good Country Index. 
What's it there for? 
Well, it's there really because I want to try to introduce this word, or reintroduce this word, into the discourse. 
I've had enough hearing about competitive countries. I've had enough hearing about 
prosperous, wealthy, fast-growing countries. 
I've even had enough hearing about happy countries because in the end that's still selfish. 
That's still about us, and if we carry on thinking about us, we are in deep, deep trouble. 
I think we all know what it is that we want to hear about. 
We want to hear about good countries, and so I want to ask you all a favor. 
I'm not asking a lot. 
It's something that you might find easy to do and you might even find enjoyable and even helpful to do, and that's simply to start using the word "" good "" in this context. 
When you think about your own country, when you think about other people's countries, when you think about companies, when you talk about the world that we live in today, start using that word in the way that I've talked about this evening. 
Not good, the opposite of bad, because that's an argument that never finishes. 
Good, the opposite of selfish, good being a country that thinks about all of us. 
That's what I would like you to do, and I'd like you to use it as a stick with which to beat your politicians. 
When you elect them, when you reelect them, when you vote for them, when you listen to what they're offering you, use that word, "" good, "" and ask yourself, "Is that what a good country would do?" 
And if the answer is no, be very suspicious. 
Ask yourself, is that the behavior of my country? 
Do I want to come from a country where the government, in my name, is doing things like that? 
Or do I, on the other hand, prefer the idea of walking around the world with my head held high thinking, "" Yeah, I'm proud to come from a good country ""? 
And everybody will welcome you. 
And everybody in the last 15 seconds before they drift off to sleep at night will say, "Gosh, I'm glad that person's country exists." 
Ultimately, that, I think, is what will make the change. 
That word, "" good, "" and the number 6.8 and the discovery that's behind it have changed my life. 
I think they can change your life, and I think we can use it to change the way that our politicians and our companies behave, and in doing so, we can change the world. 
I've started thinking very differently about my own country since I've been thinking about these things. 
I used to think that I wanted to live in a rich country, and then I started thinking I wanted to live in a happy country, but I began to realize, it's not enough. 
I don't want to live in a rich country. 
I don't want to live in a fast-growing or competitive country. 
I want to live in a good country, and I so, so hope that you do too. 
Thank you. 

Chris Anderson: This is such a strange thing. 
Your software, Linux, is in millions of computers, it probably powers much of the Internet. 
And I think that there are, like, a billion and a half active Android devices out there. 
Your software is in every single one of them. 
It's kind of amazing. 
You must have some amazing software headquarters driving all this. 
That's what I thought — and I was shocked when I saw a picture of it. 
I mean, this is — this is the Linux world headquarters. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Linus Torvalds: It really doesn't look like much. 
And I have to say, the most interesting part in this picture, that people mostly react to, is the walking desk. 
It is the most interesting part in my office and I'm not actually using it anymore. 
And I think the two things are related. 
The way I work is... 
I want to not have external stimulation. 
You can kind of see, on the walls are this light green. 
I'm told that at mental institutions they use that on the walls. 
(Laughter) It's like a calming color, it's not something that really stimulates you. 
What you can't see is the computer here, you only see the screen, but the main thing I worry about in my computer is — it doesn't have to be big and powerful, although I like that — it really has to be completely silent. 
I know people who work for Google and they have their own small data center at home, and I don't do that. 
My office is the most boring office you'll ever see. 
And I sit there alone in the quiet. 
If the cat comes up, it sits in my lap. 
And I want to hear the cat purring, not the sound of the fans in the computer. 
CA: So this is astonishing, because working this way, you're able to run this vast technology empire — it is an empire — so that's an amazing testament to the power of open source. 
Tell us how you got to understand open source and how it lead to the development of Linux. 
LT: I mean, I still work alone. 
Really — I work alone in my house, often in my bathrobe. 
When a photographer shows up, I dress up, so I have clothes on. 
(Laughter) And that's how I've always worked. 
I mean, this was how I started Linux, too. 
I did not start Linux as a collaborative project. 
I started it as one in a series of many projects I had done at the time for myself, partly because I needed the end result, but even more because I just enjoyed programming. 
So it was about the end of the journey, which, 25 years later, we still have not reached. 
But it was really about the fact that I was looking for a project on my own and there was no open source, really, on my radar at all. 
And what happened is... 
the project grows and becomes something you want to show off to people. 
Really, this is more of a, "" Wow, look at what I did! "" And trust me — it was not that great back then. 
I made it publicly available, and it wasn't even open source at that point. 
At that point it was source that was open, but there was no intention behind using the kind of open-source methodology that we think of today to improve it. 
It was more like, "" Look, I've been working on this for half a year, I'd love to have comments. "" And other people approached me. 
At the University of Helsinki, I had a friend who was one of the open source — it was called mainly "" free software "" back then — and he actually introduced me to the notion that, hey, you can use these open-source licenses that had been around. 
And I thought about it for a while. 
I was actually worried about the whole commercial interests coming in. 
I mean, that's one of the worries I think most people who start out have, is that they worry about somebody taking advantage of their work, right? 
And I decided, "" What the hell? "" And — CA: And then at some point, someone contributed some code that you thought, "" Wow, that really is interesting, I would not have thought of that. 
This could actually improve this. "" LT: It didn't even start by people contributing code, it was more that people started contributing ideas. 
And just the fact that somebody else takes a look at your project — and I'm sure it's true of other things, too, but it's definitely true in code — is that somebody else takes an interest in your code, looks at it enough to actually give you feedback and give you ideas. 
That was a huge thing for me. 
I was 21 at the time, so I was young, but I had already programmed for half my life, basically. 
And every project before that had been completely personal and it was a revelation when people just started commenting, started giving feedback on your code. 
And even before they started giving code back, that was, I think, one of the big moments where I said, "I love other people!" 
Don't get me wrong — I'm actually not a people person. 
(Laughter) I don't really love other people — (Laughter) But I love computers, I love interacting with other people on email, because it kind of gives you that buffer. 
But I do love other people who comment and get involved in my project. 
And it made it so much more. 
CA: So was there a moment when you saw what was being built and it suddenly started taking off, and you thought, "" Wait a sec, this actually could be something huge, not just a personal project that I'm getting nice feedback on, but a kind of explosive development in the whole technology world ""? 
LT: Not really. 
I mean, the big point for me, really, was not when it was becoming huge, it was when it was becoming little. 
The big point for me was not being alone and having 10, maybe 100 people being involved — that was a big point. 
Then everything else was very gradual. 
Going from 100 people to a million people is not a big deal — to me. 
Well, I mean, maybe it is if you're — (Laughter) If you want to sell your result then it's a huge deal — don't get me wrong. 
But if you're interested in the technology and you're interested in the project, the big part was getting the community. 
Then the community grew gradually. 
And there's actually not a single point where I went like, "" Wow, that just took off! "" because it — I mean — it took a long time, relatively. 
CA: So all the technologists that I talk to really credit you with massively changing their work. 
And it's not just Linux, it's this thing called Git, which is this management system for software development. 
Tell us briefly about that and your role in that. 
LT: So one of the issues we had, and this took a while to start to appear, is when you... 
When you grow from having 10 people or 100 people working on a project to having 10,000 people, which — I mean, right now we're in the situation where just on the kernel, we have 1,000 people involved in every single release and that's every two months, roughly two or three months. 
Some of those people don't do a lot. 
There's a lot of people who make small, small changes. 
But to maintain this, the scale changes how you have to maintain it. 
And we went through a lot of pain. 
And there are whole projects that do only source-code maintenance. 
CVS is the one that used to be the most commonly used, and I hated CVS with a passion and refused to touch it and tried something else that was radical and interesting and everybody else hated. 
CA: (Laughs) LT: And we were in this bad spot, where we had thousands of people who wanted to participate, but in many ways, I was the kind of break point, where I could not scale to the point where I could work with thousands of people. 
So Git is my second big project, which was only created for me to maintain my first big project. 
And this is literally how I work. 
I don't code for — well, I do code for fun — but I want to code for something meaningful so every single project I've ever done has been something I needed and — CA: So really, both Linux and Git kind of arose almost as an unintended consequence of your desire not to have to work with too many people. 
LT: Absolutely. Yes. 
(Laughter) CA: That's amazing. LT: Yeah. 
(Applause) And yet, you're the man who's transformed technology not just once but twice, and we have to try and understand why it is. 
You've given us some clues, but... 
Here's a picture of you as a kid, with a Rubik's Cube. 
You mentioned that you've been programming since you were like 10 or 11, half your life. 
Were you this sort of computer genius, you know, übernerd, were you the star at school who could do everything? 
What were you like as a kid? 
LT: Yeah, I think I was the prototypical nerd. 
I mean, I was... 
I was not a people person back then. 
That's my younger brother. 
I was clearly more interested in the Rubik's Cube than my younger brother. 
(Laughter) My younger sister, who's not in the picture, when we had family meetings — and it's not a huge family, but I have, like, a couple of cousins — she would prep me beforehand. 
Like, before I stepped into the room she would say, "OK. That's so-and-so..." 
Because I was not — I was a geek. 
I was into computers, I was into math, I was into physics. 
I was good at that. 
I don't think I was particularly exceptional. 
Apparently, my sister said that my biggest exceptional quality was that I would not let go. 
CA: OK, so let's go there, because that's interesting. 
You would not let go. 
So that's not about being a geek and being smart, that's about being... stubborn? 
LT: That's about being stubborn. 
That's about, like, just starting something and not saying, "" OK, I'm done, let's do something else — Look: shiny! "" And I notice that in many other parts in my life, too. 
I lived in Silicon Valley for seven years. 
And I worked for the same company, in Silicon Valley, for the whole time. 
That is unheard of. 
That's not how Silicon Valley works. 
The whole point of Silicon Valley is that people jump between jobs to kind of mix up the pot. 
And that's not the kind of person I am. 
CA: But during the actual development of Linux itself, that stubbornness sometimes brought you in conflict with other people. 
Talk about that a bit. 
Was that essential to sort of maintain the quality of what was being built? 
How would you describe what happened? 
LT: I don't know if it's essential. 
Going back to the "" I'm not a people person, "" — sometimes I'm also... 
shall we say, "" myopic "" when it comes to other people's feelings, and that sometimes makes you say things that hurt other people. 
And I'm not proud of that. 
(Applause) But, at the same time, it's — I get people who tell me that I should be nice. 
And then when I try to explain to them that maybe you're nice, maybe you should be more aggressive, they see that as me being not nice. 
(Laughter) What I'm trying to say is we are different. 
I'm not a people person; it's not something I'm particularly proud of, but it's part of me. 
And one of the things I really like about open source is it really allows different people to work together. 
We don't have to like each other — and sometimes we really don't like each other. 
Really — I mean, there are very, very heated arguments. 
But you can, actually, you can find things that — you don't even agree to disagree, it's just that you're interested in really different things. 
And coming back to the point where I said earlier that I was afraid of commercial people taking advantage of your work, it turned out, and very quickly turned out, that those commercial people were lovely, lovely people. 
And they did all the things that I was not at all interested in doing, and they had completely different goals. 
And they used open source in ways that I just did not want to go. 
But because it was open source they could do it, and it actually works really beautifully together. 
And I actually think it works the same way. 
You need to have the people-people, the communicators, the warm and friendly people who like — (Laughter) really want to hug you and get you into the community. 
But that's not everybody. 
And that's not me. 
I care about the technology. 
There are people who care about the UI. 
I can't do UI to save my life. 
I mean, if I was stranded on an island and the only way to get off that island was the make a pretty UI, I'd die there. 
(Laughter) So there's different kinds of people, and I'm not making excuses, I'm trying to explain. 
CA: Now, when we talked last week, you talked about some other trait that you have, which I found really interesting. 
It's this idea called taste. 
And I've just got a couple of images here. 
I think this is an example of not particularly good taste in code, and this one is better taste, which one can immediately see. 
What is the difference between these two? 
LT: So this is — How many people here actually have coded? 
CA: Oh my goodness. 
LT: So I guarantee you, everybody who raised their hand, they have done what's called a singly-linked list. 
And it's taught — This, the first not very good taste approach, is basically how it's taught to be done when you start out coding. 
And you don't have to understand the code. 
The most interesting part to me is the last if statement. 
Because what happens in a singly-linked list — this is trying to remove an existing entry from a list — and there's a difference between if it's the first entry or whether it's an entry in the middle. 
Because if it's the first entry, you have to change the pointer to the first entry. 
If it's in the middle, you have to change the pointer of a previous entry. 
So they're two completely different cases. 
CA: And that's better. 
LT: And this is better. 
It does not have the if statement. 
And it doesn't really matter — I don't want you understand why it doesn't have the if statement, but I want you to understand that sometimes you can see a problem in a different way and rewrite it so that a special case goes away and becomes the normal case. 
And that's good code. 
But this is simple code. 
This is CS 101. 
This is not important — although, details are important. 
To me, the sign of people I really want to work with is that they have good taste, which is how... 
I sent you this stupid example that is not relevant because it's too small. 
Good taste is much bigger than this. 
Good taste is about really seeing the big patterns and kind of instinctively knowing what's the right way to do things. 
CA: OK, so we're putting the pieces together here now. 
You have taste, in a way that's meaningful to software people. 
You're — (Laughter) LT: I think it was meaningful to some people here. 
CA: You're a very smart computer coder, and you're hellish stubborn. 
But there must be something else. 
I mean, you've changed the future. 
You must have the ability of these grand visions of the future. 
You're a visionary, right? 
LT: I've actually felt slightly uncomfortable at TED for the last two days, because there's a lot of vision going on, right? 
And I am not a visionary. 
I do not have a five-year plan. 
I'm an engineer. 
And I think it's really — I mean — I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, "" I want to go there. "" But I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in. 
This is the kind of person I am. 
(Cheers) (Applause) CA: So you spoke to me last week about these two guys. 
Who are they and how do you relate to them? 
LT: Well, so this is kind of cliché in technology, the whole Tesla versus Edison, where Tesla is seen as the visionary scientist and crazy idea man. 
And people love Tesla. 
I mean, there are people who name their companies after him. 
(Laughter) The other person there is Edison, who is actually often vilified for being kind of pedestrian and is — I mean, his most famous quote is, "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." 
And I'm in the Edison camp, even if people don't always like him. 
Because if you actually compare the two, Tesla has kind of this mind grab these days, but who actually changed the world? 
Edison may not have been a nice person, he did a lot of things — he was maybe not so intellectual, not so visionary. 
But I think I'm more of an Edison than a Tesla. 
CA: So our theme at TED this week is dreams — big, bold, audacious dreams. 
You're really the antidote to that. 
LT: I'm trying to dial it down a bit, yes. 
CA: That's good. 
(Laughter) We embrace you, we embrace you. 
Companies like Google and many others have made, arguably, like, billions of dollars out of your software. 
Does that piss you off? 
LT: No. 
No, it doesn't piss me off for several reasons. 
And one of them is, I'm doing fine. 
I'm really doing fine. 
But the other reason is — I mean, without doing the whole open source and really letting go thing, Linux would never have been what it is. 
And it's brought experiences I don't really enjoy, public talking, but at the same time, this is an experience. 
Trust me. 
So there's a lot of things going on that make me a very happy man and thinking I did the right choices. 
CA: Is the open source idea — this is, I think we'll end here — is the open source idea fully realized now in the world, or is there more that it could go, are there more things that it could do? 
LT: So, I'm of two minds there. 
I think one reason open source works so well in code is that at the end of the day, code tends to be somewhat black and white. 
There's often a fairly good way to decide, this is done correctly and this is not done well. 
Code either works or it doesn't, which means that there's less room for arguments. 
And we have arguments despite this, right? 
In many other areas — I mean, people have talked about open politics and things like that — and it's really hard sometimes to say that, yes, you can apply the same principles in some other areas just because the black and white turns into not just gray, but different colors. 
So, obviously open source in science is making a comeback. 
Science was there first. 
But then science ended up being pretty closed, with very expensive journals and some of that going on. 
And open source is making a comeback in science, with things like arXiv and open journals. 
Wikipedia changed the world, too. 
So there are other examples, I'm sure there are more to come. 
CA: But you're not a visionary, and so it's not up to you to name them. 
LT: No. 
(Laughter) It's up to you guys to make them, right? 
CA: Exactly. 
Linus Torvalds, thank you for Linux, thank you for the Internet, thank you for all those Android phones. 
Thank you for coming here to TED and revealing so much of yourself. 
LT: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I think we're all aware that the world today is full of problems. 
We've been hearing them today and yesterday and every day for decades. 
Serious problems, big problems, pressing problems. 
Poor nutrition, access to water, climate change, deforestation, lack of skills, insecurity, not enough food, not enough healthcare, pollution. 
There's problem after problem, and I think what really separates this time from any time I can remember in my brief time on Earth is the awareness of these problems. 
We're all very aware. 
Why are we having so much trouble dealing with these problems? 
That's the question I've been struggling with, coming from my very different perspective. 
I'm not a social problem guy. 
I'm a guy that works with business, helps business make money. 
God forbid. 
So why are we having so many problems with these social problems, and really is there any role for business, and if so, what is that role? 
I think that in order to address that question, we have to step back and think about how we've understood and pondered both the problems and the solutions to these great social challenges that we face. 
Now, I think many have seen business as the problem, or at least one of the problems, in many of the social challenges we face. 
You know, think of the fast food industry, the drug industry, the banking industry. 
You know, this is a low point in the respect for business. 
Business is not seen as the solution. 
It's seen as the problem now, for most people. 
And rightly so, in many cases. 
There's a lot of bad actors out there that have done the wrong thing, that actually have made the problem worse. 
So this perspective is perhaps justified. 
How have we tended to see the solutions to these social problems, these many issues that we face in society? 
Well, we've tended to see the solutions in terms of NGOs, in terms of government, in terms of philanthropy. 
Indeed, the kind of unique organizational entity of this age is this tremendous rise of NGOs and social organizations. 
This is a unique, new organizational form that we've seen grown up. 
Enormous innovation, enormous energy, enormous talent now has been mobilized through this structure to try to deal with all of these challenges. 
And many of us here are deeply involved in that. 
I'm a business school professor, but I've actually founded, I think, now, four nonprofits. 
Whenever I got interested and became aware of a societal problem, that was what I did, form a nonprofit. 
That was the way we've thought about how to deal with these issues. 
Even a business school professor has thought about it that way. 
But I think at this moment, we've been at this for quite a while. 
We've been aware of these problems for decades. 
We have decades of experience with our NGOs and with our government entities, and there's an awkward reality. 
The awkward reality is we're not making fast enough progress. 
We're not winning. 
These problems still seem very daunting and very intractable, and any solutions we're achieving are small solutions. 
We're making incremental progress. 
What's the fundamental problem we have in dealing with these social problems? 
If we cut all the complexity away, we have the problem of scale. 
We can't scale. 
We can make progress. We can show benefits. 
We can show results. We can make things better. 
We're helping. We're doing better. We're doing good. 
We can't scale. 
We can't make a large-scale impact on these problems. 
Why is that? 
Because we don't have the resources. 
And that's really clear now. 
And that's clearer now than it's been for decades. 
There's simply not enough money to deal with any of these problems at scale using the current model. 
There's not enough tax revenue, there's not enough philanthropic donations, to deal with these problems the way we're dealing with them now. 
We've got to confront that reality. 
And the scarcity of resources for dealing with these problems is only growing, certainly in the advanced world today, with all the fiscal problems we face. 
So if it's fundamentally a resource problem, where are the resources in society? 
How are those resources really created, the resources we're going to need to deal with all these societal challenges? 
Well there, I think the answer is very clear: They're in business. 
All wealth is actually created by business. 
Business creates wealth when it meets needs at a profit. 
That's how all wealth is created. 
It's meeting needs at a profit that leads to taxes and that leads to incomes and that leads to charitable donations. 
That's where all the resources come from. 
Only business can actually create resources. 
Other institutions can utilize them to do important work, but only business can create them. 
And business creates them when it's able to meet a need at a profit. 
The resources are overwhelmingly generated by business. 
The question then is, how do we tap into this? 
How do we tap into this? 
Business generates those resources when it makes a profit. 
That profit is that small difference between the price and the cost it takes to produce whatever solution business has created to whatever problem they're trying to solve. 
But that profit is the magic. 
Why? Because that profit allows whatever solution we've created to be infinitely scalable. 
Because if we can make a profit, we can do it for 10, 100, a million, 100 million, a billion. 
The solution becomes self-sustaining. 
That's what business does when it makes a profit. 
Now what does this all have to do with social problems? 
Well, one line of thinking is, let's take this profit and redeploy it into social problems. 
Business should give more. 
Business should be more responsible. 
And that's been the path that we've been on in business. 
But again, this path that we've been on is not getting us where we need to go. 
Now, I started out as a strategy professor, and I'm still a strategy professor. 
I'm proud of that. 
But I've also, over the years, worked more and more on social issues. 
I've worked on healthcare, the environment, economic development, reducing poverty, and as I worked more and more in the social field, I started seeing something that had a profound impact on me and my whole life, in a way. 
The conventional wisdom in economics and the view in business has historically been that actually, there's a tradeoff between social performance and economic performance. 
The conventional wisdom has been that business actually makes a profit by causing a social problem. 
The classic example is pollution. 
If business pollutes, it makes more money than if it tried to reduce that pollution. 
Reducing pollution is expensive, therefore businesses don't want to do it. 
It's profitable to have an unsafe working environment. 
It's too expensive to have a safe working environment, therefore business makes more money if they don't have a safe working environment. 
That's been the conventional wisdom. 
A lot of companies have fallen into that conventional wisdom. 
They resisted environmental improvement. 
They resisted workplace improvement. 
That thinking has led to, I think, much of the behavior that we have come to criticize in business, that I come to criticize in business. 
But the more deeply I got into all these social issues, one after another, and actually, the more I tried to address them myself, personally, in a few cases, through nonprofits that I was involved with, the more I found actually that the reality is the opposite. 
Business does not profit from causing social problems, actually not in any fundamental sense. 
That's a very simplistic view. 
The deeper we get into these issues, the more we start to understand that actually business profits from solving from social problems. 
That's where the real profit comes. 
Let's take pollution. 
We've learned today that actually reducing pollution and emissions is generating profit. 
It saves money. 
It makes the business more productive and efficient. 
It doesn't waste resources. 
Having a safer working environment actually, and avoiding accidents, it makes the business more profitable, because it's a sign of good processes. 
Accidents are expensive and costly. 
Issue by issue by issue, we start to learn that actually there's no trade-off between social progress and economic efficiency in any fundamental sense. 
Another issue is health. 
I mean, what we've found is actually health of employees is something that business should treasure, because that health allows those employees to be more productive and come to work and not be absent. 
The deeper work, the new work, the new thinking on the interface between business and social problems is actually showing that there's a fundamental, deep synergy, particularly if you're not thinking in the very short run. 
In the very short run, you can sometimes fool yourself into thinking that there's fundamentally opposing goals, but in the long run, ultimately, we're learning in field after field that this is simply not true. 
So how could we tap into the power of business to address the fundamental problems that we face? 
Imagine if we could do that, because if we could do it, we could scale. 
We could tap into this enormous resource pool and this organizational capacity. 
And guess what? That's happening now, finally, partly because of people like you who have raised these issues now for year after year and decade after decade. 
We see organizations like Dow Chemical leading the revolution away from trans fat and saturated fat with innovative new products. 
This is an example of Jain Irrigation. 
This is a company that's brought drip irrigation technology to thousands and millions of farmers, reducing substantially the use of water. 
We see companies like the Brazilian forestry company Fibria that's figured out how to avoid tearing down old growth forest and using eucalyptus and getting much more yield per hectare of pulp and making much more paper than you could make by cutting down those old trees. 
You see companies like Cisco that are training so far four million people in I.T. skills to actually, yes, be responsible, but help expand the opportunity to disseminate I.T. technology and grow the whole business. 
There's a fundamental opportunity for business today to impact and address these social problems, and this opportunity is the largest business opportunity we see in business. 
And the question is, how can we get business thinking to adapt this issue of shared value? 
This is what I call shared value: addressing a social issue with a business model. 
That's shared value. 
Shared value is capitalism, but it's a higher kind of capitalism. 
It's capitalism as it was ultimately meant to be, meeting important needs, not incrementally competing for trivial differences in product attributes and market share. 
Shared value is when we can create social value and economic value simultaneously. 
It's finding those opportunities that will unleash the greatest possibility we have to actually address these social problems because we can scale. 
We can address shared value at multiple levels. 
It's real. It's happening. 
But in order to get this solution working, we have to now change how business sees itself, and this is thankfully underway. 
Businesses got trapped into the conventional wisdom that they shouldn't worry about social problems, that this was sort of something on the side, that somebody else was doing it. 
We're now seeing companies embrace this idea. 
But we also have to recognize business is not going to do this as effectively as if we have NGOs and government working in partnership with business. 
The new NGOs that are really moving the needle are the ones that have found these partnerships, that have found these ways to collaborate. 
The governments that are making the most progress are the governments that have found ways to enable shared value in business rather than see government as the only player that has to call the shots. 
And government has many ways in which it could impact the willingness and the ability of companies to compete in this way. 
I think if we can get business seeing itself differently, and if we can get others seeing business differently, we can change the world. 
I know it. I'm seeing it. 
I'm feeling it. 
Young people, I think, my Harvard Business School students, are getting it. 
If we can break down this sort of divide, this unease, this tension, this sense that we're not fundamentally collaborating here in driving these social problems, we can break this down, and we finally, I think, can have solutions. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hi, my name is Frank, and I collect secrets. 
It all started with a crazy idea in November of 2004. 
I printed up 3,000 self-addressed postcards, just like this. 
They were blank on one side, and on the other side I listed some simple instructions. 
I asked people to anonymously share an artful secret they'd never told anyone before. 
And I handed out these postcards randomly on the streets of Washington, D.C., not knowing what to expect. 
But soon the idea began spreading virally. 
People began to buy their own postcards and make their own postcards. 
I started receiving secrets in my home mailbox, not just with postmarks from Washington, D.C., but from Texas, California, Vancouver, New Zealand, Iraq. 
Soon my crazy idea didn't seem so crazy. 
PostSecret.com is the most visited advertisement-free blog in the world. 
And this is my postcard collection today. 
You can see my wife struggling to stack a brick of postcards on a pyramid of over a half-million secrets. 
What I'd like to do now is share with you a very special handful of secrets from that collection, starting with this one. 
"" I found these stamps as a child, and I have been waiting all my life to have someone to send them to. 
I never did have someone. "" Secrets can take many forms. 
They can be shocking or silly or soulful. 
They can connect us to our deepest humanity or with people we'll never meet. 
(Laughter) Maybe one of you sent this one in. 
I don't know. 
This one does a great job of demonstrating the creativity that people have when they make and mail me a postcard. 
This one obviously was made out of half a Starbucks cup with a stamp and my home address written on the other side. 
"" Dear Birthmother, I have great parents. 
I've found love. I'm happy. "" Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas, of frailty and heroism, playing out silently in the lives of people all around us even now. 
"" Everyone who knew me before 9 / 11 believes I'm dead. "" "" I used to work with a bunch of uptight religious people, so sometimes I didn't wear panties, and just had a big smile and chuckled to myself. "" (Laughter) This next one takes a little explanation before I share it with you. 
I love to speak on college campuses and share secrets and the stories with students. 
And sometimes afterwards I'll stick around and sign books and take photos with students. 
And this next postcard was made out of one of those photos. 
And I should also mention that, just like today, at that PostSecret event, I was using a wireless microphone. 
"" Your mic wasn't off during sound check. 
We all heard you pee. "" (Laughter) This was really embarrassing when it happened, until I realized it could have been worse. 
Right. You know what I'm saying. 
(Laughter) "" Inside this envelope is the ripped up remains of a suicide note I didn't use. 
I feel like the happiest person on Earth (now.) "" "" One of these men is the father of my son. 
He pays me a lot to keep it a secret. "" (Laughter) "" That Saturday when you wondered where I was, well, I was getting your ring. 
It's in my pocket right now. "" I had this postcard posted on the PostSecret blog two years ago on Valentine's Day. 
It was the very bottom, the last secret in the long column. 
And it hadn't been up for more than a couple hours before I received this exuberant email from the guy who mailed me this postcard. 
And he said, "" Frank, I've got to share with you this story that just played out in my life. "" He said, "" My knees are still shaking. "" He said, "" For three years, my girlfriend and I, we've made it this Sunday morning ritual to visit the PostSecret blog together and read the secrets out loud. 
I read some to her, she reads some to me. "" He says, "" It's really brought us closer together through the years. 
And so when I discovered that you had posted my surprise proposal to my girlfriend at the very bottom, I was beside myself. 
And I tried to act calm, not to give anything away. 
And just like every Sunday, we started reading the secrets out loud to each other. "" He said, "" But this time it seemed like it was taking her forever to get through each one. "" But she finally did. 
She got to that bottom secret, his proposal to her. 
And he said, "" She read it once and then she read it again. "" And she turned to him and said, "Is that our cat?" 
(Laughter) And when she saw him, he was down on one knee, he had the ring out. 
He popped the question, she said yes. It was a very happy ending. 
So I emailed him back and I said, "" Please share with me an image, something, that I can share with the whole PostSecret community and let everyone know your fairy tale ending. "" And he emailed me this picture. 
(Laughter) "" I found your camera at Lollapalooza this summer. 
I finally got the pictures developed and I'd love to give them to you. "" This picture never got returned back to the people who lost it, but this secret has impacted many lives, starting with a student up in Canada named Matty. 
Matty was inspired by that secret to start his own website, a website called IFoundYourCamera. 
Matty invites people to mail him digital cameras that they've found, memory sticks that have been lost with orphan photos. 
And Matty takes the pictures off these cameras and posts them on his website every week. 
And people come to visit to see if they can identify a picture they've lost or help somebody else get the photos back to them that they might be desperately searching for. 
This one's my favorite. 
(Laughter) Matty has found this ingenious way to leverage the kindness of strangers. 
And it might seem like a simple idea, and it is, but the impact it can have on people's lives can be huge. 
Matty shared with me an emotional email he received from the mother in that picture. 
"" That's me, my husband and son. 
The other pictures are of my very ill grandmother. 
Thank you for making your site. 
These pictures mean more to me than you know. 
My son's birth is on this camera. 
He turns four tomorrow. "" Every picture that you see there and thousands of others have been returned back to the person who lost it — sometimes crossing oceans, sometimes going through language barriers. 
This is the last postcard I have to share with you today. 
"" When people I love leave voicemails on my phone I always save them in case they die tomorrow and I have no other way of hearing their voice ever again. "" When I posted this secret, dozens of people sent voicemail messages from their phones, sometimes ones they'd been keeping for years, messages from family or friends who had died. 
They said that by preserving those voices and sharing them, it helped them keep the spirit of their loved ones alive. 
One young girl posted the last message she ever heard from her grandmother. 
Secrets can take many forms. 
They can be shocking or silly or soulful. 
They can connect us with our deepest humanity or with people we'll never meet again. 
Voicemail recording: First saved voice message. 
Grandma: ♫ It's somebody's birthday today ♫ ♫ Somebody's birthday today ♫ ♫ The candles are lighted ♫ ♫ on somebody's cake ♫ ♫ And we're all invited ♫ ♫ for somebody's sake ♫ You're 21 years old today. 
Have a real happy birthday, and I love you. 
I'll say bye for now. 
FW: Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
June Cohen: Frank, that was beautiful, so touching. 
Have you ever sent yourself a postcard? 
Have you ever sent in a secret to PostSecret? 
FW: I have one of my own secrets in every book. 
I think in some ways, the reason I started the project, even though I didn't know it at the time, was because I was struggling with my own secrets. 
And it was through crowd-sourcing, it was through the kindness that strangers were showing me, that I could uncover parts of my past that were haunting me. 
JC: And has anyone ever discovered which secret was yours in the book? 
Has anyone in your life been able to tell? 
FW: Sometimes I share that information, yeah. 
(Laughter) (Applause) 

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

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

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

When I think about dreams, like many of you, I think about this picture. 
I was eight when I watched Neil Armstrong step off the Lunar Module onto the surface of the Moon. 
I had never seen anything like it before, and I've never seen anything like it since. 
We got to the Moon for one simple reason: John Kennedy committed us to a deadline. 
And in the absence of that deadline, we would still be dreaming about it. 
Leonard Bernstein said two things are necessary for great achievement: a plan and not quite enough time. 
(Laughter) Deadlines and commitments are the great and fading lessons of Apollo. 
And they are what give the word "" moonshot "" its meaning. 
And our world is in desperate need of political leaders willing to set bold deadlines for the achievement of daring dreams on the scale of Apollo again. 
When I think about dreams, I think about the drag queens of LA and Stonewall and millions of other people risking everything to come out when that was really dangerous, and of this picture of the White House lit up in rainbow colors, yes — (Applause) — celebrating America's gay and lesbian citizens' right to marry. 
It is a picture that in my wildest dreams I could never have imagined when I was 18 and figuring out that I was gay and feeling estranged from my country and my dreams because of it. 
I think about this picture of my family that I never dreamed I could ever have — (Applause) — and of our children holding this headline I never dreamed could ever be printed about the Supreme Court ruling. 
We need more of the courage of drag queens and astronauts. 
(Laughter) (Applause) But I want to talk about the need for us to dream in more than one dimension, because there was something about Apollo that I didn't know when I was 8, and something about organizing that the rainbow colors over. 
Of the 30 astronauts in the original Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, only seven marriages survived. 
Those iconic images of the astronauts bouncing on the Moon obscure the alcoholism and depression on Earth. 
Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, asked during the time of Apollo, "" What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? "" And what can we gain by the right to marry if we are not able to cross the acrimony and emotional distance that so often separates us from our love? 
And not just in marriage. 
I have seen the most hurtful, destructive, tragic infighting in LGBT and AIDS and breast cancer and non-profit activism, all in the name of love. 
Thomas Merton also wrote about wars among saints and that "" there is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. 
The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. 
It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. "" Too often our dreams become these compartmentalized fixations on some future that destroy our ability to be present for our lives right now. 
Our dreams of a better life for some future humanity or some other humanity in another country alienate us from the beautiful human beings sitting next to us at this very moment. 
Well, that's just the price of progress, we say. 
You can go to the Moon or you can have stability in your family life. 
And we can't conceive of dreaming in both dimensions at the same time. 
And we don't set the bar much higher than stability when it comes to our emotional life. 
Which is why our technology for talking to one another has gone vertical, our ability to listen and understand one another has gone nowhere. 
Our access to information is through the roof, our access to joy, grounded. 
But this idea, that our present and our future are mutually exclusive, that to fulfill our potential for doing we have to surrender our profound potential for being, that the number of transistors on a circuit can be doubled and doubled, but our capacity for compassion and humanity and serenity and love is somehow limited is a false and suffocating choice. 
Now, I'm not suggesting simply the uninspiring idea of more work-life balance. 
What good is it for me to spend more time with my kids at home if my mind is always somewhere else while I'm doing it? 
I'm not even talking about mindfulness. 
Mindfulness is all of a sudden becoming a tool for improving productivity. 
(Laughter) Right? 
I'm talking about dreaming as boldly in the dimension of our being as we do about industry and technology. 
I'm talking about an audacious authenticity that allows us to cry with one another, a heroic humility that allows us to remove our masks and be real. 
It is our inability to be with one another, our fear of crying with one another, that gives rise to so many of the problems we are frantically trying to solve in the first place, from Congressional gridlock to economic inhumanity. 
(Applause) I'm talking about what Jonas Salk called an Epoch B, a new epoch in which we become as excited about and curious about and scientific about the development of our humanity as we are about the development of our technology. 
We should not shrink from this opportunity simply because we don't really understand it. 
There was a time when we didn't understand space. 
Or because we're more used to technology and activism. 
That is the very definition of being stuck in a comfort zone. 
We are now very comfortable imagining unimaginable technological achievement. 
In 2016, it is the dimension of our being itself that cries out for its fair share of our imagination. 
Now, we're all here to dream, but maybe if we're honest about it, each of us chasing our own dream. 
You know, looking at the name tags to see who can help me with my dream, sometimes looking right through one another's humanity. 
I can't be bothered with you right now. I have an idea for saving the world. 
Right? 
(Laughter) Years ago, once upon a time, I had this beautiful company that created these long journeys for heroic civic engagement. 
And we had this mantra: "Human. Kind. Be Both." 
And we encouraged people to experiment outrageously with kindness. 
Like, "" Go help everybody set up their tents. "" And there were a lot of tents. 
(Laughter) "Go buy everybody Popsicles." 
"" Go help people fix their flat tires even though you know the dinner line is going to get longer. "" And people really took us up on this, so much so that if you got a flat tire on the AIDS ride, you had trouble fixing it, because there were so many people there asking you if you needed help. 
For a few days, for tens of thousands of people, we created these worlds that everybody said were the way they wish the world could always be. 
What if we experimented with creating that kind of world these next few days? 
And instead of going up to someone and asking them, "" What do you do? "" ask them, "" So what are your dreams? "" or "" What are your broken dreams? "" You know, "" TED. "" Tend to Each other's Dreams. 
(Applause) Maybe it's "" I want to stay sober "" or "" I want to build a tree house with my kid. "" You know, instead of going up to the person everybody wants to meet, go up to the person who is all alone and ask them if they want to grab a cup of coffee. 
I think what we fear most is that we will be denied the opportunity to fulfill our true potential, that we are born to dream and we might die without ever having the chance. 
Imagine living in a world where we simply recognize that deep, existential fear in one another and love one another boldly because we know that to be human is to live with that fear. 
It's time for us to dream in multiple dimensions simultaneously, and somewhere that transcends all of the wondrous things we can and will and must do lies the domain of all the unbelievable things we could be. 
It's time we set foot into that dimension and came out about the fact that we have dreams there, too. 
If the Moon could dream, I think that would be its dream for us. 
It's an honor to be with you. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

As a particle physicist, I study the elementary particles and how they interact on the most fundamental level. 
For most of my research career, I've been using accelerators, such as the electron accelerator at Stanford University, just up the road, to study things on the smallest scale. 
But more recently, I've been turning my attention to the universe on the largest scale. 
Because, as I'll explain to you, the questions on the smallest and the largest scale are actually very connected. 
So I'm going to tell you about our twenty-first-century view of the universe, what it's made of and what the big questions in the physical sciences are — at least some of the big questions. 
So, recently, we have realized that the ordinary matter in the universe — and by ordinary matter, I mean you, me, the planets, the stars, the galaxies — the ordinary matter makes up only a few percent of the content of the universe. 
Almost a quarter, or approximately a quarter of the matter in the universe, is stuff that's invisible. 
By invisible, I mean it doesn't absorb in the electromagnetic spectrum. 
It doesn't emit in the electromagnetic spectrum. It doesn't reflect. 
It doesn't interact with the electromagnetic spectrum, which is what we use to detect things. 
It doesn't interact at all. So how do we know it's there? 
We know it's there by its gravitational effects. 
In fact, this dark matter dominates the gravitational effects in the universe on a large scale, and I'll be telling you about the evidence for that. 
What about the rest of the pie? 
The rest of the pie is a very mysterious substance called dark energy. 
More about that later, OK. 
So for now, let's turn to the evidence for dark matter. 
In these galaxies, especially in a spiral galaxy like this, most of the mass of the stars is concentrated in the middle of the galaxy. 
This huge mass of all these stars keeps stars in circular orbits in the galaxy. 
So we have these stars going around in circles like this. 
As you can imagine, even if you know physics, this should be intuitive, OK — that stars that are closer to the mass in the middle will be rotating at a higher speed than those that are further out here, OK. 
So what you would expect is that if you measured the orbital speed of the stars, that they should be slower on the edges than on the inside. 
In other words, if we measured speed as a function of distance — this is the only time I'm going to show a graph, OK — we would expect that it goes down as the distance increases from the center of the galaxy. 
When those measurements are made, instead what we find is that the speed is basically constant, as a function of distance. 
If it's constant, that means that the stars out here are feeling the gravitational effects of matter that we do not see. 
In fact, this galaxy and every other galaxy appears to be embedded in a cloud of this invisible dark matter. 
And this cloud of matter is much more spherical than the galaxy themselves, and it extends over a much wider range than the galaxy. 
So we see the galaxy and fixate on that, but it's actually a cloud of dark matter that's dominating the structure and the dynamics of this galaxy. 
Galaxies themselves are not strewn randomly in space; they tend to cluster. 
And this is an example of a very, actually, famous cluster, the Coma cluster. 
And there are thousands of galaxies in this cluster. 
They're the white, fuzzy, elliptical things here. 
So these galaxy clusters — we take a snapshot now, we take a snapshot in a decade, it'll look identical. 
But these galaxies are actually moving at extremely high speeds. 
They're moving around in this gravitational potential well of this cluster, OK. 
So all of these galaxies are moving. 
We can measure the speeds of these galaxies, their orbital velocities, and figure out how much mass is in this cluster. 
And again, what we find is that there is much more mass there than can be accounted for by the galaxies that we see. 
Or if we look in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, we see that there's a lot of gas in this cluster, as well. 
But that cannot account for the mass either. 
In fact, there appears to be about ten times as much mass here in the form of this invisible or dark matter as there is in the ordinary matter, OK. 
It would be nice if we could see this dark matter a little bit more directly. 
I'm just putting this big, blue blob on there, OK, to try to remind you that it's there. 
Can we see it more visually? Yes, we can. 
And so let me lead you through how we can do this. 
So here's an observer: it could be an eye; it could be a telescope. 
And suppose there's a galaxy out here in the universe. 
How do we see that galaxy? 
A ray of light leaves the galaxy and travels through the universe for perhaps billions of years before it enters the telescope or your eye. 
Now, how do we deduce where the galaxy is? 
Well, we deduce it by the direction that the ray is traveling as it enters our eye, right? 
We say, the ray of light came this way; the galaxy must be there, OK. 
Now, suppose I put in the middle a cluster of galaxies — and don't forget the dark matter, OK. 
Now, if we consider a different ray of light, one going off like this, we now need to take into account what Einstein predicted when he developed general relativity. 
And that was that the gravitational field, due to mass, will deflect not only the trajectory of particles, but will deflect light itself. 
So this light ray will not continue in a straight line, but would rather bend and could end up going into our eye. 
Where will this observer see the galaxy? 
You can respond. Up, right? 
We extrapolate backwards and say the galaxy is up here. 
Is there any other ray of light that could make into the observer's eye from that galaxy? 
Yes, great. I see people going down like this. 
So a ray of light could go down, be bent up into the observer's eye, and the observer sees a ray of light here. 
Now, take into account the fact that we live in a three-dimensional universe, OK, a three-dimensional space. 
Are there any other rays of light that could make it into the eye? 
Yes! The rays would lie on a — I'd like to see — yeah, on a cone. 
So there's a whole ray of light — rays of light on a cone — that will all be bent by that cluster and make it into the observer's eye. 
If there is a cone of light coming into my eye, what do I see? 
A circle, a ring. It's called an Einstein ring. Einstein predicted that, OK. 
Now, it will only be a perfect ring if the source, the deflector and the eyeball, in this case, are all in a perfectly straight line. 
If they're slightly skewed, we'll see a different image. 
Now, you can do an experiment tonight over the reception, OK, to figure out what that image will look like. 
Because it turns out that there is a kind of lens that we can devise, that has the right shape to produce this kind of effect. 
We call this gravitational lensing. 
And so, this is your instrument, OK. 
(Laughter). 
But ignore the top part. 
It's the base that I want you to concentrate, OK. 
So, actually, at home, whenever we break a wineglass, I save the bottom, take it over to the machine shop. 
We shave it off, and I have a little gravitational lens, OK. 
So it's got the right shape to produce the lensing. 
And so the next thing you need to do in your experiment is grab a napkin. I grabbed a piece of graph paper — I'm a physicist. (Laughter) So, a napkin. Draw a little model galaxy in the middle. 
And now put the lens over the galaxy, and what you'll find is that you'll see a ring, an Einstein ring. 
Now, move the base off to the side, and the ring will split up into arcs, OK. 
And you can put it on top of any image. 
On the graph paper, you can see how all the lines on the graph paper have been distorted. 
And again, this is a kind of an accurate model of what happens with the gravitational lensing. 
OK, so the question is: do we see this in the sky? 
Do we see arcs in the sky when we look at, say, a cluster of galaxies? 
And the answer is yes. 
And so, here's an image from the Hubble Space Telescope. 
Many of the images you are seeing are earlier from the Hubble Space Telescope. 
Well, first of all, for the golden shape galaxies — those are the galaxies in the cluster. 
They're the ones that are embedded in that sea of dark matter that are causing the bending of the light to cause these optical illusions, or mirages, practically, of the background galaxies. 
So the streaks that you see, all these streaks, are actually distorted images of galaxies that are much further away. 
So what we can do, then, is based on how much distortion we see in those images, we can calculate how much mass there must be in this cluster. 
And it's an enormous amount of mass. 
And also, you can tell by eye, by looking at this, that these arcs are not centered on individual galaxies. 
They are centered on some more spread out structure, and that is the dark matter in which the cluster is embedded, OK. 
So this is the closest you can get to kind of seeing at least the effects of the dark matter with your naked eye. 
OK, so, a quick review then, to see that you're following. 
So the evidence that we have that a quarter of the universe is dark matter — this gravitationally attracting stuff — is that galaxies, the speed with which stars orbiting galaxies is much too large; it must be embedded in dark matter. 
The speed with which galaxies within clusters are orbiting is much too large; it must be embedded in dark matter. 
And we see these gravitational lensing effects, these distortions that say that, again, clusters are embedded in dark matter. 
OK. So now, let's turn to dark energy. 
So to understand the evidence for dark energy, we need to discuss something that Stephen Hawking referred to in the previous session. 
And that is the fact that space itself is expanding. 
So if we imagine a section of our infinite universe — and so I've put down four spiral galaxies, OK — and imagine that you put down a set of tape measures, so every line on here corresponds to a tape measure, horizontal or vertical, for measuring where things are. 
If you could do this, what you would find that with each passing day, each passing year, each passing billions of years, OK, the distance between galaxies is getting greater. 
And it's not because galaxies are moving away from each other through space. 
They're not necessarily moving through space. 
They're moving away from each other because space itself is getting bigger, OK. 
That's what the expansion of the universe or space means. 
So they're moving further apart. 
Now, what Stephen Hawking mentioned, as well, is that after the Big Bang, space expanded at a very rapid rate. 
But because gravitationally attracting matter is embedded in this space, it tends to slow down the expansion of the space, OK. 
So the expansion slows down with time. 
So, in the last century, OK, people debated about whether this expansion of space would continue forever; whether it would slow down, you know, will be slowing down, but continue forever; slow down and stop, asymptotically stop; or slow down, stop, and then reverse, so it starts to contract again. 
So a little over a decade ago, two groups of physicists and astronomers set out to measure the rate at which the expansion of space was slowing down, OK. 
By how much less is it expanding today, compared to, say, a couple of billion years ago? 
The startling answer to this question, OK, from these experiments, was that space is expanding at a faster rate today than it was a few billion years ago, OK. 
So the expansion of space is actually speeding up. 
This was a completely surprising result. 
There is no persuasive theoretical argument for why this should happen, OK. 
No one was predicting ahead of time this is what's going to be found. 
It was the opposite of what was expected. 
So we need something to be able to explain that. 
Now it turns out, in the mathematics, you can put it in as a term that's an energy, but it's a completely different type of energy from anything we've ever seen before. 
We call it dark energy, and it has this effect of causing space to expand. 
But we don't have a good motivation for putting it in there at this point, OK. 
So it's really unexplained as to why we need to put it in. 
Now, so at this point, then, what I want to really emphasize to you, is that, first of all, dark matter and dark energy are completely different things, OK. 
There are really two mysteries out there as to what makes up most of the universe, and they have very different effects. 
Dark matter, because it gravitationally attracts, it tends to encourage the growth of structure, OK. 
So clusters of galaxies will tend to form, because of all this gravitational attraction. 
Dark energy, on the other hand, is putting more and more space between the galaxies, makes it, the gravitational attraction between them decrease, and so it impedes the growth of structure. 
So by looking at things like clusters of galaxies, and how they — their number density, how many there are as a function of time — we can learn about how dark matter and dark energy compete against each other in structure forming. 
In terms of dark matter, I said that we don't have any, you know, really persuasive argument for dark energy. 
Do we have anything for dark matter? And the answer is yes. 
We have well-motivated candidates for the dark matter. 
Now, what do I mean by well motivated? 
I mean that we have mathematically consistent theories that were actually introduced to explain a completely different phenomenon, OK, things that I haven't even talked about, that each predict the existence of a very weakly interacting, new particle. 
So, this is exactly what you want in physics: where a prediction comes out of a mathematically consistent theory that was actually developed for something else. 
But we don't know if either of those are actually the dark matter candidate, OK. 
One or both, who knows? Or it could be something completely different. 
Now, we look for these dark matter particles because, after all, they are here in the room, OK, and they didn't come in the door. 
They just pass through anything. 
They can come through the building, through the Earth — they're so non-interacting. 
So one way to look for them is to build detectors that are extremely sensitive to a dark matter particle coming through and bumping it. 
So a crystal that will ring if that happens. 
So one of my colleagues up the road and his collaborators have built such a detector. 
And they've put it deep down in an iron mine in Minnesota, OK, deep under the ground, and in fact, in the last couple of days announced the most sensitive results so far. 
They haven't seen anything, OK, but it puts limits on what the mass and the interaction strength of these dark matter particles are. 
There's going to be a satellite telescope launched later this year and it will look towards the middle of the galaxy, to see if we can see dark matter particles annihilating and producing gamma rays that could be detected with this. 
The Large Hadron Collider, a particle physics accelerator, that we'll be turning on later this year. 
It is possible that dark matter particles might be produced at the Large Hadron Collider. 
Now, because they are so non-interactive, they will actually escape the detector, so their signature will be missing energy, OK. 
Now, unfortunately, there is a lot of new physics whose signature could be missing energy, so it will be hard to tell the difference. 
And finally, for future endeavors, there are telescopes being designed specifically to address the questions of dark matter and dark energy — ground-based telescopes, and there are three space-based telescopes that are in competition right now to be launched to investigate dark matter and dark energy. 
So in terms of the big questions: what is dark matter? What is dark energy? 
The big questions facing physics. 
And I'm sure you have lots of questions, which I very much look forward to addressing over the next 72 hours, while I'm here. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm a very lucky person. 
I've been privileged to see so much of our beautiful Earth and the people and creatures that live on it. 
And my passion was inspired at the age of seven, when my parents first took me to Morocco, at the edge of the Sahara Desert. 
Now imagine a little Brit somewhere that wasn't cold and damp like home. 
What an amazing experience. 
And it made me want to explore more. 
So as a filmmaker, I've been from one end of the Earth to the other trying to get the perfect shot and to capture animal behavior never seen before. 
And what's more, I'm really lucky, because I get to share that with millions of people worldwide. 
Now the idea of having new perspectives of our planet and actually being able to get that message out gets me out of bed every day with a spring in my step. 
You might think that it's quite hard to find new stories and new subjects, but new technology is changing the way we can film. 
It's enabling us to get fresh, new images and tell brand new stories. 
In Nature's Great Events, a series for the BBC that I did with David Attenborough, we wanted to do just that. 
Images of grizzly bears are pretty familiar. 
You see them all the time, you think. 
But there's a whole side to their lives that we hardly ever see and had never been filmed. 
So what we did, we went to Alaska, which is where the grizzlies rely on really high, almost inaccessible, mountain slopes for their denning. 
And the only way to film that is a shoot from the air. 
(Video) David Attenborough: Throughout Alaska and British Columbia, thousands of bear families are emerging from their winter sleep. 
There is nothing to eat up here, but the conditions were ideal for hibernation. 
Lots of snow in which to dig a den. 
To find food, mothers must lead their cubs down to the coast, where the snow will already be melting. 
But getting down can be a challenge for small cubs. 
These mountains are dangerous places, but ultimately the fate of these bear families, and indeed that of all bears around the North Pacific, depends on the salmon. 
KB: I love that shot. 
I always get goosebumps every time I see it. 
That was filmed from a helicopter using a gyro-stabilized camera. 
And it's a wonderful bit of gear, because it's like having a flying tripod, crane and dolly all rolled into one. 
But technology alone isn't enough. 
To really get the money shots, it's down to being in the right place at the right time. 
And that sequence was especially difficult. 
The first year we got nothing. 
We had to go back the following year, all the way back to the remote parts of Alaska. 
And we hung around with a helicopter for two whole weeks. 
And eventually we got lucky. 
The cloud lifted, the wind was still, and even the bear showed up. 
And we managed to get that magic moment. 
For a filmmaker, new technology is an amazing tool, but the other thing that really, really excites me is when new species are discovered. 
Now, when I heard about one animal, I knew we had to get it for my next series, Untamed Americas, for National Geographic. 
In 2005, a new species of bat was discovered in the cloud forests of Ecuador. 
And what was amazing about that discovery is that it also solved the mystery of what pollinated a unique flower. 
It depends solely on the bat. 
Now, the series hasn't even aired yet, so you're the very first to see this. 
See what you think. 
(Video) Narrator: The tube-lipped nectar bat. 
A pool of delicious nectar lies at the bottom of each flower's long flute. 
But how to reach it? 
Necessity is the mother of evolution. 
(Music) This two-and-a-half-inch bat has a three-and-a-half-inch tongue, the longest relative to body length of any mammal in the world. 
If human, he'd have a nine-foot tongue. 
(Applause) KB: What a tongue. 
We filmed it by cutting a tiny little hole in the base of the flower and using a camera that could slow the action by 40 times. 
So imagine how quick that thing is in real life. 
Now people often ask me, "" Where's your favorite place on the planet? "" And the truth is I just don't have one. 
There are so many wonderful places. 
But some locations draw you back time and time again. 
And one remote location — I first went there as a backpacker; I've been back several times for filming, most recently for Untamed Americas — it's the Altiplano in the high Andes of South America, and it's the most otherworldly place I know. 
But at 15,000 feet, it's tough. 
It's freezing cold, and that thin air really gets you. 
Sometimes it's hard to breathe, especially carrying all the heavy filming equipment. 
And that pounding head just feels like a constant hangover. 
But the advantage of that wonderful thin atmosphere is that it enables you to see the stars in the heavens with amazing clarity. 
Have a look. 
(Video) Narrator: Some 1,500 miles south of the tropics, between Chile and Bolivia, the Andes completely change. 
It's called the Altiplano, or "" high plains "" — a place of extremes and extreme contrasts. 
Where deserts freeze and waters boil. 
More like Mars than Earth, it seems just as hostile to life. 
The stars themselves — at 12,000 feet, the dry, thin air makes for perfect stargazing. 
Some of the world's astronomers have telescopes nearby. 
But just looking up with the naked eye, you really don't need one. 
(Music) (Applause) KB: Thank you so much for letting me share some images of our magnificent, wonderful Earth. 
Thank you for letting me share that with you. 
(Applause) 

What would be a good end of life? 
And I'm talking about the very end. 
I'm talking about dying. 
We all think a lot about how to live well. 
I'd like to talk about increasing our chances of dying well. 
I'm not a geriatrician. 
I design reading programs for preschoolers. 
What I know about this topic comes from a qualitative study with a sample size of two. 
In the last few years, I helped two friends have the end of life they wanted. 
Jim and Shirley Modini spent their 68 years of marriage living off the grid on their 1,700-acre ranch in the mountains of Sonoma County. 
They kept just enough livestock to make ends meet so that the majority of their ranch would remain a refuge for the bears and lions and so many other things that lived there. 
This was their dream. 
I met Jim and Shirley in their 80s. 
They were both only children who chose not to have kids. 
As we became friends, I became their trustee and their medical advocate, but more importantly, I became the person who managed their end-of-life experiences. 
And we learned a few things about how to have a good end. 
In their final years, Jim and Shirley faced cancers, fractures, infections, neurological illness. 
It's true. 
At the end, our bodily functions and independence are declining to zero. 
What we found is that, with a plan and the right people, quality of life can remain high. 
The beginning of the end is triggered by a mortality awareness event, and during this time, Jim and Shirley chose ACR nature preserves to take their ranch over when they were gone. 
This gave them the peace of mind to move forward. 
It might be a diagnosis. It might be your intuition. 
But one day, you're going to say, "" This thing is going to get me. "" Jim and Shirley spent this time letting friends know that their end was near and that they were okay with that. 
Dying from cancer and dying from neurological illness are different. 
In both cases, last days are about quiet reassurance. 
Jim died first. He was conscious until the very end, but on his last day he couldn't talk. 
Through his eyes, we knew when he needed to hear again, "" It is all set, Jim. We're going to take care of Shirley right here at the ranch, and ACR's going to take care of your wildlife forever. "" From this experience I'm going to share five practices. 
I've put worksheets online, so if you'd like, you can plan your own end. 
It starts with a plan. 
Most people say, "" I'd like to die at home. "" Eighty percent of Americans die in a hospital or a nursing home. 
Saying we'd like to die at home is not a plan. 
A lot of people say, "" If I get like that, just shoot me. "" This is not a plan either; this is illegal. 
(Laughter) A plan involves answering straightforward questions about the end you want. 
Where do you want to be when you're no longer independent? 
What do you want in terms of medical intervention? 
And who's going to make sure your plan is followed? 
You will need advocates. 
Having more than one increases your chance of getting the end you want. 
Don't assume the natural choice is your spouse or child. 
You want someone who has the time and proximity to do this job well, and you want someone who can work with people under the pressure of an ever-changing situation. 
Hospital readiness is critical. 
You are likely to be headed to the emergency room, and you want to get this right. 
Prepare a one-page summary of your medical history, medications and physician information. 
Put this in a really bright envelope with copies of your insurance cards, your power of attorney, and your do-not-resuscitate order. 
Have advocates keep a set in their car. 
Tape a set to your refrigerator. 
When you show up in the E.R. with this packet, your admission is streamlined in a material way. 
You're going to need caregivers. 
You'll need to assess your personality and financial situation to determine whether an elder care community or staying at home is your best choice. 
In either case, do not settle. 
We went through a number of not-quite-right caregivers before we found the perfect team led by Marsha, who won't let you win at bingo just because you're dying but will go out and take videos of your ranch for you when you can't get out there, and Caitlin, who won't let you skip your morning exercises but knows when you need to hear that your wife is in good hands. 
Finally, last words. 
What do you want to hear at the very end, and from whom would you like to hear it? 
In my experience, you'll want to hear that whatever you're worried about is going to be fine. 
When you believe it's okay to let go, you will. 
So, this is a topic that normally inspires fear and denial. 
What I've learned is if we put some time into planning our end of life, we have the best chance of maintaining our quality of life. 
Here are Jim and Shirley just after deciding who would take care of their ranch. 
Here's Jim just a few weeks before he died, celebrating a birthday he didn't expect to see. 
And here's Shirley just a few days before she died being read an article in that day's paper about the significance of the wildlife refuge at the Modini ranch. 
Jim and Shirley had a good end of life, and by sharing their story with you, I hope to increase our chances of doing the same. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Space, we all know what it looks like. 
We've been surrounded by images of space our whole lives, from the speculative images of science fiction to the inspirational visions of artists to the increasingly beautiful pictures made possible by complex technologies. 
But whilst we have an overwhelmingly vivid visual understanding of space, we have no sense of what space sounds like. 
And indeed, most people associate space with silence. 
But the story of how we came to understand the universe is just as much a story of listening as it is by looking. 
And yet despite this, hardly any of us have ever heard space. 
How many of you here could describe the sound of a single planet or star? 
Well in case you've ever wondered, this is what the Sun sounds like. 
(Static) (Crackling) (Static) (Crackling) This is the planet Jupiter. 
(Soft crackling) And this is the space probe Cassini pirouetting through the ice rings of Saturn. 
(Crackling) This is a a highly condensed clump of neutral matter, spinning in the distant universe. 
(Tapping) So my artistic practice is all about listening to the weird and wonderful noises emitted by the magnificent celestial objects that make up our universe. 
And you may wonder, how do we know what these sounds are? 
How can we tell the difference between the sound of the Sun and the sound of a pulsar? 
Well the answer is the science of radio astronomy. 
Radio astronomers study radio waves from space using sensitive antennas and receivers, which give them precise information about what an astronomical object is and where it is in our night sky. 
And just like the signals that we send and receive here on Earth, we can convert these transmissions into sound using simple analog techniques. 
And therefore, it's through listening that we've come to uncover some of the universe's most important secrets — its scale, what it's made of and even how old it is. 
So today, I'm going to tell you a short story of the history of the universe through listening. 
It's punctuated by three quick anecdotes, which show how accidental encounters with strange noises gave us some of the most important information we have about space. 
Now this story doesn't start with vast telescopes or futuristic spacecraft, but a rather more humble technology — and in fact, the very medium which gave us the telecommunications revolution that we're all part of today: the telephone. 
It's 1876, it's in Boston, and this is Alexander Graham Bell who was working with Thomas Watson on the invention of the telephone. 
A key part of their technical set up was a half-mile long length of wire, which was thrown across the rooftops of several houses in Boston. 
The line carried the telephone signals that would later make Bell a household name. 
But like any long length of charged wire, it also inadvertently became an antenna. 
Thomas Watson spent hours listening to the strange crackles and hisses and chirps and whistles that his accidental antenna detected. 
Now you have to remember, this is 10 years before Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of radio waves — 15 years before Nikola Tesla's four-tuned circuit — nearly 20 years before Marconi's first broadcast. 
So Thomas Watson wasn't listening to us. 
We didn't have the technology to transmit. 
So what were these strange noises? 
Watson was in fact listening to very low-frequency radio emissions caused by nature. 
Some of the crackles and pops were lightning, but the eerie whistles and curiously melodious chirps had a rather more exotic origin. 
Using the very first telephone, Watson was in fact dialed into the heavens. 
As he correctly guessed, some of these sounds were caused by activity on the surface of the Sun. 
It was a solar wind interacting with our ionosphere that he was listening to — a phenomena which we can see at the extreme northern and southern latitudes of our planet as the aurora. 
So whilst inventing the technology that would usher in the telecommunications revolution, Watson had discovered that the star at the center of our solar system emitted powerful radio waves. 
He had accidentally been the first person to tune in to them. 
Fast-forward 50 years, and Bell and Watson's technology has completely transformed global communications. 
But going from slinging some wire across rooftops in Boston to laying thousands and thousands of miles of cable on the Atlantic Ocean seabed is no easy matter. 
And so before long, Bell were looking to new technologies to optimize their revolution. 
Radio could carry sound without wires. 
But the medium is lossy — it's subject to a lot of noise and interference. 
So Bell employed an engineer to study those noises, to try and find out where they came from, with a view towards building the perfect hardware codec, which would get rid of them so they could think about using radio for the purposes of telephony. 
Most of the noises that the engineer, Karl Jansky, investigated were fairly prosaic in origin. 
They turned out to be lightning or sources of electrical power. 
But there was one persistent noise that Jansky couldn't identify, and it seemed to appear in his radio headset four minutes earlier each day. 
Now any astronomer will tell you, this is the telltale sign of something that doesn't originate from Earth. 
Jansky had made a historic discovery, that celestial objects could emit radio waves as well as light waves. 
Fifty years on from Watson's accidental encounter with the Sun, Jansky's careful listening ushered in a new age of space exploration: the radio astronomy age. 
Over the next few years, astronomers connected up their antennas to loudspeakers and learned about our radio sky, about Jupiter and the Sun, by listening. 
Let's jump ahead again. 
It's 1964, and we're back at Bell Labs. 
And once again, two scientists have got a problem with noise. 
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were using the horn antenna at Bell's Holmdel laboratory to study the Milky Way with extraordinary precision. 
They were really listening to the galaxy in high fidelity. 
There was a glitch in their soundtrack. 
A mysterious persistent noise was disrupting their research. 
It was in the microwave range, and it appeared to be coming from all directions simultaneously. 
Now this didn't make any sense, and like any reasonable engineer or scientist, they assumed that the problem must be the technology itself, it must be the dish. 
There were pigeons roosting in the dish. 
And so perhaps once they cleaned up the pigeon droppings, get the disk kind of operational again, normal operations would resume. 
But the noise didn't disappear. 
The mysterious noise that Penzias and Wilson were listening to turned out to be the oldest and most significant sound that anyone had ever heard. 
It was cosmic radiation left over from the very birth of the universe. 
This was the first experimental evidence that the Big Bang existed and the universe was born at a precise moment some 14.7 billion years ago. 
So our story ends at the beginning — the beginning of all things, the Big Bang. 
This is the noise that Penzias and Wilson heard — the oldest sound that you're ever going to hear, the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang. 
(Fuzz) Thanks. 
(Applause) 

Technology can change our understanding of nature. 
Take for example the case of lions. 
For centuries, it's been said that female lions do all of the hunting out in the open savanna, and male lions do nothing until it's time for dinner. 
You've heard this too, I can tell. 
Well recently, I led an airborne mapping campaign in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. 
Our colleagues put GPS tracking collars on male and female lions, and we mapped their hunting behavior from the air. 
The lower left shows a lion sizing up a herd of impala for a kill, and the right shows what I call the lion viewshed. 
That's how far the lion can see in all directions until his or her view is obstructed by vegetation. 
And what we found is that male lions are not the lazy hunters we thought them to be. 
They just use a different strategy. 
Whereas the female lions hunt out in the open savanna over long distances, usually during the day, male lions use an ambush strategy in dense vegetation, and often at night. 
This video shows the actual hunting viewsheds of male lions on the left and females on the right. 
Red and darker colors show more dense vegetation, and the white are wide open spaces. 
And this is the viewshed right literally at the eye level of hunting male and female lions. 
All of a sudden, you get a very clear understanding of the very spooky conditions under which male lions do their hunting. 
I bring up this example to begin, because it emphasizes how little we know about nature. 
There's been a huge amount of work done so far to try to slow down our losses of tropical forests, and we are losing our forests at a rapid rate, as shown in red on the slide. 
I find it ironic that we're doing so much, yet these areas are fairly unknown to science. 
So how can we save what we don't understand? 
Now I'm a global ecologist and an Earth explorer with a background in physics and chemistry and biology and a lot of other boring subjects, but above all, I'm obsessed with what we don't know about our planet. 
So I created this, the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, or CAO. 
It may look like a plane with a fancy paint job, but I packed it with over 1,000 kilos of high-tech sensors, computers, and a very motivated staff of Earth scientists and pilots. 
Two of our instruments are very unique: one is called an imaging spectrometer that can actually measure the chemical composition of plants as we fly over them. 
Another one is a set of lasers, very high-powered lasers, that fire out of the bottom of the plane, sweeping across the ecosystem and measuring it at nearly 500,000 times per second in high-resolution 3D. 
Here's an image of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, not far from where I live. 
Although we flew straight over this bridge, we imaged it in 3D, captured its color in just a few seconds. 
But the real power of the CAO is its ability to capture the actual building blocks of ecosystems. 
This is a small town in the Amazon, imaged with the CAO. 
We can slice through our data and see, for example, the 3D structure of the vegetation and the buildings, or we can use the chemical information to actually figure out how fast the plants are growing as we fly over them. 
The hottest pinks are the fastest-growing plants. 
And we can see biodiversity in ways that you never could have imagined. 
This is what a rainforest might look like as you fly over it in a hot air balloon. 
This is how we see a rainforest, in kaleidoscopic color that tells us that there are many species living with one another. 
But you have to remember that these trees are literally bigger than whales, and what that means is that they're impossible to understand just by walking on the ground below them. 
So our imagery is 3D, it's chemical, it's biological, and this tells us not only the species that are living in the canopy, but it tells us a lot of information about the rest of the species that occupy the rainforest. 
Now I created the CAO in order to answer questions that have proven extremely challenging to answer from any other vantage point, such as from the ground, or from satellite sensors. 
I want to share three of those questions with you today. 
The first questions is, how do we manage our carbon reserves in tropical forests? 
Tropical forests contain a huge amount of carbon in the trees, and we need to keep that carbon in those forests if we're going to avoid any further global warming. 
Unfortunately, global carbon emissions from deforestation now equals the global transportation sector. 
That's all ships, airplanes, trains and automobiles combined. 
So it's understandable that policy negotiators have been working hard to reduce deforestation, but they're doing it on landscapes that are hardly known to science. 
If you don't know where the carbon is exactly, in detail, how can you know what you're losing? 
Basically, we need a high-tech accounting system. 
With our system, we're able to see the carbon stocks of tropical forests in utter detail. 
The red shows, obviously, closed-canopy tropical forest, and then you see the cookie cutting, or the cutting of the forest in yellows and greens. 
It's like cutting a cake except this cake is about whale deep. 
And yet, we can zoom in and see the forest and the trees at the same time. 
And what's amazing is, even though we flew very high above this forest, later on in analysis, we can go in and actually experience the treetrops, leaf by leaf, branch by branch, just as the other species that live in this forest experience it along with the trees themselves. 
We've been using the technology to explore and to actually put out the first carbon geographies in high resolution in faraway places like the Amazon Basin and not-so-faraway places like the United States and Central America. 
What I'm going to do is I'm going to take you on a high-resolution, first-time tour of the carbon landscapes of Peru and then Panama. 
The colors are going to be going from red to blue. 
Red is extremely high carbon stocks, your largest cathedral forests you can imagine, and blue are very low carbon stocks. 
And let me tell you, Peru alone is an amazing place, totally unknown in terms of its carbon geography until today. 
We can fly to this area in northern Peru and see super high carbon stocks in red, and the Amazon River and floodplain cutting right through it. 
We can go to an area of utter devastation caused by deforestation in blue, and the virus of deforestation spreading out in orange. 
We can also fly to the southern Andes to see the tree line and see exactly how the carbon geography ends as we go up into the mountain system. 
And we can go to the biggest swamp in the western Amazon. 
It's a watery dreamworld akin to Jim Cameron's "" Avatar. "" We can go to one of the smallest tropical countries, Panama, and see also a huge range of carbon variation, from high in red to low in blue. 
Unfortunately, most of the carbon is lost in the lowlands, but what you see that's left, in terms of high carbon stocks in greens and reds, is the stuff that's up in the mountains. 
One interesting exception to this is right in the middle of your screen. 
You're seeing the buffer zone around the Panama Canal. 
That's in the reds and yellows. 
The canal authorities are using force to protect their watershed and global commerce. 
This kind of carbon mapping has transformed conservation and resource policy development. 
It's really advancing our ability to save forests and to curb climate change. 
My second question: How do we prepare for climate change in a place like the Amazon rainforest? 
Let me tell you, I spend a lot of time in these places, and we're seeing the climate changing already. 
Temperatures are increasing, and what's really happening is we're getting a lot of droughts, recurring droughts. 
The 2010 mega-drought is shown here with red showing an area about the size of Western Europe. 
The Amazon was so dry in 2010 that even the main stem of the Amazon river itself dried up partially, as you see in the photo in the lower portion of the slide. 
What we found is that in very remote areas, these droughts are having a big negative impact on tropical forests. 
For example, these are all of the dead trees in red that suffered mortality following the 2010 drought. 
This area happens to be on the border of Peru and Brazil, totally unexplored, almost totally unknown scientifically. 
So what we think, as Earth scientists, is species are going to have to migrate with climate change from the east in Brazil all the way west into the Andes and up into the mountains in order to minimize their exposure to climate change. 
One of the problems with this is that humans are taking apart the western Amazon as we speak. 
Look at this 100-square-kilometer gash in the forest created by gold miners. 
You see the forest in green in 3D, and you see the effects of gold mining down below the soil surface. 
Species have nowhere to migrate in a system like this, obviously. 
If you haven't been to the Amazon, you should go. 
It's an amazing experience every time, no matter where you go. 
You're going to probably see it this way, on a river. 
But what happens is a lot of times the rivers hide what's really going on back in the forest itself. 
We flew over this same river, imaged the system in 3D. 
The forest is on the left. 
And then we can digitally remove the forest and see what's going on below the canopy. 
And in this case, we found gold mining activity, all of it illegal, set back away from the river's edge, as you'll see in those strange pockmarks coming up on your screen on the right. 
Don't worry, we're working with the authorities to deal with this and many, many other problems in the region. 
So in order to put together a conservation plan for these unique, important corridors like the western Amazon and the Andes Amazon corridor, we have to start making geographically explicit plans now. 
How do we do that if we don't know the geography of biodiversity in the region, if it's so unknown to science? 
So what we've been doing is using the laser-guided spectroscopy from the CAO to map for the first time the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest. 
Here you see actual data showing different species in different colors. 
Reds are one type of species, blues are another, and greens are yet another. 
And when we take this together and scale up to the regional level, we get a completely new geography of biodiversity unknown prior to this work. 
This tells us where the big biodiversity changes occur from habitat to habitat, and that's really important because it tells us a lot about where species may migrate to and migrate from as the climate shifts. 
And this is the pivotal information that's needed by decision makers to develop protected areas in the context of their regional development plans. 
And third and final question is, how do we manage biodiversity on a planet of protected ecosystems? 
The example I started out with about lions hunting, that was a study we did behind the fence line of a protected area in South Africa. 
And the truth is, much of Africa's nature is going to persist into the future in protected areas like I show in blue on the screen. 
This puts incredible pressure and responsibility on park management. 
They need to do and make decisions that will benefit all of the species that they're protecting. 
Some of their decisions have really big impacts. 
For example, how much and where to use fire as a management tool? 
Or, how to deal with a large species like elephants, which may, if their populations get too large, have a negative impact on the ecosystem and on other species. 
And let me tell you, these types of dynamics really play out on the landscape. 
In the foreground is an area with lots of fire and lots of elephants: wide open savanna in blue, and just a few trees. 
As we cross this fence line, now we're getting into an area that has had protection from fire and zero elephants: dense vegetation, a radically different ecosystem. 
And in a place like Kruger, the soaring elephant densities are a real problem. 
I know it's a sensitive issue for many of you, and there are no easy answers with this. 
But what's good is that the technology we've developed and we're working with in South Africa, for example, is allowing us to map every single tree in the savanna, and then through repeat flights we're able to see which trees are being pushed over by elephants, in the red as you see on the screen, and how much that's happening in different types of landscapes in the savanna. 
That's giving park managers a very first opportunity to use tactical management strategies that are more nuanced and don't lead to those extremes that I just showed you. 
So really, the way we're looking at protected areas nowadays is to think of it as tending to a circle of life, where we have fire management, elephant management, those impacts on the structure of the ecosystem, and then those impacts affecting everything from insects up to apex predators like lions. 
Going forward, I plan to greatly expand the airborne observatory. 
I'm hoping to actually put the technology into orbit so we can manage the entire planet with technologies like this. 
Until then, you're going to find me flying in some remote place that you've never heard of. 
I just want to end by saying that technology is absolutely critical to managing our planet, but even more important is the understanding and wisdom to apply it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Applause) (Applause) I am a papercutter. 
(Laughter) I cut stories. 
So my process is very straightforward. 
I take a piece of paper, I visualize my story, sometimes I sketch, sometimes I don't. 
And as my image is already inside the paper, I just have to remove what's not from that story. 
So I didn't come to papercutting in a straight line. 
In fact, I see it more as a spiral. 
I was not born with a blade in my hand. 
And I don't remember papercutting as a child. 
As a teenager, I was sketching, drawing, and I wanted to be an artist. 
But I was also a rebel. 
And I left everything and went for a long series of odd jobs. 
So among them, I have been a shepherdess, a truck driver, a factory worker, a cleaning lady. 
I worked in tourism for one year in Mexico, one year in Egypt. 
I moved for two years in Taiwan. 
And then I settled in New York where I became a tour guide. 
And I still worked as a tour leader, traveled back and forth in China, Tibet and Central Asia. 
So of course, it took time, and I was nearly 40, and I decided it's time to start as an artist. 
(Applause) I chose papercutting because paper is cheap, it's light, and you can use it in a lot of different ways. 
And I chose the language of silhouette because graphically it's very efficient. 
And it's also just getting to the essential of things. 
So the word "" silhouette "" comes from a minister of finance, Etienne de Silhouette. 
And he slashed so many budgets that people said they couldn't afford paintings anymore, and they needed to have their portrait "a la silhouette." 
(Laughter) So I made series of images, cuttings, and I assembled them in portfolios. 
And people told me — like these 36 views of the Empire State building — they told me, "" You're making artist books. "" So artist books have a lot of definitions. 
They come in a lot of different shapes. 
But to me, they are fascinating objects to visually narrate a story. 
They can be with words or without words. 
And I have a passion for images and for words. 
I love pun and the relation to the unconscious. 
I love oddities of languages. 
And everywhere I lived, I learned the languages, but never mastered them. 
So I'm always looking for the false cognates or identical words in different languages. 
So as you can guess, my mother tongue is French. 
And my daily language is English. 
So I did a series of work where it was identical words in French and in English. 
So one of these works is the "" Spelling Spider. "" So the Spelling Spider is a cousin of the spelling bee. 
(Laughter) But it's much more connected to the Web. (Laughter) 
And this spider spins a bilingual alphabet. 
So you can read "" architecture active "" or "" active architecture. "" So this spider goes through the whole alphabet with identical adjectives and substantives. 
So if you don't know one of these languages, it's instant learning. 
And one ancient form of the book is scrolls. 
So scrolls are very convenient, because you can create a large image on a very small table. 
So the unexpected consequences of that is that you only see one part of your image, so it makes a very freestyle architecture. 
And I'm making all those kinds of windows. 
So it's to look beyond the surface. 
It's to have a look at different worlds. 
And very often I've been an outsider. 
So I want to see how things work and what's happening. 
So each window is an image and is a world that I often revisit. 
And I revisit this world thinking about the image or cliché about what we want to do, and what are the words, colloquialisms, that we have with the expressions. 
It's all if. 
So what if we were living in balloon houses? 
It would make a very uplifting world. 
And we would leave a very low footprint on the planet. 
It would be so light. 
So sometimes I view from the inside, like EgoCentriCity and the inner circles. 
Sometimes it's a global view, to see our common roots and how we can use them to catch dreams. 
And we can use them also as a safety net. 
And my inspirations are very eclectic. 
I'm influenced by everything I read, everything I see. 
I have some stories that are humorous, like "" Dead Beats. "" (Laughter) Other ones are historical. 
Here it's "" CandyCity. "" It's a non-sugar-coated history of sugar. 
It goes from slave trade to over-consumption of sugar with some sweet moments in between. 
And sometimes I have an emotional response to news, such as the 2010 Haitian earthquake. 
Other times, it's not even my stories. 
People tell me their lives, their memories, their aspirations, and I create a mindscape. 
I channel their history [so that] they have a place to go back to look at their life and its possibilities. 
I call them Freudian cities. 
I cannot speak for all my images, so I'll just go through a few of my worlds just with the title. 
"ModiCity." 
"ElectriCity." 
"MAD Growth on Columbus Circle." 
"ReefCity." 
"A Web of Time." 
"Chaos City." 
"Daily Battles." 
"FeliCity." 
"Floating Islands." 
And at one point, I had to do "" The Whole Nine Yards. "" So it's actually a papercut that's nine yards long. 
(Laughter) So in life and in papercutting, everything is connected. 
One story leads to another. 
I was also interested in the physicality of this format, because you have to walk to see it. 
And parallel to my cutting is my running. 
I started with small images, I started with a few miles. 
Larger images, I started to run marathons. 
Then I went to run 50K, then 60K. 
Then I ran 50 miles — ultramarathons. 
And I still feel I'm running, it's just the training to become a long-distance papercutter. 
(Laughter) And running gives me a lot of energy. 
Here is a three-week papercutting marathon at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. 
The result is "" Hells and Heavens. "" It's two panels 13 ft. high. 
They were installed in the museum on two floors, but in fact, it's a continuous image. 
And I call it "" Hells and Heavens "" because it's daily hells and daily heavens. 
There is no border in between. 
Some people are born in hells, and against all odds, they make it to heavens. 
Other people make the opposite trip. 
That's the border. 
You have sweatshops in hells. 
You have people renting their wings in the heavens. 
And then you have all those individual stories where sometimes we even have the same action, and the result puts you in hells or in heavens. 
So the whole "" Hells and Heavens "" is about free will and determinism. 
And in papercutting, you have the drawing as the structure itself. 
So you can take it off the wall. 
Here it's an artist book installation called "" Identity Project. "" It's not autobiographical identities. 
They are more our social identities. 
And then you can just walk behind them and try them on. 
So it's like the different layers of what we are made of and what we present to the world as an identity. 
That's another artist book project. 
In fact, in the picture, you have two of them. 
It's one I'm wearing and one that's on exhibition at the Center for Books Arts in New York City. 
Why do I call it a book? 
It's called "" Fashion Statement, "" and there are quotes about fashion, so you can read it, and also, because the definition of artist book is very generous. 
So artist books, you take them off the wall. 
You take them for a walk. 
You can also install them as public art. 
Here it's in Scottsdale, Arizona, and it's called "" Floating Memories. "" So it's regional memories, and they are just randomly moved by the wind. 
I love public art. 
And I entered competitions for a long time. 
After eight years of rejection, I was thrilled to get my first commission with the Percent for Art in New York City. 
It was for a merger station for emergency workers and firemen. 
I made an artist book that's in stainless steel instead of paper. 
I called it "" Working in the Same Direction. "" But I added weathervanes on both sides to show that they cover all directions. 
With public art, I could also make cut glass. 
Here it's faceted glass in the Bronx. 
And each time I make public art, I want something that's really relevant to the place it's installed. 
So for the subway in New York, I saw a correspondence between riding the subway and reading. 
It is travel in time, travel on time. 
And Bronx literature, it's all about Bronx writers and their stories. 
Another glass project is in a public library in San Jose, California. 
So I made a vegetable point of view of the growth of San Jose. 
So I started in the center with the acorn for the Ohlone Indian civilization. 
Then I have the fruit from Europe for the ranchers. 
And then the fruit of the world for Silicon Valley today. 
And it's still growing. 
So the technique, it's cut, sandblasted, etched and printed glass into architectural glass. 
And outside the library, I wanted to make a place to cultivate your mind. 
I took library material that had fruit in their title and I used them to make an orchard walk with these fruits of knowledge. 
I also planted the bibliotree. 
So it's a tree, and in its trunk you have the roots of languages. 
And it's all about international writing systems. 
And on the branches you have library material growing. 
You can also have function and form with public art. 
So in Aurora, Colorado it's a bench. 
But you have a bonus with this bench. 
Because if you sit a long time in summer in shorts, you will walk away with temporary branding of the story element on your thighs. 
(Laughter) Another functional work, it's in the south side of Chicago for a subway station. 
And it's called "" Seeds of the Future are Planted Today. "" It's a story about transformation and connections. 
So it acts as a screen to protect the rail and the commuter, and not to have objects falling on the rails. 
To be able to change fences and window guards into flowers, it's fantastic. 
And here I've been working for the last three years with a South Bronx developer to bring art to life to low-income buildings and affordable housing. 
So each building has its own personality. 
And sometimes it's about a legacy of the neighborhood, like in Morrisania, about the jazz history. 
And for other projects, like in Paris, it's about the name of the street. 
It's called Rue des Prairies — Prairie Street. 
So I brought back the rabbit, the dragonfly, to stay in that street. 
And in 2009, I was asked to make a poster to be placed in the subway cars in New York City for a year. 
So that was a very captive audience. 
And I wanted to give them an escape. 
I created "" All Around Town. "" It is a papercutting, and then after, I added color on the computer. 
So I can call it techno-crafted. 
And along the way, I'm kind of making papercuttings and adding other techniques. 
But the result is always to have stories. 
So the stories, they have a lot of possibilities. 
They have a lot of scenarios. 
I don't know the stories. 
I take images from our global imagination, from cliché, from things we are thinking about, from history. 
And everybody's a narrator, because everybody has a story to tell. 
But more important is everybody has to make a story to make sense of the world. 
And in all these universes, it's like imagination is the vehicle to be transported with, but the destination is our minds and how we can reconnect with the essential and with the magic. 
And it's what story cutting is all about. 
(Applause) 

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

Just a moment ago, my daughter Rebecca texted me for good luck. 
Her text said, "Mom, you will rock." 
I love this. 
Getting that text was like getting a hug. 
And so there you have it. 
I embody the central paradox. 
I'm a woman who loves getting texts who's going to tell you that too many of them can be a problem. 
Actually that reminder of my daughter brings me to the beginning of my story. 
1996, when I gave my first TEDTalk, Rebecca was five years old and she was sitting right there in the front row. 
I had just written a book that celebrated our life on the internet and I was about to be on the cover of Wired magazine. 
In those heady days, we were experimenting with chat rooms and online virtual communities. 
We were exploring different aspects of ourselves. 
And then we unplugged. 
I was excited. 
And, as a psychologist, what excited me most was the idea that we would use what we learned in the virtual world about ourselves, about our identity, to live better lives in the real world. 
Now fast-forward to 2012. 
I'm back here on the TED stage again. 
My daughter's 20. She's a college student. 
She sleeps with her cellphone, so do I. 
And I've just written a new book, but this time it's not one that will get me on the cover of Wired magazine. 
So what happened? 
I'm still excited by technology, but I believe, and I'm here to make the case, that we're letting it take us places that we don't want to go. 
Over the past 15 years, I've studied technologies of mobile communication and I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people, young and old, about their plugged in lives. 
And what I've found is that our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don't only change what we do, they change who we are. 
Some of the things we do now with our devices are things that, only a few years ago, we would have found odd or disturbing, but they've quickly come to seem familiar, just how we do things. 
So just to take some quick examples: People text or do email during corporate board meetings. 
They text and shop and go on Facebook during classes, during presentations, actually during all meetings. 
People talk to me about the important new skill of making eye contact while you're texting. 
(Laughter) People explain to me that it's hard, but that it can be done. 
Parents text and do email at breakfast and at dinner while their children complain about not having their parents' full attention. 
But then these same children deny each other their full attention. 
This is a recent shot of my daughter and her friends being together while not being together. 
And we even text at funerals. 
I study this. 
We remove ourselves from our grief or from our revery and we go into our phones. 
Why does this matter? 
It matters to me because I think we're setting ourselves up for trouble — trouble certainly in how we relate to each other, but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves and our capacity for self-reflection. 
We're getting used to a new way of being alone together. 
People want to be with each other, but also elsewhere — connected to all the different places they want to be. 
People want to customize their lives. 
They want to go in and out of all the places they are because the thing that matters most to them is control over where they put their attention. 
So you want to go to that board meeting, but you only want to pay attention to the bits that interest you. 
And some people think that's a good thing. 
But you can end up hiding from each other, even as we're all constantly connected to each other. 
A 50-year-old business man lamented to me that he feels he doesn't have colleagues anymore at work. 
When he goes to work, he doesn't stop by to talk to anybody, he doesn't call. 
And he says he doesn't want to interrupt his colleagues because, he says, "" They're too busy on their email. "" But then he stops himself and he says, "" You know, I'm not telling you the truth. 
I'm the one who doesn't want to be interrupted. 
I think I should want to, but actually I'd rather just do things on my Blackberry. "" Across the generations, I see that people can't get enough of each other, if and only if they can have each other at a distance, in amounts they can control. 
I call it the Goldilocks effect: not too close, not too far, just right. 
But what might feel just right for that middle-aged executive can be a problem for an adolescent who needs to develop face-to-face relationships. 
An 18-year-old boy who uses texting for almost everything says to me wistfully, "" Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation. "" When I ask people "What's wrong with having a conversation?" 
People say, "" I'll tell you what's wrong with having a conversation. 
It takes place in real time and you can't control what you're going to say. "" So that's the bottom line. 
Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. 
We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body — not too little, not too much, just right. 
Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. 
And we clean them up with technology. 
And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection. 
We short-change ourselves. 
And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring. 
I was caught off guard when Stephen Colbert asked me a profound question, a profound question. 
He said, "" Don't all those little tweets, don't all those little sips of online communication, add up to one big gulp of real conversation? "" My answer was no, they don't add up. 
Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information, they may work for saying, "" I'm thinking about you, "" or even for saying, "" I love you, "" — I mean, look at how I felt when I got that text from my daughter — but they don't really work for learning about each other, for really coming to know and understand each other. 
And we use conversations with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves. 
So a flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for self-reflection. 
For kids growing up, that skill is the bedrock of development. 
Over and over I hear, "I would rather text than talk." 
And what I'm seeing is that people get so used to being short-changed out of real conversation, so used to getting by with less, that they've become almost willing to dispense with people altogether. 
So for example, many people share with me this wish, that some day a more advanced version of Siri, the digital assistant on Apple's iPhone, will be more like a best friend, someone who will listen when others won't. 
I believe this wish reflects a painful truth that I've learned in the past 15 years. 
That feeling that no one is listening to me is very important in our relationships with technology. 
That's why it's so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed — so many automatic listeners. 
And the feeling that no one is listening to me make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us. 
We're developing robots, they call them sociable robots, that are specifically designed to be companions — to the elderly, to our children, to us. 
Have we so lost confidence that we will be there for each other? 
During my research I worked in nursing homes, and I brought in these sociable robots that were designed to give the elderly the feeling that they were understood. 
And one day I came in and a woman who had lost a child was talking to a robot in the shape of a baby seal. 
It seemed to be looking in her eyes. 
It seemed to be following the conversation. 
It comforted her. 
And many people found this amazing. 
But that woman was trying to make sense of her life with a machine that had no experience of the arc of a human life. 
That robot put on a great show. 
And we're vulnerable. 
People experience pretend empathy as though it were the real thing. 
So during that moment when that woman was experiencing that pretend empathy, I was thinking, "" That robot can't empathize. 
It doesn't face death. 
It doesn't know life. "" And as that woman took comfort in her robot companion, I didn't find it amazing; I found it one of the most wrenching, complicated moments in my 15 years of work. 
But when I stepped back, I felt myself at the cold, hard center of a perfect storm. 
We expect more from technology and less from each other. 
And I ask myself, "Why have things come to this?" 
And I believe it's because technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable. 
And we are vulnerable. 
We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy. 
And so from social networks to sociable robots, we're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. 
We turn to technology to help us feel connected in ways we can comfortably control. 
But we're not so comfortable. 
We are not so much in control. 
These days, those phones in our pockets are changing our minds and hearts because they offer us three gratifying fantasies. 
One, that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; two, that we will always be heard; and three, that we will never have to be alone. 
And that third idea, that we will never have to be alone, is central to changing our psyches. 
Because the moment that people are alone, even for a few seconds, they become anxious, they panic, they fidget, they reach for a device. 
Just think of people at a checkout line or at a red light. 
Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved. 
And so people try to solve it by connecting. 
But here, connection is more like a symptom than a cure. 
It expresses, but it doesn't solve, an underlying problem. 
But more than a symptom, constant connection is changing the way people think of themselves. 
It's shaping a new way of being. 
The best way to describe it is, I share therefore I am. 
We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings even as we're having them. 
So before it was: I have a feeling, I want to make a call. 
Now it's: I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text. 
The problem with this new regime of "" I share therefore I am "" is that, if we don't have connection, we don't feel like ourselves. 
We almost don't feel ourselves. 
So what do we do? We connect more and more. 
But in the process, we set ourselves up to be isolated. 
How do you get from connection to isolation? 
You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. 
Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. 
When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. 
When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. 
It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. 
We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. 
But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true. 
If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely. 
And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they're only going to know how to be lonely. 
When I spoke at TED in 1996, reporting on my studies of the early virtual communities, I said, "" Those who make the most of their lives on the screen come to it in a spirit of self-reflection. "" And that's what I'm calling for here, now: reflection and, more than that, a conversation about where our current use of technology may be taking us, what it might be costing us. 
We're smitten with technology. 
And we're afraid, like young lovers, that too much talking might spoil the romance. 
But it's time to talk. 
We grew up with digital technology and so we see it as all grown up. 
But it's not, it's early days. 
There's plenty of time for us to reconsider how we use it, how we build it. 
I'm not suggesting that we turn away from our devices, just that we develop a more self-aware relationship with them, with each other and with ourselves. 
I see some first steps. 
Start thinking of solitude as a good thing. 
Make room for it. 
Find ways to demonstrate this as a value to your children. 
Create sacred spaces at home — the kitchen, the dining room — and reclaim them for conversation. 
Do the same thing at work. 
At work, we're so busy communicating that we often don't have time to think, we don't have time to talk, about the things that really matter. 
Change that. 
Most important, we all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits. 
Because it's when we stumble or hesitate or lose our words that we reveal ourselves to each other. 
Technology is making a bid to redefine human connection — how we care for each other, how we care for ourselves — but it's also giving us the opportunity to affirm our values and our direction. 
I'm optimistic. 
We have everything we need to start. 
We have each other. 
And we have the greatest chance of success if we recognize our vulnerability. 
That we listen when technology says it will take something complicated and promises something simpler. 
So in my work, I hear that life is hard, relationships are filled with risk. 
And then there's technology — simpler, hopeful, optimistic, ever-young. 
It's like calling in the cavalry. 
An ad campaign promises that online and with avatars, you can "" Finally, love your friends love your body, love your life, online and with avatars. "" We're drawn to virtual romance, to computer games that seem like worlds, to the idea that robots, robots, will someday be our true companions. 
We spend an evening on the social network instead of going to the pub with friends. 
But our fantasies of substitution have cost us. 
Now we all need to focus on the many, many ways technology can lead us back to our real lives, our own bodies, our own communities, our own politics, our own planet. 
They need us. 
Let's talk about how we can use digital technology, the technology of our dreams, to make this life the life we can love. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

It's a great honor to be here. 
It's a great honor to be here talking about cities, talking about the future of cities. 
It's great to be here as a mayor. 
I really do believe that mayors have the political position to really change people's lives. 
That's the place to be. 
And it's great to be here as the mayor of Rio. 
Rio's a beautiful city, a vibrant place, special place. 
Actually, you're looking at a guy who has the best job in the world. 
And I really wanted to share with you a very special moment of my life and the history of the city of Rio. 
(Video) Announcer: And now, ladies and gentlemen, the envelope containing the result. 
Jacques Rogge: I have the honor to announce that the games of the 31st Olympiad are awarded to the city of Rio de Janeiro. 
(Cheering) EP: Okay, that's very touching, very emotional, but it was not easy to get there. 
Actually it was a very hard challenge. 
We had to beat the European monarchy. 
This is Juan Carlos, king of Spain. 
We had to beat the powerful Japanese with all of their technology. 
We had to beat the most powerful man in the world defending his own city. 
So it was not easy at all. 
And actually this last guy here said a phrase a few years ago that I think fits perfectly to the situation of Rio winning the Olympic bid. 
We really showed that, yes, we can. 
And really, this is the reason I came here tonight. 
I came here tonight to tell you that things can be done, that you don't have always to be rich or powerful to get things on the way, that cities are a great challenge. 
It's a difficult task to deal with cities. 
But with some original ways of getting things done, with some basic commandments, you can really get cities to be a great, great place to live. 
I want you all to imagine Rio. 
You probably think about a city full of energy, a vibrant city full of green. 
And nobody showed that better than Carlos Saldanha in last year's "" Rio. "" (Music) (Video) Bird: This is incredible. (Music) 
EP: Okay, some parts of Rio are pretty much like that, but it's not like that everywhere. 
We're like every big city in the world. 
We've got lots of people, pollution, cars, concrete, lots of concrete. 
These pictures I'm showing here, they are some pictures from Madureira. 
It's like the heart of the suburb in Rio. 
And I want to use an example of Rio that we're doing in Madureira, in this region, to see what we should think as our first commandment. 
So every time you see a concrete jungle like that, what you've got to do is find open spaces. 
If you don't have open spaces, you've got to go there and open spaces. 
So go inside these open spaces and make it that people can get inside and use those spaces. 
This is going to be the third largest park in Rio by June this year. 
It's going to be a place where people can meet, where you can put nature. 
The temperature's going to drop two, three degrees centigrade. 
So the first commandment I want to leave you tonight is, a city of the future has to be environmentally friendly. 
Every time you think of a city, you've got to think green. 
You've got to think green and green. 
So moving to our second commandment that I wanted to show you. 
Let's think that cities are made of people, lots of people together. 
cities are packed with people. 
So how do you move these people around? 
When you have 3.5 billion people living in cities — by 2050, it's going to be 6 billion people. 
So every time you think about moving these people around, you think about high-capacity transportation. 
But there is a problem. 
High-capacity transportation means spending lots and lots of money. 
So what I'm going to show here is something that was already presented in TED by the former mayor of Curitiba who created that, a city in Brazil, Jaime Lerner. 
And it's something that we're doing, again, lots in Rio. 
It's the BRT, the Bus Rapid Transit. 
So you get a bus. It's a simple bus that everybody knows. 
You transform it inside as a train car. 
You use separate lanes, dedicated lanes. 
The contractors, they don't like that. 
You don't have to dig deep down underground. 
You can build nice stations. 
This is actually a station that we're doing in Rio. 
Again, you don't have to dig deep down underground to make a station like that. 
This station has the same comfort, the same features as a subway station. 
A kilometer of this costs a tenth of a subway. 
So spending much less money and doing it much faster, you can really change the way people move. 
This is a map of Rio. 
All the lines, the colored lines you see there, it's our high-capacity transportation network. 
In this present time today, we only carry 18 percent of our population in high-capacity transportation. 
With the BRTs we're doing, again, the cheapest and fastest way, we're going to move to 63 percent of the population being carried by high-capacity transportation. 
So remember what I said: You don't always have to be rich or powerful to get things done. 
You can find original ways to get things done. 
So the second commandment I want to leave you tonight is, a city of the future has to deal with mobility and integration of its people. 
Moving to the third commandment. 
And this is the most controversial one. 
It has to do with the favelas, the slums — whatever you call it, there are different names all over the world. 
But the point we want to make here tonight is, favelas are not always a problem. 
I mean, favelas can sometimes really be a solution, if you deal with them, if you put public policy inside the favelas. 
Let me just show a map of Rio again. 
Rio has 6.3 million inhabitants — More than 20 percent, 1.4 million, live in the favelas. 
All these red parts are favelas. 
So you see, they are spread all over the city. 
This is a typical view of a favela in Rio. 
You see the contrast between the rich and poor. 
So I want to make two points here tonight about favelas. 
The first one is, you can change from what I call a [vicious] circle to a virtual circle. 
But what you've got to do to get that is you've got to go inside the favelas, bring in the basic services — mainly education and health — with high quality. 
I'm going to give a fast example here. 
This was an old building in a favela in Rio — [unclear favela name] — that we just transformed into a primary school, with high quality. 
This is primary assistance in health that we built inside a favela, again, with high quality. 
We call it a family clinic. 
So the first point is bring basic services inside the favelas with high quality. 
The second point I want to make about the favelas is, you've got to open spaces in the favela. 
Bring infrastructure to the favelas, to the slums, wherever you are. 
Rio has the aim, by 2020, to have all its favelas completely urbanized. 
Another example, this was completely packed with houses, and then we built this, what we call, a knowledge square. 
This is a place with high technology where the kids that live in a poor house next to this place can go inside and have access to all technology. 
We even built a theater there — 3D movie. 
And this is the kind of change you can get for that. 
And by the end of the day you get something better than a TED Prize, which is this great laugh from a kid that lives in the favela. 
So the third commandment I want to leave here tonight is, a city of the future has to be socially integrated. 
You cannot deal with a city if it's not socially integrated. 
But moving to our fourth commandment, I really wouldn't be here tonight. 
Between November and May, Rio's completely packed. 
We just had last week Carnivale. 
It was great. It was lots of fun. 
We have New Year's Eve. 
There's like two million people on Copacabana Beach. 
We have problems. 
We fight floods, tropical rains at this time of the year. 
You can imagine how people get happy with me watching these kinds of scenes. 
We have problems with the tropical rains. 
Almost every year we have these landslides, which are terrible. 
But the reason I could come here is because of that. 
This was something we did with IBM that's a little bit more than a year old. 
It's what we call the Operations Center of Rio. 
And I wanted to show that I can govern my city, using technology, from here, from Long Beach, so I got here last night and I know everything. 
We're going to speak now to the Operations Center. 
This is Osorio, he's our secretary of urban affairs. 
So Osorio, good to be there with you. 
I've already told the people that we have tropical rain this time of year. 
So how's the weather in Rio now? 
Osorio: The weather is fine. We have fair weather today. 
Let me get you our weather satellite radar. 
You see just a little bit of moisture around the city. 
Absolutely no problem in the city in terms of weather, today and in the next few days. 
EP: Okay, how's the traffic? 
We, at this time of year, get lots of traffic jams. 
People get mad at the mayor. So how's the traffic tonight? 
Osario: Well traffic tonight is fine. 
Let me get you one of our 8,000 buses. 
A live transmission in downtown Rio for you, Mr. Mayor. 
You see, the streets are clear. 
Now it's 11: 00 pm in Rio. 
Nothing of concern in terms of traffic. 
I'll get to you now the incidents of the day. 
We had heavy traffic early in the morning and in the rush hour in the afternoon, but nothing of big concern. 
We are below average in terms of traffic incidents in the city. 
EP: Okay, so you're showing now some public services. 
These are the cars. 
Osorio: Absolutely, Mr. Mayor. 
Let me get you the fleet of our waste collection trucks. 
This is live transmission. 
We have GPS's in all of our trucks. 
And you can see them working in all parts of the city. 
Waste collection on time. 
Public services working well. 
EP: Okay, Osorio, thank you very much. 
It was great to have you here. 
We're going to move so that I can make a conclusion. 
(Applause) Okay, so no files, this place, no paperwork, no distance, 24 / 7 working. 
So the fourth commandment I want to share with you here tonight is, a city of the future has to use technology to be present. 
I don't need to be there anymore to know and to administrate the city. 
But everything that I said here tonight, or the commandments, are means, are ways, for us to govern cities — invest in infrastructure, invest in the green, open parks, open spaces, integrate socially, use technology. 
But at the end of the day, when we talk about cities, we talk about a gathering of people. 
And we cannot see that as a problem. 
That is fantastic. 
If there's 3.5 billion now, it's going to be six billion then it's going to be 10 billion. 
That is great, that means we're going to have 10 billion minds working together, 10 billion talents together. 
So a city of the future, I really do believe that it's a city that cares about its citizens, integrates socially its citizens. 
A city of the future is a city that can never let anyone out of this great party, which are cities. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I have one more reason for optimism: climate change. 
Maybe you don't believe it, but here is the fact. 
On December 12, 2015, in Paris, under the United Nations, 195 governments got together and unanimously — if you've worked with governments, you know how difficult that is — unanimously decided to intentionally change the course of the global economy in order to protect the most vulnerable and improve the life of all of us. 
Now, that is a remarkable achievement. 
(Applause) But it is even more remarkable if you consider where we had been just a few years ago. 
2009, Copenhagen. 
Who remembers Copenhagen? 
Well, after years of working toward a climate agreement, the same governments convened in Copenhagen and failed miserably. 
Why did it fail miserably? 
For many different reasons, but primarily because of the deeply entrenched divide between the global North and the global South. 
So now, six months after this failure, I was called in to assume the responsibility of the global climate change negotiations. 
You can imagine, the perfect moment to start this new job. 
The global mood on climate change was in the trash can. 
No one believed that a global agreement could ever be possible. 
In fact, neither did I. 
If you promise not to tell anyone outside of this wonderful TED audience, I'm going to divulge a secret that has been gratefully buried by history. 
On my first press conference, a journalist asked, "" Um, Ms. Figueres, do you think that a global agreement is ever going to be possible? "" And without engaging brain, I heard me utter, "Not in my lifetime." 
Well, you can imagine the faces of my press team who were horrified at this crazy Costa Rican woman who was their new boss. 
And I was horrified, too. 
Now, I wasn't horrified at me, because I'm kind of used to myself. 
I was actually horrified at the consequences of what I had just said, at the consequences for the world in which all our children are going to have to live. 
It was frankly a horrible moment for me, and I thought, well, no, hang on, hang on. 
Impossible is not a fact, it's an attitude. 
It's only an attitude. 
And I decided right then and there that I was going to change my attitude and I was going to help the world change its attitude on climate change. 
So I don't know — No, just this? Thanks. I don't know — 
what you would do if you were told your job is to save the planet. 
And you have full responsibility, but you have absolutely no authority, because governments are sovereign in every decision that they take. 
Well, I would really love to know what you would do on the first Monday morning, but here's what I did: I panicked. 
(Laughter) And then I panicked again, because I realized I have no idea how we're going to solve this problem. 
And then I realized I have no idea how we're going to solve this problem, but I do know one thing: we have got to change the tone of this conversation. 
Because there is no way you can deliver victory without optimism. 
And here, I use optimism as a very simple word, but let's understand it in its broader sense. 
Let's understand it as courage, hope, trust, solidarity, the fundamental belief that we humans can come together and can help each other to better the fate of mankind. 
Well, you can imagine that I thought that without that, there was no way we were going to get out of the paralysis of Copenhagen. 
And for six years, I have stubbornly, relentlessly injected optimism into the system, no matter what the questions from the press — and I have gotten better at those — and no matter what the evidence to the contrary. 
And believe you me, there has been a lot of contrary evidence. 
But relentless optimism into the system. 
And pretty soon, we began to see changes happening in many areas, precipitated by thousands of people, including many of you here today, and I thank you. 
And this TED community will not be surprised if I tell you the first area in which we saw remarkable change was... 
technology. 
We began to see that clean technologies, in particular renewable energy technologies, began to drop price and increase in capacity, to the point where today we are already building concentrated solar power plants that have the capacity to power entire cities, to say nothing of the fact of what we are doing on mobility and intelligent buildings. 
And with this shift in technologies, we were able to begin to understand that there was a shift in the economic equation, because we were able to recognize that yes, there are huge costs to climate change, and yes, there are compounded risks. 
But there also are economic advantages and intrinsic benefits, because the dissemination of the clean technologies is going to bring us cleaner air, better health, better transportation, more livable cities, more energy security, more energy access to the developing world. 
In sum, a better world than what we have now. 
And with that understanding, you should have witnessed, in fact, part of you were, the spread of ingenuity and excitement that went through, first through nonnational governments, the private sector, captains of industry, insurance companies, investors, city leaders, faith communities, because they all began to understand, this actually can be in their interest. 
This can actually improve their bottom line. 
And it wasn't just the usual suspects. 
I have to tell you I had the CEO of a major, major oil and gas company come to me at the beginning of last year and say — privately, of course — he did not know how he was going to change his company, but he is going to change it, because he's interested in long-term viability. 
Well, now we have a shift in the economic equation, and with that, with broader support from everyone, it did not take very long before we saw that national governments woke up to the fact that this is in their national interest. 
And when we asked countries to begin to identify how they could contribute to global efforts but based on their national interest, 189 countries out of 195, 189 countries sent their comprehensive climate change plans, based on their national interest, concurrent with their priorities, consistent with their national sustainable development plans. 
Well, once you protect the core interests of nations, then you can understand that nations were ready to begin to converge onto a common path, onto a common direction of travel that is going to take us probably several decades, but over those several decades is going to take us into the new economy, into a decarbonized, highly resilient economy, And the national contributions that are currently on the table on behalf of national governments are insufficient to get us to a stabilized climate, but they are only the first step, and they will improve over time. 
And the measurement, reporting and verification of all of those efforts is legally binding. 
And the checkpoints that we're going to have every five years to assess collective progress towards our goal are legally binding, and the path itself toward a decarbonized and more resilient economy is legally binding. 
And here's the more important part: What did we have before? 
A very small handful of countries who had undertaken very reduced, short-term emission reduction commitments that were completely insufficient and furthermore, largely perceived as a burden. 
Now what do we have? 
Now we have all countries of the world contributing with different intensities from different approaches in different sectors, but all of them contributing to a common goal and along a path with environmental integrity. 
Well, once you have all of this in place and you have shifted this understanding, then you see that governments were able to go to Paris and adopt the Paris agreement. 
(Applause) So, as I look back over the past six years, first I remember the day the Paris agreement was adopted. 
I cannot tell you the euphoria in the room. 
5,000 people jumping out of their seats, crying, clapping, screaming, yelling, torn between euphoria and still disbelief at what they had just seen, because so many people had worked for years towards this, and this was finally their reality. 
And it wasn't just those who had participated directly. 
A few weeks ago, I was with a colleague who was trying to decide on a Tahitian pearl that he wanted to give to his wonderful wife Natasha. 
And once he had finally decided what he was going to buy, the jeweler said to him, "" You know, you're very lucky that you're buying this now, because these pearls could go extinct very soon because of climate change. "" "" But, "" the jeweler said, "" have you heard, the governments have just come to a decision, and Tahiti could have a chance. "" Well, what a fantastic confirmation that perhaps, perhaps here is hope, here is a possible chance. 
I'm the first one to recognize that we have a lot of work still to do. 
We've only just started our work on climate change. 
And in fact, we need to make sure that we redouble our efforts over the next five years that are the urgent five years. 
But I do believe that we have come over the past six years from the impossible to the now unstoppable. 
And how did we do that? By injecting transformational optimism that allowed us to go from confrontation to collaboration, that allowed us to understand that national and local interests are not necessarily at odds with global needs, and that if we understand that, we can bring them together and we can merge them harmoniously. 
And as I look forward to other global issues that will require our attention this century — food security, water security, home security, forced migration — I see that we certainly do not know how we are going to solve those problems yet. 
But we can take a page out of what we have done on climate change and we can understand that we have got to reinterpret the zero-sum mentality. 
Because we were trained to believe that there always are winners and losers, and that your loss is my gain. 
Well, now that we're in a world in which we have reached planetary boundaries and that we are not just so interconnected, but increasingly interdependent on each other, your loss is no longer my gain. 
We're either all losers or we all can be winners. 
But we are going to have to decide between zero and sum. 
We're going to have to decide between zero benefit for all or living life as the sum of all of us. 
We've done it once. We can do it again. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

I'm a cancer doctor, and I walked out of my office and walked by the pharmacy in the hospital three or four years ago, and this was the cover of Fortune magazine sitting in the window of the pharmacy. 
And so, as a cancer doctor, you look at this, and you get a little bit downhearted. 
But when you start to read the article by Cliff, who himself is a cancer survivor, who was saved by a clinical trial where his parents drove him from New York City to upstate New York to get an experimental therapy for — at the time — Hodgkin's disease, which saved his life, he makes remarkable points here. 
And the point of the article was that we have gotten reductionist in our view of biology, in our view of cancer. 
For the last 50 years, we have focused on treating the individual gene in understanding cancer, not in controlling cancer. 
So, this is an astounding table. 
And this is something that sobers us in our field everyday in that, obviously, we've made remarkable impacts on cardiovascular disease, but look at cancer. The death rate in cancer in over 50 years hasn't changed. 
We've made small wins in diseases like chronic myelogenous leukemia, where we have a pill that can put 100 percent of people in remission, but in general, we haven't made an impact at all in the war on cancer. 
So, what I'm going to tell you today, is a little bit of why I think that's the case, and then go out of my comfort zone and tell you where I think it's going, where a new approach — that we hope to push forward in terms of treating cancer. 
Because this is wrong. 
So, what is cancer, first of all? 
Well, if one has a mass or an abnormal blood value, you go to a doctor, they stick a needle in. 
They way we make the diagnosis today is by pattern recognition: Does it look normal? Does it look abnormal? 
So, that pathologist is just like looking at this plastic bottle. 
This is a normal cell. This is a cancer cell. 
That is the state-of-the-art today in diagnosing cancer. 
There's no molecular test, there's no sequencing of genes that was referred to yesterday, there's no fancy looking at the chromosomes. 
This is the state-of-the-art and how we do it. 
You know, I know very well, as a cancer doctor, I can't treat advanced cancer. 
So, as an aside, I firmly believe in the field of trying to identify cancer early. 
It is the only way you can start to fight cancer, is by catching it early. 
We can prevent most cancers. 
You know, the previous talk alluded to preventing heart disease. 
We could do the same in cancer. 
I co-founded a company called Navigenics, where, if you spit into a tube — and we can look look at 35 or 40 genetic markers for disease, all of which are delayable in many of the cancers — you start to identify what you could get, and then we can start to work to prevent them. 
Because the problem is, when you have advanced cancer, we can't do that much today about it, as the statistics allude to. 
So, the thing about cancer is that it's a disease of the aged. 
Why is it a disease of the aged? 
Because evolution doesn't care about us after we've had our children. 
See, evolution protected us during our childbearing years and then, after age 35 or 40 or 45, it said "" It doesn't matter anymore, because they've had their progeny. "" So if you look at cancers, it is very rare — extremely rare — to have cancer in a child, on the order of thousands of cases a year. 
As one gets older? Very, very common. 
Why is it hard to treat? 
Because it's heterogeneous, and that's the perfect substrate for evolution within the cancer. 
It starts to select out for those bad, aggressive cells, what we call clonal selection. 
But, if we start to understand that cancer isn't just a molecular defect, it's something more, then we'll get to new ways of treating it, as I'll show you. 
So, one of the fundamental problems we have in cancer is that, right now, we describe it by a number of adjectives, symptoms: "I'm tired, I'm bloated, I have pain, etc." 
You then have some anatomic descriptions, you get that CT scan: "" There's a three centimeter mass in the liver. "" You then have some body part descriptions: "It's in the liver, in the breast, in the prostate." 
And that's about it. 
So, our dictionary for describing cancer is very, very poor. 
It's basically symptoms. 
It's manifestations of a disease. 
What's exciting is that over the last two or three years, the government has spent 400 million dollars, and they've allocated another billion dollars, to what we call the Cancer Genome Atlas Project. 
So, it is the idea of sequencing all of the genes in the cancer, and giving us a new lexicon, a new dictionary to describe it. 
You know, in the mid-1850's in France, they started to describe cancer by body part. 
That hasn't changed in over 150 years. 
It is absolutely archaic that we call cancer by prostate, by breast, by muscle. 
It makes no sense, if you think about it. 
So, obviously, the technology is here today, and, over the next several years, that will change. 
You will no longer go to a breast cancer clinic. 
You will go to a HER2 amplified clinic, or an EGFR activated clinic, and they will go to some of the pathogenic lesions that were involved in causing this individual cancer. 
So, hopefully, we will go from being the art of medicine more to the science of medicine, and be able to do what they do in infectious disease, which is look at that organism, that bacteria, and then say, "" This antibiotic makes sense, because you have a particular bacteria that will respond to it. "" When one is exposed to H1N1, you take Tamiflu, and you can remarkably decrease the severity of symptoms and prevent many of the manifestations of the disease. 
Why? Because we know what you have, and we know how to treat it — although we can't make vaccine in this country, but that's a different story. 
The Cancer Genome Atlas is coming out now. 
The first cancer was done, which was brain cancer. 
In the next month, the end of December, you'll see ovarian cancer, and then lung cancer will come several months after. 
There's also a field of proteomics that I'll talk about in a few minutes, which I think is going to be the next level in terms of understanding and classifying disease. 
But remember, I'm not pushing genomics, proteomics, to be a reductionist. 
I'm doing it so we can identify what we're up against. 
And there's a very important distinction there that we'll get to. 
In health care today, we spend most of the dollars — in terms of treating disease — most of the dollars in the last two years of a person's life. 
We spend very little, if any, dollars in terms of identifying what we're up against. 
If you could start to move that, to identify what you're up against, you're going to do things a hell of a lot better. 
If we could even take it one step further and prevent disease, we can take it enormously the other direction, and obviously, that's where we need to go, going forward. 
So, this is the website of the National Cancer Institute. 
And I'm here to tell you, it's wrong. 
So, the website of the National Cancer Institute says that cancer is a genetic disease. 
The website says, "" If you look, there's an individual mutation, and maybe a second, and maybe a third, and that is cancer. "" But, as a cancer doc, this is what I see. 
This isn't a genetic disease. 
So, there you see, it's a liver with colon cancer in it, and you see into the microscope a lymph node where cancer has invaded. 
You see a CT scan where cancer is in the liver. 
Cancer is an interaction of a cell that no longer is under growth control with the environment. 
It's not in the abstract; it's the interaction with the environment. 
It's what we call a system. 
The goal of me as a cancer doctor is not to understand cancer. 
And I think that's been the fundamental problem over the last five decades, is that we have strived to understand cancer. 
The goal is to control cancer. 
And that is a very different optimization scheme, a very different strategy for all of us. 
I got up at the American Association of Cancer Research, one of the big cancer research meetings, with 20,000 people there, and I said, "" We've made a mistake. 
We've all made a mistake, myself included, by focusing down, by being a reductionist. 
We need to take a step back. "" And, believe it or not, there were hisses in the audience. 
People got upset, but this is the only way we're going to go forward. 
You know, I was very fortunate to meet Danny Hillis a few years ago. 
We were pushed together, and neither one of us really wanted to meet the other. 
I said, "" Do I really want to meet a guy from Disney, who designed computers? "" And he was saying: Does he really want to meet another doctor? 
But people prevailed on us, and we got together, and it's been transformative in what I do, absolutely transformative. 
We have designed, and we have worked on the modeling — and much of these ideas came from Danny and from his team — the modeling of cancer in the body as complex system. 
And I'll show you some data there where I really think it can make a difference and a new way to approach it. 
The key is, when you look at these variables and you look at this data, you have to understand the data inputs. 
You know, if I measured your temperature over 30 days, and I asked, "" What was the average temperature? "" and it came back at 98.7, I would say, "" Great. "" But if during one of those days your temperature spiked to 102 for six hours, and you took Tylenol and got better, etc., I would totally miss it. 
So, one of the problems, the fundamental problems in medicine is that you and I, and all of us, we go to our doctor once a year. 
We have discrete data elements; we don't have a time function on them. 
Earlier it was referred to this direct life device. 
You know, I've been using it for two and a half months. 
It's a staggering device, not because it tells me how many kilocalories I do every day, but because it looks, over 24 hours, what I've done in a day. 
And I didn't realize that for three hours I'm sitting at my desk, and I'm not moving at all. 
And a lot of the functions in the data that we have as input systems here are really different than we understand them, because we're not measuring them dynamically. 
And so, if you think of cancer as a system, there's an input and an output and a state in the middle. 
So, the states, are equivalent classes of history, and the cancer patient, the input, is the environment, the diet, the treatment, the genetic mutations. 
The output are our symptoms: Do we have pain? Is the cancer growing? Do we feel bloated, etc.? 
Most of that state is hidden. 
So what we do in our field is we change and input, we give aggressive chemotherapy, and we say, "" Did that output get better? Did that pain improve, etc.? "" And so, the problem is that it's not just one system, it's multiple systems on multiple scales. 
It's a system of systems. 
And so, when you start to look at emergent systems, you can look at a neuron under a microscope. 
A neuron under the microscope is very elegant with little things sticking out and little things over here, but when you start to put them together in a complex system, and you start to see that it becomes a brain, and that brain can create intelligence, what we're talking about in the body, and cancer is starting to model it like a complex system. 
Well, the bad news is that these robust — and robust is a key word — emergent systems are very hard to understand in detail. 
The good news is you can manipulate them. 
You can try to control them without that fundamental understanding of every component. 
One of the most fundamental clinical trials in cancer came out in February in the New England Journal of Medicine, where they took women who were pre-menopausal with breast cancer. 
So, about the worst kind of breast cancer you can get. 
They had gotten their chemotherapy, and then they randomized them, where half got placebo, and half got a drug called Zoledronic acid that builds bone. 
It's used to treat osteoporosis, and they got that twice a year. 
They looked and, in these 1,800 women, given twice a year a drug that builds bone, you reduce the recurrence of cancer by 35 percent. 
Reduce occurrence of cancer by a drug that doesn't even touch the cancer. 
So the notion, you change the soil, the seed doesn't grow as well. 
You change that system, and you could have a marked effect on the cancer. 
Nobody has ever shown — and this will be shocking — nobody has ever shown that most chemotherapy actually touches a cancer cell. 
It's never been shown. 
There's all these elegant work in the tissue culture dishes, that if you give this cancer drug, you can do this effect to the cell, but the doses in those dishes are nowhere near the doses that happen in the body. 
If I give a woman with breast cancer a drug called Taxol every three weeks, which is the standard, about 40 percent of women with metastatic cancer have a great response to that drug. 
And a response is 50 percent shrinkage. 
Well, remember that's not even an order of magnitude, but that's a different story. 
They then recur, I give them that same drug every week. 
Another 30 percent will respond. 
They then recur, I give them that same drug over 96 hours by continuous infusion, another 20 or 30 percent will respond. 
So, you can't tell me it's working by the same mechanism in all three size. 
It's not. We have no idea the mechanism. 
So the idea that chemotherapy may just be disrupting that complex system, just like building bone disrupted that system and reduced recurrence, chemotherapy may work by that same exact way. 
The wild thing about that trial also, was that it reduced new primaries, so new cancers, by 30 percent also. 
So, the problem is, yours and mine, all of our systems are changing. 
They're dynamic. 
I mean, this is a scary slide, not to take an aside, but it looks at obesity in the world. 
And I'm sorry if you can't read the numbers, they're kind of small. 
But, if you start to look at it, that red, that dark color there, more than 75 percent of the population of those countries are obese. 
Look a decade ago, look two decades ago: markedly different. 
So, our systems today are dramatically different than our systems a decade or two ago. 
So the diseases we have today, which reflect patterns in the system over the last several decades, are going to change dramatically over the next decade or so based on things like this. 
So, this picture, although it is beautiful, is a 40-gigabyte picture of the whole proteome. 
So this is a drop of blood that has gone through a superconducting magnet, and we're able to get resolution where we can start to see all of the proteins in the body. 
We can start to see that system. 
Each of the red dots are where a protein has actually been identified. 
The power of these magnets, the power of what we can do here, is that we can see an individual neutron with this technology. 
So, again, this is stuff we're doing with Danny Hillis and a group called Applied Proteomics, where we can start to see individual neutron differences, and we can start to look at that system like we never have before. 
So, instead of a reductionist view, we're taking a step back. 
So this is a woman, 46 years old, who had recurrent lung cancer. 
It was in her brain, in her lungs, in her liver. 
She had gotten Carboplatin Taxol, Carboplatin Taxotere, Gemcitabine, Navelbine: Every drug we have she had gotten, and that disease continued to grow. 
She had three kids under the age of 12, and this is her CT scan. 
And so what this is, is we're taking a cross-section of her body here, and you can see in the middle there is her heart, and to the side of her heart on the left there is this large tumor that will invade and will kill her, untreated, in a matter of weeks. 
She goes on a pill a day that targets a pathway, and again, I'm not sure if this pathway was in the system, in the cancer, but it targeted a pathway, and a month later, pow, that cancer's gone. 
Six months later it's still gone. 
That cancer recurred, and she passed away three years later from lung cancer, but she got three years from a drug whose symptoms predominately were acne. 
That's about it. 
So, the problem is that the clinical trial was done, and we were a part of it, and in the fundamental clinical trial — the pivotal clinical trial we call the Phase Three, we refused to use a placebo. 
Would you want your mother, your brother, your sister to get a placebo if they had advanced lung cancer and had weeks to live? 
And the answer, obviously, is not. 
So, it was done on this group of patients. 
Ten percent of people in the trial had this dramatic response that was shown here, and the drug went to the FDA, and the FDA said, "" Without a placebo, how do I know patients actually benefited from the drug? "" So the morning the FDA was going to meet, this was the editorial in the Wall Street Journal. 
(Laughter) And so, what do you know, that drug was approved. 
The amazing thing is another company did the right scientific trial, where they gave half placebo and half the drug. 
And we learned something important there. 
What's interesting is they did it in South America and Canada, where it's "" more ethical to give placebos. "" They had to give it also in the U.S. to get approval, so I think there were three U.S. patients in upstate New York who were part of the trial. 
But they did that, and what they found is that 70 percent of the non-responders lived much longer and did better than people who got placebo. 
So it challenged everything we knew in cancer, is that you don't need to get a response. 
You don't need to shrink the disease. 
If we slow the disease, we may have more of a benefit on patient survival, patient outcome, how they feel, than if we shrink the disease. 
The problem is that, if I'm this doc, and I get your CT scan today and you've got a two centimeter mass in your liver, and you come back to me in three months and it's three centimeters, did that drug help you or not? 
How do I know? 
Would it have been 10 centimeters, or am I giving you a drug with no benefit and significant cost? 
So, it's a fundamental problem. 
And, again, that's where these new technologies can come in. 
And so, the goal obviously is that you go into your doctor's office — well, the ultimate goal is that you prevent disease, right? 
The ultimate goal is that you prevent any of these things from happening. 
That is the most effective, cost-effective, best way we can do things today. 
But if one is unfortunate to get a disease, you'll go into your doctor's office, he or she will take a drop of blood, and we will start to know how to treat your disease. 
The way we've approached it is the field of proteomics, again, this looking at the system. 
It's taking a big picture. 
The problem with technologies like this is that if one looks at proteins in the body, there are 11 orders of magnitude difference between the high-abundant and the low-abundant proteins. 
So, there's no technology in the world that can span 11 orders of magnitude. 
And so, a lot of what has been done with people like Danny Hillis and others is to try to bring in engineering principles, try to bring the software. 
We can start to look at different components along this spectrum. 
And so, earlier was talked about cross-discipline, about collaboration. 
And I think one of the exciting things that is starting to happen now is that people from those fields are coming in. 
Yesterday, the National Cancer Institute announced a new program called the Physical Sciences and Oncology, where physicists, mathematicians, are brought in to think about cancer, people who never approached it before. 
Danny and I got 16 million dollars, they announced yesterday, to try to attach this problem. 
A whole new approach, instead of giving high doses of chemotherapy by different mechanisms, to try to bring technology to get a picture of what's actually happening in the body. 
So, just for two seconds, how these technologies work — because I think it's important to understand it. 
What happens is every protein in your body is charged, so the proteins are sprayed in, the magnet spins them around, and then there's a detector at the end. 
When it hit that detector is dependent on the mass and the charge. 
And so we can accurately — if the magnet is big enough, and your resolution is high enough — you can actually detect all of the proteins in the body and start to get an understanding of the individual system. 
And so, as a cancer doctor, instead of having paper in my chart, in your chart, and it being this thick, this is what data flow is starting to look like in our offices, where that drop of blood is creating gigabytes of data. 
Electronic data elements are describing every aspect of the disease. 
And certainly the goal is we can start to learn from every encounter and actually move forward, instead of just having encounter and encounter, without fundamental learning. 
So, to conclude, we need to get away from reductionist thinking. 
We need to start to think differently and radically. 
And so, I implore everyone here: Think differently. Come up with new ideas. 
Tell them to me or anyone else in our field, because over the last 59 years, nothing has changed. 
We need a radically different approach. 
You know, Andy Grove stepped down as chairman of the board at Intel — and Andy was one of my mentors, tough individual. 
When Andy stepped down, he said, "No technology will win. Technology itself will win." 
And I'm a firm believer, in the field of medicine and especially cancer, that it's going to be a broad platform of technologies that will help us move forward and hopefully help patients in the near-term. 
Thank you very much. 

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

Imagine that you're a pig farmer. 
You live on a small farm in the Philippines. 
Your animals are your family's sole source of income — as long as they're healthy. 
You know that any day, one of your pigs can catch the flu, the swine flu. 
Living in tight quarters, one pig coughing and sneezing may soon lead to the next pig coughing and sneezing, until an outbreak of swine flu has taken over your farm. 
If it's a bad enough virus, the health of your herd may be gone in the blink of an eye. 
If you called in a veterinarian, he or she would visit your farm and take samples from your pigs' noses and mouths. 
But then they would have to drive back into the city to test those samples in their central lab. 
Two weeks later, you'd hear back the results. 
Two weeks may be just enough time for infection to spread and take away your way of life. 
But it doesn't have to be that way. 
Today, farmers can take those samples themselves. 
They can jump right into the pen and swab their pigs' noses and mouths with a little filter paper, place that little filter paper in a tiny tube, and mix it with some chemicals that will extract genetic material from their pigs' noses and mouths. 
And without leaving their farms, they take a drop of that genetic material and put it into a little analyzer smaller than a shoebox, program it to detect DNA or RNA from the swine flu virus, and within one hour get back the results, visualize the results. 
This reality is possible because today we're living in the era of personal DNA technology. 
Every one of us can actually test DNA ourselves. 
DNA is the fundamental molecule the carries genetic instructions that help build the living world. 
Humans have DNA. 
Pigs have DNA. 
Even bacteria and some viruses have DNA too. 
The genetic instructions encoded in DNA inform how our bodies develop, grow, function. 
And in many cases, that same information can trigger disease. 
Your genetic information is strung into a long and twisted molecule, the DNA double helix, that has over three billion letters, beginning to end. 
But the lines that carry meaningful information are usually very short — a few dozen to several thousand letters long. 
So when we're looking to answer a question based on DNA, we actually don't need to read all those three billion letters, typically. 
That would be like getting hungry at night and having to flip through the whole phone book from cover to cover, pausing at every line, just to find the nearest pizza joint. 
(Laughter) Luckily, three decades ago, humans started to invent tools that can find any specific line of genetic information. 
These DNA machines are wonderful. 
They can find any line in DNA. 
But once they find it, that DNA is still tiny, and surrounded by so much other DNA, that what these machines then do is copy the target gene, and one copy piles on top of another, millions and millions and millions of copies, until that gene stands out against the rest; until we can visualize it, interpret it, read it, understand it, until we can answer: Does my pig have the flu? 
Or other questions buried in our own DNA: Am I at risk of cancer? 
Am I of Irish descent? 
Is that child my son? 
(Laughter) This ability to make copies of DNA, as simple as it sounds, has transformed our world. 
Scientists use it every day to detect and address disease, to create innovative medicines, to modify foods, to assess whether our food is safe to eat or whether it's contaminated with deadly bacteria. 
Even judges use the output of these machines in court to decide whether someone is innocent or guilty based on DNA evidence. 
The inventor of this DNA-copying technique was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993. 
But for 30 years, the power of genetic analysis has been confined to the ivory tower, or bigwig PhD scientist work. 
Well, several companies around the world are working on making this same technology accessible to everyday people like the pig farmer, like you. 
I cofounded one of these companies. 
Three years ago, together with a fellow biologist and friend of mine, Zeke Alvarez Saavedra, we decided to make personal DNA machines that anyone could use. 
Our goal was to bring DNA science to more people in new places. 
We started working in our basements. 
We had a simple question: What could the world look like if everyone could analyze DNA? 
We were curious, as curious as you would have been if I had shown you this picture in 1980. 
(Laughter) You would have thought, "" Wow! 
I can now call my Aunt Glenda from the car and wish her a happy birthday. 
I can call anyone, anytime. 
This is the future! "" Little did you know, you would tap on that phone to make dinner reservations for you and Aunt Glenda to celebrate together. 
With another tap, you'd be ordering her gift. 
And yet one more tap, and you'd be "" liking "" Auntie Glenda on Facebook. 
And all of this, while sitting on the toilet. 
(Laughter) It is notoriously hard to predict where new technology might take us. 
And the same is true for personal DNA technology today. 
For example, I could never have imagined that a truffle farmer, of all people, would use personal DNA machines. 
Dr. Paul Thomas grows truffles for a living. 
We see him pictured here, holding the first UK-cultivated truffle in his hands, on one of his farms. 
Truffles are this delicacy that stems from a fungus growing on the roots of living trees. 
And it's a rare fungus. 
Some species may fetch 3,000, 7,000, or more dollars per kilogram. 
I learned from Paul that the stakes for a truffle farmer can be really high. 
When he sources new truffles to grow on his farms, he's exposed to the threat of knockoffs — truffles that look and feel like the real thing, but they're of lower quality. 
But even to a trained eye like Paul's, even when looked at under a microscope, these truffles can pass for authentic. 
So in order to grow the highest quality truffles, the ones that chefs all over the world will fight over, Paul has to use DNA analysis. 
Isn't that mind-blowing? 
I bet you will never look at that black truffle risotto again without thinking of its genes. 
(Laughter) But personal DNA machines can also save human lives. 
Professor Ian Goodfellow is a virologist at the University of Cambridge. 
Last year he traveled to Sierra Leone. 
When the Ebola outbreak broke out in Western Africa, he quickly realized that doctors there lacked the basic tools to detect and combat disease. 
Results could take up to a week to come back — that's way too long for the patients and the families who are suffering. 
Ian decided to move his lab into Makeni, Sierra Leone. 
Here we see Ian Goodfellow moving over 10 tons of equipment into a pop-up tent that he would equip to detect and diagnose the virus and sequence it within 24 hours. 
But here's a surprise: the same equipment that Ian could use at his lab in the UK to sequence and diagnose Ebola, just wouldn't work under these conditions. 
We're talking 35 Celsius heat and over 90 percent humidity here. 
But instead, Ian could use personal DNA machines small enough to be placed in front of the air-conditioning unit to keep sequencing the virus and keep saving lives. 
This may seem like an extreme place for DNA analysis, but let's move on to an even more extreme environment: outer space. 
Let's talk about DNA analysis in space. 
When astronauts live aboard the International Space Station, they're orbiting the planet 250 miles high. 
They're traveling at 17,000 miles per hour. 
Picture that — you're seeing 15 sunsets and sunrises every day. 
You're also living in microgravity, floating. 
One of these things is that our immune systems get suppressed, making astronauts more prone to infection. 
A 16-year-old girl, a high school student from New York, Anna-Sophia Boguraev, wondered whether changes to the DNA of astronauts could be related to this immune suppression, and through a science competition called "" Genes In Space, "" Anna-Sophia designed an experiment to test this hypothesis using a personal DNA machine aboard the International Space Station. 
Here we see Anna-Sophia on April 8, 2016, in Cape Canaveral, watching her experiment launch to the International Space Station. 
That cloud of smoke is the rocket that brought Anna-Sophia's experiment to the International Space Station, where, three days later, astronaut Tim Peake carried out her experiment — in microgravity. 
Personal DNA machines are now aboard the International Space Station, where they can help monitor living conditions and protect the lives of astronauts. 
A 16-year-old designing a DNA experiment to protect the lives of astronauts may seem like a rarity, the mark of a child genius. 
Well, to me, it signals something bigger: that DNA technology is finally within the reach of every one of you. 
A few years ago, a college student armed with a personal computer could code an app, an app that is now a social network with more than one billion users. 
Could we be moving into a world of one personal DNA machine in every home? 
I know families who are already living in this reality. 
The Daniels family, for example, set up a DNA lab in the basement of their suburban Chicago home. 
This is not a family made of PhD scientists. 
This is a family like any other. 
They just like to spend time together doing fun, creative things. 
By day, Brian is an executive at a private equity firm. 
At night and on weekends, he experiments with DNA alongside his kids, ages seven and nine, as a way to explore the living world. 
Last time I called them, they were checking out homegrown produce from the backyard garden. 
They were testing tomatoes that they had picked, taking the flesh of their skin, putting it in a test tube, mixing it with chemicals to extract DNA and then using their home DNA copier to test those tomatoes for genetically engineered traits. 
For the Daniels family, the personal DNA machine is like the chemistry set for the 21st century. 
Most of us may not yet be diagnosing genetic conditions in our kitchen sinks or doing at-home paternity testing. 
(Laughter) But we've definitely reached a point in history where every one of you could actually get hands-on with DNA in your kitchen. 
You could copy, paste and analyze DNA and extract meaningful information from it. 
And it's at times like this that profound transformation is bound to happen; moments when a transformative, powerful technology that was before limited to a select few in the ivory tower, finally becomes within the reach of every one of us, from farmers to schoolchildren. 
Think about the moment when phones stopped being plugged into the wall by cords, or when computers left the mainframe and entered your home or your office. 
The ripples of the personal DNA revolution may be hard to predict, but one thing is certain: revolutions don't go backwards, and DNA technology is already spreading faster than our imagination. 
So if you're curious, get up close and personal with DNA — today. 
It is in our DNA to be curious. 
(Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Well, I have a big announcement to make today, and I'm really excited about this. 
And this may be a little bit of a surprise to many of you who know my research and what I've done well. 
I've really tried to solve some big problems: counterterrorism, nuclear terrorism, and health care and diagnosing and treating cancer, but I started thinking about all these problems, and I realized that the really biggest problem we face, what all these other problems come down to, is energy, is electricity, the flow of electrons. 
And I decided that I was going to set out to try to solve this problem. 
And this probably is not what you're expecting. 
You're probably expecting me to come up here and talk about fusion, because that's what I've done most of my life. 
But this is actually a talk about, okay — (Laughter) — but this is actually a talk about fission. 
It's about perfecting something old, and bringing something old into the 21st century. 
Let's talk a little bit about how nuclear fission works. 
In a nuclear power plant, you have a big pot of water that's under high pressure, and you have some fuel rods, and these fuel rods are encased in zirconium, and they're little pellets of uranium dioxide fuel, and a fission reaction is controlled and maintained at a proper level, and that reaction heats up water, the water turns to steam, steam turns the turbine, and you produce electricity from it. 
This is the same way we've been producing electricity, the steam turbine idea, for 100 years, and nuclear was a really big advancement in a way to heat the water, but you still boil water and that turns to steam and turns the turbine. 
And I thought, you know, is this the best way to do it? 
Is fission kind of played out, or is there something left to innovate here? 
And I realized that I had hit upon something that I think has this huge potential to change the world. 
And this is what it is. 
This is a small modular reactor. 
So it's not as big as the reactor you see in the diagram here. 
This is between 50 and 100 megawatts. 
But that's a ton of power. 
That's between, say at an average use, that's maybe 25,000 to 100,000 homes could run off that. 
Now the really interesting thing about these reactors is they're built in a factory. 
So they're modular reactors that are built essentially on an assembly line, and they're trucked anywhere in the world, you plop them down, and they produce electricity. 
This region right here is the reactor. 
And this is buried below ground, which is really important. 
For someone who's done a lot of counterterrorism work, I can't extol to you how great having something buried below the ground is for proliferation and security concerns. 
And inside this reactor is a molten salt, so anybody who's a fan of thorium, they're going to be really excited about this, because these reactors happen to be really good at breeding and burning the thorium fuel cycle, uranium-233. 
But I'm not really concerned about the fuel. 
You can run these off — they're really hungry, they really like down-blended weapons pits, so that's highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium that's been down-blended. 
It's made into a grade where it's not usable for a nuclear weapon, but they love this stuff. 
And we have a lot of it sitting around, because this is a big problem. 
You know, in the Cold War, we built up this huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, and that was great, and we don't need them anymore, and what are we doing with all the waste, essentially? 
What are we doing with all the pits of those nuclear weapons? 
Well, we're securing them, and it would be great if we could burn them, eat them up, and this reactor loves this stuff. 
So it's a molten salt reactor. It has a core, and it has a heat exchanger from the hot salt, the radioactive salt, to a cold salt which isn't radioactive. 
It's still thermally hot but it's not radioactive. 
And then that's a heat exchanger to what makes this design really, really interesting, and that's a heat exchanger to a gas. 
So going back to what I was saying before about all power being produced — well, other than photovoltaic — being produced by this boiling of steam and turning a turbine, that's actually not that efficient, and in fact, in a nuclear power plant like this, it's only roughly 30 to 35 percent efficient. 
That's how much thermal energy the reactor's putting out to how much electricity it's producing. 
And the reason the efficiencies are so low is these reactors operate at pretty low temperature. 
They operate anywhere from, you know, maybe 200 to 300 degrees Celsius. 
And these reactors run at 600 to 700 degrees Celsius, which means the higher the temperature you go to, thermodynamics tells you that you will have higher efficiencies. 
And this reactor doesn't use water. It uses gas, so supercritical CO2 or helium, and that goes into a turbine, and this is called the Brayton cycle. 
This is the thermodynamic cycle that produces electricity, and this makes this almost 50 percent efficient, between 45 and 50 percent efficiency. 
And I'm really excited about this, because it's a very compact core. 
Molten salt reactors are very compact by nature, but what's also great is you get a lot more electricity out for how much uranium you're fissioning, not to mention the fact that these burn up. 
Their burn-up is much higher. 
So for a given amount of fuel you put in the reactor, a lot more of it's being used. 
And the problem with a traditional nuclear power plant like this is, you've got these rods that are clad in zirconium, and inside them are uranium dioxide fuel pellets. 
Well, uranium dioxide's a ceramic, and ceramic doesn't like releasing what's inside of it. 
So you have what's called the xenon pit, and so some of these fission products love neutrons. 
They love the neutrons that are going on and helping this reaction take place. 
And they eat them up, which means that, combined with the fact that the cladding doesn't last very long, you can only run one of these reactors for roughly, say, 18 months without refueling it. 
So these reactors run for 30 years without refueling, which is, in my opinion, very, very amazing, because it means it's a sealed system. 
No refueling means you can seal them up and they're not going to be a proliferation risk, and they're not going to have either nuclear material or radiological material proliferated from their cores. 
But let's go back to safety, because everybody after Fukushima had to reassess the safety of nuclear, and one of the things when I set out to design a power reactor was it had to be passively and intrinsically safe, and I'm really excited about this reactor for essentially two reasons. 
One, it doesn't operate at high pressure. 
So traditional reactors like a pressurized water reactor or boiling water reactor, they're very, very hot water at very high pressures, and this means, essentially, in the event of an accident, if you had any kind of breach of this stainless steel pressure vessel, the coolant would leave the core. 
These reactors operate at essentially atmospheric pressure, so there's no inclination for the fission products to leave the reactor in the event of an accident. 
Also, they operate at high temperatures, and the fuel is molten, so they can't melt down, but in the event that the reactor ever went out of tolerances, or you lost off-site power in the case of something like Fukushima, there's a dump tank. 
Because your fuel is liquid, and it's combined with your coolant, you could actually just drain the core into what's called a sub-critical setting, basically a tank underneath the reactor that has some neutrons absorbers. 
And this is really important, because the reaction stops. 
In this kind of reactor, you can't do that. 
The fuel, like I said, is ceramic inside zirconium fuel rods, and in the event of an accident in one of these type of reactors, Fukushima and Three Mile Island — looking back at Three Mile Island, we didn't really see this for a while — but these zirconium claddings on these fuel rods, what happens is, when they see high pressure water, steam, in an oxidizing environment, they'll actually produce hydrogen, and that hydrogen has this explosive capability to release fission products. 
So the core of this reactor, since it's not under pressure and it doesn't have this chemical reactivity, means that there's no inclination for the fission products to leave this reactor. 
So even in the event of an accident, yeah, the reactor may be toast, which is, you know, sorry for the power company, but we're not going to contaminate large quantities of land. 
So I really think that in the, say, 20 years it's going to take us to get fusion and make fusion a reality, this could be the source of energy that provides carbon-free electricity. 
Carbon-free electricity. 
And it's an amazing technology because not only does it combat climate change, but it's an innovation. 
It's a way to bring power to the developing world, because it's produced in a factory and it's cheap. 
You can put them anywhere in the world you want to. 
And maybe something else. 
As a kid, I was obsessed with space. 
Well, I was obsessed with nuclear science too, to a point, but before that I was obsessed with space, and I was really excited about, you know, being an astronaut and designing rockets, which was something that was always exciting to me. 
But I think I get to come back to this, because imagine having a compact reactor in a rocket that produces 50 to 100 megawatts. 
That is the rocket designer's dream. 
That's someone who is designing a habitat on another planet's dream. 
Not only do you have 50 to 100 megawatts to power whatever you want to provide propulsion to get you there, but you have power once you get there. 
You know, rocket designers who use solar panels or fuel cells, I mean a few watts or kilowatts — wow, that's a lot of power. 
I mean, now we're talking about 100 megawatts. 
That's a ton of power. 
That could power a Martian community. 
That could power a rocket there. 
And so I hope that maybe I'll have an opportunity to kind of explore my rocketry passion at the same time that I explore my nuclear passion. 
And people say, "" Oh, well, you've launched this thing, and it's radioactive, into space, and what about accidents? "" But we launch plutonium batteries all the time. 
Everybody was really excited about Curiosity, and that had this big plutonium battery on board that has plutonium-238, which actually has a higher specific activity than the low-enriched uranium fuel of these molten salt reactors, which means that the effects would be negligible, because you launch it cold, and when it gets into space is where you actually activate this reactor. 
So I'm really excited. 
I think that I've designed this reactor here that can be an innovative source of energy, provide power for all kinds of neat scientific applications, and I'm really prepared to do this. 
I graduated high school in May, and — (Laughter) (Applause) — I graduated high school in May, and I decided that I was going to start up a company to commercialize these technologies that I've developed, these revolutionary detectors for scanning cargo containers and these systems to produce medical isotopes, but I want to do this, and I've slowly been building up a team of some of the most incredible people I've ever had the chance to work with, and I'm really prepared to make this a reality. 
And I think, I think, that looking at the technology, this will be cheaper than or the same price as natural gas, and you don't have to refuel it for 30 years, which is an advantage for the developing world. 
And I'll just say one more maybe philosophical thing to end with, which is weird for a scientist. 
But I think there's something really poetic about using nuclear power to propel us to the stars, because the stars are giant fusion reactors. 
They're giant nuclear cauldrons in the sky. 
The energy that I'm able to talk to you today, while it was converted to chemical energy in my food, originally came from a nuclear reaction, and so there's something poetic about, in my opinion, perfecting nuclear fission and using it as a future source of innovative energy. 
So thank you guys. 
(Applause) 

I'm going to talk about your mindset. 
Does your mindset correspond to my dataset? 
(Laughter) If not, one or the other needs upgrading, isn't it? 
When I talk to my students about global issues, and I listen to them in the coffee break, they always talk about "" we "" and "" them. "" And when they come back into the lecture room I ask them, "" What do you mean with "" we "" and "" them ""? 
"" Oh, it's very easy. It's the western world and it's the developing world, "" they say. 
"We learned it in college." 
And what is the definition then? "" The definition? 
Everyone knows, "" they say. 
But then you know, I press them like this. 
So one girl said, very cleverly, "" It's very easy. 
Western world is a long life in a small family. 
Developing world is a short life in a large family. "" And I like that definition, because it enabled me to transfer their mindset into the dataset. 
And here you have the dataset. 
So, you can see that what we have on this axis here is size of family. One, two, three, four, five children per woman on this axis. 
And here, length of life, life expectancy, 30, 40, 50. 
Exactly what the students said was their concept about the world. 
And really this is about the bedroom. 
Whether the man and woman decide to have small family, and take care of their kids, and how long they will live. 
It's about the bathroom and the kitchen. If you have soap, water and food, you know, you can live long. 
And the students were right. It wasn't that the world consisted — the world consisted here, of one set of countries over here, which had large families and short life. Developing world. 
And we had one set of countries up there which was the western world. 
They had small families and long life. 
And you are going to see here the amazing thing that has happened in the world during my lifetime. 
Then the developing countries applied soap and water, vaccination. 
And all the developing world started to apply family planning. 
And partly to USA who help to provide technical advice and investment. 
And you see all the world moves over to a two child family, and a life with 60 to 70 years. 
But some countries remain back in this area here. 
And you can see we still have Afghanistan down here. 
We have Liberia. We have Congo. 
So we have countries living there. 
So the problem I had is that the worldview that my students had corresponds to reality in the world the year their teachers were born. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And we, in fact, when we have played this over the world. 
I was at the Global Health Conference here in Washington last week, and I could see the wrong concept even active people in United States had, that they didn't realize the improvement of Mexico there, and China, in relation to United States. 
Look here when I move them forward. 
Here we go. 
They catch up. There's Mexico. 
It's on par with United States in these two social dimensions. 
There was less than five percent of the specialists in Global Health that was aware of this. 
This great nation, Mexico, has the problem that arms are coming from North, across the borders, so they had to stop that, because they have this strange relationship to the United States, you know. 
But if I would change this axis here, I would instead put income per person. 
Income per person. I can put that here. 
And we will then see a completely different picture. 
By the way, I'm teaching you how to use our website, Gapminder World, while I'm correcting this, because this is a free utility on the net. 
And when I now finally got it right, I can go back 200 years in history. 
And I can find United States up there. 
And I can let the other countries be shown. 
And now I have income per person on this axis. 
And United States only had some, one, two thousand dollars at that time. 
And the life expectancy was 35 to 40 years, on par with Afghanistan today. 
And what has happened in the world, I will show now. 
This is instead of studying history for one year at university. 
You can watch me for one minute now and you'll see the whole thing. 
(Laughter) You can see how the brown bubbles, which is west Europe, and the yellow one, which is the United States, they get richer and richer and also start to get healthier and healthier. 
And this is now 100 years ago, where the rest of the world remains behind. 
Here we come. And that was the influenza. 
That's why we are so scared about flu, isn't it? 
It's still remembered. The fall of life expectancy. 
And then we come up. Not until independence started. 
Look here You have China over there, you have India over there, and this is what has happened. 
Did you note there, that we have Mexico up there? 
Mexico is not at all on par with the United States, but they are quite close. 
And especially, it's interesting to see China and the United States during 200 years, because I have my oldest son now working for Google, after Google acquired this software. 
Because in fact, this is child labor. My son and his wife sat in a closet for many years and developed this. 
And my youngest son, who studied Chinese in Beijing. 
So they come in with the two perspectives I have, you know? 
And my son, youngest son who studied in Beijing, in China, he got a long-term perspective. 
Whereas when my oldest son, who works for Google, he should develop by quarter, or by half-year. 
Or Google is quite generous, so he can have one or two years to go. 
But in China they look generation after generation because they remember the very embarrassing period, for 100 years, when they went backwards. 
And then they would remember the first part of last century, which was really bad, and we could go by this so-called Great Leap Forward. 
But this was 1963. 
Mao Tse-Tung eventually brought health to China, and then he died, and then Deng Xiaoping started this amazing move forward. 
Isn't it strange to see that the United States first grew the economy, and then gradually got rich? 
Whereas China could get healthy much earlier, because they applied the knowledge of education, nutrition, and then also benefits of penicillin and vaccines and family planning. 
And Asia could have social development before they got the economic development. 
So to me, as a public health professor, it's not strange that all these countries grow so fast now. 
Because what you see here, what you see here is the flat world of Thomas Friedman, isn't it. 
It's not really, really flat. 
But the middle income countries — and this is where I suggest to my students, stop using the concept "" developing world. "" Because after all, talking about the developing world is like having two chapters in the history of the United States. 
The last chapter is about present, and president Obama, and the other is about the past, where you cover everything from Washington to Eisenhower. 
Because Washington to Eisenhower, that is what we find in the developing world. 
We could actually go to Mayflower to Eisenhower, and that would be put together into a developing world, which is rightly growing its cities in a very amazing way, which have great entrepreneurs, but also have the collapsing countries. 
So, how could we make better sense about this? 
Well, one way of trying is to see whether we could look at income distribution. 
This is the income distribution of peoples in the world, from $1. This is where you have food to eat. 
These people go to bed hungry. 
And this is the number of people. 
This is $10, whether you have a public or a private health service system. This is where you can provide health service for your family and school for your children, and this is OECD countries: Green, Latin America, East Europe. 
This is East Asia, and the light blue there is South Asia. 
And this is how the world changed. 
It changed like this. 
Can you see how it's growing? And how hundreds of millions and billions is coming out of poverty in Asia? 
And it goes over here? 
And I come now, into projections, but I have to stop at the door of Lehman Brothers there, you know, because — (Laughter) that's where the projections are not valid any longer. 
Probably the world will do this. 
and then it will continue forward like this. 
But more or less, this is what will happen, and we have a world which cannot be looked upon as divided. 
We have the high income countries here, with the United States as a leading power; we have the emerging economies in the middle, which provide a lot of the funding for the bailout; and we have the low income countries here. 
Yeah, this is a fact that from where the money comes, they have been saving, you know, over the last decade. 
And here we have the low income countries where entrepreneurs are. 
And here we have the countries in collapse and war, like Afghanistan, Somalia, parts of Congo, Darfur. 
We have all this at the same time. 
That's why it's so problematic to describe what has happened in the developing world. 
Because it's so different, what has happened there. 
And that's why I suggest a slightly different approach of what you would call it. 
And you have huge differences within countries also. 
I heard that your departments here were by regions. 
Here you have Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Arab states, East Europe, Latin America, and OECD. 
And on this axis, GDP. 
And on this, heath, child survival, and it doesn't come as a surprise that Africa south of Sahara is at the bottom. 
But when I split it, when I split it into country bubbles, the size of the bubbles here is the population. 
Then you see Sierra Leone and Mauritius, completely different. 
There is such a difference within Sub-Saharan Africa. 
And I can split the others. Here is the South Asian, Arab world. 
Now all your different departments. 
East Europe, Latin America, and OECD countries. 
And here were are. We have a continuum in the world. 
We cannot put it into two parts. 
It is Mayflower down here. It is Washington here, building, building countries. 
It's Lincoln here, advancing them. 
It's Eisenhower bringing modernity into the countries. 
And then it's United States today, up here. 
And we have countries all this way. 
Now, this is the important thing of understanding how the world has changed. 
At this point I decided to make a pause. 
(Laughter) And it is my task, on behalf of the rest of the world, to convey a thanks to the U.S. taxpayers, for Demographic Health Survey. 
Many are not aware of — no, this is not a joke. 
This is very serious. 
It is due to USA's continuous sponsoring during 25 years of the very good methodology for measuring child mortality that we have a grasp of what's happening in the world. 
(Applause) And it is U.S. government at its best, without advocacy, providing facts, that it's useful for the society. 
And providing data free of charge on the internet, for the world to use. Thank you very much. 
Quite the opposite of the World Bank, who compiled data with government money, tax money, and then they sell it to add a little profit, in a very inefficient, Gutenberg way. 
(Applause) But the people doing that at the World Bank are among the best in the world. 
And they are highly skilled professionals. 
It's just that we would like to upgrade our international agencies to deal with the world in the modern way, as we do. 
And when it comes to free data and transparency, United States of America is one of the best. 
And that doesn't come easy from the mouth of a Swedish public health professor. 
(Laughter) And I'm not paid to come here, no. 
I would like to show you what happens with the data, what we can show with this data. 
Look here. This is the world. 
With income down there and child mortality. 
And what has happened in the world? 
Since 1950, during the last 50 years we have had a fall in child mortality. 
And it is the DHS that makes it possible to know this. 
And we had an increase in income. 
And the blue former developing countries are mixing up with the former industrialized western world. 
We have a continuum. But we still have, of course, Congo, up there. We still have as poor countries as we have had, always, in history. 
And that's the bottom billion, where we've heard today about a completely new approach to do it. 
And how fast has this happened? 
Well, MDG 4. 
The United States has not been so eager to use MDG 4. 
But you have been the main sponsor that has enabled us to measure it, because it's the only child mortality that we can measure. 
And we used to say that it should fall four percent per year. 
Let's see what Sweden has done. 
We used to boast about fast social progress. 
That's where we were, 1900. 
1900, Sweden was there. 
Same child mortality as Bangladesh had, 1990, though they had lower income. 
They started very well. They used the aid well. 
They vaccinated the kids. They get better water. 
And they reduced child mortality, with an amazing 4.7 percent per year. They beat Sweden. 
I run Sweden the same 16 year period. 
Second round, it's Sweden, 1916, against Egypt, 1990. 
Here we go. Once again the USA is part of the reason here. 
They get safe water, they get food for the poor, and they get malaria eradicated. 
5.5 percent. They are faster than the millennium development goal. 
And third chance for Sweden, against Brazil here. 
Brazil here has amazing social improvement over the last 16 years, and they go faster than Sweden. 
This means that the world is converging. 
The middle income countries, the emerging economy, they are catching up. 
They are moving to cities, where they also get better assistance for that. 
Well the Swedish students protest at this point. 
They say, "" This is not fair, because these countries had vaccines and antibiotics that were not available for Sweden. 
We have to do real-time competition. "" Okay. I give you Singapore, the year I was born. 
Singapore had twice the child mortality of Sweden. 
It's the most tropical country in the world, a marshland on the equator. 
And here we go. It took a little time for them to get independent. 
But then they started to grow their economy. 
And they made the social investment. They got away malaria. 
They got a magnificent health system that beat both the U.S. and Sweden. 
We never thought it would happen that they would win over Sweden! 
(Applause) All these green countries are achieving millennium development goals. 
These yellow are just about to be doing this. 
These red are the countries that doesn't do it, and the policy has to be improved. 
Not simplistic extrapolation. 
We have to really find a way of supporting those countries in a better way. 
We have to respect the middle income countries on what they are doing. 
And we have to fact-base the whole way we look at the world. 
This is dollar per person. This is HIV in the countries. 
The blue is Africa. 
The size of the bubbles is how many are HIV affected. 
You see the tragedy in South Africa there. 
About 20 percent of the adult population are infected. 
And in spite of them having quite a high income, they have a huge number of HIV infected. 
But you also see that there are African countries down here. 
There is no such thing as an HIV epidemic in Africa. 
There's a number, five to 10 countries in Africa that has the same level as Sweden and United States. 
And there are others who are extremely high. 
And I will show you that what has happened in one of the best countries, with the most vibrant economy in Africa and a good governance, Botswana. 
They have a very high level. It's coming down. 
But now it's not falling, because there, with help from PEPFAR, it's working with treatment. And people are not dying. 
And you can see it's not that easy, that it is war which caused this. 
Because here, in Congo, there is war. 
And here, in Zambia, there is peace. 
And it's not the economy. Richer country has a little higher. 
If I split Tanzania in its income, the richer 20 percent in Tanzania has more HIV than the poorest one. 
And it's really different within each country. 
Look at the provinces of Kenya. They are very different. 
And this is the situation you see. 
It's not deep poverty. It's the special situation, probably of concurrent sexual partnership among part of the heterosexual population in some countries, or some parts of countries, in south and eastern Africa. 
Don't make it Africa. Don't make it a race issue. 
Make it a local issue. And do prevention at each place, in the way it can be done there. 
So to just end up, there are things of suffering in the one billion poorest, which we don't know. 
Those who live beyond the cellphone, those who have yet to see a computer, those who have no electricity at home. 
This is the disease, Konzo, I spent 20 years elucidating in Africa. 
It's caused by fast processing of toxic cassava root in famine situation. 
It's similar to the pellagra epidemic in Mississippi in the '30s. 
It's similar to other nutritional diseases. 
It will never affect a rich person. 
We have seen it here in Mozambique. 
This is the epidemic in Mozambique. This is an epidemic in northern Tanzania. 
You never heard about the disease. 
But it's much more than Ebola that has been affected by this disease. 
Cause crippling throughout the world. 
And over the last two years, 2,000 people has been crippled in the southern tip of Bandundu region. 
That used to be the illegal diamond trade, from the UNITA-dominated area in Angola. 
That has now disappeared, and they are now in great economic problem. 
And one week ago, for the first time, there were four lines on the Internet. 
Don't get confused of the progress of the emerging economies and the great capacity of people in the middle income countries and in peaceful low income countries. 
There is still mystery in one billion. 
And we have to have more concepts than just developing countries and developing world. 
We need a new mindset. The world is converging, but — but — but not the bottom billion. 
They are still as poor as they've ever been. 
It's not sustainable, and it will not happen around one superpower. 
But you will remain one of the most important superpowers, and the most hopeful superpower, for the time to be. 
And this institution will have a very crucial role, not for United States, but for the world. 
So you have a very bad name, State Department. This is not the State Department. 
It's the World Department. 
And we have a high hope in you. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

And exactly six years and three days earlier, on June 20, 1994, a ship named the Apollo Sea sank near Dassen Island, oiling 10,000 penguins, half of which died. 
Now when the Treasure sank in 2000, it was the height of the best breeding season scientists had ever recorded for the African penguin, which at the time, was listed as a threatened species. 
Eventually, over the course of this rescue, more than 12-and-a-half thousand volunteers came from all over the world to Cape Town, to help save these birds. 
So for the few of us that were there in a professional capacity, this extraordinary volunteer response to this animal crisis was profoundly moving and awe-inspiring. 
So in wildlife rescue as in life, we learn from each previous experience, and we learn from both our successes and our failures. 
And as a result, during the Treasure rescue, just 160 penguins died during the transport process, as opposed to 5,000. 
But an interesting thing was noted during the training process. 
When you clean a penguin, you first have to spray it with a degreaser. 
After half a million hours of grueling volunteer labor, more than 90 percent of those oiled penguins were successfully returned to the wild. 
So what did I learn from this intense and unforgettable experience? 
And simply put: if penguins are dying, it means our oceans are dying. 
And the two main threats to penguins today are overfishing and global warming. 

Today I'd like to show you the future of the way we make things. 
I believe that soon our buildings and machines will be self-assembling, replicating and repairing themselves. 
So I'm going to show you what I believe is the current state of manufacturing, and then compare that to some natural systems. 
So in the current state of manufacturing, we have skyscrapers — two and a half years [of assembly time], 500,000 to a million parts, fairly complex, new, exciting technologies in steel, concrete, glass. 
We have exciting machines that can take us into space — five years [of assembly time], 2.5 million parts. 
But on the other side, if you look at the natural systems, we have proteins that have two million types, can fold in 10,000 nanoseconds, or DNA with three billion base pairs we can replicate in roughly an hour. 
So there's all of this complexity in our natural systems, but they're extremely efficient, far more efficient than anything we can build, far more complex than anything we can build. 
They're far more efficient in terms of energy. 
They hardly ever make mistakes. 
And they can repair themselves for longevity. 
So there's something super interesting about natural systems. 
And if we can translate that into our built environment, then there's some exciting potential for the way that we build things. 
And I think the key to that is self-assembly. 
So if we want to utilize self-assembly in our physical environment, I think there's four key factors. 
The first is that we need to decode all of the complexity of what we want to build — so our buildings and machines. 
And we need to decode that into simple sequences — basically the DNA of how our buildings work. 
Then we need programmable parts that can take that sequence and use that to fold up, or reconfigure. 
We need some energy that's going to allow that to activate, allow our parts to be able to fold up from the program. 
And we need some type of error correction redundancy to guarantee that we have successfully built what we want. 
So I'm going to show you a number of projects that my colleagues and I at MIT are working on to achieve this self-assembling future. 
The first two are the MacroBot and DeciBot. 
So these projects are large-scale reconfigurable robots — 8 ft., 12 ft. long proteins. 
They're embedded with mechanical electrical devices, sensors. 
You decode what you want to fold up into, into a sequence of angles — so negative 120, negative 120, 0, 0, 120, negative 120 — something like that; so a sequence of angles, or turns, and you send that sequence through the string. 
Each unit takes its message — so negative 120 — it rotates to that, checks if it got there and then passes it to its neighbor. 
So these are the brilliant scientists, engineers, designers that worked on this project. 
And I think it really brings to light: Is this really scalable? 
I mean, thousands of dollars, lots of man hours made to make this eight-foot robot. 
Can we really scale this up? Can we really embed robotics into every part? 
The next one questions that and looks at passive nature, or passively trying to have reconfiguration programmability. 
But it goes a step further, and it tries to have actual computation. 
It basically embeds the most fundamental building block of computing, the digital logic gate, directly into your parts. 
So this is a NAND gate. 
You have one tetrahedron which is the gate that's going to do your computing, and you have two input tetrahedrons. 
One of them is the input from the user, as you're building your bricks. 
The other one is from the previous brick that was placed. 
And then it gives you an output in 3D space. 
So what this means is that the user can start plugging in what they want the bricks to do. 
It computes on what it was doing before and what you said you wanted it to do. 
And now it starts moving in three-dimensional space — so up or down. 
So on the left-hand side, [1,1] input equals 0 output, which goes down. 
On the right-hand side, [0,0] input is a 1 output, which goes up. 
And so what that really means is that our structures now contain the blueprints of what we want to build. 
So they have all of the information embedded in them of what was constructed. 
So that means that we can have some form of self-replication. 
In this case I call it self-guided replication, because your structure contains the exact blueprints. 
If you have errors, you can replace a part. 
All the local information is embedded to tell you how to fix it. 
So you could have something that climbs along and reads it and can output at one to one. 
It's directly embedded; there's no external instructions. 
So the last project I'll show is called Biased Chains, and it's probably the most exciting example that we have right now of passive self-assembly systems. 
So it takes the reconfigurability and programmability and makes it a completely passive system. 
So basically you have a chain of elements. 
Each element is completely identical, and they're biased. 
So each chain, or each element, wants to turn right or left. 
So as you assemble the chain, you're basically programming it. 
You're telling each unit if it should turn right or left. 
So when you shake the chain, it then folds up into any configuration that you've programmed in — so in this case, a spiral, or in this case, two cubes next to each other. 
So you can basically program any three-dimensional shape — or one-dimensional, two-dimensional — up into this chain completely passively. 
So what does this tell us about the future? 
I think that it's telling us that there's new possibilities for self-assembly, replication, repair in our physical structures, our buildings, machines. 
There's new programmability in these parts. 
And from that you have new possibilities for computing. 
We'll have spatial computing. 
Imagine if our buildings, our bridges, machines, all of our bricks could actually compute. 
That's amazing parallel and distributed computing power, new design possibilities. 
So it's exciting potential for this. 
So I think these projects I've showed here are just a tiny step towards this future, if we implement these new technologies for a new self-assembling world. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Ten years ago exactly, I was in Afghanistan. 
I was covering the war in Afghanistan, and I witnessed, as a reporter for Al Jazeera, the amount of suffering and destruction that emerged out of a war like that. 
Then, two years later, I covered another war — the war in Iraq. 
I was placed at the center of that war because I was covering the war from the northern part of Iraq. 
And the war ended with a regime change, like the one in Afghanistan. 
And that regime that we got rid of was actually a dictatorship, an authoritarian regime, that for decades created a great sense of paralysis within the nation, within the people themselves. 
However, the change that came through foreign intervention created even worse circumstances for the people and deepened the sense of paralysis and inferiority in that part of the world. 
For decades, we have lived under authoritarian regimes — in the Arab world, in the Middle East. 
These regimes created something within us during this period. 
I'm 43 years old right now. 
For the last 40 years, I have seen almost the same faces for kings and presidents ruling us — old, aged, authoritarian, corrupt situations — regimes that we have seen around us. 
And for a moment I was wondering, are we going to live in order to see real change happening on the ground, a change that does not come through foreign intervention, through the misery of occupation, through nations invading our land and deepening the sense of inferiority sometimes? 
The Iraqis: yes, they got rid of Saddam Hussein, but when they saw their land occupied by foreign forces they felt very sad, they felt that their dignity had suffered. 
And this is why they revolted. 
This is why they did not accept. 
And actually other regimes, they told their citizens, "" Would you like to see the situation of Iraq? 
Would you like to see civil war, sectarian killing? 
Would you like to see destruction? 
Would you like to see foreign troops on your land? "" And the people thought for themselves, "" Maybe we should live with this kind of authoritarian situation that we find ourselves in, instead of having the second scenario. "" That was one of the worst nightmares that we have seen. 
For 10 years, unfortunately we have found ourselves reporting images of destruction, images of killing, of sectarian conflicts, images of violence, emerging from a magnificent piece of land, a region that one day was the source of civilizations and art and culture for thousands of years. 
Now I am here to tell you that the future that we were dreaming for has eventually arrived. 
A new generation, well-educated, connected, inspired by universal values and a global understanding, has created a new reality for us. 
We have found a new way to express our feelings and to express our dreams: these young people who have restored self-confidence in our nations in that part of the world, who have given us new meaning for freedom and empowered us to go down to the streets. 
Nothing happened. No violence. Nothing. 
Just step out of your house, raise your voice and say, "" We would like to see the end of the regime. "" This is what happened in Tunisia. 
Over a few days, the Tunisian regime that invested billions of dollars in the security agencies, billions of dollars in maintaining, trying to maintain, its prisons, collapsed, disappeared, because of the voices of the public. 
People who were inspired to go down to the streets and to raise their voices, they tried to kill. 
The intelligence agencies wanted to arrest people. 
They found something called Facebook. 
They found something called Twitter. 
They were surprised by all of these kinds of issues. 
And they said, "These kids are misled." 
Therefore, they asked their parents to go down to the streets and collect them, bring them back home. 
This is what they were telling. This is their propaganda. 
"" Bring these kids home because they are misled. "" But yes, these youth who have been inspired by universal values, who are idealistic enough to imagine a magnificent future and, at the same time, realistic enough to balance this kind of imagination and the process leading to it — not using violence, not trying to create chaos — these young people, they did not go home. 
Parents actually went to the streets and they supported them. 
And this is how the revolution was born in Tunisia. 
We in Al Jazeera were banned from Tunisia for years, and the government did not allow any Al Jazeera reporter to be there. 
But we found that these people in the street, all of them are our reporters, feeding our newsroom with pictures, with videos and with news. 
And suddenly that newsroom in Doha became a center that received all this kind of input from ordinary people — people who are connected and people who have ambition and who have liberated themselves from the feeling of inferiority. 
And then we took that decision: We are unrolling the news. 
We are going to be the voice for these voiceless people. 
We are going to spread the message. 
Yes, some of these young people are connected to the Internet, but the connectivity in the Arab world is very little, is very small, because of many problems that we are suffering from. 
But Al Jazeera took the voice from these people and we amplified [it]. 
We put it in every sitting room in the Arab world — and internationally, globally, through our English channel. 
And then people started to feel that there's something new happening. 
And then Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali decided to leave. 
And then Egypt started, and Hosni Mubarak decided to leave. 
And now Libya as you see it. 
And then you have Yemen. 
And you have many other countries trying to see and to rediscover that feeling of, "" How do we imagine a future which is magnificent and peaceful and tolerant? "" I want to tell you something, that the Internet and connectivity has created [a] new mindset. 
But this mindset has continued to be faithful to the soil and to the land that it emerged from. 
And while this was the major difference between many initiatives before to create change, before we thought, and governments told us — and even sometimes it was true — that change was imposed on us, and people rejected that, because they thought that it is alien to their culture. 
Always, we believed that change will spring from within, that change should be a reconciliation with culture, cultural diversity, with our faith in our tradition and in our history, but at the same time, open to universal values, connected with the world, tolerant to the outside. 
And this is the moment that is happening right now in the Arab world. 
This is the right moment, and this is the actual moment that we see all of these meanings meet together and then create the beginning of this magnificent era that will emerge from the region. 
How did the elite deal with that — the so-called political elite? 
In front of Facebook, they brought the camels in Tahrir Square. 
In front of Al Jazeera, they started creating tribalism. 
And then when they failed, they started speaking about conspiracies that emerged from Tel Aviv and Washington in order to divide the Arab world. 
They started telling the West, "" Be aware of Al-Qaeda. 
Al-Qaeda is taking over our territories. 
These are Islamists trying to create new Imaras. 
Be aware of these people who [are] coming to you in order to ruin your great civilization. "" Fortunately, people right now cannot be deceived. 
Because this corrupt elite in that region has lost even the power of deception. 
They could not, and they cannot, imagine how they could really deal with this reality. 
They have lost. 
They have been detached from their people, from the masses, and now we are seeing them collapsing one after the other. 
Al Jazeera is not a tool of revolution. 
We do not create revolutions. 
However, when something of that magnitude happens, we are at the center of the coverage. 
We were banned from Egypt, and our correspondents, some of them were arrested. 
But most of our camera people and our journalists, they went underground in Egypt — voluntarily — to report what happened in Tahrir Square. 
For 18 days, our cameras were broadcasting, live, the voices of the people in Tahrir Square. 
I remember one night when someone phoned me on my cellphone — ordinary person who I don't know — from Tahrir Square. 
He told me, "" We appeal to you not to switch off the cameras. 
If you switch off the cameras tonight, there will be a genocide. 
You are protecting us by showing what is happening at Tahrir Square. "" I felt the responsibility to phone our correspondents there and to phone our newsroom and to tell them, "" Make your best not to switch off the cameras at night, because the guys there really feel confident when someone is reporting their story — and they feel protected as well. "" So we have a chance to create a new future in that part of the world. 
We have a chance to go and to think of the future as something which is open to the world. 
Let us not repeat the mistake of Iran, of [the] Mosaddeq revolution. 
Let us free ourselves — especially in the West — from thinking about that part of the world based on oil interest, or based on interests of the illusion of stability and security. 
The stability and security of authoritarian regimes cannot create but terrorism and violence and destruction. 
Let us accept the choice of the people. 
Let us not pick and choose who we would like to rule their future. 
The future should be ruled by people themselves, even sometimes if they are voices that might now scare us. 
But the values of democracy and the freedom of choice that is sweeping the Middle East at this moment in time is the best opportunity for the world, for the West and the East, to see stability and to see security and to see friendship and to see tolerance emerging from the Arab world, rather than the images of violence and terrorism. 
Let us support these people. 
Let us stand for them. 
And let us give up our narrow selfishness in order to embrace change, and in order to celebrate with the people of that region a great future and hope and tolerance. 
The future has arrived, and the future is now. 
I thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) 
Chris Anderson: I just have a couple of questions for you. 
Thank you for coming here. 
How would you characterize the historical significance of what's happened? 
Is this a story-of-the-year, a story-of-the-decade or something more? 
Wadah Khanfar: Actually, this may be the biggest story that we have ever covered. 
We have covered many wars. 
We have covered a lot of tragedies, a lot of problems, a lot of conflict zones, a lot of hot spots in the region, because we were centered at the middle of it. 
But this is a story — it is a great story; it is beautiful. 
It is not something that you only cover because you have to cover a great incident. 
You are witnessing change in history. 
You are witnessing the birth of a new era. 
And this is what the story's all about. 
CA: There are a lot of people in the West who are still skeptical, or think this may just be an intermediate stage before much more alarming chaos. 
You really believe that if there are democratic elections in Egypt now, that a government could emerge that espouses some of the values you've spoken about so inspiringly? 
WK: And people actually, after the collapse of the Hosni Mubarak regime, the youth who have organized themselves in certain groups and councils, they are guarding the transformation and they are trying to put it on a track in order to satisfy the values of democracy, but at the same time also to make it reasonable and to make it rational, not to go out of order. 
In my opinion, these people are much more wiser than, not only the political elite, even the intellectual elite, even opposition leaders including political parties. 
At this moment in time, the youth in the Arab world are much more wiser and capable of creating the change than the old — including the political and cultural and ideological old regimes. 
(Applause) CA: We are not to get involved politically and interfere in that way. 
What should people here at TED, here in the West, do if they want to connect or make a difference and they believe in what's happening here? 
WK: I think we have discovered a very important issue in the Arab world — that people care, people care about this great transformation. 
Mohamed Nanabhay who's sitting with us, the head of Aljazeera.net, he told me that a 2,500 percent increase of accessing our website from various parts of the world. 
Fifty percent of it is coming from America. 
Because we discovered that people care, and people would like to know — they are receiving the stream through our Internet. 
Unfortunately in the United States, we are not covering but Washington D.C. at this moment in time for Al Jazeera English. 
But I can tell you, this is the moment to celebrate through connecting ourselves with those people in the street and expressing our support to them and expressing this kind of feeling, universal feeling, of supporting the weak and the oppressed to create a much better future for all of us. 
CA: Well Wadah, a group of members of the TED community, TEDxCairo, are meeting as we speak. 
They've had some speakers there. 
I believe they've heard your talk. 
Thank you for inspiring them and for inspiring all of us. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

And she said, "" How are you? "" And I said, "" I'm great. I'm okay. "" She said, "" What's going on? "" And this is a therapist who sees therapists, because we have to go to those, because their B.S. meters are good. 

I normally teach courses on how to rebuild states after war. 
But today I've got a personal story to share with you. 
This is a picture of my family, my four siblings — my mom and I — taken in 1977. 
And we're actually Cambodians. 
And this picture is taken in Vietnam. 
So how did a Cambodian family end up in Vietnam in 1977? 
Well to explain that, I've got a short video clip to explain the Khmer Rouge regime during 1975 and 1979. 
Video: April 17th, 1975. 
The communist Khmer Rouge enters Phnom Penh to liberate their people from the encroaching conflict in Vietnam, and American bombing campaigns. 
Led by peasant-born Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge evacuates people to the countryside in order to create a rural communist utopia, much like Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution in China. 
The Khmer Rouge closes the doors to the outside world. 
But after four years the grim truth seeps out. 
In a country of only seven million people, one and a half million were murdered by their own leaders, their bodies piled in the mass graves of the killing fields. 
Sophal Ear: So, notwithstanding the 1970s narration, on April 17th 1975 we lived in Phnom Penh. 
And my parents were told by the Khmer Rouge to evacuate the city because of impending American bombing for three days. 
And here is a picture of the Khmer Rouge. 
They were young soldiers, typically child soldiers. 
And this is very normal now, of modern day conflict, because they're easy to bring into wars. 
The reason that they gave about American bombing wasn't all that far off. 
I mean, from 1965 to 1973 there were more munitions that fell on Cambodia than in all of World War II Japan, including the two nuclear bombs of August 1945. 
The Khmer Rouge didn't believe in money. 
So the equivalent of the Federal Reserve Bank in Cambodia was bombed. 
But not just that, they actually banned money. 
I think it's the only precedent in which money has ever been stopped from being used. 
And we know money is the root of all evil, but it didn't actually stop evil from happening in Cambodia, in fact. 
My family was moved from Phnom Penh to Pursat province. 
This is a picture of what Pursat looks like. 
It's actually a very pretty area of Cambodia, where rice growing takes place. 
And in fact they were forced to work the fields. 
So my father and mother ended up in a sort of concentration camp, labor camp. 
And it was at that time that my mother got word from the commune chief that the Vietnamese were actually asking for their citizens to go back to Vietnam. 
And she spoke some Vietnamese, as a child having grown up with Vietnamese friends. 
And she decided, despite the advice of her neighbors, that she would take the chance and claim to be Vietnamese so that we could have a chance to survive, because at this point they're forcing everybody to work. 
And they're giving about — in a modern-day, caloric-restriction diet, I guess — they're giving porridge, with a few grains of rice. 
And at about this time actually my father got very sick. 
And he didn't speak Vietnamese. 
So he died actually, in January 1976. 
And it made it possible, in fact, for us to take on this plan. 
So the Khmer Rouge took us from a place called Pursat to Kaoh Tiev, which is across from the border from Vietnam. 
And there they had a detention camp where alleged Vietnamese would be tested, language tested. 
And my mother's Vietnamese was so bad that to make our story more credible, she'd given all the boys and girls new Vietnamese names. 
But she'd given the boys girls' names, and the girls boys' names. 
And it wasn't until she met a Vietnamese lady who told her this, and then tutored her for two days intensively, that she was able to go into her exam and — you know, this was a moment of truth. 
If she fails, we're all headed to the gallows; if she passes, we can leave to Vietnam. 
And she actually, of course — I'm here, she passes. 
And we end up in Hong Ngu on the Vietnamese side. 
And then onwards to Chau Doc. 
And this is a picture of Hong Ngu, Vietnam today. 
A pretty idyllic place on the Mekong Delta. 
But for us it meant freedom. 
And freedom from persecution from the Khmer Rouge. 
Last year, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, which the U.N. is helping Cambodia take on, started, and I decided that as a matter of record I should file a Civil Complaint with the Tribunal about my father's passing away. 
And I got word last month that the complaint was officially accepted by the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. 
And it's for me a matter of justice for history, and accountability for the future, because Cambodia remains a pretty lawless place, at times. 
Five years ago my mother and I went back to Chau Doc. 
And she was able to return to a place that for her meant freedom, but also fear, because we had just come out of Cambodia. 
I'm happy, actually, today, to present her. 
She's here today with us in the audience. 
Thank you mother. 
(Applause) 

The Earth needs no introduction. 
It needs no introduction in part because the Apollo 17 astronauts, when they were hurtling around the moon in 1972, took this iconic image. 
It galvanized a whole generation of human beings to realize that we're on Spaceship Earth, fragile and finite as it is, and that we need to take care of it. 
But while this picture is beautiful, it's static, and the Earth is constantly changing. 
It's changing on days' time scales with human activity. 
And the satellite imagery we have of it today is old. 
Typically, years old. 
And that's important because you can't fix what you can't see. 
What we'd ideally want is images of the whole planet every day. 
So, what's standing in our way? 
What's the problem? 
This is the problem: Satellites are big, expensive and they're slow. 
This one weighs three tons. 
It's six meters tall, four meters wide. 
It took up the entire fairing of a rocket just to launch it. 
One satellite, one rocket. 
It cost 855 million dollars. 
Satellites like these have done an amazing job at helping us to understand our planet. 
But if we want to understand it much more regularly, we need lots of satellites, and this model isn't scalable. 
So me and my friends, we started Planet Labs to make satellites ultra-compact and small and highly capable. 
I'm going to show you what our satellite looks like: This is our satellite. 
This is not a scale model, this is the real size. 
It's 10 by 10 by 30 centimeters, it weighs four kilograms, and we've stuffed the latest and greatest electronics and sensor systems into this little package so that even though this is really small, this can take pictures 10 times the resolution of the big satellite here, even though it weighs one thousandth of the mass. 
And we call this satellite "" Dove "" — Thank you. 
(Applause) We call this satellite "" Dove, "" and we call it "" Dove "" because satellites are typically named after birds, but normally birds of prey: like Eagle, Hawk, Swoop, Kill, I don't know, Kestrel, these sort of things. 
But ours have a humanitarian mission, so we wanted to call them Doves. 
And we haven't just built them, though. 
We've launched them. 
And not just one, but many. 
It all started in our garage. 
Yes, we built our first satellite prototype in our garage. 
Now, this is pretty normal for a Silicon Valley company that we are, but we believe it's the first time for a space company. 
And that's not the only trick we learned from Silicon Valley. 
We rapidly prototype our satellites. 
We use "" release early, release often "" on our software. 
And we take a different risk approach. 
We take them outside and test them. 
We even put satellites in space just to test the satellites, and we've learned to manufacture our satellites at scale. 
We've used modern production techniques so we can build large numbers of them, I think for the first time. 
We call it agile aerospace, and that's what's enabled us to put so much capability into this little box. 
Now, what has bonded our team over the years is the idea of democratizing access to satellite information. 
In fact, the founders of our company, Chris, Robbie and I, we met over 15 years ago at the United Nations when they were hosting a conference about exactly that question: How do you use satellites to help humanity? 
How do you use satellites to help people in developing countries or with climate change? 
And this is what has bonded us. 
Our entire team is passionate about using satellites to help humanity. 
You could say we're space geeks, but not only do we care about what's up there, we care about what's down here, too. 
I'm going to show you a video from just four weeks ago of two of our satellites being launched from the International Space Station. 
This is not an animation, this is a video taken by the astronaut looking out of the window. 
It gives you a bit of a sense of scale of our two satellites. 
It's like some of the smallest satellites ever are being launched from the biggest satellite ever. 
And right at the end, the solar array glints in the sun. 
It's really cool. Wait for it. 
Boom! Yeah. It's the money shot. 
(Laughter) So we didn't just launch two of them like this, we launched 28 of them. 
It's the largest constellation of Earth-imaging satellites in human history, and it's going to provide a completely radical new data set about our changing planet. 
But that's just the beginning. 
You see, we're going to launch more than 100 of these satellites like these over the course of the next year. 
It's going to be the largest constellation of satellites in human history. 
And this is what it's going to do: Acting in a single-orbit plane that stays fixed with respect to the sun, the Earth rotates underneath. 
They're all cameras pointed down, and they slowly scan across as the Earth rotates underneath. 
The Earth rotates every 24 hours, so we scan every point on the planet every 24 hours. 
It's a line scanner for the planet. 
We don't take a picture of anywhere on the planet every day, we take a picture of every single place on the planet every day. 
Even though we launched these just a couple of weeks ago, we've already got some initial imagery from the satellites and I'm going to show it publicly for the first time right now. 
This is the very first picture taken by our satellite. 
It happened to be over UC-Davis' campus in California when we turned the camera on. 
But what's even cooler is when we compare it to the previous latest image of that area, which was taken many months ago. 
And the image on the left is from our satellite, and we see buildings are being built. 
The general point is that we will be able to track urban growth as it happens around the whole world in all cities, every day. 
Water as well. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) We'll be able to see the extent of all water bodies around the whole world every day and help water security. 
From water security to food security. 
We'll see crops as they grow in all the fields in every farmer's field around the planet every day. 
and help them to improve crop yield. 
This is a beautiful image that was taken just a few hours ago when the satellite was flying over Argentina. 
The general point is there are probably hundreds and thousands of applications of this data, I've mentioned a few, but there's others: deforestation, the ice caps melting. 
If you took the difference between today's image and yesterday's image, you'd see much of the world news — you'd see floods and fires and earthquakes. 
And we have decided, therefore, that the best thing that we could do with our data is to ensure universal access to it. 
We want to ensure everyone can see it. 
Thank you. (Applause) We want to empower NGOs and companies and scientists and journalists to be able to answer the questions that they have about the planet. 
We want to enable the developer community to run their apps on our data. 
In short, we want to democratize access to information about our planet. 
You see, this will be an entirely new global data set. 
And we believe that together, we can help to take care of our Spaceship Earth. 
And what I would like to leave you with is the following question: If you had access to imagery of the whole planet every single day, what would you do with that data? 
What problems would you solve? 
What exploration would you do? 
Well, I invite you to come and explore with us. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

So I'll be talking about the success of my campus, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, UMBC, in educating students of all types, across the arts and humanities and the science and engineering areas. 
What makes our story especially important is that we have learned so much from a group of students who are typically not at the top of the academic ladder — students of color, students underrepresented in selected areas. 
And what makes the story especially unique is that we have learned how to help African-American students, Latino students, students from low-income backgrounds, to become some of the best in the world in science and engineering. 
And so I begin with a story about my childhood. 
We all are products of our childhood experiences. 
It's hard for me to believe that it's been 50 years since I had the experience of being a ninth grade kid in Birmingham, Alabama, a kid who loved getting A's, a kid who loved math, who loved to read, a kid who would say to the teacher — when the teacher said, "" Here are 10 problems, "" to the class, this little fat kid would say, "" Give us 10 more. "" And the whole class would say, "" Shut up, Freeman. "" And there was a designated kicker every day. 
And so I was always asking this question: "Well how could we get more kids to really love to learn?" 
And amazingly, one week in church, when I really didn't want to be there and I was in the back of the room being placated by doing math problems, I heard this man say this: "" If we can get the children to participate in this peaceful demonstration here in Birmingham, we can show America that even children know the difference between right and wrong and that children really do want to get the best possible education. "" And I looked up and said, "" Who is that man? "" And they said his name was Dr. Martin Luther King. 
And I said to my parents, "" I've got to go. 
I want to go. I want to be a part of this. "" And they said, "" Absolutely not. "" (Laughter) And we had a rough go of it. 
And at that time, quite frankly, you really did not talk back to your parents. 
And somehow I said, "" You know, you guys are hypocrites. 
You make me go to this. You make me listen. 
The man wants me to go, and now you say no. "" And they thought about it all night. 
And they came into my room the next morning. 
They had not slept. 
They had been literally crying and praying and thinking, "" Will we let our 12-year-old participate in this march and probably have to go to jail? "" And they decided to do it. 
And when they came in to tell me, I was at first elated. 
And then all of a sudden I began thinking about the dogs and the fire hoses, and I got really scared, I really did. 
And one of the points I make to people all the time is that sometimes when people do things that are courageous, it doesn't really mean that they're that courageous. 
It simply means that they believe it's important to do it. 
I wanted a better education. 
I did not want to have to have hand-me-down books. 
I wanted to know that the school I attended not only had good teachers, but the resources we needed. 
And as a result of that experience, in the middle of the week, while I was there in jail, Dr. King came and said with our parents, "" What you children do this day will have an impact on children who have not been born. "" I recently realized that two-thirds of Americans today had not been born at the time of 1963. 
And so for them, when they hear about the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, in many ways, if they see it on TV, it's like our looking at the 1863 "" Lincoln "" movie: It's history. 
And the real question is, what lessons did we learn? 
Well amazingly, the most important for me was this: That children can be empowered to take ownership of their education. 
They can be taught to be passionate about wanting to learn and to love the idea of asking questions. 
And so it is especially significant that the university I now lead, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, UMBC, was founded the very year I went to jail with Dr. King, in 1963. 
And what made that institutional founding especially important is that Maryland is the South, as you know, and, quite frankly, it was the first university in our state founded at a time when students of all races could go there. 
And so we had black and white students and others who began to attend. 
And it has been for 50 years an experiment. 
The experiment is this: Is it possible to have institutions in our country, universities, where people from all backgrounds can come and learn and learn to work together and learn to become leaders and to support each other in that experience? 
Now what is especially important about that experience for me is this: We found that we could do a lot in the arts and humanities and social sciences. 
And so we began to work on that, for years in the '60s. 
And we produced a number of people in law, all the way to the humanities. 
We produced great artists. Beckett is our muse. 
A lot of our students get into theater. 
It's great work. 
The problem that we faced was the same problem America continues to face — that students in the sciences and engineering, black students were not succeeding. 
But when I looked at the data, what I found was that, quite frankly, students in general, large numbers were not making it. 
And as a result of that, we decided to do something that would help, first of all, the group at the bottom, African-American students, and then Hispanic students. 
And Robert and Jane Meyerhoff, philanthropists, said, "" We'd like to help. "" Robert Meyerhoff said, "" Why is it that everything I see on TV about black boys, if it's not about basketball, is not positive? 
I'd like to make a difference, to do something that's positive. "" We married those ideas, and we created this Meyerhoff Scholars program. 
And what is significant about the program is that we learned a number of things. 
And the question is this: How is it that now we lead the country in producing African-Americans who go on to complete Ph.D. 's in science and engineering and M.D. / Ph.D.' s? 
That's a big deal. Give me a hand for that. That's a big deal. 
That's a big deal. It really is. 
(Applause) You see, most people don't realize that it's not just minorities who don't do well in science and engineering. 
Quite frankly, you're talking about Americans. 
If you don't know it, while 20 percent of blacks and Hispanics who begin with a major in science and engineering will actually graduate in science and engineering, only 32 percent of whites who begin with majors in those areas actually succeed and graduate in those areas, and only 42 percent of Asian-Americans. 
And so, the real question is, what is the challenge? 
Well a part of it, of course, is K-12. 
We need to strengthen K-12. 
But the other part has to do with the culture of science and engineering on our campuses. 
Whether you know it or not, large numbers of students with high SAT's and large numbers of A.P. credits who go to the most prestigious universities in our country begin in pre-med or pre-engineering and engineering, and they end up changing their majors. 
And the number one reason, we find, quite frankly, is they did not do well in first year science courses. 
In fact, we call first year science and engineering, typically around America, weed-out courses or barrier courses. 
How many of you in this audience know somebody who started off in pre-med or engineering and changed their major within a year or two? 
It's an American challenge. Half of you in the room. 
I know. I know. I know. 
And what is interesting about that is that so many students are smart and can do it. 
We need to find ways of making it happen. 
So what are the four things we did to help minority students that now are helping students in general? 
Number one: high expectations. 
It takes an understanding of the academic preparation of students — their grades, the rigor of the course work, their test-taking skills, their attitude, the fire in their belly, the passion for the work, to make it. 
And so doing things to help students prepare to be in that position, very important. 
But equally important, it takes an understanding that it's hard work that makes the difference. 
I don't care how smart you are or how smart you think you are. 
Smart simply means you're ready to learn. 
You're excited about learning and you want to ask good questions. 
I. I. Rabi, a Nobel laureate, said that when he was growing up in New York, all of his friends' parents would ask them "" What did you learn in school? "" at the end of a day. 
And he said, in contrast, his Jewish mother would say, "Izzy, did you ask a good question today?" 
And so high expectations have to do with curiosity and encouraging young people to be curious. 
And as a result of those high expectations, we began to find students we wanted to work with to see what could we do to help them, not simply to survive in science and engineering, but to become the very best, to excel. 
Interestingly enough, an example: One young man who earned a C in the first course and wanted to go on to med school, we said, "" We need to have you retake the course, because you need a strong foundation if you're going to move to the next level. "" Every foundation makes the difference in the next level. 
He retook the course. 
That young man went on to graduate from UMBC, to become the first black to get the M.D. / Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. 
He now works at Harvard. 
Nice story. Give him a hand for that too. 
(Applause) Secondly, it's not about test scores only. 
Test scores are important, but they're not the most important thing. 
One young woman had great grades, but test scores were not as high. 
But she had a factor that was very important. 
She never missed a day of school, K-12. 
There was fire in that belly. 
That young woman went on, and she is today with an M.D. / Ph.D. from Hopkins. 
She's on the faculty, tenure track in psychiatry, Ph.D. in neuroscience. 
She and her adviser have a patent on a second use of Viagra for diabetes patients. 
Big hand for her. Big hand for her. 
(Applause) And so high expectations, very important. 
Secondly, the idea of building community among the students. 
You all know that so often in science and engineering we tend to think cutthroat. 
Students are not taught to work in groups. 
And that's what we work to do with that group to get them to understand each other, to build trust among them, to support each other, to learn how to ask good questions, but also to learn how to explain concepts with clarity. 
As you know, it's one thing to earn an A yourself, it's another thing to help someone else do well. 
And so to feel that sense of responsibility makes all the difference in the world. 
So building community among those students, very important. 
Third, the idea of, it takes researchers to produce researchers. 
Whether you're talking about artists producing artists or you're talking about people getting into the social sciences, whatever the discipline — and especially in science and engineering, as in art, for example — you need scientists to pull the students into the work. 
And so our students are working in labs regularly. 
And one great example that you'll appreciate: During a snowstorm in Baltimore several years ago, the guy on our campus with this Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant literally came back to work in his lab after several days, and all these students had refused to leave the lab. 
They had food they had packed out. 
They were in the lab working, and they saw the work, not as schoolwork, but as their lives. 
They knew they were working on AIDS research. 
They were looking at this amazing protein design. 
And what was interesting was each one of them focused on that work. 
And he said, "" It doesn't get any better than that. "" And then finally, if you've got the community and you've got the high expectations and you've got researchers producing researchers, you have to have people who are willing as faculty to get involved with those students, even in the classroom. 
I'll never forget a faculty member calling the staff and saying, "" I've got this young man in class, a young black guy, and he seems like he's just not excited about the work. 
He's not taking notes. We need to talk to him. "" What was significant was that the faculty member was observing every student to understand who was really involved and who was not and was saying, "" Let me see how I can work with them. 
Let me get the staff to help me out. "" It was that connecting. 
That young man today is actually a faculty member M.D. / Ph.D. in neuroengineering at Duke. 
Give him a big hand for that. 
(Applause) And so the significance is that we have now developed this model that is helping us, not only finally with evaluation, assessing what works. 
And what we learned was that we needed to think about redesigning courses. 
And so we redesigned chemistry, we redesigned physics. 
But now we are looking at redesigning the humanities and social sciences. 
Because so many students are bored in class. 
Do you know that? 
Many students, K-12 and in universities, don't want to just sit there and listen to somebody talk. 
They need to be engaged. 
And so we have done — if you look at our website at the Chemistry Discovery Center, you'll see people coming from all over the country to look at how we are redesigning courses, having an emphasis on collaboration, use of technology, using problems out of our biotech companies on our campus, and not giving students the theories, but having them struggle with those theories. 
And it's working so well that throughout our university system in Maryland, more and more courses are being redesigned. 
It's called academic innovation. 
And what does all of that mean? 
It means that now, not just in science and engineering, we now have programs in the arts, in the humanities, in the social sciences, in teacher education, even particularly for women in I.T. 
If you don't know it, there's been a 79-percent decline in the number of women majoring in computer science just since 2000. 
And what I'm saying is that what will make the difference will be building community among students, telling young women, young minority students and students in general, you can do this work. 
And most important, giving them a chance to build that community with faculty pulling them into the work and our assessing what works and what does not work. 
Most important, if a student has a sense of self, it is amazing how the dreams and the values can make all the difference in the world. 
When I was a 12-year-old child in the jail in Birmingham, I kept thinking, "" I wonder what my future could be. "" I had no idea that it was possible for this little black boy in Birmingham to one day be president of a university that has students from 150 countries, where students are not there just to survive, where they love learning, where they enjoy being the best, where they will one day change the world. 
Aristotle said, "" Excellence is never an accident. 
It is the result of high intention, sincere effort and intelligent execution. 
It represents the wisest option among many alternatives. "" And then he said something that gives me goosebumps. 
He said, "" Choice, not chance, determines your destiny. "" Choice, not chance, determines your destiny, dreams and values. 
Thank you all very much. 
(Applause) 

I want to share some personal friends and stories with you that I've actually never talked about in public before to help illustrate the idea and the need and the hope for us to reinvent our health care system around the world. 
Twenty-four years ago, I had — a sophomore in college, I had a series of fainting spells. No alcohol was involved. 
And I ended up in student health, and they ran some labwork and came back right away, and said, "" Kidney problems. "" And before I knew it, I was involved and thrown into this six months of tests and trials and tribulations with six doctors across two hospitals in this clash of medical titans to figure out which one of them was right about what was wrong with me. 
And I'm sitting in a waiting room some time later for an ultrasound, and all six of these doctors actually show up in the room at once, and I'm like, "" Uh oh, this is bad news. "" And their diagnosis was this: They said, "" You have two rare kidney diseases that are going to actually destroy your kidneys eventually, you have cancer-like cells in your immune system that we need to start treatment right away, and you'll never be eligible for a kidney transplant, and you're not likely to live more than two or three years. "" Now, with the gravity of this doomsday diagnosis, 
it just sucked me in immediately, as if I began preparing myself as a patient to die according to the schedule that they had just given to me, until I met a patient named Verna in a waiting room, who became a dear friend, and she grabbed me one day and took me off to the medical library and did a bunch of research on these diagnoses and these diseases, and said, "" Eric, these people who get this are normally in their '70s and' 80s. 
They don't know anything about you. Wake up. 
Take control of your health and get on with your life. "" And I did. 
Now, these people making these proclamations to me were not bad people. 
In fact, these professionals were miracle workers, but they're working in a flawed, expensive system that's set up the wrong way. 
It's dependent on hospitals and clinics for our every care need. 
It's dependent on specialists who just look at parts of us. 
It's dependent on guesswork of diagnoses and drug cocktails, and so something either works or you die. 
And it's dependent on passive patients who just take it and don't ask any questions. 
Now the problem with this model is that it's unsustainable globally. 
It's unaffordable globally. 
We need to invent what I call a personal health system. 
So what does this personal health system look like, and what new technologies and roles is it going to entail? 
Now, I'm going to start by actually sharing with you a new friend of mine, Libby, somebody I've become quite attached to over the last six months. 
This is Libby, or actually, this is an ultrasound image of Libby. 
This is the kidney transplant I was never supposed to have. 
Now, this is an image that we shot a couple of weeks ago for today, and you'll notice, on the edge of this image, there's some dark spots there, which was really concerning to me. 
So we're going to actually do a live exam to sort of see how Libby's doing. 
This is not a wardrobe malfunction. I have to take my belt off here. 
Don't you in the front row worry or anything. 
(Laughter) I'm going to use a device from a company called Mobisante. 
This is a portable ultrasound. 
It can plug into a smartphone. It can plug into a tablet. 
Mobisante is up in Redmond, Washington, and they kindly trained me to actually do this on myself. 
They're not approved to do this. Patients are not approved to do this. 
This is a concept demo, so I want to make that clear. 
All right, I gotta gel up. 
Now the people in the front row are very nervous. (Laughter) And I want to actually introduce you to Dr. Batiuk, who's another friend of mine. 
He's up in Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland, Oregon. 
So let me just make sure. Hey, Dr. Batiuk. Can you hear me okay? 
And actually, can you see Libby? 
Thomas Batuik: Hi there, Eric. 
You look busy. How are you? 
Eric Dishman: I'm good. I'm just taking my clothes off in front of a few hundred people. It's wonderful. 
So I just wanted to see, is this the image you need to get? 
And I know you want to look and see if those spots are still there. 
TB: Okay. Well let's scan around a little bit here, give me a lay of the land. 
ED: All right.TB: Okay. Turn it a little bit inside, a little bit toward the middle for me. 
Okay, that's good. How about up a little bit? 
Okay, freeze that image. That's a good one for me. 
ED: All right. Now last week, when I did this, you had me measure that spot to the right. 
Should I do that again? 
TB: Yeah, let's do that. 
ED: All right. This is kind of hard to do with one hand on your belly and one hand on measuring, but I've got it, I think, and I'll save that image and send it to you. 
So tell me a little bit about what this dark spot means. 
It's not something I was very happy about. 
TB: Many people after a kidney transplant will develop a little fluid collection around the kidney. 
Most of the time it doesn't create any kind of mischief, but it does warrant looking at, so I'm happy we've got an opportunity to look at it today, make sure that it's not growing, it's not creating any problems. 
Based on the other images we have, I'm really happy how it looks today. 
ED: All right. Well, I guess we'll double check it when I come in. 
I've got my six month biopsy in a couple of weeks, and I'm going to let you do that in the clinic, because I don't think I can do that one on myself. 
TB: Good choice.ED: All right, thanks, Dr. Batiuk. 
All right. So what you're sort of seeing here is an example of disruptive technologies, of mobile, social and analytic technologies. 
These are the foundations of what's going to make personal health possible. 
Now there's really three pillars of this personal health I want to talk to you about now, and it's care anywhere, care networking and care customization. 
And you just saw a little bit of the first two with my interaction with Dr. Batiuk. 
So let's start with care anywhere. 
Humans invented the idea of hospitals and clinics in the 1780s. It is time to update our thinking. 
We have got to untether clinicians and patients from the notion of traveling to a special bricks-and-mortar place for all of our care, because these places are often the wrong tool, and the most expensive tool, for the job. 
And these are sometimes unsafe places to send our sickest patients, especially in an era of superbugs and hospital-acquired infections. 
And many countries are going to go brickless from the start because they're never going to be able to afford the mega-medicalplexes that a lot of the rest of the world has built. 
Now I personally learned that hospitals can be a very dangerous place at a young age. 
This was me in third grade. 
I broke my elbow very seriously, had to have surgery, worried that they were going to actually lose the arm. 
Recovering from the surgery in the hospital, I get bedsores. 
Those bedsores become infected, and they give me an antibiotic which I end up being allergic to, and now my whole body breaks out, and now all of those become infected. 
The longer I stayed in the hospital, the sicker I became, and the more expensive it became, and this happens to millions of people around the world every year. 
The future of personal health that I'm talking about says care must occur at home as the default model, not in a hospital or clinic. 
You have to earn your way into those places by being sick enough to use that tool for the job. 
Now the smartphones that we're already carrying can clearly have diagnostic devices like ultrasounds plugged into them, and a whole array of others, today, and as sensing is built into these, we'll be able to do vital signs monitor and behavioral monitoring like we've never had before. 
Many of us will have implantables that will actually look real-time at what's going on with our blood chemistry and in our proteins right now. 
Now the software is also getting smarter, right? 
Think about a coach, an agent online, that's going to help me do safe self-care. 
That same interaction that we just did with the ultrasound will likely have real-time image processing, and the device will say, "" Up, down, left, right, ah, Eric, that's the perfect spot to send that image off to your doctor. "" Now, if we've got all these networked devices that are helping us to do care anywhere, it stands to reason that we also need a team to be able to interact with all of that stuff, and that leads to the second pillar I want to talk about, care networking. 
We have got to go beyond this paradigm of isolated specialists doing parts care to multidisciplinary teams doing person care. 
Uncoordinated care today is expensive at best, and it is deadly at worst. 
Eighty percent of medical errors are actually caused by communication and coordination problems amongst medical team members. 
I had my own heart scare years ago in graduate school, when we're under treatment for the kidney, and suddenly, they're like, "" Oh, we think you have a heart problem. "" And I have these palpitations that are showing up. 
They put me through five weeks of tests — very expensive, very scary — before the nurse finally notices the piece of the paper, my meds list that I've been carrying to every single appointment, and says, "" Oh my gosh. "" Three different specialists had prescribed three different versions of the same drug to me. 
I did not have a heart problem. I had an overdose problem. 
I had a care coordination problem. 
And this happens to millions of people every year. 
I want to use technology that we're all working on and making happen to make health care a coordinated team sport. 
Now this is the most frightening thing to me. 
Out of all the care I've had in hospitals and clinics around the world, the first time I've ever had a true team-based care experience was at Legacy Good Sam these last six months for me to go get this. 
And this is a picture of my graduation team from Legacy. 
There's a couple of the folks here. You'll recognize Dr. Batiuk. 
We just talked to him. Here's Jenny, one of the nurses, Allison, who helped manage the transplant list, and a dozen other people who aren't pictured, a pharmacist, a psychologist, a nutritionist, even a financial counselor, Lisa, who helped us deal with all the insurance hassles. 
I wept the day I graduated. 
I should have been happy, because I was so well that I could go back to my normal doctors, but I wept because I was so actually connected to this team. 
And here's the most important part. 
The other people in this picture are me and my wife, Ashley. 
Legacy trained us on how to do care for me at home so that they could offload the hospitals and clinics. 
That's the only way that the model works. 
My team is actually working in China on one of these self-care models for a project we called Age-Friendly Cities. 
We're trying to help build a social network that can help track and train the care of seniors caring for themselves as well as the care provided by their family members or volunteer community health workers, as well as have an exchange network online, where, for example, I can donate three hours of care a day to your mom, if somebody else can help me with transportation to meals, and we exchange all of that online. 
The most important point I want to make to you about this is the sacred and somewhat over-romanticized doctor-patient one-on-one is a relic of the past. 
The future of health care is smart teams, and you'd better be on that team for yourself. 
Now, the last thing that I want to talk to you about is care customization, because if you've got care anywhere and you've got care networking, those are going to go a long way towards improving our health care system, but there's still too much guesswork. 
Randomized clinical trials were actually invented in 1948 to help invent the drugs that cured tuberculosis, and those are important things, don't get me wrong. 
These population studies that we've done have created tons of miracle drugs that have saved millions of lives, but the problem is that health care is treating us as averages, not unique individuals, because at the end of the day, the patient is not the same thing as the population who are studied. That's what's leading to the guesswork. 
The technologies that are coming, high-performance computing, analytics, big data that everyone's talking about, will allow us to build predictive models for each of us as individual patients. 
And the magic here is, experiment on my avatar in software, not my body in suffering. 
Now, I've had two examples I want to quickly share with you of this kind of care customization on my own journey. 
The first was quite simple. I finally realized some years ago that all my medical teams were optimizing my treatment for longevity. 
It's like a badge of honor to see how long they can get the patient to live. 
I was optimizing my life for quality of life, and quality of life for me means time in snow. 
So on my chart, I forced them to put, "" Patient goal: low doses of drugs over longer periods of time, side effects friendly to skiing. "" And I think that's why I achieved longevity. 
I think that time-in-snow therapy was as important as the pharmaceuticals that I had. 
Now the second example of customization — and by the way, you can't customize care if you don't know your own goals, so health care can't know those until you know your own health care goals. 
But the second example I want to give you is, I happened to be an early guinea pig, and I got very lucky to have my whole genome sequenced. 
Now it took about two weeks of processing on Intel's highest-end servers to make this happen, and another six months of human and computing labor to make sense of all of that data. 
And at the end of all of that, they said, "" Yes, those diagnoses of that clash of medical titans all of those years ago were wrong, and we have a better path forward. "" The future that Intel's working on now is to figure out how to make that computing for personalized medicine go from months and weeks to even hours, and make this kind of tool available, not just in the mainframes of tier-one research hospitals around the world, but in the mainstream — every patient, every clinic with access to whole genome sequencing. 
And I tell you, this kind of care customization for everything from your goals to your genetics will be the most game-changing transformation that we witness in health care during our lifetime. 
So these three pillars of personal health, care anywhere, care networking, care customization, are happening in pieces now, but this vision will completely fail if we don't step up as caregivers and as patients to take on new roles. 
It's what my friend Verna said: Wake up and take control of your health. 
Because at the end of the day these technologies are simply about people caring for other people and ourselves in some powerful new ways. 
And it's in that spirit that I want to introduce you to one last friend, very quickly. 
Tracey Gamley stepped up to give me the impossible kidney that I was never supposed to have. 
(Applause) So Tracey, just tell us a little bit quickly about what the donor experience was like with you. 
Tracey Gamley: For me, it was really easy. 
I only had one night in the hospital. 
The surgery was done laparoscopically, so I have just five very small scars on my abdomen, and I had four weeks away from work and went back to doing everything I'd done before without any changes. 
ED: Well, I probably will never get a chance to say this to you in such a large audience ever again. 
So "" thank you "" feel likes a really trite word, but thank you from the bottom of my heart for saving my life. 
(Applause) This TED stage and all of the TED stages are often about celebrating innovation and celebrating new technologies, and I've done that here today, and I've seen amazing things coming from TED speakers, I mean, my gosh, artificial kidneys, even printable kidneys, that are coming. 
But until such time that these amazing technologies are available to all of us, and even when they are, it's up to us to care for, and even save, one another. 
I hope you will go out and make personal health happen for yourselves and for everyone. Thanks so much. 
(Applause) 

I also try to challenge myself to do things that doctors say are not possible. 
I was buried alive in New York City in a coffin, buried alive in a coffin in April, 1999, for a week. 
And it ended up being so much fun that I decided I could pursue doing more of these things. 
The next one is I froze myself in a block of ice for three days and three nights in New York City. 
That one was way more difficult than I had expected. 
The one after that, I stood on top of a hundred-foot pillar for 36 hours. 
I began to hallucinate so hard that the buildings that were behind me started to look like big animal heads. 
In London I lived in a glass box for 44 days with nothing but water. 
It was, for me, one of the most difficult things I'd ever done, but it was also the most beautiful. 
There was so many skeptics, especially the press in London, that they started flying cheeseburgers on helicopters around my box to tempt me. 
(Laughter) So, I felt very validated when the New England Journal of Medicine actually used the research for science. 
My next pursuit was I wanted to see how long I could go without breathing, like how long I could survive with nothing, not even air. 
As a young magician, I was obsessed with Houdini and his underwater challenges. 
So, I began, early on, competing against the other kids, seeing how long I could stay underwater while they went up and down to breathe, you know, five times, while I stayed under on one breath. 
By the time I was a teenager, I was able to hold my breath for three minutes and 30 seconds. 
In 1987 I heard of a story about a boy that fell through ice and was trapped under a river. 
When the rescue workers came, they resuscitated him and there was no brain damage. 
His core temperature had dropped to 77 degrees. 
And I think if something is done by one person, it can be done by others. 
And I asked him, how long is it possible to go without breathing, like how long could I go without air? 
And he said to me that anything over six minutes you have a serious risk of hypoxic brain damage. 
(Laughter) My first try, I figured that I could do something similar, and I created a water tank, and I filled it with ice and freezing cold water. 
And I stayed inside of that water tank hoping my core temperature would start to drop. 
And I was shivering. 
I went to talk to a doctor friend — and I asked him, "" How could I do that? "" "I want to hold my breath for a really long time. How could it be done?" 
And he said, "" David, you're a magician, create the illusion of not breathing, it will be much easier. "" (Laughter) So, he came up with this idea of creating a rebreather, with a CO2 scrubber, which was basically a tube from Home Depot, with a balloon duct-taped to it, that he thought we could put inside of me, and somehow be able to circulate the air and rebreathe with this thing in me. 
But this is that attempt. 
So, that clearly wasn't going to work. 
(Laughter) Then I actually started thinking about liquid breathing. 
There is a chemical that's called perflubron. 
And it's so high in oxygen levels that in theory you could breathe it. 
So, I got my hands on that chemical, filled the sink up with it, and stuck my face in the sink and tried to breathe that in, which was really impossible. 
It's basically like trying to breathe, as a doctor said, while having an elephant standing on your chest. 
Then I started thinking, would it be possible to hook up a heart / lung bypass machine and have a surgery where it was a tube going into my artery, and then appear to not breathe while they were oxygenating my blood? 
(Laughter) To actually try to hold my breath past the point that doctors would consider you brain dead. 
You know, because they go down for four minutes on one breath. 
And when I was researching pearl divers, I found the world of free-diving. 
There is depth records, where people go as deep as they can. 
That's holding your breath as long as you can in one place without moving. 
That was the one that I studied. 
The first thing that I learned is when you're holding your breath, you should never move at all; that wastes energy. 
And that depletes oxygen, and it builds up CO2 in your blood. 
I had to remain perfectly still and just relax and think that I wasn't in my body, and just control that. 
And then I learned how to purge. 
Purging is basically hyperventilating. 
You blow in and out — (Breathing loudly) You do that, you get lightheaded, you get tingling. 
Then I learned that you have to take a huge breath, and just hold and relax and never let any air out, and just hold and relax through all the pain. 
Every morning, this is for months, I would wake up and the first thing that I would do is I would hold my breath for, out of 52 minutes, I would hold my breath for 44 minutes. 
So, basically what that means is I would purge, I'd breathe really hard for a minute. 
Then I would breathe again for a minute, purging as hard as I can, then immediately after that I would hold again for five and a half minutes. 
At the end of that you're completely fried, your brain. 
You feel like you're walking around in a daze. 
Basically, I'm not the best person to talk to when I'm doing that stuff. 
I started learning about the world-record holder. 
And this guy is perfectly built for holding his breath. 
He's six foot four. He's 160 pounds. 
And his total lung capacity is twice the size of an average person. 
I'm six foot one, and fat. 
(Laughter) I had to drop 50 pounds in three months. 
So, everything that I put into my body, I considered as medicine. 
I ate really small controlled portions throughout the day. 
And I started to really adapt my body. 
[Individual results may vary] (Laughter) The thinner I was, the longer I was able to hold my breath. 
And by eating so well and training so hard, my resting heart-rate dropped to 38 beats per minute. 
I wanted to try it in the most extreme situations to see if I could slow my heart rate down under duress. 
(Laughter) I decided that I was going to break the world record live on prime-time television. 
The world record was eight minutes and 58 seconds, held by Tom Sietas, that guy with the whale lungs I told you about. 
I assumed that I could put a water tank at Lincoln Center and if I stayed there a week not eating, I would get comfortable in that situation and I would slow my metabolism, which I was sure would help me hold my breath longer than I had been able to do it. 
Two days before my big breath-hold attempt, for the record, the producers of my television special thought that just watching somebody holding their breath, and almost drowning, is too boring for television. 
(Laughter) So, I had to add handcuffs, while holding my breath, to escape from. 
And by seven minutes I had gone into these awful convulsions. 
By 7: 08, I started to black out. 
And by seven minutes and 30 seconds, they had to pull my body out and bring me back. 
I had failed on every level. 
(Laughter) So, naturally, the only way out of the slump that I could think of was, I decided to call Oprah. (Laughter) 
I told her that I wanted to up the ante and hold my breath longer than any human being ever had. 
This was a different record. 
(Laughter) (Laughter ends) In January of '08, Oprah gave me four months to prepare and train. 
So, it's like base camp, Everest. 
What that does is, you start building up the red bloodcell count in your body, which helps you carry oxygen better. 
Every morning, again, after getting out of that tent, your brain is completely wiped out. 
My first attempt on pure O2, I was able to go up to 15 minutes. 
The neurosurgeon pulled me out of the water because in his mind, at 15 minutes your brain is done, you're brain dead. 
So, he pulled me up, and I was fine. 
(Laughter) My brother had a picture of it. It is really — (Laughter) (Laughter ends) I then announced that I was going to go for Sietas' record, publicly. 
And what he did in response, is he went on Regis and Kelly, and broke his old record. 
Which was three minutes longer than I had prepared. 
I wanted to get the Science Times to document this. 
I wanted to get them to do a piece on it. 
So, I did what any person seriously pursuing scientific advancement would do. 
(Laughter) So, I don't know if it was the magic or the lure of the Cayman Islands, but John Tierney flew down and did a piece on the seriousness of breath-holding. 
While he was there, I tried to impress him, of course. 
And I did a dive down to 160 feet, which is basically the height of a 16 story building, and as I was coming up, I blacked out underwater, which is really dangerous; that's how you drown. 
I completely trained to get my breath-hold time up for what I needed to do. 
But there was no way to prepare for the live television aspect of it, being on Oprah. 
But in practice, I would do it face down, floating on the pool. 
The other problem was the suit was so buoyant that they had to strap my feet in to keep me from floating up. 
So, I had to use my legs to hold my feet into the straps that were loose, which was a real problem for me. 
Then, what they also did was, which we never did before, is there was a heart-rate monitor. 
So, every time my heart would beat, I'd hear the beep-beep-beep-beep, you know, the ticking, really loud. 
Normally, I would start at 38 beats per minute, and while holding my breath, it would drop to 12 beats per minute, which is pretty unusual. 
(Laughter) This time it started at 120 beats, and it never went down. 
I spent the first five minutes underwater desperately trying to slow my heart rate down. 
I was just sitting there thinking, "I've got to slow this down. I'm going to fail." 
And the heart rate just kept going up and up, all the way up to 150 beats. 
When I made it to the halfway mark, at eight minutes, I was 100 percent certain that I was not going to be able to make this. 
I figured, Oprah had dedicated an hour to doing this breath-hold thing, if I had cracked early, it would be a whole show about how depressed I am. 
(Laughter) So, I figured I'm better off just fighting and staying there until I black out, at least then they can pull me out and take care of me and all that. (Laughter) 
I kept pushing to 10 minutes. 
At 11 minutes I started feeling throbbing sensations in my legs, and my lips started to feel really strange. 
At minute 12 I started to have ringing in my ears, and I started to feel my arm going numb. 
And I'm a hypochondriac, and I remember arm numb means heart attack. 
It was awful. 
(Laughter) At 14 minutes, I had these awful contractions, like this urge to breathe. (Laughter) 
(Laughter ends) At 15 minutes I was suffering major O2 deprivation to the heart. 
And I started having ischemia to the heart. 
My heartbeat would go from 120 to 50, to 150, to 40, to 20, to 150 again. 
It would skip a beat. 
It would start. It would stop. And I felt all this. 
So, at 16 minutes what I did is I slid my feet out because I knew that if I did go out, if I did have a heart attack, they'd have to jump into the binding and take my feet out before pulling me up. 
And then suddenly I hear screaming. 
And then I realized that I had made it to 16: 32. 
So, with the energy of everybody that was there, I decided to keep pushing. 
And I went to 17 minutes and four seconds. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) As though that wasn't enough, what I did immediately after is I went to Quest Labs and had them take every blood sample that they could to test for everything and to see where my levels were, so the doctors could use it, once again. 
So, I get to New York City the next day, I'm walking out of the Apple store, and this kid walks up to me he's like, "" Yo, D! "" I'm like "" Yeah? "" He said, "" If you really held your breath that long, why'd you come out of the water dry? "" I was like "" What? "" (Laughter) And that's my life. So — (Laughter) As a magician, I try to show things to people that seem impossible. 
And I think magic, whether I'm holding my breath or shuffling a deck of cards, is pretty simple. 
It's practice, it's training, and it's — (Sobs) It's practice, it's training and experimenting, (Sobs) while pushing through the pain to be the best that I can be. 

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

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

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

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

I want to talk about social innovation and social entrepreneurship. 
They're little. They're five years old. 
(Laughter) (Applause) The real social innovation I want to talk about involves charity. 
And social business needs markets, and there are some issues for which you just can't develop the kind of money measures that you need for a market. 
I sit on the board of a center for the developmentally disabled, and these people want laughter and compassion and they want love. 
It is the market for all those people for whom there is no other market coming. 
And so if we really want, like Buckminster Fuller said, a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out, then the nonprofit sector has to be a serious part of the conversation. 
And the answer is, these social problems are massive in scale, our organizations are tiny up against them, and we have a belief system that keeps them tiny. 
We have one for the nonprofit sector, and one for the rest of the economic world. 
It's an apartheid, and it discriminates against the nonprofit sector in five different areas, the first being compensation. 
We have a visceral reaction to the idea that anyone would make very much money helping other people. 
(Applause) And we think of this as our system of ethics, but what we don't realize is that this system has a powerful side effect, which is: It gives a really stark, mutually exclusive choice between doing very well for yourself and your family or doing good for the world, to the brightest minds coming out of our best universities, and sends tens of thousands of people who could make a huge difference in the nonprofit sector, marching every year directly into the for-profit sector because they're not willing to make that kind of lifelong economic sacrifice. 
And the median compensation for a Stanford MBA, with bonus, at the age of 38, was 400,000 dollars. 
was 232,000 dollars, and for a hunger charity, 84,000 dollars. 
It's cheaper for that person to donate 100,000 dollars every year to the hunger charity; save 50,000 dollars on their taxes — so still be roughly 270,000 dollars a year ahead of the game — now be called a philanthropist because they donated 100,000 dollars to charity; probably sit on the board of the hunger charity; indeed, probably supervise the poor SOB who decided to become the CEO of the hunger charity; (Laughter) and have a lifetime of this kind of power and influence and popular praise still ahead of them. 
So we tell the for-profit sector, "" Spend, spend, spend on advertising, until the last dollar no longer produces a penny of value. "" But we don't like to see our donations spent on advertising in charity. 
But I don't want my donation spent on advertising, I want it go to the needy. "" As if the money invested in advertising could not bring in dramatically greater sums of money to serve the needy. 
In the 1990s, my company created the long-distance AIDSRide bicycle journeys, and the 60 mile-long breast cancer three-day walks, and over the course of nine years, we had 182,000 ordinary heroes participate, and they raised a total of 581 million dollars. 
(Applause) They raised more money more quickly for these causes than any events in history, all based on the idea that people are weary of being asked to do the least they can possibly do. 
People are yearning to measure the full distance of their potential on behalf of the causes that they care about deeply. 
That's an important fact, because it tells us that in 40 years, the nonprofit sector has not been able to wrestle any market share away from the for-profit sector. 
And if you think about it, how could one sector possibly take market share away from another sector if it isn't really allowed to market? 
And if we tell the consumer brands, "You may advertise all the benefits of your product," but we tell charities, "" You cannot advertise all the good that you do, "" where do we think the consumer dollars are going to flow? 
So Disney can make a new $200 million movie that flops, and nobody calls the attorney general. 
But you do a little $1 million community fundraiser for the poor, and it doesn't produce a 75 percent profit to the cause in the first 12 months, and your character is called into question. 
So nonprofits are really reluctant to attempt any brave, daring, giant-scale new fundraising endeavors, for fear that if the thing fails, their reputations will be dragged through the mud. 
So Amazon went for six years without returning any profit to investors, and people had patience. 
But if a nonprofit organization ever had a dream of building magnificent scale that required that for six years, no money was going to go to the needy, it was all going to be invested in building this scale, we would expect a crucifixion. 
So the for-profit sector can pay people profits in order to attract their capital for their new ideas, but you can't pay profits in a nonprofit sector, so the for-profit sector has a lock on the multi-trillion-dollar capital markets, and the nonprofit sector is starved for growth and risk and idea capital. 
Well, you put those five things together — you can't use money to lure talent away from the for-profit sector; you can't advertise on anywhere near the scale the for-profit sector does for new customers; you can't take the kinds of risks in pursuit of those customers that the for-profit sector takes; you don't have the same amount of time to find them as the for-profit sector; and you don't have a stock market with which to fund any of this, even if you could do it in the first place — and you've just put the nonprofit sector at an extreme disadvantage to the for-profit sector, 
If we have any doubts about the effects of this separate rule book, this statistic is sobering: From 1970 to 2009, the number of nonprofits that really grew, that crossed the $50 million annual revenue barrier, is 144. 
In the same time, the number of for-profits that crossed it is 46,136. 
All of the scale goes to Coca-Cola and Burger King. 
Well, like most fanatical dogma in America, these ideas come from old Puritan beliefs. 
It became this economic sanctuary, where they could do penance for their profit-making tendencies — at five cents on the dollar. 
So of course, how could you make money in charity if charity was your penance for making money? 
Financial incentive was exiled from the realm of helping others, so that it could thrive in the area of making money for yourself, and in 400 years, nothing has intervened to say, "" That's counterproductive and that's unfair. "" Now, this ideology gets policed by this one very dangerous question, which is, "" What percentage of my donation goes to the cause versus overhead? "" There are a lot of problems with this question. 
First, it makes us think that overhead is a negative, that it is somehow not part of the cause. 
So we've all been taught that charities should spend as little as possible on overhead things like fundraising under the theory that, well, the less money you spend on fundraising, the more money there is available for the cause. 
Well, that's true if it's a depressing world in which this pie cannot be made any bigger. 
But if it's a logical world in which investment in fundraising actually raises more funds and makes the pie bigger, then we have it precisely backwards, and we should be investing more money, not less, in fundraising, because fundraising is the one thing that has the potential to multiply the amount of money available for the cause that we care about so deeply. 
We netted for breast cancer alone, that year alone, 71 million dollars after all expenses. 
And then we went out of business, suddenly and traumatically. 
Why? Well, the short story is, our sponsors split on us. 
They wanted to distance themselves from us because we were being crucified in the media for investing 40 percent of the gross in recruitment and customer service and the magic of the experience, and there is no accounting terminology to describe that kind of investment in growth and in the future, other than this demonic label of "" overhead. "" So on one day, all 350 of our great employees lost their jobs... 
because they were labeled "" overhead. "" Our sponsor went and tried the events on their own. 
This is what happens when we confuse morality with frugality. 
What if the bake sale only netted 71 dollars for charity because it made no investment in its scale and the professional fundraising enterprise netted 71 million dollars because it did? 
I said that charitable giving is two percent of GDP in the United States. 
But only about 20 percent of that, or 60 billion dollars, goes to health and human services causes. 
The rest goes to religion and higher education and hospitals, and that 60 billion dollars is not nearly enough to tackle these problems. 
But if we could move charitable giving from two percent of GDP, up just one step to three percent of GDP, by investing in that growth, that would be an extra 150 billion dollars a year in contributions, and if that money could go disproportionately to health and human services charities, because those were the ones we encouraged to invest in their growth, that would represent a tripling of contributions to that sector. 
Now we're talking scale. 
(Laughter) (Applause) We want it to read that we changed the world, and that part of the way we did that was by changing the way we think about these things. 
And if that can be our generation's enduring legacy — that we took responsibility for the thinking that had been handed down to us, that we revisited it, we revised it, and we reinvented the whole way humanity thinks about changing things, forever, for everyone — well, I thought I would let the kids sum up what that would be. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

My name is Dan Cohen and I am an academic, as he said. 
And what that means is that I argue. 
And I like to argue. 
And I'm not just an academic, I'm a philosopher, so I like to think that I'm actually pretty good at arguing. 
But I also like to think a lot about arguing. 
And in thinking about arguing, I've come across some puzzles. 
But the more that I argue and the better I get at arguing, the more that I lose. 
Why is it that I'm okay with losing and why is it that I think good arguers are actually better at losing? 
Well, there are some other puzzles. 
One is: why do we argue? 
Who benefits from arguments? 
When I think about arguments, I'm talking about — let's call them academic arguments or cognitive arguments — where something cognitive is at stake: Is this proposition true? Is this theory a good theory? 
Is this a viable interpretation of the data or the text? And so on. 
I'm not interested really in arguments about whose turn it is to do the dishes or who has to take out the garbage. 
Yeah, we have those arguments, too. 
I tend to win those arguments, because I know the tricks. 
What do I win if I convince you that utilitarianism isn't really the right framework for thinking about ethical theories? 
Even before that, what does it matter to me whether you have this idea that Kant's theory works or Mill is the right ethicist to follow? 
It's no skin off my back whether you think functionalism is a viable theory of mind. 
So why do we even try to argue? 
Why do we try to convince other people to believe things they don't want to believe, and is that even a nice thing to do? 
Is that a nice way to treat another human being, try and make them think something they don't want to think? 
Well, my answer is going to make reference to three models for arguments. 
The first model — let's call it the dialectical model — is we think of arguments as war; you know what that's like — a lot of screaming and shouting and winning and losing. 
But there's a second model for arguing: arguments as proofs. 
Think of a mathematician's argument. 
Here's my argument. Does it work? Is it any good? 
Are the premises warranted? Are the inferences valid? 
Does the conclusion follow from the premises? 
No opposition, no adversariality — not necessarily any arguing in the adversarial sense. 
But there's a third model to keep in mind that I think is going to be very helpful, and that is arguments as performances, arguments in front of an audience. 
We can think of a politician trying to present a position, trying to convince the audience of something. 
But there's another twist on this model that I really think is important; namely, that when we argue before an audience, sometimes the audience has a more participatory role in the argument; that is, arguments are also [performances] in front of juries, who make a judgment and decide the case. 
Let's call this the rhetorical model, where you have to tailor your argument to the audience at hand. 
You know, presenting a sound, well-argued, tight argument in English before a francophone audience just isn't going to work. 
So we have these models — argument as war, argument as proof and argument as performance. 
Of those three, the argument as war is the dominant one. 
It dominates how we talk about arguments, it dominates how we think about arguments, and because of that, it shapes how we argue, our actual conduct in arguments. 
Now, when we talk about arguments, we talk in a very militaristic language. 
We want strong arguments, arguments that have a lot of punch, arguments that are right on target. 
We want to have our defenses up and our strategies all in order. 
We want killer arguments. 
That's the kind of argument we want. 
But the war metaphor, the war paradigm or model for thinking about arguments, has, I think, deforming effects on how we argue. 
First, it elevates tactics over substance. 
It makes it adversarial; it's polarizing. 
And the only foreseeable outcomes are triumph — glorious triumph — or abject, ignominious defeat. 
I think those are deforming effects, and worst of all, it seems to prevent things like negotiation or deliberation or compromise or collaboration. 
And one more thing. 
Suppose you and I have an argument. 
And I say, "" Well, why do you believe P? "" And you give me your reasons. 
How does it apply over here? "" And you answer my question. 
So, I have a new belief. 
And it's not just any belief; it's well-articulated, examined — it's a battle-tested belief. 
Great cognitive gain. 
Well, the war metaphor seems to force us into saying you won, even though I'm the only one who made any cognitive gain. 
Sure, you got some pleasure out of it, maybe your ego stroked, maybe you get some professional status in the field — "" This guy's a good arguer. "" But just from a cognitive point of view, who was the winner? 
The war metaphor forces us into thinking that you're the winner and I lost, even though I gained. 
And there's something wrong with that picture. 
And that's the picture I really want to change if we can. 
What we need is new exit strategies for arguments. 
In order to do that, well — I don't know how to do that. 
That's the bad news. 
But I have some suggestions. 
Here's my suggestion: If we want to think of new kinds of arguments, what we need to do is think of new kinds of arguers. 
So try this: Think of all the roles that people play in arguments. 
There's the proponent and the opponent in an adversarial, dialectical argument. 
There's the reasoner in arguments as proofs. 
Now, can you imagine an argument in which you are the arguer, but you're also in the audience, watching yourself argue? 
Can you imagine yourself watching yourself argue, losing the argument, and yet still, at the end of the argument, saying, "Wow, that was a good argument!" 
Can you do that? 
I think you can, and I think if you can imagine that kind of argument, where the loser says to the winner and the audience and the jury can say, "Yeah, that was a good argument," then you have imagined a good argument. 
Now, I lose a lot of arguments. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

It was November 1, 2002, my first day as a principal, but hardly my first day in the school district of Philadelphia. 
I graduated from Philadelphia public schools, and I went on to teach special education for 20 years in a low-income, low-performing school in North Philadelphia, where crime is rampant and deep poverty is among the highest in the nation. 
Shortly after I walked into my new school, a huge fight broke out among the girls. 
After things were quickly under control, I immediately called a meeting in the school's auditorium to introduce myself as the school's new principal. 
(Applause) I walked in angry, a little nervous — (Laughter) — but I was determined to set the tone for my new students. 
I started listing as forcefully as I could my expectations for their behavior and my expectations for what they would learn in school. 
When, all of a sudden, a girl way in the back of the auditorium, she stood up and she said, "" Miss! 
Miss! "" When our eyes locked, she said, "" Why do you keep calling this a school? 
This is not a school. "" In one outburst, Ashley had expressed what I felt and never quite was able to articulate about my own experience when I attended a low-performing school in the same neighborhood, many, many, many years earlier. 
That school was definitely not a school. 
Fast forwarding a decade later to 2012, I was entering my third low-performing school as principal. 
I was to be Strawberry Mansion's fourth principal in four years. 
It was labeled "" low-performing and persistently dangerous "" due to its low test scores and high number of weapons, drugs, assaults and arrests. 
Shortly as I approached the door of my new school and attempted to enter, and found the door locked with chains, I could hear Ashley's voice in my ears going, "" Miss! Miss! 
This is not a school. "" The halls were dim and dark from poor lighting. 
There were tons of piles of broken old furniture and desks in the classrooms, and there were thousands of unused materials and resources. 
This was not a school. 
As the year progressed, I noticed that the classrooms were nearly empty. 
The students were just scared: scared to sit in rows in fear that something would happen; scared because they were often teased in the cafeteria for eating free food. 
They were scared from all the fighting and all the bullying. 
This was not a school. 
And then, there were the teachers, who were incredibly afraid for their own safety, so they had low expectations for the students and themselves, and they were totally unaware of their role in the destruction of the school's culture. 
This was the most troubling of all. 
You see, Ashley was right, and not just about her school. 
For far too many schools, for kids who live in poverty, their schools are really not schools at all. 
But this can change. 
Let me tell you how it's being done at Strawberry Mansion High School. 
Anybody who's ever worked with me will tell you I am known for my slogans. 
(Laughter) So today, I am going to use three that have been paramount in our quest for change. 
My first slogan is: if you're going to lead, lead. 
I always believed that what happens in a school and what does not happen in a school is up to the principal. 
I am the principal, and having that title required me to lead. 
I was not going to stay in my office, I was not going to delegate my work, and I was not going to be afraid to address anything that was not good for children, whether that made me liked or not. 
I am a leader, so I know I cannot do anything alone. 
So, I assembled a top-notch leadership team who believed in the possibility of all the children, and together, we tackled the small things, like resetting every single locker combination by hand so that every student could have a secure locker. 
We decorated every bulletin board in that building with bright, colorful, and positive messages. 
We took the chains off the front doors of the school. 
We got the lightbulbs replaced, and we cleaned every classroom to its core, recycling every, every textbook that was not needed, and discarded thousands of old materials and furniture. 
We used two dumpsters per day. 
And, of course, of course, we tackled the big stuff, like rehauling the entire school budget so that we can reallocate funds to have more teachers and support staff. 
We rebuilt the entire school day schedule from scratch to add a variety of start and end times, remediation, honors courses, extracurricular activities, and counseling, all during the school day. 
All during the school day. 
We created a deployment plan that specified where every single support person and police officer would be every minute of the day, and we monitored at every second of the day, and, our best invention ever, we devised a schoolwide discipline program titled "" Non-negotiables. "" It was a behavior system — designed to promote positive behavior at all times. 
The results? 
Strawberry Mansion was removed from the Persistently Dangerous List our first year after being — (Applause) — after being on the Persistently Dangerous List for five consecutive years. 
Leaders make the impossible possible. 
That brings me to my second slogan: So what? Now what? 
(Laughter) (Applause) When we looked at the data, and we met with the staff, there were many excuses for why Strawberry Mansion was low-performing and persistently dangerous. 
They said that only 68 percent of the kids come to school on a regular basis, 100 percent of them live in poverty, only one percent of the parents participate, many of the children come from incarceration and single-parent homes, 39 percent of the students have special needs, and the state data revealed that six percent of the students were proficient in algebra, and 10 were proficient in literature. 
After they got through telling us all the stories of how awful the conditions and the children were, I looked at them, and I said, "" So what. Now what? 
What are we gonna do about it? "" (Applause) Eliminating excuses at every turn became my primary responsibility. 
We addressed every one of those excuses through a mandatory professional development, paving the way for intense focus on teaching and learning. 
After many observations, what we determined was that teachers knew what to teach but they did not know how to teach so many children with so many vast abilities. 
So, we developed a lesson delivery model for instruction that focused on small group instruction, making it possible for all the students to get their individual needs met in the classroom. 
The results? 
After one year, state data revealed that our scores have grown by 171 percent in Algebra and 107 percent in literature. 
(Applause) We have a very long way to go, a very long way to go, but we now approach every obstacle with a "" So What. Now What? "" attitude. 
And that brings me to my third and final slogan. 
(Laughter) If nobody told you they loved you today, you remember I do, and I always will. 
My students have problems: social, emotional and economic problems you could never imagine. 
Some of them are parents themselves, and some are completely alone. 
If someone asked me my real secret for how I truly keep Strawberry Mansion moving forward, I would have to say that I love my students and I believe in their possibilities unconditionally. 
When I look at them, I can only see what they can become, and that is because I am one of them. 
I grew up poor in North Philadelphia too. 
I know what it feels like to go to a school that's not a school. 
I know what it feels like to wonder if there's ever going to be any way out of poverty. 
But because of my amazing mother, I got the ability to dream despite the poverty that surrounded me. 
So — (Applause) — if I'm going to push my students toward their dream and their purpose in life, I've got to get to know who they are. 
So I have to spend time with them, so I manage the lunchroom every day. 
(Laughter) And while I'm there, I talk to them about deeply personal things, and when it's their birthday, I sing "" Happy Birthday "" even though I cannot sing at all. (Laughter) 
I often ask them, "Why do you want me to sing when I cannot sing at all?" (Laughter) 
And they respond by saying, "Because we like feeling special." 
We hold monthly town hall meetings to listen to their concerns, to find out what is on their minds. 
They ask us questions like, "" Why do we have to follow rules? "" "Why are there so many consequences?" 
"Why can't we just do what we want to do?" 
(Laughter) They ask, and I answer each question honestly, and this exchange in listening helps to clear up any misconceptions. 
Every moment is a teachable moment. 
My reward, my reward for being non-negotiable in my rules and consequences is their earned respect. 
I insist on it, and because of this, we can accomplish things together. 
They are clear about my expectations for them, and I repeat those expectations every day over the P.A. system. 
I remind them — (Laughter) I remind them of those core values of focus, tradition, excellence, integrity and perseverance, and I remind them every day how education can truly change their lives. 
And I end every announcement the same: "" If nobody told you they loved you today, you remember I do, and I always will. "" Ashley's words of "" Miss, Miss, this is not a school, "" is forever etched in my mind. 
If we are truly going to make real progress in addressing poverty, then we have to make sure that every school that serves children in poverty is a real school, a school, a school — (Applause) — a school that provides them with knowledge and mental training to navigate the world around them. 
I do not know all the answers, but what I do know is for those of us who are privileged and have the responsibility of leading a school that serves children in poverty, we must truly lead, and when we are faced with unbelievable challenges, we must stop and ask ourselves, "" So what. Now what? 
What are we going to do about it? "" And as we lead, we must never forget that every single one of our students is just a child, often scared by what the world tells them they should be, and no matter what the rest of the world tells them they should be, we should always provide them with hope, our undivided attention, unwavering belief in their potential, consistent expectations, and we must tell them often, if nobody told them they loved them today, remember we do, and we always will. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you, Jesus. 

This is a picture of Maurice Druon, the Honorary Perpetual Secretary of L'Academie francaise, the French Academy. 
He is splendidly attired in his 68,000-dollar uniform, befitting the role of the French Academy as legislating the correct usage in French and perpetuating the language. 
The French Academy has two main tasks: it compiles a dictionary of official French. 
They're now working on their ninth edition, which they began in 1930, and they've reached the letter P. 
They also legislate on correct usage, such as the proper term for what the French call "" email, "" which ought to be "" courriel. "" The World Wide Web, the French are told, ought to be referred to as "" la toile d'araignee mondiale "" — the Global Spider Web — recommendations that the French gaily ignore. 
Now, this is one model of how language comes to be: namely, it's legislated by an academy. 
But anyone who looks at language realizes that this is a rather silly conceit, that language, rather, emerges from human minds interacting from one another. 
And this is visible in the unstoppable change in language — the fact that by the time the Academy finishes their dictionary, it will already be well out of date. 
We see it in the constant appearance of slang and jargon, of the historical change in languages, in divergence of dialects and the formation of new languages. 
So language is not so much a creator or shaper of human nature, so much as a window onto human nature. 
In a book that I'm currently working on, I hope to use language to shed light on a number of aspects of human nature, including the cognitive machinery with which humans conceptualize the world and the relationship types that govern human interaction. 
And I'm going to say a few words about each one this morning. 
Let me start off with a technical problem in language that I've worried about for quite some time — and indulge me in my passion for verbs and how they're used. 
The problem is, which verbs go in which constructions? 
The verb is the chassis of the sentence. 
It's the framework onto which the other parts are bolted. 
Let me give you a quick reminder of something that you've long forgotten. 
An intransitive verb, such as "" dine, "" for example, can't take a direct object. 
You have to say, "" Sam dined, "" not, "" Sam dined the pizza. "" A transitive verb mandates that there has to be an object there: "Sam devoured the pizza." You can't just say, "Sam devoured." 
There are dozens or scores of verbs of this type, each of which shapes its sentence. 
So, a problem in explaining how children learn language, a problem in teaching language to adults so that they don't make grammatical errors, and a problem in programming computers to use language is which verbs go in which constructions. 
For example, the dative construction in English. 
You can say, "" Give a muffin to a mouse, "" the prepositional dative. 
Or, "" Give a mouse a muffin, "" the double-object dative. 
"" Promise anything to her, "" "" Promise her anything, "" and so on. 
Hundreds of verbs can go both ways. 
So a tempting generalization for a child, for an adult, for a computer is that any verb that can appear in the construction, "subject-verb-thing-to-a-recipient" can also be expressed as "" subject-verb-recipient-thing. "" A handy thing to have, because language is infinite, and you can't just parrot back the sentences that you've heard. 
You've got to extract generalizations so you can produce and understand new sentences. 
This would be an example of how to do that. 
Unfortunately, there appear to be idiosyncratic exceptions. 
You can say, "" Biff drove the car to Chicago, "" but not, "" Biff drove Chicago the car. "" You can say, "" Sal gave Jason a headache, "" but it's a bit odd to say, "" Sal gave a headache to Jason. "" The solution is that these constructions, despite initial appearance, are not synonymous, that when you crank up the microscope on human cognition, you see that there's a subtle difference in meaning between them. 
So, "" give the X to the Y, "" that construction corresponds to the thought "cause X to go to Y." Whereas "give the Y the X" corresponds to the thought "" cause Y to have X. "" Now, many events can be subject to either construal, kind of like the classic figure-ground reversal illusions, in which you can either pay attention to the particular object, in which case the space around it recedes from attention, or you can see the faces in the empty space, in which case the object recedes out of consciousness. 
How are these construals reflected in language? 
Well, in both cases, the thing that is construed as being affected is expressed as the direct object, the noun after the verb. 
So, when you think of the event as causing the muffin to go somewhere — where you're doing something to the muffin — you say, "" Give the muffin to the mouse. "" When you construe it as "" cause the mouse to have something, "" you're doing something to the mouse, and therefore you express it as, "" Give the mouse the muffin. "" So which verbs go in which construction — the problem with which I began — depends on whether the verb specifies a kind of motion or a kind of possession change. 
To give something involves both causing something to go and causing someone to have. 
To drive the car only causes something to go, because Chicago's not the kind of thing that can possess something. 
And to give someone a headache causes them to have the headache, but it's not as if you're taking the headache out of your head and causing it to go to the other person, and implanting it in them. 
You may just be loud or obnoxious, or some other way causing them to have the headache. 
So, that's an example of the kind of thing that I do in my day job. 
So why should anyone care? 
Well, there are a number of interesting conclusions, I think, from this and many similar kinds of analyses of hundreds of English verbs. 
First, there's a level of fine-grained conceptual structure, which we automatically and unconsciously compute every time we produce or utter a sentence, that governs our use of language. 
You can think of this as the language of thought, or "" mentalese. "" It seems to be based on a fixed set of concepts, which govern dozens of constructions and thousands of verbs — not only in English, but in all other languages — fundamental concepts such as space, time, causation and human intention, such as, what is the means and what is the ends? 
These are reminiscent of the kinds of categories that Immanuel Kant argued are the basic framework for human thought, and it's interesting that our unconscious use of language seems to reflect these Kantian categories. 
Doesn't care about perceptual qualities, such as color, texture, weight and speed, which virtually never differentiate the use of verbs in different constructions. 
An additional twist is that all of the constructions in English are used not only literally, but in a quasi-metaphorical way. 
For example, this construction, the dative, is used not only to transfer things, but also for the metaphorical transfer of ideas, as when we say, "" She told a story to me "" or "" told me a story, "" "Max taught Spanish to the students" or "taught the students Spanish." 
It's exactly the same construction, but no muffins, no mice, nothing moving at all. 
It evokes the container metaphor of communication, in which we conceive of ideas as objects, sentences as containers, and communication as a kind of sending. 
As when we say we "" gather "" our ideas, to "" put "" them "" into "" words, and if our words aren't "" empty "" or "" hollow, "" we might get these ideas "" across "" to a listener, who can "" unpack "" our words to "" extract "" their "" content. "" And indeed, this kind of verbiage is not the exception, but the rule. 
It's very hard to find any example of abstract language that is not based on some concrete metaphor. 
For example, you can use the verb "" go "" and the prepositions "" to "" and "" from "" in a literal, spatial sense. 
"The messenger went from Paris to Istanbul." 
You can also say, "" Biff went from sick to well. "" He needn't go anywhere. He could have been in bed the whole time, but it's as if his health is a point in state space that you conceptualize as moving. 
Or, "" The meeting went from three to four, "" in which we conceive of time as stretched along a line. 
Likewise, we use "" force "" to indicate not only physical force, as in, "" Rose forced the door to open, "" but also interpersonal force, as in, "" Rose forced Sadie to go, "" not necessarily by manhandling her, but by issuing a threat. 
Or, "" Rose forced herself to go, "" as if there were two entities inside Rose's head, engaged in a tug of a war. 
Second conclusion is that the ability to conceive of a given event in two different ways, such as "" cause something to go to someone "" and "" causing someone to have something, "" I think is a fundamental feature of human thought, and it's the basis for much human argumentation, in which people don't differ so much on the facts as on how they ought to be construed. 
Just to give you a few examples: "ending a pregnancy" versus "killing a fetus;" "a ball of cells" versus "an unborn child;" "invading Iraq" versus "liberating Iraq;" "redistributing wealth" versus "confiscating earnings." 
And I think the biggest picture of all would take seriously the fact that so much of our verbiage about abstract events is based on a concrete metaphor and see human intelligence itself as consisting of a repertoire of concepts — such as objects, space, time, causation and intention — which are useful in a social, knowledge-intensive species, whose evolution you can well imagine, and a process of metaphorical abstraction that allows us to bleach these concepts of their original conceptual content — space, time and force — and apply them to new abstract domains, therefore allowing a species that evolved 
to deal with rocks and tools and animals, to conceptualize mathematics, physics, law and other abstract domains. 
Well, I said I'd talk about two windows on human nature — the cognitive machinery with which we conceptualize the world, and now I'm going to say a few words about the relationship types that govern human social interaction, again, as reflected in language. 
And I'll start out with a puzzle, the puzzle of indirect speech acts. 
Now, I'm sure most of you have seen the movie "" Fargo. "" And you might remember the scene in which the kidnapper is pulled over by a police officer, is asked to show his driver's license and holds his wallet out with a 50-dollar bill extending at a slight angle out of the wallet. 
And he says, "" I was just thinking that maybe we could take care of it here in Fargo, "" which everyone, including the audience, interprets as a veiled bribe. 
This kind of indirect speech is rampant in language. 
For example, in polite requests, if someone says, "" If you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome, "" we know exactly what he means, even though that's a rather bizarre concept being expressed. 
(Laughter) "Would you like to come up and see my etchings?" 
I think most people understand the intent behind that. 
And likewise, if someone says, "" Nice store you've got there. It would be a real shame if something happened to it "" — (Laughter) — we understand that as a veiled threat, rather than a musing of hypothetical possibilities. 
So the puzzle is, why are bribes, polite requests, solicitations and threats so often veiled? 
No one's fooled. 
Both parties know exactly what the speaker means, and the speaker knows the listener knows that the speaker knows that the listener knows, etc., etc. 
So what's going on? 
I think the key idea is that language is a way of negotiating relationships, and human relationships fall into a number of types. 
There's an influential taxonomy by the anthropologist Alan Fiske, in which relationships can be categorized, more or less, into communality, which works on the principle "what's mine is thine, what's thine is mine," the kind of mindset that operates within a family, for example; dominance, whose principle is "" don't mess with me; "" reciprocity, "" you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours; "" and sexuality, in the immortal words of Cole Porter, "" Let's do it. "" Now, relationship types can be negotiated. 
Even though there are default situations in which one of these mindsets can be applied, they can be stretched and extended. 
For example, communality applies most naturally within family or friends, but it can be used to try to transfer the mentality of sharing to groups that ordinarily would not be disposed to exercise it. 
For example, in brotherhoods, fraternal organizations, sororities, locutions like "" the family of man, "" you try to get people who are not related to use the relationship type that would ordinarily be appropriate to close kin. 
Now, mismatches — when one person assumes one relationship type, and another assumes a different one — can be awkward. 
If you went over and you helped yourself to a shrimp off your boss' plate, for example, that would be an awkward situation. 
Or if a dinner guest after the meal pulled out his wallet and offered to pay you for the meal, that would be rather awkward as well. 
In less blatant cases, there's still a kind of negotiation that often goes on. 
In the workplace, for example, there's often a tension over whether an employee can socialize with the boss, or refer to him or her on a first-name basis. 
If two friends have a reciprocal transaction, like selling a car, it's well known that this can be a source of tension or awkwardness. 
In dating, the transition from friendship to sex can lead to, notoriously, various forms of awkwardness, and as can sex in the workplace, in which we call the conflict between a dominant and a sexual relationship "" sexual harassment. "" Well, what does this have to do with language? 
Well, language, as a social interaction, has to satisfy two conditions. 
You have to convey the actual content — here we get back to the container metaphor. 
You want to express the bribe, the command, the promise, the solicitation and so on, but you also have to negotiate and maintain the kind of relationship you have with the other person. 
The solution, I think, is that we use language at two levels: the literal form signals the safest relationship with the listener, whereas the implicated content — the reading between the lines that we count on the listener to perform — allows the listener to derive the interpretation which is most relevant in context, which possibly initiates a changed relationship. 
The simplest example of this is in the polite request. 
If you express your request as a conditional — "" if you could open the window, that would be great "" — even though the content is an imperative, the fact that you're not using the imperative voice means that you're not acting as if you're in a relationship of dominance, where you could presuppose the compliance of the other person. 
On the other hand, you want the damn guacamole. 
By expressing it as an if-then statement, you can get the message across without appearing to boss another person around. 
And in a more subtle way, I think, this works for all of the veiled speech acts involving plausible deniability: the bribes, threats, propositions, solicitations and so on. 
One way of thinking about it is to imagine what it would be like if language — where it could only be used literally. 
And you can think of it in terms of a game-theoretic payoff matrix. 
Put yourself in the position of the kidnapper wanting to bribe the officer. 
There's a high stakes in the two possibilities of having a dishonest officer or an honest officer. 
If you don't bribe the officer, then you will get a traffic ticket — or, as is the case of "" Fargo, "" worse — whether the honest officer is honest or dishonest. 
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. 
In that case, the consequences are rather severe. 
On the other hand, if you extend the bribe, if the officer is dishonest, you get a huge payoff of going free. 
If the officer is honest, you get a huge penalty of being arrested for bribery. 
So this is a rather fraught situation. 
On the other hand, with indirect language, if you issue a veiled bribe, then the dishonest officer could interpret it as a bribe, in which case you get the payoff of going free. 
So you get the best of both worlds. 
And a similar analysis, I think, can apply to the potential awkwardness of a sexual solicitation, and other cases where plausible deniability is an asset. 
I think this affirms something that's long been known by diplomats — namely, that the vagueness of language, far from being a bug or an imperfection, actually might be a feature of language, one that we use to our advantage in social interactions. 
So to sum up: language is a collective human creation, reflecting human nature, how we conceptualize reality, how we relate to one another. 
And then by analyzing the various quirks and complexities of language, I think we can get a window onto what makes us tick. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

How do we build a society without fossil fuels? 
This is a very complex challenge, and I believe developing countries could take the lead in this transition. 
And I'm aware that this is a contentious statement, but the reality is that so much is at stake in our countries if we let fossil fuels stay at the center of our development. 
We can do it differently. 
And it's time, it really is time, to debunk the myth that a country has to choose between development on the one hand and environmental protection, renewables, quality of life, on the other. 
I come from Costa Rica, a developing country. 
We are nearly five million people, and we live right in the middle of the Americas, so it's very easy to remember where we live. 
Nearly 100 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources, five of them. 
(Applause) Hydropower, geothermal, wind, solar, biomass. 
Did you know that last year, for 299 days, we did not use any fossil fuels in order to generate all our electricity? 
It's a fantastic achievement, and yet, it hides a paradox, which is that nearly 70 percent of all our energy consumption is oil. 
Why? 
Because of our transportation system, which is totally dependent on fossil fuels, like it is in most countries. 
So if we think of the energy transition as a marathon, the question is, how do we get to the finish line, how do we decarbonize the rest of the economy? 
And it's fair to say that if we don't succeed, it's difficult to see who will. 
So that is why I want to talk to you about Costa Rica, because I believe we are a great candidate in pioneering a vision for development without fossil fuels. 
If you know one thing about our country, it's that we don't have an army. 
So I'm going to take you back to 1948. 
That year, the country was coming out of civil war. 
Thousands of Costa Ricans had died, and families were bitterly split. 
And yet, a surprising idea won the hearts and minds: we would reboot the country, and that Second Republic would have no army. 
So we abolished it. 
And the president at the time, José Figueres, found a powerful way by smashing the walls of an army base. 
The following year, 1949, we made that decision permanent in the new constitution, and that is why I can tell you that story nearly 70 years later. 
And I'm grateful. 
I'm grateful they made that decision before I was born, because it allowed me and millions of others to live in a very stable country. 
And you might be thinking that it was good luck, but it wasn't. 
There was a pattern of deliberate choices. 
In the '40s, Costa Ricans were given free education and free health care. 
We called that social guarantees. 
By abolishing the army, we were able to turn military spending into social spending, and that was a driver of stability. 
In the '50s — (Applause) In the' 50s, we started investing in hydropower, and that kept us away from the trap of using fossil fuels for electricity generation, which is what the world is struggling with today. 
In the '70s we invested in national parks, and that kept us away from the deeply flawed logic of growth, growth, growth at any cost that you see others embracing, especially in the developing world. 
In the '90s, we pioneered payments for ecosystem services, and that helped us reverse deforestation and boosted ecotourism, which today is a key engine of growth. 
So investing in environmental protection did not hurt our economy. 
And it doesn't mean we are perfect, and it doesn't mean we don't have contradictions. 
That's not the point. 
The point is that, by making our own choices, we were able to develop resilience in dealing with development problems. 
Also, if you take a country like ours, the GDP per capita is around 11,000 dollars, depending on how you measure it. 
But according to the Social Progress Index, we are an absolute outlier when it comes to turning GDP into social progress. 
Abolishing the army, investing in nature and people, did something very powerful, too. 
It shaped the narrative, the narrative of a small country with big ideas, and it was very empowering to grow up with that narrative. 
So the question is, what is the next big idea for this generation? 
And I believe what comes next is for this generation to let go of fossil fuels for good, just as we did with the army. 
Fossil fuels create climate change. 
We know that, and we know how vulnerable we are to the impacts of climate change. 
So as a developing country, it is in our best interest to build development without fossil fuels that harm people in the first place. 
Because why would we continue importing oil for transportation if we can use electricity instead? 
Remember, this is the country where electricity comes from water in our rivers, heat from volcanoes, wind turbines, solar panels, biowaste. 
Abolishing fossil fuels means disrupting our transportation system so that we can power our cars, buses and trains with electricity instead of dirty energy. 
And transportation, let me tell you, has become an existential issue for us Costa Ricans, because the model we have is not working for us. 
It's hurting people, it's hurting companies, and it's hurting our health. 
Because when policies and infrastructure fail, this is what happens on a daily basis. 
Two hours in the morning, two hours in the evening. 
I don't understand why we have to accept this as normal. 
It's offensive to have to waste our time like this every single day. 
And this highway is actually quite good compared to what you see in other countries where traffic is exploding. 
You know, Costa Ricans call this "" presa. "" Presa means "" imprisoned. "" And people are turning violent in a country that is otherwise happy in pura vida. 
It's happening. 
So a lot is at stake. 
The good news is that when we talk about clean transportation and different mobility, we're not talking about some distant utopia out there. 
We're talking about electric mobility that is happening today. 
By 2022, electric cars and conventional cars are expected to cost the same, and cities are already trying electric buses. 
And these really cool creatures are saving money, and they reduce pollution. 
So if we want to get rid of oil-based transportation, we can, because we have options now that we didn't have before. 
It's really exciting. 
But of course, some get very uncomfortable with this idea, and they will come and they will tell you that the world is stuck with oil, and so is Costa Rica, so get real. 
That's what they tell you. 
And you know what the answer to that argument is? 
That in 1948, we didn't say the world is stuck with armies, so let's keep our army, too. 
No, we made a very brave choice, and that choice made the whole difference. 
So it's time for this generation to be brave again and abolish fossil fuels for good. 
And I'll give you three reasons why we have to do this. 
First, our model of transportation and urbanization is broken, so this is the best moment to redefine our urban and mobility future. 
We don't want cities that are built for cars. 
We want cities for people where we can walk and we can use bikes. 
And we want public transportation, lots of it, public transportation that is clean and dignifying. 
Because if we continue adding fleets of conventional cars, our cities will become unbearable. 
Second, we have to change, but incremental change is not going to be sufficient. 
We need transformational change. 
And there are some incremental projects in my country, and I am the first one to celebrate them. 
But let's not kid ourselves. 
We're not talking about ending up with really beautiful electric cars here and a few electric buses there while we keep investing in the same kind of infrastructure, more cars, more roads, more oil. 
We're talking about breaking free from oil, and you cannot get there through incrementalism. 
Third, and you know this one, the world is hungry for inspiration. 
It craves stories of success in dealing with complex issues, especially in developing countries. 
So I believe Costa Rica can be an inspiration to others, as we did last year when we disclosed that for so many days we were not using any fossil fuels in order to generate all our electricity. 
The news went viral around the world. 
Also, and this makes me extremely proud, a Costa Rican woman, Christiana Figueres, played a decisive role in the negotiations of the Paris climate agreement. 
So we have to protect that legacy and be an example. 
So what comes next? 
The people. 
How do we get people to own this? How do we get people 
to believe that it's possible to build a society without fossil fuels? 
A lot of work from the ground up is needed. 
That is why, in 2014, we created Costa Rica Limpia. 
"Limpia" means "clean," because we want to empower and we want to inspire citizens. 
If citizens don't get engaged, clean transportation decisions will be bogged down by endless, and I mean endless, technical discussions, and by avalanches of lobbying by various established interests. 
Wanting to be a green country powered by renewables is already part of our story. 
We should not let anybody take that away from us. 
Last year, we brought people from our seven provinces to talk about climate change in terms that matter to them, and we also brought this year another group of Costa Ricans to talk about renewable energy. 
And you know what? 
These people disagree on almost everything except on renewable energy and clean transportation and clean air. 
It brings people together. 
And the key to real participation is to help people not to feel small. 
People feel powerless, and they are tired of not being heard. 
So what we do is concrete things, and we translate technical issues into citizen language to show that citizens have a role to play and can play it together. 
For the first time, we're tracking the promises that were made on clean transportation, and politicos know that they have to deliver it, but the tipping point will come when we form coalitions — citizens, companies, champions of public transportation — that will make electric mobility the new normal, especially in a developing country. 
By the time the next election comes, I believe every candidate will have to disclose where they stand on the abolition of fossil fuels. 
Because this question has to enter our mainstream politics. 
And I'm telling you, this is not a question of climate policy or environmental agenda. 
It's about the country that we want and the cities that we have and the cities that we want and who makes that choice. 
Because at the end of the day, what we have to show is that development with renewable energy is good for the people, for Costa Ricans that are alive today and especially for those who haven't been born. 
This is our National Museum today. 
It's bright and peaceful, and when you stand up in front of it, it's really hard to believe these were military barracks at the end of the '40s. 
We started a new life without an army in this place, and here is where our abolition of fossil fuels will be announced one day. 
And we will make history again. 
Thank you. 

I want to tell you how 20,000 remarkable young people from over 100 countries ended up in Cuba and are transforming health in their communities. 
Ninety percent of them would never have left home at all if it weren't for a scholarship to study medicine in Cuba and a commitment to go back to places like the ones they'd come from — remote farmlands, mountains, ghettos — to become doctors for people like themselves, to walk the walk. 
Havana's Latin American Medical School: It's the largest medical school in the world, graduating 23,000 young doctors since its first class of 2005, with nearly 10,000 more in the pipeline. 
Its mission, to train physicians for the people who need them the most: the over one billion who have never seen a doctor, the people who live and die under every poverty line ever invented. 
Its students defy all norms. 
They're the school's biggest risk and also its best bet. 
They're recruited from the poorest, most broken places on our planet by a school that believes they can become not just the good but the excellent physicians their communities desperately need, that they will practice where most doctors don't, in places not only poor but oftentimes dangerous, carrying venom antidotes in their backpacks or navigating neighborhoods riddled by drugs, gangs and bullets, their home ground. 
The hope is that they will help transform access to care, the health picture in impoverished areas, and even the way medicine itself is learned and practiced, and that they will become pioneers in our global reach for universal health coverage, surely a tall order. 
Two big storms and this notion of "" walk the walk "" prompted creation of ELAM back in 1998. 
The Hurricanes Georges and Mitch had ripped through the Caribbean and Central America, leaving 30,000 dead and two and a half million homeless. 
Hundreds of Cuban doctors volunteered for disaster response, but when they got there, they found a bigger disaster: whole communities with no healthcare, doors bolted shut on rural hospitals for lack of staff, and just too many babies dying before their first birthday. 
What would happen when these Cuban doctors left? 
New doctors were needed to make care sustainable, but where would they come from? 
Where would they train? 
In Havana, the campus of a former naval academy was turned over to the Cuban Health Ministry to become the Latin American Medical School, ELAM. 
Tuition, room and board, and a small stipend were offered to hundreds of students from the countries hardest hit by the storms. 
As a journalist in Havana, I watched the first 97 Nicaraguans arrive in March 1999, settling into dorms barely refurbished and helping their professors not only sweep out the classrooms but move in the desks and the chairs and the microscopes. 
Over the next few years, governments throughout the Americas requested scholarships for their own students, and the Congressional Black Caucus asked for and received hundreds of scholarships for young people from the USA. 
Today, among the 23,000 are graduates from 83 countries in the Americas, Africa and Asia, and enrollment has grown to 123 nations. 
More than half the students are young women. 
They come from 100 ethnic groups, speak 50 different languages. 
WHO Director Margaret Chan said, "" For once, if you are poor, female, or from an indigenous population, you have a distinct advantage, an ethic that makes this medical school unique. "" Luther Castillo comes from San Pedro de Tocamacho on the Atlantic coast of Honduras. 
There's no running water, no electricity there, and to reach the village, you have to walk for hours or take your chances in a pickup truck like I did skirting the waves of the Atlantic. 
Luther was one of 40 Tocamacho children who started grammar school, the sons and daughters of a black indigenous people known as the Garífuna, 20 percent of the Honduran population. 
The nearest healthcare was fatal miles away. 
Luther had to walk three hours every day to middle school. 
Only 17 made that trip. 
Only five went on to high school, and only one to university: Luther, to ELAM, among the first crop of Garífuna graduates. 
Just two Garífuna doctors had preceded them in all of Honduran history. 
Now there are 69, thanks to ELAM. 
Big problems need big solutions, sparked by big ideas, imagination and audacity, but also solutions that work. 
ELAM's faculty had no handy evidence base to guide them, so they learned the hard way, by doing and correcting course as they went. 
Even the brightest students from these poor communities weren't academically prepared for six years of medical training, so a bridging course was set up in sciences. 
Then came language: these were Mapuche, Quechuas, Guaraní, Garífuna, indigenous peoples who learned Spanish as a second language, or Haitians who spoke Creole. 
So Spanish became part of the pre-pre-med curriculum. 
Even so, in Cuba, the music, the food, the smells, just about everything was different, so faculty became family, ELAM home. 
Religions ranged from indigenous beliefs to Yoruba, Muslim and Christian evangelical. 
Embracing diversity became a way of life. 
Why have so many countries asked for these scholarships? 
First, they just don't have enough doctors, and where they do, their distribution is skewed against the poor, because our global health crisis is fed by a crisis in human resources. 
We are short four to seven million health workers just to meet basic needs, and the problem is everywhere. 
Doctors are concentrated in the cities, where only half the world's people live, and within cities, not in the shantytowns or South L.A. 
Here in the United States, where we have healthcare reform, we don't have the professionals we need. 
By 2020, we will be short 45,000 primary care physicians. 
And we're also part of the problem. 
The United States is the number one importer of doctors from developing countries. 
The second reasons students flock to Cuba is the island's own health report card, relying on strong primary care. 
A commission from The Lancet rates Cuba among the best performing middle-income countries in health. 
Save the Children ranks Cuba the best country in Latin America to become a mother. 
Cuba has similar life expectancy and lower infant mortality than the United States, with fewer disparities, while spending per person one 20th of what we do on health here in the USA. 
Academically, ELAM is tough, but 80 percent of its students graduate. 
The subjects are familiar — basic and clinical sciences — but there are major differences. 
First, training has moved out of the ivory tower and into clinic classrooms and neighborhoods, the kinds of places most of these grads will practice. 
Sure, they have lectures and hospital rotations too, but community-based learning starts on day one. 
Second, students treat the whole patient, mind and body, in the context of their families, their communities and their culture. 
Third, they learn public health: to assess their patients' drinking water, housing, social and economic conditions. 
Fourth, they are taught that a good patient interview and a thorough clinical exam provide most of the clues for diagnosis, saving costly technology for confirmation. 
And finally, they're taught over and over again the importance of prevention, especially as chronic diseases cripple health systems worldwide. 
Such an in-service learning also comes with a team approach, as much how to work in teams as how to lead them, with a dose of humility. 
Upon graduation, these doctors share their knowledge with nurse's aids, midwives, community health workers, to help them become better at what they do, not to replace them, to work with shamans and traditional healers. 
ELAM's graduates: Are they proving this audacious experiment right? 
Dozens of projects give us an inkling of what they're capable of doing. 
Take the Garífuna grads. 
They not only went to work back home, but they organized their communities to build Honduras' first indigenous hospital. 
With an architect's help, residents literally raised it from the ground up. 
The first patients walked through the doors in December 2007, and since then, the hospital has received nearly one million patient visits. 
And government is paying attention, upholding the hospital as a model of rural public health for Honduras. 
ELAM's graduates are smart, strong and also dedicated. 
Haiti, January 2010. 
The pain. 
People buried under 30 million tons of rubble. 
Overwhelming. 
Three hundred forty Cuban doctors were already on the ground long term. 
More were on their way. Many more were needed. 
At ELAM, students worked round the clock to contact 2,000 graduates. 
As a result, hundreds arrived in Haiti, 27 countries' worth, from Mali in the Sahara to St. Lucia, Bolivia, Chile and the USA. 
They spoke easily to each other in Spanish and listened to their patients in Creole thanks to Haitian medical students flown in from ELAM in Cuba. 
Many stayed for months, even through the cholera epidemic. 
Hundreds of Haitian graduates had to pick up the pieces, overcome their own heartbreak, and then pick up the burden of building a new public health system for Haiti. 
Today, with aid of organizations and governments from Norway to Cuba to Brazil, dozens of new health centers have been built, staffed, and in 35 cases, headed by ELAM graduates. 
Yet the Haitian story also illustrates some of the bigger problems faced in many countries. 
Take a look: 748 Haitian graduates by 2012, when cholera struck, nearly half working in the public health sector but one quarter unemployed, and 110 had left Haiti altogether. 
So in the best case scenarios, these graduates are staffing and thus strengthening public health systems, where often they're the only doctors around. 
In the worst cases, there are simply not enough jobs in the public health sector, where most poor people are treated, not enough political will, not enough resources, not enough anything — just too many patients with no care. 
The grads face pressure from their families too, desperate to make ends meet, so when there are no public sector jobs, these new MDs decamp into private practice, or go abroad to send money home. 
Worst of all, in some countries, medical societies influence accreditation bodies not to honor the ELAM degree, fearful these grads will take their jobs or reduce their patient loads and income. 
It's not a question of competencies. 
Here in the USA, the California Medical Board accredited the school after rigorous inspection, and the new physicians are making good on Cuba's big bet, passing their boards and accepted into highly respected residencies from New York to Chicago to New Mexico. 
Two hundred strong, they're coming back to the United States energized, and also dissatisfied. 
As one grad put it, in Cuba, "" We are trained to provide quality care with minimal resources, so when I see all the resources we have here, and you tell me that's not possible, I know it's not true. 
Not only have I seen it work, I've done the work. "" ELAM's graduates, some from right here in D.C. and Baltimore, have come from the poorest of the poor to offer health, education and a voice to their communities. 
They've done the heavy lifting. 
Now we need to do our part to support the 23,000 and counting, All of us — foundations, residency directors, press, entrepreneurs, policymakers, people — need to step up. 
We need to do much more globally to give these new doctors the opportunity to prove their mettle. 
They need to be able to take their countries' licensing exams. 
They need jobs in the public health sector or in nonprofit health centers to put their training and commitment to work. 
They need the chance to be the doctors their patients need. 
To move forward, we may have to find our way back to that pediatrician who would knock on my family's door on the South Side of Chicago when I was a kid, who made house calls, who was a public servant. 
These aren't such new ideas of what medicine should be. 
What's new is the scaling up and the faces of the doctors themselves: an ELAM graduate is more likely to be a she than a he; In the Amazon, Peru or Guatemala, an indigenous doctor; in the USA, a doctor of color who speaks fluent Spanish. 
She is well trained, can be counted on, and shares the face and culture of her patients, and she deserves our support surely, because whether by subway, mule, or canoe, she is teaching us to walk the walk. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

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

I'm not sure that every person here is familiar with my pictures. 
I want to start to show just a few pictures to you, and after I'll speak. 
I must speak to you a little bit of my history, because we'll be speaking on this during my speech here. 
I was born in 1944 in Brazil, in the times that Brazil was not yet a market economy. 
I was born on a farm, a farm that was more than 50 percent rainforest [still]. 
A marvelous place. 
I lived with incredible birds, incredible animals, I swam in our small rivers with our caimans. 
It was about 35 families that lived on this farm, and everything that we produced on this farm, we consumed. 
Very few things went to the market. 
Once a year, the only thing that went to the market was the cattle that we produced, and we made trips of about 45 days to reach the slaughterhouse, bringing thousands of head of cattle, and about 20 days traveling back to reach our farm again. 
When I was 15 years old, it was necessary for me to leave this place and go to a town a little bit bigger — much bigger — where I did the second part of secondary school. 
There I learned different things. 
Brazil was starting to urbanize, industrialize, and I knew the politics. I became a little bit radical, I was a member of leftist parties, and I became an activist. 
I [went to] university to become an economist. 
I [did] a master's degree in economics. 
And the most important thing in my life also happened in this time. 
I met an incredible girl who became my lifelong best friend, and my associate in everything that I have done till now, my wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado. 
Brazil radicalized very strongly. 
We fought very hard against the dictatorship, in a moment it was necessary to us: Either go into clandestinity with weapons in hand, or leave Brazil. We were too young, and our organization thought it was better for us to go out, and we went to France, where I did a PhD in economics, Léila became an architect. 
I worked after for an investment bank. 
We made a lot of trips, financed development, economic projects in Africa with the World Bank. 
And one day photography made a total invasion in my life. 
I became a photographer, abandoned everything and became a photographer, and I started to do the photography that was important for me. 
Many people tell me that you are a photojournalist, that you are an anthropologist photographer, that you are an activist photographer. 
But I did much more than that. 
I put photography as my life. 
I lived totally inside photography doing long term projects, and I want to show you just a few pictures of — again, you'll see inside the social projects, that I went to, I published many books on these photographs, but I'll just show you a few ones now. 
In the '90s, from 1994 to 2000, I photographed a story called Migrations. 
It became a book. It became a show. 
But during the time that I was photographing this, I lived through a very hard moment in my life, mostly in Rwanda. 
I saw in Rwanda total brutality. 
I saw deaths by thousands per day. 
I lost my faith in our species. 
I didn't believe that it was possible for us to live any longer, and I started to be attacked by my own Staphylococcus. 
I started to have infection everywhere. 
When I made love with my wife, I had no sperm that came out of me; I had blood. 
I went to see a friend's doctor in Paris, told him that I was completely sick. 
He made a long examination, and told me, "" Sebastian, you are not sick, your prostate is perfect. 
What happened is, you saw so many deaths that you are dying. 
You must stop. Stop. 
You must stop because on the contrary, you will be dead. "" And I made the decision to stop. 
I was really upset with photography, with everything in the world, and I made the decision to go back to where I was born. 
It was a big coincidence. 
It was the moment that my parents became very old. 
I have seven sisters. I'm one of the only men in my family, and they made together the decision to transfer this land to Léila and myself. 
When we received this land, this land was as dead as I was. 
When I was a kid, it was more than 50 percent rainforest. 
When we received the land, it was less than half a percent rainforest, as in all my region. 
To build development, Brazilian development, we destroyed a lot of our forest. 
As you did here in the United States, or you did in India, everywhere in this planet. 
To build our development, we come to a huge contradiction that we destroy around us everything. 
This farm that had thousands of head of cattle had just a few hundreds, and we didn't know how to deal with these. 
And Léila came up with an incredible idea, a crazy idea. 
She said, why don't you put back the rainforest that was here before? 
You say that you were born in paradise. 
Let's build the paradise again. 
And I went to see a good friend that was engineering forests to prepare a project for us, and we started. We started to plant, and this first year we lost a lot of trees, second year less, and slowly, slowly this dead land started to be born again. 
We started to plant hundreds of thousands of trees, only local species, only native species, where we built an ecosystem identical to the one that was destroyed, and the life started to come back in an incredible way. 
It was necessary for us to transform our land into a national park. 
We transformed. We gave this land back to nature. 
It became a national park. 
We created an institution called Instituto Terra, and we built a big environmental project to raise money everywhere. 
Here in Los Angeles, in the Bay Area in San Francisco, it became tax deductible in the United States. 
We raised money in Spain, in Italy, a lot in Brazil. 
We worked with a lot of companies in Brazil that put money into this project, the government. 
And the life started to come, and I had a big wish to come back to photography, to photograph again. 
And this time, my wish was not to photograph anymore just one animal that I had photographed all my life: us. 
I wished to photograph the other animals, to photograph the landscapes, to photograph us, but us from the beginning, the time we lived in equilibrium with nature. 
And I went. I started in the beginning of 2004, and I finished at the end of 2011. 
We created an incredible amount of pictures, and the result — Lélia did the design of all my books, the design of all my shows. She is the creator of the shows. 
And what we want with these pictures is to create a discussion about what we have that is pristine on the planet and what we must hold on this planet if we want to live, to have some equilibrium in our life. 
And I wanted to see us when we used, yes, our instruments in stone. 
We exist yet. I was last week at the Brazilian National Indian Foundation, and only in the Amazon we have about 110 groups of Indians that are not contacted yet. 
We must protect the forest in this sense. 
And with these pictures, I hope that we can create information, a system of information. 
We tried to do a new presentation of the planet, and I want to show you now just a few pictures of this project, please. 
Well, this — (Applause) — Thank you. Thank you very much. 
This is what we must fight hard to hold like it is now. 
But there is another part that we must together rebuild, to build our societies, our modern family of societies, we are at a point where we cannot go back. 
But we create an incredible contradiction. 
To build all this, we destroy a lot. 
Our forest in Brazil, that antique forest that was the size of California, is destroyed today 93 percent. 
Here, on the West Coast, you've destroyed your forest. 
Around here, no? The redwood forests are gone. 
Gone very fast, disappeared. 
Coming the other day from Atlanta, here, two days ago, I was flying over deserts that we made, we provoked with our own hands. 
India has no more trees. Spain has no more trees. 
And we must rebuild these forests. 
That is the essence of our life, these forests. 
We need to breathe. The only factory capable to transform CO2 into oxygen, are the forests. 
The only machine capable to capture the carbon that we are producing, always, even if we reduce them, everything that we do, we produce CO2, are the trees. 
I put the question — three or four weeks ago, we saw in the newspapers millions of fish that die in Norway. 
A lack of oxygen in the water. 
I put to myself the question, if for a moment, we will not lack oxygen for all animal species, ours included — that would be very complicated for us. 
For the water system, the trees are essential. 
I'll give you a small example that you'll understand very easily. 
You happy people that have a lot of hair on your head, if you take a shower, it takes you two or three hours to dry your hair if you don't use a dryer machine. 
Me, one minute, it's dry. The same with the trees. 
The trees are the hair of our planet. 
When you have rain in a place that has no trees, in just a few minutes, the water arrives in the stream, brings soil, destroying our water source, destroying the rivers, and no humidity to retain. 
When you have trees, the root system holds the water. 
All the branches of the trees, the leaves that come down create a humid area, and they take months and months under the water, go to the rivers, and maintain our source, maintain our rivers. 
This is the most important thing, when we imagine that we need water for every activity in life. 
I want to show you now, to finish, just a few pictures that for me are very important in that direction. 
You remember that I told you, when I received the farm from my parents that was my paradise, that was the farm. 
Land completely destroyed, the erosion there, the land had dried. 
But you can see in this picture, we were starting to construct an educational center that became quite a large environmental center in Brazil. 
But you see a lot of small spots in this picture. 
In each point of those spots, we had planted a tree. 
There are thousands of trees. 
Now I'll show you the pictures made exactly in the same point two months ago. 
(Applause) I told you in the beginning that it was necessary for us to plant about 2.5 million trees of about 200 different species in order to rebuild the ecosystem. 
And I'll show you the last picture. 
We are with two million trees in the ground now. 
We are doing the sequestration of about 100,000 tons of carbon with these trees. 
My friends, it's very easy to do. We did it, no? 
By an accident that happened to me, we went back, we built an ecosystem. 
We here inside the room, I believe that we have the same concern, and the model that we created in Brazil, we can transplant it here. 
We can apply it everywhere around the world, no? 
And I believe that we can do it together. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

So let me just start with my story. 
So I tore my knee joint meniscus cartilage playing soccer in college. 
Then I went on to tear my ACL, the ligament in my knee, and then developed an arthritic knee. 
And I'm sure that many of you in this audience have that same story, and, by the way, I married a woman who has exactly the same story. 
So this motivated me to become an orthopedic surgeon and to see if I couldn't focus on solutions for those problems that would keep me playing sports and not limit me. 
So with that, let me just show you a quick video to get you in the mood of what we're trying to explain. 
Narrator: We are all aware of the risk of cancer, but there's another disease that's destined to affect even more of us: arthritis. 
Cancer may kill you, but when you look at the numbers, arthritis ruins more lives. 
Assuming you live a long life, there's a 50 percent chance you'll develop arthritis. 
And it's not just aging that causes arthritis. 
Common injuries can lead to decades of pain, until our joints quite literally grind to a halt. 
Desperate for a solution, we've turned to engineering to design artificial components to replace our worn-out body parts, but in the midst of the modern buzz around the promises of a bionic body, shouldn't we stop and ask if there's a better, more natural way? 
Let's consider an alternative path. 
What if all the replacements our bodies need already exist in nature, or within our own stem cells? 
This is the field of biologic replacements, where we replace worn-out parts with new, natural ones. 
Kevin Stone: And so, the mission is: how do I treat these things biologically? 
And let's talk about both what I did for my wife, and what I've done for hundreds of other patients. 
First thing for my wife, and the most common thing I hear from my patients, particularly in the 40- to 80-year-old age group, 70-year-old age group, is they come in and say, "" Hey, Doc, isn't there just a shock absorber you can put in my knee? 
I'm not ready for joint replacement. "" And so for her, I put in a human meniscus allograft donor right into that [knee] joint space. 
And [the allograft] replaces [the missing meniscus]. 
And then for that unstable ligament, we put in a human donor ligament to stabilize the knee. 
And then for the damaged arthritis on the surface, we did a stem cell paste graft, which we designed in 1991, to regrow that articular cartilage surface and give it back a smooth surface there. 
So here's my wife's bad knee on the left, and her just hiking now four months later in Aspen, and doing well. 
And it works, not just for my wife, but certainly for other patients. 
The girl on the video, Jen Hudak, just won the Superpipe in Aspen just nine months after having destroyed her knee, as you see in the other image — and having a paste graft to that knee. 
And so we can regrow these surfaces biologically. 
So with all this success, why isn't that good enough, you might ask. 
Well the reason is because there's not enough donor cycles. 
There's not enough young, healthy people falling off their motorcycle and donating that tissue to us. 
And the tissue's very expensive. 
And so that's not going to be a solution that's going to get us global with biologic tissue. 
But the solution is animal tissue because it's plentiful, it's cheap, you can get it from young, healthy tissues, but the barrier is immunology. 
And the specific barrier is a specific epitope called the galactosyl, or gal epitope. 
So if we're going to transplant animal tissues to people, we have to figure out a way to get rid of that epitope. 
So my story in working with animal tissues starts in 1984. 
And I started first with cow Achilles tendon, where we would take the cow Achilles tendon, which is type-I collagen, strip it of its antigens by degrading it with an acid and detergent wash and forming it into a regeneration template. 
We would then take that regeneration template and insert it into the missing meniscus cartilage to regrow that in a patient's knee. 
We've now done that procedure, and it's been done worldwide in over 4,000 cases, so it's an FDA-approved and worldwide-accepted way to regrow the meniscus. 
And that's great when I can degrade the tissue. 
But what happens for your ligament when I need an intact ligament? 
I can't grind it up in a blender. 
So in that case, I have to design — and we designed with Uri Galili and Tom Turek — an enzyme wash to wash away, or strip, those galactosyl epitopes with a specific enzyme. 
And we call that a "" gal stripping "" technique. 
What we do is humanize the tissue. 
It's by gal stripping that tissue we humanize it (Laughter), and then we can put it back into a patient's knee. 
And we've done that. Now we've taken pig ligament — young, healthy, big tissue, put it into 10 patients in an FDA-approved trial — and then one of our patients went on to have three Canadian Masters Downhill championships — on his "" pig-lig, "" as he calls it. So we know it can work. 
And there's a wide clinical trial of this tissue now pending. 
So what about the next step? 
What about getting to a total biologic knee replacement, not just the parts? 
How are we going to revolutionize artificial joint replacement? 
Well here's how we're going to do it. 
So what we're going to do is take an articular cartilage from a young, healthy pig, strip it of its antigens, load it with your stem cells, then put it back on to that arthritic surface in your knee, tack it on there, have you heal that surface and then create a new biologic surface for your knee. 
So that's our biologic approach right now. 
We're going to rebuild your knee with the parts. 
We're going to resurface it with a completely new surface. 
But we have other advantages from the animal kingdom. 
There's a benefit of 400 million years of ambulation. 
We can harness those benefits. 
We can use thicker, younger, better tissues than you might have injured in your knee, or that you might have when you're 40, 50 or 60. 
We can do it as an outpatient procedure. 
We can strip that tissue very economically, and so this is how we can get biologic knee replacement to go global. 
And so welcome to super biologics. 
It's not hardware. 
It's not software. 
It's bioware. 
It's version 2.0 of you. 
And so with that, coming to a — (Laughter) coming to an operating theater near you soon, I believe. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I would like to start with the story of Mary, a woman from an African village. 
Her first memories are of her family fleeing violent riots orchestrated by the ruling political party. 
Her brother was murdered by the state-sponsored militia, and she was raped more than once just because she belonged to the wrong party. 
One morning, a month before the election, Mary's village was called to another intimidation meeting. 
In this meeting, there is a man standing in front of them, telling them, "" We know who you are, we know who you will vote for, and if you're not going to drop the right paper, we're going to take revenge. "" But for Mary, this meeting is different. 
She feels different. 
This time, she's waiting for this meeting, because this time, she's carrying a small hidden camera in her dress, a camera that nobody else can see. 
Nobody is allowed to film in these meetings. 
You risk your life if you do. 
Mary knows that, but she also knows that the only way to stop them and to protect herself and her community is to expose their intimidation, to make sure they understand somebody is following them, to break the impunity they feel. 
Mary and her friends were filming for months, undercover, the intimidation of the ruling political party. 
(Video) ["" Filmed with hidden cameras ""] Man: We are now going to speak about the upcoming elections. 
Nothing can stop us from doing what we want. 
If we hear you are with [The Opposition] we will not forgive you. 
["" Militia intimidation rally ""] [The Party] can torture you at any time. 
The youth can beat you. 
["" Disruption of political meeting ""] For those who lie, saying they are back with [The Party], your time is running out. 
["" Party youth militia ""] Some have died because they rebelled. 
Some have lost their homes. 
If you don't work together with [The Party], you will lead a very bad life. 
Oren Yakobovich: These images were broadcast all over the world, but more importantly, they have been broadcast back to the community. 
The perpetrators saw them too. 
They understood somebody is following them. 
They got scared. Impunity was broken. 
Mary and her friends forced the ruling political party not to use violence during the election, and saved hundreds of lives. 
Mary is just one of hundreds of people that my organization had helped to document human rights violations using cameras. 
My background should have led me to a different direction. 
I was born in Israel to a right-wing family, and as long as I remember myself, I wanted to join the Israeli army to serve my country and prove what I believed was our right for the whole land. 
I joined the Israeli army just after the first intifada, the first Palestinian uprising, and I served in one of the hard-minded, toughest, aggressive infantry units, and I got the biggest gun in my platoon. 
Quite fast, I became an officer and got soldiers under my command, and as time passed, I started serving in the West Bank, and I saw these images. 
I didn't like what I saw. 
It took me a while, but eventually I refused to serve in the West Bank and had to spend time in jail. 
It was a bit — (Applause) — It was not that bad, I have to say. 
It was a bit like being in a hotel, but with very shitty food. 
(Laughter) In jail, I kept thinking that I need people to know. 
I need people to understand what the reality in the West Bank looks like. 
I need them to hear what I heard, I need them to see what I saw, but I also understood, we need the Palestinians themselves, the people that are suffering, to be able to tell their own stories, not journalists or filmmakers that are coming outside of the situation. 
I joined a human rights organization, an Israeli human rights organization called B'Tselem. 
Together, we analyzed the West Bank and picked 100 families that are living in the most risky places: close to checkpoints, near army bases, side by side with settlers. 
We gave them cameras and training. 
Quite fast, we started getting very disturbing images about how the settlers and the soldiers are abusing them. 
I would like to share with you two clips from this project. 
Both of them were broadcast in Israel, and it created a massive debate. 
And I have to warn you, some of you might find them quite explicit. 
The masked men you will see in the first clips are Jewish settlers. 
Minutes before the camera was turned on, they approached a Palestinian family that was working their land and told them that they have to leave the land, because this land belongs to the Jewish settlers. 
The Palestinians refused. 
Let's see what happened. 
The masked men that are approaching are Jewish settlers. 
They are approaching the Palestinian family. 
This is a demonstration in the West Bank. 
The guy in green is Palestinian. 
He will be arrested in a second. 
Here you see him blindfolded and handcuffed. 
In a few seconds, he regrets he came to this demonstration. 
He's been shot in the foot with a rubber bullet. 
He is okay. 
Not all the settlers and the soldiers are acting this way. 
We're talking about a tiny minority, but they have to be brought to justice. 
These clips, and others like them, forced the army and the police to start investigations. 
They've been shown in Israel, of course, and the Israeli public was exposed to them also. 
This project redefined the struggle for human rights in the occupied territories, and we managed to reduce the number of violent attacks in the West Bank. 
The success of this project got me thinking how I can take the same methodology to other places in the world. 
Now, we tend to believe that today, with all of the technology, the smartphones and the Internet, we are able to see and understand most of what's happening in the world, and people are able to tell their story — but it's only partly true. 
Still today, with all the technology we have, less than half of the world's population has access to the Internet, and more than three billion people — I'm repeating the number — three billion people are consuming news that is censored by those in power. 
More or less around the same time, I'm approached by a great guy named Uri Fruchtmann. 
He's a filmmaker and an activist. 
We understood we were thinking along the same lines, and we decided to establish Videre, our organization, together. 
While building the organization in London, we've been traveling undercover to places where a community was suffering from abuses, where mass atrocities were happening, and there was a lack of reporting. 
We tried to understand how we can help. 
There were four things that I learned. 
The first thing is that we have to engage with communities that are living in rural areas, where violations are happening far from the public eye. 
We need to partner with them, and we need to understand which images are not making it out there and help them to document them. 
The second thing I learned is that we have to enable them to film in a safe way. 
Security has to be the priority. 
Where I used to work before, in the West Bank, one can take a camera out, most likely not going to get shot, but in places we wanted to work, just try to pull a phone out, and you're dead — literally dead. 
This is why we decided to take the operation undercover when necessary, and use mostly hidden cameras. 
Unfortunately, I can't show you the hidden cameras we're using today — for obvious reasons — but these are cameras we used before. 
You can buy them off the shelf. 
Today, we're building a custom-made hidden camera, like the one that Mary was wearing in her dress to film the intimidation meeting of the ruling political party. 
It's a camera that nobody can see, that blends into the environment, into the surroundings. 
Now, filming securities go beyond using hidden cameras. 
Being secure starts way before the activist is turning the camera on. 
To keep our partners safe, we work to understand the risk of every location and of every shot before it's happened, building a backup plan if something goes wrong, and making sure we have everything in place before our operations start. 
The third thing I learned is the importance of verification. 
You can have an amazing shot of atrocity, but if you can't verify it, it's worth nothing. 
Recently, like in the ongoing war in Syria or the war in Gaza, we've seen images that are staged or brought from a different conflict. 
This misinformation destroyed the credibility of the source, and it's harmed the credibility of other reliable and trustworthy sources. 
We use a variety of ways to make sure we can verify the information and we can trust the material. 
It starts with vetting the partners, understanding who they are, and working with them very intensively. 
How do you film a location? 
You film road signs, you film watches, you film newspapers. 
We are checking maps, looking at maps, double-checking the information, and looking also at the metadata of the material. 
Now, the fourth and the most important thing I learned is how you use images to create a positive change. 
To have an effect, the key thing is how you use the material. 
Today, we're working with hundreds of activists filming undercover. 
We work with them both to understand the situation on the ground and which images are missing to describe it, who are the ones that are influencing the situation, and when to release the material to advance the struggle. 
Sometimes, it's about putting it in the media, mostly local ones, to create awareness. 
Sometimes it's working with decision makers, to change laws. 
Sometimes, it's working with lawyers to use as evidence in court. 
But more than often, the most effective way to create a social change is to work within the community. 
I want to give you one example. 
Fatuma is part of a network of women that are fighting abuses in Kenya. 
Women in her community have been harassed constantly on their way to school and on their way to work. 
They are trying to change the behavior of the community from inside. 
In the next clip, Fatuma is taking us with her on her journey to work. 
Her voice is superimposed on images that she filmed herself using hidden cameras. 
(Video) Fatuma Chiusiku: My name is Fatuma Chiusiku. 
I'm 32 years old, a mother, And Ziwa La Ng'Ombe is my home. 
Each morning, I ride the mini-bus Number 11. 
But instead of a peaceful journey to work, each day begins with fear. 
Come with me now and use my eyes to feel what I feel. 
As I walk, I think to myself: Will I be touched? 
Grabbed? 
Violated by this conductor again? 
Even the men inside the way they look at me touch my body, rub against me, grab me, and now, as I sit in my seat I only wish my mind was full of thoughts for my day, my dreams, my children at school, but instead I worry about the moment when we will arrive and I will be violated again. 
OY: Today, there is a new front in the fight for human rights. 
I used to carry a big gun. 
Now, I am carrying this. 
This is a much more powerful and much, much more effective weapon. 
But we have to use its power wisely. 
By putting the right images in the right hands at the right time, we can truly create an impact. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

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

Last year I showed these two slides so that demonstrate that the arctic ice cap, which for most of the last three million years has been the size of the lower 48 states, has shrunk by 40 percent. 
But this understates the seriousness of this particular problem because it doesn't show the thickness of the ice. 
The arctic ice cap is, in a sense, the beating heart of the global climate system. 
It expands in winter and contracts in summer. 
The next slide I show you will be a rapid fast-forward of what's happened over the last 25 years. 
The permanent ice is marked in red. 
As you see, it expands to the dark blue — that's the annual ice in winter, and it contracts in summer. 
The so-called permanent ice, five years old or older, you can see is almost like blood, spilling out of the body here. 
In 25 years it's gone from this, to this. 
This is a problem because the warming heats up the frozen ground around the Arctic Ocean, where there is a massive amount of frozen carbon which, when it thaws, is turned into methane by microbes. 
Compared to the total amount of global warming pollution in the atmosphere, that amount could double if we cross this tipping point. 
Already in some shallow lakes in Alaska, methane is actively bubbling up out of the water. 
Professor Katey Walter from the University of Alaska went out with another team to another shallow lake last winter. 
Video: Whoa! (Laughter) Al Gore: She's okay. The question is whether we will be. 
And one reason is, this enormous heat sink heats up Greenland from the north. 
This is an annual melting river. 
But the volumes are much larger than ever. 
This is the Kangerlussuaq River in southwest Greenland. 
If you want to know how sea level rises from land-base ice melting this is where it reaches the sea. 
These flows are increasing very rapidly. 
At the other end of the planet, Antarctica the largest mass of ice on the planet. 
Last month scientists reported the entire continent is now in negative ice balance. 
And west Antarctica cropped up on top some under-sea islands, is particularly rapid in its melting. 
That's equal to 20 feet of sea level, as is Greenland. 
In the Himalayas, the third largest mass of ice: at the top you see new lakes, which a few years ago were glaciers. 
40 percent of all the people in the world get half of their drinking water from that melting flow. 
In the Andes, this glacier is the source of drinking water for this city. 
The flows have increased. 
But when they go away, so does much of the drinking water. 
In California there has been a 40 percent decline in the Sierra snowpack. 
This is hitting the reservoirs. 
And the predictions, as you've read, are serious. 
This drying around the world has lead to a dramatic increase in fires. 
And the disasters around the world have been increasing at an absolutely extraordinary and unprecedented rate. 
Four times as many in the last 30 years as in the previous 75. 
This is a completely unsustainable pattern. 
If you look at in the context of history you can see what this is doing. 
In the last five years we've added 70 million tons of CO2 every 24 hours — 25 million tons every day to the oceans. 
Look carefully at the area of the eastern Pacific, from the Americas, extending westward, and on either side of the Indian subcontinent, where there is a radical depletion of oxygen in the oceans. 
The biggest single cause of global warming, along with deforestation, which is 20 percent of it, is the burning of fossil fuels. 
Oil is a problem, and coal is the most serious problem. 
The United States is one of the two largest emitters, along with China. 
And the proposal has been to build a lot more coal plants. 
But we're beginning to see a sea change. 
Here are the ones that have been cancelled in the last few years with some green alternatives proposed. 
(Applause) However there is a political battle in our country. 
And the coal industries and the oil industries spent a quarter of a billion dollars in the last calendar year promoting clean coal, which is an oxymoron. 
That image reminded me of something. 
(Laughter) Around Christmas, in my home in Tennessee, a billion gallons of coal sludge was spilled. 
You probably saw it on the news. 
This, all over the country, is the second largest waste stream in America. 
This happened around Christmas. 
One of the coal industry's ads around Christmas was this one. 
Video: ♪ ♫ Frosty the coal man is a jolly, happy soul. 
He's abundant here in America, and he helps our economy grow. 
Frosty the coal man is getting cleaner everyday. 
He's affordable and adorable, and workers keep their pay. 
Al Gore: This is the source of much of the coal in West Virginia. 
The largest mountaintop miner is the head of Massey Coal. 
Video: Don Blankenship: Let me be clear about it. Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, they don't know what they're talking about. 
Al Gore: So the Alliance for Climate Protection has launched two campaigns. 
This is one of them, part of one of them. 
Video: Actor: At COALergy we view climate change as a very serious threat to our business. 
That's why we've made it our primary goal to spend a large sum of money on an advertising effort to help bring out and complicate the truth about coal. 
The fact is, coal isn't dirty. 
We think it's clean — smells good, too. 
So don't worry about climate change. 
Leave that up to us. 
(Laughter) Video: Actor: Clean coal — you've heard a lot about it. 
So let's take a tour of this state-of-the-art clean coal facility. 
Amazing! The machinery is kind of loud. 
But that's the sound of clean coal technology. 
And while burning coal is one of the leading causes of global warming, the remarkable clean coal technology you see here changes everything. 
Take a good long look: this is today's clean coal technology. 
Al Gore: Finally, the positive alternative meshes with our economic challenge and our national security challenge. 
Video: Narrator: America is in crisis — the economy, national security, the climate crisis. 
The thread that links them all: our addiction to carbon based fuels, like dirty coal and foreign oil. 
But now there is a bold new solution to get us out of this mess. 
Repower America with 100 percent clean electricity within 10 years. 
A plan to put America back to work, make us more secure, and help stop global warming. 
Finally, a solution that's big enough to solve our problems. 
Repower America. Find out more. 
Al Gore: This is the last one. 
Video: Narrator: It's about repowering America. 
One of the fastest ways to cut our dependence on old dirty fuels that are killing our planet. 
Man: Future's over here. Wind, sun, a new energy grid. 
Man # 2: New investments to create high-paying jobs. 
Narrator: Repower America. It's time to get real. 
Al Gore: There is an old African proverb that says, "" If you want to go quickly, go alone. 
If you want to go far, go together. "" We need to go far, quickly. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Today I'm going to talk to you about the problem of other minds. 
And the problem I'm going to talk about is not the familiar one from philosophy, which is, "" How can we know whether other people have minds? "" That is, maybe you have a mind, and everyone else is just a really convincing robot. 
So that's a problem in philosophy, but for today's purposes I'm going to assume that many people in this audience have a mind, and that I don't have to worry about this. 
There is a second problem that is maybe even more familiar to us as parents and teachers and spouses and novelists, which is, "" Why is it so hard to know what somebody else wants or believes? "" Or perhaps, more relevantly, "Why is it so hard to change what somebody else wants or believes?" 
I think novelists put this best. 
Like Philip Roth, who said, "" And yet, what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people? 
So ill equipped are we all, to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims. "" So as a teacher and as a spouse, this is, of course, a problem I confront every day. 
But as a scientist, I'm interested in a different problem of other minds, and that is the one I'm going to introduce to you today. 
And that problem is, "" How is it so easy to know other minds? "" So to start with an illustration, you need almost no information, one snapshot of a stranger, to guess what this woman is thinking, or what this man is. 
And put another way, the crux of the problem is the machine that we use for thinking about other minds, our brain, is made up of pieces, brain cells, that we share with all other animals, with monkeys and mice and even sea slugs. 
And yet, you put them together in a particular network, and what you get is the capacity to write Romeo and Juliet. 
Or to say, as Alan Greenspan did, "" I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant. "" (Laughter) So, the job of my field of cognitive neuroscience is to stand with these ideas, one in each hand. 
And to try to understand how you can put together simple units, simple messages over space and time, in a network, and get this amazing human capacity to think about minds. 
So I'm going to tell you three things about this today. 
Obviously the whole project here is huge. 
And I'm going to tell you just our first few steps about the discovery of a special brain region for thinking about other people's thoughts. 
Some observations on the slow development of this system as we learn how to do this difficult job. 
And then finally, to show that some of the differences between people, in how we judge others, can be explained by differences in this brain system. 
So first, the first thing I want to tell you is that there is a brain region in the human brain, in your brains, whose job it is to think about other people's thoughts. 
This is a picture of it. 
It's called the Right Temporo-Parietal Junction. 
It's above and behind your right ear. 
And this is the brain region you used when you saw the pictures I showed you, or when you read Romeo and Juliet or when you tried to understand Alan Greenspan. 
And you don't use it for solving any other kinds of logical problems. 
So this brain region is called the Right TPJ. 
And this picture shows the average activation in a group of what we call typical human adults. 
They're MIT undergraduates. 
(Laughter) The second thing I want to say about this brain system is that although we human adults are really good at understanding other minds, we weren't always that way. 
It takes children a long time to break into the system. 
I'm going to show you a little bit of that long, extended process. 
The first thing I'm going to show you is a change between age three and five, as kids learn to understand that somebody else can have beliefs that are different from their own. 
So I'm going to show you a five-year-old who is getting a standard kind of puzzle that we call the false belief task. 
Rebecca Saxe (Video): This is the first pirate. His name is Ivan. 
And you know what pirates really like? 
Child: What? RS: Pirates really like cheese sandwiches. 
Child: Cheese? I love cheese! 
RS: Yeah. So Ivan has this cheese sandwich, and he says, "" Yum yum yum yum yum! 
I really love cheese sandwiches. "" And Ivan puts his sandwich over here, on top of the pirate chest. 
And Ivan says, "" You know what? I need a drink with my lunch. "" And so Ivan goes to get a drink. 
And while Ivan is away the wind comes, and it blows the sandwich down onto the grass. 
And now, here comes the other pirate. 
This pirate is called Joshua. 
And Joshua also really loves cheese sandwiches. 
So Joshua has a cheese sandwich and he says, "Yum yum yum yum yum! I love cheese sandwiches." 
And he puts his cheese sandwich over here on top of the pirate chest. 
Child: So, that one is his. 
RS: That one is Joshua's. That's right. 
Child: And then his went on the ground. 
RS: That's exactly right. 
Child: So he won't know which one is his. 
RS: Oh. So now Joshua goes off to get a drink. 
Ivan comes back and he says, "" I want my cheese sandwich. "" So which one do you think Ivan is going to take? 
Child: I think he is going to take that one. 
RS: Yeah, you think he's going to take that one? All right. Let's see. 
Oh yeah, you were right. He took that one. 
So that's a five-year-old who clearly understands that other people can have false beliefs and what the consequences are for their actions. 
Now I'm going to show you a three-year-old who got the same puzzle. 
RS: And Ivan says, "" I want my cheese sandwich. "" Which sandwich is he going to take? 
Do you think he's going to take that one? Let's see what happens. 
Let's see what he does. Here comes Ivan. 
And he says, "" I want my cheese sandwich. "" And he takes this one. 
Uh-oh. Why did he take that one? 
Child: His was on the grass. 
So the three-year-old does two things differently. 
First, he predicts Ivan will take the sandwich that's really his. 
And second, when he sees Ivan taking the sandwich where he left his, where we would say he's taking that one because he thinks it's his, the three-year-old comes up with another explanation: He's not taking his own sandwich because he doesn't want it, because now it's dirty, on the ground. 
So that's why he's taking the other sandwich. 
Now of course, development doesn't end at five. 
And we can see the continuation of this process of learning to think about other people's thoughts by upping the ante and asking children now, not for an action prediction, but for a moral judgment. 
So first I'm going to show you the three-year-old again. 
RS.: So is Ivan being mean and naughty for taking Joshua's sandwich? 
Child: Yeah. 
RS: Should Ivan get in trouble for taking Joshua's sandwich? 
Child: Yeah. 
So it's maybe not surprising he thinks it was mean of Ivan to take Joshua's sandwich, since he thinks Ivan only took Joshua's sandwich to avoid having to eat his own dirty sandwich. 
But now I'm going to show you the five-year-old. 
Remember the five-year-old completely understood why Ivan took Joshua's sandwich. 
RS: Was Ivan being mean and naughty for taking Joshua's sandwich? 
Child: Um, yeah. 
And so, it is not until age seven that we get what looks more like an adult response. 
RS: Should Ivan get in trouble for taking Joshua's sandwich? 
Child: No, because the wind should get in trouble. 
He says the wind should get in trouble for switching the sandwiches. 
(Laughter) And now what we've started to do in my lab is to put children into the brain scanner and ask what's going on in their brain as they develop this ability to think about other people's thoughts. 
So the first thing is that in children we see this same brain region, the Right TPJ, being used while children are thinking about other people. 
But it's not quite like the adult brain. 
So whereas in the adults, as I told you, this brain region is almost completely specialized — it does almost nothing else except for thinking about other people's thoughts — in children it's much less so, when they are age five to eight, the age range of the children I just showed you. 
And actually if we even look at eight to 11-year-olds, getting into early adolescence, they still don't have quite an adult-like brain region. 
And so, what we can see is that over the course of childhood and even into adolescence, both the cognitive system, our mind's ability to think about other minds, and the brain system that supports it are continuing, slowly, to develop. 
But of course, as you're probably aware, even in adulthood, people differ from one another in how good they are at thinking of other minds, how often they do it and how accurately. 
And so what we wanted to know was, could differences among adults in how they think about other people's thoughts be explained in terms of differences in this brain region? 
So, the first thing that we did is we gave adults a version of the pirate problem that we gave to the kids. 
And I'm going to give that to you now. 
So Grace and her friend are on a tour of a chemical factory, and they take a break for coffee. 
And Grace's friend asks for some sugar in her coffee. 
Grace goes to make the coffee and finds by the coffee a pot containing a white powder, which is sugar. 
But the powder is labeled "" Deadly Poison, "" so Grace thinks that the powder is a deadly poison. 
And she puts it in her friend's coffee. 
And her friend drinks the coffee, and is fine. 
How many people think it was morally permissible for Grace to put the powder in the coffee? 
Okay. Good. (Laughter) So we ask people, how much should Grace be blamed in this case, which we call a failed attempt to harm? 
And we can compare that to another case, where everything in the real world is the same. 
The powder is still sugar, but what's different is what Grace thinks. 
Now she thinks the powder is sugar. 
And perhaps unsurprisingly, if Grace thinks the powder is sugar and puts it in her friend's coffee, people say she deserves no blame at all. 
Whereas if she thinks the powder was poison, even though it's really sugar, now people say she deserves a lot of blame, even though what happened in the real world was exactly the same. 
And in fact, they say she deserves more blame in this case, the failed attempt to harm, than in another case, which we call an accident. 
Where Grace thought the powder was sugar, because it was labeled "" sugar "" and by the coffee machine, but actually the powder was poison. 
So even though when the powder was poison, the friend drank the coffee and died, people say Grace deserves less blame in that case, when she innocently thought it was sugar, than in the other case, where she thought it was poison and no harm occurred. 
People, though, disagree a little bit about exactly how much blame Grace should get in the accident case. 
Some people think she should deserve more blame, and other people less. 
And what I'm going to show you is what happened when we look inside the brains of people while they're making that judgment. 
So what I'm showing you, from left to right, is how much activity there was in this brain region, and from top to bottom, how much blame people said that Grace deserved. 
And what you can see is, on the left when there was very little activity in this brain region, people paid little attention to her innocent belief and said she deserved a lot of blame for the accident. 
Whereas on the right, where there was a lot of activity, people paid a lot more attention to her innocent belief, and said she deserved a lot less blame for causing the accident. 
So that's good, but of course what we'd rather is have a way to interfere with function in this brain region, and see if we could change people's moral judgment. 
And we do have such a tool. 
It's called Trans-Cranial Magnetic Stimulation, or TMS. 
This is a tool that lets us pass a magnetic pulse through somebody's skull, into a small region of their brain, and temporarily disorganize the function of the neurons in that region. 
So I'm going to show you a demo of this. 
First, I'm going to show you that this is a magnetic pulse. 
I'm going to show you what happens when you put a quarter on the machine. 
When you hear clicks, we're turning the machine on. 
So now I'm going to apply that same pulse to my brain, to the part of my brain that controls my hand. 
So there is no physical force, just a magnetic pulse. 
Woman (Video): Ready, Rebecca? RS: Yes. 
Okay, so it causes a small involuntary contraction in my hand by putting a magnetic pulse in my brain. 
And we can use that same pulse, now applied to the RTPJ, to ask if we can change people's moral judgments. 
So these are the judgments I showed you before, people's normal moral judgments. 
And then we can apply TMS to the RTPJ and ask how people's judgments change. 
And the first thing is, people can still do this task overall. 
So their judgments of the case when everything was fine remain the same. They say she deserves no blame. 
But in the case of a failed attempt to harm, where Grace thought that it was poison, although it was really sugar, people now say it was more okay, she deserves less blame for putting the powder in the coffee. 
And in the case of the accident, where she thought that it was sugar, but it was really poison and so she caused a death, people say that it was less okay, she deserves more blame. 
So what I've told you today is that people come, actually, especially well equipped to think about other people's thoughts. 
We have a special brain system that lets us think about what other people are thinking. 
This system takes a long time to develop, slowly throughout the course of childhood and into early adolescence. 
And even in adulthood, differences in this brain region can explain differences among adults in how we think about and judge other people. 
But I want to give the last word back to the novelists, and to Philip Roth, who ended by saying, "" The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. 
It's getting them wrong that is living. 
Getting them wrong and wrong and wrong, and then on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. "" Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: So, I have a question. When you start talking about using magnetic pulses to change people's moral judgments, that sounds alarming. 
(Laughter) Please tell me that you're not taking phone calls from the Pentagon, say. 
RS: I'm not. 
I mean, they're calling, but I'm not taking the call. 
(Laughter) CA: They really are calling? 
So then seriously, you must lie awake at night sometimes wondering where this work leads. 
I mean, you're clearly an incredible human being, but someone could take this knowledge and in some future not-torture chamber, do acts that people here might be worried about. 
RS: Yeah, we worry about this. 
So, there's a couple of things to say about TMS. 
One is that you can't be TMSed without knowing it. 
So it's not a surreptitious technology. 
It's quite hard, actually, to get those very small changes. 
The changes I showed you are impressive to me because of what they tell us about the function of the brain, but they're small on the scale of the moral judgments that we actually make. 
And what we changed was not people's moral judgments when they're deciding what to do, when they're making action choices. 
We changed their ability to judge other people's actions. 
And so, I think of what I'm doing not so much as studying the defendant in a criminal trial, but studying the jury. 
CA: Is your work going to lead to any recommendations in education, to perhaps bring up a generation of kids able to make fairer moral judgments? 
RS: That's one of the idealistic hopes. 
The whole research program here of studying the distinctive parts of the human brain is brand new. 
Until recently, what we knew about the brain were the things that any other animal's brain could do too, so we could study it in animal models. 
We knew how brains see, and how they control the body and how they hear and sense. 
And the whole project of understanding how brains do the uniquely human things — learn language and abstract concepts, and thinking about other people's thoughts — that's brand new. 
And we don't know yet what the implications will be of understanding it. 
CA: So I've got one last question. There is this thing called the hard problem of consciousness, that puzzles a lot of people. 
The notion that you can understand why a brain works, perhaps. 
But why does anyone have to feel anything? 
Why does it seem to require these beings who sense things for us to operate? 
You're a brilliant young neuroscientist. 
I mean, what chances do you think there are that at some time in your career, someone, you or someone else, is going to come up with some paradigm shift in understanding what seems an impossible problem? 
RS: I hope they do. And I think they probably won't. 
CA: Why? 
RS: It's not called the hard problem of consciousness for nothing. 
(Laughter) CA: That's a great answer. Rebecca Saxe, thank you very much. That was fantastic. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

So a few weeks ago, a friend of mine gave this toy car to his 8-year-old son. 
But instead of going into a store and buying one, like we do normally, he went to this website and he downloaded a file, and then he printed it on this printer. 
So this idea that you can manufacture objects digitally using these machines is something that The Economist magazine defined as the Third Industrial Revolution. 
Actually, I argue that there is another revolution going on, and it's the one that has to do with open-source hardware and the maker's movement, because the printer that my friend used to print the toy is actually open-source. 
So you go to the same website, you can download all the files that you need in order to make that printer: the construction files, the hardware, the software, all the instruction is there. 
And also this is part of a large community where there are thousands of people around the world that are actually making these kinds of printers, and there's a lot of innovation happening because it's all open-source. 
You don't need anybody's permission to create something great. 
And that space is like the personal computer in 1976, like the Apples with the other companies are fighting, and we will see in a few years, there will be the Apple of this kind of market come out. 
Well, there's also another interesting thing. 
I said the electronics are open-source, because at the heart of this printer there is something I'm really attached to: these Arduino boards, the motherboard that sort of powers this printer, is a project I've been working on for the past seven years. 
It's an open-source project. 
I worked with these friends of mine that I have here. 
So the five of us, two Americans, two Italians and a Spaniard, we — (Laughter) You know, it's a worldwide project. (Laughter) So we came together in this design institute called the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, which was teaching interaction design, this idea that you can take design from the simple shape of an object and you can move it forward to design the way you interact with things. 
Well, when you design an object that's supposed to interact with a human being, if you make a foam model of a mobile phone, it doesn't make any sense. 
You have to have something that actually interacts with people. 
So, we worked on Arduino and a lot of other projects there to create platforms that would be simple for our students to use, so that our students could just build things that worked, but they don't have five years to become an electronics engineer. We have one month. 
So how do I make something that even a kid can use? 
And actually, with Arduino, we have kids like Sylvia that you see here, that actually make projects with Arduino. 
I have 11-year-old kids stop me and show me stuff they built for Arduino that's really scary to see the capabilities that kids have when you give them the tools. 
So let's look at what happens when you make a tool that anybody can just pick up and build something quickly, so one of the examples that I like to sort of kick off this discussion is this example of this cat feeder. 
The gentleman who made this project had two cats. 
One was sick and the other one was healthy, so he had to make sure they ate the proper food. 
So he made this thing that recognizes the cat from a chip mounted inside on the collar of the cat, and opens the door and the cat can eat the food. 
This is made by recycling an old CD player that you can get from an old computer, some cardboard, tape, couple of sensors, a few blinking LEDs, and then suddenly you have a tool. You build something that you cannot find on the market. 
And I like this phrase: "" Scratch your own itch. "" If you have an idea, you just go and you make it. 
This is the equivalent of sketching on paper done with electronics. 
So one of the features that I think is important about our work is that our hardware, on top of being made with love in Italy — as you can see from the back of the circuit — (Laughter) is that it's open, so we publish all the design files for the circuit online, so you can download it and you can actually use it to make something, or to modify, to learn. 
You know, when I was learning about programming, I learned by looking at other people's code, or looking at other people's circuits in magazines. 
And this is a good way to learn, by looking at other people's work. 
So the different elements of the project are all open, so the hardware is released with a Creative Commons license. 
So, you know, I like this idea that hardware becomes like a piece of culture that you share and you build upon, like it was a song or a poem with Creative Commons. 
Or, the software is GPL, so it's open-source as well. 
The documentation and the hands-on teaching methodology is also open-source and released as the Creative Commons. 
Just the name is protected so that we can make sure that we can tell people what is Arduino and what isn't. 
Now, Arduino itself is made of a lot of different open-source components that maybe individually are hard to use for a 12-year-old kid, so Arduino wraps everything together into a mashup of open-source technologies where we try to give them the best user experience to get something done quickly. 
So you have situations like this, where some people in Chile decided to make their own boards instead of buying them, to organize a workshop and to save money. Or there are companies that make their own variations of Arduino that fit in a certain market, and there's probably, maybe like a 150 of them or something at the moment. 
This one is made by a company called Adafruit, which is run by this woman called Limor Fried, also known as Ladyada, who is one of the heroes of the open-source hardware movement and the maker movement. 
So, this idea that you have a new, sort of turbo-charged DIY community that believes in open-source, in collaboration, collaborates online, collaborates in different spaces. 
There is this magazine called Make that sort of gathered all these people and sort of put them together as a community, and you see a very technical project explained in a very simple language, beautifully typeset. 
Or you have websites, like this one, like Instructables, where people actually teach each other about anything. 
So this one is about Arduino projects, the page you see on the screen, but effectively here you can learn how to make a cake and everything else. 
So let's look at some projects. 
So this one is a quadcopter. 
It's a small model helicopter. 
In a way, it's a toy, no? 
And so this one was military technology a few years ago, and now it's open-source, easy to use, you can buy it online. 
DIY Drones is the community; they do this thing called ArduCopter. 
But then somebody actually launched this start-up called Matternet, where they figured out that you could use this to actually transport things from one village to another in Africa, and the fact that this was easy to find, open-source, easy to hack, enabled them to prototype their company really quickly. 
Or, other projects. Matt Richardson: I'm getting a little sick of hearing about the same people on TV over and over and over again, so I decided to do something about it. 
This Arduino project, which I call the Enough Already, will mute the TV anytime any of these over-exposed personalities is mentioned. (Laughter) I'll show you how I made it. (Applause) MB: Check this out. 
MR: Our producers caught up with Kim Kardashian earlier today to find out what she was planning on wearing to her — MB: Eh? (Laughter) MR: It should do a pretty good job of protecting our ears from having to hear about the details of Kim Kardashian's wedding. 
MB: Okay. So, you know, again, what is interesting here is that Matt found this module that lets Arduino process TV signals, he found some code written by somebody else that generates infrared signals for the TV, put it together and then created this great project. 
It's also used, Arduino's used, in serious places like, you know, the Large Hadron Collider. 
There's some Arduino balls collecting data and sort of measuring some parameters. 
Or it's used for — (Music) So this is a musical interface built by a student from Italy, and he's now turning this into a product. Because it was a student project becoming a product. 
Or it can be used to make an assistive device. 
This is a glove that understands the sign language and transforms the gestures you make into sounds and writes the words that you're signing on a display And again, this is made of all different parts you can find on all the websites that sell Arduino-compatible parts, and you assemble it into a project. 
Or this is a project from the ITP part of NYU, where they met with this boy who has a severe disability, cannot play with the PS3, so they built this device that allows the kid to play baseball although he has limited movement capability. 
Or you can find it in arts projects. 
So this is the txtBomber. 
So you put a message into this device and then you roll it on the wall, and it basically has all these solenoids pressing the buttons on spray cans, so you just pull it over a wall and it just writes on the wall all the political messages. 
So, yeah. (Applause) Then we have this plant here. 
This is called Botanicalls, because there's an Arduino ball with a Wi-Fi module in the plant, and it's measuring the well-being of the plant, and it's creating a Twitter account where you can actually interact with the plant. (Laughter) So, you know, this plant will start to say, "" This is really hot, "" or there's a lot of, you know, "" I need water right now. "" (Laughter) So it just gives a personality to your plant. 
Or this is something that twitters when the baby inside the belly of a pregnant woman kicks. (Laughter) Or this is a 14-year-old kid in Chile who made a system that detects earthquakes and publishes on Twitter. 
He has 280,000 followers. 
He's 14 and he anticipated a governmental project by one year. (Applause) Or again, another project where, by analyzing the Twitter feed of a family, you can basically point where they are, like in the "" Harry Potter "" movie. 
So you can find out everything about this project on the website. 
Or somebody made a chair that twitters when somebody farts. (Laughter) It's interesting how, in 2009, Gizmodo basically defined, said that this project actually gives a meaning to Twitter, so it was — a lot changed in between. (Laughter) So very serious project. 
When the Fukushima disaster happened, a bunch of people in Japan, they realized that the information that the government was giving wasn't really open and really reliable, so they built this Geiger counter, plus Arduino, plus network interface. They made 100 of them and gave them to people around Japan, and essentially the data that they gathered gets published on this website called Cosm, another website they built, so you can actually get reliable real-time information from the field, and you can get unbiased information. 
Or this machine here, it's from the DIY bio movement, and it's one of the steps that you need in order to process DNA, and again, it's completely open-source from the ground up. 
Or you have students in developing countries making replicas of scientific instruments that cost a lot of money to make. 
Actually they just build them themselves for a lot less using Arduino and a few parts. 
This is a pH probe. 
Or you get kids, like these kids, they're from Spain. 
They learned how to program and to make robots when they were probably, like, 11, and then they started to use Arduino to make these robots that play football. They became world champions by making an Arduino-based robot. 
And so when we had to make our own educational robot, we just went to them and said, you know, "" You design it, because you know exactly what is needed to make a great robot that excites kids. "" Not me. I'm an old guy. 
What am I supposed to excite, huh? (Laughter) But as I — in terms of educational assets. (Laughter) There's also companies like Google that are using the technology to create interfaces between mobile phones, tablets and the real world. 
So the Accessory Development Kit from Google is open-source and based on Arduino, as opposed to the one from Apple which is closed-source, NDA, sign your life to Apple. Here you are. 
There's a giant maze, and Joey's sitting there, and the maze is moving when you tilt the tablet. 
Also, I come from Italy, and the design is important in Italy, and yet very conservative. 
So we worked with a design studio called Habits, in Milan, to make this mirror, which is completely open-source. 
This doubles also as an iPod speaker. 
So the idea is that the hardware, the software, the design of the object, the fabrication, everything about this project is open-source and you can make it yourself. 
So we want other designers to pick this up and learn how to make great devices, to learn how to make interactive products by starting from something real. 
But when you have this idea, you know, what happens to all these ideas? 
There's, like, thousands of ideas that I — You know, it would take seven hours for me to do all the presentations. 
I will not take all the seven hours. Thank you. 
But let's start from this example: So, the group of people that started this company called Pebble, they prototyped a watch that communicates via Bluetooth with your phone, and you can display information on it. And they prototyped with an old LCD screen from a Nokia mobile phone and an Arduino. 
And then, when they had a final project, they actually went to Kickstarter and they were asking for 100,000 dollars to make a few of them to sell. 
They got 10 million dollars. 
They got a completely fully funded start-up, and they don't have to, you know, get VCs involved or anything, just excite the people with their great project. 
The last project I want to show you is this: It's called ArduSat. It's currently on Kickstarter, so if you want to contribute, please do it. 
It's a satellite that goes into space, which is probably the least open-source thing you can imagine, and it contains an Arduino connected to a bunch of sensors. So if you know how to use Arduino, you can actually upload your experiments into this satellite and run them. 
So imagine, if you as a high school can have the satellite for a week and do satellite space experiments like that. 
So, as I said, there's lots of examples, and I'm going to stop here. And I just want to thank the Arduino community for being the best, and just every day making lots of projects. 
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) And thanks to the community. 
Chris Anderson: Massimo, you told me earlier today that you had no idea, of course, that it would take off like this. 
MB: No. 
CA: I mean, how must you feel when you read this stuff and you see what you've unlocked? 
MB: Well, it's the work of a lot of people, so we as a community are enabling people to make great stuff, and I just feel overwhelmed. 
It's just, it's difficult to describe this. 
Every morning, I wake up and I look at all the stuff that Google Alerts sends me, and it's just amazing. It's just going into every field that you can imagine. 
CA: Thank you so much. (Applause) (Applause) 

So just by a show of hands, how many of you all have a robot at home? 
Not very many of you. 
Okay. And actually of those hands, if you don't include Roomba how many of you have a robot at home? 
So a couple. 
That's okay. 
That's the problem that we're trying to solve at Romotive — that I and the other 20 nerds at Romotive are obsessed with solving. 
So we really want to build a robot that anyone can use, whether you're eight or 80. 
And as it turns out, that's a really hard problem, because you have to build a small, portable robot that's not only really affordable, but it has to be something that people actually want to take home and have around their kids. 
This robot can't be creepy or uncanny. 
He should be friendly and cute. 
So meet Romo. 
Romo's a robot that uses a device you already know and love — your iPhone — as his brain. 
And by leveraging the power of the iPhone's processor, we can create a robot that is wi-fi enabled and computer vision-capable for 150 bucks, which is about one percent of what these kinds of robots have cost in the past. 
When Romo wakes up, he's in creature mode. 
So he's actually using the video camera on the device to follow my face. 
If I duck down, he'll follow me. 
He's wary, so he'll keep his eyes on me. 
If I come over here, he'll turn to follow me. 
If I come over here — (Laughs) He's smart. 
And if I get too close to him, he gets scared just like any other creature. 
So in a lot of ways, Romo is like a pet that has a mind of his own. 
Thanks, little guy. 
(Sneezing sound) Bless you. 
And if I want to explore the world — uh-oh, Romo's tired — if I want to explore the world with Romo, I can actually connect him from any other iOS device. 
So here's the iPad. 
And Romo will actually stream video to this device. 
So I can see everything that Romo sees, and I get a robot's-eye-view of the world. 
Now this is a free app on the App Store, so if any of you guys had this app on your phones, we could literally right now share control of the robot and play games together. 
So I'll show you really quickly, Romo actually — he's streaming video, so you can see me and the entire TED audience. 
If I get in front of Romo here. 
And if I want to control him, I can just drive. 
So I can drive him around, and I can take pictures of you. 
I've always wanted a picture of a 1,500-person TED audience. 
So I'll snap a picture. 
And in the same way that you scroll through content on an iPad, I can actually adjust the angle of the camera on the device. 
So there are all of you through Romo's eyes. 
And finally, because Romo is an extension of me, I can express myself through his emotions. 
So I can go in and I can say let's make Romo excited. 
But the most important thing about Romo is that we wanted to create something that was literally completely intuitive. 
You do not have to teach someone how to drive Romo. 
In fact, who would like to drive a robot? 
Okay. Awesome. 
Here you go. 
Thank you, Scott. 
And even cooler, you actually don't have to be in the same geographic location as the robot to control him. 
So he actually streams two-way audio and video between any two smart devices. 
So you can log in through the browser, and it's kind of like Skype on wheels. 
So we were talking before about telepresence, and this is a really cool example. 
You can imagine an eight-year-old girl, for example, who has an iPhone, and her mom buys her a robot. 
That girl can take her iPhone, put it on the robot, send an email to Grandma, who lives on the other side of the country. 
Grandma can log into that robot and play hide-and-go-seek with her granddaughter for fifteen minutes every single night, when otherwise she might only be able to get to see her granddaughter once or twice a year. 
Thanks, Scott. 
(Applause) So those are a couple of the really cool things that Romo can do today. 
But I just want to finish by talking about something that we're working on in the future. 
This is actually something that one of our engineers, Dom, built in a weekend. 
It's built on top of a Google open framework called Blockly. 
This allows you to drag and drop these blocks of semantic code and create any behavior for this robot you want. 
You do not have to know how to code to create a behavior for Romo. 
And you can actually simulate that behavior in the browser, which is what you see Romo doing on the left. 
And then if you have something you like, you can download it onto your robot and execute it in real life, run the program in real life. 
And then if you have something you're proud of, you can share it with every other person who owns a robot in the world. 
So all of these wi-fi – enabled robots actually learn from each other. 
The reason we're so focused on building robots that everyone can train is that we think the most compelling use cases in personal robotics are personal. 
They change from person to person. 
So we think that if you're going to have a robot in your home, that robot ought to be a manifestation of your own imagination. 
So I wish that I could tell you what the future of personal robotics looks like. 
To be honest, I have no idea. 
But what we do know is that it isn't 10 years or 10 billion dollars or a large humanoid robot away. 
The future of personal robotics is happening today, and it's going to depend on small, agile robots like Romo and the creativity of people like yourselves. 
So we can't wait to get you all robots, and we can't wait to see what you build. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

I'd like you all to ask yourselves a question which you may never have asked yourselves before: What is possible with the human voice? What is possible with the human voice? 
(Beatboxing) 
♪ Ooh baby ♪ ♪ baby ♪ ♪ baby ♪ ♪ baby ♪ (Baby crying) ♪ baby ♪ (Baby crying) ♪ baby ♪ (Cat meowing) (Dog barking) Yeah. 
(Applause) (Boomerang noises) It was coming straight for me. I had to. It was, yeah. 
As you can probably well imagine, I was a strange child. 
(Laughter) Because the thing is, I was constantly trying to extend my repertoire of noises to be the very maximum that it could be. 
I was constantly experimenting with these noises. 
I'm still trying to find every noise that I can possibly make. 
And the thing is, I'm a bit older and wiser now, and I know that there's some noises I'll never be able to make because I'm hemmed in by my physical body, and there's things it can't do. 
And there's things that no one's voice can do. 
You can do two-tone singing, which monks can do, which is like... 
(Two-tone singing) But that's cheating. 
And it hurts your throat. 
So there's things you can't do, and these limitations on the human voice have always really annoyed me, because beatbox is the best way of getting musical ideas out of your head and into the world, but they're sketches at best, which is what's annoyed me. 
If only, if only there was a way for these ideas to come out unimpeded by the restrictions which my body gives it. 
So I've been working with these guys, and we've made a machine. 
We've made a system which is basically a live production machine, a real-time music production machine, and it enables me to, using nothing but my voice, create music in real time as I hear it in my head unimpeded by any physical restrictions that my body might place on me. 
And I'm going to show you what it can do. 
And before I start making noises with it, and using it to manipulate my voice, I want to reiterate that everything that you're about to hear is being made by my voice. 
This system has — thank you, beautiful assistant — this system has no sounds in it itself until I start putting sounds in it, so there's no prerecorded samples of any kind. 
So once this thing really gets going, and it really starts to mangle the audio I'm putting into it, it becomes not obvious that it is the human voice, but it is, so I'm going to take you through it bit by bit and start nice and simple. 
How do I get around the problem of really wanting to have as many different voices going on at the same time. 
(Beatboxing) By dancing. It's like this. 
(Music) Thanks. 
(Applause) So that's probably the easiest way. 
But if you want to do something a little bit more immediate, something that you can't achieve with live looping, there's other ways to layer your voice up. 
There's things like pitch-shifting, which are awesome, and I'm going to show you now what that sounds like. 
So I'm going to start another beat for you, like this. 
(Beatboxing) There's always got to be a bit of a dance at the start, because it's just fun, so you can clap along if you want. 
You don't have to. It's fine. Check it out. 
I'm going to lay down a bass sound now. 
(Music) And now, a rockabilly guitar. 
Which is nice. But what if I want to make, say, a — (Applause) — Thanks. What if I want to make, say, a rock organ? 
Is that possible? Yes, it is, by recording myself like this. 
(Organ sound) And now I have that, I have that recorded. 
Assign it to a keyboard. 
(Music) So that's cool. 
(Applause) But what if I wanted to sound like the whole of Pink Floyd? 
Impossible, you say. No. 
It is possible, and you can do it very simply using this machine. It's really fantastic. Check it out. 
(Music) So every noise you can hear there is my voice. 
I didn't just trigger something which sounds like that. 
There's no samples. There's no synthesizers. 
That is literally all my voice being manipulated, and when you get to that point, you have to ask, don't you, what's the point? 
Why do this? (Laughter) Because it's cheaper than hiring the whole of Pink Floyd, I suppose, is the easy answer. 
But in actual fact, I haven't made this machine so that I can emulate things that already exist. 
I've made this so that I can make any noise that I can imagine. 
So with your permission, I'm going to do some things that are in my mind, and I hope you enjoy them, because they're rather unusual, especially when you're doing things which are as unusual as this, it can be hard to believe that it is all my voice, you see. 
(Voice effects) (Music) Like this. (Music) 
So, loosely defined, that is what's possible with the human voice. 
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. 

When I arrived in Kiev, on February 1 this year, Independence Square was under siege, surrounded by police loyal to the government. 
The protesters who occupied Maidan, as the square is known, prepared for battle, stockpiling homemade weapons and mass-producing improvised body armor. 
The Euromaidan protests began peacefully at the end of 2013, after the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, rejected a far-reaching accord with the European Union in favor of stronger ties with Russia. 
In response, tens of thousands of dissatisfied citizens poured into central Kiev to demonstrate against this allegiance. 
As the months passed, confrontations between police and civilians intensified. 
I set up a makeshift portrait studio by the barricades on Hrushevsky Street. 
There, I photographed the fighters against a black curtain, a curtain that obscured the highly seductive and visual backdrop of fire, ice and smoke. 
In order to tell the individual human stories here, I felt that I needed to remove the dramatic visuals that had become so familiar and repetitive within the mainstream media. 
What I was witnessing was not only news, but also history. 
With this realization, I was free from the photojournalistic conventions of the newspaper and the magazine. 
But the elaborate costumes that they had bedecked themselves in were quite extraordinary. 
They were improvised uniforms made up of decommissioned military equipment, irregular combat fatigues and trophies taken from the police. 

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

Imagine you're in Rome, and you've made your way to the Vatican Museums. 
And you've been shuffling down long corridors, past statues, frescoes, lots and lots of stuff. 
You're heading towards the Sistine Chapel. 
At last — a long corridor, a stair and a door. 
You're at the threshold of the Sistine Chapel. 
So what are you expecting? 
Soaring domes? Choirs of angels? 
We don't really have any of that there. 
Instead, you may ask yourself, what do we have? 
Well, curtains up on the Sistine Chapel. 
And I mean literally, you're surrounded by painted curtains, the original decoration of this chapel. 
Churches used tapestries not just to keep out cold during long masses, but as a way to represent the great theater of life. 
The human drama in which each one of us plays a part is a great story, a story that encompasses the whole world and that came to unfold in the three stages of the painting in the Sistine Chapel. 
Now, this building started out as a space for a small group of wealthy, educated Christian priests. 
They prayed there. They elected their pope there. 
Five hundred years ago, it was the ultimate ecclesiastical man cave. 
So, you may ask, how can it be that today it attracts and delights five million people a year, from all different backgrounds? 
Because in that compressed space, there was a creative explosion, ignited by the electric excitement of new geopolitical frontiers, which set on fire the ancient missionary tradition of the Church and produced one of the greatest works of art in history. 
Now, this development took place as a great evolution, moving from the beginning of a few elite, and eventually able to speak to audiences of people that come from all over the world. 
This evolution took place in three stages, each one linked to a historical circumstance. 
The first one was rather limited in scope. 
It reflected the rather parochial perspective. 
The second one took place after worldviews were dramatically altered after Columbus's historical voyage; and the third, when the Age of Discovery was well under way and the Church rose to the challenge of going global. 
The original decoration of this church reflected a smaller world. 
There were busy scenes that told the stories of the lives of Jesus and Moses, reflecting the development of the Jewish and Christian people. 
The man who commissioned this, Pope Sixtus IV, assembled a dream team of Florentine art, including men like Sandro Botticelli and the man who would become Michelangelo's future painting teacher, Ghirlandaio. 
These men, they blanketed the walls with a frieze of pure color, and in these stories you'll notice familiar landscapes, the artists using Roman monuments or a Tuscan landscape to render a faraway story, something much more familiar. 
With the addition of images of the Pope's friends and family, this was a perfect decoration for a small court limited to the European continent. 
But in 1492, the New World was discovered, horizons were expanding, and this little 133 by 46-foot microcosm had to expand as well. 
And it did, thanks to a creative genius, a visionary and an awesome story. 
Now, the creative genius was Michelangelo Buonarroti, 33 years old when he was tapped to decorate 12,000 square feet of ceiling, and the deck was stacked against him — he had trained in painting but had left to pursue sculpture. 
There were angry patrons in Florence because he had left a stack of incomplete commissions, lured to Rome by the prospect of a great sculptural project, and that project had fallen through. 
And he had been left with a commission to paint 12 apostles against a decorative background in the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which would look like every other ceiling in Italy. 
But genius rose to the challenge. 
In an age when a man dared to sail across the Atlantic Ocean, Michelangelo dared to chart new artistic waters. 
He, too, would tell a story — no Apostles — but a story of great beginnings, the story of Genesis. 
Not really an easy sell, stories on a ceiling. 
How would you be able to read a busy scene from 62 feet below? 
The painting technique that had been handed on for 200 years in Florentine studios was not equipped for this kind of a narrative. 
But Michelangelo wasn't really a painter, and so he played to his strengths. 
Instead of being accustomed to filling space with busyness, he took a hammer and chisel and hacked away at a piece of marble to reveal the figure within. 
Michelangelo was an essentialist; he would tell his story in massive, dynamic bodies. 
This plan was embraced by the larger-than-life Pope Julius II, a man who was unafraid of Michelangelo's brazen genius. 
He was nephew to Pope Sixtus IV, and he had been steeped in art for 30 years and he knew its power. 
And history has handed down the moniker of the Warrior Pope, but this man's legacy to the Vatican — it wasn't fortresses and artillery, it was art. 
He left us the Raphael Rooms, the Sistine Chapel. 
He left St. Peter's Basilica as well as an extraordinary collection of Greco-Roman sculptures — decidedly un-Christian works that would become the seedbed of the world's first modern museum, the Vatican Museums. 
Julius was a man who envisioned a Vatican that would be eternally relevant through grandeur and through beauty, and he was right. 
The encounter between these two giants, Michelangelo and Julius II, that's what gave us the Sistine Chapel. 
Michelangelo was so committed to this project, that he succeeded in getting the job done in three and a half years, using a skeleton crew and spending most of the time, hours on end, reaching up above his head to paint the stories on the ceiling. 
So let's look at this ceiling and see storytelling gone global. 
No more familiar artistic references to the world around you. 
There's just space and structure and energy; a monumental painted framework which opens onto nine panels, more driven by sculptural form than painterly color. 
And we stand in the far end by the entrance, far from the altar and from the gated enclosure intended for the clergy and we peer into the distance, looking for a beginning. 
And whether in scientific inquiry or in biblical tradition, we think in terms of a primal spark. 
Michelangelo gave us an initial energy when he gave us the separation of light and dark, a churning figure blurry in the distance, compressed into a tight space. 
The next figure looms larger, and you see a figure hurtling from one side to the next. 
He leaves in his wake the sun, the moon, vegetation. 
Michelangelo didn't focus on the stuff that was being created, unlike all the other artists. 
He focused on the act of creation. 
And then the movement stops, like a caesura in poetry and the creator hovers. 
So what's he doing? 
Is he creating land? Is he creating sea? 
Or is he looking back over his handiwork, the universe and his treasures, just like Michelangelo must have, looking back over his work in the ceiling and proclaiming, "" It is good. "" So now the scene is set, and you get to the culmination of creation, which is man. 
Adam leaps to the eye, a light figure against a dark background. 
But looking closer, that leg is pretty languid on the ground, the arm is heavy on the knee. 
Adam lacks that interior spark that will impel him to greatness. 
That spark is about to be conferred by the creator in that finger, which is one millimeter from the hand of Adam. 
It puts us at the edge of our seats, because we're one moment from that contact, through which that man will discover his purpose, leap up and take his place at the pinnacle of creation. 
And then Michelangelo threw a curveball. 
Who is in that other arm? 
Eve, first woman. 
No, she's not an afterthought. She's part of the plan. 
She's always been in his mind. 
Look at her, so intimate with God that her hand curls around his arm. 
And for me, an American art historian from the 21st century, this was the moment that the painting spoke to me. 
Because I realized that this representation of the human drama was always about men and women — so much so, that the dead center, the heart of the ceiling, is the creation of woman, not Adam. 
And the fact is, that when you see them together in the Garden of Eden, they fall together and together their proud posture turns into folded shame. 
You are at critical juncture now in the ceiling. 
You are exactly at the point where you and I can go no further into the church. 
The gated enclosure keeps us out of the inner sanctum, and we are cast out much like Adam and Eve. 
The remaining scenes in the ceiling, they mirror the crowded chaos of the world around us. 
You have Noah and his Ark and the flood. 
You have Noah. He's making a sacrifice and a covenant with God. 
Maybe he's the savior. 
Oh, but no, Noah is the one who grew grapes, invented wine, got drunk and passed out naked in his barn. 
It is a curious way to design the ceiling, now starting out with God creating life, ending up with some guy blind drunk in a barn. 
And so, compared with Adam, you might think Michelangelo is making fun of us. 
But he's about to dispel the gloom by using those bright colors right underneath Noah: emerald, topaz, scarlet on the prophet Zechariah. 
Zechariah foresees a light coming from the east, and we are turned at this juncture to a new destination, with sibyls and prophets who will lead us on a parade. 
You have the heroes and heroines who make safe the way, and we follow the mothers and fathers. 
They are the motors of this great human engine, driving it forward. 
And now we're at the keystone of the ceiling, the culmination of the whole thing, with a figure that looks like he's about to fall out of his space into our space, encroaching our space. 
This is the most important juncture. 
Past meets present. 
This figure, Jonah, who spent three days in the belly of the whale, for the Christians, is the symbol of the renewal of humanity through Jesus' sacrifice, but for the multitudes of visitors to that museum from all faiths who visit there every day, he is the moment the distant past encounters and meets immediate reality. 
All of this brings us to the yawning archway of the altar wall, where we see Michelangelo's Last Judgment, painted in 1534 after the world had changed again. 
The Reformation had splintered the Church, the Ottoman Empire had made Islam a household word and Magellan had found a route into the Pacific Ocean. 
How is a 59-year-old artist who has never been any further than Venice going to speak to this new world? 
Michelangelo chose to paint destiny, that universal desire, common to all of us, to leave a legacy of excellence. 
Told in terms of the Christian vision of the Last Judgment, the end of the world, Michelangelo gave you a series of figures who are wearing these strikingly beautiful bodies. 
They have no more covers, no more portraits except for a couple. 
It's a composition only out of bodies, 391, no two alike, unique like each and every one of us. 
They start in the lower corner, breaking away from the ground, struggling and trying to rise. 
Those who have risen reach back to help others, and in one amazing vignette, you have a black man and a white man pulled up together in an incredible vision of human unity in this new world. 
The lion's share of the space goes to the winner's circle. 
There you find men and women completely nude like athletes. 
They are the ones who have overcome adversity, and Michelangelo's vision of people who combat adversity, overcome obstacles — they're just like athletes. 
So you have men and women flexing and posing in this extraordinary spotlight. 
Presiding over this assembly is Jesus, first a suffering man on the cross, now a glorious ruler in Heaven. 
And as Michelangelo proved in his painting, hardship, setbacks and obstacles, they don't limit excellence, they forge it. 
Now, this does lead us to one odd thing. 
This is the Pope's private chapel, and the best way you can describe that is indeed a stew of nudes. 
But Michelangelo was trying to use only the best artistic language, the most universal artistic language he could think of: that of the human body. 
And so instead of the way of showing virtue such as fortitude or self-mastery, he borrowed from Julius II's wonderful collection of sculptures in order to show inner strength as external power. 
Now, one contemporary did write that the chapel was too beautiful to not cause controversy. 
And so it did. 
Michelangelo soon found that thanks to the printing press, complaints about the nudity spread all over the place, and soon his masterpiece of human drama was labeled pornography, at which point he added two more portraits, one of the man who criticized him, a papal courtier, and the other one of himself as a dried up husk, no athlete, in the hands of a long-suffering martyr. 
The year he died he saw several of these figures covered over, a triumph for trivial distractions over his great exhortation to glory. 
And so now we stand in the here and now. 
We are caught in that space between beginnings and endings, in the great, huge totality of the human experience. 
The Sistine Chapel forces us to look around as if it were a mirror. 
Who am I in this picture? 
Am I one of the crowd? 
Am I the drunk guy? 
Am I the athlete? 
And as we leave this haven of uplifting beauty, we are inspired to ask ourselves life's biggest questions: Who am I, and what role do I play in this great theater of life? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Elizabeth Lev, thank you. 
Elizabeth, you mentioned this whole issue of pornography, too many nudes and too many daily life scenes and improper things in the eyes of the time. 
But actually the story is bigger. 
It's not just touching up and covering up some of the figures. 
This work of art was almost destroyed because of that. 
Elizabeth Lev: The effect of the Last Judgment was enormous. 
The printing press made sure that everybody saw it. 
And so, this wasn't something that happened within a couple of weeks. 
It was something that happened over the space of 20 years of editorials and complaints, saying to the Church, "" You can't possibly tell us how to live our lives. 
Did you notice you have pornography in the Pope's chapel? "" And so after complaints and insistence of trying to get this work destroyed, it was finally the year that Michelangelo died that the Church finally found a compromise, a way to save the painting, and that was in putting up these extra 30 covers, and that happens to be the origin of fig-leafing. 
That's where it all came about, and it came about from a church that was trying to save a work of art, not indeed deface or destroyed it. 
BG: This, what you just gave us, is not the classic tour that people get today when they go to the Sistine Chapel. 
(Laughter) EL: I don't know, is that an ad? (Laughter) 
BG: No, no, no, not necessarily, it is a statement. 
The experience of art today is encountering problems. 
Too many people want to see this there, and the result is five million people going through that tiny door and experiencing it in a completely different way than we just did. 
EL: Right. I agree. I think it's really nice to be able to pause and look. 
But also realize, even when you're in those days, with 28,000 people a day, even those days when you're in there with all those other people, look around you and think how amazing it is that some painted plaster from 500 years ago can still draw all those people standing side by side with you, looking upwards with their jaws dropped. 
It's a great statement about how beauty truly can speak to us all through time and through geographic space. 
BG: Liz, grazie. 
EL: Grazie a te. 
BG: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Doc Edgerton inspired us with awe and curiosity with this photo of a bullet piercing through an apple, and exposure just a millionth of a second. 
I present to you a new type of photography, femto-photography, a new imaging technique so fast that it can create slow motion videos of light in motion. 
And with that, we can create cameras that can look around corners, beyond line of sight, or see inside our body without an x-ray, and really challenge what we mean by a camera. 
Now if I take a laser pointer and turn it on and off in one trillionth of a second — which is several femtoseconds — I'll create a packet of photons barely a millimeter wide. 
And that packet of photons, that bullet, will travel at the speed of light, and again, a million times faster than an ordinary bullet. 
Now, if you take that bullet and take this packet of photons and fire into this bottle, how will those photons shatter into this bottle? 
How does light look in slow motion? 
[Light in Slow Motion... 10 Billion x Slow] Now, the whole event — (Applause) Now remember, the whole event is effectively taking place in less than a nanosecond — that's how much time it takes for light to travel. 
Now, there's a lot going on in this movie, so let me break this down and show you what's going on. 
So the pulse enters the bottle, our bullet, with a packet of photons that start traveling through and that start scattering inside. 
Some of the light leaks, goes on the table, and you start seeing these ripples of waves. 
Many of the photons eventually reach the cap and then they explode in various directions. 
As you can see, there's a bubble of air and it's bouncing around inside. 
Meanwhile, the ripples are traveling on the table, and because of the reflections at the top, you see at the back of the bottle, after several frames, the reflections are focused. 
Now, if you take an ordinary bullet and let it go the same distance and slow down the video — again, by a factor of 10 billion — do you know how long you'll have to sit here to watch that movie? 
(Laughter) A day, a week? Actually, a whole year. 
It'll be a very boring movie — (Laughter) of a slow, ordinary bullet in motion. 
You can watch the ripples, again, washing over the table, the tomato and the wall in the back. 
I thought: this is how nature paints a photo, one femto frame at a time, but of course our eye sees an integral composite. 
So in the future, when this femto-camera is in your camera phone, you might be able to go to a supermarket and check if the fruit is ripe without actually touching it. 
So what we do is we send that bullet — that packet of photons — millions of times, and record again and again with very clever synchronization, and from the gigabytes of data, we computationally weave together to create those femto-videos I showed you. 
So, Superman can fly. 
Some other heroes can become invisible. 
But what about a new power for a future superhero: To see around corners. 
The idea is that we could shine some light on the door, it's going to bounce, go inside the room, some of that is going to reflect back on the door, and then back to the camera. 
And we could exploit these multiple bounces of light. 
And it's not science fiction. We have actually built it. 
There's a mannequin hidden behind a wall, and we're going to bounce light off the door. 
(Music) [A laser pulse is fired] (Music) Ramesh Raskar: We're going to fire those bullets of light, and they're going to hit this wall, and because of the packet of the photons, they will scatter in all the directions, and some of them will reach our hidden mannequin, which in turn will again scatter that light, and again in turn, the door will reflect some of that scattered light. 
(Music) And because we have a camera that can run so fast — our femto-camera — it has some unique abilities. 
It has very good time resolution, and it can look at the world at the speed of light. 
And this way, we know the distances, of course to the door, but also to the hidden objects, but we don't know which point corresponds to which distance. 
(Music) By shining one laser, we can record one raw photo, which, if you look on the screen, doesn't really make any sense. 
Can we see it in full 3D? 
(Music) (Applause) Now, we have some ways to go before we take this outside the lab on the road, but in the future, we could create cars that avoid collisions with what's around the bend. 
Or we can build endoscopes that can see deep inside the body around occluders, and also for cardioscopes. 
Now, like Doc Edgerton, a scientist himself, science became art — an art of ultra-fast photography. 
So by applying the corresponding space and time warp, we can correct for this distortion. 
So whether it's for photography around corners, or creating the next generation of health imaging, or creating new visualizations, since our invention, we have open-sourced all the data and details on our website, and our hope is that the DIY, the creative and the research communities will show us that we should stop obsessing about the megapixels in cameras — (Laughter) and start focusing on the next dimension in imaging.